SERMON: The Discipline of Christian Education

The Foundation of Christian Education in Proverbs

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day sermon, and we pray that as we declare the Word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and you would catch a greater vision of who Christ is.

And may you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word, and may the Lord be with you. For the past five Lord's Days that we've been on this education series, we have taken some breaks in between. We've been sort of building a theological case for what Christian education is, and we've been talking about it from sort of this metaphor of a foundation, digging out the foundation and then building up the structure, and we've been doing that from the greatest book of wisdom in the Bible, which is the book of Proverbs.

And in a world so incredibly deluded, especially in what it means to educate a child, this is not only a very apropos series, but my prayer is that it will be a helpful series, an essential series that will help parents understand what it looks like to educate a covenant child.

Now five weeks ago we began with the foundation, and we found that the bedrock of all knowledge, the foundation of all understandings, not mere facts and data and spreadsheets or even wrinkles in the brain, but it begins with the knowledge and the fear of God.

The fear of God is the beginning of all knowledge, the fear of God is the beginning of all wisdom, that is the bedrock under everything we could ever know. And then after laying that foundation, we raised the first walls and asked the question of who is the one who has authority over education?

Who is the one who has a right to teach, who is the Lord over the classroom? And Proverbs pointed us in a place that might surprise many people. It's not the state that has the authority over education, it's not the education boards that have authority over education, it's not the department of education who has the authority over education, it's the eternal Son of God, the Logos, by whom all things were made.

He is the one who has the right and the authority over every fact that could ever be known, and as Van Til once said, all facts are God's facts. So Christ is the authority over all education. Then in our third week, after determining the foundation and the authority, we asked the question of canon, and what is primarily the curriculum that a Christian ought to understand and receive?

What is it, what's the duty of the Christian father and mother to give unto their children? Is it algebra or jazz flute? No. It's the Word of God. God is the foundation of all knowledge, Christ is the authority over all knowledge, and they given to us the Spirit of God included.

The Triune God has given us the Word of God, and that is the primary curriculum by which that we as parents ought to impart to our children, to deposit in their minds. Special revelation, literally God's Word, is the primary and the most basic curriculum that we are responsible for giving.

Deuteronomy 6 says whether you are walking or whether you're sitting, whether you're lying down or whether you're rising up, whether you are awake or whether you're asleep, essentially all time. At all times, speak the Word of God over your children, give them the Word of God, put it in their mind.

That's the third week. The fourth week, we asked about who is the actual recipient of knowledge? What is our children? Who are they actually, fundamentally, at the deepest level, and we learned that they're not just brains on a stick.

We learned that they're not just cerebral cortexes waiting for the next upload. We saw that our children are hearts, primarily. The center of a being is actually their heart, not their head, and we realized that they're not just mental sponges who are meant to absorb a litany of facts, but they are first and foremost a being who has appetites and bends and passions that have to be molded and pointed to God.

Solomon even says that a student is a heart, or in Hebrew, a lev, which means that they're a worshiper, that they're a furnace of different loves and longings that we as parents are blessed to inflame towards the right ends.

That is what God has told us to do, and God is the end for which we inflame our children so that they would love him with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength. And then, last week, or the last time we were in this series, we talked about application, and we began with the most practical question of all.

How does wisdom actually get transmitted from one soul to the next? How is it that parents can impart wisdom? What are the techniques? What are the tips? What are the hacks? And, in a sense, what we were asking is, after we fear God as the beginning of everything, after we bow the knee to Christ, after we submit ourselves to the Holy Scriptures and prioritize the development of our children's heart, even before their head, after we do all of that, how do we actually do it?

And what we saw is that there are many practical truths that we could look at. The first is we would say that wisdom is transmitted to our children through imitation. It's often caught before it's taught.

They have to see it in us before they'll actually begin to live it. How many times? Maybe your parents said the same thing to you. My dad used to say, do as I say, not as I do, and then he was surprised when that didn't work, because we imitate more than we actually replicate the words that someone says.

So, that's the first thing. The second thing is that we actually need to be a person who is worth imitating, a person who is actually deliberately and intentionally doing the things of God, so that our children would be people who love and who do the things of God as well.

And then we finally learned last time that all of that can actually be undone by rival voices, and we saw that the society that we live in is a cacophony of rival voices that are seeking to inflame the hearts of our children, seeking to pervert them from the knowledge of God, from bowing the knee to Christ, from submitting to Holy Scripture, and it's our job, especially as men, to guard the door and say that if that stuff comes in our house, it must come through us.

The Folly in a Child's Heart

That's what we've learned so far. Now today, we get to answer the practical question in the negative. What happens when a child refuses to learn? What happens when our children, instead of being filled with wisdom and waking up and saying at six years old, Father, listen to what I read in Charles Spurgeon this morning.

Let me recite to you the next catechism. If they're not like that, what do we do? If instead of righteousness and wisdom, they're overflowing with foolishness and rebellion and folly, then what do we do?

What do we do when our children seem to gravitate towards sin and fill up their own little hearts with a love for disobedience? No one has any experience with that. What happens when our children have a penchant for testing boundaries?

Or they have a heart like a wild ox that refuses to be tamed? What do we do then? What happens when the child in front of you is not an empty cup waiting to be filled, but is already full to the brim with things that are not yet pleasing to the Lord?

And all of this matters tremendously because it applies to the child that we have, to the one who is constantly at war with instruction, to the one who does not just have some occasional rebellion but is a nature that's bent toward rebellion.

How do we deal with that? How do we discipline our children? What does that actually look like? Does discipleship come through placations and patting on the heads, or does it come through some kind of discipline?

That's the question that we're going to be asking today. What does discipline actually look like? And taken with the last sermon that we preached, today I hope you see a kind of two-part work where we can use love to fill the child, but also discipline to remove the things from the child that must not be there.

And while I know that this is a controversial topic, and I know that there are many, many different opinions on the topic of how do we discipline children correctly, biblically, lovingly, gently, effectively, all of that, there's probably a thousand different books on this topic, today my aim is merely to say what Scripture says, not what the Lankford household does, although I hope to the best of our ability we try to follow the Scripture.

All I want to do is say today, not what parenting model you've read, not what Parenting for Dummies said, but I'd like to today talk about what does Scripture say, and I would pray that we would hear it, and we would wrestle with it, and we would understand for the glory of God and for the good of our little ones.

So with that, the question before us today is very easy to ask, but it's often a lot harder to answer. How does God tell us how to get the folly out of our child? How do we get the foolishness out of our child?

How do we get the rebellion out of our child? It's a question that our entire generation has answered mostly wrongly. The world says that you remove folly by self-expression. You just let them be whatever they're meant to be, and you just let them go, and your sweet little snowflake will become something special.

Don't bend him, don't break him, don't bruise his little spirit, affirm what is in him, and what is in him will blossom. The problem is what is in him is corruption. Solomon under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit tells us an entirely different view because he says what's inside of our sweet, beautiful little babies is the same thing that's inside of us, and it's not sweet little flowers waiting to blossom.

It's the fertilizer and the manure beneath. It's the deep weeds of sin that entangle and poison our affections. It's also theirs, choking out their little hearts just like it does to ours. So this morning, from the book of Proverbs, I want us to see five things about discipline, five things about correction, five little practical nuggets for Christian parents concerning how do we lovingly, graciously, and wisely discipline a child.

And with that, I need to say up front before we begin, without the help of the Lord, there's no amount of discipline that will matter. Without the Spirit of God regenerating our children and writing the law of God on their hearts, there is precious little that we can actually do to bend them towards God and the things of God, but that's not what this sermon is about.

This sermon is not about the child who is unregenerate, who is not a believer, and you're trying everything that you can to make them a believer. That's God's work. What I'm talking about today is covenant children and how do we come alongside of them as God has commanded.

That's the point of today's sermon. First we're going to look at the nature of our children, which is bent towards folly. Second, we're going to learn that discipline actually is love. The third thing that we're going to see is how discipline is a means of grace to keep our children from destruction.

Fourth, we're going to understand that discipline creates wisdom in our children. And fifth, we're going to understand how the undisciplined child, according to the book of Proverbs, will end up becoming a public disaster and their life will end in ruin either in this life or the next.

So with that, if you'll allow me, I'm going to read several passages, we're going to pray, and then we're going to look at this topic together. We'll begin in Proverbs 12 .1. Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid.

Solomon is pretty blunt. Proverbs 13 .24. Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him. Proverbs 19 .18. Discipline your son, for there is hope. Do not set your heart on putting him to death.

Proverbs 22 .15. Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him. And then Proverbs 23 .13 -14. Do not withhold discipline from a child. If you strike him with a rod, he will not die.

If you strike him with a rod, you will save his soul from Sheol. And also one more, Proverbs 29 .15. The rod and the reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself will bring shame to his mother. Let us pray.

Lord, thank you so much that in everything you've given us wisdom in scripture for every aspect of life. How often have we heard a sermon on disciplining children from the word, and yet it's there. It's there to instruct us and guide us and help us.

Whether our children are young and moldable, whether our children are grown, whether we don't have children yet, there's wisdom in these passages for us to be able to learn how to live and also how to instruct others how to live.

Lord, I pray that as we hear this for all of us who have younger children, that we would hear it and understand what the Lord says to us about discipline. Lord, for those whose children are grown, I pray that we would hear that and learn how to care for, pray for, and instruct others who have younger children and also be a support system to our adult children who have children.

And Lord, I pray for those who don't yet have children who would hear these things and would begin developing a theology of what it looks like to be a parent, and that Lord, as they move towards marriage and towards parenting in the future, that you would allow them to even begin much better than where many of us began, that they would have thought through these things beforehand.

So Lord, we love you, we praise you, and we know that you are the only one who can actually bend a willful heart towards you. Lord, it's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. Now the first thing that we need to understand is we need to understand what folly is.

It's an old word, we don't use it very often, and we need to remember that the book of Proverbs is a book that is trying to juxtapose or compare and contrast two different kinds of people, the wise man and the fool.

The wise man is the one who knows and who loves and who obeys the Lord. That's what wisdom is, knowing, loving, and obeying God. The fool is actually not the ignorant man. You can be a genius and be a fool.

He's not the one who's empty-headed and never learned his arithmetic tables. The fool is the one in the book of Proverbs who refuses to know God, hates the things of God, and refuses to obey God. You can be the most brilliant man on earth and be a fool by hating God, refusing to know God, and disobeying God's commandments.

And since most people are not purely and totally wise, and we are also not purely and totally fools, the book of Proverbs also not only uses these two men as types, but it also describes these two things as behaviors, because there's times when we are obedient to God where we're acting with wisdom.

And there's also times when we're rebelling against God and living in our own sin where we're acting like fools. And as it relates to our children, when they are acting with wisdom, when they're pursuing the things of God, yearning to love their God, striving to joyfully obey Him, but yet when they sin and when they're given over to rebellion and mischievousness and anger and backbiting and sassiness and argumentation and every other little micro-rebellion you see growing up in your little ones, when they're doing those things, you have to call it like it is they're behaving like fools.

And it's okay to diagnose it, because we can only find the solution once you understand the problem. And that's an important point, because as it relates to parenting, folly is the natural bend of our children.

That's the second point that I'd like to bring up, is folly is native to the child as well as to us. Proverbs 22, 15 says, folly is bound up in the heart of a child. Now I know, I say this to great surprise, because no one here has ever had a child, right?

No one here has ever remembered the moment and was surprised when that sweet little adorable puddin' pop, who looks so angelic when she's sleeping and has the softest little skin, is also the one whose heart is filled with seething malice whenever they do not get what they want.

If you end up one second late from feeding them, one moment you don't realize that this particular grunt meant hold me instead of change me, then you will see the unfiltered, unadulterated rage of humanity's tiniest beings.

Even as a baby, with their razor-thin nails like eagle's talons, which rip the flesh off your face, which grab a handful of beard, ripping it right out of your follicles, screaming with a kind of red-faced fury, you probably remember that very day when you were awakened to the fact that your little child is a tidal wave of unbridled fallen affections.

The moment you realized that your little angel was not pure, unadulterated goodness. And then you saw very close, up close and personal, the sin that's plagued you for decades. How many times have you seen your sin in your kids?

This phenomenon of our children being fallen, sinful creatures who will rip your face off if you forget their binky is why Votie Bauckham once said, and this is meant to be funny, God was gracious when he made babies small so they would not kill you, and God was gracious when he made them cute so you wouldn't kill them.

From the moment they were conceived in iniquity and launched from the birth canal into the world, they are a creature whose innate nature and disposition is bent towards folly. And what does that mean?

Well, the word folly here goes far deeper than just immaturity or wittle whoopsies. The Hebrew word is el elat, which is probably the hardest and most abrasive word that Solomon could have chosen at his dispense.

He could have called the child pathy, which means naive. He could have called him kashiel, meaning dull. But he reaches for el elat, which is a visceral biting definition of someone who's willfully stubborn, God resisting a heart that will not be told what to do.

It's not only foolishness, but it's foolishness with white knuckles. It is sedition in its most miniature form. And where does Solomon locate that? He doesn't locate it in so-and-so's little hellion down the street.

He locates it in our children's heart, in our very little princesses and princes. Solomon is saying at the very center of our little covenant children's affections, right in the midst of their passions, that we hope to aim towards Christ exist a world of rebellion that festers like melanoma within them.

And how is it lodged within them? Solomon would use the word here bound up, which is a very interesting word. It's a word that means like an untieable knot. It's the word that you would think of like a sailor who knows how to tie this fancy, whatever the name of that knot is, the square hippopotamus knot or whatever they call it.

It's one of those knots that like even the hardest, most calcified fingernail can't break loose. That's how sin has taken hold of our children's heart and our heart, mangled and tangled and gripping that organ that's supposed to have affections for the almighty God, but choking out desire, polluting affections.

Solomon says folly is willful, seditionary, rebellion, bound up and mangled and untanglable knots in the hearts of our babes and of their parents. And the heartbreaking part about all of this is that he and she inherited it from us.

And we inherited it from our parents, which traces all the way back to our federal head Adam, who we all inherited our nature from. This sin nature that stains our souls and pollutes our pleasures so that we prefer our pleasures more than Christ's treasure, that's the doctrine that we call original sin.

The doctrine that we've all seen in action when you do not have to teach a child to lie, you do not have to train a child to be selfish, you do not have to train a child to rip the out of their sister's hand and then laugh as they cry.

You don't have to teach that. It is innate in the programming. And lest you think that this is nothing more than a gloomy Calvinist doctrine, I want you to look for a second at what the scriptures say about the heart of man includes our children.

The intention of man's hearts is evil from his youth. That's the disposition of man. David says that he was brought forth in iniquity and in sin his mother conceived him from the moment he was literally conceived.

David even goes further and says the wicked are estranged from the womb and they go astray from birth speaking lies. Paul says that we are all by nature children of wrath, which is his exposition of what David says that we are conceived in iniquity.

The Bible does not create a special category for our children. It tells the truth about them. Yes, they are cute and snuggly. Yes, they are adorable and make you smile in ways that you've never thought you could.

But they are also innately sinful, just like you. And that actually is the beginning of the good news because you cannot rescue a child or write a child if you refuse to understand their diagnosis. That's the first step is understand who and what your child is and understand that their nature is bent towards rebellion and that they were given to you, Christian dad and Christian mom, to not only point them to Jesus and inflame their affections, what we talked about last time, but also to act as a restraint over their sin nature to help them learn the consequences of not living for holiness and righteousness and for Jesus.

Discipline as an Act of Love

Which is why Solomon can now argue in the third point that discipline is an act of love because discipline is that thing that restrains them from their evil, even as you're trying to inflame them for the things of God.

You see how those two work together. Solomon says, whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him. That is one of the most important and yet controversial passages in the Bible.

Solomon says the one who withholds the rod literally hates his own son, despises his little girl. Solomon is saying that the parent who will not discipline his child is not being gentle or kind, but being hateful and cruel.

And he's placing that momentary comfort of his child above the eternal soul that he's been called to develop. He would rather overlook the offense tonight, not realizing that the sin will metastasize into something worse 20 years later.

And Solomon calls that hatred. He calls that posture despising a child. But the opposite is also true. Solomon continues with the antithesis saying, but the one who loves his son is diligent to discipline him.

And the word translated diligent means diligent. It carries the idea of the sun actually rising up in the morning. That's sort of the underlying metaphorical meaning of it. The sun that always rises in the morning, even sometimes at 430 in the morning, when the light hits you like in the telltale heart and wakes you up and you're like, what is happening?

The sun is always diligent to rise. The sun gets up every morning, way before we do, most of us. In the same way that the sun diligently rises every morning, we are to be eager to be about the work of God in our day.

And in this particular context, eager, diligent, intentional, dedicated to the discipline of our children. In other words, the loving father does not ignore his children's folly. He doesn't push the snooze button on discipline.

He doesn't walk out of the house feeling defeated, not knowing what he can do so that he can just go and plow away at work. Because men, we do that. We have big, big feelings that we don't know what to do with.

And we say, me go work. Our wives talk to us and communicate with us. And about after 10 words, sometimes we get overwhelmed and we're like, I don't know what's happening. Men, we can't do that. We actually have to be checked in, not checked out.

We actually have to be intentional, not unintentional. We actually have to be diligently, as much as the sun isn't rising in the discipline of our children, we have to be involved and not uninvolved. We can't outsource it to someone else.

We can't tell our wife, you do it. We actually have to be the one who oversees, manages, presides over to the glory of God this thing. Love gets up early. Love for a child causes us to address even the sins that are small.

Love corrects the child before folly takes a deep root. Love does the very difficult work now because it cares about who our child will become later. And that means that the loving father does not discipline because he's lost his temper.

This is very important. He does not discipline because he's angry. He doesn't discipline because he's lost sight of his son. He corrects him calmly, deliberately, and faithfully the same way that the darkness chases away the shadows.

Hatred leaves a child alone in the darkness, but love rises early and brings the light into view. But maybe you're asking, what does this actually look like? Well, it's here that I need to speak very plainly because the text has been abused on both sides.

On the one side, the parent who will not even lift the finger or the rod at all baptizes their cowardice as gentleness and calls negligence grace and lets the child functionally rule the house, run the schedule, set the temperature of the home.

And those parents tell themselves that this kind of negligence is love. I interacted with this recently. I can't remember where I was, but I definitely remember what happened. A child came up. Oh, I was at the VA.

A child came up to his father, I don't know this person, and swung, it's like a five-year-old, swung and hit the father three or four times and says, I don't like you. You're not doing what I want. And the father was just like, it's okay, it's okay.

And I was like, oh dear. Fast forward 20 years, what will that look like if he continues that work? It's not love. It's the abandonment of your child with a thousand cowardly smiles. Now, on the other side of that, there's parents who love this verse, champion this verse, and say, yeah, we spank, we wear them out.

We go WWE in my house. It's mortal combat. Finish him. You have parents who lift the rod and rage, strike the child when they're angry, not to win them, but to wound them. In the same kind of way that sometimes a man will kick a stray dog venting out his fury.

Some will do that. But that's not discipline either. That's satanic, and that's a counterfeit. And the reason we know that is because Solomon says in the very next chapter, discipline your son, for there is hope, and do not set your heart on his death.

That's a strange way of saying that. But what Solomon is actually grounding parental motivation for discipline in is that discipline is always aimed towards hope. It's not aimed with anger. The end of our discipline is not anger and retaliation and frustration.

And I can't believe how much they're getting on my nerves right now. The aim of our discipline is the development of our children, a loving future for our children. That's the aim. That's the telos of discipline is that they would grow up and be wise.

How can you be hateful and reactionary with overblown sensitivities if you are actually for the good of your children in your discipline? Not a discipline that injures or terrifies, where you pour out your wrath instead of love.

That kind of discipline, that kind of rod is not from God. It's the rage of men and parents who will have to stand before God for the way that they have done that. The balance that Scripture strikes is so crystal clear and so beautiful.

Biblical discipline is never cold. It's always warm. Biblical discipline is never cruel. It's always handed out in love. Biblical discipline never, ever flows from a parent who has lost control, but always one who is in control.

Discipline is the calm hand of love, not the hot hand of anger. It's the surgeon's scalpel which only cuts to heal, not the brute's club which only strikes to break. And how we know this, how we know that God considers this kind of punishment good and holy and loving, because it's the exact same way He disciplines us.

If God is always good and always loving and God disciplines us, then there is a way in which discipline can be righteous and holy. Look at what it says in Hebrews 12, 6. The Lord disciplines the one He loves.

How many people say that's their life verse? It's probably not. The Lord disciplines the one He loves. The Lord chastises every son in whom He receives. Paul is using the Greek word paideia there, which is a really interesting word, which means the totality of what you're trying to get into your children in order to form them into who you're looking to form them into.

It's an ancient Greek word that Paul borrows to say it is the sum total of biblical wisdom that you are trying to form your child to. It is the cookie cutter mold that you are trying to mold them. And it just so happens that that mold is in the image of Christ.

And if God disciplines you in that way and He's loving you when He does that, and if you left to your own devices without discipline would become an illegitimate child, an orphan, who doesn't even know his left hand from his right, then how is it not loving for us to also employ the exact same kind of loving, careful, patient discipline to our children that God has applied to us?

There are things that God has done in my life which hurt. There are things that God has done in my life which made me weep. There are things that God has done in my life that did not feel so sweet. And yet I look back on them and I see the tremendous hand of God's love in chastising me, in disciplining me, in healing me of whatever brokenness that was in me through pain because I needed it.

Because here's the problem. If you only ever have a diet of sweet things, you will become diabetic, spiritually even. So God in His grace and in His love sometimes gives us hard things to shape us. You think about the statue of David by, I think, was it Michelangelo who did that?

Yeah. Michelangelo was not kind to the rock when he was beating it. And yet something beautiful came out of it. The same is true for you. May God not be kind to you if you're just a slab of rock. May He pound on you and chisel you and cut you and scrape you until you look like Jesus.

And that is certainly loving. And here's also something that we need to remember. God does not punish us. God is perfecting us. There's a difference there. And the reason I can say that, that God does not punish us, is because of what happened on the cross to Jesus Christ.

He is not disciplining us punitively because the punishment that we all deserved was poured out on Jesus, His only Son. The wrath we deserved was poured out on Him. So our discipline that God gives us is not punishment.

It is there to perfect us and shape us and change us. It changes even the way that we look at it, doesn't it? Every single hickory switch from the Almighty, every divinely inspired butt-whooping that you and I have gotten in our life was never directed in anger towards you if you're a child of God, but it was directed in affections towards you, molding you into the image of His one and only Son.

And He does that as a good father. And as a father, He does it for our good so that we may share in His holiness, Hebrews 12, 10. So dads and moms, when you discipline your child in love, you're not being mean.

Yeah, it breaks your heart. You hate to see your child hurt for anything, but you're doing it humbly, attempting to imitate how your father has disciplined you, but who loves you way too much to leave you masquerading in your miseries.

Discipline as Rescue from Destruction

And this is especially true because as we see in our third or fourth point, discipline will actually rescue children from destruction. That's the fourth thing that I want us to talk about. Proverbs 23, 13 through 14 says, Do not withhold discipline from a child.

If you strike him with a rod, he will not die. If you strike him with the rod, you will save his soul from shield. Notice what Solomon doesn't say. He doesn't say, discipline your child because he embarrassed you in the grocery store.

He doesn't say, discipline your child because they're getting on your nerves. He says, discipline your child, mom and dad, because you're yanking their soul out of a future grave. That's literally what he says.

Solomon is saying that you're disciplining your child as a means of grace that God will use to steer them away from hell. What he's saying, the most reasonable assumption that a Christian parent can actually have is that if we faithfully, lovingly, and righteously inflame the affections of our children and also contain and restrain the sin in our children, though they will one day physically die, God will use your God-honoring leadership and discipline in your children's life so that one day they will not die, but they will live eternally.

Now, this is not an equal sign, that if you discipline your children well, they will be saved. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the normative expectation for a believer and for their children, if you raise them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord when they're old, they will not depart.

That should be the normative assumption that we have. If you leave them to their own devices, you have no assurance. You have no hope of where they're going to end up, and you're clearly only leaning upon the grace of God.

But if you follow what God says and teach your children how to love Christ by seeing it on you, teaching your children how to be disciplined for Christ, imitating you, and when they sin, disciplining them in a holy and righteous way, you should have every expectation that your children will love and follow God.

It should be abnormal if you were doing those things for your children to walk away and to depart from it, because God even says, when they're old, they will not. The verb here for a parent saving their child through godly discipline is not saw.

It's the word for snatching someone out of the jaws of danger, like a fireman rescuing a baby from a burning building, which means that, again, discipline is not punitive. It's redemptive, it's restorative, and it's redeeming a child from the direction that if you left them alone, they would go on their own.