TLP 243: Parenting in Christ, Part 3 | what does it look like?

But Aaron, you're describing slavery, imprisonment is something people try to escape. How can parenting in Christ be compared to bondage?

Welcome to Truth. Love. Parent. Where we use God's Word to become intentional, premeditated parents.

Here's your host, AM Brewster. Hey, for those of you who recently started listening to Truth.

Love. Parent, let me take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Aaron, I have the privilege of being Johanna's husband and Micah and Ivy's dad.

We live and work at Victory Academy for Boys, which is a boarding school for at -risk teens. Our ministry goal is to glorify

God by lovingly presenting the truths of scripture to families in crisis in order to impact each member's heart, help them reconcile with each other, and strengthen their relationships with God.

I'm also the executive director of TLP, that's Truth. Parent. This podcast is only one of our parenting resources.

You can visit TruthLoveParent .com to learn more about us and discover our other parenting tools. We even have email and video counseling services there as well.

I also travel and speak in churches and schools and camps and conferences. I absolutely love equipping dads and moms to be the parents that God called and created them to be.

I love helping families discover God's will for their home lives. I love learning how God's Word can impact everything we do in life, using it then in my own home, and then sharing it with you guys.

We also have an online community for Christian parents. We're on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and we have a closed

Facebook group where moms and dads can ask questions, encourage each other, and bear one another's burdens in prayer.

If you go to TruthLoveParent .com and join the TLP family, you will receive an access code to join that closed

Facebook group. Basically, everything Team TLP and I do is dedicated to helping you become an intentional, premeditated, disciple -making, ambassador parent for God.

So thank you so much for letting us speak into your parenting. It's a huge job, parenting that is. It's challenging.

It's tiring. It could even be overwhelming. But God has everything we need for life and godliness and parenting, and it's an honor to share that with you.

Now, I know this intro is a little bit longer than usual, but I would be remiss to forget to thank Ryan and Kim for making today's show possible.

Their sacrificial gifts allow us to provide this free content. In fact, Kim is closely involved in helping me edit our first TLP ebook called

God's Cure for Family Strife. There are so many people behind the scenes, and I praise God for each one of them.

Whether it's a dollar a month or a one -time gift or an encouraging email or a prayer on our behalf, it is cherished and beneficial.

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Okay, let's talk about what parenting in Christ looks like at home. Of course, we need to review. The last two episodes described what it means to be in Christ.

To be in Christ, we must have faith and trust in who God is and what He's done for us and what He's doing for us.

That faith allows us access to peace with God, peace in ourselves, and peace with others. And even though it sounds like it would be very difficult to be at peace with your terrorist child,

God provides the strength necessary to those who are in Him. And all of this results in people who love to obey

God and are growing in their submission to Him. So how might this affect your parenting? Well, the examples and applications would be as diverse and unique as your daily parenting opportunities.

In fact, the answers to that question is why we have a podcast with nearly 250 episodes to date.

It's a huge consideration with massive impact on our lives. So in order to narrow it for our purposes today,

I'm going to target some of the passages that specifically use the terminology in Christ. Today we're going to talk about how being in Christ specifically affects how we view ourselves.

How you view yourself is so important. So many of us are shackled by our perceived inadequacies and failures, while others of us are just too full of ourselves.

One of the most significant ways being in Christ affects our parenting is by starting at the foundation of who we are.

This is why our second episode is called, Why Is It Always About Me? Our home struggles are never just about the other people in our lives.

God's using every struggle and success to do a work in you. Before we can ever address the splinter in another's eye, we must first look to the log in our own.

By the way, if I ever cite a previous episode, you can find an Apple podcast link in the description of the current episode.

That way you can simply click on it and be taken right to the episode. So let's talk about being in Christ and how it affects how we view our parenting.

And the next time we'll see how it affects the way we treat our children. How does being in Christ affect our parenting?

Well, again, like I said, it affects the way we view ourselves. And we're going to look at four passages with the rest of our time, but I really want us to grapple with each of these realities and what it means for our parenting.

The first verse we're going to study is 2 Corinthians 5 .17. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

The old has passed away, behold, the new has come. Number one, parenting in Christ must be new parenting.

If you've taken the first step to being a good parent by submitting to God and following Him, then you have a brand new trajectory for your life.

This means that your parenting should be categorically opposite from the following two kinds of parenting. A, your parenting should be completely different from the parenting of unbelieving parents.

First John 2, 15 through 17 says, do not love the world or the things in the world.

If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life, is not from the

Father, but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

The lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life have no place in our parenting if we're parenting in Christ.

And we're to not love the things of the world. That means we're not to love even the parenting ideas and strategies of the world.

Now, does this mean that unsaved parents will never do the same types of things that Christians should do? Of course not.

Both will read books to their children, both will feed their kids. But like we learned in the Teach Your Children to Obey series, true obedience is doing the right thing in the right way for the right reasons.

Our parenting should be diametrically opposed to the world's parenting because we should be doing what we do for completely different reasons.

But not only should your parenting be different from the world's, B, your parenting should be completely different from what you naturally want to do.

It's easy to judge the world and find numerous examples of parenting trends in which you would never participate.

But you also have to realize that if you were unsaved, your parenting wouldn't be any more Christ -honoring than theirs.

It's not about what you do so much, it's why, and God has made you a new creation. Old parenting ways must pass away and new must come.

That means if we're in Christ, we must deliberately and regularly evaluate our parenting in order to determine if we're falling back into our old man ways.

Ephesians 4, 21 -24 reads, Paul assumes that if we've heard the gospel and been taught about him, we're obviously going to follow him.

I love that. Second, he says that being a child of God must change us so that our sinful motivations, those deceitful desires, are thrown away from us.

And then we need to put on the new self, which is a direct reflection of God's righteousness and holiness. So, this concept is that when we're born again, we will parent differently than we would have been parenting if we were unsaved.

But since we still carry our sin natures with us, the temptation to parent in the flesh, the way we would if we were worshiping ourselves instead of God, is still a very real temptation.

So first, parenting in Christ looks like the opposite of worldly parenting. It should be. We're working on a page at truthloveparent .com

that collects all of our episodes concerning sinful parenting styles. It's not up yet, but if you're listening to this in the future, you should check it out.

Those episodes were designed to help us know who we're not to be. But before we move on, let's try to get a little bit more practical.

A. Pretend for a minute that God doesn't exist. If the evolutionists and atheists are right, then what do you want for your kids?

A good job? Money? Fame? Power? Control? Skills? We must acknowledge that any goal an unsaved parent could have for their children can never compare to the most beautiful calling

God has for our kids. And B. This new man parenting stands at odds with sin in the world and flees sinful responses.

Sinful anger, depression, fear, impatience, hate, anxiety, worry, and doubt have no place in our homes or parenting.

But there's more to how we should view ourselves in Christ. What does new look like? Let's get more specific.

1 Thessalonians 2 .14 says, For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea.

2. Parenting in Christ imitates Christ. The new, the parenting that is categorically opposed to worldly, fleshly parenting, obviously looks like Christ.

It's the very definition of ambassador parenting. 3 John 1 .11 reads, Beloved, do not imitate evil, but imitate good.

Whoever does good is from God. Whoever does evil has not seen God. Every time we're commanded to imitate something in the

New Testament, the obvious implication is that we're imitating that which most closely resembles Christ.

And the Bible is where we learn who Christ is, and applying Scripture to our parenting is the goal of TLP. But our parenting in Christ isn't merely that it's new and seeks to imitate

Christ. We must view ourselves as more than children flattering God with inaccurate imitations.

In order to view roles correctly, we must understand that 3. Parenting in Christ requires that we be captured by Christ.

In Philemon 1 .23, Paul writes, Epaphras, my fellow prisoner in Christ, sends greetings to you.

Paul and Epaphras understood that their relationship with God was far more than a personal desire to gain a new life by imitating the better parts of God.

At Victory Academy, we get many boys who outright reject God's teaching and others who embrace it wholeheartedly.

But from time to time, there are boys who want all the good things God has to offer without all the humbling and serving and submitting that He commands.

But those boys never fare well because the benefits and blessings of being a child of God don't happen just because we adopt a new way of living.

The blessings are tied to the behavior, but the behavior must be rooted in and empowered by a personal relationship with God.

God won't be used. He won't be duped by a facade, a counterfeit righteousness. If we're going to try to gain the blessing of parenting in Christ without truly submitting our selfish motivations to God's perfect will by merely outwardly impersonating righteous living, we will never succeed.

In fact, we'll fail even worse than we could imagine. But when we realize that we've been captured by our

Creator, that we're willing prisoners of God who joyfully submit to His boundaries and regulations, we're in the right relationship with Him.

I must reach out again to Matthew 5. Jesus explained all of this at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount.

We must humbly submit to God in order to be able to truly hunger and thirst after righteousness that is deeply motivated by God's glory.

But Aaron, you're describing slavery. Imprisonment is something people try to escape. How can parenting in Christ be compared to this kind of bondage?

Well, in episode 172, we discussed the truth that sets us free, and the rest of season seven dealt with the liberation that comes from submission to God.

And that's our final point for today. Parenting in Christ should change us because we start to view ourselves biblically.

So therefore, number four, parenting in Christ, we understand, sets us free. Now, what

I'm about to say won't sound too liberating, but stick with me. We must acknowledge that we will always be in bondage to something.

The sin nature lies to us by trying to convince us that A, we deserve to be masterless, and B, that it's possible to be masterless.

This was Satan's delusion. This was Adam and Eve's delusion. This is our screaming toddler's delusion. We are created beings.

We will always be indebted to our creator, our master. Romans 10 9 reads, If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is

Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. The word translated

Lord means He to whom a person or thing belongs, about which He has power of deciding.

It means He's the master, possessor, and disposer of everything, the owner, the one who has control.

We can either submit to God or fight Him in delusional autonomy, but truth will win in the end.

Philippians 2 10 -11 says, At the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is

Lord, to the glory of God the Father. That's every knee, the knees of those who submitted to Christ in this life and the knees of those who fought

Him. The problem is not that we will either be enslaved to sin and death or God, the problem is how we view our dependence.

Those who view their dependence on God as wrong and uncomfortable and hazardous and debilitating are missing the beautiful fact that the truth sets us free.

Consider Galatians 2 4 -5, Yet because of false brothers secretly brought in who slipped in to spy out our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might bring us into slavery, to them we do not yield in submission even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you.

You see, those who reject God's lordship try to spy out our freedom in Christ so that they may try to convince us that we aren't free and try to enslave us once again to the lie that we don't have a master or that our master should be someone other than God.

But we are free. Obedience to God is the most beautiful freedom you will ever experience.

Heaven will be glorious in part because we'll be able to perfectly worship God in total freedom, freedom the way it was intended to be experienced, in perfect submission to our

Creator. If you're in Christ then, you have freedom in Him. You're free to parent in a new way that the world can never begin to understand.

You're free to imitate Christ. You're free to be His prisoner, as opposed to sin and death and Satan's.

Parenting in Christ looks different from parenting out of Christ. Is this how you view yourself?

If not, I would encourage you to re -evaluate your relationship with Him. If you aren't His child, will you embrace the glorious freedom that is yours in a true relationship with Him?

If you're born again, I admonish you to understand what it looks like to parent in Christ. Now please share this episode with other dads and moms who need to view themselves differently.

And join us next time as we look at the second part of what parenting in Christ looks like. Today we saw that it affects how we view ourselves, and next time we'll see how it affects how we treat our kids.

Parenting in Christ is godly, not worldly. It's selfless, not selfish. Can you even imagine what this kind of parenting looks like?

Well, to that end, I'll see you next time. 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.