Becoming the Parents God wants you to be …
Ed Moll and Tim Chester
This encouraging book is not a typical “manual” on how to bring up your family according to Scripture, but a collection of short but challenging chapters which makes it easier to read.
Each chapter begins with a real-life scenario and follows up with a relevant Bible passage to help you think it through. Thereafter there are questions for reflection and ideas for action. It’s filled to the brim with questions like:
- Is your home child-centered or God-centered?
- What do your children think about marriage based on your life?
- How do you open your home to the church family?
The section that really “spoke” to me was entitled Children as a Gift (Make sure you enjoy your children) because as a very young teenage mother in the 1960’s I didn’t have the time to actually enjoy my children . If only I had a book like this one then! On page 54 under the heading “ Eating Together” the authors remind us how important meals were in the ministry of Jesus. It urges us to eat together (with the TV off) at least once a day and even play games at the meal table thus encompassing the essence community and relationship.
Let’s face it sometimes we don’t view our children as a gift and very quickly forget about when they made us laugh, when they made us proud, when we were moved to tears and so on. We must thank God for our children and list specific things about our children that give us cause for thanksgiving if need be.
We read about how we can influence our children’s view of television adverts for instance and help to guide their thoughts and actions around these very powerful media messages.
Chapter 10’s principle is: Teach your children to pray by praying with them.
So simple yet so effective in today’s world. Listen to their prayers… they don’t construct eloquent speeches or restrict their petitions to special times or places, in doing so we could very well learn a lot about gospel-centeredness from them.
This gem of a book ends off with a chapter on how to be a serving family…. it reminds us that even though our children are a gift they are not the centre of the world….. go to page 87 and read more…..
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