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.”