Parenting: Day 3

Law

In this video, Paul David Tripp offers a vital insight: we can't ask the law to do what only grace can accomplish. While the law is indispensable, it does not have the power to change the heart of your child.

About the Book

What is your calling as a parent?

In the midst of folding laundry, coordinating carpool schedules, and breaking up fights, many parents get lost. Feeling pressure to do everything “right” and raise up “good” children, it’s easy to lose sight of our ultimate purpose as parents in the quest for practical tips and guaranteed formulas.

In Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family, Paul David Tripp offers parents much more than a to-do list. Instead, he presents us with a big-picture view of God’s plan for us as parents. Outlining fourteen foundational principles centered on the gospel, he shows that we need more than the latest parenting strategy or list of techniques. Rather, we need the rescuing grace of God—grace that has the power to shape how we view everything we do as parents.

Freed from the burden of trying to manufacture life-change in our children’s hearts, we can embrace a grand perspective of parenting overflowing with vision, purpose, and joy.

Video Transcript

Parents, your children really do need God’s law. But as a parent, you can’t ask the law to do what only grace can accomplish. Herein lies one of the big mistakes that all of us make as parents.

Think about this: If rules and regulations could change the heart of your child—and produce in your child a willingness to submit to God and do what is right—Jesus would have never had to come. Everything we say we believe argues against that.

You see, the law is important because the law has a wonderful ability to reveal the sin, weakness, and failure in your child. The law is a beautiful guide for everyday living. But the law has no power whatsoever to change the heart of your child, to rescue a child from himself.

So your parenting needs to be infused and driven by grace.

Now make sure you understand this: grace never calls wrong right. If wrong were right, there would be no need for grace. But grace moves towards that struggling, rebellious, disobeying child with love and tenderness and hope and forgiveness and wisdom and guidance.

You see, the most powerful force of transformation in the universe is God’s grace. It can do what rules and regulations will never do in the heart of a child. Therefore, your parenting needs to be dyed with this grace.