| PUT CHILDREN FIRST 
Children need LOVE, LOVE, LOVE! and then more LOVE! Love is not just food, clothing, and shelter. It is a balance between nurturing, securing their soul from being fractured emotionally. Training them to be independant thinkers, that one day they alone will realize they need Jesus Christ as Saviour. Pointing them to the cross and seeing Christ in us is our purpose, vision, aim and goal. Anything less would be shameful and definately not what Christ would want us to do. Love is not just hugs and kisses and tucking them in at night. Love is pointing the way to Christ so that when they get older they will want a desire to be saved, to be like him, to follow him. 
Love is not giving to your child material things until they have new name brand clothes to fit in. Love is teaching them about God and what he did for them at the Cross of Calvary so when they get older they will want to kneel at the same cross they were taught about and get saved. Love is not a word that is spoken just to say when it feels good. Its an action word, a verb. Love is; God is. = God is LOVE. He gave himself a sacrifice for us that we might go to heaven when we die. We as well should give our life for the sake of our children so that when they die one day they too may go to heaven.  Love is not as my Pastor says some goose pimply feeling that you feel your way into. You love your way into the feeling. Feelings are deceitful above all things and desparately wicked-(Jeremiah 17:9,10- The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: Who can know it? 10 I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings). Their will be times you will not feel like loving. Love anyway. Love through the hurt, through the pain. God loved us. Love through the burden, love through the sting of dark clouds that hover your days. Love through them. Your child needs your love no matter what. One day they will look back on it and remember you never turned your back on them, through the good nor the bad. You loved them through the good times and the bad, even when it pains you and you feel like your heart has been cut into with scissors anis wringing out like a wash rag with tears that you weep at night; stay by the stuff... God's grace is sufficient for thee. This is unconditional love. Never stop.  Agape love is God's love. A perfect love. A love that can only be loved through him by walking in the Spirit and not the flesh.Galations teaching about the flesh and the Spirit Galations Chapter 5. I suggest reading the entire chapter. Phileo love is the type of love that we love in the natural. We feel with our emotions. There is a lot of misunderstanding about what the Bible means when it talks about "love". The New Testament was written in Greek. Ancient Greeks recognized that there are different types of love. As a result there are several words in Greek that we translate today into the single word of love. The two most important are: Phileo - means to have an affection (sentiment, passion or feeling) for. A fondness based in the heart. What the Greeks meant by Phileo love is what we normally think of the words "brotherly love" meaning today. Agape - means to choose to seek the best for others. This is a love based in the mind. We can chose to show agape love by actively thinking about, and deciding how we act toward other people. Agape is the word used when the Bible talks about Christian love for one another. Agape love is talking about our behavior towards others, not our feelings. 
Phileo love is about feelings (the natural/flesh). Agape love is about how we act toward others (Spirit/from above/outward). The Bible promises in Proverbs 22:6- that if we train up a child in the way that he should go, when they are old they shall NOT depart from it. A dear Christian lady at my church has taught me many a countless things with life long lessons shared this with story in her Ladies Enrichment Class on night. "Their was a lady that (trained)wrapped her cucumber vine around her clothes line post!...She trained it up the vine post and it stayed there! (God is the post, the cucumber vine is our children!) We must have them cling to the post if we are to ever have any hope of their eternal future! 
If you have a wayward teenager, an adult son or daughter that is out into the world at the moment, they will become the Prodical one day. Just keep a look out on the porch of hope and bedside of prayer for them and never give up on their return... God is faithful to his promises. We must believe in him and NOT JUST for our salvation but through the darkest of circumstances... Our circumstances change day by day, but God changes not. 
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