How do you raise a child? Do you lay down the rules? Or do you lead them by the hand to Jesus? Speaking directly to the heart, Dr. Tedd Tripp joins Charles Morris on the next HAVEN Today. Be sure to listen to "Shepherding a Child's Heart".

September 24, 2007

Shepherding a Child’s Heart, Part 1 w/Dr. Ted Tripp

When we miss the heart, we miss the Gospel. If the goal of parenting is no more profound than securing appropriate behavior we’ll never help our children understand the internal things, the heart issues that push and pull behavior, the heart issues of what eventually God uses to lead us to grace. I’m Charles Morris and welcome to Haven Today, telling the great story that’s all about Jesus. This is a program called, “Shepherding a Child’s Heart”. Stay tuned, pastor and Christian counselor Ted Tripp will be joining us as we talk about how to raise children and lead them to Jesus.

Song: How Great is Our God
Performed by:

You have joined Haven Today and it has been a long time since our special guest has been on this program and we just decided it was time to visit him again. He’s written a bestselling book, “Shepherding a Child’s Heart” and I want to welcome back to these airwaves Dr. Ted Tripp. Ted, thank you for joining me again.
TT: Thank you Charles, I’m honored to be with you and it’s always a joy to talk about things that are dear to our hearts in raising children.
CM: you know, the first time we talked was probably 5 years ago, 6 years ago. Your book had been out a while. You’ve now revised it, you’ve updated it. And my goodness hundreds of thousands of people, children and parents around the world have benefited from what you’ve written. In fact I just was looking at a web blog a little while ago and it was a person, a parent, looking for how they raise their children in the faith and they said, “For my part I’ve appreciated Ted Tripp’s “Shepherding a Child’s Heart” and I’ve been disappointed in a number of others, particularly that just deal with behaviorism even though they’re books written by Christians.” And Ted if I can say anything to your credit, which would be the Lord’s credit, you actually zero in on the heart, don’t you?
TT: Yes, that’s right. I think a key passage that I always think about when I think about children and raising children is Proverbs 4:23 where it says, “Above all else, guard your heart for it is the wellspring of life.” And that verse just bristles with implications because we live out of our hearts and all the hopes and dreams and aspirations of human beings are found within the heart and every motion of grandeur, every desire to have life transcend just slogging it out day by day rests within the heart and it’s the heart, with all its passions and desires that sets the course of life. So we’ve tried to hit that note and stay focused on that note throughout the book “Shepherding a Child’s Heart”
CM: You know, our slogan here at Haven Today is “telling the great story, it’s all about Jesus” and that’s something you get at in your book “Shepherding a Child’s Heart”.
TT: Well, that’s what’s so thrilling you know, if you focus just on changed behavior Charles you end up – well, there are a lot of cul de sacs you end up in – but one of the cul de sacs you end up in is you end up focusing on techniques. If you focus on, “OK, you’ve got to behave in this good way and here’s how I do it,” the Gospel, the grace of God, the power of grace is not going to be part of your message. But if you focus on the heart and say, “You know the problem that you have dear, and the problem that Daddy has is we are all compulsively self-centered people and it’s our love of self, it’s our pride, it’s our anger, it’s our hypocrisy, it’s all those things within us that are the things that push and pull ways that we behave badly. And they show how profoundly we need grace.” So it’s so easy to get from heart issues to the grace of the Gospel. Because once you identify my problem is this internal problem of my heart then I have nowhere else go other than to the grace and power of the Gospel because the transforms us, it renews us, it empowers us, it enables us, it brings forgiveness to us. So it’s so exciting because every opportunity then of correction and discipline is an opportunity to focus on the heart and focus on the Gospel and the grace to be set free because that’s what the Gospel does. It sets us free.
CM: And a child can understand that too, can’t they?
TT: Absolutely, absolutely. I was observing one of my sons talking to his son who was at the time about 3 or 4 years old. And he had him up in his arms. The child had been in a little conflict with another child his age at a picnic and his dad picked him up and he said, “Benjamin it’s really hard to be kind when people are not kind to you, isn’t it?” And he said, “Yes.” You know, a little child, with his lip quivering.
Cm: Right
TT: And he said, “You know who can help you Benjamin? Who can help you be kind?” “Jesus.” “That’s right Jesus can help you be kind.” Well you know even a little child is beginning to get a hold of that truth. Now I’m not arguing that he’s a born again Christian who is living in faith, but he is understanding, even in a very simple 3 year old way, there’s something wrong within me and there’s hope for me that’s found in the grace and power of Jesus Christ. And that’s thrilling.
CM: You know what we should do, I think. We should take people back. You’ve written this book “Shepherding a Child’s Heart”. You’ve got the new version out, but Dr. Ted Tripp you’re a dad, you’re a pastor in Eastern Pennsylvania, Northeastern Pennsylvania,
TT: Right
CM: and this book didn’t just come out of thin air, did it?
TT: No, it really was borne of my own life experience. And in many ways it’s autobiographical because as we were raising our children, we were involved in work in the church. I’ve been serving as an elder in the church that I pastor since 1976, so we’ve been there a long time. And we were raising 3 children and involved in Christian education so all the things that we were experiencing really were the crucible in which we began to wrestle with these things. And I can remember my wife and I talking about our kids and recognizing it’s possible to get kids to obey you when really, it’s like the old saying, you know, “I’m sitting down on the outside, but I’m standing up on the inside.” And you know you can get a child to obey without really getting his heart. And we used to talk about how do we get under the skin? How do we get beneath that, just that veneer of obedience that is kind of reflecting our requirement of the child but is not really the child loving God and loving others, which is what God calls us to as human beings. And we talked about getting under the skin. And then we began to realize that the, the word for this in the Bible is the heart. It’s getting to the heart of behavior because the heart is the wellspring and we live out of our hearts. So we began to realize, boy it’s the heart that we want to go after in our kids and then began to study just many of the passages of scripture – there are almost 800 passages of scripture
Cm: Yes
TT: That talk about the heart, the ways that the heart directs behavior and the things that the heart superintends and oversees because we think with our hearts. You know, Mary takes these things she heard about Jesus, she ponders them in her hearts. We love with our hearts. We turn from God or to God with our hearts. We ponder in our hearts. We are delighted in our hearts. We’re anguished in our hearts. All these activities of the heart that we began to see in the Word of God and realized boy, this is the stuff that pushes and pulls behavior. And so that’s where we want to go with our kids. We want to get beyond simply focusing on the externals of behavior and really get to the heart issues. Because there’s so many things to that, it opens up to us Charles.
CM: Sure, sure.
TT: If we go for behavior, then, you know, there are a lot of ways you can manipulate behavior
CM: That’s right
TT: You can shame children, you can bribe them, you can threaten them. I mean there are all kinds of things that people do.
CM: And some of those things will work
TT: right
CM: but will they work in eternal terms?
TT: Yeah, exactly. They’ll work in terms of getting your kids to jump through your hoops. But as Christians we want more than that.
CM: Yeah
TT: We want kids that love God and love others.
CM: That’s right. And love their parents too.
TT: exactly, exactly. So we’re after more than just simply getting our kids to jump through our hoops. Yeah you can be successful at getting kids to jump through your hoops, you know. You can promise the kids, you know, “Boy if you’re really good today I’ll take you out for ice cream” and they’ll be real good, if they remember, but you’re not really getting where you want to go. Because what we want is people that love God and love others.
CM: Wow, now if you want your child to have an understanding of grace and the grace of God and you want to use this “heart approach” to raising a child as opposed to behavior modification that refers to the parents too and there are some parents perhaps listening to us right now who maybe don’t even know the Lord but yet they want their children to be good kids. And that’s obviously something that we all want if we’re a parent, but yet how does the parent find grace?
TT: yeah, I think as parents we have to recognize, you know, how profound our needs are. I had a wonderful opportunity of talking about shepherding children to a group of, a mixed group of people. There were Christians, there were Muslims, there were people involved in Eastern religions, a very mixed group at the Harvard Business School a couple of years ago and in talking to that group of people I talked about heart issues and I said, “You know, we all know that underneath our behavior there are things internally that are driving us. It embarrasses us to acknowledge, but things like covetousness, things like envy, things like pride, things like compulsive self-love, sometimes even hatred or malice toward other people or rebellion. And we know that when we behave badly it’s related to internal things that are going on inside and the bad behavior is just an expression of it.” And it gave me a wonderful opportunity in that very broadly mixed audience to say, “You know in the Christian story, in the Christian account of life which we believe to be true, it says that this is exactly why Jesus Christ came. He came and he lived in our flesh. He lived in a world, the world that we live in. He faced all the temptations we face without ever sinning. And he died as a sacrifice for sin so that we can know change, so that he can transform us internally, take out our stony heart and give us a heart of flesh. Put his Spirit in us to cause us to walk in his ways.” And it was thrilling, you know, even in that group which was not a Christian group, fine and very lovely and very nice people and they were very kind and gracious to me as an audience, but I could tell as I interacted with them that even though many of them were not philosophically or theologically buying into what I was saying, what I was saying to them made sense.
CM: It was resonating in one way with them or another.
TT: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah it made sense because it’s truth and truth is self-authenticating. It’s really neat to realize that parenting is about a lot more than just fixing my kids and getting htem to behave so I can take them to a restaurant without them embarrassing me. Parenting is about understanding my children, helping them to understand themselves, helping them to understand the ways that we are inwardly motivated and then that just opens the door for the grace of transformation, the grace of forgiveness and the grace of empowerment to do God’s will that comes when we trust in Jesus Christ. And boy, I need that, my kids need that
CM: Yes
TT: and you know when I talk to my kids about those kinds of things I can stand in solidarity with them. You know this kid that is struggling with selfishness, I can stand in solidarity with him with all of his selfishness and I can say, “I understand exactly what you’re struggling with. In fact, if Daddy were to write a book about selfishness and illustrate it with his life, it would be a thick book.” You know, can I tell you a little story?
CM: Please, please do. And let me just tell people, if you’ve just now tuned in, yes you are listening to Haven Today. We have back with us, after an absence of a few years, Dr. Ted Tripp who has written a new version of “Shepherding a Child’s Heart”. So, please share with us a little story.
TT: Sure, I often times share this when I’m doing seminars. You know at night when my wife and I are getting ready for bed and we’re in our bedroom talking over the day and reading to each other and I’ll say to her, “Honey, would you like a cup of ice cream?” Now, I just get a cup because we’re conscious of our weight, so I just get a cup. Might get a cup 2 or 3 times, but I just get a cup.
CM: Yes.
TT: So I go downstairs, do all the stuff so hard for a guy to do. I’ve got to find the ice cream scoop. I’ve got to find the proper cups. I dish out the ice cream. I rinse off the scoop. I look around the kitchen, make sure I put everything away right so I don’t get scolded for leaving a mess in the morning. Put the box of ice cream back in the freezer, go back up the stairs, I’ve got these 2 cups of ice cream in my hands. I’m feeling proud of myself because I went to get the ice cream.
CM: Yes
TT: I didn’t just say to her, “Hey, why don’t you get us some ice cream?”
CM: Right
TT: And I find myself weighing these cups of ice cream. I’m trying to remember, which one is the one with the most ice cream?
Cm: So I can take that.
TT: Exactly. You know sometimes I even mark them with different spoons so I wouldn’t forget when I got upstairs which one is the better one.
CM: You’re getting a little personal here for me here Ted
TT: Well, we have all done things like that.
CM: Yes
TT: So when I’m dealing with a child who is exhibiting selfishness, I don’t have to hypocritically distance myself from this kid, “I can’t believe you’re so selfish!” I can stand in solidarity with him, “Honey, Daddy understands how selfishness works in the human heart and there’s hope for people like you and Daddy because Jesus Christ came to this earth to change us and transform us and to make us people who are like him, who truly love others in their heart and who delight to do God’s will. He came to transform us.” So it’s so nice because I’m not reducing the standard and saying, “Well, it’s OK you’re a kid. I understand you’re selfish. I am too, don’t worry about it.” We’re recognizing, boy God’s law is holy and good and it’s appropriate for us to live according to God’s law. That’s what we desire to do. But I’m also recognizing, I’m not a person that has totally arrived and I’ve gotten there and I’m living there in sinless perfection. No one knows that better than my children. But I am a person who’s known grace and the grace of God enables me to love God and to love my children and to say to them honestly then to say, “Honey, I understand you’re struggle. I know how selfishness works. As I’ve earlier I could write a book on selfishness.”
CM: And it would be a thick book as you said too.
TT: It would be a thick book, that’s right. But there’s hope for us.
CM: Yeah
TT: Because Christ came to earth in our kind of flesh to live in our kind of world and to empower and enable us by his grace to turn away from this compulsive self love and truly love God.
CM: I hope we have a few people besides myself listening who are just saying, “Amen!” to what you just said. And we’re going to have you back on the program tomorrow too, and we’re going to talk about, well we’re going to talk about kind of reworking our goals as parents and then also we’re going to get into discipline too because there can be discipline with grace.
TT: That’s right, that’s exactly right.
CM: And we’ll do that tomorrow but let me ask you first, before we have to go, to just lead us in prayer. Pray for parents, would you, please
TT: Sure
CM: That are listening right now
TT: sure. Lord we come to you with thankful hearts for people who hear your Word, who hear your voice and follow you, people who are hearing your Word on the radio and are hearing truth and whose hearts are saying, “Yes” to that truth. And we know Lord that it is a scary thing in our day to raise children. It’s a scary world in which to live. And as parents we want to get it right and we want to serve our children and we want them to grow up to be people who are reliable and dependable and who are kind and gracious to others and we praise you that there is hope for us because Jesus Christ has come to this earth. And I pray Lord, for parents who are discouraged, I pray for parents who are just overwhelmed with a lot of children and a lot of responsibility or parents who are doing the job alone as single parents and who feel so much the need for someone to come along side them and shoulder the burden with them. Lord you know all the needs of your people and we pray that you would be the God of grace that you’re people would have a consciousness that underneath them are the everlasting arms of God and that God will strengthen them and give them grace to do this task. Lord we pray for our children that their hearts would be turned to you. We think of the prayer in the Old Testament, “Incline our hearts to do your will,” we pray that for our kids, that their hearts would be inclined to do your will and to walk in your ways. Lord give us this grace, encourage your people with your Word and show hope to us so we can do this job and that generations yet unborn would be impacted by the things we’ve considered together today and the things we’ll consider together tomorrow. We pray this for Christ’s sake, amen.

CM: Thank you Ted for praying, thank you for sharing with us once again. It’s been a number of years since we’ve had you on the program and you now have your revised edition out of “Shepherding a Child’s Heart”. And I so appreciate your drawing on your years of experience as a pastor and counselor and school administrator, father and now even as a grandfather. This is a just an important time for us, living in a day and age when children become teenager, become young adults and they don’t always know where to turn and their not fed spiritually all the time, but you can and what’s going on in your child’s heart is so much more important because that leads to behavior. You don’t want to raise children just to be good children, you want to raise children to lead them to Jesus. And that’s what Ted’s been doing through the book and now the revised book, “Shepherding a Child’s Heart” that we want you to have a copy of for, if you’re children are grown maybe this is a book that you could give to your church library or share with your children or share with some neighbor. This is a book on how to speak to the heart of your child and the things your child does and says flows from the heart. Luke 6:45 puts it this way, “Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.” I’ll give you our contact information in just a minute but first of all, let me say if you’d like to read more about the book you can get that by going to our website, haventoday.org. That’s one word, haventoday.org. And then after you read about the book, “Shepherding a Child’s Heart” you can also make your gift to Haven Ministries. We’ll send you these 2 days with Ted Tripp on the program as a bonus CD when you get a copy of the book, just go to haventoday.org. You can also call us and here’s our telephone number, it’s toll free in North America, 1-800-65-HAVEN, 1-800-65-HAVEN. Please let us know the station you’re listening to when you get in touch at 1-800-654-2836. And for everyone who gives above and beyond the suggested gift amount to help us to continue to tell the great story every day around the world, that’s all about Jesus, you have my sincere and deepest thanks. Some people like to write to us and here’s our mailing address. In the United States write to Charles Morris:
Haven Today
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And in Canada you can write to Charles Morris at:
Haven Today
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I’m Charles Morris and thanks for being with me and Dr. Ted Tripp. Would you come back again tomorrow? We’ll be talking again about raising children by the heart. And that’s the way to do it biblically speaking. And we’ll do it together here on Haven Today.