Parents as Parables of the Gospel

“But what if I grow up and go to prison?” my daughter asked, not for the first time.

“Even if you go to prison, Mama and I will still love you, be there for you, and be your mom and dad.”

“How can you keep loving me if I was really bad though and did terrible things? Wouldn’t that change your love for me?”

“Nope. Our love for you and our relationship with you will always be there, no matter what. You’ll always be our girl. We will come and visit you even in prison and remind you that we love you.”

“Doesn’t that mean it doesn’t matter what we do then?” piped up one of my sons, always looking for the holes and exceptions in our parental proclamations.

“No, it still matters. That steady love for you will be there no matter what. But if you live wisely, then that love will be mixed with more joy. And if you live foolishly, then it will be mixed with more sadness. By your actions you can bring us more joy or more sadness. But you can never lose your relationship with us as our son or our daughter.”

“And guess what?” I continued, “This is the kind of relationship you can have with God too, if you become one of his children through believing in Jesus.”

We’ve had this conversation a half a dozen times or so during bedtime devotions over the last year or two. I don’t think my kids are forgetting the previous conversations. Rather, I think they want to hear it again, one more time, that dad and mom will love them no matter what – even if they become felons. For my part, I’m happy to come back to this topic as often as they want to.

It’s common for us to speak of marriage as a parable of the gospel, and with good warrant. Paul explicitly says in Ephesians 5 that husbands and wives are a picture of Christ and the Church. But we don’t speak as often of parents as parables of the good news. Yet as I gain more experience as a dad I am realizing more and more what an opportunity I have to model for my kids the kind of love they are invited to have with God the Father through the gospel.

Yes, my father-love for them is a small and imperfect shadow of the reality of God’s father-love for his children. But such is the nature of shadows. They flicker, contort, and sometimes disappear altogether. But their very existence is evidence of something very real, concrete, and solid. Parental love exists because God is the Father whose very nature is love.

We often know of this relationship between parental love and one’s understanding of God’s love from the negative side of things. Countless believers struggle to rest in God’s love and grace because of bad experiences with their parents. Dig into why someone’s cognitive theology isn’t translating into their emotional theology and you’re likely to find some ‘daddy issues.’ And though they needn’t stay stuck there, this is how things naturally tend to go. Parents are meant to model for their children, in some limited but real way, what God is like. What a weighty calling.

The parallels are real. Our children are born into our families, not by their own will, but by the will of their parents. In the same way, believers are born again into God’s family not by their own will, but by the will of their Father (John 1:13). This birth brings with it a permanent identity that cannot be lost. Parents in this world may try to disown their children but they can never actually erase the reality of the relationship. God’s children are his forever. In some sense, so are ours.

We don’t have an Ephesians 5 type of passage directly telling parents to love their children as God loves the Church, that their love for their children is a metaphor of the gospel. Yet the clues are all over the Bible. God chooses to reveal himself, especially in the New Testament, as Father to his people, his spiritual children. This is one of his primary titles he wants us to understand him by (Eph 3:14-15, John 20:17, Matt 6:9). Indeed, even when we discipline our children, the Bible says we are pointing to God the good Father who does the same (Heb 4:4-11). And let’s not forget one of Jesus’ parables that perhaps more than any other displays the heart of the gospel – that of the father and the two lost sons (i.e. the prodigal son, Luke 15).

And although he never uses a maternal title, God is also not embarrassed to use maternal imagery to speak of his love for his people (Isaiah 66:13, 1 Peter 2:2-3, Matt 23:37). After all, both men and women are made in the image of God, so the natures of fatherly love and motherly love must ultimately find their source in God himself.

I said earlier that we most commonly speak of the connection between God’s love and parenting when it has gone wrong. In this, we can be comforted that God’s love is powerful to overcome even the worst parenting a person may have received. And for parents, the gospel is powerful to wash away even the worst of failures. But this possibility of healing and cleansing should make Christian parents even more eager to carry out their role as a living parable as best as they possibly can. Amazingly, our parenting may be the way in which the gospel comes to one day make sense for our kids. As we assure them and show them that they have our love, no matter what, that they can never lose their place as our sons and daughters – in this way they may come awake to the stunning offer of spiritual sonship offered to them in Christ.

“You are loved. You are safe. You are accepted. You are delighted in. You will be mine forever. You can never do anything bad enough to lose my love.” These kinds of statements from moms and dads preach through a physical parable something even more true in the spiritual realm – something that our kids may not yet be a part of, but which they are invited into.

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels or rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

-Romans 8:38-39

May our parenting not be a stumbling block towards our little ones delighting in God’s grace and love. Instead, may they look back at how they came to know the good news was true and find in that story the steadfast love of mom and dad – a parable pointing them to the gospel.

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