Shepherding a Child's Heart

Called to Be in Charge
As a parent, you have authority because God calls you to be an
authority in your child’s life. You have the authority to act on behalf
of God. As a father or mother, you do not exercise rule over your
jurisdiction, but over God’s. You act at his command. You discharge

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a duty that he has given. You may not try to shape the lives of your
children as pleases you, but as pleases him.
All you do in your task as parents must be done from this point of
view. You must undertake all your instruction, your care and nurture,
your correction and discipline, because God has called you to. You act
with the conviction that he has charged you to act on his behalf. In
Genesis 18:19, Jehovah says, “I have chosen him [Abraham], so that
he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way
of the Lord by doing what is right and just .…” Abraham is on God’s
errand. He is performing a task on God’s agenda. God has called him
to these things. He is not freelancing. Abraham does not write his own
job description. God defines the task and Abraham acts in God’s
behalf.
Deuteronomy 6 underscores this view of parental responsibility.
In verse 2, God says his goal is for the Israelites and their children
and grandchildren to fear the Lord by keeping his decrees. The person
by whom God’s decrees are passed on is the parent whom God calls to
train his children when they sit at home, when they walk by the road,
when they lie down, and when they rise up. God has an objective. He
wants one generation to follow another in his ways. God accomplishes
this objective through the agency of parental instruction.
Ephesians 6:4 commands you to bring your children up in the
training and instruction of the Lord. This is a command to provide the
training and instruction of the Lord; to function on God’s behalf.
Understanding this simple principle enables you to think clearly about
your task. If you are God’s agent in this task of providing essential
training and instruction in the Lord, then you, too, are a person under
authority. You and your child are in the same boat. You are both
under God’s authority. You have differing roles, but the same Master.
If you allow unholy anger to muddy the correction process, you
are wrong. You need to ask for forgiveness. Your right to discipline
your children is tied to what God has called you to do, not to your

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own agenda.
Unholy anger—anger over the fact that you are not getting what
you want from your child—will muddy the waters of discipline.
Anger that your child is not doing what you want frames discipline as
a problem between parent and child, not as a problem between the
child and God. It is God who is not being obeyed when you are
disobeyed. It is God who is not being honored when you are not
honored. The issue is not an interpersonal contest, rather it is your
insistence that your child obey God, because obeying God is good and
right.
We know that there is such a thing as righteous indignation, but
righteous indignation responds to an affront to God rather than an
affront to us. It is easy for a parent to say, “I am right and I am angry,
therefore my anger is righteous anger.” It may be that we are just
angry because we are not getting what we want.