#48.The Perils of Teaching Obedience
The more essential something is, the greater harm its neglect or disorder brings. If you’re tracking with me this far, you’re probably convinced that it’s essential to train our children to walk in God’s ways. Neglecting this duty might not be your problem, but the temptation to go about it in a disordered way stalks us all. The damage is different, but as real as when we neglect obedience altogether. Once we’re persuaded that it is good for us to train our children in obedience, a new set of potholes form in the road, some deeper than others.
Peril: We’re self-serving
Teaching children to obey is not about getting our own way, the triumph of mum’s will. Teaching obedience is not about my own convenience (although kids who obey end up being less complicated to be with). It’s not to avoid public shame (although it is much more pleasant when children bless rather than harass the world). Teaching obedience is not so kids can be more predictable and malleable, freeing us up to do other things (although kids who obey can eventually be trusted with more independence, which does give us a lot more flexibility). When we’re motivated by our own ease, we disobey our Heavenly Father. We’ll be selfish authorities who embitter and exasperate our children. This kind of obedience training is driven by selfish ambition and vain conceit. Paul’s words apply here:
“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others”. (Philippians 2)
Teaching children to obey the Lord Jesus is one way we lay aside our own interests in order to serve these others. More than that, teaching obedience is delightful to the Lord. There is something bigger than our children’s well-being or our convenience brought about when children obey their parents. Paul gives this as the motivation for kids to obey their parents:
“Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.” Colossians 3:20
God actually notices the obedience of a child, and of all his interests in the universe, it delights him.
Peril: Making obedience all about negative behaviour
Obedience training is not to be marked by antagonism. A well-ordered view of obedience will have a rich picture of the good we are pursuing. It will be conscious and deliberate about the good we are trying to usher our children into. Obedience will never be defined by mean, arbitrary deprivation. Wisdom and joy, a life of fellowship with God and others—the fullest life possible—is in view in any temporary restraint we impose. Our kids need to know we are their allies, committed to their long-term joy. Obedience training should be dominated by a vision of good. Paul was sensitive to this, when alongside his instructions to children to obey, he said:
“Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.” Colossians 3:21
“Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” Ephesians 6:4
When we care about obedience, it is easy to fall into a constant fastidiousness that is burdensome to the whole family. A critical perfectionism. Sarcasm that stings. Our children learn to have a critical eye on others, because they feel there is always a critical eye on them. This happens through micromanaging, through an over-specific, machine-gun-fire list of rules. A barrage of ‘do not’ and ‘may not’ is hard to endure and tends to produce children who are younger versions of their exacting parents. Requiring too much, in the wrong way, apart from healthy instruction, without invested, affectionate relationship, without a long term view of independent joy, will bring discouragement, exasperation, bitterness. This is something I have become increasingly conscious of in my own parenting. There is plenty of confession and repentance going on here!
In “Why Children Matter”, Doug Wilson talks about how in the Garden of Eden, obedience meant “One ‘no’ in a world of ‘yes’ ”. Belonging to the Creator was a world of opportunity and potential. It’s a helpful way of reformatting the proportions of how we think about obedience. The goal is for us to say more ‘yes’ than ‘no’, to realise that in training into obedience, we are actually giving far more than what is being held back.
Peril: We confuse compliance with obedience
Teaching obedience is not about mum and dad being lord. Obedience in our families is about all of us, together, living under the lordship of Jesus. Our mission is not merely to teach our children to obey in a general sense, but to obey Jesus. Not to merely teach kids to do as they are told, but to love the Lord, and have an appetite for all that delights him. The early stages of obedience training will require no less than compliance, but the long process is meant to lead to so much more.
Obedience training that never ripens beyond mere compliance leads to either passivity or opportunism in children. Mere compliance means they don’t figure out how to discern and choose the good, how to reject the evil for themselves. Godly discipline dislodges folly from the heart of the child, helping wisdom form up in its place. As that happens, our children shouldn’t need us continually prompting them. Mere compliance training infantilises, keeping children passive and dependent, always needing the frame of someone else’s will and instructions propping them up. Children who grow to be teenagers and adults who will merely do as they’re told, whomever is asking something of them, will not be wise and steadfast. They’ll be at the mercy of the wrong people; conflict averse, always following the path of least resistance.
We want our children to grow into non-compliance as far as worldliness goes. This ‘rebellion’ comes from their submission to Christ, not their own wills, or someone else’s will. We want our children to grow to discern the difference between a rightful authority and an imposter, to discern the difference between the fear of God and the fear of man. Unthoughtful training might look like obedience in the short term, but sets kids up to be adults who comply with anyone who appears stronger than they are. When they eventually find themselves in the position of being the strongest person, then they’ll become someone who makes ungodly demands of others. Compliance and passivity become manipulation and aggression when the relational chemistry changes. Neither are features of Christian maturity.
If we keep the focus of obedience training on obedience to the Lord Jesus, and if we are handling our authority in a way that shows that we, as parents, are also submitting in obedience to Jesus, then our kids will be better positioned to know that the standard of obedience, anywhere, is no other than Jesus’ standard.
Peril: Overstating what is being achieved
It is tempting to think we are the Holy Spirit and that our mothering is regenerating our children. Our mothering matters, because the Lord Jesus has called us to do it. But it is a limited work. A work that depends on God’s grace to make it useful in his own time and ways. When we take our duty to raise our children seriously, the inevitable time spent thinking about it and doing it can lead us to think that teaching obedience is achieving more than it is. I remember when my two year old had responded to some effort we had put in to help him stop whining. I thought the battle was won forevermore. It didn’t take long to notice that the temptation to whine would continue to beset our child beyond that first triumph. Teaching obedience is not a checklist of virtues we are completing (and don’t you let anyone sell you such a checklist, or a product or curriculum promising any such thing!). Obedience matters, and we can look forward to seeing progress in ourselves and our children, but it is not the only thing we’re are doing. Often we pump ourselves up with motivation, that our diligence will lead to particular outcomes. That, If my child learns the habits of obedience now, they will never make a foolish choice.
The two year old whining was something we were right to address, not as a one-off task, but as part of a pattern repeated tens of thousands of times over the course of many years. The single event doesn’t achieve much on its own. Even a pattern of obedience is only one element in the vast ecosystem of parenting. Done badly, it poisons the whole; done well, it is still only part of the whole. But all because our obedience training doesn’t achieve everything, doesn’t mean it is worth nothing.
Done well, in a way rightly ordered under God and responsive to his word, our mothering will recede in our children’s consciousness. The experience of learning obedience in childhood ought to be a lot more absorbing for us than for our kids. When we do it wisely, the effect is subtle and perhaps even quite forgettable, as far as they are concerned. We just can’t know the place it fills, or the void that is left when we don’t do it. We need feel the edges of what we know, and get on with doing it because it pleases the Lord and is right.
Peril: Doing the wrong thing at the wrong time.
A three year old is different from a twelve year old and seventeen year old. You can’t handle obedience and disobedience the same way across the various stages. What doesn’t get dealt with early can’t be retrofitted. Grace comes in other ways, but they are painful. The three year old shoes do not fit the twelve year old. If the young child, then older child, has never experienced a sense of healthy parental authority, then we can’t be surprised when they don’t have a sense of anyone being in authority over them as a fifteen year old. When we suddenly come to the awareness of having left obedience unattended, we don’t move forward by trying to skip through the workbook from the beginning, to get our older child up to speed. Do the right work at the time given for it, because you don’t get to go back.
The reason I write “Light Duties” with the early years in mind, is because the early years are where all the hard landscaping is built. Being alert in how we mother our children when they are younger gives us more robust spaces for when they are older.
Peril: We give up if it’s not “working”
Sometimes we use faulty tools, or are too quick to assess the situation. If our children are not learning to obey, then perhaps we need more help? We need to figure out the details in our local church, face to face with other believers who know us and our husband and children, people who can notice patterns that we might be blind to, people who can offer insight into our situation. Talk to older Christians you know, whose grown children are walking with the Lord, whose lives you can imitate (1 Timothy), and ask their advice. If you don’t know anyone personally who is suitable, then borrow someone from afar (Doug Wilson’s book “Standing on the Promises” is the most thorough I’ve read so far—I just finished reading it last week).
You mightn’t see how you could possibly make progress in the area of addressing obedience in your family. But you don’t have to figure it all out before you start. The first step is to notice and agree with what the Bible says about parents and children; to pray, confessing the ways we’ve not heeded Scripture, then asking God to make the way forward plain.
Courage and confidence despite the peril
There are many ways we get things wrong. Our sin mangles and makes further obedience more complicated. But the complications don’t nullify the command. The exceptions don’t change what God has made plain for all of us. The fact that there are potholes don’t mean we should give up on the road. It just means being alert, swerving, repairing, and occasionally dealing with the erosion that is undermining the road.
Neglecting to teach our children to obey, or teaching them for selfish reasons, or in an ungodly attitude, or using foolish means, are all things we can (must!) confess to our heavenly Father. These are among the things Jesus suffered, bled and died to forgive. Confess sin. Ask for forgiveness. Believe God’s word on forgiveness in Jesus. Ask for help to repent and get on, in the Spirit’s provisions, growing into maturity as a parent. Seek to learn what you don’t yet know. After dealing with it before the Lord, ask your children’s forgiveness for any ways you have sinned against them. Open the Bible and share with them what the Lord has been teaching you. Let them see what it’s like to be forgiven and growing into new obedience. We can trust he’ll always provide solid ground for each step as it needs to be trod.
Our obedience in this task of teaching our children to obey Jesus is not the grounds of success in this whole child-raising venture. Our obedience is only a signal of our trust in God. It is a token of our trust in what he says, even though we imperfectly grasp it. It is God who brings about his merciful outcomes and we can look past the perils, optimistically, to his triumph.
