What do you have to do for your children to grow up loving the Lord and following him with all their heart, soul, mind and strength? What’s the secret to having “good kids” – not just pleasant little ones, but honorable adults?
I’ve started reading through a little book on parenting called The Things You’ll See: Notes to My Children on How They Were Raised by Lawrence Lucas, and I’ve enjoyed it so far in spite of my usual wariness of parenting books. Early on, he points out a necessary, foundational principle for raising children: the father’s the fear of the Lord. He writes:
“If you look, you’ll find many places in the Scriptures where the obedience of fathers secures blessings for children. We aren’t told the mechanism, whether it’s because a man who fears God raises his children well, or because of some direct intervention of God on the children’s behalf. We’re simply promised the blessing.”
He cites Psalm 112:1-2 and Psalm 128:1-4 as a couple examples, where a man is blessed who fears the Lord – who “delights in his commandments” and “walks in his ways” – and this blessing is outlined as mighty descendents, children like olive shoots around the table. Psalm 128 follows right after Psalm 127, which describes a house built by the Lord as having children who are like arrows – defenders of their father, a line of warriors, mighty weapons against evil. These are promises, Lucas argues. They aren’t just nice hopes, but words from the Lord that can be relied on. These blessings, he writes, are “poured out on the man, on his wife, and on his children because of the condition of that man’s heart toward God.”
He goes on to say that “In His mercy, God makes exceptions and sometimes blesses the children of those who don’t fear him,” and surely you can think of exceptions in the other direction too – after all, the book of Ecclesisates exists in part to warn us against turning God’s promises and wisdom into a vending machine. But the point remains in spite of the exceptions that Lucas says prove the rule – “[God] is…under obligation to the man who fears Him. He has bound himself by his own word.”
This is both challenging and encouraging to me. It is challenging because too often I don’t fear the Lord and walk in his commandments. A couple weeks ago in Luke we looked at the crucial difference between fear of God and fear of man, and anyone with a pulse would be convicted by Jesus’ statements. However, concern to fear the Lord can sneakily become the fear of man when we’re so afraid of our imperfections that we take our eyes off of our Father and look in despair at our imperfections and failures.
Mostly, however, Lucas’ words are encouraging to me. Ultimately, I don’t need to figure out a secret technique, I don’t need to stress about adopting the latest psychological framework cooked up in response to trauma theory or attachment disorders, I don’t need to worry if the particulars of my tactics are not perfectly optimized, I don’t need to freak out if my kids get a little too much canola oil (let the reader understand!). Children are not electrical circuits, where one missed connection brings down on the whole operation. Children are people, and I am a person. The most important thing I can do to raise good kids – by far, overwhelmingly, staggeringly more important than anything else – is to be a man who fears the Lord. If I devote myself to this, blessings follow. Perhaps (at risk of taking the Mary and Martha interaction in Luke 11 out of context) this is the “one necessary thing” as it relates to parenting. For me, that is such a relief.
