The Children for Christ by Andrew Murray

speak the words without inquiring farther? By no means. As with those
who have come to years, so with children: impressions may be
temporary and profession superficial. We have been warning against
the disposition that doubts the reality of all children’s conversion and
profession: God’s Word teaches us what it is that will give them
sincerity and reality. Let us consider well the second lesson our
prophecy teaches: it is the Spirit’s working that will make the `I am the
Lord’s’ Spirit and truth.
And in what way is the outpouring of the Spirit, that is to have this
blessed result, to be given? Blessed be God! the promise was fulfilled on
the day of Pentecost. The Spirit dwells in the Church of Christ, in the
hearts and the homes of His believing disciples. There may now still at
times come special outpourings of the Spirit in revival movements of
wider or smaller extent, when the young come forward in numbers to
confess their Lord. But for this we have not to wait. In promising the
Spirit to the offspring of His people, God would have us expect that
parental instruction, that a consecrated home life, that His ordinances
of family religion, are to be the means the Spirit is to use and bless for
leading the children to Christ. The Spirit ever works in the Word; to the
child the parent is the God-ordained minister of the Word. The blessing
of the new dispensation is this, that the parent may count on the Holy
Spirit for his children too, from their youth up, and that all his teaching
and training, his word and work, though it be in weakness, and in fear,
and in much trembling, may be in demonstration of the Spirit and of
power.
But then everything depends upon the parent himself as a minister of
the Spirit. He must live and walk, he must be led and sanctified, by the
Spirit, he must speak and pray in the Spirit, and he must in faith claim
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