Parenting With Grace Sample

God’s Sufficient Grace for an Impossible Task

Like a mirage in the desert, every young couple envisions future fulfillment and happiness on their wedding day, or when their first child is born. I don’t want to burst your bubble, but the perfect family doesn’t exist, and every parent face struggles. Even Hollywood couldn’t make the perfect family. We think of Leave It to Beaver orThe Brady Bunch as idyllic families, but even they weren’t perfect.

Parenting has been one of the most daunting tasks facing God’s people, and while it is more so today than in the past, history shows it has never been easy. Adam and Eve, the only humans to live in a sinless world, endured the agony of their first son, Cain, taking the life of their second, Abel. The pages of Scripture are littered with dysfunctional families. Israel’s patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and other heroes of faith like Eli, Samuel, and David all have their parental failures recorded in the Bible.

And yet, despite their foibles, God used these, and countless other imperfect dads and moms, in the unfolding of His gracious plan to save fallen humanity. Broken people, broken marriages, and broken homes were time and again redeemed and restored by the persistent grace of God. Our unchanging God is still in the business of redeeming brokenness today. If you are a parent, you have felt like a failure more than once. As Howard Hendricks so aptly put it, “The problem with being a parent is that when you finally feel competent, you’re out of a job!” *

That is why understanding and living by grace is so important for parents.

Maybe you’ve felt like screaming, “I can’t do this! I’m not strong enough. I’ll never be a good parent!” If so, I have great news for you: You are in the perfect place to benefit from God’s grace, which is a limitless resource. God told the apostle Paul that His grace was sufficient for him, and that power is perfected in weakness. In his weakness, Paul learned to depend on the power of Christ in him, and in the end, he concluded that he could only be strong when he was weak. That may seem counterintuitive, but because of what God does, it isn’t. Embrace God’s grace, and discover confidence, peace, assurance, joy, and hope on your parenting journey.

*Howard Hendricks, Heaven Help the Home (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor Books, 1973), 135.