Train up your child...

Always Relationship, Not Behavior

(Excerpts from Danny Silk's "Loving Your Kids On Purpose)

Proverbs 22:6 says “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” There is a way your child is to go. Do you know what it is? It is the way of freedom to be who they were destined to be. God has put a design and destiny within our children. We were all designed in God’s image for a relationship with Him.

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. More specifically, God has entrusted us with the task of recognizing the unique qualities in our children that connect to His calling on their lives and helping them to develop those things on purpose.
We want to become apt at training our children to reach inside themselves and listen to the Holy Spirit for direction in the way they should go.

When we discipline behavior rather than addressing the motives we prevent them from getting in touch with the source of their power to walk in relationship and direct themselves toward God’s vision for their lives. It’s more than just addressing the behavior… it’s about attitude, motives, relationship.

Many parents of teens look at their kids’ wild behavior and conclude “well, they’re teenagers; they just need their freedom.” The problem is, they should have known their kids were born needing their freedom.
When you see a problem behavior don’t try to chase it down and eliminate it, know that there is a deeper problem, a heart problem. To know the heart of another person it takes time, attention, and wisdom. We need to become students of who our kids are.

We need to have a plan and an interest in the matters of their heart and how those matters are playing out in their lives (what we see in their behaviors). We are shepherding their hearts and the heart of the matter, which is always relationship, not behavior.

When we help our children practice using power from the time they are little, they become powerful people who are not afraid of the forces outside of them. They learn to draw on the power within them, the power of the Holy Spirit, to direct their lives toward their goals in life.

We need to introduce freedom to our small children and 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, “I want to get in your lap when I have sinned because it is the safest place I have on this earth. There is no one who has demonstrated love like you have to me”.

There is nothing that can separate us from God’s love and this should be our attitude toward our children “I will not allow anything to be more important to me than my connection to you. Your obedience, your respect level, and your success at chores will never be more important to me than my connection to you.”

Loving on purpose means that we learn to let perfect love cast out all our fear, let perfect love bring out the best in us, and make perfect love the bottom line in our homes, as it is in Heaven.

Mistakes: Not The Enemy

Reduce The Fear

(Excerpts from Danny Silk's Book "Loving Your Child On Purpose")

Our children are professional mistake makers. They are all on a learning journey. When we are afraid of their mistakes or their sins our anxiety controls our responses to them and the spirit of fear becomes the master teacher in our home.

We need to learn to be ok no matter what they do. When we do we usher them into a right relationship with an internal God who loves them, who’s not freaked out about their mistakes, and who has a solution that really does work.

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. To fear our children’s poor choices is to teach them to be afraid of freedom.

For many of us intimidation is our only real parenting tool. However, Heaven is not trying to control your life. God doesn’t want to control you. Remember, in the presence of the Lord there is freedom, not control (2Cor. 3:17). Rather we have been given a Spirit of power, love, and self control (2Tim 1:7).

Many parents believe they must gain control by intimidating their children into changing their minds. We think we need a more effective way of controlling our children. Those with “strong-willed” children believe they need to break their will. But really we need to be removing fear, specifically the fear of punishment.

“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love” 1 John 4:18. In order to train our children in love, our behavior as parents must reduce fear, not increase fear.

When we get in a power struggle it assaults the peace and freedom between two people by devaluing them. It damages the relationship when you teach “there’s one of us who has power and its not you”.

But when my heart is connected to your heart, my decisions are designed to protect our relationship no matter how far out of my presence you are. I actually live in your presence when my heart is connected to your heart, and the deposit you have made inside my life steers me in your absence. This can bring us confidence and trust in our children’s choices when they are out of our presence. We know we’ve invested in a loving relationship not one of fear.

If you see God as the great punisher in the sky, then you think it’s natural that the bad things in your life come from Him. Many Christians are afraid of “Being left behind” or “missing the rapture” because we know that we are not without faults. So many experience anxiety over whether God is pleased with us. Therefore, we wrestle with the fear of rejection or punishment. 

The heart of God, however, towards us is that we would learn to handle tons of freedom. To learn to live in relationship with the Limitless One who does not want to control us. To learn to choose those things that build a relationship of love when we have unlimited options. Remember that the way we see the Father determines how we will relate to Him and to others, including our children.

Heart Issues

Freedom In Choosing

(Excerpts from Danny Silk’s book “Loving Your Kids On Purpose)

If we are going to attempt to parent our children in the same way God parents us, there is a good chance that we are going to discover places in our relationship pattern that are different with how He works.

There is a huge difference between a culture where obedience and compliance are the bottom line and a culture where relationship is the bottom line. Nothing is wrong with the first but it never really addresses the heart issues that lead to mistakes in the first place.

Until our children learn to deal with what is going on inside of them, they simply cannot learn to manage freedom.

We need to not be scared of sin and mistakes. Sometimes we still believe that sin is more powerful than we are. When children grow up in an environment where their parents are scared of sin, they learn to fear failure. As they work to eliminate opportunities for sin, parents develop an expectation that their children live a mistake-free life and the goal of parenting becomes teaching obedience and compliance. As a result, their children miss the whole lesson about freedom.

In the beginning God created man to be free, there were no constraints. Think about this thought, God put both the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil and the Tree of Life in the garden. He did this because without the option of making a poor choice they would not have been free. Without the freedom to reject God, we are powerless to choose Him. Obedience is a choice in an environment of freedom!

We can become terrified of our children’s poor choices and try to eliminate as many as possible. The fact that we eliminate poor choices from our children’s lives while God introduced one in the garden on purpose shows us that we need a paradigm shift.

There are consequences to choices and we need to let our children experience their choice. Children are geniuses and if you give them some power to practice with, if you treat them like they have a brain that works, they will make you marvel. Soon they will learn “I have a choice, and one of them is really dumb. I choose freedom.”

A Covenant Switch

Live Free

(Excerpts from Danny Silk’s book “Loving Your Kids On Purpose)

Freedom is a top priority in Heaven, because it is what makes relationships possible. God is less interested in compliance and much more interested in love.

Let’s take a look at our relationship with our Heavenly Father as His children.

Our Father wants us to live absolutely free lives in an environment of unlimited options MORE than trying to keep us from sin. God relates to His children (us) under the New Covenant He made, not the Old Covenant.

In the Old Covenant He related to His children from the outside in… if you sinned you got leprosy, or stoned, etc. Now under the New Covenant He relates to us from the inside out.

In the Old Covenant or external governing system the motivating force in the relationship with God came in the form of blessings for obedience and threats of punishment for disobedience.

Many of us continue to raise our children according to that Old Testament model. It is common to believe that mistakes/sins must be punished. This puts the parents in a punisher role and creates an outside-in approach to our children.

In the New Covenant God relates to us in a new way. “I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.” Our sin was punished once and for all through Jesus taking it on the Cross.

As a result, punishment, wrath, and intimidation have all disappeared from His attitude toward us. God is a safe place. Love and freedom have replaced punishment and fear! We can boldly approach the throne of God. 

Take a minute to do a heart check… do you still feel if you sin God is right there to punish you? Or have you made the complete switch in Covenants and know that when you sin He is there with open arms to love you unconditionally?

Let’s challenge the urge to trace it back to our failure every time something bad happens. Let’s begin to embrace the fact that our God is a God of freedom, not a God of control.

“Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty” 2 Corinthians 3:17 He cares about freedom so much that He was willing to sacrifice his Son to restore the freedom that we lost through sin!

More to come … J