What Do You Want Most for Your Children?
Every parent wants to protect their children from suffering. But what if there is something even greater we should desire for them?
From the moment you discover you’re going to be a parent, you start planning for the arrival of your little one. Once that baby enters your life, you only want what’s best for them. Most parents find it difficult to imagine anything bad happening to their child.
When Stephen defended his faith in Jesus as God’s promised Messiah in Acts 7, he reminded his interrogators that God loved Abraham’s descendants even before Abraham had fathered a child.
God told Abraham that his offspring would live as strangers in “a country not their own,” where they would be enslaved and mistreated for four hundred years (Acts 7:6 NIV).
How could God love Abraham’s descendants and allow them to suffer unjustly for so long?
Stephen continued: “‘But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves,’ God said, ‘and afterward they will come out of that country and worship me in this place’” (Acts 7:7 NIV).
Stephen was speaking to Abraham’s descendants—and was one himself. The difficult truth is that people God loves still suffer. Yet God had not forgotten Abraham’s children. Their suffering did not mean His promise—or His love—had failed.
But for four hundred years? Inevitably, we ask:
“Will God help my children if He allowed Israel to suffer that long?”
“Do my children or grandchildren have to suffer?”
We live in a broken world, and neither you nor I can see what our descendants will face. So, pray earnestly that God will deliver them from evil. But notice where God’s promise ultimately led Abraham’s descendants: “They will come out…and worship me.”
God’s purpose reached beyond their immediate comfort. He was bringing them to Himself.
Why is knowing and worshiping God so important?
Jesus answered: “This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent”(John 17:3 ESV).
While a parent thinks, “I want my children safe.”
God’s purpose reaches further: “I want them Mine.”
Perhaps, then, what we should want most for our children isn’t a life untouched by hardship, but that through everything they encounter, they come to know the God who gives eternal life through Jesus Christ.
God deeply cares for our children. We naturally want Him to protect them from suffering, but His purposes reach beyond present comfort to the everlasting good of knowing Him.
Today, love your children deeply, pray for them earnestly, and entrust them and their futures to Jesus.
