Learning to Imitate and Relate (Pt 2)

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So now we’re learning moving on to learning to imitate and relate part two, okay And this is topic we’re going to be talking more about family inter relations Ineffective and or sinful communication habits are a major factor In creating homes that are full of tension and strife rather than homes that are filled with peace and harmony where Christ is honored difficulty in communicating is one of the most often stated complaints in marriage counseling sessions. Parents are often frustrated that their children don’t listen to them and children complain that their parents don’t understand them. Too often conversations within the family even those who whose members claim to be Christian turn into yelling matches or bouts of sullen silence they can last for days. And I promise I haven’t set up a webcam I’m not spying on your home you know this could have on any given day this could have been the Martin home as well. Why is this? What are the communication skills that will build each other up rather than tear down? How can we keep

conflict from escalating to the point of damaging our relationships? What steps can be taken to repair relationships that are already strained? Those are just some of the questions we want to dive into now. So let’s pick on husbands and wives first. The husband-wife relationship is the primary relationship within the family. It is paramount that parents make time to strengthen their own relationship. It is common, especially among new parents, to let the children’s needs or wishes take priority to the detriment of the husband-wife relationship. Many parents report that months, if not years, pass without and taking even a night out alone.

This is not healthy for the relationship, and it’s not healthy for the family’s sake. One of the simplest and best things you can do for your kids is you guys go out on a date and let them see you enjoy yourselves. Children need to see their parents in a stable, loving, Christ-honoring relationship. It is not enough that there is an absence of conflict. The children must be able to see their relationship in action. If children do not see evidence of their parents’ love for each other, they will tend to breed insecurity in the child. Disobedience, agitation, hyperactivity, and being cleanie are some of the potential symptoms of a child who is insecure about her parents’ relationship.

There is no parenting process that can overcome the effects of a marriage poorly modeled. So let’s talk a little bit about modeling a good relationship. What it looks like, I’m going to give you a couple of do’s and don’ts in your marital relationship that will help your parenting do, show affection for one another in the presence of the children. Gail and I are affectionate. We have PDAs, appropriate PDAs, in the kitchen, in the presence of the children. And the typical response was, ooh, yuck, cooties. But behind all those comments was, all is well with mom and dad. Security, comfort, pleasure. You could just hear it in their hearts even while they were poking at us and making fun about the cooties.

Take I call it couch time. Take time daily if possible to just catch up and visit on the day. Again, it communicates to the kids. It lets them visually see mom and dad together. and dad have a relationship that is outside of ours and they begin to again breed comfort and confidence in their hearts that mom and dad are okay. And then lastly take frequent dates without the children. Now guys how hard is that? Kiss your wife so your kids can see it, talk to your talk to each other so the kids can see it, go out and take dates okay. But just that alone just those Those three dudes will breed tremendous security in the kids.

Now you can undermine it if the rest of the time you’re fighting like cats and dogs, but assuming all the other principles are applying, it’s not that hard to really help your kids be well adjusted. There’s a couple of don’ts I want to throw at you also here. Don’t carry on conflict in the presence of the children. Excuse yourself to a private place. That is a huge mistake parents make. get into the heat of the moment, the battle’s on. Both of you, your thinking goes out the window, and you’re just pretty soon you’re at each other’s throats saying hurtful words, and the kids are sitting, they’re observing it. There’s no better way to rattle a child’s life and to breed insecurity and eventually resentment.

Most kids that pack the bags, you know, and say, run away from home, are gonna sight. I got sick and tired of watching mom and dad fight. It just got to me, and so they decide running away is a better solution. So don’t carry on conflict. People say, well, how are they ever going to learn how to resolve conflict? If they don’t see us have conflict, trust me, there’ll be plenty of opportunities to teach them how to resolve conflict. They don’t have to watch you guys have a marital fight to learn it. So take that to another person. One of you would be smart enough to say, OK, time out. We’ve got to table this for now, or we’ve got to go to another spot away from the kids.

Don’t speak in ways to each other. you went to allow your children to mean excessive teasing, shouting, name calling, et cetera. Again, I’m appalled at how many homes where it’s normal when people get mad throwing out, you’re stupid, you’re ugly, you name it, whatever, worse words, and carry it on in the presence of the children. But if it’s unacceptable for the children, if you would wash out the children’s mouth with soap for saying it, you can’t say it either.

real simple test. Don’t let your children interrupt your spousal time unless it’s an emergency. And again I’d make the point with the kids in the somewhat humorous way they’d come in try to interrupt us we’re having a conversation I say wait a minute time out. Is there a purple gorilla trying to light your hair on fire? No. Okay well this can wait. Okay mom and our talking we’ll get back to you in a minute and I just you know you just wait there okay and we would teach them that it’s not allowed just to go ahead and interrupt us, but we would make sure, don’t let the children just keep interrupting you whenever they feel like it, and then don’t let your children divide and conquer you, present a united front. Our kids are not stupid, they know well if mom said no, dad might say yes, and so one of the first questions I always had to ask them, we would both ask them, is when they would come say can I, we’d say did you speak to your father already, did you speak to your mother, well yeah,

What did they say? They said, no. Why are you asking me? And so you watch out for that trap because that creates a lot of conflict. One of the privileges about marriage that we don’t often think about is the fact that it is the one unique relationship that God’s created in all of human relationships where we have a chance to portray the relationship of Christ and the church. And I was going to read Ephesians 5 for you, but I’m going to skip that for the sake of time. Refer you back to Ephesians 5 is where that principle comes out of. But that passage gives us the benchmark by which a husband and wife can measure the quality of their love for each other.

Wife is called to be subject to her husband as the church is subject to Christ. So there’s the measuring stick. Wives, does your approach to your husband, does your submission to your husband look like as the church is subject to Christ. And then husbands, of course, does your love look like the love of Christ as Christ loves the church. That is the standard that we are to measure our marital love by.

So living according to biblical headship and submission is critical to a husband-wife relationship, bringing maximum glory to God and joy to each other in the marriage. That truth has been so seriously misunderstood and not lived out in the result is that we see homes that are just fragmented again where maybe at best they sort of coexist but it’s not what it could be in the eyes of God. Modeling biblical headship and submission becomes even more important when children are present. Most of what your children will learn about relating as husband and wife, they will learn from you. That includes your weaknesses. And so let me just give you a short list of some things to think about as you talk about what it means to be living together as husband and wife. And And the first principle there is that, I don’t know if you ever thought about this, but first and foremost, you are brothers and sisters in Christ.

Your marriage ends when death do you part. You’re no longer husband and wife, but you are, if you’re Christians, you are brother and sister now, and you will be brother and sister for all of eternity. And just that one thought ought to be really change your attitude as you look at the other person. That’s not just my spouse, but that’s my sister. my brother and the responsibility that comes with that. Now it might seem confusing at first to have Paul telling believers to be subject to one another and then a few verses later instructs women to be subject to their own husbands. If you look at that passage, that whole passage starts with be subject to one another and then it goes on later to tell wives be subject to your husbands. But the confusion can be cleared up by noting that the qualifier on Paul’s instruction to submit to one another.

It says to be subject to one another in the fear of Christ, to be subject to one another into fear of Christ means to live a life of obedience to all that God has commanded of us. In other words, I am being subject to others when I am in subjection to God. This mutual subjection in the fear of Christ will prevent husbands and wives from abusing their God-given roles in the marriage. When I approach Gail as my wife, I don’t have carte blanche because I’m the man to just tell her what I wanted to do. I am must be in subjection to the Word of God. My authority does not extend anywhere beyond what the authority, the word of God gives me, which is to love her and die for her as Christ gave his life for the church.

That’s, that’s where my authority begins and ends. And yet when husbands march in there and say, Hey, I’m the boss. I’m the dude. Did you hear the preacher wives be subject to your husbands? That wasn’t a blank check, man. We need to also understand that, uh, in the husband wife relationship, that we are equal, but not the same. Again, there’s much confusion in our, our culture today. Our culture tends to be biased towards what we call egalitarianism today, that men and women are interchangeable. We see that going on. The feminist movement started this drive some decades ago, and it’s continuing on today to where the idea that men and women are just interchangeable parts.

The only thing different is your plumbing. But other than that, let’s put the women in the fighter jets and let the men wear the aprons. But biblically, there are very clearly defined roles. I don’t have time in this course to go through all of that. But when we begin to fall into the mistake of not recognizing this principle that we’re equal but not the same, we have different roles, it’s a formula for problems within the marriage and in the home, and that confusion is going to show up in the lives of the kids. Again, for sake of time, I’m not going to go into all my notes on that point. But people try to argue it from the side of, well, look, there’s women that can do this, and men that can do that, and who said?

And it’s a foolish argument to say, well, can a woman fly a fighter jet? Can a man bake chocolate chip cookies? Yes, they can do that. They’ve already shown they can do that. Question is, is that what is best? Is that what God has ordained? Is that how a marriage should function? Is that what’s in the best interest of raising the children? And if you start to look at it from that angle, you begin to question if this egalitarian approach we’ve taken to men and women is helping or hurting our culture, our society, and our homes. Okay, let’s see. Let’s go on now and talk about parent-child relationships. First principle we want to cover on there is that parents are not to exasperate their children.

The principle comes right out of there out of Colossians 3, verse 21, fathers do not Exasperate your children that they may not lose heart and a parallel passage. Of course Ephesians 6 for word says and fathers do not provoke your children to anger but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord a tremendous charge and a command for us their Father specifically charged to bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord Occasionally your child may display an angry or soul in response to you. This could be a case of rebellion or it could be It could be that the parent has done something to provoke the child, the child, or has provoked the child to anger.

And so we’re going to be discussing dealing with rebellion later. But for right now, I want to just kind of cover quickly some common ways that as parents we can provoke our children to anger where we’re in sin and we need to fix it. One is responding with anger and intimidation. All of us have been there. A child does something that really irritates us and we snap at them and we give them an angry word or we intimidate them with our voice. That’s wrong, it’s sinful, and again, it can exasperate them, especially if there’s something going on that we need to know about and we’re not willing to take the time to find out what’s going on.

But watch out for that, because that will really provoke hard heart in your child.

Excessive rough play, dads, we’re typically guilty of this one, we start playing with them and it’s all fun and games for a while and then somebody gets hurt, mom maybe has given us a few warnings and we just keep doing it then the child’s crying and then we feel embarrassed or irritated and we say oh don’t be a baby and again which embarrasses the child especially if it’s a young son and you’re you’re saying don’t be a cry baby you know be tough but where it was our foolishness and how we were playing and not being wise excessive and mean-spirited teasing again saying things while trying to be humorous but at the child’s expense maybe you’re embarrassing them in a public setting, you’re trying to say something again to be funny, but the child is the object of your humor. One example that comes to mind is, I don’t think they have them anymore, but back when I was a young man, I forget the name of that, it must have been Standard Oil, but it was one of the oil companies and they had a sticker and it was STP with

the letters and the sticker, big red sticker, and everybody was putting them on their binders everywhere. And this one kid would wear the stickers on everything, and the young man’s His name was Paul and the father thought he was being funny one day and he says, what’s STP stand for? Stupid Paul? Well, those words stick and it really had a lasting effect. That was just one of many examples that caused that young man to grow up with a lot of insecurities that carried him on into his adult life. We have to be really, really careful with our words that we don’t make our family members pay the price because, again, we think we’re being funny or sometimes trying to be cutting in our words, having realistic expectations considering the age of the child.

When you’re asking them to do something, uh, if you’ve asked your child to go in and clean up the bedroom and they’re three years old, don’t expect it to be, you know, Mary Poppins quality. Uh, be happy if the pillow made it to the right end of the bed, you know, be happy if some of the toys made it into a box, you know, you may have to sit down and show them what it means. And every subsequent time you can continue to further their instruction and their training, sit down and say, hey, that was, you did a great job on this box. Now, this time, let’s get the blocks in this box. And over time, you build up your skill level.

But just consider the age of the child and make sure your demands are not beyond. If you’re not sure, ask other parents. And also, you know, one of the resources is the book that Gail authored some years ago.

It’s a great, if you guys love lists and things such as what can I expect three-year-old to do. That’s a great resource. It’ll give you some ideas of different skill levels that you might expect at different age levels for your kids, but many parents make the mistake of not having realistic expectations and then get upset with the child. And then being don’t… another way to extracurate the child is by being unclear or inconsistent in our instructions. And one little technique that we used in our home that worked wonderfully was we called it the right response. Here’s the typical scenario in a home. Mom’s busy, she’s trying to get the laundry done before it’s time to do dinner and she’s running through the living room and the kids watching TV, favorite shows on, and she says, Johnny I want you to go feed the dog. And she scoots right on through the room, she doesn’t wait for a response, she didn’t hear a response, she just uttered the command and goes on. Comes back 20 minutes later, you know, the spaghetti is starting to boil over in the pot and

She’s figuring out the dog hasn’t been fed yet. And then she’s upset at the kid because the kid disobeyed her. And the kids sit there saying, I didn’t hear you. Well, now you’re in a no win situation. Did they hear you or did they not hear you? By using this thing called the right response, you eliminate all that confusion. When you give your child an instruction, expect an answer back such as yes, mom, yes, dad. It’s as simple as that. Johnny, feed the dog. Yes, mom. And then you know the communication has occurred. there’s no question of what’s gone on. There’s no later on when they don’t do it. You say, didn’t you hear me?

And then they might say, I forgot, when they have a different problem. But at least they can’t say, I did not hear you. So one little simple trick that’ll eliminate a lot of your conflict, expect a right response, enter the right tone. I was noticing even when Esther was still home, but she was already out of college. So she’s a young woman out of college, but under my roof still. And one day I called up to stare something to her and here comes her voice, yes dad. Maybe she’d been trained from a child to have that right response and so it was automatic for her. So here’s a 23 year old woman saying yes dad. And you know it was music to your ears but just it shows how that gets ingrained in your thinking.

So one little trick there to really help you. Even the best of parents from time to time can lose control of their emotions and respond wrongly to the child. It’s our part of our fallen nature. We will all do it. If you haven’t already blown in front of your kids, you will at some point lose your cool. It’s paramount that when we do respond sinfully to our children, that we acknowledge our sinful response to God and ask our child to forgive us. That can be pretty humbling sitting down with a four-year-old and saying, would you please forgive daddy? I was totally wrong to get mad and say those things or yell at you.

We need to do it. When parents live honestly before their children and admit them when they are wrong, it will actually help draw the parent child closer together. Guess what? You not admitting that you blew it does not keep the kid from knowing that you blew it. They’re already well aware that you blew it. Their only question in their mind is are you going to admit that you blew it. So if you admit you blew it, then you erase the possibility of them calling you a hypocrite someday because they’ll be able to say, oh, that dad was at least honest to admit it when he was wrong. Children do not have all the rights their parents do.

This does not, however, give the parents the right to treat their children with harshness. All of the reciprocal commands found in the Bible, love one another, be kind to one another, serve one another, pray for one another, those all apply to all members of the family. So let’s talk about children now, children’s responsibility back to the parents. The principle here is found in Ephesians 6, 2 through 3, which just simply says children honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with a promise, that it may be well with you and that you may live long on the earth. Children are commanded to honor their parents.

It’s not an option. It is not contingent on the parent being worthy of that honor. Unlike the command to obey, which lasts until the child leaves home, the command to honor a parent never expires. The command to honor parents means the child must always show respect even when they disagree with their parents and they should never speak evil of their parents to others. So be careful. Do not let your children express themselves to you with angry or disrespectful words or attitudes. Yelling, pouting, angry tears, eye rolling are all examples of sinful ways children sometimes respond to their parents.

We’ve heard parents who, one family was in a situation where it actually required some professional counseling. They were in front of the counselor. It was a secular counselor. That counselor was telling the child, be honest with your parents. It was basically encouraging the child to yell and scream at their parents and to cuss out their parents. And that was somehow therapeutic. No, that was called sin. And it was wrong. The child must still show honor for the parent, even when they’re frustrated, when they’re irritated, when the parents been wrong, they must still be trained. So do not let your children vent themselves and think that’s somehow good. They must use the proper tone. If they are overcome with emotion, which that can happen, at the moment give them some time to get a hold of themselves before continuing the discussion. One of my children, their nature was to be more volatile and so if they were upset, you know, they were just hard, it was like vibrating, they were so just ready to

pop and we say okay time out you go to your room cool your jets when you’re ready to talk come back down and we’ll talk and that’s what they needed if I had pressed and forced them to talk it probably would have ended up with they would have send or I would have send you know it would have gotten heated but recognizing that they needed a timeout was helpful if they continue to respond in a non-honoring way after you’ve trained them as to what is proper then you’re gonna have to deal with it as an issue of rebellion which we’ll get to in our last session. And then talking about sibling to sibling. Few things can grieve a parent more than when their children are in constant conflict with each other. Psalm 133.1, behold how good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity and conversely how heartbreaking it is when they don’t. Respect and kindness are two specific areas to cultivate in your children. And so I’m going to give you just a couple short list again of some things that we did we required in our home to help

develop respect and kindness for each other. We made it absolutely non negotiable, big sin, big offense using harsh or critical words. I hate you, you’re stupid, you’re ugly, all those terms are off-limits. There was never any reason, any excuse to allow that. It didn’t matter what the other person did.

And so avoiding harsh and critical words unacceptable in the home Including in activities were appropriate there were times when of course the littlest one the family whoever would be the youngest at the moment Would be the the third wheel and they can’t keep up and the other ones want to run off and play it But there were times who would make them purposely say you better figure out an activity right now that you can include them in Because they’re your family there your sibling now there were times We would let the older ones also run off and do whatever older ones could do that the little one couldn’t keep up But there were times we said you got to be mindful and considerate show respect for your younger sibling Go if they can’t climb the big tree then you go find something else They can climb with you and we would just expect them to be thoughtful that way Seeking permission to use other people’s belongings just again common courtesy things just not going in and grabbing stuff But being thoughtful and asking permission

Sharing positions were appropriate. I gave that example earlier. If my one child is willing to share it with a friend, quote, unquote, friend, they better be willing to share it with a sibling if it’s appropriate. I’m not saying that the two-year-old, you know, have the expensive breakable thing, you know, that the older sibling owns, but use wisdom. But if it’s reasonable, they should be willing to share. Okay. Learning to rejoice at the siblings good fortune rather than being jealous. If something good happens to the one, and it didn’t happen to them, don’t be pouty. Don’t be jealous. Don’t complain. Be glad. Be happy for the sibling who had the good thing.

And then being thankful. Show an appreciation when their sibling does something kind of. And don’t be indifferent. Don’t just shrug your shoulders and walk away. But be genuinely appreciative when your sibling does something for you. And then developing kindness in your kids.

Speaking words of encouragement rather than criticism. Again, these are skills they need to learn. You may have to stop them after you listen to an interchange. It’s like, what could you have said that would have been kinder? What could you have said that would have been encouraging? And if they can’t think of something, then you’ll have to give them sentences to use. But you have them practice it and learn how to do it. Just don’t let them go away with the being either rude or inconsiderate. Make them stop and think about what they’re doing. The practice of praying for one another. As you’re doing your little family devotions, you can have them specifically pray for one another in whatever is going on just to develop that habit.

Occasionally encouraging them, teaching them to do one of the other siblings chores. Again, just an act of kindness. Exchanging thoughtful gifts. You give the kid a dollar and say, go buy something for Johnny’s birthday and they go to the store and they just throw a dollar at the person they see. I don’t care. Here’s something. No. You think about it. You consider your sibling. What’s your sibling like? What’s their interest? You be thoughtful as you go out and you shop for a gift.

Occasionally playing the other person’s favorite game. Our kids, with all of them together, it was not uncommon that one of them wanted to play game A and somebody wanted to play game B and someone wanted to play game C, and they’d start to squabble. And we would teach them, hey, there’s times when it’s appropriate for you to defer and say, you know what, you choose the game. We’ll play the game you want to play today. Again, just an act of kindness, not always about me first and doing what I want to do. And then again, just we called it practicing random acts of kindness. We would look for watch and if they were doing things that were a random act of kindness, we would make sure we really praise that to the hilt and rewarded it because we wanted them just to be thinking about what can I do to show kindness around the home.

So you talk about the concept and then you just say, you might even set up for a while a reward system. You can’t use that forever because you don’t want their motivation to always be reward. But initially while you’re trying to keep teaching the concept of random acts of kindness, you might say, you know what, mom and dad are going to be watching for these random acts of kindness. And if we see what we like, maybe there’ll be a treat or whatever. But getting them thinking this way is what we want them to do. And then extending the relationships outwards the family, we go into the church, we have relations with the church to consider. The first concept there is we want them to understand that as a church, we are a family of families.

It’d be pointless in the scripture to refer to us as brothers and sisters unless God intended for us to have the notion that we are family. We explain to our family very carefully that we are, yes, we’re the Martins, we’re the nuclear family called the Martins, but the Martins are a part of a bigger family called our local church. And there becomes responsibility And I say, and guess what? There may be times that we make a sacrifice as a family for the greater good of the bigger family. And there’s times that the bigger family may make a sacrifice for the good of our family. But we are a family of families. And we instilled that concept in their minds that church wasn’t just this external foreign thing that we’ve got to do because mom and dad said we got to go to church.

to church, but they got that mindset that, wow, this is just kind of like lots more aunts and uncles and grandmas and grandpas and family to be a part of. Now it’s important that obviously this be a true of you, that you have that mindset first before you try to instill it in your kids. I’ve actually literally seen parents who come and in a previous church, parents who would come and literally drop their kids off for Sunday school and then go spend the next hour you know in a coffee shop or something having a Starbucks and reading the Sunday paper yeah what are they what are they communicating to the kid that oh if we’re little we have to waste a Sunday morning in church but then when we’re bigger we can go to Starbucks and have a coffee total hypocrisy and it was escaping their awareness that they were actually doing that to their kids lost my connection here again see if it comes back up there we go and then And then lastly, we got the witness to the community.

Did I get it? Okay. And just a couple of thoughts there, things that we did. We wanted our kids to understand again that not only in the church, it’s a family of families, but you also live in a neighborhood, you live in a city, you live in a country. With that comes our responsibilities, also obligations. And so we would just teach them some basic things. One is that we would require them to use proper courtesy when greeting others.

would practice with them when they were a little pretending like she would pretend we’d have played telephones and she’d call them or they’d call her and they’d have to carry on a conversation and how do you greet and how do you speak. They would practice shaking hands, how do you shake hands, a good firm handshake, not a limp fish thing. The pleases and the thank yous, hello Mrs. Blackmore, all of those things and those were all role played with the little ones ahead of time, even if we’re gonna go to somebody’s house who would anticipate it, okay, we’re gonna be going knocking on their door and you’re gonna knock on the door and they’re gonna greet the door and they’re gonna say, oh, hi, Susie, what are you gonna say? Oh, I’m gonna say hi, this is Blackmore, and so you would prepare them ahead of time so they would understand what to do. Again, considering how their actions affect those people around them, so being noisy, our neighborhood, when we moved into it, it was already transitioning into an

Older population of people people would raise their kids. They were all starting to start their retirement years They I’m sure they all thought when they saw us moving. Sorry on family there goes the neighborhood and so we would explain to our kids that not all older people enjoy lots of screaming and noise making and so within reason we would say you know think about the noise you’re making and Should you be considerate for other people? We come home. Maybe late one night and as we’re coming into the neighborhood I see all the bedroom lights are off people are going to bed and I’d say okay kids I notice that all the lights are off in our neighbors houses. That means they’re probably sleeping What do you think we could do that would really show them honor as we get into our house?

And they think we can be really quiet when we go into the house. I said that’s a great idea Why don’t we do that? It’s all practice if we can be as quiet as a mouse Now obviously I’m we’re doing this with our three or four or five year olds But beginning to get them thinking about what I do matters and impacts other people’s lives and just training them to be considerate Along with that showing respect for your neighbor’s property you kick the ball over the fence You just don’t hop the fence like it’s your property and go get the ball you go around you ring the front doorbell You say hi, you know, Mrs. Blackmore. I kicked the ball over the fence Can I you know go through the breeze away and get the ball and you show respect for the property?

You just don’t go running across it to cut the corner because it’s the shortest path to your door But you you recognize now that’s not our property at somebody else’s You offer to help the needy neighbors with chores Again that was I keep you said referring to mrs. Blackmore. That’s not a fictitious person. That’s our next-door neighbor She recently went into retirement home, but she spent many years pretty much just shut in in her home. She needed help and so I and the kids were over there often doing things for her, just little chores and helping her and she expressed her appreciation many times about how she would have been in an old folks home a lot sooner had we not shown her that kindness.

But teaching the kids again, open your eyes and recognize that there are people around us that have needs that we can step in and help with. Just having your children that help keep your own property clean so that isn’t an eyesore. again, part of the community. Does the rest of the community want to look at our sloppy yard or do they want to see a neat yard? So when they’re out doing chores, it’s not just a chore, but it’s an opportunity to make a statement to our community that we care about our neighbors and we want our property to look nice so that our neighbors can appreciate it as well. This is sort of also related back to building family identity, but we were all one day, it was, you know, fix the yard up, get the house a bath day, and we’re all working.

And one of Jeremy’s friends came over And said, hey, want to go play? And he says, no, today’s chore day, we’re fixing up our yard and cleaning our house. And his friend, it was like, man, your parents were mean. That’s no good. And they basically threw a real toot. And Jeremy just looked at him like, what are you talking about? This is our family. This is my home. It’s time to take care of it. That’s what we do. And so to him, it was a perfectly normal thing. But you’ve got to train your kids to understand and think That way it’s not just going to happen. So when they’re hired out, make sure they do the job with excellence.

As they get older, neighbors are going to say, can you come, we? Can you come rake the leaves? So dads, moms, after they’ve done the job, you go back over and you inspect. Make sure they really actually applied themselves and did the job well. And train them if they didn’t. Make them go back and do it right. And then lastly, returning things that they borrow in better shape and without delay. don’t abuse the privilege of when somebody loans something to you. The neighbor loans you a shovel, you use it and return it, clean it, make it look nicer than when you took it back. All real simple concepts of things that we can do to help our kids learn to relate to the community around.

It is not common anymore in our culture for us to relate to our neighbors very well. It’s amazing how we can live for other neighbors for years and years, and we’ve been going through the art of neighboring and not really connect with them. But what if we lived like this, you know, with our neighbors, with our communities, what kind of a difference would we make? And in the gulf of this, the gap between this and how most people live today is widening. We have a real opportunity to live the gospel in a way that makes people stand up and take notice. Some of this used to be what we would call common courtesy, but guess what?

Common courtesy isn’t common anymore. All right? So then let’s talk lastly about, well, what happens when relationships do get broke? And they will, and they need to be repaired. What do we do? The first thing we want to understand is the difference between repentance versus regret. A person who is repentant is sorry that their actions have harmed a relationship. That’s a person who’s repentant. They understand that what I did hurt a relationship. A person who is regretful is sorry that their actions have brought upon themselves unpleasant consequences.

If the child loses, they’ve been disobedient and they lose the privilege of riding the bicycle, They will and if there’s tears that doesn’t necessarily mean you got your heart the tears might be I don’t have my bicycle Anymore, I can’t ride my bicycle. That’s regret Repentances I Understand that what I did is I disobeyed you mom. I made a breach in our relationship I made a breach in our relationship with God. That’s what you want them to understand I saw this moment of enlightenment and current and and I’ll name him Christopher. When he was a young boy, he had been disciplined for something and he was crying quite hard.

A young kind of asked him a stupid question. I said, why are you crying? I just spanked him. And then he just looks at me and just sobbing. He says, and it wasn’t because you hurt my bottom. It was, I understand I sinned against you and I sinned against God. And that was like a six year old.

So that’s what you want to do is when they get to the understand that there’s a relationship that’s been breached not just you know That that’s what’s really going on The repentant person is focused on others the regretful person is focused on themselves And I gave you a couple of examples of how that might work Second Corinthians 7 10 says for the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces a repentance without regret leading to salvation, but the sorrow of the world produces death. The repentant child will understand that their failure to do the chores revealed a lack of honor and respect for the parents, not to mention disobedience and harmed the relationship. So what do we do? Let’s talk about forgiveness and restoring the relationship. Once a person is repentant, the next step to restoring relationship is forgiveness. Now be careful not to let your child get away with a quick heart, half-hearted, I’m sorry, when he was, when he’s created an offense. Insincere apologies tend to sear the child’s conscience and do nothing to

restore relationship. You’ve all probably seen that. The child did something wrong, you reprimanded them, and they just throw a quick over their shoulder, I’m sorry, and just run off and keep doing what they were doing. That’s not a sincere sign of repentance. Here’s a few simple steps to teach your children as you train them what it means to repent and seek forgiveness. Have them verbalize what they did. Believe it or not that’s really hard for a three or four year old. Their little conscience is like, I don’t want to admit what I did was wrong and sometimes you’ve got to really work with them to say you state what you did that was wrong and they’ll squirm and they’ll try to get out of it. Well I forgot or I don’t know and so you might have to put words in her mouth But you get them to their lips to say what they did was wrong have them acknowledge the offense of sin Don’t let them deflect responsibility. They can’t say things like well I wasn’t thinking or I didn’t mean it or they made me mad

That’s not an excuse for hitting your brother. You can’t say well. They made me mad. That’s all deflecting They have to own it understand what they did was wrong Have them ask for forgiveness from the person that they’ve offended And there’s something special there that’s, you know, would you please forgive me for dot, dot, dot, dot? It may be necessary to have them make restitution if restitution is called for. Sometimes that may be beyond their means. You may have to step in and help. The boys were playing with those wrist rocket slingshots one day and shooting dog food and watching a blast on the trees.

And then one of them noticed that down the hill over on the neighbor’s property, there were some look like, what’s them look like old, junky trash windows leaning against the shed. Well, they, so what happens if we shoot dog food at the windows and sure enough, they were breaking glass. And when we found out about it, we said, Hey, you know, we just made an offense or the neighbors. So I marched him over next door. We had a knock on the neighbor’s door and they had to sit there and say, Hi, Mr. Robinson. We need to tell you something. You know, we, we didn’t know we were wrong. We shouldn’t have done this, but we were shooting dog food and windows in your backyard and broke some windows.

Would you please forgive us? And then Mr. Robinson and I worked out terms of restitution, which involved some manual labor on their part. But he had to make that right. Watch for an insincere attitude. Asking forgiveness is pointless if the heart isn’t right. And this is you’ll just have to use your wisdom, your judgment. I think we know our children well enough to be able to know if the attitude is right and when they’re asking for forgiveness. And then in addition to all these, you might want to pray with your child. I would suggest you pray to your child and have them thank God for his forgiveness and ask him for the grace to be strong when temptation arises in the future.

A main goal in this process is to teach the child to be humble and quick to admit it. When they blow it, the natural tendency is to want to deny or minimize our sin. And then I just threw a couple more things in here. We will do them real quickly. Developing social skills with our kids. These are some skills that you want to make sure your kids have developed by the time they leave your home. It’s just the normal part of relationships, the Greece that makes relationships work. We want to help them in these areas. Luke 2 52, we read that Jesus, while a child, kept increasing in wisdom and stature in favor with God and man.

Think about that as you think about your children. We want them increasing in wisdom, increasing in stature, increasing in favor with God and men. got him in. It’s a pretty good word picture. So some of the things you want to think about is we’re developing these social skills. We want them to learn to treat others the way that you want to be treated in Matthew 7 12. So as you’re working with them, have them think about that. Is that what you would like? Would you like it if somebody came and just took your toy away from you? And you explain, you take it. And again, take them to the verses, read the verses so that they tie it back to what God has said, not just what you said. Love your neighbor as yourself. Give preference to one another with honor.

important life skills that they need to learn on the topic of manners. This covers a whole area. Again, Gail’s book and others are a great resource if you’re not sure what kind of manners to be teaching them, but teach your children the common courtesies. How to, let’s see, I can’t read my slide all the way in the back there, but teaching the common courtesy saying please and thank you, greeting others by name, proper introductions, how I’m going to write thank you notes, table matters. All of those things require conscious effort and again you can roleplay them. It’s better to roleplay ahead of time and teach then wait for them to embarrass you in public or to do something and then you’re embarrassed and you respond with anger or with shortness to them. But if you anticipate, why would a child know the proper way to use a napkin or the proper way to use a fork or a knife or that it’s not okay just to belch as loud as you want to belch you at the dinner table. All of those things and And you can actually teach them some of these things using a little bit of humor in the

process. Again, this is just to show you how crazy our home was at times. If at the table the kids were showing bad manners, we had this little game where if somebody caught somebody else practicing bad manners, that person could call them out and then the person with bad manners had to leave the room, go into another room, and had to yell, I am a pig, as loud as they could, until everybody else was satisfied that they had yelled it loud enough. And so, again, just a humorous way to make the point, don’t be a pig. So there are ways to instill these skills without having to just, you know, be the bad guy, all right?

It wasn’t our home, a lot of fun. Okay, communication skills, teach your child how to carry on a conversation, listening asking good questions. A game Gail played with the kids. It was, I think, what do you call it? With the tennis ball, but you guys had a name for it. Anyhow, what she would do is she would get on one side of the room, they’d hand the other side of the room, and she would have a tennis ball. And she’d say, Jeremy, how was your day? And she’d throw the ball over to him. And that was like the, you know, the visual cue of, you know, hey, you just got asked a question. And he had to come up with an answer. It couldn’t couldn’t be just fine or okay, couldn’t be just yes or no answers. He had to come up with something. He’d say, oh, I’m fine. How are you, mom? And he’d throw the ball back.

And so just again in a fun little way, simple device, she was teaching him the mechanics of how to carry on a conversation back and forth. How tragic it is and how sad that it’s more often than not that if a group of, if teenagers get in the same room with adults, the teenagers go mute. They don’t, like, you guys are from Mars. I don’t know to say to you. I don’t know how to talk to you. But if you can begin developing that skill earlier in life, you can begin teaching kids. You know, Mr. and Mrs. Smith are coming over. We’re going to have dinner together. Now, you don’t have to monopolize the conversation, but you know what? Why don’t you think of some questions you can ask them when they’re here. Ask them what he does for work. And you begin to cue them and begin to help them understand that you can actually talk to people that are not in the same social stratus that you are and learn that life skill. I don’t know how many times when I was working for Hewlett-Packard and I would be interviewing young men maybe the age of

2021 coming in looking for a job and they could not communicate to save their life. They did not know how to talk to an adult and it was just tragic. Here’s a guy supposed to be going out and starting a family and he’s he’s deaf, dumb, and mute and wants a job and and teach them early how to speak.