Covenant Presbyterian Church

The route of God’s covenant in the lives of our children is often circuitous. We would certainly prefer straight-line development: parental diligence in instruction and love during their youth, a textbook commitment to God on their part, and growing interest and diligence in pursuing a calling as teens and young adults, resulting in careful life-preparation, the ability to marry before the pursuit of marriage, and a final settlement into a Christian home of their own. Many Christian young people are thus blessed by our heavenly Father, and we must rejoice with them and their families in celebration of God’s grace and faithfulness - even if our own experience is different. Different it often is.

For reasons that are usually known only to him, our Father sometimes brings his covenant young people through the desert of sin, hardship, and suffering. They do not fit the "mold." We watch them grow into young adults without a committed relationship to Jesus Christ. They begin making decisions and forming attachments that break our hearts. Some even seem to fall away from the faith, or to practice such weakened Christian discipleship that we doubt seriously that they know the Lord. In more consistently Christian congregations, they may come under the restorative discipline of the church. We ask: "Has God’s covenant failed? Is my child one of those in whom God is not pleased to fulfill the positive but instead the negative sanctions and warnings of his covenant? Is he or she an Esau, or a Saul, or even a Judas? What is wrong with me, with us, or with my family?"

We might blithely dismiss this angst by rejecting God’s covenant entirely and affirming the right of every young person to live as he or she wishes. This fits conveniently with the spirit of our age, but it is hardly faithful to Scripture and does nothing to comfort our weeping hearts. We might become less rigorous in our discipleship efforts and settle for an "easy-believism" approach to the Christian faith, whereby as long as a person professes to believe in Jesus, we give little concern to the way in which he lives. However, Jesus’ sheep know his voice and follow him, and we cannot go down this path and remain faithful to our Scripture and to our Shepherd Or we might simply say that at eighteen, or twenty, or twenty-one, a child is free to make his own decisions without any remaining duty to honor and obey his parents. Many Christians think this way, thereby adopting the radical rebellion of our culture. It is compelling that Jesus condemned the Pharisees for breaking the fifth commandment, even though to be a Pharisee one had to be married and in his thirties (see Mark 7). The Bible knows nothing of a fifth commandment age limitation; it certainly presents the growth and maturation of the parent-child bond, but this relationship, in far more significant ways than most want to recognize, remains operative and blessing- or cursing-determinative until death.
I mention these unattractive options because we must biblically and squarely face the issue of unfaithful children. We cannot redefine or reduce the faith in order to ease the pain and deny the problem. We cannot adopt moral relativism in its fanatical and compromised commitment to the ever-elusive dream of unconditional love. Neither of these choices is open to us; cross-bearing is. I say cross-bearing because there is a sort of cross that we carry with respect to our children, especially in those times when children in the church are not walking faithfully with the Lord. We are troubled, grieved, and deeply concerned about them. If the children are our own, the cross is heavier, the sorrow deeper. In the midst of our confusion during such times, the issue of God’s covenant comes to the center. What does God mean when he says "I will be a God to you and to your children after you?" Is this an absolute promise? Is God punishing us or punishing them because of us? What can we do to keep our sons and daughters in God’s covenant?
My present concern is our sons, for this seems to be an area of specific satanic attack and divine testing. I have been greatly troubled by the number of ostensibly Christian young men who have been willing to abandon their doctrinal commitments, church vows, and family ties in order to obtain a spouse. When the first girl shows them any affection, off they go, ignoring the pleas of their parents, and pursuing a path of autonomy. The current fragmentation of the church makes this easier. In many churches, rebaptism wipes the slate clean. No matter that significant sin, broken home relations, and even discipline follow them into their new church home. Join here, says the mantra, and all will be forgotten. The problem was likely with those who would not let you live according to your own wishes. These attitudes and practices deny the unity of the church and the commitment to preserve the peace and integrity of our young men that Christian congregations should share across denominational lines. Nevertheless, we can probably do little at present to change this tragic abandonment of biblical church government and inter-denominational responsibility. We must give serious thought to the things we can do to keep our covenant children, not primarily here in this particular body, for there are other godly congregations scattered throughout our area, but "here" in God’s covenant, walking with him, submissive to their parents, and committed to Jesus Christ.
I am firmly persuaded that the battle for our young men is fought along four broad fronts; I do not say "won," for we are only soldiers, not generals, in God’s great battle against sin. Victory belongs to him, and he grants it according to his providence and pleasure. The first front is prayer. I mention this first because it is usually reserve for last. By prayer I do not mean a conceited and self-serving plea for God to save and keep our children in order to alleviate our worries. I mean kingdom-oriented prayer. It is our desire not to keep them under our thumb, so to speak, but to see them walking on their own two feet in faithfulness to God. In other words, we want them to be soldiers of the cross, to join with us in the great battle of our times. Hence, our prayers for them should be God-centered, Christ-centered, and kingdom-centered. "Lord," we might pray, "Fulfill your covenant promises with respect to your children, for the glory of your name. Remember, Father, that your enemies take great delight in snatching your littlest lambs, even for a short while. Satan especially loves to make a mockery of your covenant and to bring reproach upon those who attempt to live it. Defend your sheep. Forgive me for not trusting your promises, for sins I have committed that set a stumbling block before my children, and for not holding them up to you in prayer. Remember your Son’s word: for of such is the kingdom of heaven. Make them yours. Do with them what you will, for they are your children more than they are mine. Use them to glorify your name and further the kingdom of your Son." You see, the Lord will not share his glory with another, not even with our precious children. We may not make an idol of them. We must commit their lives to the Lord in believing, persevering, and Christ-centered prayer.
The second front involves persevering faith. The most common failure I have made is thinking I am the ultimate source, or motivator, or guarantor of my children’s salvation and stability. When we baptized them, however, we vowed to "trust in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ for their salvation as we do for our own." I have seen covenant children that strayed in their youth become zealous servants of Christ in their adult years. This reminds us that God’s grace does not operate on your or my timetable. God has character to form and lessons to teach our children that are far beyond our ability to understand. Persevering faith leads to confidence in doing the will of God rather than the constantly changing parenting models that believers sometimes pursue because their current methods do not seem to be working. Who are we to say that they are not working? God will test our faith at exactly this point: whether or not we will teach, discipline, and model biblical faith persistently and patiently even if we do not see the results we would like. Persevering faith also leads to prayer, confident prayer for the Lord to fulfill in his time the promises he has made with respect to them. Ultimately, we can neither control nor direct the Lord and his providence; our duty is to trust his word and live in its light. The real issue is not whether our children become everything we would like for them to be but whether we will honor the Lord and leave it to him to make our children what he wants them to be.
Then, we must fight to keep our children by remembering the power of a constantly presented vision of godliness. The world is deceitfully giving our young people a vision of sexuality without responsibility, life without accountability, and self without God. Satan has made this vision very attractive by clothing it in forms that appeal strongly to our baser instincts and lusts. You must expose this vision, yes, but you must also present another vision, God’s vision for a blessed life. This becomes increasingly critical as children reach their teenage years. They may be tempted to think, "I’ll never find a spouse." Are you constantly reminding them that the Lord will bring them the helpmeet they need and desire as they are diligently serving him? Do you model a joyful life of obedience to God? Is your Christian life attractively lived out for them so that they will desire to lead the kind of life you lead? When you correct them, is it with exasperation, as if the main point is that they have offended you, or brought shame upon you, or disturbed your personal tranquility? Talk with them about the trials of life. Engage their minds and hearts through mature, relevant, and "real-life" conversation. Show them by your example that serving Jesus with joy is not a religious slogan but indissoluble cement that keeps life together even when stressful times, hard sins, and enormous responsibility come. They must be confronted with the power of a "real" Jesus, a saving and sanctifying Jesus, a joy- and obedience-inspiring Jesus. Without such a vision and daily example, your words will seem hollow to them, hypocritical, and far-removed from the real world of temptation, slick entertainment, and air-brushed beauties.
Finally, I think we need to give more thought to ways we might give our children a sense of ownership and participation in the glory of God and building of the church. We might simply make church less churchy for them, a constant carnival of spiritual thrill rides and cotton-candy Bible lessons. We might do nothing, hoping that by watching us sit in the pew week after week, they will develop passion for being as passive as we sometimes are. Or, we might really stick their hands into real church life and give them tangible opportunities to develop their gifts and sense of "place" in the local congregation. Efforts should be made in the direction of meaningful youth activities that involve service and servanthood. Nursing home visitation, mission involvement, and older youth leadership in nurturing the younger are good steps to begin. I do not have this worked out, to be sure. One thing I know is that all covenant young people, especially our sons, will reach a place of decision in their lives. Do I belong here? Are my father’s doctrines my doctrines? Am I serving or sitting? Without positive answers to these questions, I do not believe we can keep our sons and daughters. It may not be because our lives were particularly inconsistent, or that we did not have enough family devotions, or that we did not give our children a Christian education. It may be that we did not teach them that "one day in the courts of the Lord is better than a thousand days any place else" in tangible, meaningful, and personal ways. If we fail here, they may settle for dwelling in the tents of wickedness for a season until the pig trough of unbelief so sickens them that they return to their Father’s house, wiser to be sure, but also scarred and unnecessarily nauseated.
Keeping our sons and daughters is not an esoteric issue. Nor should it be a concern only for those who have children. It is a congregational concern for the simple reason that we should want to do our part to deliver the church from the cycle of one-generation congregations that leave nothing for the next generation but the trash left over from the circus. We would seek multi-generational, active, and progressively sanctified congregations that pass on a legacy of legitimate body life, passionate love, and doctrinal fidelity. I have absolutely no confidence that I can achieve such a vision. Yet, I trust my Father’s covenant. He is the ultimate keeper of our sons and daughters.