Hoppman's Happenings: Children As Pets

This message comes from Doug Phillips Blog and is an excellent lecture and thorough examination of an incredibly destructive worldview. Geoff Botkin was the speaker/writer of this very true and great message. Read it and be encouraged and challenged.

We live amidst a culture that delights in an infantile worldview. The moral character that was meant to sustain a hardy Christian people is disdained and the fruit of this is a generation of weak immoral people incapable of even helping themselves, thinking for themselves, finding their own solutions, making informed decisions, carrying them out, standing in the gap, fighting when the battle calls to name a few. Children consumed by the lust of their parents have no future and no hope for righting such backward thinking, but for the grace of God.

Caleb Hayden writes:

In his talk, “Children as Pets” Geoff Botkin explained how our culture has attempted to replace God and create a new reality. This broken culture has become a culture of death, manifested through parents’ ungodly behavior in how they raise their children by:

Nourishing within children a morbid preoccupation with self

Minimizing the value of children’s souls

Indulging children because parents carry guilt for failing in their spiritual responsibilities

Being unwilling to direct children to bear the cross of Christ in moral tests and responsibility

Not insisting on obedience to every aspect of God’s law

Making lawlessness comfortable in the home

Directing personal affections away from God toward defiant stubborn attempts at self-fulfillment

Substituting sentimentality for God’s Law

Additionally, adults often exploit their children and manifest disdain for their future by embracing the fantasy policies of a death culture, which include:

Fiat money

Anti-family “social security” schemes

Death taxes

Socialistic policies in business licensure

The religious upbringing of children by government experts

The toys and escapist entertainments of the day.

Mr. Botkin went onto describe how our culture and even some Christians believe that when families make a deliberate choice of when and how many children to have, the children are better loved, cared for, and protected.

But is this not also true of pets? Like pets, children are seen as having no future, no context in God’s created order, no responsibilities, no designated understanding of their place in God’s Kingdom, and no sense of personal duty. However, unlike pets, children have souls, are discipled, and then become disciple-makers of their own children. In our present cultural context, this means discipleship in an excessive, self-centered, and immature approach to life and culture.

Sadly, most Christian children learn to view the world not as God’s battleground, but as a playground, Mr. Botkin noted. Children made in God’s image become enslaved when they are treated like spoiled pets in a culture that emphasizes cuteness, sentimentality, and image over obedience and duty.

Men with hobby lives have hobby families in the artificial world of their own making. Artificial worlds make artificial lives, and the result is a death culture. We have a superstar mentality. We believe we can do what we want, get adulation, and have the world revolve around us.

Believers, Mr. Botkin urged, must repent and do the following four things:

Trust God and His promise to bless families who fear Him

Know your children’s hearts and souls, and guard their affections

Provide children the freedom and tools for learning

Provide children a vision for Christian civilization

In closing, Mr. Botkin commended Titus 2:11-13 as words of instruction for Christians to embrace: “For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world; Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ.”