Parenting Teens - August 27, 2012

Day 11 - Love Languages

Parenting Teenagers

Teenagers needs the confidence that comes from knowing they are loved. Their behaviour often acts like a gauge showing how full of love their internal “emotional tank” is. Today, we introduce the concept of the five love languages as a way of expressing love to our teenagers in order for them to feel loved.

Our teenagers’ greatest need is to feel loved and accepted during this enormous transition in their lives a time of: • self- discovery • pushing for independence • much self-questioning • peer pressure

they can experience a lot of self-doubt and feel awkward and unlovable • confidence rests on: • security (knowing they are loved) • self-worth (knowing they are of value) • significance (knowing there is a purpose to their lives) • seek to keep their emotional tank" full of lOVE: • their behavior acts like the gauge to show how full of love they feel

Knowing that they are loved and accepted enables them in the long-term: • to resist peer pressure when they need to • to make good choices • to build close relationships

Discovering how our teenagers feel loved
discover the primary way each teenager feels loved, whether it's through: • time • words • touch • presents • actions

(see Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages of Teenagers) • importance of a particular love language may have changed as a child has grown older

Question:
Which of the five ways of expressing love was most important for you during your upbringing?

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We explore the idea that God reveals himself to us, rather than being something for us to find.

Slide6Amazingly, God does want us to know him.

That is incredible, because God is much bigger than we can ever completely know and describe, yet he wants to know us.

Since God is the creator, and was around before us, God is not something out there for us to discover…or for us to make up.

If that was God, and we could completely understand God as a result, then God would not be worth following, knowing, etc. because he is no different from us… just another part of this world.

Instead, God is someone who chooses to reveal himself to us on his own terms.

Like the privacy settings on Facebook, that give someone control over how much they reveal about themselves, to what kind of people, God has chosen to reveal some very public things to the world at large, and some more intimate details to his friends.

We can see this public profile in the world around us, no matter what we believe – there is evidence of God.

There is a lot of goodness in our world, generosity and charity, that we don’t see in the rest of the animal world, and isn’t the way things seem to naturally behave without outside influence.  We can also see beauty in creation, beautiful people doing beautiful things.  We can see fascinating advances in technology, science, medicine, etc. that all reflect the goodness, reason and beauty of God.  The goodness in each other, despite our more primitive tendencies.

But God also reveals more of himself, through relationships with his children.

God specifically enters our world in sometimes dramatic ways.  He shows himself in miracles, visions, speaks through prophetic messages.  This can be God’s way of speaking in world, the Bible is filled with stories of God making himself known to people.

He did this most completely, most powerfully, most decisively in Jesus.  We’ll talk more about that in future weeks.

But God has revealed himself in the world in a particular way through the Bible.  Christians believe God is speaking through the words of the Bible.  Among other things, the Bible describes those times in history that God has been revealed in creation and in relationships.

 

If God wanted to get through to your personality type, how would he communicate?