The Bible Study Podcast, episode 173. Today, the Bible Study podcast is going to do something

different new. We're going to start a study on parenting that I'm calling fruitful parenting.

Welcome to the Bible study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen. I had some internal debate with

myself as I thought about doing this study because clearly some of you are not about to start

parenting. Some of you are finished with parenting, or at least your children are grown. Some of you

are children yourself. I actually know that one of the youngest listeners that I'm aware of is eight years old for this show.

So the reason that I decided to do it is, one, is that parenting is a specific role within a wide responsibility of the church to leave a legacy.

And so a lot of the things that we look at within the specifics of parenting apply to all of us at whatever age.

And two, and that's what we're going to focus on in this episode, I believe that there are some

aspects and attributes of God that we can only understand within the context of the parenting relationship.

We're going to look at more Bible verses in detail in the other episodes, but we're not going to

look at quite as many this time. This is going to be a little more personal, a little more

storytelling than usual. But notice, if you will, that when the disciples ask Jesus

to teach them to pray, he starts this way,

our Father, who art in heaven. Now, the Old Testament says that humans, you and I, are created in

God's image, male and female, he created them. And so we know that God is not a man with a physical body sitting up in

heaven. We know that God is a spirit, and those who worship him, worship him in spirit and truth,

we're told elsewhere. But there is something about that relationship, that parenting relationship, and specifically in the Lord's Prayer, the fatherhood relationship, where Jesus is trying to inform us of something about the attributes of God.

And he's using that language to inform us.

Two stories for you about parenting and the Christian faith.

The first one, we had a pastor and a friend of mine who told me when he was about to have their first child, or his wife was doing most of the work, when his wife was pregnant, that he was not going to do what he heard many other pastors do.

He was not going to use his he heard many other pastors do. He was not going to

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