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.

I was the healthiest sick person you could’ve met. From my grade school years, I mastered perfect attendance, never missing a minute of school unless I was truly too sick to be in the classroom. Once we moved up to letter grades, the only letter I was satisfied with was “A.” Anything less brought deep disappointment and a strong will to push harder.

In track and field, I studied the technique of the world’s greatest triple jumpers and ferociously hunted down the state records, even with a torn quadriceps muscle. I was also the “good” church boy who went to youth group — though mainly to play basketball, eat pizza, and meet girls. I can even remember our basketball team warming up to one of my rap songs before home games. I had it all together.

Yet my soul was desperately sick. And I had no idea.

‘Why Don’t You Rap About Jesus?’

As a 17-year-old track star with multiple Division I track-and-field offers, and everything going for me in the classroom, God used a new friend to change my eternity. Just after “the merge” of my senior year — when the two local school districts in my county became one single district — I started eating lunch with a kid named Josh. He was a pastor’s kid who had such a deep love for Christian hip-hop that he would preorder nearly every major release at our local Christian bookstore. He heard some of my music and asked a simple question: “If you’re a Christian, why don’t you rap about Jesus?”

“I was the healthiest sick person you could’ve met.”

I was floored. What kind of question was that? I was too cool for Christian rap. I listened to it a little bit during middle school, but it just wasn’t my taste. I responded with a very common response: “Christian rap is corny, and the beats are wack.” The next day, he gave me some CDs from Lecrae, Trip Lee, and Tedashii. As soon as school let out, I slid Lecrae’s After the Music Stops into my car stereo and heard “Jesus Muzik” for the first time. As I listened to this album, I couldn’t help but notice the love Lecrae and the other Reach artists had for Jesus. They had a joy in him that I desperately needed.

Diagnosed — and Healed

One question reverberated in my mind during this season: “Why don’t you know Christ like these guys do?” For years, I had prayed a rapid-fire prayer every night before bed that went something like, “Dear God, thank you for this day. Please forgive me for all my sins. In Jesus’s name, Amen.” Yet my formal, shallow version of Christianity was no match for the real faith I was hearing in these albums.

I realized that I didn’t know God, and if I wanted eternal life, something drastic needed to happen. I didn’t know what else to do besides open my Bible to the red letters and see exactly what Jesus said and how Jesus lived. During that season of life, Jesus spoke these words to me: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:12–13). At the moment that Jesus showed me that I was terminally sick, his healing touch brought me eternal life.

As a 17-year-old boy, I came to abide in the true vine and know true union with Christ (John 15:1–11). As the years progress, I continue to learn what Jesus meant when he said, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full’ (John 15:11).

Ruined Dreams and a Present God

From the outside, my life may have still looked picture-perfect, but the Shepherd of my soul carried me through some trials and taught me how to be joyful in both the day of prosperity and the day of adversity (Ecclesiastes 7:14).

Two years after being saved, Jesus carried me through a torn hamstring that ultimately shattered my track-and-field dreams, a broken engagement after three years of dating, and a shift in my college from premed to sociology. All of this happened within a twelve-month span. So much of my identity suddenly came to a crashing halt. Once again, God was showing me sickness so he could bring deeper healing.

In the years that followed, depression was a stubborn darkness that put my life in grayscale on most days. Anxiety tinged every negative experience and brought an edginess in the few moments when the darkness seemed to lift a bit. Yet God never left me. In fact, he felt nearer to me in those tear-filled nights than I had ever experienced. In the valley of the shadow of death, I felt the gentle rod of correction as God was uprooting my idols (Psalm 23:4), but I also felt the healing balm of the gentle and lowly Savior who wouldn’t break the bruised reed or quench the smoking wick (Matthew 12:20).

In that adversity, I finally understood what Lecrae meant in his song “Grateful” when he rapped,

Lord, I’m lowlyYou chose meTo witness Your glory by being made holyYou know me, my ins and outsYou calm all of my anxieties and end my doubts

For the first time, I felt those lyrics in my soul, and they resonated so deeply.

Desiring Him in Every Season

It was also during that season of adversity that I discovered John Piper’s vision for deep Christ-centered joy. I devoured his teaching and preaching through the sermons, podcasts, and articles at Desiring God, but the depression often consumed me so much that there seemed to be no joy at the end of the tether. I wondered if I was truly saved. I didn’t know if my gnawing stomach pain and aching heart would ever dissipate so I could be enraptured by the joy of Christ. I was fearful that I’d always desire relief from my pain more than joy in God himself.

But God never let me down. Through the books When I Don’t Desire God, Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ, and The Dangerous Duty of Delight, I was given a fresh vision of God-centered joy that would fuel my spiritual life. Rather than merely desiring an escape from the cage of depression and anxiety, I was captured by a more beautiful view of God than I had ever seen. I was captivated by the glory of Christ and the pursuit of infinite joy in him for my complete satisfaction.

I began to see that God could be glorified in my lifelong pursuit to glorify him by enjoying him forever — even in the place of pain and adversity. This isn’t something I’ve arrived at; it’s something that I’m learning day in and day out.

Weakness Is Where I Meet Him

After more than a decade of battling seasons of depression and anxiety, the God-centered God is still giving me joy both on the mountaintop and in the valley. Whether it’s a rough night of sleep, fears about the pandemic, anxiety about impending global war, or the daily struggles of marriage and parenting, I am faced with my weaknesses. And yet, God is teaching me to say with Paul, “I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

“Rather than resisting my weakness, I am learning to commune with God in that weakness.”

No matter the circumstance, I can’t rely on my intellect, athletic ability, skill with words, or any other natural talent I could try to muster up. I’m faced with the joyful reality that God uses me despite the gifts he gave me so that my life can be a true testament to the power of Christ resting upon me. It terrifies me to say this, but I need to be weak. I need to be confronted with my utter helplessness apart from Christ lest I forget the God who brought me out of darkness and into marvelous light. I need it lest I forget to find my confidence and joy in him. A branch cannot bear fruit in itself unless it abides in the vine.

Rather than resisting my weakness, I am learning to commune with God in that weakness. Rather than clinging to self-help strategies to fix me up, I am learning that God is my rock. Rather than living in fear of what may happen tomorrow, I am learning that God gave me a spirit of love, power, and self-control (2 Timothy 1:7). He is teaching me these lessons through the ordinary means of grace. As I exercise the spiritual disciplines, attend corporate worship, receive the Lord’s Supper, and pursue discipleship in the local church, God is teaching me to draw near to him as he draws near to me.

God continues to draw me to himself for true joy. For me, this often requires humbling me in the areas that seem like my strengths. But by tearing them away, he enables me to receive what he is offering to me. For God opposes the proud, but gives grace — and joy — to the humble.

What is the good that makes the gospel good news?

If the present, and especially the future, that the Christian gospel offers is undesirable, unimpressive, boring, bland, and unenjoyable, then how good is the good news? Is it only good in contrast with the active misery and punishments of hell? Or, does the good news positively reflect, and welcome us into, the very heart of the God who is Goodness himself?

At bottom, the good news that stands behind and beneath the Good News is what we might call “the God-centeredness of God.” Our Creator’s “supreme regard to himself” makes possible, solidifies, and guarantees his loving and gracious posture toward sinful creatures who are united to his Son by faith. And perhaps no other good news upholds the very foundation of good in the Good News itself like answering the question, What makes God happy?

Why Did God Create the World?

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), remembered as “America’s Theologian,” authored books, essays, and sermons that have been read for generations, and freshly discovered in recent decades. But given its topic and its quality, Edward’s posthumously published Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World has yet to receive its due. As Stephen Holmes observes, and laments, “there is so little attention paid to this Dissertation in the secondary literature” (God of Grace and God of Glory, 45, note 45), and yet it addresses many of the same challenges we still face today.

Biographer George Marsden recognizes the dissertation as a “counterattack against some of the most prevalent assumptions of modern thought” (Edwards: A Life, 459). Edwards is “attempting to undermine the foundations of what had gone wrong in modern thought” (459) including its “fashionable scheme of divinity,” which still remain in the air we breathe.

In the final paragraph, Edwards mentions his concerns with “our modern free-thinkers who do not like the talk about satisfying justice with an infinite punishment” (God’s Passion for His Glory, 251). We still know the type. And with it typically comes a focus on the love or grace of God that is implicitly, if not explicitly, man-centered. In Edwards’s day, moral philosophers and writers — like Alexander Pope, whose Essay on Man was “the best-known popular expression” — were “increasingly speaking of the deity as a benevolent governor whose ultimate interest must be to maximize human happiness” (Marsden, 460). Edwards countered with the clear emphasis of the Christian Scriptures from beginning to end: the glory of God.

His response was not to reduce or minimize the love of God toward his people — including God’s grace and forgiveness and mercy and goodness — but to locate it properly in the full sweep of Scripture. And in doing so, we find that our God shows us a divine love and favor for his church that does not diminish but grows in the soil of God-centeredness — good news beneath the Good News, guarding the true gospel from the would-be poison of modern man-centeredness.

What Does Reason Teach?

The dissertation contains a brief introduction, to clarify terms, and only two chapters. Chapter 1 considers what human reason alone teaches; Chapter 2, God’s revelation in Scripture.

Reason alone, Edwards concedes, is not enough to make his case, but it can answer objections. Chapter 1 culminates with four objections and his responses — with the fourth being the one he will mention again at the end of the dissertation, and expound upon further in his companion work on The Nature of True Virtue.

What is this fourth objection? It is one that many still feel and voice today: that God’s supreme regard to himself takes away from (Edwards says “derogates”) his goodness and love toward his creatures. If God, goes the objection, “makes himself his end, and not the creatures, then what good he does, he does for himself, and not for them; for his sake, and not theirs.”

Here we are right at the heart of what Edwards means to make plain in this dissertation and in True Virtue: that God’s supreme regard to himself and his genuine love toward his creatures “are not properly set in opposition . . . these things, instead of appearing entirely distinct, are implied one in the other” (God’s Passion for His Glory, 176). Chapter 1 ends with Edwards acknowledging that revelation in Scripture, to which he now turns in Chapter 2, “is the surest guide” and yet “the voice of reason” can be valuable in showing “that what the word of God says of the matter is not unreasonable.”

What Does Scripture Teach?

In the second and longer chapter, Edwards turns to what Scripture teaches concerning God’s ultimate ends in creating the world. Note an important distinction here: that God has one supreme or chief end (singular) in creating the world does not mean that he does not have other ends (plural). Indeed, as Edwards will show from Scripture, God has multiple ultimate or last ends which he finds pleasing in themselves, including loving his people.

Edwards begins (Section 1) with the Alpha and Omega, first and last texts that show God making himself his own last end in creation. Section 2, then, takes a step back to lay out twelve positions for a right understanding of Scripture on this theme. Here he introduces key interpretive principles he will return to in dealing with particular texts in Section 3. For instance, God’s ultimate end in providence also would be an ultimate end in creation. So too would be God’s revealed end in the moral world (ethics), in his providential use of the world, in his main works of providence toward the moral world, in the goodness of moral agents, in what he commands of moral agents, in the goodness of the moral world, in what is sought by exemplary saints, in what is longed for in the hearts of saints in their best frames of mind, and what was sought by Christ. Section 3 then demonstrates that in these many ways God’s ultimate aim is his glory, or importantly, his name.

Section 4 turns to “places of Scripture that lead us to suppose that God created the world for his name, to make his perfections known; and that he made it for his praise.” Now Edwards expands the field of relevant texts to include not only God’s name but also his praise, as well as his perfections, greatness, and excellency which are spoken of like his glory.

Love as End and Means

Section 5 is the heart of the dissertation in addressing the modern question we still hear today: Does God’s supreme regard to himself undermine, and even ruin, his love toward his creatures? Edwards answers with texts of Scripture in which God’s goodness toward the creature (that is, his love, grace, mercy, forgiveness, salvation) is “one thing which God had in view as an ultimate end of the creation of the world.” The ten parts of Section 5 include, first and foremost, that God is pleased, in itself, to do his creatures good — which, he says, “is not merely subordinately agreeable, and esteemed valuable on account of its relation to a further end, as it is in executing justice in punishing the sins of men; but what God is inclined to on its own account and what he delights in simply and ultimately” (220–221). In other words, God genuinely loves his people. He is pleased in itself, not simply in service of his glory, to love them. He truly delights in his people “simply and ultimately.” And he loves them enough not to leave his love unrelated to his great “further end” but to love them both as end and means.

“Does God’s supreme regard to himself undermine, and even ruin, his love toward his creatures?”

So too (Part 2) God is pleased in the work of redemption itself as an ultimate end. Here Edwards visits the love of God, and love of Christ, texts we rehearse often in the modern world: John 3:16; 1 John 4:9–10; Ephesians 2:4; as well as Galatians 2:20; Ephesians 5:25; John 17:19. Edwards even presents Christ’s sacrificial work of “labors and extreme agonies” as satisfying in itself (Isaiah 53:10–11), “not merely as a means, but as what he rejoices and is satisfied in, most directly and properly” (223).

Third, forgiveness and salvation are for the sake of God’s goodness or mercy, meaning for his name. Fourth and fifth, Christ governs the moral universe and the whole creation for the good of his people. Sixth, God judges the wicked for the happiness of his people. Seventh, speaking again of the church (“them who are to be the eternal subjects of his goodness”) “the whole of creation, in all its parts is spoken of as THEIRS” (227). Eighth and ninth, all God’s works are good and merciful to his people, and have been preparing a kingdom and glory for them. Finally (Part 10), related to Christian ethics and the companion dissertation to come on true virtue, the good of men is an ultimate end of moral virtue.

That One Phrase

In Section 6, Edwards draws together the strands of what is meant in Scripture by the glory and name of God. To this point, he has been considering what Scripture speaks of as ultimate ends in creation; now he moves to ask what they are. First, glory of God can (1) refer to what is internal (excellency, dignity, worthiness; great possessions, or fullness of good), or (2) the (external) exhibition or communication of internal glory; or (3) the view or knowledge of God’s excellency (that is, in the sight of the beholder); or (4) signify or imply praise. “Name of God” often indicates his glory, sometimes his praise, and especially is used for the external manifestation of God’s goodness.

In the final Section (7), Edwards argues that the ultimate end of the creation of the world is one (not many), and that one end is best captured as the glory of God. “All that is ever spoken of in the Scripture as an ultimate end of God’s works, is included in that one phrase, the glory of God” — that is, the “true external expression of God’s internal glory and fullness.”

Given how many conceptual threads Edwards has drawn together (glory, name, praise, goodness, grace, mercy, love, Christ, church), we might ask why Scripture contains so many different expressions for one supreme and ultimate end. “It is confessed,” he writes, “that there is an obscurity which is unavoidable, through the imperfection of language to express things of so sublime a nature. And therefore the thing may possibly be better understood by using a variety of expressions” (242). Yet these do amount to “one thing, in a variety of views and relations” (243).

This one thing, to express it afresh yet again, is “God’s internal glory or fullness existing in its emanation.”

Good News: God Loves Himself

Why marshal such energy and focus, 250 years ago or today, to argue something so obvious to most faithful readers of Scripture? Surely, many would say with Holmes, “Scripture is constantly clear that God makes Himself His end” (50).

“Our God seeks our good in seeking his glory — and we seek his glory in seeking our full and final good in him.”

This issue is a watershed, not just then but now, and not just between the contrasting theological instincts of Arminians and Calvinists, but reveals how seriously we take the Scriptures — and how functional they are in our theology and lives. Edwards serves the church in his day, and ours, with his intellect, keen observations, insights, and logic, but most of all with his knowledge of the Scriptures and by compiling into one place, in such short space, the overwhelming testimony of God himself as to what makes him happy and why he does all that he does.

It is profoundly good news that the true God — the God who is and who loves his people — does have “supreme regard to himself” and that his own God-centeredness is not in opposition with his love and mercy, but the very foundation beneath and force behind it. Such a God, who really does make much of us through his goodness and grace, is also such a God who can be our supreme joy both now and forever.

And in an often-overlooked insight in Edwards’s dissertation — which he himself does not nearly make as much of as he could — our joy in such a God not only delights and satisfies our souls, but also glorifies him. In fact, as John Piper, captures it, God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

Our God seeks our good in seeking his glory — and we seek his glory in seeking our full and final good in him.