Grant Clark continues the How to Build a Life series through Proverbs with a message on wisdom in parenting. Working from the ninth fatherly discourse in Proverbs 6:20-23, he argues that the goal of parenting is not the cultural scorecard of success but children who know God, walk in his wisdom, and follow Jesus, and he lays out four practices from Proverbs for getting there: delight, demonstrate, disciple, and discipline. The message is for everyone in the room, parents or not, both as children of the Father in heaven and as the aunts and uncles of the church's kids. Grant opens with a story from his own week and names the humility this topic requires: none of the four points is a magic bullet or a quick fix, all of them are processes repeated over years. He recalls the ten fatherly discourses of Proverbs 1-9, where Solomon sits his son down and passes on a whole way of life, what some commentators call a curriculum in wisdom, and offers hope to parents who never received that kind of training themselves. He reads Proverbs 6:20-23: a father and a mother working together to teach, command, guide, and correct their child, where a command is a lamp, teaching is a light, and corrective discipline is the way of life. The four D's: 1) Delight in your Children 2) Demonstrate How to Walk 3) Disciple them in Wisdom 4) Discipline them in Love ## What is the Goal of Parenting? Before the four practices, Grant asks what parents are actually aiming for. Every parent wants healthy, secure, happy children, but Proverbs gives a larger vision than the Western one of a good school, a good job, and a home. The goal of the Scriptures is that our children would know God, walk in his ways and his Word, and follow Jesus, or in New Testament language, that they would live out the great commandment and the Great Commission. Parenting is not controlling external behavior; it is forming hearts and showing children how to live wisely in God's world. Solomon told his son plainly what his goal for his life was. Grant asks the parents in the room: if your kids were handed the mic this morning and asked what your biggest desire for their life is, what would they say? ## 1. Delight in Your Children Proverbs 4:3-4. Solomon remembers not only what his parents taught him but how they made him feel: tender, precious, cherished, tenderly loved. Grant reads Tim Keller on this verse: "The verse literally says, "I was the only one in the sight of my mother." A child should feel they are the object of powerful, unconditional love from the parent." – Tim Keller Solomon's parents did not just love him, they enjoyed him, and he wants to pass on both the teaching and the feeling. Grant connects this to the Father's words over Jesus at his baptism in Matthew 3:17, three formative pillars of identity: you are my son, I love you, I am proud of you. He describes speaking those same words over his daughter at bedtime for six and a half years, so that when correction comes, her identity and his love are never in question. Practical ways to show delight: give focused attention and be present, play with them in ways that fit their stage of life, listen to their stories and ask questions, speak affirmation over the good you see in them rather than only calling out the bad, build family memories, and tell and show them often how valuable they are to you. ## 2. Demonstrate How to Walk in Wisdom Proverbs 23:26: "My son, give me your heart and let your eyes observe my ways." The heart in Hebrew thinking is the control center of the person, desires, thinking, and decision making, not just feelings. In context the father is warning his son against envy, drunkenness, sexual sin, and foolish companions, all of them competing for the son's heart. The father is saying: entrust your inner life to my wisdom, let me shape what you love and how you live, and watch my life. Grant links this to Jesus in John 13:15, whose disciples watched him in every conceivable situation, the highs and the lows, and to Paul in Philippians 4:9, whose discipleship strategy was the same: do what you have learned, received, heard, and seen in me. Children learn from instruction and correction, but they are also formed by example. Our lives interpret our words. If we say prayer matters but they never see us pray, if we say church matters but treat it as an obligation, if we say apologizing matters but they never hear us say sorry, they learn from the disconnect. Our faith does not need to be perfect, but it does need to be real, and the most powerful thing a parent can do is be a real example and repent when they mess up. More is caught than taught. ## 3. Disciple Them in Wisdom Grant summarizes a Gospel Coalition article, "Raising Kids in the Faith is Simpler than you May Think" by Joe Carter, built on research from the Institute for Family Studies. The single strongest predictor of a child's adult faith is not the church, the youth group, or their peers. It is the parents. The behaviors that most strongly predict lasting faith are active and verbal: praying together, saying grace before meals, reading and discussing the Bible, and talking about Jesus regularly in daily life. The report also notes that a generation of parents reacting against purity culture has overcorrected toward a light touch, and that children read parental silence about faith not as respect for their autonomy but as evidence that it is not important. Biblical parenting is intentional. Deuteronomy 6:4-9, the Shema: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength, and repeat these words to your children when you sit in your house, walk along the road, lie down, and get up. Grant quotes Mark and Jan Foreman: Parenting is "on-the-job training. We use the show-and-tell of everyday moments to transmit spiritual life." – Mark and Jan Foreman Deuteronomy 6 holds together the formal and the informal: a daily, age-appropriate rhythm of Scripture and prayer as a family, and the spontaneous moments through the week, discussing situations at school, processing friendship and disappointment, talking about the messages in what they watch, and sharing stories of answered prayer and God's faithfulness. The home is the primary place of discipleship, and parents are the most important disciple makers. One practical action step: Eat together. Sit at the table, talk about highs and lows, and hear their questions. Grant reads from Leonard Sax's book The Collapse of Parenting: "Every meal counts. In a survey of 26,078 adolescents from a wide range of backgrounds—urban and rural, affluent and low-income—researchers asked each kid, In the last seven days, how many days have you had a meal with a parent? Kids who had more meals with a parent were less likely to have "internalizing problems" such as feeling sad, anxious, or lonely. They were less likely to have "externalizing problems" such as fighting, skipping school, or stealing. They were more likely to help others and more likely to report being satisfied with their own life." "But just insisting that everybody eat together, while the TV is blaring and the kids are texting at the dinner table, probably won't accomplish much by itself. We actually have good evidence that when the TV is on during suppertime, many of the benefits of a family meal evaporate." Make intentional, undistracted time to sit and talk about the day together. ## 4. Discipline Them in Love Grant recalls a church visit where Hebrews 12:6, God disciplines those he loves, was the verse on the screen as everyone walked in. Because God loves us, he disciplines, forms, and shapes us. Proverbs has a realistic (not an idealistic) view of children: they are a gift from God, and they are not born wise. Proverbs 22:15 says foolishness is bound up in their hearts, and it is trained out through teaching, correcting, encouraging, and at times rebuking. "The word discipline means to punish. While the primary goal of parents is to teach what is right in an environment of love and delight, one of the main ways to do that is to establish both boundaries and consistent consequences for trespassing those boundaries for your children. Why? There is a design in the world, and to go against it brings natural consequences. If parents do not bring carefully controlled, unpleasant consequences into the children's lives, they will go out into the world and bring far more painful and harmful results onto themselves later." - Tim Keller Discipline prepares children for the real world. Grant points back to Jackie Rodgers' sermon on discipline from the Ephesians series and her ten-year rule: if this behavior is still there in ten years, will it still look cute? He then reads three verses he expects some will find hard, and asks the church not to bypass uncomfortable texts but to humbly study, reflect, and pray through them: Proverbs 13:24, Proverbs 22:15, and Proverbs 29:15. He acknowledges directly that some in the room were physically or verbally abused by enraged parents who twisted Scripture, that this was not love, and that faithful families land in different places on how they apply these verses. What matters is the heart of what the verses are saying. "...the rod was literally used to punish criminals in ancient society, it came to be a symbol of authority and of discipline in general. So when Proverbs tells parents to use the rod, it does include the possibility of corporal punishment, but it means much more." - Tim Keller Three clarifications. First, the rod does not boil down to spanking; the biblical idea is parents lovingly exercising authority through clear boundaries and meaningful consequences, in a culture where the children often lead the home instead of the parents. Second, Proverbs does not treat the rod as a magic bullet; discipline is not the essence of child rearing and spanking is not the only tool, as "a rod and a reprimand" in Proverbs 29:15 shows. Third, the discipline must be unpleasant. Grant tells the s
