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Jeff Gilbert Q: Have you ever gone through circumstances so hard that you feel like things can never be quite as good again?
A: (about 1/3 of the kids) Yes.
Q: Have you ever had someone hurt you enough that you feel it has diminished you and your potential for a great life?
A: (about 1/4 of the kids) Yes.
Q: Have you made a mistake so significant, that you feel like it has changed the course of your life unrecoverably, like it can never be quite as good as if you had not messed up?
A: (about 1/3 the kids) Yes.
Q: Do your parents know about these things and how you see them?
A: (about half the kids who responded yes before): No
A: (some kids): My parents are the ones who remind me things are this way.
A: (some kids): My parents are part of it, so I can’t talk about it with them.
In talking with teens in my classes over the years, I find that one of their greatest sources of confusion, pain and guilt is how they process the hard things they experience — difficult circumstances, hurtful people (which can even include us parents), and their own mistakes — and the impact of those things on their lives. They (like we do  ) tend to assess their worth and base their sense of hope on their perception of their circumstances, other people’s treatment of them, and their own performance. When things get hard and broken, and especially when they stay that way for a while, this can send them spiraling through insecurity or anger, perhaps to all-out fear or bitterness. It can ultimately manifest in depression, seeking affirmation in destructive ways, or other compulsive or addictive behaviors. And we parents — who are often sure we know our kids — often don’t know what is really going on, because the same factors that led to the problems also keep them hidden, including from us.
Years ago I came to realize that there is little correlation between what a “Christian home” looks like on the outside and what it feels like on the inside. Despite this realization, I can still get surprised at how much confusion, fear and pain many kids carry that no one knows about.
“I hate feeling this way. Does it have to be like this? I’ve tried things to feel better, and I feel worse. Where is the path to something better, that actually works?”
There is real hope for the confused, scared, hurting person. The path into the dark woods of insecurity, anger, fear, bitterness, depression, or addictive behaviors is often a desperate flight of many steps in the wrong direction, and so the path out is a journey hard and courageous steps in a better direction, toward real security, peace, and fulfillment in Christ. This path is usually best taken with one or more others we trust (Gal 6:2). Whether we are deep in the woods where all looks dark, or just inside the edge where we can still see some light, the path out is basically the same. Like any purposeful journey, it starts with knowing what direction to walk.
The healing journey begins as we start to understand how the hard things — the difficult circumstances, mean people, and personal failures that confuse, grieve, frighten, and even harm us — function in our lives for good. The genuine experience of God turning the bad in our lives to real good becomes our strength and hope along the way, as we come to realize that God Himself is walking with us, holding our hand, carrying us — leading us out of darkness, to a place of light and joy we may even have given up hope for as a real experience in this life. Seeing the hard things as God does, and understanding His promises to us in them — for this life, and eternity — is where healing begins.
Hard things
(James 1:12-17 (ESV)) [12] Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him. [13] Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. [14] But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. [15] Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. [16] Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. [17] Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.
Sometimes we think a “trial” is “really hard circumstances outside of my control.” We don’t tend to use the word unless we can justify it as being somewhat Job-like in degree and purpose. However, the biblical definition of a trial, and explanation for our reaction to trials, is perhaps not what we tend to limit it to.
According to James, a trial is basically when I don’t get something I really want. Faced with disappointment, my temptation is to allow that desire to become an expectation, perhaps legitimize it by elevating it to a “need,” then make it a demand, on God and whomever else.
When faced with disappointment of unmet desire, my first thought is often to blame someone. I blame myself for failing, others for failing me, and God for withholding from me or setting Himself against me. I might not call it blame, but it is. The deeper the desire, the stronger the temptation.
The problem is not with my God-designed or God-instilled desires and passions. It is legitimate for me to desire love, esteem, joy, and peace. It is legitimate for me to desire to feel God’s pleasure in using my talents or even my sacrifice. It is legitimate for me even to need these things, because I was designed to.
But I was designed to find love, esteem, joy, and peace in a dynamic relationship with God, not through my circumstances, nor through other people, nor through my own successes. I was designed to find fulfillment directly from enjoying God, overflow with that, and pour it out to others. Seeking these things through any other sources always leads to disappointment, which then easily becomes anger, insecurity, and worse, laced with blame for myself, others, and God.
“That’s fine for explaining the petty stuff, or the self-centered stuff. But what about the real tragedies, the deep hurts and betrayals, and the costly personal failures? What about the stuff you can’t trivialize?”
More severe trials mean more pain and confusion, and more temptation, but the principles are the same. I can take my anguish and sorrow to God and draw love, esteem, joy and peace directly from Him, or I can move to bitterness, fear, or depression. I might even turn to compulsive-addictive behaviors in an effort to dull or distract from the pain, when what I really need is to share it with God and gain His perspective and strength.
Consider Jesus’s responses to things that happened to Him. He was personally hurt, rejected and betrayed, in the most severe ways. He responded with sorrow, and even asked for it to stop. Yet He also responded at the same time with a greater joy in His relationship with the Father. He never got angry at someone for personal hurt, rejection, or betrayal. He never feared men or doubted the Father’s intentional goodness toward Him. Sorrow without bitterness, vulnerability without fear, longing without coveting…no God-replacing idols like compulsive or addictive behaviors.
How do I respond to hard things?
“How does understanding James’s perspective on trials help me? Doesn’t it just basically point out that not only is my situation messed up, but I’m all the more messed up because I can’t just suck it up and respond like I should? Is this saying I just need to decide it’s no big deal and move on?”
Contrary to the way we sometimes “exhort” one another, it is not just my will — my decision — that determines my heart’s response to a trial, particularly a severe or sustained one. I can sometimes “choose to feel” something for a little while, but usually not for very long without engaging in some form of denial or facade that tries to mask the wrong responses that are creating turmoil in my heart, and ultimately causes even more confusion and turmoil.
The Bible teaches that what ultimately drives my heart’s responses are my beliefs (Gen 45:26; Prov 4:23; Rom 10:9; Matt 13:15), or what my heart understands to be true about the role and impact these hard things play in my life, and in my present and future potential for joy and peace in love and esteem.
What drives my response are my beliefs about how these hard things affect my life and hope. I can experience tragic devastating things, and respond in godly sorrow, repentence and resolve, yet remain full of joy and hope. Or that sorrow and pain can spiral down to despair, fear, or bitterness. In the way God has designed us, my response depends on what I understand and believe about how these hard things work in my life and where they are going, not on the things themselves.
Resignation? Reasons? Rescue?
“Respond rightly.” “Respond biblically.” We’ve all heard that before, perhaps during sermons. Our kids especially have, usually during a lecture. While good advice, it isn’t helpful, if it just distills our heart’s response to intellectual decisions. If we could manage our own heart’s response purely at the intellectual-decisional level, we would change it ourselves without needing to have God change it in the context of a relationship. Nonetheless, we all tend to have a few intellectual-decisional paths we take in our hearts to try to respond as we think we’re supposed to.
One is resignation. “God has put me here, and I accept His will, no matter how bad it is for me. I will decide to be ‘joyful,’ or at least say I am, and look forward to something better, maybe in the next life.” This approach has some truth in it, as it focuses on God’s sovereignty and the decisional aspects of our heart’s attitude. However, it starts with a premise so flawed that we can’t sustain it. The premise that God is not actually being as good to me as He “could be” right now is a lie that opens the door in our hearts to all kinds of other lies about God and about myself, to try to explain why God is holding out on me or doing this to me right now. This is basically where Job started. Somehow — we will see how shortly — the hard things in my life, while difficult and probably a cause for sorrow, are also actually a direct reflection of God’s loving care toward me and a basis for true joy — decisional and emotional — in my heart.
Then there is our sometimes desperate need for reasons. “God is allowing this trial in my life for this purpose or that purpose,” as if knowing the purpose allows us to assess His goodness and is required for us to embrace His plan. It is important to note that God doesn’t explain trials to us in terms of “reasons why.” He never tells us that He “had to do it this way because…” or that “He needed us to take one for the team,” or even that “this was for our own good because of something about us, others, or circumstances.” The One who creates and re-creates is the One who makes plans and makes them happen in the same word. He is Love and Good, without reference to reasons or external standards. He doesn’t “need” to do anything, or “need” us to do anything. For those who walk with Him, He works all things to personal individual good without being limited by others or even by ourselves. “Reasons” are poor comfort in the hard things, and poor theology, as Job’s friends show us. Comfort and strength are found through my heart’s belief in God’s intentional goodness toward me experienced in a dynamic relationship with Him, without relying on knowing “reasons” for things.
Often we seek rescue. “I am believing God to rescue me from this trial, and I am waiting for that.” Desiring rescue, praying for rescue, and waiting on God for rescue are all good things…as long as our desire doesn’t become a demand. Daniel’s three friends prayed for God to rescue them from the furnace, but what they got was something better. God met them, not outside the furnace, but inside. In the center, where the flames were hottest. Praying for rescue is good, but James says our joy is to be in the midst of the trial itself, not just on the other side of it. Our joy is to be in meeting God, wherever He is, outside the furnace or in the center.
Redemption
“If not resignation, reasons or rescue, then what is our path and hope in hard things? What is joyful about a trial? It all sounds noble and holy, but can I really be joyful about my life being ‘messed up’ by difficult circumstances, evil people, or, sometimes hardest of all, my own mistakes?”
To answer that question, we need to understand what God does with trials, and with all the evil and mistakes that affect our lives. We need to understand the fuller meaning of redemption.
The concept of redemption was made personal for Israel through their connection with the Land. God’s people have always had a Land, or the promise of a Land. We started in a Garden. When we fell, we lost that Land. When God announced His plan to build a nation of His people, His first command and promise to Abraham was to go to a Land He was preparing for this new nation. When Israel later lost that Land, God promised the Church a new Heavenly Kingdom, a Land even more glorious than the the Garden had originally been.
For an Israelite, his stake in the Land was his stake in the nation, representative of his relationship with God, and of his salvation. Thus God made a special set of laws to ensure that no one could ever lose his stake in the Land, through unfortunate circumstances, evil of others, or even one’s own mistakes and sins. An Israelite could always have his share in the Land redeemed. The Kinsman Redeemer, a foreshadow of Christ, was the primary path of redemption of the Land for the Israelite (Lev 25:23-28).
The word “redeem” literally means to “buy back.” It was a word used for commercial transactions. Isn’t this a bit crass for such a holy concept? Didn’t it evoke thoughts of “worth” and “value” and “exchange?” Yes, and it was supposed to, because God wants us to understand that the Cross is indeed in some aspects a transactional exchange, and worth is an essential part of it.
In the “transaction” of the Cross, Jesus got my sins and my sin nature. He also received the full wrath of God for me poured out on Him, such that God no longer has wrath for me, because it is fully spent. By itself, that would be a gracious one-way transaction, giving me a “do-over” where I have a clean slate and get to try again to please God through my life. That is the extent of how many of us see the Cross.
However, this transaction was not one-way. In that same transaction, I received the righteousness of Christ — the goodness of Christ, in the eyes of the Father. The full approval the Father has for Jesus is now mine, right here right now, no matter how messed up things seem circumstantially. The completeness of having fulfilled all the law and every purpose, desire, and expectation the Father has for me is met in Christ. I have no more to gain and nothing to earn, because there is no higher righteousness or glory.
The Cross was the most unfair transaction in history. Jesus received my utter sinfulness and God’s wrath, and I received Jesus utter righteousness and completeness. In considering the glory and grace of this transaction, Paul makes an important observation that is usually lost on us but was part of the Israelite understanding: the process that started with God creating me good under the law, which was glorious, ends with me being found righteous in Christ, which is even more glorious (2 Cor 3:18). Run that again: I was created glorious, I sinned, God bought me back, and made me more glorious. Not less glorious, as a sort of Plan B consolation. Not as glorious, as a do-over where I have another chance to prove myself righteous in Round 2. More glorious, righteous and complete, having done nothing to earn it. All I did was sin, and kill my Redeemer.
Hard to fathom? Compare the GLORY of the Kingdom in the book of Revelation with the glory of the Garden. The Garden was glorious and good, but the final Kingdom is even more so. Consider what Paul says about our moving from glory to greater glory through Christ’s redemption. This surprises us, but would not have surprised an Israelite who knew the laws of redemption, because the OT law already had provison that anything consecreated to God and redeemed would increase in value in the process (Lev 27:14-19).
“What does this have to do with hard circumstances, evil people, and my own mistakes that affect my life?”
Redemption is not just the hope of eternity with God, though that is glorious. Redemption is temporal as well. When God redeemed me, He redeemed my whole life. He committed to take all the evil in my life and turn it upside down to a greater glory…greater than if it had not happened.
The path God used to get me from Garden to Kingdom — from glory to GLORY — was by taking my sin and the evil we brought into this Creation, turning it upside down and using it for good. And He makes this same promise to us about all the the evil and hard things in our lives.
Reconsider some familiar passages in the light of this deeper understanding of redemption.
(Romans 8:28 (ESV)) [28] And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.
(Genesis 50:20 (ESV)) [20] As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good…
(James 1:2-4 (ESV)) [2] Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, [3] for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. [4] And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
“How is it that I can count a trial as joy, especially when that trial seems to come from fallen circumstances, evil people, and my own mistakes? How is it not a resignation to Plan B, where it may be ‘good enough,’ but it would be ‘better’ if it hadn’t happened?”
Because God is my Redeemer, and His idea of redemption is to take the fallenness and evil in my life, including my own sins, and make them the very path to a glory and good that is greater than if they had never happened to me, or I had never sinned.
God is the Creator, and He is also the re-Creator. When He redeemed me He didn’t dust my garment off and put it back on me, a little stained and worse for wear. He didn’t even stop at cleaning my old garment to spotless original value. He exchanged my original ruined tunic for a robe of royalty (Eph 4:22-23). He made me a new more glorious creation (2 Cor 5:17). My worth didn’t go down through my sin, or even get restored to the same as it started. It went up. Amazing grace.
Hard things don’t come to me “because” I’m a sinner (all that has been paid) or because God “needs” me to take one for the team (as if He had no other options, or even as if He needed options). Trials are not something to resign myself to (things will be OK, but not quite as good). It is good to pray for rescue…as long as I’d rather be with God in the center of the furnace if that is where He is. Hard things are not about resignation, reasons, or rescue, but redemption. Trials are about God working all things — circumstances, people, and my mistakes — to good. Not just OK good, but greater good and glory than if they hadn’t happened. Not good that leaves me nicked and cracked, or even restored to original, but good that re-creates me in the righteousness, approval, completeness, and greater “worth” of Jesus Christ.
Of course, the eternal promise of redemption assumes that we have died with Christ (Rom 6:1-4). And the present experience of redemption assumes we have a dynamic personal relationship with God, that is emotional-experiential as well as intellectual-decisional. Often we spend too much time and energy focusing on our present circumstances, other people, or ourselves, and too little time and energy building a deep personal relationship with God. This is invariably where the feeling that God is not really close begins, and if we neglect the relationship long enough, becomes a feeling that God is not really there at all.
Love and esteem are relational experiences — they originate in our relationship with God, and have no security when disconnected from that relationship. Similarly, joy and peace are found only in our relationship with God, not outside it. Even God’s blessings to us, where we sometimes try to anchor our joy and peace, provide us no stability when disconnected from a dynamic personal relationship with our Creator.
My joy and hope — and my healing from difficult circumstances, hurtful people, and my own mistakes — are not found in resignation, reasons or rescue, but in redemption, experienced through a dynamic personal relationship with God…not just in eternity, but in the present as well.
Jeff Gilbert “Be reasonable.” Have you ever said that, or heard it said? What does it mean? What is “reason?” Is reason the highest measure of rightness? Are the best decisions based on reason? What does the Bible say about reason?
In teaching Theology and Worldview, I find that Reason — what it is, and God’s design for it in our lives — is not well understood. While Reason is important in our discussions and decisions, is it really as exalted as we tend to make it, particularly in the West?
Study of the Bible will reveal something unexpected to the Western reader: Reason has no elevated place there. Considering that the Bible says a lot about Truth and where to find it, the absence is important.
Further study of Scripture reveals that what we are actually to value is Wisdom, not Reason per se. What is the difference…isn’t Wisdom just a biblical old-school name for Reason? Not really. Unlike Reason, Wisdom does not start with the intellect of man, but rather with the the fear of the Lord (Prov 9:10). Wisdom starts with God’s Revelation — His Word — not man’s reasoning (Prov 2:6). In fact, an honest look at the Bible reveals to us endless truths and principles we would never have “reasoned” out for ourselves on our best day, and that we miss when we rely too heavily on our own Reason without checking our conclusions and decisions back against God’s revealed Truth.
This realization alone should challenge us to put aside our intellectual (and emotional, for that matter) certainty as sources of Truth in our lives, and to develop the habit of taking all our conclusions and strongly-held opinions back to the Bible for a validation check before pushing them onto others. Sadly, the alternative we too often choose is to make God’s Truth fit inside our “well-reasoned” conclusions, adapting God’s Word to support our finite and fallen Reason instead.
What is biblical Wisdom? Where does our Reason fit into it?
One way to understand biblical Wisdom is to see it as the integration of Reason and Non-reason (this paradigm draws from the perspectives of Francis Schaeffer). The Reason part of it involves the intellectual faculties (induction and deduction, rational and empirical) God designed into us as a part of His Image (Is 1:18). The Non-reason part involves such things as love, preference, and emotion, which are also faculties God designed into us as a part of His Image (Ps 37:4).
Which brings us to another surprise to the Western mind: The Bible does not make Reason superior to Non-reason in seeking Wisdom. In the biblical Wisdom arena, Reason and Non-reason — logic and love, intellect and passion — are fairly equal players.
For example, love is at the top of the list in the Non-reason category of Wisdom. This is not to say love is unreasonable (incompatible with reason), but rather to say that it is not derived from Reason. God does not love because He reasons, or based on particular reasons. He doesn’t love “because” anything; He is love. Since God’s love is fully operative in God’s Wisdom, God’s Wisdom is far more than just Reason. And given the superior place of love and compassion and other Non-reason aspects of God’s Wisdom in the Bible, it is “reasonable” (pun intended ) to say that Reason is not the superior element of biblical Wisdom.
Suffering is another example of where the Wisdom we need for life is found more in Non-reason than Reason. Human intellectual attempts to explain “reasons why” God allows evil and suffering are poor comfort for the sufferer, and poor theology as well. Suffering and evil exist in this fallen creation as grievous to God and in opposition to His stated desires, yet fully under His sovereign redemptive goodness. We are not offered reasons why they happen, or even an explanation how they can exist at all. Our attempts to identify reasons for suffering and evil invariably place us in the position of either Job or Job’s friends. One of the main messages of Job is that God doesn’t offer us reasons for our trials and suffering, or for where He allows evil versus where He does not. In these areas, God simply asks us to trust in His sovereign goodness without further human rationalization which darkens His greater Wisdom. In response to suffering and senseless evil, God offers us not Reason or reasons, but the greater comfort of Redemption.
In further considering the place of Reason and Non-reason in biblical Wisdom, it helps if we remember that both are equally finite, limited by God’s wise design. By this we mean that even on our smartest day in the Garden, our Reason and Non-reason were designed to be fully dependent on God’s Revelation, not to operate independently of it. This is, if anything, even more true after the Fall.
The historical path of Western Thought, starting with the ancient Greeks, has been to gradually elevate man’s Reason to operate on par with, then over, and then entirely apart from, God’s revealed Truth. Naturalism, the predominant intellectual worldview of our Western culture outside the church today, assumes that we have the capacity to eventually understand all things through “natural” Reason apart from God. The church has rejected full-scale Naturalism, but has incorporated some of its foundational thought patterns. Specifically, we have adopted the idea that as long as we start with some part of God’s Word, any conclusions we subsequently reason out from there must also have nearly the weight of God’s Word. We persist in this assumption despite centuries of internal conflicts (Calvinism vs. Arminianism), and even outright errors (Copernican “heresy”), continuing to place authority in “reasoned” secondary conclusions that take us beyond what the Bible specifically tells us. Long ago we seem to have lost sight of the fact that our Reason was created finite even before the Fall, and has always been intended to operate inside God’s revealed Truth, not beyond it.
For example, the Bible tells us that God hardened Pharoah’s heart and Pharaoh hardened his own heart, at the same time, without explaining how both can be true. Christians have reasoned all sorts of explanations for what the Bible must actually “mean,” given the apparently logical contradiction which says they “can’t” both be fully literally true. Yet God never invites us to reason out how His complete sovereignty intersects with the completely legitimate choices He says He gives us. He merely tells us both are true, at the same time, with the full ramifications of each. Beyond this, it is a mystery that supports no explanations or accommodations by us to make it somehow more palatable to our finite Reason.
As another example, Christian thinkers have for centuries reasoned out and then debated, often to the point of offense, two apparently logically irreconcilable views of Christ’s sacrifice, as being either “limited” or “universal” in scope. Yet the Bible does not tell us it is one or the other, nor does it suggest that we should even make such a distinction. The debate comes primarily from the insistence of both sides that one of God’s wonderful and wonderous mysteries should conform to the limits of human reason and logic.
Not only are Reason and Non-Reason both equally finite players, they are equally fallen players in the Wisdom arena.
In the West especially, we have a tendency to see our emotions and preferences and passions as more fallen and unreliable, and our reason as more intact and reliable. However, there is no biblical basis for this perspective. According to the Bible, our mind and heart and will (and all the rest of us) all fell utterly, so there is no subsequent basis for considering one more reliable than another in seeking Wisdom and Truth. Truth is based in what God says, not in what I think or feel, and what I think is not inherently more right than what I feel. The rightness of each must be determined from God’s Word alone.
To wrap up this pedantic discussion on a more relational note, consider how many discussions, debates and even arguments we have all experienced where each of us considers ourself to be very reasonable in our own minds, while seeing the opposing party as somewhat less so. Rather than appealing to our superior Reason to prove our point, we would do well to keep in mind that usually much of what we argue for is actually just our preferences (Non-reason) based on our priorities that we package as Reason to sell them to someone else, because our preferences generally seem more reasonable to us anyway. In most cases, the discussion is better aimed toward a mutual effort to seek God’s Wisdom — which stays within His Word and considers both Reason and Non-reason factors as an integrated process — for the particular decision and situation we are facing. Reason is important, but not exalted or decisive. God’s Wisdom is more holistic and involves larger principles and priorities, and often takes us down a path that Reason alone might not (Acts 21:11-13).
Sound reasonable?
Jeff Gilbert A question I often ask teens is: What happens when you mess up badly?
Q: What happens to your relationship with your parents?
A: It depends on whether they find out.
This takes us back to prior discussions about trust and communication.
A: They get upset with me.
Q: What does “upset” look and feel like?
A: Yelling sometimes. Distance or coldness others. Lectures. Threats. Telling me how disappointed they are. Varies.
Q: Is “upset” the same as “angry?”
A: My parents say they’re not angry, they’re just upset.
Q: What’s the difference?
A: None that I can tell.
This brings out a good point. We parents have words we use when we don’t want to say we’re angry: upset, annoyed, frustrated, peeved, irked, etc. The Bible considers them all to be anger. Our kids get confused, and we legimately lose credibility with them, when we can’t acknowledge our anger (or fear, or anxiety, or whatever) for what it is, and deal with it biblically as our sin that can’t be blamed on their sin.
Q: Do your parents say (or imply) that you “make” them angry…I mean “upset.”
A: Yes, of course, because I do.
More confusion. Biblically, no one makes me angry or afraid. I get angry because I don’t get what I want, and I blame circumstances (which basically means blaming God), other people, or myself. According to James, I get angry because my desire becomes an unmet expectation, which, if I allow it to, conceives and gives birth to sin. Biblically, no one “makes” me angry or upset.
Jesus was hurt, embarrassed, and betrayed by those he loved more than we have ever been, yet he never got angry at them for those things.
If we communicate to our children that they have “made” us upset, we are blaming them for our sinful response to circumstances or their actions. This not only affects our credibility, but also teaches them confusing and wrong things about the root of sin and how to deal with it in themselves.
When we become angry (upset, annoyed, frustrated), we should confess it to God and our children as our sin, not to be blamed on whatever might be their sin, and ask God to deal with that anger in us before we attempt to pursue the issue further in training or disciplining our kids.
Q: Are your parents right to be angry with you when you mess up.
A: Yes, if I deserve it. They say it is “righteous anger.”
Q: What is “righteous anger?” Is it anger when they are right about something and you’re wrong?
A: Basically, yes…though that doesn’t sound right now that you say it that way.
Another misconception. Note that at no time in Jesus’s life was he ever angry because of what someone did to Him, or how someone affected him, or how someone made Him look or feel. Even on the cross He was not angry at anyone for what they were doing to Him. The only time we see Jesus angry in the Bible is when God’s glory being ignored or insulted (for example, in the temple with the moneychangers).
Of all the times I have been angry (annoyed, upset, you name it) as a parent, I think only the smallest fraction of it has ever been about God’s glory, and the vast part of it is about me, my expectations, my dissappintment, my embarassment, etc. Calling my anger “righteous” is one of the more confusing (and unglorifying) things I can do as a parent.
Q: When you mess up, what do you feel changes in your relationship with your parents? Do they love you less?
A: They say they don’t, but it doesn’t always feel that way. Something about it changes.
It is a natural tendency in us to see love as at least somewhat conditional, whether it is love from a parent, spouse, or even God. As parents, we have to over-communicate that our love for our kids can never be diminished or increased by what they say or do, or even what they are. God’s love for me was undiminished in the depth of my sin prior to my salvation, and He calls me to love others, especially my wife and children, like that.
Q: If we assume their love is not diminished, then what changes? Does it feel like you have less esteem in their eyes?
A: Yes, that’s it!
Here our kids show they have more understanding than we give them credit for. In the church we sometimes call it “love” — or perhaps “compassion” — when we really just feel sorry for someone. But biblically they are not the same thing. In the Bible, love carries esteem with it (Rom 12:10). “Compassion” is what we feel for someone we hold in equal or greater esteem, and “pity” is what we feel toward someone we hold in lower esteem. Jesus saw people with compassion. I have never met anyone really who wanted my pity.
Sometimes when they mess up, our kids feel that our love for them has changed — either diminished until they somehow make up for their failure, or become more condescending until they can earn back esteem with us. We may not realize they are seeing it this way.
God’s love is unchanged by our sins and failures, and the esteem which He has for us is based on His declaration of our worth and dignity, not on anything we can earn or lose. He is full of compassion, not pity in the sense we sometimes mean it.
We have to over-communicate this to our kids, or they can easily come to believe that when they mess up it is actually love and esteem that are affected. Well over half the kids I talk with about these things confess to a continuing feeling of diminished worth due to past failures. Sometimes this is most acute in the families where spirituality is held as a performance measure and appearances seem most important.
Anger, distance, backhanded remarks, constant reminders and criticism, and more, are ways we communicate that some combination of love and esteem are compromised in the relationship after our kids mess up. Withholding love and esteem is always a bad idea, and they should never be used as discipline tools to shape our kids’s behavior or character.
How do we know if this is happening in our family? The best way to find out what message our kids are receiving from us is to ask them, and give them the freedom to answer without us getting defensive and without fear of reprisal.
Q: Do you feel guilty when you mess up, through failure or disobedience?
A: Yes, of course. I am guilty.
Q: What do you do with that feeling?
A: Wait for it to go away, by either letting my parents cool down or making up for what I did…or by getting punished.
Q: Making right your wrong, or taking the punishment, gets rid of guilt?
A: It helps.
Q: Do you sometimes carry guilt for a long time, maybe even still carrying it for things, such that it is actually building up over time?
A (from over half the kids, with pain in their eyes and voices): Yes.
Here is a rat’s nest of bad theology and harmful beliefs we have to untangle. The “feeling of guilt” (failure, inadequacy, condemnation, worthlessness, messed up) is often misunderstood, not resolved well, and even misused as a parenting tool.
Even when I mess up badly, the Bible doesn’t say I should “feel guilty.” “Guilt” is a legal term that expresses a state of being before God, not a feeling per se. The Bible says that the Holy Spirit convicts us, and we (hopefully) feel sorrow and remorse, and (hopefully) experience repentance. These are good biblical feelings and experiences that begin with God’s Holy Spirit and take us to the Cross where Jesus resolves it all.
When they say they “feel guilty,” our kids often mean they feel like a failure — inadequate, condemned, worthless, and messed up. These feelings are not the godly place of sorrow and repentence that leads us to the Cross, but rather an ungodly place of diminished love, performance-based value, and damaged worth. Rather than being at the Cross of unconditional love and value where Jesus took God’s wrath and our punishment for us and gave us His righteousness, we are in the Accuser’s lair of conditional love, earned worth, self-hatred and self-punishment.
We parents are often tempted to use a “feeling of guilt” or “shame” as a tool to shape our kids’s behavior and character, or even punish them. While our intent may be just to encourage godly sorrow and repentence, in our kids’s hearts it tends to become something ungodly and hurtful. God doesn’t put on us a “feeling of guilt” to discipline us or sanctify us, and certainly not to punish us, and neither should we use it on our children. We should instead try to pursue any feelings of guilt and shame as an opportunity to more deeply communicate the Gospel to our children, where their legal guilt and associated feelings of shame can be removed forever by Christ on the Cross.
Practically speaking, this means:
– Our kids are never to be the object of our anger (wrath). Even if the child is not a believer, God reserves wrath for the sinner for Himself, in His time. (Rom 12:19)
– Any “feeling of guilt” — in the sense of failure, inadequacy, condemnation, worthlessness, messed up — has no place in the believer, even when we mess up really badly. Jesus took all our guilt and shame, and gave us His righteousness and completeness.
– The experience of conviction is resolved through repentance. The feeling of remorse is godly sorrow that can be shared with Christ who has experienced all our sorrows, and eclipsed by greater joy that all is and will be made right.
– We have a vital parental role in disciplining our kids. However, “discipline” is not just another name for punishment, though well over half the kids I ask don’t know the difference. Discipline is to help them in sanctification toward Christ-likeness, and is therefore to be applied with that goal in mind. Expending our wrath as part of the process confuses that goal. Communicating to our kids that their guilt and shame remain until discipline is complete — or even longer — confuses that goal. Applying discipline in an automated system of crime-punishment confuses that goal. Discipline is wise, individual, contextual, and applied in love without condemnation or wrath. (Heb 12:5-11)
I have the privilege of helping young people caught up in self-hatred and self-harm of various kinds. Though every situation is unique, the theological root of the problem comes back to this misplaced misunderstood feeling of guilt and shame, in the sense of failure, inadequacy, condemnation, worthlessness, and being irrepairably messed up. Sadly, the church often does not understand or know how to help, and can unwittingly make it worse by careless words and confused doctrine. Our enemy the Accuser is already having a field day with our children’s hearts through the influences from outside the Church. Inside the Church we should be helping them overcome their Accuser, not making his job easier.
Q: So if love is not diminished, and esteem is not diminished, and guilt and shame are dealt with on the Cross, then what does change when we mess up?
A: Nothing?
Q: Nice try, but no. The answer is in 1 Jn 1:5-10. What does it say there?
A: Fellowship.
When we mess up (sin, fail, fall short, etc), the thing that changes in our relationship with God is not His love or esteem for us, but “fellowship,” the connection we have with Him that says we’re walking together and all is right between us.
It is not the fact that we still carry around the sin nature which breaks fellowship. If it were, fellowship would be unattainable. Nor is it struggle with a particular sin, because v. 10 makes it clear that fellowship can’t rely on being able to say we are without sin.
What breaks fellowship is when we stop “confessing” our sins and sinfulness (v. 9). This makes more sense when we understand the word “confess” as the original readers would have understood it. The picture should not be the “confessional,” but rather an ongoing conversation in which there is either agreement or disagreement. The biblical word for “confess” means “to continually agree with God” about my sinfulness and my sins. Being in fellowship does not imply sinlessness, but rather agreement about my sinfulness and my sins.
This concept of “agreement” should not be understood as just intellectual assent. It carries with it the idea of whole-hearted or holistic agreement, where I agree with who God is in his holiness (v. 5), who I am in light of God’s holiness (v. 6, 8), and my continual commitment to strive to be holy as He is holy (v. 7). It is agreement of the heart.
So I am in fellowship with God if I agree with him, in heart and mind, about who He is, who I am, and what He asks of me. In that state of agreement, even as I stumble, fall, and get back up again, I remain in fellowship with Him. If I stop agreeing with Him, by saying that His standards can’t reasonably be that high, then I break fellowship with Him. If I stop agreeing with Him by saying that I am doing well enough and can relax my striving for holiness, then I break fellowship with Him.
And when I get out of agreement with Him, it takes only an instant to get back into it. Thus fellowship with God does not have to be regained through punishment or penance, but may be restored instantaneously by confession (agreement) with Him.
What does all this theology have to do with parenting? When our kids mess up, they get out of fellowship with God, and can restore fellowship with Him immediately. They don’t have to wait for His anger to cool, or endure some punishment first. Though He may discipline them in the process, they don’t have to wait for discipline to be complete before fellowship can be restored. They only have to return to a place of heart agreement with Him.
And when He disciplines us, He does with undiminished love and esteem for us, without anger. He does not use anger or shame, or withhold love and esteem, as tools to sanctify us. His goal is our sanctification, not our penance.
It should be the same with our kids’s relationship with us. When they mess up, our love and value should be clearly communicated as undiminished and fully affirmed. What is broken is fellowship with us, because they have gotten out of “agreement” with us as they got out of agreement with God. They should similarly be able to restore instantly with us, as they restore with God, without having to endure our coldness, our venting anger on them, our condemnation, our shaming, or any penance we might be tempted to require of them. Our process of discipline should not be some veiled requirement for them to earn their way back to our full love and esteem. They should be able to restore fellowship with us immediately, at the same time and in the same way as they restore fellowship with God.
Q: When people mess up in your family, and hurt or offend one another, is it always resolved all the way to full restoration of fellowship? Or is it minimized, suppressed or ignored? Is it the same standard of restoration for parents as for kids, or does the requirement to restore diminish as seniority and authority increase?
A: (varies)
I get a wide range of answers to this question. My impression is that some families are good about making sure all offenses and hurts are truly resolved. In families where this is true, it seems that the parents take the lead in asking forgiveness and keeping short accounts with one another and with each kid.
In families where things do not get resolved biblically, invariably there is a great deal of suppressed (or not so suppressed) hurt, insecurity, bitterness, anxiety, and tension. Relationships are broken, at least on the inside, and relational standing is based on performance and how well one person pleases another.
The good news is that when families with broken fellowship start down the path of building biblical principles into their communication and relational processes, it is remarkable how quickly restoration can occur, and trust — which may never have truly existed prior to that — starts to get built.
Conclusion
Our kids’ answer to “What happens to your relationship with your parents when you mess up?” should be the same answer as “What happens to our relationship with God when we mess up?” Do we parents understand that God does not get angry with us and condemn us who are in Christ? Do we understand that God’s love and esteem for us do not diminish in the smallest way when we mess up? Do we understand the basis for knowing when we are in fellowship with God, when we are out of it, and how to restore it immediately when we step out? Do we understand the difference between discipline and punishment?
If we understand these things in our hearts, do we clearly communicate them to our kids’s hearts, regarding God and us, when they mess up?
Jeff Gilbert Pretty much all the parents I know want our kids to tell us “stuff” that is going on in their lives: how they’re doing, what they’re struggling with, their hopes and dreams, issues and decisions they’re working through…basically stuff about where their heart is.
In teaching theology to teens each year, I ask them if they tell their parents what is really going on in their hearts. Over half say they don’t, with the affirmative responses going down as the teens get older. Here are the insights the kids give me when I ask them why they don’t really talk with their parents about deeper fears and burdens.
– If my parents knew what I really struggle with, they would be disappointed in me. They would respect me less, maybe even not love me quite as much. They might even pity me. I would lose too much in their eyes.
– My parents would not understand. They would listen for a few minutes, then tell me what is wrong and how to fix it…or at least why it shouldn’t be important.
– My parents won’t be able to help, so why burden them with it? They don’t deal all that well with their own issues, and don’t seek help themselves, so what is the point of my sharing and asking for help?
Are these just our teens’ childish excuses to avoid parental “help” (sometimes referred to as a “lecture”), or are our kids telling us something biblical? Let’s reconsider from a biblical perspective what they are really saying.
– My parents’ love and esteem for me seems to be at least somewhat based on their perception of how good I am, so I have to at least seem to have it mostly together, or I may lose something in their eyes. (By the way, my perception of parental love and esteem for me being somewhat conditional has also affected my perception of God’s love too.) (Rom 5:8; Rom 12:10)
– My parents generally listen to speak and correct, rather than listening to understand first. Even though I am not a little kid anymore, they still believe they understand me without really hearing me. They want to fix my problems to make them go away quickly like when I was a little kid, rather than understanding my struggle and sharing the burden with me. (Prov 18:13; Gal 6:2)
– My parents don’t share their own struggles or make themselves accountable to others, so there must not be real help available from the body of Christ in carrying our burdens and working out our sanctification. The church is a place I have to look put-together, not a place to reveal my brokenness. (Gal 6:2; 1 Cor 2:2-5)
If our kids are not sharing their hearts with us, they have reasons that we need to understand and resolve if we have any hope of them opening up. By “resolve” I don’t mean “rebut.” I mean we need to humble ourselves to get our own communication and relational principles in line with God’s first, so our kids might imitate us as they see us imitate Christ. We can’t make our kids share things with us, but we can at least build a biblical foundation for communication in our relationship with them. This makes it a lot more likely they will share their hearts with us. (1 Cor 11:1; 1 Cor 2:2-5)
– If they feel they have to earn some of our love and esteem for them, or fear they could diminish it, they will probably not share major struggles and failures, because they won’t want to risk losing too much in our eyes.
– If they see us as generally “listening to speak” rather than listening to understand, they probably won’t share their hearts with us. They will tell us what is needed to get the lecture over with as quickly as possible.
– If they see us as unwilling to see our own weaknesses and sinfulness, and reveal our own fears and struggles, they won’t believe it is good to reveal theirs. If they see us as unwilling to share our burdens with others in the body of Christ, they will assume they shouldn’t need to either.
How do we build a biblical foundation for communication in our relationship with our kids?
– A good place to start is usually by asking our kids how they see us in communication and relationships, giving them an invitation to answer honestly and respectfully without fear of reprisal. Hint: This is a bad time to get defensive or try to justify or mitigate their perception of our communication. If we ask for the feedback, we should receive it graciously and seek to understand why they perceive us as they do. Pick another time to address issues with them.
– A good next step is to ask our kids’ forgiveness for specific ways in which we have communicated with them unbiblically and treated them differently than God treats us. Even if their perception of our communication differs from our intent, asking forgiveness for failing to effectively reflect Christ fully and clearly in our communication is still appropriate. Hopefully they will ask ours as well, for their part in any unbiblical communication patterns, but that is not a prerequisite for us asking theirs. We parents should lead in identifying weakness, failure, and sin in ourselves first, and asking forgiveness first, without reference to our kids’s failings or temptings to try to justify or mitigate our own.
– Then give them an open door to respectfully point out anytime they see us returning to unbiblical processes in communicating and relating in the home. Again, even if they do not reciprocate the offer, we can still live and model biblical communication.
Does this sound like an upside-down home, where the kids have too much freedom to speak into our lives rather than just us speaking into theirs while they listen? Please take another look at what the Bible has to say on this matter, especially as our kids get older and have their own walk with God. (Eph 4:15-16; Eph 5:21)
Does any of this larger discussion of biblical communication principles hit “home?” Maybe the Bible has some relational and communication insights we need to review as parents, perhaps even with a little help from other godly believers we can trust with our hearts.
And maybe our teen children aren’t always that much more childish than we are.
Jeff Gilbert (Malachi 4:5-6 (ESV)) [5] ”Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. [6] And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”
In the church, and particularly in the homeschooling community, we make much of guarding our children’s hearts by protecting them from the world from inside the hedge of the home and church. How is that working for us?
In considering this over the past 15 years of working with homeschooling families in the U.S. and around the world, our assessment is that, despite the appearance of conformity, many (most?) of us really don’t have our kids’ hearts.
Kids show us — their parents and the other “parental units” in the church and homeschool community — what we parentals want to see, but in their hearts kids often have a host of unresolved questions, hurts and fears they feel they can’t safely bring out. Too often they keep these inside, or become skilled at showing one face to us and another to their like-minded peers. As church kids become older teens and adults, we see those questions, hurts and fears manifest in sad and inappropriate ways, often leaving parents who “did everything we thought we were supposed to” wondering what happened.
Why don’t we have our kids hearts?
Ideally our kids would pursue transparency and accountability with us, but often they are not inclined to. Why not? Because they often don’t trust us with their deeper hearts.
Trust? Doesn’t that come automatically with parental authority? Biblically speaking, no. (Neither does wisdom come automatically with parental authority, but that is another topic.) It turns out that in all human relationships, trust must be built; it is never commanded or automatic with other people, not even parents and spouses. “Honor” and “respect” are commanded. “Love” and “esteem” are commanded. “Trust” for another person — required for intimacy with that person — is built as a biblical relational process.
Sometimes we try to shortcut the requirement to build trust with our kids by using our authority to demand it. Those of us who have played the authority card with our older teens to “make them open up” can attest to the futility of that approach. Nor does the Bible give us any reason to think it should work. We just think it should because we got away with it when our kids were younger.
How do we build trust? At the risk of dropping yet another list on the church, here are some biblical principles to consider as a prerequisite for trust.
– We won’t trust someone with our heart’s deeper questions, hurts and fears who we are not sure loves us unconditionally. We have to be secure knowing we can’t diminish love by our struggles and failures — or enhance love by our facades and successes. (1 Jn 4:18-19)
– We won’t really trust someone who we are not sure esteems us as inherently precious without us having to earn that worth. (Rom 5:8-9)
– We won’t trust someone with whom we have broken or damaged fellowship, or where the fellowship is an expectations-based facade. We have to know we can fully resolve offenses, hurts, and even uncertainties, or we will not share our deeper selves. (1 Jn 1:5-10)
– We won’t trust someone we do not see as transparent and accountable to others whom we also consider to be trustworthy. (2 Cor 5:11)
– We won’t share the heavier burdens of our questions, hurts, and fears with someone we don’t think will understand them and be able to help us carry them. (Heb 4:15)
As parents, we usually assume our kids believe we love and value them unconditionally…and we are often wrong in this. We often mistake the absence of open strife in our relationship for true fellowship with our kids. We tend to expect our kids to trust us just because we’re parents, yet we have no biblical basis for this expectation.
We tend to assume that because they’re our kids and we have known them from the beginning, that we will automatically keep knowing them as they get older. We confuse our proximity and parental authority with true understanding and wisdom, and push on them our quick fixes for their questions, hurts and fears. We suppress the nagging realization that our kids’ questions, hurts and fears are often the ones we have been avoiding in ourselves without openly working through them. Then we wonder later how our kids changed so fast from where we “knew” they were, and why they didn’t come to us for help.
If we want to know our kids’ hearts, where do we start?
For a start, we parents can lead the way by getting our own questions, hurts, and fears into the light of intimacy and accountability with other believers whom we can trust with our hearts. Honestly consider:
– To what extent do I really share about myself with other close believers the things I want (expect?) my kids to be sharing with me about themselves?
– Who knows my deeper questions, hurts and fears — the honest specific ones, not just the generic ones I offer up to keep from having to share the real stuff? Who is carrying my burdens with me?
– Who would my kids say I am openly accountable to — another wise trustworthy believer who can stop me short and speak truth into the lies of my life?
Do our kids see biblical intimacy and accountability as foundational processes in our lives? If not, then why would we expect them to pursue intimacy and accountability with us? Why would we expect them to trust us with their hearts? It is not automatic, nor even biblically commanded of them.
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