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If you have kids that are in still in school, you know how scary it is trying to raise kids today. We don’t live in the days of Beaver and Wally, instead Homer and Bart Simpson, the South Park kids, and the Family Guy are today’s family icons. It is an R rated world that we send our kids into today and sometimes it border on being X rated. It is time that we as parents start taking on our role seriously as an honorable place in society today. Regardless of what the ACLU and NEA espouses as their role in the life of our children, you are the parent and it is a privilege to be a parent.
I know you’ve heard people say, "I’m not going to impose my spiritual values on my kids. I’m going to let them decide for themselves." Baloney! What that basically says is "God is an option." He is not an option. You are hurting your kids if you say God is an option. But if you don’t force your kids to go to church, where do you think they’ll get their values? At school? When you say, "I’m not going to impose my values on my kids" what you’re doing is abdicating your authority as a parent. And you’re abdicating it to the television. Television is the number one purveyor of values today.
Only 12% of grade school kids frequently talk to their parents, particularly their fathers, about personal concerns. When they become teenagers, only 8% of fathers talk to their teenagers about premarital sex. Only 15% of mothers talk to their teenagers about premarital sex. No wonder we’ve got teenage pregnancies going rapid today. By the time a child is 18, on television, he or she has seen over 100,000 sexual liaisons on television. Ninety-one percent of all sex on tv is portrayed as sex outside of marriage. I call that brainwashing. Over a course of one year, prime time tv depicts over 1400 incidences of sex, over 2300 incidences of profanity, over 8000 incidences of severe violence. It’s a great source of miseducation. What’s happened as a result? Just pick up the paper. We’ve got grade schoolers taking guns to school and killing each other. Where did that come from?
Several thousand years ago, a guy named Joshua stood in front of an entire nation and he said, " then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve… As for me and my family, we will serve the Lord." Parents — moms, dads — have you said that about your family? — As for me and my house, we’re going to serve the Lord. He wasn’t out to win a popularity contest. He wasn’t out to be Mr. Cool. He just said, "We’re going to do the right thing. For me and my house, we’re going to serve the Lord."
What you need to be doing as well as that is praying with your kids, talking with your kids about spiritual issues, dealing with the problems, warning them in advance before they get to those temptation years in junior high and high school, even down in 5th and 6th grade and helping the kids.
You don’t have all the answers. If you haven’t figured that out yet, you will. You don’t have all the answers for the questions your kids are going to ask. I don’t mean things like, "Why are trees green? Why is the sky blue? Why do dogs bark?" and you make up the answers to satisfy them for awhile. But they ask questions as they get older like, "Why did God make me this way? If God is loving and in control of everything, why did He allow Grandma to die?" They ask questions like that and they’re very tough to answer. I don’t have those answers. My reservoir of answers is very small, but I have a God, a Heavenly Father, who does have answers. It’s my job as a parent to point them to God.