4 Ways the Gospel Shapes Your Parenting
By Michael Kelley
When we were young parents, I remember frequently turning to my wife and asking some form of this question: “Do you think every parent constantly feels like they don’t know what they’re doing?”
Now that we have been parents for over two decades, I feel that question even more deeply. Every season of parenting brings its own set of unique challenges, and so every season is a reminder that we don’t actually know what we are doing as parents. But even in the midst of all the fumbling around we do as moms and dads, I can see the Lord’s faithfulness over those seasons as He continues to press the gospel further into our lives, and one of the areas that’s most evident is in the way we parent.
See, once upon a time I thought of the gospel as a moment-in-time decision that had eternal implications. And while that may be true, if that’s all you ever see the gospel as, then you are falling radically short of approaching the fullness of its implications. Jesus likened believing the gospel to being born again. That is to say, belief in the gospel causes such a profound change in the life of an individual that you can only liken it to starting over, but this time with a new heart. New tastes. New desires. New priorities. And so on. That newness that comes as a result of new birth in Christ trickles down into every area of life, including our parenting.
The gospel, then, shapes our parenting just as the gospel shapes everything else about who we are and what we do. How does that shaping happen? I’m sure in different ways for different people, but here are four of them:
1. The gospel compels us to take parenting seriously.
If the gospel is true, and it is, then all of us who once were enemies of God have been brought into His household and given a seat at the table. Former rebels and outsiders have been adopted into His family, and now God is forever more our Father.
As parents, then, we have the incredibly weighty responsibility of modeling the fatherhood of God to our children.
It is sobering to consider that the primary picture my children will have of God as their Father will come through me. It makes me think deeply about the way I discipline them, the way I care about the things that matter to them, even the words I greet them with every afternoon. All these things matter because though they might seem like every day, run of the mill decisions that are here one moment and gone the next, they accumulate into something much larger than that. They come together, by God’s grace, in such a way that a child will think, If my earthly father loves me like this, how much more must a perfect heavenly Father love me?
2. The gospel allows us not to take ourselves so seriously.
While the gospel compels us to take our parenting seriously, it also allows us not to take ourselves so deathly seriously at every turn. This is really an acknowledgment of reality because I, like you, am a ridiculous creature. I’m double-minded, fearful, confused, and even downright gross. I am a laughable creature. That is particularly true as a parent in which I constantly feel like I don’t know what I’m doing.
Instead of despairing at our lack of knowledge and experience, the gospel reminds us of our “creatureliness.” And we are allowed to laugh heartily at our own ridiculousness because God sees that ridiculousness even more deeply than we do and loves us still.
As parents, we are free in the gospel to go all out, do the very best we can, knowing that just as it took God to awaken us to see our cold, dead hearts and our need of Him, so will it be with our children. Ultimately, it is God’s work and not ours that will melt the hearts of our kids.
3. The gospel enables us to allow our kids to pursue their own interests.
In other words, we don’t have to be “football dads.” And we don’t have to be “pageant moms.” I’m convinced that one of the ways we can fail our children most heartily is if we insist that “our thing” be “their thing.” So we push and push and push to make them the top student, the cheerleader, the athlete, the whatever, because that is not only what we are most comfortable with, but because it was either something we excelled at doing or something we wish we had.
The gospel frees us from having to force our children to live out our latent desires for ourselves in them.
Because of the gospel, we don’t have anything left to prove because Jesus has proven everything in our place. We don’t have to justify ourselves, especially through our kids, because we are already fully justified in Him. When our own insecurity and compulsion toward that self-justification is taken out of the equation, we can joyfully embrace the individual makeup of our children who might or might not share our same affinity for a given activity.
4. The gospel frees us to apologize often.
I have to do this. You probably do, too. That’s because no matter how hard we try, we will fail our children time and time again. The question is not whether we will do so; the question is what happens afterward. Will we be the people who justify ourselves before our babies, because we are still trying to earn everyone’s approval, including our own children? Or will we be able to acknowledge our failure without that self-justification and offer a simple apology?
In a very broad sense, the gospel allows us to own our own sin, whether it’s a sin against our neighbor down the street or one that lives within our home. We can truly and completely apologize, taking full responsibility and without explaining all the mitigating circumstances, not offering an “I’m sorry, but…” or an “I’m sorry, if…” but simply “I’m sorry.” And then move on to try again.
The gospel shapes everything about us, including the way we relate to our kids. In this, too, God is working to complete His good work in us. And He is faithful to finish what He started.
Michael Kelley is a husband, father of three, author, and speaker from Nashville, TN. His latest book is a year-long family devotional guide called The Whole Story for the Whole Family. Find his personal blog at michaelkelley.co.
