Whenever I speak to audiences, I usually have at least one person who approaches me afterward to ask what grandparents can do to ensure that their grandchildren will grow up with Christian values. Many of these grandparents say that their children are not serving God and are not taking the grandchildren to church or teaching them Christian principles.
On Mother’s Day, once again, a man approached me with this question. He said that he had been very careful to hold the line in his own household and to make certain that Christ was honored there. He then added that he was worried about his grandchildren but did not know what to do to help them.
“I don’t have authority in my son’s house,” he said sadly. “I feel helpless because I know that my grandchildren need to be taught about Christ, but the only time I can influence them is when they come to my house.”
This grandfather is exactly right; he cannot change what goes on in his son’s home, but he can influence his grandchildren. As we stood in the back of the sanctuary after the service, I shared with him the following story that I hope will be helpful to other grandparents who are facing this dilemma:
The first week in April of this year I visited my soon to be ninety-one-year-old mother who lives in a small Kansas town a few miles from the Missouri border. Because I was not raised there, I have never met many of my relatives, but when I visited this year, two of my female cousins drove down from neighboring towns to meet me.
As we talked, one of my cousins, who is more than twenty years younger than I, told me about having made a commitment to Christ nine years ago. She added that she had made a lot of bad choices and had gone through some very difficult times before she became a Christian. She then went on to say that the home where she was raised was “horribly dysfunctional” and that her parents had set a very bad example for her and her brother.
I was curious about what caused her to change her life. She was already in her thirties when she accepted Christ as her Savior, and I knew there had to be something that she could point to and say, “This thing caused me to face the truth about who I was and what I needed in my life.”
What she shared with me should bring hope to all grandparents who are grieving because their grandchildren are not being raised in Christian homes. She said, “I had two sets of good Christian grandparents, and they really influenced me.”
I, of course, shared one of those sets of grandparents, and I can tell you that my cousin was absolutely correct about their Christian example. I never heard either of my mother’s parents criticize anything their grown children did, but they lived their lives in such an exemplary manner that they were loved and adored by all fifteen of their grandchildren. I never saw either of them say or do anything that would dishonor Christ in any way. They were church-going, Bible-reading believers whose lives spoke to everyone around them. They did not compromise—my own father was such a reprobate that he was finally banned from entering their house, but, even then, they never said one negative word to me or my siblings about him. I knew that they expected the best from me, but I was never put in a position where I felt guilty about or embarrassed by my father’s bad actions.
Through talking with my cousin, I was reminded that grandparents have an enormous influence on their grandchildren. It is our duty to set a good example and tell them about Jesus’ love for them. If we live in close proximity, we can take them to church with us. We can tell them about Jesus both with our lips and with our lives.
We cannot change what goes on in our grown children’s homes, but we can control what goes on in ours. We can show some “tough love” when the occasion calls for it, and we can show “gentle love” the rest of the time. But the most important thing that we can do is set an example that will endure so that when our grandchildren are grown, they will remember how we lived and say, “That’s what I want for my life.”
No comments:
Post a Comment