To our beloved teachers and parents!
Research shows that the environment and society children live in have a direct effect on their development, the issues they think and care about, their actions, and their emotions. Our children often have to deal with the effects of the 5 following types of basic relationships:
- Them and God – this relationship determines who they are and steers them in the direction of what kind of person they will become. This is because the soul is what governs all other areas in their life.
- Them and Family – most often this simply means their relationships with their parents and siblings. The family plays an essential role in building up and shaping who they become in terms of their thoughts, habits, behavior, emotional maturity, and the way they respond to various situations in life.
- Them and School. Our children spend 5 or 6 days every week at school. At most schools, Christian values are not often emphasized or given much importance. Moreover, the topic of “friends” is very important to your children. Every day their tendency to listen to their friends over their parents grows stronger and stronger.
- Them and Church. If we look at the time spent for this type of relationship, our children only put aside 2 or 3 days a week to go to the house of God or participate in church programs. We also sometimes overlook the need to clearly explain to them the value of going to church and the expectations we have for them as they interact with different individuals within God’s family.
- Them and the Community. We need to teach our children the way to live with the people around them, whether these are short-term or long-term relationships. They need to understand how to examine the culture and behaviors they see around them; while these aspects of daily life may be very Vietnamese, they may not be very Biblical.
Therefore, we can probably agree that while raising our children to become good people in their community is difficult, it’s even more difficult to raise them to become good people of God. However, we are grateful to God that leading our children to become such people is His job. God has very practical teachings in the Bible to help us raise and train up our children to become people of God in the world.
With guidance from the Word of God and the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives, we hope that they will not only protect themselves from the negative effects of the world, but will also have an opposite effect – a positive effect – on the relationships around them. The reason is because our children belong to a great Covenant, a Covenant with Jesus, the One who came down from Heaven to Earth to become a man without sin. They are beneficiaries of an even greater promise – the promise that He will turn them into a source of blessings in their community.
Through the 10 lessons of this year’s Sunday School program that revolve around these 5 sources of influences that our children often come into contact with, the SU team hopes that together with their parents and teachers we can properly show our children who they are in God. We hope to help them understand how to perceive and understand the outside world, and especially how they can show others the truth of the Bible they hold within them. Our desire is that through this curriculum they may become a source of blessings for the people around them.
Let the Word of God teach, reprove, correct and train our children in righteousness, so that they, as men or women of God, may be complete, equipped for every good work (Adapted from 2 Timothy 3:16-17).
This is our wholehearted desire!
