TLP 59: The Four Children, Part 5 | Parenting a Soft-Hearted Child

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This type of parenting is founded on all that God is, empowered by His strength, consumed with His glory.

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It's also flowing with love and honesty while expecting great things from our little ones when they've submitted to their

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Creator. Welcome to Truth. Love. Parent. Where we use

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God's Word to become intentional, premeditated parents. Here's your host,

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A .M. Brewster. Welcome to the final episode of The Four Children. We have a full show today because we're not just going to answer the questions, who is the soft -hearted child, do you have a soft -hearted child in your home, and how do you cultivate your child's soft heart like Jesus did.

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We're also going to investigate the questions, how is it possible for a soft -hearted child to have a hard, rocky, or thorny response to truth?

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And how do you parent a soft -hearted child who's responding incorrectly to truth? But more on that in a minute.

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I recently posted the introduction and first chapter of my parenting book on Patreon .com. Many of our patrons get the opportunity to see stuff like that before it's published and have input into the content.

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I want the book to resonate with and benefit as many parents as possible, so getting your feedback is so vital.

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Will you please click the support TLP link in the description and check out our Patreon page? There you'll find

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Truth. Love. Parents ministry goals, but you'll also find out about all the cool stuff we have and do for our patrons.

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Okay, so we've made it to the soft -hearted child, but as we discuss them today, remember simply having a born -again child isn't the goal.

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There is so much parenting that still needs to be done. In fact, this is the point that intentional premeditated disciple -making parent starts.

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So question number one is, who is the soft -hearted child? For the last time, we turn to Aaron's Amplified Version and we read, "...other

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seeds fell on good soil and grew, and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.

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He who has ears let him hear. As for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it and accepts it, and holds it fast with an honest and good heart, and bears fruit with patience.

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He indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty."

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Obviously, this child has a similar response to truth that the hard and thorny children do, similar to the degree that all three respond to it.

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Different to the degree that the soft -hearted child accepts it all and genuinely puts his faith and trust in God and nothing else.

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He holds it fast in an honest and good heart. He's not preoccupied with the Christian lifestyle, the religious benefits, or the shiny experiences.

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He's enamored with God. And we're told simply that his heart produces real spiritual life with verifiable fruit.

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As they mature, you'll see snippets of genuine love motivated by God's glory and the best of others, not merely loving acts motivated by self -pleasure or manipulation.

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You'll start seeing a real joy that bears up even under difficult and uncomfortable situations. This child will start to exhibit a spirit of unity that peacefully learns to handle disagreements and conflict, not simply because life is easier when you don't argue, but because God commands that we all be peaceful.

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This child will begin to learn patience because they'll start to understand that this life is far better than what they deserve and that they can wait and be thankful in the waiting.

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You'll see slivers of kindness motivated by genuine love. You'll observe your children actually being good because they know it will honor the

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Lord in you. This child will also begin to be faithful in a way they never could before because the Holy Spirit will give them strength they never had before.

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Gentleness will start to blossom because this child realizes how gracious God has been to him. And self -control will slowly be built up brick by brick, not because he can rein himself in long enough to endure your watchful eye and then return right back to his sin, but because he really genuinely wants to follow

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Christ. And though all of this will look a little different in each soft -hearted child, they will all be there and growing for the right reasons.

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And this is what Jesus was talking about when he said that some will bear 30 % and some 60 % and some 100%.

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It's a picture of maturity. I remember over a decade ago talking to one of my former pastors,

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Mike Harding, about the guys who had been in my youth group growing up in his church. I lamented that only a couple of them that I knew of were still aggressively glorifying

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God and serving Him with their lives. He looked at me, and without even the slightest hint of cynicism, said, Aaron, that's how it will always be.

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What he was saying was that not every tree bears 60 -fold or 100 -fold. Some only bear 30 -fold.

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Does that mean I'm unsaved if I'm not as mature as another believer? Of course not. But it does mean

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I'm not as mature. We're going to talk about this more later, but one of our parenting jobs is to help our children be as mature as they can be.

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And for our born -again kids, that means we're helping them to bear more fruit. So question number two is, do you have a soft -hearted child in your home?

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Again, we can't know our kids' hearts with 100 % certainty, but 1 John and the multitude of sanctification lists throughout

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Scripture definitely help us understand what we're looking for. Again, I want to point you to the passages we looked at earlier in this study—Galatians 5, 16 -24, 2

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Peter 1, 3 -11, Ephesians 6, 10 -18. And passages like these present us with the fruit of maturity.

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But I just want to focus in on the two biggest indicators of spiritual life. The first is, obviously, a love for God.

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I know, I know. After a while, all preachers and counselors and parents and disciples and leaders and teachers start to sound like a broken record, but we all know the two greatest commandments are to love

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God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and it's given to us in Deuteronomy and repeated by Christ in the

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New Testament. You can't be born again and not love God. In fact, this idea of loving God is number one, so huge and vast, but number two, so incredibly misunderstood that I plan to take a future episode to discuss what biblical love really is.

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But for now, we can know that the word used here to describe love means that we are making a conscious choice to love

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God with everything that we are, nothing held back. And the same passage tells us that the second indicator of a generated heart is to love others.

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If your child loves the Lord and loves others, they're born again. And I say that with confidence because Jesus said it, people will know that you're my disciples if you love each other.

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And the best indication of a love for God and others is this, does your child enjoy sharing God with others?

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Do they have a heart for the gospel? Do they speak truth into other people's lives? We're going to see this lived out in two biblical soft -hearted examples right now.

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So question three is how do you cultivate your child's soft heart like Jesus did? Well, the first step is to introduce seed to the soil, and there are two people

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I'd like to use to illustrate this point. The first is the Samaritan woman, and the second is the maniac of Gadara.

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The account of Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman is found in John 4. I'm not certain, but I think that perhaps this woman had a hard heart when she met

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Christ. But I believe it was Jesus' initial interaction with her that began softening it. She was genuinely surprised that a male

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Jew would give her the time of day. Then he offers her a special gift, a gift of living water.

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She's still skeptical, so he tells her that anyone who drinks of the water he provides will never thirst again.

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At this point, I think she's softened enough that she's very interested, and she's starting to accept the seeds, but she's kind of having a thorny response because she doesn't really truly understand the spiritual depth of Jesus' comments.

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Either way, she wants the water because she doesn't want to have to go out there to that well again. So Jesus uses that interest to draw her into a deeper understanding by asking her something that will reveal the greatest need of her life.

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He asks her to go get her husband. She tells him that she doesn't have a husband, and Jesus uses her answer to reveal that she's had five husbands and that the one she's with now isn't even married to her.

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He simultaneously is able to exhibit his miraculous authority and draw her to the fact that she's a sinner, which is extremely important.

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At this point, I believe she kind of has a little bit of a rocky response. I can hear her kind of getting a little defensive.

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She tries to distract him with racial, political arguments, but Christ brings her back to the truth of God, and she's brought to a place where she admits that she's waiting for the

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Messiah, and then he reveals himself to her. The second individual is the maniac of Gadara.

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This account is found in Luke 8, and it's so profound. This man is the perfect picture of the hard heart.

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He has demonic forces residing in him, and he hated all that was spiritual.

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But at the word from Jesus, the evil spirits fled, and the once -possessed man wanted nothing more than to dedicate his entire life to Christ.

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I think that's a great picture of a soft heart. A soft heart wants to do something more.

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A soft heart just doesn't go, hey, thanks for saving me. Thanks for setting me free, and then going on their merry way. And this is exhibited in the fact that the

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Scriptures tell us that both the Samaritan woman and the maniac of Gadara were used mightily to reach their countrymen.

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They couldn't help but share the glorious news that lifted them from their bondage to sin and Satan. So before we move to the next point, take courage.

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Neither of these individuals started with soft heart responses, otherwise they would already be born again. It was the careful cultivation of Christ that prepared the soil for genuinely receiving his word.

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The great thing is, Jesus nurtured the spiritual life of his followers in the exact same way he cultivated their hearts to receive his word.

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Whether they weren't soft hearted yet, whether they had just become soft hearted, or whether they'd been soft hearted for years, he cultivated and he worked with them the exact same way.

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As you study the Gospels, you see Jesus consistently loving and praying for and serving and preaching to his disciples. How do you parent a soft hearted child?

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You keep the flow of truth and love pouring into their hearts. This can be used by God to mature the young saplings of spiritual life into towering plants that yield abundant fruit.

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Again, too many parents feel they've somehow completed their spiritual job by introducing their kids to Christ. And once the child is saved and the

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Holy Spirit is doing his work, mom and dad turn the kid over to the Christian school or the church to do the rest of the discipling.

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But that could not be more wrong. It's our God -given responsibility to help sanctify our children and assist them as they're conformed into the image of Christ.

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And we accomplish that the same way we introduced them to Jesus in the first place, speaking and living the Gospel into their everyday lives.

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And the reason this is so important is that just because we're Christians doesn't mean we're as mature as we could be. Our sinful flesh will still have hard, rocky, and sometimes thorny responses to truth even though we're bearing genuine fruit of repentance.

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So that leads us to our fourth question. How is it possible for a soft hearted child to have a hard, rocky, or thorny response to truth?

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Do you remember when we discussed the hard heart in episode 56? One of the verses I cited told of the resurrected

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Christ appearing to his disciples and chastising them for having a hard heart. What was the issue? Well, they didn't believe

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He would rise from the dead. Even though many of them had believed Him to be the Savior, to believe

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Him to be the Messiah, the Son of God, they didn't believe everything about Him, in particular,

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His resurrection. This shows us that saving faith doesn't equal perfect faith.

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We must always be growing in our faith. I believe this is the reason that some of the plants in the parable bore thirtyfold and some sixtyfold and some a hundred.

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The hearts that bear more fruit really believe more of the Bible. And remember, believing

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God's Word is not simply knowing it or understanding it or even agreeing with it. Belief bears behavior every single time.

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Here's an example. My children know that God wants them to obey me, and there are times that they completely agree with that.

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But the times they choose to disobey show that in that moment, my children thought they had a better plan.

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In that instant, they believed that obeying Dad was not the best choice.

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We're going to dedicate a later series to this reality so we parents can understand why we do what we do and why our kids do what they do, but we also need to be able to explain it to our kids.

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I'm really looking forward to discussing what I like to call the merest Christianity with you later. But for now, let's answer the final question of this series.

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How do you parent a soft -hearted child when they're having a hard, rocky, or thorny response to truth?

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Well, we know that every born -again member of our family will have an immature response to truth at some point or another, or multiple points.

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When we encounter these hard, rocky, and thorny choices, we need to address them the same way as we would address the unregenerated hard, rocky, and thorny hearts.

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So here's a quick review of our study up until now. A hard -hearted response to truth requires constant prayer, constant truth, constant love, and constant engaging.

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What's this engaging thing? Well, remember, the hard heart is the distracted heart. When you present the truth in love, you need to do it in such a way that they are forced to think about it.

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Lectures too often breed brainless responses. My mother tells a story of haranguing a young boy for his selfish choice, and when she was done, she asked the boy if he had any questions.

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His response was, Do you know you got hair up your nose? First, it's extremely important for you to understand that I was not that boy in that story.

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That's very important. It was somebody else. But second, we don't want our hard -hearted kids to have a hair -up -your -nose response to our admonition.

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Ask lots of questions and drive them to really think and to mull over this truth that you're talking about.

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Now, if they have a rocky -hearted response, that's going to require constant prayer, constant truth, constant love, but also constant harvesting.

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What do I mean by that? Well, this means always be looking for the fruit that shows the child finally believes the truth.

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Until their behavior aligns with their professed belief, you can know they don't really genuinely believe it the way they should. And then the fifth one, we have constant prayer, truth, love, harvesting, and then we also have constant pressure.

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If you remember this from the discussion about the rocky heart, it means that we must continually provide the child the opportunity to fail.

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I know, that sounds negative, and yes, I could have said provide him opportunities to succeed, but there really is a big difference.

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If I expect 5 -year -old behavior from my 10 -year -old son, he will always be successful, but he'll never grow.

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However, if I expect 12 -year -old behavior from my 10 -year -old son, I'm giving him a challenge for him to rise to, one that requires effort, one that he could potentially fail.

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Your rocky -hearted child will need enough pressure to break him of his self -sufficiency so he'll see his need for Christ in this life.

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Lastly, a thorny -hearted response to truth, even when it comes from a born -again believer, requires constant prayer, constant truth, constant love, and also what

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I'm going to call constant realism. A thorny response is one rooted in comfort, pleasure, ease, and fluffy emotions.

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Though genuine peace, joy, and happiness are ours in Christ, we need to help our kids become what I like to call optimistic realists, optimistic that God will get all the glory and that we will be blessed in our conformity to Christ, but realistic enough to realize that following Jesus is a weighty matter that requires sacrifice.

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We mustn't follow Jesus because of what we can get out of it. We follow Jesus because He's worthy of it.

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And if we were to put all of these together, our parenting would consist of constant prayer, constant truth, constant love, constant engaging, constant harvesting, constant pressure, and constant realism.

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Can you think of anything that's missing? And this type of parenting is founded on all that God is, empowered by His strength and consumed with His glory.

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It's also flowing with love and honesty and expecting great things from our little ones when they've submitted themselves to their

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Creator. I don't know about you, but that's definitely the type of leadership I want in my life. So don't forget about today's episode notes.

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I hope that this study has been a fantastic one for you, has been as great for you as it has been for me. You can find the notes linked in the description.

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Next time we're going to talk about a parenting game that you should never, ever play.

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Please don't miss that one. And I pray that the God of all comfort will genuinely keep your hearts and minds in His perfect care as you parent.

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Parenting isn't easy. No one ever said it would be. But being an ambassador parent is a calling of hope.

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Truth. Love. is dedicated to helping you become an intentional, premeditated parent.

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Join us next time as we search God's Word for the truth your family needs today.