Discover even more places to enjoy Truth.Love.Parent.TranscriptIntroduction
Hey, everyone, it’s been a while since I told you how much I love my job.
I love creating these free biblical parenting resources, I love counseling God’s people from His Word, I love training pastors, teachers, and mentors to work with at-risk children, I love speaking and preaching into marriage and parenting and family life. I really love it. It’s an honor to glorify God by serving you and your families! That’s why I created The Year Long Celebration of God and its podcast. I believe that we parents struggle with intentionality. We don’t do a good job creating premeditated plans for discipling our kids. Well, that’s what The Celebration of God discipleship experience is. It’s an intentional and premeditated plan for discipling our kids as we grow as Ambassadors of God. If you’re new to the show, then perhaps you haven’t yet heard about The Celebration of God parenting resource, so I’d like to talk about it a little today as we transition into Season 18. And if you are already familiar with The Celebration of God, I hope you’ll still interact with today’s discussion because I’ll unpack some additional family-related ideas I didn’t cover in the Season of Life episode posting this Friday. Also, just because you listened to today’s episode doesn’t mean you shouldn’t subscribe to The Celebration of God podcast and join the discussion over there. Both shows compliment each other as they help you become a more mature disciple of Jesus Christ and help your children do the same. Topic
A number of months ago, we reworked the Truth.Love.Parent. season transitions to line up with the Year Long Celebration of God.
The official celebratory year starts with the Season of Mercy and runs from September to November. The Season of Grace goes from December through February, and the Season of Life encompasses March, April, and May. In the Northern Hemisphere, this is Spring. In the Southern Hemisphere, it’s Autumn. The final season of the Celebration of God is called the Season of Power and runs from June-August. Why will it help your family to segment your year this way? Well, like I said in the introduction, we want to be intentional, premeditated, disciple-making, Ambassador parents. That means we have to have a plan, and the most successful plans are plans that are specific. Now, this is not going to be a discussion about making and keeping a schedule, micro-managing, or anything like that. But I will say that the families I counsel always start succeeding more than they’re failing when they take change seriously enough that they schedule out the spiritual disciplines in their home. So, let’s stat broad and work our way in. Our lifetime goal should be to introduce our kids to God and — once they are born again as followers of Christ — help them grow in their conformity to Him. The first part is evangelism; the second part is discipleship. And that’s a huge goal that will span from the day we discover we’re pregnant until the day we or our child dies. And it’s a wonderful goal! But how do we accomplish it? This is one of the reasons that it’s valuable to break our children’s lives into digestible chunks. Let’s call these Stages. Lord willing, there will come a time when our children will transition out of our direct authority. Whether by marriage or permission to enter into full adulthood while single, my relationship with them is going to change ever so slightly. Before this stage is the time of young adulthood where we’re training our kids to be Christ-honoring adults. And before that is childhood where we’re laying the foundation on which we hope to build adulthood. And before that we may imagine a stage from conception through infancy. For the majority of you listening today, your kids are either in the infant, child, or young adult category. And each of those stages is going to require the same kind of evangelism and discipleship, but with different age-appropriate focuses. But our plan for discipling our kids should get more specific than this. This is why we often segment our children’s lives and developmental stages into years. It’s become cliche to parent our children in certain ways simply because of their chronological age. Though I believe that this is a dangerous habit, it can — at times — have value. It’s dangerous because our children’s actual maturity is far more important than their age. If a young child is mature enough for a responsibility or new life focus, then we should interact with them on that level. If our child is 17, but still acting like a 3 year old, we would be fools to give them the independence of an adult. But are year long plans as specific as we need? A year is so long, and there are so many responsibilities and distractions. We should be more specific. And you see where I’m going. As we plan our Seasons, months, weeks, days, and portions of days, we will become even more premeditated and intentional. But today we only want to discuss the Seasons level. How are they beneficial to the discipleship of our kids. In the King James rendering of Ecclesiastes 3:1 we read, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” Though the Hebrew word translated “season” can better be understood as any predetermined period of time, it perfectly illustrates the value of our celebratory seasons. If we take our Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer months and predetermine that those periods of time will be used to help our children know and be conformed to Christ, then the Season takes on more practical value. In regard to the Season of Life, these three months contain the most celebratory observances and holidays of the whole year. And the biggest event of the Season is the greatest holiday ever — Easter. So, we parents will help ourselves be more intentional and premeditated in our discipleship as we recognize that March, April, and May are a fantastic time to talk with our kids about a biblical understanding of physical and spiritual life. What is the purpose of our physical life? When does it begin? What is the purpose of our spiritual life? When does it begin? Does God have any expectations for our lives? Did God start the life cycle and walk away, or is He intimately part of every process? These questions and far more are great topics of conversation for this Season. If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s even easier to find ourselves taking about life and growth as Spring ushers in new plant and animal life. If you live in the Southern Hemisphere, moving into your Autumn can also highlight the importance of life because life does have cycles and changes. God has a plan for all of them, and it’s our responsibility to discover how we can best glorify Him in this new season of life. During the Season of Life we will observe Lent and the various facets of Passion Week, we’ll also celebrate the World Day of Prayer, Easter, Stewardship Day, Mother’s Day, Ascension, and Pentecost. Each of those events are brimming with implications for life and godliness. And as we interact with each Anticipation, Preparation, Observation, and Celebration, we should be capitalizing on the opportunity to unpack yet one more glorious Truth about our great God. So, as you can tell, the Season of Life is a uniquely wonderful time of year to focus on the evangelism or discipleship of your children from a unique perspective. Conclusion
Once again, I strongly encourage you to do a couple things.
Please share this episode with your friends and join us next time as we open God’s Word to discover how to parent our children for life and godliness. To that end, as we start Season 18, we’ll be continuing our discussion of the biggest parenting challenges you will ever face by talking about your children and sexuality.
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