Parenting: Day 6

Process

In this video, Paul David Tripp shares the truth that change is a process, not an event. Therefore, parenting is a life-long process that is best understood as an ongoing conversation with our children.

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

As a parent, it is very important to take the long view of parenting. Here's why: change is a process, and not an event. Parenting is a life-long process.

Now you're probably like me. I wanted to go into the room of my children and have a single conversation and hear them say, "I get it, I'm a sinner, I need a Savior, where can I repent, and I promise to obey for the rest of my life." It simply doesn't work that way.

There's a real way in which parenting is an unending conversation. Parents—if you're eyes ever see and ears ever hear the sin, weakness, and failure of your children, it's never an accident, it's never an interruption, it's never a hassle. It's alway grace. God loves that child. He has put him in a family of faith. And he will reveal the need of that child to you so you can be part of his ongoing process of change.

Every conversation is an opportunity for the Spirit of God to work in the lives of your children. You have to be committed to being part of that process. You have to have joy in that process, quite apart from your plans and your schedule. God will give you repeated opportunities to be part of his process of change in the lives of your children.

Parenting can't be reduced to a series of events. Parenting is a process. And that process is God working by his grace through us in the lives of our children.