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If you’re a Christian parent, at some point, church will probably be a challenge for you and your kids. It was for me, and yet in retrospect, those challenges blessed our kids and our family, and I’m grateful for them. Let me share some of the lessons we learned when church was hard.
Friendships can either make learning attractive or they can derail a child’s motivation altogether. Friendships are where a child learns how to relate to others and works at practicing patience, forgiveness, kindness, and compassion. Most parents talk to their kids about grades. I’m convinced we need to talk to them at least as much about relationships. Here are four conversations I think parents and children need to have.
What’s ironic is that you tell yourself you’re making these sacrifices for your child, but the tension in your relationship is actually adding stress to your parenting and anxiety to your children.
Some people feel stifled by a freedomless marriage and other married couples are like single people who happen to share the same address. The way that the members of the Trinity relate model for us a vision of marriage marked by profound unity without the loss of individuality.
Christian women see Proverbs 31 as another burden they have to wear, but rightly read, it’s actually intended to do the opposite. The entire poem contains only a single command, and it isn’t addressed to women. The command comes after multiple statements about the woman’s children calling her blessed and her husband praising her.
Children who are born innocent don’t need God. They don’t need a God to teach them, a Saviour to rescue them, the Spirit to empower them, or the Bible to guide them. They just need everyone to get out of the way and let them be true to themselves. But the Bible says the opposite.
People don’t tend to talk a lot about the conflicts they have. That’s understandable, of course, but the result can be that we don’t have any sense of what’s normal. I often hear people say, “Every couple argues,” but what does that mean? Someone might wrongly conclude that every couple has shouting matches with threats and intimidation. That’s not the case! When does conflict cross the line? When should you be concerned? What kind of behaviour should be out of bounds?
This week, I had a strange experience with two books on marriage. I finished reading Darby Strickland’s book, “Is It Abuse?” and started reading Tim and Kathy Keller’s book, “The Meaning of Marriage.” Both of them are excellent. Both of them address the topic of marriage from the Scriptures. But it’s as if they’re addressed to people from two different worlds. The first helps people to identify whether domestic abuse is present in a relationship and gives strategies for addressing it. The second helps people discover how a marriage can become all it was intended to be. Reading one gave me new awareness in reading the second. I realized that in only approaching marriage from the ideal that the Bible presents, there are principles that can be misunderstood and even used by abusers to manipulate their spouses. Consider the following examples.
As you look through the lists of qualifications for elders in the New Testament, you can’t find words like tough, outspoken, bold, or unrelenting. In their place is the call to gentleness. An elder is someone who is neither quarrelsome nor arrogant but is marked by a considerate attitude toward others. Consider whether you’re gentle enough to do the hard work of Christian leadership.
As a Christian parent, the greatest desire should be to see your child trust in Christ. But how do you do that? And how do you know what is happening in your child’s faith?
