Owners of or ambassadors to our children?

Paul Tripp begins Parenting—a runner-up for WORLD’s 2016 Book of the Year in the Accessible Theology category—with a diagnostic test: Do we believe we are owners of our children or ambassadors to them? Then he lays out the big picture of our God-given parenting task: We are “his tool for the forming of the souls of your children.” With lavish reminders of grace, Tripp guides readers through 14 principles and warns fathers and mothers, “If you are not resting as a parent in your identity in Christ, you will look for identity in your children.” Tripp writes as a pastor, not a scold, and offers many specific examples along with Biblical wisdom: “No parent gives mercy better than one who is convinced that he desperately needs it himself.” In the excerpt below (courtesy of Crossway), Tripp describes four areas that help us think through the differences between ownership and ambassadorial parenting. —Susan Olasky

Lost in the Middle of Your Own Parenting Story

The big picture starts with knowing who you are as a parent. I don’t mean your name, address, and Social Security number. I mean who you are in relation to who God is, to what life is about, and to who your children are. If you don’t have this “who you are” perspective right, you will miss the essence of what God has called you to, and you will do things that no parent should do.

I am afraid that parenting confusion and dysfunction often begin with parents having an ownership view of parenting. It is seldom expressed and often unconscious, but it operates on this perspective of parenting: “These children belong to me, so I can parent them in the way I see fit.” Now, no parent actually says that, but it tends to be the perspective that most of us fall into. In the press of overwhelming responsibilities and a frenetic schedule, we lose sight of what parenting is really about. We look at our children as belonging to us, and we end up doing things that are short-sighted, not helpful in the long-run, more reactive than goal-oriented, and outside of God’s great, big, wise plan.

Ownership parenting is not overtly selfish, abusive, or destructive; it involves a subtle shift in thinking and motivation that puts us on a trajectory that leads our parenting far away from God’s design. This shift is subtle because it takes place in little, mundane moments of family life—moments that seem so small and insignificant that the people in the middle of them are unaware of the movement that has taken place. But the shifts are significant precisely because they do take place in insignificant little moments, because those little moments are the addresses where our parenting lives. Very little of our parenting takes place in grand significant moments that have stopped us in our tracks and commanded our full attention; parenting takes place on the fly when we’re not really paying attention and are greeted with things that we did not know we were going to be dealing with that day. It’s the repeated cycle of little unplanned moments that is the soul-shaping workroom of parenting.

Ownership parenting is motivated and shaped by what parents want for their children and from their children. It is driven by a vision of what we want our children to be and what we want our children to give us in return. (I’ll say more about this later). It seems right, it feels right, and it does many good things, but it is foundationally misguided and misdirected and will not produce what God intends in the lives that he has entrusted to our care. There, I’ve said it! Good parenting, which does what God intends it to do, begins with this radical and humbling recognition that our children don’t actually belong to us. Rather, every child in every home, everywhere on the globe, belongs to the One who created him or her. Children are God’s possession (see Ps. 127:3) for his purpose. That means that his plan for parents is that we would be his agents in the lives of these ones that have been formed into his image and entrusted to our care.

Good parenting, which does what God intends it to do, begins with this radical and humbling recognition that our children don’t actually belong to us.

The word that the Bible uses for this intermediary position is ambassador. It really is the perfect word for what God has called parents to be and to do. The only thing an ambassador does, if he’s interested in keeping his job, is to faithfully represent the message, methods, and character of the leader who has sent him. He is not free to think, speak, or act independently. Everything he does, every decision he makes, and every interaction he has must be shaped by this one question: “What is the will and plan of the one who sent me?” The ambassador does not represent his own interest, his own perspective, or his own power. He does everything as an ambassador, or he has forgotten who he is and he will not be in his position for long.

Parenting is ambassadorial work from beginning to end. It is not to be shaped and directed by personal interest, personal need, or cultural perspectives. Every parent everywhere is called to recognize that they have been put on earth at a particular time and in a particular location to do one thing in the lives of their children. What is that one thing? It is God’s will. Here’s what this means at street level: parenting is not first about what we want for our children or from our children, but about what God in grace has planned to do through us in our children. To lose sight of this is to end up with a relationship with our children that at the foundational level is neither Christian nor true parenting because it has become more about our will and our way than about the will and way of our Sovereign Savior King.

I want to say right here and now that I am very bad at what I am now writing about. I like sovereignty, I like ownership, and I like having my will done on earth as God’s will is done in heaven! I often treated my four children (who are now grown) as if they were my possessions. I often suffered from ambassadorial schizophrenia—at moments losing my mind, taking my parenting into my own hands, and doing things that I shouldn’t have done. I was often a very poor example of joyful submission to God’s law. I was often a very poor representative of God’s grace. I was often more propelled by fear than I was by faith. I often wanted short-term gain more than I wanted long-term transformation. There were moments when I forgot who I was, lost my mind, and did things that really didn’t make any sense, or at least weren’t very helpful.

I am going to ask you right now to be honest and admit that you’re like me. You too lose your way and forget who you are in the middle of the endless, repetitive tasks of parenting the children entrusted to your care. There are moments when you too lose your mind. There are times when what you’re saying and doing just isn’t helpful and definitely not ambassadorial.

You just sat down fifteen minutes ago after giving your five-times-a-day lecture on loving your neighbor and are feeling momentarily good about how it went; now you’re back in the family room with your iPad. Before you have a chance to hit the button for your favorite magazine app, you hear angry voices floating down the hallway from the very room you were just in. You can’t believe it! You’re tired, and it feels personal. You want to throw your iPad through the window, but you know doing so would break both. You wish the insanity would stop so you could enjoy just one sane personal moment. You don’t regret that you have children, but at this point you kinda wish they weren’t your children. You’re angry, and you’re about to lose your mind, forgetting who you are and what you’ve been called to do. Emotion is propelling you down the hallway, and that emotion is not love. An agenda is motivating you, and that agenda is not grace. You are in the room and yelling before you even realize you have left your family room chair. You’re talking, but you’re not thinking. You’re reacting, but what you’re doing is not parenting. You’re meting out a catalog of punishments, which you’re later going to have to enforce. You threaten worse if you have to come down that hallway again. You leave the room mumbling something about how you would have never thought of acting that way when you were their age. You throw yourself into the chair, grab your iPad, and open the app, but you’re not paying attention because your emotions are raging. “What do I have to do to get them to listen, to get them to obey for once?” you ask yourself as your emotions calm. You feel a bit guilty, and because you do, you try to convince yourself that your kids deserved it.

Who of us hasn’t been there? What parent can look back on the days, weeks, months, and years that he had with his children with no regret whatsoever? It is so important to humbly recognize how counterintuitive ambassadorial parenting is and to seek the rescue and the power to remember that only God in his amazing grace can provide. Sin makes us all more natural owners than ambassadors. Sin makes us all more demanding than patient. Sin causes all of us to find punishment more natural than grace. Sin makes all of us more able to see and be distressed by the sin, weakness, and failure of others than we are about our own. Sin makes it easier for us to talk at other people rather than listening to them. Here’s what all of this means: the thing that constantly gets in the way of our ambassadorial calling as parents is us! Humbly confessing this is the first step in your ambassadorship.

The thing that constantly gets in the way of our ambassadorial calling as parents is us!

Owner or Ambassador?

Perhaps you’re thinking at this point, “Paul, I don’t think I treat my children like they’re my possessions. I think I try to serve God in the lives of my children, but I’m not sure.” Well, I want to help you. Maybe the place to begin is to observe that few parents conduct themselves like total owners or complete ambassadors. I think for most of us ownership parenting and ambassadorial parenting represent a daily battle that is fought on the turf of our hearts. We are constantly torn between what we want and what God wants. We are constantly pulled one way by what we think is best and the other way by what God says is best. We at one moment are way too influenced by the values of the surrounding culture and at another moment are very serious in our conviction that a biblical way of thinking must shape our parenting. Sometimes we just want our children to behave so our lives could be easier, while at other moments we accept the fact that parenting is spiritual warfare.

It is helpful to think through, at a practical level, the difference between ownership and ambassadorial parenting. I therefore distinguish between these two models of parenting in four areas that every parent somehow, in some way, deals with: identity, work, success, and reputation. The way you think about and interact with these four things will expose and define who you think you are as a parent and what you think your job is in raising your children.

1. Identity: Where you look to find your sense of who you are.

Owner: Owner parents tend to look to get their identity, meaning, purpose, and inner sense of well-being from their children. Their children tend to be saddled with the unbearable burden of their parents’ sense of self-worth. I have to say this: parenting is a miserable place to look for your identity, if for no other reason than the fact that every parent parents sinners. Children come into the world with significant brokenness inside of them that causes them to push against the authority, wisdom, and guidance of their parents. Parents who are looking to their children for identity tend to take their children’s failures personally, as if they were done against them intentionally, and respond to their children with personal hurt and anger. But the reality is that God simply does not give you children in order for you to feel that your life is worthwhile.

Ambassador: Parents who approach parenting as representatives come to it with a deep sense of identity and are motivated by meaning and purpose. They don’t need to get that from their children because they have gotten it from the One whom they represent: the Lord Jesus Christ. Because of this they are freed from coming to their children hoping that they will get from them what no child is able to give. They are freed from asking family life to give them life because they have found life and their hearts are at rest. Because of this, they are now freed to forget themselves and parent with the selflessness and sacrifice that ambassadorial parenting requires.

2. Work: What you define as the work you have been called to do.

Owner: Owner parents think that their job is to turn their children into something. They have a vision of what they want their children to be, and they think that their work as parents is to use their authority, time, money, and energy to form their children into what they have conceived that they should be. I have counseled many children who were breaking under the burden of the constant pressure of parents who had a concrete vision and were determined that these children would be what these parents had decided they would be. Owner parents tend to think that they have the power and personal resources to mold their children into the children they envision.

Ambassador: Parents who really do understand that they are never anything more than representatives of someone greater, wiser, more powerful, and more gracious than they are know that their daily work is not to turn their children into anything. They have come to understand that they have no power whatsoever to change their children and that without God’s wisdom they wouldn’t even know what is best for their children. They know that what they have been called to be are instruments in the hands of One who is gloriously wise and is the giver of the grace that has the power to rescue and transform the children who have been entrusted to their care. They are not motivated by a vision of what they want their children to be, but by the potential of what grace could cause their children to be.

3. Success: What you define success to be.

Owner: These parents tend to be working toward a specific catalog of indicators in the lives of their children that would tell them that they have been successful parents. Things like academic performance, athletic achievement, musical ability, and social likability become the horizontal markers of how well they have done their jobs. Now these things are not unimportant, but they simply are unable to measure successful parenting. Good parents don’t always produce good kids, and parents should constantly be asking themselves where they get the set of values that tell them whether they have “good” kids or not. I am afraid that many good parents live with long-term feelings of failure because their children have not turned out the way they hoped.

Ambassador: These parents have faced the scary truth that they have no power at all to produce anything in their children. Because of this they haven’t attached their definition of successful parenting to a catalog of horizontal outcomes. Successful parenting is not first about what you’ve produced; rather, it’s first about what you have done. Let me say it this way: successful parenting is not about achieving goals (that you have no power to produce) but about being a usable and faithful tool in the hands of the One who alone is able to produce good things in your children.

Successful parenting is not about achieving goals (that you have no power to produce) but about being a usable and faithful tool in the hands of the One who alone is able to produce good things in your children.

4. Reputation: What tells people who you are and what you’re about.

Owner: Owner parents unwittingly turn their children into their trophies. They tend to want to be able to parade their children in public to the applause of the people around them. This is why so many parents struggle with the crazy, zany phases that their children go through as they are growing up. They’re not so much concerned about what that craziness says about their children, but what it says about them. Children in these homes feel both the burden of carrying their parents’ reputation and the sting of their disappointment and embarrassment. Owner parents tend to be angry and disappointed with their children, not first because they’ve broken God’s law, but because whatever they have done has brought hassle and embarrassment to them.

Ambassador: These parents have come to understand that parenting sinners will expose them to public misunderstanding and embarrassment somehow, someway. They have come to accept the humbling messiness of the job God has called them to do. And they understand that if their children grow and mature in life and godliness, they become not so much their trophies, but trophies of the Savior that they have sought to serve. For them, it’s God who does the work and God who gets the glory; they are just gratified that they were able to be the tools that God used.

Content taken from Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family by Paul David Tripp, ©2016. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, Il 60187, www.crossway.org.