AUTHENTIC PARENTING 1

Children are God's gift to us!

Well, that’s no news to the average Christian. It’s also, probably, no news at all that we parents are privileged caretakers and custodians of God's treasures whom these children are. (Psalm 127:3) He commits them into our care to further His agenda of perpetuity and dominion for us. Take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; that ye may be increased there, and not diminished. Jeremiah 29:6. So, they arrive; these adorable, precious little darlings who tug at our hearts. They spice up our lives with untold joy and laughter. They radiate pure, unpretentious innocence.

As harmless as doves, as vulnerable as all the sides of a square, children come into this world like clean slates. They form their values and character based on the myriad of experiences and directions they will receive from their environment and relationships, chief among which is the parent-child relationship. Seeing that children do not come into this world with manuals detailing how to handle them for optimum results, the challenge before the average parent is how to raise them in order to ensure that they turn out right in the future.

This becomes even more challenging because many people grew up in less than desirable environments where parents, mostly due to ignorance, did not do an excellent job of raising them well. Unfortunately, many people simply repeat the errors of their parents. They raise their own children in the same dysfunctional manner they were raised. Thus continues the cycle from generation to generation.

Many Christians arrive at the parenthood stage armed with only the pleasant or unpleasant knowledge of how their parents brought them up, clueless on how to raise their own children to become independent, responsible, spiritually sound, successful and stable adults.

It is impossible to do justice to this topic in one short article like this, as entire volumes have been written on this subject, as you are well aware. I, however, want to discuss a little tangent of this topic, which I think represents the foundational knowledge of raising children. Many are ignorant of this salient truth, one of the reasons well- meaning and godly parents somehow fail to reproduce these virtues in their offspring. Despite their best efforts, many parents still grapple with the nagging thought of how their cute, little angels turned out to be the exact opposite as adults. The missing link is the lack of understanding of the nature of human beings. Need I remind us, that our children, no matter how old, are humans too, lol?

In Genesis 1:27, God shows us something fundamental to understanding the nature of man: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

God created humans in His image and after His likeness.

God is a Spirit. John 4:24

So He made us as spirit beings too.

What has that got to do with parenting?

Well, in order to do a great job of raising our children right, we must first understand that we are dealing with SPIRIT BEINGS IN LITTLE BODIES! 

So, we must bear in mind that babies and children may look helpless and clueless, but they are spirit beings and their spirits are alive to God! When we speak to them, they look like they don’t understand us, but their spirits are alive and well!

The spirit of a person is the real person; the part that represents the engine room of that person’s life. Our character emanates from the situation room of our spirits, thus parents should make the spirit of a child the focus and starting point of raising them right.

Since the spirit of a man is the real person, if we intend to make a mark and see changes and improvements, we must target the spirit, that invisible part of man that has the nature and life of God in it. This is where we miss it. We think that, because young children cannot understand whatever language we speak to them, they are too young to be instructed and corrected. So what do we do? We leave them to themselves to do as they like. We don’t correct or discipline them and when we attempt to, as soon as they throw a resistant tantrum, we back-off with the all too familiar line, ‘he or she is too young and don't understand. When they grow up we will correct and discipline them!’

Oh how wrong and naive of us to do that! ... to be continued