The Parenting Manual
by Drenda Keesee
When children are trained up in God’s system, they don’t want to go anywhere else. It’s a good system! God is good! The problem is, who knows how to train a child up?
My son-in-law jokes, “They didn’t come with a manual, did they?”
God did give you a manual for parenting…
…and that’s His Word.
Your children are supposed to be mentored, and that means “consistent pressure.” It’s kind of like weeding your garden. You watch over it and pull out the weeds. You grow and water it, anticipating the fruit it will have. That is what training is about. It’s not as much what you say as what you do. We have to be aware that God has given us the responsibility to raise our families because His plan depends on it.
The family is so important to God that He says if you can’t get that right, you can’t stand up to your potential. In fact, the apostle Paul says, “The overseer must be above reproach . . . He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?” (1 Timothy 3:2–5 esv). In other words, Paul says a person is disqualified if they can’t take care of their family. If they can’t manage the responsibility of their family, they can’t handle anything beyond that.
And if some-body who can’t take care of their own family does take on more, he is going to spread the dysfunction in his home to others. Being a perfect parent is not the point the point is that God wants us to know how He designed families to operate. And for many of us, our prosperity, our direction, and the assignment on our lives are held in check until God can trust us with our family and His destiny plan. God is training parents while they are training their children. The world is not going to teach you how to train up your family or how to be a good husband or a wife. The world doesn’t have a clue! We live in a world of selfishness. People have no understanding of sacrifice or what it means to do things righteously, unless they learn it from God and your example.
~Drenda
ps…Are you looking for a good church? Be sure and listen on Saturday evening or catch the 3 services on Sunday for Faith Life Church!
*Excerpt From The Book “The New Vintage Family” by Drenda Keesee
Drenda Keesee’s contagious zeal and humorous personal experiences help make her ministry of spiritual, emotional, and relational wholeness one that will bless your life and spark a new fire in your spirit.
A wife of over 30 years and a mother of five children, Drenda has ministered at churches, seminars, and conferences, and through the mediums of television and radio, for more than 20 years.
Her books, The New Vintage Family, Better Than You Think, and She Gets It are available wherever books are sold. In these heartfelt books, Drenda shares her personal journey and the life lessons that have brought her to where she is today, as well as practical answers that all people need to live a joyful life.
Drenda and her husband Gary founded Faith Life Now, a ministry designed to spread the message of freedom in the areas of finances, faith, marriage, and family. Tune in for their weekly messages here. Faith Life Now hosts conferences worldwide and sponsors both Fixing the Money Thing, which Drenda co-hosts with her husband Gary and Drenda.
Through their own life experiences, the Keesee’s have found the principles from God’s Word to be powerful and effective. At one point, Drenda was a young, suicidal feminist with no hope of ever being “good enough” for her own standards of perfection. She never wanted the “inconvenience” of a husband or children, and she was on her own path to success. But the stress of trying to achieve perfection and perform for love left her broken and used. She had success, but it was nothing compared to the pain and loneliness it had also brought.
That’s when God got a hold of her heart. It was there—at her lowest point—that she found the One who accepted and loved her, faults and all. Since that transformation, Drenda has had a passion to reach women who find themselves where she once was.
She married Gary after attending college, and there she found herself in a personal boot camp of sorts. She says, “I cried and told God, ‘I can do anything but be a wife and mother.’” She committed to learning how to do it God’s way. Through the many years of raising their children and struggling to make ends meet, Drenda learned from their mistakes. “I didn’t know how to be a wife and mother, but God saved our marriage, taught us how to parent our children for success, showed us how to have financial success, and then the irony of all ironies, He called us to ministry.” It’s truly because of these life experiences that Drenda can now share so many insightful principles for people who are now going through the same struggles.
