Some lovely photos we took to celebrate her first birthday…

One of the irksome things that some parents do when they want children to listen is to lie to them. Here are some examples:

• Oh look! You just broke this so you can’t play with this anymore (when toy is not broken, but parent simply wants child to stop playing).
• Sweetie, don’t go over there or else some really bad people will snatch you away.
• I’ll buy you this toy for Christmas, let’s just go home now (assuming they’ll forget).
• If you don’t come with me right now, I won’t love you anymore.

The truth is, it’s easier to lie to them than to say no to them. I was actually told on several occasions to lie to my kids so to save myself the time and energy in disciplining them when they don’t obey. After all, my kids are young and what do they know? They won’t know that you lied. It is lot quicker to get them to listen.

Evers and I don’t lie to our children. We tell it as it is. A “no” is a “no” and if the child cannot accept it, then correction is needed. No bribing, no lying, no coercing. Why don’t we take the easier route? First off, we believe lying to our children is wrong even when it is a little lie.

Second, we believe that God placed us parents as authorities over our children. This means we have God’s blessing to exercise our authority over them. Lest someone misunderstand this, this doesn’t mean we are cruel when exercising our authority. Let’s be reminded of Ephesians 6:4 “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” Our authority over our children is to be exercised with the most humble and servant-hearted love.

Lastly, we want to develop a lasting and meaningful relationship with our children. Lying to them will only sabotage this trust relationship. Too often adults underestimate a child’s ability to understand. They know very quickly that what you said isn’t true and eventually they learn not to trust you anymore. Think about your children’s future as well. Will they have lifelong emotional scars from constant (or even occasional) dishonesty from you? Once you start lying to get children to obey, it is not easy to stop, and eventually you develop a habit to keep it up. You may think lifelong emotional scars is a bit farfetched. It is not. I know people who are still scarred from this parenting technique and can still remember every single incident.

What then? Rather than invent lies to manipulate (is there any better word?) our children, let us instead be frank and firm with them. Our goal is not simply getting them to behave in a certain fashion, but to mold their character and shepherd their souls. I think speaking the truth in love is a good place to start.

We have discovered that it is not easy to adopt a child, nor to rear children, biological or adopted. Not only in helping our daughter Emmie adjust to us (which she has done ably) but in our adjusting to her!

So why do it? And how to do it? To exalt and exult in the suffiency of God’s grace.

To quote John Piper, who with his wife Noel, has adopted a girl in addition to their four biological sons, from a sermon on adoption:

We dare only adopt children if we have a firm faith in the all-sufficiency of God’s future grace.The pain of adopting and rearing children is sure. It will come in one form or the other. Should that stop us from having children or adopting children? No. The self-centered world “cuts their losses” by having few or no children. (And there is way too much of that thinking in the church.) In one sense we may be very glad that such people don�t tend to have children or at least not many children. Because it means that breed of selfish person will die out more quickly since they don�t replace themselves. But on the other hand, we grieve, hoping that they will see that the grace of God is sufficient for every new day no matter how difficult, and that there is more true joy in walking with God through fire, than walking on beaches without him.

What a wonderfully poetic way of putting it, that “there is more true joy in walking with God through fire, than walking on beaches without him.”

Six months pregnant, caring for three children under 4 years old, she somehow managed to clean our kitchen to the point of that I almost didn’t recognize the place. So much junk had accumulated over months on the kitchen table & countertops… yet when I got home yesterday from the office, everything was so perfectly clean and organized that I was in shock.

As heavy a burden as being a homeschooling stay-at-home expecting mother has been – both physically and emotionally – this was no small task.

Thank you, my dear. You amaze and humble me.

An amusing tidbit and then something more serious…

We’ve previously noted that (almost-four-year-old) Matthew has been learning some of the worship hymns that we enjoy. I sing to him every night and he’s eventually caught on. One of his favorites is Before the Throne of God Above. He’s more or less mastered the first stanza, so he’s now trying to put the second to memory. The second half – which is a perfect statement of the gospel – goes:

Because the sinless Savior died,
My sinful soul is counted free;
For God the just is satisfied,
To look on him and pardon me.

Well, leave it to the active but vocabulary-limited mind of a 3+ year old to come up with a variant on this portion of the song that actually has amusing theological implications (don’t worry, we’ll correct him sooner or later):

Because of sinless Savior died,
My sinful soul is counted three;
For God the just is satisfied,
To look on him and part of me.

When I heard this I started cracking up, realizing that the last line is actually the (bad) theological understanding of many false gospels which require works of men to gain approval before God. ‘Twas amusing. I’ll correct him soon enough…

On a more serious note, this evening, as I was tucking him into bed, I noticed underneath his bed an array of papers. Apparently, he’d covertly taken a perfectly usable small notepad and pulled every sheet off the pad (leaving a number of blank sheets in a mess). Now, this whole day, he’s had a rather poor attitude, so my first instinct was to raise my voice and demand to know why he’d done so obviously a foolish thing (he knows it’s not his to mess with and he’s got a bad habit of messing with things). But, by God’s grace, I restrained that initial response and bought some time by calmly telling him to collect the papers up neatly and give them to me.

In the meantime, I sat down on the floor. After he collected the papers, he sat on the bed watching and awaiting my reaction. I knew full well the reason he’d taken apart the notepad: his sinful and fallen nature prefers to do things that are “fun” irrespective of others, including their property. To merely rebuke him for doing it was pointless and even counterproductive: as parents, our job is not to be mere legalists, requiring perfection of our children; but evangelists and heart-shepherds, leading our children to see their need for Christ.

So instead of asking why he’d done it, I told him why: “Do you know what this means? The fact that you took apart mommy’s notepad, knowing full well it was against her wishes, shows the wickedness of your heart. You did a wicked thing because you have a wicked heart.”

Now, we’ve just begun memorizing memory verses together, and he’d just memorized Psalm 1:6, which reads, “For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.” So we’d actually talked about what the word “wicked” meant last night and I’d told him that he had a wicked heart, as did all men, apart from Jesus giving them a new heart.

So when I said this, he immediately said, “You have a wicked heart too, Daddy.” Not maliciously or with ill will, but as a matter of fact.

So I responded, “Actually, Matthew, I don’t. I had a wicked heart, but Jesus has given me a new heart�a heart to love Him and obey Him and love others.”

He thought about that a moment and said, “I want a new heart too.”

After that, I took a few moments to attempt to convey the real meaning of having a new heart. In other words, it’s not like getting new shoes, simply something you acquire with the right amount of asking or money. It’s something God gives in the context of conviction of sin and repentance and faith. Mostly, I just told Matthew that I too want him to have a new heart, but it’s not as simply as simply wanting a new heart; but also him coming to feel horrible about the wickedness of his current heart. Then, in closing, I prayed that God would give him a new heart, something I pray for him nearly every day, that would hate evil and sin and wicked things, and love Christ.

If you have a moment, I welcome your prayers on his behalf as well. I give thanks to the Lord for helping me tonight not to preach legalism but the gospel of hope.