Teach Your Kids: Devotions From Time of GraceSample

Teach your kids about drugs

Why would anybody inject recreational drugs for the first time?

I can understand how an addict would feel the compulsion, but why would you start in the first place? Do people not fear the enslavement? impoverishment? destruction of relationships? physical emaciation? risk of overdose and death?

Those miserable outcomes sadly may be the very reason some people find drugs so attractive. Miserable people; hate their lives; feel really rebellious, angry, depressed, or alienated may actually find a thrill in an activity so dangerous, so full of risk, so exciting, so bad. Smoking or injecting opiates may express people’s self-hatred or even a death wish, and it happens in Christian families too.

Have conversations with your kids about drugs. Don’t say it could never happen to us. One of my sons has lost a high school friend already to a heroin overdose. Encourage your kids to see that they have great value to you and their family and God himself. The Father who was willing to sacrifice his own Son to win back the human race expresses his passionate love for people with these encouraging words: “Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand” (Isaiah 41:10).