For those of us with children, this is an awesome charge. But God has His eye on my children, and on their children. The single most important thing I can do with my life is, by the grace of God, to live with my children in a way that makes them trust me and, despite my shortcomings, which they can see more readily than I, to tell them stories of the Living God. For those of us without children, the charge is no less profound. Every neighborhood has lonely children.
Every county has needy children.
In opening up our homes and lives to little children, we are helping God form hearts which will respond to His call, long after we ourselves are gone. They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. And their prayer offered in faith will heal the sick, and the Lord will make them well. But some of the repulsion toward praying for the sick stems, albeit unconsciously, from the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment followed closely on the heels of 17 th century advances in scientific method.