Emmanuel Boston

“I propose that so much of what drives our responses to our kids is an unannounced set of laws that are more about what we want for ourselves and our lives than what God wants for and from our children. In our allegiance to our law, we end up breaking God’s law in our interactions with our children. In this way we are just like our children: people who need to be rescued from ourselves.”
― Paul David Tripp, Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family

“A man may sink by such slow degrees that, long after he is a devil, he may go on being a good churchman or a good dissenter and thinking himself a good Christian.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“When you think your job is to change your child and you’ve been given the power to do it, your parenting will tend to be demanding , aggressive, threatening, and focused on rules and punishments. In this kind of parenting you are working to make your children into something rather than working to help them to see something and seek something. In this form of parenting, it is all about you and your children, rather than you being an agent of what only God can do in your children. Your hope is that you will exercise the right power, at the right time, and in the right way so change in your children will result. That process is profoundly different than working to be a useful tool in the hands of a God of glorious transforming grace, who alone is your hope and the hope of your children.”
― Paul David Tripp, Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family

“If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll get my children to believe.”“I will discipline the hell out of my children.”“It’s my job to ensure that they do what is right.”“If I do nothing else, I will send children out into the world who are prepared to live right.”“After I’m done with him, he’ll never even think of doing that again.” The assessment in these statements that children need to change is right. The deep desire for that change which motivates a parent is right. The commitment to work for that change is right. Then what is wrong with each of these statements? Each of them assumes power on the part of parents that no parent has, and that assumption creates all kinds of parenting trouble. If you are going to be what God has designed you to be as a parent and do what he’s called you to do, you must confess one essential thing. This confession has the power to change much about the way you act and react toward your children. It is vital that you believe and admit that you have no power whatsoever to change your child.”
― Paul David Tripp, Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family