Parenting Out of Faith in Jesus
Stop for a minute and calculate your children’s ages. Subtract those ages from 18, and that is the number of years you have remaining with your child under your roof. Psalm 90:12 is a prayer of Moses asking God to “Teach us to number our days, that we may present to God a heart of wisdom.” Only God knows the number of our days, but I believe this verse is telling us that we need to reflect on our time as a gift and not squander it. And certainly, this applies to child-rearing.
While your children are under your roof, parenting them is your most important task; it is the task where you invest most of your time and energy. Is your mindset focused on inviting the Lord to build your house, because unless He does, those who build it labor in vain (Psalm 127:1). How is this achieved? By faith. What is faith? It is simply putting your trust in the work of another – trust in the work of Christ to build your family. As you teach and train your children, is your mindset dependent on the Lord to work in you, through the power of the Holy Spirit? It is doing the work via faith-walking (not sleep-walking), but faith-walking. Ask the Lord to give you this kind of faith.
The challenge: How do I set my mind on faith-walking when there is so much noise in my world? I understand. This current culture is clamoring for our attention and time. Each day there are many ways and opportunities in which we can invest our time. Sign up for this, respond to that, fix a meal for a friend, serve at church, and so forth. There are many good things and several better things, but the best is growing in our own relationship with the Lord because out of that relationship develops all others---including our relationship with our spouse and our children.
Parenting means that you probably can’t do all the things that you could otherwise do. It might affect your golf handicap or your tennis game. It might mean that your home isn’t always perfectly tidy. And, it might mean saying no to something, so you can say yes to your spouse, or say yes to pursuing a quiet heart, reading your Bible, or simply resting while the baby is napping.
Parenting is the most self-sacrificing calling on the planet. Plans get changed; dreams might be put on hold. Your energy and efforts are geared toward another life or two, or three, or more. You wonder how you can get through another day. You are bone-weary and tired.
You ask yourself: How is this humanly possible? I dare say it’s not…apart from Christ. The grand message of rearing children is recognizing our daily need for Jesus. Our part is receiving by faith the finished work on the cross. And verse 2 of Psalm 127 tells us that when we don’t live by faith, we “eat the bread of anxious toil,” and all we do turns out to be “in vain.” When we think it is all up to us, then we become fearful. Parenting is partnering with Jesus. He will teach us how to speak and guide our children’s hearts, not merely their external behaviors. While constantly guiding little hearts toward their need for a Savior we are, at the same time, recognizing our own daily need for His transforming power to guide and ‘parent’ us.
The antidote to fear is faith. Faith in Jesus to build your home. This begins by knowing Jesus as your Savior. If you do, are you looking to Jesus each day and depending on Him for His strength and His wisdom to rear your children? Oswald Chambers said, “There is no condition of life in which we cannot abide in Jesus. We must learn to abide in Him wherever we are placed” Parenting is putting our hearts on the altar of transformation and renewing our minds with His Word (Ro. 12:1-2).
