A Listening Ear
In my devotional time this morning, I was reading John 10. In it, Jesus compares himself to a shepherd and says this,
The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice. (vss. 2-5)
There are a lot of voices in the world, each clamoring for a hearing. Many of these voices are somewhat neutral, but others are more sinister. One of the worries of parents, particularly of preteens and teenagers, is what voices their kids are listening to. Parents employ a number of strategies—censoring those voices as long as they can; isolating their kids from those nefarious voices; or providing little to no monitoring and just hoping (or assuming) their kids will not be influenced.
Regardless of the approach, eventually all kids will choose what voices they want to listen to and there will not be much parents can do about it. In my years serving students on campus, I saw many Christian parents bewildered by their kids’ choices. Some would leave the faith altogether, while others would make poor choices in relationships that negatively affected them both emotionally and spiritually. It is a sad thing to watch your child make poor decisions, particularly when those decisions may have lifetime consequences. I remember a young man who dedicated his life to Jesus early in his college career, only to walk away from the faith a few years later while pursuing a masters in one of the sciences. He turned his ear towards voices proclaiming it was idiocy to believe in the God of the Bible. I knew another whose father was a pastor who got involved with our campus ministry initially, only to fade away and proclaim he no longer believed. He had listened the voices of doubt and bitterness.
While the sinister and nefarious voices are a clear and present danger to our kids, too much focus on those can be detrimental to helping our kids resist those voices. Often, the focus is so intense on resisting them that we fail to teach our kids to know the Lord and to listen to his voice. So when they leave home, the voice of the Lord is drowned out because he is a stranger to them and they aren’t familiar with his voice.
Then how do we train them to listen to the Lord’s voice and get acquainted with it? By letting them see us in an intimate relationship with him, listening to his voice and responding to it. Kids learn from parents, not so much by what they tell them, but by how they live in day-to-day life. If you are a parent, the questions for you to answer are, how familiar am I with the Lord’s voice and how responsive am I to it? In other words, do your kids see you in relationship with the Lord, and listening to his voice instead of the voices common in the world (e.g., “You’re value is tied to your success.” “Your kids’ success validates your parenting.” “Let’s not get too caught up in religion.” “Safety and security are what matter most.”).
Based on my years working with college students and interacting with many of their parents, I believe there has been a failure on the part of many parents to model what it looks like to be in a relationship with Jesus (not merely going to church and being a good person), to listen to the Lord’s voice and respond to it. Thus, that is passed along to their children. So when they get into high school, start college, or a vocation, they have no perspective about what it looks like to listen and follow the Lord’s voice. They may know about him, but the intimacy with him is lacking. He, in essence, is a stranger and his voice is unfamiliar.
Particularly if you are parents of young children, if you want them to grow up to follow the Lord, then begin by letting them see your active relationship with the Lord. Train them how to listen and follow his voice. Show them what that looks like by doing your own listening and following. And as they grow older, you can have conversations with them on how you learned to listen and how they can as well.
If young people are to overcome the influence of all the voices out there that would lead them down a wrong and destructive path, they must become familiar with the Lord and his voice, so much so that his stands out amongst all the others. Their best teachers in doing that are not their pastors, but their parents.
© Jim Musser 2022 All Scripture references are from the New International Version, 2011.
