(Part 1 of 3)
“Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from Him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth. How joyful is the man whose quiver is full of them!”- Psalm 127: 3-5a
Parenting, according to Wikipedia, is the process of promoting and supporting the physical, emotional, social and intellectual development of a child from infancy to adulthood. If I could be so bold, I would also add spiritual development to that list.
That is quite a task for those brave enough to tackle parenting. When my wife and I first became parents of our first born 25 years ago, we were blissfully ignorant of that definition. Or at least we were ignorant of the monumental effort that it would require. In fact, we were shocked by how little instruction we were given at the hospital. The first night the nursing staff was wonderful, they came in every 12 minutes and showed us how to bath the baby, change the first disgusting diaper, as well as how to feed and swaddle the baby. The next night, we were on our own. And then, they put us in our car and sent us home without an instruction manual! I would have liked to have known about colic, ear infections and temper tantrums. Right? We spent mosts of our early parenting years just trying to keep him alive and when we found out that we could do that, we decided having another child would be a good idea. It wasn’t until after our oldest daughter was born that we began to really think about what is our ultimate goal as parents?
Have you ever asked yourself that question? What is the goal of parenting? Shouldn’t there be a big picture? Isn’t parenting important enough hat we should have some sort of a destination in mind, so that we are not haphazardly raising our kids with no real objective or outcome anticipated. As a Christian, who lives by a biblical worldview, my objective may look differently from some of yours. As I began to look deeper into the objective of parenting I came across a quote by Pastor Craig Groschel that really sums up well my parenting objective:
“Our greatest priority as Christian parents is to gradually transfer our children’s dependence away from us until it rests solely on God.”
For a long time I thought I was to raise my kids to be independent, unfortunately, many times becoming independent from you means that they also want to be independent from what you believe; including faith in God. In reality, however, my mission as a parent isn’t to make them more independent, but rather to shift their dependence from me, solely onto God. In this way, God remains a focal point in their life, founded on their own personal relationship with Him and not based on my faith as a parent.
How do we do that? How do we champion that in our homes? It begins with modeling and training.
Pastor Scott Burr
Dayspring Community Church
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