Do You Really Love Your Children?

To most parents that isn’t even a realistic question. All parents, 99% of them, love their children. But now consider this…what’s the real depth of your love? Most would measure that question to their own standards- or, at least, society’s.

But I want you to think of God’s measuring stick. God gave you your children. He chose you to bring into the world children that had some of your likeness, but we’re actually, like all people, made in His image (Genesis 1:27). Here is where parents get it all mixed up. They begin to make their children in their image, what they should think they should be. And that is not love. That is control. It is nothing more than manipulating someone’s life how you want them to be, and you’ll do what you can to see it as that way.

Parents do have responsibilities to their children, but not as dictators, controlling as much of their future as they can. Jesus said in Mark 10:14, “let the child come unto Me…” but how many parents usurp the authority of God and do with their lives what they think is best?

Proverbs 22:6 says that a parent is to train up a child in the ways of God, and when they get older they will not stray away from it. Yet many a parent never takes their child to church or teach the ways of the Bible. And then they wonder why their child turns out the way they do or are just robots of themselves and will end up doing the same to their children.

Parents will be held greatly accountable before God, and it won’t be about how they provided for them, but it will all be determined by the ways of Jesus that the parent provided for them. By the way, Jesus spoke to parents about this in Matthew 18:6 where He said, “Whoever causes one of these little ones to sin, it would be better for them to have a boulder put around their neck and be cast into the sea.”