Family is wonderful. It can also, at times, be volatile. Establish a regular rhythm of prayer together as a family. This can be as easy as praying at mealtimes. This regular rhythm, even if it is only at one meal a day, gives us an opportunity to go before the Lord whenever inevitable tensions arise. When a fight has just broken out, Jesus calls us to be reconciled. One way to clear the air is to ask for help in prayer. Something about the ordinariness of a mealtime prayer of thanksgiving makes such requests surprising but, most importantly, ordinary.

Parents are parables. Our lives tell stories to our children. The great gospel story that we hope our lives will tell is one of forgiveness. God forgives us in Christ, and a living witness of God’s forgiveness is a heart of forgiveness in us—a heart that not only receives, but gives. We must begin teaching our children about forgiveness with the gospel, but we must also become parables of forgiveness for them with our lives.

One of the most striking parables about forgiveness is told in the negative: the parable of the unforgiving servant. In the parable, a servant who owes much is forgiven much, only to turn around and demand from another the relatively little that was owed to him (see Matt. 18:21–35). This parable stresses how incongruous it is for the forgiven not to forgive, but the fact that Jesus stresses such an incongruity implicitly teaches us that we first become forgivers by being forgiven. That is why we teach forgiveness to our children by starting with the good news that we are forgiven because of the incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ.

The Heidelberg Catechism in its exposition of the Apostles’ Creed helps us understand the extent of our forgiveness in the gospel:

1. What do you believe concerning “the forgiveness of sins”?
   A. I believe that God,
   because of Christ’s satisfaction,
   will no longer remember
   any of my sins
   or my sinful nature
   which I need to struggle against all my life.
   Rather, by his grace
   God grants me the righteousness of Christ
   that I may never come into judgment. (Q&A 56)

As outlined here, our forgiveness is lavish—secured in Christ and forever. The next lesson for our children is that if this is our forgiveness in the gospel, then so it should be when it comes to our forgiveness of others.

We teach our children that their forgiveness of others should look like their own:

• Our forgiveness should be because of Christ, in honor of Him, just as God forgives us “because of Christ’s satisfaction.”

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