Daly Focus Blog
Week ending July 13:
Sharing God’s Big Love with Little Lives (by Jean Thomason)
The 10 Best Decisions Every Parent Can Make (by Bill Farrel)
Letters from My Father’s Murderer (by Laurie Coombs)
From Anger to Intimacy (by Dr. Gary Smalley and Ted Cunningham)
Raising Kingdom Kids (by Tony Evans)
Parenting Your Powerful Child (by Kevin Leman)
Growing Kids with Character (by Hettie Brittz)
Kingdom Marriage (by Tony Evans)
The First 9 Months (by Vicki L.
Week ending July 3rd:
Growing Kids with Character (by Hettie Brittz)
Parenting Your Powerful Child (by Kevin Leman)
Happily Ever After (by Ginger Kolbaba)
Unoffendable (by Brant Hansen)
Kingdom Marriage (by Tony Evans)
Doing Good Is Simple (by Chris Marlow)
Raising Kingdom Kids (by Tony Evans)
Making Happy (by Les & Leslie Parrott)
Through the Eyes of a Lion (by Levi Lusko)
The Children’s Illustrated Bible (by Selina Hastings)
ESV Economy Bible
A Lifelong Love (by Gary Thomas)
Miracle in Shreveport (by David & Jason Benham)
Enjoy!
The Independence Day holiday evokes warm memories for many of us. From firework shows to backyard family celebrations, July 4th is a seasonal high point. I hope you and your family have fun plans for tomorrow.
In that spirit of nostalgia, I wanted to share a poignant essay penned by my friend and colleague, Joel Vaughan. Joel, who serves as our chief of staff, recently lost his mother. A few years earlier they said goodbye to his father.
Is your child a rosebush?
A palm tree?
A pine?
How about a boxwood?
God wires our children with unique personality types. The nuances can be quite diverse, but they’re also finite to the point where a model of four personality types can explain them.
There’s power in personality. It’s a window into a child’s soul that parents can look through to see their hearts and to know how to lead them forward through life.
Hettie Britz is an author, a speaker, and one of the foremost voices in parenting advice from a biblical perspective in South Africa.
By: Ashley Durand
Everyone said marriage would be hard.
But our first year of marriage wasn’t hard in predictable ways.
Sure, there were little adjustments here and there, tiny conflicts like agreeing on how much to budget for groceries or what time to go to bed. But we had a lot of fun together, laughed constantly, and loved each other more every day. We led small group and kids club at church, and felt God’s hand of blessing.
Luis Palau is one of the most well-known evangelists in the world. And yet, for many years, while he stood in front of stadiums of people and witnessed thousands respond to his call to receive Jesus, his own heart was aching for his son, Andrew, who had turned away from God.
Luis and his wife, Patricia, saw him moving in the wrong direction, and they did everything within their power to guide him back. But there came a point, Andrew says, “where I had wandered so far away from God that all they could do was have faith.
Do the headlines and circumstances of the world sometimes get you down? Do they irritate and frustrate you? From the border debate to the ongoing political wrangling on various other issues, we exasperate easily, don’t we?
My friend Dr. Tim Keller, the former senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, once preached a sermon on “The Christian’s Happiness.” He used Romans 8:28-30 as the basis for his message.
I think his three main takeaway points will encourage anyone regardless of where they find themselves emotionally.
The controversy at the southern border continues to churn. Like many of you, I’ve been following its many twists and turns, straining to gather reliable information and, at times, struggling to separate the fact from the fiction. There is a lot of bad and biased information out there. To be sure, emotions are running high on both sides, a consequence of the very real human concern and the highly partisan nature of our times.
As I’ve previously indicated, separating children from their parents can be harmful and traumatic.
Why do kids misbehave?
Dr. Kevin Leman offers these 3 reasons:
Attention-getting
Power
Revenge
He says the strong-willed child has been given a bad rap. We want our kids to be strong-willed. When the world tells them, “Do everything we do,” we want our son or daughter to know right from wrong and to have the conviction to stand for it.
What you don’t want, Dr. Leman says, is the “powerful child.” They have an agenda.
My dad had a bad habit of breaking his promises. So when I was 11, and our trip to a Dodgers baseball game almost fell through, I thought for sure it would be just one more disappointment in a long line of them.
We were running late that day, and we just barely missed the bus to the stadium. Honestly, I figured my dad would do what he had always done in circumstances like that: offer a weak apology and take us home.
Jim Daly is a husband, father and President of Focus on the Family and host of its National Radio Hall of Fame broadcast. His blog, Daly Focus, is full of timely commentary and wisdom designed to help you navigate and understand today’s culture. His latest book is Marriage Done Right.
