Every parent wants their child to become obedient and turn out well. But is that the starting point for Christian parenting? Don't miss the next HAVEN Today as Charles Morris is joined by pastor and Christian counsellor, Dr. Ted Tripp, for a program called "Shepherding A Child's Heart".

September 25, 2007

Shepherding a Child’s Heart, Part 2 w/Dr. Tedd Tripp

When we miss the heart, we miss the Gospel. If the goal of parenting is no more profound than securing appropriate behavior we’ll never help our children understand the internal things, the heart issues that push and pull behavior, the heart issues of what eventually God uses to lead us to grace. I’m Charles Morris and welcome to Haven Today, telling the great story that’s all about Jesus. This is a program called, “Shepherding a Child’s Heart”. Stay tuned, pastor and Christian counselor Tedd Tripp will be joining us on a program where we talk about how to raise children and lead them to Jesus.

Song: Come, Now is the Time to Worship
Performed by: Haven

Welcome back to Haven Today for part 2 of a program called, “Shepherding a Child’s Heart” and we have on with us Dr. Tedd Tripp, a pastor as well as a parent and now a grandparent from Eastern Pennsylvania. Tedd, welcome back to the program
TT: Thank you Charles. I’m glad to be with you again.
CM: We were on last time together and we’ve actually posted that program up on our website, haventoday.org, but just let me ask you one more time, how did you get started? How did you write what has become one of the bestselling books on raising children of all time? And I know you’re not gloating on that, but that’s a fact too.
TT: yeah, well actually we had no anticipation that the book would be received as it has been received and we are still stunned and surprised by it. But I was involved in ministry involved and involved in starting a Christian school with my wife Margie and raising 3 children and serving as a pastor of a church in Northeastern Pennsylvania and all those things put us into a lot of contact with children. We had just a whole gaggle of kids under the age of 12 in our church and a lot of parents with a lot of questions about raising kids, so that’s how the book came about. And in a sense it was kind of autobiographical. We started out with our own children, recognizing the importance of teaching them to be people under authority and we felt like we were doing a great job until our first son went to school and we realized that we had to be there. If we were there to give him directions he was OK, but without us there to give direction he was in trouble and so we realized, boy we’ve got to get beyond just simply managing behavior. And that really got us thinking about the heart, the heart issue
CM: Sure
TT: Then the whole issue of appealing to his conscious and helping him to understand the ways his heart was straying from God that was behind the ways his behaviors strayed from God. And then as our kids got into their teenage years we realized, boy we really want to see our kids embracing the Gospel. We want them to embrace the Gospel as their own living faith. So it’s more than just a matter of us controlling teenagers. It’s a matter of us helping teenagers see the vitality and goodness of God’s ways and learn to live before him.
CM: Through your own honesty as a fallen person.
TT: That’s right, that’s right. Through our own integrity as someone who can stand in solidarity with them as part of a fallen race of people. And just recognizing, you know, we are fallen. And you know, I know people think sometimes, “Oh, there’s that ‘doom and gloom’ aspect of Christianity again,” but the reality is, all of us know that we are many times we are disappointed with ourselves.
CM: Yes
TT: We can’t even keep on a diet. We go some place, we promise we’re not going to say something unkind and we get drawn into situations and there it goes again.
Cm: Sure
TT: We disappoint ourselves continually. We think, “Boy, I’ve yelled at my kids. I don’t want to be like that. I’m –
CM: Yeah, I’m going to make them better than me!
TT: Yeah, exactly, so I’m going to stop yelling.” But then we find ourselves exasperated another time and yelling at our kids so, all these things, you know, we know that we’re part of a fallen race of people. So it’s acknowledging that and recognizing that not only are we fallen but there’s grace, there’s grace in Jesus Christ to transform us and to set us free.
CM: Tedd, I recall talking to a young Presbyterian elder a few years ago and he was an elder in a Presbyterian church in Chicago and he decided that this was too scary a world to raise a child. And he finally did have a child, but there was one point in life where he was newly married and he just thought it was too dangerous. What do you say to someone like that?
TT: Well, I’ve had exactly that situation. We had a couple in our church who had been married for a number of years who had not had any children, quite intentionally, and when I taught through “Shepherding a Child’s Heart” the first time in the church that I serve, back in the late 80’s he said afterwards, “You know, this has given us the courage that we can have children, that there is a hope for us because God has laid out for us truth, pathways of truth that we can walk in and we can expect, you know, good results.” And this couple now have a couple of teenagers that are just sweet, fun kids to be with and they’ve been very diligent, very faithful in showing their kids God’s ways. So I guess what I would say to a parent who looks around him and looks at the way the culture is, looks at the way he sees a lot of young people turning out and feels scared, I would say there’s hope. Boy, there’s hope because God’s has not left us just to figure this out on our own. He’s given us a book. And the Bible is true and we can take these truths that we find in the Bible and collate them and apply them to this task of raising kids with good results.
CM: Tedd, I said on our last program together I was going to do this. And I know there were people that were hanging on to every word you said last time and now they’re listening again. Yeah, they agree, grace and heart over behavior but would you just please tell me how to do it? Why don’t we talk about the 2 big issues I can think of? One, communication and then I’ll ask you about discipline as well. How do we communicate with our children and do it in a godly way and how do we keep communicating even as they begin to grow older?
TT: Well, I think one of the important things as we think about good communication is just recognizing that communication is not just monologue, it’s dialogue and the Proverbs speak to that so powerfully. Proverbs 18:2 says, “The fool does not delight in understanding but in airing his own opinion.” And what that passage is telling us is that when I’m a person who is just getting something off my chest and I’m not understanding the person I’m talking with, I’m acting as a fool. And boy, I have had to hang my head many times Charles to say, “I was a fool in this conversation with this child. I could have said everything I wanted to say, everything it was appropriate to say in the context of asking good questions and drawing this child out and drawing him along with me but instead I just went into my speech mode and just gave him my speech.” And of course you know what happens when you speech at your kids? The eyes glaze over and their gone, you know, they’re just waiting and, they may not be visibly tapping their toe on the floor saying, “When is he going to be done?” But inside that’s what they’re doing. And we’re getting nowhere. But it’s so thrilling to think about, you know, asking good questions, drawing our children out, understanding them. One of my favorite phrases with my kids was always, “Help me understand. You know, help me understand. What were you feeling in this situation?” Or even before that, “What was the situation you were in? What were you feeling? You know, how were you responding to that? What did you choose to do in that situation? Why did you think that was going to make things better? What was the result?” You know, and those kinds of questions get to motivation,
CM: Yes
TT: They get to what the kid’s actually did, but they also enable a parent to say, “Yeah, I understand. It was pretty hard when your brother you know, came in there and knocked over the checker game you were playing. And I understand that was hard, and I can understand the desire to strike out at him, verbally or however, but what were you trying to accomplish when you did that?” Which is really a motivation question, but it’s delighting in understanding. Or another Proverb, 18:13 says, “He who answers before listening, that is his folly and his shame,” and again I’ve got to hang my head with that one in my house.
CM: Yeah, everything you’re telling me is directed to me, Tedd, it’s not directed to my kids.
TT: People say to me sometimes, it’s so nice Charles, “You must have been in our house.” And I say, “No, I’ve been in my house.”
CM: You were listening in on a phone call I had with my son in Spokane just last Sunday afternoon, you know. But I had to ask him to forgive me the next day.
TT: Yeah, it’s just so easy to do that. We see them coming, we say, “I know what you’re going to ask and the answer is no.” “But Dad” “What part of no don’t you understand?” “But Dad I didn’t ask my question!” “ You don’t have to ask your question. I’m your father. I know what you’re going to say before you say it.” Well kids never walk away happy that they’ve got a dad that’s a mind reader, they walk away feeling like, “I can’t get to first base with you. Before I even spoke you fired off your response.”
CM: The speech, as you called it.
TT: That’s right. I answered before listening.
CM: That’s right. If you’ve just joined us, we have on Haven Today, Dr. Tedd Tripp and he has revised and updated his famous book, “Shepherding a Child’s Heart” and I thought we needed to have him back on the air after the absence of a few years. OK, I mentioned communication. Let me move you into, anything new on, well, just approaching discipline with our children?
TT: well, I’ve refined a lot of what was in the first edition of “Shepherding a Child’s Heart” with regard to spanking children. And you know, that’s a topic that of course is a very controversial topic and one of the reasons it’s controversial, I think, is there are a lot of people, in your audience Charles, there are a lot of people in every seminar that I teach anywhere in the world who were abused as children.
CM: Yes
TT: Whose experience was an out of control angry parent striking them out of frustration whenever they had had it up to their eyeballs, and so young people think, “That was a horrible experience for me. I never want to do that with my kids.”
CM: And they think of that as discipline, godly discipline.
TT: Right. That’s exactly right and it’s really child abuse and it’s always wrong. And we can never discipline in anger. We can never just strike children when we’re frustrated with them. We’ve got to look at discipline very carefully and understand very carefully what God is calling us to. And there’s some very clear passages in the book of Proverbs that talk about physical discipline and children. In seminars I love teaching this material because I’m teaching a live group of people and I’m there. People can see me, they can see my facial expressions, they can see my eyes, they can see – I trust – kindness and compassion in me that helps contextualize it a little more easily than one can do in –
CM: Here on the radio. That’s right. My kids will never let me forget Tedd, and we tried to do the right thing. And by the way, we’re on in some places like in Canada it’s illegal to spank your kids. Some places we’re on the air besides Canada it would be illegal, but we used the wooden spoon approach in our house and I broke a couple of wooden spoons. And my kids will never let me forget the time that I spanked them and they didn’t do anything wrong. And here it is you know, many, many years later and believe me, I’ve ask their forgiveness many times. Now it’s a joke. They actually laugh about it because well, my daughter especially, she has her own children and you know, she gets in those frustrated moments. But you know what? The fact is, we can ask for forgiveness. And anger doesn’t have to be the rule in a household.
TT: That’s exactly right. And one of the steps that I recommend in the book, “Shepherding a Child’s Heart” is that step of securing the acknowledgement of the child, so that when a child is going to be disciplined you’re telling them clearly,
CM: Yes, yes.
TT: “Honey this is what you’ve done that is wrong” or “This is what you failed to do that you should have done,” and “Do you understand, you know, what I’m talking about?” and so forth. And I want to secure an acknowledgement from the child. And you know, my point with parents is always, I would always rather err on the side of mercy than on the side of judgment.
CM: Yes
TT: You know if the child says, “No, you’ve got it wrong” I’m going to back off.
CM: Yes
TT: Because I don’t want to be in a situation where I’m ever disciplining a child who is innocent and I have misread a situation. That’s very easy for me to do that. So I don’t want to ever be in that situation. So that’s one of the recommendations I make.
CM: and you talk about this in appealing to the child’s conscience. I think that’s how you put it.
TT: That’s right.
CM: How do you then correct with a central focus that keeps coming back to redemption?
TT: Well I think one of the things that, you know, that we do, is we talk to our kids about the fact that, you know, “Daddy loves you. I’m not angry with you. You have done something that is wrong and I’m going to have to discipline you. And I want you to remember, I discipline you because I love you.” See that’s what the book of Hebrews says in chapter 12. It says, “Have you forgotten the word of encouragement that addresses you as sons? My son, don’t despise the Lord’s discipline because he disciplines those whom he loves just like the father disciplines a child he delights in.” So I’m saying to my child, “Honey, Daddy loves you, but you know, I’m going to have to discipline you.” And then in the course of that conversation and discussion with the child, one of the things I want to say is, “You know this is why Jesus came. Jesus came because you and Daddy are people that stray from God’s ways like lost sheep and there’s hope for us, and that hope is found in Christ and Christ’s grace.” And I think always in the context of talking with our children and disciplining them, you know, we want to be pointing them to that grace. You know, “Christ came to change us and I want to pray for you. I want to pray that you would be a boy or a girl who love God and who obey Mom and Dad.” So I think there’s got to be a lot of tenderness with it. But you know one of the things we found, Charles with our kids is that because we really worked hard at training them to obey Mom and Dad; we worked hard at helping them to embrace the goodness of common courtesy and kindness to one another. We don’t strike one another, those kinds of things. And we disciplined them, when they were young, when they were younger children for those issues, we found that as we were raising our children there were months that would pass sometimes without the necessity of someone having a spanking. So it wasn’t something that was just always, every day is about spanking children. Boy when every day is about spanking children I’d be very alarmed.
CM: Yeah, yeah
TT: There’s something wrong with what’s going on here.
CM: Tedd we really haven’t even talked about this. We brushed on it yesterday, but you know, children have sin in their hearts but it’s not just the kids. It’s the parents too.
TT: Yeah, that’s exactly right. One of the things I always talk about in seminars and have talked about in “Shepherding a Child’s Heart” is the fact that we as parents have strayed from God. In fact, it’s very interesting if you think about it, there are really no sins that my children ever commit that I know absolutely nothing about. You know, the desire to strike out in revenge, whether that’s physically or verbally, the desire to shave the truth or misrepresent myself when I feel like my back’s against the wall, unkind words. All those things that my kids struggle with, I struggle with I struggle with.
CM: Yes
TT: One of the ways that I think about it is there’s a when, a what and a why to behavior. And the when of behavior is the circumstance, the what of behavior is whatever it is I’m doing, but the why of behavior is always internal. One of the illustrations I use sometimes, I come home from work, there’s a bicycle in my pathway in the driveway. I’ve got to get out of the car, move the bicycle, get back in the car, drive in the driveway. I go in and find the kid that blocks the bicycle and I say, “Why’d you leave your bicycle in the driveway? I told you never to do that! I’m going to drive over it next time!” And I’m railing at this kid. Now if you came along at that moment and said, “Tedd, Tedd, why are you so angry?” I would probably say to you, “I’m angry because he left his bicycle in the driveway.” But that’s not why, that’s when. The hwy of my anger is I want my will to be done on earth as God’s will is done in heaven. I want to speak and it happens. I want to say something to my children and ever after that they do as I said. I want to rule. In short, I want to be God. So it’s that sin in me that I’ve got to be continually dealing with and in dealing with my own sin and going to God, finding grace and forgiveness from Jesus Christ, I’m really modeling for my children that life of finding grace and forgiveness. And so our children ought to hear us come to them sometimes and say, “Honey, Daddy’s very sorry. I humiliated you in front of our guests because I was embarrassed. And I was not serving you then and that was wrong. Please forgive me.” And I think the willingness to do that not only is very cleansing in terms of the parent/child relationship it really preaches grace to our kids.
CM: Tedd, you’ve humbled me again, one more time and I needed that. So I’m glad I get to talk to you again today.
TT: Well, Charles I always enjoy speaking with you and I’m so thankful for the work of Haven and just the good things that you’re putting on the air that serve so many people.
CM: Well, I would like to please ask you to lead us one more time in prayer. And just pray for parents and pray for kids too.
TT: OK, let’s pray to God.
Lord, we come to you with grateful hearts for the fact that you have not left us in this world just to try and figure things out on our own but you have given us a revelation of truth in your Bible. And we can go to that truth and we find that it’s timeless and ageless and it’s always fresh and it describes us and it describes the world in which we live. It describes our struggles but it also describes for us a beautiful Savior, one who always did the will of God, one who delighted in speaking the Word of God and one who not only lived sinlessly but died as an infinite sacrifice for our sins and we thank you and we praise you for that grace that is found in Jesus Christ. And I pray Lord, for parents who feel guilty over their failures as parents and we all have felt guilty sometimes. I pray for your grace for them. I pray that they wouldn’t try to work off their guilt, or they wouldn’t go home and beat themselves up over their guilt because that just reinforces our pride and self righteousness. Lord I pray that you would help parents find grace and forgiveness and mercy in Jesus Christ and then bring that grace and that mercy to their children. And Lord I pray for children. I pray that you would incline children to hear your words from their parents. That they would not be cynical and hard, that they would not be arrogant and proud but that they would be humble and hear your word and see that the pathway that you lay out for us is the path of life and it’s a pathway of great blessing. Lord I pray that you would work your grace in the hearts of every parent under the sound of my voice and in the hearts of their children, whether their children are listening to the radio right now or not, that they would know the grace and mercy of God. We pray this for Christ’s glory, amen.

CM: Thank you Tedd for praying, thank you for sharing with us once again. It’s been a number of years since we’ve had you on the program and you now have your revised edition out of “Shepherding a Child’s Heart”. And I so appreciate your drawing on your years of experience as a pastor, and counselor and school administrator and father and now even as a grandfather. This is just an important time for us, living in a day and age when children become teenagers, become young adults and they don’t always know where to turn and they’re not fed spiritually all the time. But you can, and what’s going on in your child’s heart is so much more important because that leads to behavior. You don’t want to raise children just to be good children. You want to raise children to lead them to Jesus. And that’s what Tedd’s been doing through the book and now the revised book, “Shepherding a Child’s Heart” that we want you to have a copy of for, if you’re children are grown maybe this is a book that you could give to your church library or share with your children or share with some neighbor. This is a book on how to speak to the heart of your child and the things your child does and says flows from the heart. Luke 6:45 puts it this way, “Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.” I’ll give you our contact information in just a minute but first of all, let me say if you’d like to read more about the book you can get that by going to our website, haventoday.org. That’s one word, haventoday.org. And then after you read about the book, “Shepherding a Child’s Heart” you can also make your gift to Haven Ministries. We’ll send you these 2 days with Tedd Tripp on the program as a bonus CD when you get a copy of the book, just go to haventoday.org. You can also call us and here’s our telephone number, it’s toll free in North America, 1-800-65-HAVEN, 1-800-65-HAVEN. Please let us know the station you’re listening to when you get in touch at 1-800-654-2836. And for everyone who gives above and beyond the suggested gift amount to help us to continue to tell the great story every day around the world, that’s all about Jesus, you have my sincere and deepest thanks. Some people like to write to us and here’s our mailing address. In the United States write to Charles Morris:
Haven Today
Box 79997
Riverside, CA 92513
And in Canada you can write to Charles Morris at:
Haven Today
Box 6800
Vancouver, BC V6B4C9
I’m Charles Morris and thanks for being with me and Dr. Ted Tripp. Would you come back again tomorrow? We’ll be talking again about raising children by the heart. And that’s the way to do it biblically speaking. And we’ll do it together here on Haven Today.