No good biography ever begins with its subject but with the parents, and probably the grandparents, for the most formative influences on each of us have been our parentage and our home.
Every biographer of the erratic French composer Hector Berlioz has been forced to analyse in depth the bizarre fact that his parents refused to attend any of his Paris concerts, even at the height of his fame as both conductor and composer.
They died in bitterness without ever hearing the brilliant overture Roman Carnival, the exotic Symphonie Fantastique or the glory of L'Enfance du Christ because the youthful Hector stymied their all-consuming ambition for him to become a medical doctor.
When the Apostle Paul wrote his Second Letter to Timothy, he also recognised that the young pastor working with the Christian congregation in the city of Ephesus was a product of his inheritance.
No person can inherit their parents' faith in the way they might inherit facets of their personality, but a child can be led to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ by his parents' teaching, example and prayers.
Timothy was the son of a mixed marriage, for his father was Greek and his mother Jewish and the presumption must be his father was an unbeliever while his mother Eunice was a believing Jewess who became a Christian.
Remarkably in his family, Timothy's grandmother Lois had also come to personal faith in Christ because Paul mentions (2:5) "the sincere faith" of all three generations. It is tantalising to think that grandmother, mother and son all owed their conversion to the great apostle when he brought the Gospel to their home city of Lystra.
Even before the Gospel changed their lives, these godly women had instructed Timothy from the Old Testament so that "from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures which are able to make you wise for salvation through Christ Jesus" (3:15).
Anyone who has been born and bred in a Christian home has received from God a birthright and blessing beyond price. To be taught the content and value of the name of Jesus as Saviour and Lord rather than mimicking it as a mindless expletive that parents hurl around in irritability or anger must have lifelong implications.
A call-answering girl, frustrated by her computer's reluctance to locate an account this week, was reduced to reflective silence and an unforced apology when gently reminded that the name of Jesus is too precious to be repeated as a day-long mantra of hate at a mute collection of chips and wiring.
Christian parenting is the single biggest responsibility many of us are faced with, the demands and implications are enormous and even those with the best of intentions are struggling.
Churches which have traditionally managed to lay on some kind of wedding preparation for couples are surely failing them later at their point of greatest need when children come along if all they can offer is a hurried production-line baptism.
The churches destined to grow in the future in Ireland will not do so because of a particular name or tradition. They will grow because of the excellence of their crΩches, the professionalism and expertise of their all-age Christian education programmes, and a thought-through partnership with parents from cradle to teens in providing the kind of godly nurture inherited by Timothy.
Listen to the reading from Paul's letter tomorrow, or reach for a Bible over the weekend to get the gist of it, and be inspired to pray for parents and grandparents that they may talk godly talk and walk a godly walk before their youngsters.
Pray, too, for Ireland's struggling local churches, hit by blizzards of secularism and generations of neglect of attractive all-age Christian education. Some heavy-duty prayer leading to radical reordering of priorities and resources may be just in time to catch the tail-end of this generation, then ready to meet the needs of the next.
G.F.