father. He and his wife decided to video much of their family life. The program showed one video segment of him addressing his unborn child in its mother’s womb and saying, “Child, I want you to know that I don’t know anything about being a father!” This need not be a problem if the trainer is willing himself to be in training, and to give priority to the job in hand. The subsequent family videos revealed that the young man’s honesty and dedication allowed him to become a very good father.
On one occasion when I gave this address children were present in the service with their parents. A week or two later when a mother licked a knife her daughter exclaimed “Mum! Remember that children are like sponges!” Her daughter had soaked up far more of the sermon than her mother had realised, and now both of them needed to be in training together.
Many parents experience a great deal of guilt and inadequacy about their role in training their children. It is helpful to remember
· that God is opposed to the proud,
but gives grace to the humble. 1 Peter 5:5, Proverbs 3:24
· that God is the supreme and original parent and all families are his business. Prayers for our children go straight to the Father’s heart.
· that part of God’s remedy for his rebellious children is to make them parents, so that they can be further trained by their heavenly Father.
Perhaps it is also helpful to realise that, whereas all of us fall short of the mark as parents, God gives us a re-run as grandparents! With the wisdom of hindsight, the maturity of years, and the opportunity of more available time we can joyfully revisit God’s window of opportunity.
Rod James
Permission is given to copy in this form.
Bible quotations are from The New International Version
God’s
Window of Opportunity
Train up a child in the way he should go,
and when he is old (i.e. grown up)
he will not depart from it.
Proverbs 22:6
by
Rod James
The Window of Opportunity
When our children were young it was always a pleasure for me, as their Dad, to announce that our coming family holiday would be a camping holiday. This announcement was always welcomed by a great chorus of joy and enthusiasm. Imagine my surprise and disappointment when I made this announcement one year only to be greeted with “Eerrr! What do we want to do that for?” As a parent I was being rudely awakened to the fact that there is a limited period of time in a child’s life when they wish to be with their parents, to be like their parents, and to learn from their parents.
I call this period of time, which all too quickly comes to an end, God’s window of opportunity. It starts at conception and lasts until about 10 years of age. For much of that period the child is like a sponge, soaking up all that the parents say and do. In the earlier years of this period the child mimics the parents, and their motto seems to be “I want to be like you Dad, I want to be like you Mum!” Parents will have noticed that during this period the child wants to do things and go places as a family, and that includes Sunday School and Church.
This window of opportunity is a God-given and built-in mechanism for the training of children.
Train up a Child
The Bible alerts us to this window of opportunity and instructs us on how to use it.
Train up a child in the way he should go,
and when he is old (i.e. grown up) he will not depart from it.
Proverbs 22:6.
Fathers do not exasperate your children; instead,
bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
Ephesians 6:4
The word used here in Ephesians for training can be translated ‘nurture’, ‘discipline’ or ‘training’.
Three Aspects of training:
Here are three aspects of that Biblical training which the Bible instructs us to give to our children:
young we were too busy with our own self-interested aspirations, and we have regretted the fact that the window of opportunity in our children’s lives passed too quickly for us. We can see that if a generation is not adequately trained in the wisdom of God in younger childhood, then the sins of the parents will be visited upon the children even to the third and fourth generation (Exodus 33:6,7). By the same process however, God assures us that
From everlasting to everlasting the Lord’s love is with those
who fear him, and his righteousness to their children’s children.”
Psalm 103:17.
Clearly the training of children is of supreme importance to any family, community or nation. It is the means by which the treasure of being human is passed on from generation to generation.
‘Better a family which has little income but has time to make use
of the window of opportunity in their children’s lives, than a family
with much income which misses that opportunity.’
(Proverbs of Rod, chapter one, verse one!)
Training - Grace or Law?
It is important, when trying to understand what the Bible means by the training of children, to distinguish it from the stern, legalistic and punitive training of children that was characteristic of the Victorian era a century ago. In that era children were trained to be “seen and not heard”, and to “speak when spoken to”. However legalism leads to hypocrisy, e.g. “Do as I say, not as I do” and “Not in front of the children dear”. The training of children, far from being an exercise in legalism, is to be an exercise of grace. D T Niles described Christian evangelism as “one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread”.
In the same spirit parenting is one (older) child of God training another (younger) child of God in the ways of life. An essential part of that training is the open acknowledgment by the parents of their own sins and failures, and the need of both parent and child to live in God’s wonderful mercy and constant grace.
Some time ago, on the TV program ‘Australian Story’, a young man gave an account of his horror at discovering that he was soon to be a
But if you do that the outcome will be bad.’
e.g. A heart at peace gives life to the body,
but envy rots the bones. Proverbs 14:30
A child is given wisdom when they are taught that God has established the world upon certain universal, non-optional principles. They are universal, because they apply to everyone regardless of culture or beliefs. They are non-optional because they apply even if you do not acknowledge them. The following wisdom is found in the teaching of Jesus
Give, and it will be given to you;
A good measure, pressed down, shaken together
and running over shall be poured into your lap. Luke 6:38
Here is wisdom which a child can understand—the way to prosper is to serve. By realising that the above is a universal, non-optional principle a child has the beginning of wisdom. When the child understands that to disregard such God-ordained principles is to invite certain disaster, then the child is beginning to live in the fear of the Lord.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,
and knowledge of the holy one is understanding. Proverbs 9:10
Training the Trainers
Training children is hard work. It requires determination, patience, self discipline, and courage. If you try to move a heavy object such as a stone and set it rolling it will resist you. Once it is rolling, however, it will resist you if you try to stop it. In the same way our human nature resists training, but then adopts the momentum of the things in which it has been trained e.g. physical exercise, putting on your seat belt, cleaning your teeth, and learning Scripture texts. Parents who introduce a weekly ‘TV free day’ into the life of their family will encounter great opposition to begin with. However, once the momentum of a regular TV free day has been established the family will come to anticipate it and enjoy the activities that become possible when the TV is turned off.
If determination, patience, self discipline and courage are required to parent the next generation, then we marvel at God giving us the job when we ourselves are still immature. Those of us who have been parents a long time reflect on the fact that when our children were very
1. Learning by heart
In recent years ‘information technology’ has put rote learning out of favour, e.g. times tables, poetry, etc. However the human mind has an enormous capacity for storing important and useful information, and the early years of openness and willingness are an opportunity to give a child a memory bank of Biblical truth. This was the principle used in the Hebrew community as God had commanded through Moses.
These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them upon your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
Deuteronomy 6:6-9
Learning by heart was also the principle behind the Catechism - a question and answer method once used by many churches to teach the truths of the Christian faith. I would not advocate returning to the Catechism, but I would advocate the learning of Scripture by children, e.g. the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, the 23rd Psalm, John 3:16, the Beatitudes and a number of other important scripture texts, including excerpts from the Proverbs and other wisdom literature in the Scriptures.
Early childhood is also a great opportunity to teach great Christian songs e.g. ‘What a Friend we Have in Jesus’, ‘Jesus Loves Me this I Know’, ‘To God be the Glory’, and so on. It is those great Christian songs which we learnt in our childhood which come back to us in our later years. Playing music to babies is also very worthwhile.
2. Learning by doing
A thing is not learnt by acquiring information but by seeing, doing and regularly repeating, e.g. making the bed, washing dishes, cooking a meal, cleaning a room, checking the car. The word ‘disciple’ in the Scriptures means a learner in the apprentice sense, and children learn the above habits of life as apprentices with their parents or others. The following three elements are used in that apprenticeship:
Þ You watch while I do it,
Þ I’ll watch while you do it,
Þ You do it even when I am not watching.
When I was a prison chaplain it was my practice when visiting the prison to have the evening meal with the prisoners. One day those at the table pulled me up for not saying grace before I started to eat. It turned out that all of them had said grace with their families as children and the memory of that had not left them even in prison. Everyone at the table stopped eating, heads were bowed, and childhood memories were revisited as I said grace.
This principle of learning by doing is not limited to tasks such as the above. In fact a godly approach to the whole of life can be learned in this way. The prophet Micah instructs us about life saying,
He has shown you, O man, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly, to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
When parents act justly in their business dealings, when they love mercy in helping those in need, when they walk humbly with God in dependence and obedience; in all these ways the child learns and is trained. So it is that, in God’s window of opportunity, parents teach their children to laugh, to play, to sing, and to dance; to listen, to obey, to plan, and to work; to cry, to mourn, to empathise and to care; to give, to receive, to love and to be loved.
3. Learning by taking responsibility.
We have seen that tasks are learned by apprenticing with the parent. However, the ultimate goal in human development is personal responsibility in the absence of the parent. As their father in the faith Paul encourages the Philippian Christians towards maturity.
Therefore, my dear friends, as you have obeyed me - not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence- continue to work out
you salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose. Philippians 2:12
All too quickly the window of opportunity closes and the child, programmed by its Creator, seeks a period of independence from parental training. Rightly understood this is the time for the third part of the learning process referred to above; that is, doing without the parent being present. This opportunity for the child to put into practice what it has learned without the parent being present is extremely important for the child’s personal development and dignity as an adult person. The taking of responsibility is an act of empowerment which produces maturity.
When I was eighteen years old my father sent me interstate to jackeroo on the parent stud of our own sheep stud. When I returned a year later he gave me the responsibility of setting up the breeding program and records for our flock, and of preparing the best of our sheep for showing at the Agricultural Shows. When I was nineteen he sent me to Perth with two stud rams to show and to sell. These acts of trust and empowerment made important contributions to my adult sense of responsibility and mature decision making.
‘When he is old (i.e.grown up) he will not depart from it’
Parents of teenagers can be encouraged when they realise that the ground floor of personality and human values is not established in the independent and rebellious years, but rather in the training that a person receives during those ‘window of opportunity’ years. Indeed the older we get the more we revert to what we have learned as a child. Once, while browsing in a bookshop, I came across a book entitled “My Mother used to Say”. There followed 20 minutes of delight as I read many sayings which, indeed, my own mother used to say. Many children of Christian parents have complained because family time has been invaded by their parents acts of compassion towards other people, only to find that when they themselves grow up they are ‘tarred with the same brush’ and perform the same acts of kindness that their parents performed.