Transcript
I spend a good portion of my time on weekends talking with discouraged parents. Parents who are exhausted, parents who are discouraged, parents who are angry, parents who are fearful, parents who are at the end of the rope and saying, "I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I don't know what to do."
Asking the Law to Do What Only Grace Can
And I just want to critique that I think that a significant portion of that is that we're asking the law to do what only grace can accomplish. And when I think that the law is the thing that will parent my children, will change my children, then I become the law-giver, I become the judge, I become the jury, I become the jailer, and I hope that all of those things will result in change in my child, that change is the result of the announcement and the enforcement of law. And what always happens to parents is you're confronted with the inability of those things to create change. They just don't create change.
You know this. If you look at your child and say, "You're supposed to respect me. Now, I want you to respect me right now." That doesn't result in instant respect in the heart of the child. You know that. And so, parenting has to be more than the announcement and the enforcement of law.
Does law have a place? Absolutely, because the law reveals sin. The law is what God will use to reveal need inside of the heart of your child. The law gives us a guide for life. It announces to us the way that God has designed for us to live. The law is good, but it has no power whatsoever to deliver your child from sin, to make them - in terms of character - what God wants them to be. And so, what I want to do is talk to you about something different. I want to use one word that I think radically changes your understanding of, your agenda for, and your behavior as a parent; and that word is "grace".
What the Bible says is that it's God's grace that changes us and so, if I want to be part of God's work of changing my child, I have to understand God's work of grace. I have to understand how grace alters the way I think about parenting. I just want to ask you this question. If I saw the last six weeks of your parenting on a video, how much grace would I see?
