Prayerful Parenting – Day 9

Proverbs 3:5-6 ‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, he will show you which path to take.’

These words are packed full of difficult tasks:

1)      Trust – to trust here means to place our confidence in God. A God our eyes have never physically seen. This can be a difficult task for someone who has been a follower of Jesus 50 years, consider its loftiness when our students attempt it as they physically stand eye to eye with something that declares otherwise.

2)      Do not depend on your own understanding. The first task was hard – This one can be even harder as it tells us to stop trying to figure it out. Difficult? Yes, necessary? ABSOLUTELY. We see these mountainous ‘things’ before us and we attempt to picture what is on the other side by using our best guess, and our humanity gets it wrong nearly every time – HOWEVER we don’t have to risk getting it wrong with our best guess – We know the God that stands on the other side, he sees it, and he declares that on the other side of this mountain sits goodness, hope, and a future (Jeremiah 29:10)  

3)      Seek his will in all you do. What if that thing our child wants isn’t really in God’s will at all? Do they have a willingness to lay it down in order to receive what God has for them?

Let’s pray this verse over our students today. May we ask God to help them to know confidently he has their best interest at heart, that he knows what he is doing, and his plan for their life is greater than any picture they can paint for themselves. May they have a transparency with God – willing to admit whether what they seek is in accordance with his will or not – and if not may God give them the strength to lay it down.

Check out A Prayerful Send Off for more on this Back-to-School send off 2018