Parenting is Hard, Prayer is Vital
There, I said it. It’s hard. Social media would have you believe it’s all glorious and perfect…with just little hiccups between joyful photo shoots. Nope. It’s hard. It can be painful…and ugly. But parenting is also sacred and worshipful. The Bible shows us from the start that God is our Father and He works to build into us in ways that make us more like Him. Parenting gives us that opportunity to model God’s character and selfless love. It’s not easy, but it’s beautiful and it’s valuable.
As parents, we sometimes make the mistake of thinking that if we can just get through ‘this’ stage, it will be easier. But ask any seasoned parent and they will tell you, with each new stage come new challenges and yes, new joys, too. “I can’t wait until…” is often the mantra of the battle-weary parent, the one who is overwhelmed with sleepless nights, laundry, and diapers. Then, the toddler years arrive and the child seems to have 1000 hands, boundless energy, and insatiable curiosity. I can’t wait until…. School, all the activities, sports, then driving, and dating, and before you know it, they’re off to college and then working, married, and with their own children. How did it go so fast? "I can’t wait until they’re grown and I don’t have to worry any more.” Ah, that is a faulty expectation. When you love someone, you will always carry concern for them, whether they’re 2 or 32. Each new stage of parenting brings new and often more complex prayers.
Our parenting doesn’t end when our sons and daughters become adults. But our prayers change. They move from “Lord, please let them sleep… to Lord, please wake them up, spiritually.” The early years are filled with prayers for their physical growth and safety, along with their spiritual formation. But as they grow and age, our prayer becomes even deeper because, as a parent, we no longer have the daily influence or the ability to steer them away from negative influences and dark places. Our prayers take on a deeply spiritual direction, not that they were not before, but there becomes a greater urgency and a deeper understanding of eternity and their place in it. The physical needs, although still present, are secondary to their eternal state. We feel the heaviness of their spiritual condition and direction, we battle on our knees for protection from spiritual attack, and we plead with the Lord for His intervention…and for their recognition of it.
Parenting doesn’t get ‘easier’ it just shifts to another level of support, concern, and intervention- most of it spiritual. Are you prepared for that?
Some may say, “I don’t know how to pray that way.” Oh friends, prayer isn’t just for the ‘learned’ or those who have a long faith history. Prayer is a practice, a spiritual discipline. You just do it. You start where you are and allow the Holy Spirit to guide you. You have a complete handbook to use- the Bible. A great way to begin is by praying scripture over your sons and daughters; God’s word never returns void. It is guaranteed to bear fruit.
Remember, God works outside of time and space. He sees the end from the beginning. He’s weaving people, events, places, and resources together in ways we cannot begin to comprehend all to bring about that which He wills. When we pray, we not only need to lift up our sons and daughters, but we need to pray for our own heart, that we would be surrendered to what God wants and that He would align our desires with His will. Be cautious. Too often we pray with an answer or conclusion in mind. Let God lead.
Today, let’s do just that. Let’s pray Philippians 1:9-11. It’s straightforward and powerful. Write it down and carry it with you this week and pray for your sons and daughters that God would do a work in their lives, reflective of the passage.
“And this is my prayer: that (name)’s love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that (name) may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God.” In Jesus’ name, amen.”
Pray without ceasing.
What IS Perfect Love?
Ah, we all long for that ‘perfect love’ don’t we? As parents, we hope and pray our sons and daughters will find ‘the one’. When the main character looks at his love interest and says, “You complete me”, we melt and hope that someone, someday, would say the same to us. We all love a sweet love story and a beautiful wedding. We gush over the newlyweds as the “perfect couple” with a perfect love. Everything is rosy.
And then life happens. What was once beautiful can become ugly. What was once perfect compatibility becomes irreconcilable differences. Love as we know it can fade and cool. Its endurance and length of days are terminal. Love is used as a tool for manipulation, a weapon to gain control, a bargaining chip to leverage and win battles. It is meted out to those ‘deserving’ of it and withheld from those who do not. There are separations and divorces, and attempts to try again, after the healing. Love between two people will never be perfect because we’re all flawed and sinful and in reality, perfect love seems elusive. We are prone to hurt one another because, at the heart, we are selfish people, aren’t we? We all want and need something in return. And when we look to another flawed person to fill that void, we expect them to provide something that, in their limited capacity, they cannot perfectly supply.
And those are the parameters by which we, as fallen sinners, learn to define love. We are finite and our experiences and understanding are as well. We have an incorrect, even corrupt, understanding of love. We must ask, are we setting our sons and daughters up for a Biblical understanding of love, especially if we’ve experienced flawed relationships, hurt, pain, and disappointment ourselves. What have our sons and daughters witnessed to shape their understanding of love?
God tells us, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 1 John 4:18. What is perfect love? The word perfect in Greek is the word “telios” which means to be complete, lacking nothing to be brought to full completion (1). And love, agape, means affection, goodwill or benevolence, to be charitable (see a need and move to fill it) (2).
But nothing we see around us seems to fit that description, does it? And love, the lack of love, the need for love and the attempt to find love can generate such fear and heart-crushing disappointment. Oh, friends, this is a prayer point that should drive us ALL to our knees- that we, our sons, and our daughters would have a correct, Biblical understanding of love.
Let’s look at perfect love through Scripture:
First, the focus of perfect love never resides with another person, but with God Himself. When we look to another human being, even those who are in the family of God, to provide perfect love, we are expecting them to deliver something that exceeds their capacity and capability. No man (or woman) is perfect. Yes, they can mirror and reflect Christ, but they will never be perfect. Perfect Love is from and in Christ. His love is limitless, boundless, and eternal.
John 15:13 “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
Jesus demonstrated that perfect love for us when He gave His life on the cross to pay for our sins and make a way for us to be justified, redeemed and restored to the Father.
Romans 5:8 “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Perfect love is only and always generated from and sustained by God Himself.
Second, God’s love will never fade or become incompatible with us. His love will not cool. He will never become disinterested or disillusioned. His is the ministry of reconciliation, always working and moving to bring us into intimate fellowship with Himself. He’s always reaching out and drawing in.
Colossians 1:19-20 “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Him (Christ), and through Him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”
Romans 5:17-19 “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.”
Third, God will always, always, always remain faithful. There is nothing we can do to make Him not love us. He won’t find comfort in the arms of another. He IS perfect love and so He doesn’t need to look elsewhere for it nor does He need us to fulfill His needs. No, He chooses to love us unconditionally so that we will find our complete fulfillment in Him! He completes us!
2 Timothy 2:13 “if we are faithless, He remains faithful, for he cannot disown Himself.”
Deuteronomy 7:9 “Know therefore that the LORD your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments.”
Fourth, our limited minds will always struggle to comprehend the unlimited magnitude of God’s love. Though we try, we always default to what we know and have experienced, and thereby we evaluate God’s love by our own experiences. But that is faulty and, honestly, that’s sinful. We must teach our sons and daughters to have spiritual discretion, Scriptural wisdom and a heart and mind trained to hear the Holy Spirit and submit to and follow His teaching. We cannot judge God by human standards, nor can we gauge His love by what we know in this fallen world. The Apostle Paul gave us a powerful explanation in Ephesians 1.
“Among the mature, however, we speak a message of wisdom—but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing.” Ephesians 1:6
The rulers of this age love to tell us what we should believe and how we should think based on their own ‘wisdom’. They continually trot out their standard of “perfect love” that, given time, shows itself as short-lived, broken, and incapable of truly meeting the needs of the ‘other’. It’s faulty.
“Rather, as it is written: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no heart has imagined, what God has prepared for those who love Him.” But God has revealed it to us by the Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.” Ephesians 1:9-10
God’s love far exceeds what we could EVER imagine!! Isn’t that mind-blowing? Nothing we’ve ever seen or experienced comes close. It IS perfect, complete, and lacking nothing. And it can be ours. What joy!! What mind-blowing generosity!! Pure, perfect love meeting all our needs and providing eternal security, provision and protection!
Oh that we and our sons and daughters would understand the true and perfect love of God. Let’s be careful not to create our expectation or judgment of perfect love based on what we see around us. Let’s always be cautious and only look to Jesus as our example and as the true lover of our souls. And then, let’s rely on the Holy Spirit to help us live like Jesus toward others, showing selfless, faithful love that isn’t based on what someone does for us, but offered freely because God loves them and created them in His likeness.
Today, let’s pray Ephesians 3:14-19 for our sons and daughters, asking God to help them get a glimpse of His perfect love that will eclipse anything and everything they know and have experienced yet in this life. Go on, pray boldly! Pray with hope! Our God wants to lavish His love on us freely and continually!
“Father, Abba, the One who loves me dearly, I pray in Your Son’s name that You would work in (name)’s heart today. “For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen (name) with power through his Spirit in (their) inner being, so that Christ may dwell in (name)’s heart through faith. And I pray that (name), being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that (name) may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” May it be so, Lord Jesus. Amen.”
Pray without ceasing.
G5046 - teleios - Strong's Greek Lexicon (niv). Retrieved from https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/g5046/niv/mgnt/0-1/
G26 - agapē - Strong's Greek Lexicon (niv). Retrieved from https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/g26/niv/mgnt/0-1/