Life

Parenting Like God Does

If you have read my post on "Intimacy," you will have noticed that I like to use the sphere of human relationships as the lense through which to view and understand our relationship with God. This post is in that same "genre". (If these homemade things can be called a genre.)

I have been in on a lot of discussions where Christian parents ask the question, "How can I parent my children so that it will help them become vibrant Christians, and not just good people.?" The question bothered me, because I thought of parenting  and discipline as synonyms. The principles of disipline -- some of which involve; consistency, challenging but not demoralizing expectations, and perseverance -- fit in the category of wisdom, and will work as effectively for non Christians as for Christians. I was left with no answer.

"No answer," clashed with my experience, because one by one my first five children have embraced  Christ and are in the process of journeying with and towards Him in an authentic way. This is also true of many families in our church. So does this just happen? Is it all about God calling them, and not at all about the way they were raised? Or, is their something about Christian parenting, that the Spirit of God uses in His calling of our children to Himself?

So then what, if anything,  do we bring to parenting that makes it uniquely Christian?

The answer came to me in the sentence, "Discipline is a vocation."

I don't expect that to work for you, because it needs a context, so I will try to unpack it.

I wondered about changing it to, "Discipline is just a vocation." But that didn't work because it implies a marginalizing of discipline, something that I would like to do, but only for parents who see themselves primarily as disciplinarians. There are other parents who view discipline as distasteful, almost a "last resort," kind of thing. For them, I want to elevate discipline to the place of a vocation that they embrace wholeheartedly. So I stick with, "Discipline is a vocation." If you like, it is neither more than a vocation or less than a vocation. But this is probably still not working for you.

Perhaps if I say, "We are Mom and Dad, and we do discipline," you may begin to see where I am going. It is rooted in my understanding of my relationship with my heavenly Father and what I take to be the nature of the gospel.

In John 17, Jesus prays that the kind of intimacy that He enjoys with His father would be the kind of intimacy that we enjoy with each other and with Him and His Father. We are talking family here. This follows a discussion starting in John 14, where Jesus makes the point that we can come to know the Father by seeing and living with the Son. He incarnates God for us. Furthermore, "This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." (17:3) So then eternal life is at it's essence this kind of intimate knowing. At the end of John 17 He says that the point of our intimacy with Him and the Father is that the world may know ...

So then our children need to come to know God, and they will do that by seeing Him in the flesh, and it is our flesh in whom His Spirit now dwells.

Beyond that, their are a number of metaphors of relationship used to paint the picture of our relationship with God: Friend/friend, Brother/brother, (used of Christ)  Master/bondslave, King/kingdom, Husband/wife, and Father/child.

So then if people need to see God in order to come to know Him, and if Fatherhood has been chosen by Him as one of the primary metaphors of our relationship with Him, then it makes sense that our children should be able to see and fall in love with their heavenly Father as they see and  love  us as parents.

Being like Him, is then what makes Christian parents unique.

But God disciplines us. As a matter of fact He is rather focussed on it. Romans 8 teaches that He causes everything that comes into our lives to work together towards the goal of conforming us to the image of Christ. He doesn't apoligize for training us, and He doesn't let up until He is finished. But the tenderness of His heart towards us, is not dependent on our response to His discipline. His love for us is the engine that drives His discipline.

The picture that I get is of a heavenly Father who laughs at the antics of His toddlers, who would give His life in a heartbeat for their good, who rejoices with their growing, and weeps with their rebellion, all the while relentlessly leading them closer and closer to home. In our Father God, authority serves love. Discipline is what He does, and loving is what He is. His heart towards us is stable -- always full of grace -- while his discipline ranges from mild and gentle, to firm and severe.

If our children experience coldness or rejection from us when they missbehave, If they learn that relationship comes and goes based on performance or behavior, If they see that our reputation, or ego, or well being is what drives discipline, we have missrepresented our Father. Children are hugely forgiving, so we can mess up from time to time. But when discipline moves from vocation to essence, from servant to master, and that becomes the pattern, we jeapordize the eternal vibrance of our children. They will see God as mean spirited, manipulative, and ugly. God will then need to call our children to Himself in spite of us, if He calls them at all.

Our children will come to know us as we are, and if we have come to know Him as He is, in knowing us they can come to know Him.

As Christian parents, we get to manifest the beauty of God, including the beauty of His authority, to our children.

The Incarnation

For a lot of years Christmas would frustrate me, because worship would be a struggle. The story so often told, the Christmas programs, the need to preach in an engaging lifegiving way -- it didn't seem real or vivid to me. Intellectually, I understood, but I wanted my heart to be more engaged. This was supposed to be a big deal, but it felt terribly cliched.

Then last year, I think it was, a truth that I may or should have known was illumined to me, and now I have a different problem.

I think I had been prone to think of the Incarnation as a mission. God needed to get in touch with us, show us what He was like, and provide redemption and free access for us into His presence. So the eternal Son of God became a man, and lived and died and rose again. Then He went back where He came from to be what He was before.

Wrong!

He became a man, and He still is a man. Wow! The eternal Son of God is now what He was not. It was not a mission that He could end and say, "Oh , that was awful." or, "I am glad that's over." He became, is now, and forever will be my brother King. This is mystery beyond comprehension. He who had no beginning, became what He was not, in order that I/we might gain what we lost, and enter into the kind of intimacy with the Father, that the Father and the Son have shared fom eternity past. (cf John 17)

Dare we say, that the Son changed for our sake. Not that He lost what He was, though He emptied Himself for a time. But that He took on what He did not have -- our humanity, so that He is now one of us, and one with us who have become one with Him.

Worship is easy now at Christmas.

But then someone asked me why it was important that Jesus is still a man. Wouldn't Christianity be intact if the incarnation was just a mission for a time. His death and resurrection would still hold true wouldn't it?

I think we unknowingly read the phrase, In Him, to be a metonymy, for in His work. When the apostle Paul says that we have died, and risen, and been seated with Christ, I don't think He is just talking about our relationship to the finished work of Christ. I think our participation in the finished work of Christ depends upon our union with Him which is dynamic and ongoing (the abiding in the vine metaphor) and depends on His humanity. It is the kind of union we had with Adam before we came to believe in Christ. So then if Christ has not come "in the flesh" as John would say, we can not be in Him, and if we are not in Him, then we are in Adam, and if we are in Adam, our share in His rebellion continues to hold us aloof from our loving Father.

"Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these, my brethren," is the heart cry of one who belongs forever to the human family.

So what's my problem? The incarnation has become so uncliched -- so vivid to me, that I struggle to believe. The creator of the universe is my brother? The unseen Christ, is still the Jesus of the manger. God is not distant at all, but so connected to us that He has become one of us. It was easier to believe when Spiritual realities were somewhere out there, and physical realities down here.

I think I am helplessly secular! God help me shed my rationalism, and give me eyes to see Jesus.

Intimacy Revisited

The Foundation of Intimacy is vulnerability.

(Inspired by an article in Touchstone magazine on old married sex.)

In the kingdom of the god of this world, attraction is the foundation of intimacy. In that place intimacy is earned by being attractive, and is lost by being unattractive.

Intimacy can then be lost or withheld because of wrinkles, fat, a belly too big, or breasts too little, things done or things not done, little offences collected until their cumulative weight judges the bearer ugly, or big offenses deemed too big to forgive.

In that place, intimacy tends to die with age, and the young are viewed as the ones worthy of emulation.

But in the Kingdom where Jesus reigns it is the opposite. Here, it is all about knowing and being known. Vulnerability is the foundation of intimacy. I come to Him and thus also to you naked, and I rest in the knowledge that both He and you will not hold yourselves aloof, when you see me as I am. And so I run into the freedom and ecstasy of vulnerability. Now my too large belly, my many little offenses and even my few big ones, are cause for shared sorrow perhaps, or shared hope, but not cause for intimacy withheld or lost (unless of course I pretend that they are not offenses). The fact that I am unattractive is now an attribute I share with you, and my weakness causes you to draw me into your arms, just as it causes Him to draw us into His arms.

In this place, old married sex is the best sex precisely because we have come to know and love each other as we are – vulnerable – wrinkled, fat, weak, and so often unattractive. We relax with no fear of being uncovered, because we have uncovered ourselves and are known and yet still held. In this place the old teach the young to be vulnerable, naked, unpainted and unmasked; to risk being known, and to give the grace of knowing and yet still holding – to leave attraction at the foot of the cross.

In this place pretense rather than ugliness stands as the enemy of intimacy. And so in our relationships we want to uncover and let our inside show. It becomes all about sharing our deepest fears, joys, sins and triumphs. Integrity comes to matter much.

And wonder of wonders, in this place the ugly become beautiful.

So are we talking about old married sex, or our relationship with God? Both really. Old married sex is to our relationship with God, what the trees and the mountains and the clouds reflected in the water are to the trees and the mountains and the clouds. For those unmarried, authentic intimacy in friendship should have some of the same quality.