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God’s plan for parents is for us to be His agents in the lives of these ones that have been formed into His image and entrusted to our care. The word that the Bible uses for this intermediary position is ambassador. It really is the perfect word for what God has called parents to be and to do. The only thing an ambassador does, if he’s interested in keeping his job, is to faithfully represent the message, methods, and character of the leader who has sent him.

Parenting is not first about what we want for our children or from our children, but about what God in grace has planned to do through us in our children in these four areas:

Identity: Where you look to find your sense of who you are.

Owner: Owner parents tend to look to get their identity, meaning, purpose, and inner sense of well-being from their children.
Ambassador: Parents who approach parenting as representatives come to it with a deep sense of identity and are motivated by meaning and purpose.

Work: What you define as the work you have been called to do.

Owner: Owner parents think that their job is to turn their children into something.
Ambassador: Parents who really do understand that they are never anything more than representatives of someone greater, wiser, more powerful, and more gracious than they are know that their daily work is not to turn their children into anything. They have come to understand that they have no power whatsoever to change their children and that without God’s wisdom they wouldn’t even know what is best for their children. They are not motivated by a vision of what they want their children to be, but by the potential of what grace could cause their children to be.

Success: What you define success to be.

Owner: These parents tend to be working toward a specific catalog of indicators in the lives of their children that would tell them that they have been successful parents.
Ambassador: These parents have faced the scary truth that they have no power at all to produce anything in their children. Successful parenting is not about achieving goals (that you have no power to produce) but about being a usable and faithful tool in the hands of the One who alone is able to produce good things in your children.

Reputation: What tells people who you are and what you’re about.

Owner: Owner parents unwittingly turn their children into their trophies.
Ambassador: These parents have come to understand that parenting sinners will expose them to public misunderstanding and embarrassment somehow, someway.

14 Gospel Principles

1. Calling Principle: Nothing is more important in your life than being one of God’s tools to form a human soul.

Parenting is either the highest treasure to you, and that is demonstrated in your choices, words, and actions every day, or it’s not. There are parents who fail to be hospitable to the friends of their children because they are concerned about the impact on their physical surroundings and possessions. Do physical things get in the way of, or create needless tension in, your parenting?

How has the value of career success impacted your commitment to the work that God has called you to as parents? For many people, it is their commitment to ministry that constantly gets in the way of doing what God has called them to do as parents.

What competes in your heart and therefore in your daily decisions for the value that parenting should have?

Your kids will never be what they’re supposed to be or do if they lack God-consciousness. It is the essential thing that must be developed in the heart of every child, and the passages above say that that task was assigned by God to parents.

The most important thing that a child could ever learn about is the existence, character, and plan of God. If you know this fact, it will alter the way you understand and interpret every other fact in your life.

Children who don’t acknowledge God will act as if they are God and will resist the help and rescue that God has provided for them through their parents.

Here’s the bottom line: God has met you so that you would be ready to introduce his glory and grace to your children. Every day is filled with opportunities to point to God. No one gives grace better than a parent who humbly admits that he desperately needs it himself.

2. Grace Principle: God never calls you to a task without giving you what you need to do it. He never sends you without going with you.

There is nothing more important to consistent, faithful, patient, loving, and effective parenting than to understand what God has given you in the grace of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Like everything else God calls people to, God doesn’t call people to be parents because they are able. If you read your Bible carefully, you will understand that God doesn’t call able people to do important things. Abraham wasn’t able. Moses wasn’t able. Gideon wasn’t able. David wasn’t able. The disciples weren’t able, and the story goes on.

God did not create human beings to be independently able; He designed us to be dependent. God calls unable people to do important things so that he will get the glory and not them. He isn’t working so that your life as a parent would be easy, predictable, and free from struggle. He calls you to do the impossible so that in your search for help, you would find more than help—you would find him.

God doesn’t ask you to be able; he asks you to be willing. If you are willing, he will meet you in your weakness and change you, and as he changes you, he will work good things through you into the hearts and lives of your children.

God’s Grace:

Frees you from having to deny your weaknesses.
Rescues you from you. When you are frustrated, mad, discouraged, unkind, abusive, bitter, joyless, vengeful, or irritated as a parent, you don’t so much need to be rescued from your children—you need to be rescued from you.
Grows and changes you as a parent.
Works to make your heart tender.
Liberates you from the prison of regret.

One of the most beautiful things about God’s grace is that it welcomes you to fresh starts and new beginnings. Way too many parents are paralyzed by a whole catalog of “what ifs” and “if onlys.”

3. Law Principle: Your children need God’s law, but you cannot ask the law to do what only grace can accomplish.

As a parent you know that it is your job to help form character—obedience, respect, honesty, and willingness, among others—in your children. Thousands and thousands of well-meaning Christian parents are asking the law to do in the lives of their children what only the powerful grace of God can accomplish. This truth needs to be considered and needs to shape everything you do as a parent: If rules and regulations had the power to change the heart and life of your child, rescuing your child from himself and giving him a heart of submission and faith, Jesus would have never needed to come!

Many Christian parents have reduced Christian parenting down to being a really faithful lawgiver, arresting officer, prosecutor, judge, and jailer. This is what every parent of every child needs to understand: the law does a very good job of exposing your child’s sin, but it has no power whatsoever to deliver your child from it.

We also tend to replace God’s perfect law with a sorry human second best. Somehow, someway God’s law gets replaced by our law—a law that’s sadly driven by our craving for affirmation, control, peace, success, and reputation.

As parents we need to be rescued from our addiction to the law of our comfort, pleasure, success, and control. Parents, we all need to have an “everything I do, I do to point my children to the presence and promises of God’s grace” way of parenting our children.

4. Inability Principle: Recognizing what you are unable to do is essential to good parenting.

It is vital that you believe and admit that you have no power whatsoever to change your child. Parenting is not about exercising power for change in your children. Parenting is about your humble faithfulness in being willing to participate in God’s work of change for the sake of your children. Parents, here’s what you need to understand: God has given you authority for the work of change, but has not granted you the power to make that change happen.

When you think your job is to change your child and you’ve been given the power to do it, your parenting will tend to be demanding, aggressive, threatening, and focused on rules and punishments. In this form of parenting, it is all about you and your children, rather than you being an agent of what only God can do in your children.

Here’s the bottom line for every parent: the change that has to happen in each of your children, you can’t create. In fact, nowhere in his Word has God tasked you with the responsibility to create it.

Good parenting lives at the intersection of a humble admission of personal powerlessness and a confident rest in the power and grace of God.

5. Identity Principle: If you are not resting as a parent in your identity in Christ, you will look for identity in your children.

This success-driven system of unrelenting rules, performances, and obligations exists because these parents care too much about the present and future success of their children. The desire for successful children is a good thing that has become a bad thing because it’s become a ruling thing. It causes parents to do things that ultimately crush and embitter their children, all in the name of something good.

There are only two places for you and me to look for identity. One place to look is vertically, getting our identity and the direction and assessment of potential from God—from his love and acceptance, his forgiving grace, his constant presence, his power and his promises, and the glory of all of these that he’s showered down on us. What this means for a parent is that if you are not getting your identity from God and the work of his Son, you will probably try to get it from your children.

What are the signs that your parenting is driven more by what you need from your children than by what God wants to do through you in your children? Here are five sure indications:

Too much focus on success.
Too much concern about reputation. God didn’t give you your children to build your reputation but to publicly proclaim His. Vertical identity amnesia leaves us all too worried about what others think about us and what we are doing.
Too great a desire for control.
Too much emphasis on doing rather than being. What you and your children need most is not success; it’s redemption. What you and your children need is not the glory of personal achievement but rescue from your bondage to self-glory so that you can enjoy the freedom of living for the glory of another.
Too much temptation to make it personal. In subtle ways the focus shifts from how their behavior is viewed by God to how it affects you. It becomes “how could you do this to me?” rather than “this violates what God has called you to be”

6. Process Principle: You must be committed as a parent to long-view parenting because change is a process and not an event.

Parenting is not a series of dramatic confrontation-confession events, but rather a life-long process of incremental awareness and progressive change. The desire for overnight change gets us into trouble.

The Bible states very clearly that one of the most dangerous aspects of sin, which all parents deal with personally and which all parents deal with in their children, is the fact that sin blinds. Your children are not just selfish and rebellious; they are blind. Unlike physical blindness, where you know you are blind, spiritually blind people are blind to their blindness. They are blind, but they think they see quite well. Spiritual blindness happens at the intersection of the deceptiveness of sin and the delusion of self-knowledge.

Here are three mentalities that need to shape your parenting:

You Need to Parent with a Process Mentality. Since change is most often a process and seldom an event, you have to remember that you can’t look for a dramatic transformational conclusion to your encounters with your children.
You Need to See Parenting as One Unending Conversation. Here, in a phrase, is what you are committing yourself to: many mini-moments of change. Incremental steps that are being taken to rescue, restore, and transform your children.
You Need to Parent with a Project Mentality. You know your children; you know where they tend to be weak, blind, tempted, and rebellious, and where they struggle. So you look for opportunities to address what God has shown you about the needy heart of each individual child.

What gets in the way of parenting is one thing: the character of the parent. We turn God-given moments of ministry into reasons to be angry. We respond with impatience to moments where patience is required. We are self-righteous in moments where we’re called to confess that we are more like our children than unalike. We throw threats at moments where quiet wisdom is what’s needed. The kind of parenting that God wants takes patience, humility, self-control, submission, gentleness, love, faithfulness, and joy.

Let’s be honest here: none of these character qualities are natural for us!

7. Lost Principle: As a parent you’re not dealing just with bad behavior, but a condition that causes bad behavior.

In parenting you’re not just dealing with your child’s wrong behaviors but his condition.

Jesus used His parables to highlight different aspects of what it means to be lost, which can help us understand our experiences with our children and our job description as parent.

Parable of the Lost Sheep

Three things jump out of this parable:

Sheep need a shepherd. They need the wisdom, the protection, and the sustenance a shepherd can provide.
Sheep are prone to wander. So it is with your children.
Once a sheep has wandered, he is incapable of rescuing himself. He needs someone who will search for him, find him, and bring him home. So it is with your children. They don’t so much need to be rescued from the world around them or from their friends; no, they need to be rescued from themselves.

Parable of the Lost Coin

The parable of the lost coin is not about what it means for the coin to be lost; in this parable the spotlight is not on the coin, but on the one searching for it. This short little word picture, just three verses long, is a powerful portrayal of God’s attitude toward the lost. The three verses portray with power the compassion, the patience, and the grace that we are called to represent as God’s ambassadors in the lives of our children.

Parable of the Lost Son

The longest of the three lost parables is the parable of the lost son. The danger that makes parenting both essential and difficult lives inside your child, not outside him. No child is free of that danger. The susceptibility to temptation and the tendency toward self-deception make your children a danger to themselves. Again, it is vital to understand that the rescue they need is rescue from themselves. As the father in the story so powerfully demonstrates, what lost children need most is not criticism, judgment, condemnation, or punishment.

Like the lost son, lost children need compassion, lost children need understanding, lost children need patience, lost children need acceptance, lost children need forgiveness, lost children need grace.

Every lost child believes two big lies:

The lie of autonomy. What this lie says is that I am a completely independent human being, and because I am, I have the right to live my life any way I choose to live it.
The lie of self-sufficiency. This lie tells your child that he has everything he needs inside himself to be what he needs to be and to do what he needs to do. He doesn’t need your help, rescue, instruction, wisdom, or correction.

Lost children need:

Insight.
Compassion.
Hope. They need to know that God sent his Son to earth so that when they begin to confess their need and cry out for help, they would have just the help that they need.
Rescue.
Wisdom. Our children need the wisdom to know when to say no. A successful life is all about saying no, but not to the authorities in your life, or to the people you’ve been called to love, or to God’s call, but no to yourself.

8. Authority Principle: One of the foundational heart issues in the life of every child is authority. Teaching and modeling the protective beauty of authority is one of the foundations of good parenting.

There is one significant heart issue: authority. You could argue that if you don’t deal with this fundamental heart issue, all the good things you seek to accomplish as God’s tool in the life of your children will not work.

Children come into the world as self-appointed little self-sovereigns. Every child in some way wants his or her own way. Every child tends to think that being told what to do is a negative thing. Every child wants to write his own moral rules and follow his own life plan. The delusion of the right to self-rule is one of the sad results of sin in the hearts of all of our children.

What 2 Corinthians 5:15 tells us is that your work to establish clear, loving, consistent, biblical authority in the lives of your children is doing gospel work. It is vital that you understand that you have no independent, autonomous authority as a parent.

In the lives of your children, you are the look of God’s face, you are the touch of his hand, and you are the tone of his voice. You should never let your exercise of authority be dictated by your mood. (This will always lead to a confusing and inconsistent culture of authority, where what was wrong yesterday doesn’t seem so wrong today. In this kind of unpredictable, insecure environment, children become emotional weathermen, nervously gauging the weather of their parents to see what they can or cannot do without getting in trouble.)

If you exercise authority in a lazy, abusive, selfish way, you will deepen and strengthen the natural rebellion to authority in the hearts of your children. What kind of picture are your children getting of God’s authority by the way you exercise yours?

Your children don’t know who they are and why they do the things they do. Your children daily suffer from a lack of spiritual self-understanding.

Every time you couple ambassadorial discipline with ambassadorial instruction, you are giving the Spirit of God another opportunity to work conviction and desire for help into the heart of your children. The more your children understand why they do what they do, the easier it will be for them to admit their wrongs and seek your forgiveness and God’s.

Our anger and impatience as parents reveal the true condition of our hearts. Like our children, we need the care of a loving Father who doesn’t beat us with condemnation, but rather caresses us with his grace.

Do you humbly own the rebellion of your own heart as you deal with the rebellion of your children in a way that causes you to exercise authority with patience and grace? In moments of discipline, do you often point your children to the hope and help that is to be found in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus?

9. Foolishness Principle: The foolishness inside your children is more dangerous to them than the temptation outside of them. Only God’s grace has the power to rescue fools.

As a parent you are never, ever dealing just with the words and actions of your children. You are always also dealing with the thing that controls their words and behavior: the heart. Sadly, many Christian parents lose sight of this or don’t know this, so they think that their job is to direct and control their children’s behavior. So they spend all of their parental focus and energy on announcing and enforcing the law.

Read carefully and repeatedly the words of Proverbs 4:23. Remember, those are the words of counsel a wise father is giving to his son.

Here’s a biblical definition of the heart: the heart is the causal core of your child’s personhood.

Many Christian parents think that the main thing they need to do to produce children who are what God wants them to be is to protect their children from the evils of the surrounding culture. God has not called us to erect a little family monastery. Monastic parenting will not deliver your children from moral danger.

The Bible tell us again and again that the greatest danger to us and our children lives inside us and not outside us. You will never build walls of protection that protect your children from the danger that resides in their own hearts.

The struggles over food, sleep, homework, sibling conflict, possessions, wardrobe, and dating are theological struggles. You see, at the center of the foolishness of the children you are called to parent is a denial of God.

Sin reduces all of our children to fools (us too) and because it does, it causes them to live as if God doesn’t exist, and because they do that, they will be attracted to what is wrong and resist when you ask them to do what is right. It is a simple but sad equation. If you do not submit to God’s way, you will want your own way. This defines the struggle of our children and the daily job description of those who parent them.

The only hope for a fool is the God that every fool somehow, someway denies. The only hope for a fool is God’s amazing, rescuing, forgiving, transforming, and delivering grace. This means that as parents we are called to be representatives not only of God’s holy authority, but also of his redeeming grace. These four words represent the rescue and salvation of a fool:

Glory: The only solution to your child’s addiction to his own glory is to introduce him to a greater glory.
Wisdom: As a parent of a fool, you need to be looking for wisdom moments. God will give you opportunities every day to point to how beautiful, protective, practical, helpful, and good God’s wisdom really is. Think about it. Who wouldn’t want to live in a world where everyone was kind, loving, humble, patient, giving, and serving?
Story: As you are doing this, tell the story of the person and work of Jesus to your children again and again and again.
Welcome: Finally, talk about how God right here, right now, extends a welcome to them to confess their foolishness, to seek his forgiveness, and to receive his eternal help. Be a visible representative of the patient and forgiving welcome that God extends to all who come to him.

10. Character Principle: Not all of the wrong your children do is a direct rebellion to authority; much of the wrong is the result of a lack of character.

It’s not enough to just emphasize the beauty of submission to authority. You must also emphasize the need for character development. Will the heart of your child be controlled by love for the Creator (worship) or by craving something in the creation (idolatry)?

The character issues in the lives of your children exist not just because they want bad things, but because they become enslaved to good things. You see, a desire for even a good thing really does become a bad thing when it becomes a ruling thing. Proverbs 29:25 says that fear of man is a snare. You see, it is natural to want to be accepted because God has designed us to be social beings, but if human acceptance is where your son or daughter looks to get his or her identity and inner sense of well-being, then he or she will be tempted to do and say things that he or she should not in order to get it.

Your child needs something more than a parent who will say a firm no; your child needs a parent who will help him or her understand his or her heart and how it shapes the way he or she responds to authority.

Your children don’t so much need character management as they need worship realignment. They don’t first have a character problem; they have a worship problem that produces a character problem. Think of how God works in your life. He is not content with just forgiving you for your sin; having forgiven you, he is zealously committed to transforming you. He doesn’t just target those intentionally rebellious moments. He works on the character of your heart as well, so that you progressively become what he designed you to be.

Now God calls you to do with your children what he graciously does with you every day.

11. False Gods Principle: You are parenting a worshiper, so it’s important to remember that what rules your child’s heart will control his behavior.

Every parent needs to ask three questions:

Why do my children do the things they do?
How does change take place in children’s hearts and lives? We need to be careful not to parent to control kids’ behavior. Instead, work every day to be a tool of change in God’s hands.
How can I be a tool of change in the hearts and lives of my children? God has called you to be an agent of his rescuing, forgiving, transforming, and delivering grace. You cannot allow yourself to settle for anything less.

The answer to these questions is found in a single word: worship. Worship is not only the shaping force of our children’s behavior, but it is the explanation of the choices they make and the actions they take.

Change is not so much about behavior management, but worship realignment. Worship is that inner desire for wonder, amazement, and awe that every human being possesses. It’s that life-long hunt for God.

Sin causes all of us to exchange worship and service of the Creator for worship and service of the creation.

The capacity of the heart of our children to worship is meant to drive them to God. Our children were made to find life, hope, identity, and meaning in God.

Many parents unwittingly separate Christianity from everyday life as they parent their children, and in separating Christianity from daily life, they fail to make worship as important as it is. Yes, they want their children to believe in God, to go to church, and to do what is right, but the primary focus of their parental energy is on producing children who are mannerly, do well at school, and succeed in sports and music. So they try to control all of the behaviors that will get in the way of these goals. Because of this they do not focus on the heart and what rules the heart. And because they fail to think about the heart, they miss those wonderful moments of grace where God is revealing the heart of the child so that his parents can be God’s tools of rescue, leading our children to insight, confession, and repentance. They are left with trying to get their children to do what is right without addressing the heart, failing to understand that if they could do that, Jesus wouldn’t have had to invade earth on his mission of rescue.

Since your children are worshipers, you must be committed to being an instrument of seeing. When you work to help your children to see and own what is motivating them to want what they want and to do what they do, you are doing the work of the Messiah, Jesus, who sent you. Parenting is not just about getting your children to do something, but helping them to see so that they would desire to do it.

Since your children are worshipers, a vital skill for you is to learn how to lead them to confession. Leading your children to confession is about having tender, patient, understanding, and insight-giving conversations with your children that are intended to get them to examine what they haven’t acknowledged and to begin to accept responsibility for the thoughts, desires, and choices that cause them to do what they do.

To say your children are worshipers means you have no power to free them from their biggest problem. Because your children are worshipers, your only hope for them is the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We are more like our children than unlike them. This final point is essential. If you are going to be God’s tool in your children’s life, you have to require yourself to remember that their worship struggles are your worship struggles as well. When you admit this, you stop being self-righteously judgmental and start being compassionate.

Parenting is being willing to expend your time, gifts, energies, and resources in a daily battle of worship as God’s tool in the lives of your children.

12. Control Principle: The goal of parenting is not control of behavior, but rather heart and life change.

As a parent you have been called to something more foundational than the control of the behavior of the children that God has entrusted to your care. Here’s what our children need from us:

Guidance: “Where there is no guidance a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety.” (Prov. 11:14) “For you are my rock and fortress; and for your name’s sake you lead and guide me.” (Ps. 31:3)
Protection: “Like the birds hovering, so the Lord of hosts will protect Jerusalem; he will protect and deliver it; he will spare and rescue it.” (Isa. 31:5) “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.” (Ps. 91:1)
Instruction: “Good and upright is the Lord; therefore he instructs sinners in the way.” (Ps. 25:8) “Thus says the Lord of hosts…Will you not receive instruction and listen to my words? declares the Lord.” (Jer. 35:13)
Wisdom: “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.” (James 1:5) “And because of him you are in Christ, who became to us wisdom from God. . . .” (1 Cor. 1:30)
Authority: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.” (Rom. 13:1) “And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.’” (Matt. 28:18)
Rules: “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.” (Ps. 19:7) “But you are near, O Lord, and all your commandments are true.” (Ps. 119:151)
Structure: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” (Jer. 29:11) “The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations.” (Ps. 33:11)
Preparation: “The heart of a man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.” (Prov. 16:9) “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness.” (2 Pet. 1:3)
Understanding: “I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation.” (Ps. 119:99) “The unfolding of your words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple.” (Ps. 119:130)
Confrontation: “He who disciplines the nations, does he not rebuke? He who teaches man knowledge…” (Ps. 94:10) “But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” (Heb. 3:13)
Discipline: “Know then in your heart, as a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you.” (Deut. 8:5) “For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.” (Heb. 12:6)
Warning: “He said to them, ‘Take to heart all the words by which I am warning you today, that you may command them to your children, that they may be careful to do all the words of this law.’” (Deut. 32:46) “Moreover, by them is your servant warned; in keeping them there is great reward.” (Ps. 19:11)
Love: “The Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” (Ex. 34:6) “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. . . .” (John 3:16)
Forgiveness: “But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.” (Ps. 130:4) “As the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive.” (Col. 3:13)
Security: “He gives them security, and they are supported, and his eyes are upon their ways.” (Job 24:23) “You, O Lord, will keep them; you will guard us from this generation forever.” (Ps. 12:7)

God calls you to exercise faithful control, but never to be satisfied with the fact that you have. Your dear children desperately need your parental control, but they will not be all God has designed them to be if that’s all that you give them.

When you read Psalm 51, you are hit with the fact that embedded in David’s confession of specific and concrete sins is a cry for God’s help with a even deeper moral drama. The Psalm includes six agenda-setting observations for your work as a parent:

Your Children Need to See Their Sin, So They’ll Cry Out for God’s Mercy. There is no more important function for a parent than this: to lovingly and patiently bring our children to the point where they too cry out for God’s mercy. Crying out for God’s mercy happens only when you have acknowledged the sin that is inside you from which you are not able to free yourself.
Your Children Need to Understand the Nature of Sin, So They Don’t Minimize Its Danger (vv. 1–3)
Your Children Need to Understand That Their Problem Is Not with Their Parents, but with God (v. 4) It seems almost weird for a man who has committed adultery and murder to say that his sin is against God and God alone. But the fact that David says this means he understands not only the gravity of what he has done, but the seriousness of the condition of his heart that caused him to do it.
Your Children Need to Understand That Sin Is a Nature Problem That Produces Behavior Problems (v. 5). Sin is not first a bad behavior; sin is a condition that produces bad behavior.
Your Children Need to Understand That Since Sin Is a Heart Problem, the Only Solution Is a New Heart (v. 10)
Your Children Need to Be Taught to Run to the Only Place of Hope: The Forgiving Grace of God (v. 14). Until your children begin to give up on themselves, their wisdom, their strength, and their righteousness, they will not cry out for God’s mercy.

Parenting is about being used of God to bring your children to that wholesome and heart-changing place of personal hopeless. This is not a process of condemnation, but of patient and loving rescue.

13. Rest Principle: It is only rest in God’s presence and grace that will make you a joyful and patient parent.

Overburdened, overwhelmed, exhausted, and discouraged. 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.

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.

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. It is a heart at rest that will enable you to do the good things that God has called every parent to do.

Here’s the best parenting passage in the entire Bible: 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)

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.

Your children must come to learn early that their lives don’t belong to them.

Here’s the core mission of parents: to raise up children who approach everything in their lives as the disciples of Jesus. As a parent you are also called to teach your children to observe everything that Jesus has commanded. Helping them to develop a comprehensive biblical worldview that is a way of looking at life that is distinctively God-centered and biblically driven. Jesus ends his call with these words: “And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

The Great Commission summarizes your calling as parents, and its promises remind you of where you can look for help and hope.

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.

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.

As Paul alludes, it’s not your weaknesses that you should fear, but your delusions of strength.

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.

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.

Good, godly, transformative parenting grows best in the soil of a heart at rest.

14. Mercy Principle: No parent gives mercy better than one who is convinced that he desperately needs it himself.

Mercy is tenderheartedness and compassion toward someone in need. Our children are just that—needy.

Parenting is about being God’s ambassadors in the lives of our children. It is about faithfully representing his message, his methods, and his character to our children. Parenting is a life-long mission of humbly, joyfully, and willingly giving mercy.

Parents, here’s what God has called you to: he has called you to be his first responders in the lives of your children. Being a first responder is always motivated by the combination of an awareness of need and compassionate desire to help. That first responder is not there to lecture, judge, or condemn, but to provide the rescue that is needed but that the person cannot give to himself. First responders willingly expend their time and energy day after day on missions of mercy.

Look for every opportunity to shower your children with grace. Be careful to help your children see the heart behind the behavior. Be patiently committed to process. God has called you to a process of many mini-moments of insight that lead to many mini-moments of change. Point your kids every day to Jesus.

Talk about how Jesus delivers them from sin, because they could never escape it on their own. Talk of how, if they come to him for help, he will never turn them away. Talk about how much you need the grace of Jesus every day.

Don’t let a day go by without your children somehow, someway hearing the beautiful truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ once again.

Humbly accept your limits. Faith as a parent means that you rest every day in God’s presence and power, and because you do, you aren’t frustrated by your limits.

Remind your heart each morning to rest in the presence and power of your heavenly Father. For most parents worry is more natural than rest.

Willingly confess your faults. Your children need to hear your confession as well. It won’t be long before they begin to understand that their mom or dad is less than perfect.

Root all that you require, say, and do in the wonderful wisdom of Scripture. Don’t let Sunday or the children’s or youth ministry be the only time your children are taught God’s Word.

Don’t treat opportunities like hassles. Here’s the problem every parent faces: your best opportunities to get at issues of the heart in your children won’t be on your schedule.

Be slow to anger and quick to forgive.

Pray before, during, and after. Parenting really is all about praying without ceasing from before your children are born to long, long after they leave your home. You pray before, during, and after because prayer requires three things: a recognition of God’s position, an admission of your need, and a surrender to God’s plan.

Do all of these things over and over again.

God has called you to a life of patient perseverance.

You are blessed to be chosen to go on the mission of missions, and you are blessed with his grace so that every day your parenting would be dyed with the most powerful force of change in the universe: mercy.