A home without any rules or discipline may sound like the epitome of freedom for children,

but today on Truth For Life weekend we'll find out why a lack of parental authority actually renders children helpless and puts them at a higher risk for ruin.

Alistair Begg is teaching from Proverbs chapter 22, our focus is on verse 6.

And by nature we love our children dearly, but we need the scriptures to learn how to love them wisely.

And the only way that we can love them wisely is by a right understanding of what we've been given here in this child.

The verse, which is before us as a sort of launching pad for our study, is trained a child in the way he should go or the way she should go.

So in raising our children it is important that when we ask the question, what do we have here? What are we dealing with? That we answer that question on the basis of a faithful consideration of that with which we're presented.

We are given a child. What is a child? Well a child is not the product of time plus matter plus chance.

But a child is the product of the faithful work of a creator God who intricately wrote them together in their mother's womb establishing their DNA.

The unique factors of personality, their traits and their abilities, their colorings and their codes all put there by the express purpose of a loving God.

And this loving God who has stamped this child in his image also recognizes that this child's image of God is marred by the imprint of sin.

Now in the course of my studies for a project, a writing project that I have at the moment, I've been spending a lot of time in the Catholicism, the shorter Catholicism.

And then going through this, I've recognized again just how crucial it is for us as parents to be instilling in our children either in an obvious way or in an oblique way, but instilling in our children,

the basic essential truths concerning who they are in order that they might understand their identity.

Because a world view that can't answer for our children, who they are and where they came from, is an insufficient world view.

And our friends and neighbors do not have answers to the question, who am I, where did I come from, where am I going and does it matter.

And a Christian parent's responsibility is so to instruct their children that they'll be able to answer those four questions.

They'll be able to give the answers to them before they fully appreciate the significance of the answers, but it is important that we give them the answers.

So for example, in the Catholicism, it goes along like this, and you can teach this to your children.

I wish I had this little book.

Question 24, who was the first man God made, Adam?

What did God make Adam from, the dust of the ground?

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