The Greatest Gifts We Can Give Our Kids

The Greatest Gifts We Can Give our Kids

 Here's my short but complete list of the greatest gifts we can give our kids:

• ·      Clear out your view of love based on your experiences
• ·      Accept that authority and discipline without love is a gong (I Cor. 13)
• ·      Write down and pray through all the verses of God’s love for us
• ·      Model love and forgiveness with your spouse
• ·      Ask forgiveness of your kids when you screw up
• ·      Live in Front of them that we are flawed but forgiven
• ·      Tell them that Perfection is only in Jesus
• ·      Pray, pray and pray some more for them—every day let them see you pray
• ·      Tell them they are sinners, or they won’t know why they need Him
• ·      Laugh at yourself; model not taking yourself too seriously
• ·      Don’t tolerate half-truths or half-apologies (God doesn’t either)
• ·      Tell them you love them at the moments they are least deserving of it
• ·      Tell them you forgive them when you discipline them and they ask forgiveness
• ·      Remind them that they can’t do anything they set their minds to; they can do what God has created them to do; its ok not to be good at everything
• ·      Let them speak correction into your life when its true; we aren’t the standard of right and wrong (the law), God’s Word is
• ·      Laugh with them as much as possible
•      Read aloud to them  and with them and let them see you reading regularly
• ·      Listen to their complaints as long as they say it respectfully
• ·      Let them fail at things and talk them through it
• ·      Be honest with them about their strengths and weaknesses
• ·      Prepare them for the tasks they have to do on their own (boy and girls): housecleaning, cooking, yard work—don’t let your perfectionism get in the way of their need for training
• ·      Prepare yourself to let them go, if you love them they will always come back
• ·      Accept that you will be second place to a spouse and support that!

Parenting the Heart

I have been noticing a trend lately with my two year old: Anything that he does not want that I offer to his baby sister, he regains a sudden interest in. I think God saved the best commandment, the hardest for last: Thou shalt not covet. Its not about evident behavior, its about the heart.  It's the latest challenge for me these days.

How do I parent in such a way that I deal with the squishy issues of the heart and motives through the evident behavior? After all I am trying to parent in a way that points above me to something/one higher. It is hard to do with a two year old and not feel like you are being a legalist. You can't make rules about everything.

I'm finding that I get why the pharisees developed so much commentary on the OT. They wanted to make the application clear. That's the deal though. You can't prescribe it.

What I do think kids get much better than my holding their behavior under a microscope, is holding my own. I have had to apologize to my two year old at least half a dozen times now, and that's probably a conservative estimate. Its amazing that I can tell Isaac not to yell in anger, but when I have and apologize, it registers with him.

Its humbling to realize as a parent that probably my best parenting, the lasting impact of my parenting may not be the ways in which I did it right, but modeling how to handle my doing it  wrong. What I mean is that my most important lesson to my children is not how to NOT sin and how to be perfect all the time. Its how to repent and have brokenness about my sin. How to both accept my own forgiveness and be a conduit of God's forgiveness to others. That doesn't happen without admitting that my own sin shows up to the party frequently, and allowing my repentance process to be evident to my children.

Boy its been a strange and humbling realization that my biggest impact on my kids might be their watching my failures and how I deal with that. It is the ultimate test of what I really say I believe.

So I hold up a standard to them which neither I nor they can meet, and then hold up the cross. No wonder Jesus says, "I am the vine, you are the branches, he who abides in me and I in him, the same brings forth much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing." John 15:5. Jesus, let me walk before my kids in such a way that they see your redemptive work in my life and theirs. Amen.