It's very simple in the process of reprimanding our children for it to revert to anger and yelling. After the third, fourth, or more times of repeating ourselves, a calm response is hard to come by. There are two verses in particular that come to mind when I'm faced with this problem. One is Colossians 3:21: “Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.” The other is Ephesians 6:4: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”
What does it mean not to provoke our children? Colossians 3:21 has a more general provoking in view, as in simply to stir up, by one’s action, an emotion in someone else, and in this context, it’s plainly negative. “Do not stir up your children, lest they become discouraged” is to stir them up in an unhelpful, even sinful, way by sinning against them. It is misuse and abuse, in greater or lesser degree, of a father’s God-given role in the lives of his children. When we get angry and yell we are sinning against our children and showing them extreme emotion in resolving issues.
Ephesians 6:4, then, more specifically mentions provoking to anger. It is a warning against sinful fathers unjustly provoking their vulnerable children to (at least what begins as) righteous anger. Implications for fathers (and mothers with them), then, begin to become clear. We should not give our children any good reason to be angry. They may indeed get angry with us, as all sinners lash out against God’s own authority manifest in his appointees, but the charge to parents is not to give our children any just reason to be angry with us. And responding with anger and yelling the majority of the time is giving them just reason to respond in anger.
In other words, we should not sin against them, but treat them with Christian virtue; with as much kindness and respect as we treat any fellow adult in our lives, whether at work or at church or in the neighborhood. Having them as our children, instructed by the Lord to obey us, is patently no excuse for sinning against them. If anything, it is all the more reason to pursue every means possible, with God’s help, to treat them with the utmost Christian kindness and respect. We may even go so far as to say that our children, of all people, should be the ones we treat best, given their vulnerability and our vocation as parents, not the ones we treat worst. Which is a sobering calling. Sadly, the members of our own household are often the recipients of our poorest treatment. A wife is often the witness, and object, of her husband’s most unfiltered words and actions, and the children can be an even more troubling target. There’s more accountability and parity with a spouse who is a fellow adult, with more recourse for help, but children are in an especially defenseless situation.
So, Paul’s charge, general and specific, not to provoke our children, is in essence a penetrating warning not to abuse the remarkable stewardship God has given parents for the nurturing of their children. It is especially wicked to sin against our children, because they are our children and the very essence of our relationship with them is for their good and not their harm. The wakeup call for parents, and for fathers in particular; is that we are sinners too, adult sinners, and our sins have even greater repercussions than the missteps of our children, and tragically our children are frequently the victims of the dragon still within us. It’s not as if we’re sinners only in our relationships with other adults, and above the law when parenting our children. We are sinners in every facet, and often most dangerously so in our parenting.
Parenting is not first and foremost about our children’s sins. It is first about ours. Yes, our children are in need of our gentleness and careful attention to help remove the childhood specks from their eyes. And we first, and continually, need to remove the adult logs from ours, so we can genuinely help our children, and not harm them. Even more important than the work God is doing through us in parenting is the work he is doing in us while parenting. Even more, the work he is doing in us in this season of life is vital to our being a vessel of his work for our children.
