Marriage & Parenting Made EasySample

The Heart of Parenting: Chamber 3: Training:

You’ve made it to the second to last chamber of the heart of parenting—training!

Training is a huge responsibility and a vital piece of the parenting puzzle. How you train your kids academically, physically, emotionally, and spiritually to have good manners and social skills is imperative to your parent rating! Just look at Proverbs 22:6. A child’s training could be the difference between whether or not they depart from the faith! How can parents ensure they do well in training their children in all aspects of life?

If you feel inadequate in training your kids, you are absolutely right. You can’t do it. In fact, you weren’t designed to do it. You’re incompetent, and that’s the way God planned it: “Such confidence we have through Christ before God. Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant” (2 Corinthians 3:4-6).

If the challenge of parenting daunts you, echo the prayer of Manoah. He and his wife had been unable to conceive, but then an angel of the Lord appeared to her and said God would give them a child. The angel had special instructions because the child—Samson—would grow up to deliver the Israelites from the hands of their oppressors.

What was Manoah’s prayer when he learned about all this? “Pardon your servant, Lord. I beg you to let the man of God you sent to us come again to teach us how to bring up the boy who is to be born” (Judges 13:8).

As Manoah recognized, training your kids starts with this confession: Lord, I can’t do this, but You can. And You live in me. My life is Your life. I’m trusting You to do it through me.

That’s where training begins, and that’s where training ends, too: trusting in the Lord rather than your strength and abilities. There is no limit to what God can do through you as His child. The only limit is the one you put on God. So don’t limit Him. Trust Him.

While we should trust God, it doesn’t mean you should be hands-off as a parent! The best way to train your child is to model what you want from them.

Look at what Paul says in the opening of 1 Corinthians 11:1. “Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ” (NIV). This is exactly what we should be doing as parents . . . leading our children by example as we continuously strive to live like Christ!

Unfortunately, they won’t be able to look to us for guidance forever. We eventually need to equip and empower our children to make decisions and live on their own. One important scripture will be a powerful tool in this area. We find it in Proverbs 4:23 (NIV): “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” Wow! What if we equipped our children to guard their hearts?

Ultimately, we have to remember that we are making disciples. Our children are disciples, being trained by us to live life in a way that glorifies Jesus. Will your little disciples be ready?