"He also had gone down and killed a lion in the midst of a pit on a snowy day."
II Samuel 23:20The lions that oppose your destiny
will not defeat themselves.
The account in Scripture is brief. Only one sentence is used to depict the powerful demonstration of courage displayed — and yet it is the type of story out of which legends are formed. Benaiah, one of David's mighty men, chose to battle the fiercest of foes on the most extraordinary of battlefields: in a pit on a snowy day.
It begs the question — why? What would possess someone to go toe-to-toe with the likes of a lion? Benaiah decided to play offense against this potential threat rather than allowing it the opportunity to disrupt his future by preying on things that were most valuable to him.
While most of us will never engage in such a battle with a physical beast, we must each ask ourselves how to defeat the internal lions that seek to defeat us. Lions like:
If these lions are left unchecked in our lives, they become threats to our ability to fulfill our destiny. As each battle brings us one step closer to victory, we must decide that our future, our calling, our family, and our ministry are worth the fight. And day by day, as we defeat each lion, we grow closer to achieving the plans God has in store for us.
The stage is set. Get ready to battle the beast.
"Your future, your calling, your family — they are worth the fight."
Order Your Copy →Book by Darin Sargent
Parenting with Purpose
Five Foundations for Shaping the Next Generation
Darin Sargent
Coming Soon"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it."
Proverbs 22:6
About the Book
You are not just raising children.
You are shaping the next generation.
Time moves faster than you think. The shoes that once cluttered your hallway will be gone before you're ready. The voices that called out in the night will grow quiet. And what you built — or didn't build — into your children during the ordinary, unhurried moments of daily life will be what they carry into everything that comes next. Parenting with Purpose is not a manual for perfect parenting. It is a call to intentional parenting — and there is a difference. Drawing from the final words of Moses in Deuteronomy, from the honest reality that Scripture gives us no perfect family models, and from decades of lived experience as a husband, father, and minister, Darin Sargent builds a case for the most important work any parent will ever do: shaping a soul. Built on five foundations — Loving, Learning, Living, Leading, and Launching a Legacy — this book moves from the bedrock of unconditional love that forms identity, through the daily rhythms of teaching and modeling, all the way to the moment every parent must face: releasing the arrow you have spent years shaping into a future you may never fully see. This is the book for the parent who is knee-deep in the long days and can't yet see the short years. For the parent who has made mistakes and wonders if it's too late. For the parent who grew up without a model and is building something from scratch. And for the parent who simply wants to be more than a good provider — who wants to be a faithful discipler of the life God placed in their hands. You are not just raising children. You are raising arrows. And in the hands of a purposeful parent, an arrow is destined to fly further than you ever could.
Parenting with Purpose is a call back to what matters most.
You don't have to be a perfect parent. You have to be an intentional one.
"The greatest threat to the next generation is not the culture around your children. It is the forgetfulness within your home."