Real World Parents Review

What Are Real World Parents?

I have a vivid memory of being a teenager and sitting at the dinner table with my family, rolling my eyes and pretending to gag behind my dad’s back.

Why?

He was trying to do family devotions with us. But my three younger brothers and I just weren’t buying it.

Every four or five months my dad would hear some program on Christian radio about family devotions, and he’d come home with another new idea for making it work with our family. After all, that’s what Christian families are supposed to do, right? But it just never worked in our house. It felt completely forced and unnatural.

Still, somehow all four of us Matlock boys ended up in ministry. My youngest brother, Jonathan, helped me start WisdomWorks Ministries, and now we both do pretty much the same kind of youth ministry and youth minister support through Youth Specialties. Our brother Josh is a senior pastor in Southern California, and our brother Jeremy is a missionary in Russia. And still to this day, whenever Dad tries to bring us together for Òfamily devotionsÓ during the holidays, we mock him a little. It’s become a kind of tradition because it isn’t genuine for who we are as a family.

Now, I’m not saying that having kids who serve in some area of ministry means you’re a successful parent. The point I’m making is that all four of my dad’s sons grew into men with a real passion and appreciation for God’s Word–even though he couldn’t get us to sit still and take the reading of the Word seriously during repeated failed attempts at family devotions.

Why? Because we knew he had a real passion and appreciation for God’s Word. We saw Dad reading the Bible. We saw him struggle to apply it to his life. We saw both of our parents base their decisions on their understanding of what the Bible teaches.

Ultimately we were convinced of the worldview contained in the pages of Scripture because we saw our parents openly endorsing it, talking about it, learning from it, and living it out day after day, year after year. That was enough for us–despite the failed attempts at family devotions.

That’s what this book is about. We’re not interested in presenting more artificial techniques and methodology to ÒfixÓ our kids or do what Christian families are Òsupposed to do.Ó Rather we want to help you discover how to live for God in a real way, right in front of your kids, so they can’t help but catch the big picture that God and his Word mean the world to us and that living for Jesus really works in the Real World.

Don’t get me wrong. Not all families are built to the same specifications. We each have our own family DNA. So if family devotions fit who you are, more power to you! Organized, structured, traditional family devotions are a great tool for some families. Now that my wife, Jade, and I have two kids of our own–our son Dax is in middle school, and our daughter Skye is 10–we’ve tried to have a family Bible hour around the table. It kind of worked off and on when the kids were younger, but we eventually realized it wasn’t a good fit for the natural rhythm of our lives. It’s not who we are right now. So instead we’ve found ways to talk about God’s Word that are a better fit for us.

As we work together through the concepts in this book, one thing we’ll discover is that Real World Parents are real in the sense that they do what best fits their families, and they genuinely adjust their own lives to fit into God’s story.

Is God Happy with My Family?

In the church today, there’s some really good teaching on parenting. My wife and I have benefited from writers, conference speakers, and pastors who’ve opened God’s Word and helped us connect with what it means to raise up our children in the way they should go, how to provide godly discipline, and ideas for reinforcing good behavior. But again, that’s not what this book is about.

And, honestly, over the years I’ve been frustrated with some teaching on parenting that’s built around making parents feel guilty. These teachers, authors, books, and programs build parenting models based on our common fear that we’re going to mess up our kids–or that we’ve already messed up our kids. That’s an easy road that plays on our fears and our guilt over the areas in which we struggle as parents. Then they suggest that their programs or perspectives are our final hope to Òget it rightÓ or, worse, to do it the only way God wants it done.

That’s not what this book is about, either. I promise not to use your parenting fears and anxieties against you. And we all have those feelings. I know I have them. If you could spend a little time with my family, you’d quickly see that we have issues, too. Those prone to critiquing parents would have no trouble criticizing my wife and me. So, no, I’m not interested in beating up other parents in order to somehow make them feel better or more motivated in their parenting.

In fact, I’d like to communicate exactly the opposite.

In our Real World Parent seminars, held around the United States, our teachers use a self-diagnostic tool to help attendees identify what they believe God thinks of their families.

It goes something like this:

What do you think God sees when he looks at your family? Do you think God grins or grimaces? (Place an X on the line.)

God Grins God Grimaces

This can be a challenging question if you take it seriously. On one hand, those of us who’ve grown up in Christian churches understand the idea of God’s grace. We understand that our relationship with God isn’t based on our performance. God sacrificed his only Son–the Son whom God loves so deeply–to pay for our sins on a cross. And God did this long before we even knew we wanted that gift from God. Thus, we’d always check the box that says God’s love is unconditional for those of us in Christ.

Still, we have trouble carrying the idea of God’s grace into our parenting. We can talk ourselves into believing that failing our kids is an unforgivable sin, that God could never be pleased with us if we’ve been guilty of sloppy or harsh or inconsistent or selfish or fearful or overprotective or neglectful parenting.

We may wonder how God could ever look at our families and grin. And the problem is that, as parents, we sometimes forget that we’re also children–that our God is our Father, and that God is more lovingly inclined to smile at us than we are to smile at our own kids. Our Father loves us, and he forgives our parenting shortcomings and our family failings.

I will say this more than once: Nothing you read in this book will make God the Father love you and your family any more than he does right now, no matter what’s going on with your family today.

I made this statement at one of our Real World Parent seminars, and I noticed that one of the women began to cry. She came up to me later and explained how inferior she’s felt as a mother in her local church. Her husband isn’t a believer, her kids get into trouble, and she just felt like such a failure–like a second-class parent in a church where most of the other parents were both Christians, still married, and raising such ÒniceÓ children.

I tried to assure her that God’s grace applies to us as parents, and that in Christ she is forgiven and fully accepted as a beloved daughter (and mom!). The idea that God loved her family right now–in its present condition–was a reality she wasn’t living in. She felt she was ÒunderperformingÓ as a parent and couldn’t keep up. So she said the idea that she’s forgiven, accepted, and loved as a parent gave her immense comfort.

Ernest Hemingway’s short story called ÒThe Capital of the WorldÓ begins with an anecdote about a man in Madrid who put an ad in the newspaper to contact his estranged son. The ad read, PACO, MEET ME AT HOTEL MONTANA NOON TUESDAY. ALL IS FORGIVEN. PAPA. The story then describes how at noon on Tuesday, 800 young men arrived at the hotel to make peace with their fathers.

The joke was that there are lots of guys in Spain named Paco. But the other message is that wanting our dads’ approval, specifically, is a universal human experience. Taking nothing away from the indispensable role of our mothers, we all long to have our fathers sign off on who we are and what we’re doing.

It’s what psychologists call Òfather hunger.Ó

As Christians, followers of Jesus, we have that hunger even in our roles as parents, even if we’ve made mistakes along the way. Our Father has forgiven us. We live in God’s grace. God approves of us in Christ. And, yes, God loves us.

I want to make it perfectly clear–again–that you’ll find no directives in this book that will make God love you or your family even a little bit more than he already does. God’s unconditional love for your family was established long ago. It is full. It cannot grow. Romans 8:1 declares, ÒTherefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.Ó And that includes Christian parents.

I hope you’ve heard that. But I also hope you aren’t satisfied to leave your family where it is today. Because while I’m convinced that God will never love or accept you any more than he does right now, I’m also convinced that God loves you so much that he won’t leave you where you are right now, either.

No matter how good or bad you believe your family is, God has plans for you that will unfold in the Real World. God will continue to move your family along in the journey he has in store for you. Which is why this book is designed to help Real World Parents understand that journey–or story–and communicate it to our kids.

ÒHow Will This Book Fix My Kids?Ó

As long as we’re talking about things this book isn’t, I should mention again that in the following pages you won’t find any tips or tricks or techniques to fix your children’s bad behavior. (We’d probably sell more copies if that’s what we were promising, but we’re not.)

In my experience, books full of tips, techniques, and tricks succeed at making readers feel good for a while. They make us feel hopeful. They make us feel as though we’re doing something about the problem. But they often fail in the long run because we just can’t keep it up. We can’t change the personalities of our families to fit the models of the new programs on an ongoing basis.

When my kids came along, though, and I started making my way through all the different kinds of Christian parenting books, I noticed that a lot of them focused on helping me raise well-behaved, well-mannered kids. And while that’s an important element, there wasn’t much focus on raising kids to have hearts that seek after Christ. Of course we can’t force that kind of spiritual openness and connectedness with God onto our kids–but in our Real World homes, we can create environments that promote such growth.

In a sense we become gardeners tending the spiritual development of our kids. God places the spark of life in the seed. We can’t control that or how the plant eventually matures. But we can make sure the soil is rich, the ground is generously watered, the weeds are kept at bay, and the opportunity for sunlight is freely available. We can raise our children in environments where having a heart for God is the norm and not the exception.

What we don’t want to generate are well-behaved kids who mindlessly follow our directions without ever willfully owning the faith in Jesus that they see in us. In the long run, the goal of parenting isn’t for our kids to be known for how well-behaved they are, but for how well they know and respond to God.

Part of our challenge is to communicate to our kids a worldview that supports right actions. It’s true that we (and they) will be held accountable for our behavior based on God’s instructions to us. But whether or not we obey those instructions has a lot to do with whether or not we really believe God’s story–a biblical worldview–and whether or not we walk in God’s power.

In that way, our children’s behavior is kind of like the tip of an iceberg. From countless illustrations we all know that the part of the iceberg that rises above the waterline is just a fraction of its total size. As such, you could conceivably make all kinds of alterations to the exposed part of the iceberg–in other words, the outward stuff (behaviors)–without significantly altering the iceberg itself.

What we’ve got to get at–in our own lives and in the lives of our kids–is the 80 percent of the berg that’s under the waterline. In our illustration that represents one’s worldview. We believe our behavior is ultimately driven by our understanding of the way the world works, of what we believe to be true and false about the universe, of our perception of reality.

And that’s what we want to focus on as Real World Parents. How can we communicate God’s worldview to our kids? What story are we telling them about the universe, both intentionally and–more importantly–in the way we live with and for God over time?

Before you move on to the next chapter, ask yourself these questions:

1. When you imagine God looking at your family, what do you think God sees? What do you believe God’s desire for your family is?

2. When you look at the world your children are living in, do you believe it’s better or worse compared to when you were growing up? Why?

3. Which matters more to you–that your children demonstrate good behavior, or that your children understand and believe in a biblical worldview? Why?

4. In your own life, what has mattered more in the long run–your behavior on any given day or your foundational beliefs about God and the world?