Why Children Matter

by Douglas Wilson

The family is a divinely ordained community. The institution of the family—consisting of one man, one woman, and their children—was created by God, not by people.

Marriage was established by God at the very beginning of the world. It is not going anywhere any time soon.

You do not want your children imitating you unless you are imitating God.

Your purpose as parents is ultimately to be the instrument of your children’s salvation. You are not the ground of their salvation, but you are commanded to imitate the One who is the ground of their salvation.

You sing over your children when you are sacrificing for them, when you are

taking the hit for them, and when they have no idea what you are giving up for them.

Bringing your children up is not abstract bookkeeping, but rather a

story that spans from plowing and planting to harvest. It is a story, and you need to have your eye on the story so that when you discipline your children it is with an eye on the harvest—in this case, for the sake of their own good. The harvest comes when they too realize the peaceful fruit of an upright life.

Hardship in a story is grace; hardship without a story is just pain.

If you want to be a godly Christian parent without being a godly Christian who dies to yourself and your desires, then you have got everything all wrong from the beginning.

God’s purposes and the good counsel of His will include our children, and therefore raising them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord means that both you and they are putting off the old

man and putting on the new. You and your children are putting off the old man. You and your children are putting on the new man.

Regardless of what you say you believe, your theology of justification and sanctification is enacted in microcosm in your relationship to your children.

We are bringing up our children as Christians are called to do, and you cannot bring up Christian children as Christians outside the context of the gospel.

The way we treat our children is not always a good way to learn about God, but sometimes by God’s grace we do

the right thing, and it provides us an opportunity to learn more about what God is doing in our own lives.

Your requirement to discipline has to be based on what God tells you to do in this moment, not based on whether you were the kind of kid you ought to have been.

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.

So ineffective discipline is a way of disowning, rejecting, or hating your children. God does not do that with us, and we must not do that with our children.

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.

The difference between corrective and formative discipline is that when something has gone actively wrong, corrective discipline puts things back on track, restoring the fellowship between parent and child, while formative discipline prevents things from going wrong in the future.

We want to think about the principle—are we bringing up our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord? If your primary loyalty is to the method, you are not thinking

like a Christian. If your primary loyalty is to the goal, you will find yourself in good fellowship with a number of people who are pursuing the same goal with different methods.

A Christian paideia prepares a child for their adult responsibilities as a citizen in the kingdom of God. When Paul requires fathers

Childrearing is preparation for life in the kingdom of God as it interacts with the kingdom of man.

There is no place on the planet where you can hide your kids from the presence of sin.

Sin has to be addressed with gospel, not with isolation or defensive padding.

The only place to hide from sin is in Jesus Christ. Every other technique will not and cannot work. You must be trusting in Jesus.

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,

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.

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.

Godly teaching, character formation, and discipleship are simply this—loving God and loving the thing you are doing currently in the presence of another person whom you also love.

If you are not imitating Him or imitating people who imitate Him, if you are correcting your children harshly or blindly with a sense of panic, or if you are not correcting your children as you ought, then it is very easy to think back upstream and believe that God is doing the same thing with you.

Childrearing is all gospel because God is bringing us up too. And what is He bringing us up to? To His presence, into His joy and into His Heaven. He is bringing us up to be like Jesus. He is growing us up into ourselves.