Saturday, May 23, 2009

Sacred Parenting by Gary Thomas

When my sweet daughter advanced to the developmental period known as the terrible two's, I began experiencing a lot of difficulty in parenting her. Surprise! I repeatedly asked the Lord (with some anger in my tone), "How do I make her stop this?!" Each time, the Lord lovingly responded that her behavior would change whenever I corrected my own. After this scenario played itself out several times in one day, I threw my hands into the air, turned my face to the sky and cried, "Whyyyy, God? Why is it always me?" And at that moment, the Lord showed me that He intended to use my daughter to make me more like Himself.

Yes, it's just like Proverbs says, "As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)" Or, in this case, a child will sharpen his/her parent. And, just like Romans 8:28 says, "We know that all things work together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose." All things, including parenting.

God is so good to us. He works it out that while we (hopefully) make disciples of our children, He simultaneously makes us into better disciples.

So, the sum of this book? "The Lord inends to use your children as a sanctifying force in your life." Thomas breaks this idea down into 13 chapters and an epilogue. While I agree with the author's point, I'm surprised that he can spend a whopping 13 chapters on it. I suppose that's why he's a writer, and I'm not. His gift for verbosity.

However, if you struggle with your child's behavior and you've never heard this message before, I highly recommend this gentle book.

4 comments:

  1. I always enjoy books that remind me where to keep my focus. In my day to day events my thinking can become twisted. I appreciate books like Sacred Parenting who reminds me what is important. It gave me much food for thought on how to actually implement these principles.

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  2. WE HAVE FOUND THAT MARRIAGE IS ANOTHER TOOL FOR PERFECTING EACH INDIVIDUAL, NOT FOR THE SAKE OF MARRIAGE BUT BECAUSE OF MARRIAGE. IT IS USED TO PERFECT YOURSELF INTO THAT IMAGE GOD HAS MADE OF YOU AND ALSO TO USE YOU TO PERFECT THE PERSON YOU ARE MELDED WITH IN MARRIAGE

    MAMA

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  3. Anonymous MAMA,

    Yes, that is so. In fact, Gary Thomas wrote a book about that very thing entitled SACRED MARRIAGE. Some friends of mine are reading it for their women's group. I haven't heard their thoughts about it yet, though. I agree, however, that if you're not a parent, or even married, I think God will use all your relationships to perfect you and conform you to the image of His Son. For the unmarried person, it might be those abrasive people at church or work that you have to put up with or who shed light on your least attractive qualities and force you to deal with those parts of yourself that don't exactly look like the Bride of Christ yet. For those of us who are married or parents or even grandparents, God uses the relationships that are most readily available: the ones in our own home. Just (I think) so we can't pull a Jonah and run away. Er, well, some do run away, but they end up smelling like stinky fish puke (spiritually speaking, of course).

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  4. Ginny,

    I'm so glad this book blessed you. I'm probably one of the few that didn't feel that his message was breaking news. For the record, God spoke to me a lot while reading the book. Just not about the content in the book. About other things I needed to work on. Things that, I suspect, I'm a little behind the curve on. I'm sure that there were several in the discussion group that were looking at me while I shared what God was doing and thinking, "Duh. Haven't you figured that out by now?"

    My dear husband reminds me that I need to be a little more tactful about what I say to be sure that I don't send a message across that says to others, "Duh, haven't you figured that out already?"

    I'm still working on it.

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