“Ravi Zacharias’ Great Teaching on Parenting”

A note from my journal this morning . . . .

Following a great dinner last night, Karla and I prepared for bed and picked up our end of day reading and listening. She is reading The Hole in the Gospel by Richard Stearns, and I listened to part 2 of Ravi Zacharias’ teaching on King David titled “Divided Heart, Divided Home.” It’s a powerful study, and Ravi is a great teacher.

Within just a few minutes of reclining into these stories, we both heard from our glorious and personal Father. For example, the writer of The Hole in the Gospel (the CEO of Compassion Int’l) identified John 10:10 as Jesus’ personal mission statement. Are you kidding me?

As for me, Ravi’s teaching on the podcast that I listened to started with the following:

(He was speaking to Dads in the audience.)

“All I’m saying gentlemen is with the 8, 9, 10 hour work days that you have ….

If you don’t influence your children, your neighbors will;
If you don’t influence your children, television will;
If you don’t influence your children, the humanistic, secularistic media will;
If you don’t influence your children, the system of education in this world will control them until they no longer know what they believe anymore.

And we are graduating students out of university who are able to argue one thing while they can not believe anything; we send them to university to graduate them as skeptics while we supposedly paid for them to get informed.”

He went on to say:

“Children are fragile personalities with the breath of God upon them. Let us raise them with the fatherliness that God intended for us to give to them.”

Train up a child in the way they he shall go and when he is old it will not depart from it. Proverbs 22:6

His invitation to mothers and fathers is that we would cradle the ones who could change history.

And finally, he closed with this quote from Billy Graham, which I love:

Dr. Graham said this, “if I had to do it all over again I’d read more, preach less, and spend more time with my family.”