We touched on this briefly in our last post, but let’s take a longer look at what is probably the most important and vital relationship a child will ever have.
The parent-child relationship should be protected and nurtured by everyone in a community. The success or failure of that bond affects us all. God loves children and gave them as a special gift to parents.
Continue reading “Teaching Wisdom to Our Children (Pt 13)”
The purpose of this study is to help parents, Christian martial arts teachers and other adults guide children through the mine fields of life and find God’s purpose and blessing for their lives.
The fourth step to Teaching Wisdom To Our Children is to lead them to make wise choices when it comes to relationships in life.
Babies are born into the world with almost no ability to care for themselves. Doctors and nurses and other types of caregivers help in the first days of a child’s life, but the primary responsibility for a baby’s health and wellbeing falls to the parents. In a child’s early years parents will look to family members, friends, neighbors, teachers and others for assistance in giving their children direction and protection. Parents soon learn about the many “mine fields” facing them as they attempt to raise healthy, well-adjusted children.
In our previous post we began sharing ten steps about how a person gets to the point where they know they’re walking with God. Here are the next three steps in the process as David explained in Psalm 16. They are the same steps we can use to Teach Wisdom to Our Children.
An expert in the “path” of life was King David. He was a man after God’s Heart and desired deeply to walk with God every day of his life. In Psalms 16:11, David wrote: “Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.” Walking on the path of God gives us three great treasures: “life,” “fulness of joy,” and “pleasures for evermore.” If we walked up to ten people today and offered them life, fulness of joy and pleasures for evermore, how many do you think would say they weren’t interested? My guess is most would say they would like to know more about how to have those things in their life.
The third step to Teaching Wisdom To Our Children is to lead them along the path of wisdom. Let me share some insights from the world of martial arts. Martial artists speak often about following the path or way (Dao or Do). The ancient pursuit of martial arts was to learn the way and walk in it. Martial Arts was a “way” of life. It is the same today. Students search out teachers who can show them the way to live as a martial artist. Christian teachers have the unique opportunity to teach students about Christ as the True Way even as they demonstrate the proper way to block, punch, kick and escape from holds.
Do you remember the name Buckminster Fuller? He was an inventor, mathematician and futurist who wrote a book shortly before his death 30 years ago titled Critical Path (St. Martin’s Press, 1981). In the book, Fuller introduced the idea of a “Knowledge Doubling Curve.” Using all of the knowledge that the human race had accumulated and transmitted by 1 AD as a starting point, Fuller believed knowledge would have doubled by about 1500 AD. The next doubling of knowledge would have been about 1750 AD. Doubling increased exponentially during the next two centuries and had grown to about every 25 years by the end of World War 2. Today, because of the computer and other information systems, the doubling time of knowledge is close to every 12 months and experts say it may one day double every 12 hours!
I touched on some of these futurist views in the section about “The Science of Immortality” in my book A History of Man’s Quest for Immortality (Fifth Estate, 2007, pp. 391-470). Though “knowledge doubling” is certainly a big challenge to our society, there is a bigger problem. Knowledge is increasing, but wisdom is decreasing. Our children will “know” more in their lifetime than we will ever know in ours, but they will have little “wisdom” to use that knowledge.
We must teach wisdom to our children now!
It’s interesting how the mind works. I read the 2011-2012 Planned Parenthood Annual Report that showed their clinics killed more than 333,000 babies and distributed more than 1,430,000 “emergency contraception kits” that include birth control drugs used to cause abortions in pregnant women. Pause and consider those “annual” numbers for a moment because they are staggering.
Something else staggering about Planned Parenthood’s report is that they are proud of their accomplishments.
“We are so proud of the year’s many successes, and deeply grateful to all the partners, supporters, volunteers, staff, and friends who helped make them possible.” Signed, Cecilia Boone, PPFA Chair, and, Cecile Richards, PPFA President
