SPECIAL CHRISTIAN HOME SERIES
providing for our children
by Dr. W. Robert Smith
While our homes are not necessarily responsible for human depravity, we are responsible, under the Lord, for guiding and directing the lives en trusted to us. What kind of a setting are you providing for the Holy Spirit’s work? As one has rightly declared, “It’s not society that makes people bad, it’s society that keeps them from being worse than they are.” Similar ly, it is not homes which make chil dren bad, but rather they are the in stitutions our Lord uses in order to make children good by His redeeming grace. If a child grows up without any re straints, love, or anything he normally must have, he will naturally become delinquent. There must be both re straints of love and restraints of dis cipline. There a re th re e p r ima r y avenues of development open to any human being in the course of his growth. First it is the avenue of widening interests known as the “ex panding self.” Then we have detach- 3
W it h a l l o f t h e s tr e s s e s and strains today, it is not easy to have the kind of home one ideally pic tures. For our problems we must seek the answers directly from Scripture, with the guidance of God’s Holy Spir it. Many of the difficulties people ex perience are due to an improper en vironment. Hard circumstances grow out of relationships which are not ideal. If we as fathers and mothers were mature individuals, growing more in the likeness of Christ, most of these griefs and tribulations would be solved. Our Lord was an ideal and perfect person in every way. At the same time He had Judas with Him. He loved Judas with an infinite love, communi cating that compassion in many ways. Judas did not respond. When we have done the best we can and the child is influenced by circumstances around about him, this cannot always be blamed on the parents. We ought not to be excessive in self-condemnation.
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