A pastor friend of mine once confessed that in times of stress, he would “panic-buy” Bibles. He figured that even if he didn’t need them at the moment, he would eventually give them away. If there were deals and sales for multiples, it was an even greater incentive for him to get trigger-happy with his shopping cart.
We laughed about the piles of Bibles he must have hoarded in his basement. But later on it made me wonder what my version of panic under pressure would be.
I didn’t have to look far, literally, for in my line of sight were two pieces of lined paper, hastily torn out of a notebook and taped to my kitchen cabinet. On them was my attempt to legislate a proper heart attitude into my children. I’d scribbled a flowchart about sinful tendencies like anger, ungratefulness, selfishness, inconsideration, and disrespect, leading into what the consequences for each would be. In a moment of pent-up frustration with my kids’ stubborn sinful attitudes, I gave them an ultimatum in the form of arrows, rectangles, and angry scrawls.
Addressing Sin or Fixing Sin?
Sin is never unserious. We parents do well to take our children’s sinful attitudes seriously. We read the stories of Eli’s sons and David’s blind eye towards his children’s sins as cautionary tales, the worst-case-scenarios of parental inaction (1 Sam 2, 2 Sam 13). We make a point of addressing our children’s sinful attitudes because we want to prevent the damage that sin has the potential to cause.
But sometimes, it’s easy for “addressing sin” to morph into “fixing sin”. For me, it begins by equating the success of my parenting with whether my kids’ sinful attitudes have improved. When I’m frustrated by my child’s slow rate of change, I become stuck on trying harder with parenting efforts, as if I were the one who could change his heart.
In my self-sufficiency and haste to control, I am impatient and prone to angry outbursts. When I don’t remember that God is at work in my children, I am more prone to being critical than charitable. Like someone with a plank in my eye (Matt 7:3-5), I realize that I have more sinful attitudes than those written on the flowchart I’d made for my kids.
We parents are imperfect sinners, right along with our children. But thanks to our Savior Jesus, we and our children have all the grace we need to keep battling our sinful attitudes and grow in loving and enjoying God together.
Gospel Forgiveness
The gospel is the good news of grace for sinners like us and our children, not just once at the front-end of our lives with Christ, but for every moment for the rest of our lives. The apostle Paul warns against the thinking that once we are justified, we must stop sinning and grow by our willpower and works. He says in Galatians 3, “Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?”
Our kids do not stop sinning because we are great parents. We cannot “fix”, nor force them to “fix”, their sinful attitudes. When it comes to sin, we and our children must address it the way followers of Jesus do: by taking it to our heavenly Father in repentance and receiving the grace of his forgiveness.
Because Jesus’s death on the cross paid for our every sin, God is faithful to forgive us and our children’s every angry outburst, every selfish and careless comment and action (1 John 1:9).
For many parents, owning our mistakes and asking for forgiveness from our kids is far from a natural inclination. I come from a background where admitting wrong as a parent is itself a “sin”, and the shame of messing up becomes a heavy burden on the entire family. But I believe that our kids need to see us model how to receive grace in sin-failure as much as they need to see us model fruits of the Spirit. We do so by saying sorry for the specific words or actions we’re responsible for, and asking for forgiveness from both the ones we have hurt and from God. We pray for God’s help to remember for next time.
God’s forgiveness for his people is truly a grace that’s unconditional. We do not need to come before God with a 10 step plan of action to prove that we “should” receive his forgiveness. Truly, our Savior Jesus has absorbed the penalty for our sins, not because we have done anything to merit forgiveness. Our forgiven-ness is a permanent, real-life status and God’s forgiveness is a flowing fountain from which we will continue to draw on all our lives.
This is such comfort for us and for our children because we find ourselves confessing and repenting of the same sins again and again. But as God’s children, in all the innumerable times we will come before him in confession, we have never been, nor ever will be, in any danger of being less than exceedingly welcomed by our heavenly Father who loves us (Rom 8:38-39).
The Promise That Quiets Parental Impatience
The practice of putting off sin and putting on righteousness is part of how we and our children live out our identity as God’s children (Eph 4:22-24). As the Spirit renews our hearts and minds through God’s Word (Eph 4:23), we anticipate the fruit of our sanctification with hopeful expectation. But sometimes we grow weary of dealing with sin and want to enjoy walking with Jesus without it. Perhaps it is this yearning for a fuller realization of our new selves (2 Cor 5:17) that makes us impatient for ourselves and our kids to grow in spiritual maturity. We wish we sinned less.
It quiets my impatience to return to God’s promise that “he who began a work in (us and our children) will bring it to completion” (Phil 1:6). As we routinely bring our sins before God for forgiveness, apologize and forgive one another, and pray all the while for God to grow our hearts, we can trust that God is at work in us in his divine, perfect way. He will act in his divine, perfect time, listening to our prayers, and acting out of his all-affecting love for us.
That assurance is yet another grace from above, a perfectly warm and wonderful way that we and our children can enjoy walking with Jesus in the here and now.
Parents, join us for Rooted 2024 in Dallas, Texas, October 24-26!
