Practical Ways to Teach Your Children to Pray
Remember to model for them, but also give them opportunities to pray alongside you. James Dobson rightly concludes, “There is nothing more important than parents passing on a generational legacy of faith and values to their children.” When you teach your children to pray you are giving them a greater opportunity for a close relationship with God.
When one thinks about the great men and women of faith they can visualize their strength of character, their personal holiness, and their exercise of the disciplines of the Christian faith.
Whether reading the Word of God, serving in a ministry capacity, or preaching to a multitude, nearly every hero is also marked by another characteristic.
They are men and women of prayer.
Modeling Prayer
Prayer is a critical part of the Christian life. We are told to “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17) and to “Devote yourselves to prayer” (Col 4:2). We must exercise our privilege to pray individually, but we must also teach this great discipline to our children.
Just as the disciples petitioned, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 13:1), our children are needy of us to teach them to pray. We must teach our children what we have learned about prayer.
When teaching children to pray, the most powerful method is modeling. You become the example of what prayer is like. You can show your children how to pray by the way you pray.
Invite your children to be part of your prayer life. When you allow them the privilege of praying with you as you commune with God, they will begin to replicate what you do.
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How I Would Explain a Christian View of Transgenderism to a Non-Christian
Written by Samuel D. James |
Wednesday, June 22, 2022
To miss God’s design is to not live as God intended. It’s to sell ourselves short, to make for us lives and identities and destinies that are far, far poorer than what God intends. That’s why Christians talk about this stuff: because the good life really is possible.Let’s begin with the observable facts of anatomy. Males have different reproductive organs than females. More than that, the reproductive organs of males appear to be designed to fit together with those of females. If you took a class on safe sex in high school, your teacher (or book, or video, or whatever) almost certainly assumed that female reproductive organs had to be treated differently than male ones. Thus, every boy in that class was expected to know how to put on a condom, and every girl in that class was expected to know what the birth control pill does. I doubt there was much confusion in the class over why girls weren’t expected to practice with condoms on themselves or the boys weren’t asking questions about the pill.
Now of course, this doesn’t prove that all the biological males in the class experienced male gender identity, or that the biological girls experienced the opposite. But the point is simply that sex education depends on a meaningful distinction between maleness and femaleness, and that this distinction is a given one, not simply an artifact of culture. No one was brainwashed into thinking they have the physical parts between their legs that they can plainly see. Boys see their boy parts, and girls see their girl parts, and from the moment boys and girls are born other people relate to them not simply as generic humans but as boys or girls, mostly because of these observable human parts.
Christianity begins with the teaching that God created a man and a woman, Adam and Eve. When Adam saw Eve for the first time, he was so excited that he broke out into song. Christians take “Bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh” to mean that Eve was like Adam, yet unlike him. She was a human being, but she “completed” him in a very real way. In fact, in Genesis, we are told plainly how this completion was immediately expressed: through sex. “The man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.” Adam and Eve’s natures as like yet unlike demanded sexual union. So in the Christian religion, men and women were created by God with bodies that are like yet unlike, and the expression of this mysterious, complementary creation is sexual union. There is no sex without bodies, and there are no bodies without maleness and femaleness.
Now here is where many critics of Christianity argue that this doctrine simply fails to describe the lived reality of many people. What about the intersex? What about those with gender dysphoria? What about those who say they know they are a different gender than their biological sex?
Two answers are in order here. First, while the existence of intersexed persons and persons with gender dysphoria is often treated like a golden gun against the Christian position, this is a gross oversimplification of what usually happens with these folks. We have research that suggests more than 90% of teens diagnosed with gender dysphoria will eventually grow out of it. Gender dysphoria should be understood as a psychological malady, not as a kind of person.
Second, the Christian position certainly anticipates the possibility of feeling alienated from one’s body. Christians believe that Adam disobeyed God and introduced sin into the world. Sin corrupted the Adam’s relationship with God, with Eve, with the earth, and even with himself. Adam and Eve’s recognition that they were naked and now ashamed is a sign of profound alienation between Adam and Eve and their bodies. Before sin, they accepted themselves and each other and rejoiced without shame. After sin, they cover their bodies and hide their persons from God.
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Streams in the Desert: Burning Man, 2023
As usual, the newspapers reported on the Burning Man storm as an art festival that got rained out, which shows you why no one should read them to find out what’s actually going on in the world. But that’s another story. God cannot be silenced, and His glory and love are too powerful to be mocked forever.
A few weeks ago, millions of Americans learned for the first time about a new modern religion, because of a flash flood in the desert of Western Nevada that left some 75,000 people dangerously stranded. What were 75,000 people doing in a barren desert?
Revelry in the Desert
They were at a weeklong pagan festival called Burning Man where they go live in the desert every year for a week of revelry. Elon Musk calls it Silicon Valley’s annual must-go retreat. If so, then Silicon Valley is more of a problem than you or I had imagined.
The schedule is punctuated by a host of quasi-religious rituals. The makeshift city that hosts it boasts an Orgy Dome with long lines of people waiting to enter and do exactly what its name says. (If that seems unlikely, feel free to confirm it however you like, but be aware that what you find will be disturbing. I do not care to supply a link.)
The entire complex is centered around two freshly built structures: one of them a temple, and the other some form of massive depiction of all mankind. At the end of the week, they ritually burn the temple and the “man,” which is where they get the name Burning Man.
This year they built and burned the Temple of the Heart and the 60 ft. tall Chapel of Babel, respectively. Revelers spend months preparing for it, partly because if you are not properly outfitted you could die in the waterless heat, and partly because everyone is supposed to contribute something to the affair. If that isn’t a religion, then the word religion has no meaning.
Behind the Burning Rituals
Burning rituals are fundamental to religions as different as Buddhism, Hinduism, Molech, and that of the Vikings. There is a reason: They all reject the body. The physical world on the whole is regarded with suspicion (hence the need to escape it), but specifically the human body is regarded as an enemy in which the soul is imprisoned for the time being.
Our own bodies are the great enemy of our souls, and everything fixed about them is the enemy of the spirit which longs to be free from captivity and return to somewhere or something or nothing at all. The rainbow-trans flag which adorned the wall of the Burning Man chapel serves as testament to their rejection of the sanctity of the body and of the natural order.
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A Time to Keep Silence: A Dissenting Perspective on the Nashville Massacre
This massacre was perpetrated by one person in one place and toward one group of people. Even granting that we share a faith and formal ecclesiastical ties, there is a case for many of us keeping silent and not presuming to advise or to otherwise discuss the matter. In a matter so awful even consolation can come across as callous, especially when it comes from strangers and via digital means.
The year that I graduated high school the county in which I lived was greatly affected by a jeep wreck that killed two young men who attended that same school. I suppose the news outlets in Charlotte were strapped for news that day, so at least one of them apparently sent a reporter out into the hinterlands to ‘get the scoop’ on what had happened. That caused no little furor among some of the locals, who objected that such a thing was an inconsiderate and insulting thing to do at a time when many people were in shock at such a sad affair.
I am paraphrasing/filling in the blanks and working from secondhand testimony here, but the objection was that under normal circumstances the media paid no attention to the county. Indeed, many of them were probably unaware that it existed, and even those that had a vague idea were probably not inclined to visit or to generally think or speak well of it: the meteorologists in particular caused an irritation every time there was a major thunderstorm and they mispronounced the name of one of our communities. And yet when something tragic – read: newsworthy – happened they acted as though they had a right to invade the community and interrogate total strangers about their feelings about the situation. Strangers, it might be added, whom they would probably look down upon under normal circumstances. The local rejoinder to all of this was something along the lines of ‘mind your business and leave us to grieve in peace, for we are hurting and have no interest in our pain being used as a revenue-generating spectacle in your news program.’
This affair came to mind after the recent outrage in Nashville. And as I watch people fall all over themselves analyzing, discussing, well-wishing, and politicking in response to that sad episode I am inclined to think that the response of my fellow citizens in the former case is wise and well-suited to the present moment as well. There is an important difference in that the former case dealt with a tragedy in the form of a vehicular accident, whereas in Nashville a heinous crime was willfully perpetrated by a person as a responsible moral agent. Still, the basic response in the first case is useful here as well.
This massacre was perpetrated by one person in one place and toward one group of people. Even granting that we share a faith and formal ecclesiastical ties, there is a case for many of us keeping silent and not presuming to advise or to otherwise discuss the matter. In a matter so awful even consolation can come across as callous, especially when it comes from strangers and via digital means. Those who have actual relationships with the grieving have an obligation to “weep with those who weep” (Rom. 12:15), but those of us who do not have such relationships would probably do well to keep silence and to let our efforts be restricted to interceding with God for mercy for the grieving: this is a “go into your room and shut the door and pray” moment (Matt. 6:5-6).
Job’s friends are a helpful example here. They did not come from afar to console a stranger, but one whom they knew well. And they did not come in speech that presumed to comfort but sat speechless in the elements, exposed for seven days to the Near Eastern sun and the desert nights in torn garments while they waited for Job to break the silence with his laments (Job 2:11-13). That forms a remarkable contrast to our present situation, and it involved a sacrifice far greater than what I am suggesting. I do not ask you, dear reader, to lay aside your temporal affairs to travel to Nashville to sit in sackcloth and silence. But I do suggest real good might be done by simply not talking about the matter on the internet, and I think that you might consider whether your own behavior until now falls short of that of those who have otherwise become a byword for people who fail to comfort in a time of need.
Central to my thinking on this matter are several points. One, it is not appropriate to discuss the suffering of others in public. It is in fact rather rude, being actually a form of gossip. Two, there is such a thing as respect for the dead and for the survivors and the grieving, and such respect includes a solemn refusal to speak in the presence of or about those who have been killed or who have lost loved ones. Presence in our day includes not only real presence, but the digital sphere as well. I fear that such respect is in short supply at present, perhaps even among some believers. Three, it is not right to pretend that one knows or cares about people and places that one does not know and would not know or care about absent exceptional events that bring them to one’s attention. (That remark is directed to those in our wider society who have no relation to the victims whatsoever, not those of us that share a faith and ought to feel a general compassion for all our fellow believers, whether they are personally known or not: Rom. 1:10-13; Col. 1:29-2:5.) Four, opportunism is always revolting, and there seem to be many in our society who have no qualms about using a crime perpetrated against strangers as an occasion for sounding compassionate and important, or for their advantage otherwise.
Lastly, as for the specifically political opportunism, there is much in the present case that shows the civil affairs of our nation are in a poor state. It is the depth of brazen knavishness to use a massacre committed by someone in one of your side’s favored groups as an occasion to demand that your own preferred policies be enacted posthaste, especially when those policies would tend to make the victims more defenseless against those and other groups that conspicuously hate them. Then too, the concepts of dignity of office and proper civil decorum seem to be wholly unknown to many in our society, including some who have attained to high office: we have many of whom it can be said that they “neither fear God nor respect man” (Lk. 18:4). I have no interest in entering too much into a partisan political discussion of that, but it does much to reiterate that we are as sheep among wolves (Matt. 10:17), and that we ought to be diligent in prayer that the ruling authorities will be just and wise, and that we might “lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Tim. 2:2). And as for the larger matter at hand, let us recognize that this is for many of us “a time to keep silence” (Ecc. 3:7) and act accordingly.
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name.
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