“It’s not my fault. I only said it because he said it first”.
“Why am I the one getting in trouble when she does it all the time!”
“It was his idea, not mine!”
These are some of the (lovely) retorts our kids have for us when they are on the defensive. Whether they justify themselves by dismissing their wrongdoing or by shifting blame onto someone else, they are determined to acquit themselves. Sometimes our kids’ self-justification looks like self-righteousness, when they position themselves above someone else on a moral high ground. Sometimes it’s both at once.
And we parents can relate – we have our own ways of justifying ourselves. We can look to our kids’ behaviors and aptitudes to prove that we’re good parents and therefore, good people.
At the root of self-justification is the desire to mark ourselves righteous by counting up all our good works or denying our wrongdoings. We do our best to not need grace or forgiveness by aiming do everything right, to be perfectly righteous, by our own strength and willpower.
The Human Urge to Self-Justify
Why do we feel this urge? As people in Christ, we confess that we are fully justified by Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. Jesus knew no sin, yet he took the punishment for sin that we deserve. His perfect obedience and righteousness are counted on our spiritual record instead. But the security and confidence our spiritual reality brings can get obscured by our own sinful desire to glorify ourselves. Likewise, fear of what other people will think of us makes us feel defensive or less-than.
So, the irritation and indignation I feel upon hearing my kids’ defensive remarks share a common origin with the retorts themselves. In my kids and in me, there’s some corner of our hearts that wills to forget we are all sinners who mess up, who depend wholly on grace. The apostle Paul understood that this forgetfulness is part of our sinful human nature. He reminds us to never “set aside the grace of God” (Gal 2:21); that what we do or avoid doing can never make us righteous. We must take care to not step into the trap of self-righteousness or underestimate the depth of our need for the grace we have in Jesus.
We never have to self-justify. We should not self-justify. We have already been justified by the only one who can save us and make us righteous. Thanks be to God, we have nothing to prove and nothing to lose in Jesus.
Nothing To Prove and Nothing To Lose In Jesus
Since we are justified in Jesus, there’s no need to deny or blame-shift when we’re faced with our sin and failure. Our imperfections say nothing about whether we are worthy of the grace we have been shown– that we are unworthy has already been proven. Our unworthiness only confirms our desperate need for Jesus’s grace. Rather, our imperfections confirm God’s deep love for us because he loves us in full knowledge of our every sin and failure.
Because our sins can never condemn us who are justified in Christ (Rom 8:1-4), taking responsibility for our sins and bringing them before God is not the fear-filled confession of guilt that ends in conviction and sentencing. For the justified, repentance is the farthest thing from being threatened by punishment. Repentance is a means to drink deeply of God’s grace.
To paint a picture of this wonderful truth for our kids, we take care to speak to them about sin and failure with a lot of grace. We don’t demand perfection. Instead, we celebrate progress appropriately, according to who that child is. We acknowledge how difficult it is to resist the urge to turn inwards when we face our imperfections. We can lessen shame by empathizing with our kids, letting them know we parents are in the same boat. We all live in fallen bodies in a fallen world where we still need to fight sin, and we swing and miss sometimes. We can normalize patterns of acknowledging when we’ve wronged one another and apologizing, which helps our kids see that truth and reconciliation are essential to relationships.
From that framework we demonstrate how the cycle of repentance and forgiveness is a normal part of walking in relationship with Jesus. Finally,we can be generous with our affection for our children, always communicating our pleasure in them, apart from what they do or do not do. In this way, we help our kids feel God’s own delight in them which far exceeds our own.
Lord, Give Us Eyes of Faith
My kids have expressed to me how they find it difficult to know that our heavenly Father is truly pleased with them, because they cannot physically see his smile or audibly hear his voice say, “I’m so glad you came to me with this”. They sometimes wonder if all those truths of the gospel are really for them. Their words leveled me, because I have also struggled with feeling too feeble in faith. It’s when we feel alone and unsure of God being for us that we, in self-defense, turn to self-justification.
Fellow parents, it takes the eyes of faith to begin to see how completely sinful we are, and how securely loved we are by our heavenly Father. We need eyes of faith to see the value and truth of all the spiritual blessings we are promised in Jesus: that though we’re imperfect, we are never alone; that God works in us and through us; that though he knows us fully, including all our sin and failure, he takes great pleasure in us, his children. To become willing, even glad, to uncover our imperfections to God, our hearts must see that the one we show our imperfections to is someone who can, and wants, to heal and redeem them because he has healed and redeemed us. This is all the miraculous heart-work of the Spirit.
So as we pray for the Spirit to bear the fruit of deeper faith in our kids, we pray the same for ourselves. Take heart, parents! He is doing this work in you now. He can, he is, and he will do it in your kids too.
For more comfort and reassurance in the gospel, be sure to check out the Rooted Parent Podcast.
