TLP 422: The Season of Life

Our lifetime goal should be to introduce our kids to God, and once they're born again as followers of Christ, help them grow in their conformity to Him. The first part is evangelism, the second part is discipleship.

Welcome to Truth.

Love.

Parents. Where we use God's Word to become intentional, premeditated parents. Here's your host, A .M.

Brewster.

The Call to Evangelize and Disciple Our Children

Hey everyone, it's been a while since I told you how much I love my job. Seriously, I love creating these free biblical parenting resources. I love counseling God's people from His Word. I love training pastors, teachers, and mentors to work with at-risk kids.

I love speaking and preaching into marriage and parenting and family life. I really love it. It is an honor to glorify God by serving you and your families. That's one of the reasons I created the year-long Celebration of God and its podcast.

I believe that we parents struggle with intentionality. We don't do a good job creating premeditated plans for discipling our kids. Well, that's what the Celebration of God discipleship experience is.

It's an intentional and premeditated plan for discipling our kids as we grow as ambassadors.

Of God.

So I'd like to talk about it a little bit today as we transition into season 18. And if you're already familiar with the Celebration of God, I hope you'll still interact with today's discussion because I'm going to unpack some additional family-related ideas I didn't cover in the Season of Life episode posting this Friday.

Also, just because you listened to today's episode doesn't mean you shouldn't subscribe to the Celebration of God podcast and join the discussion over there. Both shows complement each other as they help you become a more mature disciple of Jesus Christ and help your children do the same.

Why the Celebration of God Helps Families Plan Discipleship

A number of months ago, we reworked the Truth Love Parents season transitions to line up with the year-long Celebration of God. The official celebratory year starts with the Season of Mercy and runs from September to November.

The Season of Grace goes from December through February, and the Season of Life encompasses March, April, and May. In the Northern Hemisphere, this is Spring. In the Southern Hemisphere, it's Autumn. The final season of the Celebration of God is called the Season of Power and runs from June through August.

Why will it help your family to segment your year this way? Well, like I said in the introduction, we want to be intentional, premeditated, disciple-making ambassador parents. That means that we have to have a plan, and the most successful plans are plans that are specific.

Now, this is not going to be a discussion about making and keeping a schedule, micromanaging, or anything like that, but I will make the observation that the families I counsel always start succeeding more than they're failing when they take change seriously enough that they schedule out the spiritual disciplines in their home.

Breaking Children’s Lives Into Stages and Age-Appropriate Focuses

So let's start broad and work our way in. Our lifetime goal should be to introduce our kids to God, and once they're born again, followers of Christ, help them to grow in their conformity to Him. This first part is evangelism, the second part is discipleship, and that's a huge goal that will span from the day we discover we're pregnant until the day we or our child dies.

And it's a wonderful goal, but how do we accomplish it? This is one of the reasons that it's valuable to break our children's lives into digestible chunks. Let's call these chunks stages. Lord willing, there will come a time when our children will transition out of our direct authority, whether by marriage or permission to enter into full adulthood while single, my relationship with them is going to change ever so slightly.

Before this stage is the time of young adulthood where we're training our kids to be Christ-honoring adults, and before that is childhood where we're laying the foundation on which we hope to build adulthood, and before that we may imagine a stage from conception through infancy.

For the majority of you listening today, your kids are either in the infant, child, or young adult category, and each of those stages is going to require the same kind of evangelism and discipleship, but with different age-appropriate focuses.

But our plan for discipling our kids should get more specific than this. This is why we often segment our children's lives and developmental stages into years. It's become cliche to parent our children in certain ways simply because of their chronological age, and though I believe that this is a dangerous habit, it can at times have value.

It's dangerous because our children's actual maturity is far more important than their.

Age.

If a young child is mature enough for a responsibility or a new life focus, then we should interact with them on that level. If our child is 17 but still acting like a 3-year-old, we would be fools to give them the independence of an adult.

The Value and Limits of Year-Long Planning

But are year-long plans as specific as we need? A year is so long and there are so many responsibilities and distractions. We should be more specific, and you see where I'm going. As we plan our seasons, months, weeks, days, and portions of days, we will become even more premeditated and intentional, and, generally, more successful in our parenting.

But today we only want to discuss the seasons level. How are they beneficial to the discipleship of our kids? In the King James rendering of Ecclesiastes 3 .1, we read, To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

Though the Hebrew word translated season can better be understood as any predetermined period of time regardless of how long it is, it perfectly illustrates the value of our celebratory seasons. If we take our autumn, winter, spring, and summer months and predetermine that those periods of time will be used to help our children know and be conformed to Christ, then the season takes on more practical value.

The Season of Life as a Time to Reflect on Physical and Spiritual Life

In regard to the season of life, these three months contain the most celebratory observances and holidays of the whole year, and the biggest event of the season is the greatest holiday ever, Easter. So we parents will help ourselves be more intentional and premeditated in our discipleship as we recognize that March, April, and May are a fantastic time to talk with our kids about a biblical understanding of physical and spiritual life.

What is the purpose of our physical life? When does it begin? What is the purpose of our spiritual life? When does it begin? Does God have any expectations for our lives? Did God start the life cycle and walk away, or is He intimately part of every process?

These questions and far more are great topics of conversation for this season. Now, if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, it's even easier to find ourselves talking about life and growth as spring ushers in new plant and animal life.

If you live in the Southern Hemisphere, moving into your autumn can also highlight the importance of life because life does have cycles and changes. God has a plan for them all, and it's our responsibility to discover how we can best glorify Him in this new season of life.

Lent, Passion Week, and Celebrations That Point to Life and Godliness

During the season of life, we observe Lent and the various facets of Passion Week. We'll also celebrate the World Day of Prayer, Easter, Stewardship Day, Mother's Day, Ascension, and Pentecost. Each of those events are brimming with implications for life and godliness, and as we interact with each anticipation, preparation, observation, and celebration, we should be capitalizing on the opportunity to unpack yet one more glorious truth about our great God.

So as you can tell, this season of life is a uniquely wonderful time of year to focus on the evangelism or discipleship of your children from a unique perspective. Once again, I strongly encourage you to do a couple things.

Number one, take some time to understand your child's life and the main opportunities you'll have to evangelize and disciple them as they age. Number two, embrace every chance you have to speak truth into your child's life.

Every event, holiday, and circumstance of life is pregnant with discipleship opportunities. And three, I encourage you to subscribe to the Celebration of God podcast so you can learn how to take our holiday calendar and put it into intentional, practical use as we grow in our own discipleship and help our kids do the same.

Looking Ahead to Season 18 and Children’s Sexuality

And as always, please share this episode with your friends and join us next time as we open God's Word to discover how to parent our kids for life and godliness. To that end, as we start season 18 of Truth, Love, Parent, we'll be continuing our discussion of the biggest parenting challenges you will ever face by talking about your children and sexuality.

Truth, Love, Parent is part of the Evermind Ministries family and is dedicated to helping you become an intentional, premeditated parent. Join us next time as we search God's Word for the truth your family needs today.