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Shepherding a Child’s Heart Study: Chapters 12 & 13

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shepherding a childs heart study

These are the final two weeks of the Shepherding a Child’s Heart book study. Today we will be covering chapters 12 and 13, then we will be taking two chapters at a time until next Friday. I have to be honest, I’m struggling to keep up with the pace, but I’ll do my best!

Chapters 12 and 13 end Part 1 of the book. In these chapters Tripp reviews the lessons from Part 1 and expands on the idea of appealing to the conscience. Tripp says:

Your most powerful appeals will be those that smite that conscience. When the offended conscience is aroused, correction and discipline find their mark…. The central focus of childrearing is to bring children to a sober assessment of themselves as sinners. They must understand the mercy of God, who offered Christ as a sacrifice for sinners…. You must address the heart as the fountain of behavior, and the conscience as the God-given judge of right and wrong.

This was a good reminder for me that I need to consistently and constantly bring my children (and myself) back to the foot of the cross. The Holy Spirit is the one who convicts the conscience and it is the Holy Spirit who can change hearts. I must not focus so much on simply changing behavior, but must see the root of that behavior and help my child to see it as well.

Update

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Ok, so I started this blog last year with grand ideas of typing up new entries three times a week because the kids were a little older (ok, not that old; they were only 5 and not-quite-two, but they were in a really good routine), I wasn’t teaching for the summer, and I felt I had some extra time that I could finally begin something I had been thinking and praying about for quite a while.

However, life sometimes has a way of surprising us just when we think we have things figured out, and the week after I posted my first set of articles, I found out I was pregnant with baby #3. And life pretty much came crashing to a halt.

I had some complications during the first trimester and things were pretty touch and go for a while, so I decided I needed to reduce outside stress as much as possible. To do that I basically cut out anything in life that wasn’t absolutely necessary, including having to put this dream of writing a blog on hold for a while, so I could focus fully on this new life and all the changes that came with it.

Fast forward almost a year and we now have a beautiful baby girl!

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She is just over two months old and life is beginning to take on a sense of normalcy, and I have been bitten by the writing bug again, so I am jumping back into blogging!

Unfortunately, considering I’m still somewhat sleep deprived from getting up at 3 am every night to nurse a newborn, I probably won’t be able to keep up with the three-posts-a-week schedule for a while. But I decided I needed to start somewhere, so I will post as often as I can. I’m not sure exactly how that will look right now, and it may mean that my posts aren’t as “pretty” with the lovely pictures and fonts and all that. But I have had some things on my heart that I wanted to share and I hope you’ll join me as we start (again)!