Understanding & finding purpose as parents

Every man, and indeed the women that would walk with them (as a helpmeet/wife), must find the purpose for which they were born, the giftings that God has equipped them with towards accomplishing that purpose, and commit to a life that is given to daily refining that talent to birth the skillful precision that yields impact.

For every person that has been called to the higher purpose, indeed we all have been called, when the purpose is not known, understood, and pursued as the only course our lives must follow, we live the life of the mediocre. Profiting nothing and no one. Our "great" is crucified on the cross of the many just "good enough" we pursue. This is not God's will for us, His will is for us to administrate the earth on His behalf, establishing His will and counsel across the face of the earth. The Bible speaks concerning us:

"Your duty is to deliver the poor and the powerless; liberate them from the grasp of the wicked. But you continue in your darkness and ignorance while the foundations of society are shaken to the core! Didn’t I commission you as judges, saying, ‘You are all like gods, since you judge on my behalf. You are all like sons of the Most High, my representatives.’ Nevertheless, in death, you are nothing but mere men! You will be laid in the ground like any prince and you will die.”

Psalms 82:4‭-‬7 TPT

Furthermore, we understand that the story of our salvation is the story of purpose; God's purpose for the earth is wired through the restored man (the Christus). Our purpose in life is to discover the intersections of God's eternal purpose that our lives close up.

We are overseers, stewards, and managers of God's eternal purpose for the earth from one generation to the next. Beginning with our lives, the people God will have us serve, support, or mentor. Our roles will change over time but the centrality of who we are must be stabilized on the foundation of God's purpose for our lives. To fully understand our purpose as individuals and as parents, there must be the discovery of

who we are. Who we are speaks to our identity, who God says we are!

• IDENTITY: Then a voice said from heaven, “This is my own dear Son, with whom I am pleased.” Matthew 3:17 GNB. Jesus's identity will first be established by the Father before, He begins the purpose of His life. The first thing the enemy will do when God reveals your identity to you will be to create an identity confusion in your heart like he did with Eve in the bible - Gen. 3:5, if he succeeds, your purpose and your life's trajectory are defeated.

• Where Eve failed, Jesus triumphed; the enemy would escalate from identity confusion to attempting to make you doubt your God-given identity and offer promises he has no power to fulfill all in a bid to steal your identity. A consolidated sense of who we are in Christ helps us navigate our pathway through purpose and does lead to a life of impact.

What is our identity? Eph 2:10. "We are God's workmanship created in Christ to do good works which God purposed from time"

Who are you? Born of God in Christ to replenish the earth, be fruitful, and multiply. Born of God in Christ and called to abide in Him, letting His word transform us into fruits that yield by His Spirit, fruits that abide (biological or spiritual, our fruits must abide to reproduce after God's kind). We are His workmanship created for good works in our homes, community/work, and the church. We have been called to a life of productivity. When we know who we are, we begin the journey of discovering our purpose.

PURPOSE: our purpose is good works in Christ in whatever field God has planted us. His desire is that we produce fruits that endure; the fruits of our bodies must endure in God. We are here to represent God to our world, giving essence as the salt of the earth and shining His righteousness as lights.

General and Specific purposes

• General purposes involve direct works for kingdom manifestation and growth; preach the word, heal the sick, deliver the oppressed, and set the captives free. It speaks to our daily walk as Christians commissioned by God to reconcile the world to Him by sharing the gospel of the kingdom.

• Specific purposes refer to our individualized expressions such as touching governmental exchanges in the physical or spiritual realms depending on where God has positioned us individually. This is our expressed callings that we have been crafted and gifted to manifest in ways that strategically manifest God and His kingdom. Daniel was an administrator yet a priest of God. Paul was a lawyer later called to ministry such that he had to have a career shift to be better positioned to fulfill his calling. Aquilla and Priscilla were entrepreneurs strategically placed to minister to their industry. Specific purposes refer to the works we have been gifted to profit from and impact our world.

We must discover who we are, what God sent us to accomplish, and where He would have us set up a house. Purpose sometimes may not have glitz, it essentially has only function and use. Every other thing is based on perceived value for the maker-user.

In the account of the temptation of Jesus, satan would offer Jesus the good of the world, however, Jesus had a sound superior understanding to know that "good" is not what serves Purpose, it is an alignment with intent to function and use that serves Purpose. In other words, the glory satan offered was good but not functional or fit to use; it was not aligned with the Maker's intent and would offer no value to Him as far as Jesus was concerned; He was always conscious of His Purpose!

Today, Jesus is valuable to us as God's children because His life was synched to the purpose for which God had created Him!

Until there is an alignment between my life and His purpose, I have short-changed my world and cannot be said to have made any impact. Impact, is not measured in evidentiary magnitude but that the need that existed prior to and warranted your coming is fulfilled.

It is the way of the world to seek the good, glitzy, "promised great" for all things. Which a lot of times never turns up that way. As God's children, we must give ourselves to the discovery of the purpose we have been created to serve in Christ; only then can our lives offer true value to our world. And as parents, we must also help our children discover this truth from a young age and guide them to pursue it before they become corrupted by the bandwagon infection that keeps men mediocre.

The Purpose of Parenting

First, kingdom parenting is for sons and daughters who have found themselves and their place in the Fatherhood of God. They are stable men and women who have been parented and are in the process of being groomed into maturity in Christ. Some inherent purposes of kingdom parenting include:

1. Fruitfulness, multiplication, and replenishing of the earth - Gen 1:28

2. Familial leadership: Abraham will lead/guide his family after God - Gen 18:19

3. Raising Godly seeds - Malachi 2:15

4. The transmission of kingdom culture through discipleship - John 17: 6-12

5. For the continuation of legacy: one generation will testify to the next. In the book of John, Jesus prayed to the Father, stating how He kept the disciples, giving them all the Father gave Him so they would become one with the Father. When He would leave, He left behind men who had fully become Him. That the disciples were called Christians at Antioch was not by chance but a deliberate work of Christ to reproduce Himself in a people that will continue the legacy of manifesting God's kingdom on the earth. Similarly, parenting is the extension of that genealogy initiated by Christ.

Parenting is disciples raising other disciples for God within the context of family.

When we fully understand this, we are more deliberate about how we live before our children and what we expose them to. Is my home the church where His word reigns? Are my children being discipled for God and indoctrinated in truth?

Parenting becomes easier when its purpose is understood and pursued with intentionality. There are specific outcomes we must seek from our role as parents "that our children will come into the fullness of maturity in the faith: "This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ. Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching". We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church."

Ephesians 4:13‭-‬15 NLT