Submission to Your Children is the Key to Parenting…No, Really!

Jonathan Edwards is a constant amazement to me. At the age of 26, upon the death of his grandfather Solomon Stoddard, he became the sole pastor of the largest church in New England outside of Boston. In spite of delicate health he spent 12 hours a day in his study, prepared and preached 2 sermons a week as well as a weekly lecture, started a mission to Mohawk Indians, led two revivals (the Connecticut Valley revival of 1734 and the Great Awakening of 1741-42), which made him an international figure, wrote books that are so profound and useful to the Church that they are still in print today. He did all that AND found time to get married and bring up eleven children! Doing all that and having a family is not what amazes me and inspires me. It is the kind of family he had.

Edwards had a very close and loving relationship with his wife Sarah, and the same was true of his children. They all loved, admired and respected him. One of Edwards’ protégés, Samuel Hopkins, who spent a great amount of time at the Edwards’ home, wrote about them saying “No person of discernment could be conversant in the family without observing and admiring the great harmony and mutual love and esteem that subsisted between them.”

It is one of the black eyes in Christian history that so few of the Church’s greatest leaders were as committed to God’s work in the home with the children God had given to them, as they were with the spiritual children God gave them in their churches.

I believe that one of the reasons Edwards’ legacy has continued as it has, is because he saw that being a good spiritual father in the church meant being a good natural father in the home.

That works as a good segue into what I want to talk about in my next few posts—parenting. Take a look at Ephesians 6:4 (NIV). Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.

It is very telling that the very first thing Paul says on the subject of parenting is, “fathers, do not exasperate your children. The Greek behind the word “exasperate,” literally means to provoke to anger or wrath.

Then he says, instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. That phrase, “bring them up,” is a translation of the same word the NIV translated “feeds” earlier in Ephesians 5:29. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church. The word means “to nourish.” It is in the environment governed by the goal of nurturing and maturing children that parents are called to train them and instruct them.

Parents are to relate to their children by modeling submission to one another out of reverence for Christ. Remember, verse 21 of chapter 5 (Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ) is the lynchpin to everything Paul says through verse 9 of chapter 6. Is that even possible? Is that even right? Parents submitting to their children out of reverence to Christ? The Duke of Windsor once said, “The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.” Isn’t that the road we are headed down if parents submit to their children?

Before I tell you what I believe Paul is saying here, let me say a few things about submission. “Submission” needs a PR campaign to rehabilitate its image. When we think “submission” we automatically take that to mean we are to be passive, quiet, and compliant. Am I right? We think to submit means to be a pushover.

That is not what submission means here. Submission means to recognize Christ’s authority and to willingly and joyfully live in obedience to it. So when, for example, Paul says wives submit to your husbands as to the Lord, it means recognizing and respecting the role and responsibilities that God has placed each of them in. Likewise, when Paul says wives should submit to their husbands, he was not saying wives should be “yes” people. Submission is about respecting that a marriage needs to look to the marriage between Christ and the Church as its example: and in that example, the husband is a type of Christ and the wife is a type of Church, and living in light of that.

I believe the answer Scripture gives to the question—how do parents live in submission to their children out of reference to Christ is this: it is the manner in which Paul admonishes parents to pursue the goals of training and instructing them: not in a way that exasperates their children, but rather in a way that nourishes them and helps them to flourish and grow. It is a submission to them by seeing children as God sees them, and relating to them out of that understanding.

In my next few posts I want to ask two questions:

1. How does God view children?
2. How does God want us to view our children?