Modeling Repentance: Asking Your Kids for Forgiveness
Lord's Day Exhortation
As parents, you have the great duty and privilege of raising your children in the faith. This is why we share the gospel with them repeatedly, why we keep them in the worship service with the rest of God’s saints, why we provide them a Christian education, why we discipline them in love, why we read the Bible and sing in our homes, and why we tell them great stories of God’s people.
One powerful way to teach your children the gospel is for you as parents to model repentance to them. By this, I mean that they need to occasionally see you asking them for forgiveness.
You certainly know you sin against them at times. Maybe you ignored them while they repeatedly tried to get your attention. Perhaps you spoke to them harshly in frustration, or grabbed their arm in a disrespectful way. Or maybe you neglected to follow through on an important promise you had made to them.
There are any number of ways you may sin against them – and you all know that look of dismay or sadness on their faces when you do. It is in those moments that you must step back, examine yourself, and seek forgiveness as necessary.
Doing this teaches your children a few very important lessons. It reminds them of their dignity as individuals and that they matter to you and to the Lord. It tells them that dad and mom are sinners, too, and that everyone in the home must obey God’s Word. And it demonstrates that you are humble enough to acknowledge your sin and make it right.
While some may fear that apologizing will reveal their weakness, the truth is that it is a weakness that must be shown for the gospel to be fully glorified and adorned in your home. The Apostle Paul commands fathers not to provoke their children to anger (Eph. 6:4), and one easy way to exasperate them is to hold them to a standard that you do not live up to yourself. And sadly, there are very few things that obscure the gospel for children as much as parents who are hypocrites.
This exhortation was given on December 21, AD 2025, at King’s Cross Church in Moscow, Idaho.