13 Rest
Principle: It is only rest in God’s presence and grace that will make you a joyful and patient parent.
If you are struggling to be patient, finding it hard to be joyful, and sometimes dreading the next day of parenting, could it be that your struggle to be tender and loving toward your children is rooted in the reality that you are overburdened and overwhelmed? Could it be that in your attempt to be a tool of grace in the lives of your children, you have lost sight of the amazing resources of grace that are the gift of the Father to all of his children? Perhaps in all your work to be used of God to produce children who know what it means to rest in his wisdom and grace, you have forgotten how to rest yourself.
As I fly around the world to lead parenting conferences, I meet exhausted and discouraged parents all the time. In fact, many of them have confessed to me that they dreaded coming to another parenting conference because they thought they’d be told again all the things they’re not doing and leave the weekend feeling defeated and guilty. I’ve had mom after mom confess to me that they were at the end of their rope. I’ve had fathers ask me what to do about their anger. I’ve had parent after parent say that they know that they’re doing and saying things that they know they shouldn’t do, but they don’t know how to stop.
Lydia said, “I start out the day telling myself that I’ll do better, but by the end of the day, I’m screaming at them again.”
Jason said, “I just hear my teenage son begin with his excuses and I get angry.”
Marge said, “I have read all the good parenting books, but none of them have helped me.”
Sue said, “How could it be that a three-year-old boy could have the power to make me so crazy?”
Ginny said, “I go to bed exhausted, I wake up exhausted. I don’t have a lot of joy.”
Frank said, “We got away last weekend because both of us were at the end of our rope with our four boys.”
Sam said, “We were so excited about having children, but the excitement is long gone.”
Sharon said, “I feel all the time that I just don’t have what it takes to do all the things you’re supposed to do as a parent.”
Judy said, “I feel all the time that I just need to rest, but there is no rest for a parent.”
Overburdened, overwhelmed, exhausted, and discouraged. I think this is the state of many more Christian parents than we think. And in our exhaustion and discouragement we are all too susceptible to doing and saying things that are not only unhelpful to our children, but that add to the burden of inadequacy we are already carrying. Occasionally we reflect on what we’ve been doing, and we’re saddened that we’ve become what we determined we would not become and we’ve done what we told ourselves we would never do.
Here near the end of this book I want to give you good news. My prayer is that this news will not only lift your burden, but will clarify and simplify what God has called you to as a parent. God will never ask you to deny the reality of your everyday, moment-by-moment parenting struggle. He will never ask you to minimize how hard it is to raise up God-fearing, God-loving, God-serving children in this terribly broken world. He will never ask you to act as if you’re doing well, when you’re not doing well. He will never call you to rationalize away your children’s rebellion and the struggle you have dealing with it in the right way. Biblical faith never requires you to deny reality; rather, it calls you to look at all the troubling realities in your life through the lens of the awesome glory and grace of your Redeemer. And as a parent, it’s vital for you to understand that you only properly understand your daily troubles and struggles accurately when you look at them remembering the grandeur of the One who appointed you to the task.
You see, if you humbly face the reality of what your children need and how you struggle as a parent, but you do not remember the incalculable glory of the God who sent you, you’ll soon feel overwhelmed, defeated, and guilty. As a Christian parent, you must not deny reality, but if you spend your mental and spiritual time meditating on the struggle and not meditating on your Lord, you’re probably going down. When we’re God-forgetful, we tend to load burdens on our shoulders that we cannot bear. We tend to give way to worry and fear, and we tend to get weakened by guilt. Perhaps the best thing that you do for your children is not something you do with them, but something that you do for yourself. Here it is: the most important thing you do for your children is to remember the One who sent you, and in remembering the One who sent you, teach your heart to rest. Bringing unrest to your parenting of your children never goes anywhere good. Vertical remembrance and rest is the soil in which the wholesome, good, and change-producing parenting grows.
It’s so easy in the middle of any day of parenting multiple children to lose your mind. I don’t mean that you’ve actually gone crazy. What I mean is that in the middle of all the busyness and confusion, without knowing it, you’ve forgotten who you are, you’ve forgotten who God is, and you’ve forgotten what you’ve been given. And because you’ve forgotten, you’re shouldering burdens that you were never meant to carry and you’re defeated by your inadequacy. I remember sitting on my bed in my dark bedroom late one night after having had a horrible conversation with my son where I had lost it and said all the things that I told myself I wouldn’t say. In the dark, I felt so defeated, so alone, and so overwhelmed. I remember mumbling to myself and to my Lord, “I just can’t do this anymore. It’s just too hard.” In that moment it hit me that God hadn’t called me to do what I could not do all by myself. Yes, as a parent, he had called me to do things that were way beyond my natural abilities, character, wisdom, strength, and gifts, but he had never sent me out to do them alone. Aloneness is a cruel lie that will defeat us every time.
So I want to help you to remember and in remembering to rest. It is a heart at rest that will enable you to do the good things that God has called every parent to do.
The Best Parenting Passage in the Entire Bible
If I were to ask you what is the best, most practical, most helpful parenting passage in all the Bible, what would you answer? Most biblically literate Christian parents would answer, “Ephesians 6:1–4.” That is a wonderfully helpful passage, but I want to take you to one that is even more fundamental. I think my choice will surprise you. And I think I know why.
You probably don’t need me to tell you this, but I will: Your Bible is not arranged by topic. I know that frustrates some of you. You kind of wish it were arranged by topic, with little tabs on the end of the page that would direct you to your topic of need or interest. Well, the Bible isn’t arranged that way. It’s not arranged as it is because God made a massive editorial error. The Bible is arranged the way it’s arranged because of wise divine intention. Your Bible is essentially a grand redemptive story. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that your Bible is a carefully theologically annotated story. It’s a redemptive story with God’s essential explanatory notes.
This means you can’t approach your Bible topically and get the best that it has to offer you, because the Bible wasn’t designed to operate that way. For example, if all you do to understand parenting is go to the passages that have that word in them or seem to address that topic, you will miss the majority of the information the Bible has for you as a parent. Rather, your Bible works this way: to the degree that every passage tells you something about God, something about yourself, something about the disaster of sin, something about life in this fallen world, something about what God has called you to, and something about the operation of grace, to that degree every passage tells you about every area of your life. That’s how your Bible works.
So I want to take you to a passage that almost is never mentioned in the context of parenting, but has in it everything you need to know and understand in order to experience the rest and courage of heart that fuels good, godly, perseverant parenting.
I want to take you to one of the final, and surely the best known, of Jesus’s commands to his disciples. This passage is popularly known as the Great Commission, and because of that has been most often applied to the formal evangelistic mission of the church. But I am deeply persuaded that its call is much wider than that and because it is, it offers real hope and help to every Christian parent. It captures with clarity what God has called you to and what he has promised you as you take on this hugely important and life-long task. As we near the end of this book, I thought it would be helpful to consider its implications and encouragements.
And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matt. 28:18–20)
I cannot think of any directive from the mouth of Jesus that is a more appropriate call to every Christian parent than this one. If someone were to ask you what the ultimate job of a parent is, what would you answer? Well, the answer is here. Your job is to do everything within your power, as an instrument in the hands of the Redeemer who has employed you, to woo, encourage, call, and train your children to willingly and joyfully live as disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is more important than how they do in school, or how positively they contribute to the reputation of your family, or how well they set themselves up for a future career, or how well they do in sports and the arts, or how well they are liked by adults and peers.
These things aren’t unimportant, but we must not let them rise to the importance of this one thing. Your children must come to learn early that their lives don’t belong to them. They must understand early that they have been given life and breath for the purpose of serving the glory of another. They must learn that they do not have the right to follow their own rules or write their own laws. They must surrender to the fact that their lives are meant to be shaped, not by what they want, but by what God has chosen. They need to know early that they are worshipers whose capacity to worship is meant to be owned by the One who created them with this capacity.
Here’s the core mission of parents: to raise up children who approach everything in their lives as the disciples of Jesus. Now, let’s be honest here; this way of living is not natural for anyone. It’s natural for our children (and us) to live as if they are the owners of their own lives. So they don’t just need to learn that this is not true, but they need to admit their need of the grace of divine rescue, forgiveness, and empowerment. If you are going to raise willing disciples of Jesus, you need to patiently communicate the story of his amazing grace to your children again and again. You see, God’s law has no power to turn your children into disciples, but his grace does. Are you working to be used of God to make disciples of your children?
This leads us to the second part of the call of Jesus. As a parent you are called to teach your children to observe everything that Jesus has commanded. It is awesome to think that God’s will extends to every single area of your children’s lives. He has a plan for their thoughts, their desires, their choices, their words, their decisions, their relationships, what they do with their bodies, what they do with their money, what they do with their worship, how they invest their time, how they conduct themselves in relationships, how they relate to authority, their relationship to the church, the way they steward their physical possessions, and what they allow to occupy their minds and capture their hearts.
Our children must learn to look at life through the lens of the will and plan of their Creator. What we are talking about is helping them to develop a comprehensive biblical worldview that is a way of looking at life that is distinctively God-centered and biblically driven. Not only is this not natural, but it is also important to remember that your children will be bombarded by the seductive and attractive voices of many other competing worldviews. They will be hit again and again with other ways of thinking about who they are and the purpose of life. They will be challenged by those who don’t believe in God and who will tend to mock the faith of those who do.
It’s not enough to tell your children what to do and what not to do. This passage calls every parent to a deeper goal. You must teach your children how to think about everything in a way that is pointedly God-centered. Now, if our children are ever going to think about themselves and life this way, they need to be willing to submit to the wisdom of someone greater. Let’s again admit that this is not only not natural for our children, it’s not natural for us. It’s natural for our children to think that they are right and that they know what’s best. It’s natural for our children to resist recognizing and surrendering to a greater wisdom.
So once more, we are confronted with the fact that as parents, we have no power to turn our children into the thinking and living disciples of Jesus Christ. They will become his disciples only as they are rescued by his grace. As parents, we are called every day to faithfully participate in what is impossible for us to produce. And if sadly we fall into thinking that we have the power to produce it, we will invariably end up doing bad things. This is precisely where the promises of this passage are so encouraging. Perhaps you’re thinking, “How can I get up every morning to do what is impossible to do and not end up exhausted and discouraged?” The rest of the passage answers that question.
Our passage makes it very clear that Jesus would not ever call you to this huge parenting task without also blessing you with his mind-blowing promises as well. If you understand and embrace his promises, then you can give yourself to participate in what is impossible for you to produce and not have discouraging or even paralyzing anxiety in your heart. In fact, good, loving, faithful, grace-driven parents only ever grow in the soil of a heart at rest. Jesus’s promises are not so much promises, but reminders of the unshakable identity of every one of his children. The two promises here are meant to remind you of what the great heavenly Father has become for you by grace. These promises define for you not only who God is, but who you are as his child.
You see, your rest as a parent will never be found in the success of what you are doing or the success of what your children are doing, because there will always be some degree of struggle, weakness, and failure there. No, rest in found in the One who sent you and in what he wills always to do for each of the ones he sends to represent him. If you look horizontally for your rest, you will always end up disappointed. There will be days when you’ll able to see the fruit of your labors in the lives of your children, and there will be days when it seems like you have accomplished almost nothing. This is why the words we are about to consider are so important.
Jesus begins his commission not with calling us to something, but with comforting us with these words: “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me.” Wow! Just let your heart marinate in this truth. These words tell you that it is impossible to be in any situation, any location, any circumstance, and any relationship at any time that is not at that time being ruled by King Christ. Now let that color the way you think about parenting your children. There is never a moment, in any location, where you are in a situation with one of your children that is not under the wise, careful, and powerful control of the One who sent you into it. Yes, there will be moments when you will lose control and there will be moments that seem out of control, but there is never a parenting moment that exists outside the control of the King who sent you.
You can rest when you don’t understand what is going on because the One who sent you is never confused and never surprised. You can rest in the middle of parenting mysteries because you know that the One that you represent knows no mystery. You can rest when your authority seems weak because you know that the One you serve has authority that can never be weakened or defeated. And here’s why he is telling you this: he wants you to know that he is exercising his authority for the benefit and success of the mission to which he has called you. Your success as a parent does not rest on your shoulders but on his. The fruitfulness of your work as a parent does not rest on your authority but on his. Your Lord doesn’t just call you to this huge parenting task; he also blesses you with the power, glory, and transformative ability of his unshakable rule. When your rule seems weak, you can rest in the reality that his rule on your behalf is never weak.
But that’s not all. Jesus ends his call with these words: “And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Stop reading right now and let yourself be amazed by these words. The Father, who sends you to extend his arms of fathering grace to your children, goes with you. He would never ever think of sending us out on our own. He would never coldly watch us at a distance as we go, work, and struggle. He would never sit idly by as we give ourselves to the single hardest, most comprehensive, most long-term, most exhausting, and most life-shaping task that a human being could ever take on. No, when your Father sends you, he goes with you.
This means that in every moment when you are parenting, you are being parented. In every moment when you are called to give grace, you are being given grace. In every moment when you are rescuing and protecting your children, you are being rescued and protected. In every moment when you feel alone, you are anything but alone because he goes wherever you go. It is impossible for your parenting to ever wander outside the light of his presence. He never forgets you, he never turns his back on you, he never wanders away for a moment, he never favors someone else over you, he never gets mad and refuses to be with you, he never grows cynical, he will never give up, and he will never ever quit. He is tenderly, patiently, faithfully, and eternally with you. You can bank on his care. You can rest in his presence.
So your hope as a parent is not found in your power, your wisdom, your character, your experience, or your success, but in this one thing alone: the presence of your Lord. The Creator, Savior, Almighty, Sovereign King is with you. Let your heart rest. You are not in this parenting drama alone. Your potential is greater than the size of your weaknesses, because the One who is without weakness is with you, and he does his best work through those who admit that they are weak but in weakness still heed his call.
The Great Commission summarizes your calling as parents, and its promises remind you of where you can look for help and hope. Let me suggest what hoping in the two redemptive realities (promises) of the Great Commission means practically for you in your everyday work with your children.
You will not be punished for your failure. You will fail as a parent. You won’t always have the right reaction, you won’t always say the right thing, and you won’t always want what’s best. It’s important to remember that the One who sent you is not only your sender, he is your Savior, and his cross means you do not have to hide in shame and you do not have to be paralyzed by guilt, because Jesus paid the penalty for every moment when you fail as a parent. Since you do not have to fear God’s anger in moments of failure, you can run to him for help and receive his forgiveness and help. Basking in the comfort of God’s forgiveness then makes you able to own your weaknesses and confess them not only to God, but to your children as well.
You are welcomed by grace to new beginnings. Because your Savior is always with you, his grace is too. This means that you are free from living in the regret of things done wrong. He welcomes you to confess your failures and move on with the freedom and joy of his forgiveness. Embedded in his forgiveness is the promise of new beginnings. You see, he has taken away the burden of penalty for your sins so you can run to him, not only for his forgiveness but also for his help. In his help is the promise that you really can learn, change, and grow. His grace lets you put yesterday away and commit to new and better things today. The One who worked to forgive you now works to teach and mature you. Better parenting days ahead are made possible by his transforming grace.
You are not left to your limited resources. I know because I’ve been there: there are parenting days when it feels as if you have no wisdom and you’ve lost most of your strength. There are times when you don’t know what to do. There are times when you know what to do, but it just doesn’t feel that you have the inner will and outer strength to do it. Sometimes you feel exhausted before you begin the day, and sometimes you go to bed discouraged and not really looking forward to the next day. There are times when it feels that your kids have gotten the best of you or that you fell into doing something as a parent that you’re not really proud of. In these moments when your weakness is all too evident, it is so important to know that God hasn’t left you to the limits of your righteousness, wisdom, and strength. He knew exactly what this calling would demand of you, so he chose to be with you. Because he is with you, his power can enable you, his wisdom can direct you, and his character can restrain and redirect you. God knows what the ones he sends are made of, so he always works what only he is able to work, in them and through them. Your potential as a parent is hugely bigger than your independent personal resources.
God blesses you with the right here, right now wisdom of his Word. God has blessed you with the most amazing compendium of true wisdom, daily hope, and practical guidance for everyday living that you could ever want as a parent. Where is it found? In your Bible, his Word.
Now, to plumb the depths of his Word there is something that you need to consider. The Bible presents to you the grand explanatory story, the redemption story. This is the story that you need to know and understand in order to make sense out of your story as a parent and the stories of your children. By grace, God has embedded your personal story and the stories of your children in the larger story of redemption. And so you want to raise children who grow up thinking how they should think, desiring what they should desire, and doing what they should do because they always think of their identity and purpose from the perspective of God’s story of redemption. Christian parenting is about raising children who live with a “God’s story” mentality. Your God-given task is not just to raise children who know what God says is right and what he says is wrong, but who also are prepared to think and live biblically. Teaching your children to think in a way that is distinctively biblical is right at the center of what God has called you to. And so he has blessed you with the wonderful gift of his Word. Your Bible is not exhaustive, addressing everything in detail, or it would take an eighteen-wheeler to carry it to the Sunday worship service. But your Bible is comprehensive; it gives you wisdom to deal with everything you face in life. The best way to celebrate the gift of God’s Word as a parent and to mine the depths of its wisdom is to take time to soak it in every day.
You do not have to load the burden of your children’s welfare on your shoulders every morning. Every day remind yourself of this truth. The welfare of your children does not rest on your shoulders, but on the shoulders of the One who sent you. He has the power to do what you could never do. Unlike us he never is weak or weary. He never gets lost in his own discouragement or anger. Unlike us, he never looks back and regrets what he has done. He always does what is just, good, wise, kind, loving, gracious, and right. He loves our children more than we ever will—so much so that he died so that they would have everything that they need to be what they’re supposed to be and live as they were created to live. Thankfully, the great heavenly Father’s shoulders are big enough to carry what our small parenting shoulders could never bear, and he willingly bears the burdens that would otherwise crush and disable us.
God will never close his ears to your cries for help. Psalm 34:15 says, “The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry.” First Peter 5:7 talks of “casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.” Jesus offered this invitation: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28–30). Parenting is hard; it will expose your weaknesses and it will challenge your faith. There are times when you won’t feel very good about what you just did or said. There will be days when your work with your children will seem more futile than helpful. But the good news of the gospel is that you don’t have to hide your struggle. You don’t have to act as if you’re doing better than you are. No, you are welcomed by grace to cry out for help, you run to God in your need, and you are assured that not only will you not be turned away, but your heavenly Father will pay careful attention to your cries. “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Ps. 34:18).
Weakness is not a curse; it’s a blessing. Because we all still tend to want to be independently strong, we tend to hate being weak. We hate feeling that we’re not prepared. We don’t like not knowing what to do next. We find it hard to acknowledge that we did it wrong. We tend to be afraid to confess that we’re at the end of our rope. It is hard to be in the deep end of the pool and not be confident about your ability to swim. But for the children of God, weakness loses its terror, because the source of our rest is not our strength but the strength of our Father. It’s liberating to be able to face your inadequacies without shame or panic, but that’s just what the grace of God enables us to do.
But there’s another thing. God will expose your weaknesses so that you will run to him, find his help in your time of need, and grow in your street-level confidence in his presence, power, and provision. Paul says it this way: “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Cor. 12:9). It’s not your weaknesses that you should fear, but your delusions of strength. Delusions of independent strength are a curse because they tell you that you have power that you don’t truly have and they keep you from resting and relying on the power that is yours in the presence and grace of the One who called you to be his representative in the lives of your children.
Success is about faithfulness, not results. You do not have to fear being judged by God for the results that you have produced. You are not manufacturing trophies; you are parenting children. As we have considered before, you have no power to transform your children from what they are to what they should be. No matter how righteously you act toward the children God has placed in your care, if they don’t transact with God, they won’t be what they’re supposed to be and live as they were designed to live. You cannot make your children love, believe, surrender, respect, confess, forgive, serve, speak the truth, be pure of heart, and worship God. Only God can do these things. He would never call you to produce what you can’t produce. No, he simply calls you to be faithful, to do good toward your children day after day after day, knowing that the results are in his infinitely powerful hands.
It really is true that good, godly, transformative parenting grows best in the soil of a heart at rest. Parent, is your heart at rest? Is your parenting fueled by trust? Or does worry haunt your heart? You have reason for rest. You have been sent, but the One who sent you rules every location and relationship he sends you to. You have been sent, but the One who sent you has packed up and come with you, so that you would have everything you need to do what he’s called you to do. Fight the assessment that the job is too big. Fight the feeling that you are all alone. Meditate upon and celebrate his power and presence and go do what you’ve been chosen to do with courage and hope.