Your family life and what God expects of you concerning your family is very important. A beautiful promise is found in Exodus 2:1–10. And there went a man of the house of Levi, and took to wife a daughter of Levi. And the woman conceived, and bare a son: and when she saw him that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months. And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink. And his sister stood afar off, to wit what would be done to him.
And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river; and her maidens walked along by the river’s side; and when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it. And when she had opened it, she saw the child: and, behold, the babe wept. And she had compassion on him, and said, This is one of the Hebrews’ children. Then said his sister to Pharaoh’s daughter, Shall I go and call to thee a nurse of the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for thee? And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, Go. And the maid went and called the child’s mother. And Pharaoh’s daughter said unto her, Take this child away, and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages. And the woman took the child, and nursed it. And the child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. And she called his name Moses: and she said, Because I drew him out of the water.
Your children, given to you by the Lord, carry the same promise that God gave to Moses’ mother: “Take this child and raise him for Me and I will pay you wages.” Some efforts are very thankless, and a mother’s duties are one of them. Any mother who nurses her child or takes care of him does not expect any gratitude. She is making a mistake if she does. The only time that a child appreciates his mother is when he is mature and far beyond childhood. A child cannot appreciate what a mother faces until they become a parent themselves and understands the problem of being a parent. A mother must love and teach the child to love. She cannot expect a child or a little baby to appreciate what she does. But there are certain things that she can do which will bring great rewards.
Some parents are only concerned about raising their children, yet without any concern about them walking with God to become prophets of God or to walk in any ministry. This should be your concern. When you raise your child for God in the proper way, there will be real wages, real returns that will be very valuable to your own heart. Otherwise, your children may slip away from you. It is not enough to keep your children from accidents or to feed them until they finally grow up and become adults. That alone is not worth the effort in this day; and if that is all you consider doing, you had better forget about having children.
If Christians in these end times are going to put their money and energy into raising a child, and are interested in the joys of family life, they had better go all the way and raise that child to be a real man or woman of God. It is not worth the effort unless they strive for the very best.
They should raise their children wholly for God; otherwise, it is not worth all the expenditure of energy, considering what that energy could do in some other labor for God. If children are raised for God, then the labor and the energy of a mother is really worthwhile in comparison to what those energies and those hours of labor would accomplish in another field for the Kingdom of God.
Look upon your life as a stewardship, not as a merrily playful, full of fun adventure. Do not look upon your life as something for your own pleasure, your own comfort, or the gratification of your own ego.
When you say, “This is my child,” there is a certain personal self-satisfaction in that. But more than that, God will pay you wages and give you something back again that will be a wonderful return for your efforts.
Another passage of Scripture out of the life of Moses opens the door to another truth. Moses had probably been trained by his mother to believe in the law of God and to follow it. He knew what God demanded of him. Later God spoke to him in the burning bush and convinced him to go down to Egypt and set the people free as God gave him miracle deliverance. He started to go down, but he was abruptly stopped, as we read in Exodus 4:24: And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the Lord met him, and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah (his wife) took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me. So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art because of the circumcision. Verses 24–26.
This is a strange story and most people do not understand it. If Moses was to lead a whole nation out of slavery, then God first had to require that he conform to the will of God himself. Moses was circumcised and knew the law.
He kept it, except for one area. Zipporah, his wife, was a little lax concerning it. She had a hostile attitude and did not want her son circumcised. Moses went along with it, but God met him as they came to the lodging place in the way. The Lord Himself was ready to kill Moses.
God would rather have His servant dead than to have a servant who disobeyed Him. When Zipporah saw what was happening, she knew it was because Moses, the head of his house, had not circumcised his son; he had not brought him under the covenant blessing that God had for him.
She then circumcised the child and threw his foreskin at Moses’ feet; and so the Lord stopped His effort to kill him. Moses then could go on and lead the children of Israel out of Egypt.
Is God that particular about families? He surely is. God demands that elders must have children who are not unruly or accused of riot, but in subjection (Titus 1:6).
Read what He says about deacons and elders in the Bible; read what God demands of a father and a mother when they raise their children for the Lord.
How much effort are we putting into Bible study classes for our children? Are we believing for the classes to be a means of bringing impartation to our children? Are we believing that the elders and the teachers will impart to them, teach them, minister to them, and see them come into something from God? How many of those children are going to walk with God when they become older?
Many young people have been redeemed out of the hand of the enemy and are ready to serve God, but what about the little children? Are they going to walk with God?
Will this end-time walk with God go the same route that other movements have gone before, and as soon as the children reach a certain age they will be lost to the church because no one has ministered to them the reality of what their parents have? There should be concern about this.
There should also be concern about the boys and girls who run up and down the aisles, after a church service is over, without any sense of reverence. Many of them are from the families of the elders and deacons.
Is a walk with God for the parents, but not for the children? The children must be reached and brought into a walk with God from the very beginning. They should be ministered into it by whatever way possible.
According to Old Testament or New Testament requirements and qualifications, God deals with you when you do not bring your family under the blessings and provisions for which He opens the door.
God has promised to bless your house and your children. How can you believe in a walk with God and not open up to minister the full measure of impartation and blessing to little children and babies? This has been done, but only in a measure.
There is an apostolic foundation of order that God has laid out which He blesses. There is an order for the home and a provision for the children. There are certain things that must be taught to them. Do not play with it. Do not come close to it and then miss it. Do it! Take the responsibility.
As Kingdom schools are brought forth for the children, the parents are not to shift their own responsibilities to a teacher who has them for several hours. This would not be right.
The building of Kingdom schools will be encouraged more if the parents themselves do what they can to bring the children into a real walk with God. God will bring rewards of blessing to any mother who will consistently labor to make her son a prophet, or her daughter a prophetess, and bring them into a walk with God in the Spirit.
Involve your children in a walk with God. Let them suffer, let them find out what satanic assault is, let them learn to build their defenses while they are young.
Let them grow up walking in a spiritual walk from the very beginning, because there is nothing else in this world worth living for now.
What will it mean to be a success and make money? What is going to happen to the world in the next few years? What are you really going to live for? Press into the next age and have children who can walk with God now. That is more important than giving them an annuity (a specified income payable at stated intervals), a paid-up life insurance, a college education, or any other benefit. Give them all of that if you can, but in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, do not forget to give them the ability to walk with God.
And Pharaoh called unto Moses, and said, Go ye, serve the Lord; only let your flocks and your herds be stayed: let your little ones also go with you. And Moses said, Thou must give us also sacrifices and burnt offerings, that we may sacrifice unto the Lord our God. Our cattle also shall go with us; there shall not an hoof be left behind; for thereof must we take to serve the Lord our God; and we know not with what we must serve the Lord, until we come thither. Exodus 10:24–26. Who knows with what he must serve the Lord? Who knows what kind of price he is going to pay? Moses had already insisted that the little ones were to go along too. Although several compromises were offered, Moses refused them all.
You do not know with what you must serve the Lord. Be prepared to go the whole way. You might become a martyr for the Lord. It is possible that you might suffer or be persecuted or even die for the Word. What do you think is going to happen to you?
Mothers, will you raise your sons to become ministers of the Lord, to see them go to a foreign land to preach this Word and die? Could you accept hearing that one of your boys had been killed in a riot? That would be far better than to be killed in war. Raise your children for God and see them die for the Lord first. America has seen her sons and daughters slaughtered elsewhere.
Many families with good incomes watch their children become hooked on drugs until only a miracle of God can restore normality. Is that what you want?
Why hesitate to pay the price for whatever is necessary to train and raise your children to serve the Lord? The dearest price you can pay, that of giving your whole life, is cheaper than the defeat that will happen in this generation to the Christian world that does not walk with God.
Raise your children for the Lord, and they will also be good husbands and wives. Do not let children sort of grow up by themselves, or they may end up as those who riot for causes, they know nothing about, protesting against the society in which there is no challenge.
Do you want to reach the young people? Give them something to live for, give them something to fight for, give them something to die for; and they will do it. But give them a car, all the allowance they want, fine clothes, and watch them go to hell.
In your walk with God, you have something to live for, something to sacrifice for, and something to die for. Raise your children to walk with God. Raise them for something better than cannon fodder (soldiers, especially infantrymen, who run the greatest risk of being wounded or killed in battle).
Raise them for something better than divorce courts and broken homes, something better than drunkenness and drugs. Raise them to walk with God, and you will not lose them to the devil. Hold this vision and go after it with all your heart.
Jesus was a revolutionary and Paul created riots. If Jesus and Paul were here today, riots would not be in the universities, but in the churches.
Protest against the arrogance, the indifference, and the settling down to just exist. It would be better to be dead than to be a vegetable that merely exists.
Live the life God called you to live. Be what He wants you to be. Walk in the grace of God. Why fail in the purposes and destinies for which He raised you up?
Let the fathers and the mothers be moved in their hearts to seek the Lord in raising their children to be the sons and daughters of Joel’s prophecy.