Sunday, 9 October 2016

You Don’t Need More Parenting Advice



Article by - Paul Tripp
Guest Contributor
For the past two decades, I have grown increasingly uncomfortable. I have grown uncomfortable as I’ve listened to people tell me how they’ve used my book on parenting, Age of Opportunity, or my brother Tedd’s book, Shepherding a Child’s Heart. Something was missing in the way these parents were interpreting and applying the strategies detailed in the pages of our books.
It took me a while to figure out what was off. Then it hit me: the missing piece was the gospel. This sounds obvious, almost cliché, but the significance of remembering or neglecting the gospel in parenting is greater than we often realize.
The Biblical Picture of Parenting
Whenever I travel to speak, I always have someone come up to me afterward asking for an effective strategy for this, a guaranteed formula for that, or a proven approach to some other struggle. I try to impart helpful guidance in the moments we have together, but what they (and I) really need is a big-picture, gospel worldview that can explain, guide, and motivate all the things that God is calling them to do.
Take marriage, for example. If you want a healthy relationship with your spouse, clicking on Buzzfeed’s “Fourteen Ways to Make Date Night More Romantic” will not get you there. You need the gospel of Jesus Christ to establish foundational principles of unity, understanding, and love — not a listicle of tips and tricks.
This is what we’re after in parenting. If you desire not only to cope but to thrive with vision and joy as a parent, you need more than seven steps to solving whatever. You need God’s helicopter view of what he’s called you to do. You need the gospel of Jesus Christ to reveal the foundational principles that will not only help you make sense of your task, but will change the way you approach it.
Often, these biblical principles are counter-intuitive to the natural principles of our flesh. Nevertheless, they’re essential to understanding who we’re supposed to be and what we’re supposed to do in all things, including parenting.
Fourteen Christian Principles of Parenting
This may seem hypocritical. I just told you not to rely on BuzzFeed’s list of fourteen ways to make date night more romantic, and now I’m offering a list for Christian parents. The difference is that this list isn’t comprised of strategies or techniques: these are fourteen overarching themes in Scripture that, when properly understood, offer a vivid picture of God’s calling for parents.
1. Calling: Nothing is more important in your life than being one of God’s tools to shape a human soul.
In a couple brief but profound paragraphs, Deuteronomy 6:4–9 and 20–23 summarize the value that God places on parenting.
2. Grace: God never calls you to a task without giving you what you need to do it. He never sends you without going with you.
Ephesians 3:20–21 provides us with the single redemptive reality that makes parenting possible.
3. Law: Your children need God’s law, but you cannot ask the law to do what only grace can accomplish.
Romans 7:7 tells us that we need the grace of wisdom that God’s law alone can give, but the rest of the chapter reveals how only the Spirit can produce change.
4. Inability: Recognizing what you are unable to do is essential to good parenting.
God has tasked parents with many things, but nowhere in his word has he tasked you with the responsibility to create heart change.
5. Identity: If you are not resting as a parent in your identity in Christ, you will look for identity in your children.
Second Peter 1:3–9 warns about identity amnesia. When applied to parenting, it means that when you’re not getting your identity from God and the work of his Son, you will probably try to get it from your children.
6. Process: You must be committed as a parent to long-view parenting because change is a process and not an event.
Even the world’s best teacher — Jesus — had a process mentality and, because he did, he was willing to leave his work to unfinished people (see John 16:12–15).
7. Lost: As a parent you’re not dealing just with bad behavior, but a condition that causes bad behavior.
Luke 15 is a tremendous help to parents, because it sheds light on the condition that is the reason for all you have to deal with in the thoughts, desires, choices, words, and actions of your children.
8. Authority: 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. The famous Ephesians 6:1–4 parenting passage is very helpful for this principle.
9. Foolishness: 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.
Psalm 53:1–3 reveals that your child has the heart of a fool and, because he does, he is a danger to himself and desperately needs God’s arms of rescue that come through your parenting care.
10. Character: 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.
Romans 1:25 and 28–32 connect character issues to the most significant of all human functions — worship.
11. False Gods: You are parenting a worshiper, so it’s important to remember that what rules your child’s heart will control his behavior.
This should be no surprise, considering how often the Bible warns us (see Exodus 20:3, Deuteronomy 11:16, 1 Samuel 12:21, and many more).
12. Control: The goal of parenting is not control of behavior, but rather heart and life change.
No matter how successfully you control their choices and behavior, your control cannot and will not free your kids from a deeper need – a clean heart (Psalm 51:6, 10, 17).
13. Rest: It is only rest in God’s presence and grace that will make you a joyful and patient parent.
This may surprise you, but I cannot think of any directive from the mouth of Jesus that is a more appropriate call to every Christian parent than the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18–20).
14. Mercy: No parent gives mercy better than one who is convinced that he desperately needs it himself.
Hebrews 4:14–16 gives us a model for a life-long mission of humbly, joyfully, and willingly giving mercy.
Parenting by Gospel Grace
Many Christian mothers and fathers are exhausted, discouraged, and frustrated. It’s time we consider a new and better way: the way of grace. These fourteen gospel principles are 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.
They are meant to yank you out of the daily grind and have you consider the big picture of what God is inviting you to be part of: the high and holy call to be an essential part of his mission of rescuing the children he has given you.
In all these things, it’s not just about the mission that he has sent you on, but the fact that he has gone with you. Parents, God faithfully parents you, so that by his faithful grace you can, in turn, faithfully parent your children. In every moment of parenting, our heavenly Father is working on everybody in the room.
Paul Tripp is a pastor and conference speaker. He is author of Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family.



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Saturday, 8 October 2016

Fight Sin, Find Rest









        
We close out the week with a question from a listener named Bob. “Pastor John, I struggle with understanding what the Bible teaches on grace and how I should live in light of this wonderful gift. I’ve been taught to be killing sin or it will be killing me. But I’ve also been taught to relax — that there is grace enough in the Holy Spirit to take care of us. This all makes my head spin and seems a bit dangerous for how comfortable I can get with my sin! I know that we should not sin so grace abounds, but then how ought we to live? What’s a biblical view of grace in our sanctification?”
There are some head-spinning things in the Bible, and one of the callings of teachers and one of the hopes I have for this podcast is I can keep his head from spinning off.
The first thing I think I should do is clarify what might be a slight distortion of the meaning of God’s grace in the way the question is posed. Bob asks or contrasts the work of killing sin with a kind of relaxation. He contrasts the work of killing sin with a kind of relaxation that seems to say that grace is what you are enjoying when you relax, but something else is operating when you are working or striving. He says: But I have also been taught to relax. There is grace enough in the Holy Spirit to take care of us. Well, yes, and a lot of people have that view.
“Grace is not just the gift of restfulness, but the power of God to enable us to work for holiness.”  
The problem with it biblically is that grace in the New Testament is not just the gift of restfulness, but the power of God to enable us to strive for holiness and work for holiness. For example, 1 Corinthians 15:10, “By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.” So, the first thing I want to say to Bob is: Don’t frame the question that way. Don’t say that the Bible sometimes teaches us to strive and sometimes teaches us to be relaxed in grace. Rather say how, Pastor John, do we put together the biblical exhortations to strive and work and fight by grace with the biblical exhortations to rest and be content in grace? That is the real head-spinner for anybody who reads the Bible carefully.
So, the New Testament says things like — and he knows this, he’s citing them — Hebrews 12:14, “Strive . . . for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.” Romans 8:13, “By the Spirit put to death the deeds of the body.” And Luke 13:24, “Strive to enter through the narrow door. For many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able.” Now right there in Luke 13:24, those words of Jesus, there is a clue. At least, it points to a clue of how it is that people who are justified by faith alone and who believe they are secure in Christ and will make it to heaven by God’s grace, how do those people go through the narrow door? How do they strive?
The reason I say it is a clue is because there is a parallel in Matthew 7:13–14, which says this: “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” Now that sounds, whoa, goodnight, like the Christian life is just: hard, narrow, work, strive. Yes.
“As long as you prefer this world and sin over Christ, the only way to conceive of the Christian life is killing sin.”
However, four chapters later in Matthew — that is why I think Matthew is the best help here, because you are dealing in the same Gospel with the same Jesus talking the same language: Matthew 11:28–30, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” You can just feel it being lifted, right? Verse 30: “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” So, in Matthew 7:14 “the way is hard that leads to life” and in Matthew 11:30 the yoke of Jesus is “easy” and “light.” So, I get why his head is spinning. My head spins.
So, one of the greatest questions in life is how those fit together. And you may take a lifetime to live it, if not learn it. And here is my suggestion for how I put those together. And you can think it through on your own. The fight, the striving, the narrow, the hard, the work, the warfare is not a striving to get Christ or to earn salvation. It is a striving precisely to rest. Now, I know that sounds like a contradiction, but think of it this way: When Jesus calls us to come to him and rest, he means rest in him, find your soul resting in him. We are to find Jesus to be our rest. Or, to use different words — and it is important to use these words — find Jesus to be our contentment. Find Jesus to be our peace. Find Jesus to be our satisfaction. That is what Jesus is for us, and he is bidding us come and find him to be that for us. And when Jesus is becoming that for us in large measure, that is our victory over competing pleasures of sin.
Therefore, it is warfare. The way we kill sin, the way we successfully strive and work to put sin to death is by doing whatever it takes to be more happy in Jesus, more restful in Jesus, more content and satisfied in Jesus than in sin. So all striving, all working, all fighting is a striving and working and fighting to rest, to be content, to be satisfied, to be happy in Jesus. This is the only way of gospel sanctification. If you don’t put to death sinful temptation by a superior satisfaction in Jesus, but only by your willpower, then you are going to get the glory and not Jesus. And that is not biblical sanctification.
“All striving, all working, all fighting is to rest, to be content, to be satisfied, to be happy in Jesus.”   
First Peter 4:11 says, let him who serves serve in “the strength that God supplies” so that in everything God may get the glory through Jesus. So, how do we strive and work and fight to serve God? Answer: by receiving power and grace from God so that God gets the glory. And that power flows through faith: faith in God’s promises. And the essence of faith in promises is being satisfied in the promises, trusting in the promises, resting in the promises, being content in the promises. And that satisfaction is the rest of Matthew 11.
So, the reason Jesus says it is hard is because we love sin. We don’t love to rest. We love to find our satisfaction in this world and in sin. And he says: As long as you are preferring this world over me, sin over me, then the only way for you to conceive of the Christian life is killing. You must kill that. But the goal of the killing is the rest. And if you are already at rest in Jesus and he is a superior satisfaction to you over all sin, he is not going to have to fight: you are there. But nobody is there. So, in this way, we fight, and every day God gives us measures of restfulness and we defeat sin.


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John Piper (@JohnPiper) is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including A Peculiar Glory.



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