There is a blog post I wrote on the high school site called, “The Key.” The key was the grace of God. There’s a page in my prayer journal that has scrawled across it: Everything is Grace. When you are teaching your kids to read and to multiply and to recognize the difference between mitosis and meiosis, don’t forget to teach grace.
You aren’t going to raise perfect children because you are human and they are human. There’s no perfect way you can teach them. There’s no perfect way you can raise them. Teaching them rules and enforcing them may create a nice family picture on the outside, but it will never teach your children grace, and we are saved by grace. Do you want your children to act good or be good, act like a Christian or be a Christian?
The Old Testament is two-thirds of the Bible. Its main point seems to be humans aren’t perfect and can’t be. God is God and we’re not. God is good and we’re not. God is all things wonderful and we’re not.
And it would be a sad story, but for grace.
Grace gives God’s goodness and all things wonderful to us, namely Himself. He gives us the grace to be patient, to love, to understand, to teach, to learn, to live, to laugh, to forgive, to try again, to turn back, to heal, to help, to rejoice when our world and our life is far from perfect. He gives us the sun, and the rain. He provides for our needs and then some.
One of our family expressions is: God provides cake too. For a time, about a decade ago, my husband decided he needed to leave his job. We decided we would live by faith and trust the Lord to provide. One evening right around the time we had made our decision, a Roma man, just an acquaintance of ours, stopped by with all the leftovers from his fruit and vegetable cart that he hadn’t sold that day. It was the only time he ever did that. And on his way over, he had picked up a cake for the kids from the store. We feasted on the fresh fruits and veggies—and the cake. We said to our kids, “God doesn’t just make us eat our vegetables. He gives us cake too.”
So let your kids eat cake, the sweet grace of God. Teach your kids grace, the good God who knows we’re human and can’t do it on our own and so made a way to be there with us always to help us out. Make sure your kids know they will never be “good” apart from Christ in them, but that God sees them perfect in Christ Jesus. And make sure they know that God doesn’t just give us what we need, but cake too, just because He can, just because He loves us. God loves your kids more than you do. Make sure they know it.