Mr Ekpo was offshore when his first son was born. By the time the helicopter brought him back to Port Harcourt and the taxi crawled through the traffic at Rumuokoro, the baby was eleven hours old. He walked into the ward still smelling of diesel, washed his hands twice, and took the child from his wife. He told me years later that he could still remember the weight of him. “He was lighter than my phone,” he said. “And I stood by the window and told him, You are mine. You will lack nothing. You will be a doctor.”
They named the boy Tamuno, after his mother’s people, and Mr Ekpo kept every promise he had made at that window. He worked two weeks on the platform and two weeks at home for nineteen years. Tamuno went to the best primary school in the GRA, then to a boarding secondary school with a swimming pool and a fees schedule that made other parents whistle. There were lesson teachers for mathematics and chemistry. There was a laptop in JSS3 and a generator that never ran out of diesel. When Tamuno sat his senior school examinations, his father paid for a weekend coaching centre as well, just to be sure.
The results were good. At dinner that week, with the plates still on the table, Tamuno said quietly that he had been thinking about his university choices. He did not want medicine. He wanted to study architecture. He had been drawing buildings since he was nine, he said, in the backs of his exercise books. Did his father know that?
His father did not know that. And the sentence that came out of his mouth, he told me, came out before he had decided to say anything at all. “After everything I have spent on you?”
Tamuno said nothing else that night. He said very little for the next three weeks.
Punchline“Pastor,” Mr Ekpo said, sitting across the desk from me with his hands folded, “I have given that boy everything. Why do I feel as if I do not know him?”
It is one of the most honest questions a parent can ask. And the Bible has an answer that is both humbling and freeing, because it begins by telling us whose children they are.
A gift held in trust
The clearest single statement on the matter is a short song from the collection Israel sang on the road up to Jerusalem:
Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD : and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.
“Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD.” The Hebrew word translated heritage is nachalah. It is the word used throughout the Old Testament for the land God allotted to the tribes of Israel. No family in Israel bought its inheritance. It was given, marked out and assigned by the Lord, and the family that received it held it as a trust. They could work the land, enjoy its harvest and pass it on, but they could not sell it outright, because the land remained the Lord’s (Leviticus 25:23).
That is the picture the psalmist chooses. Children are an inheritance that comes from the LORD. You receive them. You do not manufacture them, and you never become their final owner.
Notice too how the psalm opens, two verses earlier. “Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it” (Psalm 127:1). The house in view is the household as well as the building. The psalm warns against anxious, self-reliant labour, rising early and sitting up late and eating “the bread of sorrows” (Psalm 127:2), as though the family’s future depended entirely on the parents’ exertion. Then it turns to children and calls them a gift. The flow of the song is deliberate. The family is something God builds, and the children in it are His before they are ours.
Then comes the image of arrows. “As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth.” An arrow is shaped carefully. It is straightened, weighted and fletched so that it will fly true. But every arrow is made to leave the hand. An archer who never released his arrows would not be a mighty man. He would be a collector of sticks. Parenting has a direction built into it from the beginning: the child is being prepared to go.
Finally, the psalm speaks of children who “shall speak with the enemies in the gate.” The city gate was where elders sat, where disputes were settled and where a man’s standing was tested. The picture is of grown sons and daughters who stand beside their parents with wisdom and integrity of their own. That is the reward the psalm has in view. It is the joy of seeing a person you helped to form take his own place in the world, with nothing to do with your control over his choices.
NuggetChildren are an inheritance from the Lord. You receive them, you are trusted with them, and you will give account for them, but they are never your property.
Lent to the Lord
Hannah understood this better than most. She had prayed for a child through years of barrenness and taunting, weeping so bitterly at Shiloh that the priest thought she was drunk. When the child came, she named him Samuel. And when he was weaned, she took him back to the house of the Lord and said to Eli:
And she said, Oh my lord, as thy soul liveth, my lord, I am the woman that stood by thee here, praying unto the LORD . For this child I prayed; and the LORD hath given me my petition which I asked of him: Therefore also I have lent him to the LORD ; as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the LORD . And he worshipped the LORD there.
“Therefore also I have lent him to the LORD.” Hannah’s situation was unusual. She had made a specific vow, and she fulfilled it by placing Samuel in the service of the tabernacle. Most parents are not called to do what she did. But the principle in her words belongs to every believing parent. She recognised that the child she had longed for was the Lord’s gift, and she held him with an open hand.
The prophet Ezekiel states the same truth from God’s side: “Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine” (Ezekiel 18:4). The son does not belong to the father in the way that a house or a car belongs to him. Both father and son stand before God as persons, each answerable to Him.
We need to hear this in our own setting. Many of us grew up in families where children were spoken of, half jokingly and half seriously, as the parents’ retirement plan. “Train him well, he will build your house in the village.” “This one will take care of you in your old age.” There is something good buried in that language. Scripture does honour the care of ageing parents, and Paul tells children and grandchildren to “learn first to shew piety at home, and to requite their parents” (1 Timothy 5:4). Gratitude is a Christian virtue.
But when a child is treated chiefly as a return on investment, something has gone badly wrong. Paul, writing as a spiritual father to the Corinthians, turned the usual expectation round: “for the children ought not to lay up for the parents, but the parents for the children” (2 Corinthians 12:14). The parent gives. The parent lays up. Whatever care the child returns in later years should come as the free response of love, not as the repayment of a debt that has been recorded since the maternity ward.
The question “After everything I have spent on you?” is the language of a ledger. It assumes that provision has bought a share in the child’s life. Hannah’s language is different. I have lent him to the LORD.
How Jesus received children
If we want to know how God regards children, we should watch Jesus with them. Mark tells us that people “brought young children to him, that he should touch them: and his disciples rebuked those that brought them” (Mark 10:13).
The disciples’ reaction was perfectly normal for their culture. Children in the ancient world were loved by their families, but they had little public standing. They could not contribute to a theological discussion. They could not fund a ministry or influence the Sanhedrin. A busy rabbi on his way to Jerusalem, the disciples assumed, had more important people to attend to.
Jesus “was much displeased” (Mark 10:14). The word is a strong one. It describes indignation. And He said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.” Then He did something that no disciple had suggested: “he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them” (Mark 10:16).
Jesus treated those children as persons worth His time, His touch and His blessing, in their own right and at their own age. He did not wait until they were old enough to be useful. He did not treat them as future adults who would only matter once they had grown up. Elsewhere He warned His disciples in the most serious terms:
Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.
“Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones.” To despise is to treat as of little account. A parent can despise a child without ever raising a hand, simply by treating the child’s inner life as unimportant: his fears, his ideas, his questions, the drawings in the back of his exercise book. Jesus says heaven pays attention to these little ones. So must we.
There is a further point. Jesus said that “Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein” (Mark 10:15). The child is held up as a model of how to receive God’s grace: openly, dependently, without pretending to have earned it. Parents who have learned to receive the kingdom that way are better prepared to receive their children that way too.
Authority that answers to God
None of this means that children should run the home. The New Testament gives parents real authority, and it is right that they use it. Paul writes:
Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. Honour thy father and mother; (which is the first commandment with promise;) That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth. And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
Children are told to obey their parents “in the Lord: for this is right.” Paul does not soften this. A child’s obedience is pleasing to God, and the command to honour father and mother carries a promise of blessing. Parents who refuse to give clear direction, who leave a seven-year-old to decide his own bedtime and a fourteen-year-old to decide his own friendships without guidance, are not being gracious. They are abandoning a responsibility God has given them.
But look at where the weight of the passage falls on the parent’s side. “And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” Paul addresses fathers because in that culture fathers held almost unlimited legal power over their children. A Roman father could, in principle, decide whether a newborn would be kept or exposed. Into that world Paul speaks a limit. Authority must not be used to exasperate and embitter. And the instruction applies to mothers as fully as to fathers, since the same letter has already called both to honour.
Nurture translates the Greek paideia, the whole work of training and discipline that forms a child. Admonition is nouthesia, literally “putting in mind”, the instruction and warning given in words. Both are “of the Lord”. That small phrase changes everything. The parent is not raising the child according to his own ambitions, or the family’s reputation, or the expectations of the extended family at Christmas. He is raising the child in the Lord’s instruction, for the Lord’s purposes, as a steward answerable to the Lord.
That is why biblical authority and ownership cannot be the same thing. An owner may do as he likes with what belongs to him. A steward must do what the owner requires. Parents have authority precisely because they have been entrusted with someone who belongs to God, and that same fact sets the limits of what they may do.
Provision matters, and it is not the whole task
I want to honour the parents reading this who work extremely hard. Some of you leave home before five to beat the traffic on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway. Some of you trade in the market from first light, or run a business that keeps you awake at night, or work two jobs so that school fees are paid before resumption. Scripture does not look down on that labour. It calls it faithfulness. Paul is blunt: “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel” (1 Timothy 5:8). Food, shelter, health care and education are part of what love looks like.
Jesus Himself assumed this: “Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?” (Matthew 7:9). Good fathers give good gifts.
But provision is the floor of the responsibility, never its ceiling. A child can be fed, clothed, schooled and fully funded and still be largely unknown. Luke gives us a short summary of the growing years of Jesus Himself:
And he went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them: but his mother kept all these sayings in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.
“And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.” Four kinds of growth are named. Stature is the physical: food, health, sleep, safety. Wisdom is the growth of mind and judgement. Favour with God is the spiritual life. Favour with man is the life of relationships, character and conduct among other people.
Money can help with the first and support the second. It cannot by itself produce the third or the fourth. Those grow mostly through relationship: through conversation, example, prayer, correction, laughter and time. Notice also that Jesus “was subject unto them” in Nazareth, and that “his mother kept all these sayings in her heart.” Mary was paying attention to her son. She remembered what he said. She pondered it. That is part of parenting too.
This is a tender subject in our time, because many families are stretched across distances. Parents relocate abroad for work and send money home to grandparents who are raising the children. Fathers work in Abuja or offshore while the family remains in Enugu or Warri. These arrangements are often made from love and necessity, and I do not condemn them. But they make it all the more important to ask what the child is receiving apart from transfers and school fees. A weekly video call where the parent actually listens, letters, visits planned and kept, a real interest in the child’s friends and fears: these are not luxuries. They are part of the stewardship.
Fearfully and wonderfully made
There is another way parents can treat a child as property, and it is subtler than neglect. It is the assumption that the child is a blank page on which the parent may write whatever life he has planned.
David reflected on how God formed him:
For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.
“Thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.” “In thy book all my members were written.” The God who gives the child is also the God who has been shaping that child from the first moment of life. Every child arrives with a particular temperament, particular gifts and a particular way of seeing the world. One is quiet and observant. Another talks from the moment he wakes. One loves numbers. Another draws buildings in the back of her exercise book.
These differences are part of God’s handiwork, and a wise parent sets out to discover them. Proverbs gives the familiar instruction, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). Most interpreters understand “the way he should go” chiefly as the way of wisdom and righteousness, the path every child needs to learn. Some also hear in the phrase an attention to the individual child, training that fits who he is. Both readings call for the same posture: a parent who is studying the child, not merely issuing a programme.
This matters enormously when it comes to education and careers. Our setting carries intense exam pressure. Families compare JAMB scores at birthday parties. Certain courses are treated as the only respectable choices. Parents rightly want their children to be secure, and they have experience their children lack. A wise parent will give honest counsel about the realities of the job market, the cost of courses and the importance of diligence.
But counsel is different from ownership. When a parent overrides a child’s God-given gifts simply because another path brings more prestige, he is treating the child as an extension of his own ambitions. A young person who has been made to study a course he hates in order to satisfy his parents may obey outwardly while something inside him slowly closes. And many of us know adults who are still living out a parent’s plan at forty, competent and unhappy.
There is a distinction to keep clear. Where a child’s choice involves sin, the parent must say so plainly and lovingly. Where a child’s choice is simply different from the parent’s preference, the parent’s role is to advise, to pray, and then increasingly to trust God with a person who belongs to Him.
Leading at the pace of the children
There is a small, lovely moment in the life of Jacob that shows what stewardship looks like in practice. After his reconciliation with Esau, his brother offered to travel alongside him. Jacob declined:
And he said unto him, My lord knoweth that the children are tender, and the flocks and herds with young are with me: and if men should overdrive them one day, all the flock will die. Let my lord, I pray thee, pass over before his servant: and I will lead on softly, according as the cattle that goeth before me and the children be able to endure, until I come unto my lord unto Seir.
“The children are tender.” “I will lead on softly, according as the cattle that goeth before me and the children be able to endure.” Jacob knew that if the company were driven at Esau’s pace, the young ones would suffer. So he chose to travel more slowly, adjusting his plans to what the children could bear.
Jacob was no model father in many respects, as his favouritism toward Joseph would later show. But in this moment he displays something every parent needs. Children are not small adults. They tire. They fear. They need explanations that fit their understanding and expectations that fit their age. A good steward pays attention to the actual condition of the people in his care.
In practical terms, leading softly might mean noticing that your daughter has been unusually quiet since the new term began, and asking. It might mean recognising that your son’s struggle with reading is a real difficulty to be assessed, not laziness to be punished. It might mean refusing to load a ten-year-old with three different lesson teachers after school because the neighbours’ children have them. It might mean slowing down the family’s pace of life when everyone is fraying.
It also means letting the pace change as children grow. The steward of a five-year-old decides almost everything. The steward of a seventeen-year-old explains, discusses and gradually hands over responsibility. Authority remains, but its form matures. The goal of the arrow is the flight.
Stewards, not saviours
Some of you are reading this with a heavy heart. You recognise yourself in Mr Ekpo’s question. You have provided and controlled and planned, and now you look at a teenager or a grown child who feels like a stranger. Or perhaps you went the other way, and you were so absent, through work or difficulty or your own wounds, that you hardly know where to begin.
Hear this first: the doctrine of stewardship carries good news for parents as well as responsibility. If your children belong to God, then you are not their saviour. You cannot carry the full weight of their future on your shoulders, and you were never meant to. “It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep” (Psalm 127:2). The same psalm that tells you children are a heritage tells you to stop trying to build the house by your own anxious labour.
The God who gave you your children is a Father Himself, and He is far more committed to their good than you are. He knows them better than you do. He is at work in their lives in ways you cannot see. Your role is real and important, but it is the role of a faithful steward, working alongside the Owner, not the role of the owner himself.
And stewardship can be renewed. The gospel tells us that “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins” (1 John 1:9). That forgiveness covers parenting failures as surely as any others. It does not remove the need to repair what you can with your children, but it gives you a place to stand while you do it. A parent who has been forgiven by God can afford to say to a child, “I got this wrong, and I am sorry.” Those words have opened more closed doors than any number of expensive gifts.
PunchlineMr Ekpo did not sleep much the night after our conversation. Early the next morning, before the house was awake, he went and knocked on Tamuno’s door. His son opened it warily.
“Show me the drawings,” Mr Ekpo said.
Tamuno hesitated, then pulled a stack of exercise books from under his bed. Years of them. Floor plans of the house they lived in, with the generator house moved to a more sensible spot. A church building with a roof that caught the breeze. A school with classrooms arranged round a courtyard. Mr Ekpo turned the pages slowly for almost an hour. “I paid for every one of these books,” he told me, “and I had never once looked inside them.”
He apologised to his son that morning, for the sentence at dinner and for the years of planning a life without asking whose life it was. They talked about architecture and about engineering, about costs and universities and what it might mean to study abroad or at home. He still gave his opinion, firmly in places. But this time it was counsel, offered to a person he was beginning to know.
Before he left the room, he put his hand on his son’s shoulder and prayed. He told me what he said, because it was so different from the words he had spoken at the hospital window nineteen years before. “Lord, he is not mine. He is Yours. Thank You for lending him to me. Help me to finish well.”
Children are a heritage of the Lord. You have been trusted with a person, and that is a far greater honour than owning one. Feed them, school them and provide for them with all your strength. Then open the exercise books, learn who they are, and hold them with an open hand.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- In what ways have you thought of your children, perhaps without realising it, as your possession or investment?
- Which of the four areas of growth in Luke 2:52 (wisdom, stature, favour with God, favour with man) receives the least of your attention at present?
- What do you know about each of your children’s particular gifts and temperament? What might you still need to discover?
- How does Jesus’ response to the children in Mark 10 challenge the way your household treats its youngest members?
- Is there a conversation, or an apology, that you have been postponing with one of your children?
This Week
Choose one evening this week to spend thirty unhurried minutes with each of your children separately, or with one if time is short. Let the child choose the activity, and ask one simple question: “What have you been thinking about lately?” Listen without correcting or advising unless asked. Afterwards, write down one thing you learned about that child that you did not know before, and pray over it by name, thanking God that this child belongs to Him.
A Prayer
Father, thank You for the children You have entrusted to me. I confess that I have sometimes treated them as my own possession, planning their lives without asking who You made them to be, or thinking that provision alone fulfilled my responsibility. Forgive me. Teach me to hold them as a heritage from You. Give me wisdom to guide them, courage to correct them, patience to listen to them and grace to release them when the time comes. Where I have failed, help me to repair what I can, and cover what I cannot. They are Yours before they are mine. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.