What holds the substance of your kids heart?

WisdomIn keeping with my series on Training up the Children or “Which way did they go?” it is imperative that we as parents know who has the heart of our child. This is an individual glimpse not corporate. Each child will give their heart to someone, something, or a multitude of someone’s and/or things whatever that is, their heart does not remain dormant once alive on this planet. Our job as caring parents is to know just who owns our child’s heart in order to help them grow into that fact or away from that fact. Parents must use the Scriptures such as this in order to deal with the deepest core of the child. Sinful prostitutes are positioning themselves to lure the heart of our children away. These prositutes are not limited to just female or male, but the television, movies, cars, trucks, money, houses, vacations, video games, sports, clothes, the “in” crowd, the latest fads, and so on….these can all be prositutes to the heart of our children.

Proverbs 23:26 “My son, give me your heart and let your eyes observe my ways.”

Wisdom is speaking in this instance. Wisdom is another name for God or the Lord Jesus who is the incarnate wisdom. Wisdom calls out, demands that we give Him our heart. To train our children to be wise is a very important lesson. As our kids get older all kinds of activities, events, people, and obsessions will make every attempt at luring them away from God.

Why does God call us out and demand our heart? As Spurgeon so eloquently put it “Only love will thus seek love.” He is not calling for our heart in order to spoil our lives. God knows that the heart of man is an evil destructive machine and without us giving Him our heart this destructive vessel will destroy not only our own lives, but the lives of others. Wisdom is greatly increased by one giving their heart to God in totality.

The saying goes “He who has the heart has the man.” Whatever object, person, or place that enjoys being the king or queen of our child’s heart will lead them down a destructive path. As parents we need to be sure that we are training our sons and daughters to refuse by the power of God to allow their hearts to be given away or even taken away by anything that would pull us from the feet of Christ.

They must see in us a heart that belongs to Christ. Our actions speak of what is in the heart…from our mouths gives a picture in words of the scene going on in our hearts. We must be careful to exhibit from our actions and our speech a reflection of God living vibrantly in our lives. Our children will know the owner of our hearts by who they hear and see us to be. A quick study was done recently about this very thing. The study was done on children to see if their parent’s actions spoke louder than their words or visa versa. The results are astounding. The test was done concerning charitable giving. The parents that would say to their kids, “Don’t give too much, keep your money” yet would always end up giving much more themselves resulted in children that would give very much of their time and money. However, the results from the parents who taught their children in word “Give much of your time and money to these great causes” yet they themselves never gave much money or time, those children became the worse givers of all.

As parents our actions really do speak loudly. If we are going to train our children it must be done from the position of action not just words. Whenever we mess up, a training opportunity was created and they can learn from our mistakes as well. We must let the kids know that our hearts belong to God and then be transparent on that. Make sure our actions even in a mistake prove to our children that we belong to God. God called David “A man after His own heart”. We all know that David was not perfect and sinned violently…yet, when confronted about his sin, immediate repentance and crying out before God. This is the transparency we want to pass to the kids. This is the training that will build wise respectable young adults someday.

Hugh Stowell said this:

“For two reasons we should give God our heart: 1) unless the heart be given, nothing is given. Read further in Hosea 7:14, Matthew 15:8-9 and 2) if the heart be given, all is given. Read further in 2 Chronicles 30:13-20

So, in the daily event called “life” we are training our children in a direction to go. An important part of this training is that they give their hearts over to God completely without holding back anything. Many o the greatest missionaries of the past 200 years would tell you that without the giving of themselves over to God 100% their mission work would have been in vain.

Spurgeon went even further to say “At once-give God your heart. Delay is wicked and injurious.”

God desires not half a heart or trust nor does He want a divided loyalty or trust. He commands total obedience which requires a complete heart. Great training is done when they understand they should give their heart or trust to God.