Praying Obedience for Our Children

Daily Truth:  “Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right.”
 Ephesians 6:1

 

 

Praying obedience.

Wow!  That is a huge undertaking.  I think obedience is the behavior we struggle with the most as parents.

We want our children to be able to obey immediately and sweetly.

However, sometimes our pride gets in the way.

Let’s be honest we all love it when our children demonstrate proper obedience and it makes us look good as moms.

Yet, that’s not the obedience we need or want.

We want obedience that comes from the heart.

Two examples from scripture of obedience come to mind.

The first is Samuel (I Samuel 3).

Hannah brought Samuel to the temple to serve and live in the temple when he was a very young boy as part of promise she made to the Lord.

Eli was not known for his tremendous parenting skills.

Can you imagine how hard that must have been for Hannah to leave Samuel with Eli?

I can only imagine that she prayed daily for Samuel’s obedience to God’s commands and not follow the path of Eli’s sons.

Is it no wonder then that Samuel immediately answered Eli when he thought Eli called him in the middle of the night.

Eli eventually realized that it was God calling Samuel and told Samuel how to respond.

Samuel immediately responded, “Speak, for the servant heareth”.

God then used Samuel in an amazing way in the lives of His people.

Then there’s the boy with the 5 loaves and 2 fish. (John 6)

I think this is one of my favorite stories of God using a child especially in the area of obedience.

Here the Lord has been teaching a crowd of over 5,000 men not to mention women and children.

It’s lunch time and there is no way to feed all these people.

The disciples display their great lack of faith in God being able to provide.

Then here comes this boy with only five loaves of bread and two fish and willingly gives his lunch to God to use.

Insert pause – I have a hard time imagining my boys being willing to do this.  They think of the next meal before they even finish the one they are working on.  Although, one of them willingly gave me one of their Cadbury eggs the other day.  So maybe……

Can you imagine the boy’s utter amazement when his little lunch multiplies to feed all those people and then have 12 baskets of food left over?!?

In both of these cases, I have to speculate that there was a mother praying for the willing obedience of their son.

So, why should we pray for our children’s obedience.

1.  Confidence.  The Bible says that honoring our parents is the fist commandment with promise.  (Ephesians 6:1-3)  Our children will have confidence knowing that when they demonstrate proper obedience they are obeying God’s command.

2.  God blesses obedience (Proverbs 1:8-9).  I am not talking about material blessing.  Rather, spiritual blessing and isn’t that what we want for our children.

There are so many verse dealing with obedience, especially in the book of Proverbs.

Take the time this week to find some of those verse and start praying these scriptures for your children,

Remember, we want obedience to penetrate into their hearts and not just to be an action to please us.

Until next week,

Rebekah

klink

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.