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?