In our years of homeschooling the most profound way we have taught our children how to live a life of faith has been by allowing the Holy Spirit do the heavy lifting. I have always believed it has been my job to live my life of faith before my children with excitement and to share with them the walk God has me on, especially as it affects their lives. As I pray and commit to Spirit-led parenting, the Holy Spirit does the heavy lifting of convincing, convicting, and moving my children’s hearts.
Spirit-led Parenting: What it Looks Like
One example of God working in the hearts of our children has been through reading biographies together. When we’ve read together, my children often remarked on how amazing God is to use those who seem ordinary, unfit, and sometimes all-together unworthy of His attention to perform some amazing things for Him just because they trusted Him and believed what He said He could do with someone who turned to Him with an obedient heart.
Another story I share often is when God had impressed upon both mine and my husband’s hearts that He wanted us to sell our house and move to the county. For our oldest on the Autism spectrum, it seemed like a death sentence to leave behind his comfortable world for the unknown. But I trusted God had clearly spoken to me. One day when he was protesting about us preparing the house to sell, I decided to let the Holy Spirit do the heavy lifting of convincing my son this was God’s will not mine.
I basically told my son, “You ask God to tell you if moving is something he wants our family to do, and then come back to me when you have clearly heard from him.”
A few days later, unbenounced to me, he prayed to God to show him that day if we were supposed to move. All day long he was looking, but he never told anyone of his prayer for fear we would add in our own interpretations.
Then when evening rolled around, he went to his sister’s room with his other brother to listen to an audio tape of “Mr. Henry’s Wild and Wacky Bible Stories” as they did most evenings. It was their practice to not turn the light on because our daughter usually fell asleep during the story, so in the darkness my son picked up a tape, put it into the tape player, and sat down with his siblings to listen.
Do you know what story he happened to put into the player that night? The story of Abraham being called out of his homeland. As soon as the words, “Abraham, get out of this land” hit my son’s ears, he knew those words were the answer he had been looking for that day. He ran out of the room screaming at the top of his lungs,”Nooooo!” And that is when I was brought up to speed with the prayer and God’s answer. Never again did he complain about moving.
We forget too often, no matter how old or young we are, we have access to the same God and the same Holy Spirit. Spirit-led parenting trusts God through the Holy Spirit to do the convincing, convicting, and moving of our children’s hearts, and God’s ways will always turn out more positively then when we try to force our will or our faith upon our children.
