Parents’ Responsibility to Righteousness

Every time a parent brings sin into their home, we become responsible for its influence on our children. Children are always learning; every observation they make, every experience they have, affects their ideas about God and eternity, their understanding of what it means to be human, of how to interact with community in general and other people in particular, their perception of what is right and wrong, and how to engage it. Whether we work deliberately to teach our children or not, the children continually develop their values and ideas as they observe our decisions and conduct.

Parents who speak of God and Christ and salvation while entertaining themselves on that which endorses what God has revealed to be wicked, belie the seriousness of evil before their children, and teach them to “count the blood of Christ a common thing.”[1] Parents who use foul language in their children’s presence teach disdain for God’s call to be holy[2]; to be separate from sin and the world.

When parents are selfish, deceitful, or lazy, they set the example for their children to do likewise. If these parents also speak of Christ and salvation, their children come to view Christ’s death as a means of facilitating one’s pursuit of one’s own pleasure without consequence, because they will come to think we may “sin the more, that grace may abound.”[3] Children will see no reason to avoid the “unfruitful works of darkness”[4], because the example set for them encourages their participation in those things which please their palate while perverting the righteousness of God.[5]

Parents who profess Christ while pursuing sin, cheapen Christ’s atonement to their watching children. We are not approved by God by our good behaviour; rather we are condemned by God for every wrongful act, as well as the unfaithfulness toward Him that motivates each one. Only the loving kindness of the holy God Whom we have offended makes it possible for anyone to be freed from the punishment for our wickedness; how can our children view the offense against God that sin causes as anything other than trivial when we make noise about the cross of Christ while continuing in their sight to be and do those things that made His cross necessary?

Our responsibility as Christians are to have our minds renewed[6] by meditating upon those things which are “true, honourable, just, good, pure, lovely, and of good reputation.”[7]  We are to remain apart from everything that dishonours God and defiles God’s creation[8], ensuring that everything we choose to do, think, or say will glorify God in and to His creation.[9] There is no exception clause to this obligation; rather the defining characteristic of our professed faith toward God is that we love and trust God completely, and live our lives by His Holy Spirit in righteousness and truth.[10] 

Our responsibility as parents is to “train up our children in the way they should go”[11], which is in the ‘nurture and admonition of the Lord.”[12] How dare we consider the fate of our children’s souls so much less valuable than the pursuit of our own convenience or the satisfaction of our fleshly desires? How will our children come to recognize sin as the despicable and vulgar rebellion against God that it is? How will they learn that every sin of every type is an offense against their Creator?[13] And however will they come to hate sin as God hates it, so that they will learn to come to Christ for forgiveness of it, to be reborn by the Spirit of God into a ‘new man’ recreated in the image of a holy and righteous God as God originally intended?[14] However will they fail to disdain the LORD Jesus if their parents persist in preferring sin to Christ? 

Paul warned Timothy that before Christ would return, evil men would become worse and worse, and wickedness would be rampant upon the earth.[15] The grandparents of our generation could not have imagined the depths of wickedness into which society would descend in our day. We could not have anticipated the aggressive campaign of evil that would assault impressionable minds through every possible means, as the devil wages his final attack against God’s image-bearing creation. But as wickedness advances toward total consumption of the social order, parents, and particularly Christian parents, continue to sacrifice their children on the altar of Molech, offering the souls of their children up to the idols of self-satisfaction, self-justification, and self-approval. 

Parents! Time is long past for we who claim to be followers of Jesus Christ to live what we say we believe, led and instructed exclusively by the Holy Spirit and the Holy Scripture,[16] so that when our children watch us, they see the life of Christ in us, and are led to the Saviour for forgiveness and redemption to eternal life.  

2 Cor 6:14-18  “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, ‘I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 

Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, and will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters’, saith the Lord Almighty.” 

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