A Puritan Parenting Lesson

If you have children or if you may have children in the future, it is never too early to seek to learn how to effectively raise them to fear and love the Lord.  Of course, we cannot force the Lord’s hand and make our children love the Lord, but we can apply ourselves to doing those things which the Lord has often blessed in the past.  In light of this, Thomas Watson’s A Body of Divinity is of great assistance in this task.

In the introduction to his work, Watson discusses why often “there has been no more good done by preaching” (5).  In answering this question, Watson offers the following:

I fear one reason why there has been no more good done by preaching, has been because the chief heads and articles in religion have not been explained in a catechistical way.  Catechising is laying the foundation.  To preach and not to catechise is to build without a foundation.

When I served as a youth pastor in West Tennessee, the two greatest struggles which I dealt with on a weekly basis was 1) parents who didn’t love Christ, and 2) youth who didn’t love Christ.  As you can see, these were not minor issues!  Of course, it should surprise no one that the second problem was an extension of the first.  Why did these teenagers not enjoy hearing or submitting to the preaching of the Word?  Largely because they had not been trained to think rightly about God when they were small children.  Unsurprisingly, the parents, themselves not believers, did not actively work in teaching their children about God.  They certainly did not catechize them.

On the flip side, in the community in which I served baseball was big business.  The majority of parents, though not all, had bought into the dream that if their child worked hard then a baseball scholarship would certainly be found.  Therefore, while the majority of the youth’s parents did not catechize their children in Gospel truth, they did send their young children to baseball camps.  The result?  The majority of the youth cared very little about Jesus Christ or what it meant to follow him.  What they did care about was hitting home runs and throwing curve-balls.

The lesson from all this?  As Watson reminds us, one of the most effective ways to fill our children’s minds with right thoughts about the Lord is by catechizing them.  In this way we lay a foundation.  Once this foundation is laid, one can only imagine how much more effective our preaching may be.

How then shall we parent?  Work diligently to lay a foundation in our children and pray for the Lord to apply this foundation to their hearts.