Praying for Your Kids

There is going to come a day, and it comes faster than you think, when your prayers reach further into your kid's life than your hands ever can.

Right now you can still do a lot. You can drive them places and check their homework and lay down the rules and be in the room. But that window is closing every single day, and on the other side of it is a whole world you will not be able to follow them into. The friend group you never meet. The phone in the dark. The thoughts they never say out loud. The years after they walk out your door for good. You cannot go there with your hands.

You can go there with your prayers.

That is not a soft thing to say. It is the hardest, most far-reaching work a father does, and the man who neglects it is leaving his kids to fight the whole thing with a father who was present for the easy part and absent for the part that lasts.

There is a father in the Bible who understood this, and he was not a flawless man, he was just serious about it.

"Job would send and consecrate them, rising up early in the morning and offering burnt offerings according to the number of them all; for Job said, 'Perhaps my sons have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.' Thus Job did continually."

Job 1:5, NASB 1995

Look at what Job was doing. His kids were grown. They were out of the house, living their own lives, at their own feasts. He could not control them, could not see into their days, could not follow them into their sin. So he got up early, and by name, one offering for each of them, he lifted them to God. Not for something he caught them doing. For what they might be doing that he could not see. Perhaps my sons have sinned. And it says he did this continually. Not once when there was a crisis. Continually. That was just how the man lived.

That is the picture. A father on his knees for kids he cannot reach, covering the sins he cannot see, over and over, as a way of life.

Now think about what your kids are walking into that you will never see. You already know the world is aiming at them. It is aiming younger every year. There are ideas coming for how they see themselves, their bodies, their worth, their God, and those ideas will reach them in places you are not allowed to go. You can fight some of it in the daylight. But a lot of the war for your kid happens in rooms you will never enter, and the only way you get in there is on your knees.

So pray for them by name. Not "bless the kids" on the way out the door. By name, one at a time, for the real things. Pray for their salvation before anything else, because a well-behaved kid who does not know Christ is still lost. Pray for their protection, body and soul. Pray for the friends they have not met yet and the person they will marry someday who is out there right now. Pray for the character you are trying to build in them to actually take root. Pray for the day, years off, when they will be somewhere you cannot follow and something you prayed over them will hold.

And do it continually, like Job. Not only when they are in trouble. As a way of life, so that when the hard day comes, and it will, you are not starting cold. You have been standing in that gap for years.

Here is one to pray tonight. Then make it a habit, and put their real names in it.

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A prayer for your kids.

In the hallway outside their door, after they're asleep.

Father, these are Yours before they are mine. I keep forgetting that.

I cannot follow them everywhere they are going. I cannot see what they are already carrying. You can. Go where I cannot go. Guard them in the rooms I will never enter.

Get them, Lord. Before the world does, before their own sin does, get them and hold them. I want them saved more than I want them successful. Cover the things I cannot see, the way Job covered his.

I will be here, on my knees, for as long as You give me. The battle for my kids begins right here. Amen.