Instructing a Child's Heart

As part of the upcoming Spiritual Habits of a Child’s Heart 2 symposium, I’ve been preparing notes and reading up on the subject of parenting. One of the books that I referenced was Instructing a Child’s Heart by Tedd and Margy Tripp. In a sense, this is a follow-up book to Tripp Tripp’s excellent Shepherding a Child's Heart. I say in a sense because this book goes so much deeper.

It opens with familiar material but it then goes much more deeply, not into the child’s life, but into the heart of the parent. This is not a how-to book. The point that the Tripps are making is that how-to parenting books miss the mark by a galaxy. Going about trying to make a child behave is like what Jesus accused the Pharisees of doing when he metaphorically said that they cleaned the outside of the cup but the inside remained dirty (Matt 23:25).

Indeed, the Tripps main point is that we need to give our children a vision of the glory of God. God is the most valuable, more precious treasure in the universe. And we were made to honour him, made to worship him, made so that only by savouring him will we be most satisfied. We will have meaning in life if we have God. And we are to impart this vision to our children so that they won’t end up rebelling against God and leading an empty, meaningless life that ends up in destruction.

One of the sentences that most caught my eye was one that goes something like this: “The man who has God and talents is no richer than the man who just has God.” How profound that thought is.

The question for me personally is: Do I dare to teach my children such a thought? Believing the above is to tell my children to lay no importance to striving after a good job, a good reputation in the community or to put any stock into talents and skills but to rely solely and completely on the grace of God. To the world, that is a foolish message. But if I can rely on God for everything, then he gets the glory and I get the help whenever he acts out his best plan for me. I want to live like that and I want my children to live like that. I need to cut out the thinking that the world has crammed into my brain and fill myself up instead on the wisdom of God.

I would say Instructing a Child’s Heart tops the previous book by a factor of 10. It really helped me to see that at the heart of discipling a child is teaching the child that all life revolves around God and that God is the source and goal of life. If we can teach that to our children, how much more life they will have.