Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family (with Study Questions) E-Book

Paul David Tripp

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 385

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Paul David Tripp's Bestselling Book on Parenting, Now with Study Questions Sometimes parents wish there was a guaranteed formula for raising good kids—a certain list of rules to follow to ensure they'd have obedient children. But if moms and dads view their role through the lens of God's grace, they will see that the gospel must first shape how they parent before they can effectively shape their children. In the bestselling book Parenting, Paul David Tripp unfolds a more biblical perspective on parenting than merely adhering to a list of rules. He lays out 14 gospel-centered principles that will radically change the way parents think about what it means to raise up a child, informing everything they do as a parent. This edition includes a section of engaging study questions for every chapter, helping individuals and groups reflect on each topic in greater depth.  - Christ-Centered Advice for Families: Explains how the gospel should affect the way parents interact with their children at every age - Engaging Study Questions: Reflect on each chapter alone or as part of a small group - By Bestselling Author Paul David Tripp: Other books include New Morning Mercies, Reactivity, and Lead

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“Paul Tripp constantly turns us back to the life-giving power of the gospel and God’s unfailing grace. Parenting our children is one of life’s greatest challenges, and Paul points us to the one thing that can make a difference—a genuine encounter with the living God.”

TobyMac, hip-hop recording artist; music producer; songwriter

“Simply put, I read everything that Paul Tripp writes. I can’t afford to miss one word.”

Ann Voskamp,New York Times best-selling author, One Thousand Gifts

“This is the most meaningful book I have read all year. It is both theological and practical, a rare combination for a parenting book. For years, people have asked me to write a book on parenting. After reading this, I am convinced that I could never write one better than this. I’m so glad I read this, but I wish I could have read it twenty years ago. After reading Parenting, I was torn. Part of me wanted to sit, cry, and confess all of my failures as a parent. The other part wanted to scream with excitement for the tremendous insight I now have to be a better parent.”

Francis Chan,New York Times best-selling author, Crazy Love and Forgotten God

“I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is simply outstanding. This is Tripp at his best: he shows us the big picture of life with Christ and gets down to the nitty-gritty specifics of walking by grace through faith. Tripp’s manifesto is about more than simply our duty as parents—it’s about our privilege of being ambassadors of Jesus Christ to our kids. Moms and dads from every culture will benefit from Tripp’s call for us to live in light of the grace and hope we have in Jesus.”

Gloria Furman, pastor’s wife, Redeemer Church of Dubai; author, The Pastor’s Wife and Missional Motherhood

“This book is so timely for me. My bride and I are raising four children aged five and under, and we need help! It’s easy to find books with parenting tips on how to correct our children’s behavior, but Paul Tripp’s book goes far beyond behavior; he takes the reader to the source of the problem—the heart. If we understand our children at a heart level and have a proper understanding of the gospel, then we can parent them as God intends. Paul Tripp has written a simple yet profound book. Parents, you need to read this now. You will surely be blessed.”

Webb Simpson, professional golfer; 2012 U.S. Open Champion

“I am an imperfect parent. You probably are too. Buy this book and soak in it. This is not another ‘5 Steps to Becoming a Perfect Parent’—instead, Tripp wants us to see our relationship to God and to our children through a big-picture lens. My wife and I are always-go-never-stop parents of young children. If you know the feeling, this book will be both challenging and refreshing, and ultimately it will be a great blessing to your journey. Tripp has made me think in a fresh way about the extremely important and tremendously challenging task that is everyday parenting. To raise up a child is a great responsibility—let us take it up with reverence, joy, and a loving heart!”

Jacob Tamme, former NFL® tight end

Parenting

Crossway Books by Paul David Tripp

40 Days of Faith

40 Days of Grace

40 Days of Hope

40 Days of Love

A Quest for More: Living for Something Bigger Than You

A Shelter in the Time of Storm: Meditations on God and Trouble

Age of Opportunity: A Biblical Guide for Parenting Teens

Awe: Why It Matters for Everything We Think, Say, and Do

Broken-Down House: Living Productively in a World Gone Bad

Come, Let Us Adore Him: A Daily Advent Devotional

Dangerous Calling: Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry

Do You Believe: 12 Historic Doctrines to Change Your Everyday Life

Forever: Why You Can’t Live without It

How People Change (with Timothy S. Lane)

Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change

Journey to the Cross: A 40-Day Lenten Devotional

Lead: 12 Gospel Principles for Leadership in the Church

Lost in the Middle: Midlife and the Grace of God

Marriage: 6 Gospel Commitments Every Couple Needs to Make

My Heart Cries Out: Gospel Meditations for Everyday Life

New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional

New Morning Mercies for Teens: A Daily Gospel Devotional

Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family

Reactivity: How the Gospel Transforms Our Actions and Reactions

Redeeming Money: How God Reveals and Reorients Our Hearts

Relationships: A Mess Worth Making (with Timothy S. Lane)

Sex in a Broken World: How Christ Redeems What Sin Distorts

Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn’t Make Sense

Sunday Matters: 52 Devotionals to Prepare Your Heart for Church

War of Words: Getting to the Heart of Your Communication Struggles

Whiter Than Snow: Meditations on Sin and Mercy

Parenting

14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family

Paul David Tripp

Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family

© 2016, 2024 by Paul David Tripp

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Josh Dennis

Cover image: Exopixel, Shutterstock.com / Prapass, Shutterstock.com Roman Tsubin, Shutterstock.com

First printing 2016

Reprinted with study questions 2024

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-9360-4 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-9362-8 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-9361-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tripp, Paul David, 1950– author.

Title: Parenting : 14 gospel principles that can radically change your family / Paul David Tripp.

Description: Wheaton : Crossway, 2016. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016011594 (print) | LCCN 2016025563 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433551932 (hc) | ISBN 9781433551963 (epub) | ISBN 9781433551949 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433551956 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: Parents—Religious life. | Parenting—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Child rearing—Religious aspects—Christianity.

Classification: LCC BV4529 .T755 2016 (print) | LCC BV4529 (ebook) | DDC 248.8/45—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016011594

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2024-03-25 12:07:08 PM

To the team of people who partner with me to do what God has called me to do.

Because you love God,

are dedicated to your calling,

and are smarter than me,

I am blessed every day by your work

and freed to do mine.

Contents

Introduction: Ambassadors

1  Calling

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

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.

3  Law

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

4  Inability

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

5  Identity

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

6  Process

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

7  Lost

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

12  Control

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

13  Rest

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

14  Mercy

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

Study Questions

General Index

Scripture Index

Introduction

Ambassadors

your house is noisy and not as clean as you’d like it to be, you and your husband haven’t been out together for a long time, the laundry has piled up once again, you just discovered there’s nothing to pack for lunch, you’ve just broken up another fight, the schedule for the week looks impossible, you seem to have more expenses than money, none of the people around seem to be satisfied, and you feel exhausted and unappreciated.

In the middle of all the endless parenting activities, many parents get lost. They are doing lots of things, lots of good things, but they don’t know why. They’ve been swallowed up into the daily grind of parenting, but they’ve lost sight of what it is that they’re working for or building toward. They don’t understand why these ones that they love have the power to pull such irritation and frustration out of them. The menial tasks that they have to do day after day get reduced to an endless catalog of unattractive duties that don’t seem to have any overarching vision that holds them all together and sanctifies them with meaning and purpose.

As I’ve traveled the world talking about parenting, I’ve had thousands of exhausted parents ask me for more effective strategies for this or that, when what they really need is a big picture parenting worldview that can explain, guide, and motivate all the things that God calls them to do as parents. If you are going not only to cope, but to thrive with vision and joy as a parent, you need more than the next book that gives you seven steps to solving whatever. You need God’s helicopter view of what he’s called you to do. You need a big gospel parenting worldview that will not only make sense of your task, but will change the way you approach it.

Yes, you did read it right. I am deeply persuaded that what is missing in most Christian parent’s parenting are the big grand perspectives and principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ. These perspectives and principles are radical and counterintuitive. They’re simply not natural for us, but they’re essential to being what you’re supposed to be and doing what you’re supposed to do as a parent. When you parent with what the gospel says about God, you, your world, your children, and God’s grace, you not only approach parenting in brand-new ways, but you carry the burden of parenting in a very different way.

I have to be honest here. I wrote a parenting book (Age of Opportunity), and I told myself and repeatedly told others that I was not about to write another one, yet here I am doing just that. Why? Because as I listened to people tell me how they had used Age in the lives of their teenagers, I became increasingly uncomfortable. I kept thinking, “No, that’s not exactly it,” or “No, that’s not what I meant,” or “No, there’s something missing.” It took a while, but it finally hit me that what bothered me in these conversations and what was missing in these parents was the gospel that was the foundation behind everything that I wrote. So with the publisher’s encouragement, I decided to write a parenting book, but not the typical kind. This will not be a book of practical strategies for dealing with children at the various ages of their development. This book will not provide practical steps for dealing with the kinds of things every parent faces. This book is meant to be a reorienting book. It is meant to give you a new way of thinking about and responding to everything that will be on your plate as a parent. This book is meant to give you vision, motivation, renewed strength, and the rest of heart that every parent needs. It is written to give you the big gospel picture of the task to which your Savior has called you.

Lost in the Middle of Your Own Parenting Story

The big picture starts with knowing who you are as a parent. I don’t mean your name, address, and Social Security number. I mean who you are in relation to who God is, to what life is about, and to who your children are. If you don’t have this “who you are” perspective right, you will miss the essence of what God has called you to, and you will do things that no parent should do.

I am afraid that parenting confusion and dysfunction often begin with parents having an ownership view of parenting. It is seldom expressed and often unconscious, but it operates on this perspective of parenting: “These children belong to me, so I can parent them in the way I see fit.” Now, no parent actually says that, but it tends to be the perspective that most of us fall into. In the press of overwhelming responsibilities and a frenetic schedule, we lose sight of what parenting is really about. We look at our children as belonging to us, and we end up doing things that are short-sighted, not helpful in the long-run, more reactive than goal-oriented, and outside of God’s great, big, wise plan.

Ownership parenting is not overtly selfish, abusive, or destructive; it involves a subtle shift in thinking and motivation that puts us on a trajectory that leads our parenting far away from God’s design. This shift is subtle because it takes place in little, mundane moments of family life—moments that seem so small and insignificant that the people in the middle of them are unaware of the movement that has taken place. But the shifts are significant precisely because they do take place in insignificant little moments, because those little moments are the addresses where our parenting lives. Very little of our parenting takes place in grand significant moments that have stopped us in our tracks and commanded our full attention; parenting takes place on the fly when we’re not really paying attention and are greeted with things that we did not know we were going to be dealing with that day. It’s the repeated cycle of little unplanned moments that is the soul-shaping workroom of parenting.

Ownership parenting is motivated and shaped by what parents want for their children and from their children. It is driven by a vision of what we want our children to be and what we want our children to give us in return. (I’ll say more about this later). It seems right, it feels right, and it does many good things, but it is foundationally misguided and misdirected and will not produce what God intends in the lives that he has entrusted to our care. There, I’ve said it! Good parenting, which does what God intends it to do, begins with this radical and humbling recognition that our children don’t actually belong to us. Rather, every child in every home, everywhere on the globe, belongs to the One who created him or her. Children are God’s possession (see Ps. 127:3) for his purpose. That means that his plan for parents is that we would 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. He is not free to think, speak, or act independently. Everything he does, every decision he makes, and every interaction he has must be shaped by this one question: “What is the will and plan of the one who sent me?” The ambassador does not represent his own interest, his own perspective, or his own power. He does everything as an ambassador, or he has forgotten who he is and he will not be in his position for long.

Parenting is ambassadorial work from beginning to end. It is not to be shaped and directed by personal interest, personal need, or cultural perspectives. Every parent everywhere is called to recognize that they have been put on earth at a particular time and in a particular location to do one thing in the lives of their children. What is that one thing? It is God’s will. Here’s what this means at street level: 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. To lose sight of this is to end up with a relationship with our children that at the foundational level is neither Christian nor true parenting because it has become more about our will and our way than about the will and way of our Sovereign Savior King.

I want to say right here and now that I am very bad at what I am now writing about. I like sovereignty, I like ownership, and I like having my will done on earth as God’s will is done in heaven! I often treated my four children (who are now grown) as if they were my possessions. I often suffered from ambassadorial schizophrenia—at moments losing my mind, taking my parenting into my own hands, and doing things that I shouldn’t have done. I was often a very poor example of joyful submission to God’s law. I was often a very poor representative of God’s grace. I was often more propelled by fear than I was by faith. I often wanted short-term gain more than I wanted long-term transformation. There were moments when I forgot who I was, lost my mind, and did things that really didn’t make any sense, or at least weren’t very helpful.

I am going to ask you right now to be honest and admit that you’re like me. You too lose your way and forget who you are in the middle of the endless, repetitive tasks of parenting the children entrusted to your care. There are moments when you too lose your mind. There are times when what you’re saying and doing just isn’t helpful and definitely not ambassadorial.

You just sat down fifteen minutes ago after giving your five-times-a-day lecture on loving your neighbor and are feeling momentarily good about how it went; now you’re back in the family room with your iPad. Before you have a chance to hit the button for your favorite magazine app, you hear angry voices floating down the hallway from the very room you were just in. You can’t believe it! You’re tired, and it feels personal. You want to throw your iPad through the window, but you know doing so would break both. You wish the insanity would stop so you could enjoy just one sane personal moment. You don’t regret that you have children, but at this point you kinda wish they weren’t your children. You’re angry, and you’re about to lose your mind, forgetting who you are and what you’ve been called to do. Emotion is propelling you down the hallway, and that emotion is not love. An agenda is motivating you, and that agenda is not grace. You are in the room and yelling before you even realize you have left your family room chair. You’re talking, but you’re not thinking. You’re reacting, but what you’re doing is not parenting. You’re meting out a catalog of punishments, which you’re later going to have to enforce. You threaten worse if you have to come down that hallway again. You leave the room mumbling something about how you would have never thought of acting that way when you were their age. You throw yourself into the chair, grab your iPad, and open the app, but you’re not paying attention because your emotions are raging. “What do I have to do to get them to listen, to get them to obey for once?” you ask yourself as your emotions calm. You feel a bit guilty, and because you do, you try to convince yourself that your kids deserved it.

Who of us hasn’t been there? What parent can look back on the days, weeks, months, and years that he had with his children with no regret whatsoever? It is so important to humbly recognize how counterintuitive ambassadorial parenting is and to seek the rescue and the power to remember that only God in his amazing grace can provide. Sin makes us all more natural owners than ambassadors. Sin makes us all more demanding than patient. Sin causes all of us to find punishment more natural than grace. Sin makes all of us more able to see and be distressed by the sin, weakness, and failure of others than we are about our own. Sin makes it easier for us to talk at other people rather than listening to them. Here’s what all of this means: the thing that constantly gets in the way of our ambassadorial calling as parents is us! Humbly confessing this is the first step in your ambassadorship.

Owner or Ambassador?

Perhaps you’re thinking at this point, “Paul, I don’t think I treat my children like they’re my possessions. I think I try to serve God in the lives of my children, but I’m not sure.” Well, I want to help you. Maybe the place to begin is to observe that few parents conduct themselves like total owners or complete ambassadors. I think for most of us ownership parenting and ambassadorial parenting represent a daily battle that is fought on the turf of our hearts. We are constantly torn between what we want and what God wants. We are constantly pulled one way by what we think is best and the other way by what God says is best. We at one moment are way too influenced by the values of the surrounding culture and at another moment are very serious in our conviction that a biblical way of thinking must shape our parenting. Sometimes we just want our children to behave so our lives could be easier, while at other moments we accept the fact that parenting is spiritual warfare.

It is helpful to think through, at a practical level, the difference between ownership and ambassadorial parenting. I therefore distinguish between these two models of parenting in four areas that every parent somehow, in some way, deals with: identity, work, success, and reputation. The way you think about and interact with these four things will expose and define who you think you are as a parent and what you think your job is in raising your children.

1. 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. Their children tend to be saddled with the unbearable burden of their parents’ sense of self-worth. I have to say this: parenting is a miserable place to look for your identity, if for no other reason than the fact that every parent parents sinners. Children come into the world with significant brokenness inside of them that causes them to push against the authority, wisdom, and guidance of their parents. Parents who are looking to their children for identity tend to take their children’s failures personally, as if they were done against them intentionally, and respond to their children with personal hurt and anger. But the reality is that God simply does not give you children in order for you to feel that your life is worthwhile.

Ambassador: Parents who approach parenting as representatives come to it with a deep sense of identity and are motivated by meaning and purpose. They don’t need to get that from their children because they have gotten it from the One whom they represent: the Lord Jesus Christ. Because of this they are freed from coming to their children hoping that they will get from them what no child is able to give. They are freed from asking family life to give them life because they have found life and their hearts are at rest. Because of this, they are now freed to forget themselves and parent with the selflessness and sacrifice that ambassadorial parenting requires.

2. 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. They have a vision of what they want their children to be, and they think that their work as parents is to use their authority, time, money, and energy to form their children into what they have conceived that they should be. I have counseled many children who were breaking under the burden of the constant pressure of parents who had a concrete vision and were determined that these children would be what these parents had decided they would be. Owner parents tend to think that they have the power and personal resources to mold their children into the children they envision.

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 know that what they have been called to be are instruments in the hands of One who is gloriously wise and is the giver of the grace that has the power to rescue and transform the children who have been entrusted to their care. 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.

3. 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. Things like academic performance, athletic achievement, musical ability, and social likability become the horizontal markers of how well they have done their jobs. Now these things are not unimportant, but they simply are unable to measure successful parenting. Good parents don’t always produce good kids, and parents should constantly be asking themselves where they get the set of values that tell them whether they have “good” kids or not. I am afraid that many good parents live with long-term feelings of failure because their children have not turned out the way they hoped.

Ambassador: These parents have faced the scary truth that they have no power at all to produce anything in their children. Because of this they haven’t attached their definition of successful parenting to a catalog of horizontal outcomes. Successful parenting is not first about what you’ve produced; rather, it’s first about what you have done. Let me say it this way: 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.

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

Owner: Owner parents unwittingly turn their children into their trophies. They tend to want to be able to parade their children in public to the applause of the people around them. This is why so many parents struggle with the crazy, zany phases that their children go through as they are growing up. They’re not so much concerned about what that craziness says about their children, but what it says about them. Children in these homes feel both the burden of carrying their parents’ reputation and the sting of their disappointment and embarrassment. Owner parents tend to be angry and disappointed with their children, not first because they’ve broken God’s law, but because whatever they have done has brought hassle and embarrassment to them.

Ambassador: These parents have come to understand that parenting sinners will expose them to public misunderstanding and embarrassment somehow, someway. They have come to accept the humbling messiness of the job God has called them to do. And they understand that if their children grow and mature in life and godliness, they become not so much their trophies, but trophies of the Savior that they have sought to serve. For them, it’s God who does the work and God who gets the glory; they are just gratified that they were able to be the tools that God used.

Are you ready to chuck the burden of being an owner and begin to experience what parenting looks like when you know that you have been called to represent the message, methods, and character of the Owner of your kids? Are you ready to be freed from the burden of trying to create change, and to experience the rest to be found in functioning as a tool of the One whose grace alone has the power to change? Then this book is for you. It is meant to yank you out of the daily grind and to consider the big picture of what God is inviting you to be part of as he works in the hearts and lives of your children. It is meant to help you see how radically different parenting becomes when you quit trying to produce change and become a willing tool of the grace that rescues, forgives, and changes. Each chapter will introduce and explain a parenting principle that takes that grace seriously. Many of you are exhausted, discouraged, and frustrated. How about considering a new and better way: the way of grace?

1

Calling

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

you’re frustrated because for some reason on this particular Tuesday night your two-year-old daughter has decided that she will not, under any circumstance, pressure, or threat, eat her peas. You’re not asking her to eat poison; they’re peas—silly little, round, green vegetal orbs! What in the world is in her mind right now? Why do these little tasks have to be so hard?

You can’t believe it—another note from his teacher. This is the fifth note in three weeks, and he’s only in kindergarten! For some reason he won’t stop talking in class during the moments when he’s not supposed to be talking. He talks when the teacher talks. He talks when other students are trying to talk. He talks with his mouth full during lunchtime. He talks his way through his nap time. He talks when you’re trying to talk to him about talking too much! And you thought that finally sending him to school would simplify your life.

It’s been one of those days. You’re convinced it’s a sibling conspiracy against you. It feels as if your children have plotted together to make this day particularly difficult. It feels as if it’s you against The Legion of Rebellious Ones. You’ve lost your patience too many times. You’ve said and done embarrassing things. You raised your voice and made ominous threats, but nothing has seemed to help. You’ve lost control of your own house and, silently and with a bit of guilt, you wish for the simple days of before.

You’ve just had one of the best conversations you’ve ever had as a parent; it’s hard to imagine that an eleven-year-old could be so deep, so philosophical. You were caught off guard; you had no idea that in this passing moment time would stop and profound considerations would be on the table. You didn’t feel very prepared; you stumbled over your words. You hoped what you said was helpful, understandable, and wise. You hope the way you said things would open up more conversations. You just wish an alarm would have gone off, telling you that things were about to get very serious.

She seems embarrassed by you. It really does hurt. She used to run into your arms for comfort and love. She loved to hold your hand as she skipped her way through the mall. She would dress up in your clothes and pretend to be you. She’d get on a stool in the kitchen and “help” you cook dinner. She would run to you with that great big smile when she won the ribbon at gymnastics. Now she wants you to drop her off at the mall and asks you please not to come in. She doesn’t really want you to pick her up from school and when you do, she wants you to park down the street. She doesn’t bring many friends home and when she does, they hide in her room out of sight and separate from you. You want her to run up to you and bury her head in your chest and say, “I love you. Mommy,” like she used to, but you don’t think she will.

You’ve taken them to a movie; it’s the one thing you all enjoy doing as a family. It was billed as a fun family comedy, but it’s been filled with sexual innuendo from beginning to end. You didn’t catch the last part of the movie because your mind had wandered away thinking of what you should say, how you should handle what your children were exposed to. How much did they understand? If you talk to them, will you just be opening a can of worms? Is it time to have a very frank talk about sex? Are you ready? Are they ready? How will you do it? When will you do it? You wish you had a script to follow.

As you carry the final bit of his stuff up to his dorm room, you tell yourself that he’s a good kid, but you really wonder if he’s ready. You look at him, and you don’t see a university student; you see a leaky-nosed, scuffed-kneedsix-year-old begging to spend the night with a friend. He did okay in high school; no drugs, sex, or jail time. He was determined to go away to college, somewhere new, somewhere different from home. You worry that his dorm has double the students that were in his high school. The girls walking around the hallways of his coed dorm make you uncomfortable. You want to grab him, throw him and his pile of stuff into the car, and get out of there as fast as you can before you lose him completely. He tells you not to worry, that he will be okay, but it doesn’t help. You pray with him before you leave, but you’re still a wreck. You ask him to call later, but you don’t think he will.

She finished college. She’s come back home while she looks for a job. You thought that your parenting days were over, but they’re clearly not. The state of her room, her choice of friends, and the way she spends her time make you wonder if she is ready to be a full-fledged adult. You have mixed emotions. You loved having your house and your time back again, but you missed being a mom. Now she’s back and it’s different. You know she still needs you, that she’ll need guidance as she makes her launch, but you’re not sure she realizes it. Every night you try to go to bed and sleep at the normal time, but you never really get to sleep until you hear the door and know she’s home safe. You’re tired of being a parent and thankful that she’s home, all at the same time.

You’re haunted by regret. You don’t want to be, but you are; not about anything big, but about all those little moments of failure. You remember the little promises you made that you got too busy to keep. The moments when you yelled when you should have been listening. You remember how hard it was to have children and be fair and how often you failed. You remember falling asleep at recitals and hope they never knew. You remember making ridiculous threats and hope they don’t remember as well as you do. You remember that time you stopped the van, made them all get out, and told them that you wouldn’t let them back in until they could get along with one another. You remember that it was easier to announce the law than to give grace. You’d like to be free of regret, but you’re not.

What is everything I just described about? What unifies all these parental scenarios? They are all about a calling—one of the most significant callings that could ever be laid in the lap of a human being. If you would stop and think about its full ramifications, it would make you run away unless it had already made you too weak in the knees. In a way it’s insane for anyone to actually think that they could take this on. You’d have to be delusional to think that you’re actually prepared. It has the quality of standing before a 747 and telling yourself that you could pick it up if you wanted to. It seems that this could possibly be the one mistake of an otherwise perfect God. Is it really true that God asks parents to be his agents-on-hand for the forming of a human soul? Really? Let’s consider the enormity of God’s plan and what it means for you as parents.

Parents as Treasure Hunters

Here’s what you need to understand: everything you do and say in your life, every choice that you make, and everything you decide to invest in is a reflection of a system of internalized values in your heart. As beings made in God’s likeness, we do not function by instinct. Rather, we are value-motivated human beings. Your words, your time commitments, your finances, your emotional highs and lows, your relationships, and your spiritual habits together form a portrait of what is really valuable to you. Think with me for a moment; if I were to watch with you the video of your last two months, what would I conclude is of true value to you? Or, if I were to watch the last few months of you parenting your kids, what would I say about the level of importance given to this foundational task that God has assigned to you?

I write in Marriage that when we talk about values, no passage is more helpful than Matthew 6:19–34. (Why don’t you stop and read it right now?) In this passage Jesus uses the word treasure to capture the fact that we all live in pursuit of what we’ve named as important. We are all alike in the fact that we all get up every morning and dig down into the soil of our lives to find some kind of treasure. And the way we speak and behave is our attempt to get out of our lives and relationships the things that are important to us. Now, this is hard to accept, but it needs to be said: parenting is either a thing of the highest treasure to you, and that is demonstrated in your choices, words, and actions every day, or it’s not.

So it’s humbling but helpful to admit that on this side of our final home, many, many things in our lives as parents compete for a place in the treasure center of our hearts. For example, we live in a world of beautiful physical things, either created by God or crafted by man out of what God created. These physical things play to the quest for beauty that God built inside us, but they can command a place in our hearts that God never intended. And if the pleasure of physical possessions becomes too important for you, it will create all kinds of dysfunction in tasks that God has called you to as a parent. For example, parents who are too controlled by possessions (houses, cars, lawns, furniture, artwork, etc.) tend to be so busy acquiring, maintaining, financing, and protecting their possessions that they have way too little time to invest in their children in the way God intended. Or parents who love possessions too much tend to be so uptight about protecting their possessions that they unwittingly turn their home into an uncomfortable furniture and craft museum that their children are now tasked to live in. It’s possible for a mom to be more worried about stains on her couch than the soul of her son, or for a dad to be more focused on the shine and maintenance of his new car than the heart of his daughter. 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?

Or how about success? I am persuaded that the desire for success is another thing that the Creator wired inside us. In the image of the Creator, we’re designed to create. We were made to be builders, managers, and doers. We were designed to change our surroundings. We were created to leave an imprint of our work as we move on to another place. We were made to strategize and achieve. Because of all of this achievement, success is important to us. We all want to be successful. In fact, if you have no motivation to succeed anywhere in your life, if you don’t care about accomplishing anything, we would all think that something is emotionally or spiritually wrong with you and that you need help. But, like possessions, this very good, God-created thing can become a bad thing in your life if it becomes the ruling treasure it was never meant to be.

Thousands and thousands of children are handed over every day to people they don’t know because success in work and career has become too important for their parents. Since neither parent is willing to step away from their work outside the home for fear of its long-term implications on their career and finances, no one is left to take care of the children, so someone else must be hired to do it. I know this is controversial, and I would never judge a couple who have their children in day care without knowing the details of why they made that decision, but I am troubled that we are not talking about this more. I am saddened by the numbers of children who are not with their parents for the bulk of the day during their formative years. I am saddened by the growing cultural comfortability with “latchkey” children. I am concerned about how many exhausted parents pick up their children at the end of their day and are just not able to have the kind of patience and grace that they need for the rest of the evening with their children. This is not a matter of a busy schedule, but busyness that is a matter of values. How many children rarely see their fathers because Dad is off to work before the kids are up and around and home from work after they go to bed? By the time they are teenagers, they are used to Dad not being involved with their lives and don’t expect attention or participation from him anymore. How has the value of career success impacted your commitment to the work that God has called you to as parents?

Fasten your seatbelts; I’m going to be even more controversial here. I am deeply persuaded that 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. Perhaps this is the most deceptive treasure temptation of all. There are many, many ministry fathers and mothers who ease their guilty consciences about their inattention and absence by telling themselves that they are doing “the Lord’s work.” So they accept another speaking engagement, another short-term missions trip, another ministry move, or yet another evening meeting thinking that their values are solidly biblical, when they are consistently neglecting a significant part of what God has called them to. Sadly, their children grow up thinking of Jesus as the one who over and over again took their mom and dad from them.