Daily Devotional
Training Versus Teaching Children

December 11, 2016

The Bible says to “train up a child in the way that he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” The word “train” in the dictionary says this, “To prepare for a contest, to instruct by exercise, to drill, to form to a proper shape, to discipline for use.”

You have to train and to coach your children. You have to pray. You have to teach. You have to plead. You have to show them by example.

Do you have your children in a Bible-believing church? Do you have them in a Bible class or Sunday school under a born-again teacher? Are you training in the home by precept and by example? Sometimes people spend more time training their dogs than they do their children.

You have probably seen men who have champion bird dogs. Watch them and see how they train a dog, then go to their home and see how they train their children. They spend more time with the dog than with the child; then they tie the dog up at night and lets the kids run wild!

We are to train our children. If you teach a child and that is all you do, you teach him one thing; and then someone else can come along and teach him something else. But when you train him, he gets something through the pores of his skin into his very psyche. There is a difference between teaching and training.