Using God as a Model for Parenting

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

RICHARD LAND: Jim, welcome to For Faith & Family.

JAMES LUCAS: Thank you very much for having me on the program, always a delight to talk to you, sir.

LAND: When you look at parenting from the master parent of God as our model, how is that different from other parenting models?

LUCAS: Most of the models, I think, that people see out there on the bookshelves, Richard, are talking about templates. They are saying, here’s an approach that we can come in to disciple that is going to have so many steps and many of them are focused on mechanisms and tools rather than mindset and heartset. That this is how we are going to approach this thing, and I think many of them because they do that are very mechanistic and the very thing that we were talking about earlier where each child is so different and the first child’s experience is so different from that third or fourth or fifth child and this template really doesn’t fit, it is not a one-size-fits-all and it just gets clumsy as you get into it. This is really talking about the fact that we want to step back and develop a mindset and a heartset so that we can relate to this child where they are at the time. If we have a child who goes over the line, how do we know when to dispense justice or when to dispense mercy? Well, if you see a lot of the books and articles and things out there, they will just say if a kid is over the line, especially in the culture we are in, you always have to be tough, you always have to be on the side of justice, and so there is sort of an approach, there is sort of a model that is laid out that everybody is expected to follow, but God doesn’t really do that with us. There are times when we stumble and God is so kind that he does not treat us as our sins deserve, the Bible tells us, and so there is room for this other side; but when we get into this model or template mode, we have to keep following the steps and there isn’t room to be able to use wisdom and judgment and God’s example to really be able to let us know, based on how this child is responding, how we should react on either side of this equation.

LAND: Well, when you were saying that, I kept thinking about the prodigal son and the prodigal father. Clearly, the model, God is the prodigal’s father. You know, he forgives. He rewards the older son for being the “good son,” but he forgives and he welcomes back the younger son and he scans the horizon waiting every day for him to come home. So that would not square with that tough and stern template, would it?

LUCAS: Well, it really doesn’t. You know, I’m very glad, you know, I’ve been a believer a long time but I’ve very glad that every time I have stumbled along the way that the heavens didn’t open and this big hammer drop from the sky and that He is a God who has high standards and He does expect us to be holy and works with us with his Holy Spirit to make us holy, but at the same time, He understands we are a work in progress and I think that I see so many parents today, Richard, that it is a tough culture that we live in and it is easy to go for this Custer’s Last Stand approach to parenting. You know, where we kind of hide out and we are off to the edge and I think it can end up in our very fear; it can end up leading to some of the very things that we don’t want to happen. We can become overly protective where we try to protect our children’s innocence, not by giving them careful exposure to reality and then helping them learn what that means as they interface with this world around us, we end up trying to hide them out instead and then when they finally do get exposure to the world, they are just not able to handle it and deal with it. So I think this is a very proactive approach that says I’m not going to wait and see what the world throws at me and then try to respond to it and then try to find a good template or model that will help me deal with this particular problem. This is a whole different way of thinking about parenting like God thinks about parenting and lets you do what somebody said, children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. This is going to let us produce children that really have been raised with the mind and heart of God because that’s how we are trying to do it, however imperfectly we’re doing it, we are trying to do this with the mind and heart of God and we’re trying to find that way of responding that God does with us. There are some times God let’s us face the full consequences when we get off the track and there are other times He does not and it’s really related to where we are in our journey, how we respond to things, whether we repent and ask for forgiveness, whether we make restitution or not, He’s waiting and responding as we make each of those steps and I think this is really what master parents do. We don’t have a formula but we have a mindset and a heartset that lets us respond appropriately based on God’s example with us when we see our children doing this or that.

LAND: Now, you state right in the front of your book that this master parenting model is radical. Explain what you mean by radical.

LUCAS: Well, radical is an interesting word, and I really like to reclaim that word. Much of the work I know that you and I are both trying to do with this culture and with people and families is radical in the sense that the first definition of radical is to get back to the root—to get back to away from all of this chaff and fluff and simplistic solutions. I think it was Mark Twain who said every difficult problem there’s an answer that is simple, easy, and wrong. I think that it is so easy to look for simplistic solutions instead of getting all the way back to the root. I think one of the interesting things, Richard, as I was looking at this approach, is discovering that this approach of looking at two sides of the coin and trying to get both of those sides in balance, justice and mercy, and high expectations and high tolerance and authority and sharing power and insisting on the way and insisting on freedom, that this is actually a methodology that Jewish rabbis used at and before the time of Jesus because they understood this is going to make us a more complete, more like God, kind of person. So, one of the things that we have been delighted to hear from people who have read the book, that not only is it giving them advice that has helped them on parenting, but it has actually given them some of the mindset and heartset of God and they now understand how He is relating to them as a Father. Many people coming out of situations where perhaps they didn’t even have a father they could relate to well and now saying, I understand He’s not always ready to hit me hard if I make a mistake but He’s not, on the other hand, always willing to say well boys will be boys or girls will be girls, and there are some standards as well. I see He’s got both of these things in His hands and that’s how He parents me and I have learned to do the same now with the people in my life.

LAND: Jim, you state in the book that mastering parenting is simple but not simplistic, and that’s one of the most misunderstood things. You know, people think simple and easy are synonyms. And they are rarely, rarely the case. There are a lot of things that are simple that are not easy, aren’t there?

LUCAS: I think that’s exactly right and, you know, so much of what’s written out there, so many things are written to be simple so that people can read them quickly and feel like they’ve got something and I think a lot of times, what’s being offered is really a mouthful of gravel. I think people go away and they’ve got this simple thing that they go try and they try it with child number one—it sort of works and on children number two it doesn’t work at all, and then they are just left struggling. I think that simplistic says, I just want something I can pull off the shelf and I can go apply and it really looks at parenting more as a job than as a relationship. A long-term relationship where iron is sharpening iron, and we are trying to do these things over a long period of time, and I think we want to get away from that idea that this is that simplistic and move toward the idea though that if I go through and really try to understand the mind of God on a particular issue or a particular approach, that I could move through that and then I can come out with a way of reacting that makes sense to me that I have gone through the complexity to get to the simplicity, and I think that is really the way we would talk about it, Richard, is, it is not simplicity as a starting point, it is simplicity as an ending point. We go through the thinking so that we can get to the other point and so often I have been discouraged or frustrated when I’ve heard comments from people that, you know, nobody wants to think. Christians don’t want to think; parents don’t want to think. We need to write books for people who don’t want to read or think, and I really just reject that. I think there’s a lot of serious people and I think if they felt I’ve got a serious book here, I’ve got a serious set of material here that is going to get me into the mind and heartset of God, and that I am going to go be able to do something with it, and are willing to wrestle with it, willing to take the time to really get into it, I think they can come out at the other end with an elegant simplicity, with a simplicity that’s powerful because they’ve wrestled through and sought through the complexities to get to that point.

LAND: We often hear that parents are trainers, are teachers or CEOs, that they are counselors, that they are buddies, but none of those roles work when it comes to parent. Parenting is a unique role, isn’t it?

LUCAS: It is a very unique role. You know, I think we’ve heard comments, and I’m sure you have as well, that parenting is a job and it is a very hard job but it really isn’t a job; a job has limits. Parenting is under that line on the job description “other duties as required.” That’s what most of parenting is. You can’t quit, they can’t be fired. Really parenting isn’t a job, it is a relationship and it is really not even a profession. It is much more challenging and much more nuanced than that and I think people who say that maybe have a good intention, you know, I want to really be serious about this and focus on it, but they just haven’t gotten down to the point where they say, I know it’s not those things; I know it’s something more. It is really even different than a friendship because with a friendship you don’t have to discipline and punish, you don’t have to life with them 24/7. It is not a doctor/patient relationship. A doctor can give you a shot and a prescription and send you home, so I think that this is really moving out of any of these roles and I think the ones you mentioned and some of the ones I mentioned, there are books out there both secular and Christian that talk about these different things, parent as CEO and so on. I think they get at little pieces and edges but they don’t really create a mindset. They don’t really say if I want to think properly as a parent, and feel properly as a parent, here’s they way I need to do it, so I think they may have pieces of truth but they really fall short as a way to really approach this grand job we’ve been given.

LAND: You really focus on the fact that there are a lot of elements in mastering parenting and one of them is the expectations we have as parents for our children. How do you suggest that we judge if our expectations are too high or too low?

LUCAS: Well, I think we find with high expectations that if we have high expectations without high tolerance, we are going to stress our children until we break them. If we have high tolerance without high expectations, then we start excusing failure until that becomes a way of life. So, I think great parents stretch their children without stressing them. They are always pushing them, they are always stretching them, but they are always watching for that breaking point where they see the child just can’t keep up with what it is we are trying to do. I think if you have, for example, a son who has made promises and you’ve have gotten sort of an arrangement that if you want this, you have to do that, there was a woman who had a son who promised to do dishes for a week to earn a CD that he wanted. He did them for several days but had a lot of other things going on, school work and tests, and so on and one day she came home and found dirty dishes in the cabinet. At this point, we can go back and say, look, you made this deal, you broke this deal, but I think it is helpful at that point at times to say, wait a minute, I’m watching it, I’m watching the stress level go up; this is what this woman did. She saw the stress level going up trying to keep all of these balls in the air at the same time and a thought ran through her mind, Richard, oh, yeah, doing dishes is boring, and then she recalled when she let them pile up a few weeks before for a mental health day, and remembered how her husband had procrastinated on a report that was due and nobody grounded him and she had this thought come through her mind—sometimes you can be sloppy and not get killed for it. So I think we really have to say we’ve got to have those standards there but we’ve got to know when to let up. We’ve got to know that it’s not godly to be less tolerant than God and it is too easy to demand what God doesn’t demand of us, and to be able to back off and say, this is a fragile human being, this wasn’t a sin, it’s just being fragile, I love that Biblical picture, Richard, that we are treasures and jars of clay. You know, we’ve got the gold, but we’ve got this clay that we are walking around in that just is imperfect and one of the questions I ask parents, “Are your children imperfect?” And they always raise their hands, and my response is, “Welcome to God’s world of parenting, that’s where God is with us. We’ve very imperfect as well. He says that we’re just dust and ultimately you can’t expect too much from dust.”

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