Cultivate a Heart of Willingness Transcript
If you’re like me, you’ve probably raised your children with a delayed obedience disobedience. We’ve heard it, we’ve repeated it, but there is a problem with that philosophy and I wanna talk to you a little bit about that in today’s episode about cultivating a heart of willingness.
I’m going to encourage you to concentrate on willing hearts over instant actions.
Now, here’s why.
In my parenting of our children, 28 years of parenting and counting, I have made a lot of mistakes over this instant obedience over looking at the instant actions that my children are having parenting with this concept of delayed obedience is disobedience.
There is a time in a child’s mind that they forget. They forget what it is that’s required of them. They forget those steps of what you want them to do, and there takes a forming of habit to actually get your children to have this thing that we call habit of remembering. When you have a child who delays because they have a heart problem and they’re not willing to obey you, it’s a completely different situation.
That is one I cover inside the obedient child or I also call the obedient trilogy.
That is something that definitely needs a different way of parenting. However, there is an approach to parenting that says that if you use the rod enough by the age of five, you won’t have to use it again. And in that they’re talking about instant obedience. I don’t wanna step on any toes because parents are doing what they know best to do.
But I will tell you that that parenting is what got me to a place of my daughter and I nearly losing our relationship. My daughter nearly struggling with so much of what we taught her is because of this one thing. She and I both have had this discussion. We both pinpointed our situation directly to that one thing. Now, I don’t just boldly say that without a lot of backing up.
So let me talk to you a little bit about why I say what I say about willing hearts over instant actions.
There comes a time when a child doesn’t have the habit of remembering, which is usually long after age five, that a child will still have a willing heart and desires to obey you, but their mind is not matured enough to remember what it is that is asked of them.
And so in this instant obedience, we’re looking at the action of obedience instead of the heart of obedience. We need to get to this heart. We need to get our children looking at the inside.
This is scriptural.
If you look at the Old Testament, we’re talking about God’s telling what his ways are and he gives us the commitments. And in the New Testament he says that if you hate your brother, it’s as if you killed him. But in the Old Testament is thou shall not kill.
In the Old Testament is says, thou shall not commit adultery. But in the New Testament it says, if thou has lusted on another woman or man, you have already committed adultery in your heart.
So we see that the old and New Testament has a defined difference between actions and hearts.
We need to carry that into our adult or into our parenting as well and recognize that when we are only looking at the actions, we could easily be creating habits of veneer, meaning that these habits are just on the surface like a piece of wood with a veneer over it.
It’s just the surface that’s pretty.
It’s just the surface we see.
But when a child takes a step into the real world as their own authority, that veneer quickly comes off and you cannot recognize your children.
That’s the danger in raising your children with delayed obedience is disobedience when in fact we have to recognize that obedience is in the heart and there’s a spirit of disobedience that is influencing our hearts to go against the obedience and when it aligns with the will of God.
So how do we cultivate a heart of willingness?
That is the answer that you need to answer, and I wanna help you today. I wanna help you get started because it’s key when we approach parenting in a different way.
When we come along our children as friends, when we recognize that we have to have our elliptical orbit playing in the right field of obedience or an authority, our children will then walk in obedience.
But we have to cultivate the heart of willingness first.
We cannot be looking at just the actions.
We have to be looking at the willingness.
Now, there are some things that I used to do that was so wrong in helping our children to create this veneer, and that is simply telling our children, you can act one way at home, but when we’re in front of Mrs. Jones or whoever your friends are, you better make sure you obey me.
And of course I didn’t use those words.
It’s when we are at home, I will allow things to happen. But when we go out, you better make sure you say, yes ma’am, and no ma’am. Make sure you say thank you. Make sure you say say please, but I don’t enforce it at home.
I’m putting this this veneer on my family so other people can look at us and praise us.
You might be doing the same thing. And in that we are showing our children that the actions are more important than the heart, but if we let our children know you respond to mommy. Yes ma’am. Yes ma’am. No ma’am. It will filter and go into someone else because we’re creating that willingness of the heart, not focused on the action.
When we require our children to act differently out of the home than they do in the home, we are creating this the veneer of actions and we are not getting to the heart of our children.
So how can we cultivate the heart of willingness?
We speak to their hearts.
We need to make sure they’re open. We need to make sure that they understand what is required of them, and we need to form this habit of remembering.
This habit of remembering is crucial to a child to go from instant obedience, parenting to willing obedience.
When we put the focus on willing obedience, guess what happens?
Willing obedience results in instant obedience. And we have the heart right, right before God and right before us, you know what automatically begins to happen.
We are now during honorable things to influence our children to go the right way and to grow to fruitful purpose.
We’re aligning ourselves with the word of God so that our children can be influenced from the heart that will then determine their conduct.
But if we are only focused on the conduct, we are creating mere veneer for our family that they will strip off as soon as they get into this world and they will walk away from what it is that you have required of them all these years, that they may have done it instantly because they felt like they were forced.
They didn’t have an opinion, they did not have a choice, and so they did it just to appease you and stay in good terms with you. All the while their heart had a different reflection, a different habit being formed in their mind, and they kept those thoughts to themselves until they could get into this world and do that under their own authority.
This is why we must cultivate a heart of willingness.
And to do this, here’s the key. We must give them ownership of their choices, ownership over what it is they’re willing to do.
Now, I’m going to tell this with you with a caution. We’re not giving our children ownership over their actions. We’re giving them ownership over their consequences.
That is very scriptural. If you read in Joshua eight, I believe it is, it’s in Joshua. If you read about the blessings and the cursings, you will see it’s actually in Deuteronomy also. It’s repeated multiple times in the Old Testament. But if you will see the blessings and the cursings, you will see that in that they’re choosing the consequences, not the actions they’re choosing.
If I do this action, I’m already accepting the consequences, and that’s why I like to reference in Joshua, because Joshua talks very much about that warning, very much about accepting the witness against them, saying, yes, I will do this. And if they don’t, they actually get the consequence of their choice. There’s a lot I teach about that all inside level one lasting influences for wholesome influencers.
If you need that step-by-step, if you need to help get that cultivating of willingness into your heart, if you need to undo a lot of bad habits in your parenting like I have had to do over the years, let me show you exactly how to do it to turn your children’s heart towards the Lord.
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