Tidings for Tuesday
Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged. Colossians 3:21
I have heard of some Assemblies that have no young people, no teenagers or young couples in their early 20s, because the children of those in fellowship escape from the environment as soon as they can legally leave home. As someone who grew up in an Assembly that had a high percentage of young Christians – nearly half of those in fellowship were teenagers – it is difficult for me to understand an Assembly where the children of those in the Assembly do not provide the youthful energy and enthusiasm that is essential. What I have heard about these Assemblies is that the parents enforce such rigorous discipline on their children that the children turn their backs totally on the Gospel and the Assembly for the rest of their lives. How sad!
The parents will declare that it is their responsibility to keep their children firmly in line. When the children leave, the parents declare that the children are being disobedient by turning their backs on God and His people. Perhaps these parents need a mirror to see who is being disobedient to today’s text. In many cases, the children are not disobeying God, they are rebelling against their parents’ distortion of what God expects of them.
Even the best of parents will have children who will turn out to be disobedient and who will rebel. But if it is the pattern for an entire family, or, as I have heard reported, of the families of an entire Assembly, something is terribly wrong. The Bible plainly declares that a child who is trained in the way he should go will not depart from it (Proverbs 22:6). So if all the children are departing from their parents’ training, the training is wrong. Parents whose harsh discipline drives their children away from the Gospel and the Assembly are condemning their own children to hell. Yes, children require discipline. But they require loving, careful, scriptural discipline, not severe, painful, discouraging rigor.
May God give us grace to see the appropriate discipline for our children, discipline that directs them toward, and not away from, the love of God and His great salvation. – Jim MacIntosh