Elisabeth Elliot on obedient children...

As usual, she says it so much better than I.....

The Comfort of Discipline

Too many parents today hate their children. We saw it a couple of weeks ago, and in church at that. Lars and I attended a very small church where there was a very large number of small children. The creaking of pews, rustling of books and papers, dropping of crayons and toys and offering-plate nickels, talking, crying, and traipsing up and down the aisles for trips to the rest room all made it quite impossible to listen to the sermon. One child who was sitting with his father in front of us was passed forward over the back of the pew to his mother. Immediately he wanted daddy. Back over the pew again, headfirst into his father's lap. In a few minutes, up to mommy. So it went.

A week later we went to a much larger church with over a hundred children present. They were quiet. We were amazed, and later questioned a couple who were members there. ''We believe Christian parents should control their children," they said simply. Where did they get that idea, we wanted to know. Well, from the Bible. The Book of Proverbs speaks repeatedly of the use of the rod. One reference is in chapter 13: "A father who spares the rod hates his son, but one who loves him keeps him in order." The implication is clear: The keeping of order, where children are concerned, sometimes requires the use of the rod.

In the small church, it seemed, they hated their children. In the big one they loved them. They were taught (from the pulpit, the couple told us) to love them according to the Bible's definition of love: Keep them in order.

My dear friend Mari, the wife of a Welsh shepherd, writes often about lessons she learns from watching sheep. In a letter to me she described a very hard winter:

All the sheep were brought down from the mountain early, about one thousand breeding ewes. Two hundred are wintering in a lowland farm while the others are hand-fed here with hay and maize. The grass is covered with snow...When John wants to move sheep or cows from one pasture to another it is a hopeless job when the lambs or calves take to running their own way. They will be followed invariably by their mothers, who will go headlong after their offspring, blindly, in their care for them. What chaos! If only the parents would stay where they were, holding their ground, defending their standpoint, the little ones would eventually return to them and would willingly be led together to the right place.

Although our men are fighting hard against nature's elements these days, even that's easier than fighting unchanged, selfish human nature. I wonder: are the sheep and cows a true picture of what's happening in the world? Road men refuse to grit and salt the snow-covered roads; dustmen, gravediggers, and others are pressing for more money. It is so true that money is the source of all evils. If it isn't the capitalists it's the workers. This has been true in every generation. But now parents are leaning backwards to please their children, afraid of displeasing them. Teachers live in fear of their pupils at school, bosses are afraid of the workers, the government of trade unions. It's anarchy.

Anarchy is the complete absence of order and authority. It's what lambs and calves like. It's what people like too--for themselves. (It's another matter when the neighbors scorn order and authority.) A Houston high school principal described the new educational system as a "cross-graded, multi-ethnic, individualized, open-ended learning program with the main objective being to learn respect for the uniqueness of a person." Maybe that's what the parents in the little church were aiming for. It was open-ended, all right, and each unique little individual was doing his or her not particularly unique thing. The result was chaos, if not downright anarchy. A short lesson, emphasized in the vestibule with a narrow "board of education," i.e., a rod, might have done wonders to teach small individuals respect for the persons around them, who were there not to provide an audience for their antics but to worship.

The trouble starts, of course, not when the kids tumble out of the station wagon and charge into church. It starts at home, before they can walk, with parents who believe that love means giving them what they want and letting them do what they choose. They don't like ordinary food. They blow it out when they're babies and throw it on the floor or down the garbage grinder later on. They scream for other foods, and their screams are rewarded. If screams don't do the trick, tantrums will, especially in public. (Watch them around the gumball machine in any supermarket. The initial "No" is quickly reversed.) A child who doesn't throw tantrums can use another weapon--he can go into a sulk. His parents pity him and this teaches him to pity himself. When things don't go his way he knows that he has a right to resentment. The spiritual implications in later life of this kind of early training are disastrous: ''If God loves me he will give me what I want. If he does not give me what I want he does not love me." That isn't what the Bible teaches, of course, but it's what a child may conclude if his parents operate this way.

Training children, like corralling calves and lambs, is a great deal of trouble. It takes sacrifice. It's much easier to let them go. But you can't do that if you care about them. Only the one who cares about them will go to the trouble of bringing them under control. "The good shepherd gives his life for the sheep." The sheep don't take kindly to the crook he uses, to the dogs who herd them where they don't want to go, or to the disinfectant baths they are plunged into. It is the shepherd's sole purpose to take care of them, to see to their well-being according to his wisdom, not according to their whims.

My parents loved us enough to make us wear galoshes (those awful things with black metal clasps) when "nobody else had to wear them"; to see to it that we got five meals a day (three for the body and two for the soul, the latter including hymns, Bible reading, and prayer); to say no to things like candy or coming in when we felt like it, or skipping piano lessons and church; to give us chores to do around the house and to make it clear that if we didn't do them they wouldn't get done; to give us an allowance even during the Depression and teach us that some of it belonged to God; to stick by what they had said--line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little. They drew lines. We knew where they were drawn. They didn't move them. They knew more about life than we did, and had a fairly clear picture of what was good for us. Like other kids we complained that they didn't love us or they would do so-and-so. "When you have children of your own," Mother would often say, "you can let them do that if you want to." She knew we wouldn't want to--if we loved them.

We've got it backwards--love says don't restrain, hate says restrain. God puts it the other way: "The Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives. . . . If you are left without discipline . . . then you are illegitimate children and not sons" (Hebrews 12:6, 8 RSV). "When we fall under the Lord's judgment, he is disciplining us, to save us from being condemned with the rest of the world" (1 Corinthians 11:32 NEB).

It is not difficult for adults to see what's wrong with other parents and other people's children. But how blind we are in our childish reactions to the dealings of a kind Heavenly Father! The motive for discipline is love. Its purpose is salvation. The people of Israel muttered treason against him and said, the Lord hated us that he brought us out of Egypt" (Deuteronomy 1:27 NEB). Freed from slavery, they missed onions. Led by the Lord of Hosts himself with his angels and a pillar of cloud and fire, they were terrified of the Amorites. "You saw how the Lord your God carried you all the way to this place as a father carries his son. In spite of this you did not trust the Lord your God" (verse 32).

Discipline or "chastening" can be a painful thing for us poor mortals. We think only of the "rod" itself--the hard experience, the prayer that was answered with a No, the shattered hope, the misunderstanding, the blow to pride--forgetting the loving Hand that administers the lesson and the Savior who like a shepherd leads us. We forget how much we need his tender care.

As parents, let us faithfully remember that the keeping of order sometimes requires the use of the rod. As children of the Father and sheep of his pasture, let us remember humbly to accept his discipline, praying:

We are Thine, do Thou befriend us, be the Guardian of our way;
Keep Thy flock, from sin defend us, seek us when we go astray.