Teach Your Children to Recognize God's Voice

Help your children grow in grace and intimacy with God

When it comes right down to it, life is all about making decisions.  From the (apparently) mundane daily decisions about what to eat and what to wear to the life transforming choices about who to marry and what profession to pursue, every day is a parade of decisions we must make, and every life is a result of the decisions we have made.  Therefore, training to make wise decisions has been a major priority of our parenting.

However, our true goal as Christian parents is not simply that our children make wise decisions.  Frankly, we are not interested in the decisions even the wisest human mind can make.  We are those who ‘do nothing on (our) own initiative.”  As parents, we do not seek our own will but the will of our Father who sent us (John 5:30 HAS).  We do not seek earthly human wisdom, but the wisdom that is from above, that is full of good fruits (Jas. 3:15-18).  We want only those thoughts that are higher than our thoughts, and the ways that are higher than our ways (Is. 55:8-9).  Therefore, our goal is not that our children make wise decisions based on their own insights and abilities, but that they recognize God’s voice for themselves and live always and only out of His voice, His vision, and His initiative.

 

We were not satisfied to simply lead our children to the Lord when they were young and then expect their Sunday school teachers to fill their spiritual needs.  We were called to disciple our children and to encourage them to follow us as we follow Christ.  It was our responsibility to bring them not only to physical maturity but also to social, emotional, and spiritual maturity.  To us, that meant training them to personally hear God’s voice within their own hearts and live in obedience to Him.  If a child is old enough to hear the Holy Spirit calling him to repentance and salvation, he is old enough to hear the Holy Spirit guiding him on a daily basis.  Would you be as slow to recognize that God was speaking to your child as Eli was to identify God’s voice for Samuel?

Forbid them not – that means that leading your child to Christ is not your ultimate goal but only your first step.  Ask yourself:  Do you believe that the Holy Spirit takes up residence in a believer when he is born again?  Do you believe He lives within the young child just as He lives within the adult?  Is God’s grace and ability limited by the age of the one who comes to Him in faith? Are you confident in your ability to hear God’s voice within your own heart?  Are you able to teach your children how they can recognize the voice of the Spirit within them?  Are you prepared for them to submit what they hear to you for confirmation and adjustment, based on what you have also heard from God?

Jesus welcomed the children who came to Him, declaring that His kingdom is made up of those who receive Him in childlike faith and trust.  Essentially, He was saying that children naturally have the abilities necessary to be part of His kingdom.  Any time we make a part of Christianity too difficult or beyond the reach of children we have perverted the simplicity of the Gospel and are no longer messengers of the Good News.

Sanctified by the Spirit

Children can and must be born again, some even as young as three or four years old.  But that is just the beginning!  Once the Holy Spirit is living within them, they can and must learn how to recognize His conviction, His guidance, His wisdom-His voice within leading them into all truth and righteousness.  This is the greatest channel of grace we can open up for our children-the ability to hear and the desire to obey the voice of the Lord within their own hearts!  If we will cultivate this ability, if we will train our children to recognize the Holy Spirit’s presence and power within them from the very day of their salvation, He who began a good work in them will carry it to completion (Phil. 1:6 NIV)!

It is so tempting to place our children, who have been saved by grace just as we were, under the Law.  It has been a temptation that believers have faced since the days of Paul.  But the Law will no more justify or sanctify your children than it could justify or sanctify the Galatians.  It is not enough to teach your children the rules: “Good little girls don’t sass their mommies.  Good little boys don’t hit their sisters.  God wants you to do this.  God doesn’t want you to do that.” 

That is just attempting to justify them by the Law, which Paul says will alienate them from Christ and cause them to fall away from grace (Gal. 5:4).  It is not our responsibility or even our right to burden them with the Law-not God’s Law and especially not our own laws.  Instead, we must teach them to live by the Spirit and then they will not gratify the desires of the flesh (Gal. 5:16).  We must teach our children to recognize and respond to the voice of the Holy Spirit living within them.

Excerpted and adapted from Rivers of Grace by Mark and Patti Virkler (Sovereign World, 2002).  See their ministry website at www.cwgministries,org for more information on the more than 50 books they have written in the areas of Christian spirituality and healing.

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