Parenting is hard.
Your son comes home from school crying because he feels rejected by his friends.
Your daughter feels self-conscious about her appearance.
Your 5-year old has an issue with lying.
Your teenager is anxious about her upcoming exams.
Your child seems to have no interest in faith.
What do you do?
Parenting is a very practical endeavour isn’t it? Countless times every day, we serve our children in practical ways. We wake them up. we feed them food, we do their laundry, we teach them personal hygiene, we take them to school, the list goes on.
So what do we do when faced with an emotional and spiritual issue like the ones above?
Our natural instinct is often to think of practical solutions to the problems. Talking to the school teacher, rewarding good behaviour, giving a pep talk. And none of those things are necessarily bad. Not at all.
But our first response (not our last resort) should be to pray. To pray for our children, and to pray with our children.
And not just to model dependence on God to our children. But because as we pray, we are addressing the mighty creator of the universe, and appealing to our heavenly Father to act on their behalf. In other words, we are asking the God who is powerful, and who loves us to intervene. What a brilliant privilege.
Prayer is essential in our parenting. It is true that we can sometimes change an outcome or a behaviour through practical actions… for example, if we bribe our three year old with chocolate, he will probably be a “good boy” while we’re running our errands. And yet while bribery, threat and praise might change his behaviour, they cannot change his little heart. Only the Holy Spirit can bring about heart change.
Stop and ponder this for a moment, and you’ll see this is actually hugely liberating – none of our efforts can bring Christian faith in our children. But as well as liberating, it’s also sobering – we need God to be merciful and bring about newness of life.
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.”
So what should we do when confronted with any situation big or little in the life of our children?
Pray.
Pray as a first response not a last resort.
It’s easy to say, but more difficult to do.
So why don’t you (and your spouse) commit to spending a couple of minutes each night before bed praying for your children? Pray about the issues in their life at the moment. But most importantly of all, persist in prayer for them to come to faith in Christ, and for them to grow in their faith in Christ.
Keep going! Remember, God is “able to do infinitely more than all we ask or imagine.” Wow – what a thought! And what a brilliant comfort for us, whatever our children face.
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