Matthew 10.37 warns, whoever loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.

This is one of God’s requirements we read about and dismiss quickly. It’s easily understood but hard to comprehend it’s application. Two thousand and more years ago, parents proved their love for a god more than their children by sacrificing their children to the god. A deplorable practice the one true God never required and always forbid from His people.

While it makes sense that God would demand we love Him more than anyone or anything, making that practical without sacrificing  our children seems difficult. We are not wrong to think of love as sacrifice, as costing something. The greater the love the more is paid in its expression is not entirely incorrect. It’s how God demonstrated His love by sacrificing Himself in His Son thus satisfying His holy requirements while at the same time allowing Him to pardon those (us) who have spent our lives disobedient to those requirements.

The modern parent however is loving their children more than God because they refuse to raise their children in God’s ways depending instead upon the wisdom of this age for determining their parenting practices. The first practice modern parents have dismissed is corporal punishment of their children. The Bible, God’s Word Christians profess, teaches corporal discipline of young children in order to train them to obey. We use the term spanking to refer to this corporal discipline.

Spanking is an anathema to the modern parent. The fruit of their pagan beliefs is demonstrated daily in the disrespectful and disobedient behavior of their children. It is no wonder people want fewer children; untrained children are little tyrants that make our lives miserable. Grandparents say things like, ‘we would have never gotten away with that when we were kids.’

Children today, from toddler to graduate, do not display greater character or moral adherence than their parents or grandparents. A key reason for this demise; the absolute refusal to believe God’s command to discipline our children.

Second, parents don’t train their children to know God or obey His commands through prescription and practice. God commands parents throughout His text to train their children in the way they should go. This training is prescriptive, we tell them what God requires, and practiced, we live as God requires. The poverty of the modern Christian in knowing God’s Word and thus obeying God’s Word is epidemic among this generation.

The hope that a one hour church service where we and our children are spoon fed from the Bible as being sufficient for knowing God and doing His will isn’t working. We all realize this by the moral and spiritual corruption of our country and the slow erosion of church attendance in general among millennials.

If we truly loved God more than our children we would sacrifice our time by teaching them His ways. If we loved God more than our children we would discipline our children according to God’s standards even as we modeled those standards before our children.

Christian parenting is different from all other parenting because it is based upon the teachings of God’s Word practically applied in the home by the parents. The world’s ways do not lead us into the ways of God but away from Him.

If we would prove our love for God is greater than our love for children we would sacrifice our apathy toward’s God and begin to obey Him wholeheartedly beginning with training our children in the way they should go.