12 Parenting
A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.
C. S. LEWIS11
If you had to capture on a piece of paper what God’s job description of the family is, what would you write? What has God called parents to be and to do? What goals should you have for your children? When you’re at the end of a week as a parent and you say, “That was a good week,” what makes you say that? What are you trying to accomplish with all those early-morning and late-night conversations? What are you trying to produce with all those mini-lectures? What are you trying to instill in your children when you seek to bring peace to all those sibling wars? If you had to paint a portrait of the ideal child you’re trying to produce, what would that portrait look like? How will you know when you have been successful?
We all know that few things in life are as profoundly important as being God’s agent for forming a human soul. But I fear that many of us parent without a big picture, without a grand agenda in mind. We seem to lack expansive goals that guide everything we do as parents. We do various things with the hope that our children will behave, will be polite, and will believe, but our parenting tends to be piecemeal and reactive rather than unified around a central vision or an overarching goal.
Judy was a frustrated parent, and in her frustration, she reached out to me. She had begun to hate her relationship with her children. No, she didn’t hate her children; what she hated was the negative cast of her relationship with them. Judy said, “All I am is a lawgiver, a prosecutor, a judge, a jury, and a jailer. From morning to night, I say no over and over again and enforce punishments when my children don’t respond. I am always wondering what they’re going to do next, and they see me coming and wonder what they’ve done wrong. I know I must be missing something, but I just don’t know what it is.”
Sally and Bill approached me at a parenting conference. Sally was in tears before she spoke. She told me that it was embarrassing to have to admit what she was about to admit, but she had to talk to someone. Sally proceeded to tell me that she had no ability whatsoever to control her four-year-old. “Rather than me parenting him, he controls me,” she said sadly. She expressed that she was already scared to death as she thought of what it would be like when her son became a teenager.
Frank shared with me the grief of thousands of fathers. He had been a conscious and faithful disciplinarian. While they were at home, his kids all submitted to his authority. In many ways, at school, church, home, and work, Frank’s children looked like model kids. People in Frank’s church repeatedly told him what a fine job he had done as a father. Frank confessed that when his first son graduated from high school at the top of his class, he was not just proud of his son, he was proud of himself. But as he stood before me, Frank didn’t look like a proud and self-confident father. He looked broken and defeated. “I thought we did it all right, but when my son and daughter went away to college, they both forsook the faith. They have no relationship with God and little closeness with us.”
I can’t tell you how many of these conversations I’ve had with parents over the years. The names and places differ, but the themes are all the same. Masses of Christian parents have lost their way or never had their way in the first place. Thousands of parents have begun to think that all their hard work has been for naught. Thousands of parents don’t know what they’re doing or why they’re doing what they’re doing. Thousands of good-hearted, hard-working parents lack the big picture that would give sense and direction to everything they do. This chapter addresses what is missing in the parenting of countless well-meaning believers. Let’s begin by examining the “state of the union.”
Parenting without the Big Picture
I am convinced after talking with hundreds of parents that most parents lack a big, overarching vision that guides all that they do with their children. Sure, they want their children to believe in Jesus, and they want their children to obey, and they hope that they will have athletic and musical ability along with a good education, marriage, and career. But at the street level, they’re just reacting to whatever comes at them on a particular day. Yes, they may say and do many good things with their children. Yes, they are sincere about their children’s spiritual life. And yes, they work to enforce a set of rules to shape their children’s behavior. But it is a reactive system.
The problem with reactive parenting is that it lacks a big picture, which enables parents to interpret what is going on in the hearts and lives of their children and thus target the significant heart issues that are really the focus of all good and successful parenting. This inadequate vision leaves these parents with a neat system set up to control, regulate, and conform the behavior of their children. Now if all you do is control the behavior of your children when they are in the home with you, then when they leave your home, they will have nothing. When they leave home and no longer have that system of control over them, their lives will go where their heart has been for a long time.
Let me give you an example. Every year thousands of supposedly Christian young people go off to residential universities and forsake the faith. I would propose to you that they are not forsaking the faith at all. They never had it in the first place. They grew up under a system of control that forced the faith upon them, but when they get to college and the system vanishes, their true hearts reveal themselves.
Reactive parenting has another problem. Since it lacks a grand, big vision, it tends to be way more determined on any given day by the emotion or mood of the parent. The thing that was okay yesterday is not okay today because mom isn’t doing well. Or the thing that made dad angry yesterday doesn’t seem to bother him at all today. Instead of children being molded by a consistent standard, they become emotional weathermen, reading the “weather” of their parents to see what they can or cannot get away with. Siblings will even have conversations to find out if one or the other is cued into how their parents are doing on any given day.
This is simply not the way that God intended children to be parented. It becomes an emotionally driven, behavior-control system that misses both the centrality of the heart and the transforming power of the gospel to create lasting change in the child’s behavior.
The Big Picture
Here’s what every parent needs to understand: your child doesn’t just have a behavior problem; he or she has a heart problem. The Bible teaches that all the words and behavior of a child are controlled, shaped, and directed by what’s in that child’s heart (see Luke 6:43–45). And the core dysfunction of the heart of every child doesn’t first have to do with law; it has to do with awe. Every child is born with a heart controlled more by awe of self than by awe of God.
Let me say it this way: every child comes into the world embracing two very seductive but equally seductive lies. First is the lie of autonomy. Autonomy says, “I am an independent human being, and I have a right to live my life the way I want to live it.” Those early battles that you have with your child about what to eat, what to wear, and when to go to sleep are not just about those issues. Your child is pushing back because your child does not want to be ruled. She sees herself in the center of her universe. He has appointed himself as a little self-sovereign. Although they have no understanding of a healthy human diet, what is appropriate to wear when, and the amount of sleep a healthy child requires, they will fight you because they do not want to be told what to do. That’s why a little boy will scream “no!” at an adult four times his size or a little girl will stiffen up in anger and turn red. They’re after autonomy. They want no other authority over them than their own.
The second lie is the lie of self-sufficiency. This lie says, “I have everything I need inside myself to be what I am supposed to be and to do what I am supposed to do.” Although young children have almost no understanding of the world around them, they will resist help because they want to hold onto the delusion that they do not need wisdom, instruction, or correction. Let me give you an example. Little Jimmy has discovered that his shoes have laces, and he has realized that after he puts the shoes on, they need to be tied. So you walk into Jimmy’s bedroom, and he has his shoes on the wrong feet and is fumbling with the laces. You know that he could fumble with those laces for a century and not make a bow, but when you bend down to assist him, he slaps away your hand. He wants to believe that he is capable, that he doesn’t need to be quiet, submit, and learn.
These two lies were first told by the Serpent in the garden of Eden and unleashed an unspeakable chain of disastrous consequences on the physical world and on humanity. Now it’s important to understand that these laws reveal that your child has not only a law problem, which he or she does, but a deeper and more formative awe problem. Children will only live as God has ordained them to live if their hearts have been freed from their bondage to awe of self and have been captured by the awe of God.
So, parents, it simply doesn’t work to have a law system as the model for your parenting. Now maybe you’re thinking, “But don’t my children need rules and enforcement in their lives? Don’t they need constant authority?” Of course they do, but these things are not enough. If all your children needed was a tight system of law to be what they’re supposed to be and to do what they’re supposed to do, Jesus would never have had to come and live a perfect life, shed his precious blood, and rise again from the grave. The gospel of Jesus Christ tells us that this kind of parenting simply is not enough.
Do your children need the law? Yes, they do! God employs the law to help your children see how spiritually needy they are. The law tells your children how God wants them to live, but the law can never, ever deliver them from the sin and self-worship that have captured their hearts.
So our parenting must target the central heart issue of our children. We know that as long as their hearts are ruled by awe of self, they will push against our authority, they will go their own way, and they will practically ignore the God who created and sustains them. This means that our parenting must be guided by a great big awe agenda. We need to do everything we can to put the glory of God and his grace before our children so that the awe of God would rule over their hearts.
Now maybe you’re thinking, “Paul, how in the world do we do that?” I’m afraid that for many of us, the only time we regularly refer to God as parents is when our children will not listen to us, and so we get God out as the ultimate threat. “You know, God is watching, and he could crush you like a bug!” This just makes the hearts of children want to run away from such a God!
Well, God in his condescending love and mercy has helped us here because he has created his world in such a way that it would reveal him. The fact that the physical world points to God is no accident; it was his divine intention as he was forming the physical universe with his awesome power. So God has made his power, faithfulness, wisdom, goodness, love, and mercy visible to us every day through the lens of the world that he created. Every glorious created thing points to a God of far greater glory. So, parents, it’s not unnatural to talk about God every day to your children; it’s positively unnatural not to. God made hot, and God made cold. God made water that freezes on one end and boils on the other (wow!). God made the delicacy of a lily, the inexhaustible wings of a hummingbird, the lumbering gait of an elephant, the multicolored stripes of a rainbow, the terror of a storm, the processes of the earth to supply us food to eat, the splash of stars at night, and a myriad of other things to see, hear, touch, and taste every day. You just can’t get up in the morning without bumping into God. Every day it’s God here, God there, God over there and there and there.
Now, parents, you need to understand something further. You are parenting children who have a perverse ability to look at the world around them and not see God. Sin and self blind the eyes of your children to the glory everywhere around them, the glory that has the power to change their hearts and put them in their proper place. They see the tree, but they don’t see the glory. They taste the sumptuous meal, but they don’t see the awesome God who made everything they just enjoyed. They may be afraid of the storm, but they have little fear of the power of the One who sent it. The disaster of spiritual blindness is one of the reasons God put you on earth and in the lives of your children. He has strategically positioned you so that you would function as his instruments of seeing, pointing to his presence, power, and glory over and over every day. He has called you to be a tool that recaptures the awe of your children’s hearts, so that awe of him would reign where awe of self once did. You can nurture that change as a result of his grace, but you are called to commit yourself to being a tool of his awe-recapturing agenda (see Psalm 145).
So when you go to the petting zoo with your little girl, talk about the God who made each distinct characteristic of every single animal. When you bake bread, talk about how the rising of dough is just one of millions of physical, chemical processes that came out of the mind of God. When your child smells a fragrant flower, talk about how God created these smells and then gave us the organs in our body to take them in and enjoy them. When you’re hiking with your son through the woods, talk about the One who created these huge organisms with arms that reach toward the heavens. When your child is sick, talk about the One who created all the delicate, interdependent systems of the body that must work in complete harmony for us to be well. When your daughter is complaining about the rainy weather, talk about what an impossible job it would be to control the world’s weather, yet God does it every day. Have your young son make faces in the mirror, and talk about how God designed all those little muscles in the face that allow us to communicate so much without saying a word. I could give page after page of illustration after illustration. We live in the middle of an awesome, never-ending glory display, and it is our job—and should be our joy—to point our children to this glory again and again day after day.
But here’s the rub. In parenting it is very hard to give away what you don’t have. In many of our homes, it’s not just our children who are blind to the awesome display of God’s presence, power, and glory everywhere around us; we are also blind to it. So perhaps we should start with asking God not to open our children’s eyes, but first to open ours, so that we can help them to see. It is impossible to point someone to something that you don’t see. We tend to see transportation that needs to be supplied, lunches that need to be made, clothes that need to be washed, activities that need to be scheduled, homework that needs to be done, and sibling squabbles that need to be resolved. For some of us, we can go through days with no awareness of God whatsoever. Only as God graciously opens our eyes to his glory and captures our hearts with his awe will we ever be his instruments in the eyes of our children.
Maybe you’re saying to yourself right now, “But I just want to have children who obey and do what is right.” So what is the only pathway to complete and willing submission to God’s authority and his law? Only when our children are living out of a heartfelt awe of God will they quit living for themselves, recognize God’s authority, and submit to the instruments of his authority that God has placed in their lives—their parents. Only awe of God has the power to defeat awe of self in my heart. It’s the glory of God that can protect our children from the seductive draw of self-glory. If awe doesn’t rule my child’s heart, God’s law won’t control my child’s behavior. The great battle of parenting is not the battle of behavior; it’s the battle for what kind of awe will rule children’s hearts.
Let’s get even more specific. Parents, you don’t have any independent authority over your children. None. Your children haven’t been given to you as indentured servants to make your life easier. They have not been given to build your identity or prop up your reputation. They are not to be viewed as potential trophies on the mantel of your success. The only kind of authority you have is representative or ambassadorial authority.
Here’s God’s plan: God intends to make his invisible authority visible in the lives of children through their parents, who exercise their authority in submission to him. Parents, there is no higher calling than this. You have been chosen to visibly represent the authority of God on earth in the lives of your children. You are the look on God’s face. You are the tone of his voice. You are the touch of his hand. You are his character and attitude. This means that every time you exercise authority in the lives of your children, it must be a beautiful picture of the patient, firm, gracious, wise, loving, tender, merciful, forgiving, and faithful authority of God. Why? Because your job is to leave your children in awe of the stunning, rescuing beauty of God’s authority. Your job is to be used of God to help your children move from natural rebels against any authority but their own to those who are in awe of God’s authority. Once they embrace this awe of God, they will cheerfully submit to his rules and honor the visible representatives of his authority whom God has placed in their lives.
This means that every time your authority is exercised in a selfish, impatient, irritable, name-calling, abusive, partial, or condemning way, you are not part of what God is doing in the life of your child; you are in the way of it. When you express your authority this way, you don’t lead your children to stand in awe of the beauty and helpfulness of God’s authority. No, you help deepen the natural rebellion your child has toward it. You know that when anyone has gotten up in your face and ripped into you, you have never felt thankful, loved, or helped. That has never made you feel rescued and cared for. In those situations, you have never felt like you’re being blessed with rare wisdom. No, you just want the pain of the demeaning onslaught to end. You see, if my child has an awe problem in his heart and I have been sent to visibly represent the God who should be at the center of his awe capacity, then the manner in which I respond to my child affects the way he views God himself.
Who can read what I have just written and say, “No problem, I can do that!” If you have any humility and sanity as a parent, you would confess with me that you are not up to such a task. You are unworthy of such a high calling. I know I can be so incredibly impatient, so easily irritated, so comfortable with failing. Yet when God’s grace has produced in me greater awe of him than I have for myself, I will then be motivated to serve as an instrument of awe of him in the lives of my children. This means not only that my children need parenting that rescues their awe but that I need that as well. I need a heavenly Father who will again and again show me his glory until this fickle heart of mine rests in an awe-filled understanding that he is the only One worthy of the worship of my heart.
What, then, is the fruit of the awe of God in the hearts of our children? I would propose to you that awe of God can produce in the heart of a child what every parent longs for. A child whose heart is ruled by the awe of God will submit to authority, will listen to and value wisdom, and will not resist but will hunger for rescue and will surrender control to God and the ambassadors he has placed in his life.
You and I can’t recapture the hearts of our children; only God can. But we need to understand that this is the mission he has called us to be part of. We need to recognize the daily evidence that our children live out of an attitude and behavior-shaping awe of self. And we need to do everything we can to point to God’s visible glory, so that the hearts of our children will, by grace, be captured by awe of him. We need to finally realize that it is not enough to announce and enforce God’s law; we should carry out both of these charges, but we must also do more. And we must submit our parenting to the reality that only when our children are in awe of God will they surrender their lives to his control, heed the call of his Word, and esteem the authorities that he has graciously placed over them. To do this, we also need to be rescued by his grace, rescued not from our children but from the selfishness and pride of our own hearts. Thankfully, Jesus purchased this rescue.