Principle : Nothing is more important in your life than being one of God’s tools to form a human soul.
God never sends you without going with you.
It is only rest in God’s presence and grace that will make you a joyful and patient parent.
“I am deeply persuaded that what is missing in most Christian parent’s parenting are the big grand perspectives and principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
“What is the will and plan of the One who sent me?”
“When your child questions the rules...talk to them about a loving Redeemer, who not only created them but she’d His blood for them so that they could know and do what is right. When your child wonders about what is right and what is wrong, don’t just threaten them with the law of God; woo them with the sweet music of the grace of God. When they are struggling with what God says is right, don’t talk of God as just a judge, but as a helper and a friend who meets us in our weakness with forgiveness, wisdom, and strength. Blow your child away with God’s patience, mercy, and love. Talk again and again about how He willingly exercises His power for our help, benefit, and rescue. Go beyond enforcing your authority and point to His authority, and go beyond pointing to His authority to pointing your children to His grace.”
“God uses our marriages and our parenting to expose our hearts to us.”
“God’s grace rescues you from you.”
God delivers us from sin.
God rescues us from the power of sins grip.
God has the ability to give new hearts.
God creates lasting change.
God rescues, redeems, and restores.
“If we are going to teach our children to run to Jesus daily, we must run to Jesus daily as well. If we want our children to be sad in the face of the sin of their hearts and hands, we must mourn our sin as parents as well.”
“It is only when we are willing to confess that we are more like than unlike our children, that we ourselves need parenting every day, that we will be parents in need of a father’s grace who will again and again lead our children to the grace of the Father.”
“When you are too concerned about your public face, you don’t seek the help you need in your struggle because in order to seek that help you have to admit that you’re not doing so well.”
Parent with :
- Process Mentality
- One Unending Conversation
- Project Mentality
“The needs of your children will get you up early in the morning, will interrupt you a hundred times during the day, and will even interfere with your sleep, but dependent is what they are and care is what God has called you to.”
Children need to know we are their allies. We are here to do anything we can to protect, support, and guide them.
Don’t give way to irritation, frustration, impatience, or discouragement. We move toward our children with the grace of forgiveness, wisdom, correction, and rescue, and we pray every day that God will empower our work as parents, and that He will change our children at the deepest of levels where every human being, including us, needs to be changed.
Sin makes us want our own way. Sin makes us want to set our own rules. Sin convinced all of us that we know better. Sin causes me to want to do what I want to do when and how I want to do it. Sin makes me resist being told what to do by another. Sin really does insert me in the center of my world, the one place that I must never be because it is the place for God and God alone.
“People who are committed to self-rule won’t submit to the rules of another, and because they won’t submit to the rules of another, they won’t think that they are wrong or confess their wrongs, and because they don’t confess their wrongs, they won’t seek God’s help. You could argue that the drive for self-rule is the thing that, apart from God’s grace, separates us and our children from God. You could not consider a more central issue for every child ever born than this one. To reject authority is to reject God, who is the authority over all authority, and rejection of God never has and never will go anywhere good.”
“Remember, because everything they do comes out of their hearts, everything they do reveals their hearts. Helping your children see what their behavior reveals about their hearts is gospel work.”
Obedience is a willing submission of my heart to the authorities that God has placed in my life.
“We have a problem here. Mommy wasn’t being unkind to you. Mommy didn’t ask you to do something bad, but you’re yelling at mommy. When you yell at mommy you are trying to be the mommy of mommy. When you try to be mommy’s mommy then you don’t have a mommy to guide and protect you.”
“Be careful to always pay attention to the content and character of your heart.”
“You are always dealing with the thing that controls words and behavior: the heart.”
“Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flows the springs of life.” Proverbs 4:23
How Do You Parent A Fool?
- Glory : capturing His glory in every day moment
- Wisdom : pointing to how beautiful, protective, practical, helpful, and good God’s wisdom is
- Story : tell the story of the person and work of Jesus
- Welcome : God extends a welcome for us to confess our foolishness, to seek His forgiveness, and receive His eternal help
Wisdom came to rescue fools so that fools would become wise.
Parenting is about parenting the heart, and parenting the heart means recognizing and dealing with the foolishness that is in the hearts of all of our children.
Children don’t just need God’s law. They are also born with a deep, abiding need for His grace, and we are called to be tools of that grace in the hearts and lives of our children.
If you want to be God’s tool of heart rescue and heart change in the lives of your children, you have to humbly be willing to start with your own heart.
“They traded the truth about God for a lie. So they worshiped and served the things God created instead of the Creator himself, who is worthy of eternal praise! Amen.
Since they thought it foolish to acknowledge God, he abandoned them to their foolish thinking and let them do things that should never be done. Their lives became full of every kind of wickedness, sin, greed, hate, envy, murder, quarreling, deception, malicious behavior, and gossip. They are backstabbers, haters of God, insolent, proud, and boastful. They invent new ways of sinning, and they disobey their parents. They refuse to understand, break their promises, are heartless, and have no mercy. They know God’s justice requires that those who do these things deserve to die, yet they do them anyway. Worse yet, they encourage others to do them, too.”
Romans 1:25, 28-32 NLT
The Bible connects character issues to worship.
“Your children don’t so much need character management as they need worship realignment.”
“Parenting is being willing to expend your time, gifts, energies, and resources in a daily battle of worship as God’s tool in the lives of your children. Every struggle is an opportunity give to you by a God of amazing grace to get at those deeper issues for the sake of the redemption, rescue, and transformation of your children. God will give you everything you need to engage yourself in that deeper war.”
Guidance
Protection
Instruction
Wisdom
Authority
Rules
Structure
Preparation
Understanding
Confrontation
Discipline
Warning
Love
Forgiveness
Security
