In our Mama Heart Like Jesus series we are studying how Jesus discipled His followers as a model for discipling our own children. This month we are looking at how Jesus built close relationships with his disciples, and we discussed ways to spend quality time with our kids. Now let’s look at three ways Jesus spoke words of life to His followers.
Today we will be discussing a fourth way to reach our children’s hearts: Teaching a Dependence on God.
We live in an independent world where we grow up in a culture with a “Do it yourself” mentality. Independence is seen as a strong, desirable trait, and dependence as a weak one. But in the Kingdom of God, things are reversed. God’s Word says to rely on the Lord for everything. In fact, this builds our relationship with God when we depend on Him.
As parents we want our kids to have a relationship with God and follow in His ways, but their hearts have to be open to receiving truth and desiring a relationship with God. This is why it is SO IMPORTANT that we cultivate the heart of our children to desire this from a young age. We have been discussing 5 Ways to Lead Your Children’s Hearts to Christ, and we talked about the first way: Keeping Distractions at Bay a few weeks ago. If you missed this post, you can go back and read it here before moving on. It has some great preventative measures to help keep our children from getting distracted from their relationship with God.
Parenting isn’t easy. Teaching our kids to show respect, be kind to their siblings, live a life of contentment, and demonstrate a heart to serve others can feel like an uphill battle. There are so many distractions warring for our children’s hearts, but it is our goal as parents to lead their hearts away from those distractions and straight to the Lord. Only Jesus, by His saving grace and Holy Spirit can make a true heart change happen with our children. With that being said, here are five practices to help lead your children’s hearts to Christ.