The biggest temptation we parents face, I think, is to consider our kids as our kids rather than God’s children. Don’t misunderstand me, when I look at my children, I think all the time, Wow, these are my kids, this is awesome. And yet I have to remind myself that they are God’s children more than they are my children. This matters because it affects the way we parent.

 
I hesitate to write a parenting post, only because I’m not an expert, just a father trying his best to parent the way God wants me to. Our kids are still young, so there is no “finished product” to evaluate to see if what I’m saying even makes sense. So when you read the following, take those above caveats in mind.

Parenting involves hard truths. It is a way that God searches your heart, humbles you, and softens you for His service. I’ve learned five hard truths about being parent, that I’d like to share with you:

1) There is no guarantee that your kid will be great. When I say greatness, I mainly mean biblical greatness, which involves knowing, loving, and serving God. It means living above the world, living an extraordinary life on mission. I’m referring to kids who become adults who have an impact for Christ on their generation. It’s hard to accept the fact that God doesn’t really give us a guarantee that our kids will achieve this.

We need to disabuse ourselves of the bad theology that says Proverbs 22:6 is an ironclad guarantee that if we “follow the formula”, inserting our kids in one end of the evangelical assembly line, that they will come out at the other end as perfectly formed Christians. This is not a note of despair, but a breath of fresh air. It means that our job is to simply be faithful with our children, to provide the kind of loving, nurturing, providing, spiritual environment where faith can best grow.

We’re to sacrifice for them, discipline them, teach them, and motivate them to fulfill God’s call on their lives. But we cannot change our children. We cannot alter their hearts. Only God through the regenerating work of His Holy Spirit can produce the kind of righteousness we would like to see. This is very important, both for lazy parents who are tempted to be less than faithful and overly analytical parents who bludgeon themselves daily with the false notion that they are constantly failing.This reality is why we must pray fervently for our kids.

2) Your child, upon entering life, is a sinner in need of regeneration. Nobody likes to think of their child as the bad kid, right? I’m amazed at how blind we parents can be to the faults of our own kids and supersonically sensitive to the faults of the kids of other parents. It seems our generation is likely to be more defensive on this than our parent’s generation, but maybe that’s just my experience. It seems that we parents are more likely to defend our child at all costs against any accusation of misbehavior and constantly point it back at the other kids, whose parents are obviously less intentional than we. But if we believe what the Scripture says about humanity, about the Fall, about every person’s desperate need for redemptive grace, then we’ll stop hurting our children by defending their sin. The truth is that one day it may be the other kid that commits the outrageous acts in the church nursery and then the next week it may be my child. I must constantly remind myself that my child needs a work of the Spirit as much as the other kids. Parents, we need to be less sensitive when it comes to criticism and/or correction of our kids by other parents and we need to acknowledge that our kids are not the perfect angels we like to think they are.

3) There is no method, no strategy, no system that can do the work of the Holy Spirit. We evangelicals love our parenting formulas and every year the strategies seem to change.

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