Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family

by Paul David Tripp

Good parenting, which does what God intends it to do, begins with this radical and humbling recognition that our children don’t actually belong to us. Rather, every child in every home, everywhere on the globe, belongs to the One who created him or her. Children are God’s possession (see Ps. 127:3) for his purpose. That means that his plan for parents is that we would be his agents in the lives of these ones that have been formed into his image and entrusted to our care.

The ambassador does not represent his own interest, his own perspective, or his own power. He does everything as an ambassador, or he has forgotten who he is and he will not be in his position for long.

Here’s what this means at street level: parenting is not first about what we want for our children or from our children, but about what God in grace has planned to do through us in our children.

They are not motivated by a vision of what they want their children to be, but by the potential of what grace could cause their children to be.

successful parenting is not about achieving goals (that you have no power to produce) but about being a usable and faithful tool in the hands of the One who alone is able to produce good things in your children.

parenting is either a thing of the highest treasure to you, and that is demonstrated in your choices, words, and actions every day, or it’s not.

Your kids will never be what they’re supposed to be or do if they lack God-consciousness.

The most important thing that a child could ever learn about is the existence, character, and plan of God.

Children who don’t acknowledge God will act as if they are God and will resist the help and rescue that God has provided for them through their parents.

The second paragraph from Deuteronomy 6 helps us here. It tells us that we should root all the rules and beliefs that we give our children not only in the existence of God, but in the things that he has, in grace, done for us.

When your child wonders about what is right and what is wrong, don’t just threaten him with the law of God; woo him with the sweet music of the grace of God.

Go beyond enforcing your authority and point to his authority, and go beyond pointing to his authority to pointing your children to his grace.

No one gives grace better than a parent who humbly admits that he desperately needs it himself.

God calls unable people to do important things so that he will get the glory and not them. He isn’t working so that your life as a parent would be easy, predictable, and free from struggle. He calls you to do the impossible so that in your search for help, you would find more than help—you would find him.

You see, he doesn’t ask you to be able; he asks you to be willing. If you are willing, he will meet you in your weakness and change you, and as he changes you, he will work good things through you into the hearts and lives of your children.

God’s plan is to make his invisible grace visible to children by sending parents of grace to give grace to children who need grace.

And parents who know they need grace tend to want to give grace to children who are just like them.

Humble, confessing parents encourage their children to be humble and confessing too, and the result is that they have many opportunities to talk about the rescuing love of Jesus.

“As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him” (Ps. 103:13).

If rules and regulations had the power to change the heart and life of your child, rescuing your child from himself and giving him a heart of submission and faith, Jesus would have never needed to come!

another way that God’s law is good for your children; it provides them with the grace of conviction.

The law has no ability to deliver your children from this mess—the very mess that you have to deal with every day as a parent.

As a parent, you are not called to just enforce God’s law in the lives of your children, but also to constantly exhibit and teach God’s grace to them as well.

I mean you should look every day for every opportunity to point your needy kids to the presence, promises, power, and grace of Jesus.

I presented God as an irritable, impatient, judgmental, loud, and accusatory father.

And if we are going to teach our children to run to Jesus daily, we must run to Jesus daily as well.

You see, it is only as we are willing to confess that we are more like than unlike our children, that we ourselves need parenting every day, that we will be parents in need of a father’s grace who will again and again lead our children to the grace of the Father.

They need to see we are the same both needing our Savior Jesus Christ. I’m not someone superior than them when it comes to sin.

Then what is wrong with each of these statements? Each of them assumes power on the part of parents that no parent has, and that assumption creates all kinds of parenting trouble.

It is vital that you believe and admit that you have no power whatsoever to change your child.

God has given you authority for the work of change, but has not granted you the power to make that change happen.

Inside change always precedes lasting outside change.

What you’re always dealing with is the need for heart change, and we simply have no power at all to change another person’s heart.

In this kind of parenting you are working to make your children into something rather than working to help them to see something and seek something.

We have to stop with the loud voices, the escalating threats, the subtle name calling, words of condemnation, ever-worsening punishments, telling our children how much more righteous we are than they, the silent treatment, and withholding affection when they’ve upset us.