More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Tell me about your connection with your daughter. Describe the heart-to-heart connection between the two of you.”
I said, “This is the biggest problem that you have right now with your girl. This disconnection is the culprit. We need a solution to this problem before we can ever approach solutions to the other issues.”
This book will show you that the goal of obedience and compliance is an inferior goal. It can actually be detrimental to both your children’s development of personal responsibility and their perception of God the Father.
His response was, in essence, “Love God, love your neighbor, and love yourself” (Luke 10:27). The greatest commandment is love. These Pharisees had hoped that He was going to say, “Obey this commandment,” because their culture was steeped in the priority of obedience and compliance to “the rules.”
In one fell swoop, Jesus promoted
relationship above the rules. Love and relationship are the bottom line of the Kingdom, and they must be ours if we wish to estab...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
I want to propose to you that freedom is a top priority in Heaven, because it is what makes relationships possible. Heaven’s culture of relationships is vastly different than most everything we see on earth because God, the Father, is less interested in compliance and much more interested in
love.
Our behavior flows from our beliefs, from the way we interpret the world around us.
Unfortunately, many of us, whether believers or not, continue to raise our children according to an Old Testament paradigm. It is still common or “natural” to believe that mistakes or sin must be punished. The parenting model that flows from this paradigm presents a “punisher” role for the parent and creates an “outside-in” approach to learning about life for the child.
When love and freedom replace punishment and fear as the motivating forces in the relationship between parent and child, the quality of life improves dramatically for all involved.
As believers, we will never be able to parent our children from the inside out like God does unless we fully make the switch in covenants. The problem for many of us Christian parents is that we still believe that the way God shepherds us and consequently, the way we must shepherd our children, is primarily through punishment.
When we train our children to obey by presenting an external threat, we handicap their understanding of how the Kingdom of Heaven works.
So, at the heart of godly parenting is the conviction that the mistakes and failures of our children are not the enemy. The real enemy is bondage, and if we don’t teach our children how to walk in and handle freedom, they won’t know what to do with it.
The way that we see the Father determines how we will relate to Him and how we will relate to others.
David described the way He relates to us this way: “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go. I will guide you with my eye upon you” (Ps. 32:8).
As parents, our goal is really to introduce our children to relationship with God by doing our best to relate to them like God does.
One of the primary ways that we show honor to one another is by sharing power and control in our relationships. When
Therefore, we introduce freedom to our small children, and we allow them to practice messing it up while they have a safety net in our home. When we create a safe place for them to fail and learn about life, they end up saying, “This is the safest place I’ve got, right here at home. You can handle my mistakes. I can be myself, and you can find out about who I am. I can practice life, and I can run to you in my time of trouble, because you are an ever-present help. I want to get in your laps when I have sinned, because they are the safest place I have on this earth. There is no one who has
...more
The lie that “we can control others” is the biggest lie in human relationships.
First John 4:18 teaches us, “There is no fear in love. Perfect [mature] love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect [mature] in love” (NIV). Our methods of discipline and training must reduce fear and anxiety and not generate them.
Anger makes me powerful.
Angry, fearful reactions to people’s mistakes reveal that somewhere in our minds still lurks that fundamental belief of the Old Covenant, not only that people can be controlled
but that they need to be controlled, and they need to be controlled through punishment. They need to experience the pain of our anger so that they won’t make mistakes that cause us to feel out of control. We think: “I must control them so I can have some control over the quality of my own life.”
In short, they’re going to learn to talk back to you, and when they’re not being fun, that talk can look like defiance, arguments, and disrespect. And that’s the big red button on the chest of most Christian parents—disrespect. Parents do all they can to keep the children from ever pushing this button. They know how crazy this makes them feel inside, so it becomes a priority to teach that no one is disrespectful to the parents, ever!
Parents who think that their child’s problem is their problem end up in trouble. In fact, they end up feeling just like the person they’re trying to fix—miserable. When they take their child’s mistakes personally, they are effectively allowing their child’s shortcomings to determine who they are. The only way we can respond, rather than react, to our kids’ mistakes is to stay disconnected from those mistakes.
Some of the disrespect they have had to deal with has actually been shown by authority figures that have mistaken assertiveness for disrespect. After all, the common belief a generation or so ago was that asserting yourself at all as a child was disrespectful.
Submission is a sign of a love connection. It has nothing to do with external pressure. True submission says, “I direct myself to honor you and to empower you in my life. I choose to stay connected to you.” I believe that true submission is the key to becoming all that we can be.
