The Children For Christ by Andrew Murray

children: teaching ourselves. Yes, parents, teach yourselves. If we are to
train our children wisely, we must go through a new course of training
ourselves. We have to put ourselves to school again, and to be teachers
and scholars in one. Of the two scholars whose education has to go on
simultaneously, the parent and child, the parent will often find that the
child makes more progress. The lessons which the attempt to train a
child teaches parents, are often of greater importance and difficulty
than those the child has to learn. It is especially well if the first lesson is
learnt — the need of self-teaching, the need of teachableness, the need
of continual daily learning.
Let the parent who begins to see this realize what it means to become a
scholar. All schooling requires time and trouble, patience and payment.
Teaching that costs nothing is of little value. No one can graduate as
even fairly competent to train a child for eternity, without making
sacrifices. Take time to study God’s Word and what it says of a parent’s
duties. Study man’s moral nature, with its wonderful capacities, as the
sacred trust committed to your care. Teach yourself to cultivate that
nature to its highest fitness for God’s service: it will be the best
preparation for teaching your children aright. And if you feel how
much you need the help of some friend to stimulate and to guide — let
Jesus be that teacher. He came and taught Himself, that He might know
to teach us; He learned obedience that He might show us the way. He
came to show us the Father; He will so reveal the Father’s love and
grace, the fatherly tenderness of our God, that we shall be full of a
joyful assurance that He will not refuse to teach and enable us to be true
fathers and mothers to our children. And we shall understand that to be
ourselves teachable, obedient, loving children of the Heavenly Father, is
the surest way of having our children teachable, obedient, and loving
too.
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