The afternoon session featured a 7-member panel
discussion titled “The Voice of Legacy,” that focused on the importance of moms
and dads mentoring those struggling spiritually, or who are young in the faith.
The first aspect of mentoring begins at home. Your
children need to hear about some of your struggles, your testimonies of God’s
answers to prayer, your aspirations for the future. They need you to bless them
verbally; they need your love, kindness, encouragement, and acceptance.
You can’t mentor everyone, so the question asked was,
“How do you decide whom to mentor?”
·
Watch their lives, their hunger. Are they
serious in wanting discipleship?
·
If anyone becomes a burden, ask the Lord
to intervene by perhaps removing them from your influence.
·
Listen to your spouse, because your home
will be used to mentor these individuals. Respect his/her spiritual radar. Agree.
·
Be wise about how you spend your time.
·
Be a person of prayer, and love the Word
of God.
·
Trust God to protect your circle of
mentoring.
·
Look for the abandoned, the introvert,
those who cannot speak for themselves, the abused, the lonely, etc.
There’s a difference between caring for someone and
sharing your life with them. A word of sound advice about mentoring is this: be
careful that your mouth doesn’t write a check you can’t cash. In other words,
don’t make promises you can’t keep.
One leader shared how he and his wife were called,
verbally, by God, to leave the West Coast and move to D.C. He gave this advice:
·
Love on every person you pass or meet.
·
Impact people in your city. Go “in and
out” of the city; be out and about.
·
Affect the people who live next door.
·
Love your city.
·
Don’t curse D.C. People speak curses
against our government, and it also affects the people who live in the city.
Bless D.C. and the people who live there. Ask God to take blinders off eyes so
they can see the truth. Declare the good things you want to see God do in D.C.
For example, say, “I bless D.C. with peace in their streets. Let there be an
absence of drugs and violence. Let there be godly restoration in families, in
churches, in neighborhoods. Let good businesses prosper. Let there be equity in
the courts and halls of justice.” (You get the idea!)
·
Learn from cross-generational people. The
young need the old, and the old need the young.
·
Dialogue with people: revival will not be
very effective if we don’t.
Years ago, in the Charismatic Church, the discipleship
movement was, in many cases, much too involved in people’s lives. People were
told when and whom to marry, where to live, talked into business ventures that
lost money, coerced into selling their homes, giving their money to the pastor,
and other hurtful things. It became a system of control by power-hungry and
prideful individuals. Thankfully, I don’t hear of such things today.
At sessions’ end, a pastor prayed powerfully for the
restoration of families: fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, fathers and
daughters, and mothers and sons, and we received his blessing.
I applied this session to my own life, and asked the
Lord to give me wisdom in mentoring. Perhaps you will too.
Copyright
© 2016 Elaine Beachy
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