Christ Frees Parents to Play

The useful part

Listen to Theology Refresh → Most people in the world have no experience of lasting joy in their lives. All of our resources exist to guide you toward everlasting joy in Jesus Christ. If our children had to say what God is like based on how we act toward them, what might they say?

How it works

• Note that the question concerns not "what we teach them" but "how we act toward them" — our typical moods and demeanors, our everyday ways and words, our knee-jerk reflexes and responses.
• And, granted, in a world of sin and death, the Bible shows God's seriousness far more than his playfulness.
• At work, a man may make spreadsheets or manage employees or design building plans.
• At work, he is "project manager" or "software engineer." But at home, he is by turns David and Goliath, Batman and Robin, the gallant knight and the knight's gallant horse.
• Perhaps many of us need to remember how powerful the medicine of parents' laughter is.

What to take from it

At times, I shut down my kids' play or refuse to join them not because they're acting inappropriately but because I'm feeling annoyed. As our children think about ordinary moments in relationship with us, what might they say God is like? "God's glory consists much in the fact that he is happy beyond our wildest imaginations," John Piper writes (The Pleasures of God, 26).

Example or evidence

• At home, he slays dragons and builds castles and shoots arrows.
• One activity offers an especially apt opportunity to embody God's joy: play.
• If we conceive of play as an "imaginative, non-compulsory, non-utilitarian activity" filled with creativity and laughter, then, yes, the living God is a playful God.
• What else accounts for the world we live in, even on this side of the curse?

Details worth keeping

Christ Frees Parents to Play | Desiring God Less fluff. Would they come close to saying, "God is happy"? God intends every parent to be a portrait of his happiness.

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