Transcript
The goal of parenting is not controlling behavior, but heart and life change. Think about this for a moment. If all you do as a parent is set up this neat, consistent system for controlling the behavior of your children, when your children leave your home, they have nothing.
Why So Many Young People Walk Away
I mean, every year, there are thousands of supposedly Christian young people who go off to residential universities and forsake the faith. I would argue that they're not forsaking the faith. They never had it in the first place. It was the faith of their parents and they lived under this neat system of control that didn't address the deeper issue of the heart, the thoughts and motives and desires of the heart that actually control behavior.
One of my goals as a parent is to be used of God to help my children to understand a very important but humbling thing - that my biggest, deepest problem in all of life doesn't exist outside of me, it exists inside of me. It's my heart because my heart wants what it shouldn't want. It thinks what it shouldn't think. It desires what it shouldn't desire. It believes what it shouldn't believe.
Lasting change in the behavior of a child always travels through the pathway of the heart, so I want to be a tool in the life of my child of heart awareness, of heart understanding. I want to give my child eyes to see his heart. I want to lead my child to confession because it's only when the heart changes that the behavior will change in a lasting light.
