Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother”—which is the first commandment with a promise—“so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.” Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
—Ephesians 6:1-4 (TNIV)
Paul makes it all sound so simple with his directive to parents, “Don’t exasperate your children,” and to children, “Do what your parents tell you.” Clearly, Paul never sat at a soccer field with a six-year-old who begged to be signed up for soccer but now refuses to play! Or experienced the stubbornness of a two-year-old determined NOT to climb into the car seat! Paul’s God-inspired guidelines are great in theory (after all, if parents always took time to gently lead their kids in God’s way and if kids honored their parents with obedience, family life would run much more smoothly) but difficult to observe in practice. Our kids mess up and so do we. That’s what makes parenting (and being a kid!) so challenging. Like our children, we are works in progress. Boundaries will be pushed; expectations will be challenged.
We have much to learn from the role model we and Paul share—the God of grace. As parents, we need to extend grace to our kids when they mess up. There are also times when we need to apologize for our less-than-perfect parenting techniques and ask our kids to extend some grace our way. While Paul may not have experienced the challenges of modern parenting, his writings from Scripture can teach us much about living grace-fully.
—An excerpt from Home Grown Handbook for Christian Parenting, by Karen DeBoer, from chapter 3: Setting Boundaries, Showing Grace.
