1. When Your Kids Can’t Sleep
2. When Your Kids Want Control
3. When Your Kids Keep Whining
4. When Your Kids Get Sick
5. When Your Kids Scratch the Neighbor’s Car
6. When Your Kids Disobey You (Again!)
7. When Your Kids Have a Meltdown in Public
8. When Your Kids Get Overly Emotional
9. When Your Kids Ask About Death
10. When Your Kids Ask About Earthquakes
11. When You’re Stuck in the Basement
12. When You’re Just There.

1. We are God’s stewards
2. God made us for work
3. A worker is worthy of his earnings
4. We give freely because we’ve received freely from Jesus
5. We prepare for the future by planning and saving
6. How we spend our money shows what we treasure in our hearts
7. The Bible encourages us to avoid debt

ESV Grow! Bible from Crossway on Vimeo.

Click on the Bible to the right to view the text.

1. Creating Prayer Cards for Your Kids
2. Blessing Your Children at Bedtime

Using these simple tools helps us depend on God each day for grace that only he can give.

1. Never underestimate the impact of children in the lives of others.
2. It is good for a child to learn to love, grieve, and let go.
3. It will cause the young and old to see the value of the other.

Read the whole thing.

If applying the gospel can be overdone, these authors do it proudly: “We’ve encouraged you to dazzle [your children] with the message of Christ’s love and welcome, and then when you think that surely they must be tiring of it, go back and drench them with it again.”

The only problem with this is that when we apply the gospel to every event in life, and especially when we use it to correct, children will tire of it. Not every moment needs to be a “teachable moment.” Do we need to bring up Jesus’ agony on the cross every time our child acts like a child?

The authors give an example of how we might apply the gospel to a child who pouts after losing a baseball game: “Yes, losing is difficult….Jesus Christ understands losing because he lost relationship with his father on the cross….He’s using this suffering in your life to make us both look up and see his love.”

Besides the superficial view of suffering in the above quote, this loose way of applying the gospel, especially when often repeated, takes the power out of the message and can weary the children. Something sadder than a child growing up never hearing the good news is a child who grows up hoping to never hear it again.

I’m curious.  What are your thoughts?  I encourage you to read Bird’s entire review of the book as he ends on this note:

Still, the most important things to be said about this book are that it leaves room for failure, emphasizes the superiority of the gospel over the law, and is primarily about imperfect parents glorifying a perfect God (rather than themselves or their children). These things put Give Them Grace above many other Christian parenting books.

The first few weeks of our SEEDS ministry has gone really well!  We’ve looked at the big story of Scripture, Creation, and now the Fall.  Thanks to each of you who serve in this ministry to children and families!  You are appreciated!

Pastors use a variety of tools to prepare their sermons.  Commentaries, Greek/Hebrew texts, language lexicons, biblical theology books and other sermons on a passage all aid the preacher in his preparation for his weekly sermon.  Here is a tool that will probably not be taught in a seminary class, but has been one of my most unexpected, yet helpful tools for my weekly sermon prep.  Here it is:

“The insights of my children on the passage I am preaching as I read it with them throughout the week”

(Read the rest …)