“Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.” (Proverbs 22:6)
A mother's intention is never to raise an employee that feels entitled to show up late for work on account of the line for their five-dollar cup of coffee. No mom pictures her sweet-cheeked babe steered through life by any other substance than her love. Yet, these fears are very real for more than just a few faithful moms.
Fear will grow up to crush us unless we fight back. Thankfully, prayer isn’t a wafting of positive thoughts into thin air, it’s a firm grip on the truth of God’s promises.
How to Pray for Your Children
When we faithfully pray and read God’s Word daily, His wisdom starts to interrupt our madness. God’s Living Word is rooted in love, and we should be privy to bring that into focus as we guide our children through life.
Don’t wait until they are older; start young. It’s important to embrace the immediate influence we have on our children. The battles we wage happen in God’s timing.
“Repeat them to your children. Talk about them when you’re sitting together in your home and when you’re walking together down the road. Make them the last thing you talk about before you go to bed and the first thing you talk about the next morning.” (Deuteronomy 6:7)
When we apply everything to God’s Word, we are living the life He designed with intention. Our motherly duty is to show our children the way to follow Him.
A Prayer for Your Child’s Future
Father, You are powerful to hold the future in Your hands. The direction of our lives is no more predictable to us than our children’s lives. We trust You with all of it, and praise You for the perfect way You have designed each human life.
We praise You for blessing us with motherhood, and the intentional way it matures our faith in You. Your all-knowing hand pulls families together in Your time and will, which is perfect and unchanging. There is no love that is an accident or outside Your will, because You are love. Each child, each person was created on purpose with purpose. Praise You that we get to take part in the greatest love story of all time.
Thank you for our children. They bless us in ways that our hearts know but our heads cannot make sense of. The forgiving grace in our hearts for our children is only a thread of the love You have for us… and them. Help us to remember that You loved our babies before we did and infinitely more than we do. We can trust You with their lives, and ask the strength of Your Holy Spirit to help us lead them to Your loving arms.
Forgive us for our human strain of impatience, control, worry and anxiety. The very things we try to prevent our children from suffering sometimes happen anyway, and that’s a very hard thing to understand. We ask You to help us trust You more. Bless our hearts with great faith, daily steps of obedience, and lives full of evident trust in Your love.
Bless us with reciprocal love from our children. Help us to love them through all circumstances with appropriate apology and steadfast discipline. May the love we show for You be evident to them. Bless our lives to uphold Your truth and the testimony of Your Son--Our Savior--Jesus, to the best of our ability on this earth. Send Your Spirit to help us remember Your Word, and applicably pull it from the tucked-in places of our hearts, to point our children in the right direction. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
Megs is a stay-at-home mom and blogger at http://sunnyand80.org, where she writes about everyday life within the love of Christ.
Photo courtesy: Thinkstockphotos.com
Publication date: January 13, 2017
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