God says that people consist of two parts: the outer man (your earth-suit) and the inner man (your spiritual self). What do you mean when you use the word “heart”? The Bible says our relationships and circumstances are merely the occasions in which our hearts express themselves. The world’s blame-shifting comes straight out of the chaos of sin in Garden of Eden. But the Bible says, in hundreds of ways, that human beings live out of their hearts. They say the problems of teen behavior results from association with other people (e.g., peer pressure) or circumstances (e.g., hormones). People think the world influences and directs teens. It says that the gospel doesn’t work for this particular group of people. This approach says that God didn’t make teenagers. But this approach is a subtle denial of God and the gospel. People tend to see teenagers as a collection of raging, rebel hormones encased in skin. Unfortunately, Western culture has a cynical view of the teen years. Being involved with our teenagers at a deep level is a critical goal for these years. This means parents have to take every opportunity to be part of the final stage of preparation. As a child’s world unfolds before him and he experiences greater freedom, his heart is revealed. The final years of a child’s life at home are a time of unprecedented opportunity. The true heart of the teenager, masked by years of parental control and regulations, comes out in the college years. They had the faith of their parents but never internalized it for themselves. But I suspect they never had a living faith in the first place. Many teens from Christian homes go off to college and then forsake the faith. Teens can be quite good at keeping external rules. Yet even Christian parents create new young Pharisees who live with no sense of need for the gospel at all. “Rule-keeping” was the sin of the Pharisees.

It is disconnected from the heart and is repudiated throughout the Bible. That sort of rule-keeping is behaviorism. Naturally, every parent needs to have regulations to control the behavior of their children, but that is not enough of a goal.

We try to deal with our kids according the Nike way, “Just do it!” But parents who just want to regulate and control behavior don’t give teens much to take with them when they leave home. In order to get through these years, parents tend to settle for external, behaviorist goals. But this goal focuses simply on getting yourself through a difficult time. Many parents have a simple goal for getting through their child’s teenage years: survival. What goals do most parents have for their teenagers? Adapted and used with permission from the National Journal Committee of the Presbyterian Church of Australia. This article is excerpted from an interview with Peter Hastie of the Australian Presbyterian, June 2000.

Parenting by paul david tripp