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by Jason DeZurik

“In fact, this is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world.” - 1 John 5:3-4

When my wife and I began raising the children that God had given to us, we knew we wanted to at least strive to raise them up not only in Godly ways but for them to learn how to discern the Word of God to make good and right choices on their own. We came up with only 2 rules to follow in our home. Those rules were as follows:

1) Honor and obey God and your father and mother

2) Do not lie.

We taught first-time obedience to all of our children from a very young age.

By only having these two rules to follow, our home became a very permission giving household. Our children learned the importance of liberty versus fear, shame, and control. This also freed up my wife and me to be able to give our children grace when they might do something unwise or sinful, and we would allow God’s “special revelation” (natural law) to teach them the importance of benefits and consequences in decisions they would make.

We did our best to try and follow God’s example in the Garden of Eden. God only gave Adam and Eve one simple rule to follow: do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the middle of the garden. If they did eat from it, they would eventually receive a consequence and they would surely die (Genesis 2:15-17). Everything else was fair game! Think about that for a moment. Nothing else was sinful. As it states in 1 John above, God’s commands are not burdensome. He desires for us to live without fear, shame, and control. God’s Word is very clear not to worry or to be anxious about anything (Philippians 4:6). God’s Word also tell fathers to not exasperate their children and to bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4).

Another thing my wife and I decided to implement in our household was the importance of first-time obedience and to administer discipline right away. Even if I would be relaxing in my easy chair after a hard day of work, it was my responsibility to get out of that easy chair and administer discipline, right away, if one of our children chose to disobey me or their mother. I could not be lazy, whine, or make up an excuse that I was too tired from a hard day to show our children love in this way. If we would let them get away with sinning now, how much more would that take place later in life? Our children learned that talking back to their mother or father was not honoring them and that this was not obeying us the first time we told them to do something, which was disobedience. This was a breaking of our first rule.

Discipline needed to be administered swiftly but lovingly. One way we chose not to exasperate our children was to make certain they knew why they were going to be disciplined for their action. This could literally take 30-60 minutes of our time to have a conversation with our child and talk out what had just taken place, allowing our child to understand that what they did was breaking not just our house rules but breaking God’s law as well. It was very important to us to instill this into our children to help them understand that as their parents we weren’t just making up rules willy-nilly but trying to honor and obey God ourselves. We would do this behind a closed door with just the one child who committed the offense, usually with just one parent. This helped our children to learn that they could trust us and that we were not going to embarrass them in front of others.

This also gave us the opportunity to allow our children to learn about the wonderful gift of grace. You see, my wife and I learned very early on that we couldn’t share with our children every single bad thing that might happen to them by making sinful or bad decisions. But, it gave us freedom to discuss things with them later and give them some grace after talking to one another so they could then have the liberty to make their own choice later on. So, sometimes we wouldn’t administer any discipline because they might have already learned the lesson needed to make a good and right choice on their own. After all, it really is about a heart issue, isn’t it?

Jason and his wife Jaya have been married since 1997 and have been blessed with 6 children, 2 boys and 4 girls. If the topic in this post interests you, check out Jason’s book on leaving a life of security for a life of liberty in “How Being Consistent Changed Everything.” You can get your own copy here.

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