1. College Freshmen

Hi, I’m Mike Riggs. The title of this mini meditation is:

What Happens When Your Son or Daughter Leaves Home for College?

See audio and text versions below. 

It was inspired by a message titled: How to Prepare Your Children to Leave Home with Lifetime Biblical Values. My personal experience is an example so, I will start there, however, it is not the typical experience, but it did result in lifetime biblical values. So, I will explain my experience and then the more typical experience I observed, including the results I have seen. 

God’s Hand in Drawing Me to Himself

When I started college in my hometown after high school, I was introduced to a group of friendly students who seemed to be interested in knowing me. The drawback was that they invited me to their Friday evening meetings where I heard about Jesus Christ and the need to come to Him for salvation from the penalty of my sin. I ran into them a lot because my twin sister had joined them. They encouraged me to come to Christ whenever an opportunity presented itself. I consistently gave them a hard time by questioning their faith and how they could know or prove what they were telling me was true.

A verse they shared with me kept haunting me. John 10:10 says, I came that you may have life and have it more abundantly. So, while I was giving the Christian group a hard time on the outside, God was working me over inside about the emptiness and lack of purpose in my own life. Finally, near the end of the first year in school, I stopped wrestling with conviction and the emptiness and lack of purpose and turned to the Lord Jesus Christ to come into my life and take it for Himself and His purposes.

For a while I wrestled with thinking I was crazy for buying into this Christian stuff, most likely because my family did not attend church, and this was all new to me. Some important things helped me grow in faith. I spent time with other believers, and I read and meditated on God’s Word. I still remember some of those times today and how once empty words in the Bible came alive. I still have journals written during that time.

One of those evenings, as I was reading 1 Corinthians 1 and meditating on it, a new way of thinking about life, the world and myself overwhelmed me. After a few hours of meditating on it and talking with the Lord about it, I fell into a peaceful sleep. Christ had opened my eyes and heart to the wisdom and wonders of His Word and had removed the emptiness and lack of purpose like an empty stomach being filled.

From Conversion to Serving

From the start, I was taught that after repenting from my sin and trusting Jesus, believers should be devoted to serving and knowing Christ. We should read and study our Bibles regularly, have quiet times, memorize Scripture, pray often, make applications, and share Christ with others. That was my view of real Christians; I didn’t know any better.

After that first year of college, Uncle Sam requested my participation in the military where I served for four years. The first year without Christian fellowship and accountability was hard. The next year I was transferred to another base where I did have Christian fellowship and accountability and continued to grow spiritually and help others as well.

After my time in the military, I and other discharged military men were asked to go back to finish college and help start a ministry to college students. To start the ministry, we surveyed college freshmen to see if they were interested in doing a Bible study. A number of them chose to participate.

Perplexity

When I learned that some of those in my study had grown up in a church and in Christian families, I was looking forward to their contribution to the study and to me. The first study was in the book of John. We would read the passage and then walk through it with questions about observations and applications from the Scripture. What happened in that study completely surprised me. They did not know how to interact with God’s Word on a personal level.

I didn’t understand how these young men could be so clueless about how to truly interact with the Scripture after growing up in Christian families and attending church. It soon became obvious that they had not been taught how to get into the Scriptures on their own. They didn’t even understand that they should regularly spend time in God’s Word. Of all the men I helped in the military and college ministries, only one had left home with a devotion to the Lord and to spending time in Scripture.

Not long ago I was asked what I thought were significant factors that influence the lack of parent-child discipleship in the home?”

I said, “You would think that of all the people anyone would want to disciple, it would be their own children, but so often it just doesn’t happen. I think the main reason is that most parents were never discipled like I was. I saw so many young men leave the faith when left to themselves." The young men in my Bible studies who had grown up in a church and Christian families had never actually studied the Bible, and their answers to questions with the Scripture right in front of them were canned answers.

I saw the Lord work in their lives as they interacted with the Scriptures, but the question that went through my head and heart was, what happened to the 18 years Christian parents and churches had these men? They should be teaching me; I shouldn’t be teaching them. So, the main answer to why parents are not discipling their children is that they have no clue about how to disciple their children because they have never seen it done. Once you get past this major roadblock to discipleship, it comes down to the priority you put on your Christian faith.

Even Today

Even today, we still see good churches where God’s Word is preached regularly from the pulpit turning out sons and daughters without the mindset or know how of spending time in Scripture and taking personal responsibility for their continued growth in the Lord. They may be able to tell you the basic doctrines of the faith, and stories about mighty men of God, but they lack a living and growing personal walk with the mighty God of men. That is still happening today, and we ask why?

That is one of the reasons we wrote the Lamp and Quill Bible Curriculum. Besides using it for our own children and in the Sunday School classes we were teaching, we wanted to help parents pass on a hunger and practice of growing in the Lord by regularly spending time in and interacting with His Word and passing on that mindset to their sons and daughters. We are often saddened by all the programs in churches where true discipleship is often neglected or handled superficially.

God’s Plan for Growth

So, how do we fix this?

• Well, according to passages such as Genesis 2:24 and others, (Matthew 19:5, Mark 10:7, Ephesians 5:31) the Bible says your children will leave home.
• According to Deuteronomy 6:6 & 7 it says that parents are responsible for their children’s spiritual preparation for leaving home not just the secular fields of knowledge.
• And the next important area to understand is that interacting with God’s Word has influence well beyond our capability. Hebrews 4:12  explains how, it says, “For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” Interacting with Scripture changes lives. We know that personally and have seen it happen many times.

Questions to Ponder

• What is your son or daughter’s personal initiative for interacting with the Lord in His Word?
• What does this tell you about your child’s convictions on spiritual matters and their potential direction once they leave home and make their own decisions?

Future Mini-Meditations

In future mini-meditations, I will cover areas such as how to disciple your children, including what to aim for and how to practically grow together spiritually. My wife, Carolyn, has had a different background and motivation over the years. I will tell you more about that in a different mini-meditation.

Thank you for listening to or reading this mini-meditation. We are praying that God may draw you close to Himself as you interact with Him in the Scriptures.