Jesus on the Value of Children

Then Jesus took a little child, and placed it in the middle of them. Taking the child in his arms, he said to them, "Anyone who for the sake of my name welcomes one of these little children welcomes me. (Mk 9.36-37)

But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be best for him to be sunk in the depths of the sea with a great millstone hung around his neck. (Mt 18.6)

Parents, do not  irritate your children, but bring them up with discipline and instruction from the Lord. Do not provoke your children, or they may be disheartened. (Eph 6.4, Col 3.21)

  IN ANCIENT TIMES, children were not held in high esteem by the Romans. Life was so hard that unwanted babies were abandoned in trash heaps by the sidewalk. Some unscrupulous passersby would pick them up and raise them as prostitutes, beggars or servants. (Daniel Akin, danielakin.com)

The children were not considered important in the social pecking order. A person could literally throw children away by exposing unwanted infants at birth. (Jonathan McLeod, sermon central.com) When the disciples tried to stop the little ones from approaching Jesus, he rebuked them and said, in effect, It is to these children that my ministry belongs.

At the same time, theologically (in another part of the scripture) Jesus enjoins the children to respect their parents and by extension their grandparents. (Honor your mother and your father.) Also Jesus tells parents to bring up the children to a moral, uplifting life thru "discipline and instruction from the Lord."

Children become what they are the way they were brought up to be, and they bring up their own children the way they were brought up to be. So this legacy of upbringing passes on from generation to generation until we become a nation of child-loving parents.

God bless our children.

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