Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Hypocrisy?

I wonder if I'm the only person who often chokes on her own hypocrisy.
I tell my children that God's Word and the souls of men are the only things that are eternal.
However, they see me spending more time on temporal things than in reading God's Word and reaching out to the lost.
I tell my friends that every situation is sifted through God's hands, yet I fret about my children's safety.

I don't think I'm an intentional hypocrite. I don't mean to deceive. Let me re-phrase that. I don't ALWAYS mean to deceive. I want to believe what I say. I sometimes believe what I say. Yet I find fruit in my own life that often contradicts the things I speak. I believe God's Word to be truth. Sometimes I live as faithless as someone who doesn't believe God's Word is truth. Am I a hypocrite or just a sinner working out her faith?

I often wonder how sinners are supposed to train up their children. Seriously, Lord? Why would you put these precious little souls in the hands of sinners like us? We can only mess them up. Can't you, Lord, train them?

God commands us to train up our children. To remind them of the things He has done. To write His word on the doorposts of our homes. To parent them with scripture.
I still wonder how someone who doesn't always place God's Word supreme in her own life is to train up her child to value God's Word above all else. Do as I say, not as I do. It doesn't work that way.

I'm seeing now that one of the best ways to train up my children is to train up myself. For ME to seek the Lord with all my heart, my soul, and my mind and everything else will fall into place.
I can't give my children what I myself do not possess. (A good friend told me that and it has made me think.)
I can't force them to love God's Word. But it would surely help them to see me loving God's Word and desiring to spend time with Him.

I'm constantly reminded that I can't do it all as a parent. I can't work on their faith, their hearts, their manners, their talents, their emotions, their health, their friendships, their future marriages, their education, etc., etc. I can't do it all. I can't even do most of that. But God can. He's way more trustworthy with their lives than I am. As I said before---Lord, why can't you just train them up? Why involve us parents at all?

The bottom line is that scripture tells us to train up our kids. I'm completely incapable of doing any great training without training myself. Quite often I start the day focused on what I need to be training in them and I never quite get around to feeding myself with God's Word. Those are the days that I feel like the biggest hypocrite.

I suppose it's a gift for us to see our hypocrisy. It would be worse to NOT know that it even exists in us. I often pray that God will search my heart and reveal to me what sins/weaknesses/lies are in my life that are keeping me from fully believing Him.
At the end of the day, I am accountable for training up my children.
I think at the end of the day, though, the Lord really just wants all of me.

1 comment:

  1. so beautiful. so true. so convicting. again, thank you. i don't yet have children; but if i do have them, i surely do desire to train them up in the way of the Lord. time to be more serious about training up myself...right.now.

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