Sermon Quotes on Parenting

Franklin P. Adams

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.

James Baldwin

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

Henry Ward Beecher

There is no friendship, no love, like that of the parent for the child.

Henry Ward Beecher

We never know the love of a parent till we become parents ourselves.

Henry Cloud

Leave your pride, ego, and narcissism somewhere else. Reactions from those parts of you will reinforce your children’s most primitive fears.

Kevin DeYoung

God doesn’t provide many specific instructions about the parent-child relationship, except that parents should teach their children about God (Deut. 6:7; Prov. 1-9), discipline them (Prov. 23:13; Heb. 12:7-11), be thankful for them (Ps. 127:3-5), and not exasperate them (Eph. 6:4). Filling in the details depends on the family, the culture, the Spirit’s wisdom, and a whole lot of trial and error.

Crazy Busy, Crossway.

John Eldredge

The balancing act we parents attempt is convincing our children: 1. You are loved more than you can imagine. 2. The world does not revolve around you.

Love and War: Finding the Marriage You’ve Dreamed of

Anne Frank

Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.

Benjamin Franklin

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.

Ursula Hegi

“That’s the nature of being a parent, Sabine has discovered. You’ll love your children far more than you ever loved your parents, and – in the recognition that your own children cannot fathom the depth of your love – you come to understand the tragic, unrequited love of your own parents.”

Stones from the River

R. Kent Hughes

Above all, we [as parents] must make sure that the open book of our lives – our example – demonstrates the reality of our instruction, for in watching us they will learn the most.

Chip Ingram

Remember that you are not called to produce successful, upwardly mobile, highly educated, athletically talented machines…Giving your children great opportunities is good; it is not, however, the goal of parenting. Christlikeness is. Above all, seek to raise children who look and act a lot like Jesus.

Tim Kimmel

Some of your children’s rebellion against your spiritual lifestyle might be a necessary step in their finding an authentic relationship with God. But beware: If they find it, it might look quite different from what you’ve always thought it should be.”

Why Christian Kids Rebel: Trading Heartache for Hope.

Andreas Kostenberger

We learn from Jesus that we should not look down on children because they are not fully grown and hence are of lower social status than adults. Like Jesus, we should treat children with respect and dignity, as unique and precious creatures made by God and valuable in His sight. What is more, contrary to our national inclination that may tell us that we can learn nothing from children and that the relationship is strictly one-way from parent or adult to child, we should look at children also from the vantage point of desirable kingdom traits they may exemplify in a more pronounced way than we do ourselves.

God, Marriage and Family, Crossway.

Anne Lamott

There really are places in the heart you don’t even know exist until you love a child.

Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year.

Josh McDowell

We do not develop habits of genuine love automatically. We learn by watching effective role models – most specifically by observing how our parents express love for each other day in and day out.

Lisa Earle McLeod

Childhood happiness has become the scorecard by which adults measure their success or failure as parents . . . Constantly striving to please your kids turns them into your boss. Their happiness becomes your performance review.

Genny Monchamp

Show your children God’s love by loving them and others as Christ loves you. Be quick to forgive, don’t hold a grudge, look for what’s best, and speak gently into areas of their lives that need growth.

Lane Ollinghouse

The quickest way for a parent to get a child’s attention is to sit down and look comfortable.

P.J. O’Rourke

Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.

Dorothy Parker

The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.

Ray Romano

Having children is like living in a frat house – nobody sleeps, everything’s broken, and there’s a lot of throwing up.

J. C. Ryle

Fathers and mothers, do not forget that children learn more by the eye than they do by the ear… Imitation is a far stronger principle with children than memory. What they see has a much stronger effect on their minds than what they are told.

Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton

Most teenagers and their parents may not realize it, but a lot of research in the sociology of religion suggests that the most important social influence in shaping young people’s religious lives is the religious life modeled and taught to them by their parents.

Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, Oxford Univ. Press.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Let no Christian parents fall into the delusion that Sunday School is intended to ease them of their personal duties. The first and most natural condition of things is for Christian parents to train up their own children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

John Steinbeck

Perhaps it takes courage to raise children.

East of Eden

Source Unknown

They say it takes a village. Where can I get directions to this village?

Source Unknown

If you don’t know where your kids are in the house, turn off the WiFi and watch them slowly appear.

Source Unknown

90% of parenting is just thinking about when you can lie down again.

Source Unknown

Parenthood is the scariest hood you will ever go through.

Chuck Swindoll

Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.

Paul David Tripp

Nothing is more important in your life than being one of God’s tools to form a human soul.

Parenting, Crossway.

John Wilmot 2nd Earl of Rochester

Before I got married I had six theories about raising children; now, I have six children and no theories.

Lisa Earle McLeod

Childhood happiness has become the scorecard by which adults measure their success or failure as parents . . . Constantly striving to please your kids turns them into your boss. Their happiness becomes your performance review.

Christian Smith

Most teenagers and their parents may not realize it, but a lot of research in the sociology of religion suggests that the most important social influence in shaping young people’s religious lives is the religious life modeled and taught to them by their parents.

Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, Oxford Univ. Press, 2005.

Gary L Thomas

When we realize that having children isn’t about us but is rather about God, then the trials and sacrifices of parenting are more easily borne. We see the purpose behind the difficulty and remind ourselves, “This isn’t about me; it’s about him.”

Sacred Parenting (p. 18). Zondervan.

Rachel Cusk

As a mother you learn what it is to be both martyr and devil. In motherhood I have experienced myself as both more virtuous and more terrible, and more implicated too in the world’s virtue and terror, than I would from the anonymity of childlessness have thought possible.

A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (New York: Picador, 2002), 8.

Carolyn Mahaney

We can deduce that if God in his divine wisdom chose to give sinful children to sinful parents, then our children are not so weak that they are unable to endure our sinful behavior . . . Our children are not that fragile. If they were, God would have waited until we were further along in the maturing process before he gave them to us. But he didn’t.

Feminine Appeal: Seven Virtues of a Godly Wife and Mother (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2003).

Colin Meloy

“My darling, what wonder have we wrought here?
It’s weird and it’s wonderful, dear
An ankle, an earlobe, an elbow bone
It’s weird how it wonderful grows
And it was only me and you
That made this three come out of two.”

Song: “Wonder”

Nora Ephron

When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman (Vintage Books, 2006)

Paul David Tripp

Principle: Nothing is more important in your life than being one of God’s tools to form a human soul.

Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family (Crossway, 2016).

Paul David Tripp

If rules and regulations had the power to change the heart and life of your child, rescuing your child from himself and giving him a heart of submission and faith, Jesus would have never needed to come!

Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family (Crossway, 2016).