Armed with passwords and last year’s tax forms, we gathered at the dining room table with my youngest son and his new wife.

They had asked for help in the annual ritual of completing the FAFSA, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which college students must submit in order to qualify for scholarships of any type. Within minutes, however, the newlyweds were in the driver’s seat at the keyboard, clicking, scrolling, and entering data. I was happy to quietly excuse myself and move on to preparing snacks to fortify them for this blessed foray into independence.

Some parenting ties are easier to snip than others, and I’ll admit that this one was welcome. But the journey from dependent child to independent adult is never without its pulling and stretching on both sides. As young adult children relinquish their need for hands-on parenting and take up responsibility for their own lives, there is a mirrored relinquishment for which we, as their loving parents, usually need plenty of grace.

In the midst of this process, many mums worry that the mother-child relationship will be damaged as adult sons and daughters marry and start families of their own. We fear being replaced and forgotten when new family ties are established. Unfortunately, fear and worry are not helpful building materials for a bond that lasts. Mothers like me need help to embrace a biblical vision of motherhood that will enable us to work ourselves out of a job like missionaries, with gratitude for the gift of parenting and with joy in the launching and the letting go.

Holding Our Children Loosely

As a homeschooling mum who scheduled every minute of the day for my four sons, I stumbled at first with the choreography of letting go. Then, a seemingly unrelated principle from the teaching of Paul opened my eyes to a hidden idolatry, disguised as “good mothering.” In 2 Corinthians 9, Paul commends bountiful sowing and cheerful giving, a practice that demonstrates belief in God as both provider and sustainer. Giving strips money of its idolatrous power over our hearts, for we are saying, “I love God more than I love whatever this money could do for me.”

“Learning to hold my children loosely was step one in allowing God to take his own rightful place in my heart.”

I began to see that releasing my young adults and teens into their growing independence was one way to make war against that particular idolatry and the cherished illusion of control I had cultivated. Learning to hold my children loosely was step one in allowing God to take his own rightful place in my heart. And holding on tightly to God strengthened my belief that my children belonged to him first of all.

As loving mums, we balance our deep love for our children with a deeper trust in God’s loving and keeping, and, for me, this required stepping back from my idol of control, and then stepping joyfully into a new advisory role.

Stepping Back from Control

I realized when my boys were small that maintaining a relationship with them as they grew older was going to be a challenge, because I’m a do-er. When they needed help in the tub or someone to make them a sandwich, I knew exactly what to do. However, that physically dependent stage, when I was clipping forty fingernails and forty toenails besides my own, was (mercifully) short, and it didn’t seem long before our sons no longer needed my help or care.

Encouraging practical independence from mum and dad is a goal that sits alongside fostering spiritual dependence upon God, and conscientious parents can actually thwart that goal without even realizing it. Orchestrating every detail of your teen’s life, or swooping in to prevent every disappointment and to manage every outcome, can actually teach your children a false hope in success and happy circumstances. That’s a hope that will wear you out and leave your children utterly unprepared for the realities of adulthood.

As their dependence upon God grows, our adult children’s relationship with God may not look exactly like our own. Their mode of worship, their boundaries on gray areas, and the way they express their faith may not line up perfectly with what they learned in our home. In middle age, it’s tempting to define holiness as our own way of living the Christian life, with a dangerous shift in pronouns that redefines, “Be holy, for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16), with the parent as the standard for holiness.

Just as we look to Jesus Christ as the standard of holiness for our own life on this fallen ground — not our pastor, not our favorite worship leader or inspirational author — grace-dependent parents encourage our children to turn their eyes toward Christ and to follow his lead. We recognize that we are not the standard for holiness. We are followers of Christ alongside our adult children, and we trust him to establish habits of holiness in their lives as we set an example by our own practice of lively faith.

Our New Advisory Role

The prophet Jeremiah wrote words of wise advice to the nation of Israel in exile, wisdom that helped me find a peaceful bridge into my empty nest. Somehow, at first, I found myself standing alongside those poor, displaced Israelites, waiting for life to return to “normal.” Sadly, their wrong thinking — that Nebuchadnezzar would come, and in a few weeks they’d be back home again — had gotten in the way of their obedience in the moment.

“I am learning that it is possible to live out the will of God in a land I don’t quite understand yet.”

Jeremiah counseled against their camping mentality with instructions to build and to cultivate and to make a life in Babylon, a location that felt like a dislocation (Jeremiah 29:4–7). As the grieving nation came to realize, “No, we’re not going back,” they stumbled toward a right understanding of what it meant to be God’s people in a place they had no desire to be. Likewise, I am learning that it is just as possible to live out the will of God in a land I don’t quite understand yet.

Rather than languishing in unmet expectations, parents of adult children have the privilege of stepping into a new role. Suddenly, we can “seek the welfare of the city” in an advisory capacity (Jeremiah 29:7). Someone else is doing the hands-on budgeting, planning, building, and designing that accompany the parenting life. Our children are now the primary ones responsible for the welfare of the next generation.

In None Like Him, Jen Wilkin warns readers against the tendency to usurp the incommunicable attributes of God — those qualities of deity that are his alone. Nowhere is this more of a temptation for me than in parenting. God will stop at nothing to pour his holiness, justice, and patience into the love I have for my kids, but what I really covet is his sovereignty, his omniscience, his omnipresence. By entrusting each member of my family to God’s sovereign plan, I am enabled to release the death grip on my desire to control and manage life from my limited perspective.

Still Sowing, Still Growing

Returning to Paul’s metaphor of generous sowing (2 Corinthians 9:6–7), the biblical pattern for all of us is to spread our seed pell-mell. As empty nesters, we are in a position to put on display the generosity of the gospel and the nature of God by investing in multigenerational pursuits with our families, and also by shaping our demeanors and our schedules to communicate our openness to their needs and our willingness to put our own lives on hold to be available to them.

Not all the seeds we plant along the way will bear fruit — but, then, we learned when our children were younger that parenting is anything but a cause-and-effect proposition. It is not a vending machine into which we insert our right actions and are rewarded with equal and corresponding reactions from our children. We’re after faithfulness first, not results.

Everyone collects a few regrets along the way, but regrets can’t set the agenda for our parenting journey going forward. Our goal is to leave a legacy of godliness, not a monument to our own glory and success. Freedom comes with understanding that our family is not our own personal project. God is doing bigger and more glorious things that we may not see or understand. He is building his kingdom, and it will be our greatest joy to have raised a small band of worshipers to join those standing around his throne at the end of all things.

Of course, this means that I will never be a “parenting graduate.” For as long as I live, I will need to grow in grace so that I will honor boundaries, resist giving unsolicited advice, and steadfastly reject unrealistic expectations of my adult children. I will need to trust God to instill in my heart a genuine and unselfish love for my family that enables me to see their ever-expanding world as a gift rather than a threat.

By grace, we can balance our deep love for our children with the “expulsive power” of a deeper love for God and a deeper trust in his sovereign goodness at work in their lives.

Audio Transcript

Comforted, warned, threatened. Comforted, warned, threatened. Comforted, warned, threatened. Does your Bible reading feel like an emotional roller coaster? Mine does a lot of times. And I know that is not my experience alone. So, is this experience by design? Another really important Bible question today that you have sent to us. And we’ve had a lot of those over the years, as you can see in the APJ book on pages 1–46 — the longest section in the book — talking about Bible reading and Bible memorization.

This next Bible-reading question is from a young man who listens to the podcast. “Hello, Pastor John! Every day I seem to get happy and feel comforted. And every day I feel sad and worried. Almost like it switches in a moment. The reason for this is the words of comfort and warning from Jesus and Paul. For instance, I’m happy to hear Jesus say, ‘Whoever comes to me I will never cast out’ (John 6:37). But then I hear him say, ‘No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God’ (Luke 9:62). Then I hear Jesus say to the seemingly mature church of Ephesus that if they don’t repent, he will take their lampstand out of its place (Revelation 2:1–7). Is it right to feel sort of emotionally pushed back and forth like this so regularly in my Bible reading? Is this healthy and normal for the Christian life to feel like this — comforted, then warned, then threatened? Is the Christian life in this fallen world meant to feel like this by design?”

That’s such a good question. There are over four hundred imperatives in the writings of Paul, over a thousand in the four Gospels. Now, what this means is that when Paul says in Romans 8:29 that God predestined Christians to be conformed to the image of Christ — that is, to be holy like he’s holy, to love like he loves, to be morally perfect as he’s morally perfect — the means by which God brings that about, that predestined reality, is by hundreds of commands given to those predestined saints. That’s the key thing. He uses commands that we must take seriously because they are his appointed means for our moral perfecting, our glorification.

Commanding the Justified

There are people who think that because we are justified by faith alone, there are no imperatives that we must obey in order to show that our justifying faith is genuine and that we’re true Christians. But in fact, the way God brings us to the final state of glory, moral perfection, is by means of commanding us to stay on the narrow way that leads to life. The fulfillment of these commands is rooted in the fact, now, that we are already justified, already forgiven, already accepted because of what Christ has done for us and our attachment to him by faith. But it is unbiblical to say that because we’re already forgiven, already accepted, there’s no need for God to command us to do anything. That’s unbiblical to say that.

It’s unbiblical and foolish to say that God gives no threats of destruction for disobedience. That’s not true. God’s means of bringing about what he has predestined to take place — namely, our holiness, our glory, our perfection — is to command us to be holy and then, by the Spirit, enable us to do what he commands us to do. St. Augustine was right when he prayed, “Command what thou wilt, O God, and give what thou commandest” (Confessions 10.29.40).

New-Covenant Commandments

And here’s what our friend, who sent this question, is drawing our attention to: God uses both promises and threats to motivate that obedience to his commandments. Lest anybody say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I don’t even need the word commandments. We shouldn’t even use the word commandments in the New Testament. That’s an Old Testament idea. We don’t live by commandments in the New Testament. That’s law. We live under grace.” To that I respond,

“By this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments” (1 John 2:3).
“Whoever keeps his commandments abides in God, and God in him” (1 John 3:24).
“This is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3).
Jesus said in John 14:15, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

“The Christian life in this fallen age is a pattern of continuous confident faith and occasional threatened fear.”

And so on. People need to read their Bibles and not just make theological pronouncements about what the Bible means without paying close attention to texts. The difference between the old covenant and the new covenant is not the absence of commandments, but the presence of power to keep them. “I will write my law on your heart and cause you to walk in my statutes” (see Jeremiah 31:33). That’s the heart of the new covenant. Obedience to commandments is the fruit of the Holy Spirit and the fruit of faith. Paul calls it “the obedience of faith” (Romans 1:5).

Promises and Threats

What our friend is pointing out is that God motivates us to this obedience by using promises and threats. And his experience is that threats make him feel sad and worried, while promises make him feel happy and comforted. And he wonders if this is normal. Is it the way God designed the Christian life to be in this fallen world? Now, I can’t get inside his head or heart to pass any judgment with any confidence on whether this particular Christian experience of his is healthy and normal. It might be, so I’m not going to base my counsel on his experience, but on the biblical pattern.

The biblical pattern is that God motivates positively with promises and negatively with threats and warnings. The positive pattern looks like this: God’s promise leads to confident faith, which leads to obedience. And the negative pattern looks like this: God’s threat leads to fear, which drives us back to confident faith, which leads to obedience.

Here’s an example of the positive. Hebrews 13:5–6:

Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said [here comes the promise], “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” So we can confidently say, “The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?”

So, the promise is this: “I will help you and never forsake you.” The confident faith: “So we can confidently say, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not fear.’” And then the obedience: we stop loving money by believing that promise.

And here’s the negative side. Romans 11:18, 20–21:

Do not be arrogant toward the [broken-off Jewish] branches. . . . They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast through faith. So do not become proud, but fear. For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you.

So, the threat is this: God won’t spare breaking off your branch if you are arrogant. That causes fear. I don’t want to be a broken-off branch. This fear drives you away from boastful self-exaltation and self-reliance and leads you back to humble faith in Christ. And then the obedience is that you stop boasting over Jewish unbelievers.

How Faith and Fear Relate

Here’s what’s important to see about the way the two emotions relate to each other — confident faith on the one side, fear on the other side. They’re not equal or balanced in the Christian life. Confident faith is the continuous, lasting, normal condition of the Christian heart in this age. But because of sin, God also uses fear as a temporary warning to drive us back to Christ, his cross, his forgiveness, his acceptance, his love, and faith when we’re tempted to sin.

But that’s not the only difference between these two emotions. It’s not just that faith is to be continuous and fear is to be temporary, but also that a confident feeling of faith is the end, and a threatened feeling of fear is a means to drive us to the goal. So, continuous versus temporary is one difference, and end versus means is another difference.

So yes, the Christian life in this fallen age is a pattern of continuous confident faith and occasional threatened fear. This is the way every healthy family raises kids. We want our kids to be overwhelmingly, dominantly happy and confident that there’s an ongoing, continuous trust in the goodness and helpfulness of their parents. But we also want them to know the boundaries — where they could get themselves killed in the street or in an electric socket — and for their own good they don’t cross the boundaries. They feel fear of the discipline that’s going to come to them if they cross the boundaries and are tempted to cross them.

God is a good Father toward us. He knows how to bring his predestined children home to glory, and he uses both confident faith and the feeling of fear that comes through his warnings.

Audio Transcript

Today’s question for episode 2001 is a book question from me, Pastor John. We like to talk books on this podcast, and in past episodes we’ve looked at seven ways books have changed your life. That testimonial was APJ 707. We’ve also talked about how 1 percent of book-insights make reading the other 99 percent worth it. That was APJ 1910. Classic point. More recently, we looked at ten of your favorite authors who write to edify the soul. That was APJ 1972.

Now, speaking of your library, I recently paged through your copy of Mortimer Adler’s classic How to Read a Book while working on my APJ book about this podcast, which comes out in February. More on that later, but as I was writing the introduction to my book, I found it instructive to see what sentences you underlined in Adler’s book, what sections you marked up, and how you jotted down notes in the front and back of the book. I noticed that you made something of your own index to your discoveries. Can you walk us through your book-marking strategy? When did you start the practice? Why do you do it? What types of marginalia are you adding to your books? And of course we all want to know: pencil or pen?

The answer is pencil, and there are reasons. I use a mechanical pencil so that it never goes dull, 0.5 millimeters. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book is one of the very few books that I have read twice. Your mentioning it gives me a good opportunity to sound a warning to people who are going to ask me or others this question: the way a person underlined and wrote in a book — whether in the margins, indexes, or whatever — twenty or forty years ago may be very different from what he does today.

That certainly is the case with me. I am amazed when I look back on how many books I read, say, thirty or forty years ago that don’t have any of my own indexing in the front flaps, because today that is the dominant way for me to keep track of insights and enjoyments that I’m getting from the book.

Handmade Indexes

By “indexing” (that’s not a very accurate phrase, and I wish I had a better one), I mean simply jotting down, with a pencil in tiny handwriting, a very short three- to eight-word description or pointer in the front flap of the book. I write about what I have read in the book, along with the page number. Sometimes I have to weave it around what’s already there. In a short book, there may be anywhere from 30 of these up to, say, 150 or more of these little notes in the flap of the book at the front or, if I have to, in the back.

“I don’t just read for pleasure. I read for a pleasure that spills over on other people.”

I think the reason I didn’t do this in the early days — and my memory’s not good, so I may be wrong — might be that I wasn’t thinking primarily of reading for the sake of writing, or reading for the sake of preaching, or reading for the sake of systematic increase of understanding of particular truths, or reading for the sake of discovery and preservation of some striking and compelling way of saying something, all of which is what I’m so keyed into now.

So now, virtually every book I read — and I’m talking print books, not electronic (which I hardly ever do) or audio (which I do all the time). I’m talking about the books I’m going through all the time, the ones sitting on my chairs. I’m always reading something in print. That’s what I do. And all these books — I index them.

Even fiction. People say, “Oh, you’re kidding me. You read a novel with a pencil in your hand?” Yes, I do. I can’t read without a pencil in my hand. I’m not going to spend time reading, even fiction, if there is no life-giving insight or striking expression of reality worth preserving. Seriously, I don’t just read for pleasure. I read for a pleasure that spills over on other people, because that’s the biggest pleasure. “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).

I read too slowly, and my life is too short, to read without the hope that what I’m reading will help me to think more clearly, to feel more fully, and to express more compellingly the glories of God in the word and in the world — and all of that is worth preserving in some way. It has been good to discover this about myself.

Reading Like a Teacher

I don’t presume, by the way, to suggest that everyone should be like this, but I realized along the way that my built-in, God-given impulse, my dominant impulse, is not to read, but to write and speak. To say it more generally, my bent is not to take in what others have created, but to be a creator. That’s just my bent. I want to make something new, usually with words, which means that all of my intake increasingly has become fuel for my own creation — for sermons, articles, books, poems, and devotions.

Now, I know this can be dangerous. There’s a big yellow flag here. I warned my students at Bethlehem College & Seminary, “Do not read the Bible in the morning just in order to produce a sermon on Sunday. Christ is glorious and precious and to be trusted in the very last hours of our lives when we can do nothing with his beauty but enjoy it on our way into heaven.” Yes and amen. So, don’t just be a user. Be an enjoyer of what you read. Savor it. Love it. Exult in it.

However, I believe that one of the evidences of the spiritual gift of teaching is that a person can scarcely prevent his mind from taking everything he reads and instinctively, without even trying, asking himself, “How would I say this? How would I say this in my own words? How would I explain this to other people? How would I illustrate it and live it? How does it fit into the framework of my own thought — or does it? Do I need to change my framework?”

This is why I not only index my books, but I keep a little field notebook (that I buy in packs of five from Amazon) beside my chair on my desk. This way, when I get a thought or an idea that stirs me up to think out my own train of thought, I have a place to put it. I have a place to write it down quickly.

There’s something about the mind of a teacher that can’t just hear things or read things and leave them. He’s got to do something with it. So, you can see what a huge impact that’s going to have on how I mark up my books.

Three Things to Index

Now, what goes into those indexes? Here are just a few thoughts.

One: fresh insights into my life or into life in general. My index for a biography of C.S. Lewis, for example, which I just took down from the shelf, has a notation at the front, from page xxiii, where he said, “Without self-forgetfulness, there can be no delight.” That got three asterisks in the margin. It got a notation in the front flap, and I’ve been thinking about it for twenty years. I mean, if that’s true, what an agenda for those of us who are pursuing delight in life. So, fresh insights — we mark them, we note them, we meditate on them, we try to grow into them.

Two: raw facts. If I’m reading a biography, and if I know I’ve got to give a talk about it, or if I want to use it in a devotion, I want to be able to spot birth, conversion, marriage, employment, controversies, death, and impact. That way, when I run my eyes down the front flap, I can get an outline of his life, and quick. I don’t have to go researching all over the place and say, “Now, when did he die? When was he born? When was he converted? When did he get married?”

“Pay attention, be engaged, be an active reader — even if you will never look at these pages again.”

Three: great illustrations, ones that might be useful to giving a striking impression of a viewpoint, even a viewpoint we disagree with. For example, I’m reading a book right now called Biblical Critical Theory. I’m about two hundred pages into it, and on page 196, I wrote a little index in the front about Jean-Paul Sartre on atheism. He said, “Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or without outside himself.” That’s a quote.

Now, I thought, that’s a serious confession from an atheist. It’s out of his mouth, it’s footnoted, and it’s tragic. It’s just tragic, and it will probably make its way into some sermon, article, or book someday. (Though I don’t mean to give the impression, with this idea of indexing, that that’s all I do. I do underline, and I still make comments in the margin, ones like “great” or “baloney.”)

Why Annotate

And yes, I use a pencil, not a pen. Here’s what happened. About thirty years ago, I took a box of used books to Loome Bookstore in Stillwater, Minnesota, to sell them. They would not even look at the books that had marginalia in ink. It was a principle. It was a law. I don’t know all the reasons for it, but that’s one reason.

My main reason is that I am fallible. I make mistakes. I want to go back and erase the word “baloney” because two pages later he explains himself, and I was wrong. It’s not baloney. I don’t want to memorialize my mistake with a pen.

One of the main functions of underlining and marking in the margins is simply to help me pay attention. That’s the big reason for underlining, for me anyway, and for putting notes in the margin: pay attention, be engaged, be an active reader — even if you will never look at these pages again (which is true for most of the pages that I read).

So, I think the main takeaway from this episode, Tony, is this: Know why you read. Know what you are reading right now. Then adapt your markings to fit your purpose.