God wanted man to be fruitful and multiply to fill the earth with His glory.  Unless we bring our children into the new birth, we are failing to fill the earth with God’s image.

We must see that our duty in the Christian home is not to birth flesh and blood but to birth the spirit of God into our children.  If we don’t do that, we fail.  We must do everything we can to see our children brought to the new birth.

We need to get our homes and families in divine order.  When parents get their marriages into divine order, it creates the kind of environment conducive to bringing up godly children.

We need to get hands-on with our children to establish a right relationship and develop our children spiritually through the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

Children must be taught to obey and honor their parents.  If we outsource this and don’t train them, we fail them.  You cannot make your child a Christian, but you can make them subjected to your authority in your home.

Children are not to have authority in the home within the God-ordained structure, but children-centered homes where children are leading the home is a problem today.  This wreaks havoc on the child and puts them in an awkward position to determine boundaries, set identity, and set direction.

The first expression of church is in our home, when parents become the pastors of their home.  Don’t outsource this pastoral duty.  It takes work.  It takes time.  It takes effort.  We will have to give an account as to how we spend our time, especially with our children.  And not just time with them, but time teaching them the truths of God.

A lot are raised in church who are not raised in Christ.  We are not talking about going to church but about being Christian.  If your children are going to reflect God’s glory, they must see you doing it at home.  True spiritual authority is when they can see God is your God and you worship Him.  This isn’t just some put on, some Sunday deal.  Don’t drag them to church when your house is something different.  Your children need to see daddy and mama bow down to God.  They need to see it at home.  They need to see you humble yourself before God.  If you are a Christian, you must be one at home.

2 Timothy 3:4-5 describes a perilous time that we have been in for some time.  We are currently in an obsession of self-love.  Men are lovers of themselves, lovers of pleasures, and not lovers of God. We have narcissistic parents raising narcissistic children. There’s such a self-love that self-love and self-loath live in the same vessel.  They cannot be pleased.  They are miserable and expect the whole world to give them something.  Really what they want is worship.

We are commanded not to provoke our children.  This could be mean-spirited provocation, or it could be the exact opposite, a passive dereliction of duty.  Most people do a good job of meeting a child’s natural physical needs.  But what about the real serious needs of a child?  What about their spirituality?  What about dealing with the true spirt of a child and in their innocence developing the very heart of that child?  What about instilling in that child identity?  What about boundaries?

We need to bless and speak the life of God into our children.  We need to share our testimony with our children and with boldness and honesty testify how God appeared to us and changed our course.  When we speak that into our children, our God becomes their God.  Without glorifying the sin, tell them how you were a sinner and God had mercy on you.

Tell your child you want to see their life filled with the life of God.  That it’s your whole duty to see that they bear His image in the earth.

Tell them about the spirit of adoption. Let them know God wants to make them His own, they must listen carefully to His voice, and there will come a day when God adopts them into His family.

Our command is to be fruitful and multiply, but what good is it to multiply flesh?  Flesh is the enemy of God. We must multiply in the spiritual realm.  We must bring our sons and daughters to Christ.  This is where we are failing.

Childrearing isn’t for sassies, and it’s not to be outsourced.  It’s your duty.  We need to see revival in our homes.  He wants to gather the children under His wings.  He wants to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to their fathers.  This calls for repentance.  Can’t we do that today?