The Children for Christ by Andrew Murray

authority of God’s Word — all these the discipline of a wise training
appeals to in nurturing for the Lord.
And then there are the virtues that belong more distinctly to the New
Testament, and the great redemption it reveals. These are the faith and
love of Jesus, the indwelling and leading of the Holy Spirit, the selfdenial
and holiness and humility of a Christlike life. All this is not to be
only matter of teaching in the faith of the promise of the Spirit,
working all unconsciously in the children; they are to be trained into it.
To be temples of God through the Holy Spirit, to bear the image and be
fit for the service of the Lord Jesus must, from the outset, be the aim of
the Divine nurture in which we seek to bring up our children.
For such training to be successful, it is absolutely necessary that there
be authority; the nurture must be in the discipline of the Lord. To this
end it is not enough that the parent as the superior assert the right God
has given him; the authority derived from God must become a personal
possession by the influence the parent acquires over the child. The
parent must prove himself worthy of his place; his ascendency will
depend upon the weight of his moral character. To acquire such
influence must be a matter of study and effort and prayer. All who wish
to govern children not by force, but by influence, not against their will,
but by means of it, not in virtue of a position in which they have been
placed, but in the power of a life that proves them worthy of that
position, and that secures an instinctive acknowledgment of their
authority, must make not only their own duty, but especially the nature
and the needs of childhood, their careful study. Only then can the
education of our children become, instead of being a series of
experiments and failures, that teach us wisdom when it is too late to
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