Children Are Pledge Entrusted to Parents

This comment from John Calvin is a good reminder for parents. This truth should shape our parenting guiding us to give serious attention to the training, teaching and discipling of our children.

“He who has children must think it is a pledge that God has committed to his charge; as if a man should commit his goods to his friend when he departs out of his house and gives him his key, or gives him his purse to keep.  Therefore fathers and mothers must keep their children as things committed to them by God upon this condition, that they have to render an account for them.  …
Besides this, fathers and mothers, and masters must consider that that which God has committed to their charge must be referred to God.  And therefore their children must be so taught, that they may be always God’s.  For as for the earthly fathers, they must not think that their children belong only to them, that God does not have constant and sovereign possession of them…”
(From sermon on 1 Timothy 6:20-21. I am preparing a forthcoming new edition of these sermons)