Over the past couple of posts, I have attempted to define biblical correction and to show that God requires it of us. Not only does he require adults to correct ourselves with His word as the standard, but also, He requires us to correct our children, “to put them right,” according to the standard found only in God’s word. Seems like a slam dunk, right? Well, maybe not exactly.
If your children sometimes bristle at correction, or they listen attentively and then go on doing what they were doing, or they give you a thousand excuses for why their behavior was justified and never want to own up to any wrongdoing, or they are compliant when you are near but behave like the devil when you are away, then read on.
The problem of sin
This point may seem obvious and even redundant; still, it is worth our placing a marker here. Clearly, we would not be talking about correction in the first place if it weren’t for sin in the world. Sin has corrupted everything, so we and our children need to be corrected back to God’s standard. Here’s where it gets tricky, ironically redundant even. Sin is exactly what makes it difficult for parents to correct and for children to receive correction.
The problem of the child
Children are autonomous beings. They live and move and have being. They are dependent upon their parents, but they are different from their parents. Who can say what actually is happening in the conscious self of an infant, but it does not take a rocket scientist to see that he fancies himself the sovereign of the world—he perceives that he has needs, and he demands those needs be met immediately lest he protest with every faculty of his being. As he gets older, those faculties of his being change; he goes from screaming to crying to whining to talking to subtly rebelling to openly defying. In short, his sin grows up with him, and he does not want his autonomous self to be challenged on any level. This is why he does not love correction.
But the Bible is very clear, throughout Proverbs especially, that only fools and scoffers hate correction while the wise love it. Don’t our children want to become wise? My two-year-old grandson is a lovely boy, about the best boy ever by my estimation, but he has no interest in becoming wise. That is why his parents must be wise for him, must correct him, and must teach him to love correction; otherwise, he will become a character from Lord of the Flies. “A child left to himself brings shame to his mother,” says Proverbs 29:15, and so parents must be actively correcting their children and teaching them to love it. It is an exercise akin to that old story about removing a thorn from the lion’s paw: he hates it with everything he has and will try to bite you every time you get near it, but once the thorn is removed, he is the most thankful fellow you ever met. Because of sin, there is nothing in your children that loves correction, so they will fight correction like the lion with the thorn in his paw. Someday, however, if you are truly faithful, they just may become wise, and then they will certainly thank you for all those years of correction. Just know, it is going to be a one-sided love affair for the first few years.
The problem of the parent
As it turns out, parent, sin has corrupted you, too, and so correcting your child to God’s standard is difficult. This is true in so many different ways that it won’t be possible to cover them all, so we’ll concentrate on a couple of main ones—laziness and anger.
Correcting children is hard work and not for the faint of heart. We have to be diligent and vigilant, and we must know the Bible well. It is much easier to send our children off to play so that we can have some me-time than it is to keep them close so we can monitor and correct them. This one gets many young parents. Correcting (parenting in general) is hard work that requires selfless, tireless, seemingly endless sacrifice. It hardly seems fair that so much time should be devoted to something other than self, especially when there are so many friends to chat with and books to read. Play dates, therefore, can very quickly devolve into coffee-friend-chat dates where children are left to themselves, and consequently, bring shame to their mothers. Believe it or not, this season of life is remarkably short. If you don’t correct your children during this season, you will not get a do-over. Don’t let laziness keep you from correcting your children to the glory of God.
Our anger also makes it difficult to correct our children, and it often comes in two different forms, both of which can be brought about by the aforementioned laziness. Parents who are not resolved to correct their children but are going about it timidly or distractedly or lazily often get their buttons pushed, as the saying goes. Rather than correct an errant child head-on for the right reason and with determination, the parent will make a suggestion or plea that the child stop whatever he is doing. The child, seeing that the parent’s level of engagement is non-committal at best, continues on as before. After a few rounds of this, the parent becomes angry enough to engage, sometimes with a shout, sometimes with an angry swat. And with that, the child’s sinful hatred of correction is reinforced. The parent is also worse off than before, but his condition is more complicated.
Sometimes parents get angry because they are embarrassed by their child’s behavior. In this case, the child does something in public that he may not have been corrected for in private. In this public setting, however, the parent’s eyes are open to the need for this to be corrected, so he moves quickly and decisively to correct. The child is surprised and resists. The parent becomes even angrier, and the whole situation gets ugly. The problem here is not that the child needs correction but that the parent is correcting in anger, and he has become angry not because his child sinned but because he is embarrassed by his child’s behavior. The parent is in need of correction himself and is by no means in the right frame of mind to correct his child.
Left to ourselves, neither parents nor children naturally love correction. As parents, however, it is our job to invite God to work in us through His word and the power of the Holy Spirit to put us in the right frame-of-mind and the right spiritual disposition to correct our children. We must love it when He corrects us and teach our children over time to love it when we correct them. Biblical correction leads the wise to the path of righteousness while fools and scoffers find themselves on the path of destruction.
