It's only natural biological genetics that make children look like their parents, right? How many times have you heard, "You must be so proud?" Why should we be proud? Because our children-what they say and do, how they look, etc.- reflect us, their parents.
Where would such pride come from unless we, at some level, have made our children an idol? My husband, Jeramy, always talks about the idols of the heart and he wrote a really great post on this subject: Children, Anxiety & Idolatry. We want our children to bring us glory by reflecting us (the best parts of ourselves) in themselves. This, in essence, must be worship of self disguised as another idol of our children.
So what happens when they do something that we don't approve of? Willful disobedience demands our immediate and consistent discipline, which is Biblical and necessary. But what if the issue is not one of sin? Let's say they marry a person, a godly Christ-like person, but within such a marriage, they do not achieve the career dreams that we had always envisioned and we get angry and bitter over it. Is it easy for us to give up our hopes and dreams for their lives joyfully accepting whatever God wills for them, or do we struggle with resentment and gossip?
Perhaps the parents have made their child an idol. This puts way too much pressure on the child. For him or her there is a great pressure to perform, to be acceptable, to go over and above what is necessary in order to please the parents. Parents can be super critical of everything that the child employs: hobbies, activities, projects, even worldviews and philosophies. So what happens? In turn, the parents become the idol of the child. It's like a recurring cycle of idolatry: the parents make the child the idol, to reflect their own glory, and the child makes the parents the idol, to earn approval. Both would then have grounds on which to boast, to worship themselves.
The experience I have with this is that I am an only child. All of my parents hopes for their children to accomplish rest in me and me alone. I continue to struggle to this very day with vain attempts to please people, especially my parents. By God's grace through sanctification, I am learning to put away these vain attempts - these idols - to please people and focus on pleasing God. My hope is that I can teach my children the Word of God and to test everything by Scripture while guarding my own heart and motives, that I don't push them into something for my own sake. Because what is the end of it all? We all die and everything we do will be forgotten by following generations - it's vanity! Why not teach them, train them in the Way in which they should go and let all other matters that are not sin issues rest in the hands of our Holy, Sovereign Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer God whose judgment of us is all that really matters in the end?
No comments:
Post a Comment