8 Authority
Principle: One of the foundational heart issues in the life of every child is authority. Teaching and modeling the protective beauty of authority is one of the foundations of good parenting.
She was in tears as she spoke to me. Her frustration and dismay were written all over her face. She pushed through the crowd during a break at a weekend parenting conference. She was determined to talk to me, and it seemed nothing was going to stop her. She said, “I came here this weekend because I had to talk to you. You guys make parenting seem easy, with all your stories and principles, but it isn’t easy. I have a four-year-old son who I cannot control. There is nothing that I can do or say that will make him obey me. And if I raise my voice and say no, he throws a fit and will not stop until I finally give him what he wants. Rather than me parenting him, I feel he is controlling me. I know it’s wrong, but every morning I dread when he wakes up, and I can’t wait for the evening when he goes to bed. In between is just battle after battle; nothing is easy or enjoyable. The new thing now is that if I even hint at saying no to him, he hits me. I know he’s only four, but he has really hurt me a couple times. I’m at the end of my rope, and I don’t know what to do.”
How could your heart not go out to this poor, exhausted, discouraged, and frustrated woman? How could you not relate to how awful those battles are with a child that you love and you’re trying to help? But I want you to stop and consider one phrase. I want you to let it sink in. “I have a four-year-old son who I cannot control.” Four years old and he’s already out of control. Four years old and he knows what to do to get his own way. Four years old and he has brought a thirty-two-year-old woman to the end of her rope. Four years old and his anger strikes fear into the heart of his thirty-two-year-old mother. Four years old and he sets the moral and relational agenda in his home. Four years old and his mother dreads the next day with him. Four years old and he see his mother as an adversary, not a loving helper placed in his life by a loving God. Four years old and he sees authority as a very bad thing that he must fight at every point.
Now as you would probably understand, I couldn’t give that dear mother the specificity she was hoping for, because in order to do that I would have to ask a whole lot of questions that would help me understand how things had gotten so bad. But I want to examine with you the significance of the issue that was at the center of the dysfunction between this tired mom and her angry son.
The Central Issue
What is going on between this mother and her son is deeper than moments of disrespect, deeper than defiant episodes, and deeper than a refusal to obey. All of these sad things are rooted in a very significant heart issue: authority. You could argue that if you don’t deal with this fundamental heart issue, all the good things you seek to accomplish as God’s tool in the life of your children will not work.
To begin with, it’s important to always keep in mind that as a parent you are never just dealing with the words and actions of your children. You are always also dealing with the thing that shapes, directs, and controls the behavior of your children: the heart. I will say much more about this in the next chapter. And there is no more important heart issue for every child ever born than the issue of authority. Your children must learn early that they have been born into a world of authority, and they’re not it. Why is this so important? Because submission to authority that is not me is unnatural for any sinner. Sin makes us want our own way. Sin makes us want to set our own rules. Sin convinces all of us that we know better. Sin causes me to want to do what I want to do when and how I want to do it. Sin makes me resist being told what to do by another. Sin really does insert me in the center of my world, the one place that I must never be because it is the place for God and God alone.
All of this means that children come into the world as self-appointed little self-sovereigns. That battle you have over the peas you want your daughter to eat is not about diet. Your three-year-old daughter is not saying to you, “I have studied my dietary needs, and it is not necessary that peas be included in a three-year-old’s diet.” No, this skirmish over something that is little in the scheme of things is not little at all because it is not about peas; it’s about authority. Your daughter is saying to you, “No one but me will decide what I put in my mouth, thank you.” Your daughter is not just resisting peas; she is fighting against the exercise of authority. She is fighting being told what to do. She is buying into the destructive delusion of self-rule.
The fights over when to go to bed, what to wear, what to watch on television, or the condition of the child’s room are also not first about those issues; they are about this fundamental battle of the heart—who will decide how I will live? You can see this struggle even in a yet wordless infant. You’ve fed him. You’ve changed him. You’ve sung every song in your repertoire, and he’s finally asleep. You begin tip-toeing out of the room, and just as you get to the door, you hear a bloodcurdling scream, and so you turn around. Your son has pushed himself up on his little arms, has stiffened his body, and is yelling for all he’s worth. Do you know what he’s saying in those unintelligible screams? “Oh no, you don’t. You will not leave. I love you and have a wonderful plan for your life. I am the Lord!” He hasn’t yet lived for two years, he can’t even speak in real words, yet he wants to be, yes, is determined to be in charge.
Second Corinthians 5:15 is very helpful here: “And he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves. . . .” Think of the significance of this statement. One of Jesus’s primary purposes of going to the cross was to address the very thing that we are talking about. Jesus knew that your child would be born with a bondage to himself that only his grace could break. That drive to “live for himself” would make him all too self-focused and self-absorbed. It would make him angry at anything or anyone who would get in his holy way. It would make him shrink the focus of his concern, desires, and motives down to the small confines of his wants, his feelings, and his needs. And central to this sin-induced drive to live for himself is a hunger and a determination for self-rule.
This means there is a natural resistance to authority in every child who has ever been born since the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden. Every child in some way wants his or her own way. Every child tends to think that being told what to do is a negative thing. Every child wants to write his own moral rules and follow his own life plan. The delusion of the right to self-rule is one of the sad results of sin in the hearts of all of our children. But thankfully, this passage tells us way more than this. It tells you that as a Christian parent you are not alone in your battle to establish authority in the lives of your children. God controlled the forces of nature and ordered the events of human history so that at just the right time Jesus would come, live the life we could not live, die the death that we should have died, and rise again to defeat sin and death. He did all this so that by powerful delivering and transforming grace he would break our bondage to us.
Here’s what this means. Mom and Dad, you have no ability at all—by the tone of your voice, by the force of your personality, by your physical size, or by your threats—to deliver your children from their addiction to self-rule. If you had that power, Jesus and his work would not have been necessary. But Jesus does have the power. He cares so much about the dark delusion of self-rule that lives in the hearts of all of our children that he literally gave his life so that they would be rescued and this bondage broken. Here’s how important this is: People who are committed to self-rule won’t submit to the rules of another, and because they won’t submit to the rules of another, they won’t think that they are wrong or confess their wrongs, and because they don’t confess their wrongs, they won’t seek God’s forgiveness or seek God’s help. You could argue that the drive for self-rule is the thing that, apart from God’s grace, separates us and our children from God. You could not consider a more central heart issue for every child ever born than this one. To reject authority is to reject God, who is the authority over all authority, and rejection of God never has and never will go anywhere good.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ and Authority
So what 2 Corinthians 5:15 tells us is that your work to establish clear, loving, consistent, biblical authority in the lives of your children is doing gospel work. It is consistent with the gospel mission that brought Jesus to earth. It is at the center of what made the cross of sacrifice necessary. Authority work is grace work. Let’s consider what that means. We will use Ephesians 6:1–4 to guide our discussion.
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.” Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
Exercising ambassadorial authority is doing gospel work. Please read the last sentence of the passage again. It’s where our discussion of your exercise of authority must begin. It is vital that you understand that you have no independent, autonomous authority as a parent. None. You have not been given the right and power to exercise authority in the lives of your children any way you want; the opposite is true. The authority that you have is ambassadorial authority. The ambassador doesn’t have any authority in and of himself. He has authority only because he represents a king who has authority. Here’s God’s amazing plan. He makes his invisible authority visible by sending visible authority figures as his representatives. This means that every time you exercise authority in the lives of your children, it must be a beautiful picture of the authority of God. In the lives of your children, you are the look of God’s face, you are the touch of his hand, and you are the tone of his voice. You must never exercise authority in an angry, impatient way. You must never exercise authority in an abusive way. You must never exercise authority in a selfish way. Why? Because you have been put into your position as parent to display before your children how beautiful, wise, patient, guiding, protective, rescuing, and forgiving God’s authority is.
This means you don’t let your anger at your child’s disobedience control you so you do things that you should not do (for example, pinching, poking, yanking, slapping, shoving your child). It means that you never combine your discipline with berating, demeaning, or condemning talk. (“What are you, stupid?” “I can’t believe that you’re my daughter!” “I’ve forgotten more than you’ll ever know!”) It means you don’t treat you child as your indentured servant, there to make your life easier. (Yes, your child should participate in the chores of the house, but if you’re a father who likes to read the newspaper and it is five steps from you, don’t call your son who is upstairs to come downstairs and get it for you.) You should never exercise authority in a way that makes it look as though you’re breaking relationship with your child. You should never let your exercise of authority be dictated by your mood. (This will always lead to a confusing and inconsistent culture of authority, where what was wrong yesterday doesn’t seem so wrong today. In this kind of unpredictable, insecure environment, children become emotional weathermen, nervously gauging the weather of their parents to see what they can or cannot do without getting in trouble.)
Why is this so important? It’s important because, as I said earlier, your children enter the world resistant to authority. They don’t tend to see that real life is found inside a life of willing submission to authority. If you exercise authority in a lazy, abusive, selfish way, you will deepen and strengthen the natural rebellion to authority in the hearts of your children. What God has called you to is to daily confront your children with how beautiful, helpful, and patient God’s authority is. You want to be used of God to help your children to begin to believe that submission to authority is where life and freedom are to be found. When this happens, children begin to admit their need, confess their wrongs, and reach out for the help of the Savior. Nothing in your child’s life is more important than this. What kind of picture are your children getting of God’s authority by the way you exercise yours?
Helping your children to understand why they do what they do is doing gospel work. Please read that last sentence of the passage one more time. Notice that you are called not just to “discipline” but also to “instruction.” Here’s the bottom line. Your children don’t have a clue why they do the things they do. They don’t know why they resist you. They don’t know why they argue with you. They don’t know why you make them angry. They don’t know why they think that they know better than you. They don’t know why they demand their own way. They don’t know why they will put themselves through tension and painful situations in order to fight for a little independence. Your children don’t know who they are and why they do the things they do. Your children daily suffer from a lack of spiritual self-understanding.
Parents, that’s our job. It is never enough, when your child has done something wrong, to just mete out discipline, because you’re always dealing with something deeper than just behavior. Your discipline must every time be coupled with clear biblical instruction. I don’t mean angry sermons. What I mean is a brief conversation that once again enables your child to look at, examine, and understand the heart struggle behind his authority resistance. In his Word, God has revealed to you the mysteries of human desire and motivation so that you can then reveal those mysteries to your children who are lost, ignorant, and deceived. Every time you couple ambassadorial discipline with ambassadorial instruction, you are giving the Spirit of God another opportunity to work conviction and desire for help into the heart of your children. The more your children understand why they do what they do, the easier it will be for them to admit their wrongs and seek your forgiveness and God’s. Remember, because everything they do comes out of their hearts, everything they do reveals their hearts. Helping your children see what their behavior reveals about their hearts is gospel work. How often to you combine moments of discipline with patient, insight-giving instruction?
Establishing authority early in little things is doing gospel work. Fight your authority battles early. Fight them when the issues are small. Capitalize on the little moments God will give you when your children are still young. You do not want to be fighting authority battles with a seventeen-year-old. Don’t tell yourself that those little moments of resistance to your authority (what to eat, what to wear, when to go to bed, what to watch, doing chores, etc.) are unimportant because the issue at hand is not that important. Those little moments are profoundly important because, as I stated earlier, the resistance is not coming from their thoughts about food or sleep, but from hearts that will tend to resist all authority but their own.
Be thankful for these little moments. Don’t look at them as the bad moments of parenting, as hassles and interruptions; these are the good moments of parenting. These are moments of grace. This brings us to another one of the basic themes of this book. Parents, if your eyes ever see or your ears ever hear the sin and weakness of your children, it’s never an accident, it’s never a hassle, it’s never an interruption; it’s always grace. God loves your children and because he does, he has placed them in a family of faith so that you can be his tool of convicting, forgiving, and transforming grace. You are faced with the resistance of your children because God is a God of amazing grace. His grace has the power to turn very bad moments into the very good moments. Isn’t this what the cross of Jesus Christ is about? The cross is the worst thing that ever happened that, by God’s plan, became the best thing that ever happened. God inhabits your trials of discipline with his presence and grace to do in those moments in the hearts of your children what you would never be able to do. Don’t get mad in those moments; don’t be frustrated that you have to deal with the same thing over and over again. Thank God for his grace and seek to be a tool in his powerful hands.
But there’s another thing that needs to be said about these little moments of discipline and instruction while your children are still young. Know that your children do not know what true obedience looks like. It’s your job to clarify this for them. What is obedience? It’s a willing submission of my heart to the authorities that God has placed in my life. What does this willing submission of the heart do? It causes me to be motivated to and find joy in doing what the authorities that God has placed in my life have asked me to do. Here’s what this means. If you ask little Sharon to go down the hallway and into her room and pick up the toys that she has scattered everywhere, and she is yelling at you as she goes, it is very important that you do not let Sharon think that she is obeying you. Because even though you can see Sharon’s body moving toward her room, her heart is raging in anger and rebellion against you and against your authority. True obedience always begins with the heart.
So you need to call Sharon back, not to say, “Don’t you ever dare talk to me that way again. Who do you think you are! Look at the size of me and the size of you. You don’t want to think about what will happen to you if you ever talk to me that way again!” You see, that kind of angry response hardens Sharon’s heart against authority, when what you want to do is be used of God to soften it. You need to quickly pray for patience and grace and then lovingly call Sharon back and say, “Sharon, we have a problem here. Mommy wasn’t unkind to you. Mommy didn’t ask you to do something bad. Mommy didn’t call you mean names, yet you’re yelling at Mommy. When you yell at Mommy, you are trying to be the mommy of Mommy, and if you’re the mommy of Mommy, then you have no Mommy over you to guide and protect you.” Will your daughter immediately fall to her knees and say, “I get it; I am a self-oriented rebel against authority. I want to rule my own world and so I hate being told what to do. Mommy, I need to be rescued from the danger I am to myself!” Of course, that won’t happen, but you have taken one little step in helping your daughter to understand her heart, and you will have many, many more conversations like this, capturing little moments that God will empower by his grace. Did you fight or are you fighting your authority battles early? If not, what changes in the way you look at little moments of discipline need to take place in you and the way you respond to your children?
Exercising consistent authority is doing gospel work. I talked about this earlier, but here are a few more thoughts. The exercise of God’s love never gets in the way of the exercise of his authority. The dispensing of God’s grace never compromises God’s exercise of his authority. The accomplishing of God’s sovereign plan is never interrupted by his exercise of authority. God doesn’t get tired of enforcing his rules. He doesn’t have bad days when he’s angrier and meaner. His divine joy doesn’t keep him from doing the hard work of being a faithful disciplining father; the opposite is true. God is glorious in the utter consistency of his faithfulness to uphold his holy commands and to discipline his children. So we too must be like him as his ambassadors. Our children need the security of faithful, consistent, firm, uncompromising, and loving authority—authority that is motivated by and tempered by grace. Is your exercise of parental authority consistent because it’s driven by God’s call or is it inconsistent because it’s shaped by the emotion of the moment?
Confessing that when it comes to authority you are more like your children than unlike them is doing gospel work. Why do we get angry when we exercise authority, why do we make a big deal of something one day and then blow if off the next, and why do we tend to look at discipline moments as hassles? We do all of these things because we are more like our children than unlike them. Sin is inside us just as it’s inside them, and it causes us to want our own way and to want to do things our way, just as it does with our children. You see, anytime we exercise ambassadorial authority in a mean, angry, impatient, condemning, or abusive way, we are rebelling against the authority of the One we have been called to represent. It’s not just our children who have an authority problem; we do too. It’s not just our children who need patient rescue; we do too. It’s not just our children who need insight-giving instruction; we do too. It’s not just our children who need forgiving grace; we do too. It’s not just our children who obey with their bodies but still harbor rebellion in their hearts. Our anger and impatience as parents reveal the true condition of our hearts. Like our children, we need the care of a loving Father who doesn’t beat us with condemnation, but rather caresses us with his grace. Who could understand the call to make his authority visible and say, “Yeah, I can do that, no problem”? Understanding the profound holiness of God’s call confronts us with the profound depth of our inadequacy. You see, it’s essential to confess this, because no parent gives grace more joyfully and consistently than the parent who daily confesses that she desperately needs it herself. God calls rebels to his authority to rescue rebels against his authority. Only powerful grace can make that happen. Do you humbly own the rebellion of your own heart as you deal with the rebellion of your children in a way that causes you to exercise authority with patience and grace?
In discussions of authority, talking about the cross of Jesus Christ is doing gospel work. If Jesus came and died to break the bondage of our hearts and our children’s hearts to our independent authority, and in so doing, to rescue us from us, it’s not weird to talk about the gift of the cross of Jesus Christ in moments of discipline. It’s not weird to talk about the forgiveness and hope of change that the cross provides. In fact, it’s weird not to. Were it not for sin, there would be no rebellion; were it not for rebellion, there would be no need for a Savior; and were it not for the need of a Savior, there would have been no need for the cross. So every moment of rebellion reveals a child’s heart, and every moment when a child’s heart is revealed is a God-given opportunity to talk about the Savior who alone can deliver this child from himself. It is important to again and again embed the story of your child’s rebellion into the larger story of redemption. In moments of discipline, do you often point your children to the hope and help that is to be found in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus?
It really is true that there is no more central issue in the lives of our children. Their struggle with authority really does reveal the depth of the hold of sin on their hearts and their need for the grace of the Savior. And in that way we really are like our children. When we admit that, we are able to exercise authority with humility and grace, giving our children a little picture of how gloriously beautiful and good God’s authority actually is.