“Remember that God gave Adam and Eve a perfect garden: there was a world full of yes, and there was only one no. Minimize the number of no’s in your home. This is another way of saying that you should pick your battles carefully as parents. Suppose that over the space of a month, you have issued a hundred commands, and the kids have been constantly disobeying them. It would be far better for you to reduce those hundred commands to ten commands, and enforce every one of those ten, than to keep it at a hundred and enforce a fifth of the time”
Covering the Waterfront
“I remember when I was a child, my father delivered three rules to me. Not only that, I remember where I was standing in the front yard when he delivered them to me, and I remember the fond and affectionate demeanor with which he delivered it (he had his fist in front of my face). His three principles were 1) no disobedience, 2) no lying, and 3) no disrespecting your mother. Now, what is not covered by that?”
Different Exercises Entirely
“Spanking and disciplining your children and correcting attitudes is disciplinary, not punitive, and the whole point of it is so that you can get to a certain place.”
Status and Direction
“Justification establishes the fact of this relationship, while sanctification determines the direction of the relationship.”
Defeated at Their Own Game
“The righteousness of liberty outdoes the legalist, and the joy of liberty outdoes the libertine.”
Both Strict and Free
“Liberty is not a middle position between legalism and license; it is another thing entirely. We have a hard time with this. Liberty is not moderate legalism or moderated license. Liberty is stricter than legalism, and liberty is freer than license.”
Hard Grace, But Grace Still
“Hardship in a story is grace; hardship without a story is just pain.”
The Way It Is
“A garden of grace can contain a tree of law. A garden of law cannot contain a tree of grace”
Poor Pairing
“It is the easiest thing in the world to find a moral standard in the Bible and then to be selfish with it”
Rigorous Grace
“The environment of your home should be full of grace. When you have a home filled with grace, it is not without standards. You are not introducing moral anarchy. Grace is not an amorphous, gelatinous mass. Grace has a backbone. However, when the standards are broken, the heaviest sacrifices in the work of restoration are made by the guardians of grace, not by enforcers of the law, finger-pointers, parental accusers, or people who correct in a nasal tone of self-pity”