If you keep quiet at a time like this, deliverance and relief for the Jews will arise from some other place, but you and your relatives will die. Who knows if perhaps you were made queen for just such a time as this?” Esther 4:14

There’s a lot of handwringing going on today. Have you heard people saying things like: “What kinds of world will my children face as adults?” or “I sure wouldn’t want to be raising kids today! But you won’t hear comments like these from Alex Cravens.  He’s a youth pastor and father of two young sons.

“Don’t feel sorry for or fear for your kids/grandkids because the world they are going to grow up in is not what it used to be,” Cravens wrote in a post that went viral.[1]  Like Daniel, David, Esther and Peter in the Bible, “God created [our kids and grandkids]… and called them for the exact moment in time that they’re in.”

There is much that we can do to help our kids know and live out the purpose for which God created them.  Pastor Cravens suggests:

Raise them up to know [God’s] power (1 Chronicles 29:11-13).
Train them up in the authority of His Word (Isaiah 4:8).
Teach them to walk in faith knowing that God is in control (Isaiah 45:5-7).
Don’t teach them to be fearful and disheartened by the state of the world but                    hopeful that [in God] they can do something about it (Isaiah 41:10,

Ezekiel 22:30).

“God isn’t scratching His head wondering what He’s going to do with this mess of a world,” encourages Pastor Cravens. “He has an army He’s raising up to drive back the darkness and make Him[self] known all over the earth.”

 

Resource reading: Esther 1:1-10:3

[1] Cravens, A. (2021, January 6).  Don’t feel sorry or fear for your kids. Retrieved February 3, 2022, from https://www.facebook.com/alex.cravens.5