Discipline is not punishment but involves instruction and correction.
Loving your children enough to discipline them in the truth.
Discipline is not punishment but involves instruction and correction.
Loving your children enough to discipline them in the truth.
The issue of disciplining children has grown in complexity by our societal dogmas. Too many people confuse punishment or consequences for behavior. as discipline. Schools struggle with finding effective methods and are often reacting to the latest societal outcry. And we lack consensus or meaning of the application of discipline. The church fathers like Aquinas, Luther, and Ryle, well, they provide advice based on what the God who created and gifted you the child. And it is a wisdom, strangely unfamiliar.
Ethan:Raising joyful children in an angry world, a podcast dedicated to faithful parents navigating their families through a stormy culture.
Paul:Welcome to Raising Joyful Children in an Angry World. I'm your host, Paul Osborne. The Proverbs tell us that if we love our children, we'll discipline them. But what is discipline? Well, while discipline includes consequences for, let's just call it sinful behavior or rebellious behavior, Discipline is not synonymous with punishment, and too often this is what people mean by the term disciplining our child. Sadly, we get into these lengthy debates about the new school version of timeout versus some old school method, and it leaves us bogged down in tactics, and we miss the mission and the purpose. And almost redefine the entire word of discipline. I suggest to avoid these debates. Just agree that punishment or consequences, which is a portion of discipline, be something that parents prayerfully consider and come to an agreement that they can consistently do it and that it's effective with your children. And it's built on an understanding of what discipline means and understanding of the biblical purpose discipline is both teaching and correction. And we're going to see this in our text, 2 Timothy 3, verse 6. All scripture is given by inspiration of God. And is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness. Discipline has a biblical goal in this text, particularly when we talk about correction. This is a word where we get the word ortho or orthodox or orthodontist, right? We're going to correct and straighten the smile and make it beautiful. The orthopedic surgeon is going to straighten the broken arm and make it beautiful. And when families begin to understand that, These two issues of needing wisdom and needing, parents to work with the Lord in straightening what sin has made crooked, you're going to have a much better understanding. While these behavioral uprisings and these upheavals can be exhausting and they are taxing and they happen too often, they are necessary opportunities to reach the goal. What we talked about in the government of, of our families, we want our kids to learn to trust God. So there, there appears to be two underlying issues. One is our lack of knowledge and the other. It's dealing with the sinful nature of our children. It's something that they have inherited. So we get texts. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Train up a child in the way he should go. When he is old, he will not depart from it. Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, right? The rod of discipline drives it out. And we're seeing in this is a lack of knowledge is needing training. But the other side of this is that all of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. That's out of Romans chapter 5. We, we've heard about the first Adam and how he passed this sin nature down. And so having clarity that there are two issues, uh, two underlying causes in our issues of discipline is important. I want to talk first about the underlying cause of what I would call or what Thomas Aquinas calls rational capacity. This is sometimes hard to grasp in a society that keeps telling you, Oh, your kids are so smart. Oh, yay. They are smart, but being smart means a need to learn. And so what Aquinas does is he breaks childhood into three seven year age groups. And he acknowledges that the ability of children to reason as they are in that first age group. is limited. It needs to grow over time. So some of the behavioral issues are a lack of rational capability. This is not yet developed. The ability to reason, it isn't there. And so, yes, things happen over and over. But if a two year old picks up something that doesn't belong to them, A simple no, that's not yours, and removing is what we do. You may feel better about giving him a long explanation, but there's a lack of rational capacity. And because of that, they're then going to default to their emotional capacity, so we're going to see some tears. And at some point, you gotta get comfortable with some of those tears. That rational talk may make more sense as the child grows older. So, your five, six, seven year old sitting at the table with a taco that's kind of sloppy and you say, hey, you need to learn to eat that over the plate and boom, they get it on their new shirt and it's all over the floor you just cleaned and you're upset about it. But once again, this is a lack of rational capacity. And so a couple of things that we got to come to from this. One is we've got to build rational capacity in terms of their education and in their activities. And as they're learning that, they're also learning to control their emotions. And these are, are really connected. So this may seem obvious, but it is not in the heat of the moment. The trap is believing then that everything is a lack of rational capacity. Or that your children are a blank page and that they can be programmed like a computer or become your story that you're going to write. Aquinas advises that children need to have reason built in their brains and in their minds. So, you know, yeah, we're going to do puzzles and we're going to do these, these, uh, games in the house and we're going to demonstrate how to eat that taco. But, when it comes to the issue of sin, uh, we're going to have to leave Aquinas and we're going to have to move over to Luther. Because we're going to get into the issue of the sin nature of our children. So, we're going to have to remember that the mission of governing our homes, which we talked about in the last episode, is for our children to learn to transfer the trust that they have in us to trusting God. And our discipline has to have this mission particularly in mind as we deal with the sin nature. Yes, your children are created in the image of God. They are uniquely made. But that sometimes can be hard to see when the sin nature comes boiling over. And we are making a classic mistake if we think that we can, through rational teaching, get the will and the rational capacity to overcome that sin. This is why we need to leave Aquinas, and we need to go to Luther's bondage of the will. Which is understanding that we need faith in Jesus to untie and free that soul and that will from the power of sin. J. C. Ryle, in his book, talks about discipline saying, Sympathetically, it's hard to see the sin nature of our kids come out. But accepting it, and dealing with it the way that God deals with our sin nature. is what we need to understand. This is where many Christians, I think, get tripped up. We see the progress of our children's capacity to reason, and we mistakenly believe, and start siding with Erasmus and Pelagius. Those are the guys that argued against Luther and Augustine that it's all up to us, our effort, and power to reason can save us and fix what is broken in our kids, and with just a little more effort. The rationalism of the world leaks into what we call free will theology, decision salvation, and it comes from the world, not the Bible. Our Bible tells us that while we were yet sinners, God died for us, that God loved us first before we loved him, and that we are saved by grace, not of ourselves. The Hebrews could not be set free from Egyptian slavery by figuring out a better escape plan. It took the miraculous power of God. And so grasping this spiritual battle for the soul of the nature that cannot be fixed with lectures and reasoning is what the Reformation reclaimed from the church that was trapped in the Middle Ages and the idol of reason. This recognition that we are dealing with a nature that can only be made straight by the Lord Himself is why apostolic confessing churches You may come to a different conclusion on this sacrament, but it was seen as a parental dependence on God infusing grace to battle the sin nature. I don't want to get into the battle over sacraments or debating about baptism, but any conclusion that what is crooked in the souls of kids can be made straight. By just better parental coaching or knowledge or anything apart from the mysterious saving work of Jesus Christ is going to be futile. God has a relationship with your child. He loves your child. But we are not going to be able to impose our will and our reason on them. We are going to need to ask God to turn their hearts to trusting Him. And to have their wills untied from sin and discover their purpose in the kingdom. Now what is our role? Well again, back to the text. All scripture is given. By inspiration of God, it is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. The God breathed word corrects us. It means literally to make straight, and the purpose of our discipline then is to make straight what has been broken. And so we're going to talk about the scriptures and teach our children the scripture because this God breathed word is going to be instrumental in dealing with the sin issue. It's also going to be instrumental in dealing with wisdom as well, what will happen is some people start to argue, but isn't this teaching of scripture, doesn't it involve reason? Well, yes, of course it does, but it's not a reason that is. Untouched by the mystery of God, Jesus tells us of people back in Capernaum who hear but do not understand, who see but do not comprehend. Remember, the people of Capernaum, he said, if if the signs and miracles that were done in front of you had been done in Sodom and Gomorrah. That city would still be here. See, we need our heart to trust what we are hearing, and that is the work of grace by the Holy Spirit. So this, I think, is what I would call the parental code of discipline. One, is this a sin or is this a lack of rational capacity? It's not always easy to see, particularly in the heat of the moment, but that's the first thing we've got to understand. If it's sin, we're going to have to meet the child and show them the mirror of the law of God. We're not going to sugarcoat sin. So if you lie, we're going to tell you, you lied. If you took something that didn't belong to you, we're going to tell you, you stole something. If you dishonored your parents, we're going to tell you, you broke the commandment of honoring your mother and father. And there are consequences for those sins and it must be consistent. And then there has to be redemption from this sin via the confession and repentance that we lead them through in the God breathed word. And once we come to terms with this, that sin's going to happen. It's just going to happen. That we're going to tell our kids the truth, that we're going to deliver an appropriate punishment or correction. And that it is designed to straighten and make beautiful what sin has made crooked. That our consistency is going to teach them to trust us. So that they can count on us to say, hey, I love you too much to engage in sugar coated, no judgment. No consequences. You're not that bad. God's not that mad. Nonsense of the world. We're not going to fall for that stuff and let them keep plowing ahead into destruction. We're not going to believe that they will outgrow the sin nature by increasing rational capacity. We are deploying a discipline structure built by the Word. Here's the benefit of this. This is a huge benefit that I think people miss. Once the spiritual part of your child begins to be quickened by this truth and we start to transfer the trust that is initiated with a healthy fear of God, not only does wisdom begin, our children then transfer their fear of men. Also known as peer pressure and society, and we start transferring that to the fear of God in a healthy way. Learning to trust and fear God inoculates us from the fear of society, of people, and of rejection, and all that junk, that social peer pressure that messes us up. How did Stephen face the stoning? How did Paul face imprisonment? How did Luther face the death threat of the papacy, the most powerful man in the world, threatening to kill him? They had such a trust in God, so deeply immunized to the fear of men, that they were willing to trust God and had less anxiety towards the world. So let me close with this. This past weekend, Barron's, which is a financial investment publication connected to the Wall Street Journal. It's all about stocks and bonds and investments. It had a story by Megan Lenhart about the high levels of unhappiness, fear, and anxiety. among young Americans. Now this isn't psychology today, this article was largely about the potential impact it could be to the economy and the financial world. Barron's does not write about stuff like this until it reaches the concern high enough to start to influence the investment community. But the information reported was similar to what we talked about in Why We Are Restless by the Furman professors Ben and Jenna Story. The researchers were uncertain of the cause. Perhaps it was COVID or social media, which seems to be the new demon that everything wrong is blamed on. Correlations as causations are always risky. But the current generation of 20 somethings is a generation with the smallest education in Christianity in our nation's history. It has the smallest percentage of its population that attends church. Faith to many of this age is something they have been taught to approach as a skeptic. A generation that was flooding athletic fields on Sunday, churched at best on Christmas and Easter, and rarely catechized if at all. With no fear of God and is afraid of Everything else under the sun. An honest look at America's young adults should be driving us to fill our Sunday schools and our churches with young families. The church fathers would tell us stop mining for blame in the caverns of social media. And point the hearts of our kids to God, the only God, Jesus that loves them. God the Father who promises to parent them in ways that we can't. And the Holy Spirit who fills their hearts with trust and joy and wisdom. This is the goal of discipline. The ultimate battle for the heart and soul is a fight for identity. Our king invites our kids to know who they are, what to believe, and where they belong. Until next time, let's remember the words for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.