My good friend Jay Crowdus encouraged me to share this story.

Recently, one evening my wife and I were getting ready for bed, but the kids were still awake. I still have six kids at home ranging from 21 years old to my twins at 10 years.  They were all in the bedroom next to us.  My wife, knowing that it was getting late, called out to them to “get to bed!”  But I noticed something going on that numerous times has brought such delight and happiness to my soul, so I held my wife back from enforcing the “code.”

“Listen,” I said.  As we laid there, we heard all six kids talking simultaneously, laughing, joking, acting out roles of movies,  like best friends!  We sat there and just soaked in the moment.  “Let them stay up,” I said “and let us just relish the moment.  It doesn’t get any better than this.”

Our family has been really blessed to have deep affections for one another. The kids from my oldest at 25 to the youngest at 10 are best friends and continue that way.

I suppose there are many reasons for this.  It could be our natural disposition.  Or simply because we spend a lot of time together. I am sure these help.  But I think in reality, we have “stumbled” onto this more by God’s grace than anything else…   Maybe these are the reasons…

1.  Jesus Christ:  We teach our kids that without the new hearts Christ has obtained for us through his substitutionary sacrifice on the Cross, we would be blind to true affections and be groping in the fog of this secular landscape for solutions.

2.  We are reformed in doctrine:In simple terms we have taught our kids that our salvation is TOTALLY dependent upon God’s free will and not our own.  He predestined us, chose us and gave us new hearts, a taste for Him, because he loved us and not the other way around. We also believe in the complete corruption of our nature before being In Christ and our inability to repent and believe the gospel without first having our nature transformed by a sovereign God.  This gives our kids great humility and gratefulness.

3.  From infancy, we have taught our kids early on that they were created by a loving God in His own image who makes no mistakes in timing, place, family, race, or country.  And that God made them in His image, beautiful, valuable and exalted above the rest of creation. He set them in the Taylor household, by his love, so they could hear the gospel of Jesus Christ.  And that same God saved their parents just so they could hear this good news.  This has given our children a deep sense of their infinite value to God, not because of what they have done, but because they are the Imago Dei. This gives them great humility and confidence!

4.  We home school: This has helped us avoid much of the problems associated with the segregated system we have today in many institutions.  We even keep our kids with us during church!

Now some think that these blessings have come to us in spite of what we believe. That if we truly acted out our beliefs on human depravity, beauty and God’s sovereignty, we would act quite differently.   But I say that it is because of what we believe that we have these affections, not in spite of….

George MacDonald said “the door of opportunity always opens behind you.”  Seek first the Kingdom of God and all these things will be added to you….  Include your kids in the process, they will pay you back in spades…  So will God!