The Call of a Parent

If you're a mom or a dad, what is job one for you as a parent? Adam Griffin says the Bible gives us clear instruction. We are to raise our kids in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. This is the general call of every Christian parent, and it's not just about having a well-behaved kid. And nor is it this shameful thing of having a misbehaving kid or a kid who rejects the Lord. Our theology has room for all of those versions, including imperfect, discouraged, worn out and exhausted moms and dads.

How do we help them see the call to lead their family spiritually without saying, Hey, here's another thing you're not doing well. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. We've got some words of encouragement for you today and some practical coaching on how you can fulfill God's assignment to disciple your kids as you raise them.

Adam Griffin joins us today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today. Thanks for joining us. We're coming back to a subject that we visit somewhat regularly here.

And we should. It's what parents tell us they need help with. And in fact, as we were producing the Art of Parenting video series, we were talking about how do you form character in a child's life?

How do you help a child grow up with character? And part of that is the spiritual disciplines that take place in your family. And we talked to a number of our contributors to the art of parenting about the issue of family devotions and how they do that.

You were included in this. And I thought we just should start by revisiting what people like Alistair Begg and Davyn Ann Wilson and Stephen Kendrick and Kevin D. Young, how they talked about family devotions in their families. So you ready to listen?

It's about three minutes. I don't even remember what we said. Here's what it is. Here we go. Parents who are not familiar with family devotions, it's awesome.

You got to do it. And basically, no preparation. You don't have to be seminary trained or anything, but get some copies of God's Word in the same translation. Turn off the TV, sit on the couch together as a family and just pray, God, would you speak to us now? And then open up the Word of God and read a chapter of God's Word out loud and then just talk about it. And then pray together as a family for God to help you to apply what you've learned.

And then for the events of the day, it's not rocket science. You're sitting there reading God's Word, talking about his very relaxed setting. But in doing so, we are prioritizing time with the Lord and time with each other and makes our relationships stronger. It breeds the education of the Word of God in the lives of my children and it gives them a hunger to know the Lord more. We just try to have maybe one or two points. What do we learn about God and what do we learn about ourselves? Just two simple questions.

You don't have to be a Bible scholar, but just helping them think about who God is and who we are in light of who God is. I don't want to say we were sporadic. We were sporadically consistent.

You know, our kids understood and we did our best and it has been patchy along the way. I'd like to have the time all over again and I read some of the books and I go, goodness gracious. I was horrible at this. Anne always had this idea that I often heard about in the early years when they were toddlers that we would have a family altar.

Once a week, we'd all come together and I would lead us in teaching scripture and prayer and the whole deal. The image in my head was the best. It was just this beautiful time. Oh, Dad, tell us more.

That was my image. And the kids would sit there and fold their hands and listen, that was your vision. And actually we tried that a few times and they were running around the house and screaming and yelling and I ended up throwing the Bible at them.

It was like, okay, that's not going to work. So I mean, some families can do that and some do do it and it works. It didn't work for our family. We had devotionals with our kids when they were younger, but then they got older and we had to change how we went about that.

They became young adults and then they moved out of the house. Now it's, I send a text. It's a group family text and sometimes we get to have a conversation around that text and sometimes we don't. But I'm just trying to keep the Lord in front of them.

We are like most families in that we struggle. It's hard work to have this family worship or this devotional time at the table because our kids are running all over the place. I don't mean that figuratively. I mean it literally.

They're running all over the place on things, around things. So it is very easy for me to think of family worship times that have been less than ideal. I'm not sure I have any that have been ideal. It's not always great. There are times where the kids get under my skin. It's like, all right, let's sit down and do a Bible story today.

And they're just haywire. Okay, let's just pray and get to bed because we're done with it. It is worth it.

It is worth it. And I think of my parents just methodically reading a passage of scripture with us. Nothing fancy at all, but the impact over years of just the Bible and prayer with mom and dad is immeasurable. Well, again, a great montage of voices talking about the importance of family worship. I think we were the worst ones. I'm glad we were in there like, yeah, it didn't work for us. We actually didn't get to finish that because it did work in a different way. That's right.

It did, honey. And you know, what we're talking about today is not just family worship. We're really talking about a broader subject of family discipleship.

Family times together around God's word is a part of that, but there's much more to it than that. And Adam Griffin is joining us to help us dive into this. Adam, welcome to Family Life Today. Well, thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. Adam is a pastor and an author, lives in East Dallas, Texas, has written, actually co-wrote, you co-wrote this book with Matt Chandler.

That's right. A book on family discipleship. And I had a sense in reading your book that this was a rhythm that you grew up with, that family discipleship was something that you experienced as a child. I think, yes, it is different because every family is different. So even though I had a version of it in my childhood, this is not a reiteration of that. It's a total restart because I've got my kids.

You know, my parents had me and I was mischievous, rambunctious, not wanting to listen. And it was much more ritualistic, I remember, growing up. It was the Lord's Prayer.

We're praying it like this, and we're going to do this devotional book. And I think there's a lot more flexibility in the version that I'm getting the lead out in. Yeah, I did, but yeah. Hearing Alistair and Dave and Ann and Kevin D. Young and all those guys, you've talked to parents who can tell you any number of stories about what it looks like in their house, right?

Absolutely. And that's one of the advantages, I think, of co-writing this book. Instead of it just coming from my perspective, you've got Matt's perspective as a parent of teenagers and my perspective as a parent of elementary kids. He's talking about taking his son out for breakfast and talking about football and the Bible and girls.

And I'm talking about putting my kids to bed at night and praying with them as in blessing them, as we're putting them to sleep and saying, both of these are good examples of how we'll shift and change as our kids get older and as we determine who are these kids the Lord gave us and what is the way that this kid is going to be the one that I'm dialing into and pressing towards the Lord. Tell us about your family. So, I have three sons, Oscar, Gus, and Theodore.

They're eight, seven, and six, right around there. Their birthdays are right around right now. So, give me a break on that, but I have three boys. And then my wife, Chelsea, she works full-time as a labor and delivery nurse.

She works nights, and so we both work full-time. And so, we get to do family discipleship together. Sometimes she's leading it when I'm out.

Sometimes I'm leading it when she's out. But my sons are just a joy. They share a room.

They love each other right now. We're at that kind of golden age of parenting where it's not been an option to do family worship together. It's not been an option to go to church.

And it's just normal and ordinary for them that we are reading the Bible together. And did you come into marriage and parenting with a vision for this? Or did you have kids and go, oh, we've got to figure this out?

That's a great question. I feel like my background in student ministry has led to my passion for this in kids. I spent so much time in one-on-one discipleship with teenagers that when I had my own sons, now with my three sons, it's been a very easy and natural transition to saying, what will it look like for me, who discipled so many young people, to now disciple my own kids? I spent time as a public school teacher, and I get to lead kids to the Lord in the public school that were students of mine. And similarly, now I look at my own kids and think, man, I've got all this time with them. How am I going to leverage the opportunities I have, the conversations we have, the time we have together in order to talk about the Lord? And because I love them so much, there's nothing I want for them more than to know Christ. So that led to this passion, and it kind of coincided, dovetailed, with the gifts and the experience that the Lord had already given me. So as a youth pastor and as a teacher, did you see things in the kids you were mentoring, like, okay, I don't want to do that.

I definitely want to do that. I mean, you saw families from as they're bringing to your church. So what were the things that made you think, okay, I can't do that. I can't do this. Anything jump off the page? A great example would be Jen Wilkin, who wrote the forward for this book, who now writes great, like people know Jen. I didn't know Jen. I met her son when he was a freshman in high school, and I was mentoring him and discipling him, and his mom hadn't written any books yet. But when you met Matt, Matt Wilkin, her oldest son, you thought, man, this is a godly young man. This man's been, he's been parented in a godly way and been discipled. And then once you meet his parents, you're like, of course, these people have been so intentional at raising him to follow the Lord. But then I'd also meet kids whose parents did not know the Lord, who were coming to church on their own or even against their parents' wishes who'd come to know the Lord. You look at the disadvantage they had, where they didn't have a parent who was leading them, but they now met this God.

What is it going to look like for the church to step in alongside that kid and disciple them? And both of those experiences helped me shape what I hope for my kids, what I pray for my kids, and learning from other parents, as well as knowing my God is bigger than any of my shortfalls as a parent, and praying through those things as well. So what would you say is the calling of a parent? And I'm saying it because, you know, when we became parents, just like everybody in this room, you feel this.

Yeah. I can remember bringing our firstborn, CJ, who's 34 now, putting him in the crib after coming home from the hospital and just standing there looking down. I'm guessing a lot of moms and dads have this same experience going, I feel such a responsibility. You know, number one, I didn't have a dad. Now I'm a dad. But I'm looking down there like just almost fear and reverence. I have a responsibility. Am I equipped to do it? What am I supposed to do?

Talk about that. There's a calling that a mom and dad have, as you obviously have in your title, Family Discipleship. But what's the calling? I think that's been the driving force behind even writing the book at all, is I felt like when you get engaged, there's a thousand books you could read on engagement and on how, are you ready to be married? And once you're married, there's a thousand books on marriage, and they're really, really good. And then when it comes to parenting books, there's a lot of books that help with some of those stresses about making sleep choices for baby and making parenting choices for discipline and parenting in a Christian manner.

There's a lot of books like that out there. But I had trouble finding something that went, how am I going to be equipped to lead my home spiritually? Like, how am I going to take on what—when you read the Bible, it's not all about discipline and it's not all about birth order and it's not all about, you know, sleep choices. But a lot of it is about, hey, tell this to your kids. What the Lord has done in your life, communicate to their kids. What the Lord has done in the life of God's people. The call, like you're saying, the literal call, the vocation of every parent is to be a spiritual leader in their home.

And I felt like there was an opportunity for us to say, hey, this is some helpful language we use, some helpful ways to think about it to help you take kind of the mystery and demystify the idea of what does it mean to be a spiritual leader in my home and help it become something ordinary and accessible. So, this is the general call of every Christian parent. And it's not just about having a well-behaved kid. And nor is it this shameful thing of having a misbehaving kid or a kid who rejects the Lord. This is—our theology has room for all of those versions, including imperfect, discouraged, worn out and exhausted moms and dads. How do we help them see the call to lead their family spiritually without saying, hey, here's another thing you're not doing well? And some parents are feeling so overwhelmed.

They don't come from a spiritual or Christian background. And so, they have no idea, like, what do I do? And I think, I'm just speaking for—because I talk to a lot of women, they're thinking, I want to do this. My husband's not on board. You know, but you're saying it's a call that God has assigned us this task.

And you're right. It is a legitimate problem that some of us have never been discipled. We don't find the scripture that to be a legitimate excuse not to disciple our kids, right? In the book, we've made provisions for that, too, understanding that every family is different. Some of them are single parents. Some of them are spiritual single parents saying, my husband or my wife doesn't believe the same thing.

So, how can I spiritually lead this home? Some of our kids have disabilities or they're blended families. It's like, how can we in this modern era think about our family in a way that's going to demystify all the stuff that's so discouraging, all the stuff that's so exhausting, all the stuff that leads to comparison and judgment and shame and self-harassment in that because it is such a significant deal.

And at the same time, not minimize how important this is. Like, it is a big deal that the Lord has entrusted to us a human life and asked us to raise it to know Him. I don't think, like, that day I'm standing there looking at CJ and, you know, as a newborn, I don't think I had in my head yet, Matthew 28, the Great Commission, go, Jesus said, go, therefore, make disciples. I had that as a pastor. I was supposed to go out, outside of my home almost, make disciples of the men and women in our church. But that's a calling. I mean, the most important disciple a dad or mom will try to pour into is their own sons and daughters, right?

That's the call. It's right in front of you. Yeah, the Great Commission and the Great Commandments to love God, to love your neighbor, and to make disciples everywhere, it starts in your own home. But it's easier sometimes out there. Sometimes, yes. Sometimes it's easier to say at the end of this appointment you're going to go home versus your kids.

It's like, we're going to be together. You're going nowhere. I'm going nowhere. But that's why the family dynamic both lends itself to helping our kids understand, how can an imperfect person follow a perfect God? Not, how can my kids get more perfect parents?

Which is kind of what we trick ourselves into thinking. Okay, family discipleship must be about me being perfect around my kids. No, it's about helping your kid understand you're not perfect.

You need to repent. You need a perfect God. You rely on the gospel. So how do you help your kids see that version of you?

Not, how can you do this in a way that, like you talked about in that intro, Bob, where kids are just sitting down, folding their hands, and like their faces are glowing, listening to everything you're saying. No, it's how does an imperfect family follow a perfect God? And I wish I'd had somebody giving me that mentoring early on because I didn't grow up with an experience of any kind of family discipleship.

So I'm starting cold and I thought my job is to model what this looks like and let you see it in all its glory and never let you see it in any of its brokenness. Because if you think mom and dad can't do it, maybe you'll go, well, nobody can do it. What I didn't recognize is I was not discipling my kids to know how to deal with their own failures. So part of the message they were getting was, well, mom and dad seem to be able to have this all worked out.

I don't. I make mistakes. Mom and dad don't. I guess there's something different about mom and dad than me. That didn't happen in our house. Our kids knew that I messed up, right?

I mean, it's not that I was always perfect in front of them, but I remember a guest we had on Family Life Today years ago who said, most Christian parents are teaching their kids how to avoid sin and how to conceal sin. So stay away from this. Don't do it. If you do, you'll get in trouble.

That's the message. So kids do stuff and they go, I'm going to get in trouble if they find out, so I've got to conceal it. He said, we've got to teach our kids how to confess and repent. Yes. And he said, and the way you teach your kids how to confess and repent is you confess and repent in front of them so that they can see, oh, that's what it looks like.

Yeah. One of the aspects we talk about in this book is not just scheduling family devotions. It's being a legit believer around your kids and inviting them into that and saying, hey, this is where dad made a mistake and I need you to forgive me.

Or when they make a mistake pointing out, hey, dad has done the same thing a million times. Isn't it good that our God is forgiving? That he can forgive us fully, freely and forever. That he can both say, neither do I condemn you and go and sin no more. And we can operate out of that great trust in our Lord. In a sense, that's how you make disciples, right?

Yes. Because, I mean, we're joking on that Art of Parenting clip, but there was a real tension in our home when the boys were really little with Anne really wanting a family altar. And she called it that. I did not call it a family altar.

I said, let's have family devotions like Barbara and Dennis Raimi. And we didn't know what they had, but we had this image that they sat on the fireplace. I'm not kidding. This is it. And so we actually, because I'm like, I didn't have this. I didn't grow up a Christian home.

I didn't know. So how do we do this? So she actually convinced me, why don't you just take the sermon you preached on Sunday morning and give a mini version on Sunday night? So we tried that. I feel like that idea. Oh my goodness. It's not a bad idea. I mean, I thought that works.

Why would I care more about the people on Sunday morning in my own household? So we did it. We sat on, I can see it right now, on the fireplace. There were the boys.

What are they? Four, five, six, seven years old. And it was like boogers and hit each other and run around. And I got so frustrated. Like I thought it was going to be like Anne, little halo above my head, soft play music.

And you know, I didn't realize in that, and we tried it a couple of times. It's like, that's what's going to happen. They're little boys.

You're not going to have them strapped in a seatbelt listening to this quiet little thing. But so we learned, or maybe I learned, it's going to look different. It's not going to look like that. We still are called to make disciples, figure out a different strategy. I threw away the sermon thing.

And I think what ended up happening is it's an overflow of dad's life. Like you just said earlier, it's like, what did God say to you today? What do you struggle with today? How did God meet you today?

What are you praying right now? Just, you know, grab a moment and emote that. What you would want if you were being discipled, what would you ask for? Would you say, what I really need is somebody just to sit me down on a fireplace, make me sit absolutely still and talk at me for an hour. No, we would say, I want somebody to invest in my life, to think about what is happening with me, to really look me in the eye and be present, not be on the phone, not be moving about, not just say, well, I'm sure they're picking up enough as we go.

No, you would want somebody to really show that they really cared. And that's the opportunity we have in our own home. And sometimes for some families, that's going to look like, sit down. We've got a lesson we're going to walk through. And for some families, it's going to look like, I just want to ask you a bunch of questions about where you're at, how you're doing.

I just want to pray for you. And at different stages, it can change for each family and for each kid. And if we start to prioritize our plans over the people that the Lord put in our house, that is going to be frustrating. Yeah.

But if we look at the people the Lord gave us and come up with a plan based on that, then I think there's going to be some fruit from that. Well, I think the thing that we realized, too, was bedtime was ideal for little kids because they don't want to go to sleep. And they're willing to talk about anything and everything at that point. Is that what you have found? Absolutely right.

Yep. A family to establish a time for us can extend far into the night. My kids right now are asking really deep questions. But part of it, I know, is they're trying to avoid maybe bedtime some of the time. But I think we'll be surprised, and I hear this from parents all the time, you'll be surprised at what your kids picked up, what they remember, what they keyed in on when you thought they were just running around the house and smashing things. It might have been that moment that also the Lord used to convict their heart or that they heard something or that it really clicked for them. And that's the way the Holy Spirit works.

And I'll add this. In the teenage years, bedtime was critical, too. I mean, you don't do it the same way. You're not laying in bed and rolling around in it.

You might be laying on the floor. But there's that moment at 9, 10 o'clock at night. Homework's done. They're getting ready right in. It's like there's still moments there.

There are men now, or women almost, as 13, 14, 16, 17-year-olds. But man, if I laid on the floor and said, boy, I struggled with this today, and God met me here, there were conversations that were sort of beautiful that I had a tendency to say, hey, man, good night, walk out of the room. And now, as a grandparent, you're like, man, you're going to blink, and they're going to be gone. So seize those moments to help make disciples. Well, and that's exactly what we're talking about in the book, is saying, what are the cross points your family already has?

You guys are already together. So how do you leverage that opportunity for the gospel? If you're driving them home from football practice, you're not just going to talk about the game. You're going to talk about maybe a proverb that comes to mind based on what they said.

And it doesn't have to be scheduled and prepared. You're just thinking about, how can I try to help this kid understand my relationship with the Lord and my desire for Him to have one? And whether it's putting your kids to bed at night when they're teenagers, or it might be when they get busted in the concealed sin that you talked about, Bob, and talking about just what grace the Lord has for us. But we'll see the reality of the scripture. When our sin causes devastation, every parent's going to have that moment where they get the opportunity to be the one who demonstrates grace to their kids, that I can still love you even now. And we have the opportunity in that because we've seen the Lord do that for us.

All of us have personally experienced that if we know the Lord. There is a word that just keeps coming back over and over again any time we talk about this subject that I think is the key word. And the word is intentionality. It's moms and dads who are purposeful with this as an objective. If you say, oh, I'll do that like when the moment is right, well, that's a good approach, but you have to be intentional to be looking for those right moments.

You can't just hope it's going to kind of naturally emerge. You have to be thinking when and how and this is important and do I have opportunities during the day and looking to seize those moments for spiritual deposits in the lives of your kids. And what you've done for us with the book Family Discipleship is to help us think through, and I like these categories, the times, the moments, and the milestones, and how we can be intentional with all of that. In fact, we want to make your book available to any Family Life Today listener who would like to get a copy. If you're able as a listener to make a donation to support the ongoing work of Family Life Today, we'll send you Adam's book as a thank you gift.

It's co-written by Adam and Pastor Matt Chandler. Again, the book is called Family Discipleship. It's our thank you gift to you when you go online at familylifetoday.com and make an online donation or when you call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate over the phone. Your donations are what make Family Life Today possible for you and for others who are joining us in your city and all around the world.

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You can donate online at familylifetoday.com or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate. And thanks in advance for your support of this ministry. We really appreciate you. Now tomorrow we're going to continue to talk about practical ways we can do a better job as parents connecting spiritually with our kids. Adam Griffin is going to join us again tomorrow. Hope you can join us as well. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. MUSIC Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.