Wednesday, August 10, 2011

"A Prayer for Gospel Parenting"

It has taken me many years of living as a Christian, and many years of parenting, to start to grasp how very big the grace of the Lord is, how very beautiful that grace when shown to others. This prayer from Pastor Scotty Smith says everything that I want to. Do read the entire post, and join me in that petition.

Oh, the arrogant pride of thinking that by our “good parenting” we can take credit for what you alone can graciously do in the lives of our children. Oh, the arrogant unbelief of assuming that by our “bad parenting” we’ve forever limited what you’ll be able to accomplish in the future.

Oh, the undue pressure our children must feel when we parent more out of fear than faith; more out of rules than relationship; more out of and pride than patience; more out of comparison than covenant; more out of threats than theology. Forgive us. Free us. Focus us.

Father, since our children and grandchildren are your inheritance, teach us how to care for them as humble stewards, not as anxious owners. More than anything else, show us how to parent and grandparent in a way that best reveals the unsearchable riches of Jesus in the gospel. We want the gospel to be beautiful and believable to our children.


Amen.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Literary Power

It was Charlotte Mason's conviction that the child should work steadily through a complete book. Little snippets of information here and there just don't hang together. Our generation is prone to amuse itself with fragmentary information and resources. We flip on the TV for brief programs, and then we think we know about the subjects they dealt with. A few paragraphs in a magazine, and we think that we've formed an opinion. What is happening often is that we are merely forming a habit of amusing our interest, and then for getting the fragments. This is not education...The child needs books with "literary power."~ Susan Schaeffer Macaulay

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Beholding is becoming

The following letter was written by John Piper to a teen in his church. But really, what a word of wisdom for all of us, no matter what our age, because we all need to be reminded that:

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.
This was one of the greatest secrets I ever discovered:
Beholding is becoming.

There is much in this letter that echoes some of what I want to communicate well to my children-
that God is good,
and His creation is full of awe and wonder,
and that life in His plan is joy.

But read it in Piper's words (from Desiring God, Letter to an Incomplete, Insecure Teenager by John Piper):

Four years ago a teenager in our church wrote to me for advice about life in general, and identity in particular. Here is what I wrote, with a big dose of autobiography for illustration.

Dear ________,

My experience of coming out of an introverted, insecure, guilty, lustful, self-absorbed adolescent life was more like the emergence of a frog from a tadpole than a butterfly from a larva.

Larvae disappear into their cocoons and privately experience some inexplicable transformation with no one watching (it is probably quite messy in there) and then the cocoon comes off and everyone says oooo, ahhh, beautiful. It did not happen like that for me.

Frogs are born teeny-weeny, fish-like, slimy, back-water-dwellers. They are not on display at Sea World. They might be in some ritzy hotel's swimming pool if the place has been abandoned for 20 years and there's only a foot of green water in the deep end.

But little by little, because they are holy frogs by predestination and by spiritual DNA (new birth), they swim around in the green water and start to look more and more like frogs.

First, little feet come out on their side. Weird. At this stage nobody asks them to give a testimony at an Athletes in Action banquet.

Then a couple more legs. Then a humped back. The fish in the pond have already pulled back: "Hmmm," they say, "this does not look like one of us any more." A half-developed frog fits nowhere.

But God is good. He has his plan and it is not to make this metamorphosis easy. Just certain. There are a thousand lessons to be learned in the process. Nothing is wasted. Life is not on hold waiting for the great coming-out. That's what larvae do in the cocoon. But frogs are public all the way though the foolishness of change.

I think the key for me was finding help in the Apostle Paul and C. S. Lewis and my father, all of whom seemed incredibly healthy, precisely because they were so absolutely amazed at everything but themselves.

They showed me that the highest mental health is not liking myself but being joyfully interested in everything but myself. They were the type of people who were so amazed that people had noses—not strange noses, just noses—that walking down any busy street was like a trip to the zoo. O yes, they themselves had noses, but they couldn’t see their own. And why would they want to? Look at all these noses they are free to look at! Amazing.

The capacity of these men for amazement was huge. I marveled and I prayed that I would stop wasting so much time and so much emotional energy thinking about myself. Yuk, I thought. What am I doing? Why should I care what people think about me. I am loved by God Almighty and he is making a bona fide high-hopping frog out of me.

The most important text on my emergent frogishness became 2 Corinthians 3:18 —

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.

This was one of the greatest secrets I ever discovered: Beholding is becoming.

Introspection must give way to amazement at glory. When it does, becoming happens. If there is any key to maturity it is that. Behold your God in Jesus Christ. Then you will make progress from tadpole to frog. That was a great discovery.

Granted, (so I thought) I will never be able to speak in front of a group, since I am so nervous. And I may never be married, because I have too many pimples. Wheaton girls scare the bejeebies out of me. But God has me in his hand (Philippians 3:12) and he has a plan and it is good and there is a world, seen and unseen, out there to be known and to be amazed at—why would I ruin my life by thinking about myself so much?

Thank God for Paul and Lewis and my dad! It’s all so obvious now. Self is simply too small to satisfy the exploding longings of my heart. I wanted to taste and see something great and wonderful and beautiful and eternal.

It started with seeing nature and ended with seeing God. It started in literature, and ended in Romans and Psalms. It started with walks through the grass and woods and lagoons, and ended in walks through the high plains of theology. Not that nature and literature and grass and woods and lagoons disappeared, but they became more obviously copies and pointers.

The heavens are telling the glory of God. When you move from heavens to the glory of God, the heavens don’t cease to be glorious. But they are un-deified, when you discover what they are saying. They are pointing. “You make the going out of the morning and the evening to shout for joy” (Psalm 65:8).

What are the sunrise and sunset shouting about so happily? Their Maker! They are beckoning us to join them. But if I am grunting about the zit on my nose, I won’t even look out the window.

So my advice is: be patient with the way God has planned for you to become a very happy, belly-bumping frog. Don’t settle for being a tadpole or a weird half-frog. But don’t be surprised at the weirdness and slowness of the process either.

How did I become a preacher? How did I get married? God only knows. Incredible. So too will your emergence into what you will be at 34 be incredible. Just stay the course and look. Look, look. There is so much to see. The Bible is inexhaustible. Mainly look there. The other book of God, the unauthoritative one—nature—is also inexhaustible. Look. Look. Look. Beholding the glory of the Lord we are being changed.

I love you and believe God has great froggy things for you. Don’t worry about being only a high-hopping Christlike frog. Your joy comes from what you see.

Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.

There is another metamorphosis awaiting. It just gets better and better. God is infinite. So there will always be more of his glory for a finite mind to see. There will be no boredom in eternity.

Affectionately,

Pastor John

(art credit: Girl Whose Hair is Blown by the Wind by Hiromi Taguchi at AllPoster.com)

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Tell ye your children

Charles Spurgeon's evening devotion for July 11th is a wonderful reminder to us of the awesome responsibility and privilege we have as parents. I pray that you will be encouraged by its bold exhortation! Press on!

Friday, July 15, 2011

"Motherhood is a Calling"

The piece starts with "Your hands are full!"
How many times have I heard that?
Five almost-teenagers, and this is still a very good read...

Live the gospel in the things that no one sees. Sacrifice for your children in places that only they will know about. Put their value ahead of yours. Grow them up in the clean air of gospel living. Your testimony to the gospel in the little details of your life is more valuable to them than you can imagine. If you tell them the gospel, but live to yourself, they will never believe it. Give your life for theirs every day, joyfully. Lay down pettiness. Lay down fussiness. Lay down resentment about the dishes, about the laundry, about how no one knows how hard you work.Stop clinging to yourself and cling to the cross. There is more joy and more life and more laughter on the other side of death than you can possibly carry alone.
- Rachel Jankovic, "Motherhood is a Calling," at Desiring God, July 14, 2011

(art credit: Good Housekeeping cover by Jessie Willcox Smith, September 1926)

Friday, July 1, 2011

31 days of prayer for children

This link will take you to a guide for praying through 31 days of Scripture for our children.

31 days of prayer for children

I printed it out and trimmed it a bit and put it with my Bible and my journal.

(thank you to Ann Voskamp and A Holy Experience. As she writes, "this is the greatest gift to give to our children, the gift of our knees...")

(art credit: A Child's Prayer by anntalitha at etsy.com)

Full Moon Rising

"It's dawning, my full moon rising: I was lost but know I am found again, Jesus, and I know what I want: to see deeply, to thank deeply, to feel joy deeply. How my eyes see, perspective, is my key to enter into His gates. I can only do so with thanksgiving. If my inner eye has God seeping up through all things, then can't I give thanks for anything? And if I can give thanks for the good things, the hard things, the absolute everything, I can enter the gates to glory. Living in His presence is fullness of joy -- and seeing shows the way in.

The art of deep seeing makes gratitude possible. And it is the art of gratitude that makes joy possible. Isn't joy the art of God?

It's true! What that ancient man Irenaeus, very disciple of the apostle John, wrote: 'The glory of God is the human being fully alive and the life of the human consists in beholding God.' ...And I am fully alive beholding GOD!" ~ Ann Voskamp, one thousand gifts, pg 118