Quotes about Responsibility

Good parenting, which does what God intends it to do, begins with this radical and humbling recognition that our children don't actually belong to us. Rather, every child in every home, everywhere on the globe, belongs to the One who created him or her. Children are God's possession (see Ps. 127:3) for his purpose.

I think we would be shocked if we knew how many homes of parents who love to sing of God's grace on Sunday completely forget that grace as they parent their children the rest of the week. But without the intervention of God's grace, your children will not be who they are supposed to be or do what they are supposed to do.

We would rather be comfortable than to hold people accountable. We swindle ourselves into thinking that things are better than they are, and in so doing we compromise the calling and standards of the God we say we love and serve.

when you blame other people for your circumstances or for the wrongs that you do, you are, in fact, blaming God. You are saying that God didn't give you what you needed to be what he has called you to be and to do what he has called you to do.

I propose that so much of what drives our responses to our kids is an unannounced set of laws that are more about what we want for ourselves and our lives than what God wants for and from our children. In our allegiance to our law, we end up breaking God's law in our interactions with our children. In this way we are just like our children: people who need to be rescued from ourselves.

there's no such things as a purely horizontal complaint. If I am complaining about the insensitivity of my physician, the lack of attention I am getting from my pastor, and the fact that my friends lack sympathy and understanding, I'm not just complaining about those people but also about the God who ordained all of them to be in my life.

It means that as parents we need to daily remind ourselves that we're called to rescue our children again and again, and we should not resent those moments when that rescue is necessary.

Someone once said that you never see a person in a protest carrying a sign with an arrow pointing downward and with the words "I am the problem" painted on it.

We were never meant to be self-focused little kings ruling miniscule little kingdoms with a population of one.

When we replace vertical awe of God with awe of self, bad things happen in the horizontal community.

To be part of God's redemptive rescue is not only a high calling but a moral obligation.

Parenting is about the condition that makes good behavior seem such a hard and elusive goal.