How to Exasperate Your Children

Erik Raymond

The reality of submitting your life to Jesus, and living under his authority has massive implications. When you become a Christian, all of your relationships are redefined by your relationship with Jesus.

In Ephesians 2-3, we see that people who had substantial personal differences because of the color of their skin or their country of origin were to be set aside in light of their shared relationship in Christ. Being a Christian takes priority. Now in God’s family, we are to be loving, gentle, forgiving, and gracious to one another. Later in Ephesians 5, marriage gets a facelift. A Christian marriage should look much different from other marriages in the world around us. This is because of the relationships the husband and wife have with Jesus.

But this isn’t all. Even the relationships between parents and children are different. They don’t march according to the drumbeat of the world around us but rather according to the tune of heaven. We salute the King, even in our parenting. When the gospel comes to the home, there are changes. God gives specific instructions for the family to reflect his authority. In verses 1-3, instructions for children. And in verse 4, instructions for parents.

Notice in verse 4 that it’s addressed to fathers. The word translated here as “fathers” is the common word for father. (Although, in Hebrews 11:23, it is used to describe both parents.) In light of the revolutionary and counter-cultural way Christian dads were to treat their kids, it is likely addressed to fathers to make the point about their accountability to God and the need for something different to take place.

He says, in Ephesians 6:4: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”

Pretty straight-forward, don’t do this, do that. In this article let’s think about what not to do. Do not provoke your children to anger. The word here translated “provoke” has the sense of exasperating, instigating, or inciting. It’s the idea of pushing the children’s buttons and getting under their skin. Calvin says parents mustn’t “irritate their children by unreasonable severity.” In a parallel passage in Colossians 3, we read, “Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.”

Don’t exasperate your kids, lest you discourage them.

How can you exasperate your children? Here are 11 ways.

1. Bullying: Parents are generally bigger, stronger, and more intelligent than their kids. Combined with the authority of parenting, this could be wielded with harsh and intimidating words that greatly discourage children.

2. Showing favoritism: If parents favor one child over another discouragement is inevitable (think about Jacob and Esau).

3. Question their salvation every time they mess up: Saying, “Are you even a Christian?” when your kids do something wrong will reinforce the (erroneous) view that Christians never do anything wrong and that the gospel is not for them.

4. Unclear standards: Kids need to know and understand the standards they are being held to. If not, then they’ll be confused, surprised, and discouraged.

5. Unexplained discipline: Discipline requires instruction. Even in Ephesians 6:4, there is a don’t do this and a do this. There is a need to explain what is right and what is wrong.

6. Inconsistency: Parents need to be consistent with their kids. If something is wrong on Tuesday, it should be wrong on Thursday. Inconsistency sends mixed messages, and, when punished, they lose trust.

7. Excessive or unreasonable discipline: Just as there are levels of rebellion, there should be corresponding levels of discipline. Also, parents can’t discipline for every single thing that the child does that is wrong. (Otherwise, they would never stop correcting.) Be careful of punishing too often or excessively. Discipline should be reasonable.

8. Discipline out of anger: Parents who are out of control and losing their temper will hurt their children and discourage them. Think of how twisted it is to inflict harm in the name of love. It will also most certainly damage the child and the relationship. Be careful, parents. (Sometimes we may need a time out.)

9. Humiliation: Parents are seeking to build up their kids. If they are humiliating them (in public, in front of their siblings, or even one-on-one) with words or discipline, they will most certainly exasperate them.

10. Never admit you are wrong: Kids live with their parents. They see when they mess up. If the parent never admits they are wrong, especially when the offense is toward the child, then they will soon see through all of the Bible talk. Humility is required by parents who don’t want to exasperate their children.

11. Over-protection and smothering: Well-meaning overprotection can cause discouragement and resentment. Remember, kids are people who need to grow. Their wills should be shepherded, but they can’t be controlled absolutely.

I’m sure there are a dozen more ways to do this, but you get the idea. God loves children. And so Christian moms and dads should too. This means not exasperating them.

Posted at: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/erik-raymond/how-to-exasperate-your-children-2/

Trusting God in the Sleepless Nights of Motherhood

Sara Wallace

I remember the woman who made me terrified of becoming a mother.

My husband and I were attending a Bible study with another family who had four small children. Every time they came to the study, the mom and dad couldn’t keep their eyes open. The mom just stared blankly at the study leader and groaned every time she had to get up to chase the children.

I couldn’t relate to that level of exhaustion. But I would learn soon enough. I would walk that sleep-deprived road five times with five babies. I myself would become that bedraggled, blankly staring lady who scared all the young women in the church into never wanting kids.

Now I can look back on that season and laugh at the craziness. I’ve come out the other side. I survived. Now I tell my kids, “I was so tired when I had you, I put my phone in the fridge. I forgot the words to ‘Jesus Loves Me.’ I put olive oil in my coffee instead of creamer. I ran all over the house trying to find you and then found you nursing on my breast. I started the dryer with nothing in it. I made choo-choo sounds whenever I saw a train, even if I was completely alone.”

I can laugh now, but I couldn’t laugh when I was in the midst of it. My season of sleeplessness was one of the hardest times of my life.

Facing Our Physical Limitations

When my first baby was 4 weeks old, I got into a horrible cycle of insomnia. My postpartum hormones were out of control, and the roots of anxiety strangled out every opportunity for me to sleep. I would put the baby down for the night and lie in my bed staring at the clock. I knew I would have a couple of hours at best before the baby woke up to eat. As the minutes ticked by, I pictured my stores of strength for the next day draining away. I knew I would have nothing left.

But what could I do? I felt completely helpless. Sometimes I had panic attacks, and I had to get up and pace just to try to slow my heart rate.

I begged God to let me sleep. “Don’t you know I need this?” I pleaded. “How can I do what you called me to do if I can’t sleep?” I was confused. Being a mom was hard enough. How could I do it with no sleep?

It is true that we need sleep. Sleep is a good gift from God. God does not treat our physical needs lightly. He is the one who created us with these needs, and he delights in meeting them. But, as with many good gifts that meet our needs, this one had become an idol to me. My heart was telling God, “I cannot trust your care for me unless I have sleep.” My hope was in the gift, not in the Giver.

God was prying my hands open to make me let go of my dangerous self-reliance. I was terrified of what I would find if I truly came to the end of myself. I didn’t want to know. But God didn’t give me a choice. Sleeplessness forced me to stare my utter helplessness in the face. But instead of finding a black hole of despair, I found the grace of God.

Daily Mercies

In my own sleepless nights and the torturous days that followed, I saw God’s mercy. There were many days when I couldn’t see anything but God’s mercy. I saw his mercy in friends and family who provided food when I could barely remember where the fridge was. I saw his mercy in naps I was able to take at completely unplanned times. I saw his mercy in coffee. I saw his mercy in verses that had been hidden in my heart for years that suddenly came alive to hold me tight when I felt like I was falling through thin air.

This sleepless stage of life is a great reminder of things that are guaranteed—and things that are not. I’m not guaranteed a good night’s sleep. God doesn’t owe it to me.

But there is comfort that runs deeper than simply outlasting a particular stage. There is something that is guaranteed to us, right now, with sleep or without sleep: “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lam. 3:21–23).

I love that that verse uses the word “morning.” As a sleep-deprived mom, mornings can be especially grueling. But that’s exactly where God meets us with fresh mercy.

I might not feel “new” every morning, but God’s mercies are always new. My energy might be small (or non-existent), but God’s faithfulness is great. My legs might be wobbly, but God’s love is steadfast. Sleeplessness has stripped me of all my strength time and again, but it has never destroyed me. No matter how weak my body, my mind, or even my faith, God has been “the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Ps. 73:26).

My flesh and my heart have failed me many times—but God has never failed me.

Our Limitless God

When everything is going well, it’s easy for us to say we trust God. We don’t even realize that we have placed conditions on him until those conditions are tested. My sleepless nights revealed that I was really thinking, God can help me through the day (as long as I get a good night’s sleep). And by taking away sleep he was graciously taking away those conditions. He was showing me that he is enough.

Do we trust God to equip us for the tasks that he calls us to? When he called me to be a mom and gave me my marching orders, I didn’t need to hand him a list of his marching orders, too. “You must give me sleep, physical strength, energy, clarity of mind, and emotional stability. Then I can do this.” Instead I should have said, “All I need is you.”

When God gave Mary the task of bearing his Son, she didn’t ask for a supply list. She said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). The God who knows the number of the hairs on our heads and knows the number of the stars and calls them each by name (see Ps. 147:4; Matt. 10:30)—that same God has planned exactly how much sleep we will get each night, down to the last second. And each moment will put his mercy on display.

Editors’ note:

This is an adapted excerpt from Created to Care: God’s Truth for Anxious Moms (P&R, 2019).

Sara Wallace graduated from The Master’s University and was a classroom teacher before becoming a homeschool mom. She and her husband, Dave, live with their five sons in Idaho. She is the author of Created to Care (P&R, 2019), For the Love of Discipline (P&R, 2018), and The Gospel-Centered Mom Bible study (Minuteman Press, 2014), and she writes at gospelcenteredmom.com. You can follow her on Facebook.

Posted at: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/trusting-god-sleepless-nights-motherhood/

7 Ways Parents Unfairly Provoke Their Children

by Tim Challies

Parents, do not provoke your children to anger lest they become discouraged, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” This single sentence combines the New Testament’s two most prominent passages on parenting and, as I said yesterday (see Fathers (and Mothers), Do Not Provoke Your Children!), offers a significant warning to parents: We can parent our children in such a way that we provoke them to anger and discouragement. There are times when we so provoke our children that anger is the fitting and inevitable response. Today I want to offer a few ways that we, as parents, may provoke our children to that kind of anger and discouragement.

Goodness instead of holiness. We may provoke our children to anger and discouragement when we teach them to be good instead of holy, when we care more for their good behavior than their holy hearts. We can too easily content ourselves with outwardly moral children instead of children who are inwardly holy. We can focus on bad behavior instead of the sinful heart that causes and enjoys that bad behavior. This will eventually provoke our children to anger and discouragement because they will see that we are calling them to a standard of behavior that is impossible, a standard they cannot reach until their hearts are first transformed. Not only that, but they will see the gap between what the Bible teaches and what we promote, and they will sink into angry despair. Parents, don’t content yourself with good kids but pray for holy kids, for children whose good behavior flows out of a transformed heart. Shepherd them with and to the gospel instead of badgering them with unfair and impossible demands.

We need to live before our children in such a way that we can say not only “Do what I say” but “Do what I do.”

Hypocrisy instead of authenticity. We can provoke our children to anger and discouragement when we live with hypocrisy instead of authenticity, when we hold ourselves to one standard but hold them to another one. When we allow this, our children will see that we have no firm standard and they will come to believe that the Christian faith only calls for change in the eyes of other people, not in the eyes of God. Yet God calls us to discipline and instruct our children by explanation and demonstration, by explaining with words and demonstrating with our lives. We need to live before our children in such a way that we can say not only “Do what I say” but “Do what I do.” We need to take our cues from the apostle Paul who could boldly tell others, “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). (See The Humblest Words.)

Doubt instead of confidence. We can provoke our children when we live in great doubt instead of great confidence in God’s desire to save them. There are all sorts of good things we want for our children, but nothing more than their salvation. Parents can live with crippling fear that God will not save our children, and this fear has consequences: We can become heavy-handed, demanding our children turn to Christ, or we can become manipulative, constantly begging or pleading with them to make a profession. Our children may then grow angry and discouraged because they will see their parents professing faith in a God who is sovereign and good but then acting as if God is neither one. God’s instruction to parents is to discipline and instruct our children with confidence that God loves to save the lost and that he saves them through the appointed means—the gospel. (See 1 Timothy 2:4 and What Gives God Pleasure.) As we expose our children to the gospel through our discipline and instruction, we can expect that the gospel will do its work. We need to raise our children to hear the gospel proclaimed and to see it lived out. All the while we need to trust that God will work through his gospel.

We need to wisely protect our children, but without fearfully sheltering them.

Fear instead of boldness. We may provoke our children when we raise them in fear instead of boldness. It is wise parenting to protect our children by holding back evil influences until they have developed and matured. But it is unwise parenting to so shelter our children that they never see and experience sin and its ugly consequences. Many parents make decisions about relationships or church or education or family involvement based on fear. But fear-based parenting provokes children because we create a fictional world, a bubble that does not reflect reality. Not only that, but we hide from our children the experience of seeing sin and its consequences, the undeniable reality that sin promises joy and life but brings sadness and death. While we need to boldly raise our children to be in but not of the world, we cannot do this by sheltering them entirely from the world. We need to wisely protect our children, but without fearfully sheltering them.

Anger instead of patience. We may provoke our children to anger and lead to their discouragement if we raise them with anger instead of patience. So many can testify that their parents used anger or the threat of anger as a means of correction and punishment. Discipline was not delivered with calmness and self-control but with angry slaps or cutting words. And of course this leads to anger. A parent’s anger leads to their child’s anger. How couldn’t it? But in this case the parent’s anger is unjust while the child’s anger is just. God expects that we will discipline and instruct our children with patience and kindness. This involves modeling the very actions, attitudes, and words we want them to display.

Aloofness instead of involvement. We may provoke our children when we raise them with aloofness instead of involvement. Too often we are involved in our kids’ lives only when there are problems. We have little real relationship with our children, but then come rushing in during times of danger, disobedience, or difficulty. The parents I most want to imitate are the ones who deliberately build friendships with their children, who have a vision of their grown children being their friends and Christian brothers or sisters, and who then work deliberately toward those goals. These parents give time and attention to their children while they are young, they raise them with kindness and discipline, and they do this by holding in mind the future relationship they long to have. Parents, we need to pursue and befriend our children. (See An Unexpected Blessing of Parenting.)

Pride instead of humility. We will undoubtedly provoke our children to anger and discouragement if we raise them in pride instead of humility. Every generation of Christians seems to have to rediscover the ugliness of pride and the beauty of humility. Every parent needs to discover it as well. Parental pride manifests itself in a hundred different ways, but perhaps never more clearly than in an unwillingness to seek our children’s forgiveness. Pride convinces us that apologizing to our children displays weakness, that it gives them power over us. Nothing could be further from the truth! Humility convinces us that apologizing to our children displays the greatest strength, that it models the very character of Christ. We will inevitably sin against our children so we need to humbly seek their forgiveness, trusting that while God opposes the proud he gives great grace to the humble (see James 4:6).

There are undoubtedly many more ways that we can sinfully, unjustly provoke our children. There are undoubtedly many more ways that we actually do. So we honor God and love our children by examining ourselves and our parenting to find our particular temptations. Where we find them we must confess and repent. And all the while we can have confidence that God chooses to display his strength through our weakness, his power through our inadequacy.

Posted at: https://www.challies.com/articles/7-ways-parents-unfairly-provoke-our-children/

Chip Away at Your Child's Spiritual Growth

By Jen Oshman

My husband loves to tell the story of speaking with a World War II veteran almost 20 years ago. Mark was working at Oppenheimer Funds, advising and serving clients with their mutual funds. He got a call one day from a man in his 80s who, Mark quickly found out, had well over a million dollars in his account. 

Would you like to know the secret to his financial success? 

He put away $25 per month starting from the age of 18. That’s it. Nothing aggressive. No getting rich quick. Just small, slow, steady deposits each and every month. 

It reminds me of what my Crossfit coach says during seemingly insurmountable workouts: Chip away at it. Just chip away. 

It’s the principle of how you eat an elephant: one bite at a time. 

It’s the “daily drip of obedience” that my friend’s mentor admonished him to pursue. 

We humans are drawn to get rich quick schemes, to lose 10 pounds by this weekend diets, to the express lane. Like moths to a flame, we love instant gratification, magic formulas, and silver bullets. But we know silver bullets are rare. We know the truth is that real growth comes in one small, right decision after another. 

And so it is with bringing up children in the Lord. 

Late Easter (yesterday) afternoon I received a photo by text from a friend. It was of one of my teenage daughters leading a Sunday school class of toddlers through the twelve Resurrection Eggs. My friend said the kids were captivated, as she told the story of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection using the eggs and the little figures they each contain. 

I immediately texted another photo back to my friend. It was of me about eight years ago doing the same thing: teaching the resurrection story to some young children, using the same eggs  at our church in Okinawa. 

Every Easter since my first daughter was born, I have used the Resurrection Eggs on Easter morning to tell my own children, as well as the children of our church, the story of Jesus. Each time I go through the story it only takes about ten minutes. There’s nothing fancy—no video or song or take-home craft. Just some eggs, some figures, some Bible knowledge, and a young, listening audience. 

Apparently my daughter has been listening, because without prompting from me or anyone else, she grabbed the eggs and did exactly what she has seen me do every Easter of her life. My small, steady investment paid off. 

This story is a simple one, but it’s one of many, now that my girls are all twelve and above, Mark and I keep witnessing the dividends of our small, but repetitive, investments. It has been in their outspoken refutation of a secular TV show, and their conversations with one another about what modesty is and what it isn’t, and their robust conversation in the car about how Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament laws (all three of these things transpired in the last week). 

You must believe me when I tell you that we have never done a whole lot in the way of spiritual formation with our kids. I can tell you honestly that is has just been one small bite every day. We’ve chipped away, unimpressively, at their spiritual growth. 

Our routines have usually consisted of the following: 

• asking the girls to keep some kind of Bible reading plan that they maintain on their own

• watching 10 minutes of global news together about four times a week and discussing it from a Biblical worldview 

• me reading a chapter a day (about 4/7 days a week) from some kind of spiritual formation book out loud (see my “Book Reviews” for ideas)

• praying together about 4/7 mornings a week for our family’s needs, missionaries, unreached people, our neighbors, and others

• eating most dinners together, praying as a family at dinner, and discussing my husband’s sermon or what’s going on in the world or in their own lives

• attending church (and serving) together every Sunday no matter what 

• Mark reading them a story before bed (about 4/7 times a week), praying with them, and often striking up a deep conversation about once a week

These few and simple tasks add up to mere minutes a day. They are routine and rythymic, but they are not deep or impressive in any way. And, as you can see, none of them happens every day. We aim for general consistency, but know that perfection is not at all realistic. 

And I’m seeing now that these small things make an impact. These seemingly insignificant habits have formed some significant things in my daughters: some solid theology, an ability to critique pop culture and media, a capacity to apply a biblical worldview to the news, an awareness of Bible stories and the so-what behind them, an understanding of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, and a desire to teach the Bible to younger children. 

God, in his mercy, has seen fit to impress one little truth upon another in their lives. Our tiny, but frequent (not perfect! not even daily!) investments are paying off. This is not to say—at all—that my girls have arrived. It is not to claim that they’ve made it to Christian maturity. There are still so many ways I look forward to seeing them grow. This is only to say that God has been faithful to us, in spite of our weak offerings, our imperfect skill, our laziness, our quick-get-this-done mentality at times.  

Like the millionaire on Mark’s phone call, setting aside a little something on a consistent basis has added up over time. Be encouraged. Your children are listening. Your children are absorbing. Your small monthly payment is going to pay off in a big way in the decades to come. 

Don’t believe the hype—you don’t need a silver bullet, a glossy kids program, a magical summer camp (though those can be sweet added bonuses). You just need a commitment to put in small amounts of time, consistently over time, and God will take care of the rest.

And then you’ll likely find yourself on the phone one day with a younger parent asking you how you became a millionaire in the spiritual formation of your kids. You will be able to tell them then that it was nothing fancy. You just protected and deposited a small amount each month, you chipped away at it, you took one bite at a time. 

Posted at: https://www.jenoshman.com/jen-oshman-blog/2019/4/22/chip-away-at-your-childrens-spiritual-growth

The Fifth Commandment: Root of Honor

by Kevin D. Gardner

In Romans 1:28–32, the Apostle Paul goes through a litany of offenses committed by those who don’t see fit to acknowledge God. Many of the charges make sense, including that such people are “full of envy murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness” (v. 29). Yet there is one offense that might seem out of place: they are “disobedient to parents” (v. 30).

This phrase tended to make an impression on the teenagers with whom I used to work. It’s easy to say that we are not murderers or filled with malice. We might protest that we are not “gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil” (vv. 29–30; although we might have a hard time credibly denying the first two). But who has never disobeyed his parents? We might think that disrespectful children are a uniquely modern phenomenon, but the problem certainly existed in Paul’s day. The law of Moses even prescribed death for intractably rebellious children, a penalty that seems unspeakably harsh to people today (Deut. 21:18–21).

Clearly, the Bible takes obedience to parents seriously. The fifth commandment tells us, “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you” (Ex. 20:12). Let’s explore why this commandment is included among the Ten Commandments and what it means for us.

The fifth commandment is the first on the so-called second table of the law. The first table has to do with our duties toward God, while the second table has to do with our duties toward our fellow man.

It may seem strange that a command to honor one’s father and mother is the first of the commands regarding man. But it makes sense. The first commandment begins the first table of the law by telling us that we are to have no other gods before God (Ex. 20:3). God is setting up a structure of authority: He is God, and we are His people. We are to have no other Gods. We are to recognize His authority alone and to act accordingly. In the same way, God has set up authority structures on earth, and so He begins the second table of the law by addressing the most basic of these structures, the family—one man and one woman for life, together with their children. In this context, children learn what authority is, and they learn to obey. In the same way that we are to recognize and abide by our heavenly authority, we are to recognize and abide by earthly authorities.

As God is due honor by virtue of His being our God, so our fellow man is due honor by virtue of His being God’s image bearer.  SHARE

Recognizing this parallel, the Westminster Standards expand the meaning of the fifth commandment to encompass our duties in all of our relationships. The Westminster Shorter Catechism says that the commandment requires “the preserving the honor, and performing the duties, belonging to every one in their several places and relations, as superiors, inferiors or equals” (WSC 64). The reference here is not to superiors and inferiors in terms of dignity or value but in terms of authority. The Westminster divines understood that while fathers and mothers are the first and most basic authorities in our lives, they are not the only ones. The divines also included authorities in the church and the state; we might add authorities in the classroom and the workplace.

In each of these contexts, we have various relationships. Sometimes we are superior, sometimes inferior, and sometimes equal. In each case, we have various duties and are liable to commit certain sins, and the Westminster Larger Catechism expands at length on these duties and sins (WLC 123–33). In so doing, the Larger Catechism unfolds the meaning of honor as paying what is due to them—to superiors, reverence, prayer, obedience, imitation of their godly virtues, maintenance of their dignity, and bearing with their infirmities (WLC 127); to inferiors, love, prayer, instruction, rewards, correction, and protection (WLC 129); and to equals, recognition of their dignity, deference, and rejoicing in their advancement (WLC 131).

To fail to honor those around us, whether superiors, inferiors, or equals, is to engage in rebellion against God. Especially in the case of our superiors, casting off earthly authorities is tantamount to casting off our heavenly authority, the One who placed those earthly authorities over us. This is why rebellion against parents was such a grievous sin under the old covenant and why Paul included disobedience to parents among the grave offenses committed by the ungodly.

As God is due honor by virtue of His being our God, so our fellow man is due honor by virtue of His being God’s image bearer, and so also our superiors are due honor by virtue of their having authority “by God’s ordinance” (WLC 124). When we honor our fellow men in their several relations, we honor the God who placed us all where we are.

Rev. Kevin D. Gardner is associate editor of Tabletalkmagazine and a graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He is an ordained teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America. 

Posted at: https://tabletalkmagazine.com/article/2019/02/fifth-commandment-root-honor/?fbclid=IwAR3qBVKPGVQsCzgJXXCZ6TVo3SdYnr_jHC2JlkKk8PLL2EInIlVLPpxl9vo