Focus on the Family

Guest (Male): The following program is sponsored by Focus on the Family and is made possible by the heartfelt support of listeners like you.

John Fuller: This is John Fuller and please remember to let us know how you're listening to these programs on a podcast, app, or website.

Bill Smith: So every time I talk, whether I'm giving formal theological instruction or I'm talking about how do we clean up the milk that just got spilled on the table, I'm communicating this is what's most important to me. Never having any mistakes or, yeah, mistakes happen. I'm communicating your place in that world.

John Fuller: That's Pastor Bill Smith, and he's our guest today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. He'll share some important tools, actually the most important tool you have as a parent, and that is your words. Thanks for joining us. I'm John Fuller.

Jim Daly: John, look at the book of Proverbs. In Proverbs 18, it says the tongue has the power of life and death. For us that are Christians, that is pretty good instruction. This is especially true in our role as parents. The tongue has the power of life and death with our children.

On the flip side, harsh or biting comments can wear your relationship down little by little with your kids if you're that biting parent where you're expecting perfection. It's never quite right. Why didn't you get an A? A B is okay, but an A would be better. If some of this is ringing true, I want you to stick with us today because we have a guest who's going to talk about how to use words of grace when talking to your kids.

John Fuller: The goal is to build a better relationship with your child and to equip them to navigate life better. I wish we had some redos in my home, Jim, so I'm looking forward to the conversation with Dr. William Smith. He's a pastor, counselor, and author. He's written a book that we'll be exploring today, Parenting with Words of Grace: Building Relationships with Your Children One Conversation at a Time.

Jim Daly: Bill, welcome to Focus on the Family.

Bill Smith: Jim, thanks for having me.

Jim Daly: It's your first time!

Bill Smith: It is. It's great to be here.

Jim Daly: I love the title of your book, Parenting with Words of Grace. Let me kick it off there because I think even in the intro setting that up, I can hear that dad going, "Oh my goodness, I can't believe they're going to talk about this. Sometimes you need to be tough with your kids." That might be true, but speak to that balance of boundaries and words of grace. I'm sure a lot of people went, "Words of grace? You don't know my kid."

Bill Smith: Absolutely. Here is where I think it's so helpful to realize that what I'm trying to capture is how do we talk to our kids like God talks to us, recognizing that everything he says is tinged with grace. It doesn't mean that he's necessarily soft or easy or doesn't deal well with sin, but he deals well with it in a way that actually develops relationship rather than crushes it.

Jim Daly: That is perfect. Somebody once said to me, "God's a God of a bunch of teenagers." We don't behave perfectly. That's the other aspect of this life. Paul, who could rise to Paul's ability as a theologian knowing the word the way he did, yet Paul himself said, "I do those things I don't wish to do, and I don't do the things I should do."

He was giving us that idea of imperfection in this life. It's so easy for us as parents to have such a high bar for our kids. It's not necessarily bad. It's just bad if you're just dripping on them with this idea of non-performance, non-behavioral performance.

Bill Smith: Yeah, I think we really—I've said it provocatively this way before—it's as though we're trying to raise Pharisees. We think that the best child that we could possibly have would be one that just looks perfect on the outside, and we really don't care what's going on on the inside.

As you go through the Gospels, you realize that the Pharisees were the epitome of good kids. People who had everything down the right way. They were the kids that you wanted your kids to play with because then some of that would hopefully absorb on your kids. You wanted your kids to marry them. They were the future leaders of the community.

They stood in front of Jesus and did not recognize the one who created them. They accused him of being a tool for Satan. You think, okay, that's not what I want when I'm helping my kids grow into moral human beings.

Jim Daly: Right. And that's, again, why I'm so excited to have you here today because I believe in this message. I think even in my imperfection as a dad, I think you'd agree, John, and I think Jean would say that as a mom, we have to realize we're broken people too and we're not perfect at parenting.

When you can express that to your kids at the appropriate age, it's revolutionary to them. I remember one time I went into Trent's bedroom. I had disciplined him. I went in and said, "I just got too emotional on that, Trent. I'm sorry I reacted the way I did." I remember he was in the top bunk, eyeball to eyeball with me, and he had this big smile on his face. I said, "Why are you smiling?" He goes, "I didn't know parents had to apologize."

Isn't that awesome? It really communicated the right thing. Let me go back a moment. You talked about God obviously being our Father and the wonderful, perfect model of that. What kind of words does God use with his children? Let's get into it. What are the things that he says to us?

Bill Smith: So, let's unpack a theology of conversation for want of a better phrase. What does God do when he communicates? He's unpacking who he is. He's the invisible God, but you get a sense of who he is as he speaks because he tells you, "Here's what I value." You realize he makes us in his image, so there's an analogue out of our hearts. Our mouths speak, as Jesus says. So you can see our invisible values and our concerns as we talk. The same is true with God.

As he communicates to us in the scripture, you're getting a sense of who he is as a person. But you're also getting a sense of our place in his world because he tells you, "I value you. You're important to me. I want you to be with me forever." You get that sense of, wow, we count. "What is man that you should care about him?" and God says, "A lot," because he puts that value on us.

As we hear him speak, we get a sense of who he is, we get a sense of how he values us, and with those two things, there's an implied invitation. Given what you've just learned about me, given how you've heard me connect with other people, would you like some more of me?

As God's image, we do the exact same thing. So every time I talk, whether I'm giving formal theological instruction or I'm talking about how do we clean up the milk that just got spilled on the table, I'm communicating this is what's most important to me. Never having any mistakes or, yeah, mistakes happen.

I'm communicating your place in that world. You're this rotten person who always interrupts my schedule, or you're someone who gets to learn now how to clean something up that they spilled. Based on how I value them, I'm offering an invitation that says when you have more emotional maturity, when you have more options, are you likely to want to spend some more time with me or will you spend that elsewhere?

Jim Daly: In the book, you mentioned an example where your son, being a little boy, took something he shouldn't have taken, some money or something like that. How did that turn into an opportunity to show him this dynamic between God's treatment of us and your treatment of him? What happened?

Bill Smith: Yeah, that was one of those opportunities you don't really want. It's the end of the day, you clean everything up, and you just want to be left alone. This little person walks into my office and says, "Do you remember two or three years ago when ten dollars went missing and you knew that it was me because it was on my bedside table, but I said no, it was the cat?" I said, "I remember this."

He says, "Well, it was wrong and so I wanted to get that right. Do you want the money back?" I think, okay, wow, here's a beautiful opportunity. Obviously the Lord is at work, moving in his conscience.

Jim Daly: That's amazing. How long after the fact?

Bill Smith: About three years or so.

Jim Daly: Wow, that's amazing. He'd been carrying it that long.

Bill Smith: Yeah. Well, think about how long I carry the things I've been deceptive in. Three years is short. But I was very grateful to see that. I'm also aware he has a very moralistic approach to sin. Sin is an activity only. By paying it back, I'm clean. Okay, and maybe I'll give you interest.

I wanted to expand this for him. I said, "Do you really think that you can pay me back for what we went through?" He said, "Yes." I thought, okay, now I have to enter in a little bit more. I said, "So you can pay me back for all the hours that I spent worrying about where you were inside your own heart and mind? You can pay me back for the suspicions that we then had when other money was misplaced around the house? You can pay me back for my concern over how you're building greed into your life and how you're pushing us away? You can pay for all of that?"

And he says, "No, I can't." That's that kind of moment that I want for my own life when I realize here's what Jesus really did to pay for me.

Jim Daly: Something you could never repay.

Bill Smith: Exactly, which makes the Gospel beautiful, the cross wonderful, and my God amazing. That's what I wanted him to experience in that moment.

Jim Daly: You encourage in the book parents to look for the positive in seed form. So I want you to describe what that means.

Bill Smith: So as a parent in my 30s and 40s, I wanted to see my kids respond in 30 and 40-year-old ways. You realize that just doesn't happen often.

Jim Daly: That is so true. Why do we do that? Jean and I have had those conversations. Sometimes she's the one correcting me and sometimes me toward her. I remember saying, "They're 15, they're not 40 years old. They're not going to think the way we think." And that's true.

Bill Smith: It took me four decades to get here. You think, "Well, why aren't you? I told you how to get here." Maturity takes time. So I want to walk that back then and say, "What's that look like at your level and how do I affirm that rather than being irritated because it's not the way that I really wish it was?"

Jim Daly: Bill, I can imagine some parents watching or listening to us and they're going, "Okay, this is good, I get it, but it's difficult to know when to encourage and when to speak the truth." It's kind of that balance. We still need to be mom and dad. You just can't let them do anything they want to do or behave anyway. How do we balance that? What are the clues that you give us in the book to make sure that you're doing that in a healthy way, which probably is the best goal?

Bill Smith: Underneath of that question, I think, is the realization that on any given day, in any given moment, your kid is doing some things that are positive and some things that are less than positive. So what do you focus on?

As I go through the scriptures, I notice that Jesus rebukes people. He rebukes the Pharisees. He rebukes Peter when Peter's rebuking him. You realize there are hardhearted moments where he goes after people. Then you read a book like 1 Corinthians, which always is weird for me because the opening several verses are just about how great the Corinthians are, how thankful Paul is for them, how they've been blessed with every spiritual gift.

Then you read the book and you think, "Really?" because these are guys who are engaged in all kinds of sexual immorality and divisions in the church. You think, "Why did you encourage them?" You go to 2 Corinthians and you realize, "Oh, they responded." There's a softness in their hearts.

I think that's the key. The hardhearted people, you come a little bit more strongly, a little bit more energy. If someone is responding and soft, lead with encouragement because what you're affirming is what God has built in there that will last forever.

Jim Daly: So often, Bill, I leave this question to the end, but I think the timing's right now. The parent that has blown it. We have lived by behavioral modification guidelines. We want you to behave a certain way so that we can be proud of you and our neighbors can be proud of us. It's dawning that realization as we're listening to this discussion, "Okay, I haven't managed that well."

What do they do with their 15-year-old who may be rebellious now? Because they never have been able to get to that standard and it's caused division and a prodigal potentially. Oftentimes those prodigal kids are walking away because that bar was set so high they could never attain it. I can never please you, so why try anymore? Speak to that parent. What can I do differently now?

Bill Smith: I think for that parent, you have to realize I am that parent as well. There are so many times that I've blown it, and I've heard within the last couple of weeks about places where I've blown it. My first response is to be crushed and depressed and I'm a hypocrite, I should not be here at Focus today.

The Gospel that was good for me decades ago is still the Gospel I have to run to today. Everything that I've ever done has been paid for by Christ. My Father in heaven knew all of that beforehand, took me on anyway, and brought me into his family to parent me so that I would be a better parent. I always have to start there.

There are remedial things that I can do with the ones that I've blown it with. You've mentioned some, I think, going back and apologizing is huge. Offering a different kind of relationship. "Okay, this is the way I have been. I will not deny it. I'm not going to try to cover it up. If you want to talk about it, we can talk about it, but I will set a new path and a new pattern because if Christ is risen from the dead, there isn't anything that's impossible for his people."

Jim Daly: Boy, that is really good. I think the other thing I'd add is it's not too late to start for that kind of reconciliation, confessing your own sin as a parent to that adult child or that teenager. To say, "I've blown it. I did not understand this."

That leads into the next question I want to ask you about, which is the need for honesty. That's brutal honesty when you as a parent can come to that conclusion that, "Okay, I have not done this well," and then confess that to your child. Describe what it means to be a mirror to your child in that context of honesty.

Bill Smith: I use a metaphor of a mirror, a verbal mirror. That's simply when I'm saying to somebody—my child, my spouse, my friend—"This is what I see in your life. I could be wrong. I could be misreading you, but this is what I see."

You realize that's what a mirror does. It simply shows you, you, the way that you are. Then it's up to you whether or not you accept that. So I've offered, "Here's what I think I'm seeing. Am I seeing correctly? Do I need to be corrected? Or if I'm seeing correctly, what do you want to do about this?"

Jim Daly: How did that work practically with your son? Describe your kids, by the way, sons and daughters?

Bill Smith: Our oldest is a daughter, now married, and then we have two sons.

Jim Daly: Okay. So in that context, as you were the mirror to them, how did that go?

Bill Smith: I appreciate that. Let me add a caveat up front. There is no guarantee that any time you engage your kids well that they'll respond well. You're not given that authority or that ability in their lives. So sometimes when I've done that with people, it's worked out very well. There's been a reciprocal, "Okay, I know dad loves me and cares about me, so I respond well." And other times it's, "Yeah, okay, get away from me."

Jim Daly: Let me press you. I think your son had an issue with self-control. How did you do the mirror thing with him in that context?

Bill Smith: So in that one, just sort of watching all the different kinds of things he'd been doing for several days or a week, realizing I needed to step in and say something to him, which would be that, "Here's what I think I'm seeing."

Jim Daly: Can you help us with what that looked like?

Bill Smith: Just endless time on his phone, eating way too much junk food, watching other kinds of things. Typical behavior for life lived without limits.

Jim Daly: Were you at our house lately?

Bill Smith: He's my son. It's not all that surprising. So I knew that I needed to lay that out for him, but that's a vulnerable spot where you're going to come to somebody and say, "Here's all these unimpressive things that I see you doing."

I wanted to lay the groundwork for that first. So I did by confessing my own sins, saying, "I know what that's like." As a pastor, Sunday is sort of the point you drive the rest of the week towards. Sunday afternoon is Friday night for most everyone else, where you just sort of, "I'm all done." The pressure's off.

The way that I tend to handle that—and I can't slow my mind down—is I just want to feel numb for a little while. TV is a great number. Just this electronic thing. I can so easily just start to binge-watch shows. So I found myself one Sunday night watching Sunday Night Football. Well, that wasn't interesting enough, so I'm flipping back and forth between that and the World Series. One of those ends, I've watched the other one until it's done.

If I turn this off, I'm going to feel all of the things I've been trying not to feel. So let's go look for Person of Interest reruns and now Elementary. Finally, by 12:30, I was like, "Enough, just turn this off."

I'm able to go to my son and say, "I get it. I know what it's like to go hours and hours and hours without feeling like you can stop. And there's hope. And there's a place where we can both go. It's not just you and your need, but it's collectively our need at the foot of the cross."

Jim Daly: Bill, sometimes your children will need you to explain hard things. You've touched on that theme. You were helping your family prepare for a family member's funeral. Tell us what happened in that context. That sounds like a heavy illustration.

Bill Smith: Yeah, and that was a time where they were very little. It was my grandmother. Very young kids, one of whom really does not like death. You realize that in the US, we don't handle death well. We keep it away from everybody so nobody has to engage it.

I thought in advance, Proverbs has two people: the fool and the wise person. The wise person thinks before they speak. So I thought, "Okay, what's going to give us the best shot at this?"

Sitting down at dinner time, I said, "Guys, I have some hard news." Dinner was over. "I have some hard news. Nanny has passed away. She's died." And immediately the one person said, "Do we all have to go to the funeral?" That was the first question.

I said, "Let's take a look at a passage out of Ecclesiastes." I brought a children's Bible version that said it's better to go to a funeral than to go to a party. I paused and said, "That seems a little odd. That's counterintuitive." The kids are like, "Yeah, that doesn't make a lot of sense."

You keep on reading, and it says because everyone living will die, so it's better to think about that. So I just sort of unpacked why is that helpful? Why is that a better thing to do? We realize that when we die, what happens when we die? Well, we go to heaven or to hell. I said, "Okay, and what's special about going to heaven?" "Well, it's where Jesus is."

I said, "That's right. So we're either looking forward to being with Jesus or not being with Jesus. It's helpful to think through that because this life is very short and the life with Jesus is how long?" And they said, "Forever."

Nobody knows what forever means. So I put numbers on things. I said, "What's that like? 27 million years?" And they're like, "No, longer." Now we do the ramp-up. "56 million?" "No, longer."

Basically, I was able to say to them, "This life is really short. It's like 3/8ths of an inch long. The life to come is like from here to the sun, about 93 million miles long. So my plan next Tuesday is to go to the funeral and think about the 93-million-mile life. I'll be sad, I'll cry, but I think there's more wisdom to that than just living in the 3/8ths of an inch life."

Jim Daly: That's great, just having them capture that and tuck it in their heart to give them something to think about. Let's move to another area of final encouragement. It's important to expect that your kids are going to make mistakes and to be ready to respond well when they do. I think even mental talk for a parent to understand that.

I remember Jean and I had that. The boys were younger, and I could see Jean panicking a little bit. I said, "Okay, tell us what's going on." "Well, I'm thinking of when Trent or Troy, when they're going to be 15 and what they potentially could be doing." Parents can do that. You can catastrophize what your kids might do when they're teenagers because you saw them do something as an eight-year-old. Explain for us the opportunity that you had to comfort your son after a baseball game, which I think is a little bit related to this.

Bill Smith: I would say it is. My wife Sally and I have worked very hard to think to ourselves, "They are going to make mistakes." I've said they've got my DNA.

Jim Daly: That's good for you to take it upon yourself.

Bill Smith: If raising morally upright children is the goal, then mine are doomed because of the genetics I've passed onto them under the fall. So what can they experience in my home? It's not being perfect, but it would be to have a sense of how God responds to them when they're not perfect. What does love look like that embraces them, that does not say your sin is okay, but still embraces them anyway?

I thought that's what I want them to experience in our home, but that means then I've got to invite myself into that. My son lied one time. He lied one time about catching a ball when he didn't at a championship baseball game. I kind of knew that he had, but there's a lot of pandemonium, a lot of pressure on him. Literally, the ump asked him, "Did you drop the ball?" He's 10, come on. Everybody's cheering, "He caught it! He caught it!" I could imagine that.

He lied. I was praising him on the way back to the van after the game about all the good plays, including that one, which was astounding, even if he dropped it. I dropped down on one knee and I said, "Look, I just want to say one thing before we go home and that is, I want you to know that if you ever do something wrong, like lie about catching a ball when you didn't, I want you to know you can come and talk to me, okay?" And he said, "Okay."

I thought, "All right, here's another one that doesn't work." But there's wisdom in that. I didn't blister him. I didn't say, "Okay, so what do you want to tell me?" Because all you're doing is forcing a confession. You're not trying to reach a person's heart.

We drove home, I did a bunch of chores on the way after we got back. Kids followed me all around and then eventually everybody left except that one. He looks at me and he says, "Hey, do you have a minute?" I said, "Yeah, what's up?"

He said, "You know when I told you that I caught the ball? I lied. I didn't." Tears streaming down out of his eyes at this point. He said, "It meant so much when you said that I could talk to you whenever, and so all the way home I just kept thinking about that and I just couldn't wait to say something."

Jim Daly: It's so good. Bill, this content is so good. I can't express enough, yet I still have this ringing in my head when we talk about parenting with words of grace. I can feel that hardhearted parent saying, "Yeah, I understand that, but kids need to learn how tough a world this is."

I don't know why, maybe this is something about my childhood I don't know, but it is just like I can feel that hardhearted parent saying that. They just, I don't know if it's because they're uncomfortable, they didn't receive it as a child and therefore they're going to pull up their kids by their bootstraps and life is tough and get over it.

But God's heart for us is all grace, it's all love. He even says if we don't have love we're a clanging cymbal. That his nature is love. How do we move from that maybe hardhearted parent, even as a believer, into something so much better?

Bill Smith: When you speak in those kind of ways, and I've had this question before and had people ask this, what I often hear people doing is equating grace with niceness and discipline with punishment. You think no, there isn't a single way that our Father relates to us apart from grace. Grace is the overarching umbrella. It's Covenant.

So everything is done within the context of a relationship, both the positive affirmations as well as the discipline. Discipline from your Father, that's grace because it would be ungrace to just let you run and destroy yourself.

I think the grace part really does talk to what's the goal? Is the goal that we would be restored to each other, that we would be closer after this interaction? That's the grace part. Because you can discipline without grace. You can be accurate in your assessment that discipline needed to be given, but if the end result is you're driving your child away because they've learned to not disappoint you, to receive hatred from you, you're not disciplining them in the same way that God disciplines you.

Jim Daly: You're right in the action and wrong in the heart. That's where we miss it. Bill, this is so good. Parenting with Words of Grace: Building Relationships with Your Children One Conversation at a Time. What a great resource for parents to have.

I say this from time to time, John, if the listener, the YouTube watcher, if you can, send a gift of any amount, one time or monthly, we'll send you a copy of the book as our way of saying thank you for being involved with the ministry. If you cannot afford it, I'm going to trust others will cover the cost of that as part of the ministry here, and we'll get it into your hands because I feel like this is one of the core key messages that parents need today. In a world that is going to beat up our children, they should know they can come home to a loving environment to learn both the truth and the grace of God's heart for them. Bill, thanks for being with us.

Bill Smith: Thank you, guys. It was really good to be here.

John Fuller: And when you get in touch, be generous as you can and request that book, Parenting with Words of Grace. Our number is 800-A-FAMILY. 800-232-6459. Or stop by focusonthefamily.com/broadcast. On behalf of Jim Daly and the entire team, thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ.