The Limit of Grace

I often wonder how far grace should go as a parent. After reading Isaiah 5 I think I might have gotten a better picture of how the Lord parents.

The Lord speaks through Isaiah telling us about His beloved - His son Jesus. His Son Jesus built a beautiful vineyard, He put in the best of everything.

My beloved had a vineyard
on a very fertile hill.
2 He dug it and cleared it of stones,
and planted it with choice vines
he built a watchtower in the midst of it,
and hewed out a wine vat in it;

I have read that the Lord provided a fertile hill .. as a parent we would provide a good, strong healthy environment for our family to grow.

For our families the fertile soil would be full of the goodness of the Lord. We would have accepted His love for us, we would be full of His mercy because we would understand our own sinful condition and the eternal plan that the God of the universe had put into place so that we could be redeemed by the sacrifice of Jesus. As a result of that revelation to our soul we would be exhibiting our own good fruit   - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control.
That would be a fertile land for our children to grow in.

Next Isaiah told us that the beloved dug it and cleared it of stones. As we parent we will work the soil of our children's hearts .. we will cultivate an understanding of God and His sovereignty, teaching them their place in the eternal plan of God and we will show them the Word of God - His holy standard. Recently, I read an excerpt from a John Piper statement that spoke about how we are to relate the Word of God to our children.

… the Bible will be the sun in the solar system of all that we teach our children. It will not be one among many books. It will be the central book, the all-permeating book. The other books are dark planets; the Bible is the light-giving sun. All other books will be read in the light of this book. 

All books will be judged by this book. All books will find meaning in the worldview built by this book. Which means that this book must be known first and known better than all the other books.”

That standard will be the tool to help us remove the stones and obstacles to growth in the Lord. It is with His Holy Word that we will build and then plant. It is His Word that will be the seed for our family's vineyard.

The seeds that are planted in their souls are the seeds that will grow. In John Piper's statement he is referring to a comparison of  books to the Bible, that other books will be judged by the truth of the Bible so and it goes to reason that he is referring to any knowledge as well. We have many different kinds of knowledge. For instance their is knowledge regarding relationships and our social world, there is an academic kind of knowledge, there is a spiritual knowledge. Those knowledge will only have it's value in it's relation to the truth we find in God's Word.
The hearts of our family will be planted as we growc. The example the Lord has shown us in Isaiah is the beloved using only the best seed. As our days go by we can be like His beloved and choose only the best seed for our children.