I was thinking today about how I can better discipline my children, and how to discipline them in love, and then I thought, “What would Jesus do?” I thought about how Jesus might have disciplined His own children if He had had children on earth. I know He wasn’t married and didn’t have kids, but if He did have biological children when He was on earth, I was just wondering how He would have gone about disciplining them. Would Jesus have done it the old-fashioned way, giving them hidings, or the more modern way, with the use of a ‘naughty step’, or grounding them, or punishments such as withdrawing things that the children like for a period of time? Just on a practical level, how would Jesus have disciplined? And how would He want us, as parents, to discipline?
I don’t know the answers to those questions of how, on a practical level, Jesus would have disciplined, but I think He would have discipled His children. The noun ‘disciple’ comes from the Latin word ‘discipulus’, which means ‘student, learner or follower’. Jesus had his 12 disciples while He was here on earth, 12 men who followed Him and learnt from Him. I think Jesus would have viewed and treated His children in a very similar way to how He treated His 12 disciples – as fully persons (a Charlotte Mason principle), little persons, but fully human – He would have discipled them. The way that Jesus discipled was by doing life together with His disciples. He would do everything with them – he would eat meals with them, drink with them, rest with them, travel with them, perform miracles with them, teach them, train them, mentor them, and just do life with them. Everything Jesus did, He did with His disciples, and the only time He was on his own, was when he went alone to pray. But He basically did all of life with His disciples, to be an example to them, to show them how to live. It just made me wonder whether Jesus would have been like that with his own children? Discipling them, mentoring them, doing life with them, just spending nearly every moment of every day with them to be an example to them and just show them how to do life?
It has reminded me of the huge privilege and honor that we, as homeschooling parents, have got. How we do have that opportunity to be an example to our children because we are with them most of the time. We are given the huge privilege, and responsibility, of discipling them, being an example to them, discipling them in Christ. As Christ followers, we are called to follow Christ’s example, and I would really like to follow Christ’s example, to live as He wants me to live, by discipling my children as best that I can – not just viewing them as children to be disciplined, but fully persons who God has entrusted to my care to disciple. It is my prayer that both Ant & I would really learn how to better disciple our children more and more each day, to point them to Christ, for He is the way they should go: ‘Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old he will not depart from it’ – Proverbs 22 vs 6.
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