The Christian Life
So last week I wrote about short term mission trips and about my concern about them. Today I want to try to go a little deeper into the problem. Today I talk more about all mission work not just “short term mission trips”. Anyways first we will talk about football (that’s a first for me).
Let’s say that a person wants to play in the Super Bowl. You can not start at the super bowl. First this person (and their team) would have to play in games (and win).
But even before this person plays games with their team they must go to practice. The team practice together and they learn how each person fits into the team.
And for years before this person was ever picked to play for the NFL he spent time doing personal practice. Just him, him and friends, high school, etc.
Now playing in the super bowl is more grand than a guy going to the gym. But it would be imposable for a person to get to the point where they can go to the super bowl without going to the gym.
Now I want to say the same thing is true in the normal Christian life (I say normal because I believe that God does grant special grace to people who are in jail or persecuted countries where they can not do corporate worship, or they might just not have a family).
The thing is that we think that we (and our children) can grow into healthy Christian men and women living only in the top two or three levels.
Personal Bible reading, prayer and fasting are foundation to the Christian life. And daily family worship is as important to the Christian life as going to practice is for a NFL player.
Yes, dear Christian parent, you have the main responsibility to raise your child in God’s ways. It’s not the youth pastor’s job to do so. Using mission trips to help “mature” our children spiritually would be like playing in the super bowl to learn about football. Yet we treat it as the norm to send our young adults – who spend no time in the Word, who don’t pray, have never fasted (apart from a “soda” fast for lent one year) and who parents have never sought to teach them God’s way – to do mission work in hope that it will mature them.
It does not work. We can not spend all our time (or even most of it) with our kids playing sports or watching tv. It is our job as parents to lay a Christian foundation for our children to build upon.
So maybe the problem is that we have parents who are not passionate about the Gospel. We have people who have no spiritual foundation of their own bringing up worldly children and instead of trying to build a solid foundation of Christian disciplines we send them off to West Virginia for a week.