Please stop reading for a moment and think of one word that you would compare children to. Have you got it? I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that you didn’t come up with “arrows.” I mean, when you have to get out of bed at 2am to clean up your child’s vomit, few parents instinctively say, “Oh, you poor little arrow!” But Psalm 127 speaks of children as arrows in our hands.

Children, like arrows, need to be carefully made.

To turn a branch or plank into an arrow requires considerable time, care, and skill. Here’s a question: who is going to be the primary shaper of your kids? School friends? TV? Movies? Magazines? If you don’t shape them, someone else will.

Children, like arrows, are weapons of war.

God will use them as swift, penetrative, and offensive weapons to advance the gospel in the lives of many in the future and to unleash great damage on the kingdom of darkness.

Children, like arrows, can go where we can’t.

During the American presidential race that George W. Bush won to continue into his second term, the Harvard Business Review cited states voting for Bush (Republican) having a birth rate 12% higher than states voting for John Kerry (Democrat). Their conclusion was that the future would belong to the Republicans! The moral of the story: raise lots of godly kids. (Editor’s note: we are not aligning with any political party—merely pointing out a sociological fact that having kids changes culture.)

Children, like arrows, should obediently go in the direction that they are fired in.

Obedience is the primary biblical command to children (Eph 6:1-4) because it is the key to all other godly characteristics. Issues such as laziness and bad manners are actually rooted in disobedience, because if you train your children to be well-mannered then they will be, unless they are disobedient.