Receiving Grace from God
Living life in the grace of God.
Hands
When we have been able to help our kids to understand God’s grace, encouraging our children be take up a posture ready to receive God’s grace is vitally important and a key part of their maturation in the faith. In order to develop the hands-on skill side of this equation, our approach in discipline needs to key in on opening the door to allow for God’s grace to have a regular place in the process. Balancing God’s Law and Gospel is critical as we move from a heart humble before God and a head filled with the knowledge of God’s grace to hands ready to receive. In order to be prepared to receive God’s grace, children do need to understand what it means for them personally to actually engage in the reception of God’s grace in their lives. This avoids the cheap grace that Bonhoeffer warned about in his work The Cost of Discipleship.
When we catch our children in the midst of disobedient behavior, we need to have our own wits about us, which in and of itself can be a challenge. If you need to pause before talking through things with your child, take that opportunity. We can say a lot of things in the heat of the moment that might not achieve our long-term purpose of raising mature, faithful adult believers.
Articulating to your children specifically what has led to their need to be disciplined helps to focus the conversation and make their need for both the discipline you will provide and the grace of God that you as a parent are privileged to share all the more concrete and comprehensible. As parents, we tend to be able to understand why we need to provide punishment to our children, but we need to be able to articulate to them in a manner that they can understand the connection between their actions and the consequences.
With this understanding, both we as parents and our children are ready to explore our need to encounter and receive God’s grace. We embody the giving of that grace as we ourselves offer concrete evidence of God’s grace through our actions. Verbally offering forgiveness to our children, even when they are still struggling to articulate their own regret and sorrow for their actions, begins to move the conversation toward a move of the Holy Spirit to introduce grace.
Exodus 34:6 helps to provide the right mindset for our conversation with our children. “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” In the context of this verse, we recall that this statement follows the presentation of the second set of stone tablets containing the 10 Commandments. Can you comprehend the grace God is showing to His people at that moment? Moses has no more than returned from the presence of God with the original tablets when he witnesses the people in open rebellion, worshipping the gods of Egypt that they just left behind.
God is in the process of forming a nation out of this very large extended family. In the process, much learning remained. Giving Moses the 10 Commandments to present and teach to the people was an early step in that process and it did not go well. God’s Law was intended to help establish the unique relationship God was to have with His chosen people and that they would have among themselves. The creator of the universe was taking the time to help layout how life is best lived in community with Him and with one another.
When we sit without our own children and pass along God’s law as well as our own lifetime of wisdom, we enter into the formation of our family as a part of the family of God. It is at this point that we move from understanding to action. It is one thing to talk about God’s grace, it is altogether different to experience and share that grace with one another. In our ongoing ministry disciplining as well as discipling our children, our conversations need to fully explore the realities of our sin, our need for a Savior, along with the grace of God given freely to us. In this way, our children learn what it means to receive grace from God and by receiving God’s grace live free from sin as redeemed children of God, able to put the guilt of sin behind them and move forward in life forgiven and ready to love and forgive others.
