Just want to let you know that as you're listening to today's podcast, you are definitely going to hear some thunder rumbles from a good Florida thunderstorm.
Welcome to summer in Florida. Loving God is not about religious activities.
Right.
Because I go to church every Sunday, every Wednesday. And I attend the ladies Bible study, and I work at the homeless shelter. Those things don't equate to I love God. Now, some of those things are actions that are born out of my love for God.
Right.
But those don't define my love for God. My love for God is a relationship.
Well, hello again, and welcome to the Trim the Wick podcast. I'm Dan.
And I'm Becky.
And we are back with you again this week. And we are continuing our series on simply parenting.
That's right.
And last week we talked about the struggles with the expectations and the frustrations and all the pressures of am I doing parenting?
Right, right. And we talked about a lot of that stress comes from not knowing which rule book you're supposed to follow.
Right.
And, it comes down to not following a rule book.
Right, exactly. Trying to put into place all of these rules, and regulations. it wasn't good for the children of Israel.
It's not good for us.
And it's not good for us either, you know? And I think that's why, Jesus broke it down. You know, we had ten commandments that came from God. The Pharisees and the sadducees. And the religious leaders turned that into over 600 rules and laws and just a heavy burden to carry.
Right.
And then Jesus broke it down and said, here. Here's the thing. I want to break it down to two things. To love God and to love people.
Yep. The whole of the law and the prophets hangs on this.
And we are to love God with.
All of our heart, our soul, our mind and our strength.
Yep. And we are to love people like ours how we love ourselves.
Right.
Today, this week, we want to talk about that first part. we're gonna break this up into two parts. We're doing a three part series here. And so if you didn't hear last week, we wanna encourage you to go back and listen to last week.
Yep. It'll set the foundation for you.
It'll definitely set the foundation. Plus it will also kinda give you the angle that we're coming from.
Right.
so you can understand where we're coming from. Now, Becky and I, we've been married for over 33 years.
Yeah.
And we've had four, beautiful children. We still have four beautiful children.
We do. We just older children now.
Yeah. Ah, well, actually we have five now because one of them is married.
That's right.
And, they've all been raised to adults. And so these are things that we've learned kind of the hard way. Through bumps and bruises and tears, but also through joys.
Right.
And we want to pass these things along to you because, you know, it's kind of good to have someone who's, kind of been down the path, help walk you that.
Help walk you that way. Man. If somebody who's already been there can give you a shortcut so you don't have to learn the hard way that they learned.
That's right.
That's a good thing.
Exactly. So we're going to be spending, some time giving you some of the knowledge that we've learned over the years. And the first thing that we're going to talk about, or the first step here is loving God. When you're raising a child, one of the things is it's always, don't do this, don't do that, don't do this. And we try to limit, because, a child's mind and a child's eyes are huge and their actions are
spontaneous and whatever. So it seems like that we spend the majority of our time with parenting kids is telling them the don'ts.
Right? I mean, it's one of the first things you do when you find out that you're pregnant, right? You're planning for. For this new little one to come into your house and you're prepping the nursery and you're getting the house ready, and what do we do? We baby proof.
Yeah, you gotta childproof the whole house.
We baby proof the whole house because we don't want them getting into those places that are gonna hurt them. And we set those hard boundaries. We establish the don'ts before the little people ever arrive. And it's parenting. We've learned over the years that, yes, there are reasonable precautions, okay, but we don't want children sticking forks in outlets. We get that. If that mentality is where you parent from consistently, it's parenting from a place of fear.
Right.
I'm afraid you're gonna get into this. I'm afraid you're gonna hurt yourself. I'm afraid it's gonna reflect poorly on me. I'm afraid. I'm afraid. I'm afraid. But if we're parenting with God empowering us, perfect love casts out fear, right? So we need to parent from a place of loving God first.
Exactly. Cause when you're parenting the other way, it's always reactionary, it's always fighting those expectations that we talked about last week. And so when you're parenting, the what you do, do. Okay, you said do. We're talking children. It always goes into doo doo.
Hi. Sometimes we're twelve year olds.
but when you're parenting, it's so liberating and encouraging to focus on the what you can do.
Right.
And in this idea of loving God, you're focusing on, How do we love God? What are the expressions? How do we do that? And the first thing that I wanna suggest is that you have to do this in your own life first.
Absolutely. Because you can't teach something that you don't already know yourself.
Exactly.
You can't teach from a place of ignorance. I mean, you can.
Well, yeah, you can.
It's not gonna go real well.
And then you get frustrated. Usually if you're teaching or if you're trying to apply something that you know nothing about, you're usually gonna make a lot of mistakes. You're frustrated and then you end up throwing that away going, it just doesn't work for me.
Right. Well, and the kids that you're trying to tell that this is the way to do things, eventually they begin to dismiss you. Right. Because kids are smart little critters and they catch on really quickly that either you don't know what you're talking about or what you're saying isn't lining up with what you do in your life, and so they dismiss you as an authority.
Right. Well, and that's a horrible place. That is a horrible place to be. And I think the thing is, is we want to say this, is that we're not talking about you being a perfect Christian.
No. We are not talking about having the record attendance at church. We're not talking about whatever your mental image of perfectly performed religious duties is. That is not what we're advocating.
And we're also not saying it's not even a thing where you're going through struggles and stuff. I know, through our years, we had a time where we had a, ah, bad church experience. And we moved away and then we had some more bad experiences. And we were really in a low place spiritually. But oh, guess what? We still had four babies. We had four little ones in the house that we were still parenting. And so we had to go through a process where we were struggling with our own faith.
Right.
But there were some basic things that we knew and understood.
Right.
And that we always portrayed that to the kids of loving God. We're gonna deal with some of these other things we've been taught through the years. We're gonna hold tight to loving God, loving Jesus. We know that Jesus is our salvation, and those were the things that we then would continue to teach our kids and continue to, display to them.
Right. So I'm gonna kind of loop it back to what you were saying, that it has to come from a place you teaching your children to first love God with all of their heart, soul, mind, and strength has to come from you actively pursuing loving God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Even when it's tough, you know, those were some of our best times, when our kids learned to love God, because I'm a break it down kind of person, so I'm gonna expound just a little bit on
that. I love that verse where he says, to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength, because that encompasses your whole person.
Right.
Right. Loving God with all of your heart is every intention, every desire. You know, the motivations that live inside of you, the emotions that you have. It's loving God with all of those. And so that means checking on those and making sure that they're in alignment with who he is, with all of your soul, your personality, the things that you are, the talents you have, the interests and the experiences, all of your soul.
Loving God. So anything that he's given you, anything he's built into you loving him with those things, all of your mind. Right. Every thought you think, every decision you make, how do you love God? With your thought, life and with your decision making and what you choose and what you choose not to.
Yeah.
And then with all of your strength, all of your physical being. Right. the words of your mouth, the activities of your hands and feet, the things that you put your strength behind, loving him with all of your physical being. This is an all encompassing thing. This is a relationship that you have with God that covers all of who you are. And so your kids need to see that. They need to see you going, I'm wrestling with this decision right now. And, Okay, how do I love God in making this
decision? Okay, well, if my choice is between choice a and choice b, and one of those two choices clearly goes against the character of God. you know, God is truth, and one of my decisions is to lie about something. I'm gonna love God by choosing to speak truth instead of speaking a lie.
Right.
My heart motivation. My kids see that I am frustrated with this other person. I'm gonna take it back to what you said where we had had a bad church experience. Right.
Yeah.
it was clear to our children.
Oh, yeah.
That we were very upset and very hurt. Very hurt. Very, you know. So what is my heart motivation going to be? What am I going to show my kids about this? I can. I've got some options here, and I've got some skill sets here to act on some of those emotions. Right. I can go out and very publicly just disparage somebody and trash talk them, and I would have every right to do so.
Oh, and, Yeah. You would feel justified.
Right.
And in the moment, you would just.
Be, I'm protecting other people from being harmed by you.
Yep.
Okay. Or I can forgive and move on. One of those feeds my flesh and one of those is loving God.
Right.
And you can have these conversations with your kids and go, hey, mommy's wrestling with this. Mommy would really love to just take out a bold print newspaper ad on the front page and tell everybody how she's been wronged.
Yep.
But because I'm going to love God with my heart, with my motivations, I'm going to choose to be motivated by what God would have me do towards that person. And God says, turn the other cheek. God says forgive. God says, okay, it's not passing over what they did. It's not saying it was right, but it's saying that I'm going to choose to love God with the motivations of my heart, and then my actions are gonna follow.
Right. And I wanna, address something you said where it's having that conversation with your child, even at a young age, if they can start understanding what you're talking about, and trust me, they understand a lot more than you think they do.
Yes, they do. They are smart.
Children are very smart, very observant. And being honest with your child that you're struggling with something, this idea of the super parent who never has any problems and never has any struggles and.
Doesn'T want to put those problems on their kids.
Exactly. And there is a way that you can talk with your child to help them understand without putting the burden on them. You explain to them, this is a struggle I'm having. These are the choices I'm having. This
is why I would be choosing this over that. And you can actually talk it out with your child, and you would be, you're going to probably be shocked how much your child will appreciate that and will understand that and actually start to come to you with more of the things they're dealing with.
Right. Help me get my heart in line with loving God, mom and dad, because right now, the flesh is being loud.
Exactly. And you'll be shocked where a child will sit down and say, hey, I need to ask you a question about this. And you're like, wow, okay. My kid's actually asking my opinion. I'm not having to pull it out of them. I'm not having to draw every comment out of them. They're actually wanting to talk to me because they know that there's been a trust there that you've
built with them. Being a perfect parent is not anything anyone can achieve, but talking with your child, communicating with them, letting them know what's going on, does help a lot.
Yes.
And it helps you a lot as parents.
You're not carrying burdens. And, you know, obviously, sometimes there are going to be things that kids don't need to be privy to in your life, and that's fine.
Right.
But where you can. Where you can allow them to see your process of loving God and where you can allow them to understand that loving God is not about religious activities. because I go to church every Sunday, every Wednesday, and I attend the ladies Bible study, and I work at the homeless shelter. Those things don't equate to I love God.
Now.
some of those things are actions that are born out of my love for God.
Right.
But those don't define my love for God. My love for God is a relationship, just like my love for my husband is a relationship.
Exactly.
And we want our kids to understand that. when we're asking them to love God with everything that they are, we're teaching them that that is the way to live in this life. It's the same thing as going, hey, we're gonna go visit grandma and grandpa because we love grandma and grandpa. You're inviting your kids into that relationship with you. They don't have to know every bit of my relationship with grandma and grandpa, but they're gonna hear the parts
that are pertinent to them. They're gonna hear the stories about where grandma and grandpa were awesome and fun and taught us things, and, you know, the joys. And they're gonna hear about the times when our relationship with grandma and grandpa was maybe a little bit difficult. We're inviting our kids into those relationships, but somehow, when it comes to loving God, we've smushed that relationship into this list of activities
that we have to perform correctly. And there's this big disconnect we need to undo that. You know, we need to undo that thinking that teaching our kids to love God is training them to memorize bible verses.
Yeah, well, and. Or dumping them off into the youth group. Or dumping them off into the children's room.
Right. Go get trained up in righteousness and let the church fix you, you know, inviting you into a relationship that's meaningful to us. Yep.
And I told this to parents when I was a youth pastor. You know, I would tell parents and say, listen, I get your child two to 3 hours a week, right? You get them for hours and hours every day.
Who's gonna have the greater influence?
Yeah. I might be able to get them excited about God and get the long lasting impact on their life of how they see God and view God and love God is coming from their parents, right? Not from the youth pastor. And I think that's why we're seeing what we're seeing in churches. But that's a whole nother story.
That really will be a wild goose chase on a tangent.
But let's talk about this some, practical cause we're kind of talking a little hypothetical. How do we do this? How do we kind of set up for the new parent who's got a three year old, four year old, and they're going, okay, I want to start doing this. I want to start teaching my child to love God with all my heart. Let's break it down to the different things. So let's talk about how do I break down loving God with all my heart?
Your heart. Right. We've already kind of defined is your emotions, your motivations, those things that drive you from the inside. So letting your kids hear and see and helping them at a young age to begin to understand their heart motivations, we're assuming. Right. If we're talking about the parents of a three year old, four year old during their infancy and during their itty bitty years, we're assuming that you've exposed them to singing
praises to God. We're assuming that they've heard you either reading the scripture or discussing what you've read in the scripture.
Right.
We're assuming that you've been praying over them. If you haven't, it's not too late to start, right? Right. You start there, and that's where we're.
Talking as a start. You know, go ahead and start just saying, God, cover my child and let.
Them hear it and make it. When we were teaching our kids prayer when they were little, we realized that we had had this very ritualized, religionized teaching. Going on in our home as a result of that, when our youngers were in that three, four, five year old range, we did away with praying over meals at the table.
Right.
Completely did away with it because we weren't meaning anything. We were saying, God bless this food, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Our heart motivation was not a motivation of relationship with the father. It was not actual gratitude. It was ritual.
Right. We weren't actually saying, thank you, God, for what you're providing for us.
We were like, this is what good religious parents do.
there's food in front of us, so thank you.
Right? Lots of heart in that.
Yeah.
So we did away with that practice in our home. We told our kids we were doing away with that practice in our home, and we told them why. And we said, this has become a thing. That's just a thing that we do. And our relationship with God is more important than that. God really is a person sitting at this table with us. God really is the one who provided this food to us. And so when we sit down to eat, we are
grateful and we are including him. He's in all of the family conversation that goes on around the table. And so we want anything that we say to him to come from our hearts.
Right.
We, want him to be a present, active part of our conversation all the time. Yeah, we had that conversation with our littles. And then we took opportunities. If we were driving down the road and we saw something beautiful. Wow, God, thank you for creating that gorgeous tree, man, look at that over there. We were training
ourselves as we were training them. Yeah, definitely to, to pay attention to where our heart motivations were and then to align those with motivations that were coming out of a love for God, not out of a ritualized thing. And what was really cool is about a year and a half later, This had kind of worked its way into who we were and how we were operating in our house. About a year and a half later, we sat down to Emil. You remember this?
Yep.
It was one of the coolest things. We put down a plan. I don't even remember what I had made that day, but when the kids were little, I plated all of the plates in the kitchen because portion control was a thing. I set down the plates in front of everybody, and I sat down, and our third son just kind of glances down at his plate and didn't close his eyes, didn't bow his head in the most natural, as if God was sitting at the table with us, which he was.
Yep.
He looked at it he goes, wow, mom, this looks really good. Thanks, God. This is a great meal.
Mm
M and it becomes this natural outflow of the heart, your motivations, your conversation. Prayer becomes an ongoing, running conversation with God, as if he's a real person that matters in your life, just like any other real person that matters in your life. Instead of this thing where I've got to get in just the right environment and I've got to have just the right lighting, and I've got to have just the right music, and then. Then I can pray. No, that's not the heart.
Yeah. yeah. And we've seen that as the kids have gotten older, as they've come to us, and being able to pray, without ceasing and being able to acknowledge things that are blessings from God and to be able to see what they are and to even see their hard work and their skill and their knowledge of something and thanking God for that.
Right. Because they understand that he created them. So it's teaching that heart attitude of relationship and love that motivate, where love becomes your motivator instead of fear becoming your motivator.
Yeah. So we've just talked about the heart, so let's now talk about the soul.
Okay. So the soul is those things that make you up. Right? You've already kind of hinted on this one already. Your personality, your talents, your gifts, the things that make you who you are, your soul, loving God with those things. What does that look like?
It's the things that you start doing that you're doing it for God's glory, and you're doing it for him. And you're starting to realize or you not start to realize, but you are realizing that the things that you have, your talent, your giftings, your skill comes from him. So everything that you do honors him. And so you start to pay attention to those playing music. You know, all of our kids are
musicians doing work. You honoring God with the way that you do those things, it starts to trickle into the next thing of doing what you're supposed to do, having integrity in, the things that you do. Because all those things, when you're now focusing on God and you're focusing on, the things that he gave you that gives you the talent and the skill, then the work that you do is for him as well.
Right. So we hung heavy on that. But, again, this comes from you as parents, right? You can't teach your kids something that you're not actively doing. And so how do you reinforce that? Yes, you go to the scripture you point them back to scripture and you take them to the verses that say, whatsoever you do, do all to the glory of God. You take them to those things and you teach them what
God says about himself. You do train them to see those things by introducing them to the word, but you also walk them out in front of them. if you walk in such a way that you go, well, who I am, the talent that I have isn't the talent that that person over there has. And they can use their talent for God, but mine's really good for nothing. And you diminish the value of what God's putting. You guess what your kids are going to do.
Exactly. You're basically undercutting what God's doing in your life, right? And then the kids will start undercutting what God's doing in their life. And then what happens, and this is what I've seen, is you get the self made or the bootstrap made individual who goes, well, God didn't give it to me, so I'm gonna have to just do it myself, right? And I'm gonna have to just pick myself up and I'm gonna have to just be my own.
And then they're operating from a place of resentment and chip on the shoulder, and we don't want that for our kids.
Well, not only that, and then you also get, I mean, there's so many things that become, quote unquote, the negatives of that because we're talking now in actions that are happening. And motivations of actions. Now you're talking. Wait a minute.
So loving God with our soul is tied to loving God with our heart.
So, yeah. So it all works together, right?
Because we're whole beings.
Exactly. When you start looking at it, that the things that God has given you, that your desires, your talents, your gifts, that those things are coming from God, it helps you to use those things for God and to honor God with those. And it also protects you from using those things for your own personal gain and your own selfish motives and stuff. Because again, you're building this relationship of love to God, and it's all encompassing, right.
One of the other things that it does for you is it protects you when you go, who I am, whether I'm artistic or whether I'm really like, intellectual and logical, or whether I'm physically gifted and I'm an athlete, or, no matter what God has built into me, if I understand from a very young age that those things are how God designed me, those are personality traits he gave me to serve a purpose in his kingdom. I understand that those are on purpose for
a purpose. In my life right now, I'm not so much at risk of comparing myself to somebody else and going, well, who I am just doesn't measure up. And that's huge right now with kids. I mean, my gosh. Well, it was huge when we were kids. And if you, as a parent, can show to your kids, listen, this is who I am. This is who I am blessed to be because God made me this. God, gave me these talents.
God gave me these skills. God gave me the capacity to accomplish these tasks, and I'm going to do that with integrity and without complaining. We're serving God with our soul, with the person that he has made us to be. And that becomes this. I hate using terminology like this, but it becomes this empowering thing in your life. You know, you are emboldened and empowered to live out who you are faithfully and consistently and without apology.
Right.
Because, you know, you've been created to be this person, okay? And you have surrendered that back to him. And if you can show that to your kids, you know, how do you show that to your kids? Well, you begin as the parent to see, you know, when your kid's a year and a half, two years old, you're seeing all kind of personality starting to come out in them. Right? You're seeing who, who they are, what their skills are, what some of their little manipulative traits
are. You're seeing where the strengths and where the pitfalls of who they are come in and, man, you can really get in there and call out, those things in them and go, hey, wow, kiddo. Look at you. You did this. How can we love God with this skill of yours? How can you love God even just by appreciating and using who you are?
Yeah. So as we're looking at our three year old again, three or four year old and stuff, and so we're modeling this loving God. We're calling out the positive things, always encouraging the positives.
Right.
There are gonna be times when, you know, little Johnny, little Billy's gonna reach up and he's just gonna. He's gonna touch the hot stove. He's just gonna do it. He's gonna walk over and he's gonna reach over and bam.
Because part of his personality as a leader is also that he's a personality who's a risk taker.
Yeah. And they don't see that. There are things here where you're gonna break down and you still have to do discipline. Right now, we're not saying at all that if you follow this, if you teach your kids to love God and to love people, that you're never gonna have to do discipline. No, discipline is very much a part of this.
Absolutely.
They're still going to be pushing. Because they're learning, they're exploring, they're trying to understand what's going on in their own brain, in their own bodies. So you're still going to have to deal with that. You're still going to have to deal with discipline. What this does is this helps you direct that motivation or that behavior into a positive instead of just calling down the negative.
Right. Okay, y'all, I'm gonna call out all four of our kids here. Every one of them is gonna nod their heads when they hear this. One of the personality traits that is consistent across all of our kids, all of our children are very, very strong willed children.
Yes.
They know what they want. They know where they wanna go. They'll fight you for it. Okay. Which, when properly trained, is a beautiful thing.
Yes.
And we are seeing it serve them well in their adult lives. When they were kids, we had to show them that, yes. That is a personality trait that God built in you. You are strong and you see things and you will fight for what you believe. That's a good thing.
Yes.
However, there is authority in your life. And sometimes you need to trust that even though what you see and what you're fighting for may be partially accurate, you need to trust that the grown up in the room who's asking you to do almost the opposite of what you're currently doing has information that you don't have and that they are asking you to not do the thing that you are bent on doing because it is in your best interest. And that is part of relationship.
Yeah.
Right. That's part of the relationship that you build with your children, but it's part of what you build into them because you teach them. Listen, part of our personalities, part of your personality is that you are strong and that you see things very strongly and you are ready to hold to them. But you need to submit that part of your personality to who God is. And you need to let him show you where are the things that you need to stand that
strong on. And you need to trust him when he tells you to stop it.
Yeah.
because he does love you. He does have your best interest at heart and be strong willed. Learn to stand, learn to fight for what is righteous and right, but also learn that when God says, hey, enough. Then it's enough.
Right.
And you submit to that, and you stop parenting. This way is not a. Come over here. Let me show you. I'm gonna point out rule number 18 that you broke.
Right.
This way of parenting is much more of a long conversation that you have through their lives. Yeah, it's work, guys. Yeah, it's work. But it trains them up to the way that they should go instead of hemming them in to a very narrow definition of what it is to love God.
One of the questions that we've been asked many times is, how do you get your kids to do what they're supposed to when you guys aren't around? And that is our answer. You know, is that what we've done is we've trained our children to love God and love people and their actions and reactions and their motivations fall under that. It's not rules and regs. It's not, don't do this and don't do that. It's no, do this. Love God in doing this. Love God in showing him this and
acknowledging this to him. we're teaching them to love God with their heart and their soul and now their mind.
Okay. So their soul, we've kind of been defining it is their personalities, who they are, those things about them that make them themselves.
Right.
Right. Your mind is your thought processes and your decision making.
Right.
Who you are plays into how you think and the decisions that you make.
Right.
But there's a little bit of a separation there.
Yeah.
Your mind can be influenced by all kinds of outside things, too. It's not just who you are. It's outside voices that get to impact.
Right.
your thought life, you know, it's one of the things that we've told our kids from very young. Please, you've got to guard your minds, protect what voices you're listening to, because it does begin to dictate your thoughts.
Yes.
And to direct the decisions that you make. This is kind of one of those ones that's a little bit on the straightforward side, is that you, as parents, especially a very young children, you get to set the tone in your home of what feeds your children's minds.
Right.
You get to set the tone of what feeds your mind. You want to bring modern scientific study into it. You know, all the anxiety and all of that. We all know all of those levels are way up there. And there's an increase in impulsive decision making that ends up in bad things. There's an increase in addictive behaviors that come out of decision making that's not right thinking.
Well, in confusions.
Yeah, there's all kinds of confusion out there. A lot of that is because of not filtering the voices that are coming in. And so you, as mom and dad, get to be the primary filters and go, hey, we're gonna filter how we speak in this house. Yeah, we're gonna. The power of life and death is in the tongue.
Right?
So choose life.
Right?
So we're gonna speak life in this house. We're not going to speak death and condemnation and you're awful and you're horrible and you're not measuring up. And those are not the voices we want in our kids minds.
Right.
Those are not the thoughts we're going to feed.
Yeah, well, and also, we're not so much talking about different words, but again, talking about the motivations and the motivations of what you're saying to the other person. If you're saying something sarcastically flippant or if you're saying something to deliberately hurt somebody with your words, those are the things that you want to deal with. Those are the things you want to cut out.
Right. Because it impacts the thought patterns and the mind of your child.
So you want to speak in a way that lifts them up, that encourages them. Some of the words, you know, we don't want to say, you know, you don't want to call your kid stupid. You don't want to call your kid dumb. You don't want to, when they make a mistake, say that you're an idiot. Things like this, these words, I'm gonna.
Tag on that one right there. Cause it's a problem we've addressed in our home.
Yeah.
We never told our children they were idiots, but if you or I messed up, what would we do?
We would tell each other, I'm so.
Stupid or call ourselves I'm so stupid, I'm such an idiot.
Yep.
and we have had to correct that behavior in ourselves because it was a thought pattern in our head that our kids were picking up on. And they caught the self condemnation that we had for ourselves, we never had for them, but they were learning it for them, right?
Well, yeah, we wouldn't say that to them, but because we were saying it to ourselves. They began saying it to themselves. And it also changed kind of the way they say things to us.
Right.
Because they would hear us call ourselves stupid or an idiot, and then they would be like, well, you're an idiot, mom. You're an idiot, dad.
And then we'd be like, where's all this rebellion coming from? Where's this?
Yeah. And they're like, what? That's what you called yourself. There's a lot with those things of heart motivation on what you're saying and how you're saying it to each other. And that's one of the things we dealt with the kids. If you were angry or mad at your sibling, you could tell them that, right. But you couldn't tell them you hated them.
Right.
And you couldn't tell them that, you know, they were stupid. You couldn't make fun of them. You couldn't. But you could say, I don't like you right now. I'm very angry with you right now. I'm mad.
honesty was treasured in our house.
Yep. You were allowed to do that. Those were things because we wanted those to come out so that they could deal with it and talk about it, but we did not want the denigration.
Right.
And so, you know, you're talking about protecting the mind. Those are the things. And I know we're gonna be meddling here, but, I mean, tv shows and stuff were, there were things that kids were watching that were degrading music and stuff like that. And we didn't have to do a lot of it head on. We would be cognitive of what was going on and kind of cut it off
early. But, you know, that's where that active parenting had to be, where we had to be aware of what they were listening and what they were watching and go, you know what? This isn't good. Tv goes off. Go get a book, guys. Or go get the legos.
Yeah. And again, it's that balance of going, I'm going to overload the household with things that I want. Feeding your m mind. Right, right. I'm going to speak life out of my mouth. I'm going to put books in the house that are of, valuable content. I'm going to make sure that there is music that is available and a broad range to where this is. If you are drawn to any particular genre of music, there is uplifting and feeding things coming
into your ears and your mind. When we do turn off a tv show, I'm gonna have a conversation with you about why.
Right.
It's not going to be because I'm the parent and I don't want to watch that.
Exactly.
It's going to be, well, this is what we saw in that we don't really want in our home, because it can lead to this kind of thinking. And this kind of thinking is wrong thinking, and it will fuel wrong decisions.
Right.
Obviously, you put those on their level, but you help them start to make their own decisions because you're teaching them how to analyze and think for themselves. You're going, this is valuable. This is good. This loves God. This is in alignment with who God is, what his character is, and who he has called us to be. And this over here, not so much. Yeah, not so much. And so we're going to diminish the influence of that stuff on your thinking because it will train
your thinking. Children's minds are very, very impressionable.
Yeah. The thing is, is we want to, again, stay positive. You want to focus on the things that are going to move your child ahead, not focus on all of the negatives and don'ts. We're loving God with all of our heart, with all of our soul, with all of our mind. So those things, we want to make sure that we're addressing those things with our mind, that we're loving God. We're appreciated for the things that God does for us. We are calling them out. We are saying nice things about people.
Those are the things as adults that we need to be doing constantly in front of our children. And they will pick up on those things. So it's not even so much a thing where we have to always set them down and read them a passage or whatever. But as our modeling, they're gonna pick.
It up and we're having these conversations. And one of the things that I love that you just said was that you need to stay positive with it. One of the things that we kind of saw a lot of in our years in church ministry is parents who put in those same types of boundaries in their home had very positive content. were careful about what kind of entertainment came into their home, but it was not, I'm going to put this in my home
because it's good for you. It was, I'm going to put this in my home because the world is bad and scary.
Yep.
And if you tell your kids that the world is bad and scary, guess what they're going to think? They're going to think that the world is bad and scary. Okay. And yes, we understand that Satan is a roaring lion, seeking who he may devour. We understand that our enemy seeks to steal, kill, and destroy. And we get it that he's out there. And we get that the prince of the power of the air is active and meddling. Yep, we
get that. But we want our kids to also understand that in Christ, we already have the victory over them.
That's right. That's right.
We already have the victory. So the thought process of where we're operating from is we are victorious over the enemy. And so we don't want to play in his playground.
That's right.
Right. We don't want his junk infecting our thoughts and our minds, because that stuff's already been overcome. We're not gonna live like that. We're not gonna think like that. We're not gonna allow those things to be our guiding thought processes. So we want to focus on what's true and what's lovely and what's right and things that are of good report.
Right.
So those are the things that we're gonna have in our home, and those are the things that we're gonna teach our children to feed their minds with and to think on. And if we catch lies coming out of their mouths, whether it's a deliberate lie of, Okay, I'm going to tell on our daughter. When she was two and a half somewhere in there. Two, two and a half. learning to write her name, she got hold of a sharpie marker. Now, she is the only one in the house who has the first initial that she has.
Right.
And with a sharpie marker, she monogrammed the toilet in a thousand different places with her first initial. It was everywhere.
Yep.
And so, you know, being a parent, discovering the toilet monogrammed in Sharpie, your first thing is to take the child who, you know, totally did this.
Yes.
And present them with the evidence and go, do you know anything about this?
Yep.
And her little innocent two year old answer was no. Was no. And she pointed the finger at one of her brothers, who has an entirely different lead initial. Okay. And we said, are, you sure about that, sweetheart? And she said, yeah. And so we had to address truth and lie.
Yep.
So there are those incidences where you're gonna go, listen, the thinking here was your thought process. If I just lied about it, I wasn't going to face the consequences that I don't want. Right. I wasn't gonna face getting in trouble about this. We addressed. Yes, sweetheart, you did.
Yeah.
And also, this is where lying is a problem.
Yes.
Right. Lying didn't get you anything.
Yep.
It prolonged your consequences. Florida in the summertime, we got a thunderstorm going on outside, so it prolonged the consequences. Was that loving God at all? Does God love it when we lie? And so you take those opportunities to take where their thought processes are and bring them back to that one of two rules that you have in your house. Love God. Right, right. Love God. Is this sweetie we know you did the toilet, and it's okay. I'm
gonna hand you a magic eraser. We're gonna clean it off together.
Right.
But let's address the thought process and the heart attitude that drove the lie, and let's take it back to our rule in the house. Are we loving God when we tell lies? No. No, we're not. Because God says he's truth, right?
Yeah.
he is the way, the truth and the life. And so if God himself is truth and we're telling lies, we're not loving God really? Well, are we?
No.
Let's tell God sorry. Right. We're gonna apologize, and we're gonna go clean up the mess. We're gonna do it together.
Yep.
And then let's love God next time. Okay. Can we tell the truth?
Yeah. This is where this whole process is not easy.
No.
And it takes time, and parenting's hard.
It is. It's work.
And, if anyone told you it was gonna just be an easy thing, it's not. You know, our hearts go out again. We've done it. We've been there, and we know how difficult it is. If you're not wanting to have a child that you're constantly calling down, constantly correcting, it's going to take work, and it's probably going to take more work in the long run without dealing with this.
But here's the benefit, is that once we got into those really, really fun teenage years and we weren't encountering. Telling lies about monogramming a toilet with a sharpie.
No.
Right. The lies and the thought processes and the decisions that our kids were making, they tended to be more serious and have potentially more lifelong consequences. You get into those teenage years, and you don't navigate that well with your thoughts and your decisions, man, you can really set yourself up for some hard times.
Yes.
If you begin young, teaching them to have the heart and the soul and the mind that loves God.
Right.
And to analyze their decision making and their thinking based on whether it's loving to God or whether it's, opposed to him.
Yeah.
You navigate those teenage years into adulthood a lot more smoothly. Man, there are gonna be bumps in the road.
Yeah, definitely.
Because kids have to learn the hard way sometimes.
Yep.
There are gonna be some pretty massive bumps in the road, but you have a foundation that you can come back to and go, hey, where was your thinking on that?
Yep.
Where was your thinking?
Well, that's, one of the things that we probably haven't addressed enough yet is that in this idea of breaking it down to two things is you have, as a parent, an anchor to always go back to. You're not being thrown by the moment.
There's never an, oh, my goodness. We didn't have a rule for that.
Yeah. How am I gonna deal with this? Because it's all based on the same thing. You know, it's all funnels to the same thing. So we've been focusing on loving God with all of our heart, our soul, and our mind. The last thing of that verse is with our strength right now. This is, again, to me, just, it's all three things into one. And you get to see it in action, and you get to see it where the kids start taking ownership themselves of what they have been taught and what they
believe. One of the things, as a youth pastor, it's always encouraging to watch teenagers grow into their own faith and understand their own faith. It's not a church faith. It's not a mom and dad sent me to church faith. But it's something that they start to really take ownership of. The thing that we got to see with our kids is that that ownership started at a much younger age, right. Where they were able to say, this is what I believe and why I believe it.
They also started to go, I'm not sure what I believe here. Can we have a conversation?
But when you're talking about with all of your strength.
Yeah.
So here we go. What are we talking about here?
So now we're talking about the physical outgrowth, the physical outpouring of all of that loving God with your heart and your soul and your mind. Now. Now we're putting it into physical action. It's the words out of our mouths. It's the actions we take, in this world. It's the, am I gonna slug you or not? When I'm offended, it's the, how am I going to speak to others?
Right?
It's the, what tasks am I going to undertake in this world?
Yeah. The thing I think of when I'm m thinking about this is the moment of, if I do this, I get a whipping. I do this. You know, that's the old mindset is like, I'll just get the whipping or whatever. But what it does is it the kids start realizing, going, you know what? I don't want to get the whipping because I don't want to do that. Right.
It's not about the spanking.
It's not about the spanking because the spanking will go away in just a few minutes. But it's the heart of. I'm, doing something that's against right.
To watch your children come to a place where they grasp the concept of grieving. The spirit. Is amazing because you watch it play across their faces. At least we do with our kids. Bless them. They got my face where, if I'm thinking it, you will see it. so you watch the struggle play across their faces. You see the moment an offense happens and man, they got words and they.
Got actions and they're ready to go.
And you watch the moment of, you know what? I would be justified in this.
Yeah.
But it is not the right thing to do if I'm gonna be loving to God. Because that's not what God would have me do. So I'm gonna take a breath sometimes. I'm gonna remove myself from the situation so that I do not act out.
Yeah. That seeing your child literally turn around and, go eye for an eye and tooth for tooth in a, situation, but instead turns the other cheek and says, you know what? I'm gonna just walk away and I'm gonna remove myself. Because I know in doing this might feel great in the moment, but that's not loving. And then
we've seen it also with other things. When we were preparing for our first trip to go to Kenya, you know, we came up with this crazy idea of volunteering at these races, getting up at three, four in the morning, and our kids, our teenagers, right, were getting up at three in the morning to go help us with these races. They were receiving nothing from this. No, but they wanted to do it because they loved us and they wanted to do something
for us. And they loved God and they wanted to do something that was honoring the.
Lord and expanding his kingdom. Yeah, man, they were all in.
They were all in. Four in the morning. They're ready to go. You know, there were actually some of the races, we didn't even have to go in there and knock on the doors. They were already awake and dressed and ready to go, going, okay, we know it's Saturday, we know it's time to go down to the race. This whole thing of training this way and teaching your child this way and raising them this way is they start to take things a little more serious.
Right. Which is not to say that they're not still goofballs.
Exactly. I mean, it's, you know, it's not to say that get a banana suit and ride around downtown on a skateboard in a banana suit.
You know, they'd be known around town as banana man. Yeah.
But, when it comes to the things that are important, they are more serious, and they take it and they understand it, and they are willing to do what it takes.
Right.
And, you know, that is, the idea of this parenting this way, where you're raising kids to love God with all their heart, you know, with all their soul, with all their mind and all of their strength, the actions they have, even as a child to adulthood, follows that pattern and trains them in the way they should go.
Right. And loving God with all your strength, it's kind of that dual thing of being willing to go do the hard things because they're the right things and also being willing to accept that fruit of the Holy Spirit in your life of self control. To not do the wrong things.
Exactly.
But not because you're afraid of the consequences, because you understand that loving God means these kind of actions, and not loving God means the opposite. Exactly. and so when they're little littles, you know, we had four siblings in the house.
Yeah.
They did not always get along.
Nope.
And so we had fights in the house, and so we had those conversations of. Okay, wait, let's stop.
Okay.
First, everybody go to your room. Right, because we're not gonna do this right now.
Right.
Because nobody's being loving right now. So I need you to separate and let the emotions come down a little bit, and then we're gonna go one by one by one by one.
Yeah.
We're gonna ask you not about what the other three did.
Right.
Just about what you did and what were your actions? And let's talk about where your heart was, and let's talk about where your actions flowed out of that heart. And was that loving to God at all? Nope. Okay, cool. So
who do we need to apologize to first? Guys, if you take everything back to the action that you're trying to, if you're dealing with correcting a wrong action of your child and you're taking them back to was this loving God, then you need to understand the principle that's in scripture, that they didn't sin against you.
Right.
they didn't sin against their sibling. They didn't sin against the wall that they drew all over with crayon. That was not where their sin was. They sinned against God, by doing an action that was not loving to him. And so you train your kids that he is a father who is ready to forgive, and the way you do that is you train them by being a parent who is ready to forgive.
Yep. That's exactly right.
And to snuggle them and hug them and say, good job. I know that was really hard to say you were sorry. And I know, man, this mess that we made in doing that wrong action, it's gonna be stinky to clean up.
Yep.
You, know what? I'mma help you.
Yep.
I'm gonna get in there with you and help you clean up the mess you made because you now are modeling the love of the father towards your own kids.
Yeah.
And so they learn to love him by seeing that he is a loving and trustworthy father by how you behave.
Yeah. Yeah.
It all comes full circle.
Yep. And this leads right into what we're gonna talk about next week, as in, first, we love God, and then the second part of it is that we love people. And once we get the thing set up with ourself and understanding who God is in our life and loving God, the loving people part of it actually comes pretty easy.
It does. It flows right out of it.
Yep. So we wanna. First of all, thank you so much. We know that this one was a little bit longer than some of our other podcasts.
Little bit meaty.
We know that there's a lot here, and, we're glad you hung out with us for this. If you want to connect with us, if you want to know more about what we do, you can go to our Instagram at trim the Wick global right. And you can connect with us there. And we have all kinds of things on there. And also our website that you can check out. Thank you guys again, so much for listening. We love you all, and we'll see you guys next week.
Love you. Bye.