
“6 When Joshua dismissed the people, the people of Israel went each to his inheritance to take possession of the land. 7 And the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great work that the Lord had done for Israel.8 And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of 110 years. 9 And they buried him within the boundaries of his inheritance in Timnath-heres, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of the mountain of Gaash. 10 And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel.” – Judges 2:6-10 (ESV)
So how do we do this? How do we avoid this generational departure? I thought long and hard on this, so much so I even had to take a walk and just mull it over. So after some serious prayer and some serious walking time, my thoughts came to this. The Christian parent must do everything in their power to pass on the heart and passion for the Lord to include the knowledge. I know vague right! Good news though, there are many ways to enhance doing this (and we will talk more about this in Part 2), but it has to start with living out Godly lives before our children. I think, no I know, that my children more often than not look at the goodness of my life rather than what I say (they rarely listen to me), so if we do not LIVE by what we say then our children only see our hypocrisy. By us living that Godly life, our children will pick up that passion and as we will see in part 2 of this blog (coming soon) we can begin to build off that foundation we set and foster that undivided loyalty and devotion to God and his Word!
To be continued…