Quotes about Parenting

This means that my biggest, ongoing problem as a dad is not my children, it's me.

Good parenting, which does what God intends it to do, begins with this radical and humbling recognition that our children don't actually belong to us. Rather, every child in every home, everywhere on the globe, belongs to the One who created him or her. Children are God's possession (see Ps. 127:3) for his purpose.

Parenting gets to the core of what should motivate every thought, desire, word, decision, or action that every human being has ever taken.

I think we would be shocked if we knew how many homes of parents who love to sing of God's grace on Sunday completely forget that grace as they parent their children the rest of the week. But without the intervention of God's grace, your children will not be who they are supposed to be or do what they are supposed to do.

Principle: Your children need God's law, but you cannot ask the law to do what only grace can accomplish.

I propose that so much of what drives our responses to our kids is an unannounced set of laws that are more about what we want for ourselves and our lives than what God wants for and from our children. In our allegiance to our law, we end up breaking God's law in our interactions with our children. In this way we are just like our children: people who need to be rescued from ourselves.

No, the message is that God puts an uncompromising standard before us, then sends his Son to perfectly meet that standard on our behalf, so that we can be free to admit our failures and go to God for help. The cross of Jesus Christ means I don't have to deny my struggle as a parent, I don't have to act as if I'm something that I'm not, and I surely don't have to hide from the only One who is able to help me.

It means that as parents we need to daily remind ourselves that we're called to rescue our children again and again, and we should not resent those moments when that rescue is necessary.

Your children must learn early that they have been born into a world of authority, and they're not it.

Parenting is about the condition that makes good behavior seem such a hard and elusive goal.

I mean you should look every day for every opportunity to point your needy kids to the presence, promises, power, and grace of Jesus.

No one gives grace better than a parent who humbly admits that he desperately needs it himself.