Discipline to Listen

Have you, as a father, ever found yourself quite uninterested in what your little children have to share with you? Certainly there are moments when our children surprise us by recognizing the Wendy’s restaurant sign when they’re only two-years-old. Or they make us laugh by climbing into the snack cabinet. Or they stump us by asking “How did my baby brother get inside Mommy’s belly?” But then there are those moments when they boast about how they would’ve fought off that T-Rex if he had come into their town, or they begin telling you the story that never ends, or perhaps they want to explain the rules of subtraction to you. Sometimes it’s difficult to keep from yawning or to raise one’s eyelids in an expression of supposed interest.

But the Holy Spirit makes clear through the Scriptures that earthly fathers are to behave like our heavenly Father. This principle can be seen in passages like the following: “As a man chasteneth his son, so the LORD thy God chasteneth thee,” – Deuteronomy 8:5; and “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him,” – Psalm 103:13.

We also have heard from many a modern pulpit of I Peter 5:7 – “Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you” – and Psalm 34:15 – “The eyes of the LORD are upon the righteous, and his ears are open unto their cry.” We’ve been told that God cares about the little things as well as the big things.

Sometimes it is a challenge to be truly interested in our children’s particular observations, about which our own excitement waned years ago. But our heavenly Father “understandest [our] thought afar off” (Psalm 139:2) and His thoughts are higher than our thoughts “as the heavens are higher than the earth” (Isaiah 55:9). Our generation gap doesn’t even compare with the gap between the heavens and the earth. So the only way we’re really going to convince our children that God listens even to our own boring prayers is by faithfully giving them eye contact, a listening ear, and time.