Sermon quotes on children

Lyman Abbott 

A child is a beam of sunlight from the Infinite and Eternal, with possibilities of virtue and vice, but as yet unstained.

Gomez Addams (Raul Julia)

“I hope that someday you’ll know the indescribable joy of having children, and of paying someone else to raise them.”

Addams Family Values 

Orlando Aloysius Battista 

The best inheritance a parent can give his children is a few minutes of his time each day.

Henry Ward Beecher 

Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven.

Henry Ward Beecher 

Beware of him who hates the laugh of a child.

Henry Ward Beecher 

Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they are going to catch you in next.

 

Barbara Bush 

You have to love your children unselfishly. That is hard. But it is the only way.

Ross Campbell

Inside every child is an “emotional tank” waiting to be filled with love.

 

Dr. Seuss

A person’s a person, no matter how small.

Dr. Seuss 

Adults are just outdated children.

 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The soul is healed by being with children.

 

Frederick Douglass (attributed)

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

Albert Einstein 

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.

Nora Ephron 

When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you. 

Nora Ephron 

A child is a grenade. When you have a baby, you set off an explosion in your marriage, and when the dust settles, your marriage is different from what it was. Not better, necessarily; not worse, necessarily; but different.

Billy Graham 

The greatest legacy one can pass on to one’s children and grandchildren is not money or other material things accumulated in one’s life, but rather a legacy of character and faith.

Charles Hodge 

The gospel is so simple that small children can understand it, and it is so profound that studies by the wisest theologians will never exhaust its riches.

Oliver Wendell Holmes 

Pretty much all the honest truth telling there is in the world is done by children.

Herbert Hoover 

Children are our most valuable resource.

Lady Bird Johnson 

Children are likely to live up to what you believe of them.

Franklin P. Jones 

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.

Joseph Joubert 

Children need models rather than critics.

John F. Kennedy 

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.

Robert Leahy

The average child today exhibits the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the 1950s.

Anxiety Free: Unravel Your Fears Before They Unravel You (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2009).

Wayne Mack 

Becoming mature Christians will require the sovereign work of God. Only God can save and sanctify. Still, God uses men and means. Certainly we as parents must seek to bring our children to Jesus Christ for salvation. But salvation is not the end of the journey. It is only the beginning. The destination toward which we are headed with our children is nothing less than maturity in Christ.

Nelson Mandela 

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.

Mother Teresa 

It’s the greatest poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.

Louis Pasteur

When I approach a child, he inspires in me two sentiments — tenderness for what he is and respect for what he may become.

John Piper

The happiest and holiest children in the world are the children whose fathers succeed in winning both their tender affection and their reverential and loving fear. And they are the children who will come to understand most easily the mystery of the fatherhood of God.

Cornelius Plantinga 

We know the excitement of getting a present – we love to unwrap it to see what is inside. So it is with our children they are gifts we unwrap for years as we discover the unique characters God has made them.

Winkie Pratney 

Little children are God’s ongoing witness of His kingdom: a perpetual reminder of what it means to belong to the father. Children are an unspoken sermon in every home for simplicity, joy, and humility of that which makes the world worth living in. They remind us what it means to be a real Christian.

Louis Pasteur

When I approach a child, he inspires in me two sentiments — tenderness for what he is and respect for what he may become.

Fred Rogers 

Anyone who does anything to help a child is a hero to me.

Fred Rogers 

Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.

Carl Sandburg 

A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.

Select Panel for the Promotion of Child Health 

Children are one third of our population and all of our future.

Charles Spurgeon 

Train up a child in the way he should go – but be sure you go that way yourself.

Wess Stafford 

Every child you encounter is a divine appointment.

Chuck Swindoll 

Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.

Paul David Tripp 

In times of struggle and failure, we need to do more than pronounce judgment on what’s wrong and enforce punishment. We need to talk, discuss, question, evaluate, engage, and interact with our teenagers, hoping that God will use these moments of opportunity to open their eyes a little more to who they really are and to their constant need for Christ.

Denis Waitley 

The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence.

Richard Plass and James Cofield

The primary factor that determines the pattern a child will land on is trust. Trust is born and nurtured in the infant through the consistent and reliable care of the primary caregivers. Trust is the critical, nonnegotiable element required for learning to attach well.

Taken from The Relational Soul: Moving from False Self to Deep Connection by Richard Plass and James Cofield, Copyright (c) 2014, p.26 by Richard Plass and James Cofield. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com.

John Wilmot (attributed)

Before I got married I had six theories about raising children; now, I have six children and no theories.

John Trainer

Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.

Graham Greene

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

The Power and the Glory

Dorothy Day 

An individual can march for peace or vote for peace and can have, perhaps, some small influence on global concerns. But the same individual is a giant in the eyes of a child at home. If peace is to be built, it must start with the individual. It is built brick by brick.

Stanley Hauerwas 

For Christians do not place their hope in their children, but rather their children are a sign of their hope . . . that God has not abandoned this world.

Timothy R. Jennings

In 2007 Frederick Zimmerman and Dimitri Christakis confirmed that educational television watching in children over the age of two did not worsen attention problems, but both nonviolent and violent theatrical programming did. The primary issue is neural developmental. Overstimulation of the limbic system by theatrical entertainment—while decreasing the usage of the prefrontal cortex during the developmental years—results in children growing up with brains out of balance.

Taken from The God-Shaped Brain by Timothy R. Jennings. ©2017 by Timothy R. Jennings.  Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove  IL  60515-1426. www.ivpress.com

Carolyn Mahaney

We can deduce that if God in his divine wisdom chose to give sinful children to sinful parents, then our children are not so weak that they are unable to endure our sinful behavior . . . Our children are not that fragile. If they were, God would have waited until we were further along in the maturing process before he gave them to us. But he didn’t.

Feminine Appeal: Seven Virtues of a Godly Wife and Mother (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2003).

C.S. Lewis

Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter, but darker.

Nora Ephron

When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman (Vintage Books, 2006)

Paul David Tripp

Principle: Nothing is more important in your life than being one of God’s tools to form a human soul.

Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family (Crossway, 2016).

Paul David Tripp

If rules and regulations had the power to change the heart and life of your child, rescuing your child from himself and giving him a heart of submission and faith, Jesus would have never needed to come!

Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family (Crossway, 2016).

Still Looking for inspiration?

Consider checking out our illustrations page on Children. 

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