Shepherd Press Newsletter

I appreciate the work of Shepherd Press, and their regular newsletter is a good resource for thoughts on paretnign and good books. Their best known book is probably Tedd Tripp’s Shepherding a Child's Heart , which is a great book.

My point here though is their email newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it. Here is an excerpt, written by Tedd Tripp, from the most recent newsletter. Great exhortation and reminder.

Until your childrenhave seen the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, until theyhave come to see that he is the Lily of the Valley, that he is theBright and Morning Star, that he is the One who is altogether lovely;until they have seen and understood that it is worthwhile to divest of everything, that nothing in all the earth matters but knowing and loving Jesus, they will never know him and love him and serve him.They might play church. They might even be teen VBS helpers, or go on short-term mission’s trips, but until they are convinced that Christ is the treasure, they will never truly know him.

You cannot over-estimate the importance of showing your children the glory of God. If they do not know who God is, how God thinks,what God feels, and why he does what he does, they will have no grounds for finding joy in him, no reason to celebrate his abundant goodness and no basis for finding satisfaction in him. Delight in God cannot occur in an intellectual vacuum. Your careful display and demonstration of the wonders of God’s glorious being is crucial for your children. Joy in God is the fruit of what you know to be true ofhim. The spiritual heat of joy, delight, and wonder in the face of God cannot take place in a conceptual vacuum.

Wow! My purpose in this blog is to recommend books we find helpful in pursuing this goal, though this from Tripp reminds me of how far we are from meeting this goal.