3 Law
Principle: Your children need God’s law, but you cannot ask the law to do what only grace can accomplish.
They were so disheartened. They thought they had done exactly what God called them to do. They had faithfully exercised their authority. They had made the rules clear and the threat of punishment obvious. They had followed through again and again. They didn’t compromise, no matter where they were and no matter what the situation was. They told their children again and again that they did what they did as parents because it was what God commanded them to do. They told their children repeatedly that no matter how old they got, they would still have to obey somebody’s rules.
Now they were wondering if it was all worth it. They were plagued with the question of what had gone wrong. Josh was sixteen and as rebellious as they come. He seemed in love with the world and everything in it. Rules to him weren’t things to be obeyed; they were challenges to be accepted. He fought every regulation with mocking disrespect. He acted as if he hated his mom and dad, saying things to them that were intended to hurt. He’d told them a thousand times that he couldn’t wait to get out of their house and be on his own, then he’d make his own choices and there was nothing they could do about it. He really did seem to be a person who loved evil and hated what is good.
Sitting on her nightly perch outside Josh’s bedroom door, as she did every night, to keep him from sneaking out, she recounted the years. She thought about that sweet little boy that everyone liked, contrasted with the angry young man behind the door. She felt disappointed, humiliated, and powerless. She was tired and secretly couldn’t wait for him to leave for good.
Jessica was the typical, busy little three-year-old. Life was her playground, and she seemed to get up every morning to enjoy every part of it. Sally was increasingly tired of chasing her around the house as she proceeded to get into everything. She felt that Jessica didn’t listen to her. A couple months ago she’d tried counting. “Jessica, get out of that drawer, 1 . . . 2 . . . 3.” You know the drill: the threat was that at “3,” Mom would swoop in, and you didn’t want to know what would happen next. But Jessica had survived many 3s, and nothing terrible had happened. Sally was now at 5 and getting almost no response from Jessica. Threat was no longer a threat. In fact, counting had sadly become an invitation for Jessica to do whatever wrong she was doing for a little longer. She knew she could push her mommy just a little bit further. And Sally was tired of counting, and with each larger number she felt herself getting angrier and more discouraged. Counting didn’t work, and she couldn’t figure out what else to do.
Frank and Mary were so worried about Emma. It wasn’t that she was hard to live with; on the contrary, she was always friendly and polite. In many ways, Emma was the dream teenager. She did well in high school and as a junior was already getting scholarship offers from prestigious universities. She participated in her youth ministry without resistance and volunteered with Habitat for Humanity. From a distance it all looked good.
But Frank and Mary knew it was not good. Emma spent more and more time on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. She was obsessed with the lives of the current pop stars and young actors. Every day she read every trashy gossip website there was. She was also obsessed with fashion, with how she looked and how people responded to how she looked. Emma couldn’t bear not having a boyfriend and had begun to dress more provocatively. The faith, which she had never rejected outright, seemed less and less important to her. She worshiped every day at the feet of all of the current idols of the surrounding culture, but she didn’t know it was worship. Frank and Mary felt they were losing her, but didn’t know how to handle it. Emma was not rebellious; she was responsible with her school work and basically obeyed the rules at home. Whenever Frank and Mary expressed their concern to Emma, she would tell them that they were just old-fashioned and needed to relax, everything was okay. But Emma was being captured; her parents saw it, but no rule they laid down seemed to rescue her.
Rob was a quiet kid. He spent a lot of time alone, and he didn’t seem to mind it. He loved to skateboard, but didn’t have much time for, or interest in, organized sports. He was not hard to parent, except that he played it very close to the chest. It was always hard to get Rob to open up and talk about anything personal, so his mom and dad felt that the older he got, the less they knew him. His senior year he became very close to a friend at his high school. They began to spend hour upon hour together, both inside and outside the home. It was not at all unusual for Rob and his friend to spend the weekend at one another’s house.
For several weeks Rob’s mom had wondered if something was wrong with Rob. He just didn’t seem like himself, but when she would inquire, Rob would say it was nothing, that he was cool. Finally, one night, when his dad was away on a business trip, his mom cornered him, putting on the pressure for him to tell her what was wrong. He resisted for a while, but she would not give up, and with more emotion than he had displayed in a long time, Rob said, “I’m in love.” His mom said, “Well, you don’t have to be embarrassed or fearful about that.” But Rob said, “I’m in love with Nate [his friend from school].” Holding on to her emotions, his mom said, “What do you mean when you say you’re ‘in love’ with Nate?” Rob said, “Mom, I’m gay, and I knew if I told you that you and dad would hate me, but it’s true, I’m gay, and there’s nothing or no one that can do anything about it.” With that he stormed out of the room.
Although Rob’s mom and dad had expressed their love for him no matter what, it wasn’t long before they had constructed and announced a whole new set of regulations for Rob. He had to surrender his car keys, he was no longer allowed to see Nate, he had to put a content limiter on his computer, he had to leave his bedroom door open when he was home, and he had a new, earlier curfew. Rob grew more and more sullen and angry, and he and Nate continued to find ways to be with one another.
A Subtle but Foundational Mistake
One theme runs through each of these stories, an error that each of these loving and well-meaning parents is making. Did you see it? Consider that every parent puts their confidence in something. Every parent knows that their children have to grow, mature, and change. As a parent you know that it is your job to help form character (obedience, respect, honesty, willingness, etc.) in your children. So as a parent, you will rely on something to create change in your children. There is some tool that you will use again and again in the belief that it has the power to change your child. And because you have confidence in that tool, you will use it again and again, in situation after situation and with child after child. The change tool that you have placed your confidence in will not only be the tool that you reach for when change is indicated, but it will also be the lens you’ll look through to assess situations and to evaluate your children.
Let me stop right now and get you to examine your parenting. If I watched the last six weeks of your parenting, how you evaluate your children and seek to work change in them, what would I conclude is the primary tool that you’re relying on? Don’t answer quickly. Scan what you’ve done with your children over the last several weeks. Could it be that you are making the same mistake the parents in my stories are making? Could it be that your primary tool of change doesn’t have the power to do what you’re asking it to do? Could it be that the evidence is right in front of you, but you don’t see it? Could it be that there is a new, a better way that you believe in, but that hasn’t influenced your parenting?
Now, read what I’m about to write very carefully. I am convinced that without knowing it, thousands and thousands of well-meaning Christian parents are asking the law to do in the lives of their children what only the powerful grace of God can accomplish. This truth needs to be considered and needs to shape everything you do as a parent: If rules and regulations had the power to change the heart and life of your child, rescuing your child from himself and giving him a heart of submission and faith, Jesus would have never needed to come! You see, what you assign the power of change to will then shape the way you parent your children in all of those mundane and not-so-mundane moments that end up forming who they are as they leave your home. Let me explain.
Your Children Need God’s Law
Check out the words of the apostle Paul: “What shall we then say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet’” (Rom. 7:7). Our children are born with a desperate need for God’s law. Because they come into the world as fools, not knowing what is true or what is false, what is good or what is bad, what is right or what is wrong, they need the grace of wisdom that God’s law alone can give. Apart from God’s law human beings wouldn’t have a clue how they are supposed to think, what they are supposed to desire, how they are supposed to speak, or how they were designed to behave. Like all human beings, children were not made to be self-governing, that is, to be guided by independent thoughts and desires. Children need to be given tracks to run on and boundaries to stay inside of. So God in his wonderful mercy gives us his law so that our behavior would be guided by a clear knowledge of what is right and wrong. But the guidance of the law is meant to do something else. It is meant to protect your child from herself. All children come into the world as sinners. This means all children are a danger to themselves and need the protection that God’s law gives. Because God’s law provides your children with guiding and protecting wisdom that they would not have without it, his law is good for them.
But there is another way that God’s law is good for your children; it provides them with the grace of conviction. Your children would have no idea that they are sinners in need of protection, wisdom, forgiveness, and rescue without the standard of God’s law. You know how it works: it’s only when you apply a standard of measurement to a board that you realize you have cut it too short. One of the most dangerous things in your child’s life is his blindness to the depth of his spiritual need. A child who does not see himself clearly will resist his parents’ wisdom, guidance, discipline, and correction. Why? Because he doesn’t think he needs it. The law is very good at exposing not only our behavior, but our hearts as well. God’s law is the ultimate human measuring system, and because it is, it’s good for your children to be regularly exposed to it and exposed by it.
Your Children Need to Understand the Law’s Weakness
Yes, your children need the law of God in their lives, but it is very dangerous as parents to daily ask the law to do what only grace can accomplish. I am afraid that many, many Christian parents do exactly that without knowing it. They have reduced Christian parenting down to being a really faithful lawgiver, arresting officer, prosecutor, judge, and jailer. So their parenting is basically a body of rules followed by threats of punishment. Yes, children need rules and they need faithful correction, but that simply is not enough. Think with me. If all that your children needed was the knowledge and enforcement of rules, as I wrote earlier, then the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus would not have been necessary. Jesus came because the law was good, but definitely not enough to solve the great human dilemma of sin. Remember, the greatest danger to your child is not the evil outside them; it’s the sin inside them that is the greatest of all threats to their well-being.
This is what every parent of every child needs to understand: the law does a very good job of exposing your child’s sin, but it has no power whatsoever to deliver your child from it. The law has no ability to rescue your child from the power of sin’s grip. The law has no ability to give your child a new heart. The law has no ability to create the lasting change in your child that every parent longs for. The law cannot and will not rescue, redeem, and restore your child, but that’s exactly what every child needs. So if you are going to be a tool of change in God’s hands in the lives of your children, you need more than God’s law in your personal parenting toolbox.
But there’s something else I need to say here. It’s not just that as parents we tend to put all the eggs of our hope for our children in the basket of the law, but we also tend to replace God’s perfect law with a sorry human second best. Somehow, someway God’s law gets replaced by our law—a law that’s sadly driven by our craving for affirmation, control, peace, success, and reputation. So we make selfish, impatient, and angry demands on our children, treating them as indentured servants who exist to lessen our load of daily chores and to make our lives more comfortable. The fact is that our children weren’t created and given to us for our sake, but for God’s sake and their good.
So we get mad at our kids, not first because they’re breaking God’s law but because they’re in the way of our law (something that we want). Think of how little of your anger as a parent in the last few months had anything at all to do with God’s law. It’s not just law dependency that keeps us from doing all we should do as God’s representatives in the lives of our children, but it’s law replacement that causes us to do all kinds of things we shouldn’t do toward them. The good news is that there really is a new and better way for us and for our children.
You Need to Understand That God’s Grace Is Essential
I think we would be shocked if we knew how many homes of parents who love to sing of God’s grace on Sunday completely forget that grace as they parent their children the rest of the week. But without the intervention of God’s grace, your children will not be who they are supposed to be or do what they are supposed to do. Remember, it’s the sin inside them that messes everything up. It’s sin that makes your children resist your guidance and authority. It’s sin that causes children to constantly be in conflict with their siblings. It’s sin that gets in the way of your child’s learning in school. It’s sin that causes children to be attracted to what is hurtful or destructive. It’s sin that causes your children to be entitled, demanding, materialistic, and complaining. It’s sin that causes your children to act as if they are the center of the universe and that life should do their bidding. It’s sin that causes children to say hurtful things to their parents, siblings, and peers. And it’s sin that makes parenting difficult, demanding, and exhausting.
The law has no ability to deliver your children from this mess—the very mess that you have to deal with every day as a parent. So your children came into the world in desperate need of God’s rescuing, forgiving, transforming, and delivering grace. You could argue that it’s God’s grace that is the only hope for parents and children alike. As a parent, you are not called to just enforce God’s law in the lives of your children, but also to constantly exhibit and teach God’s grace to them as well.
But I have to remind you that you need that grace as much as your children do. If you are ever going to function as God’s ambassador, you need to be rescued by powerful grace from your bondage to you. As parents we need to be rescued from our addiction to the law of our comfort, pleasure, success, and control. It’s not our children’s sin that is in the way of good parenting; it’s our tendency to make parenting about our little kingdom of wants, needs, and desires, and our tendency to want our children to serve the purposes of our kingdom rather than submit to the purposes of God’s kingdom.
I make the best cinnamon rolls in the universe. Sorry, there’s just no doubt about it. It’s one of the things I like to do on our family vacations. And when I make them, I know what’s going to happen. That gorgeous smell will pull my children out of bed and down the hallway. They will bow at my feet and say, “Our life is good because we have a father who makes cinnamon rolls!”
So it’s early in the morning, I am the only one up, and I am making the rolls, thinking about the delight to follow. Finally they’re in the oven, and the house is beginning to be enveloped in the beautiful smell. I position myself on a chair that looks down the hallway, anticipating the worship that is to come. One of my sons appears and instead of praising my existence, he says these shocking words: “Dad, can I make something else for breakfast?” I want to say, “Are you an idiot? Of course you can’t make something else! Why in the world would you?” But I hold my tongue as he explains that his wife (interloper in the family that she is) doesn’t like to eat sweet things for breakfast, so he’s going to make some scrambled eggs. Eggs! Eggs! Beaten up former embryos!
I know I shouldn’t be angry, but I am. I know this isn’t personal, but to me it is! Now we’re at the breakfast table, and my son’s wife positions herself right in front of that big pile of cinnamon-oozing wonderfulness. I know she will break down and take one, but she doesn’t. Every bite of those eggs bothers me. I know scrambled eggs are soft, but I think I can hear her chewing and it drives me crazy. I can’t believe she’s rejected my transcendent rolls for her eggs!
Now think of what that whole scene is driven by. God’s existence and his law are out the window. It is all about me. The law of my self-centered expectations for my children. The law of my acclaim, my comfort, and my appreciation. I propose that so much of what drives our responses to our kids is an unannounced set of laws that are more about what we want for ourselves and our lives than what God wants for and from our children. In our allegiance to our law, we end up breaking God’s law in our interactions with our children. In this way we are just like our children: people who need to be rescued from ourselves.
You Need to Preach the Gospel to Your Children
I don’t mean that parents should “preach” to their children in the Sunday-morning-sermon style. I mean you should look every day for every opportunity to point your needy kids to the presence, promises, power, and grace of Jesus. Now here’s where I think this parental mission of grace begins. It doesn’t begin with your concern for the deep spiritual needs of your children, but rather with a humble admission of the depth of your own need. It is when you confess that you don’t have a prayer of being what God wants you to be and doing what God wants you to do as a parent without the rescuing and enabling grace of God. You become increasingly excited about and thankful for the rescue, and your personal thankfulness causes you to be enthusiastic about your children reaching out for the same kind of help.
Parents, we all need to have an “everything I do, I do to point my children to the presence and promises of God’s grace” way of parenting our children. Every conversation is an opportunity. Pointing them to the beauty of nature is an opportunity, every moment of correction and discipline is an opportunity, every sibling battle is an opportunity, success or failure at school is an opportunity, family worship is an opportunity, birthdays and holidays provide an opportunity, teenage identity angst is an opportunity, bedtime conversations provide an opportunity, discussions after watching something on Netflix provide an opportunity.
There will be no want of opportunities to talk to your children about their inescapable need for God’s grace. There will be no lack of opportunity for telling the story of how Jesus meets those needs. Because, by God’s plan, every good thing, every beautiful thing, every hard thing, every sad thing, and everything to celebrate gives us an opportunity to point to the God who, in grace, rules it all. The question is: will you see those opportunities in the mundane moments of parenting and capture them again and again and again?
What do you want for your children? Do you just want them to buck up and obey? Do you just want to be able to control their behavior until they’re out of your care? Do you want little more than children who do what they’re told and don’t embarrass you in public? Or do you long for more—much, much more? Do you want children who live every day as God designed them to live, whose hearts are ruled by worship of him and who gladly live inside his boundaries? You know, in your heart of hearts, you can’t produce children like this on your own. If you’ve paid attention, you’ve begun to realize that you can’t control the hearts of your children even with the best lectures, the best correction, and the most faithful discipline.
So it’s time to give up trying to do in the hearts and lives of your children what only God can do. It’s time for you to surrender your heart to his grace and lead the hearts of your children to trust in his grace. You say, “Paul, I get it, but I just don’t know practically what that looks like.” We’ll, I’m happy to say that this is what the rest of this book is about.
You Need to Model the Gospel of Grace to Your Children
I know what raising children was like for me, and I suspect it is this way for you as well. If as parents we really are called to be visible ambassadors of the presence, character, and plan of God in the lives of our children, then I often did a very poor job. In the way I often reacted to my children, I presented God as an irritable, impatient, judgmental, loud, and accusatory father. There were themes of daily contradiction between the message of grace that I talked to my kids about and the lack of grace that shaped my responses to them. I often failed to model the stunning patience and beauty of that grace. I was committed to what was right for my children, but I went at it in the wrong way. “I can’t believe that you would do such a thing!” “I do and do for you, and this is the thanks I get!” “You don’t want to know what’s going to happen if I have to come up those stairs one more time!” “Would you just be quiet for one meal so I can for once eat in peace?”
No child hears that kind of talk and says to himself, “What a wise and loving parent! I know I can share my heart with this person. I just wish he would say more of these things to me! I am so thankful that this person is my parent! I think I’m beginning to see my heart.” No one, adult or child, has ever had someone get up into their face and yell at them and has walked away feeling helped by it. All we just want is to escape, to have it end.
If God’s plan really is to make his invisible grace visible by sending parents of grace to give grace to children who desperately need grace, then I am called not just to preach that grace but to live and model it for my children every day. Writing this makes me weak in my knees, because I know this is counterintuitive to me and to you. As parents we lose our way, and we want our own way; we forget God’s plan and follow our own plan. If we are ever to represent the great Father well, we need to fathered by him as well. If we are going to give grace to our children, we need to confess that we are but children in daily need of the Father’s care. If we are going to be patient, we need to confess our need for patience. If we are going to be forgiving, we need to admit our need for forgiveness. If we are going to persevere, we need to humbly admit that our only hope is that our heavenly Father will never give up on us. And if we are going to teach our children to run to Jesus daily, we must run to Jesus daily as well. If we want our children to be sad in the face of the sin of their hearts and hands, we must mourn our sin as parents as well.
You see, it is only as we are willing to confess that we are more like than unlike our children, that we ourselves need parenting every day, that we will be parents in need of a father’s grace who will again and again lead our children to the grace of the Father.