As we seek to provide godly discipline for our children, there are times where it’s appropriate for us to devise consequences or allow them to experience the natural consequences of their sin. Why are consequences part of godly discipline? 1. Consequences prove that we love our children. “Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.” (Proverbs 13:24) 2. Consequences drive out folly. […]
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Why do we discipline? What is the point of our child-training efforts? It’s not ultimately about good behavior. It’s not about the convenience of having well-behaved children. It’s certainly not about giving out just deserts when children make mistakes. Our first goal as parents should be shepherding our children into their own personal, growing, relationship with God. As God’s representatives to our children during their early years, we’re part […]
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Are you ready? Today we start our child-training “boot camp”! We’re going straight to God’s Word, because that is where we’re going to find the real answers to the challenges we face as we seek to raise children who love and obey God. I still remember the season when our first three children (all boys) were little and stretching my patience and “wisdom” (ha!) to their limits. God drove me into His […]
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I’ve been so busy trying to get our house ready to put up for sale (we get the photos taken today and list it this week), that I’ve neglected to remind you of our new study that is going to start tomorrow, July1! This month we’re going to do something a little different. Instead of spending the whole month of July studying one chapter like we normally do (and like we will […]
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Disobedience is a like a weed. It’s like the wild morning glory that torments me all summer long. I pull a vine out of a bed of flowers, only to find it sneaking back again two days later. Besides poisoning it, the only way to actually beat it is to dig down into the soil and carefully pull out all of its long, ropey root. The root is the real […]
Read More →We’ve been looking at obedience for the past month or so. Daniel has explored: Why we are tempted to allow our children to disobey, Why learning to obey is good for our children, What obedience actually is, and some practical ways to teach our children to obey. We’ve also looked at some reasons for our children to obey cheerfully and some ways to encourage cheerful obedience. Today we’re going to […]
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We can’t change our children’s hearts and make them cheerful about obeying us, but we can certainly encourage cheerful obedience, and we can help our children see why they can obey with joy. We’ll talk about teaching older children to respect parental authority (as Daniel promised last week) in a future post, but for today let’s look at the attitude behind true obedience. We’ll look at 3 reasons for cheerful obedience, and 4 ways to encourage cheerful […]
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Last week we considered what obedience looks like, and how our own example is an integral part of teaching our children. Today I want to look more closely at some tactics for teaching young children to obey. My children are still young (ages 1, 3, 4, and 6), and I’m thoroughly convinced that these early years are the prime time to be teaching obedience. (Next week, you’ll hear from my […]
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We recently considered why it’s easy to let our children disobey, and why teaching obedience is important. You all raised so many good questions that we’ve decided to spend several more posts working through the practical elements of teaching our children to obey. Today I want to define what I mean by obedience and then consider the first “strategy” for teaching our children to obey. In upcoming posts, Mama and […]
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Last week, we looked at some ways we can easily allow our children to disobey. This sparked some good questions, which will be addressed in next week’s post. Before we talk about teaching obedience, it’s important to consider why obedience is so important. Here, as in many aspects of Christian parenting, we should look to the example of our Heavenly Father. Why does God ask us to obey Him? How […]
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