Our natural (but not necessarily holy) inclination to make life as easy as possible for our children, coupled with our focus on what we really want them to achieve, ultimately tells us parents what we value most about life. In what we stress with our children, we reveal the true passion of our own hearts.
[Read the Bible Gateway Blog post, Sacred Marriage: An Interview with Gary Thomas]
What is the most important thing for our children? Is it to make it into Harvard or Yale law school? Is it to make it to age 21 without suffering a single scar or a single broken heart? Is it to raise a child who says, “Yes, sir,” and “No, ma’am,” and who becomes financially independent? Though these are worthy goals, ask yourself a question. Is a child who has never been in the hospital, who is comfortable and familiar with the protocol of eating at a fancy restaurant, and who is a managing partner at a major law firm—but who cheats on his or her spouse, acts like a jerk to others, and whose soul is in eternal peril—really the kind of son or daughter you want to produce?
The Bible gives us a strong warning in 1 Samuel. High Priest Eli had two sons who slept with women workers and who gorged themselves on God’s offerings. Their father’s position allowed them to live in relative luxury, and though Eli despised what they did, he didn’t stop them. You might say he chose his sons’ happiness over their holiness and, in doing so, elicited God’s wrath. “Why do you honor your sons more than me?” God scolded Eli (1 Samuel 2:29). Eli’s sons became God’s enemies, to the point that the Bible tells us, “It was the Lord’s will to put them to death” (1 Samuel 2:25).
How terrifying to think that my kids could feel happy on the way to receiving the full brunt of God’s wrath! I want my children to echo Paul, who called himself “a servant of Christ Jesus . . . set apart for the gospel of God” (Romans 1:1). Rather than seeking mere behavior modification, sacred parenting points our children to their need for a relationship with God and his wonderful answer to this need. If they never experience this emptiness, they will never appreciate God’s remedy.
Another way of putting this is that worldly failure can set our kids up to seek and receive God’s grace. Failure may teach them that they can’t do it on their own—they need the empowering Holy Spirit. If we protect our kids from failure, we may inadvertently protect them from believing that they need God. They will never sense their need for a Savior. They will always take Adam’s lame approach, blaming someone else for their own spiritual failing. And ultimately they may face God’s wrath because of it.
This means accepting a very difficult but very important truth: Ultimately God’s kingdom far outweighs in significance the personal comfort of my children. As much as I adore my children, as crazy as I feel about them, I betray them if I put their happiness and comfort over God’s overall purpose in their lives and in our world.
I confess that it hurts even to type those words! Of course I want my kids to be safe and well fed, and to achieve their full potential, educationally and otherwise. But even more important to me is that they become recipients of God’s salvation and servants of their Savior. If they reject this gospel, they will be justly condemned. Even more difficult, I will have to agree with that condemnation—which means that if I try to craft a world without pain and consequences, I blind them to the reality that there will be eternal consequences, involving great pain, if they persist in rebellion against their Creator.
One time, one of our children got upset with us following a bout of discipline occasioned by an improper attitude toward us. I told her, “Look, this isn’t just about the attitude you have toward your mother or me; it’s about the health of your soul as you accept the authority God has placed over you. If I simply turn a blind eye to your attitude, I risk putting your eternal soul in peril, and I love you too much to do that.”
Children are our heart’s mirror. How we interact with them truly does reveal what we value most about life.
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Parenting is a school for spiritual formation, says author Gary Thomas, and our children are our teachers. The journey of caring for, rearing, training, and loving our children profoundly alters us forever . . . even when the journey is sometimes a rough one.
Sacred Parenting is unlike any other parenting book on the market. This is not a “how-to” book that teaches readers the ways to discipline their kids or help them achieve their full potential. Instead of a discussion about how parents change their children, Sacred Parenting turns the tables and demonstrates how God uses children to change their parents.
Stepping beyond the overly-tilled soil of method books, you can learn a whole new side of parenting. you’ll be encouraged by stories that tell how other parents handled the challenges and difficulties of being a parent – and how their children transformed their relationship with God.
The lessons in this book are timeless. And in this edition, Gary Thomas includes some additional insights and stories that he’s learned and lived over the past fifteen years of his own parenting. He has found that the lessons have remained much the same but there are new applications for new generations who are just now discovering his book.
Gary L.Thomas is Writer in Residence and serves on the teaching team at Second Baptist Church, Houston, Texas and the author of 18 books that have sold more than a million copies worldwide and have been translated into a dozen languages. He and his wife, Lisa, have been married for 30 years.