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Pastor Jay's Blog

The Age of Accountability Demands You Be Ready

 

 

Every parent wants to know the age of accountability.  But really, that precise moment isn’t important to know.  This is like being 90 years old and asking “When am I going to die?”  That is asking a question that can’t be answered while ignoring the question you should be giving all your attention to.  The real question is, "How can I be prepared for my very near death?"  The exact time doesn’t matter.  What does matter is putting the time and work into getting everything done and squared away well before that day arrives.

The same is true for the age of accountability.  The ability to know the exact moment is not available to a parent.  You would have to look into the child’s heart and see his level of understanding about God, himself, and right and wrong.  Since you cannot know the moment when, as Romans 1:20 says, he is without excuse, you therefore need to give your attention to the bigger issue. 

Think back to our 90 year old man mentioned above.  That man needs to prepare for his death by writing letters, mending relationships, talking with lawyers, caring for material possessions, and a host of other issues.  He can’t do this on the day of his death.  He needs months, if not a year or more.  The same is true with your child who needs to be prepared for dealing with his spiritual death.  He was born in Adam, and therefore death is his inheritance.  The original sin of Adam resides in the soul of your child.  In your child’s infancy, this fallenness is not yet connected to culpable knowledge.  For instance, in your baby’s supreme selfishness he knows he wants his bottle and screams for it, but he doesn’t even know what a “self” is in order for him to understand selfishness.  Therefore, there is no personal guilt of sinful deeds yet.  But it is coming, and unless there is some kind of handicap, it is coming soon. 

How then do you prepare your young child for that moment of guilt before God and the burden of spiritual condemnation?  Things need to be set in order.  What kind of things?  You need to give your child a vocabulary, a framework, and a solution.  Let’s think about these things.  First, give him a vocabulary of words that he needs to understand.  He needs to understand who God is, what sin is, what heaven and hell are, who Jesus is, what the cross is, what repentance is, and what faith is.  These words need to be defined in simple ways and spoken about often.  Second, he needs to have a framework of the big picture of redemption.  He needs to understand he was created, that God owns him, what God’s commands are, and what God has been doing to redeem people.  Lastly, your child needs to know the solution clearly.  He needs to know about Jesus’ life, Jesus’s death, Jesus atonement, Jesus’s resurrection, what faith and repentance mean, and what the evidence of real conversion is. 

If you look over that above paragraph, you know that you cannot accomplish that in a day or a month.  This takes time and almost daily interaction concerning these things…which is exactly what the Scripture calls for. 

Deuteronomy 6:6–7 These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.

The major point is this: you want to do this all before your kids reach the age of accountability.  The second my child feels his guilty conscience, I want him to know who God is, what this burden he feels is, why he is feeling it, and what to do about it.  That means I need to be talking about it and setting it all in place well before he even has a need for it or can understand it fully.  I want the gospel to so fill my home and my conversations that my child has the key in his hand the first moment he encounters the locked door of sin and guilt and death and hell.  Up until this moment, that key has only been a play thing to him.  But now, by the grace of God, he realizes what this key does and why it is important. 

Be sure, this all presupposes grace.  Just because I have given my child the key, doesn’t mean he will care about it.  I can carefully and zealously put the key into the hand of a corpse all day long.  God has to give new life in every instance.  But for this discussion, we are talking about parental faithfulness.  What has God call us to do?  He has not called us to figure out the moment of accountability.  Instead, he has called us to put the key into their hand, not hastily or with one giant surge of effort or by sending them to a Christian summer camp but every day with prayer that God will unlock for them eternal life.  

 

 

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