This is part one of a four part series on freedom from condemnation. The four parts ended up being Freedom from Condemnation, Repentance, Parenting, and Drivenness.
I was sitting next to a friend last week in a seminar on age-graded ministry. He currently works in youth ministry; I used to. The seminar/discussion was related to ministry in the church for specific age groups, and striking the balance between offering age-focused ministry and honoring the fact that it was the parents who were called to lead their children spiritually. A few of the pastors in the group seemed to tread pretty close to the, "I tell people how to raise their kids" line, and my friend leaned over to me and asked, "so I'm supposed to watch you parent and then parent my kids the same way?" It was a tongue in cheek question. His kids are older than mine, and he's older than me. He has five kids. I have five kids. We can learn from each other, but it would be foolish to suggest that somehow I've got the one-up when it comes to parenting.
I had been thinking about this idea of freedom from condemnation and how it relates to our parenting. For one thing, there are a lot of parents who feel condemned in their parenting. We live in a day and age when everyone and there mother wants to post on social media about their parenting best practices. We never stop to consider context, economic status, or whatever. It's easy to buy all organic food when you have one kid and are in the top financial tier of society. It's not easy to do that when you have five kids and are surviving on an average salary (or nearly any salary, for that matter.) That's not to suggest that eating organic food is wrong or bad in some way; it's not, and it's commendable if you can do it. You can't hold it up as a parenting law, however, and make others feel bad if they can't attain that standard. That's the condemnation we're supposed to be freed from.
The other related idea, though, is not just how we as parents feel condemned, but how we raise our children without making them feel condemned. How do we teach our children to obey the law, something we are commanded to do, teaching them to essentially live out their lives according to God's ideals, without making them feel guilty and shamed when they inevitably fail?
Here's why this relates to my story about telling parents how they should parent. My role as a pastor is to help people see how the Gospel relates to their parenting; not to tell them how to parent. That fine line is important. If I fell too heavily on the telling people how to parent, I will inadvertently create a law that may or not be in line with God's expectations. I will lead parents into condemnation rather than Grace. On the other hand, if the Gospel relates to our parenting, so that we live in the beauty of God's call on our lives and yet our total freedom from condemnation, perhaps we will find joy in our parenting rather than guilt, both for us and our children.
(For the record, I think the other people in the discussion I was a part of believe that too, but it didn't come across that way. Hence my friend's somewhat snarky comment.)
So how does the Gospel relate to our parenting? I'll address the two that I already mentioned, starting with our own sense of failure as parents.
FREEDOM FROM OUR OWN CONDEMNATION
It takes very little to feel condemned as a parent. We don't call it condemnation. We call it "feeling judged", but it's the same thing. Every time you get "the look" from the patron in the restaurant, you immediately feel it. It's that feeling of failure; it's the knowledge that that person believes they would raise their children better than you would. "The look" conveys what they are thinking. Their kid would never act like that in a restaurant.
And then, of course, the next time you are in a restaurant and your kid is eating their french fries, and someone else's kid is acting up, you can't help but glance over, wondering, "what's wrong with those parents? Why don't they stop him?"
Even worse, some of you just read that last paragraph and thought, "I can't believe he feeds his kids french fries."
You get this condemnation from strangers, from friends, from parents, and from siblings. Every younger sibling who has no children believes that they will raise their children better than their siblings. "My kids will never act that way; I'll never let them get away with _______________".
Every child feels it from their parent on at least one occasion. Grandma or Grandpa tries to enforce their will on your children, whether you are around or not. "We didn't raise our kids to act like that."
There are two parts to this problem. The first part is that we, as people, are incredibly self-righteous, and we believe that whatever it is we think we will do, we are doing, or we have done, is the right way to do it. That's what "righteousness" is. It's the "right way". And we think we nailed it.
The second part is that we, as people, have all these little areas that we haven't really embraced the freedom of the Gospel, and our parenting is one of those little (or not so little) areas. We want to be free from condemnation, but every time we feel that look there's a part of us that thinks they are right, and we really are a failure.
The Gospel re-focuses our parenting so that we can keep first things first. In my initial post on freedom from condemnation, I said that one of the things that this freedom allows is that we can evaluate expectations that we our others place on us and decide whether they are really relevant and worthwhile. Most of them aren't. Freedom from condemnation gives us a filter to judge what is really important in our parenting, since we are now free to examine what God desires of us, without the need to feel like the people around us will think we are a failure if we disagree with what they desire of us.
Surely, there are expectations of the Christian parent. We are called to raise our children to love Jesus. We are called to teach them the ideals of God. We should desire that our children understand God's word and grow to love God's word. We should be concerned with our children's "heart, soul, mind, and strength". We should ensure that they are healthy in their mind, their spirits, and their body. They have been assigned to us, by God, so that we can show them the good news of Jesus and the greatness of their Father God, to the best of our ability.
In spite of all of that, or perhaps because of all of that, we are free to live without condemnation, even when we mess up or don't live up to the expectations. The Gospel is the reminder to us that we can't save ourselves, and we can't save our kids. That's God's work. So even when we mess up, we can have the confidence that we couldn't do any of it without God anyway.
As for other's expectations on us, it requires a two-way grace. First, the grace to apply to yourself to remind you of your freedom, and then the grace to apply to them, to realize that they are still a self-righteous work in progress as well.
FREEDOM FROM CONDEMNING OUR CHILDREN
This is the freedom with which we raise our children. The unfortunate reality is that many, many people have grown up under the pressure of "obedience" without the pressure-release of "freedom from condemnation". Such was the case for much of my childhood. The attitude I experienced wasn't, "we want you to learn to live according to God's ideals because of God's love for you"; the attitude was, "we want you to live according to our ideals because otherwise we'll be embarrassed." One of those is obedience based on freedom; the other is obedience based on guilt and shame.
I could recount moments of "shaming" disguised as discipline, but it's not worth it. Must more important for us is understanding how we can raise our own children to be disciplined without being shamed. I've mentioned the "pendulum" of culture before. In a lot of cases, if parents grew up in a shaming household, they go the total opposite way and try to raise their kids boundary free. The wrong-headed belief is thinking that the opposite of shame-brought-on-by-law is absence of law. In other words, get rid of the law, and we'll get rid of the shame. Boundary-free, no limit parenting is the wave of the future. Even gender remains up for debate. It's "whatever you decide", and as a result, we think, there will be no guilt and shame.
Of course, it never works, in part because the law is a deeper reality than some external restrictions. We can remove external boundaries all we want, but we can't remove the internal ones. And if we could, we wouldn't want to. If we truly lived our lives as if rules and boundaries didn't matter, it would obviously be chaos. Shame doesn't get removed because we remove the law.
The Gospel actually handles it exactly the opposite of culture. If culture says, "get rid of law, and we'll be rid of shame", the message of the Gospel is, "get rid of the shame, and enjoy the law." It isn't absence of law that brings freedom, it's absence of shame. When the shame is gone, we are not only free to obey without the fear of condemnation, we are also free to receive loving discipline that keeps us on the path when we don't obey.
When my son misbehaves, therefore, what I want him to understand is that whatever consequence he may face as a result has zero impact on how I view him as my son. I don't love him less when he misbehaves, and I don't love him more when he behaves. (And just to be clear: I'm a sinner, so yes, when he misbehaves I'm annoyed with him and when he behaves I'm grateful. I feel the need to say that so that you don't think that I have this down, like the Heavenly Father loves us. If there is loving discipline in our lives from God our Father, it has zero impact in God's view of us, because he actually is perfect and loves us with a perfect love. But I digress.) When I discipline my son, I want to make sure that he knows that the reason I'm disciplining him is because I love him. When he is disrespectful to me or my wife, there are consequences. And the reason there are consequences is because I honestly believe that it is better for him to be respectful than it would be to allow him to continue in his disrespect. It's love that leads to discipline, not lack of love. It's for his good, not mine. I love him no matter what.
Furthermore, I'm not shocked when he misbehaves. I don't think less of him when he misbehaves. I already knew he was going to misbehave, and I knew it from before we got into this parent/child relationship.
I know he's going to misbehave.
I don't love him any less because he misbehaves.
I correct him because I love him.
That's the Gospel. If there is loving correction from God, it has nothing to do with whether or not he needs me to behave. He doesn't. In his eyes, I'm already perfect. If there is correction, it is for my good and ultimate joy.
As a result of this, we are free to discipline our children without leading them into shame and guilt. We can at the same time teach them that there is a way to behave, and not shame them when they fall short.
I fail at this all the time, but I'm trying, and by God's grace, I'm okay, and so are my kids.