27 Jan PARENTING – CHAPTER 8
Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family by Paul Tripp
Chapter 8 – Travis Koch
When was the last time you wished you could just do what you want, regardless of what those around you want? Was it sometime in the last hour? In the last 5 minutes? As Paul Tripp notes in chapter 8, “Authority,” we humans have a strong attraction to self-rule. We like to believe we can control our own lives—that we should be the ultimate authority over what we do and how we live. Not surprisingly, our children are born into this same struggle. “There is a natural resistance to authority in every child who has been born since the fall of Adam and Eve,” Tripp writes, and this resistance to authority, more than anything else, is the thing that, apart from God’s grace, separates us and our children from God.
The fact is, our children are born into a world of authority. The ultimate source of all authority is God, and he exercises his authority in the lives of children primarily through their parents and teachers. Helping our children understand this, Tripp explains, is doing gospel work. As you read (or re-read) this chapter, let’s pray together for God’s grace to patiently engage our children on this level, and to regularly point them back to the One who “died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised” (2 Cor 5:15).