Parenting can quickly become a reactionary calling. From our earliest days as mommy or daddy, we’re summoned by piercing cries for food and attention. Other callings in life are regularly interrupted and inconvenienced by our new role, with its responsibilities in which we’re still just learning to walk. The pattern continues as our children grow and mature, finding more refined ways to summon us to nourish and cherish them.
With the sheer quantity of time and energy it takes simply to react to our children’s needs, and to their growing manifestations of sin, it’s all too easy to focus only on discipline and punishment, and neglect the proactive and visionary calling of parenting.
The New Testament’s twin texts on parenting (Ephesians 6:4 and Colossians 3:21) begin with a check for our own sin, but both have more to say — and in doing so they give us a sightline into a positive vision for parenting that is fully Christian.
Nourish Them in Jesus
Ephesians 6:4 tells us positively to “bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” Our task is to nourish our children with what God has revealed to us in the Scriptures about himself, humanity, our sin, our world, and his Son. We are to bring our children up toward adulthood in the very things we teach and expect, with God’s help, of Christian adults.
I say “nourish” because the word for “bring them up” in Ephesians 6:4 is the same word translated “nourish” just a few verses prior in Ephesians 5:29: “No one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church.” Such proactive nourishing, not just reacting, applies to husbanding and fathering alike in its distinct expressions.
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