Experiencing God at Home (13 page)

Two Dangers

There are two primary dangers parents face when it comes to God working through their children’s lives. The first is, as we’ve seen, when parents miss what God is doing. The second is when parents impose their own will on their children rather than being sensitive to what God intends to do.

Do you remember Mrs. Zebedee, the mother of James and John? She had some definite ideas about what she wanted her two boys to do! (We can only imagine how she behaved at Little League games!) She asked Jesus to let her two sons serve as His right- and left-hand men (Matt. 20:20–22). Jesus’ response was, “You do not know what you ask” (Matt. 20:22). If Jesus had granted this ambitious mother’s request, her two sons would have been impaled on crosses at the left and right of Jesus. At times, the worst thing God can do for us is to give us what we keep asking for!

The problem is that parents often mistakenly assume that they know what is best for their children.
Of course
they need to go to the same university their parents attended, or join the family business, or enter a profession that will earn them a lot of money, or live in the same county when they are adults so the grandchildren are close. Well-meaning parents can assume that what they want for their children must also be what God wants. It is wise to remember the words of Isaiah: “‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,’” says the L
ord
. ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts’” (Isa. 55:8–9). If we have not clearly heard what is on God’s heart for our children, it is likely that we are settling for less than His best for them.

Opposing God’s Work (An Example from Richard)

I was once leading a conference with my father for a wonderful group of missionaries serving in Europe. One afternoon we had a sharing time. Many couples came to the microphone and recounted heartbreaking stories of how their own children’s faith had suffered while they were serving in foreign countries and sharing the gospel with others. Some of the missionary children had become involved in drugs. Others had rejected the Christian faith. There was not a dry eye in the room as parents related the suffering they had endured. The missionaries grieved that their children, after watching their parents travel the globe to tell others about Christ, had chosen to reject Christ themselves.

There was one couple standing at the end of the line to speak who appeared deeply troubled. After all the agonizing stories that had already been told, I could not imagine what suffering these parents had endured. Then they told their story. Their oldest son had grown up with his family on the mission field. He was in his final year of high school and was trying to determine what God wanted him to do with his life. One day he told his parents that he wanted to spend his first year out of high school volunteering somewhere in the world where there was poverty so he could help people and share the gospel with them. His mother quickly demurred, arguing that he needed to go to college and that it would be wasteful to expend a year of his life that way. The youth approached his parents later and said he would like to enter medical school. By gaining this expertise, he could one day enter a country that might be closed to Christian missionaries. Once again, his mother opposed his plan, claiming they were poorly paid missionaries and medical school was extremely expensive. Was there not a cheaper degree he might pursue? Finally, one evening the young man told his mother he had just received a desperate call from a teenage girl. The young woman sounded suicidal and had desperately reached out to him for help. He was on his way to meet with her. “You can’t go and see her!” the mother protested. “I don’t trust that girl, and you can’t meet with her at night.” She forbid him to leave the house.

That afternoon during the conference, the mother finally realized what she had been doing. Unlike many of the other missionary couples whose children were drifting away from God, her son was earnestly seeking to do God’s will. However, it was the boy’s own mother who consistently opposed everything God was initiating in his life. The mother wept as she realized the greatest deterrent to her son’s walk with God was not Satan, or atheists, or ungodly friends, but his own mother. She, a loving mother and Christian, had often prayed that her son would grow up to serve the Lord, but was bewildered at the realization she had consistently been her son’s greatest roadblock.

If parents are not careful, they can unwittingly oppose or hinder the very work in their children’s lives that they have been praying for.

3. God Is at Work around Your Home

God is not only working
in
your children and
through
them, but He is also at work
around
them. Wise parents continually keep their spiritual senses attune to what is happening in and around their house and family.

Jesus once rebuked His disciples for being oblivious to God’s work around them. God the Father had performed a miracle to feed five thousand men and their families with a handful of loaves and fishes. Then Jesus performed a similar miracle feeding four thousand. Yet despite all they witnessed, the disciples were still disoriented to God’s activity. Jesus asked, “Is your heart still hardened? Having eyes, do you not see? And having ears, do you not hear?” (Mark 8:17–18).

It’s possible for God to be working all around our family and yet for us to miss what He is doing. We were fortunate to have a mother who stayed home during our childhood years. Part of the reason was because with five children to coordinate, feed, and shuttle, our Grand Central Station required a stay-at-home mom! But our mother also believed her ministry was to respond to what God was doing around her family.

As teenagers, we had our “lair” in the basement where we hung out with our friends. We’d often come upstairs to raid the kitchen for snacks only to discover one of our friends sitting at the kitchen table talking with our mother. He had come over to hang out with us, but upon being greeted at the door by our mother, she had commenced a lengthy discussion about his life and how he was spending it! Some of our friends never made it downstairs! We had two friends who lived across the street from our house when we were growing up. Their parents were divorced, and they lived with their father. When they needed somewhere to eat lunch on school days, our mother agreed to take them in and commenced ministering to them every lunch hour. Our house always teemed with neighborhood children when we were growing up (especially just after our mother pulled homemade cinnamon buns out of the oven!). Her attitude was: If these children’s parents don’t want their kids to hear about God, they can keep them away from my house!” Our friends heard a lot about God!

The same truth applies in our children’s schools. God is at work there too, and wise parents try to be alert so they can join in His activity. Both of our wives were favorite volunteers at our children’s schools. One year Lisa received a call from Daniel’s teacher one week before school was to commence. The teacher explained that renovations to her classroom were running late, so her class could not meet in it during the first week of school. She had scheduled field trips for every day that first week. The teacher had heard Lisa was a great volunteer, so she was calling to enlist her services! Richard, on the other hand, took a shift as a parent volunteer at his daughter Carrie’s kindergarten class one afternoon and had to go home immediately afterward and crawl straight into bed from exhaustion!

God is at work in our children’s schools. Some of our children‘s friends come from hurting, broken homes. Other children have never been to church and have only heard God’s name uttered in their home when it was being blasphemed. Still other children are lonely or hurting and desperately looking for someone who cares about them. Schools, whether they are public or private, are enormous mission fields for families that want to be on mission with God.

School and Casseroles (An example from Richard)

Do your children struggle with mornings as much as ours did? We’re not sure if it was because their breakfast cereal was laced with sedatives, or what it was; but compared to our children, molasses looked like the Roadrunner when fleeing Wiley Coyote. One morning was particularly gruelling. Lisa kept encouraging the kids to pick up the pace and get ready for school. They stared blankly at her. “Hurry!” she urged. By the time Lisa pulled up to the school in our car, the school bell had rung and children were making their way to their classrooms. As Lisa helped her kids cross the street, she noticed Daniel’s schoolteacher, Mrs. Smith, pulling into the staff parking lot. Anyone arriving
after
the Blackabys was
really
late!

Lisa’s first thought was to look the other way and not embarrass the teacher by making it obvious she was aware of her tardiness. But Lisa felt impressed that she should find out why the teacher was unusually tardy. As Lisa walked quickly alongside the teacher, the frazzled woman explained what had happened. She was a single mom with two school-aged children. In the middle of the night, she awakened to a strange sound only to discover her oldest son in the midst of a seizure. Terrified, the woman raced him to a hospital emergency room and stayed up all night waiting for test results. The woman did not attend church and was unsure where to turn for help.

That day, Lisa sensed God had an assignment for her. She went home and began baking! I like to joke that Lisa has the “spiritual gift” of casseroles! After school that day, Lisa showed up at the teacher’s doorstep with a homemade meal and words of encouragement. God wanted to comfort a distraught woman that day, and He chose to use an ordinary mom to do it.

The question is not, “Is God at work around my family?” The question is, “Have you recognized where God is working?” (Because He
is
at work!)

4. God Is at Work in Parents

When it comes to the role of parents in their children’s lives, we could summarize it in two ways.
First,
parents support and participate in God’s activity in their children’s lives.
Second,
parents oppose and counteract the secular world’s negative influence on their children. The harsh reality is: just as God is constantly at work in your home, so is the world’s ungodly influence. More than likely your home is permeated with worldly values and perspectives that flow through social media, television, Internet, movies, music, billboards, and your children’s friends. The world’s values are diametrically opposed to God’s. That is why the apostle Paul urged believers to “not be conformed to this world, but be transformed” (Rom. 12:2).

The challenge is that even as you train up your children to walk in righteousness, your children’s friends and classmates may be trying to indoctrinate them with opposing values and viewpoints. You must be walking closely enough with your children to know what they are encountering. You must be able to recognize signs of the world, or God’s activity, in your child’s life.

What makes parenting so challenging is that each child is unique! One-size-fits-all parenting doesn’t work! You may have worked hard to be a good parent to your firstborn. Then, just when you think you are starting to “get the hang of it,” you have a second child who is diametrically opposite to the first one! Back to the drawing board! Some children will readily accept parental guidance while others stubbornly insist on doing everything their own way. Parents must fashion a unique and workable relationship with each child.

What makes things even more interesting is that the same qualities and characteristics in your children that exert a positive influence can likewise be their Achilles’ heel. Being a sociable child can also lead your daughter to be easily influenced by her friends. Being an obedient child can lead your son to be easily led astray by deceitful classmates. It is imperative that parents know their children well so they are attentive to issues that inevitably arise.

A Challenge to Grow

As your children mature, their problems and temptations become more complex. It is one thing to help your preschooler learn how to share a toy with her friend in the nursery. It is quite another issue to teach your teenage daughter about moral purity or your son about avoiding Internet pornography.

That is why we commend you for reading this book. Wise parents are constantly learning and growing so they are prepared for the next stage their children enter. Just because you were successful with your children’s previous stage of life is no guarantee you will obtain the same results in the future, especially if you fail to keep growing.

A word of caution is in order here. We know parents who insist that their children adapt to them rather than the parents adjusting to their children. After all, they are the parents, the adults in the household. They are in charge. It is the children who should adapt to the leadership style of their parents and show due respect in the process! As you might expect, this approach doesn’t work very well.

We recommend the opposite.
You
are the mature person in the relationship, so it stands to reason that
you
should do the adapting. Your faith in God is presumably stronger than that of your child, so you should be the first one to go the extra mile. I (Richard) recently talked with a frustrated set of parents. They had developed the unhealthy habit of arguing with their daughter. She seemed so irrational and irresponsible to them that they were continually criticizing her choices and descending into yelling matches with her. They confided to me that they were worried that their daughter, having made so many poor decisions, might walk away from the Christian faith. I gently asked them what their daughter witnessed of the Christian faith when she interacted with her parents. They were critical, argumentative, and sarcastic toward her. I suggested that since they had been long-time Christians, they ought to be modelling Christian maturity to their daughter. The problem was that as their daughter progressed to teenage issues, her parents had lagged behind in their growth as parents. Now they were bewildered at how to relate to their teenage daughter who had been so sweet and compliant as a young child.