Be a Parent, For it is God Who Will Change Their Hearts

Everyone is an expert parent...until they have kids. We all have ideas in mind on how we would do things in certain parenting situations, either based on how our own parents did or did not raise us. Some people, like me, spend a ton of time reading and asking questions from experienced parents in order to be as prepared as possible for the arrival of the little sanctifiers.

With six years of parenting down (and now three kids with more on the way) I am thankful that God gave me so many resources ahead of time. It has prepared us for inevitable challenges and been a grace to create some sense of order in our home. It doesn't guarantee that our kids will always be well-behaved and especially doesn't guarantee their salvation, but it gave us something to aim for, something to evaluate ourselves, not so much our kids.

Early on in our parenting as we were establishing our family's routines and traditions with our children's early obedience and ultimate salvation in view, we had so many people who felt like they wanted to throw cold water on our fire to be godly parents. I believe their motives were honestly good, but it was discouraging. So many people wanted to remind us that our kids salvation didn't depend upon us so they would say, "You can't guarantee they'll believe in Jesus. Your kids will have to give an account to God on their own. You could be the best parents in the world and they still might reject your faith."

Yes, that is true. But it always bothered me. Did God not intend the family structure to have influence on the children in the home? What is the point of God's wisdom for the home if we are just supposed to resign to the fact that 80% of our children will turn away from Christ? It seemed to me that the exception to godly parenting was losing your children, not the rule. But something so different is playing out in our churches.

Most people fall into one of two ditches; we either set up a bunch of rules and boundaries thinking we will create obedient children through our own effort (even though they are biblical rules) or we resign to the fact that we don't have control over our children's hearts anyway and don't apply any biblical principles. Both produce children who don't know true grace. But we don't have a category for walking the narrow path in between. We usually just say that we need to balance the two.

I've never been a fan of the balance argument. It sounds to me like compromise; sometimes we need to give a little on grace and emphasize the law and others we need to stand firm on our boundaries and forget grace. Isn't there a place where both justice and mercy express themselves?

Oh right. The cross! In redeeming us, God doesn't relax his justice to set us free from our sin. That would be corrupt (Prov 17:15). Our salvation is a mystery in which God creates Christ's righteousness in us so that we are no longer guilty sinners and Jesus takes our sin upon himself so God can justly punish our sin (2 Cor 5:21).

How, then, does this apply to parenting?

I think the process of progressive sanctification parallels our parenting. Salvation isn't complete the day we are converted. God continues to actually make us righteous through a process we call progressive sanctification.

Writing to the Philippians, Paul commands something strange for the sanctification of a believer: "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (Phil 2:12-13). Sanctification is a process by which we pursue faithfulness and through that God shows that he is working in us. Paul is serious when he commands believers to remain diligent and faithful, but then he says also that God is working our sanctification in us. It is the mystery of God's sovereignty and our responsibility.

A parent's role should be getting clearer. We do not seek a balance between our role as parents and God's role as the shaper of a child's heart. It is both. Work out your parenting with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in your kids.

We work because God is working in us. We parent because God is parenting through us. It is not an either/or dichotomy. Godly parenting is 100% diligence on the parents' part and 100% trust that God is working in us to produce salvation in our children.

An example of this is the response of the Israelites who just returned from exile to rebuild the city of Jerusalem to their opponents who sought to disrupt their rebuilding project. In Nehemiah 4, Sanballat mocked the Israelites and threatened to prevent them from finishing their work. Israel's response was a perfect example of diligent work trusting in the sovereignty of God. "And we prayed to our God and set a guard as a protection against them day and night" (Neh 4:9). They trusted God to protect them as they set people around the city to protect them. Faithfulness is neither praying to God to work and doing nothing nor is it doing the work without praying to God.

And so goes parenting. We work to teach our kids about God and his work in the world through the word. We work to discipline them when they are disobedient. We train them with wisdom in godly living. We have high expectations for the person they are to become and we aren't surprised when their sin (or our own) trips them up along the way. And we do all this with complete hope, not in the effectiveness of our parenting, but in the power of God to use it for the good of our children.