Children suffer in the absence of a parent's blessing. It is like an ache that eats away at the relationship. It affects their self-worth, confidence, and ability to have healthy relationships as they get older. It even causes them to doubt their value to God.
The way to overcome this lack of blessing in your life is to understand the depth of God's love for you. He loves you very much.
You can't need to convey a clear, God-inspired blessig of love and acceptance to your children. Your blessings upon them, will give them relational, physical, and spiritual health. It will provide them with a sense of meaning and purpose.
One way to bless your children is to show them you believe they can become all God desires them to be. You can also celebrate special times in their lives - you might call them rites of passage - with God-honoring rituals and loving experiences. Jesus showed us the power of spoken blessings and how He interacted with people in different situations. Many times Jesus took children in His arms and blessed them.
The greatest gift you can give your two beautiful children is the blessing of love and acceptance, transmitting God's unfailing love to them. This will give them the strength and security to make wise and right decisions about their own lives.
"So much wisdom ... mixed with so much mystery."
This family was different. They prayed before meals. They laughed and played together. Then was a connection between them. Their was a quiet innocence to their life. Don't they know how hard and brutal the world is?
Yet someone they had managed to find the most meaningful life.
You are old enough to decide, but in my mind, from the moment you walked into this home, I knew that you were meant to my daughter. I believe God has a great plan for you. I will help you find your way.
She had received the blessing of security and honor.
Still it is unfortunate that many families today do not proactivity and intentionally provide generational blessings to their children. In the Old Testament, it is common to read stories about parents bestowing a blessing on their children and children's children. These blessings were taken very seriously and given with reverence.
If this is true for you, now is the time to learn how blessings can help you become the transitional generation.
The best defense against a child looking for acceptance and security in the wrong places is to provide the blessing of love and acceptance at home. We cannot predict our childrens future, but through clear transmission of the blessing we can encourage meanifngful goals and a strong sense of self-worth. With the biblical blessing, we can bring out the best in our kids with God-honoring character and solid morals and values.
Children suffer in the absence of the blessings of love, affirmations, and belief in them.
Dr. Walt Larimore, a medical doctor and writer, calls this blessing of nurture the "A, B, C, D of nuturing your children."
There are several ways to offer a blessing to our children.
Your words have great power with your children. The writer of Proverbs puts it this way: "Death and life are in the power of the tongue" (Proverbs 18:21 NKJV). My mother gave me the blessing of a lifetime right before she passed away.
As I sat on that plane, those words of blessing at the end of my mom's life have sustained me. Like my mom's blessing to me, your words can have great power of blessing for your children.
Use your words with your kids to bring out the best in them.
You don't have to be eloquent to have your life all together to speak words of blessing. Love is the only qualification you need. Even if the words don't always come out right, your children will still understand your emotional message. Speak the words of blessing often! There is not one person living today who wishes they had received fewer words of blessing from their parents.
Our days on this earth are unknown to us; don't delay - give the gift of blessing.
The power of sharing belief in your kids may be even more important than words alone. The best defense against a child's longing for imaginary acceptance is to provide him or her with genuine acceptance. By providing a child with genuine acceptance and affirmation at home, you can greatly reduce the likelihood that he or she will seek acceptance in the arms of a cult member or with someone in an immoral relationship.
When we believe in our children, we cherish them for who they are not, not for what we'd like them to be. Yet the best belief and blessing we can have for our children is that they possess a sense of unfailing love and acceptance.
This is no easy task in today's world, where we can be consumed with worrying about their having good grades for college, choosing good friends, and dealing with all the other pressures kids face. Nevertheless, the healthiest and most successful was are the ones who have their parents' belief in them/ Most kids will struggle with a poor self-image at times what may bring them through it is the knowledge that their parents believe in them. Don't forget that the difference between kids who make it and kids who don't is often just one caring adult.
You are a rule model to your children. No one is calling you to perfection, but you will show the blessing to your kids by your actions more than in any other way.
One man put it this way, "I never really thought very much about being a role model for my boys. We were always so busy with work, school, sports, church, and juggling everything else, that life just sort of slipped by.
You are a mentor to your kids. Studies tells us for good or bad, you are their most influential person in the most important stages of their life. Mentoring is actually a very old concept. There will be a day when we are no longerf around, so from the day our kids are born, we are in the process of leaving a legacy to a new generation.
If we are going to understand mentoring as a way of being the blessing for our kids, let look at four biblical examples of mentoring.
4 Biblical Examples of Mentoring:
1. Jesus and His Disciples: Being Real. They watched Him and they knew His habits. Jesus was perfect and we are not. Just being real is one of the great ways of mentoring.
2. Eli and Samuel: Instruction in Hearing the Word of God. When Eli was asleep, God spoke to Samuel. Samuel didn't recognize the voice of God, so three times he interrupted Eli's sleep. Finally, Eli figured out God was speaking to Samuel and Eli taught Samuel how to respond to the word of God.
The most effective way to mentor our kids in hearing the word of God is for our children to see us reading and listening to His Word.
3. Moses and Joshua: Passing on the Wisdom. You, too, are in a relationship where it is your job to pass on the wisdom to your kids at appropriate times in their lives.
You have wisdom, just find ways to creatively share it with your kids so it doesn't feel like school or a lecture.
Paul and Timothy: Sharing Life. Paul called Timothy his son and treated him as such even though Timothy had other parents. Understanding your children world and share life with them.
Part of giving your kids a blessing is celebrating their milestones, and rites of passage are one way of doing just that. Most other cultures do a more effective job with this than ours.
Celebrating a spiritual mileston in a child's life is a great way to cap off a period of instruction from parents. The practice, they say, gives parents "an effective way to address critical spiritual and developmental issues, often before they become problematic."
The author believe families should celebrate events like baptism, Communion, and other spiritual experiences.
We can also celebrate church membership, profession of faith, commitment to sexual purity, or even making a decison to spend time with God on a regular basis. These are all experiences that can be cause for celebration and a time of dedication and remembering. The author also suggest that we celebrate times when our children have been used by God to serve, when they discover their spiritual gifts, or even share their faith. These are not necessarily the things we think to celebrate as rites of passage, but they can be.
So far, we have focused more on spiritual celebrations, but other celebrations and rites of passage are important too.
The number of people who wish they'd received a blessing from their parents is quite large. So go ahead and intentionally celebrate your children by offering them a blessing.
Shaunti Feldhahn - Bestselling author of the For Women Only Series .... "Parents, we need this special book. But in these pages, the author gives us exactly the encouragement and tools we need to put the words confident and parenting together."
Gary D. Chapman - Author of The Five Languages and The Five Languages of Apology ... Parents have read the statistics among children and they are afraid. For the concerned parent, here is a book that focuses on answers. Confident Parenting is practical, biblical, and genuinely helpful. I highly recommend it.
Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott - Founders of RealRelationships.com and authors of The Parent You Want to Be ... If you're like us with little ones at home, you're looking for a boost of confidence in the parenting department. It's no-nonsense, grace-based, and throughly grounded.
Jim Burns, PH D, (author) founded the ministry of HomeWord in 1985 with the goal of bringing help and hope to struggling families. He is heard daily in over 800 communities nationwide. He speaks to 1,000's around the world each year through seminars and conferences.
