If you are a parent, God has given you a significant work to do. That work encompasses a whole variety of things, from discipling your children to know the Lord, to teaching them how to behave in public, to overseeing their education, to making sure they are equipped to make a living, to showing them how to write a household budget, to making sure they know how to haggle for the best price on a car, to baking the perfect chicken, the list goes on and on and on......or does it??
It is very easy to pack all those things into our luggage and drag it through our parenting days, the weight of how to teach our children all the things they might possibly need on their journey. We feel this burden to do it all RIGHT, making few mistakes. Sometimes we take comfort in doing it with others, copying what those around us do because we feel safety in numbers. However, doing things for safety’s sake and relying on the good opinion of others means we don’t necessarily rely on the Lord to show us what He wants for the children He has entrusted to us.
Let me share a thought with you: Phil. 1:6 - Paul says, “I am sure of this, that He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion in the day of Jesus Christ.” He wasn’t directly talking about the work of parenting, but the principle he mentions is truth: that God will finish what He starts. He started a work when He gave you those children, to partner with Him in building new people for His Kingdom!! Will He give you what you need to parent them? Job 23:14 says, “For He will complete what He appoints for me, and many such things are in His mind.” Not only will He complete it, He will equip you to do what He has called you to do, if you let Him. He entrusted those children to you, not to your neighbor or your playdate mom friends, not to your Bible study group leader, not to your mom or sisters, not to your church small group. Your children were given to YOU to raise, in the training and instruction of the Lord.
The same God who tells us those things also told us through His Son, “My yoke is easy and My burden light.” Is your parenting burden feeling light? At the start of a new school year, is it sitting rather heavy? Are you questioning everything and feeling responsible for things beyond your purvey? Let me remind you of the truth in these verses about God and His partnership with you: He has called you, He has & will equip you, and you are the one He has asked, not anyone else in your sphere. Don’t shrug the burden onto the collective opinions around you, but do not shoulder burdens not yours to bear either. Solomon summed it up easily, “Fear God, and keep His commandments, for this is the WHOLE duty of mankind.” As long as you have taught your children well to love God and love their fellow man, and to keep His commands, all those other things you perceive to be burden will fall away. He will finish what He started as long as we do our part and then move out of His Way.
“Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of His eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do His Will, working in us that which is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.” Heb. 13. Go get ‘em Mom!
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