Jesus Christ has come to be the sacrifice for our sins, to take the punishment that we are owed for the sins that we have committed so that God can give us a new, spiritual nature by the power of the Holy Spirit, and then allow us into Heaven rather than give us the punishment that we so justly deserve.

Jesus Christ died so that we would believe in Him, and then become salt and light to those with whom we come into contact. He could have mentored the whole world, but Jesus chose to only have a few faithful disciples so that we would be encouraged by His example to touch the few with whom we come into contact, and not become discouraged simply because our reach is not as wide as that of the Jewish and Roman leadership.

Let us look at our children as Jesus looked at His disciples, and emulate Jesus’ example by living lives of character before them, and then by taking every opportunity to build up our children, not in self-esteem, but using discipline to develop character to build respect for the authority of God’s Word in them.

In the book of Proverbs, Solomon, the wisest man that ever lived, endeavors to instruct his son in the proper way to live. Instructing our children, both verbally and by example, as to specifically how they should live is, in my opinion, the most important thing that we can do to insure that they appropriately handle their academic goals and life pursuits.

Men need women and women need men. Our differing functions, strengths and weaknesses are the reasons we need one another. Simply because we have the ability to function outside of our need for one another does not mean that the need does not exist. The plan of God is that men and women combine to create children to which we can pass on our acquired wisdom and our knowledge of Him.

God designed marriage so that we could help one another and become as one. Satan introduced complaining so that we could drive one another crazy, change the oneness that God planned for us to an adversarial relationship, and become separated and divorced.

Our personal discomforts, our personal self-consciousness, and our focus on the bad experiences in our history all combine to make us defensive. Once we become defensive, we find it difficult to allow ourselves to experience the joy that the Lord has for us in our relationships. Our defensiveness leads us into adversarial relationships with our spouses and draw us inexorably toward the dissolution of our marriages that we consciously do not want.

If husbands and wives decide to focus on the desires and interests of their spouse rather than just their own interests, and if husbands and wives decide to have more esteem for the desires of their spouses than of their own, like-mindedness between the spouses will develop.