Parents! Your children are as surely as grown-up people, "dead in trespasses and sins!" May no parent fail fully to realize the spiritual state in which all human beings are naturally found. Unless you have a very clear sense of the utter ruin and spiritual death of your children, you will be incapable of being made a blessing to them. Go to them, I beg you, not as to 'sleepers' whom you can by your own power awaken from their slumber--but as to 'spiritual corpses' who can only be quickened by a divine power!
If you think that your child is 'not really depraved', if you indulge foolish notions about the 'innocence of childhood', it should not surprise you if you remain barren and unfruitful.
If you would bring spiritual life to your child--you must most vividly realize that child's state. It is dead, dead! God will have you feel that your child is dead in trespasses and sins--as you once were. God would have you come into contact with that death by painful, crushing, humbling sympathy. If you would raise your dead child to spiritual life--you must feel the chill and horror of your child's death yourself. You must have, more or less, a distinct sense of the dreadful wrath of God, and of the terrors of the judgment to come. Depend upon it, when the spiritual death of your children alarms and overwhelms you--then it is that God is about to bless you!
~Spurgeon
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