I recently got an e-mail from a good friend, a mother with three grown children, who is facing a severe, life threatening illness. The e-mail included the following paragraph:

“Oh, wretched man that I am! Every day and all day long I am confronted with my constant distrust of God. I abandon Him at every turn looking for someone or something else to save me. I am so eager and willing to put my trust in horses and chariots; all things that CANNOT save. I sell God short, doubt His word and promises, turn away from Him to worship and trust earthly idols and THEN I want Him to prove to me that He really is!!! Can't help but laugh out loud! Lord have mercy!”

This mother has beautifully isolated and expressed a heart attitude that all parents have when faced with seemingly impossible situations, if we are perceptive enough to see it and then face it. Yes, we are believers, knowing intellectually that God is good, loves us, and is ultimately in charge and that “all things work together for good,” but in the press of life, we are essentially unbelievers, overcome by fear and doubt in practical, daily situations. Just as we are simultaneously wicked sinners and perfect saints, we are also simultaneously believers and unbelievers.

There is a clue in the paragraph of her e-mail quoted above that indicates she remembered that fact in the midst of her despair and then moved from unbeliever to believer, from performance to faith, from death to life. Do you see it? Read on for the answer.

Over the past few weeks we have discussed the firsts two of the three prayers that represent the attitude a parent needs in order to do his parenting job successfully: 1.) “Open the eyes of my heart so I can see;” 2.) “Oh God, be merciful to me a sinner.” We are maturing in the Lord when we begin to understand that we are the primary objects of those requests--not our spouses, our children or others around us with who we have conflicts.

This week we are going to look at the third of the prayers—“Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.”

When the Lord begins to answer the first prayer and we begin to see what is in our hearts, the result can be initially very shocking. Several years ago I was preaching a typical Sunday morning sermon as I have done practically weekly for the past 30 years, I concluded with a closing prayer, closed my Bible and was immediately aware (for the first time in 30 years of preaching!) of the following thoughts flooding my mind:

“Andrews, you had them in the palm of your hand. What a sermon! The depth of your understanding, the breadth of your exegesis, the brilliance of your insights was amazing!” Then I waited with anticipation for those in the congregation to come up to me and tell me what a wonderful sermon I had preached. I can see now that the amazing thing was not that those thoughts were in my mind, but that I had been preaching for all those years completely unaware that they were, I am sure, in my mind each time I spoke.

I was appalled, and repented to the Lord for my unconscious, self-aggrandizing desire to seek glorify for myself. Any gift I have and everything I know is from Him alone, and yet I was exposed as seeking the honor and recognition for myself that belongs only to Him. How could I do that after 50 years as an earnest Christian, all the while trumpeting regularly that “God alone is worthy of our praise and honor?” How could I sin so blatantly without even being aware of it?

It is amazing how much more eagerly I recognize the sins of others than I do my own. The sins of my children, my wife, my fellow church members, my employer, and my coworkers I can identify with remarkable perception. Mine? Not so much. I had no difficulty discerning with marvelous insight the offenses that had been committed against my daughter and me in the incident related in last week’s newsletter, but I was completely blind to the murder and bitterness that I harbored in my own heart for 15 years!

Without the intervention of God to open the eyes of my heart I will continue in blindness and ignorance because my flesh desperately wants to continue to live and not go to the cross and die. I am like the king who wore no cloths, naked before all those with whom I relate who can see my sin clearly because they have no vested interest in keeping my flesh alive as I do. As one good friend said when I told him about the revelation I had just had concerning my unconscious attempts to control the lives of my married children –“You should have asked me; I could have told you!”

Today I want to explore another example of what the results can be when we pray Gospel Parenting prayer #1 (“Open the eyes of my heart”) and prayer #2 (“ Oh God, be merciful and forgive me for this sin that You have shown me”).

Some years ago a young man and his wife began to come to our church. They seemed to fit in well and began to attend meetings regularly, the husband even playing on the worship team. We accepted them as a part of our church family, helping them move to a new home and standing with them as they went through a miscarriage, sending meals to help them as they suffered through their grief.

As they settled in to church life, the young man revealed to me that he felt he had been given the unique ministry of being a burr under the saddle of church leadership. As time went by, he gave me books he felt I needed to read and would summarize men’s meetings with his analysis of what we needed to do in order to handle the situation we were discussing properly. He gave the general impression that he felt the church needed to go in a different direction – one that he could readily show us. After being with us for a year, and being a regular participant in the church, he had neither officially identified with us nor given any tithes or offerings to the church. Neither I nor the other elders were particularly eager to listen to or follow the suggestions of this young man.

Finally, after about a year, he requested a luncheon meeting with the elders.

During the first 44 years after I graduated from the University of Oklahoma, I self-consciously did my very best to serve Jesus Christ--first as a campus evangelist with a para church organization, then as a teaching elder in the church and finally as a conference speaker and author of Christian books, including The Family, God’s Weapon for Victory.

No, I was not on the white horse wearing the white hat as I imagined. We are all on black horses wearing black hats—we are all sinners, and rather than be concerned about the sins of others, which has always been my penchant, my own sin is the only sin for which I am responsible. My responsibility is to pray Gospel Parenting Prayer #2 –“Oh God, be merciful to me a sinner (not my wife, not my husband, not the brother or sister in the church with whom I have a disagreement).” As I began to see myself as a sinner in all these broken relationships, with personal responsibility in every case, amazing things began to happen. I want to share a couple of them with you.

Last week we saw a living example of how a parent’s unconscious sin, sin of which mother or father is totally unaware, can drive wedges between parent and child and drive them apart. Our only hope is that God will “open the eyes of our hearts” so we can see that sin of which we have been so ignorant.

However, our flesh stubbornly resists that revelation as it desperately attempts to avoid the cross and remain alive. As a result, we face a crossroads when revelation comes that we as parents may have some serious responsibility in the relational difficulties that are occurring in the family. “But isn’t he/she (spouse/child) really the one at fault?”, we reason. The flesh always tries to find someone else to blame as it continues to live by the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—desperately wanting to be good and not evil.

And you can always do so, as there is always plenty of sin to go around. Is your spouse or your child without sin in family conflicts? Of course not. The sin in the lives of other family members is ever on display before us, and we can place our focus upon their sin if we so desire. This is generally how family difficulties are addressed—point out, emphasize and work on eliminating the sins of spouses or children—and relational problems will invariably continue to fester and grow and not be resolved. To many parents, not being wrong is unconsciously more important than a restored relationship.

The Bible teaches a totally different tack. Jesus says that we first must focus on our own sin and deal with it before addressing the sins of others (Matthew 7:3-5). This is the crossroad we as parents face. Once we see our sin, do we cover and hide it, rationalize and excuse it, or face it head on, own it and pray Gospel Parenting Prayer #2, the prayer of the tax collector in Jesus’ parable in Luke 18:10-14? “Yes, Lord, it is I. I did it. No excuses. I repent for my own sin in this conflict. Oh Lord, be merciful to me a sinner.”

It is this prayer of repentance from the sin that God has revealed to the human heart that releases the mighty power of God to break down walls and heal relationships. This cannot be done by the numbers, just because it is the right thing to do. Our children can sense that hypocrisy in a heart-beat. Our repentance can only be in response to a genuine revelation of the sinfulness of our hearts. Until that revelation comes, we continue to pray Gospel Parenting Prayer #1.

Over the past few years, I have learned by personal experience that the three prayers we are discussing in these newsletters have application far beyond the family.