I have made plenty of parenting mistakes to fill a book, but we won’t go there today. Instead I want to focus on what God thinks about myself and every parent who believes in Jesus. When I look at Romans 6:1-4, you and I were baptized in His death and made alive with Him. What that means is “I no longer live but Christ lives within me”. A promise that I remind my old, dead self daily to renew my mind to the way God thinks of me. Can I act like a dead (spiritually) parent? Absolutely, but now that I am a new creation and the Kingdom of Heaven sees me as such, my focus remains on my new life in Jesus and not my dead man (or lack of parenting skills.) God is a way better parent than we could ever be because He never asks us to do something that He doesn’t already do Himself.
If God asks you to consider and believe yourself dead to the power of sin and alive to God through Christ Jesus (Romans 6:11) then He himself believes this about you, His child. Have you ever asked your kid to do something you struggled doing yourself? God is not this way! He doesn’t struggle seeing you forgiven in the blood of Jesus. He no longer considers the old you who was born in a kingdom of darkness and slave to sin, because He asked you to consider yourself dead and that you have been born again and made alive in Christ Jesus. He asked you to consider yourself a son and daughter whom He adopted and clothed with a robe of righteousness only because of the death and obedience of Jesus Christ which you received by faith. Is it possible that God is asking you to consider yourself the way He sees you(Hebrews 10:12-14)?
When I receive this parenting lesson from the way my Heavenly Father sees me, it is so much easier to breathe life into my children and tell them how God loves and sees them through the lens of the cross!
brandonpollard 