Daily Devotional
Training Up A Child

February 1, 2017

“Train up a child in the way that he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6) Do you know this word “train” in the phrase “Train up a child” actually comes from a Hebrew root, I am told, that comes from what the midwives used to do when the little Hebrew babies were born. They would take their index finger and dip it in olive oil, and then take that index finger and dip it in crushed dates. And then they would take the little newborn baby, and they would slip their finger inside the mouth of that newborn baby and touch the palette of that baby. What that would do was it began the sucking instinct, the nursing instinct. It was to create a desire in the heart of that child to take nourishment. As a matter of fact, if you take your finger and rub it right back over the roof of your mouth, you’ll find instinctively you want to swallow.

It literally means to create a desire. Oh, if parents today could create a desire for God in the hearts of their children!