Jonathan Switzer, Pastor, Crossroads Valley Chapel, Frederick, MD
I want to talk about an issue that has only at times been my own. Since it is not something that I deal with significantly personally, I want to request your permission to talk about it. I have not had as big a problem with this issue because my parents, though imperfect, were mostly godly, humble and prayerful. As such, they were very good models for me. Again, they were not perfect, but they persistently exuded grace from God and not legalism or harshness. I have had little reason to rebel from their exercise of parental authority in my life.
My topic?…recovering from harsh and legalistic parents and authority figures.
Corrie Ten Boom was a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany during World War II. Her sister, who died in the same prison camp, amazingly, helped her to learn to love the Nazi soldiers who were their captors. Corrie learned to love the cruel and harsh soldiers while they were being cruel and harsh to her. As a result, she ended up leading several of them to Jesus Christ.
There seems to be a need for believers to recognize that some of the people that were abusive to us in the past were actually often teaching us things that were important to learn. More importantly, God was supervising them to teach us those good things. Please follow me here…God was always there with us protecting us even from harsh and abusive parents/authorities.
I will explain this more fully, but for now please consider your response to those harsh authority figures.
I am going to speak in the language of “we” and not “you” because, though my parents were very godly, they were not perfect; but more difficult for me, I did have other authority figures through the years that were legalistic and harsh and from whom it was difficult to learn.
Because we were learning from abusive teachers (coupled with our resentments and personal sinful attitudes) we often did not learn lessons fully. Other times, we learned the lessons but due to our own sinful responses to their abuse we ended up learning abusive behavior along with the lessons.
God’s Discipline is Life
We possibly did not understand at the time that God can use ALL things for our benefit. As a result, now, we often don’t know how to let God finish teaching us those lessons. Our past hurts can, as a result, often limit our ability to receive from God the discipline that he has always had for us.
His discipline is life. Pastor John Schuch, a close minister friend of mine, likes to use the word train instead of discipline because the word discipline had been poorly used in his upbringing.
The point is that God wants to prepare us and train us. God’s discipline was never intended to be harsh and punitive but rather life-giving and helpful. Not that God is unwilling to bring a firm correction or rebuke when necessary, God certainly does that. But the LARGE MAJORITY of God’s discipline and training is not intended to be punitive but rather uplifting and building. God wants to teach us good things, right things.
So, if we were taught by imperfect or downright poor models, we need to learn to get back on the discipline horse. We often need to revisit the very painful ways that we were “disciplined” by our imperfect authority-figures and ask God to re-train us to do what our parents over-trained or poorly trained us to do. Often, the absent parents are the worse. They train nothing; leaving a child learning lessons all alone, feeling unloved.
Personal Inventory
In fact, it would be wise to do a personal inventory of those things that we were poorly taught to do by our parents. After doing the inventory we would ask the Lord to show us how to forgive our parents for exasperating us; for over training us; for not training us at all. Then, after God shows us how to forgive them, we should ask God to re-train us to do what our parents so poorly trained us to do.
This could include mundane things like cleaning our rooms, budgeting our finances, managing our time, maintaining priorities, taking care of cars and houses. Most importantly it could include learning to be self-controlled, resolve conflicts, avoid immorality or be at peace…anything our parents tried to teach us but did so poorly.
Attitude Most Important
I remember one time that I was trying to teach someone a skill. I was being harsh with them. I realized that I had been taught that particular skill by a harsh person. Because I did not let God use that harsh person, my attitude about that skill also ended up harsh.
We need God to re-teach us the right attitude to have. Our parents and authority figures often taught us to do things but to do them with a wrong motivation. We need God to teach us how to do those things with grace and not harshness or stress. We need him to show us better motivation to do those things; so that they come from a heart of gratitude toward God and not a need to please people; not from pride.
However, if we are not willing to let God teach us to do those things, then we will possibly find ourselves passing on to our own children the same harshness that we received OR, and this is just as bad, we can find ourselves overcompensating and not disciplining our children enough (that is spoiling them).
The Lord disciplines the son in whom He delights/loves. However, we can often limit how we want God to discipline us due to our bad memories. We can often totally reject a certain form of discipline that God wants to bring into our lives simply on the basis of our bad experience with that form of discipline from abusive and poor teachers/parents or mentors. As a result, we develop a philosophy of life; a view of life; that is faulty and ultimately man-centered (i.e. trying to not be like our parents).
God Always in Control
Consider Joseph, for example. The reality is this: to the extent that our parents or bad authorities trained us up according to worldly principles and not godly ones, they allowed humanistic, ultimately satanic influence into our lives. This influence, however, was NEVER beyond God’s control. God was always supervising. He allowed that bondage or suffering to happen only for a season, only for a time. Nevertheless, we often ended up getting tied up inside our heads and hearts due to our own and our parent’s sinfulness.
Like Joseph who was trained by Potiphar and the prison guards, God is still in control. What the devil meant for evil, God meant for good.
Nevertheless training toward good habits can be done poorly leaving us thinking/feeling that perhaps those habits are not really good or important. Yet, if we minimize those habits we can end up coddling ourselves and others. This can leave us spoiled brats in those areas. The point is that if our parents trained us poorly we can often give ourselves permission to be bratty or undisciplined in those areas of our lives.
Birth of Rebellion
Think about it. Twenty years of harsh, angry training is enough to make any of us want to push away, rebel and declare our freedom. Nevertheless, our freedom, or rebellion, can lead us to overcompensate. We can unwittingly fall into license where we spoil ourselves. We can find ourselves feeling vindicated every time we rail back at someone who tries to encourage a particular habit in our lives. We can find ourselves railing at God himself in the name of grace and freedom. We can feel like we have the right to be spoiled and bratty.
This is called a rebellious attitude.
I am sure that many of us have felt that burn of childish, selfish rebellion to things that we know deep in our gut were forced down our throats as children.
Satan’s desire is to make us feel horrible. His goal is to cram everything down our throats so that we give up hope and throw off all righteousness. His desire is to make us sick and tired of righteousness and breed into us a resentment of all authority and all discipline. This is why rebellion is said to be as the “sin of witchcraft”.
God’s Grace Redeems the Past
I had one person in my early life who was very meticulous about everything. I found it hard to be around them due to the sense that I was about to do something wrong. My heart began to resent having to “get things right”. I was starting to think that I would rather not worry about getting things right. My view of God’s grace began to fade.
However, the Holy Spirit comes and reminds us of the great good things that God has for us in the Gospel. The Holy Spirit pours out grace through Christ; enough grace that we can now go back and not just forgive our parents, but even allow God to use those same parents/bad authorities (or people who remind us of them) to train us in areas that they previously horribly failed to train us.
You very likely will say, you’re just not ready to go back and change in those areas. You are still too hurt to go back into those areas of your life. Well, that is fine. God is patient. This is why he calls us to just be willing and to submit to the voice of the Holy Spirit. God knows that you are not ready.
However, He also knows that you are ready for more than you think you are. He knows that Satan continues to lie to us to make us think that we are just worthless and will never be able to change; that we will never be ready. He knows that Satan’s lies can have the effect of making us lazy and ultimately wicked in any area of life.
Spiritual Laziness
The lazy man says there is a lion in the streets. Laziness comes either because of the perception of danger or because of actual danger. Fear of getting hurt again can produce in us the unwillingness to do even what is healthy and normal. It can drive us into our spiritual beds and away from the truth.
In Church history spiritual laziness is called sloth.
The point is that we need to recognize that our enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. We must be vigilant to not base our response to life on satanically produced fear leading to spiritual sloth/laziness. The fear of roaring lions must not be our motivation.
Walk by Faith, Not by Sight
I often find that I can not trust my heart. When it comes to what other people think of me, I have had to learn to trust what God says, not what my head is telling me.
We will have to walk by faith. Satan is a factor. He leaves you and I with a perverted view of reality. Further, Satan’s temptation, sin to be precise, further distorts our perspectives. Our eyes, our perceptions, are skewed. We are no longer able to identify what is right and what is wrong. We are often paranoid. Other times we swing the other way and are foolishly oblivious and naïve. This happens because Satan and sin are working to subvert reality. It leaves us confused.
Because our perceptions are skewed, we find ourselves in the lamentable position of no longer being able to trust our eyes. We are no longer able to trust our perceptions; not even our hearts can be trusted. This is why we have to walk by faith and not by sight.
God’s Plan To Make Us Like Him
Consider this illustration. If I angrily and harshly yell at my son to clean his room, yes, I have to go and apologize genuinely for losing my temper, hug him, look him in the eye and tell him I love him. But I still need to require him to clean his room.
It is not enough for you and I to just receive from God the love and delight that we never received from our parents or bad authorities. We also need God to discipline us, to train us, to change us into the people that He is capable of making us. Yes, first God heals the hurts from the past where we were abused, let down and broken. But God also, after we are healed, wants to develop our character, develop our gifts, develop our people skills, develop our parenting skills, develop our home-making skills, develop our time-management skills, develop our financial management skills. He still wants to help us to clean our rooms, to be responsible.
Most importantly, God wants to give us love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. He wants to change us inside first. He wants to teach us to love others and be capable of serving unselfishly.
How God Looks At Us
Ever seen a coach that is always yelling negatively at his players? What about the opposite? Even seen a coach that his players seem to love? Ever known a coach that seemed able to pull things out of his players that no one knew were there?
God loves us enough that He refuses to leave us as we are. He improves us. We are better because of Him in our lives. However, His improvement of us, training and discipline is always surrounded by thorough and complete delight and favor. He wants us to get back on the horse of discipline (from which we fell when we were hurt by people or parents in the past) with a pervasive sense that He is wild about us and thinks that we can do ALL things through Him who is strengthening us.
The point is not that you and I just need to be confident that we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us. Rather, almost more importantly, we need to know that God himself thinks that we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us.
Do you see the difference? What counts is that God is smiling at us saying, “way to go!” He even does so when we whiff and stumble and miss the ball. Why? Because he sees us trying and willing to do what He is asking us to do. That leaves us OBEDIENT.
As a result, God knows that He who began a good work in us will carry it on to completion. He knows that if we make every effort to add to our faith…it WILL keep us from being ineffective and unproductive in our walk with our Lord Jesus Christ. He knows that if we remain in Him and His words remain in us that we WILL bear much fruit.
How does He know all this? He is God. He knows these things. He made us this way. When we do things the way that He made us, it is amazing how efficiently our lives run. It is amazing how effective our lives can be for building His Kingdom and bringing Him glory. God knows that His word will not return void, but will accomplish that for which it was sent forth.
The Root Problem is Not Bad Parents/Authorities
I had this one teacher in elementary school that had a habit of making fun of me. He would do so in front of my fellow students. He seemed to think shame was a good motivator.
He was wrong…Why did God let him in my life?
Well, the truth is that even when we were being abused by poor parents or abusive teachers or cruel classmates growing up, even then God was superintending and overseeing our personal development. But because we lost faith, our perceptions became skewed and we fell into hopelessness thinking that God just did not care.
Thinking that God did not care, we often took matters into our own hands and let our hearts grow bitter toward the cruel people in our lives. Once we grew bitter and resentful, once we lost hope that God was in control and working all things together for the good of those that love Him, that is when the benefit that God was bringing into our lives through bad and cruel people was lost.
It was not when the bad and cruel people started being bad and cruel that our lives began to go astray. Rather, it is when we lost hope and began to doubt that God was able to use those bad and cruel people to accomplish a MIGHTY DESTINY for us. Of course, many of us never had hope of a loving God in the first place. In which case, the abuse may seem to have had little effect for good in us.
Nevertheless, scripture says that God will restore the years that the locust has stolen. I take this to mean that he can even use past abusive situations to His glory in our lives. What the devil meant for evil, God meant for good.
Job’s Friends/Humanity’s Wrong View of God
This is what was wrong with Job’s friends. At the heart of their bad formula for perceiving reality was the belief that God did not really have a great destiny and loving purpose for each of us; the belief that God did not find pleasure in bringing man into His glory; the belief that God did not so love the world that He would give His only son.
Their faulty belief led them to accuse the innocent, and ruthlessly attempt to impose punishment on Job in the name of God. At the end of the day, they had a low view of mankind. They did not understand that God’s destiny, his predestiny, for man was that man would be made righteous in Christ by faith, be adopted and be seated in the heavenly realms with Christ. Job’s friends did not know that sinful man would be holy and blameless in God’s sight by Christ’s blood.
Remember, God actually sent a prophet, Hosea, to marry a prostitute to show how much He loved the nation of Israel who was, at times, as sinful, if not more sinful, as the rest of the human race. God married the prostitute. He married you and me. He loved us so much that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Sometime, a few years before or after Job, God was going to show Abraham how much he valued man. He was going to start making promises to mankind through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and begin to show them His great love, the glory that He prepared ahead of time to be shared with man through His Son Christ.
However, in Job’s day, Job’s friends seemed unaware of the great destiny God had for mankind. They actually went so far as to compare mankind with a worm or maggot. They actually said that if man were righteous it would still bring no pleasure to God.
Many of us have had people in our lives that treated us as if we were only maggots or worms. Nevertheless, God is able to use what the Devil meant for evil to bring good into our lives. He is able to use our abusive pasts in ways beyond what you and I could imagine.
Conclusion
Our job is to trust God to do so. It is our responsibility to be willing to let God use us as He will. Then He does miracles with everything in our life, including our abusive past.
As a result, we can take any discipline from God about anything and realistically consider it pure joy.
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