Obedience & Respect

What do these mean? Well from the Merriam-Webster dictionary they mean the following...

Obedience - an act or instance of obeying b : the quality or state of being obedient.

Ok so what does obey mean?

Obey - 1 : to follow the commands or guidance of. 2 : to conform to or comply with

Respect: 1 : a relation or reference to a particular thing or situation 2 : an act of giving particular attention : consideration 3 a : high or special regard

Our children are told to be respectful and obey us as parents. We as Christians are to do the same thing with God. We are to obey God's commands as the bible tells us.

Ok but why? Just because "I said so"?

Tonight Emma was being disrespectful and disobedient. This is becoming more of an issue as she gets older. I'm not a spanker nor will I ever be. So this has caused me to try other methods of discipline which sometimes seem harder but usually work. The only one that hasn't is this respect/obedience thing.

There have been times when I want to slap her then scream at her "because I said so"! But I don't and try to come up with other alternatives. They usually involve some yelling, taking something away, etc. So far nothing that has worked completely.

But tonight God gave me an answer. It's something that I have learned recently in my walk with him.

It's not about obeying just because "we're supposed to". It's not about just following the rules because that's the way it is.

It's about doing it out of love.

A few weeks ago I was telling the Christmas story to my class at church. Some of the kids honestly thought I was referring to the movie when I said I was going to tell the Christmas story. How sad is that?

When I finished, I asked what the story was all about. A kid who is very troubled and has a really sad story raised his hand and said "it's about God's love". This was huge! So huge that I can't go into it right now.

But it's so true. Jesus is all about Love. God sent his one and only son here because he loves us that much. Jesus asked Peter three times if he loved him. Finally when Peter had answered three times yes, he said "Follow me".

He wants us to follow him because he love him. Not just because we're supposed to. Not because he said so. But because we love him so much we don't want to hurt him. We want to WANT to follow him because we wouldn't want to not to.

I realized tonight this is the same thing with parenting. We want our kids to be obedient. We want them to be respectful and productive adults. Part of being a productive adult at times is about being obedient. But if they are only being obedient because they feel they need to, that is going to backfire someday.

There needs to be a deeper level of understanding when it comes to obedience. It needs to be focused on love not on the disciplined act of obedience.

So now that I have this piece... I just need to figure out how and where to being in teaching this to my 7 year old...