Hear, My Children, The Instruction Of A Father: Diligently Teaching Children To Live According To The Word -- By: Mark McCarty
Journal: Journal of Discipleship and Family Ministry
Volume: JDFM 05:1 (Fall 2015)
Article: Hear, My Children, The Instruction Of A Father: Diligently Teaching Children To Live According To The Word
Author: Mark McCarty
JDFM 5:1 (Fall 2015) p. 119
Hear, My Children, The Instruction Of A Father: Diligently Teaching Children To Live According To The Word
Mark McCarty (D.Min., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of Pine Grove Church in Opelika, Alabama. His twenty-seven years of ministry experience include serving as a youth evangelist, a Director of Youth and Family Ministries, as well senior pastor. He and his wife Debbie have five children and five grandchildren.
God commands parents to teach their children the word of God diligently (Deut 6:7). Throughout salvation history, whenever people are in a covenant relationship with God, the divine mandate to teach children is present.1 This truth has been evident from the very beginning. In Genesis 1:28. God commissions His image-bearers to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” Implicit in these words is the need for Adam and Eve to teach their children, for filling the
JDFM 5:1 (Fall 2015) p. 120
earth and subduing it requires descendants, as evidenced by the mandate to be fruitful and multiply, which in turn takes place when the man is joined to his wife and they become one flesh (Gen 2:24). A natural implication of the first couple’s unity is, as G. K. Beale notes, “reproducing offspring in God’s image.”2 From the beginning, God’s purpose has always been for his elect to teach their children diligently. This divine mandate, first given in the garden of Eden, has now been given to the church. Parents within the household of God are now called to bring up their children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord (Eph 6:4), so that they, like Timothy, might from childhood be acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to make them wise for salvation (2 Tim 3:15). How are parents to go about accomplishing this task?
From The Parent’s Heart To The Child’s Heart
Deuteronomy 6:7–9 records Moses’s familiar exhortation to Israel to diligently teach their children the words which he commanded. This teaching is to be so woven into the fabric of everyday life that it takes place “when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (v 7). This teaching was to frame the beginning of the child’s day (when you rise), the close of the day...
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