How should I respond to my kids when I am struggling with losing patience with them?
Well, thanks so much for engaging with our sermons and all of the content that we’ve been putting out for our 40 day focus on stewarding God’s many gifts. This past week we had the opportunity to talk about stewarding our children and looking at what Moses taught in Deuteronomy 6 regarding how to diligently and consistently steward them as the body of Christ.
We got to learn more about how to rest in the fact that God has saved us and to answer our kids questions accordingly. And this week a question that has come in is one regarding how to have patience in the midst of being frustrated with our children. And I think that as a parent, I speak for many of us when I say that that happens quite a bit.
That’s a consistent thing that many of us might struggle with, feeling frustrated because we’re teaching our kids the same thing over and over again. And so the first thing I want to say, I hear you and I understand and that’s totally normal. But I do think God’s Word gives us many things that we can pull from when we’re going into those interactions with our children.
And the first thing that I would go to is actually prayer. I would actually say that one thing we can all be doing is making sure that we’re spending adequate time in prayer with the Lord before we’re entering into these interactions with our kids.
That can be frustrating or can drain our patience and not waiting until those things are happening to pray about them. So one thing I like to do actually is pray in the morning, right as soon as I wake up about the things that I will be doing as a parent that day and just asking God to go before me into those interactions with my daughter, a small child, and helping me know how I can reach her, how I can speak to her in a way that will get through to her and show her his love.
I think another thing that we can ponder and prepare ourselves for as we go into our everyday parenting interactions is something that one of my favorite authors likes to say, and it’s that we are actually a lot more like our children than we are unlike them. So this means that we actually should realize as we’re parenting that we need grace too.
We need it so desperately.
And instead of thinking of ourselves as people who have all the answers and we are right and we want to get our point across to our kids all the time taking a step back and realizing that God is parenting us. He is a good father and he is showing us how to teach our kids. And so we also might mess up and being willing to come clean to our kids and apologize, I think can really help us bridge that gap with them and reminding them that we need help too, and that God is helping us in everything that
we’re doing. And another thing that we can be thinking about too is the fact that we don’t just want to be approaching things from a place of wanting behavior modification, but that what we’re trying to do every day when we parent our kids is show them the heart of Jesus and show them that what we’re actually battling with is sin.
That’s the problem that all of our kids have and that we all have is we’re all fighting sin.
And so I think as we go into those potentially difficult situations, thinking about the fact that it’s not us versus our kids, it’s us and our kids versus sin. And we get to fight those battles together. So those are just a couple things that we can think about. Another really important verse that I love to go to when struggling through these things is in Isaiah.
It’s a verse that talks about that how God’s word will never return void.
So every day as you’re going through these things and disciplining your kids and telling them maybe the same thing for the millionth time that day, hopefully it’s in alignment with God’s word and we can remember that he has promised that his word will never return void. So I encourage you, I stand with you, and I say that we can do this because of God’s work in us and not because of anything we can do.
We don’t have the power to change our kids hearts. It’s him working in them and us being useful tools and instruments for his glory in their lives. So keep going.
Don’t lose heart. Don’t grow weary. And I know that God will continue to guide us as we all grow on this journey of parenting.