Tag: parenting

Are You Parenting with Grace?

Posted on August 1, 2009

Are you parenting with grace? How is the gospel working out in your home. How are you raising your children to cherish and follow Jesus, to be good citizens and saints? How are you passing on your understanding of the gospel to your kids and the next generation?

Cheap Grace Parenting

Consider this quote:

Seeing grace as an excuse not to parent your children within the boundaries  of godliness is equally repugnant to God. It is not grace that condones the crooked paths of our children may take. Rather it is cowardice, laziness, and selfishness. – Tim Kimmel, Grace-based Parenting

How is your parenting? Do you allow your your children to be undisciplined, disrespectful, and disobdient in the name of “grace”? This is a poor reflection of the gospel for our kids. Grace does not surrender truth, love does not translate as laziness. Our children need bold love and deep grace to guide them into true contentment and good development. They need fathers who are firm but loving, disciplining but sacrificial, truthful and playful. They need mothers who are faithful and faith-filled, sacrificial but strong, patient but not pansies. Grace is not a cop-out.

Legalistic Parenting

However, grace is also not law. It is not unflinching enforcement of household rules that punish for failure to perform. To be sure, grace upholds the law (assuming your household rules are good, true, and consistent), but it does not confuse law for grace. Our children need to be instructed and held accountable to what is good, true, and right. They need to learn God’s Word and his ways, but like us, they need more than punishment to obey. They need grace. They need to be instructed about the strength of Jesus in their weakness, the power of prayer in the face of stubbornness, the importance of confession and repentance when confronted with their sin, the hope of grace in the difficulty of growing up.

Gospel Parenting

Kids need the mirror of God’s Word to see who they really are, but they also need the lamp of his Gospel to warm their hearts. To parent with grace is to labor to keep truth and love together, to uphold law with grace, to show our children both the mirror and the lamp. If you lean towards cheap grace or legalism in parenting, take a few minutes to confess your sin to God and ask him for grace to change your heart. Talk your parenting over with your spouse. Press into the gospel for yourself and for your children. Be parented and parent in grace.

Our Worst for our Kids Best?

Posted on June 24, 2008

Children need to see the best and worst of marriage in order to understand not only the depth of sin but also the luminescent glory of conviction, repentance, grace, reconciliation, and celebration. Otherwise relational darkness will be known but not named. And it will poison the hope of healing. ..Whenever parents fail to grow as human beings, we also refuse that growth opportunity for our children. We cant take our children any farther in life, relationahip, and love that the point we have chose to progress on our own and in our marriages…True redemption involves being struck dumb by the enormity of our failure and then struck even dumber by the enromity of the heart of God that cancels our debt.

~ Dan Allender, How Children Raise Parents, p. 94, 102, 104

The Joys and Challenges of Parenting

Posted on April 27, 2008

If you are parent, you probably clicked on this post right away. There’s something about being a parent that is both uniquely joy-giving and challenging. As a result, we often look for honest, life-giving stories to help us grow into our parenthood. As I grow with my two kids, I am steadily challenged to rely on God and his wisdom in raising children that are neither spoiled not straight-jacketed. Above all, I desire that my precious little sinners come to delight in all that God is for them in the Son and the Spirit. I am soberly aware that I can be both a hindrance and a help in this aim.

It was out of my struggles in parenting infants that I wrote much of “Becoming A Parent: Facing your Fears and Frustrations.” As my children grow, new challenges and joys emerge. Their facility with language brings us to tears of laughter. I think of my son’s recent cry, “Daddy, get my dirties off, get my dirties off” referring to his need to take a bath. Of course there are the moments of iron-hard resistance to anything we say; the flaring of the human will to chart his or her own course. Discipline is always hard, especially doing it from the right motives.

At this new stage of parenting, I’m considering writing another article, one like, “Becoming A Parent,” that helped me work through how my children were raising me, as well as how I am to raise my children. So, I thought I’d put a request out, to see what some of my fellow parents would appreciate reading. What topics might be of interest to you?

Family Devotions with Unattentive Kids

Posted on December 29, 2007

Dr. J. Ligon Duncan answers some practical questions about how, what, and why to lead family devotions with little, inattentive kids:

My own answer is you start family worship as soon as possible, as soon as one is married, and continue it after children come along, no matter how young the children are (and the younger the better). The point is not for the youngest children to be able to comprehend (or even to sit still during it!). The point is impress upon them, by paternal example the priority of God and his word in all of life. They learn this, even if they comprehend nothing in the reading, praying and singing, simply by seeing a father pausing day after day to read the word with his family.

An excerpt from his book Give Praise to God (P&R):

“Now there is a whole host of practical questions and problems that come to mind once we determine to begin family worship. How long should it last? It should be regularly brief, as little as 10 minutes when the children are very young. Gradually, it will run a little longer as they grow older and conversations strike up. Don’t kill it by trying to go too long. Pace yourself. Regularity and repetition is the key. When should we do family worship? When it works – morning/breakfast, suppertime or bedtime are the three most common times.

“… There are dozens of potential hindrances: a lack of discipline, a lack of sense of the importance of family worship, a lack of experience of family worship in one’s own upbringing and more.

“But above all, there is the enemy of idealism. You have this picture of a Puritan family sitting around the table attentively and reverently reading the whole book of 1 Chronicles at a sitting, singing half the Psalter from memory, and praying for ninety minutes, and then you look around your table and your wife is rolling her eyes, your two-year old is throwing left-over spaghetti around the kitchen, your eight-year old is making faces at her sister and your teenager would rather do calculus. Don’t let the gap between the ideal and the reality stop you! Those unattentive children will grow up and thank you for persevering, and the memories of a father who loved them enough to make that kind of an effort will etch a permanent affection in their hearts.”

HT: SS