2025-05-12
Ephesians 6:4 NIV
Parenting doesn’t end when your child becomes a teenager. Teens are just more mobile, spend less time with you, and are more independent. Now they value and emulate peers who are as immature as they are. Even when you have laid moral and spiritual foundations in their early years, something will happen that leaves you asking, “What happened? Where did I go wrong?” Adolescence happened!
It’s the teenager’s brain; it’s wired that way. Their frontal lobes – the part of the brain linked to moral development, emotional reactivity, impulse control, and decision-making – aren’t fully developed yet. Their frontal lobes won’t finish growing before their twenties, and sometimes later.
Meantime, what happened to all those Bible stories and your efforts to build godly beliefs into them? It’s all in there, temporarily lost in those budding lobes! They aren’t bad or stupid, though they sometimes seem to act that way. They haven’t abandoned your teachings. The belief systems you helped them construct earlier are not erased – they have been transferred to a “holding file” until their new sanity-restoring brain cells arrive. And they will!
Your job is to avoid panic, pray and allow God to work on them, love them unconditionally, and be their anchor. Stand firm, and live by your principles. Demonstrate empathy, but teach them how their decisions affect others. Help them learn self-control by letting them deal with their consequences! Be patient, supportive, and never give up on them. You have sown the seed of God’s Word into them, and “at just the right time [you] will reap a harvest of blessing if [you] don’t give up” (Galatians 6:9 NLT)!
Soul food: Heb 5-8; Mark 6:30-44; Ps 18:30-50; Prov 11:22
2025-05-11
Proverbs 22:6 KJV
Training your child is both challenging and rewarding. By shaping their underlying belief system, you help their developing brain establish permanent neural pathways that will guide their moral and spiritual growth. Neuroscientists Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman, authors of Born to Believe, tell us the most crucial years are from age seven to ten. That’s when your child has the greatest propensity to understand the concept of a God they can’t see, feel, or hear. What an ideal opportunity!
Newberg and Waldman also suggest that our most effective tool for belief building at this stage is storytelling, not preaching or moralizing. Stories that incorporate godly principles, moral behaviours, courage, faith, love, compassion, and forgiveness are welcomed, easily digested ingredients for building Christian character.
Storytelling was how God instructed the Israelites to teach their children His ways and Word. Stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, Daniel, Esther, Samson, Ruth, and David; of Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection; of Jesus walking on the sea, raising the dead, and feeding the five thousand, stir the hearts, interest, and imagination of young children and impart enduring, life-changing principles! In fact, studies show that the belief systems of adults are powerfully influenced by stories they heard growing up.
Implant stories that will become the underpinning for their character and the basis for a lifetime of faith. As a parent, it’s your job to encourage and stimulate their developing brain toward godly beliefs, decisions, and lifestyle!
Soul food: Exo 20:13; Gen 4:1-15; Matt 5:21-22
2025-05-10
Romans 8:1 KJV
Once we understand that God’s love for us is based on what Christ did for us rather than what we do ourselves, the struggle is over. Now we can stop “performing,” and we can serve God because we know He loves us and that we don’t need to try to make Him love us. We no longer fear rejection by Him because of our mistakes. When we do something wrong, now all we do is repent, receive God’s forgiveness, and then refuse the condemnation that sin brings. Realizing we are loved and accepted even though we’re imperfect is such a relief!
Serving God out of desire rather than obligation is incredibly liberating! The moment you place your trust in Christ, God sees you as righteous from that point on. He doesn’t accept you because of your performance but because of your relationship with Him through Christ. And you need to decide to believe it and stand on it.
A noted minister writes: “We become what we believe we are; therefore, as we become convinced that we are right with God, our behaviour will improve. We will do things right and with less effort. No matter what other people may have told you that you are not, God delights in telling you in His Word who you are in Him – loved, valuable, precious, talented, gifted, capable, powerful, wise, and redeemed. Take a moment and repeat those nine things aloud. Say, ‘I am loved, valuable, precious, talented, gifted, capable, powerful, wise, and redeemed.'”
That’s how God sees you, and it’s how you need to start seeing yourself.
Soul food: Heb 1-4; Mark 6:14-29; Ps 18:1-29; Prov 11:19-21
2025-05-09
Genesis 1:27-28 NKJV
A pastor writes: “When God created man, he made him ‘in his own image.’ That was God’s original plan, and it has not changed. He wants to make us like himself… godly. He does it by working on our character through his Word, through his Holy Spirit, and through circumstances. The Greek word for ‘character’… means ‘tested and proven reliable.’ It brings to mind the work of a blacksmith, describing something that has gone through the fire, has been beat on… but has stood the test.”
Notice, one of the first things God said to man was, “Be fruitful.” And Jesus tells us how: “If you stay joined to me, and I stay joined to you, then you will produce lots of fruit” (John 15:5 CEV). But fruit takes time to ripen. When you try to rush the process, it doesn’t taste as good. Have you ever tasted gassed tomatoes? You buy them at the grocery store. If farmers picked ripe tomatoes and shipped them, they would get smashed en route to market. So, they pick them green, spray them with ethylene gas before they go to market, and the gas quickly ripens green tomatoes into red. Nothing is wrong with those tomatoes, but if you have ever tasted a vine-ripened tomato, you know there is no comparison.
Similarly, it takes time for spiritual fruit to grow in your life. You can’t take a crash course and graduate with spiritual maturity. It requires a lifetime of walking with God, leaning on Him, learning from Him, and loving Him with all your heart. God wants to produce the fruit of the Spirit in your life, so cooperate with Him.
Soul food: Titus 1-3; Mark 6:1-13; Ps 150; Prov 11:16-18
2025-05-08
Psalm 37:23 TLB
To come up with a daily to-do list that keeps your peace and joy intact, consult God. When you take on too much, you set yourself up for failure – and stress. If you’re wise, you won’t schedule more than one or two “majors” in a day. Life doesn’t run smoothly, no matter how badly you want it to. So, build in time for interruptions, traffic jams, lost keys, slow-moving people, etc.
And be careful about multitasking. Studies have connected high-stress multitasking to short-term memory loss. Experts have concluded that multitasking makes you less efficient because it decreases the brainpower needed to execute each task. So, make yourself finish one task before beginning another. To be productive, you must be focused.
And one more thought – a very important one: Solitude is essential to success! Before Jesus picked His disciples, fed the multitude, and calmed the storm, He took time to be alone with God in prayer. He did, but we don’t, and it shows up in the results we get! We pick the wrong people, lack the necessary resources to meet the need, and the storms of life overwhelm us. The great thing about prayer is that you can do it anywhere – in a traffic commute, in the checkout line at the grocery store, on your lunch break, or when your eyes first open in the morning. Bottom line: Since God “delights in each step” of your life, begin to involve Him more.
Soul food: Jonah 1-4; Mark 5:31-43; Ps 62; Prov 11:15
2025-05-07
Ephesians 3:20 NIV
Lack of faith is not a failure of logic; it’s a failure of imagination. Lack of faith is the inability or unwillingness to entertain thoughts of a God who is able to do “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us” (v. 20 NIV). Did you get that? God wants to empower your imagination!
A pastor writes: “If we are going to have an eternal impact on our culture, we can’t just criticize it or copy it. We’ve got to create it. If we are going to reach our generation with the gospel, we can’t just appeal to logic. We’ve got to capture their imagination. And C. S. Lewis is a great example of both. Can you think of anyone more left-brain logical than Lewis? His theological writings, from Mere Christianity to The Problem of Pain, are as logical as logic can be. But Lewis combined left-brain logic with right-brain creativity. The Chronicles of Narnia continue to capture the imagination of new generations. The church ought to be the most creative place on the planet. And there are certainly pockets of ingenuity and imagination, but we’re nowhere near our creative potential.”
Perhaps this is because we have a false definition of faithfulness. Faithfulness is not doing it how it has always been done. It’s not preserving the status quo. No, we must never water down the gospel or promote biblical compromise for cultural relevancy. Bottom line: Our message must never change, but our methods must change if we are to gather in the final harvest before the Lord of the harvest returns.
Soul food: Num 34-36; Mark 5:21-30; Ps 57; Prov 11:14
