Children: A heritage from God

Instead of making material things such as property and money our heritage let us invest in the next generation – our children, our heritage from God. Your family and your children are worth all the time and resources that you can give them. But God must come first. We are tasked to bring up our children for God. We therefore need to be very careful that we bring up our children in the way which pleases God.

The African concept of inheritance is quite biblical in that parents expect to benefit from what their children will do for them when they grow up. What we inherit must benefit us in the long run. How we invest in our children determines the benefits we will be able to enjoy from them when they grow up.

If we let our children live recklessly and ruin their lives we will not be able to reap any meaningful benefits from them. Some will end up in prison or even dead long before us. Others will become sick and unable to fend for themselves let alone for us. Children who refuse to look after their parents are misguided and in opposition to what the Bible teaches. They are likely to be failures in life regardless of what level of education they attain.

When you inherit, say, a lump sum of money, you do not rush to the mall to squander it all with people of loose morals. Instead you seek smart ways of investing your inheritance so that it can earn more for you. When we correctly bring up our children by giving them a good education, teaching them good morals, and insisting that they live lives that are clean and respectable, we will receive many benefits from the prosperity that they will earn later in their lives.

Good parents will therefore always seek ways of training their children in doing what is good for God, for them and for society as a whole. God rewards parents that bring up their children in the right way by ensuring that such children will have more than enough of the material resources to look after their parents.

I know that for some of us it is already too late to change anything since our children have already made their own decisions and choices in life. But perhaps there may be others who still have the beautiful opportunity of impacting on their heritage before it is too late.

We are grateful to have post-teenage children in our house and they have all since received Jesus as their personal Saviour. They live godly lives and they relate with other God-fearing young people. We pray daily for them to get a good education and good jobs so that we can later benefit from our heritage and reward.

Parents, whatever your station in life, you have the greatest opportunity to change the course of events in the lives of your children by praying for them. No one can stop you from praying for your children. When you pray for your children God will answer your prayers. Yes, the devil will still fight against you and your children. He will seek to destroy your inheritance from God, but you must rejoice in the fact that he is defeated.