You’ve always heard that it’s what’s on the inside that counts…and it’s TRUE! Good character is what compensates for weaknesses, redeems brokenness, and increases potential. Many of the parenting tools and advice available today focus completely on behavior modification. Unfortunately, this only addresses the surface of the problem and not the cause. Grace Based Parents build character into their children from the inside out. When we focus on the heart, the behavior will follow. Most parents want their child to go through childhood right. Grace Based Parents want children who turn out right.
Building character into our children sets them up to be better siblings, more responsible students. It also prepares them to be better spouses and parents. It paves the way for them to become believers who rely upon God’s power to live out their faith.
Faith
Faith becomes a character trait when what we believe starts making moral choices for us.
“Being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we cannot see”
Hebrews 11:11
Integrity
What you are when no one is looking. Integrity is the moral clarity we depend on to do the right thing even under stress or when no one would know otherwise.
Poise
A keen sense of the appropriate.
Poise is that moral and relational equilibrium that keeps people balanced, practical, and relevant. God’s gracious presence in a person’s life helps him or her know when it’s time to plant or uproot, tear down or build, weep or laugh, mourn or dance, embrace or refrain, search or give up, keep or throw away, be silent or speak up, love or hate, go to war or make peace.
(Ecclesiastes 3:1-8; 7:16-18)
Discipline
Forgoing the immediate to guarantee the ultimate.
It’s saying “no” now so you can say “yes” later. Like the rails beneath a train, the disciplines we build into a young person’s life enables him or her to harness all the many potentials God has built into that child. Train tracks confine a train, but in so doing, empower it to do an enormous amount of good for people and the marketplace. A train that leaves its rails is called a “train wreck.” Train wrecks are a mess. So are the lives of people who don’t have disciplines built into the core of their character. Grace based parents and churches love kids enough to do the hard work of building tracks for their potential.
Endurance
The ability to keep going when everything is telling you to give up.
The world is full of quitters. This gracious character trait trains young people to keep going when everyone else would have long given up.
(1 Corinthians 9:24-27)
Courage
The resolve to do what you ought to do in any given situation.
If disciplines are what we put around our children’s strengths in order to harness them, courage is what we wrap around our kid’s weaknesses and fears in order to help them move beyond them. Just as God’s grace courageously drove Jesus to center stage of time and space to pay the price for our sins on the cross, it can also empower His children to face the giants in their life.