Sin nature.

[arymanth]

Originally Posted by TenderLovingWillow

My parents have told me that babies are pure selfishness to, because none of it has been trained out yet.

The problem with that is, selfishness is knowing how others feel and intentionally deciding you don't care, or you just care about yourself more. A baby CANNOT be selfish, they have no idea that anyone else exists. To a baby, mom is just an extension of himself, like a hand or a foot. Eventually he starts to understand she is separate, but it takes awhile before he can figure out that she has feelings that are separate from his. Then it will be awhile before he develops the skill to be able to see things from another person's perspective. Until I child gets to the point where they can understand that people are separate from themselves, that they have their own feelings, and the ability to put themselves in someone else's place to see things from their point of view, they are not capable of understanding empathy.

If a person does not have the ability to be empathetic, then they are not truly "selfish". They are responding to the world in the only way they can.

The ironic thing is that parents often try to teach a baby to be "unselfish" by behaving in a selfish way towards them by refusing to respond to their cries or meet their need for closeness. If an adult did that to another adult, they would be considered "selfish"... I don't feel like responding to you right now, I have decided your needs are not important enough to earn my attention. I will get to you when I feel like it. You need to learn how to wait. I don't care what you want, you can only have it if I feel like giving it to you.

Think about it, if we can't be generous, selfless, giving, and patient with someone who has no idea how to be these things... just how do we expect them to learn?

I think that the biggest problem is that people don't stop to think these things all the way through to their logical conclusion. They can only see the desired outcome and what they can do to achieve it, not how their methods may otherwise impact their child. You may very well teach a baby not to cry so much by ignoring their cries, and it may look like you have taught them "patience"... but you have also taught them to ignore the cries of others. That is not selflessness, that is indifference.

[ruhama]

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
1 John 4:18

---------- Post added at 02:42 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:40 PM ----------

Originally Posted by arymanth

The problem with that is, selfishness is knowing how others feel and intentionally deciding you don't care, or you just care about yourself more. A baby CANNOT be selfish, they have no idea that anyone else exists. To a baby, mom is just an extension of himself, like a hand or a foot. Eventually he starts to understand she is separate, but it takes awhile before he can figure out that she has feelings that are separate from his. Then it will be awhile before he develops the skill to be able to see things from another person's perspective. Until I child gets to the point where they can understand that people are separate from themselves, that they have their own feelings, and the ability to put themselves in someone else's place to see things from their point of view, they are not capable of understanding empathy.

If a person does not have the ability to be empathetic, then they are not truly "selfish". They are responding to the world in the only way they can.

The ironic thing is that parents often try to teach a baby to be "unselfish" by behaving in a selfish way towards them by refusing to respond to their cries or meet their need for closeness. If an adult did that to another adult, they would be considered "selfish"... I don't feel like responding to you right now, I have decided your needs are not important enough to earn my attention. I will get to you when I feel like it. You need to learn how to wait. I don't care what you want, you can only have it if I feel like giving it to you.

Think about it, if we can't be generous, selfless, giving, and patient with someone who has no idea how to be these things... just how do we expect them to learn?

I think that the biggest problem is that people don't stop to think these things all the way through to their logical conclusion. They can only see the desired outcome and what they can do to achieve it, not how their methods may otherwise impact their child. You may very well teach a baby not to cry so much by ignoring their cries, and it may look like you have taught them "patience"... but you have also taught them to ignore the cries of others. That is not selflessness, that is indifference.

[BarefootBetsy]

Only God's Grace can wash away sins or sin nature. Physical punishment, IME, just increases rebellion and embitters children, which parents are specifically told not to do to their children.

[NavaNessa]

I believe children are born into a sinful world...but I personally don't believe they are sinning, sinful or are sinners, as that implies them having actually sinned.
What constitutes as sin?
And at what age (which I feel varies depending on the child's level of understanding)?
Example: A toddler who takes a toy from another toddler is NOT a thief, neither are they sinning.
They are in a learning process on how to properly acquire something they want, and it is our job to instruct them in the kind way to do so.

Does this mean children are perfect? No.
But I do believe we are all born innocent, and that we all sin at some point (points)....

[Zooey]

Originally Posted by ArmsOfLove

the sin nature is between God and the individual, and He has done a perfectly fine job in taking care of it (with the cross and all). I don't expect I have anything to *add* to that plan - though I do make my children aware of it and raise them with the expectation before them that they will/are in relationship with God because of that

the immediate behavior is between my children and me and I don't over-spiritualize childish behavior. I deal with the behavior, teach, model, correct, etc., and they respond.

Children are born with a sin nature, but they are also born with a desire to be social.

What Crystal said.

Originally Posted by ArmsOfLove

I think the average person hear "sin nature" and think "God doesn't like what we do" without realizing that God clearly outlined what He does and doesn't like and NONE of it has anything to do with babies crying or jumping on the couch God loves us . . . He loved us so much IN OUR SIN that He died to redeem us. We love Him because He first loved us. If we are supposed to introduce our children to God, shouldn't we lead with the love?

What Crystal said. (We seriously need a "what she said" sign in our otherwise terrific smileies).

I don't like the terminology of "sin nature" & "total depravity". A friend once asked me, very seriously, "How can sin have a nature? Its a thing not a person!", & I realized that saying "original sin" is much more easy to understand & explain. As for TD, I beleive that we are deeply, deeply wounded by original sin, but that we are damaged, not destroyed.
Each & every person is still made in the image of God. There is still that in us that is all the image of our Creator. Otherwise, we would never be able to respond to God's love in the 1st place. That is what I see in a baby: a small person made in the image of God Himself.

[WildFlower]

just subbing because I love all the good replies here and am learning alot

[Hilary316]

Sometimes I wonder if we could have seen Jesus as a child if we would be surprised at how He acted. Would He have done some things that many Christians feel are "sinful" like throw a tantrum, hit his mother as a toddler, ever said No? I think we might all be surprised!

[Auroras mom]

Originally Posted by NavaNessa

I believe children are born into a sinful world...but I personally don't believe they are sinning, sinful or are sinners, as that implies them having actually sinned.
What constitutes as sin?
And at what age (which I feel varies depending on the child's level of understanding)?
Example: A toddler who takes a toy from another toddler is NOT a thief, neither are they sinning.
They are in a learning process on how to properly acquire something they want, and it is our job to instruct them in the kind way to do so.

Does this mean children are perfect? No.
But I do believe we are all born innocent, and that we all sin at some point (points)....

This. I truly despise the doctrine of total depravity, as well as the teachings that little babies are sinners. I used to firmly believe it. I remember totally alienating a boyfriend in college b/c I spoke about how his baby niece was such a selfish, wretched sinner (when she did normal, annoying crawler/toddler things). Bleck.

---------- Post added at 02:46 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:45 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Zooey

What Crystal said.


What Crystal said. (We seriously need a "what she said" sign in our otherwise terrific smileies).

I don't like the terminology of "sin nature" & "total depravity". A friend once asked me, very seriously, "How can sin have a nature? Its a thing not a person!", & I realized that saying "original sin" is much more easy to understand & explain. As for TD, I beleive that we are deeply, deeply wounded by original sin, but that we are damaged, not destroyed.
Each & every person is still made in the image of God. There is still that in us that is all the image of our Creator. Otherwise, we would never be able to respond to God's love in the 1st place. That is what I see in a baby: a small person made in the image of God Himself.

Amen, amen, amen.

[Hermana Linda]

Originally Posted by arymanth

Sin is what happens on the inside, it is not what you do on the outside. If a child wants to hit his brother, but he does not because he is afraid of being punished... you have not dealt with the sin, which is the DESIRE to hurt his brother in the first place. All you have done is kept the sin from being seen on the outside. If you focus on replacing that sin with love, by teaching compassion, empathy, patience, forgiveness, then you are dealing with the sin. Love extinguishes sin the way light banishes darkness. Where there is love, there is no sin, it just cannot exist. The way to deal with sin is to sow LOVE. You cannot do this with punishment.

Christian parents often punish what they see as "sinful behavior" because they think they are making their child more pleasing to God. It might be a good idea to find out what God actually wants from us in the first place. The number one command God gives us is to LOVE HIM and LOVE EACH OTHER and he tells us that everything else hangs on these two things, so if you do not LOVE, then nothing else you do means anything. I Cor. 13 tells us that no matter how GOOD your behavior is, if you do not LOVE, it is completely worthless. So if you are making your child behave in a way you believe is pleasing to God, but this behavior is not motivated by love, God is not impressed. You have accomplished NOTHING. So what if he jumps to obey at your every command... if he is not obeying out of love, it is nothing. So what if she never talks back or argues, if the only reason she is "respectful" is because she knows that if she does, you will punish her? This does not please God, either.

If you truly want to make your children pleasing to God, you have to teach them how to love him. Punishments cannot do this. The best way to teach your kids how to love God is to demonstrate his love towards them. "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." "We love him because he first loved us." 1 John 4:19 "he does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities." Psalm 103:10


My biggest hang-up when I was learning about gentle discipline was that I could not figure out how to make my kids "not sin" if I was not punishing them. Paul ran into that, too. "What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?" Basically, if God isn't going to punish us, can we just do whatever we want?

Basically, Paul's answer was that because we were set free from the law, we are also free to CHOOSE to obey, not out of fear of punishment, but because of our relationship with Jesus. We learn through building our relationship with Him to make better choices, and when we DO miss the mark, we are told to "come boldly to the throne of Grace to find mercy and help in time of need".

So if we are going to model that relationship to our children, we have to treat THEM the way God treats US. We need to show them how to make good choices, and when they inevitably make poor ones, we extend grace and show them how to fix their mistakes.

THIS is how you deal with the sin nature, you irradiate it with the Love of God. You, as the parent, make love the foundation of your life, to the point that everything you do is directly motivated by your love for God. This is what will draw your child to God, not fear of being punished, but a personal understanding of what it means to be loved so fiercely and unconditionally. We love Him because he first loved us... LIVE God's love to your children. That's all he asks you to do. "Love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself". THIS is the core of the Gospel, this should be the core of every Christian home. If you love, you will not hurt others. If you love, you will not lie. If you love, you will not steal. If you want your kids to act this way, put love into them. " If you LOVE ME, you WILL keep my commands". The love has to come first.

So how does God deal with a sinful nature? With LOVE.

...
The problem with that is, selfishness is knowing how others feel and intentionally deciding you don't care, or you just care about yourself more. A baby CANNOT be selfish, they have no idea that anyone else exists. To a baby, mom is just an extension of himself, like a hand or a foot. Eventually he starts to understand she is separate, but it takes awhile before he can figure out that she has feelings that are separate from his. Then it will be awhile before he develops the skill to be able to see things from another person's perspective. Until I child gets to the point where they can understand that people are separate from themselves, that they have their own feelings, and the ability to put themselves in someone else's place to see things from their point of view, they are not capable of understanding empathy.

If a person does not have the ability to be empathetic, then they are not truly "selfish". They are responding to the world in the only way they can.

The ironic thing is that parents often try to teach a baby to be "unselfish" by behaving in a selfish way towards them by refusing to respond to their cries or meet their need for closeness. If an adult did that to another adult, they would be considered "selfish"... I don't feel like responding to you right now, I have decided your needs are not important enough to earn my attention. I will get to you when I feel like it. You need to learn how to wait. I don't care what you want, you can only have it if I feel like giving it to you.

Think about it, if we can't be generous, selfless, giving, and patient with someone who has no idea how to be these things... just how do we expect them to learn?

I think that the biggest problem is that people don't stop to think these things all the way through to their logical conclusion. They can only see the desired outcome and what they can do to achieve it, not how their methods may otherwise impact their child. You may very well teach a baby not to cry so much by ignoring their cries, and it may look like you have taught them "patience"... but you have also taught them to ignore the cries of others. That is not selflessness, that is indifference.

This is fantastic! Do/will you have it on a blog somewhere that I can link to?

If not, can we talk?

[HadassahSukkot]

Originally Posted by Hilary316

Sometimes I wonder if we could have seen Jesus as a child if we would be surprised at how He acted. Would He have done some things that many Christians feel are "sinful" like throw a tantrum, hit his mother as a toddler, ever said No? I think we might all be surprised!

I have wondered this myself.

[rjy9343]

I think that people who do not believe in sin nature do not have kids. Otherwise they would have seen the appalling sin nature that comes out when their child does not sleep, does not comply or other really irritating behavior.

[saturnfire16]

Originally Posted by Hilary316

Sometimes I wonder if we could have seen Jesus as a child if we would be surprised at how He acted. Would He have done some things that many Christians feel are "sinful" like throw a tantrum, hit his mother as a toddler, ever said No? I think we might all be surprised!

I said this at a Bible study one time. Something like, "I can just imagine baby Jesus crying for his mom and hitting his brother."

That particular crowd was at the crying, but at that thought of toddler Jesus HITTING someone!

[arymanth]

Just a few more thoughts. I was talking with my friend about this, and I kept going back to what Paul was talking about when he said AFTER "What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?"

What is the answer to sin and how to we transmit it to our kids? The Bible says

"but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed.Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death." James 1: 14-15

The problem is in WHAT WE WANT. We sin because we are going after something we want. The key to changing our nature is to find a way to CHANGE WHAT WE WANT. It is like what you do as a parent when you are learning to control your own frustration and impatience, you have to focus on how much you LOVE your child, and not how much you want them to be less difficult. When your focus is on LOVE, it changes how you respond. Human nature is essentially self-centered. The natural man wants to find ways to make himself happy. It is not always natural to want to help others or make them happy. That is the part of us that is like God, but the other side of our nature is constantly at war with this.

The more we focus on God, getting to know him, loving him, the more HIS desires become OUR desires. His goals become our goals. If we are actively pursuing a relationship with God, it is very difficult for sin to get any hold in our lives, because the only way sin can get in is if we WANT something we shouldn't want. You have to have a desire for sin before it can do anything to effect your behavior. If a man is so deeply in love with his wife, he is not going to be thinking about wanting another woman, not even in his heart... and where there is no desire, there is no sin.

So how do we translate this to our kids? Well for one thing, it does no good to tell a small child that having desires are wrong. They are not. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be happy. The problem is in how you go about making yourself happy. So showing kids how to meet their own needs in appropriate ways leads them AWAY from sin. Sin is just trying to make yourself happy in inappropriate ways. Hitting your brother because you can't have his toy is an effort to get the toy to make yourself happy. Showing a child how to share, how to take turns, how to ask nicely, and even how to be content with something else for awhile are all ways to "turn off" sin. If they are getting their need met, where is the desire to hit their brother going to come from? Sometimes it is going to take TIME for them to learn, because of their own immaturity. Teaching a child how to find better ways to get what they want/need is not going to happen overnight, but if you are sowing gentleness and patience into them by your own behavior, then it WILL happen eventually.

Using impatience, frustration and even anger to correct a child sows all of those things into them and teaches them that the proper way to respond to someone who does something you don't like is with frustration, impatience and anger. You reap what you sow. If you have a frustrated toddler, you want to give him the ANTIDOTE to anger, not feed it with your own. The antidote to anger is patience and love.

"Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind". Changing the way you think about things changes who you are and how you respond. So how you renew the mind of a toddler??? "Repeat them again and again to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up." Deut. 6:7 Show them by HOW YOU LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE how to respond to things in theirs. The best way to teach is to be an example of what you are trying to teach. Love is attractive, it garners respect and honor. When a child lives with an adult who is consistently living the way God wants them to live, they EARN that child's respect simply because of WHO THEY ARE.

We have gotten a backwards view of this from too many teachers who tried to insist that children need to honor their parents FIRST, that parents were to DEMAND honor from their children... instead of focusing on BEING SOMEONE HONORABLE YOURSELF.

If you want your kids to turn away from sin, you have to give them something valuable to substitute for the wrong things they want. If you are angry and frustrated and miserable and stressed out... what is there to want to imitate there? Who wants to be like that?

If you focus on your OWN relationship with God and dealing with your OWN areas of sin in your life... you will automatically become a beacon in that area. This is why God says "First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend's eye." Matt. 7:5 and "if one blind person guides another, they will both fall into a ditch." Matt. 15:14

If you can't figure out how to deal with the sin in your own life, you will never be able to help your children deal with theirs.

As a parent, the best way to deal with sin nature in our children is to FIRST deal with the sin nature in ourselves. Then, as we master sin in different areas of our lives, we can share what we have learned with our children in a HUMBLE way. "if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted"

If you see your child getting caught up in sin (the desire to get something they shouldn't have or getting what they want/need the wrong way) you should restore them (correct and steer them in the right direction) GENTLY, always being aware that you are not above falling for the same type of temptation yourself, and are really no "better" than your child.


Demonstrate God's love and how to conquer the desire to sin in your own life, stay humble, be patient. Sin doesn't stand a chance.

[marbles]

I think something that people on the total depravity side forget is that God only holds us responsible for the things he has given us. Children have little to no knowledge of God and are not capable of understanding Him. He says all over the place that he has different "standards" for different people (his standards don't really change, but he meets people where they are) like teachers, parents, children, priests, those who have much and those who have little. So we can't expect children to live according to standards they don't know.
On the other side of that is the parable about the debtors. We have been forgiven much, we shouldn't go demanding a few pennies.

[twentysixcats]

Originally Posted by marbles

I think something that people on the total depravity side forget is that God only holds us responsible for the things he has given us. Children have little to no knowledge of God and are not capable of understanding Him. He says all over the place that he has different "standards" for different people (his standards don't really change, but he meets people where they are) like teachers, parents, children, priests, those who have much and those who have little. So we can't expect children to live according to standards they don't know.
On the other side of that is the parable about the debtors. We have been forgiven much, we shouldn't go demanding a few pennies.

Yes! Back when I was first questioning methods of discipline, I wondered why the parable of the debtors didn't apply... and now that I'm on this side of it, I think it is a beautiful way to view our relationship with our children.