The Importance of a Good Foundation

For Christmas, my wife and daughter bought me a pair of shoes. Very nice shoes that I really liked. Well, I wore them for a couple of weeks thinking, "These are pretty comfortable, but they just seem to be a little loose." You can always tell when a shoe is too big or when it just needs to be tightened at the laces. The problem was, though, that I couldn't get the laces any tighter. Not because they were already too tight, but as I looked closer they were laced in a funny way. Growing up, I learned to lace shoes by crossing over and putting the lace through the hole on the inside of the shoe, then crossing over and going through the inside of the next hole and so on. These were done the opposite, for reasons unbeknownst to me. Instead of being laced from the inside of the holes, these were laced from the outside to the inside which meant that when you tried to tighten the laces, it didn't work. It seems that someone at the shoe factory, or maybe at the shoe store did not know that laces needed to go a certain way. As I pondered this, I began to wonder how many things do our kids (whether our own children or students entrusted to our ministry) pick up over the years that are just not right?

Proverbs 22:6 says, "Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it." This is not a promise from God, but rather a proverb--a general nugget of truth and wisdom. But the truth is there. We should train our children in the proper way. In the church, this means teaching them a sound theology. If they do not have an overall grasp of who God is in their lives, as soon as life gets rough, they will jump ship to the first temporary thing that will momentarily ease their pain. As we serve God's children, let us be thorough and accurate in our teaching.