The Gospel and Parenting - Colossians 3:20-21

Here are the notes from last nights LightHouse, I'll blog some of the questions we thought about later in the week:

1. What are your hopes and dreams for your children?

2. What most influences the way you parent?

There is no silver bullet, you won't leave here with the secret to perfect parenting or with a programme of behaviour management to put in place which will make you the perfect parent of perfect children. But what we are going to think about is how the gospel transforms first us and therefore because it transforms us how it transforms our parenting. What Paul does in Colossians is get to our hearts and our identity because we parent out of our hearts and our identity. As we realise how the gospel transforms us then we will parent differently.

As with marriage these instructions flow out of the rest of the letter. Paul is encouraging the Colossians to see who they are in Christ; that God has given them, and us, everything they need to live out the gospel and how that affects every area of life, including parenting. 

The Gospel means our parenting is concerned with heart change not behaviour modification
There are lots of theories in our society about how to bring up your children, how best to discipline, how best to mould character from Gina Ford to Supernanny. But as those who are in Christ we need to examine all these theories through what God teaches us about ourselves, our children, our world and our future. We need to weigh up and analyse our assumptions and what we have learned about parenting and run it through a gospel filter, there are good things there which will be helpful butwe need to weigh them up alongside what God says.

There are a number of ways we learn to parent, primarily we parent as we were parented either by default or in reaction against how we were parented. We watch others who we respect, absorb the ideas of the culture around us, or parent out of our personality and pragmatism - depending on teh situation. None of us comes to parenting with a blank canvas on which we plan our parenting.

The context for these instructions is (1-17)which examines the distinctive identity of Jesus’ followers. As Gospel people we are changed, transformed, and are to be continually undergoing change and transformation. We are continually applying and reapplying grace to our lives cooperating with the Holy Spirit to change. That applies not just as gospel people but as gospel parents, it must affect us and our desires for our children.

Worldly models of behaviour and childhood studies may have helpful things to say but fundamentally they are flawed because they deal with behaviour not the heart. But in the gospel God gives us a much more robust framework with which to understand ourselves as parents and our children. We live in a broken world where sin is a present reality and influences us all. Sin in our hearts leads us to battle for our kingdom as we want it just as it leads our children to battle for their kingdom the way they want it. And sin exerts powerful pressures on both us and our children; tiredness, illness, bereavement, frustration, fear, all part of living in a broken world and all influences on us and our children.

But fundamentally the gospel doesn’t leave us at the mercy of sin and helpless in the face of it but calls us to realise our new identity, as those renewed and recreated in Christ. Just look at(1) and we see the magnitude of what that means for us. “Since then you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on earthly things. For you died and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” Just notice the scope of the gospel transformation, it affects our hearts, our desires and transforms our thinking. We are those who know God in Christ through the Spirit and who want our children to know that too.

That reality, that identity has to inform our parenting. That means we mustn’t settle for behaviour modification but go deeper and expose the heart, both ours and our children’s. Our primary concern must be to see our children come to know Christ and to change at a heart level.
Behavioural change without heart change will simply produce little legalists, or children with a split personality where they behave one way on Sunday and at home and another at school or with friends. So as our children react with anger or selfishness or whatever we want to try to examine with them where that has come from, to see how their story fits into God’s gospel story.

One of our problems with this is that it is out of our control. We cannot change our children’s hearts but we can modify their behaviour through punishment and reward. Now I am not saying there is no need to do that, we do need to teach our children how to love and care for others, we do need to teach them how to behave, that they are to love others in teh way they treat them. But fundamentally we need to go deeper just as Jesus did to show them their sin and point them to Jesus as their Saviour and their identity and who gives them everything they need to change. We need to help our children wage spiritual warfare just as we help one another do so.

We must also pray, God alone can change hearts, God alone can save our children. And we need to realise that God is for our children he loves them more than we do and he doesn't give us an impossible task, he equips us for it.

We are making disciples not rearing children
That means our children need to see us dealing with our hearts too. This change in Colossians 3, this putting to death of the old self and putting on the new clothes is not something to be done in private it’s a community project. Our heart change, our transformation in the gospel happens not in isolation but in church, in families, in marriages. Our children must see us grappling with our sinful hearts, confessing our failures, our battles with the kingdom of self, and our turning again to Christ for grace and help.

(12-17)Are the marks of gospel living, we are to be kind, compassionate, humble gentle and patient, bearing with one another, quick to forgive and to show the grace we have been shown, ready to love at full stretch and live at peace, to be thankful to God and to have the gospel at work among us as we teach, train and sing it to one another, dealing with one another’s hearts. That is not just a picture of what happens when we are in church but Paul draws that down into the home; that should characterise our homes.

The assumption here is that children will see that ongoing heart change as a result of the power and grace of God, it is the backdrop against which they grow up and naturally they will be invited to share in that. If they don’t see us changing, dealing with our hearts, treasuring God’s word, being thankful, repenting of our sin, valuing God’s people they will rightly conclude that the gospel is irrelevant to everyday life and to them.  In fcat God gifts us our children to help us change, to show us our hearts and to apply grace to us and the gospel liberates us to accept that from them with thanks.

The first step to discipling our children and dealing with their hearts is to deal with our own. How is your heart? How are you changing? If we were to ask our children how the gospel affects our homes what would they say?

One of the scariest verses in the bible is Matt 23:15 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hyprocrits! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and then you make that convert twice as much a child of hell as you are.”

We all make disciples, the question is what sort of disciples are we making? We must be dealing with our hearts, treasuring the gospel being changed by it if we want that for our children.

The best thing we can do for our children is to be concerned for our hearts, to be changing and inviting them to help us change.

Gospel Parenting requires a Church
I want you to notice something here that we might easily miss, raising a child takes a church. All of Paul’s instructions assume the families’ place in church, as part of a gospel community which loves, cares, forgives, welcomes, doesn’t judge, supports and gospels one another. These instructions don’t suddenly become private, raising a child takes a church family. As families in church we are not on show, we are not trying to impress, or win awards as parent of the year. The church is the God given context in which our parenting and growing as a child happens because it is the place where we love and encourage and share. We must be part of the church family, we must not allow our children to be on the fringe of church.

One of the most distinctive things here is that Paul addresses who? (20)The children directly. Paul expects children to be being directly taught this instruction, to be hearing this teaching read aloud to them. He values children as part of the church, people who can be discipled and understand the gospel and be putting to death and clothing themselves and people who can serve. Paul wants them to be changed by the gospel just as adults are and assumes it will be happening in church.

We must have the same view as Paul, children are a part of the church and they need to be taught the gospel and its implications and given opportunities to serve just as the adults are. We must teach children the gospel and deal with their hearts on Sunday, and in the home and family, we must be looking to encourage them and disciple them as we do others.   We mustn't teach the childrenm moralism or nice stories whilst we teach the gospel to the hearst of adults. 

We must look to build relationships with them and as parents give them opportunities to be building relationships with other children and adults within church. And Paul assumes that the gospel will change their hearts empowering them by the Spirit to obey their parents in everything, not as behaviour modification but as a result of being in Christ and empowered by the Spirit.

(21)Paul turns to fathers because in first century Roman culture the father was responsible for educating and disciplining children, but this to all parents. Paul is clear as parents transformed and being changed by the gospel at work in our hearts our parenting will be different. “do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.” That word embitter means to demean, belittle, deride or nag. That means we are not to try to live our failed dreams through them, or provoke them by belittling them or by being harsh or unreasonable with them. We are not to be impossible to please, neither are we to keep harping on about past failures, or parent comparatively with a sibling or other child, we ought not to set unreasonable expectations for our children, or seek to bolster our esteem or standing as a parent through requiring them to behave a certain way or do certain things.

What will happen to them if we do? “they will become discouraged” they will lose heart. They will conclude they are not loved, welcomed, forgiven, treasured, valued. In short we fail to love as we have been loved. We will fail to model the gospel and the loving grace of God the Father who has not set unrealistic expectations on us. And they will conclude that our Saviour and his grace stands for little.  That if their father isn't open handed and hearted them God the Father isn't either.  If they do not see us confessing our failures and asking them for forgiveness when we sin they will conclude that sin is not serious and their hearts will become hardened.

Our parenting needs to begin by being concerned with our hearts. Change is the result of our hearts transformation by the grace of Jesus Christ as it comes to rule our hearts.