Our Home Is Like A Little Church

Our Home is like a Little Church
Publisher: Christian Focus
Author: Blair, Lindsey; Giles, Bobby

Our Home is like a Little church was written to teach preschool children the Christian doctrine of the home as a place of worship where the father teaches his family God’s commands and leads them to worship the one true God. The home is the front line of ministry to children—not the Sunday school or public church gathering. All the practices present in a Christian worship service—the Scriptures, prayer, and praise-should be present in the home as well.

Our Home is like a Little church teaches this truth by repeatedly putting church and home side by side-on adjacent pages. God expects parents to teach their children when they sit down for meals, when they drive along the road, when they lie down for bed, and when they get up in the morning. These pastoral duties can be daunting, so this book also serves as a reminder that these duties are done in light of God’s grace, which is shown to us through Jesus work on the cross. Parents and children together can read this engaging little book in order to discover what Gods plans are for worshipping Him inside their home.

A Word to Parents

by Arthur W. Pink

One of the saddest and most tragic features of our twentieth-century “Civilization” is the awful prevalence of disobedience on the part of children to their parents during the days of childhood, and their lack of reverence and respect when they grow up…

In the vast majority of cases the children are not to be blamed nearly so much as the parents. Failure to honor father and mother, wherever it is found, is in large measure due to parental departure from the Scriptural pattern…

God has intrusted to parents a most solemn and yet a most precious privilege. It is not too much to say that in their hands are deposited the hope and blessing, or else the curse and plague of the next generation… Most assuredly God will require an account of the children from the parents’ hands, for they are His, and only lent to their care and keeping. The task assigned you is no easy one, especially in these superlatively evil days. Nevertheless, if trustfully and earnestly sought, the grace of God will be found sufficient here as elsewhere. The Scriptures supply us with rules to go by, with promises to lay hold of and, we may add, with fearful warnings lest we treat the matter lightly…

Read the full article HERE

HT: Grace and Truth Books

Explaining Baptism to Covenant Children

I recently got Big Truths For Little Kids: Teaching Your Children to Live for God which basically explains the First Catechism through stories. And I just love how baptism was explained to Caleb and Cassie (the covenant children in the story) in the 33rd chapter:

“…I have a question. I told Tommy that Hunter and his mom will be baptized tomorrow, and I told him that I was baptized when I was a baby. Tommy is a Christian, but he said he hasn’t been baptized. Why were Cassie and I baptized as babies?”

“Well, Caleb,” explained his mom, “some churches do not baptize until a person is older, but we believe that baptism is a sign and seal of God’s covenant to be our God and the God of our children. When you were baptized, that did not mean that you would automatically become a believer. You did not even know what was happening–in fact, you slept most of the time! But it did mean that you are part of the covenant family. By having you baptized, Daddy and I were saying that we knew you were a sinner and that you needed Jesus to be your Savior. We were saying that we trusted Him to one day give you a new heart so that you would repent of your sin and trust Jesus to be your Savior. We promised to teach you about God. And the other members of our church promised to help us teach you about the Lord Jesus.”

“Why wasn’t Hunter baptized when he was a baby?” asked Cassie.

“Because his mom and dad weren’t Christians,” said her mother. “But Hunter and his mom have now become part of God’s family and are joining the church, so they will be baptized to show that they have been cleansed from their sin by the blood of Christ. This is a time of celebration not just for Hunter and his mom but for our whole church…”

This book is a good resource to teach children basic truths of the Christian faith. And it works well with GCP’s Kids’ Quest! Catechism Club in reinforcing the lessons. Another one that I love is Starr Meade’s Training Hearts, Teaching Minds which expounds on the Shorter Catechism using the family devotions format.

How about you? How would you explain the sacrament of baptism to children? Or how have you explained it in the past?

Evangelizing Our Children

by E. Calvin Beisner

Reformed Christians take comfort from Acts 2:39: “the promise is for you and for your children.” God’s promises are multi-generational. Paul’s assurance that children even of just one believing parent are “holy” (1 Cor. 7:14) reinforces our confidence, as does his statement: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household” (Acts 16:31).

We find the root of this comfort in God’s covenant with Abraham: “I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant” (Gen. 17:7).

Yet simply being born of believers doesn’t guarantee salvation (Rom. 2:12–29). A child must also be raised faithfully in the covenant (Gen. 18:19; Deut. 6:6–9; Ps. 78:1–7), and he must believe (John 3:18). Only those “who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” are children of God (John 1:10–13).

But if there is no blanket promise of salvation to the children of believers, is there no advantage to being born to Christian parents?

Yes! There is great advantage. Like the Jews, they are entrusted with the oracles of God (Rom. 3:2). That is a tremendous advantage, for “you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Peter 1:23–25).

What other children hear the Word in the home, grow up in the church where they hear the preaching and teaching of the Word week in and week out, and where their friends and teachers encourage them to believe and obey? Where they learn the great hymns of the faith and soon have them in memory?

Yet the promise of salvation is to all who believe, and only to them. Far from unconditionally guaranteeing their salvation, the promises of Scripture to believers for their children establish Christian parents’ responsibility to evangelize our children.

READ MORE at Ligonier Ministries’ TableTalk