Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family

Ownership Parenting

- is motivated and shaped by what parents want for their children and from their children.

Ambassador Parenting

- is to faithfully represent the message, methods and character of the leader who has sent him.

	Owner Parenting	Ambassador Parenting
Identity Where you look to find your sense of who you are.	Get their identity, meaning, purpose and inner sense of well-being from their children.	With a deep sense of identity and are motivated by meaning and purpose.
Work What you define as the work you have been called to do?	Owner parents think that their job is to turn their children into something they want their children to be by using their authority, time, money and energy to form their children.	They know that they have been called to be instruments in the hands of One 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.
Success What you define success to be.	These parents tend to be working toward a specific catalog of indicators (eg: academic performance & athletic achievement) in the lives of their children that would tell them that they have been successful parents.	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 lone is able to produce good things to your children.
Reputation What tells people who you are and that you are about	Owner parents unwittingly (不知不觉) turn their children into their trophies. They tend to want to be able to parade their children in public to the applause of people around them.	They understand that if their children grow and mature in life and godliness, they become not so much of their trophies, but trophies of the Savior that they have sought to serve.

No	Principle	Description	Additional Description
1	Calling	Nothing is more important in your life than being one of God’s tools to form a human soul.	God has met you so that you would be ready to introduce his glory and grace to your children.
2	Grace	God never calls you to a task without giving you what you need to do it. He never sends you without going with you.	He gives you what you need by giving you Himself, and in giving you Himself, he showers his amazing, forgiving, rescuing, transforming, empowering, and wisdom-giving grace down on you.
3	Law	Your children need God’s law, but you cannot ask the law to do what only grace can accomplish.	I am called not only to preach grace but to live and model it for my children every day.
4	Inability	Recognizing what you are unable to do is essential to good parenting.	Good parenting lives at the intersection of a humble admission of personal powerlessness and a confident rest in the power and grace of God. He has not placed the burden of change on your shoulders because he would not require you to do what you cannot do. He simply called you as a parent to be humble and faithful tool of change in the lives of your children.
5	Identity	If you are not resting as a parent in your identity in Christ, you will look for identity in your children.	It really is the completeness of the work of Jesus for us that frees us from coming to our parenting task needy, exhausted and discouraged, asking our children to give us what they will never be able to give.
6	Process	You must be committed as a parent to long-view parenting because change is a process and not an event.	He works through the mundane satiations, locations, and relationships of your life to progressively transform you by His grace.
7	Lost	As a parent you’re not dealing just with bad behavior, but a condition that causes bad behavior.	Well, as Jesus came back to seek and to save those who are lost, the calls us to love and to rescue our lost children. We don’t give way to irritation, frustration, impatience, or discouragement. We move toward our children with the grace of forgiveness, wisdom, correction, and rescue, and we pray every day that God will empower our work as parents, and that he will change our children at the deepest of levels where every human being, including us, needs to be changed.
8	Authority	One of the foundational heart issues in the life of every child is authority. Teaching and modeling protective beauty of authority is one of the foundations of good parenting.	What kinds of picture are your children getting of God’s authority by the way you exercise yours? How often to you combine moments of discipline with patient, insight-giving instruction? Is your exercise of parental authority consistent because it’s driven by God’s call or is it inconsistent because it’s shaped by the emotion of the moment? In moment of discipline, do you often point your children to the hope and help that is to be found in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus?
9	Foolishness	The foolishness inside your children is more dangerous to them than the temptation outside of them. Only God’s grace has the power to rescue fools.	Parenting is about parenting the heart, and parenting the heart means recognizing and dealing with the foolishness that is in the hearts of all our children.
10	Character	Not all of the wrong your children do is a direct rebellion to authority; much of the wrong is the result of a lack of character.	Your children don’t so much need character management as they need worship realignment. Your Lord goes after the idols of your heart and he will not rest until every thought, desire, choice, word, and action is fully rooted in the worship of Him.
11	False Gods	You are parenting a worshiper, so it’s important to remember that what rules your child’s heart will control his behavior.	It’s never just about food, friends, Facebook, homework, sleep-time, cloths, household rules, or sibling squabbles. Those things are struggles because there is a deeper war going on inside the hearts of your children.
12	Control	The goal of parenting is not control of behavior but rather heart and life change.	Self-righteously pointing out the sin of others never work; It is offensive and condescending, and it will close down the hearts of your children. Ask God to give you the grace come to them and to talk to them about their sin as a person who is much more grieved by the sin that is inside you that the sin that is in them. When you come this way, your tenderness and humility becomes a workroom for God to do in the heart of your child what you can’t do.
13	Rest	It is only rest in God’s presence and grace that will make you joyful and patient parent.	It really is true that good, godly, transformative parenting grows best in the soil of a heart at rest. Fight the assessment that the job is too big. Fight the feeling that you are all alone. Meditate upon and celebrate his power and presence and go do what you have been chosen to do with courage and hope.
14	Mercy	No parent gives mercy better than one who is convinced that he desperately needs it himself.	He has called you not only to parent your children but to lay down your life for them. He has called you to expand the major effort, time, and energy of your life for your children’s welfare. He’s called you to be his tool of grace again and again and again. Parenting really is a life of holy repetition.

Source: Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family by Paul David Tripp (2016)