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How To Leave Spiritual Wealth For Your Children (Series 3)


Parenting in Spiritual Abundance

Now, for the parallel. When a person is brought up in a spiritually deprived environment, there’s a natural sense of something missing. Spiritual hunger, and the emptiness that often accompanies it, typically plays a significant role in a person’s response to the gospel. Up to that point, they may have embraced a string of religious counterfeits. But counterfeits, like junk food, can’t ever satisfy. When a spiritually starving person finally gets a taste of the Bread of Life and a sip of the Living Water, the contrast is overwhelming. There might not be an instant surrender, but when the Holy Spirit finally makes his move on their heart, the change is deep, the contrast is stark, and at least it seems there’s no turning back.
A newfound faith is often accompanied by a passionate desire for more of God, his word, his truth and grace, and his extended family. This pursuit has a transforming impact across the board in this new believer’s life.
If this transformation takes place in their young years or the early years of marriage, it’s not uncommon for them to use some of their spiritual wealth in Christ to “upgrade” their lifestyles. Prayer and the ingesting of God’s word become routine. Their closest friends become spiritual assets rather than liabilities. Fears are more consistently overcome with faith. Bad habits are replaced with life-giving ones. Their home is increasingly filled with God.
But if you’re a child born and raised in this type of home from the beginning, it can have a completely different impact on your spiritual journey, humanly speaking. There are unintended consequences of raising kids in homes where the gutter-to-glory transforming work of God is one generation removed. I have observed three common problems of kids raised in spiritually safe and comfortable Christian homes:
  1. They don’t think God is as real as he is.
  2. They don’t think sin is as bad as it is.
  3. They don’t think.

The Christian environment that surrounds them — with its traditions, clichés, and built-in protections — may become their view of who God is rather than God himself. The safe confines of their comfortable Christian world may give them a naiveté towards sin that can easily make them vulnerable to its true nature once they’re adults. And they’re living in a world that’s constantly giving them answers to questions they’re not driven to ask and solutions to problems they’ve never truly had to wrestle with.
We shall continue in Series 4 looking at

Passing on a Living Faith

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How To Leave Spiritual Wealth for Your Children

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