Raising Children Who Are Confident in God

What is our calling as parents and as a community of Christians toward our children?

John Piper emphasizes these points:

• Our Children Are Not Our Highest Value. But God is.
• To be born into a Christian family does not make a child a member of the New Covenant community; it makes the New Covenant community the spiritual guardian of the child.

Piper then calls for a new kind of partnership between church and parents. Parents are the primary agents of God in this calling. But no parents can do all this without the help of others. This is why schools exist and why all other educational efforts in the church exist.

• Parents need help in keeping a God-centered vision of parenting alive.
• Parents need a deep confidence in God.
• Parents need motivation to persevere year in and year out.
• Parents need encouragement when everything seems to go wrong.
• Parents need relief from time to time from the strain of parenting.
• Parents need help in boiling down the Book of God into essential, transferable, age-appropriate portions.
• Parents need help in teaching subjects and skills where they lack expertise and time.
• Parents need community reinforcement of truth and moral standards.
• Parents need solutions to tough problems raised by children.
• Parents need camaraderie for the sharing of accumulated wisdom.
• Parents need correction when others can see that something is wrong and they can't.
• Parents need prayer because in the end God is the great Teacher.

Parenting is the main thing for children under God; but God means for parenting to happen in a covenant community that helps provide what parents need. And he means, in turn, for parents—and single people—to sustain and shape the ministry of the covenant community toward the children.

• Parents and singles who teach,
• parents and singles who oversee,
• parents and singles who sing,
• parents and singles who plan and carry out activities for children,
• parents and singles who open their homes,
• parents and singles who model all that we are aiming at in educational mission.

The audio presentation is here.

What are your thoughts? Leave comments below.