Parenting that honors the Lord and passes on the gospel starts with a right understanding of our role as ambassadors of God, not owners of our kids.
Intro
The “Gospel Shaped Home” podcast is a family discipleship resource from Providence Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. It aims to equip you and your family to be on mission with God to the end of the street, to the ends of the earth.
Andy Owens
Welcome back to another episode. Today we’re going to begin discussing Paul Tripp’s excellent book from Crossway titled Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family. And to discuss the introduction with me today, I have a guest I really look up to in more ways than one, Pastor Phil. Pastor Phil, welcome.
Phil M
Hey Andy.
Andy
So how tall are you?
Phil
6′ 9″.
Andy
6′ 9″. Are you as tall as LeBron James?
Phil
I am.
Andy
He’s also-
Phil
6′ 9″, yeah. He’s a much better basketball player than me though. That’s why I’m a pastor, and he’s an NBA player.
Andy
Seriously, brother, I do look up to you in many ways. Most of our listeners won’t know naturally that when my family and I crashed back from Turkey almost two years ago, you and I spend a lot of time talking together, reading together, praying together. You were in a significant sense, one of God’s frontline first responders to love and care for me and my family in a hard season…
Phil
Praise.
Andy
So thank you and yeah, praise God. From that time I got an insight into you, your life, your family that a lot of our folks haven’t seen before. Right? You’re the mission’s guy. That’s how a lot of people think of you, but you are through and through a family man. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about your family before we dive in.
Phil
Yeah, thanks Andy. Married to my wife for over 22 years. We have four kids; Valerie, Lexi, Juju, and Phillip. Valerie’s a senior in college, Lexi’s a sophomore, and Juju’s a senior in high school, and Phillip’s a freshman. So I’m still in the throes of parenting at different stages of life.
Andy
You have a wealth of experience that you can speak from as well.
Phil
Well, I don’t know, a wealth of experience of how we are to do things because of how we didn’t do things.
Andy
Sure, sure. Well you have significantly more experience than I do, that’s for sure. I’ve seen evidence of God’s grace in your family in ways your kids serve and love and think it’s at least in part because of the way God has so worked in your and Linda’s hearts to affect the way you think about parenting and the way you love your kids, so praise Him for that.
Let’s jump in. What do you think Paul Tripp’s main point is in this introduction? How could you sum it up?
Phil
Yeah. Paul is basically saying we should be ambassadors, not owners. And he talks about the idea of an owner is somebody who looks out for their own interests, the interest of their children and not what God desires for their children. And so, an ambassador would be somebody who puts aside their personal interest and is not shaped by that or any cultural perspective but is shaped by what God would have them to do in their family.
Andy
Yeah, that’s good. He says on page 14, the job of an ambassador is quote, “to faithfully represent the message, methods, and character of the leader who sent him.” And so as parents, we represent God to our children and we represent God as servant, as ambassadors of God, not as owners of our kids.
He talks about the distinction between mundane moments and big grand moments as the address where our parenting lives. What’s the point he’s making there Phil?
Phil
We can get tied down into little things that happen in our lives and get frustrated, and I think in our parenting we need to take everything that God puts before us as a chance to bring a gospel center perspective for our kids. One of my kids, when we were homeschooling, she was going to take a test one day and I was down doing something in the kitchen, had been at home that day and she went upstairs, took the test, came back down and was just sitting at the table looking at me in a really funny way. And I said, “What’s wrong sweetie?” And she reluctantly told me that she had cheated on the test and she looked at all the answers.
And so, she was already in tears, already broken and repentant, but I knew it was an opportunity for me to infuse the gospel. What I desired was to let that go, just say, “Okay, you’re sorry,” but it was an opportunity for me to add a consequence to that because there are consequences to sin, but explain to her in that moment that God’s grace is sufficient for you and he loves you and he forgives you for this, but there is going to be a consequence.
So, it was in that little mundane moment that we had a test and I was working in the kitchen that God did an amazing thing.
Andy
That’s great. That’s a good example of I think what he’s talking about. A lot of times we make the mistake of thinking about our parenting, our lives in general through the lens of the big kind of life-altering decisions or these milestone moments when really we only have a few of those in our lives and we only have a few of those interactions with our kids in their lives. Most of our parenting is made up of thousands and thousands of mundane moments and our responses in little things like how well our kids share with siblings, interact with classmates, how they do their schoolwork and just trying to help us see our parenting really is the sum of all of those mundane moments and so they really matter. They are really significant and I think he’s calling us not to overlook them.
One of the things Paul Tripp says is that ambassadorial parenting requires two things, at least. One that we relinquish control and two, that we humbly recognize that we, because of our sin, are the biggest problem in our parenting. How have you seen your own need to relinquish control or to recognize your own sin affecting the way you parent?
Phil
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think in my own life my tendency is, my default is to be prideful and think that my way is the best, but obviously my life is, I’m saved by grace, but I’m still a sinner. And one of the things I learned quickly was that I needed to be humble and yield to God and his control. When I tune my ears to his word and to the gospel, it allowed me to be humble in those situations where I even go to one of my kids and say, “Daddy’s sorry, I should not have spoken to you that way. I should not have acted that way. Will you please forgive me?” That’s been really impactful I think for me but also for my kids.
Andy
Absolutely. Yeah, seeing a model of humility, confession, repentance is really powerful and it’s going to open up the door to our kids’ hearts a lot quicker than us just throwing our authority around, our weight around when we’ve clearly messed up, so that’s good. I think of Erica and I have found ourselves in moments where we’re, especially when we see a repeated pattern and a kind of a recurring pattern of sin or disobedience in one of our kids, we often will talk about, they do this, they keep doing this and we overlook in that moment, you know, that there’s something happening in us too. We’re frustrated, we’re impatient, we just want this problem to go away, and really we’re missing an opportunity to be a minister of the grace of God to our kids in that moment of need and sin, weakness. And so I think that’s also part of ambassadorial parenting recognizes God is not just using me in my kids’ lives; he’s also doing something in me…
Phil
Absolutely.
Andy
Through parenting.
So at the end of the chapter he talks about how having this view of parenting as an ambassador of God to our kids, affects four significant areas; our identity, our work as parents, our view of success, what is successful parenting, and our reputation. How have you seen this play out in your parenting?
Phil
Yeah, Paul Tripp says things like academic performance, athletic achievement, music ability, and so on become horizontal markers of how well we’ve done our jobs. One of those for me was basketball. My identity before I became a believer was wrapped up in basketball. And so, our kids love what we love and so my kids love basketball. Well, Valerie junior year in high school, she decided that she didn’t love basketball as much anymore, as much as I loved it and she didn’t want to play. But there was so much pressure on her that I had put on her not meaning to because I wanted them to drive what they wanted to do in terms of athletics, but obviously subtly in some way there’d been pressure on her.
And so, one night I was sitting down, I heard her up in her room crying. I just went up there and I said, “Sweetie, you need to go tomorrow and tell the coach that you’re not playing basketball this year.” It was all like the burden had been taken off her shoulders, this huge weight had been lifted because her daddy had released her from this idea of having to play basketball.
Andy
From your dream for her.
Phil
It was good for me to, to realize that I had subtly in ways that I didn’t even realize put that pressure on her and it was to a point where she was in tears having to make this decision.
Andy
Yeah, yeah. I can very much sympathize. My kids are still younger, but as someone who was significantly involved in sports and success in sports is a big part of my identity when I was growing up it’s easy for me to see that desire rising up in my heart to see potential future success, athletic success or academic success in my kids, and for it to become way more significant than it should be, an idol that needs to be cast down.
Yeah, I can remember a quote from Matt Chandler, or I think it may of us the title of an article, but “The Goal of Parenting is Making Disciples, Not D1 Athletes.”
Phil
Absolutely.
Andy
It’s a good word for us here in America.
Well, any final just word of encouragement to our parents before we close this one out.
Phil
I’m glad he started the book with this introduction because it’s so hard for us to put our self-interests aside. And so let’s try to be ambassadors and put God’s interest at the forefront for our lives and for our kids’ lives.
Andy
Amen. Not only does it relieve our kids of burdens that we might put on them, it relieves us of burdens as parents.
I’ll close with this little quote from page 12 Paul Tripp says, “When you parent with what the gospel says about God, you, your world, your children and God’s grace, you not only approach parenting in brand new ways, but you carry the burden of parenting in a very different way.”
Thanks for listening. We hope this has been a blessing to you and look forward to seeing you next time.
Outro
Thanks for listening to this episode of the “Gospel Shaped Home” podcast, produced by Providence Baptist Church of Raleigh, North Carolina. For more information and resources from Providence, visit us online at pray.org. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts.