#43. Why We Don’t Teach Kids to Obey Jesus
When I was younger, “obedience” was merely uncool. In the 90’s and 00’s, we didn’t use the word because it was daggy, uptight and prudish. Obedience meant deprivation and legalism, the arbitrary spoiling of fun. Thoroughly unappealing. Now, it is counted among the evils of this world. Obedience belongs to discussions about authority. Authority is a bit too close to power. Power is the thing we’re busy deconstructing and redistributing. In a world that believes the individual Self gets to define all reality, that there is nothing objectively true, then obedience doesn’t make sense. Where individual self-determination is the ultimate value, obedience is the enemy. The only way of understanding obedience in a Godless world, is to see it as a stronger person exerting their will over the weaker; as one person interrupting another person’s self-rule. In this system, to expect obedience is an assault on the Self of another*. Hating obedience makes perfect sense outside of a Christian worldview.
But God's people are meant to love it. While, on paper, many of us hold orthodox Christian views, our parenting practice shows where we have drifted far from biblical fidelity, especially when it comes to obedience. I’m saving the theological hindrances for the next article. Let’s consider some other reasons why we might not be inclined to teach our children to obey Jesus.
DISTASTE
Since the beginning, people have been afraid that obedience stifles. Eve ate the fruit, because obeying God’s one prohibition in the garden of Eden looked like intolerable deprivation. She questioned God’s goodness and the goodness of the boundary he had set. The serpent still whispers. We think obedience is God’s way of shutting us out of satisfaction. We are all born inclined toward disobedience. Our own ancient fallen nature, longing to define reality and live our own way in it, is against us. This is true of ourselves and our children.
Where obedience is counted as evil, disobedience is a virtue. It’s the new truth, to assert one’s authentic Self (as fluid and changeable as that Self is). For a parent to get in the way of self-expression is considered abusive. We justify, or even enjoy, the disobedience of our children. We pull out our phones and ask them to do it again for the video camera. A contrary two year old is often very amusing. We’re proud of their warrior-spirit defiance. As my friend Charlotte Mason says, we mistake wilfulness as a strong will, when actually it’s the opposite—it’s a weak will enslaved to the appetites. What we celebrate as freedom is slavery.
We have been culturally conditioned to expect that merely liking or wanting something is enough to justify our actions. We are governed by our preferences and appetites rather than convictions. We dismiss ideas which don’t smell to our taste. Rather than examining the merits of the idea, the truthfulness of what is being said, we follow our noses in another direction. This is particularly true when we read about motherhood. If the tone is a bit foreign or abrasive, if it paints a picture we don’t like, we dismiss the argument. We mightn’t be able to say what is untrue about it, we just didn’t like it. If we don’t like the sound of something we ignore it. If we do like it, we count it as true-for-me. Taste wins against truth.
BLAME CULTURE
Some current popular schools of psychology blame all our adult difficulties on the failure of our own parents decades earlier. These theories guess that adults are anxious or depressed because of things their parents did or didn’t do. Sometimes, it’s because parents expected behaviour which conformed to a certain standard. In other words, obedience. We dismiss obedience because a foolish parent didn’t understand what true obedience was, or because they used unfair means to train us. This is why, rather than dismissing a word which the Bible uses a lot, we need to come to terms with it afresh. I’ve been tempted to find things in my childhood to blame for my adult struggles, and it is always possible to retell one’s history in a way that neatly allocates blame. But the fact is, even with a completely different childhood experience, I could still be an adult who struggles with anxiety and depression. There are always many possible explanations for our troubles. Ditching obedience in our own families won’t solve these problems.
This psychoanalytical quicksand makes us very hesitant about parenting our own children. We dread being blamed for damaging our kids. We’re paralysed by fear that guiding our child toward a definite standard will actually be bad for them. We are suspicious of restraint. So we don’t teach them to obey Jesus for fear that obeying Jesus will wreck them.
WE’RE BEING DISCIPLED BY PEOPLE WHO HATE JESUS
Many smart, biblically literate mums get their parenting advice from online experts who don’t believe in sin, an eternal soul and the saving Lordship of Jesus. Many experts would make a case for why we shouldn’t seek to train our children at all, because they are being consistent with an atheistic, secular humanist worldview. Secular parenting advice will not do much to help you raise your kids for God and into godliness. When popular theories (and they are just theories) shape our parenting practices, then all the things which would need to happen to bring children into obeying Jesus will probably feel rather impossible. Pop psychology is taking us in the opposite direction of where we’re meant to be going. Parenting is applied theology. It doesn’t make sense to go to someone who hates Jesus to tell you how to raise his children.
WE OVERESTIMATE CHILDREN
While we might agree to a creed that says all of us are born with fallen natures, we give our children freedoms as if they were infinitely wise. We allow them to follow their impulses (since we don’t like restraining their options) as if their every desire was only ever, always good.
Since it’s popular to do everything in response to the child’s demand, from birth, we transfer breastfeeding principles to all aspects of child rearing. When our standard for everything, from birth, is “what does she want?” and then trying everything until we placate the child, this tends toward a certain dynamic in the parent/child relationship. The governing question is about what the child wants, rather than, “what is good for her?”, and, “what is the long term goal for her whole personhood?”.
WE UNDERESTIMATE CHILDREN
We don’t believe children can learn habits and choices apart from the immediate gratification of their impulses. We look for explanations about their idiosyncrasies and then believe these divergencies mean they are unable to ever mature in some areas. We don’t believe in their ability to learn new ways of being. We create permanent identities out of temporary challenges. We don’t think they’re capable of learning to obey Jesus, so we don’t bother teaching them.
WE DON’T THINK OBEDIENCE IS A BIG DEAL
Most disobediences are so little that we feel like correcting them is an overreaction. All because the two year old’s refusal to come was understandable does not change the fact that he disobeyed. When we better understand what the Bible teaches us about obedience, we’ll get a better sense of proportion. It will be easier to see what the real issues are, and how important they are. We also need the Bible to show us how to hold the weight, teaching our kids to obey Jesus, without us being melodramatic fuss-pots. Thinking through such things will take a few more articles.
NO GUARANTEES
If we aren’t in the category of believing that obedience will harm our kids, some of us still hesitate to teach our kids to obey, because we’re not guaranteed a particular outcome. Why bother if it might not “work”? Setting up a life which immerses our children in all that God says is good, all the habits of being his obedient people, will be costly. It will be done at the expense of other things you could be doing. We get to enrich the nutrients in the soil, and protect the spaces for growing, and plant and feed and defend, but we do not make things grow. It’s all from Jesus and for him. His Holy Spirit is the life, ungoverned by us. Our Father achieves his own purposes and does not work on our timeline. He is not obliged to grow the type of fruit we would prefer. Our responsibility is to teach our kids to obey Jesus, but sometimes the lesson isn’t received the way, or in the time, that we hoped. This uncertainty can be enough to stall us.
WE DON’T KNOW HOW
Even if we’re persuaded that we ought to teach our children to obey Jesus, it can be a great mystery to know how to do it. We misunderstand how children take hold of new ideas and how they grow into new habits. Whenever we’re focused on a behavioural outcome, we’ll run to techniques that are often a travesty against the personhood of the child, causing them more trouble than help. We’ll focus on punishment or bribery rather than the habits of godliness, the atmosphere, the appetites and affections which help our children experience the delights of obedience. We’ll have a sterile view of home, which makes learning obedience have a rather medicinal flavour—for us and the kids.
WE’RE TOO BUSY
It takes time and energy to learn how to do new things. And it takes time and energy to do the things we’re learning. We’re in a hurry for convenient outcomes. Because we’re in a hurry, we’re relationally disconnected, which makes difficult behaviour more exaggerated and also reduces our resources to deal with it. Teaching our children to obey Jesus, in a way that doesn’t cause us to exasperate them, in a way which doesn’t lead us to sin against them, takes time and consideration.
WE’RE AFRAID
Teaching kids to obey Jesus might be one of the most costly, most counter-cultural, most risky things you could do as a Christian these days. It will only become moreso. If we can’t figure it out while we have some ease, I wonder how we’ll go when it is legally defined as a criminal activity? Courageous faithfulness in being a disciple of Jesus might be as basic as teaching our own children to obey the Lord Jesus. Let’s steward the present well.
*Our vision is bloodshot with current narratives of power and victimhood. To get the backstory on these things, Rachel Jankovic’s “You Who? Who You Are And How To Deal With It” is a straight forward read. For a more scholarly tone, try Carl Trueman’s, “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution”.
