How Parents Love Children Series

How parents love children

Philippians 1:9–11

(If you feel this sermon is helpful, you are welcome to visit www.danachau.com for a free online course.)

Dave Stone wrote: Once there was a preacher who had no children, who preached a series of sermons entitled, “Ten Commandments for Child Rearing.” Several years later when he had little children of his own, he preached another series, “Five Suggestions for Child Rearing.” By the time his children were teens, he preached one sermon entitled, “Good Luck on Parenthood.”

Many parents are frustrated when it comes to raising their children. And many children are uninterested when it comes to relating with their parents. Young children and teens have little awareness of the great love their parents have for them.

I didn’t have a lot growing up. I still remember my Dad ordering BBQ pork over rice and giving my sister and me the BBQ pork, and he would eat the white rice. When my Mom asked if I knew why Dad gave me the BBQ pork, I answered, "Because he doesn't like BBQ pork." I was clueless of his act of love.

At a Father’s Day service of the previous church where I served I asked, “If you were crossing the street with your child, and a truck fails to stop, how many of you parents would push your kids away from the truck, even if it means you would get hit by the truck? Stand up if you would do that. Every parent stood up.

There were children through teenagers in the service that morning. You could see their jaws drop. Not because they didn’t believe their parents would sacrifice for them. They just never thought about it.

This morning, I want to talk about how parents love children. Most books on parenting are about behavior modification. Discipline. But loving our children involves more than disciplining our children.

Our text this morning calls us to love. Paul writes in his letter, “And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ--to the glory and praise of God (Philippians 1:9-11).”

Paul prays for the Christians in Philippi to have and practice this biblical kind of love. As parents, we need this kind of love for our children. See if you agree.

First, Paul prays we would express an intelligent love. Vs. 9-10

What is intelligent love? From our text and for your notes: “Intelligent love is doing what is best for others with a pure motive.”

So there are two components in this definition of intelligent love: 1) Best for others, and 2) Pure in motive. Applying this to loving our children, intelligent love needs to have the children’s best interest in mind and our pure motive at heart.

The first component of intelligent love is: Best for others. This is not easy to know. For instance, to know what is best for others, we need to know what they need.

When my daughters were young, one of them gave me a coin. I asked what it was for. She said, “It’s for you; so you don’t have to work so hard; so you can play with me.”

Part of my working hard was to provide for her because I loved her. But she needed me to play with her to feel loved.

Here’s what I propose. To express intelligent love, we need to gather intelligence. Gather it from the Bible.

The Bible is not a parenting manual. But it is a book on developing healthy relationships with God and with one another. And that one another includes parents and children. So we can learn from biblical examples and principles having to do with family relationships.

Good examples from the Bible we imitate. Bad examples from the Bible we avoid. For instance, avoid the bad example of Isaac and Rebekah’s playing favorites with their kids. As a result of playing favorites, they made their sons into enemies of one another.

We can also gather intelligence from our own experience. Be a student of your children. Do you know their love languages? Spending time? Hugs? Receiving gifts? Affirming words? Learn from our own experiences with our children.

And there is gathering intelligence from other people’s experience, such as books, seminars and family conferences.

I remember when my younger daughter was four years old, she said, “I’m going to cut your head off and eat it.” You might wonder what kind of pastor’s daughter this was. Luckily at the time I was reading a book about four-year-olds, so I understood they can be quite morbid. I chose not to make a big deal out of that. We did let her know that was not appropriate.