#47. Taught to Obey, by Whom?
Teaching children to obey is a delicate, yet robust work. No relationship other than parent to child is designed to bear the weight of it. The trained childcare worker, the babysitter, the neighbour, the aunt, the uncle, the grandparent, the friends, the Sunday School teacher, the pastor, the school are not authorised by God to discipline and instruct children into mature godliness. Biblically, no one else is commissioned for this role. Even though other people are involved in the lives of our children, it is—by far—the parents’ responsibility to teach their children to obey Jesus. Other people provide relational backdrop, and short-order support of various kinds, but Scripture directs children to obey their own parents and directs parents to the training and instruction of their own children*. When we notice that the training is not merely a transfer of information and skills, but to “bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4), we soon realise that no one else can do it for us. Certainly not someone who doesn’t acknowledge the Lord Jesus. It is fathers in particular who are given this command and since a wife is helping him fulfil his work for the Lord, let’s count it as mum’s work too.
The Bible’s quietness on non-parent caregivers isn’t merely an accident of historical context, as if the Bible would hold different assumptions if it had been written in the 21st Century. The Bible reflects God’s design, established in how God created the world to be. That design is meant to be normative for us. We simply cannot fulfil the role we’ve been given if we are ordering our lives and parenting by typical standards around us—standards that mean kids end up in the care of people who aren't their own parents for significant slabs of time. Other caregivers can make sure our children are supervised and safe, but they can’t address sin or help form patterns of godliness with our children. Mere childcare is not helping us do Christian parenting.
One of the significant differences between parents and other caregivers is authority. No one else can raise godly offspring on our behalf, because no one else has been authorised by God to discipline our children. What the Bible calls the “rod of discipline” is meant to be in the hand of a parent and no one else. And not just any parent. A parent who is walking in God’s wise and loving ways, obeying all that God says is good. A rod in the hand of a non-parent, or an ungodly parent, is a problem. The problems are not our exemption.
This rod pops up in the book of Proverbs. Proverbs is the long talk from a father to a son,
“Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction
and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.
They are a garland to grace your head
and a chain to adorn your neck.” Proverbs 1:8-9
Along the way, Solomon makes some bold (and very off-trend) statements. Here are a few:
“The iniquities of the wicked ensnare him,
and he is held fast in the cords of his sin.
He dies for lack of discipline,
and because of his great folly he is led astray.” Proverbs 5:22-23“Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.” (13:24)
“Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him.” (22:15)
“Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die. If you strike him with the rod, you will save his soul from Sheol.” (23:13-14)
“The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother.” (29:15)
Whatever that corrective rod is, we can see that, in the very least, fathers and mothers are to be the active, diligent agents in using it. Instead of being the means of harm, it is the shepherd’s tool of comfort (Psalm 23). Proper use of it gives wisdom and life. We may not withhold discipline from our children, nor is it possible to outsource this responsibility.
No one else is meant to have the kind of rich physical and emotional proximity to our children that enables corrective discipline to be given in the right ratio. Correction needs to be the unmistakably loving action of a parent who is invested in the child in a lot of other, more obviously joyful ways. If we don’t have a full bank of pleasant interactions, the prerequisite security that enables effective disciplinary correction will not be there. Discipline needs to be suspended in a sea of affection and good humour; a joyful, interesting atmosphere, from the hands of parents who give abundant provision. Corrective discipline distorts when it’s given by people who aren’t the child’s parents. Children are distorted when corrective discipline isn’t given at all.
Corrective discipline is a feature of how God himself shows fatherly love, a feature that we were created to copy. The writer of Hebrews appeals to the experience of fatherly corrective discipline as a good picture of how our heavenly Father brings about the fruit of righteousness and life in us:
“we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.” Hebrews 12:9-11
When done and done well, within the rich substance of time and affection, correction eventually becomes redundant. Our kids are meant to mature out of their need for the corrective consequences of childhood. Wisdom grows in the heart of the child, and makes the immediate consequences of corrective discipline unnecessary. The sense of benevolent parental authority remains, but the need to enforce that authority slims right down as the children grow. After starting with consistency, we don’t need to correct constantly and perpetually. My friend Charlotte Mason would say we secure free open spaces for our children to expand into the fullness of their personality, into wisdom and all manner of lively pursuits. When it has been done well, discipline becomes a small piece of the story. But left undone, lack of discipline ends up ill-defining the family culture and spoiling the very relationships we fear to lose.
Our children are to obey us as we bring them into the norms of following Jesus, so that by the time they are ready to take responsibility for their own children (ie. old enough and competent enough to be married and have a household apart from ours), they will no longer owe us obedience. As our kids grow closer to that stage of adult independence, the mentorship of others is valuable. That mentorship will never be marked by the kind of obedience that is designed between child and parent in childhood. That influence of godly non-parents is more likely to be effective when there has been faithful corrective discipline from parents in the earlier years, because the teenager and young adult will have learned to appreciate wisdom.
Mentorship is a great thing when our kids are becoming adults. But our three year olds don’t need mentors. Mentorship is inadequate for training the young child in God’s ways. They need parents who have an immediate, felt authority. So don’t expect too much from Sunday School teachers and other caregivers. Any “success” they have will usually have a lot to do with the groundwork you lay. And if you lay that ground work of faithful corrective discipline, you won’t be as desperate for their remedies.
In an era where we can drift into ordering our lives in ways that don’t much resemble God’s design shown in Scripture and creation, it takes thoughtful effort to move towards the Bible’s norms in raising our children. Our key means of teaching our own children to obey all that Jesus commanded is through the obedience they owe us as parents, in the Lord. When we give up training children in obedience, when we give our children into the lengthy care of those who have not been given authority to discipline them, we give up our main means of teaching them to be Christian. God is in the habit of transforming and reforming his people, so conforming our parenting to his likeness isn’t such a far-fetched idea.
*Adoptive and long term foster carers have taken on a committed parental responsibility, which grows into parental authority, so they are “parents”, not proxies.
