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Baker Publishing Group - Jack Hayford

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73 pages

English

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The seeds we plant in the lives of children will grow into good, healthy fruit or into weeds that choke out their potential and promise. But parents, grandparents, and mentors don't always know how to speak life into a child or teen. Now Pastor Jack Hayford shows adults how to bless the kids in their lives with words of encouragement, nurture, protection, and challenge. In Blessing Your Children, Hayford shares Jesus' tender heart for children and offers a biblical blueprint for passing on God's blessing to future generations. This warm, insightful book, which includes an application and prayer at the end of each chapter, will be a treasured resource for parents and grandparents, children's pastors and family counselors, and mentoring programs.

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Christianity

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	18 janvier 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441268204
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0374€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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P RAISE FOR B LESSING Y OUR C HILDREN
Our eternal Father desperately longs to bless His children. And, as the creator of the parent-child relationship, He knows how to give the ultimate gifts. Blessing Your Children has articulated many of God’s unique favors. It teaches parents to enjoy this intimate heavenly relationship and pass those loves, opportunities, freedoms and fulfillments on to their own children. The call to bless our children is a divine assignment; and with the grace of God and the help of the Holy Spirit, we can pass on an inheritance that will never fade.
Gary Smalley
Marriage and Family Author, The Gift of the Blessing, Love Is a Decision and Key to Your Child’s Heart
www.smalleyonline.com
Blessing Your Children is more than a book for parents; it is for all of us who care about the next generation. Pastor Jack has extended his hand of blessing to touch me at many critical points in my life. The impression he has left on me will be visible for eternity. Let us take the practical wisdom of Blessing Your Children beyond our own homes to touch the lives of every child within our reach.
Lisa Whelchel
Actress and Author, Creative Correction and The Facts of Life and Other Lessons My Father Taught Me
Castaic, California
B LESSING Y OUR C HILDREN

© 2002, 2012 Jack Hayford
Published by Chosen Books 11400 Hampshire Avenue South Bloomington, Minnesota 55438 chosenbooks.com
Chosen Books is a division of Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan. www.bakerpublishinggroup.com
Chosen edition published 2014
ISBN 978-1-4412-6820-4
Previously published by Regal Books
Ebook edition originally created 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the New King James Version . Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
C ONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Foreword by Stormie Omartian

1. From Generation to Generation
2. Bless Your Children with a Long and Fruitful Life
3. Humble Yourself as a Child
4. What Happens When We Don’t Bless Our Children
5. Learning God’s Way of Correction
6. Create an Atmosphere of Freedom in Your Home
7. Speaking Blessings on Your Children
8. Declare His Wondrous Works to Your Children

Afterword
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
How often an author becomes indebted to people! There are so many people without whom this book would not be in your hands.
First, Anna, my dear wife. Together we have learned lessons on how to bless children. The greatest blessing for me, however, has been you, Anna.
Second, thank you to the late Bill Greig, Jr. of Gospel Light. He and his wife, Doris, heard my sermon messages and insisted that this book come in to being. Their welcome support and vision blessed me.
Finally, to Selimah Nemoy goes the greatest tribute for the book’s existence. Her editorial skill and spiritual discernment are a gift to all of us at The King’s College and Seminary. Blessings on you, Selimah!
F OREWORD
I am one of Pastor Jack Hayford’s spiritual kids—his daughter in the Lord. That’s because 32 years ago, at a very low point in my life, Pastor Jack talked to me about Jesus and the life that God had for me. I ended up receiving the Lord in his office. For the next 23 years, I attended Church On The Way where Jack was the pastor, and I grew up in the things of the Lord under his teaching. The foundations of my life were solidly established during the time I spent there.
One of those foundations was becoming the kind of parent that God wanted me to be. Because of my own dysfunctional upbringing—I was raised by a mentally ill mother who was abusive and by a father who could not control my mother’s cruelty—I didn’t have good role models for parenting when my own children were born. I knew I was not equipped to raise them. But I was able to learn everything I needed to know about that from Pastor Jack.
I learned, first of all, by example as I watched Pastor Jack and Anna raise their four wonderful children. I never saw trouble or rebellion in any of the children as they grew up to be solid and grounded in the things of God. I was even more impressed when I saw the high-quality person each one of them chose to marry. And I continue to be impressed with the great children they in turn are raising. It was clear that this was a family who knew what worked.
I also learned how to be a godly parent from Pastor Jack’s teachings on the subject. One of the most important things he taught was how to bless and speak life into a child. I came to understand that we all have the power to plant seeds, not only in the hearts of our own children, but also in any child God brings into our lives. These seeds can produce good fruit or they can produce weeds that choke out life. The things we say can live in a child’s heart for a lifetime and mold the way they think about themselves and the people around them. We can either point children toward a path of self-destruction or help them to find the destiny God has for them.
That is what this book is all about. In a culture that has lost all sense of what is best for a child, Pastor Jack boldly speaks the truth. In a society that too often devalues children or overindulges them, or uses them for self-gratification, he shows us how we can have a powerful effect for good. He shows us how to speak words that bring life and not death, blessings and not curses, encouragement and not discouragement. He shows us how to build up and not tear down. This book will help you leave a spiritual inheritance to your children that will serve them well for a lifetime.
Stormie Omartian
Author, The Power of a Praying Parent
Chapter 1
F ROM G ENERATION TO G ENERATION
One generation shall praise Your works to another, and shall declare Your mighty acts .
PSALM 145:4

It was several years ago, while I flew across the Atlantic toward Africa where I was scheduled to speak to a group of church leaders, that I began to read a book concerning planning for the future. One of the foremost decisions borne of that reading was that it motivated my wife, Anna, and me to do the one thing it said we should do immediately if we hadn’t already done so—prepare a will. With the help of one of the attorneys in our church, we began to work through the details of our children’s inheritance.
An Inheritance for Your Children
A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children .
PROVERBS 13:22
The matter of inheritance—both spiritual and material—is addressed throughout the Old and New Testaments. Depending upon a man’s godly wisdom (or his foolishness), his descendants might inherit anything from prosperity to folly. Our spiritual inheritance, “willed” to us as adopted sons and daughters of God through Jesus Christ, is described in Matthew 25:34 as “the kingdom [of God] prepared for [us] from the foundation of the world.” While the book you are now holding in your hands and the one I read on the plane are very different, they are similar in more ways than one might think, because they parallel the matter of establishing a will and transmitting an inheritance.
The will Anna and I prepared to make, with the help of our attorney, was a conscious judgment that would state how the inheritance of what we have will someday be distributed to those we love. Since the combined value of all a person’s assets is referred to as his or her net worth, I remember thinking it especially gracious of the attorney that, as he totaled what Anna and I owned, he didn’t refer to it as our “net worthlessness.” As a couple, at that time in our late forties, we were not in debt; but the amalgamate sum of our earthly possessions reflected the fact that we had pursued the path of pastoral ministry—one seldom known for an accumulation of wealth.
As we looked over the paperwork together, the attorney—highly respected in his profession and also a man of deep commitment to Jesus Christ—made such a gentle, touching observation. Rather than make a condescending remark about our small estate, he simply said, “Well, Pastor Hayford, just studying these figures, it’s clear to see where you have set your priorities.” It might have been a nice way of exclaiming, “Wow, this is pathetic. A guy your age ought to have a lot more money than this.” But I don’t believe that’s what he meant. He knew enough of Anna’s and my life to know how gracious the Lord has been to us. He knew of the multitudinous ways we’ve been blessed—in our marriage, in our family, in our ministry and in the privilege of seeing so many lives touched, changed and enriched over the years. And while being in ministry for our whole life together has certainly not made us financially wealthy, Anna and I have no complaints. At that moment, and even to this hour, if we could start all over again, we would do it exactly the same way.
After the will had finally been drawn up, Anna and I were able to arrange a setting in which we could review the will with our kids. Of course, we had few assets and no idea of what a future date would afford them as their inheritance, but we nonetheless went over the details, explaining the formula by which anything we had would one day be passed on to them.
That day in our living room offers a genuine and practical spiritual parallel to this book’s subject of blessing your children, for learning and planning how to transmit blessing to them involves as real a decision as arranging their inheritance of material things via a will.
L earning and planning how to transmit blessing to our children involves as real a decis