Showing God to Our Children

This post is from Moms Take Ten episode 4, “Showing God to Our Children”, which you can listen to wherever you listen to podcasts or at https://sites.libsyn.com/403493/showing-god-to-our-children

In my mom’s group at church, we are reading the book Parenting by Paul Tripp. It is a book about fourteen gospel principles that are to guide our parenting. Principle 8 is about authority. Paul talks about how we all have a heart issue with the concept of authority. This is why we struggle so much in our relationship with the Lord as well as our relationships with others. This issue impacts our parenting because our children want authority in their lives just as we want authority over their lives. I’m sure you have felt that tension. 

Paul makes the statement that “every time you exercise authority in the lives of your children, it must be a beautiful picture of the authority of God. In the lives of your children, you are the look of God’s face, you are the touch of his hand, and you are the tone of his voice.”

Let’s look at that last sentence again: “In the lives of your children, you are the look of God’s face, you are the touch of his hand, and and you are the tone of his voice.”

I spent a lot of time thinking about that in my parenting…as I am standing over my children and their eyes are fixed on me, I’ve started wondering, “What are you seeing on my face?” As I am touching them, what are they feeling in my hands? As I am speaking to them, what are they hearing in my voice? Am I representing God well? Am I being an ambassadorial figure in their lives—because the authority that we have in our children’s lives is given to us by God—so am I representing him or am I not. Are they just seeing me? My ugly, my sin, my impatience or desire for authority, my self-righteousness or pride? 

This has prompted a lot of reflection on that, but even more so, it has prompted reflection on God. What is the look on his face? The touch of his hand? The tone of his voice? Am I in tune with that? Do I know what that means? When I try to picture God, am I picturing what is in the Bible? Could it be from other people in my life, or something I’ve created in my mind? Is it from the Chosen? 

This line of thinking has created more of a hunger in me to know better who God is. I cannot display him well if I don’t know him. There is a growing desire in me to see him, feel him, and hear him. We can turn to all of Scripture to learn more about who God is but a few have been standing out to me this week.

Psalm 145:8-9 says:

The Lord is gracious and merciful,

    slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

The Lord is good to all,

    and his mercy is over all that he has made.

Some translations use “compassionate” instead of merciful. “The Lord is gracious and compassionate”. 

Psalm 23 says:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

    He makes me lie down in green pastures.

He leads me beside still waters.

    He restores my soul…

Both of these passages highlight the nurturing side of the Lord. He is there. He gets down on our level and looks us in the eyes. (We should be doing that with our children instead of towering over.) He is like the father in the story of the Prodigal Son who is waiting and waiting and waiting at the window for his child to have a heart change and return home. When the child does, the father doesn’t say “I told you so!” or “Well, hopefully I learned your lesson!” He says, “Welcome home! I’m delighted to have you back. I love you. You are my son. Let’s have a party!”

One evening, my husband turned to me and said, “Doesn’t God ever get frustrated?!” He was feeling the frustration with our kids and feeling like he wasn’t doing a good job of reflecting the Lord. I laughed and said, “Yes! I’ve been thinking about that too.” 

We do see in Scripture that the Lord gets angry. He gets frustrated with the Israelites. There are times of grief over what his children have done. So yes, there is a place for our anger, grief, sadness, or disappointment. What matters is how we go about expressing them. Remember, the Bible says not to sin in our anger, not to never be angry.

Colin Smith, a pastor who is local here and can be heard on the radio, wrote an article about God’s anger that I found convicting. In the article, he says, “It [God’s anger] is his holy response to the intrusion of evil into his world.” Now, my anger, and maybe you would say the same, is not often a holy response to the intrusion of evil in my world. My anger is often an unholy response to the intrusion of my children and their childishness or foolishness or maybe even their sin into my world. They are disrupting my world. They are not upholding or abiding by my laws. They are causing inconvenience. They are making my life difficult. That is usually the prompting of my anger. And that, that is not what God’s anger looks like. When I respond to my children in THAT way instead, I am no longer reflecting God to them.

So can we feel angry? Yes. But with a big heart check of why we are feeling that anger and how we should be expressing that. How can we frame our feelings in love to our children?

Genesis 3 is the first place where we see the discipline of the Lord. He comes down, knowing where Adam and Eve are and what they have done. He leads off the conversation with a question, “Where are you?” This was an invitation for them to engage him even though they were hiding from him. They answer, and he follows up with another question. “Who told you?” They answer, and he follows up with yet another question. “What have you done?” He gives them repeated opportunities to speak.

How many times do we jump to conclusions with our children and don’t give them opportunities to speak? Not God. He gives opportunities to speak first and then he gives consequences. In his consequences I noticed that he starts with “because you have this.” He gives reasons for why they are being given their consequences. After he gives all the consequences, we come to verse 21 of Genesis 3. “And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.”

I was struck by that, the beauty of it. God did not leave them to their consequences and say, “Well, figure it out.” He showed empathy, kindness, and discipline. He had instructed. Then he reconciled with him. He sought to restore their relationship with him. He showed the graciousness, compassion and mercy that we all so desperately need. And our children so desperately need that from us.

I have been convicted to be more mindful of my look, touch and tone with my children. I want to be more intentional in my pursuit of the Lord so that I would be able to represent him well. I want to make him look beautiful and for them to know that they are loved by the creator God. What about you?