Light Duties

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.

So, how do we actually teach children to obey? Here's a bullet point list to start with.

This chat is about what has been helpful in different stages of my mothering years, as far as personal Bible reading goes. Resources I mention in the chat can be found on the webpage.

https://biblereading.christkirk.com/women/#

Like me, were you ever the person at school who hated every subject you weren’t intuitively good at? The need to save face meant avoiding the areas where one’s incompetence could be exposed. Which meant it took me decades to realise there is more to enjoying something than being the best at it. It’s possible to learn to do new things. There’s much pleasure, when we’re willing to be seen for the duffers we are, while we fumble around learning something new.

It’s natural to dislike the word ‘obedience’, after all, none of us are very good at it...

A casual chat about both maternal boredom and bored kids. Is boredom really good for us? I used to think so. It's taken 17 years of being a mum to think otherwise. And, what can we do about it? 

https://www.motherbiblelife.com/articles/whymotherhoodisboring

Bringing about belief in Jesus is God’s, hidden, sovereign work. On the other hand, tending to behaviour (which can either help or hinder belief) is definitely on the rather visible parental job description. God starts and finishes the work of saving people, but he uses all manner of means in the middle. Christian parents are not meant to wait on belief before we get busy teaching our children to obey Jesus.

Should we expect children will learn to obey when we know they have a sinful nature? Is it even possible this side of Genesis 3?

The fallen, sinful nature does not completely erase the divine likeness every human being bears. If our thinking about total depravity has us conclude that no child can ever learn to obey at all, that they are beyond instruction and correction, that their lack of obedience is inevitably permanent, that they are unrestrainable, then we’ve not understood enough of the doctrine...

What if kids learning to obey parents is a gift of God's common grace, whether people are Christian or not?

When it comes to fulfilling the great commission in our families (to teach our children to obey Jesus), sometimes our Christian conundrums paralyse us:

• Should we expect children will learn to obey when we know they have a sinful nature? Is it even possible this side of Genesis 3?

• Should we expect obedience (and give consequences for disobedience) when the Bible tells us that “no one is righteous, not even one”?

• Will teaching obedience to Jesus leave kids thinking they merit God’s favour by their own goodness?

• Will training our children to obey Jesus make them think they don’t need God’s forgiveness?

• When I’ve told my child to put her bowl in the sink, and she doesn’t, am I correcting a very young Christian or a very young unbeliever? Does it make any difference?

• When I pray with my child, should I expect she will learn to pray with me, or just listen in? Is it wrong to teach my children to pray when I don’t know if they are actually Christians? Does God welcome their prayers? Is it teaching them to be presumptuous?

• Should we teach kids to say sorry to others and God before they understand the significance of what they’re doing? Isn’t this teaching them formulaic hypocrisy?

• Will teaching obedience make Christianity distasteful to them, leading to rebellion against Jesus down the track?

• Isn’t obedience the same as legalism—the thing which undermines the gospel of grace?

• Isn’t our job just to teach the Bible, then kids will work out obedience for themselves eventually?

• Doesn’t behaviour follow belief? How can children behave a certain way if they don’t believe, or are not yet cognitively able to understand the ideas which Christian belief is made from? If our children haven’t come to the place of independent belief, how is it possible for them to obey Jesus?

• If it is only God’s work which can change our child’s heart, what could parents possibly do to help their children obey?

• Since we’re saved by grace, why should we care about teaching our children to obey?

This is another audio-only free think about some aspects of teaching kids obedience, shared casually over my kitchen sink. These think-aloud chats are a bit of a birds-eye view from 17 years of parenting six kids (ie. lots of years not being able to ignore the realities of obedience!). 

You can find the long train of thought (mostly in article form, all available in audio) at Light Duties.

This is another audio-only stream of consciousness. Cathy talks through some reflections on the changing relationships she's had with music for kids across her 17 years of mothering. Real-time, real sound (complete with the soothing sounds of dishwater). An exercise in trying to think behind the artifacts of Christian resources.

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.

In this episode, we consider a range of reasons why we don't teach our children to obey Jesus, from fear of stifling them to just not knowing how to go about it.

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.

articles referred to:

https://www.motherbiblelife.com/articles/mothers-abiding

https://www.motherbiblelife.com/articles/feeding-on-bible-when-the-meals-are-interrupted

https://www.motherbiblelife.com/articles/nokidschurch

https://www.motherbiblelife.com/articles/is-worship-the-right-word

https://www.motherbiblelife.com/articles/constantembodiedworship

Here are some problematic assumptions about the Great Commission which end up stifling motherhood (and stifling the mission too):

Wrong Idea 1: We’re all meant to be constantly expanding our range of relationships to tell the gospel to new people.

Wrong Idea 2: Our children don’t qualify as people to be discipled.

Wrong Idea 3: The Great Commission is only about evangelism.

Wrong Idea 4: Mission to our children is done the same way as mission to our unbelieving neighbour.

Since Jesus is our Head and Lord of everything, since he has appointed us each to our own spheres and duties, we can trust that the limitations of his provisions will achieve his mission.

Are home duties a rival to the Great Commission? Will building an overflowing home waste resources that could otherwise be spent telling the world about Jesus? This is the question that troubled me most as I fumbled around in the early years of motherhood. The word that evangelical Christians often focus on is “go”. It’s hard to know what to do with that when so much of raising children is not going. This focus on taking the gospel to new people in new places pickles many of us in guilt, because the time of small children is not full of new people and new places. We’re trying to work out how to be with the same few people in far fewer places than we used to circuit. The slow smallness which goes with invested mothering can look, on the outside, like apathy about Jesus’ mission, or a barrier to it.

Home is meant to be the central place from which we worship and train up worshipers. It is naturally the locus of our maternal responsibilities. It won’t be the only place where responsibility and influence happens, but it is the basic place. We can’t leap over it. This is a bland thought if we’ve not known what it’s like to be in a home full of vitality; if we’re still trying to grow out of our boredom. To say that home is where we are primarily responsible and most influential can be insulting, or at least bewildering, if we have a purely functional view of the home. I’ve written in article #11 about how the instruction to ‘be busy at home’ is calling us to more, not less, than we imagine. The problem isn’t so much with home, but with its unrealised potential. We underestimate the influence we wield through it.

It’s not unusual to divide life into sacred and secular, bits God cares about and the bits he doesn’t. Because gathered worship and the Bible and prayer and evangelism matter enormously, we think that everything else doesn’t matter at all. But that is an unbiblical view, and a rather disheartening one. Most of our time as mums is given over to things which we would still do even if we weren’t Christian. When we think that God doesn’t care about the common activities we do, we’re behaving as if someone else created ordinary human life in this world and then God came in to rescue us from it. Not so!

We live in a time where home is seen as either a day spa you retreat to, or the site of heavy-duty, mind-numbing labour we’re desperate to escape. For the mothers of young children, we long for the former but live with the latter. Both ways of thinking about home are pretty boring and neither help us mature in worship while we raise worshipers. Let’s talk about boredom, because it is surprisingly connected with worship.

What do we do if we're tying to help our children grow into worship, but our church situation isn't ideal? Well, none are ideal. This episode is about what you can do.