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Three Essentials for Christian Parenting

The contest for the hearts of our children is real, literal, and perpetually raging. The enemy does not sleep. He operates with Machiavellian brilliance. We must be intentional, relentless, and confident in our pursuit of Deuteronomy 11:19, “You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.” Failing to indoctrinate our children in the truth of the gospel is antithetical to loving them.

Our adversary has a canny way of wrapping sin in pretty packages. What can be done, then, to convince children that God is more attractive than anything the world has to offer?

1. Immerse yourself in sound doctrine.

Before we parents and teachers teach truth, we’d better be sure we have it ourselves. Ligonier Ministries conducted a poll in which self-professed evangelicals were asked to rate on a Likert Scale their agreement or disagreement with fundamental Christian doctrines. The sobering results led the Ligonier pollsters to conclude,

Many self-professing evangelicals reject foundational evangelical beliefs. The survey results reveal that the biblical worldview of professing evangelicals is fragmenting. Though American evangelicalism arose in the twentieth century around strongly held theological convictions, many of today’s self-identified evangelicals no longer hold those beliefs.

In her book, Almost Christian, Kenda Creasy Dean challenged, “If teenagers lack an articulate faith, it may be because the faith we show them is too spineless to merit much in the way of conversation.” That stings, but the truth remains.

This generation is woefully ignorant of sound doctrine. How, then, can “spinelessness” be avoided? Assess your time management when it comes to prioritizing Christ. Make daily Bible reading a habit. Follow faithful teachers. Your phone can be an instrument of wasted time or a tool for learning sound doctrine! Read edifying works, and study alongside other strong believers. Heed Ephesians 5:15–17 and Psalm 90:12. If you want Christ to be your child’s first love, you must make him your own.

2. Make your joy in Christ visible to your children.

When my children were small, I made it a point to show them the resplendent and dazzling creativity of God. From a magnificent sunset to a lovely vista to a fascinating animal at the zoo, or simply a towering tree or pretty flower in our yard, I would quiz joyfully, “What is God?”, to which they’d shout the blithe reply, “A good artist!”

I wanted to make sure they recognized God’s handiwork and glorified him in his marvelous creativity, genius, and beauty. When God gives you reason to exult, share it with your kids! And don’t just do it from the mountaintop. Be sure to remind your children of God’s grace and glorify his goodness from the depth of the valleys, as well. Don’t waste a moment in showcasing our benevolent God in all circumstances. Your enthusiasm and love for Christ will make an impression on your children.

3. Present the gospel every day and in different ways.

In her talk at this year’s Gospel Coalition women’s conference, Kristie Anyabwile spoke of her grandmother, who faithfully took every opportunity to teach her about God — not through formal devotion times, or a curriculum or formula, but by simply and unwaveringly living out her convictions before her granddaughter and speaking the truth to her.

Children will not learn the gospel without hearing it. Not just on Sundays, but every day. Paul asks, in Romans 10:14, “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?”

Don’t become complacent or succumb to the lie that your schedule is too tight to regularly share the gospel with your kids. When you’re driving them to soccer, tucking them into bed, walking through the mall, waiting in line at Chick-fil-A, be intentional in taking every opportunity to teach your children sound doctrine through the regular hearing of Scripture, catechisms, creeds, and doctrinally sound music. Take every moment with them captive to the teaching of Christ.

Children in the Christian Bubble

Some accuse Christians of keeping their children in a bubble, hidden away from reality and the world. But it is becoming increasingly clear that the so-called “Christian Bubble” is exactly where some children need to be. Not to keep them from the world, but to teach them to live as Christ-followers in the context of it. The bubble should be a strong community of believers who live and teach the absolute truth of their faith.

Only Jesus Christ has “the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). Only Jesus Christ can fulfill what we all long for. Only Jesus Christ can save our children from an eternity of separation from God. These are desperate times. We must never waver in our effort to teach our children that Christ is worth following, despite the lure and enticement of the world. It must begin and end with the gospel.

Schmucker, Leslie "Three Essentials for Christian Parenting" Desiring God July 19, 2018  https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/three-essentials-for-christian-parenting

Since 2005 Juntos has blessed young people in the International District of Albuquerque with a variety of programs aimed at furthering their stated goals:
At Juntos® we believe that whole families and entire communities can be transformed by young leaders discovering and living out their God-given purpose. We know that God has an amazing purpose for each of the young people we meet. As they learn to lead their community in a generous fashion, we will see families, a neighborhood, and a city transformed!

This summer there were several transformative programs involving the young people. In Bolivia, a team from Juntos worked with Food for the Hungry to celebrate a community receiving water for the first time, visit and pray with many families in their homes, participate in an entrepreneurship showcase, and encourage several new business owners with visits and prayers. The team also spent time in La Paz and El Alto worshiping and praying with staff from Project Suma, an activity to lift women from oppressive and exploitive life conditions. The team came back with ideas they had developed during the trip that will be useful in ministry in Albuquerque.

In June Kids Club attracted over 90 children and young leaders to a week of learning about Jesus and finding meaning in a walk with God. There were over 40 kids who had not attended before. Several children who had never heard of Jesus or stepped foot in a church got to learn about His love. Two of the class leads were dads who grew up at Juntos and their kids are now here! They both took the week off of work to help out. Another dad (who married a former Juntos parcipant) was a much needed small group leader in the middle school boys class. A pool party at the end of the week was an opportunity to meet many other family members and parents.

There are a variety of programs at Juntos targeting children of all ages. Volunteers are always welcome and needed, either for a single activity or as part of ongoing ministry activities.

https://www.juntosabq.com/volunteers outlines volunteer roles;
https://www.juntosabq.com/programs has more detail about the scope of programs.

More information about Project Suma is available at https://www.projectsuma.org

Healing and Hope

For the next two years, my part-time job and our simple living arrangements made it possible for both of us to study God’s Word deeply, assess our hearts, wrestle with past trauma and fears, and learn to trust God in areas where we had previously kept him at arm’s length. We slowly moved toward each other, working through our wounds, and reconnecting where we had lost trust.

The 22-month discipleship program at Harvest USA helped me in several ways. Each week we learned to become more and more vulnerable with each other, sharing personal failings, past wounds, and current struggles and calling one another to live more obedient to God’s will. We built transparency and trust and prayed for each other knowing we were dependent on God’s strength in our battle with sin. We also encouraged each other to develop a support network at our churches, recognizing how important it was to have others help us when the program was over.

Amid it all, God did not abandon my wife and me. Even when I cried for help while still unwilling to change my behavior, he was patient with me. I was a wandering sheep, but he was a pursuing Shepherd (Ezek. 34:12; John 10:11; Ps. 119:176). I was stubborn and recalcitrant, and he remained unwavering in his fatherly discipline. I didn’t know it, but when things seemed darkest and hopeless, he was at work behind the scenes.

Similarly, despite the hurt and loneliness my wife felt due to my sin, she held onto the promise that God would be a faithful husband to her (Isa. 54:5). When she cried out to him in prayer, she found him to be a comforter (Isa. 51:3; 2 Cor. 1:3–4) and counselor (Ps. 16:7).

Only Christ Satisfies

C. S. Lewis was right. God loves us so much that he will use painful experiences, even pain itself, to awaken us from being overly content with our attachment to worldly ease and the comforts of this life. He takes us through such difficult times not to punish us, but to make us more like Jesus. It is not easy, but we learn to love him more through it.

To bring about the deep and lasting change in our lives, God didn’t just change our circumstances—he broke the power of reigning sin by dying on a cross.

Such trials and times of testing are evidence of God’s undying love for us. In them, he reveals to us the folly of thinking that the transitory pleasures of this world will satisfy.

But we also learn how far he is willing to go to show us that we will only be truly fulfilled and happy when we seek him first. To bring about the deep and lasting change in our lives, he didn’t just change our circumstances—he broke the power of reigning sin by dying on a cross. By doing so, he set us free indeed! As the Apostle Paul wrote to the believers in Rome, “But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (6:22–23).

Charles Dickens fans may wince at my blog title. His iconic first line of A Tale of Two Cities says, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” and I purposely misquoted it because it aptly describes the inner-wrestling I experienced for almost 40 years.

In all that time, I lived a double life—caught in a cycle of sin and shame, full of self-inflicted guilt, stuck in a rut that I thought was never going to end. But—praise the Lord! —God was working behind the scenes to bring something beautiful from it all.

The Poison of Hidden Sin

For 35 years, most people would have described me as a gregarious and friendly guy. My wife and I seemed to have a happy marriage. We were blessed with a big family. I had a good job. I was a homeschooling father, a leader in my church, lived in a nice home in a beautiful neighborhood, and was always quick with a funny story at social gatherings.

But what most people didn’t know was that I was fighting—and regularly losing—a battle with pornography.

I feared being exposed. I became good at lying to hide my activities. Protecting my secret became all encompassing, and after years of failure, it seemed impossible to overcome. I prayed time and again for forgiveness as well as for strength to win this battle over sin. But at other times I was apathetic, and placated my guilt by telling myself that my small personal sin wasn’t really hurting anyone.

I lived a double life—caught in a cycle of sin and shame, full of self-inflicted guilt, stuck in a rut that I thought was never going to end.

But that was an illusion. My sin wasn’t private. My family—and especially my wife—were affected by my “secret sin.” We kept up appearances of a well-ordered family life, but the reality was that our marriage was in trouble. Despite my wife’s many requests for us to get marriage counseling (which I deflected or ignored) we simply settled into a fairly soulless relationship.

God Steps In

Then, in a matter of months, God stepped in—in a way that was overwhelmingly confusing and disorienting, but which later became evident as his particular care for us. I lost my job, and less than a year later we had to radically downsize and move out of our spacious home of 17 years to a new city 300 miles away. Our new place was a compact church apartment, and my new job was the church custodian. I had been a busy traveling marketing manager, but now I opened and locked the church, mopped floors, changed light bulbs, scrubbed bathrooms, cut grass, trimmed hedges, shoveled snow, moved chairs and tables—and even dug graves!

We slowly began to realize that this devastating “subtraction” was God’s way of removing the things in my life that were holding me back from submitting myself more fully to his will. Up to that point, I had pretty much lost hope of changing the sinful patterns in my life. But in the heat of my sin, God didn’t let go of me. Instead, although I didn’t listen to his whispers and hardened my conscience to his shouts, he used this traumatic experience as a megaphone (as C. S. Lewis illustrates) to get my attention. We were isolated, basically starting over, and shaken to the core—but it provided a merciful opportunity to reassess our priorities and to hear the Lord’s voice anew.

My faith was weak, and I feared taking the biblical steps I needed to break free from pornography. But through it all, my wife never stopped praying and asking God to break through my stubborn heart. In hindsight, I can see how he heard my wife’s prayers and took pity despite my weak faith.

We were isolated, basically starting over, and shaken to the core—but it provided a merciful opportunity to reassess our priorities and to hear the Lord’s voice anew.

In an amazing series of providences, my wife met Ellen Dykas, the director of Harvest USA’s women’s ministry. And because their ministry offices were just a few miles away from our new apartment, they began meeting together so my wife could understand her own struggles (which mostly stemmed from the fallout of my sexual brokenness). As my wife shared with me about what she was learning, I finally took her advice, visited Harvest USA, and joined one of their discipleship support groups for men.

Barr, Jim "It Was the Worst of Times, It Was the Best of Times"Harvest Ministries USA  https://harvestusa.org/it-was-the-worst-of-times-it-was-the-best-of-times/   August 31, 2023

As many of you are aware, Father recently provided me with the opportunity to spend two months overseas in Africa. While there I got to witness firsthand His faithfulness, provision, and providence. I’ve returned with more stories than I’m able to share in this short blog, but there is one that stands out vividly to me.

While my team and I were there, a large festival took place. This festival is celebrated throughout the Muslim world and involves three days of celebration during which everything closes, even grocery stores. In the days leading up to the festival, families will buy a sheep, then on the morning of the first day they slaughter the sheep in the street and eat specific portions of it each day. We had been prepared that things slowed down a lot during the festival and that we probably wouldn’t have any opportunities to meet new people. So, during the first morning we decided to walk around our neighborhood and lift it up to Father and ask Him for opportunities.

Walking through a large plaza, we noticed one of the many cafes was open, so we decided to stop in for coffee. While there, a gentleman sat down next to me, and I immediately felt I had to talk to him. I asked if he spoke English, which he did, and was able to spend the next two hours talking to him about my story, the Main Thing, and sharing stories from the Book.

The second day, we again were out walking and lifting up our city. The streets were entirely empty except for us, so I asked Father that He would provide an opportunity to be used today. As soon as I finished, I heard Mark talking with someone behind me. An older gentleman had joined us at some point and was engaging us in English. After a few minutes he invited us to his home for tea. When we arrived at his home, his son (who was my age) arrived at the same time. While we were relaxing in the salon (think living room), the father left, and we began sharing the Main Thing with the son. Partway through sharing the father returned, listened to us while we finished, and then began to talk about Islam and how Jesus couldn’t be both human and God.

After some time listening to him and asking questions about Islam, he again left to go to mosque, leaving us with his son. We then got to have tea and lunch with the son and hear a bit about his life. The last several years he has been away from home at university and hasn’t been practicing Islam for a while now, though his father doesn’t know. He told us he is “studying other religions to figure out which one is true before dedicating his life to one of them.” This blew us away and we were able to spend the time with him explaining the Main Thing in great detail, sharing our personal stories, and even some stories from the Book. He was very receptive though he said he wasn’t ready to follow Father just yet, so we encouraged him to keep learning and to read the Book.

The time during the festival was really impactful to me. We went into that time thinking we wouldn’t get to do much and Father vividly reminded us that He is in total control and can use us wherever and whenever despite the circumstance we can’t see past.