I believe one of the greatest privileges as a parent is the responsibility of teaching your children about Jesus. Do you talk to your kids about Jesus?

Deuteronomy 6:7 says “You shall teach them diligently to your children (impressing God’s precepts on their minds and penetrating their hearts with His truths) and shall speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the road and when you lie down and when you get up.”

When your children are little, they learn about all the Bible stories and you do your best to teach them by taking them to Children’s Church and by buying them their own little Bible along with books that tell about the characteristics of living a life sold out to Jesus. Occasionally, you have a battle or two over an outfit or over an attitude, but generally, your children love to hear the story of Jesus.

However, as life continues, you begin to have more battles with your preteen to teenagers about going to church, having the right friends and doing the right thing. Life gets complicated. Battles become bigger and your words become sharper. At times you’re at your wits end, wondering whose kids are these little heathens anyways? Then you realize they must take after their father. So you do your best to correct them, often feeling like you are failing as a parent. However, you keep the faith that they will keep Jesus close in their hearts, just as they did when they were little.

Eventually, your children grow up and go to college, get married or get their own place. You no longer tell them the stories like you did when they were children. But you do remind them on occasion when they call that Jesus still has the answers to all their questions of life. Yes, they are grown but now you spend more time worrying about them and who will remind them and protect them now?

Then one day you realize, you used to talk to your children about Jesus, but now you talk to Jesus about your children. So now you must be the one who trusts Him to complete the work that He started in them when they were just babies.

It all comes full circle. The circle of life doesn’t end with you talking to your children about Jesus. It continues with them talking to their children about Jesus and all the generations that follow after you.

Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.”

I trust that God will always keep His Word and that Jesus will find their hearts and bring them home to Him.

So teach your children about Jesus and then talk to Jesus about your children when they are grown. I promise you that you’ll never be sorry that you did.