Parenting Series--ABCs Christian Parenting--Part 6

This week in my parenting series we are going to talk about a subject that I am sure for some is difficult to do, esp. when it comes to our child. That subject is forgiveness. Like I said last week, each of these topics are getting to be a little more challenging.

FORGIVE your child’s wrong doings as the Lord forgives you and start over together with God's grace and love.

When I read that sentence several different thoughts started pouring into my mind. Thoughts like "do unto others as you would want them to do to you" and Ephesians 4:32--"Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you." and "forgive as God forgave you"(Colossians 3:13)

These verses just don't apply to us when we are dealing with other adults but they apply when we are dealing with our child too! With being a stay at home mom, I can go days without interacting with other adults(besides hubby). However, I interact with my children on a daily basis and I can tell you that they are not perfect and they do wrong and yes I have to discipline them. In an effort to be a good example, I make sure that I take the time to forgive them as well after I explain to them why I felt that they had done wrong.

I am sure that forgiveness doesn't come easy for some of us(I know it doesn't come easy for me). We want to be angry and hurt rather than forgiving. It is so freeing though when we do forgive, esp. when our children do something to hurt us. Something as simple as them breaking our rules that we have established can hurt us. Or having a teenager that rebels and goes totally the opposite way that we as parents have taught them can hurt us as well. In each of those instances, we are to take the "high road" and forgive them. We might not like what they have done but they are our children and we need to forgive them.

Elizabeth Elliot said it well in one of her Back to the Bible broadcasts, "Now in order to forgive others, you and I must know that we have been forgiven, that we have received grace, that we have had our sins canceled on the cross. How can we forgive someone else if we have not received the grace of God that forgives us? But the deeper our recognition of our own need of that grace--the worse our sins appear to us to be, the more we marvel at the amazing grace of God and the more humbly we accept the grace that He gives to us--the more ready we will be to offer to someone else the grace of forgiveness, someone who has abused or cheated or betrayed or lied about us. We must receive God's grace for ourselves first."

Once we realize that we have God's grace we can share it with our child!

Don't let that guilt you feel because you think you didn't raise your child right, hence the reasoning behind their waywardness, get in the way of you forgiving them.