“Discipline your son while there is hope. Don’t set your heart on being the cause of his death” (Prov 19:18).
This implies that if you do not discipline him, you have set your heart on being the cause of his death. This is the sin of omission. This tells us that omission can lead to death. We tend to be open minded to the idea that the error of commission, something you did, can result in someone’s death. However, even the laws of nations recognize that there is something called ‘criminal negligence’. For instance, you were not careful, and a patient died. You were reckless, careless and didn’t pay attention, and someone died as a result. Even though it looked like you were helping the person, you left the scissors inside his belly, or you forgot a swab inside there and caused his death. No, you’re not allowed to do that. You cannot be that reckless. You cannot finish surgery and rush off after removing your scrubs and washing your hands. No, you must carefully assess your work and ensure that everything is in place. You must be careful to pay the people who worked with you. As a doctor, you cannot choose to keep all the money for yourself and refuse to employ the required number of nurses or doctors who will stand there and point out things to you, correct you and remind you. The only reason you can go to prison for such a thing is to discourage others from thinking they can be careless while treating someone. There are many other examples.
Drunk driving: If you want to drink, take your drink home and get drunk at home. But do not go out, drink and then drive because too many people have killed others due to drunk driving. Did you intend to kill anyone? No. Did you intend to harm the person you ran over? No. What did you then do that deserves going to prison? Oh, you didn’t care if you killed someone by being drunk while driving. It’s just that one thing led to another. So, the parent who does not discipline his child does not shape them properly and such a parent wants them to die.
A child who is not disciplined will die. It’s simple. If the child is not disciplined, corrected, and shaped properly, many bad things will happen; their future will die. They may be the one who will drop out of school, the one who will become a drug addict, the one who will become pregnant, the one who will join a bad gang, and the one who will resort to fraud. The way a parent acts with a child should tell you what the definition of discipline is. You caught him once, stealing or deceiving someone, and you reacted gently. You saw him do it again and you still reacted gently, and you kept reacting in the same way. You have led to that child’s death. His conscience will die in that area, if he does not die physically. In many instances, he can get beaten to death or shot to death. And that is because he continued with that wrong act till, he thought he could do it freely. But if he got a flogging that terrified him from stealing, or was deprived of benefits because of what he did, he would have a godly fear reside in his heart. And whenever he got tempted to do wrong, he would remember his parents, the pain they caused him, the way they overreacted, and he would not yield to his impulses. Because unchecked impulses lead to death down the road. The Bible tells you how death is arrived at. Evil desire brings forth sin. Sin, when it is finished, brings forth death James 1:15).
So, the parent who doesn’t deal with sin plans for their child’s death. You may not be able to deal with his evil desires that much, but you can control them a bit. For instance, you can stop him from watching certain things on TV, from listening to certain things, from reading certain books, and hanging out with people that stir up evil desires in him. You can change their school and warn them against such things. You can control all those things almost fully at 100% when they’re younger. But when they hit a certain age, you can’t have 100% control anymore. You wouldn’t know what they are reading on their phones. They can do all sorts of things with their phones.
You have up till their teenage years to control certain things. They do not really know that they can rebel at this time. You cannot do much once they hit the higher teens and upwards. Then, what you did earlier will take hold – what you allowed, the discipline you put or did not put in will run with them. If you didn’t put that discipline early, it will be almost impossible to do so once they’re 15 or 16 years up. In front of you, they may not dress the way you don’t like. But once they step out, they’ll put on those trousers. You may not like them watching certain things, and reading certain things, but they’ll do all of that. You can’t be there to stop them. The younger ones come home, eat your food, climb your bed and sleep. You are in control every minute and they don’t feel so offended. But you can’t do that with the older ones. It’s impossible.
So this is how discipline, or the absence of discipline works. You can control desire to a great degree in the early days. You can control sin to a degree by reacting very strongly. But if you were not reacting when they’re younger, it’s almost impossible to do it when they are older. How are you going to not flog them, make them kneel, cause them pain or discomfort of any kind in the early days and then, you want to start when they’re older? They’ll look at you and wonder at your new reaction. Their sense of independence and individuality will be too high for you to begin something on that level.
In fact, for many people, they wonder why their parents didn’t react strongly when they had been acting that way from when they were young. They are shocked that their parents even say anything to them at the older age. By this time, they can talk back to the father and mother, walk out on them, take their things out, insult them, be a terror and disregard them. It is obvious that the reason is that they are unable to change what was. Desire leads to sin. Sin leads to death. What many a parent tries to do most of their lives is to stop their child from encountering death.
Parents, you are trying to stop him from continuing with drugs when he’s hooked, you’re trying to stop her from sleeping around when she’s hooked, you’re trying to stop her from stealing when she’s hooked. If he does not steal physically and he finds out that there’s Yahoo fraud, internet fraud, he will be doing that with his phone. It is a terrible error to try to stop your child from encountering death when you didn’t stop your child from countering evil desires. You didn’t stop him from committing sin, then you came to stage three, when he’s doing his Ph.D., to stop him from being educated. It cannot work. It is too late. This is why parents are to save their children from death by applying the first thing – discipline. Discipline controls desires. Discipline curtails sin. But discipline has no effect on death.
When death is decreed, what can discipline do? Through one man’s sin, death entered the world. Death is a consequence. You cannot stop the consequence of planting a mango tree. You can’t stop the consequence of planting a palm tree, except you cut down the palm tree. That means you remove the human or kill the person; remove him from circulation, cut him down. Therefore, discipline your son while there is hope – that is, at the early stage; at the level of evil desire and sin. There is still hope there. You can discipline them then, when it is only evil desire at work or the possibility of evil desire. You can also discipline them after the evil desire, before it yields sin, or you discipline them when there’s sin. But the stage at which there is no more hope is the stage where death has come to collect its wages. Then you cannot stop death from taking its wages.