Last month we had the pleasure of dedicating our daughter at Hammersmith Christian Fellowship. Why did we want to do this? As Christian parents, we believe that every child is a blessing from God [Psalm 127 v 3: Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from Him”] and we wanted to thank God for the gift of our daughter.
While giving thanks to God for our children is important to us, we wanted to do more than give thanks. We wanted to publicly commit to bringing up our daughter in the ways of the Lord. Proverbs 22 v 6 states: “start children off in the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it”. The importance and responsibility of teaching our children about God, the Bible and how to become a Christian cannot be underestimated. Yet carrying out this task as parents alone would be a lonely road.
God places us in church families for us to live in relationship with each other and live out the Gospel on a daily basis. Ephesians 2 v 19-20 [“Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone]” emphasises the role of the church family. In the context of dedication, we were asking our Church family to stand with us, to pray for us and to care for us as a family as we seek to bring our daughter up the way of the Lord.
So, while dedication is a great time of gratitude and prayer, it does not make our daughter a Christian, only a conscious decision on her part to accept the sacrifice Jesus made on the cross, will make her a Christian. We pray daily our children will grow up to make that decision for themselves, so that one day we can say: “I have no greater joy than to hear my children are walking in the truth” (John 3 v 1.)