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Restoration International

Cultivating Christian Character in Children

Alane Waters

The Gardener

Well, it's a joy to be back with you again this year and I'm excited for the things that God is doing in each of our lives and the way he wants to continue to help us to become more and more like him.

And I think especially as a mother, as a wife, and a woman, it's exciting to know the various things that God can do in our hearts and the various roles that we play in our home.

And 1 of the areas that has very much interested me as a mother is that of how to help my children learn how to be Christ-like.

We all want to learn how to be Christ-like.

And 1 of the things the Lord showed me is that I had to learn how to be Christ-like if I wanted to teach that to my children.

So for years, when my children were very, very young, as I began to spend time with God and His Word, studying, I started studying the character qualities of Christ.

And then I was praying, Lord, help me to understand how to cultivate your qualities of the loveliness of your character in the hearts of my children.

And through the years as my children grew older and they were now in school, I saw my need all over again to go back and look at those qualities and study them and see if there's other things that I'm missing to help instill in this maturing mind how your character can become a part of human nature.

And so as my children reached into their youth years, this has been a study of mine for many years.

And as I thought about cultivating the character of Christ in our children, I thought of a lovely garden.

And for me, if I could live anywhere in the world, I would pick a beautiful garden scene.

And really, as I look, that's where God wanted us to live in the first place, wasn't it?

And I'm sure you've seen man's conceptions visualized through pictures and art and felts and movies or whatever that display the beauty of a garden.

And it makes everyone, whether we're young or old, it just enlists our interest to be able to sit in that garden, to walk through that garden, to enjoy that garden and the beauty that it has.

And so that's really kind of the foundation of the entire series, Cultivating Christian Character, is the gardener.

Well, maybe I should ask, how many of you have a garden?

Veggie garden, flower garden, or any kind of gardens?

So does your garden just come up beautifully?

If you want to see what our property looked like when we bought it 18 years ago, it was just rough, wooly, wild woods.

And now after much hard labor, year after year after year, we have grass that grows and flowers and fruit trees and vegetables, and it takes a lot of work.

And so as parents working to cultivate the character of Jesus in our children, every garden needs to have a gardener.

Or else what will happen is what happens in my garden if I'm too busy to go out and take care of it.

The weeds come up and they come up so quick don't they?

I mean it seems like we've often said we just weeded that bed and here they are again and you work so hard to get those little plants to come up and you know you're very careful to protect them and nurture them and water them and and yet the weeds just flourish and it takes work to go out there and de-weed the garden and to cultivate the good, the right.

And so with the hearts of our children, I like in the hearts and our heart as a garden, as the soil.

And in that soil we want to plant the good seed.

And the soil of the hearts of our children needs to have a tender gardener to work, to cultivate in what is right.

It takes time to have a beautiful garden, doesn't it?

I can remember as we traveled, oh, many years ago we were in New Zealand and we were doing meetings in the area of Christ Church and 1 of the leaders of organizing those meetings said, would you like to see a beautiful garden?

So he took us over to a, it's actually a big corporation called Sanitarium Foods.

And at this big factory, all of the grounds around were sculptured, gorgeous, immaculate gardens.

And I can remember walking through there and just stopping and looking and, isn't that beautiful?

Oh, look how this trellis is, and look at the little pond here, and the lilies that are in the pond.

And that's how God wants us to work in the hearts of our children, that we can help them to become attractive like he is attractive.

So, in my thoughts, to have a beautiful garden, we need to have a gardener.

We're under the leadership of our Savior, of God, as the master behind the garden, but we are the workers that need to spend time.

So in a physical garden, what do we need to be effective in our work to have a beautiful garden.

What kind of tools do you use in your garden?

Spades, little hand shovels for the delicate areas and then sometimes those really heavy shovels.

Now where we live we had to do a lot of cultivation because we're 75% gravel.

So it has been a lot of work for us to build up that soil.

And just this year I was out harvesting and I started digging through my lily bed, my little favorite spot of the garden.

I have all my lilies protected from the deer.

And I was in there with a spade, and I got blisters on my hand because the soil was so hard.

And I had to dig all that bed out, undo all those lily bulbs, and replant and put in mulch and peat moss and extra nutrient soil so that the lilies would grow better and so that next summer I could weed them without you know having this heavy spade in there.

So I would like to challenge us as parents that God wants us to be the gardeners and that there's no occupation on earth, no profession, no more important work than to cultivate the character of Jesus Christ in the hearts of our children so that they can reveal the loveliness of his character.

And I like what the apostle Paul says, and these are really the words of Christ, and this was Paul's experience.

And I have found so much comfort in that because I recognize with my children like I recognized in the physical gardening that I don't have much knowledge in that area.

We had children before I had even studied how to be a parent.

We're not trained how to be parents We're not trained in the way we grow up how to raise a family to be a godly Christ like family So we have to learn and Jesus has said to us that his grace is sufficient that means he has the the wisdom and the abilities and the energy that we need as parents to do the work of a gardener.

That his grace is sufficient and it's sufficient and it's made perfect in my weakness, in your weakness.

That's encouraging to me, because when I became a mother, I didn't know I had so many weaknesses.

In fact, the more I have parented, the more weaknesses that have been revealed of my human flesh.

And so God wants to be the strength in our weakness.

That means that he wants to change our weakness.

He wants to trade our weakness for his strength, his wisdom, and his ability to help to soften the heart of that child, to plant in what is good, and to cultivate that, and nurture that, and to grow that.

That means that the work in my heart, in your heart as parents, has to go on simultaneously with that work happening in the hearts of our children.

Heaven has given us every opportunity through heaven-born love, heaven's wisdom, and God's power to be successful.

The choice is, are we willing to cooperate, to accept that role as a gardener and cooperate with Christ and use those tools that will help us to be effective?

Because like in the natural garden, It's impossible to grow without having tools to work the soil, to plant the seeds.

You need the garden hose and water to water and some may need greenhouses or shelters from the heat.

I live in Montana and I'm always needing more heat and sunshine.

My mother lives in the deserts of California and they have to put a shade cloth so the Sun, which is so intense at 120 degrees a day, doesn't burn out those tender plants.

So there's all kind of tools and things to facilitate the garden and so in the heart there are all kind of tools that God has given us parents to use to cultivate those tender precious character qualities of Jesus Christ.

So this morning as gardeners, if you will join me and accept the role of being a gardener in the hearts of our children, I want to share with you things that God has given us, the tools that God has given us to help make us effective in our work in the hearts of our children.

I'm gonna be sharing each 1 of these in just a nutshell, and I would like you, if you have paper and pencil, to write them down and then go back to your scriptures, to your Bible, and in your study time, and study each 1 of these out, and expand on this so that that tool can be used in its most effective way.

Because we can, in the real garden, we have a shed that has all our garden tools in it we can have all the tools there on the wall but unless we know how to use that tool they're not effective and so with the tools God has given we need to learn how to use those tools to be effective to cultivate into the hearts of our children the loveliness the beauty of Jesus Christ the first tool I think is vitally important and they're all important but the first 2 I'm going to talk about I think are the most important.

Just like in a garden you have some tools that you use regularly and some tools you only use occasionally.

So also as we work in the garden of the hearts of our children certain tools we're going to be using much more frequently than some of the other tools.

The first tool I'd like to discuss is the tool of prayer.

Cultivating Obedience & Self-Control

Have you enjoyed seeing all of these young people up here?

I think that is the most special part of family camp, is all the children and youth that come.

And I'm thankful that you mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and grandmas and granddads and friends bring all the children here.

I love children and I know that God has a special place in this heart for all the children and we're all children of His, aren't we?

We all belong to Him and He wants only the very best for each 1 of us.

He wants that very best to be experienced here in this life on earth and He wants us to be prepared to receive the ultimate joy of that experience of love with Him forever and eternity.

So does God have a work for us to do as parents?

Cultivating Christian character in children.

I have studied through 3 different times as a parent, 3 times I've been through studying the character qualities of Christ.

Secondly, to help to understand what God is wanting my children to become, and thirdly because I need the constant review.

I studied it when my children were little, I studied it when they were in the early years of school and then with just a few years ago my children as they are youth now we went through and studied those character qualities together and God wants to teach us as parents how to cultivate the right in our children, cultivating Christian character.

Now, as I've been through many times, I've seen there are a number of character qualities that Christ exemplified that he wants us to learn how to become when we become like him.

There's all kind of things, honesty, unselfish, kind, gentle, obedient.

And so today, I'm only going to be sharing with you 2.

But to me, they are the foundation of all character qualities.

And the most important principle that I think as the Lord has opened my eyes as a parent is the replacement principle.

I'm going to share that with you because we're told in Romans chapter 12 and verse 21 that we overcome evil with what?

So rather than focusing our parenting on just correcting what we see is not right, what is not Christ-like.

Rather, God wants to teach us, and he wants to help us to teach our children, how to develop the right character qualities, so that becomes the habit of the child.

We need to spend more time cultivating good than just trying to pull out the bad, right, or correcting the wrong.

And I think of it from the gardening perspective.

When we moved to the country, I was not a gardener at all, and all of a sudden gardening became very important to us and I read all these books and tried to do my very best but you know I found my greatest help is to go to people who had experience and then I learned from them because I learned better by what I see and by and see doing than by what I read And so I found that it takes time to learn how to cultivate plants.

And we put the seed in, the good seeds, but we have to nurture it, we have to help protect it.

And I find, and we just did it last week in our home, we've got the gardens all ready to be planted, but you know what's already there?

We've spent the last week just pulling weeds so we can get ready to put in the good seed.

So God wants to teach us as parents how to cultivate the hearts of our children like we would a garden.

So we want to talk today particularly about cultivating obedience and cultivating self-control.

I believe that's the foundation of all the character qualities.

Now I'd like to tell you a little story of what our home was like when my firstborn, Allison, was between 6 and 9 months old and she was now old enough to start eating things from the table, getting past that baby food stage and you could put little pieces of food on the tray, her little high chair tray, and you know what?

She would take something and if I wanted her to eat it, she would eat a little bit and then what would she do?

And as a parent I knew it really wasn't the best thing to let my child start, you know, dropping the food over on the floor.

Not just because it made work for me to do, but because I didn't think that was a good habit for her to get into.

As she got older, I thought it would be a little bit strange to see the child just, you know, anything they didn't want, they just drop it on the floor.

And so I started to say, Allison, no, I don't want you to do that.

And I said, Alice, mommy doesn't want you to do that.

And she'd smile and she'd look at me and there we go the next 1.

We may go off the other side of the tray.

And I didn't want to have to correct her, But eventually I saw that she wasn't understanding my requests and so I might have given her a little smack on the hand And then she would just fall apart, and I felt like such a mean parent God wants us to teach how to call us to cultivate the good in obedience and I hadn't understood that when she was that young and so we're going to be looking at ways that we can cultivate the good rather than just working to restrain what isn't good.

Often for us parents we say well I'm going to teach my child to obey when they understand.

See I wasn't really sure she understood, I thought she understood what I was saying and her expressions were there but I didn't know how to turn and win her heart and turn that behavior from the wrong to the right.

But if we listen to the common counsel that we have, oh, you know they're too little to understand.

What we're really saying is you wait to reason with your child till they have the verbal Ability to reason back with you at that point.

We've already lost a great opportunity to cultivate in that right I've heard mothers say well.

He's just a strong-willed child or he just has a will all of his own.

I'll wait because he's old enough now to decide for himself.

As they get older and older and older, we as parents in our modern society have developed excuses not to really work to cultivate in the right and those little weeds that start out very small they strengthen and They strengthen and they strengthen and they strengthen.

And most of us have not understood how to surrender our hearts to God, how to take hold of His power and how to find His guidance and His will to lead us how to win the heart of our child.

And so we've just lopped off wrong behavior, lopped off the top of the weed fruit.

And I thought of that the other day when I was in the garden because there was this dandelion and it wasn't that big on top and we had some really big ones too But this 1 wasn't that big and I got my spade and I was digging we had some rain and and that we have to wait for rain because our soil is very very Hard and so I was digging digging digging because I've always told my children especially with dandelions You know children when you help your parents pick those weeds, make sure you get all the root of the dandelion, because if you don't, you're going to be picking that same dandelion and not too long down the road.

And if you don't really like to weed, get it done right the first time.

Get it, that's right, get it done right the first time.

So there I was with my spade, digging, digging, digging, and I went deeper and deeper and deeper and I would get my hand on the weed and I would twist a little bit and jiggle it, see if it would come loose, and I would dig again and jiggle it and finally it came.

And it had a massive root system and I knew that that weed had been plucked off at the top but the root of the problem was still there.

God wants us to dig out the roots of wrong and he wants to implant in our children the roots of right doing, righteousness, developing his character in our children.

Otherwise Our feeble attempts to cut them off will only be temporary.

Jesus himself, as a child, learned how to obey.

He came with the ability to choose to do wrong, just as we have that same ability, and he had the ability to choose what was right.

And Jesus learned as a child, you can find it in the book of Hebrews chapter 5 and verse 8, though he were a son, he was a child, he was a son, yet learned he.

Notice the word learned he, we would say in modern English he learned.

It says Yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered.

Now that doesn't mean that everything was harsh and cruel to him.

It means his experiences in life as a child, from infancy through childhood, through youth, young adulthood, and even into manhood, the experiences that he went through in his life was how he learned to obey, to surrender his will to his Heavenly Father.

So I would like to look at 6 ways today that I have found that have been very helpful in cultivating obedience in my children.

And I would encourage you to write these down, just the idea, and then ask God how he would impress you to implement these How we can begin to establish?

Obedience in our Children when I talk about obedience I'd like to define the word obedience is not that my child does it because they have to.

We don't want compliant behavior, outward manifestations of obedience.

True obedience means first that my child chooses out of love and respect to obey.

It doesn't take them 5 minutes to decide if they're going to even listen to you.

They choose with a willing heart and they are quick to obey, quick to respond.

Self-respect, Purity, Reverence & Gratitude

Cultivating Christian Character in Children.

That's the title of the series I did, because as a mother, I wanted my children to become Christ-like.

Just like every parent wants their children to learn how to be like Jesus.

And isn't that what needs to happen to prepare our young ones for the heavenly kingdom?

No 1 will be in the kingdom except they have the character of Jesus Christ and it's he that will put it in us as we cooperate with him in his spirit working in us and through us cultivating Christian character We're going to be talking about 4 character qualities this morning.

And I appreciated what Kent and Delora shared because for me as a parent, I studied these on my own.

And then week by week we would take a different character quality and we would learn how to experience that in our home with everyone giving input and it became something not just for our children to learn but as important for us as adults and as parents in our home to learn.

We want our child to be respectful, we need to learn how to be respectful ourselves.

And so we did this through the weeks and months and then as our children grew older and what stimulated this entire series to be put together was when my children were all in their youth, I still knew that there were areas of weakness in their character, and God was calling to my heart, and so my children and I studied together again these qualities and we went through the Bible and we found references that had to deal with those particular qualities.

So today we're just going to talk about 4 and I would encourage you if you have paper and pencil to take notes because we're going to be giving some practical ideas on how we begin to cultivate the garden of the heart in our young people.

So if they're young or if they're older and youth, we all need that cultivation.

So if any of you need a sheet of paper, I have a few pieces of notebook paper I did bring along.

Josiah, if you want to just put your hand up and as we, as I begin, Josiah will come by.

Today we want to start with cultivating self-respect.

Now self-respect and self-dignity is not self-esteem And I think it's very important for us as Christians, as Bible-believing Christians, to recognize that self-esteem, which we're all very familiar with, is not a part of the kingdom of God.

That may come as a shock to some of you here today, because you can go into any Christian bookstore anywhere in the world and you can find out how self-esteem and the Christian go hand in hand.

We're gonna be sharing a very powerful principle from the word of God.

We wanna talk about God's principle and the true characteristic that God wants us to cultivate in our children and in our hearts as parents, as adults, is that of self-dignity and self-respect, not self-esteem.

I'll define self-esteem by typical comments.

They build up the self nature, don't they?

And almost always, they're putting someone else down in order to put self up.

It's a, they go hand in hand and it's quite a contrast.

When I lift myself up, almost always, human nature then does that by putting someone else down and it comes natural to all of us and that is not a part of the kingdom of God it is a counterfeit to what is true and holy The Apostle Paul says it like this, and of course he's inspired by God's Spirit to put into these words a representation of the character of God.

He said, Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory.

Self-esteem is vainglory and it causes strife because you're putting someone down in order to build yourself up.

He said let nothing be done through strife or vainglory, but in lowliness of mind, let each esteem other better than themselves.

Self-esteem is a counterfeit, a very close counterfeit to the true principle of God's Word.

He says, let us esteem others better than ourselves, and let's not let anything be done through vainglory or through strife.

So let's talk then about self-dignity and self-respect, because I believe this is the true aspect that God wants to cultivate in all our hearts, and man has come up with a very close counterfeit that Christians by the thousands and hundreds of thousands worldwide have accepted that is a counterfeit to what is real.

Self-dignity and self-respect, let's define those.

It is a conscious recognition that we are the children of God that we were created in his image And that we not only were created in His image, but through our choices lost what God had intended for us to have.

In Christ, we can have new life, fulfillment, and we can experience true dignity and respect self-dignity and respect recognizing that we are children of God, created and redeemed by Him.

So I would like to share a few ways that we begin to build self-dignity and respect in our young people.

How do we cultivate this character quality in our young people?

1 of the things that's the strongest to build it is wholesome, useful occupation.

In contrast, what destroys self-dignity and respect is that a child has all the free time that they want.

They can do anything they want, whenever they want, and they don't feel good about themselves.

And that's why you find children getting into conflicts with 1 another.

They haven't found the fulfillment of being useful, needed, and wanted.

And Therefore, when self, nature takes over, that self-esteem, which is the opposite of self-dignity and respect, the child begins to become more and more difficult, more and more self-centered, more and more selfish, more and more irritable, and self-esteem grows and self-dignity and respect gets lower and lower and lower.

In our home, when our children were very young, I didn't understand this.

And I let them have lots of playtime because that's what I read and was told that good mothers did.

But I found that I had a lot of contention even amongst toddlers.

The irritability and the fussiness and the discontent and the arguing and even fighting, maybe not aggressively at that age but as they get older, if that has been allowed as they get older, becomes more aggressive and more violent.

And so I started inviting my children to help me in the kitchen.

We were living in a 35-foot travel trailer and you know if you've ever been in a travel trailer everything is mini size isn't it?

We had these tiny little sinks there in the little kitchen which was probably about 4 feet long the counter with these 2 little sinks in it and here was Emily 3 years old and she's standing up at the sink to help do the dishes.

I didn't think a three-year-old had the ability to know how to do a dish.

And she was so happy, she was so content, she was so enjoying herself.

She was more obedient, more willing, more cheerful because she had found just in that 1 situation a new experience of self-dignity and respect.

The second way we can build self-esteem in our children is teaching the child to help themself.

And when your, as your children are young, and you take a lot of time, remember in your first teaching, to tie their shoe and when they learn how to do it, they are so excited they can hardly wait for daddy to come home because they want to show daddy what they've learned how to do, right?

Helping our child to gain the ability to help themselves.

And we see it in many lines and we think that's wonderful and it is good training, but it has to incorporate everything in the child's life.

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Series

Cultivating Christian Character in Children

Honesty, Courage, Kindness & Meekness

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Sponsor

Parts

The Gardener

59m

Cultivating Obedience & Self-Control

1h

Self-respect, Purity, Reverence & Gratitude

29m

Honesty, Courage, Kindness & Meekness

59m

Patience, Perseverance, Initiative & Mercy

1h 1m

Orderliness, Diligence, Faithfulness & Generosity

55m

Sound Doctrine