“You are to bring your children up to take their position among their people, and this means success is found in them going away”
Well. There’s an Interesting Perspective . . .
“It is quite possible—certain, in fact—that some parents sitting across the aisle might know more about what’s going on with you and your kid than you do. You might not know that your kid is a pill, and the person sitting across from you at church might not know your kid’s middle name—but he can still see that the kid is a pill. We need people looking at the back of our head”
Sounds Like Fun
“The goal is to have civilization and the kingdom of God become more and more synonymous and harder and harder to tell apart.”
The Foundation of Christian Civilization
‘Paideia was one of those huge words in the ancient world, and it referred to the enculturation of a child so that he could take his place as a citizen in the polis. In other words, paideia referred to an all-encompassing, civilization-making reality. Paul is using the word to refer to something very similar [in Eph. 6:4]”
An Exercise in Missing the Point
“Imagine a four-lane highway, with two lanes going opposite ways, two to Heaven, two to Hell. A Ford and a Chevy are on the two lanes going to Heaven, and on the two lanes going to Hell are a Ford and a Chevy. We live in perverse time, such that when the Fords pass, the drivers beep and wave at each other. Same thing with the Chevys. The cars going in different directions might feel a real sense of solidarity, since they have the same kind of vehicle, but they are going in completely different directions”
The Two Sides of Discipline
“Once we have accepted the duty of administering parental discipline, we discover that discipline itself falls into two categories: corrective and formative. Corrective discipline is correction of manifested sins in the past, as well as correction with regard to the future. Formative discipline anticipates temptations that are common to man and seeks to instill certain character traits beforehand”
Imitation Where It Counts
“Ineffective discipline is a way of disowning, rejecting, or hating your children. God does not do that with us, and we must not do that with our children”
And Do You Really Want To?
“If someone loses his temper, and you clean up after him, regardless of whether he is a two-year-old, a thirty-year-old, or a sixty-year-old, you are going to have to do it again . . . You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you penalize.”
Rasputin in Jammies
“Many time, parents are reluctant to discipline when it is needed, because they think their child is feeble-minded when it comes to godly cause and effect. A mom says, ‘I don’t think my little baa-lamb’—known to outsiders as the wailing tornado, and to his siblings as Rasputin in footie jammies—“understands the connection between the whining and the spanking. He looks so sad and bewildered.’ Doesn’t understand disciplinary cause and effect, you say? But how can this be, when he is a veritable genius when it comes to ungodly cause and effect? Tell me, does he understand the connection between whining and getting whatever it is he wants”.
God’s Word Done God’s Way . . .
“We live in a time when a number of very foolish Christian parents have attempted to discipline foolishly, found out that that does not work, and concluded that the problem must be with God’s Word, and not with their own inept applications of it”