05/05/2026
Paul Tripp Ministries in a Grace and Knowledge email from a couple of months ago, shared the below wisdom about parenting with mercy. A long read but well worth the time.
This month, I will continue along those same lines. Today’s G&K will be about parenting, but if you don’t have kids, please don’t stop reading! The “right here, right now” gospel message applied to parenting still offers practical wisdom, not exclusively for moms and dads, but for all of us in any human relationship.
In the paragraphs that follow, I’m going to make direct applications to parents and their kids, so if you aren’t raising children, simply substitute another person whom God has placed in your life.
Here’s the thesis: The parent (or any person) who is most convinced that they desperately need mercy themselves will be the one who offers mercy most abundantly to their kid (or another person).
One of the biggest errors Christian parents can make is allowing themselves to forget. If we allow ourselves to forget the daily mercies we receive from our Father’s hands—mercies we could never earn—then it will become easier not to parent with mercy. No parent gives mercy better than one who is convinced that they desperately need it themselves.
Modeling Mercy
Mercy is tenderheartedness and compassion toward someone in need. Our children are just that—needy. They need:
guidance and protection
help and rescue
wisdom and instruction
confrontation and discipline
patience and grace
love and compassion
support and provision
And they need to see God and themselves with accuracy. Because of this, our primary calling as parents is not first to represent God’s judgment, but rather, to constantly deliver his mercy.
Parenting is about making the invisible mercy of God visible as we respond with mercy toward our children. Hebrews 4:14–16 explains to us exactly what this looks like:
“Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” (ESV)
Jesus was willing to subject himself to the hardships of life in this fallen world and to be tempted in all the ways that we are so that he would be an understanding high priest, able to sympathize with our weaknesses. As we reflect on how much we need God’s mercy now, we can reflect on how much we needed the mercy of our parents as we grew up, and we can let sympathy grow in our hearts.
The word for “weaknesses” in verse 15 is used elsewhere in the Bible to refer to various kinds of weakness. Jesus is able to sympathize with the human condition or with our human frailty. Because he can sympathize with us, we can rest assured that he will bless us with mercy tailored to the needs of the moment.
Defining Mercy
Mercy is parenting with a tender heart. Mercy is not taking our children’s failures personally but viewing their struggles with compassion. Mercy is about blessing our children with patience. It is about being as careful to encourage as we are to rebuke. It is about discipline that is kind and correction that is gentle. Mercy is about being firm and unyielding and loving at the same time. It is about refusing to indulge our irritation or our anger.
Mercy is not about being wishy-washy. Mercy is not about letting down our standards. Mercy is not about acting as though the bad things our children do are okay. Mercy does not mean abandoning discipline or correction. Mercy does not mean that we quit holding God’s law before our children. Mercy is not letting one’s children decide what they are not mature enough to decide or control what they are unable to control. Mercy is not about always saying yes and never saying no.
Yet when we parent with mercy, we do not condemn our children with a barrage of harsh words. If we are parenting with mercy, we do not compare our righteousness to our children’s sin, letting them know that their problem is that they are not like us. Mercy means not allowing our hearts to grow bitter or cold. It is about always being ready to forgive, not making our children pay today for the sins of yesterday.
Mercy is about moving toward our children with love, even in those moments when they do not deserve our love. Mercy is about being willing to do things again and again without throwing into our children’s faces the number of times we have had to repeat ourselves.
Here is what mercy means for our parenting: every action, reaction, and response toward our children is tempered and shaped by tenderness, understanding, compassion, and love.
Parenting is a lifelong mission of humbly, joyfully, and willingly giving mercy.
Unnatural Mercy
Here’s the problem: mercy is simply unnatural for me. It is natural for me to be harsh. It is natural for me to be demanding and impatient. It is natural for me to be a bit irritated that I have to repeat myself. It is natural for me to be more upset by the wrongs of others than I am by my own. It is natural for me to want life to be easy and predictable and to be upset with those who get in the way of my plan. It is natural for me to find it more comfortable to have the people around me agree with me rather than debate me.
I am not always compassionate, and I do not always have a tender heart. I do not always respond with love or communicate with grace. I have to confess that there are times when I am a pretty poor representative of God’s mercy. And I am sure that I am not alone in my struggle. How well have we pictured God’s mercy in the way we have responded to our children in the last month? Last week? Yesterday?
So I need help, and I suspect others do too. I do not need to be rescued from the sins, weaknesses, or failures of my children. I have been called to be a parent precisely because of their sins, weaknesses, and failures!
Every moment of the foolishness and failure of our children should remind us of why the heavenly Father provided children with parents. My struggle is not them; it is inside of me. The fact that I struggle to give graciously what has been given graciously to me means that I still need to be rescued from myself. Again, I am sure that I am not alone.
Since responding with mercy in the face of foolishness, immaturity, rebellion, and failure is not natural for us, the only hope for us as parents is that God would look on our failure as parents not with condemnation but with mercy. His mercy toward us provides the only hope that we will have what we need in order to respond with mercy toward our children. And, as we require ourselves to reflect daily on the mercy we are constantly receiving, our own need and gratitude to God for his mercy will soften our hearts and make us more ready and able to give to our children what we ourselves have received from our Father in heaven.
If we forget who we are and what we need, it becomes easier to parent our children without mercy. But God uses the needs of our children to expose how needy we are as their parents, so that we would do all that we do toward them with sympathetic and understanding hearts. God is working on us through our children, so that he can work through us for our children.
We should stop and confess that we regularly lay down concrete evidence of our need for God’s mercy as a parent. But we should also celebrate that this mercy is ours as his children. And we should look for ways to make the invisible mercy of God visible.
Unscheduled Mercy
Here is the problem every parent faces: opportunities to show mercy never align with our predictable, comfortable schedule. They will come when we are in a moment we neither planned nor expected. There will be an argument in the car, a skirmish on the way to bed, a heated debate at the dinner table, an unexpected call from a teacher, the evidence of homework undone, something we have found in our children’s room, a text that we discover on our teenager’s phone, or a late-night refusal to obey.
It is so easy in these moments to throw up our hands in frustration and say or do things that we should not. So it is important to remember this: if our eyes ever see and our ears ever hear the sin, weakness, or failure of our children, it is never a hassle, never an interruption, never an accident; it is always grace. God loves our children and has put them in a family of faith, and he will reveal the needs of their hearts to us so that we can be his tool of rescue and transformation. It is important to see these moments as opportunities of grace and to resist turning moments of ministry into moments of anger.
Angry or Mercy?
Perhaps there is no more important commitment in parenting than owning our anger and seeking God’s help to resist its draw. The things parents say and do in anger are invariably the things they live to regret. There are angry moments I wish I could take out of history and remove from the memory of my children.
For parents, there is probably no more powerful argument for our need of grace than our struggle with irritation, frustration, and anger toward our children. We need to seek God’s help and to commit to resist. For some of us, this means getting out of the room to calm down and pray, if only for a couple of minutes. For some of us, it means that if we are too angry to deal with something, we will either wait until later or look for another opportunity. For some of us, this means confessing when anger has gotten in the way of what God has intended to do through us for our children.
We should start every day by confessing the anger of the previous day and by asking God to give us the grace we need so that our responses to our children will be driven not by the condemnation of anger but by the rescue of forgiveness.
Praying Mercy
Lastly, we must pray, pray, pray. We must pray before, pray during, and pray after. Parenting really is all about praying without ceasing from before our children are born to long, long after they leave the home. It is about constant prayer for God’s grace for ourselves and for them. It is quietly praying for them and for ourselves as they get up, as we make them breakfast, as we are with them throughout the day, or as we send them off to school. Parenting is about praying for your children when you are helping them get an afternoon snack or when you are trying to get them to talk about their day.
It is about praying for them as we instruct, correct, and discipline. It is about moments when our children hear us pray for them and for ourselves. Parenting is about teaching our children to pray. We pray before, during, and after because prayer requires three things: a recognition of God’s position, an admission of our need, and a surrender to God’s plan. When it comes to parenting, we just cannot pray enough. And, the more we pray, the more we confess our limits, the more we rest in God’s power, the more we will be freed from the temptation to do in and for our children what only God can do.
Merciful Psalms
God has called us to be an essential part of his rescue mission in the lives of the children he has given us. But he does not ask us to do what only he can do. So he blesses us with his presence, power, wisdom, and grace. He parents us faithfully so that by his faithful grace we can parent our children faithfully.
In every moment of parenting, the wise heavenly Father is working on everybody in the room. We are blessed to be chosen to go on the mission of missions, and we are blessed with his grace so that every day our parenting would be dyed with the most powerful force of change in the universe: mercy
To conclude, here are just a few verses from the Psalms that remind us of the mercy with which we are blessed every day, so we, in turn, can shower our children with the same mercy that we have received.
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” (Psalm 23:6)
“Blessed be the Lord! For he has heard the voice of my pleas for mercy.” (Psalm 28:6)
“As for you, O Lord, you will not restrain your mercy from me; your steadfast love and your faithfulness will ever preserve me!” (Psalm 40:11)
“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy.” (Psalm 103:2-4)
“The Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made.” (Psalm 145:9)
