#42. The Mission of Motherhood: Teach Them to Obey Jesus
In article #41, I mentioned several ideas about mission which end up clogging the arteries of motherhood. One of those ideas is that the Great Commission is primarily about evangelism to strangers. We leave off the main bit that Jesus told his disciples to be, “teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Jesus tells us to teach obedience to those for whom we have some sort of discipleship responsibility.
The most profoundly connected disciples Christian parents have are their own children. We are obliged to teach our kids to obey Jesus. Every moment and task in our children’s young lives is given by Jesus to be used for training them into obedience to Him. Whole body, whole heart, whole soul, whole mind, whole strength obedience. The sort of obedience which grows alongside of, comes from—and feeds—love for Jesus. Our job is to remind our children, in a way they can’t ignore, in all of life, that they live under the authority of the Lord. We are to use our temporary season of parental authority to train our children to live for him. Never was the commission to “teach them to obey everything I have commanded” more thorough than for a parent who gets to oversee their children’s first experiences of everything.
How do kids in Christian families learn to obey the King they can’t see? By learning to obey the parents that the King has put in authority over them. We teach our children to obey us, not for our own sake, but because that’s how they learn to obey Jesus. We are the temporary middle-men, visible representatives of God’s authority while our children learn to see the unseen. When we are careless about obedience in our families, we are betraying the Lord Jesus, living out of harmony with what’s true; behaving as if we, or our children, are lords unto ourselves.
Doing a faithful job of teaching our children to obey Jesus doesn’t secure their obedience to Jesus. There are parents who do a faithful job raising their kids in the ways of the Lord, and whose children still grow up to drift from Jesus. Our parental diligence cannot secure their salvation (only Jesus’ obedience in their place does that). But neglecting to train our children in obedience will certainly hinder them. We’ll cover more of the perils of teaching obedience in coming articles. The point remains, regardless of the outcome, it is our responsibility as parents to raise our children in the ways of obedience.
A big hangup we have is that we grownups don’t naturally like learning to obey Jesus ourselves. Obedience is not trending. We spend an awful lot of time talking ourselves out of it. We know that thinking seriously about our kids’ obedience will force us to come to terms with our own. Only a work of the Holy Spirit will make us want to bother.
In coming articles we’ll consider what it means to teach our children to obey Jesus: what Biblical obedience is, what stops us (practically, theologically, philosophically), what the perils of teaching obedience are and how it can be attempted. My prayer is that we grow to know the sweetness of obedience, from the inside out—for ourselves and our families. And that, tasting the goodness, we learn the subtle art of teaching it.
Even if we are convinced that we should be teaching our children to obey Jesus, we often get into a muddle. We think that teaching our children to obey Jesus is done the same way as we would help an adult who has recently become a Christian, by merely imparting information.
Discipling a completely dependent person from infancy is more than telling them a message. It’s growing a whole person in a way of being, a whole life lived in and for Christ Jesus. The work of Christian motherhood is to build a whole life of worship, a life of abiding in Jesus, which our children are immersed in during their growing years. We’re building a culture which gently exerts a constant, definite force. Our family culture will either help or hinder our children in growing up into Christ. Our work as mums is to build homes, culture and relationships that help.
The scope of a parent/child relationships is broader and deeper and more varied than what we have in other relationships. This means that discipling our child is broader, deeper and achieved through an aggregate of more varied factors than we share with anyone else. You are not responsible for the fabric of your neighbour’s entire life (food, time, sleep, bathing, play, learning, emotions, social network) the way you are for your children. You don’t have the job of training your neighbour to regulate themselves in every bodily and emotional function. You have not been entrusted with the gift of parental authority over the woman you chat with at the gym. Your old school mate is not commanded to honour and obey you. You are not responsible for your work colleague’s behaviour. You are responsible for what your dependent children do. God will not call you to account for the sin of the guy at the supermarket. God will be asking you questions about how you managed your own child’s tantrum in the confectionery aisle.
God has designed and ordered the needs of children such that they depend on mothers and fathers. It would be disorderly and unhealthy for other people to have the same level of dependence on you. But in motherhood, by God’s design, we’re given 24 hours and a whole life full of tools, for decades on end, to use in helping children grow into their fullness. Every corner of our home, every routine, every glance, every gesture, each interest and delight cultivated—every word—all these things are God’s provisions to form obedient people for himself.
Neglecting obedience is not neutral ground. If we do not train our children into everyday godliness, we are inadvertently teaching them to walk in ungodliness; passively teaching our children to disobey Jesus. Not teaching obedience in our homes means we’re working against the Great Commission. Anti-Great Commissioning.
The habitual disobedience which we permit hardens into unbelief. To be passive about the obedience of our children is to be fortifying their natural enmity to God. Our mission is to recruit all our domestic and maternal muscles to build home cultures that put our children in the way of obeying God’s truth, while we wait on him to bring them from death to life. In his grace, the life of teaching obedience to Jesus can be the very means God chooses to use in the process.
