My Experience with Spanking

After Barbie’s last post, some were asking, “Should you ever spank your kids?”  Well, I’m putting myself in the hot seat today to share how I have been guilty of doing it wrong and what the Lord has taught me as a result.

In the past, whenever my kids have done something wrong or disobeyed, and I thought they needed a spanking, I was usually angry. I figured that I had to respond somehow to their disobedience, misbehavior, etc. Of course, I knew that I shouldn’t be spanking in anger, but like it or not, I was still angry and I had to do something about their behavior.

Unfortunately, I was justifying my sin. As a result, my kids learned that I couldn’t be trusted to control my anger. It also became quite obvious that my anger never empowered them to change. In fact, it had the opposite effect. It always left my kids trapped in their self-centered ways, just as I felt trapped in my own unloving expression of anger towards them.

Yet I had always believed that my anger really was justified. After all, it was my children who made me angry. However, it wasn’t long before the Lord exposed my thinking as a lie, and I began to tell the truth about my sin: Nobody can make me angry. When I am angry, it is only because I choose to be angry. I always have the option of responding in love.

That sounds like such a simple answer, and yet I know what it feels like to be enslaved by my anger, feeling powerless to make a “simple” choice to love. Something just didn’t make sense. You see, I believed that the only power that my flesh (my anger) had over me was the power that I chose to give it. After all, Jesus already nailed my anger to the cross when He died for me, putting it to death once and for all. But if that was really true, then why wasn’t I experiencing the reality of His freedom?

I believed the Lord had the power to transform my heart if I would only cooperate with Him in that process. I could hear the Holy Spirit correcting me (“You are acting in anger towards your child.”) and instructing me (“Your correction needs to be motivated by love.”). I was listening, and I was trying my very best to obey, but my anger just wouldn’t go away. What was I missing?

Something was indeed missing. I was trying to obey without having first come to a point of repentance. I was trying to overcome my anger in my own strength, without tapping into the Lord for the only source of real power – the power of the cross. Attempting to obey in that stronghold of my life (my anger) without first repenting over it was an effort made in vain.

Up until that point, I hadn’t understood how much I was hurting my children through my anger. I didn’t see how I was a source of fear, how I was bringing death into our relationships, and how I was losing their hearts. Not simply because I was spanking them, but because I was spanking in anger.

In His kindness, the Lord opened my eyes to clearly see the pain that I was causing my kids. When He did, it broke my heart, and I finally experienced true repentance over what I had done. It wasn’t because I wanted to be a “better mom.” In fact, it wasn’t about me at all anymore. It was about my kids and how much I wanted them to experience my love. It was about how I didn’t want to keep on hurting them like that anymore.

I had been powerless to obey before my heart was broken before the Lord. Before I came to the place of repentance over my anger, I was indeed hearing His voice and trying to obey, but my motivation was not out of love for my kids. The Lord couldn’t do His work in my life – the transformation of my heart from one of anger to one of love – without me first repenting and crying out to Him in brokenness over the pain that I had caused my kids. It was then that the Lord could begin to do His miraculous work in my heart. It was then that the healing could begin as I began to rebuild the trust that I had broken with my kids for so many years.

I have come to believe that even repentance itself is a gift from the Lord. We must cry out to the Lord to reveal to us just how much we are hurting our kids. He wants to show us. He wants to break our hearts over it and to see us come to the point of repentance so that He can do what He has wanted to do in our hearts all along, but that we have been too stubborn to let Him do. It is time for us to cry out to Him: “Lord, show us the truth about our unloving ways! Break our hearts so that we can be changed from the inside out!”

So you may be wondering – do I still spank my kids? Yes, I do – the ones who need an immediate correction that they can understand because they are not yet able to govern themselves. You see, my kids always have the opportunity to govern themselves first – to choose to obey, to choose not to hit, to choose to… or not to. When they choose not listen to my words, they will get corrected in a way that makes an impression on them, and that may or may not be in the form of a spanking.

To be honest, I have been surprised that the more I have come to recognize and understand the voice of the Holy Spirit, the less I have spanked. That is not to say that my kids do not continue to need my correction and instruction. They are still very immature and have a long ways to go in developing Christlike character. But the Lord has been impressing me with His wisdom in addressing their self-centeredness in specific ways so that more often than not, their correction does not include a spanking at all.

I began by saying that I would share about my own experience with spanking, but as it turns out, the real issue that needed to be addressed was the one in my heart. The Lord is in the business of changing hearts. There is nothing that He finds more pleasure in than leading us into victory over our specific unloving ways of relating. Thank you, Jesus, for loving us so much that you want to come beside us and make a way for us to taste that victory that you gave us so long ago through your work on the cross.

~ Christi Faagau

You can find the third part of this series here.