“Jesus brought grace & mercy as His methods and message for a reason” L.R. Knost.
We long for our children to accept the saving faith of Jesus Christ. In our attempts to stack the odds we put a lot of effort into sowing seeds of God’s Word, like those Jesus talked about in the Parable of the Sower. In this parable, the seed represents the gospel of salvation and when the seed takes root in the heart of our children, it means they hear the Truth, accept it, understand it, and retain it (Luke 8:15).
But the seed is only half of the story. The other half is the soil = the heart.
The soil represents the condition of the heart. Jesus said that the seed planted in good soil would be spiritually fruitful, producing a crop a hundred times as great! This parable is not about a good seed. It’s about good soil. The good soil is a prepared heart. Yes, planting seeds is important, but as parents, our focus should be to purposefully cultivate the soil of our child’s heart ahead of time, so that it is ready to receive the seed!
We should ready their hearts, preparing fertile soil so that the gospel can sink deep roots into their lives, “Then the Holy Spirit will begin the lifelong process of producing the character of Christ in them” (Clarkson). When we let go of the desire to ensure our children always listen to us, and instead focus on the condition of their heart soil, we align ourselves with the things God cares about most.
This shift requires us to seek God’s wisdom and help from the Holy Spirit.
Focusing on behavior change in our children is not only a low bar, it doesn’t lead to heart change. When what we desire is heart change, we raise the bar and set them up on the only path that leads to long-term behavior change. The path to heart change is not paved with a set of laws, punitive punishments, or quick solutions. “If the child has developed no internal controls, then external parental controls will have little to no long-term effect” (Clarkson).
Read my book review on Heartfelt Discipline here.
Sources: Heartfelt Discipline by Clay Clarkson
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This is really cool! I’ve always thought of the soil as just how people are – sort of like the potter having power over the clay to make some to honor and some to dishonor he also has power over the soil and there’s different ways in which different soil might not receive the word (Satan, lack of perseverance, cares of the world). So I pray that I and my family would be made good soil for the Word.
But it makes a lot of sense that we as parents have a participation in preparing the hearts of our children – that we have a responsibility to tend the soil and cultivate soft hearts.
One of the very hard things to me in this is that I think the first step toward salvation we take is acknowledging that sin is infinitely bad (each sin deserving death), that we are powerless over sin in and of ourselves. If we aren’t aware that we are slaves to sin we can’t know that we need a savior.
Its one thing to read Romans 7 and agree with Paul and quite another to be one who cries out as Paul did in verse 24 “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
I would say I believed that God existed and that Jesus died for sin and rose to save sinners and that the Spirit is sent to help those who are being saved for 30 years before I really started to hate sin and see my own bondage and need for a savior. I want my children to see that sooner.
So how do you lovingly prepare their hearts to know that hearts are deceitful above all things and desperately wicked (or sick depending on translation) as we see in Jeremaiah 17:9? How do we kindly and gently but firmly and effectively inform someone that they are slaves to sin with no hope except in Jesus – and that it isn’t some vague passive hope that he’ll just make it all go away but an active hope in his lordship over of us that we could be slaves to righteousness as in Romans 6:19?
It was a difficult thing to me to realize that I had to choose a master – that I had to be a servant or a slave to something that wasn’t me. Thanks be to God that when I saw that reality was either slavery to sin in my flesh or slavery to righteousness by the power of the Spirit the choice presented itself and by the Spirit I was able to pray to be made His and He is faithful and will complete the good work He has begun – Lord give me perseverance!
I’m grateful for my parents who raised me in the Church, teaching me that the the Word of God was living and active and telling us the truth of Jesus and of the love and mercy of God. He was gracious to me through them and if I didn’t know that there was grace and mercy and hope out there I don’t know what I would have done when I saw that there was no hope in myself. But is there anything I can do for my children that might accelerate their awareness of their total depravity and acceptance of their insufficiency? Or even if there isn’t, what we can we do to prepare them for that realization when it comes?
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Oh my dear brother in Christ! I would love nothing more than to dive deep into the weeds about this subject for hours over a pot a tea! I’ll start with my short answer:
I don’t know. Ha! Oh- pray! That’s my short answer, pray. Shoot, can I add another? Thanks: faith.
You asked how do we teach them that their hearts are “desperately wicked” In my personal opinion, I don’t think young children need to be convinced that they sin. I think children are quite aware of their shortcomings. Now, do they fully understand the doctrine of sin? No, and truth about God is something we could spend our whole lives studying this and still not fully understand. We should have a posture of coming along side of our children and learning God’s truths together. Semantics maybe, but children can also sniff out hypocrisy so how can we teach them about their insufficiency when we have yet to fully grasp our own.
But we have hope! The Holy Spirit. We can trust the Holy Spirit to convict sin (John 16:8) and to lead us into truth (John 16:13). With this we are freed from the burden of manufacturing life-change in our child’s heart, and I would say acknowledging our sin and insufficiency is at the heart, a heart issue. But I like the word you used earlier: participate. I do believe we can participate in this work. Paul David Tripp uses the word “ambassador” to describe the role of a Christian parent: An ambassador is one who “faithfully represents the message, methods, and character of the leader who sent him.” Read Parenting by Paul David Tripp if you want to dive into that deeper.
We can have faith in the nature and character of God. We can trust in His eternal plan for our children. We can trust that God is living in us and guiding us to be a usable tool in His hands- the only hands able to produce good things in our children.
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