The Conviction to Parent

Parenting is incredibly convicting.

Seriously.

Try disobeying God in an area of your life while explaining the necessity of obedience to a child. It's doable, but it certainly isn't comfortable. I sat down with Isabella today, for what seems like the millionth time, to talk about obedience and what it means.

I feel like I'm on repeat sometimes as I listen to myself talk about the same thing over and over again...

But every time I have that discussion I am reminded of some area of my life that is not rightly aligned to God's standard for me as a Christian. I am convicted of just how guilty I am of disobeying my heavenly Father, even in the midst of discussion that is centered on the disobedience of a child toward her earthly father.

Discussions about

    obedience,

        patience,

            attitude,

                discipline,

                    consequences

then drive me to humbly and honestly consider my own relationship with God.

Discipline is then infinitely harder because I feel as though I am disciplining myself in some vicarious way. That's probably a skewed understanding of discipline, but I can't help thinking that sometimes God uses that conviction to lead me to repentance and thus draw me closer in relationship to Himself.

Just as I have found that conviction within me grows as I walk through life as a parent, so also is grace all the more real to me. I think this is because in spite of my frustration over yet another blunder on the part of my child, I constantly feel the overwhelming desire to extend grace and show mercy for her error based on the very grace and mercy which were shown to me at the cross. This doesn't mean that my wife and I don't discipline her, but it does mean that we are honest with her about the grace that we have experienced in Christ. She gets her fair share of spankings. But she also gets her fair share of second chances. We want her to know as she grows in understanding that discipline is both external and internal. It is the external ordering of our behavior to line up with God's standard for holiness. But, more importantly, it is the internal change of heart that comes with conviction of sin and repentance before a holy God. Without both, it's guilt at best and hypocrisy at worst.

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That you might know Christ,