Welcome to Bible and business. I’m Bill English, the publisher of Bible and Business, and I want to thank you for joining me today. This episode is the 11th of a 30 part series that it’s been taken from my book Biblical Wisdom for Business Leaders. 30 sayings from Proverbs. And today’s episode is on disciplining your children.
I’ll be in Proverbs chapter 23, verses 13 and 14. But before we get started, just remember, if you’d like to purchase a copy of my book in order to follow along with these videos, you can do so at Amazon. You can get them in paperback, Hardback or Kindle, or at these other online bookstores that you see listed here. Okay, let’s go ahead and get started. Proverbs 23, verses 13 and 14.
When it comes to disciplining our children, it says this. The Sage tells us this do not withhold discipline from a child. If you punish them with the rod, they will not die. Punish them with the rod and save them from death. So a little bit of context here, saying nine.
So you have to go back a couple of episodes here. Instructs us to avoid a fool. In other words, have minimal contact with a fool. And a fool is, among other things, a person who despises sound instruction and wisdom. In the saying ten, the one that we went over last week, we are taught to be the opposite of a fool.
We are to pursue wisdom and knowledge and value development through learning. In this saying, what the Sage is doing, he is saying, discipline your children so that they don’t become fools. Discipline them so that you really discipline out of them any level of or any pattern of foolish behavior. So the connection between these sayings is more easily discerned. In the Hebrew language, the same Hebrew word translated as instruction in saying ten is translated as discipline here.
So scholars think that the translators use the word discipline instead of instruction in these two verses because of the reference to the rod in verse 13 and the harsh language here. And we’re going to deal with that a little bit more in a moment. But the harsh language here should not obscure the central message. Parents who avoid the unpleasantness of disciplining their children both in action and belief, will enable their children’s march toward an early grave that’s going to result from an undisciplined life that is filled with foolishness. That’s really what’s at stake here.
Now, let’s deal with this whole corporal punishment piece. If you punish them with the rod, that phrase, a lot of people think about a person taking a long rod and just beating their kids with it. And that’s really not what the Sage has in mind here. But using some kind of corporal punishment is an illustration of how far you may need to go, hopefully not very often as a parent, to discipline a wayward child. So if I say it another way.
It means starting with corporal methods when disciplining our children is really not the primary interpretation here. It’s really the extreme. We discipline through other methods and then if we’re forced to, we end up disciplining using corporal punishment. But I’m not a big believer in starting with corporal punishment. I don’t think that’s the right way to discipline children.
But if you do use corporal punishment and you do it in love, not anger, and you do it measured, you’re not abusing those two things. No anger and you’re not abusing if you do it in the right way, properly administered, it can save your child from a life of destruction. That’s what the sage is telling us here. Now, those who use this passage to justify child abuse or other forms of abuse cannot hide behind this saying they are wrong. This saying does not in any way, shape, form or any sense of reasonable interpretation support the abuse of children physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually.
And neither do I. I want to be very, very clear about that. I have witnessed some adults who were severely abused as children and they tend to take very much a nonphysical approach to all discipline out of their really what I think is an understandable fear of abusing their children. So the sage is saying that if you do have to use corporal punishment, that’s the extreme. And if you do it in the right way, it can save your children from going into a life of foolishness.
Now applying this to business. Of course, we don’t use rods and corporal punishment in business. But if your business culture if you’re a business owner heads up for just a moment, if your business culture is just filled with conflict and the staff is demoralized, then it’s likely you’re not enforcing your policies and your rules consistently and without prejudice. And so I would say one of the first things you need to do is get to a place where you are facing into conflict and you are applying the rules and the policies consistently without prejudice. And if you’re a Christian leader who avoids conflict, then you only got two choices here.
You either become good at engaging in conflict resolution or you need to get out of leadership, because leadership is always going to have conflict in it. Christian business leaders who avoid conflict inevitably don’t discipline well. Now, I want you to hear that phrase, if you’re a leader and you avoid conflict, then you’re not going to discipline your team or your staff well because discipline of staff always involves conflict. Proper enforcement of rules and policies is always going to involve some conflict. And if you avoid conflict, then you’re also not going to be enforcing your rules and your policies very well.
And the result is going to be an unhappy demoralized, probably fractionalized staff. And that’s just not something that you want and it’s not something that Christians in business should be known for. Okay, so here’s our conclusion. We will run our businesses or teams like we run our house. And so if we avoid applying rules consistently in our home, then we’ll avoid doing it in business.
But if we learn to apply our rules and our policies consistently in business, then we’ll also be able to apply those at home consistently, and applying proper discipline to our children and applying rules and policies consistently, that’s the right thing to do. But I want you to hear me again. I do not condone in any way, shape or form child abuse with a rod or a hand or anything else. I am against the abuse, the physical, mental, social, sexual, spiritual abuse of children and of adults. And this verse does not support abusing kids in order to punish them.
It just doesn’t. And so I want everybody to hear that loud and clear. Okay, what’s next? In the next episode, we’re going to be in Proverbs 20 315 and 16, verses 15 and 16, and we’re going to talk about succession, succession in business, and taking joy in succession. So I want to thank you for joining me today.
I’m Bill English, the publisher here at Bible and Business. If you’d like to get a hold of me for any reason, as some of you have, you can do so just by sending me an email at bill@bibleandbusiness.com. I’d love to hear from you. I have talked with a number of you about problems in your business or problems in your team, and I just enjoy paying it forward with you a little bit. So feel free to ping me and let me know what’s going on, and I’ll be sure to respond as soon as I can.
So, again, thank you for joining me today, and I hope you go out and make it a great day. Take care.