In this post, we will consider how parental discipline fulfills our parental accountability to Christ.
Scripture reading: John 10:25-29
If I am faithful to the Lord as a parent, I cannot be held responsible for their decision to reject the Lord. However, if I am unfaithful as a parent, then their sin will be held on my account. Jeremiah 23:1-2, James 3:1, Revelation 22:18-19. When we discipline our children, feelings of guilt in ourselves and expressions of sadness from our children threaten to override our understanding that the Lord is in control and holds us accountable for our actions.
When your child is in the schoolyard or you are at work and an issue arises, it can be easy to gloss over the potential consequences of our actions and get caught up in the moment. One of my children was continually receiving discipline at school for something that just didn’t seem possible. On further investigation, I discovered that the child was being bullied at school and getting in trouble for defensive action. There was no physical contact until my child responded. Rather, the bullies were using emotionally destructive behavior. Obviously, the thought process going through my child’s head was that it was necessary to prove the bullies wrong or else what the bullies said would be perceived as truth.
This incident demonstrated clearly how easy it is to get our priorities mixed up. Responding to the bullies became more important than the consequences of breaking school rules. When we have a bad day, it is easy to confuse our priorities and perceive “fixing” the problems of the day to be more important than pleasing the Lord.
We have to please the Lord first and then trust Him that circumstances will work themselves out. We have to trust that how the Lord “fixes” a situation will be the best, whether we agree with His way or not. Taking control of a situation to fix it according to our standard immediately puts a stop to anything the Lord would otherwise do to intervene.
Disciplining a child is hard. It can be very difficult emotionally to “inflict” negative consequences on the child. It can be difficult if it seems the discipline is not effective (the child repeatedly offends). A very dangerous situation is when the parent wants to be the child’s friend and be liked by the child. (How quickly we forget that in many friendships a good friend will confront bad behavior.) And, if we fail to discipline our children, we are essentially turning them away from Christ.
We cannot let any of these strings that tug on our emotions cloud our allegiance to Christ. We are first accountable to Christ before we are accountable to anyone else, and proper, effective discipline of our children fulfills our accountability to Christ.
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