Why Children Matter

by Douglas Wilson

If you do not discipline your children effectively, you hate them. If you do not discipline them in accordance with God’s Word, I do not care what your emotional framework is—you are not loving them. Love is defined, not by our emotional framework, but by what the Bible says.

That’s why disciplining children is the Christian life in microcosm. It is not some secular pursuit detached from issues like sin and forgiveness, gospel and redemption. Child discipline is all about Jesus. We are nurturing souls, not training puppies. This is a form of discipleship and ministry, and it cannot be ministry without Jesus being at the center of it.

You can have the best equipment in the world, but if you try to make an omelet with rotten eggs, you are still going to get a rotten omelet. It doesn’t matter how good the recipe is, or how fancy the kitchen is. In order to not have rotten eggs, you have to have Jesus—forgiveness, cleansing, humility, and confession of sin. That is why when Christians get on their high horse about different methods of education, it is spiritually dangerous, not because they are necessarily wrong about the method, but because their attitude excludes Jesus. When you do that, you are forfeiting the blessing. You should only want to undertake the work of bringing up your children, teaching and educating them, if the whole thing is on the altar waiting for the fire to fall.

Godly parenting is a function of becoming more like Jesus in the presence of little ones who are also in the process of becoming more like Jesus.

If there is one thing that you take away from this little book it should be this: parents have a tendency to mislabel the lesson. If you have ever been in a Bible study trying to track with the lesson when everyone else is in 1 Kings and you are in 2 Kings, then the more you try, the more awkward it gets. If they are doing one thing and you are doing something completely different, you are going to get completely muddled. Imagine a basic showdown scenario: suppose a toddler is standing at the coffee table right across from you and repeatedly wants to mess with the vase. Suppose further that the toddler has just gotten mobile and you have not child-proofed the house yet, and they keep wanting to touch the vase. Too often, parents think that the lesson is entitled “How not to mess with vases,” when the actual lesson is called “How not to get exasperated with other people.” You are teaching the toddler how not to get exasperated with other people when they cross you repeatedly, and that is the real lesson you are teaching them.