We are called as Christian parents to pass down our faith to our children. It is not transferable but it certainly is trainable. I believe in the sovereign electing purpose of God, and I know that he has placed each one of my children in my household for a reason. I believe that reason is that he has chosen my children from before the foundations of the world to be elect saints and he has sovereignly foreordained the means to that end by placing them under my care.

Our world is at – or maybe past – a crisis point. Adults and children alike are abiding by a morality of their own making. As the book of Judges puts it, “Everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” (Judges 17:6) In the West, we are living in a post-Christian culture, one rapidly returning to paganism. Some of the “tribes” left in the West have markings and carryovers of their Christian heritage passed down by their forefathers. 

But that is only because their fathers outlasted the rot longer than the others. Those Christian heritage markings are superficial at best and may soon finish their decay into the compost pile with the rest of the Christian West. The Christian heritage established and preserved by our ancestors at great cost is now a house of cards suspended in mid-air in the middle of a typhoon. It is there only until the next inevitable gust of wind comes. 

So what are we to do? Should we stop bringing children into this awful place as many propose? Should we hunker down and wait until everything crashes and burns so that another generation might bear the curse of our choices and rebuild from the ashes? The answer is an emphatic no. Where are we to lay the blame? Are we to look at the current generation so that we might place all the blame for the state of things at their feet and all the guilt on their shoulders for them to bear? The answer again is, no. The blame goes back generations. Certainly, the founders of the West had their faults, but they held their belief in the divine Creator, moral Lawgiver, and Judge of the earth to be a foundational principle for setting up society.

Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the greatness and the genius of America. – Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

In answering what we can do, we must first ask what went wrong.

Heritage Squandered

Generations got complacent and, much like the circle of history has proven, we began to interpret our blessings as rights. We forgot that blessing follows obedience and cursing follows disobedience, as is the nature of the world and God’s covenant with man. We ignored the God of all blessings as we coasted on the coattails of mercy. But we’ve reached the end of the coattails and are now hanging on for dear life saying, “I don’t get it. Everything was fine until a few moments ago.”

But everything is not fine, and it hasn’t been fine for a while. We had illusions of function because the full effect of our heritage hadn’t yet worn off. Somewhere along the line, a father didn’t portray with his life the importance of godly living to his son, but he still took him to church on Sundays, said grace before meals, and occasionally took the Bible off the shelf. That son grew up and only took his son to church on holidays and had Sunday lunches at grandma’s house. Some biblical principles of morality were passed down but no real faith. His son, now grown, is expected to maintain the same principles that his family has held for generations, but no foundation is laid for those principles and morals to stand upon. So when he has a son, he has no standard or authority by which he should raise his son. All values have become subjective, and the legacy of faith is driven into the dirt. Four generations in and the faithful heritage has been squandered.

Back to Basics

But this is an entry on optimism, not a downer message about a culture tossed to the wind like chaff on a threshing floor. Yes, times do indeed look grim. Homosexuality is celebrated twelve months out of the year. Democrats celebrate killing babies with jubilee. “Climate activists” shackle us with their “twelve years left to live” crisis rhetoric. To add insult to injury, much of self-proclaimed Christianity is either asleep in the back seat or is driving the car – a car complete with a “coexist” bumper sticker. 

How are we supposed to win? We play the long game. We go back to basics. We have children and raise them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. 

Gays are not having children. So, if we wait long enough and are faithful with our generations, we will outlast them. We will possess the gates of our enemies. 

Let’s start at the beginning. The very first command to Adam and Eve in the garden was to “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it.” That was their mission on earth. Would they have succeeded in this mission if they had had children and filled the earth with human beings? No. That’s not the whole of the command. By that reasoning, we would have succeeded in the mission of man, as the earth is pretty much full. 

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