Would you take your Bibles, please, and turn to Proverbs 12? We talk today about honorable children. One of the things we constantly need to remind ourselves as we read through and study through and preach through Proverbs is that Proverbs was written for parents to teach to their children. So it is a book aimed at young people, even when the Proverb doesn't explicitly use the word son or child or daughter. And one of the things that Proverbs lays before parents, and I think very tactful and win some way, is their responsibility to provide for the world and for the kingdom of Jesus Christ honorable children. We are living in an age where we are raising a generation of troubled and unhappy and unprepared children who will ultimately fail in life. Now that is a bold statement even outlandish, but that is the assessment of business and church and educational leaders as well as people who are psychotherapists and counselors. That modern American youth are deeply troubled. Suicide is on the rise among teenagers, not teenagers from what we would call troubled backgrounds, but from upper middle-class families. More and more, young people are displaying patterns of cutting, of bulimia, of addiction to alcohol and drugs and other things. They are depressed and discouraged, lacking energy and hope for life. Tim Elmore is one of these experts who spent 30 years focusing on young people and their parents. He is a Christian. As a Christian-based organization known as growing leaders, dedicated to helping parents and schools develop spiritually socially and relationally healthy teenagers who will become leaders for tomorrow. His curriculum called Habitudes is used in over 6,000 schools and organizations. It is used at my alma mater, the High State University, as well as at Duke and North Carolina and Wake Forest in this state, other universities that use that curriculum or Oklahoma, Florida State, Auburn, Georgia Tech, Alabama, Virginia Tech, Baylor Stanford, the University of Texas Purdue, and other major universities. His curriculum is used by the Department of Education in the state of Nebraska by the National Organization of Future Farmers in America and believe or not by the San Francisco Giants Professional Baseball Team. They use his leadership curriculum to overcome obstacles in students and in players and our future farmers. He has written a book, several books, and on one post called The Secret of Raising Emotionally Healthy Kids, Mr. Elmore says this, we live in complex times. And as I work with thousands of parents and faculty each year, I am increasingly convinced we have a more engaged set of adults who care about their children than in any other time since I began my career in 1979. So I'm a teenager, however, I am observing a more troubled population of kids, especially about the time they reach 13 years. It appears at first like an oxymoron. How can such a cared-for generation experience such emotional difficulties? As I speak to psychologists and career counselors, I've begun to hear a term over and over again as they describe the emotional state of today's young people. The term appears to be a paradox, but it aptly defines perhaps millions of adolescents in America. They are full of high arrogance and low self-esteem, high arrogance and low self-esteem. One of Dr. Elmore's colleagues, Arthur Levine, who's the president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, says the same thing. He calls them digital natives, this young generation. And this is a generation that was not allowed to skin their knees, he says. They got awards and applause for everything they did, even if it was being the most improved or the best trombone player born on April 5th. So it makes sense that they think very highly of their abilities and expect to go on getting awards and applause all through their life. The grade inflation on college campuses plays into that. Two out of five students have grade point averages of A minus or better, almost six times as many as in 1969. And 60% of them, nonetheless, say that their grades underestimate and understate the true quality of their work. Only 5% have a grade point average of C or less, even though almost half of all college students entering university have to take remedial courses in their freshman year. Inflated grades, inflated egos, endless praise from parents, namely he says from mothers. One out of five college students call their mother on their cell phone three times a day or more. That's 20%. And 41% speak to mom or dad every day on their telephone. Levine goes on to say student affairs officials told us amazing stories. We heard about the mom who called 15 times in a single afternoon until she reached the present of the university when her son had trouble with his wireless connection. One mother called to report that her daughter was caught in an elevator. The daughter never called the elevator service people whose number was posted in the elevator. Another mother complained that the college and assigning roommates should match the parents as well in other words, quote, to make sure that the other mom is of the same culture I am so we can support each other. One student came in for a heart-to-heart about whether to join a fraternity and at the end whipped out his cell phone handed to the school counselor said, now would you tell all this to my mom? And one mother whose son had a dispute with another student called the college to ask how it would be handled. When the counselor and eventually the dean told the mother that they would contact the boy to arrange a meeting with the other student, the mother responded that her son was too busy to meet with the dean or the other student, but she would handle it on her own. Over involvement with an intrusion into our children's lives have turned them into a narcissistic generation. Just as each generation has a name, this younger generation is now almost officially called the me generation. An inflated view of self-importance and inability to accept failure or rejection. Poor communication skills, lack of creativity, dependence upon other people's opinions, especially their peers, and the inability to stand up for themself or to make key decisions on their own. One writer says that young people have gone from pampered to spoiled to self-absorbed to ruin. Jim Ilmore says, sheltered by parents, teachers and coaches who fear that unhappy kids are a poor reflection on them. We have rewarded them quickly, easily and repeatedly. Kids naturally begin believing that they are amazing, case in point. My son recently took part in a theater arts competition. Parents paid dearly to enable their kids to get on stage and now I know why. Every single student got a medal just for showing up. When they performed, they received extra medals. The medal levels were gold, higher gold and platinum. Did you notice that gold was the lowest? Here's the clincher. If your child did not get the reward he wanted, those trophies were on sale after the competition. This is not uncommon, Ilmore says. Kids today have received trophies for ninth place in a little league baseball tournament, and fourth runner up at a competition for music. Ribbons and stars are given out routinely and of course they are arrogant. With little effort they have been awarded a prize, the problem is as they age they begin to suspect that this affirmation received from mom and dad is skewered. In fact, mom may be the only one telling them they are amazing. By college, kids meet other kinds of kids who are special students. Who are as smart or athletic or more than they are. In between the ages of 17 and 24, they now begin to experience their first real failures in life. They bump against lead hardship and difficulties, and they are often not resilient enough to bounce back. The truth be told when a child has been told again and again that they are excellent without working hard or truly adding value to a team, it begins to ring hollow to them. We must realize that our affirmation must match their performance. Low self-esteem hits them at this point, often in their freshman or sophomore year in college because they suddenly recognize that their esteem and their greatness has been built upon a foundation that is just not true. Bottom line, our desires to shelter our children from all pain and any disappointment is not good for them. It makes them inflexible, unable to handle adversity, and dependent upon mom and dad for the rest of their life. And it hurts them most of all, psychologists say, in the development of their soul, what psychologists call the self because that's what suitcase means in Greek, the soul or the self. Dr. Madeline Divine, no relation to the other Dr. Lavanna mentioned, has been a psychotherapist in Southern California for over 30 years. She works primarily, she says, with upper middle-class and wealthy children of public and private schools. She says that there are five stages of development that we need to take any child through. She calls the ages two to four, the magic years, where everything is new and the child is discovering his own self, his own family, his own world. Then there's the masters of the universe, ages five to seven, where they are fearless and can do anything, even things they can't do. Then the tentative years, eight to eleven, she calls, how am I doing? Then ages 12 to 14, what happened to my kid? And finally the high school years, ages 15 to 18, working on the real me. She said that the key to rearing children who are well-adjusted and self-affirmed and confident is parental warmth, which she defines as acceptance and understanding and investment. But she says there's a bad kind of warmth that becomes intrusive, and that is over-envolvement, intrusion and parental neediness. Dr. Madeline Levine has some pretty strong things to say to us. I don't want you to bear with me one more long quotation, because this is what she writes in the book, The Price of Privilege. Why are children are so unhappy? While many of these teenagers who come to see me are verbal and psychologically aware, they don't know themselves at all. They lack practical skills for navigating the world. They can be easily frustrated or impulsive, and they have trouble anticipating the consequences of their own actions. They are overly dependent on the opinions of parents, teachers, coaches and peers, and frequently rely on others not only to pave the way on difficult tasks, but to grease the wheels of everyday life as well. While often personable and academically successful, they aren't particularly creative or interesting. They complain about being bored, and I find that they are boring. Being their children's vulnerability, parents find themselves protecting their offspring from either challenge or disappointment. Fearful that their kids will not be sturdy enough to withstand even the most mundane requirements of completing homework, or meeting curfew or straightening their rooms or even showing up for dinner, discipline becomes lacks often non-existent. While demands for outstanding academic or extracurricular performance are very high, expectations about family responsibilities are amazingly low. Tutors and coaches and counselors and psychotherapists are all enlisted by parents to shore up performance and help ensure that the kind of academic and athletic success so prized in my community is theirs. While my patients seem passive and disconnected, their parents are typically in a frenzy of worry and over-envolvement. Parents tend to shower their children with material goods, hoping to buy compliance with parental goals, as well as divert attention away from their children's unhappiness. Parents who persistently fall on the side of intervening for their child as opposed to supporting their child's attempts to problem solve, interfere with the most important task of childhood in adolescence, the development of the self. Autonomy, what we commonly call adult independence, along with competence and interpersonal skills are considered to be inborn human needs. Their development is central to psychological health. In a supportive and respectful family, children go about the business of forging a sense of self by being exposed to and learning to manage and increasingly complex personal and interpersonal life. The reason that so many of my patients feel empty is because they lack the secure, reliable, welcoming, internal structure that we call self. The boredom, the vagueness, the unhappiness and the reliance on others all point to kids who have run into difficulty with the very foundation of psychological development. Well-meaning parents contribute to this problem of self-development by pressuring their children, emphasizing external measures of success, being overly critical and being ultimately emotionally unavailable or too intrusive, becoming independent and forging an identity becomes particularly difficult for children born into these kinds of families. But this is nothing new. Solomon ran into this 3,000 years ago, believe it or not, about helicopter moms and doting dads and too much praise and not enough responsibility. And you know what? His son Rahobom was a troubled boy who turned out to be a mess of a man. So Solomon writes about these things, not from experience but perhaps out of his own fear of where his son was heading. And in chapter 12 of Proverbs, he talks about the importance of developing character in our children. This chapter has 28 verses that divide themselves in half. Each of the halves are mirrors of the other. In other words, Solomon covers the same territory in the same way in the same two halves, the first 14 verses repeated in the next 14. And introduction about the relationship between how we talk to our children and their character, the idea of speech and how it affects the home, the responsibility of deeds or actions that lead to success or failure, and a summary that concludes that character is more important than credentials. One of those sections is chapter 12 verses 8 through 12, and that's what I want to focus on this morning. Five Proverbs that give five pointers for parents on how to raise honorable children. A man is commended according to his good sense, but one of twisted minds is despised. We lonely and have a servant that to play the great man and lack bread. Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel. Whoever works his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits lacks sense. Whoever is wicked, cupits the spoils of evil doers, but the root of the righteous bears fruit. Solomon says how we communicate to our children and what we tell them produces the internal values that lead to the formation of the soul or the self, and whether they will be a success or a failure in the world, a blessing to God or curse. He tells us five things, and here's the first one. Praise your children with honesty. Praise your children with honesty verse 8. A man is commended according to his good sense, but one of twisted minds is despised. What he means is simply this. A person should be praised because of their good character or good sense. But the one who receives too much praise ultimately becomes despicable. He's talking about honest assessment of our children and honest praise. Now children need praise. Everybody needs affirmation, and everybody does something or several things well, but not everybody does everything well. We live in a world of bumper stickers. I'm the proud parent of a terrific kid or I'm the proud parent of an honor role student and on and on they go, which these bumper stickers tell us more about mom and dad than they do the child. Everyone gets a trophy. Everyone gets a B, but not everyone gets a job or a spouse or a happy life. Jean Twenge is the professor of psychology at the San Diego State University, and she's been writing about this long before anyone else has. She herself is in her late 30s. She talks about her own generation, the me generation, and in counseling and in teaching and in working with students for over an hour, a decade and a half, a professional teaching. One of the great misconceptions in America is that if you load your child up with praise, it will raise his self-esteem and his confidence level, but she says the opposite is true. What raises self-esteem and confidence is ultimately success and failure. Not telling Junior or Missy that they're the greatest thing in the world, but letting them through trial and error discover who they are and where their strengths are, and steering them in a way where their confidence is built by accomplishments that are real rather than praise that is not. Inflated grades, inflated sense of specialists, inflated egos have led to depression, dysfunction, and disengaged lives. I mean, folks, these are hard things to say, and even harder to hear, but one kind of education system do we really have where we give extended time on an exam, an extra credit until they do the minimal amount to get a B and then our students cannot compete on the global market. Despite the fact that they graduated cum laude from university, that should tell us something about our system. How come every child who struggles with something has a learning disability? I had a huge learning disability. It was called boyhood. I didn't like to do any studies. I liked recess and sports and terrorizing girls, and I got A's in all of those things. But, as I grew up, all of my learning disabilities seemed to go away. I was never good at math. I'm not good at math now, but I didn't have to take medication for that. I simply was being told by God that I shouldn't be an engineer, a banker, or an accountant. And you know what? I never dreamed to be in those things. Sometimes when our children can't do something, listen to me, mom and dad, it's the Lord telling them he doesn't want them to do those things. And sometimes it's just their children, and they don't like to do those things. Attacking teachers and principals and coaches and pastors, so that junior gets playing time and missy gets the honor that we think she deserves, is not creating exceptional children. The children of entitlement who don't really know who they are and how God has made them strong in some ways and weak in other things. Here's the fact of life. Very, very few children are exceptional. Maybe 15 to 10 percent are above average. 75 percent are pretty common. And 5 percent will need help for the rest of their lives. Helping your child face early on who they are and where they fit in those brackets is good for their selves and their souls. They are precious in God's sight and inside of mom and dad, they should be. And God has a special plan for each one of them that is unlike the plan he asked for any other person, which makes their life exciting and hopeful, full of joy. And God will show his love for them, listen mom and dad, more when they fail than when they succeed because failure will draw them closer to Christ and success will. And they live under grace, not under performance standards. God sees who they are in Christ and not their accomplishments. I'm asking you to face some difficult, hard facts about your lives that some of you, not all of you, but some of you are driving your children relentlessly to excel in every area which is impossible unless they are a progeny or a genius. And when we do that, it's more of a statement about who we are than who our children are. Madeline Levine says many affluent women have active social lives but few real friends. Rates of marital dissatisfaction are high, affected by the same forces that burden their children, too much pressure and too little intimacy. Without a close friend to share our problems with, or a spouse with whom we are intimate, we are likely to turn to our children for solace. This leads to what psychologists call enmeshment. When the boundary lines between parent and child have collapsed and we bleed into our children's lives, share our hurts and disappointments and anger, often about the other parent and make it impossible for them to get on with the business of growing up to be the person they ought to be. Supporting an unhappy parent, being our confidant and advisory, saps children of the emotional energy and the sense of security they need to work on their own development. Warmth protects our children from psychological trouble, enmeshment, and intrusion bring trouble into their little lives. Children can read the needs of the parents remarkably well and one thing I have noticed, she says, is that often time a child will sacrifice his own needs and his own future to meet the needs of his parents who are living their life through him. Autonomy and not dependency are always the goals of good parenting but a parent who needs a child's success more than the child does only contributes to his own self-esteem and never to the need of the child to be his own person. You think about it, think hard about it. We need to praise our children honestly because it will affirm to them who they are and how God made them and not create for them unrealistic expectations that we could not meet and now we are living those expectations through them. You were never the great athlete you wanted to be. You never made it to the NFL but you are going to make sure your son is in every sport possible so he does. You were never on the cheerleading squad and never the homecoming queen and never the starlet you wanted to be and so you are going to push your daughter until the Ford modeling agency discovers her these are unrealistic expectations and they are not helping your children be the person God called them to be you are hurting your children. The enmeshment of your own dissatisfaction with who you are has bled into their lives and caused them all kinds of sorrow about who they are and it doesn't have to be that way. Solomon says here is a second thing, promote productivity over social status. Here is a starting point, promote productivity over social status. What they can do rather than what everybody thinks is right. Look at verse 9, better to be a lowly person and have a servant than to play the great man in lack bread. Let me paraphrase that for you. Better to be a plumber with a business that employs other people than to have a PhD in all the credentials in the world and be unemployed poor and living at home with mom and dad even though you are an exceptional child. Sounds kind of crass but that's what he says. And we need to face some hard facts about our life. Dads in particular, dad, listen. The economy that our children are entering is not the economy we grew up in and never will be again. We are now a service economy, we don't manufacture anything. Therefore the venues of success and economic affluence are very limited and they are down three or four trajectories like medicine and computer science and engineering and things like that. We are living in an age where a college degree or a master's degree or a PhD doesn't mean what it used to anymore. 73 million millennials will compete for jobs that are increasingly going overseas. Our own degrees will not produce the children able to do what they called stem cells, science, technology, engineering and math and we are losing out to other nations like China and India and Japan because we're not training them in the right things. Socialism is now the government of America and will be for the rest of our lives which means our economy will continue to spread. We will continue to sputter like those of European countries and our kids will have difficulty starting out and ever achieving the affluence or the outward trappings of success that you and I have accomplished. The University bubble his burst. Colleges are closing all across the nation. Universities are scaling down. They're narrowing their skill set and their offerings for STEM, science, technology, engineering and math. The purpose of education, as you know, is skyrocketing. We're heading the way of Europe where the majority of people do not go to university, only people who need a specific university degree to function and be productive. And other people are finding technical skills, whether it's in computers or automobiles or in healthcare so that they can get a job and function at a reasonable level of productivity and recompense. And as long as we keep saying, no, it's all about credentials. It's all about the right school and the right grades. We can put our child to the University of North Carolina and give her a degree in English and pay $140,000 to do that so that she can fry hamburgs at McDonald's until she gets married. If we think that's the best thing to do, or we can face the fact that it's better to be productively employed than all the college credentials in the world and be looking for a job. I know that I am preaching heresy and I know that the General Assembly will defrock me in a number of weeks because I'm speaking against the American dream but the American dream is now a myth. And good parents help their children prepare for what is coming, not for what was at one time. Sonless saying, better to be lowly and have a servant than to play the great man and lack bread. Better a job, a small company, and less social status than all the credentials in the world and the poverty that comes with disillusionment. Here's the third thing he says, prepare your kids to be responsible and kind. Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of the beast but the mercy of the wicked is cruel. You may ask, why is a proverb about animals in the middle of this thing about sons and daughters? Was Solomon a conservationist? Well, you know he was. He says that in Ecclesiastes, chapter 2. He built gardens in forest and raised flocks and herds. He was concerned about flora and fauna. But that's not what he's talking about here. He's saying that children who have inflated you yourself become proud and proud people are mean. But people who see themselves accurately take their responsibilities even to care for domestic animals, if that is the purview of their responsibilities. Teaching our kids to be responsible and kind is part of the calling of Christ. Most proud people can never do the one thing that God wants all of us to do. And that's to serve and care for those people or those things that cannot care for themselves. It is little wonder that our young people today are so interested in doing community service which I commend them for. Because that may be the one thing in their life. Listen to me that seems real and that doesn't get a grade, a trophy or reward. Somehow when they reach out to serve people like seek the city, they feel more human because they are. That's what men and women were made for. To serve God, to love one another and to care for the whole earth that was under their dominion, including the animals, kindness and responsibility are not built into a child who thinks that he or she is God's gift to the world. They are produced by children who have a healthy sense of their responsibility toward God and parents and the world around them. Fourthly, protect your children from fantasies. Verse 11. Whoever works as land will have plenty of bread but he who follows worthness pursuits lacks sense. The NIV says those who work their land will have abundant food but those who chase fantasies will have no sense. One version says they are daydreamers who are nothing more than stupid fools. Their friends is really in your child's best interest to create for them a persona of who they are that is a fantasy or to help them face who they really are and to be comfortable in fact in a biblical way. I mean this biblically to love themselves as they ought to because I think that's biblical. The famous author, English professor David McCullough, spoke last year at Wellesley High School in New England and he caused quite a row when he said to the children, you are not special. He told them in his speech that there were 37 high school graduations in the month of May and June. That means there was 37,000 valedictorians, 37,000 salutarians, 37,000 class presidents, 37,000 kids who got the presidents or the principals or the headmasters cup and who knows how many hundreds of thousands of scholarships of one sort of another to a university. All of whom went to university to find out that they were just one remarkable amazing person among hundreds of thousands of others. He says, mom and dad, it's our job to get our sons and daughters ready to outgrow their childhood fantasies and step into real life armed, locked and loaded, he said with who they are and who they want to be. At least to the fifth and final thing. Prioritize the development of character, verse 12, whoever is wicked, comets the spoiled evil doers, but the root of the righteous bears fruit. This is a very difficult proverb to translate if you look at several verses, they're all different, but the just tremper long and says is this, it is the idea that those who love wickedness are going to find evil or trouble and thus their lives will be unstable. This is contrasted to the lives of the righteous whose lifestyle and character leads to stability. What is more important, a child's GPA, their SAT scores, income levels, awards, trophies and popularity, the right kind of people as we talk about them or their character? What does God focus on? What they do, or who they are. When I used to go to school with my little ones, they had an awards night every quarter. My parents teach and I, everybody, and my kids would, I said, no, when they come time and they call off your name for being on the honor roll, we're just not going to stand up. And they'd say, why daddy? And I'd say, because I want to teach you something, that good character and good conduct are more important than good grades and good looks. And they learn that lesson. And most of them got good grades, which they had to because I was paying for them. That was the deal. And I wonder folks, if we're focusing more on what our children do than what they are. You can say, boy, he needs to go on sabbatical, he is cranky, or he's got a thing about parenting, but I really don't. I do have some credentials here. I've been a husband and a father for into my fourth decade now. I've raised four children, they all know the Lord. They all follow the Lord, they're all gainfully employed. They are serving Christ and other people. Two of them are happily married with precious grandchildren, who are special to me. One of them is about to get engaged in a couple of weeks, and the fourth one is on the prowl. And they're good kids, and I love them, but they're not the greatest thing that ever happened to the human race. Their father is. So let me suggest you three things, and three little pieces of advice here. Number one, take what Tim Elmore calls the emotional health survey of your children. Here's a little survey to see how your children are emotionally healthy or not. Are your children fragile because they've been oversheltered? Are your kids unmotivated because they have been praised too much? Are your kids anxious or fearful because they are never allowed to take risk or to fail? Are your children self-absorbed because they have been rewarded too often for doing too little? Do your children have a growing sense of what God wants them to do in life, or are they chained to your vision for life? Do you go after teachers and pastors and coaches and principals and employers and others when your kids are hurt, disappointed, or wronged, or do you teach them how to handle these disappointments themselves? Do your children know Christ as Savior and Lord, and are they growing in holiness and devotion to Him? Do your kids move back home after college because they are ill-prepared for life? I'm not saying children aren't precious. They are, and they're special. They're a gift from the Lord. But let me tell you something, folks. They're not God's gift to the world. His boy is. There is one child who is God's gift to the whole world, and it's not my children or yours. It is the Lord Jesus Christ whom they should serve. That's what this whole service of baptism is about. That they be disciples of Christ and servants of God, disciples, temples of the Holy Spirit, witnesses of the Lord because his son is the center of the world and not my son, not my daughter, not your children. The second thing he says, Gmail more mentions that there are two curriculum. We ought to give our children when they're little and when they're in high school. You tell them the childhood message, and here it is in five brief statements. You are loved, you are unique, you have gifts, you are safe, and you are valuable. You tell them that in the first ten years of their life. But then as they enter adolescence, you slip to the third thing he says we need to do, and you tell them the adolescent message. Life is difficult, you are not in control, you are not that important, you are going to die, and life is not all about you. Those are two different messages, but he says if you tell them the childhood message for ten years, that they're loved and unique, that they're valuable, that they're safe, that they have gifts, they'll be able to accept the heart of lessons of life, that things get more difficult, that failure will come, that they're important but not that important, and that they're there to serve somebody other than themselves. Here's the final thing we need to face, and this is the most difficult thing in life, this is quite frankly the thing I struggled with most as a dad and quite frankly as a husband. And it's the question, do I love Jesus Christ more than my family? How about it, moms, do you love Jesus Christ more than your children? Dads, do you love Jesus Christ more than your wife and your family? Because that's what life's about. It's about presenting, Paul says, our wives, as pure in chase vessels, cleansed by the word of God through our spiritual ministry as a husband, and preparing our children to go out and serve the Lord because his son is the center of the universe. And if I love my children like I should, I will send them to Jesus Christ who loves them infinitely more than I could and should be the love of their life. In other words, it is my job to teach them to love me less and love Jesus more because they'll spend eternity with Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ is the only one who can make them happy. Are we willing to accept that message that I have no greater joy than this than to hear that my children are walking in the truth? What truth? Jesus loves me this I know because the Bible tells me so. And because he loves me, I will serve him forever. That is what an honorable child learns to do. Let's pray. Father, we want to thank you for the precious gift of our children. They are a gift from the Lord, the fruit of the reward of a womb. They are absolutely precious in your sight in ours. You have a special place for children. In your heart, Jesus said to them, belongs the King of God, let the little children come to me and do not hinder them. And we confess today that our emeshment in their lives, our helicopter parenting, our forcing onto them, the goals and aspirations that we never met, has done everything but helped them to learn how to love you and serve Christ. We repent of that today. We ask you to help us to focus on their character and their conduct to affirm them in truthful ways, to help them struggle through failure, to learn how to discover their own selves in Christ and develop the most precious gift they have been given, which is their souls, to pursue Christ as a dear pans for water. And to realize this most liberating of all truths, they could never be the center of the world because your son is. So we give you our children and we give you again ourselves in repentance and faith so that your love might flow through us and we might prepare them to be the kind to people who honor Christ and to love him. And because of that, who love us and other people as well, this we ask in Jesus' name, amen.