http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15875408/gods-righteous-judgment-on-christians-now

I love the old word equanimity. It’s almost fallen out of use today. Perhaps that’s because, in part, the reality has become increasingly rare. Equanimity is a term for composure, for emotional calmness and presence of mind, particularly in trying circumstances.

We’re living in times that condition us to overreact and explode, in a society that rewards outrage and outbursts. It’s never been easy for sinners to keep even tempers in trial, but present distresses summon us afresh to learn composure under pressure, how to “hold our peace” when the moment requires it, and give release to emotion in its proper time and place. Our families and churches and communities need leaders who have learned to keep their heads when others are losing theirs, to not lose control in anger or self-pity but keep a sober mind, and be, like our God, “slow to anger” (Exodus 34:6).

We need to bring equanimity back.

Non-Anxious Presence

The road-tested wisdom of Proverbs 16:32 whispers to those with ears to hear,

Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty,and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.

“Our families and churches need leaders who have learned to keep their heads when others are losing theirs.”

Count “he who rules his spirit” as a biblical phrase for equanimity and holy composure. Note well, the wise man neither smites his spirit nor takes orders from it. He neither stuffs his emotions nor lets them play king. Rather, he rules his spirit. He learns how to keep his spirit cool, his temper even, in moments when fools get hot, weak kneed, and their passions carry the day.

This is not stoicism. Christians have long called this “self-control.” We aim not to be men without spirits but those who keep “a cool spirit” under duress, when the immature lose control. We do not discard our emotions (as if we could) or suppress them, but by God’s grace we seek to bring our spirit increasingly under the control of his Spirit.

Holy Calm

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) commends the “holy calm” of godly strength and praises the Spirit-empowered composure to which God calls his people and provides — and all the more in times volatile and easy agitated.

The strength of the good soldier of Jesus Christ appears in nothing more than in steadfastly maintaining the holy calm, meekness, sweetness, and benevolence of his mind, amidst all the storms, injuries, strange behavior, and surprising acts and events of this evil an unreasonable world. (Religious Affections, 278)

Foreign as “holy calm” and equanimity might seem in our frenetic and furious age, we are well aware of the present challenges to our composure — which Edwards names in language we could hardly update more than two hundred years later: “storms, injuries, strange behavior, and surprising acts and events of this evil and unreasonable world.”

Superlative Meekness

Yet Edwards not only commends “holy calm” in Christ’s soldiers. He presses deeper. He celebrates it in our captain and Lord himself. “In the person of Christ do meet together infinite majesty and transcendent meekness,” he writes, which are “two qualifications that meet together in no other person but Christ.”

Only God has infinite majesty; only in becoming man does Christ have meekness, “a virtue proper only to the creature.” In this meekness, Edwards says, “seems to be signified, a calmness and quietness of spirit, arising from humility in mutable beings that are naturally liable to be put into a ruffle by the assaults of a tempestuous and injurious world. But Christ, being both God and man, hath both infinite majesty and superlative meekness” (“Excellency of Christ”).

Who among us has not felt the temptation “to be put into a ruffle by the assaults” of our lives and age? And what comfort might we take that God himself, in the person of his Son, entered into our same “tempestuous and injurious world” and exhibited such an unusual and admirable “calmness and quietness of spirit”?

Sinless as he was, Jesus had his emotional moments as he dwelt among us. We do not presume he was “calm” when he took up a whip and cleared the temple with zeal, or when he wept at Lazarus’s tomb, or when he prayed, in anguish, in the garden, with loud cries and tears. Yet apart from a few exceptions, the Christ we encounter in the Gospels is strikingly calm. A man of equanimity indeed — a model of the kind of composure that we his people want to grow in, and can grow in, by the power of his Spirit.

Severely Injured and Remarkably Calm

For Edwards, such equanimity wasn’t theoretical. It was all too real, in fact. Years of injuries, strange behavior, and surprising acts in this evil, unreasonable world came to a head in the spring of 1750. His trial was his own congregation, the church he had pastored for twenty-five years. His own people dismissed him after a week of painful proceedings. However, from all surviving accounts, he never lost his composure.

Even though the church dismissed him for his spiritual views about church membership, they couldn’t help but commend his “christian spirit and temper.” As biographer George Marsden reports, “Edwards’ demeanor during these proceedings apparently was remarkably calm and helped earn him this affirmation even from his opponents. His supporters viewed him as simply saintly” (Jonathan Edwards: A Life, 361). One observer of the long, gut-wrenching process wrote,

I never saw the least symptoms of displeasure in his countenance the whole week, but he appeared like a man of God, whose happiness was out of the reach of his enemies, and whose treasure was not only a future but a present good, overbalancing all imaginable ills of life, even to the astonishment of many, who could not be at rest without his dismission.

Even as Edwards, before his God, received “these afflictions as a means of humbling him” — and he did suffer deeply, and had his own failings — he held his peace. He showcased an equanimity under strain that could not be pretended, a composure arising from decades of grounding and a happiness “out of the reach of his enemies,” from a treasure that was “not only a future but a present good” — that is, from looking to Equanimity himself, the preeminent man of God, and God-man, seated at his Father’s right hand.

Edwards — like Stephen, whose “face was like the face of an angel” (Acts 6:15) before his accusers — looked to that same face as church’s first martyr, who

full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. And he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” (Acts 7:55–56)

Asleep in the Storm

No doubt, Edwards, like John Owen (1616–1683) before him, would have us “study Christ more,” not only to “recover spiritual life” when we find ourselves to have “decayed” spiritually, but also “to have an experience of the power . . . in our own hearts” that would feed composure and produce equanimity in trying times.

As we look habitually to Christ, as we find him communicated to us in the Gospels, we observe a man who is stunningly calm. What composure, what self-control, what holy equanimity he demonstrates again and again when failed by his disciples, interrupted by the infirm, imposed upon by the well-meaning, challenged by the sophisticated, and disrespected by the authorities. He even shows us what calm is possible in our own storms by what he did in a literal storm: he slept.

And when they woke him, he was not frantic but spoke stillness into the wind: “Peace. Be still.” And so the calm of his own spirit settled over the raging sea: “the wind ceased, and there was a great calm” (Mark 4:39).

Face of Composure

So too, as we look to Christ at the right hand of the Father, in glory, we see the one who not only modeled such composure in our own skin and setting, but now, with all authority in heaven and on earth, he upholds us and makes it possible for us to find the feet of composure.

“We cannot study the real Christ too much. We cannot look to him too often. We cannot meditate on him too much.”

Christ, as man, is not only our example of Christian equanimity. Seated on heaven’s throne, he is now God’s mediatorial king who, by his very reign, makes our progress in equanimity to be holy, rather than delusional. We not only follow him, imitating his calmness; we have faith in him as the world’s only unshakable footing for real and lasting composure. We can scarcely even begin to estimate what healing there is for the flighty, ruffled soul, what health and strength and stillness may be found in “the frequent actings of faith upon the person of Christ,” as Owen says.

Beholding the glory of our Lord — in his striking Gospels calmness and his present imperturbable equanimity — we are “transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). We cannot study the real Christ too much. We cannot look to him too often. We cannot meditate on him too much.

In coming as near to him as we can, and abiding in him as much as we are able, we will in time learn more of that holy stillness of soul, that godly composure, that glorious equanimity, and a thousand other graces besides.

My wife, Julie, and I have been parents now for 43 years. During that time, God has graciously given us 6 children and 22 grandchildren, with more on the way (grandchildren, not children!). That’s a lot of parenting experience, even if many of our experiences only showed how confused we were at the time.

When people ask us for counsel on raising kids, as our children often have, it can be difficult to respond briefly. Parenting is complex, and there are few simple answers.

Of course, the most important words are those God himself has given us, such as these from the apostle Paul, in Ephesians 6:4: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” And similarly in Colossians 3:21: “Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.”

It’s significant that Paul issues a common warning in these two verses: “Do not provoke your children.” Don’t tempt them. Don’t overly burden them. Don’t frustrate them. But how do we keep from doing that? In our early years of parenting, I remember how often I thought the answer to any parenting problem was more rules. Unfortunately, that became a primary way I provoked my children. And it became especially obvious when I lost track of what rules I had actually made.

A wiser way to avoid provoking our children is to consider what kind of father God is to us. In these years far removed from the daily pressures of raising little ones, Julie and I have identified at least three ways God calls us to reflect his fatherly heart in the way we raise our children.

Attention

In this age of nonstop, ever-present, competing spectacles, giving children our attention can be more challenging than we think.

The voices of distraction are loud and persistent. Dirty dishes. Dirty house. Dirty laundry. Dirty children. Grocery shopping. Time with friends. Deadlines. Text messages. Unfinished books, magazines, and articles. Internet browsing. The nonstop allure of social media, phone games, and podcasts. It’s easy to stop paying attention to the little ones right in front of our eyes. We have an uncanny ability to tune out a whining child or ignore little fingers pulling on our shirt when we have something “more important” to do.

But God isn’t like that. “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you” (Psalm 32:8). As our Lord teaches us, his eye is on us. In fact, he is always watching us: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear him, on those who hope in his steadfast love” (Psalm 33:18).

We are never out of God’s sight. We always have his attention. Likewise, our children need to know they have our attention. That means patient listening. Focusing. Stooping down to eye level. Spending time. It often requires saying no to other activities. Turning off or turning down the TV or music. Closing your computer. Putting down your phone.

Of course, children should be taught not to interrupt adults and to respect the conversations of others. But too often, we seek to parent our kids without really knowing them or understanding them. We can view them more as interruptions, nuisances, or obstacles to what we want to accomplish.

But raising our children for God’s glory is what we want to accomplish. And to do that, we need to give them our attention.

Affection

Our young children need to know not only that we notice them, but that we love them. They were made to respond to and benefit from our affection.

J.C. Ryle reminds us in The Duties of Parents,

Love should be the silver thread that runs through all your conduct. Kindness, gentleness, long-suffering, patience, forbearance, sympathy, a willingness to enter into childish troubles, a readiness to take part in childish joys — these are the cords by which a child may be led most easily — these are the clues you must follow if you would find the way to his heart. (11)

Consider God’s affection for his people — the kind of affection we’re to reflect to our children:

It was I who taught Ephraim to walk; I took them up by their arms, but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of kindness, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaws, and I bent down to them and fed them. (Hosea 11:3–4)

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. (Psalm 103:8)

Affection begins in the heart, but it leads to physical contact: holding, touching, hugging, kissing, cuddling — and typically for boys, wrestling.

We can easily withhold affection when we want to “teach our kid a lesson.” They’ve been disrespectful. They’ve blatantly disobeyed. They’re being selfish and arguing — again. Our responses are short, even cold. There’s nothing warm or inviting about the way we’re addressing or interacting with them.

“It’s God’s kindness, not his harshness, that leads us to repentance. The same will be true with our children.”

But no matter how irritated, frustrated, bothered, inconvenienced, or bad we’re feeling, we don’t want to withhold the kind of lavish affection God has poured out on us through his Son. Showing such affection doesn’t mean we don’t speak clearly, firmly, or even sternly at times. There are directions we want our children to understand, sins we want them to avoid, and dangers we want them to flee.

But far too often, self-centered anger motivates us rather than wisdom and compassion. Paul reminds us in Romans 2:4 that it’s God’s kindness, not his harshness, that leads us to repentance. The same will be true with our children. God doesn’t withdraw his affection from his children when they disobey. Neither should we.

Authority

The Bible isn’t vague about children needing to obey their parents.

My son, keep your father’s commandment, and forsake not your mother’s teaching. (Proverbs 6:20)

Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. (Colossians 3:20)

“Authority combined with attention and affection is crucial for our children, especially in their early years.”

But a parent’s authority is never to be confused with demanding, bullying, manipulating, shaming, deriding, abusing, venting, belittling, crushing, domineering, or distancing. It’s never to be harsh or cruel or rooted in selfishness or vengeance. That kind of authority drives our children away from God, not toward him. But authority combined with attention and affection is crucial for our children, especially in their early years.

We exercise authority over our children not simply because we’re the adults, but because we want to point them to God’s authority. His rule over us is perfect and absolute; ours isn’t. So, as we exercise authority, we can look for ways to communicate the beauty, necessity, and delight of God’s commands to our kids. For example:

Talk regularly about what God wants us to do and why he wants us to obey him with joy.
Reference God’s word at planned times and spontaneously throughout the day.
Distinguish between God’s rules and our own preferences.
Point out the consequences of disobeying God’s commands.
Bring appropriate discipline when commands have been clearly heard, understood, and then disobeyed or disregarded.
Consistently bring discipline with a calm, hopeful, and faith-filled spirit.

Where Godly Authority Leads

Because authority is so often ignored or abused, it’s also helpful to remember why exercising authority in our children’s lives is so important.

First, authority teaches our children how God wants us to live. “All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his testimonies” (Psalm 25:10). Teaching our children not to lie, steal, hurt, or be disrespectful isn’t merely our preference — it’s God’s command. Likewise, being kind, truthful, generous, merciful, and faithful doesn’t just make them good citizens — it reflects their Father in heaven (Ephesians 5:1).

Second, authority shows our children their inability to keep God’s commands perfectly. As Paul Tripp has said, “Parenting is not a behavior-control mission; it is a heart-rescue mission.” Our job isn’t to keep our kids from sinning (an impossible task), but to teach them what to do with their sin in light of the Savior. There is a difference between doing good and being good, between the way we act and the way we are. God’s authority, over time, is meant to reveal our children’s waywardness, rebellion, deception, and inability to save themselves.

Finally, authority is meant to point our children to the Savior who perfectly obeyed his Father so he could take God’s punishment for our disobedience. Parental discipline is necessary to keep our kids from harming themselves and others, but it can’t change their hearts. They need to know that hope comes not from their spotless record but from the spotless record of Jesus. Regardless of how good our children look on the outside, they are never beyond the need for a Savior. And regardless of how bad our children act on the outside, they are never beyond the power of a Savior.

As in all things parenting related, we’ll never carry out these plans, or any others, as well as we hope. But we can take great comfort knowing we have a heavenly Father whose eye is always on us, whose heart is always for us, and who is always working in us what is pleasing to him (Psalm 121:7–8; Psalm 103:17; Philippians 2:13) — even, and especially, as we parent our young children.