Leading Our Children
Towards a Sincere and
Pure Devotion to Christ
by Craig Smith
I feel a divine jealousy for you, for I betrothed you to
one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ.
But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his
cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a
sincere and pure devotion to Christ. — II Corinthians
11:2-3
Paul is here very soberly and softly laying down some
absolute basics of the Christian faith, things with which
we should each be thoroughly familiar. Are we? Let’s
check it out.
Paul evangelised these folks from the dominion of
darkness and led them to the light of Christ. They were
spiritually dead, and now they are alive in Christ. As
the new-born creatures they were, he presented them as
pure, chaste virgins to their (and our) husband, Jesus
Christ the Lord, to await the final consummation with
Him in heaven.
This is also, of course, our situation as believers: we
are Christ’s betrothed, and we are to be busy preparing
ourselves for that marvellous Day when He comes to
take us to Himself. Preparations include getting to
know as much as we can about Him and performing all
the tasks He has assigned to us to do until that
heavenly Day arrives. It includes remaining pure and
chaste, staying away from whatever might defile us in
body, soul, spirit, mind, emotions, affections, desires,
etc. That is, we are in training until He arrives so that
all our thoughts, all our words, all our actions might be
beyond reproach, might reflect only pure and
praiseworthy motivations, might bring blessing and
edification to those around us and might honour our
Lord by causing others to give glory to our Father in
heaven even though it is our good works they see.
Quite a challenge, isn’t it? But nothing when you
suddenly realise that this is also the way we are to be
raising our children, discipling them for Jesus, training
them to be soldiers of the Cross, totally sold out to one
Lord and to one Lord only, our sovereign Saviour
Jesus Christ. Does He want us to let these children, for
whom we have every hope and promise of believing
that Christ died for them as much as for us and that
they are indeed among the elect…would He be
impressed if we casually let them experiment with
lifestyles and substances and philosophies that He
declares in His word are abominations? He has
delivered these children to us as a stewardship,
that we might raise them up in the nurture and
admonition of the Lord, being in full-time service for
Him as His possessions from conception onwards. Yes,
they must do personal business with God and
individually repent at the foot of the Cross and
consciously, sincerely embrace Christ as their only
Lord and trust Him as their only Saviour. These things
we remind them of constantly as we also train them to
think God’s thoughts after Him and perform all that He
has commanded us in His Scriptures. The children
belong to God not only because He created them but
also because He claims them for Himself through His
substitutionary death on the Cross to redeem them
from futility, a promise conveyed to them through us
their parents as we live the Faith before them and
inculcate the Faith into them (Exodus 20:6, Acts 2:39,
Romans 4:13, I Corinthians 7:14).
How could we possibly take a hands-off approach to
our children’s development, letting them dabble in
things that are not only foreign to Biblical standards
but actively hostile to them? This is the approach the
media, the government, the schools and every single
non-Christian child-advocacy group in the country
pushes ad nauseum—that children are well-nigh
autonomous, and how dare we parents impose our
beliefs and standards on these independent little people
we only have for a short time? Well, we train them up
for Christ alone because they do not belong to the state,
to us parents or to themselves…they belong to God
alone, and He alone is worthy to receive their full
allegiance. What’s more, He demands it (Acts
17:30), and as far as it depends upon me, He
shall have it.
Brothers and sisters: what then does this say
about the vast numbers of believers’ children
who are being shipped off to the temples of
Moloch, the compulsory, secular state
schooling institutions where any serious
consideration of Christ’s claims to Lordship
and the Christian faith are excluded by law?
You know the serpent is going to use such
places to deceive them away from a sincere
and pure devotion to Christ. How can anyone
be immersed in such anti-Christian
environments and come out as a “pure virgin
to Christ”, whose thoughts, words and actions
have not been led astray time and time again?
Why do believing parents compromise their
children’s futures like this? The state schools
teach that homosexuality, sleeping around
and prostitution are all valid lifestyles, that
evolution is fact and that truth is relative.
These are abominations. The Nehemiah
Institute’s (www.nehemiahinstitute.com)
worldview test shows that 83-percent of the
children from committed Christian families
who attend public schools adopt a secular
humanist or Marxist socialist worldview; that
is, they think like pagans, not Christians. At
the Southern Baptist Church’s 2002 annual
meeting in the USA, the Southern Baptist
Council on Family Life reported that 88-percent
of the children raised in evangelical homes
leave church at age 18. Barna Research (www.barna.
org) reports that only 9-percent of born-again teens
believe in moral absolutes, and more than half believe
that Jesus sinned while He was on earth.
Giving Christian children over to indoctrination by
pagans is not just unwise….it is foolish in the extreme
and precisely opposite of what we’re instructed to do…
and doing it to those least able to resist error: immature
Christian children….and being done by those who
should know and want far better: their own parents.
From Keystone Magazine
January 2007, Vol. XIII No.1
P O Box 9064
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email: craig@hef.org.nz
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