Unless the Lord Builds the Family | Psalm 127
How many of you are expert parents? Me neither. I’m always hesitant to preach on parenting because I don’t know what I am doing either and my kids are still in the house and the cake is not baked yet. Pew research found that 4 out of 10 parents say that being a parent is tiring and stressful. The other 60% are liars. Any parents of kids under 6 years old? The Department of Labor found that on average mother spent 7.5 hours and father spent 5.3 hours per day with their children under 6 years old. It is a full-time job. A study found on average each new parent loses 109 minutes of sleep every night for the first year after having a baby. Having children can cause sleep deprivation. This is why we age, rapidly after having kids. If you are tired, frustrated, exasperated or weary in parenting, you are not alone, but the good news is that God has principles and promises that we can rest on as we parent the next generation.
Psalm 127 is written by Solomon. It is a wisdom psalm. In history, it was sung or read over every Jewish baby born and it is a psalm of ascent that would be sung every year by pilgrims going up to the temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. If you know about Solomon, he was a king, a builder, and the wisest person to ever live, but his family was jacked up. Later in life, he took his eyes off of God. If you think about it, there are not many great examples of parenting in the Bible: Adam and Eve had one kid kill another kid. Even Jesus’ mother and brothers wanted to Baker Act him. Yet, God still has principles for parenting. Where God’s principles and ideals are not realized, God’s grace abounds and gives us hope. This Psalm teaches us to depend upon the grace of God as we steward the gift and realize the goal of raising a family.