Skip to content
priorities in Christian life
The Main Thing

The Main Thing

  • About
  • Faith Blog
  • Faith Hope and Love and Contact

Unconditional Love and Children

Jim October 8, 2022 Family Issues

unconditional love and childrenJesus in his incarnation and death on the cross for us his enemies opened the issue of unconditional love. How do we handle it? Let’s start with unconditional love and children – our own children.

I picked up a phrase when my children were young that I often shared with them.

I would regularly ask them: “If you were really really really bad, would Daddy still love you?” Initially they would say no, but I would help them see more. Finally, they could happily though sometimes uncomfortably say yes.

It is incumbent on us to love our children completely whatever happens. They are made in the image of God and given as a gift to us. God makes no mistakes in sending them to us.

It is also our job to train children. See Proverbs 22:6.

Start children off on the way they should go,
    and even when they are old they will not turn from it.

In our initial church work in China, we often fell upon mothers who said their children are annoying in a very negative and hopeless manner. This puzzled me.

Unconditional Love and Children is Our Big Big Task

God gave you just the child you need. Then, you trained the child or failed to.  Then, this child is annoying, and you blame the child. So wrong!  Children can be annoying and our job is to train them and love them, so they learn to not be annoying.

If our child is annoying, then that is our mistake, and we should carry that attitude. We made the error.

Now, if our method to train our child is to always lecture them, then we are being annoying, and they will learn much more from what we do than what we say.

If we do not like their personality and try to change it, we are even more wrong, God gave them a personality, and you are rejecting their God given strengths and weaknesses.

Keep in mind that children have no choice in being born into your family. They have no responsibility to love you. If you love them, and help them become who God made them to be, they will love you.

We can usually not train people in church work like we would a child, but each of us is a child of God all our lives so should keep growing. Our friends will vary, and some will be closer and some more distant based on interests and even personality and background. How we can express unconditional love in these cases is different than with a child we raise ourselves. We still owe the world much, but not as much. We need to give all to our spouse to save our children. See also Raising Children with and for God. Also see Raising Kids With All We Have.

 

facebookShare on Facebook
TwitterTweet
FollowFollow us
Let's Not Live Half a LifePREV
Love is Dynamic - Wonderfully SoNEXT

Primary

Recent Posts

  • Care for the Alien Among You
  • What About Life in the Spirit?
  • God is Bigger Since 1277AD
  • God Is Not Our Grandfather-He is More
  • New Life Already Began

Recent Comments

  • Jim on Chinese Church Faith Report
  • Anonymous on Chinese Church Faith Report
  • Brenda Hanson on Started a Blog for God and Did Not Pray
  • Carling S Labitoria on A Lesson Learned From My Great Grandfather
  • Donata on Faith Without Religion – Who Started That?

Archives

  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019

Categories

  • About Me
  • Church Work
  • Culture/Sociology Issues
  • Family Issues
  • outside input
  • Theology
  • Uncategorized

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Created with Taproot