TLP 435: Stop Focusing on Impossible Obedience

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This episode is not going to be a progressive, mamsy -pamsy, unbiblical feeling -fest about how we need to lower our expectations.

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Since our kids aren't perfect, and neither are we, we obviously just need to tone it down on the sin and consequences business.

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Welcome to Truth. Love. Parents. Where we use God's Word to become intentional, premeditated parents.

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Here's your host, A .M. Brewster. Welcome back to the show. Man, I hope our last episode did for you what it did for me.

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It is so important. Christian families have absolutely got to stop letting their emotions dictate how they respond to the circumstances in their lives.

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God never intended for us to give our feelings reign over our lives. But we do it, and it needs to stop.

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So if you didn't catch our last episode, Your Family Needs to Stop Getting Offended, I highly recommend you check it out.

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And speaking of things you need to stop doing, today we're going to talk about how parents need to stop expecting impossible obedience.

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Now, fair warning, most of you did not understand what I really meant by what I just said. Please stick with me before jumping to any conclusions.

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But before I hand you the conclusion you're allowed to jump on, please let me remind you that Truth. Love. Parent is a 501c3 nonprofit ministry.

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And with that, don't forget that you can access your free episode notes and transcripts at TruthLoveParent .com just in case you're mowing the lawn right now and later you want to take a look at the passages

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I reference on the show. All right, let's talk about what I mean by impossible obedience.

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First, let's start with a baseline. If you've never heard our Teach Your Children to Obey series,

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I'll sum up the main points. True, biblical, Christ honoring obedience is doing the right thing in the right way for the right reason and in the right power.

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Anything less than that is not true obedience. Now let's be honest with each other. We all have children.

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When was the last time your child truly, 100 % biblically obeyed? Yeah, I know, it's not as often as we'd like.

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But if we're still being honest, and I hope we are, then when was the last time we truly, 100 % biblically obeyed?

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Praise God that he's merciful and patient. And we know this is true. We know our kids aren't holier than we are.

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We know they fail more often than we do. And yet, as a biblical counselor, I encounter so many parents who have exceptionally unrealistic expectations for their children.

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Now before I outline the problem, I do want to set your minds at ease. This episode is not going to be a progressive, mamsy -pamsy, unbiblical feeling -fest about how we need to lower our expectations.

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Since our kids aren't perfect, and neither are we, we obviously just need to tone it down on the sin and consequences business.

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No, my friends, that is not the case. Our children have the exact same expectations on their lives as we do.

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We must be holy as God is holy. We must glorify the Lord in all we eat, drink, say, and do.

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If we love Christ, we must obey his commandments. Never forget that it's completely acceptable to have unrealistic expectations for our children's spirituality.

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Let me say that again, and then let me clarify. Never forget that it's completely acceptable to have unrealistic expectations for our children's spirituality.

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And I know that sounds like it contradicted what I said earlier about having unrealistic expectations for their impossible obedience.

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So why can I say that? Because in our flesh, it's impossible for us to ever please the

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Lord. You and I obey not because of some righteousness which we have done, but according to his grace in our lives.

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And the same is true for our kids. Since God is the author and finisher of our faith, he can set the bar at perfection.

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And since his sacrifice on the cross enabled us to positionally gain victory over sin, and since his future grace in our lives will one day rid us of our sin nature, he really will be the one who enables us to obey perfectly as he is perfect.

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So no, I'm not going to say that we need to stop expecting our children to obey. Of course they need to obey.

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Their creator demands it. And honestly, the kind of obedience they need to have is godly obedience, which is really unreasonable because they're humans.

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On the other hand, I want to talk about our obedience to God when it comes to our expectations for our children's obedience to us.

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And this is where things, it's going to sound complicated, but it's not. So stick with me. Just like our kids, most of us parents don't drop the ball when it comes to wanting the right things to be done in the right ways.

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It all starts to unravel, though, when it comes to our motivation. So here we go.

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1. Your unsaved children cannot please God. It's impossible obedience.

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Too many parents find their anxieties appeased when their kids simply follow the rules. They have no real passion or love for God, but they're good kids.

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They get good grades. They do good work. They like good things. And we convince ourselves that it's good enough.

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But the problem is that Romans 8, 7 through 8, tells us the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God, for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so.

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And those who are in the flesh cannot please God. Deep inside, we know that superficial, pharisaical obedience isn't good enough.

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But we lie to ourselves by pretending that when our children muster up enough fleshly self -control to outwardly conform to simple rules, they're actually doing something worthwhile.

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But they're not. Yes, they eat vegetables instead of doing drugs. Yes, they go right to sleep at night instead of sleeping around.

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Yes, they tackle their homework instead of beating up kids at school. But Romans 14, 23 makes it very clear that anything we do, including outward acts of religiosity, that's not done from genuine faith, is sin.

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That means that my unconverted 5 -year -old is no more pleasing God by going to bed sweetly than a 15 -year -old is messing around with his girlfriend.

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If you have children who are not born again, please stop hanging your peace on their ability to quote -unquote obey.

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They cannot truly obey. They cannot glorify God without first being regenerated, submitting to Him, and being born again.

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What you want from them is impossible obedience, and it shouldn't be our goal. If our kids are not born again, our biggest focus should be on introducing them to God.

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They need to see His miraculous works. They need to wonder at His infinite character. Without first understanding

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His perfection, their sinfulness won't be that bad. If their sin isn't that bad, they won't need saving.

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Now, that's the first kind of impossible obedience. That's expecting a dead person to live.

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Your unregenerate children cannot obey. Yes, you should have standards, but the requirement that they do the right things in the right way is merely a schoolmaster to show them how sinful they actually are when they can't do the right things in the right way for the right reasons and the right power.

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It's not an end goal. It's merely part of the process of realizing they're a sinner and seeing their need for a

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Savior. But even if our kids are born again, we can still expect impossible obedience.

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Number two, your born -again children can't obey if you are the motivation for their obedience.

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It's impossible obedience. I've said it before and I'll say it again and again.

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If your child isn't interested in worshiping God, what makes you think he or she wants to worship you?

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But there's another application of this truth. If you want your children to worship God, stop demanding that they worship you.

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This is the same issue as our first point, but from the other side. In the first scenario, the parent's goal was that their kids do what they're told.

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As long as little Benjamin and Olivia listen to Mommy, we're happy, but that motivation falls so infinitely far from what

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God expects of them. We should never be happy with our unsaved children's mere conformity to rules because they need far greater than that.

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They need to become a follower of God. In the same vein though, just because my kids are born again doesn't mean that mere outward conformity to my rules pleases the

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Lord. If my kids are doing the right thing in the right way, but they're doing it for my reasons, they're not obeying any more than an unsaved kid is.

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Sure, their eternal life isn't at stake, but they're still not pleasing God. Again, as a biblical counselor,

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I encounter so many parents who, even though it's really hard for them to realize it, they just want their kids to follow the rules.

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But they want their kids to follow the rules for their own peace of mind, their own comfort, and their own happiness.

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The parents want their kids to obey for the parents. They literally want their kids to engage in idol worship with the parents themselves as the idols.

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They're not thinking about it that way, but that is their underlying motivation. Sometimes it shows itself in manipulation.

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Sometimes we use force. But it's not rightly motivating our kids' behavior. Our kids cannot please

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God while they're obeying solely for us, because they're afraid of us, because we've manipulated them, whatever else. It's impossible obedience.

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So, what do we do? Well, we too need to stop focusing on impossible obedience. But more than that,

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I'm going to carefully suggest that we need to stop focusing on obedience, period.

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Now, the same people who were worried I was falling off of the Bible train into mamzy -pamzy progressivism are back to being concerned because I just said that we need to stop focusing on obedience.

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But please give me a moment to explain. Travel back in time with me to Mount Sinai. Moses had just given the children the ten commandments he had received from God himself.

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But despite the Lord setting up a theocracy and codifying religious expectations, God does something else very important.

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Of course, in order to really appreciate it, we need to travel back a little bit further in time. Moses finds himself before a burning bush.

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He's commanded to take God's people from Israel, but Moses is concerned that the people will not recognize the

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Lord, whom shall I say sent me? And God replies, I am who I am has sent me to you.

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The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has sent me to you.

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This is my name forever, and this is my memorial name to all generations. The children of Israel had nearly forgotten who their

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God was, but they knew very well who Abraham and Isaac and Jacob's God was. He remembered how he kept promises.

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He remembered what he did for them. So he started by revealing his character to them. He revealed himself to them as Yahweh, the covenant -keeping personal

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God. Then all the plagues not only substantiated his power before the people, they communicated the fact that he loved his people enough to upset the order of the universe and rearrange chemical bonds and do the impossible just to set them free.

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Shortly thereafter, he splits the sea in half for them to cross on dry land. He provided for them over and over and over again, sometimes in very normal ways and sometimes in very miraculous ways.

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And he did all of this before he gave them a law. And then, when the time finally came to make them a nation and give them the law,

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God's first words are these, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

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You shall have no other gods before me. There was one and only one motivation for the

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Jews' obedience. God is worthy of their obedience. You see, obedience has never been the goal.

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It's merely a byproduct of the goal. The goal is that all people everywhere would recognize

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God for who he is and give him the love and honor and fear and adoration that's due him.

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That's the goal, for them to know who he is and respond. And when people love

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God, they obey God. Loving God is the goal. Obeying God is merely a consequence of achieving that goal.

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Our problem is that we make obedience the goal. And when we make obedience the goal, we're expecting an impossible obedience.

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It's like expecting a blizzard without an accumulation. It's demanding fire that gives no heat.

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So, do we expect our children to obey? Of course we do. God expects our children to obey.

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But we don't make the obedience anything more than God does. God expects obedience because he expects love.

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He demands fear and honor and glory. He doesn't want obedience if the love isn't there.

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This is why in Amos 5, 22 through 24, God says, Even though you offer up to me burnt offerings and your grain offerings, which by the way was them obeying,

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He says, I will not accept them. And I will not even look at the peace offerings of your fatlings. Take away from me the noise of your songs.

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I will not even listen to the sound of your harps. By the way, all of those things were things that he had commanded them to do.

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But why was he rejecting it? He says, But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever -flowing stream.

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Well, isn't there obedience through sacrificing and singing songs righteousness? No it wasn't.

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True justice and righteousness can only grow from love for God. The key component was missing.

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This is why Jesus said in Matthew 22, 37 through 40, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.

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This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

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On these two commandments depend the whole law and the prophets. The whole law depends on loving

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God. We should only expect our children to obey because our greatest goal for them is to love

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God. Therefore, their disobedience is concerning to us simply because it reveals that, in that moment, they're not loving

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God. We're not bothered by their disobedience because they're disobeying. We're concerned that their disobedience is revealing they clearly don't know

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God the way they should. When we parent that way, the disobedience won't get under our skin.

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It won't annoy us. It won't exasperate us. It will remind us that our kids don't love

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God the way they should, and we simply need to redouble our efforts to make certain that they know just how worthy

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God is. Listen, I get this wrong all the time because I like it when my kids do what

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I tell them to do. I can't see their motivation, so as long as they don't watch too much TV, they get their homework and chores done well, and they talk sweetly to each other,

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I'm happy. But if I'm being honest, and if they're anything like I was at their age, most of the time they're doing those good things.

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They're not pleasing the Lord any more than I am wanting them to do those good things for me. Whether my kids are doing something that looks right or looks wrong, my focus should be to help them see the wonder and grandeur of God.

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Now, next week we're going to expand on this topic and discuss the curse of obedient children, because well -mannered kids, contrary to popular belief, actually make parenting much more difficult.

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It's rewarding and awesome parenting, but it's so much harder, and we'll talk about that more next time.

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For now, though, we have to shake up our expectations. God wants us to focus on a majestic, mountainous vista, but we're distracted by a couple run -of -the -mill fir trees named

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Good Grades and Curfew Keeper. There are goals far more grand and glorious for our parenting than mere obedience.

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Expect obedience. In fact, expect the unrealistic obedience that can only come from the

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Holy Spirit. But don't parent toward that mere obedience. Parent toward a love for God that will result in the obedience every single time.

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And also, please share this episode on your favorite social media outlets, and get in touch with us if you're uncertain how to overcome your personal preoccupation with outward obedience.

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You can email us at counselor at truthlofeparent .com or call us at 828 -423 -0894.

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And I hope you'll join us next time as we again open God's Word to discover how to parent our children for life and godliness.

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To that end, we'll be discussing the curse of obedient children. And in the near future, I'll continue this conversation even more with my friend

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Jared Lopes, the author of, that's right, Stop Behaving. Don't worry, he hasn't fallen off the deep end either.

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I'll see you then. Truth. Love. Parents. Is part of the Evermind Ministries family and is dedicated to helping you become an intentional premeditated parent.

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Join us next time as we search God's Word for the truth your family needs today.