How To Pray For Your Kids

"How to pray for the next generation"

Suggested Message for Mother’s or Father’s Day

By Pastor Bob & Cambria Hunter

EASY TO P.P.T. OUTLINE:

What should I say when I pray for my children?

Three prayerful suggestions:

* A hand of protection to cover them

* A sense of purpose to guide them

* A portion of joy to sustain them

MESSAGE TEXT:

We’ve been talking about prayer here at Springwater Church. Our songs, our messages, our materials, our energy this month is all put into prayer. And I can’t think of a more appropriate topic for Mother’s day, than that of prayer. Perhaps one of the most important things a Mom (or Dad, if occasion) can do is pray. Pray for her children.

There was once a Mom who gave birth to 17 children. Her name was Susanna Wesley. Susanna prayed for all of her children 1 hr. a day. How do you even find an hour a day with 17 children? Then every week she set up an appointment with each one of her children to inquire about their spiritual well being. She did this consistently until she died. Two of her 17 children impacted the world. Their names were John and Charles Wesley. Together in the 1700’s they spawned a spiritual movement in Great Britian that is said to have saved English people from moral and social decay. John and Charles pay great tribute to their praying Mom. Susanna’s prayers influenced a whole generation, even a whole soceity for God.

Needless to say, prayer and motherhood (fatherhood) should go hand and hand! And folks, if ever there was a time to pray for our children it’s now. Our kids need our daily prayers like never before. This next generation is going to face challenges the world has never known. And we need to prepare them for it. Tis morning I’m going to talk to you about praying effectively for the children of the world. Now let me give some insight into what’s going on out there. I want to take some time to describe to you what our children face, and where they are at spiritually.

According to the Barna research, the Bible remains a respected text among most young adults. Three out of five teenagers said they believe the Bible is totally accurate in all that it teachers. Protestant teens were twice as likely as Catholic teens to strongly affirm the accuracy of the Bible. But each had very distorted views of what the Bible teaches. For example, 2/3 of young people believe that Satan is not a living and active being, but merely a symbol of evil. 6/10 young people argued that a good person can earn eternal salvation on the basis of good deeds. And a majority of them as in 53% of them said that Jesus Christ, when He walked here on earth, committed sins. That’s scary!

Now let me just sum up what this means. That while 3/5 respect the Bible as a document, at the same time they hold beliefs that are dramatically inconsistent with it. The regard for it’s actual content is eroding.

Even scarier is the fact, that 85% of youth believe that moral truth depends on an individual and their circumstances. In other words, truth is relative, not absolute. That it’s all dependent upon the situation you’re in and how you feel about right and wrong.

Now let me break the situation down into gender categories. The average teenage girl is more likely to be able to name all the characters on her favorite sit-com. Than any of the twelve disciples of Jesus. For teenage girls the average of age of their first sexual experience is now 15 years old.

The findings about teenage boys are even more disturbing. Boys younger than fifteen years of age are twice as likely to be admitted to psychiatric hospitals, and five times more likely than girls to kill themselves. Fully 80% of suicides involve males under 25 years of age. Suicide among black adolescent boys has increased 165% just in the past twelve years. Boys comprise 90% of those in drug treatment programs and 95% of kids involved in juvenile court.

Dr. James Dobson summed it all up His book Bringing up Boys, by saying this: "….boys are experiencing a crisis of confidence that reaches deep within the soul. Many of them are growing up believing they are unloved by their parents and are hated or disrespected by their peers. This results in a form of self-loathing that often serves as a prelude to violence, drug abuse, promiscuity, and suicide. It helps explain why both boys and girls do things that would otherwise make no sense, such as cutting their flesh, piercing sensitive body parts, tattooing themselves from head to toe, taking dangerous drugs, and or identifying themselves with death, as the pipe bomber did that was caught this week, how old was he? 21 yrs. of age. And some of them, Dobson said, cry with bullets. And we’ve seen that played out. "