Why We Stopped Taking Our Kids’ Sin Personally

When it comes to parenting, everybody has advice for you. Mostly about how you should raise your kids. Less about theirs.

So I want to pass along one piece that actually held up, given to Tina and me a long time ago.

Our kids were little at the time. Around three, five and seven.

And like most parents, we had at least one strong-willed kid. Fine, all of them. We were dealing with attitudes and actions that needed discipline constantly, and some weeks it felt like we were running a small detention center out of our house.

That’s when our friend and mentor Pastor Johnnie stepped in and dropped the bomb.

Keep sin an issue between God and your kids

Johnnie suggested we work hard at keeping our children’s sin primarily an issue between them and God.

That we not take it so personally. That we stop stacking up wall after wall of hurt and shame between our kids and us.

He pointed us toward something David prays after he has committed genuinely horrible offenses against a man and his wife.

“Against you, and you alone, have I sinned!” — Psalm 51:4

Which is a strange thing to say, given how many people David had just hurt.

But Johnnie helped us see it. When our kids were disobedient or naughty or flat-out defiant, the deepest problem wasn’t that they’d crossed us. It was sin, and it needed dealing with between them and God. His forgiveness was what they actually needed.

So Johnnie’s counsel was to hand two things to God. Our kids’ rebellion, and our own hurt feelings and disappointment about it.

Then help our children go talk to God about whatever they’d done and ask for his forgiveness, and for help being obedient. Or nicer. Or more respectful.

If this is landing, we went further into it here: How To Parent With Grace (Not Fear or Control)

What that sounded like in our kitchen

Let me show you, because in practice it’s less lofty than it sounds.

Suppose our son, Little C, had lied to us about, oh, I don’t know, cutting his little sister’s hair one morning while we were asleep.

And suppose he repeatedly denied chopping a large chunk out of the back of her head when we asked him.

He lied. We knew it. He knew it. And Sissy sure knew it once she found a mirror.

So instead of the lecture, we’d say something like this:

“Hey son, your lying to us hurt our hearts a little. Mom and I feel bad when you don’t tell us the truth. And telling lies is a sin, buddy. You need to go have a talk with God and ask him to show you why you lied, and ask him to forgive you. Would you do that?”

“Uh huh.” And off he’d go to his room for a little repentance time.

Later we’d ask if he’d prayed and asked God to forgive him. He almost always had.

“Did God forgive you, son?”

“Yes.”

“And so do we. We love you, pal. Now let’s go help Sissy sort out her new hairdo.”

What it did over twenty years

There were still consequences sometimes. This was never a trick for avoiding discipline.

But doing it this way consistently as they grew up did two things we didn’t fully appreciate until later.

It kept walking them back to God rather than to us. Their relationship with him got exercised weekly, in ordinary kid-sized failures, long before anything big came along.

And it kept a mountain of hurt from piling up between us and them. We never became the ones they’d wronged. We stayed the ones helping them take it to the one they’d actually wronged.

That kept our relationship in the right place, and it kept theirs with God growing at the same time.

Here’s a brief video version you can share with your community: The Best Parenting Advice I Ever Got

The part that’s hardest

I’ll be honest about which half was harder for us. It wasn’t the kids.

It was handing over our own hurt.

When your child lies to your face, something in you wants that acknowledged. Wants the apology aimed at you. And every time we insisted on that, we made ourselves the offended party and quietly moved God off to the side.

And if you want the bigger picture of who God is behind all of this, start there instead: 4 Truths About God That Will Impact Your Parenting

Most of us were never actually shown how to do this with our own families.

FAQ

Q1: Doesn’t this let kids off the hook for how they treated me?
No. You still tell them plainly that it hurt you, the way we did with Little C. What changes is where the resolution goes. They still hear the impact; they just don’t carry it as a debt to you.

Q2: What age does this start working?
Ours were three when we started, and a three-year-old can absolutely go talk to God about hitting his sister. The words get more real as they get older, but the pattern is what you’re building, and it’s better built early.

Q3: What if my kid says God didn’t forgive them, or that they didn’t feel anything?
That’s a gift, not a problem. Now you get to talk about what forgiveness rests on, which isn’t their feelings. Some of the best conversations we had came out of exactly that answer.