Parents As Prophets

“Then the Lord said, ‘As my servant Isaiah has walked naked and barefoot for three years as a sign and a portent against Egypt and Cush…” – Isaiah 20:3

It was hard being a prophet. Apparently the job description included giving up clothing and shoes for three years as an object lesson. The prophets brought the intangible, easy-to-brush-off realities of God to the people around them in an extremely palpable, concrete way, even if it caused them extreme discomfort and embarrassment.

Paul Tripp likes to say that the one word that describes parents the most is “ambassador.” Children don’t belong to us. They are God’s possession (Psalm 127:3) for his purpose; we are God’s agents in their lives. “The word that the Bible uses for this intermediary position,” Tripp writes, “is ‘ambassador’… The only thing an ambassador does, if he’s interested in keeping his job, is to faithfully represent the message, methods and character of the leader who has sent him.”

As an ambassador, you find your sense of identity as a parent from Jesus, not from your children. Your work as a parent is not to turn your kids into something, but to represent God and realize you have no power to change them. Your work is motivated not by what you want them to be, but by the potential of what grace could cause them to be. As an ambassador, success is not about working towards a specific catalog of horizontal outcomes, but about being faithful; it’s not about what you’ve produced but what you have done. As an ambassador, you care about your children breaking God’s law, not about the hassle or embarrassment they’ve brought you.

It’s not unlike being an Isaiah, personifying intangible spiritual truths so that they can be seen, heard, touched by the people God has put in your care. It involves an abandonment of your own agendas and preferences at some level. It involves having your own encounters with God. At heart, it involves hearing “whom shall I send?” and responding as Isaiah did: “Here I am! Send me” (6:8).