Parents Establishing God's Kingdom
and not our own
Parents establish certain rules and systems to encourage right behavior in their homes. I recently devised a way to cut down on complaining around my home. It involves candy and jars. Each day my kids choose 20 little candies to put in their jar. They lose candies by complaining or whining or insulting each other. They can gain candies by going the extra mile, doing things without being asked, giving encouragement, etc. We’re on day 3 of the experiment and already the children have discovered loopholes.
What if I do a good thing, but Mama isn’t there to see it?
What if I complain to a sibling? Does that count?
What if Mama doesn’t remember to put my candies in the jar?
What if I don’t care how many candies I get?
Like every man-made system, mine is going to break down. Every system breaks down because . . . well . . . things fall apart, the second law of thermodynamics.
This law states that in a closed system, things naturally tend towards disorder and decay. (A.I. Google 8/6/25)
Systems are bound to break down because they don’t grow, and we are people who were made to grow. The life of the flesh stays static; the life of the Spirit grows. The life of the flesh is a closed system; the life of the Spirit is open. It learns.
Systems don’t last forever because we grow out of them. Systems confine and constrain like a cast around a broken leg. It helps heal a break, but if not removed at the right time, it hinders the growing of muscle. We wear casts until our bones are healed. Then we take them off and walk by the spirit.
As parents, we work to develop chore charts and consequences and goals for our kids so that they can grow up acting like God’s children. However, if we hold to those systems as if they were God’s ways, we establish a little tower of Babel, so to speak. We teach our kids that our system of speech and behavior is God’s system of speech and behavior.
God will not stand for that. He will, like he did at Babel, confuse the languages between parent and child until we are forced to scatter and disperse. I send them outside and rethink my systems.
I recently read in Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes by Kenneth E. Bailey, that Jesus most likely taught his disciples to pray in Aramaic, the language of that day. However, the established holy language for the Jews was Hebrew, and the New Testament was written in Greek. So the significance of Jesus teaching his disciples in Aramaic was like saying, “There is no holy language of God. All languages are holy. There is also no holy nationality of God. All nations are invited.”
Likewise, there is no holy system of parenting. There is no perfect way to do it. There are popular options for this day in age, and there will be different options in a generation or two. The point is that the parents grow and change as their children do too.
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