If you are angry, frustrated, or despairing because you work so hard and they aren’t responding, then you’re working (at least in part) for the wrong reasons. Conversely, if you’re proud when your children obey and you get those desired kudos–Oh! your kids are so good!–you should suspect your motives. Both pride and despair grow in the self-reliant heart.

It’s very easy to make an idol out of good, obedient, well-behaved children. Isn’t that our goal, to have good kids? The problem seems to lie in basing our efforts on the quality of our plan, our program, and our parenting. Our effort becomes the means to the end, and when we fail either we become fearful or demanding. “When we see our failures, we will be overcome with fear… When we see their failures, we’ll be overly demanding.” We elevate our work and effort above God’s work in the lives of our children. But “[o]ur idolatry is a symptom of a deeper problem: unbelief… We have far too high a view of our ability to shape our children and far too low a view of God’s love and trustworthiness.”

Chapter 3 in Give them Grace focuses on the truth that it is only the work of God that causes heart change in our children. Do we believe that God can work in the hearts of our children? We may believe in our minds, but our actions betray that we often trust more in ourselves than in God. Our main task is to believe. The authors point to John 6:28-29 as a key passage in this regard. “Then they said to him, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” (John 6:28–29 ESV)

It’s not that we are to give up, to ‘let go and let God.’ No, God requires work, effort, and faithfulness. But we must not work as if it depends on us, but in a way that we acknowledge that it only depends upon God. Let me close with this quote.

We are always to do our best, striving to be obedient and to love, nurture, and discipline them. But we are to do it with faith in the Lord’s ability to transform hearts, not in our ability to be consistent or faithful. Seeking to be faithfully obedient parents is our responsibility; granting faith to our children is his. Freedom to love and enjoy our children flows out of the knowledge that God saves them in spite of our best efforts, not because of them. Salvation is of the Lord.

The history of the Old Testament from the beginning is a history of people who tried to be good on their own, who tried to prove themselves good. Just as they were not naturally good, so our children are not naturally good either. Jesus came to show us his goodness where we have failed. So teaching and praising outward goodness misses the mark. According to Fitzpatrick and Thompson,

Teaching our children to be well-behaved, good citizens is proper as far as it goes. But we must never mistake this training for Christian nurture or discipline, nor should we mistake their acquiescence to our social mores as true Christian righteousness. (45)

Christian righteousness is a goodness bestowed, not earned or deserved. The authors have a good chart that distinguishes human obedience and passive righteousness.

We shouldn’t tell our children that they are good, rather when God works in them we should praise God for his goodness and grace that was evident in our child. Their bottom line in this chapter is this: “You cannot raise good kids, because you’re not a good parent. There is only one good Parent, and he had one good Son.”

They ask an excellent question: “what percentage of your time is spent in declaring the rules and what percentage in reciting the Story.” (29) How often do we merely recite rules and commands, and how often do we explain to them why they cannot obey and how Jesus helps us obey? Of course with younger kids we do have to give rules and instructions, and at that age they may not fully comprehend the story of Jesus’ work done for them, but the point is still worth considering.

Fitzpatrick and Thompson list four types of obedience we teach our children – initial, social, civic, and religious. But in teaching them obedience in these ways we need to remember that “[e]very way we try to make our kids good that isn’t rooted in the good news of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ is damnable, crushing, despair-breeding, Pharisee-producing law… We have to remember that in the life of our unregenerate children, the law is given for one reason only: to crush their self-confidence and drive them to Christ.” (36)

As we examine our own parenting and make our way through Give them Grace, let’s try to assess how much the gospel is really the central part of our parenting.

Today I would like to begin a series of posts on the book Give them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus, by Elyse M. Fitzpatrick & Jessica Thompson. This book caught my eye because of its focus on the gospel, the authors’ desire to transcend the typical ‘how-to’ parenting book structure, and because I found it a breath of fresh air on the topic of parenting.

Tullian Tchividjian aptly summarizes the theme of this book in his forward:

[A]ll too often I have (wrongly) concluded that the only way to keep licentious hearts in line is to give more rules. The fact is, however, that the only time licentious people start to obey is when they get a taste of God’s radical, unconditional acceptance of sinners.

In this book the authors (mother and daughter) instruct that the only hope for our children is Jesus and the transforming power of his grace. The sooner that we see that the foundation for bringing up godly children is not good parenting but our great Savior, the sooner we will work and rest in his power to change our children.

In subsequent posts I will write about each of the chapters, but today I would like to include part of an excellent review of this book from Andy and Jennifer Naselli, which is part of the spring issue of the Journal of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

In this review Jennifer Naselli tells about her experience as a first time mother, which she approached with an air of pride and arrogance, thinking that she could do it all right because of all her preparation for parenting. God, through the birth of their daughter, instantly displayed to her what Dave Harvey has written about parenting: “I thought parenting was going to portray my strengths, never realizing that God had ordained it to reveal my weaknesses.” She continues,

At the same time, God was kindly teaching me more about the gospel. I began to see the gospel as central to all of life, not just as “step one” in the Christian life. I began to see my own desire for self justification as idolatrous and robbing God of his glory. I began to understand that I needed God’s grace, too, even though I wasn’t an outwardly rebellious child.
As I grew in this understanding, I also grew uncomfortable with my approach to discipline with my child. By this time, Kara was headed full steam into the terrible two’s. I became dissatisfied with my routine exhortations and exclamations:
• You just need to obey God.
• When you sin, you’re making God sad.
• Good girl!
• You’re pleasing God when you obey like that!
I began to feel that I was instilling self-justification into her heart—the very sin I was finding so pervasive in my own. But I really wanted to help Kara understand from the beginning that God is her final authority and that disobedience is ultimately against him alone. I was stumped and frustrated by this seeming incongruity between what I was learning and what I wanted to be teaching my child.
Then I picked up Give Them Grace. As I read it I kept exclaiming to Andy, “It’s like she is inside my head, answering all of my questions!” I was fascinated and intrigued, but I had to keep putting the book down and mulling over the concepts that were so diametrically opposed to how I was accustomed to thinking about my role as a parent.

As you and I work through this book together your response may be just like Jennifer’s. This book may challenge your thinking on parenting, but in a good way, I hope. So join me as we journey through how we can give God’s grace and experience his grace as parents.

But, finally, good fiction isn’t a “waste of time” for the same reason good music and good art aren’t wastes of time. They are rooted in an endlessly creative God who has chosen to be imaged by human beings who create. Culture isn’t irrelevant. It’s part of what God commanded us to do in the beginning, and that he declares to be good. When you enjoy truth and beauty, when you are blessed by gifts God has given to a human being, you are enjoying a universe that, though fallen, God delights in as “very good.”

Russell Moore, in an interview with Tim Challies

Pride is the enemy of grace, and prison is the enemy of pride. “How else but through a broken heart,” wrote Oscar Wilde after leaving Reading Gaol, “may Lord Christ enter in?” It is the central paradox of Christianity that fulfillment starts in emptiness, that streams emerge in the desert, that freedom can be found in a prison cell.

Michael Gerson, in his excellent article on the passing of Chuck Colson

We (Laurel and I, Betsy and Carl) were on our way south from Redding on Interstate 5 to Red Bluff and Chico for the day. Betsy was driving, and we were in the far left lane of 3 lanes going south. I asked Betsy to move over one lane to the right so that people could pass us. She looked, signaled, and started to move over, but when we got halfway over into the next lane there was another car right next to us. So she swerved back to the left, overcompensated back to the right, and the nearest we can remember we went off the right shoulder, up a little hill, and rolled left at least two times across the whole highway and ended upside, facing back towards the way from which we came. In the second picture, the one in which the car is turned sideways on the highway, you can see one of our hubcaps in the background!

It is miraculous that no one hit us as we rolled across the highway, that we didn’t hit anything, and that we all walked away with just bumps and bruises. It’s kind of freaky ending upside in your seat belt. It’s also pretty incredible the damage we did and didn’t have. None of the side windows broke, the roof was fairly intact, no airbags opened, and the trunk doesn’t even look like it was touched. (you can click on the pictures to see them larger).

We are thankful to God for saving us physically, after he has saved us spiritually. We appreciate your prayers as we get over our bumps and bruises.

 For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.  2 Corinthians 5:14-15

I want to inspire them to pursue their dreams, to be all that they are designed to be, and to enjoy the life that God has given them. That’s why this young man’s story inspires me.

Thomas Lake has already risen to the top of his field as a writer, having written for the St. Petersburg Times and Atlanta Magazine and currently for Sports Illustrated as a senior writer. In this video (from a chapel talk at his alma mater, Gordon College) Thomas Lake speaks of his life and where God has brought him at 31 years of age. He speaks of stories and the one story that’s all around us. He speaks eloquently and inspires. I encourage you to watch the whole talk and be inspired yourself.