How Much of My Sinful Past Should I Tell My Children?
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00:00:05.000 | A podcast listener named James writes in, "Pastor John, a big question for parents is whether talking about past sins,
00:00:10.440 | sins like drug use, sexual immorality, drunkenness, etc.,
00:00:14.520 | will make our children more or less likely to try out or do these things when they're older.
00:00:19.460 | It seems like they might reason like this, 'Well, you turned out alright,' and proceed with entering into the behavior.
00:00:26.560 | Pastor John, what category should parents think through when it comes to communicating past sins with our children now?"
00:00:32.960 | Let me establish a crucial
00:00:37.160 | parenting principle and practice, which I think is dictated by the Gospel,
00:00:43.480 | before I
00:00:46.000 | tackle the direct question. And I've got six questions for parents that I think
00:00:51.800 | they should ask, kind of diagnostic questions as to whether at this time to this child,
00:00:57.360 | this particular sin should be talked about. But before I go there,
00:01:01.440 | let's lay down a principle. The principle is
00:01:04.280 | that far more important than the confession of past sins is
00:01:11.120 | the regular confession of present sins. And
00:01:15.880 | the practice, therefore, is that we model,
00:01:21.240 | for our children, in family devotions or other times, a
00:01:25.840 | regular pattern, a rhythm of
00:01:29.080 | confession to show our children how a follower of Jesus
00:01:36.640 | handles sin in his own life. So a pattern of confession,
00:01:42.960 | forgiveness, restoration to fellowship—
00:01:46.320 | nothing will have a greater Gospel impact on a child,
00:01:51.080 | I think, than to see daddy—that they tend to think are infallible, since they deliver the law.
00:01:56.240 | Daddy's infallible. Daddy's
00:01:59.320 | flawless. And to hear daddy
00:02:01.880 | regularly confessing to mom, confessing to kids, but especially confessing to God,
00:02:06.800 | sins, applying the blood of Jesus and
00:02:11.800 | experiencing restored joy of fellowship with God will show the child, "Oh, I
00:02:17.600 | don't have to be perfect. There is a way to handle sin." Children are born legalists, and they are born
00:02:25.520 | licentious, and those are not
00:02:28.800 | contradictory. They believe that the only path to morality is keeping the law—
00:02:35.040 | parents' law, school law, babysitter law, traffic law, whatever, law, law, law. Everywhere's law because these kids are just being told what to do.
00:02:41.760 | All the time, from the time they're, you know, nine months old on up. And they don't like those
00:02:47.640 | limitations of law on their desires, and so they
00:02:51.120 | gravitate towards strategies of getting around the law and somehow squirming away or through the law. And the
00:02:59.200 | alternative to this is the Gospel of the glory of Christ, seeing parents who love
00:03:06.640 | Christ so much that Christ looks appealing to them,
00:03:11.640 | not mainly as a lawgiver, but a soul satisfier, a friend, a guide, a
00:03:16.520 | helper, a counselor, and yes, a final absolute authority,
00:03:22.840 | which is good news, not bad news, if all those other things are true.
00:03:26.640 | Seeing parents who admit they don't love him perfectly all the time,
00:03:32.420 | but sometimes act as though he's not their greatest treasure,
00:03:36.840 | that's crucial for a child. Parents who regularly admit to the children, to the spouse, that
00:03:43.720 | they don't model
00:03:46.160 | Christ and his value perfectly all the time, and so they confess their sins,
00:03:51.360 | they're honest about their sins, not hiding their sins, they're modeling for their children.
00:03:56.520 | You don't have to lie about your sins. You don't have to hide your sins.
00:04:00.960 | You can be honest about them, and Christ will forgive, and we will forgive, and we can press on with
00:04:06.680 | fresh joy.
00:04:07.960 | So that's the principle. That's the practice, and I think it might lift some of the burden of,
00:04:14.080 | "Well, don't I have to, you know, be honest with my children about these past sins of mine?"
00:04:18.720 | And the children will never even enter their mind that you're being dishonest with them, if you set this pattern.
00:04:25.240 | But they did ask, "Okay, so there are these real sins in our pasts.
00:04:31.800 | What should we do with them in regard to our children?" And here are my six more or less, I suppose,
00:04:37.520 | diagnostic questions to ask. Number one, how old is the child?
00:04:43.120 | Capacities to grasp what you're talking about vary with age.
00:04:47.760 | You will not confess to your five-year-old that once, when you were 12, you dabbled in
00:04:54.640 | homosexual pornography. You won't say that to your five-year-old child.
00:04:59.360 | He doesn't even have the categories to know what that is yet.
00:05:02.720 | You might confess this to a 15-year-old whose sexual identity is confused,
00:05:08.800 | and he's come to you kind of scared and
00:05:11.000 | wondering about some feelings that he has, and you might then go back and pick up some of your own struggles and help.
00:05:16.840 | So the question there is, how old is he? Number two, how spiritually mature is the child?
00:05:22.200 | If you're dealing with a hateful and rebellious 16-year-old
00:05:28.120 | who would only hang your dirty laundry on Facebook as soon as you say it because he's so down on you,
00:05:34.440 | then you might want to wait until there's a more tender, mature
00:05:39.200 | season in that kid's life to reveal some things. The third question is, what's the nature of the sin?
00:05:47.200 | Some sin may be of such a nature that if a child heard it, it would frighten them, confuse them,
00:05:55.160 | give them a kind of insecurity that just wouldn't be good for them. For example, there might have been in your life a
00:06:00.760 | sexual sin against a minor when you were babysitting at age 17 or something like that, and you didn't go to
00:06:08.080 | jail, but that would be the kind of thing that would require the greatest care in sharing, if you ever
00:06:16.240 | shared it, because of the kind of disorientation it might create in the child's mind. Number four,
00:06:23.040 | what are the circumstances right now as the possibility of divulging a sin presents itself?
00:06:29.720 | I'm thinking mainly about privacy here.
00:06:31.960 | My guess is that there are some sins that would have a far better effect on a young person if you shared it
00:06:39.520 | with the person if they were alone with mom or dad when the sin was shared.
00:06:44.960 | Probably not at Pizza Hut, but taking a walk by the river and not with the brothers and sisters around because kids can feel
00:06:52.000 | really awkward around brothers or sisters or another parent when dealing with something heavy and
00:06:58.200 | awkward, and they might have questions that they'd be willing to ask mom or dad if they were alone in a safe place.
00:07:06.040 | So the circumstances. Number five, is your spouse okay with your sharing the sin? Get on the same page
00:07:13.560 | so that you don't cross wires here in dealing with the kids. It needs to have a unified
00:07:21.520 | sense or impact as you go forward. Number six,
00:07:24.480 | what is the child struggling with?
00:07:27.400 | One great motive in sharing past sins will be to help the child have realistic expectations about the Christian life.
00:07:35.720 | A child that's struggling, say, with lying
00:07:38.520 | may be helped by parents' confession of lying, perhaps to illustrate
00:07:45.560 | forgiveness or perhaps illustrate the trouble that it got him into as a kid, one way or the other, just kind of warning or
00:07:52.760 | comfort, or perhaps to illustrate how God helped the parent stop lying.
00:07:57.400 | So what is the child dealing with at any given time that might trigger which kinds of things you might call up from your
00:08:04.480 | past? And the last one I would say is, what's your motive for telling the sin?
00:08:10.360 | What's your motive for silence about the sin? Because frankly, I don't think you need to say
00:08:15.520 | everything to your child about your past. There's no rule
00:08:20.680 | I'm aware of that says every sin from the past must be known by children in the present.
00:08:26.680 | In deciding what is shared and what is not,
00:08:31.920 | the motive really matters, and the manner by which you do it that we've been talking about
00:08:37.640 | matters. Fear and shame are not good motives for silence,
00:08:44.120 | but concern for children and modeling humility and
00:08:48.800 | illustration of the gospel and glorification of Christ are
00:08:53.120 | motives that are good.
00:08:56.040 | But I want to end by just going back and saying what I did at the beginning that far more crucial,
00:09:02.400 | I think, than discerning which, if any, of your
00:09:07.320 | significant, heavy, weighty sins of the past are shared in the present is that
00:09:12.560 | pattern of
00:09:15.200 | ongoing confession and
00:09:17.200 | making it a regular feature of family life so that kids learn what the Christian life is by the
00:09:24.960 | present, not just the past.
00:09:27.320 | Those are very helpful categories to think through on this issue. Thank you, Pastor John.
00:09:31.200 | And thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.
00:09:34.120 | If you have a question for John Piper or if you want to listen to recent episodes or if you want to listen to specific
00:09:39.360 | episodes in the archive or if you want to see the most played and most popular episodes of all time,
00:09:44.840 | you can do all of this at our landing page. Go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:09:51.920 | We return tomorrow to talk about getting the tough and tender balance just right in the Christian life.
00:09:58.480 | Pastor John will point to a model of this balance in 18th century England.
00:10:02.720 | I'm your host Tony Reinhke. We'll see you tomorrow.
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