TLP 122: Needy Parenting

We're all needy parents, but some of us haven't realized it yet. If you haven't realized you're a needy parent, well, you can't be a good parent.

Welcome to Truth. Love. Parent, where we use God's Word to become intentional, premeditated parents. Here's your host, A .M. Brewster.

Hello friends. I am back in the studio. You know, that awesome place where we talk about God and the Bible and kids and parenting and you're back in your car or kitchen or on your treadmill or in the shower and we are ready to go for this new year.

First though, I need to tell you about a great podcast to which you should be listening. Well, at least you guys out there should be listening. Ladies, I highly suggest you just grab your husband's phone and subscribe him at your next opportunity.

This podcast is called Real Men Connect and is hosted by Dr. Joe Martin. It's currently the number one rated podcast for Christian men on iTunes and I had the opportunity recently to be interviewed by Dr. Martin.

That's right. He was interviewing me. That episode should be posting on a Wednesday sometime in January. It could be this week. It could be next week. I don't really know, but when I figure it out, I'll let you know.

For now, we're promoting his podcast at TruthLoveParent .com and we're gonna share it on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and all those places when the episode goes live. So please don't miss it. And don't forget to share this episode with your friends on social media.

We may not feel like needy parents, but we all need to be needy parents and we need to be the kind of needy parents that God calls us to be. And lastly, we are a listener-supported ministry and you can receive updated thank yous if you become a patron at patreon .com.

You can click on the five ways to support TLP link in the description to learn more. And speaking of patrons, I want to thank Matt and Sonia for becoming equipping patrons this past December. Their partnership will, Lord willing, allow me to finish my book this year and give it away for free at TruthLoveParent .com to anyone who wants it.

Salt and Light Parenting in Matthew 5

Okay, so here we go. What does it mean to be a needy parent and are you one? Well, for today's show, we turn to one of the most popular passages in the Bible and like I'm so want to do, we're gonna work our way through it backwards.

Let's start in Matthew 5, 13 through 16. You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It's no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet.

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden, nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who's in heaven.

Part of your job as a parent is to be a burning light and tasty salt in your family. We don't hide our lights under failure philosophies or unnecessarily long work days. In episode 111, we talked about being a fragrant parent and a flavorful parent is very similar.

We can't allow the taste we leave in our family's lips to be bland or bitter. Our words and our actions need to be filled with the glorious truth and the perfect philosophy of God. Are your children glorifying God in heaven because of your good works, your salt and light?

If not, then perhaps you're not needy enough. Verses 10 through 12 read, Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. We talked about this concept way back in episode 37, Parenting a Terrorist. A number of you have mentioned how timely and helpful that episode has been for you.

We could spend our whole time just on these verses, but for the sake of time, let me summarize the truths like this. Number one, we must be prepared to be hated and persecuted by anyone who's not a believer.

Now, it doesn't happen all the time, but Jesus foretold that we would be hated as he's hated. So why don't more of us experience more persecution in our lives? Number two, we're going to be persecuted in direct relationship to the amount of light and salt we spread around us.

And this is an answer to the question I just asked. Why aren't more of us persecuted in our lives? Well, possibly because we're not really spreading that much light and salt. We should be righteous and living for God's will, not our own.

This type of living will experience persecution for righteousness' sake and reviling and all kinds of evil words spoken against you falsely on God's account. And you can expect that from your own spouse and children if they're hard-hearted, rocky-hearted, or thorny-hearted like we talked about in the four children series, which started in episode 55.

By the way, persecution we receive from our families because we're angry or bitter or unkind or impatient or demanding or unsympathetic is not what God is talking about here. Don't make that mistake. And number three, however, being persecuted and having evil words spoken against you for the right reasons should produce joy in us.

We're talking about heel-clicking types of joy. The Greek word translated be glad is actually a more powerful word than the one translated rejoice. I know in our culture we would think rejoice would be the stronger word, but the first word rejoice is the one we talked about in our past two episodes.

It does describe true joy, but the other word means to be so exceedingly glad that we jump for joy. Think about that. The persecution we receive from our children should not leave us depressed and morose.

If we believe God's word, we know that family suffering is designed to work God's perfect will in our lives. And though it's never comfortable, we should be exceedingly joyful when it occurs. We've been promised the kingdom of heaven as a reward for the persecution we receive for parenting rightly.

Now, if your entire immediate family is born again, then that persecution will likely be few and far between, but it will come when you as the ambassador parent share God's truth with a child who wants to worship himself instead.

We all do that. Our kids do it. Our spouses do it. We do it. We all want to worship ourselves more than God at times, and it's at those times when we may meet persecution because of the salt and light that we're living out in our families.

So when that persecution comes because of God, the question for you is, are you experiencing joy and gladness? If not, well, perhaps you're not needy enough. Verse nine says, blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

Are you the type of parent who doesn't fight for superficial peace and a quote-unquote happy family, but instead helps reconcile your children with each other in God, a true peacemaker? We touched on this in our interview with Jessica Mayer, Tackling Tattling in episode 93.

Are you redemptively living in your home in such a way that you do your best to be at peace with your whole family and help them become reconciled with God? If not, then perhaps you're not needy enough.

Verse eight reads, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. The word pure would have taken the ancient Jew's mind back to the requirement for a sacrificial lamb or the ceremonial cleansing of the priest, but this word goes far beyond what we look like.

This word is talking about the purity of our hearts, our spirits. The Greek word used here refers to being free from corrupt desires, free from sin, and free from guilt. Being free from anything false, being sincere and genuine, it speaks of being blameless, innocent, and unstained by the guilt of anything.

Does that describe your parenting? Now at this point you may be thinking, Aaron, I get it. I need to be needy and you're going to walk backwards to the Beatitudes to show me what I can be if I'm needy.

But seriously, you're setting a very high bar and I don't even understand what being needy has to do with it. My friend, I understand your angst. Just stay with me. The bar is set very high because it's Jesus himself setting it.

We're called to be holy even as he is holy. This is ambassador parenting at its purest and I encourage you to re-listen to episodes 26 and 27 called The Fifth Way to Parent. The Fifth Way to Parent is the only parenting style that glorifies God, but it's also the only personality that glorifies God, and the expectations are infinitely high.

So allow me to ask the question, does your spouse and your children view you as blameless and pure? If not, then perhaps you're not needy enough. Verse 7 says, Does your family view you as being compassionate like Jesus was?

If not, yeah, that's right, you're not needy enough. Now let me stop for a minute and put into perspective the passage we've read so far. The last part of the chapter tells us how to live in such a way that everyone sees the high expectations of God lived out in our lives.

In essence, it's telling us how to be persecuted and reviled. Then that list we saw from being merciful to pure to peacemakers to joy-filled is there to give us more detail about what verse 6 means. Verse 6 reads,.

Being a merciful parent, a pure parent, a peacemaking parent, and a joy-filled parent is part of what it looks like to be a parent who hungers and thirsts after righteousness. Those things are the righteousness that we're hungering and thirsting after.

And the promise associated with that verse is that when we hunger and thirst for God's truth, His light, His delicious flavor, then it will be at work in us. We will be merciful and pure and peaceful and joyful.

But we can't be hungry and thirsty for righteousness if we're not humble. Verse 5 of Matthew 5 reads,. The Greek word translated meek describes a parent who's gentle and humble. Humility is not thinking lowly about ourselves.

It's not thinking about ourselves at all. Jesus was the meekest man who lived and his entire life's goal was to live to the glory of his Father and the good of all mankind. He did a lot. He worked hard, but he gave little thought to his own desires.

But in the same way that we can't hunger and thirst for righteousness unless we're meek, we can't be meek unless we're grieved. If you're not a peaceful, merciful, joyful, and pure parent, it's because you're not meek.

And if you're not meek, it's because you're not grieving. Now, I know that sounds a little paradoxical. In order to be joyful in my parenting, I need to grieve? Well, yep, that's what Matthew 5, verse 4 says,.

Now, what on earth is it we're mourning about? We took the last episode to discuss how we can have joy in our parenting even when other parents would be grieving over their children's refusal to submit to God.

So why now is Jesus saying that we have to mourn? I thought the whole point was all of us can be joyful. Well, the answer to that grows out of verse 3. Let's look at that and then put the whole picture together.

The word here translated poor speaks of being a beggar, of being destitute, of being needy. And the word spirit refers to the same word used to describe the spirit that resides in every soul. You see, I started at the back and worked forward for a couple reasons.

One of them was to set the bar super high and allow us to feel those pangs of insufficiency. Which of us is a brilliant light and flavorful salt to the truth of God in our houses? Which of us genuinely leaps for joy in God when our spouse and kids persecute us for living for Christ?

Which of us are peacemaking parents? Which of us are really pure parents? Which of us are merciful parents? You see, we all need to grow in all those areas and hopefully you sense your neediness in these categories the same way I do.

Spiritual Poverty and Mourning Before God

So, why does Jesus start with poor in spirit? Why does he start with needy? This is God's perfect version of the Zen proverb you're probably familiar with, empty your cup. It's said that Master Ryotan said this to the scholar Tokusam.

You are like this cup. You are full of ideas. You come and ask for teaching, but your cup is full. I can't put anything in. Before I can teach you, you'll have to empty your cup. Before God can fill your life and parenting with himself, you need to realize that you have nothing worthwhile to add to the equation.

We have no purpose and we have no power aside from God. It is only in God that we can have the purpose that he has ordained for us and to have the power to achieve that purpose. Aside from him, we don't have it.

We've got nothing. We have no purpose. We have no power. We have nothing. We have no spiritual strength. We have no great ideas. We are spiritually destitute. We're needy and broken. If we come to our parenting or anything else really in our life for that matter, puffed up and our own ability and awesomeness, then there will be nowhere for God's righteousness next to our unrighteousness or his perfect philosophy next to our failure philosophies.

So, this is how it works for the needy parent. The needy parent realizes he or she has absolutely nothing to bring to their parenting that will benefit the situation. Even our God-given abilities and skills will only hurt and destroy if we exercise them in our own power for our own little kingdom.

When we realize that we're needy, broken people, that should cause us to mourn. And for every Christian, we've experienced that grief when we were convicted of our sin and guilt before God. You see, we're not to live in that mourning and grief, but that mourning and grief is supposed to be the catalyst that starts our ability to have real joy.

We're to get up in the power of God and live for the glory of God and rejoice in situations that would cause other people to mourn. But we can't do that unless we started the proper type of mourning way back when or anytime we realize that we are spiritually destitute.

So now, as a born-again believer, one of the only things that should really cause us grief is our own unconfessed sin before God. And when we truly grieve over our spiritual destitution, we will run to God, the only one who can give us purpose and empower us and the only one who can comfort us.

And we will humbly bow before Him and acknowledge that we can't do it on our own and that we need Him. And again, this is the place to which all born-again believers have come at least one point in their lives.

Unfortunately, we don't return there as often as we should. I believe the beginning of this year is a wonderful place to acknowledge our spiritual neediness. Our unrepentant sin should weigh heavy on our hearts until we humbly throw ourselves on God's mercy and grace.

Then and only then will we be able to hunger and thirst after righteousness. That needy parenting leads inexorably to hungry parenting. And when we hungrily seek after the righteousness of God, that is when we start seeing mercy and purity and peacemaking and joy in our parenting.

That's when we are the types of parents that fill our house with the light of God and the delicious aroma of God. That is needy parenting. And the more often we're needy, the more often we live in the realization that we're needy, the more often we can live God's light and God's salty delicious flavor in our families.

It's when we forget that we're needy and we get all stuck in ourselves and our own quote-unquote purpose and our own quote-unquote power that we lose that neediness and then our parenting starts to fall apart.

Do you know a parent perhaps that could use this encouragement? Please, please definitely share this episode with them. In fact, take a moment to share it with all your friends on social media. As always, I've posted free episode notes and today's transcript at TakingBackTheFamily at TruthLoveParent .com.

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It will only take a minute or two, but it'll be a huge blessing to us on Team TLP and other people deciding if they should subscribe to the podcast. On our next episode, we're going to talk about what it means to parent like the Holy Spirit.

I hope you're looking forward to that. That's all I'm going to tell you. I hope you'll join us. And please do not forget to check out Real Men Connect with Dr. Joe Martin and click on the link Five Ways to Support TLP to learn how you can receive the upgraded thank yous at Patreon .com.

Listen, it's okay to be needy. We all are, just some of us haven't acknowledged it yet. Please, for your family's sake, realize just how needy you are. Allow that to break you. And then give yourself 100 to God to parent the way He created you to parent.

And then join us next time to see some ways God Himself and the person of the Holy Spirit actually parents. See you then.

Truth. Love. Parents 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.