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Working towards a greater vision for your children

In my last post I suggested:

We should look for our children to have
  • a deeper experience of God,
  • a greater level of Christlikeness and
  • more experience of God's power 
at a younger age than us. 

In this post I would like to list some keys:

  1. Be committed to continued growth yourself in these three areas.  Don't be satisfied with your current level of experience of God, seek to know God better.  Have a laser sharp focus on becoming even more the sort of person who naturally and automatically acts as Jesus Christ acted.  That means being a person who has confidence in God's goodness; is progressively free from anger, contempt, lust, manipulation, revenge, appearance management, worry, and judgmentalism (see sermon on the mount); and is full of peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.  Thirdly, continue to seek fresh gifts of prophecy and healing.  Don't be satisfied with a prophetic word you had 5 years ago or a healing in response to prayer from last year.  Adopt Paul's admonition to 'eagerly desire spiritual gifts' (this is active, not just a passive openness to them if they happen to come your way). 
  2. Share your experiences of God and growth as a Christian with your children.  Make it a habit to share over dinner the Kairoi from your own life and how you are learning from these God moments to be more like Jesus.  In this way you model to your children how God helps us grow and it gives you the opportunity to explain to them your desire that they learn these things earlier than you did.
  3. Pray and Plan.  Pray that God would reveal himself to your children and pray they would experience God's grace.  Then pray for wisdom and make plans to involve your children to growing situations: involve them in church activities, serving activities, outreach activities, and short term mission trips (Jesus did that with his disciples); include them when you are praying for things including for healing; and seek to encourage them to relate to dynamic Christians of any age but also look and pray for ways they can be involved with dynamic Christians who are older than them but not as old as you!





David Wanstall, 20/09/2010