Apostle Paul writes to the church in Ephesus that they must make every effort to stay united in the Spirit and bound together in peace.
In our mini-series on marriage, we talked about how we need to stay united in our marriages because they are signposts to what God is going to do in the renewal of all things. (You can listen to that sermon here)
For the same reason, parents must be united with their children.
The problem is we often view our children through an unbiblical lens. We either see them as “dumpsters” or “golden calves”.
Dumpster View: Our children are unfortunate recipients of our “junk.”
Paul Tripp describes in his book, Awe: Why It Matters for Everything We Think, Say, and Do, children learn to become “emotional weathermen,” watching carefully and adapting to the emotional forecasts that swirl around them.
When parents don’t learn to control their own emotions and rather dump their junk onto their children, the children must learn to adapt to these inconsistent emotions and learn to “read the weather” of their parents.
They become emotionally driven and behaviorally controlled.
Golden Calves: Our children are unfortunate recipients of our “worship.”
We view our children as golden calves when we make them our idol.
An idol is anything that we try to supplement with Jesus in order to attain a semblance of security or hope.
It can look like this: Jesus + (_____) = My Happiness
We can learn if our children are idols when we ask this question: Who is orbiting who?
When the parent’s time, money, relationships orbit around the child, the child becomes the “sun”.
But we are called to train our children to orbit around God and His ways.
These unbiblical views and expectations actually exasperate our children.
In Ephesians 6, it’s written, “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.”
When we neglect our role as parents, our children will have an un-blessed life. And as a result, they are left angry, resentful and exasperated.
So what is our role as parents?
Scripture says, “Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.” (Proverbs 1:8 NIV) and “Train up a child in the way he should go. Even when he is old, he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6 NASB).
Thus, a godly parents’ role is to be a Trainer, Instructor, and Teacher of the Christ-way.
First, we train by being a practitioner of the Way.
As parents, we are the first view of authority, of power, of God to our children. They see what God looks like, feels like, sounds like through us as their parents.
Our role as parents is to be the best disciple of Jesus so that our children will be encouraged to do so as well.
“…parents still carry the most important weight in their kids’ faith development. This is true not only in childhood but also through adolescence. Research continues to affirm that the best predictor of a young person’s faith is the faith of their parents.”
— Kara Powell
“And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today. Repeat them again and again to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up. Tie them to your hands and wear them on your forehead as reminders. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” – Deuteronomy 6:4-9 NLT
We must be intentional at being disciples of God and being an active student to the ways of Jesus. We must “commit wholeheartedly these commands.”
We instruct by being a praying parent.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “The entire day receives order and discipline when it acquires unity. This unity must be sought and found in morning prayer… decisions, demanded by work (and parenting) becomes easier and simpler where they are made not in the fear of men (of kids, mistakes or being a bad parent) but only in the sight of God.”
We need to pray.
But oftentimes, we might not know how to pray or what to pray for. We curated and crafted 31 prayers for parents to pray over their children.
You can download the PDF of the 31 Prayers for Parents here.
We teach by passing on the Lord’s teachings to our children.
In Malachi it says that Fathers need to turn their children’s hearts. “Look, I am sending you the prophet Elijah before the great and dreadful day of the Lord arrives. His preaching will turn the hearts of fathers to their children, and the hearts of children to their fathers…” (Malachi 4:5-6 NLT)
According to studies, only 46% of young adult children who don’t feel close to their fathers maintain the same faith as their parents. This is compared to 71% of children who do maintain the same faith when they do feel close to their fathers. (Involved moms only account for a 1% difference. But this can be due to a dearth of involved fathers, as mothers more often than not, stay in the picture.)
That’s a 25% difference! This means we need more fathers to be invested in their child’s faith. More fathers present in their child’s life.
Because the truth is that we don’t have that much time.
As we shared previously in Time’s A-Wastin’, time is a gift.
There are roughly 939 weeks in a child’s life between the day they are born and the day they turn 18. To illustrate this in more tangible ways, each marble represents each week. And each week, a marble gets taken out, until the last one is plucked at the age of 18.
We only have this short amount of time to instill in our children the ways of God.
Our goal as parents is to prepare our children to obey and serve God. We only have so much time to equip and instill in them this dream.
In a painting by Penny Dowie, “The Foreshadowing of the Cross,” we see young Jesus carrying wood as a carpenter, creating a shadow in the shape of the cross. As Pastor Bryan’s ruminated on this illustration, he wrote a prayer interpreting Jesus’ last thoughts as He carried the cross:
“Father, I can’t help but think of dad, my dad Joseph. I see now why you had me raised by him. Father, I worked so hard with wood all my life, I get it now, you wanted me familiar with this, this wooden beam. I remember carrying wooden beams to my dad for all his projects. Thank you for my dad, I see now how you have prepared me through him for this day. Father, today, I get to carry one more, this last one, for you, Abba Father.”
May this be the prayer of our children. As we teach, instruct and train them in the way of Christ.
You can listen to the sermon Godly Parenting, Pt. 1 from the Ephesians series that inspired this post here.
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