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TranscriptIntroduction
Welcome back to our 9th year of podcasting. This is season 33 and our 601st episode.
Today we’re discussing the fact that our kid’s behavior really is a big deal, but we have to understand the dynamics of that big deal. If we make it the wrong kind of big deal, there will be a huge problem, but if we act like it’s not a big deal, then there’s a completely different huge problem. So, be sure to subscribe to this podcast and take advantage of our free episode notes, transcript, and related resources which you can find in the description of this episode. So, let’s begin. Topic
If you're new to the show, I would love to invite you to listen to two of our resources. And it may be a good idea to revisit these resources if you did listen to the them in the past but haven’t listened to them in a while. I know how vital these truths are for me and how easily I forget them.
The first is called The Merest Christianity. It addresses the very foundation of the truths we’ll uncover today. If at the end of this episode, you’re thinking, “I need to better understand these concepts,” The Merest Christianity should be your first step. The second resource is called The Biblical Parenting Essentials. This series is a summation of our nearly 10 years of teaching carefully distilled into a single series, and it will build on many of the concepts we’re discussing today. Our points for today are . . . 1. Downplaying Our Children’s Behavior Now, you may think you never do this, but we all do this. We may never downplay certain behavior, but we definitely downplay and even ignore other behavior that should be on our radar. 2. Making a God out of Our Children’s Behavior Again, it will probably be easy to want to skip over this point because you don’t think that’s a problem. However, we all do this. It’s human nature, and we need to pull the wool off the wolf. And finally . . . 3. Learning from Our Children’s Behavior Every day our kids tell us exactly who they are and that information is vital to parenting them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. So, those are our points, but before we officially dive in, I want to remind you that our goal is to raise $100,000 before the end of 2026. We’ll be starting out 10th year of ministry, and in that entire time we’ve only ever been able to raise about $20,000 a year. It’s really challenging to run a full-time ministry and support a family on $20,000. So, we’re praying we can turn a corner and enter our 10th year equipped to continue serving families all over the world. Please visit TruthLoveParent.com/donate to learn how you can help us meet our goals. Alright, here we go. 1. Downplaying Our Children’s Behavior When people are arguing the chicken-and-the-egg scenarios, quite often both sides can make a legitimate argument for how their’s came first. But in this discussion, it’s less about what came first, and instead about how the two sides of the equation influence each other. You see, what we do grows from what we are. I’ve often said that if you want to do something different, you need to be different, but . . . what we are is shaped by what we do. Our actions, words, and feelings heavily influence and reinforce our trajectory. Here’s how it works. The temptation I face comes naturally to me because of my sin nature. Therefore, deep inside, my wicked heart wants things it shouldn’t because it believes things it shouldn’t. And the first couple times I act on those impulses, quite often the experience is uncomfortable—especially if I’ve been taught that what I’m doing is a sin. But with repetition, it gets easier and easier to commit that same sin, and—consequently—it feeds the initial sinful drive. This is why our kids rarely ever simply fall off a behavioral ledge . . . it’s always slight and subtle and a slow boil. Therefore, when our kids do wrong, but we dismiss it with a wave of the hand and the words, “He’s going through a phase,” or “Well, she just turned two,” or “Boys will be boys,” or “We can’t expect them to act like adults,” then we’re blinding ourselves to the fact that what may seem small and dismissible now is only going to continue to grow. It’s not a phase. It’s not like a shoe size. “Sure, they’re in a size 4 now, but they’ll be in a 5 by the end of the year.” No, that’s a bad picture. The better picture is that they’re moving down a road, and—but by the grace of God and assistance from others—they will be further down that road later this year. Look at Cain. He went from offering a sacrifice to God for his own purposes, to getting mad at God for exposing his idolatry, to murdering his brother, and rearing a godless heritage. Consider David. He went from removing himself from his wartime responsibilities to lusting after another man’s wife to murdering that man. Romans 1 teaches us that the trajectory of sin is always a decline to deeper and deeper sin. Therefore, everything our kids do and say and feel and want and think and believe is important because as they continue on that track, it will only become easier to go further and further down the same sinful track. If piano practice makes permanent, then so does exercising our own sinful hearts. And if addiction has taught us anything, it’s that it’s easy to become desensitized over time and therefore seek out worse and worse forms of our addiction. In our episode entitled “Is Your Child Addicted,” we grapple with the fact that everyone is addicted. We’re all addicted to our own ways. As a biblical counselor who’s worked with extreme cases involving young people, I have the unfortunate benefit of seeing how “tiny” behavioral issues become huge behavioral issues over time. I mentioned earlier that it’s really easy for us to push back when someone suggests we’re downplaying our children’s behavior. We push back on that because there is definitely behavior that we absolutely don’t tolerate. But just because we put our foot down on certain behaviors doesn’t mean we’re responding as we should to all of their behavior. This discussion isn’t about specific behaviors. It’s about their overall behavior. It’s all important. We need to investigate and understand and parent our kids through all of their decision-making processes. Are we really doing our job to rear our children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord when we dismiss the things they do that the Scriptures clearly reveal to be a problem? Of course, we’re not. This was Samuel’s problem in I Samuel 2 and 3. He didn’t take seriously the egregious sins of his sons. So, I hope you see that we should never ignore, dismiss, downplay, or excuse any of our children’s behavior. But there’s an equally dangerous extreme to which we can swing if we’re not vigilant. We may be tempted to respond to our kids’ behavior in another bad way. 2. Making a God out of Our Children’s Behavior No one sets out to do this. It’s always subconscious. We don’t think to ourselves “I want to teach my kids to worship their behavior.” But that doesn’t stop us from producing just that with our parenting. Here’s how it happens. Somewhere along the line—maybe today—we're coming to realize that it’s very unwise and dangerous to overlook what our kids are communicating through their behaviors. So, obviously, we need to start taking them very seriously. Then, we start carefully watching and investigating everything they do and say and feel. If anything seems out of place, or we’re told that a certain behavior is bad, we do everything we can to help them stop doing the bad thing and start doing a better thing. Now, all of that probably sounds great, however, it’s missing a key component. You see, that kind of parenting can be done without being motivated and empowered by God and His Word. In fact, this kind of parenting is done every single day by countless unbelieving parents across the globe. Here’s a really good, terrible example. A bully of a father hears his son got beat up at school, so the father teaches him that he needs to fight back. He teaches his son to find the kid who beat him up when he’s all alone and teach him a lesson he won’t forget. That parent saw behavior he didn’t like and worked to change it, but the motivation for the change was the father’s own failure philosophies. Consider Rebekah who encouraged Jacob to lie to his father. Rebekah pushed Jacob to lie because of how it would benefit him. She was teaching him to worship his own lusts. And this happens when we’re encouraging our kids to do “good” things as well. It’s too easy to simply push our kids to be moral, and then the kids change because they’re tired of consequences of doing wrong or they realize that “moral” living has its benefits, but they’re only making those changes for their own comfort and perceived wellbeing. Ultimately, that kind of change is nothing more than self-focused idolatry. No one can work their way to heaven by performing good works. Our external righteousness can never save us. All of God’s children are born again into His family by recognizing His glory and majesty and submitting to it. Now, yes, after we’re saved, we should be growing in good works, but not because we’re trying to earn anything from God. We should be righteous because we want to please Him, and we can’t help but be changed into His image as the Holy Spirit sanctifies us. Therefore, we must make God’s will and glory ours and our children’s highest goals. It’s not about behavior modification that’s merely skin deep, it’s about heart change in submission to God that eventually produces the fruit of repentance. So, now let’s consider our final point and get practical about how to parent for God’s glory as we observe our children’s behavior. 3. Learning from Our Children’s Behavior In our Biblical Parenting Essentials series we talk about a stage of parenting we call the Reproof Phase or Interpreter Stage. Everyone does what they do because they observed the situation and believed they knew how best to act. We all do what we believe is best. However, what Cain and David and the Bully Father believed was best was absolutely not the best. They interpreted the situation and the best course of action very poorly. Therefore, God has put people into our lives to help us correctly interpret the situation and the best course of action. And we are the primary people to do that in our kids’ lives. How are those people to know how God wants us to act? That’s why He gave us His Word. So, we Ambassador Parents are to use God’s Word to help our kids correctly interpret the situation in front of them and respond in a way that will please the Lord. That’s the goal, but far too often we’re not really aware of the bad interpretations our kids are making. We’re come from a long day at work, they come home from a long day at school where thousands and thousands of interpretations were made throughout the day, and how much basic information are we actually able to talk about before the child has to get to their homework, instrument practice, or get online, into a video game, or goes back out to be with their friends? I’ve been working from home for nearly all of my daughter’s life, and 99% of her life has been lived right here in our house, under my nose, and yet I have come to realize again and again over the 16 years of her life that I went into autopilot, and instead of engaging with her, we were merely living our lives in the same home. I wasn’t being an intentional, premeditated, disciple making parent. I was focused on so many others things, and I came to find out that my daughter was coming to some very incorrect conclusions about life. Now, before I continue, I want to praise the Lord that He is sovereign and that He doesn’t need me to draw my daughter to Him. I also am relieved when I meditate on the fact that I can’t ruin God’s perfect will for my children. However, on the flip-side, I do recognize that I have the responsibility to worship God with my parenting. Therefore, yes, we do have a legitimate burden of responsibility on our shoulders to learn from our children’s behavior and parent them accordingly, but this burden is to please the Lord in His power to His glory and not to manufacture something in my kids or accomplish my own purposes. So, since it’s so easy to live with our kids like functional roommates who otherwise don’t really know much about each other or have significant conversations unless we’re annoying each other, I need to . . . A. Be Interested I need to want to be a student of my child. I need to want to set out to purposefully learn my child. And this can’t simply be knowing things about them. I need to want to intimately know them. Who are they, what do they want, why do they like the things they like, why do they think the way they think, what do they believe about life? Too often we don’t desire to really investigate the very core of our kids because we think we already know them, but I can’t tell you how many parents I’ve met who feel like they don’t know their kids. I can’t tell you how many times a young person has said or done something that his parents would never have imagined he would do or say. I love the little insight we get to how Job approached his adult children. Job 1:4-5 reads, Job’s “sons used to go and hold a feast in the house of each one on his day, and they would send and invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them. 5 Now it happened when the days of feasting had completed their cycle, that Job would send and set them apart as holy. And he would rise up early in the morning and offer burnt offerings according to the number of them all; for Job said, ‘Perhaps my sons have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.’ Thus Job did continually.” Job was paying attention, and I can only hope that interest he took in their spirituality turned into conversations with them as well. We’re not interested in knowing our kids because we think we already do. But—let’s just clear the air—we really don’t. We can see the outward appearance, but unless we’re having purposeful, self-revealing conversations, we don’t really know what’s going on in their hearts. The other reason we don’t care to know them is that we don’t care to know them. Too often in our selfishness and idolatry, our kids are nothing more than a hindrance and barrier to our happiness. If you’re in this situation, I would highly encourage you to speak with a pastor or biblical counselor. Yes, your kids may be really terrible people, but God loved us even though we were His enemy and completely unloveable. God commands us to love our enemies. We absolutely need to address our own hearts if we’re not genuinely interested to know our kids more intimately. And this isn’t going to happen accidentally. We need to just as purposefully choose to be interested in and pursue our kids as we do unpacking their minds. Therefore, we need to . . . B. Be Intentional This will require me to not only listen to what they say and watch what they do, but to understand it. Who are they, what do they want, why do they like the things they like, why do they think the way they think, what do they believe about life? Regardless of their age, the answers to these questions need to be our top priority if we are really interested in knowing them. We mustn’t assume. We’re too good at assuming that people who make similar choices we do make them for similar reasons, but I cannot tell you how false and foolish that assumption is. Your kids may make a lot of “good” choices in what they do and how they do it, but the motivation for those choices is so incredibly self-serving and sinful. And—generally speaking—those deeper motivations aren’t just going to come up in conversation around the dinner table. We need to consciously pursue those answers by having conversations and asking targeted questions that help our kids draw out the intentions of their own hearts. Proverbs 20:5 says, “The purpose in a man’s heart is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out.” Now, this is not easy to simply start doing. And a single podcast is not long enough to train us how to do this well if we don’t already do it well. But we do have a number of other episodes about communicating with your kids. Those episodes will be linked in the description of today’s show. Yes, we need to ask questions, but we also have to recognize that our kids won’t always consciously be aware of the answers. We have to be that wise parent who helps them understand why they do what they do. We’ll likely have to navigate a bunch of I-don’t-knows, and not treat them like a barrier that stops us in our tracks, but view them as a doorway we need to help our kids unlock. We need to be interested in knowing our kids, and we need to be intentional to know them, but we also have to . . . C. Be Understanding It’s one thing to know that someone acted a certain way for a certain reason, but it’s something completely different to understand it. Now, I need to be clear. To understand a person does not require that we agree with them. For example, I completely understand why a person who believes in Santa Claus would write him letters. But I don’t believe in Santa Claus, I don’t write him letters, and I don’t think that anyone else should. I am not a Presbyterian, and I do not advocate for baptizing infants, but I understand why a Presbyterian who believes that baptism has replaced the Old Testament sign of circumcision would baptize children regardless of their profession of faith. If you don’t understand what baptizing a baby would have to do with circumcision or what either of those have to do with the Bible, then you really don’t understand why some Presbyterians baptize infants. Because you don’t understand it, you may wrongly think they do it for the same reason Catholics do it, but you would be wrong. This is why it’s not enough to know what and how and why our kids believe what they believe, we have to try to understand how they got from point A to B to C and so on. My friend Andrew Rappaport wrote a book called “What We Believe.” It’s intended to be an accessible systematic theology to help Christians deepen their understanding of the Scripture. But he also wrote a book called “What They Believe.” As an evangelist with a heart to reach the lost, he understands the importance of knowing what unbelievers believe so that he can best help them come to a true understanding of the Bible. So, we’re not merely caring to intentionally pursue knowledge. That’s part of it. We need to get to the point where we either understand how our kids made the connection from what they believe to what they did, or—if we’re lucky—expose that our kids don’t even understand it themselves. And that leads to . . . D. Be Wise Do you know what God says about how we’re to believe, think, desire, feel, speak, and act? I’ve talked about this so many times over the past 600 episodes, but it bears repeating that in order to be biblical parents, we must intimately know the Bible and—more importantly—the God of the Bible. And we need to know how the truths of the Scripture were designed by God to motivate and inform our choices. Deuteronomy 6 demands that we must know God and His Word before we can lead our children to His truth. Then, when we are genuinely interested in knowing our kids, and we intentionally pursue them to understand who they are, we can take what we know and understand from God’s Word to wisely help them reinterpret the season of life they’re in. But we must . . . E. Be Proactive When our child screams at us, it’s easy to recognize that’s wrong and tell them to stop. Galatians 6:1 tells us, “Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness.” In order to do this, we need to intentionally work past the behavior to the deeper motivations, and we need to especially do that for their otherwise good choices. In Acts 8, Simon asks the Apostles to help him accomplish something truly miraculous and spiritually beautiful, but Peter saw to the man’s heart and rebuked him and showed him how his motivations were actually self-serving and sinful. As our kids get older, they are want to seek us out less and less. Even those of us who have fought to have have an open relationship with our kids—they know they have an open invitation to talk to us about anything—as they become more and more confident in their decision-making capabilities, they will seek us out less and less. And—in a way—that’s what we’ve been parenting them to do. We want them to be able to glorify God without us. But as long as they are under our care and authority, it’s desperately important that we be proactive in our kids lives. This doesn’t mean that we need to proactively make all their decisions for them, but it does mean that we should proactively engage with them to identify how they’re making their decisions, what decisions are on the horizon, what God’s doing in their lives, and whether they’re ready for the next step in their spiritual maturity. Every single tiny decision our kids make from the clothes they wear to the food they eat to the games they play to the major they want to study to the friends they have to the amount of time they spend with God . . . absolutely everything is revealing who they are, what they believe about God, and the spiritual path they’re currently walking. Every decision matters individually, but they also matter as a whole because they are the practical outworking of our children’s hearts. That’s why their behavior is so incredibly important—far more important than we often realize. It’s all the revelation of their soul and spiritual trajectory, and we would be wise to have our eyes open and be allowing their behavior to inform our parenting. We parent for God, but we parent according to what our kids need to better know and worship Him. Conclusion
I hope you understand how every action, word, feeling, desire, thought, and belief your child has is so incredibly important to your child, God, and your parenting.
Again, there are plenty of resources in the description for you to peruse if you want to get better at this process of being interested, intentional, understanding, wise, and proactive your parenting. Please share this episode with other parents who want to evangelize and disciple their kids for God’s glory, and please email us at [email protected] or leave a voicemail at (828) 423-0894 if we can answer your parenting questions. Also, please help us hit our goal of raising $100,000 by September of 2026. Please visit TruthLoveParent.com/donate to learn more. And join us next time as we discuss the importance of teaching your kids what it means to flee to the glory of God. I’ll see you then.
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