Col. 3:21Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.

Eph. 6:4 Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

Sherri and I have to discuss and evaluate how we teach our children all the time. It is a never ending conversation, because we seem to constantly drift toward unhealthy parenting. What follows are a few ways in which we discussed what it means to provoke our children.

Playing favorites

• Some parents do this on purpose to manipulate their children, but many do this not realizing. Among divorced parents this can happen more easily, especially when one kid stays with one parent more often.

Disciplining them only for selfish reason and not to teach them right and wrong.

• Discipline is for the good of the child. But is easy to discipline our children for personal gain. Anger often comes out during selfish times, that is one reason we should try not to discipline in anger all the time.

Being inconsistent

• When we don’t discipline for something and then blow up the next time we see them do the very same thing, it sends mixed messaged to our children and leaves them confused, frustrated, or discouraged.

Unrealistic expectations

• A 2 year old can’t realistically be left alone to clean a room by themselves. Not every child is going to make straight A’s. Our kids are all different they excel in different things and we don’t punish one kid for not excelling the way big sister or brother does.

verbal abuse

• Talking to your child in a rude, less than human way is always going to provoke them to not honor their parents.

Never admitting when you are wrong.

• Parents who never admit they are wrong are only training their children to never admit they are wrong. It will provoke a child less for a parent to admit their faults than to just think “they’ll get over it.”

Always focusing on the negative and not the positive

• Parents need to praise the children more than correct them. If the majority of the time that you converse with your children is to get on to them, they will resent you. Talk to your children more than just to say, “Stop it, don’t do that, why did you do that, clean that up, go play, go to your room.” Tell them when you are proud of them. You should encourage your kid more than any other adult.

Failing to keep our promises

• Okay, sometimes we just can’t follow through. But when we make promises on a regular basis that we know we are not going to be able to keep or just don’t plan on keeping, we are failing to be the parent the Bible calls us to be.

By disrespecting your parents in front of your children.

• We as parents should be careful how we talk about our parents in front of our kids. If we want our kids to honor us, we should honor our parents especially in front of them.

When you don’t support them or say “I love you” to them.

• I still like to hear my parents tell me they love me. No one is going to tell my kids they love them more than me. If you don’t, some creep might.

2 Tim. 2:13 “if we are faithless, he remains faithful.”

I for one am thankful that God’s faithfulness is not dependent on me being faithful to him. In fact this type of thinking is actually the opposite of the gospel. God did NOT save me because of my faithfulness and he does NOT keep me because of my faithfulness.

He wasn’t faithful to rescue the Israelites out of Egypt because of their faithfulness. To the contrary, they were some awefully faithless people. Even right before they crossed the Red Sea they were complaining about dying and wanted to go back to Egypt (Exodus 14:11-12). And the worst thing about this is they had seen God perform the 10 plagues miraculously. How Faithless is that? But God parted the Red Sea and saved them anyway. But they still complained and displayed their faithlessness by building a golden calf. They were faithless, He was and is faithful!

Even Peter did not remain faithful. Jesus makes it clear that the reason Peter did not give up the faith was because of Jesus’ faithfulness to pray for him. Luke 22:32 says “but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.” Once again, Peter denied Jesus 3 times being unfaithful, but God was faithful keep him so that his faith would not fail.

This is great encouragement because I am unfaithful in so many ways. It is a constant reminder that it is not by my works or my faithfulness but by his grace through faith which is a gift from God. Yes, that’s right even the faith the we have is a gift from God. So we cannot even take credit for that.
Eph. 2:8-9 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.