Emmanuel Boston

“If rules and regulations had the power to change the heart and life of your child , rescuing your child from himself and giving him a heart of submission and faith, Jesus would have never needed to come!”
― Paul David Tripp, Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family

“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

“Modern culture has disenchanted the world by disenchanting numbers. For us, numbers are about quantity and control, not quality and contemplation. After Bacon, knowledge of numbers is a key to manipulation, not meditation. Numbers are only meaningful (like all raw materials that comprise the natural world) when we can do something with them. When we read of twelve tribes and twelve apostles and twelve gates and twelve angels, we typically perceive something spreadsheet-able. By contrast, in one of Caldecott’s most radical claims, he insists, “It is not simply that numbers can be used as symbols. Numbers have meaning—they are symbols. The symbolism is not always merely projected onto them by us; much of it is inherent in their nature” (p. 75). Numbers convey to well-ordered imaginations something of (in Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s metaphor) the inner design of the fabric of creation. The fact that the words “God said” appear ten times in the account of creation and that there are ten “words” in the Decalogue is not a random coincidence. The beautiful meaningfulness of a numberly world is most evident in the perception of harmony, whether in music, architecture, or physics. Called into being by a three-personed God, creation’s essential relationality is often evident in complex patterns that can be described mathematically. Sadly, as Caldecott laments, “our present education tends to eliminate the contemplative or qualitative dimension of mathematics altogether” (p. 55). The sense of transcendence that many (including mathematicians and musicians) experience when encountering beauty is often explained away by materialists as an illusion. Caldecott offers an explanation rooted in Christology. Since the Logos is love, and since all things are created through him and for him and are held together in him, we should expect the logic, the rationality, the intelligibility of the world to usher in the delight that beauty bestows. One”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth's Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education

“Our heavenly Father is never content with just controlling us. Control is no problem for him; he’s sovereign after all. But in grace he wanted more for us. So he devised a plan that would result in our forgiveness and complete transformation. In Jesus he made a way for us to see our sin, to confess it, to be granted complete forgiveness, and to be blessed with both the desire and the power to change. He is the Redeemer, and so he is unwilling to settle for anything less than radical personal heart and life change.”
― Paul David Tripp, Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family