Helping Children Respond to Sin: 4 Positive Discipleship Strategies

I don’t know about your home, but ours is full of sinners! There are six of us plus a dog living in a home that feels too small. We added two children within the past two years and are really feeling the crunch. My husband often works from home. We homeschool. There is usually nowhere inside our house to get away from each other. And since we are all sinners bumping into each other it can get rather messy around here. Can you relate? We have had loads of opportunities to help our children respond to sin. Their own sin and ours. Trial and error has left us with a few positive discipleship strategies that I’d love to share with you.

Help children respond to sin by naming it.

“If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

One of the most fundamental steps you can take in helping children to respond to their sin is to help them understand what sin is! Our culture shies sprints away from this. We say making up a story instead of lying, feeling frustrated as opposed to anger, naughty in place of disobedience, and our kids don’t steal – they merely borrow.

How can we help our children respond to their sin if they can’t even identify it! Also, the practice of using Biblical terminology can be a great aid for parents to distinguish between behavior that is sinful as opposed to behavior that is merely childish or irritating. Our response to sinful behavior ought to be significantly weightier than our response to irritating behavior.

You cannot defeat an enemy you do not admit exists.

Michael T. Flynn

We have been listening to The Giant Killer from Lamplighter publications. The “Giants” in the book are various sins. I would highly recommend this resource. The Lamplighter Theater CDs are excellent as are their beautifully bound hardcover keepsakes.

Teach kids to understand their role when they sin and when others sin.

Last weekend a few of us in our home hit a breaking point. I won’t go into all the details but there were slammed doors, a tirade of throwing random things in the trash, tears, and some yelling. It wasn’t pretty at all. The end result was EVERYONE feeling bad (except the baby – she just smiled cutely which was served to make us all feel even more disgusting).

It ended with repentance all around and forgiveness, but I wanted my children to understand something very important. They are not responsible for my sin! Or daddy’s sin! No one can make someone else sin – our sin is our own problem.

How a jar is helping our family

To illustrate this I took a mason jar and filled it with water and dirt. Then, I explained that the dirt is like our sin. Just there. The only fix is to actually open the jar and take it out or replace the water. The dirt often settles to the bottom and we don’t really notice it. But it can also be shaken up! Then, we really notice how much dirt is in there. The more we are packed in to our home together the more we tend to bump into each other’s “jars” and stir up all that dirt/sin.

I had one of my kids shake up the jar. This was our conversation: Did you put the dirt in there? Nope. All you did was something that made it get stirred up so that it was visible. Then I connected that to mom and dad loosing it! You didn’t put anger in my heart – the sin was there already. All you did was something that caused it to spill out. You might have bumped into my “jar” by sinning or by doing something just irritating – either way you are responsible for your own sin and I am guilty of mine.

We have kept the jar on the coffee table. Our joke is that the toddler likes to run around the house shaking it up! Such a powerful image. This has also really helped my kids understand why I am always pushing for everyone to have a little alone time!

View children as smaller versions of yourself.

I bought into behaviorism in college when I was studying to be a teacher. Rewards, Consequences, Antecedants, yada yada yada. To some degree, there is truth in it all. I am likely to do something if there will be a reward of chocolate. My husband does his job for the reward of a paycheck. My toddler does not turn the knobs on the stove because she desires to avoid a spanking.

People are much more complex than Pavlov’s dogs! There is more to us because, unlike all the other creatures, we are created in God’s image! We are motivated by rewards and consequences. But we are also fallen sinners. If we have trusted Jesus we also have the indwelling Holy Spirit who influences our thoughts and actions. We are complex beyond what we can comprehend.

For some reason, we tend to think that children are more simple than we sophisticated adults. That given the right environment they will act in a certain way. We forget that, just like us, they are sinners and image bearers. Just in smaller packages. These things are true of all humans (no matter how small):

• They are sinners.
• They absolutely need to make war on their sin, but they can not win against sin in their own strength.
• Only Jesus can fix their sin problem by his substitutionary atonement on the cross. Only by trusting in Him can anyone have a new heart.

Help children grasp repentance and forgiveness in response to sin.

We need to be about the business of modeling repentance and forgiveness for our children. Over and over. Surely we sin around them many times each day and each is an occasion to teach our children how to respond to sin.

It is easy to fall into the trap of nitpicking at their sinful behavior while ignoring our own but we must model for our children a vigorous battle against our sin! We need to be real aware of the “logs” in our eyes and hard at work dealing with those in order to effectively be able to remove the “specks” from our children’s eyes. That isn’t to say we don’t correct their sin, just that as adults we had better ALSO be dealing with our own sin.

Just as we model repentance and forgiveness when we sin, each time they sin there is an opportunity to walk through the process of repentance as well. The process looks a little like this:

• First, name and identify the real issue. What is the sin? What does the Bible say about it?
• Second, confess our sins to the Lord. Our sin is always primarily an affront against Him.
• Third, pray and ask the Lord for help! Tell him about the struggle and ask him to help to make things right. Ask for help next time there is temptation!
• Third, apologize to whoever was impacted by the sin.
• Fourth, take any steps possible to make those relationships right.
• Fifth, move on! Trust that God’s promises are true. Enjoy and celebrate the reconciliation made possible by Jesus.

Conclusion

Giving our kids an understanding of how to solve their sin problem ought to be our top priority as parents! Life in a family is a perfect arena for modeling and teaching a Biblical response to sin including repentance and trusting in the atonement Christ accomplished for us on the cross. I hope this article inspires you to positively disciple your children by teaching them how to respond to sin. Give this article a share!

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