Parent Compass Radio

Anne Graham Lotz: People ask me very frequently what it was like to grow up in Billy Graham's home. I don't have anything to compare it with, so I have to speak from my own experience, of course. To grow up in Billy Graham's home was really to grow up under a single parent. My father has been estimated that he traveled 60% of the time, or he was away 60% of the time. I was raised pretty much by my mother and grandparents.

I say that because there are many single parents today. You feel like you can't do this alone. I know God intended every family to have a mother and a father, and I believe that's His design for the home. But when something happens, whether it's through divorce or death or in my father's case, just traveling and answering the call of God on his life, and a parent is left to do the job by themselves, God is enough and God is sufficient.

God gave me a verse in Psalm 27:10 that said, "When your mother and father forsake you, then the Lord will take you up." My father didn't forsake me; he just wasn't there. But I believe that I have a relationship with God that I wouldn't have had had my father been present in the home from eight to five like an average working father. In fact, it wasn't until I got married and had children and saw the way my husband fathered my children that I realized what I'd missed because that was normal for us to have an absentee father and to have a mother and grandparents that stepped in to fill that gap.

I'm very grateful for that. To be in Billy Graham's home also meant that, as long as I can remember, I've heard about Jesus. The Bible was read, loved, and obeyed. Jesus was central in our home. But it wasn't until Good Friday, and I can't remember the year, but I remember I was watching Cecil B. DeMille's film. He used to have it on every Easter. They would replay "King of Kings." He's the one that had directed "The Ten Commandments," if you remember.

He had an old black-and-white film called "King of Kings," and I was watching the crucifixion scene. I knew that Jesus had died on the cross for me. So on my own, up in my bedroom at my father's house, I got on my knees and told God I was sorry for my sin and I wanted to claim the death of Jesus for myself. I believed Jesus died for me, and I asked Him to forgive me and to cleanse me.

I remember as a little girl feeling the weight lift. I was young, and I fought with my siblings and maybe disobeyed Mother or talked back from time to time, but nothing what we think of as big sins. But there was a weight of sin, and I think everybody's born with that. We get good at shuffling it around and ignoring it and doing other things with that burden, but that burden is there. I know that lifted. I can remember going down the steps to tell my mother what I had done and feeling lighter.

Sometime after that, the next year, I read the Bible through when I was nine and fell in love with the Scriptures. I just loved the Scriptures. I continued in the Scriptures. My mother was very good at guiding me in reading my Bible and taking notes and listening to some great Bible teachers. At 16, there was nothing that triggered this that I remember at all, except that the thought process was that when I stood before God, I would give an account to Him for my life.

Up until then, I had thought when I stood before God, I'd tell Him who my daddy was, who my grandparents were, and God would give me credit for what they had done. It just occurred to me that when I stood before God, it would be all by myself and that I would give an account to Him for what I had done, and I had done nothing. I knelt down in that same bedroom at my father's house and surrendered my life to God for service.

I wanted to make my life count so that when I stood before Him, at least I'd have something to show. I was 16 and had to finish out my high school years. My senior year, I led four of my friends to faith in Christ. We knelt down in the bedroom of one of their homes and they prayed to receive Christ. The next year, I finished secondary school or high school in this country.

That summer, I met Danny Lotz, who was 11 years my senior. I didn't think anything about it except my father had arranged for me to meet somebody other than the person that I was dating at the time. I think my father was concerned I was getting too serious, and I wasn't at all, but he just never was home and he wasn't used to the fact that I went out on dates and it was making him nervous.

Danny Lotz was working from his end. He had seen me and, the way he told it, he said first time he saw me, he fell in love with me. We went out, and it was at a Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting, so we were with a lot of people. I was very relaxed because I thought I was just doing this to satisfy my father, so it wasn't like a first date. He was a strong believer, came from a strong Christian home, and his father was a Baptist pastor in New York City. He had been raised in a similar fashion to myself.

We enjoyed the same music and the same things. It was a great first evening going to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes conference and listening to the speakers, and I didn't think anything of it. But from that day forward, Danny Lotz wrote me every day. He was in the Air Force at the time. He had finished undergraduate and finished dental school. He was just finishing up two years in the Air Force.

He arranged to come to our home in Montreat for a weekend. He was on leave. He was very in love, and I just wasn't in for that at all. I was preparing to go to college. That was in between my high school years and my college years. I wasn't interested at all. The next time I saw him, I'd gone to California for a leadership institute, which is another place I made a life's decision.

At that leadership institute, I remember feeling very bound by what other people expected Billy Graham's daughter to be like. They let me know that I had disappointed them. They were all praying. They said that I was carnal. I didn't know exactly what that meant, but I knew it meant I didn't meet their expectations. I remember making the decision, and I can remember where I was when I made the decision. It was out in California.

I decided that I would live my life to please an audience of one. I would live my life to please God. I knew if He was pleased, my parents would be pleased, my grandparents would be pleased, and the people I cared the most about would be pleased. You can't please everybody anyway, and I just wouldn't live my life for public opinion. Somebody told me I'd been looking at God and my relationship with Him through a prism, and my relationship with God was colored and distorted by everybody's opinion of what I should be like.

I decided to throw away the prism and just live my life for that audience of one. That was a life's decision because now when I stand on platforms, you can have one person in front of you or you can have 10,000. I've been on some major platforms, and my aim is not to please the audience. My aim is not to be invited back. My aim is just to please that audience of one, to give the message that I feel He's put on my heart and to be faithful to deliver it without messing it up.

That summer, I flew back from California and met my father in Denver. He was holding meetings there. Danny Lotz had just been honorably discharged from the Air Force. He'd finished his Air Force stint, so he drove up to Denver and took me out. He brought me back to the hotel where we were staying and told me that he loved me and wanted to marry me. That was the third time I'd been with Danny Lotz.

I told him I wasn't in love at all and didn't care. He asked if he could pursue the relationship. I said it's a free world, you can do what you want, but I'm not going to encourage you. I went up and told my father because I thought he'd put an end to this. My father looked at me and he said, "Anne, I believe Danny Lotz is the man you're going to marry." Deep in my heart, I knew that was right, but I wasn't in love.

But what I was was very ill. I flew home, and they met me at the plane with an ambulance. It turned out I had a severe case of mononucleosis, I think it was probably the hepatitis. I was in bed for three months, which God had. Instead of going to college, I was in bed, and Danny Lotz came up. He was setting up his practice about four hours east of where I lived with Mother and Daddy.

He came up to see me every weekend. My mother fell in love first, and she just so loved him. My whole family did. Then it was maybe four or five months later that I did fall in love and we were engaged and married the following year. That began a journey. Our marriage went for 49 years, shy two weeks. For a lifetime, Danny Lotz has been the center of my life, other than the Lord Jesus Christ.

He gave me three fabulous children. I have a son and two daughters. I know what it's like to be a parent and to desperately want to raise your children. My aim as a parent was not to have them successful in business or in a profession or a career. My aim was I wanted them to have a personal, vibrant faith and to have a love relationship with Jesus.

In retrospect, I probably should have emphasized a little bit more the career aspect. But each one of my children loves the Lord with all of their hearts. They're serving Him. They're leading people to Christ. They're leading Bible studies. They know how to pray and get answers. They know how to read their Bible and hear God's voice speaking to them through it. That was my aim, and I believe God blessed both my husband and me because it takes two. My husband was a very hands-on father. He was a wonderful father.

I thank God. I look back at this stage of my life and I look back at my children and know that really it's by God's grace because we make so many mistakes as parents. But children can see our heart. If there's one thing that I would say to parents who are seeking to raise godly children in this very wicked and perverse generation, it's to be authentic in your own relationship with God. Have a vibrant faith yourself.

My mother said that you can't teach somebody to enjoy eating spinach if every time they see you eating yours, you gag. We lead by example in the home. When our children catch us on our knees in prayer, or they catch us reading our Bibles not because we have to but because we want to, when they catch us sharing the gospel with a neighbor, when they overhear us talking about Jesus and loving Jesus, then that's contagious within the home.

I saw that in my parents. I saw that in my grandparents. It's what I wanted, and I believe my children saw something of that with all the mistakes and failures. They saw something that made them want to know Jesus like that, too. The example of a parent in the home, you can't fake it. You can't put on a show because children see that. They know when you tell your neighbors, "It's been so nice to see you," and they walk out the door and you say, "Goodness, they stayed too long," or "I wish they hadn't been here."

They see the contrast between what we say and what we do. It's important to be authentic in your own faith and your own walk with Jesus, and your children will see it. My father was gone a lot. When he would leave home, my mother made very little commotion about his leaving. We would come home from school and say, "Where is Daddy?" Well, he's gone off again. She just ignored his goings.

But when he was coming home, she made a big deal out of it. One of the things we did when I was a little girl was my father traveled to our small town by train. It was before the airports were big and before you could get around like that. There was a train that came to our little town that directly connected with Washington, D.C. and that directly connected with New York. My father traveled a lot, but many times he came home on that train.

When we knew he was coming, my grandparents would put me in the car and they would drive me down to the foothills. We grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina. We'd drive down to the foothills, maybe 30 minutes away, and we would wait in this little town where the train had to cross where the main road crossed in this town. The train would go through that intersection, and we would see the train go through.

When we were in that little town and the train would come through, we knew the train was going on up the hill. My grandparents would turn around in the car, and they would race up the mountain. We would get to the little town that was near where I grew up, where I knew my father would be getting off the train. We would get to that train station and stand on the tracks and look down the train tracks.

We knew the train was coming because we had seen it go through the intersection. As we looked down the train tracks, pretty soon the little bar would come across the road and you'd see the red lights flashing. Then we could hear the whistle blow and I would look, and around the bend comes the train, the big headlight of the train. It would pull up to the station and it would stop with all the squealing and the smoke and the steam.

Then my father would step off, and he'd come home. He always had a gift for us, something probably he'd picked up in some train station gift shop, a little stuffed animal or something. He always had something in his bag to give us. I've used that as I've gotten older as a story of my expectancy that Jesus is coming. I've been down at that little town. I've seen the train go through the intersection.

I've read Matthew 24. I've looked at the signs of His coming that Jesus said would take place in that last generation. I've seen that Israel has been reborn as a nation in May 1948, after 2,000 years of non-existence. I've seen that the gospel right now is being preached to the whole world. So I know the train has gone through the intersection. But I'm looking down the tracks and I don't see it yet.

There's an enormous expectancy, and it's as though I can hear the lights flashing and I see the bar coming down. I believe any moment we're going to look up and we're going to see the sky unfold and Jesus is coming. I have this enormous sense of expectancy. The sweet thing is when He comes, He brings gifts for us and rewards. He will honor us for the way we've honored Him and all the things that we've had to sacrifice or give up, or the persecution which is so rampant today.

All of that's going to be worth it when He comes back and rewards those who have been faithful to endure to the end and been strong in our faith and passed that faith on to the next generation. They say you can't take anything to heaven, but you know what? You can take your children. They have to make their own decision, but you provide the atmosphere, set the example, and then I think we have to use words.

We have to share the gospel with our children and tell them how they can invite Jesus to come into their hearts, how they can be born again into God's family. If we lead our children to faith in Christ, we can take them to heaven. I'm very expectant, just like when I was a little girl looking down the train tracks that soon and very soon, we're going to see Jesus. Five minutes before I see Him face to face, what will I wish I had done differently?

I want to live in such a way that five minutes before I see Jesus, I have as few regrets as possible. We all have regrets, especially within the home where the rubber hits the road. But I want to have as few regrets as possible and live my life within the home as well as out on the street or on a platform in such a way that the Lord Himself would be pleased. My daughter says when we walk into heaven, she wants to hear the angels applaud Jesus so that we bring Him glory by the way we've lived our lives.

One of the things I think we can do as parents to strengthen our children for the days to come is because if we're living at the end of the end times, if we're living in the days right before Jesus returns, it's going to get uglier, it's going to get worse, it's going to get more dangerous, it's going to get much more frightening. I believe as parents, we have a responsibility to prepare our children and to train them up in such a way that their faith will be strong enough to stand when nobody else is.

The basic way you do that, there's just no shortcut, is you teach them how to pray by your own example. My mother, when I was small, had me keep a little prayer book. In it, I could write down my prayer requests. It was a little white leather notebook, but then she would have me skip a space. That was to leave place for the answer so I would date it and put the answer in when God had answered my prayer.

She was teaching me to pray expectantly, teaching me to pray specifically, so I was praying in such a way looking for God to answer me. The other thing that we need to do as parents is teach our children how to read their Bibles. We can't do that if we don't know how ourselves. I've talked to so many people who say they've been reading it all their lives but they never knew how. By saying how, I mean to read the Scripture so that you listen to the voice of God speaking to you through it.

I've just been talking to a dear friend of my husband's who just very recently lost his wife. She died in the hospital of a horrendous infection. This husband is very lost and hopeless without her. Every day she had read the little volume called "Daily Light." It's just Scripture morning and evening, and it was first published in the 1700s. I republished it just to make it available to a whole new generation.

She had read her "Daily Light" every morning and evening, so one way to honor her, he was going to start reading his. For the first week in between her death and her burial, I texted him every morning and just from the "Daily Light," pulled out a phrase, something that I felt was God speaking to him about the grief that he was experiencing. It was amazing that week that every portion of Scripture in the "Daily Light" was exactly for him.

After a week's time, he sent me a phrase that he felt was meaningful to him from his "Daily Light." What I was doing was teaching him to read God's word and listen for God to speak. People read it for facts, for information, and then they get on to the devotional. They read something about God's word. But God speaks through His word. It's just that we don't think when we read it, could God be speaking to me?

But God does. If we learn that ourselves and then, in turn, we teach our children how to read God's word so that they hear God speaking to them. Then, of course, we teach them to be obedient, and they watch our example. You not only hear God speaking, but whatever He's saying—sometimes it's for comfort, sometimes it's encouragement, sometimes it's instruction, sometimes it's conviction—we not only read it, but we apply it and we live it out.

My mother, when I was baptized, gave me my first Bible. I was baptized shortly after I'd asked Jesus in my heart when I was nine or ten. She wrote in the flyleaf of the Bible that this is your one sure guide in an unsure world. Read it, love it, obey it, live by it. It has a verse for every occasion. So long ago, Mother gave me the wisest advice a parent can give a child.

I took her up on that advice and I've done it ever since. It makes all the difference in your world view, your perspective, your relationships. It makes all the difference in how we view our failures as a parent because nobody's perfect. You look at the Lord God Himself, our Father, and you look at so many of His children in full-blown rebellion, living wickedly. They've been to the cross, been saved, been born again, they're in His family, but they don't act like it.

He understands what it feels like to feel like a failure as a parent. Yet He can redeem that. I love the passage in Joel that says that He can make up the years that the locusts have eaten and those wasted years. He knows how to redeem a mess. I think we just shouldn't play games with our words. We need to go to God and say, "God, I really messed up here. I wasn't living for You when my children were growing up, and so they didn't see a parent in the home like that."

"Now I'm living for You, but they're not because they never saw it up close and personal. So would You show me now how to convey that to them? Would You pray for them?" Ask God to give you promises for your children. It's what I call or what Eugene Peterson called reversing the thunder, where you take God's word and you pray it back to Him. You ask God to give you a promise for each one of your children, and then you pray it back to Him.

Jeremiah 1, He told Jeremiah that He watches over His word to see that it's fulfilled. We can really stand in the gap for our children. Remember that this moment in time is not the whole story. They may be doing whatever today, but it doesn't mean that God's not going to be working in their lives. In answer to our prayers, I know He will be. He'll work in their lives, so we have to, in a sense, let them go.

I'm talking about adult children, older children, but we have to let them go and let them find God in their own way and believe that He won't let them go. He will chase them down just because we're praying, if no other reason. But He loves them more than we do. He'll come alongside, He'll woo them to Himself. Of course, they have the freedom of choice as to whether they would submit to Him or not, and we have to let them go to make that decision.

I believe the prayers of a parent in particular, I think the prayers of a mother, are very powerful. I would also say the prayers of a father. My husband had a father who was a street corner preacher in New York. He got up at four every morning and prayed for his children, his grandchildren, the children yet to come that he would not live to see. My grandfather, my mother's father, got up at four in the morning. When he died, they found his prayer list was like eight or nine handwritten pages long.

He was even praying for some of my high school friends, praying for me. His prayer list was so broad. I think the prayers of a father, a grandfather, a mother, a grandmother, a sister, even a child praying for a parent, God hears our prayers, especially when they're in line with the promises in His word. Obeying God means what it says: you do what He says. Delayed obedience is disobedience.

When He says it, you do it. That's a very serious issue. I think one of the things we could address is the motivation for that. Our motivation is really loving the Lord our God. That's why Jesus said that's the first and greatest commandment: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. If you're in love with Him, if He's the passionate pursuit of your life, then everything else just falls into place.

You want to obey Him because you love Him. Jesus said, "If you loved me, you'll be obedient to my commands." So obedience is our way of expressing love for Him in a way He wants to be loved. It's His love language. We obey Him because we love Him. He expects us to obey Him. If we don't, it's to our own detriment, and we'll lose blessing. Sometimes we get into a lot of trouble.

So many of the complications in life come because we've disobeyed God and we're not following His pattern for living. But if we do that and we make a mess and we're in a mess of our own making, God knows how to get us out of that, too. He can redeem that. I remember when at Christmas, we make a big deal of Christmas; we always have.

When my middle daughter was two or three, we were giving her a little red tricycle for Christmas. I bought it in a box. I don't know why we always waited until Christmas Eve to put things together. You're up until past midnight putting the toys together so that when they walk in Christmas morning, they see it all laid out before the Christmas tree. For this little tricycle, my husband pulled out the wheels and the handlebar.

He said, "Anybody can put this together." So he slapped it together. When he finished, the handlebars went in different directions and all the wheels were crooked. By then, he had put on the little caps and you couldn't fix it. He reached down the bottom of the box. There was a piece of white paper that said, "Read very carefully the manufacturer's directions for assembly."

But he hadn't followed the directions. So he told my daughter the next day, right or wrong, that Santa Claus had dropped it down the chimney because it never worked. It never went in the right direction. Life is like that. The creator has given us directions for living a life that works. The creator's directions for living are found in the Bible. But we think, "Goodness, anybody can live this," and so we slap it together.

Then in our 20s or our 30s or certainly mid-life, life hasn't worked and it's all going in a different direction and we're suffering and we have hardship. It's because we decided we could do it our way and we didn't follow the creator's directions. So to be obedient to follow the directions that He's laid out in Scripture is to live a life that works. If you don't, life doesn't work and it gets more and more complicated, and you can get into a big tangled web of consequences that really can be very hard to untangle.

I love the way the Bible says that we can walk with God. In Genesis chapter five, Enoch walked with God, and he walked for several hundred years. He started walking, by the way, when he had a child. I thought when he looked at that little baby lying in his arms, he named the child Methuselah, which is a big name for a little baby, but when Methuselah was born, that's when Enoch started walking with God.

You know it's because he felt the burden of responsibility raising a child in a very wicked generation. That was Cain's civilization that actually provoked the judgment of God in the flood. But Enoch walked with God until his faith became sight and he walked right into heaven. Then we find Noah in that same generation, and it says that Noah was a righteous and blameless in his generation and he walked with God.

It was while he was walking that God told him that He was going to send judgment, He was going to send a flood to destroy every living thing on the earth. "And I want you to make an ark because salvation from judgment was also on God's mind." So Noah did. We wouldn't be here today if Noah hadn't walked with God and listened to what God had to say and then followed through in obedience.

There are other examples all the way through Scripture. Abraham, I love it when he walked with God and he heard about Sodom and he interceded for Sodom. As a result, his nephew Lot was saved. To walk with God is very key if we're going to hear what God has to say and be in step with Him for our families, for our friends, in the wicked generation in which we're living.

When I'm home, I love to walk. I walk two and a half miles every day. Sometimes I walk with a friend, sometimes I don't. When I walk with a friend, we have two basic rules, or we don't walk together. One is that we have to walk in the same direction, and the second is that we have to walk at the same pace. Otherwise, we don't walk together.

When you walk with God, the same two rules apply. You have to walk in His direction, which means you can't go off in a direction of your own. You have to surrender your will to Him. He doesn't adjust His direction for you; you adjust your direction so that you walk with Him. It just means surrendering. You have no goals of your own, no ambitions, no aims. You surrender all of that to Him, and you want to live out His will through your life.

That's walking in His direction. Walking at His pace is to walk step by step in obedience to His word, which you and I can't do if we're not reading it. So I read His word every day, and I'm listening for Him to speak to me. I ask myself as I read just a paragraph of Scripture, and right now I'm going through Lamentations. It's been very interesting as Jeremiah saw his nation coming under judgment and how he wept over his nation.

I just take a few verses and I write down the outstanding facts. Then for each fact, I try to find a spiritual lesson. What does this mean for people living in our world today? What's the spiritual principle? Then I take that principle and turn it into a question: "What does it mean in my life?" That's where I listen to see what God would have to say to me through the facts and the lessons in that paragraph of Scripture.

Every day, I'm listening. Then I apply it, and then I obey it and I live it out. That's walking with God. As our children see us walking with God, they see our lives are surrendered to His will. It may mean that we have to take a job or give up a job. It may mean that we leave this job to take something less because we want to be in ministry, or maybe it means we're witnessing to a co-worker and risking our promotion, or witnessing to a friend and risking the friendship.

They see us living out our faith and walking with God in His direction where we want to live our lives for His glory. Then catch us reading our Bibles and they know we've applied it and we're living it out, and we show them how to do the same thing. As they see us walking with God—Noah, he walked with God and when he built the ark and the flood came, the only ones inside that ark were his family.

But his family came into the ark. If we want our families to be saved from the judgment that's coming, then I think we walk with God and we invite them to come to Jesus through the one door of the cross and come into that safety, come into the ark, salvation from judgment. Maybe not at this moment, but at least my children have followed and they've come into the ark.

My grandchildren, I have three grandchildren, and each one of them has prayed to receive Christ. I know each one of them is safe in Jesus. Whatever happens in this world, I know they'll be safe forever. For the encouragement of parents who are raising children in this generation, or grandparents who are watching their children raise their children in this generation, I would just like to encourage them and tell you that you're not alone.

Jesus told His disciples right before the cross, "I'm not going to leave you like orphans. I'm going to send you the Holy Spirit." When Jesus went back to heaven and the disciples prayed, you know one of the things they were praying in Acts chapter 1 for 10 days was, "Don't forget your promise. We can't do this on our own. We can't do this by ourselves."

Then, of course, in Acts chapter 2 at Pentecost, God sent down the Holy Spirit. Since that point in time, the Holy Spirit has been available to come live within each one of us so that whether we're parents, whether we're children, whether we're just a friend or neighbor, we don't live out our lives by ourselves. We have the spirit of the living God living within us.

It's very important to make sure the Holy Spirit is within you. When I was a young girl and I told God I was sorry for my sin, I believed Jesus died on the cross for me and I asked Him to forgive me and come into my heart. He came into me in the person of the Holy Spirit. As a little girl, I didn't understand that. I invited Jesus to come in, and I didn't understand He's in a man's body up in heaven, He couldn't possibly come into me.

But He knew what I was saying, and He came into me in the person of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is like Jesus without skin. He's Jesus without the man's physical body. As we are parenting, as we're working, as we're living 24/7, we have the Holy Spirit within us. The Holy Spirit loves us. It says if we do something wrong, He grieves. You only grieve for someone that you love.

When you do the right thing, He applauds. He's emotionally caught up in our parenting, in our living, in our daily life. He has the power. He prays for us. It says that when we don't know how to pray, and how many times as a parent I've not known how to pray, the Holy Spirit will take my yearnings and my groanings and my agonized prayer that has no words, and He puts it into words and presents it to God the Father.

He prays on our behalf. He prays for us. The Holy Spirit, another word for Him, the word in John 16 that's used for Him is counselor, which means somebody who gives advice. You ever need advice as a parent? Well, that's the Holy Spirit's job. That word can be translated strengthener. He gives us strength. It can be translated standby. He's ready 24/7 to meet a need in an emergency.

We can call on Him anytime. The Holy Spirit's a wonderful hidden resource. He's one of the best-kept secrets in the Christian life, and people do things in His name that are so bizarre that I think it's the enemy's way of causing us to pull back from Him. Our very source of strength, our comfort, all that would empower us to be great parents, we're shy of because we see what people do in His name and it spooks us.

But the Holy Spirit is not spooky. The Holy Spirit is Jesus living inside of me. So I have Jesus. Jesus told His disciples it'll be better if I go away because if I go away, then the Holy Spirit will come to you. So I can't imagine anything that would be better than having Jesus sitting here across from me talking to me, letting me hear from Him.

But He said actually that's not as good as having the Holy Spirit in me. If I get up and leave the room and Jesus is still sitting there, then I'm separated from Him. But the Holy Spirit will never leave us, never forsake us. We have Him every moment of every day, and He knows how to parent. He knows. In fact, He can work on the inside of our children to bring them to that place of obedience, to convict them of sin.

John 16 says that that's His job, to convict us of sin and righteousness and the judgment to come. He can work on the inside while we're working on the outside. But He's a wonderful, I don't want to say resource, but He is God living inside of us. Without His 24/7 help, we wouldn't be able to parent children even in the good days. But especially today, when there are so many temptations and so many pressures, only God can help us be parents in such a way that our children are successful from His perspective.

That requires the Holy Spirit living inside of us. I just encourage those who are watching to make sure the Holy Spirit is inside of you because you've invited Him to come in. I'd love to pray for the parents who are watching.

Father, we come to You now, and even as we address You as Father, we're addressing You in that parental role. We come to You as Your children, and we come to You with the awesome, overwhelming responsibility of raising our children that You've entrusted to us. First, we want to thank You for them. Even the bad ones, Lord, we thank You for them.

We believe they're gifts from heaven that You've given to us for a short time here on earth. So right now, we give them back to You, and we ask that You take responsibility for them. Show us on Your behalf how to raise them, not only to be obedient and contribute to society and be good neighbors and friends and to be honest and have integrity and purity and all the things we long for.

But Lord, show us how to show them what it means to be in love with You, to have a vibrancy to our faith that is the very core of our lives. Help them to see in our example, as flawed as it can be and all the mistakes and the times that we fail and we sin, but help them to see, Lord, something of You in our lives that would be contagious, that they would want to know You and love You and obey You and serve You and live for You because of what they see in their mother or father.

So we ask that You'd bless each one watching, in Jesus' name and for His glory. Amen.