Parents and children— each group is blessed with a unique role to play in bringing God's goodness to light in universal salvation. And ideally, each generation will recognize and accept its responsibility to help the next to surpass its own in spiritual enlightenment and the practical living of it. How seriously are we taking the Christly demand to come out from the misconstrued material sense of things into the spiritual sense of the ever-present kingdom of heaven— not only individually, but collectively, generation by generation?
An important aspect in fulfilling this mission as adults is to commit ourselves to promoting children's spiritual growth through teaching, example, and healing, instead of leaving them to start their spiritual search from scratch when they reach adulthood. In this way, each new generation is blessed with the spiritual progress of the previous one.
Think of the many accounts in the Bible that illustrate the important role of parents in the early lives of leaders. The devotion to God of the parents both of Samuel and John the Baptist surely helped to provide them with a pure atmosphere of thought to foster their spiritual growth and shelter them from the aggressiveness of materialism.
