Love your children (1)

As a parent, your first duty to your children is to love them. You have the responsibility of unconditional and unqualified love towards your children. To a large extent, most parents share this God-like love for their offspring. Every now and then, however, parents seem to fall into the “If you do this, I will do that” kind of love. But whether a child is good or bad, whether a son is arrested for robbery, whether your 14-year-old daughter gets pregnant or not, as a parent you owe that child a lifelong duty of love. Hopefully, many Christian parents will not have their love strained to such limits, but sometimes after all the Christian upbringing, a child may choose to go against his or her parent’s lifestyle and even rebel against God.

There must be one place for a child where he/she knows that no matter what happens, the door is always open and that place must be the parental home. Maintaining an open door for your child is probably the most difficult responsibility in Christian parenting. The importance of this cannot be over emphasised. This is an order from God because, while serious wrong doing by one’s own off spring will normally affect your fellowship, the fact that he/she is your child is unchangeable. This is how God, our Father in heaven, looks out at Christians and we need to do the same as earthly fathers.

Many Christians are familiar with the story of the prodigal son as told in Luke 15; 11 -24. Jesus narrated that there was a man who had two sons. The younger son requested his share from the father’s estate. He got together all he had, set off for a distant country and spent all his wealth overzealously. After all the wealth was spent, he became so poor; he ate pig feed to avoid starving to death. When he thought of his family, he realised that there was still plenty back home and there was no need for him to be lacking while his father was living in abundance. He came to his senses and decided to go back home and seek his father’s forgiveness for his behaviour.