God as Teacher

All your children will be taught by ADONAI; your children will have great peace.  Isaiah 54:13 (Complete Jewish Bible)
There must be some ifs, ands or buts in here somewhere.  Isaiah 54 is a much more beautiful passage of scripture than I ever noticed until now.  It has promise after promise in it.  The problem we tend to have as human beings is to pick out the promises without discovering what we must do in order to secure them in our lives. 
When my children were little I would say something like the following: "If you clean your room within the next half hour, we will have time to get some ice cream."  Later in the day, their rooms still a mess, they would come to me and say, "Mommy, you promised we could get some ice cream!"  When I reminded them of the "IF," they might stomp their foot, cross their arms, pout and walk back to their rooms.  We are just like this. 
The promise above is a beautiful promise, but there is an unwritten catch to it.  Just because someone is being taught doesn't mean they are listening.  My children heard what they wanted to hear when I mentioned ice cream.  Humans hear what they want to hear when God is speaking - a lot of the time.  This does not mean we cannot pray this promise over our children; rather we can pray that God continues teaching them and that their spiritual ears and eyes will be open, their hearts of soil be tilled up and softened, that they might be hedged in on all sides from the attempts of Satan to draw them away and that God help them understand their need to receive instruction from Him and His word.  We can ask that He burden them with a hunger to know Him more fully and a burning desire to get into His word and learn all they can before their time on earth is over.
We can also search the scriptures ourselves for other promises to pray over our children and grandchildren, but we must be certain to catch the "ifs" "ands" and "buts" included, whether they are written out in full for us or not.
There are some written necessities in this passage as well.  Consider the following:

Do not be afraid; you will not be put to shame.
    Do not fear disgrace; you will not be humiliated.  verse 4
YAY!  We won't be put to shame or humiliated!!  Then why have I been in the past?  Because I feared and tried to take care of things in my own strength instead of turning to my Help.  However, there have been times when I used wisdom.  Once, before I retired, a young girl came into the office and handed me an envelope.  She told me it had a few hundred dollars in it and was to go to the president of our parent organization.  I took her over to their mailbox and showed her where it should go if her mother asked her to deliver something like that again.  I then placed it in the box and she went to class.  The next day the president asked me where the money was.  I told her it was in their mailbox.  She looked again and said she had now gone through everything twice and it was not there.  She then said something that sounded rather accusatory and implied that I would need to replace the money.  I prayed all that evening about it as fear did its best to overpower me.  I refused to listen to fear and told God that I would trust Him whatever happened.  The next morning I went to talk to the little girl.  She said she told her mother that she watched me put it in their mailbox.  Later in the day the president came to me and apologized.  Their treasurer had been caught with her hand in the till, so to speak.  She had to pay the money back and was fired as treasurer. Oh, if only I would remember all the ifs and follow them every time!!
Father, we desire the very best for our children just as You do.  The problem is, we are not all wise as You are.  You cry out to us what to do moment by moment, but we must listen!!  Our ears get stopped up by the commotion of the world around us.  We are deafened by the tinnitus of our sinful nature.  The wax designed to protect our hearing has become too much as it works overtime to keep out damaging influences.  Unstop our ears.  Help us to turn deaf ears to worldly influences and determine within ourselves to listen so that we hear Your powerful words of wisdom and run to You in times of distress.  Our children are watching Father!!  You tell us that they will be taught by You, and they are, but part of that teaching is done through us.  They are studying us to see if what we are telling them is true in our own lives or not.  If we truly want our children to have great peace in knowing You, then we must demonstrate that peace in our own lives so that they know it is of MORE worth  than silver or gold, rubies or diamonds.  May we be those children trained in the way we should go so that our children might become so as well.