Parenting

Dazzle Them with the Gospel of Grace

Tony Reinke Parenting

From Elyse Fitzpatrick’s new parenting book, Give Them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus (Crossway, 2011), page 166:

The one thing that our children really need is the gospel of grace. They need to be absolutely dazzled by the kind of love that would suffer the way Christ suffered, forgive the way he forgives, and bless the way he blesses. Martin Luther wrote that it is grace that brings us forgiveness of sins, which produces peace of conscience. The words are simple; but during temptation, “to be convinced in our hearts that we have forgiveness of sins and peace with God by grace alone is the hardest thing.”

Living and parenting in grace is not the easy road. In fact, it is much harder to rest in his promise of grace than it is to make a list and try to live by it. Some parents may think that giving grace to their children equates to giving themselves a pass. Just the opposite is true. Giving grace to children is an exercise of faith, and faith is always more difficult than works. It flows out of humility, a character trait that none of us comes by naturally. That’s why most people miss it and why works, not faith, is the stumbling block of the cross. You are not slacking off when you tell them of his dazzling love. You are doing the hardest thing.

So go ahead. Freely dazzle your babies with the cross of Christ. Give them grace when they succeed and grace when they fail. Show them how much he loves little children, like you.

Deadbolting the Idols Out

Tony Reinke Family, Family worship, Parenting

While intermarriage appears to have been tolerated early in Israel’s history (Abraham, Joseph, and Moses married foreign women, perhaps for political reasons), this later changed. In fact, intermarriage was especially forbidden when Israel was at its weakest, according to John Goldengay. “Ezra and Nehemiah assume that the little Second Temple community living among other peoples is too weak to risk the loss of its identity by absorption into the wider group through intermarriage” (OTT1:747–748). But the concern was larger than identity, and it’s not hard to imagine why. A foreign wife carried her foreign-deity-baggage into a marriage, and likewise, a foreign husband carried his foreign-deity-baggage into a marriage. The addition of these deities into an Israelite home invariably shaped the spiritual devotion and worship practices of a family, making any wholehearted worship of the living God impossible (see 1 Kings 11:1–13). Goldengay takes this one step further by suggesting that Israelites may have been tempted to intermarry to secure divine insurance, a way to broaden one’s base of collected gods to better ensure personal blessing, peace, and financial prosperity. Whatever the motive, intermarriage with a non-believer, he writes, “compromises the principle that Yhwh alone is the one from whom the community must seek help and guidance for its life concerning matters of a moral and religious kind and concerning the future” (Ex. 34:12-16, Deut. 7:1-4, Ps. 106:34–36). Thus, the forbidding of intermarriage in Old Testament history was not a matter of racial preference, a point made especially clear with the Moabite people. It was faithless Moabite women who led Solomon’s heart astray and it was the faithful God-fearing woman named Ruth, also a Moabite, who became the great-grandmother of King David, thus finding herself in the lineage of the Savior. The bottom line: intermarriage was forbidden to preserve undistracted devotion to Yhwh. John Piper summarizes the point well: “The issue is not color mixing, or customs mixing, or clan identity. The issue is: will there be one common allegiance to the true God in this marriage or will there be divided affections?” God wants our homes to be places of guarded worship for Himself alone. There’s application in there for us all.

Parenting

Tony Reinke John Chrysostom, Parenting

John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), On Vainglory and the Education of Children, 22:

Just as an artist who paints pictures and portraits exercises great care in his work, so each of you, mothers and fathers, must be attentive to these wonderful images [children]. Each day, a painter adds what is necessary to the picture. Sculptors do the same, removing excess stone and adding what is lacking. You should do the same: as makers of images, devote all your time to the task of fashioning wonderful images for God. Remove the excess; add what is lacking. Each day, examine the images closely. Cultivate the natural excellence that each one has, removing what is by nature inferior. Take care to root out first the thought of licentiousness, for sex is especially troublesome to young souls. Instead, before they encounter this temptation, teach them to be sober, vigilant, watchful in prayer, and to place everything that is said and done under the sign of the cross.

Readers-in-Training

Tony Reinke Parenting, Reading, Writing

The current stage of book editing is all about trimming excess. In the next two weeks I hope to whittle off 1,500 words to keep the manuscript around the 55,000-word target. Sadly, this meant cutting out a nice quote that I discovered in my early research and had planned to include in the front matter of the book. The quote has been pruned, but it’s bloggable. Enjoy!

Gene Veith, Reading Between the Lines: A Christian Guide to Literature (Wheaton, Ill: Crossway Books), 224:

Christians to one extent or another have to read. They are ‘people of the Book,’ whose spirituality and conceptual framework is centered upon the linguistic revelation of the Word of God. As the culture moves farther and farther away from the printed word, Christians will still read. As their neighbors plug themselves in to their video images, Christians may find themselves making up a greater proportion of the reading public. Their tastes and values may matter again. Because readers exert the most influence in a society, however the masses amuse themselves, Christians may find themselves once again the thinkers and leaders of society.

Something similar happened 1500 years ago in the first Dark Age when the Vandals trashed a civilization based on law and learning. Amidst the moral anarchy, staggering ignorance, and image-centered paganism that prevailed for centuries, the tradition of literacy was preserved in the church. Behind the protective walls of the monasteries, books were cherished. They were copied out by hand, carefully stored, and eagerly read. The church was concerned for all kinds of books—Bibles, of course, but also books of medicine and science, works of pagan philosophers such as Aristotle, the poetry of Virgil and the comedies of Plautus. The Vandal aesthetic may be coming back in the anti-intellectualism of the mass culture and in the Postmodern nihilism of the high culture. Christians may be the last readers. If so, they need to be in training.

Luther on Parenting

Tony Reinke Parenting

From Martin Luther’s, “A Sermon on the Estate of Marriage” [Luther’s Works (Fortress Press), 44:12]:

But this at least all married people should know. They can do no better work and do nothing more valuable either for God, for Christendom, for all the world, for themselves, and for their children than to bring up their children well. In comparison with this one work, that married people should bring up their children properly, there is nothing at all in pilgrimages to Rome, Jerusalem, or Compostella [the home of a famous shrine in Spain], nothing at all in building churches, endowing masses, or whatever good works could be named. For bringing up their children properly is their shortest road to heaven. In fact, heaven itself could not be made nearer or achieved more easily than by doing this work. It is also their appointed work. Where parents are not conscientious about this, it is as if everything were the wrong way around, like fire that will not burn or water that is not wet.

Train a Child to Read: Entry 3

Tony Reinke Parenting, Reading

Recently I offered free books to parents who could explain the most creative ways they have used to train their children to read and to appreciate books. I’ve chosen three finalists. The third entry comes from Lisa. Lisa writes:

I have taught four of our kids to read. Some of our kids loved it and it came easily, others struggled and needed more encouragement, but there’s a way to get through to every kid!

1. Make it fun!

When our kids were little we decoded and learned words by writing them on anything BUT paper. We wrote them in flour filled cookie-tins or outside on the driveway with chalk held in our toes, or played H-O-R-S-E with the basketball (except spelling out other words).

We turned our spelling words into puzzles and cut out images of what shape a word would be if the letters were invisible (the shape of a word is a great aid in learning it!). We rolled out Play-doh ‘snakes’ and turned them into letters and words. We spelled words with Nestle Chocolate morsels (and then ate them!). Anything to get them to think about how words are built and have some fun along the way. Visual leaning is a great standard tool, but kinetic learning has it’s advantages too!

2. ‘Salt the oats’

Encourage a long-life affection for literature by reading captivating books to them. Like no other approach, this develops a hunger for reading in them. Little ears have an appreciation for classics and great literature well before little eyes can decode the visuals of advanced language.

It’s important that story time is not laundry-time or dish-washing-time, it’s story-time, it’s time to delight in the pure joy of being enraptured in a tale.

The best feedback for me came at the end of a chapter, when a chorus of voices pleaded, “Mom, read just one more chapter? Pleeeeaaasseeee!”

Even now on occasion, when I read classics to my little ones, I catch the teenagers quietly coming into the room too, just to be part of the journey again.

Note: This habit created an affection for stories and a joy in literature in one child long before she was diagnosed with dyslexia. After the diagnosis, we made more use of audio books for her texts as well as for her pleasure reading. The American Printing House for the Blind (and others) have great audio resources for people who struggle with the printed word. After all, he goal is the absorption of great books, not the movement of eyes across a page! Dyslexia and other learning disabilities can snuff out a love of reading and be very discouraging if the love of books isn’t already secure.

3. Practice

Improvement in reading, like anything else, only comes with practice. So we varied their personal reading with level-appropriate biographies, mysteries, historical fiction, subscribed to sports magazines and nature magazines, enjoyed how-to books… everything!

There’s something for every child on the shelves of your local library. We set goals, made charts, joined book clubs for kids, got free pizzas from Pizza Hut through their reading program (Book It), and enjoyed book reviews from siblings around the dinner table.

Also, since a reward can be motivational and can add to a child’s pleasure in reading, a special, chosen treat often awaited them after meeting their reading goals.

Happy reading!

Winners will be contacted via email on Wednesday. Thanks for the entry, Lisa.