Family Life Focus Review
Lesson 1: Viewing Family with the Right Perspective
Both family and church serve an important purpose in God’s plan for the world. As such, they are not competing institutions. For the complete lesson, click here.
Lesson 2: The Power of Heartfelt Values
You must have regular conversations with your children about God and his ways, and you must arrange the environs of your home to achieve the same purpose. To have a genuine and lasting effect, your conversations about God and his ways must come from your heart. They must be genuine, heartfelt values that we personally embrace. For the complete lesson, click here.
Lesson 3: Scripture in the Home
The more your child or children hear of God’s Word, the more they will view life and the world around them from God’s perspective, and the more likely it will be that they will place their trust in Jesus Christ as Savior. For the complete lesson, click here.
Lesson 4: Preventing Anger and Frustration
Parents need to avoid certain recurring behavior that causes anger and frustration in the hearts of their children over time. These things include: 1) a broken marriage, 2) absence, 3) repeated aggravation, 4) neglect, 5) permissiveness, 6) silence, 7) disregard for Christ as Lord, 8) failure to understand your child’s purpose, 9) unresolved anger and bitterness, 10) favoritism, 11) hurtful words, 12) hypocrisy and inconsistency. For the complete lesson, click here.
Lesson 5: Providing Your Child with Presence
Children need more than material provision. They need a father and mother to be present at home in a physical way. They also need them to be present in another way, through personal interaction. For the complete lesson, click here.
Lesson 6: Breaking Bad Parental Patterns
Before you can effectively correct the failures of our children, we must correct our own flaws and failures first. If we don’t, then our failures become hurtful patterns that discourage our children over time. For the complete lesson, click here.
Lesson 7: Meeting the Needs of Your Children
When Paul teaches parents to “bring up” their children, he uses a word that means to feed your children. Feeding children certainly includes giving them food, but it means so much more than this. In a more general sense, it means to provide your children with whatever they need. It also does this with a specific goal in mind, which is to bring them to a point at which they are prepared to lead an adult life in a responsible manner. Then, when a child reaches adulthood, he or she should be able to meet their own needs and no longer rely on their parents. To accomplish this, you should understand and meet their 1) educational, 2) physical, 3) spiritual, and 4) social needs. For the complete lesson, click here.
Lesson 8: Biblical Child Training
The New Testament Greek word for nurture or discipline means “child training.” It focuses on establishing rules for the purpose of establishing proper behavior. This involves both punishing wrong behavior with appropriate consequences and rewarding good behavior with appropriate benefits. Another word for admonition or instruction means “teaching or warning.” The primary purpose of this instruction is to raise awareness of what is wrong and to encourage a better perspective in from your child. For the complete lesson, click here.
Lesson 9: The Painful Side of Parenting
Parents should accompany the other aspects of their child-training approach with appropriate punishment for wrong behavior, which the Bible calls “the rod of correction.” This should be done in a loving, consistent manner as consequence for disobedient behavior and should not cause injury or physical harm to the child. This mirrors the way that God trains his spiritual children in Christ-likeness. For the complete lesson, click here.
Review Questions
- Which of these lessons raise additional questions that you would like to ask?
- Which of these lessons do you find the most challenging to practice as a parent? Why?
- How can your family put into practice what you have learned from this review?
