The Christian Family & Children
(*The following is an excerpt from a chapter entitled "Family and the Gospel" from my new book, still in progress, "Gospel Glasses: Seeing this World through the Lens of the Good News")
Parents,
do all that you can to make Jesus and His Gospel priority in your homes. Talk about Him, model Him, discuss Him, and
pray to Him together. Do this all with
your kids. And as our kids are
concerned, we must not give into the temptation of pacifying their tantrums and
mistakes with bargains or negligence. This is not to be done to insight fear or
to provoke our kids to anger (Eph. 6:4); abuse of any kind is never a part of
God’s design for the family. But we
cannot afford to bypass the appropriate corrections when they disobey and/or
dishonor us. God makes it clear:
Children must obey and honor their parents.
In so doing your duty as a Christian parent, you will not only “train your child in the way he/she should go,”
but you will also develop a true Christian household with the purpose of
building a Christian family where all its members are connected in the glorious
Gospel of Jesus Christ through faith.
It is in the Gospel that we see true
obedience and honor afforded between Son and Father. Christ, although fully God and responsible
for creating all things, came to this earth in the form of a human being (Col.
1:15-19), emptying Himself of His eternal rights and privileges of Deity for a
season (Philip. 2:5-7) in order to fulfill the ultimate will of God the Father
– His redemptive and atoning death on the cross for our sins (Philip.
2:8-11). It is the Gospel that models
for us a perfectly formed family of God, a family that exists in a communion of
obedience and honor built upon the everlasting and unchanging love between the
members of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We look to the Holy Trinity and the Gospel to
see how a Christian family is to operate in a fallen world.
This is how the Gospel affects our
views on family.
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