The Goal Every Parent Is Shooting For

Today’s Reading: 3 John

Where parents used to rely on peers or their parents to help them navigate parenting challenges, such as bedtime, homework, and tantrums, many are now turning to parenting coaches. Many of these coaches charge between $125 to $350 a session and meet with parents—either in person, by phone, or over Skype—to set goals and develop a plan to reach them.

Parenting coaches, which is a more recent profession of just the past twenty years, has taken its place in the $1.08 billion personal coaching industry in the States. It seems more and more Americans choose to hire experts to help them improve every area of their lives—from parenting to sleeping, to finances, to life in general. Parents who invest that kind of money in this arena have one goal—joy. They want to see their children succeed, which in turn brings joy to their lives.

In today’s chapter, the apostle John says something about spiritual parenting, which is true for all parenting: “I have no greater joy than this, to hear of my children walking in the truth” (3 John 1:4). There is no greater joy for a parent than to see their children succeed. Based on 3 John’s passage, we understand that “succeed” means having our children walking with God.

The words of Jesus couldn’t be clearer and more true when He said, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:36). Having our children graduate college, get good grades, succeed in business, have a great marriage, have healthy grandchildren—mean a lot, but not at the expense of not having a strong spiritual life. Our first priority as parents is their spiritual lives.

Steven Furtick, the pastor of Elevation Church, said, “My goal in parenting is to raise my kids to have a boring testimony. In other words, to stay out of trouble and love Jesus all their lives. It’s just that I’d prefer that my kids change the world without having to have the world first change them. A person’s testimony does not have to be spectacularly sinful to be significant.”

One of my dear friends told me, “You are only as happy as the child who is doing the worst.” That means when one of my kids is not following God or going through a bad time, that is the watermark of joy for a parent.

How do you get the joy of knowing all your kids are walking in truth? It starts with you, not them. As T. D. Jakes said, “You can teach what you know but you can only reproduce what you are.”

That’s why this article caught my attention several years ago:

“An annual Easter egg hunt attended by hundreds of children has been canceled because of misbehavior last year. Not by the kids, but by the grown-ups. Too many parents, determined to see their children get an egg, jumped a rope marking the boundaries of the children-only hunt at Bancroft Park [in Colorado Springs, Colorado] last year. The hunt was over in seconds, to the consternation of eggless tots and the rules-abiding parents. Parenting observers cite the cancellation as a prime example of so-called “helicopter parents”—those who hover over their children and are involved in every aspect of their children’s lives—to ensure that they don’t fail, even at an Easter egg hunt.”

Misbehaving children are usually the result of misbehaving parents. Your children need to see your life with God and your convictions. If they see you compromise or try to “get ahead,” they will become disillusioned with religion, like a young Jewish boy who once lived in Germany.

His father, a successful businessman, moved their family to another German city and then told the family that instead of attending the local synagogue, they were going to join the Lutheran church.

The boy, who had a deep interest in religion, was surprised and asked his father why the switch. His father answered that it was better for business since so many Lutherans lived in the town, he could make good business contacts by attending the Lutheran church.

The boy became so disillusioned with his father that something died within him. The incident helped to turn him against religion. That young boy was Karl Marx, the father of Communism and the author of The Communist Manifesto, in which he called religion “the opiate of the masses.”

I wonder if history would have been different if Marx’s father had taken God seriously and not as a business. Become serious about God and watch your children get serious about God.

If joy to you is hearing that your children are walking with God, as the apostle John said, then you walk with God the way you would want them to. As Francis Chan said, “Our goal as parents ought to be to help our kids become independently dependent on God.”

I like that.


Excerpt from:
Dilena, Tim. The 260 Journey. Colorado Springs, CO, Book Villages, 2001.
260journey.com