Guests: Nick Bellamy and Johnny Farr

Chapter 4 Inability

Principle: Recognizing what you are unable to do is essential to good parenting.

It is vital that you believe and admit that you have no power whatsoever to change your child.

Parenting is not about exercising power for change in your children. Parenting is about your humble faithfulness in being willing to participate in God’s work of change for the sake of your children.

Parents, here’s what you need to understand: God has given you the authority for the work of change, but has not granted you the power to make that change happen.

Chapter 5 Identity

Principle: If you are not resting as a parent in your identity in Christ, you will look for identity in your children.

If you are not resting in your vertical identity, you will look horizontally, searching to find yourself and your reason for living in something in creation.

How do you know if you’re putting your identity on the shoulders of your children?

1. Too much focus on success.

Chapter 6 Process

Principle: You must be committed as a parent to long-view parenting because change is a process and not an event.

Parenting is not a series of dramatic confrontation-confession events, but rather a life-long process of incremental awareness and progressive change.

The Bible states very clearly that one of the most dangerous aspects of sin, which all parents deal with personally and which all parents deal with in their children, is the fact that sin blinds.

What, by God’s grace, is clear to you is not clear to them. What seems obvious to you is not obvious to them.

Spiritually blind people are blind to their blindness.

Chapter 7 Lost

Principle: As a parent you’re not dealing just with bad behavior, but a condition that causes bad behavior.

Our children are not just disobedient; they are disobedient because they are lost.

Two big lies ever lost child believes:

1. The first lie is the lie of autonomy. What this lie says is that I am a completely independent human being, and because I am, I have the right to live my life any way I choose to live it. It is the belief that my life belongs to me and that I should be able to do whatever I want with my life to make me happy. Part of this lie is the belief that no one should tell me what to do.

1. The second lie is equally dangerous. It is the life of self-sufficiency. This lie tells your child that he has everything he needs inside himself to be what he needs to be and to do what he needs to do. He doesn’t need your help, rescue, instruction, wisdom, or correction.

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