Who will your child of today become?

Today’s child is tomorrow’s Hitler. Today’s son is tomorrow’s Dennis Nilsen. Boris Johnson. Ravi Zacharias. Today’s daughter is tomorrow’s Gladys Aylward, or Florence Nightingale, or praying Hannah. Or the Myra Hindley of tomorrow.

Or think about this: Saddam Hussein was yesterday’s child; Stalin, yesterday’s baby; and Harold Shipman, yesterday’s child – an aspiring doctor, then a serial murderer.

And today’s son is tomorrow’s Saul, the angry persecutor of Christians. Such was the perceived threat of the believers to Saul and all he stood for, that he went on the warpath tormenting Christians, determined to chase them down wherever he could find them. But for God’s intervention.

Here we must pause

Let’s truly grasp the power and the wonder of God’s grace in the life of this self-confessed ‘chief of sinners’. This same sovereign God who continues to strike at the heart of sinners today.

The divine miracle that God worked on Saul on the road to Damascus, the road he planned would take him to condemn yet another group of Jesus-followers, was no more a miracle than that which takes place in lives today.

That deep conviction of sin, the spiritual reawakening and change wrought by God himself still happens today, to the most outwardly wicked of people when He so chooses.

Today’s child is tomorrow’s son of Eli. Eli, that godly priest of old who nurtured Samuel through his earliest years in the temple, nonetheless neglected his parenting duties towards his own sons – with devastating results for his family and for the wider work of the Lord.

The one thing the above-named have in common with us is sin. Conceived in sin. But for God’s restraining power and grace, we all have the propensity to perform the most evil of acts.

There’s good reason why the writer of the Ecclesiastes wrote: ‘Remember your creator in the days of your youth.’ Children are more easily taught. Humanly speaking, it is harder for them to turn to God in later years.

Each day, each night when I tuck my youngest boy up and pray with him – I pray that he’ll not only know the Lord for himself but that he’ll be a mighty man of God. I don’t mean a renowned preacher – tomorrow’s Tyndale, C.H. Spurgeon, or R. C. Sproul – but a godly man of integrity; a Christian father to his own children; a faithful witness to his brothers and sisters in Christ; a wise spiritual father.

I do not want him - any of my children -to be tomorrow’s lost sinner (and in God’s mercy, two are saved).

But we’re under no illusion that our children – because of any diligent parenting of ours – will be saved; destined to be faithful men and women for the Lord. If we were, we deceive ourselves and we put our faith in our own works, not in God’s sovereign grace.

To the reader who is desperately sad for a child who has rejected God, never give up praying. Take heart from this: today’s child may be a Saul – but that same child may also be a Paul.

Paul, the missionary, who exchanged his murderous travels for dangerous journeys across land and seas, bringing the gospel to the Jews and gentiles. Once the God-hater, then the gentle lover of souls – an encourager to the believers in the towns and cities.

Today’s children are tomorrow’s evildoers and lovers of self. But they are also tomorrow’s pastors, teachers, missionaries and lovers of God.

I don’t know who my children will be tomorrow. I do know that my years of inherently imperfect parenting are sowing the seeds. But they can neither save nor make my children who or what I would choose them to be.

But God knows. He knows their hearts and their futures. And please pray with me that He will guide our children by His hand and into a future of loving and serving Him.