Dear Editor,
Parents and other family members play a vital role in the child’s salvation and discipleship. I believe the church needs to empower parents to take a more active role in the spiritual birth and growth of their own children while continuing to play that supportive role through its Children’s ministry.
Now, you may ask, well what about children that have no godly parents or family members to influence them on a daily or consistent basis?
There are thousands of such children in our schools and our communities and the Lord has commanded His church, you and I, to go after them to meet their needs to be saved and to be discipled. God the Father does not want one child to be lost.
Jesus illustrated this by telling the story of how a shepherd left his 99 sheep to rescue one lost sheep from dangerous, treacherous mountains. Jesus said, “In the same way, it is not the Father’s will that even one of these little ones be lost or go to hell.
As the shepherd values each individual sheep, so the Father values each child.
The hallmark of the child that makes him “the greatest in the Kingdom of God, is his humility, having a simple faith to believe and trust wholeheartedly.
Now, as adults, any one of us can get qualified as the greatest in the kingdom, but the process of renewing our minds and hearts is long and uphill..why? Because that child-like faith that we once possessed, decreased with exposure to the hardships of life without the balance of also having faith building experiences.
Jesus knew that the faith of children can be damaged and can diminish as they grow and experience abuse, neglect of needs [ spiritual and emotional], exposure to secular worldviews and ideologies, and cultural evils. The faith of a child is fragile unless it is strengthened continually.
I am,
Donna Werdenie