the duties of parents: #3

We have been looking at J.C. Ryle's book The Duties of Parents.

Here is Duty #3:

Train your children with an abiding persuasion on your mind that much depends on you.

That is to say, take your job as a parent very seriously, because a whole lot is riding on it. :) Listen to this good, big chunk of common sense and Biblical truth:

We depend, in a vast nature, on those who bring us up.  We get from them a color, a taste, a bias which clings to us more or less all our lives.  We catch the language of our nurses and mothers, and learn to speak it almost insensibly, and unquestionably we catch something in their manners, ways, and mind at the same time.  Time will show, I suspect, how much we all owe to the early impressions, and how many things in us may be traced up to seeds sown in the days of our very infancy, by those who were about us...

And all this is one of God's merciful arrangements.  He gives your children a mind that will receive impressions like moist clay.  He gives them a disposition at the starting-point of life to believe what you tell them, and to take for granted what you advise them, and to trust your word rather than a stranger's.  He gives you, in short, a golden opportunity of doing them good.  See that the opportunity be not neglected, and thrown away.  Once let slip, it is gone forever...

I know that you cannot convert your child.  I know well that they who are born again are born, not of the will of man, but of God.  But I know also that God says expressly, "Train up a child in the way he should go," and that He never laid a command on a man which He would not give man grace to perform.  And I know, too, that our duty is not to stand still and dispute, but to go forward and obey. It is just in the going forth that God will meet us.  The path of obedience is the way in which He gives the blessing.

I'll just let us all chew on these words this week, because even if this advice does hark from circa 1888, it's pretty clear. :)