Your Home For God, How-to-Succeed-in-Parenting-By-Depending-on-the-Lord

It took a long time for us to realize how much we needed to depend on the Lord in our parenting. We set goals for our children and that action was instrumental in realizing we were failing. We failed a lot. Struggled to achieve our goals for our children. We realized our need for the LORD, and began to see how to succeed in parenting by depending on His Holy Spirit, crying out to Him for help, and recognizing that He was at work in our children and us in ways we could not even have imagined.

Desperate for clarity, can’t stand the chaos, and want help prioritizing what is truly important in your Christian parenting? Get my course, Raising Godly Kids today!

Raising Godly Kids Course | Your Home For God

I want to encourage you to set goals and strive in consistency to achieve them, but humble yourself, realizing your complete inadequacy and inability to accomplish God’s goals for you and your children without depending on Him to be at work in your family. And then keep on praying.

We Were Clueless in How To Succeed in Parenting​​​​

When our first baby was born, we didn’t know much about being parents. We had a loving family around us–both of our families in the same state–and we were part of a good church. We were led to some excellent resources, thankfully, but we were still pretty clueless.

At the time we didn’t know it, but we were clueless as to how to succeed in parenting. We stumbled and bumbled along and we did our best. What we did is what I see so many young couples–young parents–do. We looked at our friends and copied them. Thankfully, we had pretty good friends, but this isn’t God’s plan.

Your Home For God, You-can-succeed-and-heres-how

You can succeed and here’s how!

Parenting Makes You See Your Need Of God

As our children grew older–and if you have children 9, 10, 11, 12, that age, you will understand what I’m saying–we realized that our goals were big and our dreams for our children were even bigger, but they were unattainable without the help of the Lord Jesus Christ.

“We began to see how to succeed in parenting by depending on His Holy Spirit, crying out to Him for help, and realizing He was at work in our children and us in ways we couldn’t even imagine.”

We realized how desperately our children needed the Holy Spirit’s work in their lives as well as us. We realized that nothing was going to happen–we were not going to realize any true success in parenting from a Godly perspective–unless our prayers were answered. We often felt woefully inadequate as we just didn’t have the wisdom and knowledge to face and handle each new thing that each age of our children brought.

We knew that we were hopelessly imperfect parents and as we faced these unexpected problems, and our children’s sin as well, we knew we needed wisdom, knowledge, and skill from above. We needed the Lord.

We needed wisdom, knowledge, and skill from above.

We needed the Lord!

Set Character Goals for Yourself and Your Family

Setting goals for our family became more of a habit. We were all growing spiritually. We were Homeschooling and part of an organization that held us accountable and encouraged us in our desire to succeed in parenting by requiring us to set character goals, as well as academic goals for our children, monthly.

This is an excellent activity and every parent should do this for their children. It’s not a bad idea for adults to evaluate their own character, either! We learned ways to measure how our children were doing in character areas. We became more disciplined with monthly times of checking in and focusing on character issues. The Scriptures became increasingly our guide and we learned more of Christ. We talked in a more Biblical way about the behavior we saw in our children that was sinful, realizing that it was a heart issue that caused behavior problems, and a character problem.

Your Home For God, Comparing-yourself-to-other-moms

Comparing yourself to other moms?

Neither our desire to know how to succeed in parenting nor our increased discipline in evaluating our children’s character resulted in our perfection as parents. We also didn’t see the result of our children achieving a state of perfection as tweens, teens and young adults! What it did do is humble us. It taught us to set and seek to accomplish God’s goals of change in our character and to care about His molding and building Godly character in us when we saw how short we fell of the righteous mark set in the Scriptures. It caused us to lean and depend on the Lord more and more.

“The only question I have, as the parent of adult children, is how to keep the duct tape firmly in place over my mouth?”

As a mom of grown children, I feel compelled to communicate to younger moms that your parenting is not over when your children grow up. You will still be a mom–the way you act out that role just changes. I think that there’s a misconception that we are only parents until our children are 18 or maybe 21 and this is just not so. God is working on our character until the day He takes us home. We also have an influence on our grown children, and an important role to play.

Your Home For God, Feel-like-a-failure-at-parenting

Feel like a failure at parenting?

It’s just that each stage and age of our children causes our parenting role to change. So I jokingly say now, as the parent of a married daughter and also the parent of a grown man, that my biggest challenge and most important job as a parent (besides praying, of course), is to keep the duct tape firmly in place over my mouth!

“God is at work, whether you see it or not, whether you think He is or not. Keep on looking to Him for how to succeed in parenting, depending on His Spirit at work in you and your children, and keep on praying.”

Desperate for clarity, can’t stand the chaos, and want help prioritizing what is truly important in your Christian parenting? Get my course, Raising Godly Kids today!

Raising Godly Kids Course | Your Home For God

My aim is to only give counsel when asked, not give free advice, and mostly to pray and listen! Prayer has become even more important to me! I hope that prayer has become an essential, deep, and abiding part of your parenting. I’ve talked about prayer as an essential part of parenting in my parenting video: Parenting, Example, and Training (PET) in Parenting

I want to emphasize that we can learn skills in goal-setting and grow in Godly character. God uses parenting to develop not only our children’s character, but our character! We are learning and growing. We teach our children how to live and walk with God through our weakness, our striving, our failures, our successes, and most of all our utter dependence on the Lord through it all!

We can learn how to succeed in parenting as we grow closer to the​ Lord and as we learn parenting skills. We will grow if we are reading His Word and obeying it, obeying His Holy Spirit, and praying for change in our lives. We can become more disciplined! Never think you can’t! But there is not going to come a time when you and I will arrive at perfection, or close to it, short of heaven! I want to urge you to look to the Lord til the day you go to be with Him. Don’t give up and don’t feel hopeless. God is at work, whether you see it or not, whether you think He is or not. Keep on looking to him, depending on His Spirit at work in you and your children, and keep on praying.

Have a Great Week Making Your Home For God!

Wendy Gunn | Your Home For God

I help overwhelmed young moms be consistent in their relationship with God, raise Godly kids, and have clarity to live out God’s priorities for His glory, through Courses, Conferences, and Coaching.

 Want clarity on what tasks to be doing as a mom and prioritizing them? Get “Raising Godly Kids”–help from a mom of grown children who has been there. You can be consistent and there is parenting help available.

Subscribe to My YouTube Channel for more Encouragement and Tips!

If you liked this post, Share it on FacebookPinterestInstagram, and Twitter. You might also like my Facebook live videos. Follow my Pinterest Boards: Christian Living Life, Homeschooling, Christian Parenting, Organization, and Goals on Pinterest. You’ll find helpful tips and encouragement for your home and family. I pray for my subscribers–subscribe today and let me know what you need prayer for!

@pinterest.com/WendyGunnYourHomeForGod

@facebook.com/wendygunnyourhomeforgod

@instagram.com/wendygunnyourhomeforgod

@twitter.com/YourHomeForGod1

Your Home For God Blog: yourhomeforgod.com

Contact me at: [email protected]

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *