Over the years, as my wife and I have sought God's wisdom in raising our four children, two things have become abundantly evident to us: it is a profoundly difficult task and the Gospel must be foundational in our home if we are going to succeed at any measurable level. We have been blessed to have many godly guides over the years in the form of excellent books, and William P. Farley has just given us a brand-new one - Gospel-Powered Parenting: How the Gospel Shapes and Transforms Parenting (P&R).

As the title indicates, Farley's work seeks to show how the Gospel provides the strong foundation upon which the superstructure of parenting is to be built. While there are truck loads of books on parenting available, Farley's work includes some unique aspects that make it a "must read" for dads and moms who want to build Gospel-centered homes. One major note that sounds throughout the book is grace-centered parenting vs. legalism. Farley promotes a grace-centric approach to parenting that takes an offensive, non-isolationist posture in preparing children for life in a fallen world. A Gospel-centered home is as much a staging ground for battle as it is a fortress, Farley argues:

Either we can focus on preparing our children to enter the world and conquer it, or we can concentrate on protecting our children from the world. A defensive mind-set worries about the evil influences of Halloween, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or non-Christians on the Little League team. Although parenting always involves some protection, this should not be the main focus for biblical parents. Often this defensive mentality is the fruit of legalism. The legalistic parent usually assumes that his or her children are born again. But this parent has little confidence in the power of the new birth. Therefore, parenting is all about protecting the children from evil outside influence. This approach can be deadly.

Farley also emphasizes the crucial role that fathers play in raising children and he spends four central chapters on fatherhood and the Gospel. To postmodern ears, Farley's emphasis upon patriarchy may sound provocative and Neanderthal-like, but his arguments are compelling and uncompromisingly biblical. The bottom line is both fathers and mothers are vitally important to healthy families, but God places the heaviest responsibility in raising children upon the shoulders of dad.

Throughout Scripture, fathers are the parents, and their wives are their assistants. The wife is a crucial assistant. Parenting is a team sport. It is very hard to do alone. But in a two-parent family, Dad is the chief parent, the one accountable to God for his family. Mom is there to assist him. Western culture used to assume this arrangement. Before 1830, virtually every manual on parenting was addressed to fathers...Why did previous generations assume the father's lead role? Because culture assumed that the Bible was the primary instruction manual for parents, and the Bible addressed its parenting instructions not to mothers, but to fathers! The unstated assumption in the modern evangelical church is the opposite: Mom is the chief parent, and Dad is her assistant.

The concluding chapters examine discipline, teaching children and loving your children-all with the Gospel as the center of gravity. Overall, Farley proves to be an excellent guide for those of us who are raising children and who are desperately in need of the Gospel as our own daily treasure and as a "how to" guide. Gospel-Powered Parenting is cross-centered, counter-cultural and Scripture-saturated. I enthusiastically commend it to every parent.

Gender Blog continues with the latest installment of our "Unchanging Truth" series. These articles, while not as current, are still beneficial, and they demonstrate the consistent application of biblical truth by complementarian scholars, authors, and pastors through the years.

The following is an excerpt from an article by Mary Kassian, entitled, "Father of the Fatherless: Women Approaching God as Father." It was first published in 2000.

Does every child need a father? Increasingly, our society's answer to this question is no, or at least not necessarily. Each night, about forty percent of American children will go to sleep in homes in which their fathers do not live.And not only have we as a society lost the presence of fathers, we have lost something more fundamental: We have lost our idea of fatherhood. We are living in a culture of fatherlessness.

Unlike earlier periods of father absence caused by war, our cultural loss is more than physical and it affects every home. The most important absence our society must confront is not the absence of fathers but the absence of our belief in fathers. Few idea shifts in this century have had such enormous implications. At stake is who we are as male and female, what type of society we will become, and even more importantly, the way we understand and relate to God.

God is our Father. Why do we call Him that? God is not male. He is a spirit. And does not the Bible use a number of maternal metaphors to speak of how God relates to His people? Did He not give birth to the Jewish nation (Deut. 32:18)? Does He not have compassion on us like a mother has compassion on the baby at her breast (Isa. 49:13)? Does He not nurse, nurture, and comfort us like a mother does (Ps. 131:2; Isa. 66:13)? Because so many women, particularly those who come into Christianity from non-religious backgrounds, wrestle with the idea of addressing God with masculine pronouns, shouldn't we refer to God as Mother, or at least as Mother and Father? Why do we address God as Father?

You can read the rest of this article here.

This is the first in a series of clips from D.A. Carson's talk at the Different by Design 2009 Conference. In his address, Carson analyzed the flow of thought in 1 Timothy 2, and this series of clips is designed to provide the highlights of Carson's argument. This particular clip deals with Paul's statement, "I do not permit...." 

Paul David Tripp recently visited Louisville for a conference on biblical counseling. Gender Blog was fortunate to have an opportunity to sit down with him and discuss issues of gender and culture. Following is the third part of a three-part interview with him. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Paul Tripp is the president of Paul Tripp Ministries, a nonprofit organization, whose mission statement is "Connecting the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life." He is on the pastoral staff at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, Pa., where he preaches on Sunday evenings and leads the ministry to Center City. 

 Gender Blog: Let's change gears a bit and discuss something that is intimately related to what you just said, to put some legs and feet on it. You and your wife Luella raised four children. As the kids were growing up what did a typical day in the Tripp home look like in terms of family worship and interacting about the things of God with your children?

Paul David Tripp: We always planned our mornings so that the last thing we would do before we went out the door was to ask one anther about their day and pray for one another. So, it was a reminder of God's presence, but it was very specific to what was going on that day and it was wonderful if, for nothing else, to have that moment of love and sanity before we left the home. It was mandatory and we would plan our morning so we had that five or ten minutes before going out the door. Our family worship tended to happen around the supper table. It was our pattern that we always read our children adult books. This has changed now, but back then there wasn't much in the way of children's Bibles with good content. What I would do is read ahead and dumb down the language in places where I needed to because I didn't think it would help my children if there were words that they didn't understand. So, I would find similar words that were faithful to the content that they could understand and check out the illustrations, because sometimes I would insert another illustration that would be more at their level. We wanted them to be exposed to rich, content-filled things because we wanted them to learn to self-consciously think from a biblical perspective. And we were always very willing for our children to question or disagree because we thought that was a part of learning and internalizing.

 Gender Blog: What would a Gospel-centered home tend to look like?

Paul David Tripp: I think Gospel-centered parenting has this gorgeous law-grace balance. On one hand, I really do esteem that the Law is a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. There is a way in which my sense of need is built as God's standard is held before me and I begin to break under the burden of the standard, I begin to feel how much I fall short of the standard and that builds in me a sense of need. Now, if that's all I have, I will break my children. So, that has to be balanced with the rescuing, forgiving, empowering, delivering message of God's grace. Now, if I don't have the law, all I have is a sense of His grace and that results in a sort of easy-believism and a sort of lazy Christianity that doesn't take sin and struggle seriously. It's that harmony of those two things that need to be expressed. I don't think that law will that which ultimately rescues my children, because if law does that, then Jesus would not have had to come. I also think you only get excited about grace if you have a sense of need. It's the harmony of those things that I want to structure the way I interact with my children.

Paul David Tripp recently visited Louisville for a conference on biblical counseling. Gender Blog was fortunate to have an opportunity to sit down with him and discuss issues of gender and culture. Following is the second part of a three-part interview with him. Read Part 1.

Paul Tripp is the president of Paul Tripp Ministries, a nonprofit organization, whose mission statement is "Connecting the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life." He is on the pastoral staff at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, Pa., where he preaches on Sunday evenings and leads the ministry to Center City. 

Gender Blog: How specifically do parents combat gender confusion? Do we insulate our children completely from the world?

Paul David Tripp: You ought to want to protect your child from that, but you will never successfully insulate your child. It's nearly impossible for a family living in Western culture not to breathe some of its air. When I think of isolating my children, I tend to think of it in one of two ways: it's sort of like the medieval monastery, which didn't work, or it feels like what Tom Ridge told us to do when there was some concern about a biological attack on America—‘Get a lot of plastic and duct tape.' I was thinking, ‘Are you serious, this is going to keep us safe?' Well, I think there is a whole lot of plastic and duct tape going on in Christian families. I think a better protection is just getting the topic on the table. Be honest with your children. Be honest early and don't stop being honest. Parents need to build relationships with their children where their children know it's safe here for me to talk about all my confusion and for me to ask embarrassing questions. I'll never be mocked. I'll never be made fun of. My parents will never respond in fear and end up grounding me or punishing me. This is a place of safety and grace and patience and we are going to talk our way through all of the confusion and all of the attack and all of the distortions and delusions that are out there. So that means you can't have just one talk about sexuality. You have to open that topic and keep it open and build relationships with their children where they feel safe and comfortable in both talking and listening.

Gender Blog: Is it ever too young to start teaching about gender?

Paul David Tripp: No. I think we would all say the greatest guardian for our children against falsehood is to enculturate them with truth. So, a boy who is taught God's design for a man, a girl who is taught God's design for a woman, will be taught honestly about the dangers and distortions that get all mixed up and blended and will also be taught about the dangers on the far end of a man being a chauvinisic arrogant blowhard—that's not godly—or a girl being so prissy and delicate that she becomes a diva that nobody can touch, which are distortions too. You have to do that in a way that is wholesome and balanced, but wow, we've got to do that. My son is 33 years old, but I would feel a much bigger burden to do that today than I did when he was coming up. That's how much things have changed. We did that, but it's a huge issue now.