• Lisa and I would like you all to join us for the wedding of our daughter, Hannah, at 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, June 1, at Covenant Presbyterian. The groom, lucky man, is Adam Lutz of Asheville, N.C. If you are able to join us, an RSVP would be appreciated by the first week in May. Alana Roecker is making Hannah’s dress; Heidi Dillow is preparing the feast; Julie Bilbro is making the cake. I’m preaching! We hope you can come!
• This note is about parenting, specifically the need to clarify motives: what are you trying to accomplish and how? (Bear with me, this will be black-and white for the sake of brevity.) Coming out of the 20th century, the standard tools for understanding and shaping children are psychological, which is to say, kids are thought of as something like lab-animals who respond to various inputs in various ways. So the secret of parenting is to find the right inputs for your kids (whether food, or sleep, or play-dates, or time-outs or whatever) and administer them in the optimum dosage and timing. It’s a material model that understands people as organisms rather than children of God, mechanisms that respond to impulses rather than souls being trained to love God.
• By contrast, the Bible says things that seem to have come from a day when men carried clubs and dragged their wives around by the hair. For example, “Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him” (Prov 22:15). In fact, there are serious and significant ideas in this text and others like it. First, children come to us not perfect, but flawed (original sin), just as David came from his mother’s womb and as all of us came from Adam (Ps 51:5, Rom 5:12). So a great deal of our work as parents is to discern and discipline (a word which comes, of course, from “disciple”). There are things we need to “drive” out of our kids, things that will destroy them with time — superiority, lying, self-pity, indifference to the pain of others, anger, possessiveness and so on. You are saving your kids from themselves, just as Jesus saves us from ourselves (“ Punish him with the rod and you will save his soul from death” Pr 23:14). An intelligent parent can read his kids, he knows what their particular habits of sin are and corrects those, hopefully with words, but with a wooden spoon or whatever if necessary. It’s true, your kids may not be demons, but they are hardly angels. Just ask the parents who watched them in the nursery last week.
• Parents who think of themselves as more caring, or sensitive, or cool in not correcting their kids are making two mistakes. They are unwilling to face the destructive power of sin (Prov 23 again), and they refuse to see that the cost of their present conflict-avoiding peace is their child’s ruined adulthood. Imagine the misery of being married to someone whose parents raised them in the illusion that they never had to face or correct their wrongs.
• But above and behind and more important than all this, what’s at stake in the way you shape your kids is the glory of God. The goal of the psychological model for parenting is some vague psychological idea of personal happiness, as though the entire meaning of existence could be captured in having a house in the suburbs and membership at the gym. Our goal as the people of God is to raise children whose lives honor God — which is the same as saying, to raise children who live in harmony with the purpose of their existence. That purpose is not in life itself, but in God who created and transcends life. In any home where the conflict over sin is not merely a personal power struggle (parent vs. kid), but is about both parents and kids seeking God, things get a lot healthier.
• Finally, it’s odd, but often when Christians read something like this note, they skip the Bible passages. Bad habit. I encourage you to read this one. It’s from Psalm 78 and I’ll put it in prose form: “ He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children, that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children, so that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments; and that they should not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not steadfast, whose spirit was not faithful to God.”
• This is what you are trying to accomplish, to pass from generation to generation the ability to “set [your] hope in God and not forget the works of God.” The raw material you are beginning with is naturally “stubborn and rebellious.” This is the problem, but it’s also the calling, the mission. Stay on task. Keep your own heart in Christ and pass that on to your children. As Moses said, “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Deut 6:4ff).