Avoiding The Blame Game Series

5. Accept no excuses from your kids. I wonder what would happen if each of us we would make our home a “No excuse zone”? Maybe we even need some signs that say, “No Excuses.” Actually, we do have a sign for you in your bulletin to put up in your house somewhere. Let’s try this. Whenever you hear someone start blaming or making excuses, make the sound of a buzzer to signify the blame game is over. Let’s try it together: Mommp! Here’s the deal. Kids, you have permission to do this when you hear your parents playing the blame game as well.

Here are some practical things to teach your kids.

* Life is not fair. One of the best things we can teach our kids is how to handle adversity because they need to learn that life does not revolve around them.

* Take responsibility. Children don’t become responsible by accident or by magic. I’ve shared this before but when I started a fire in a forest and my parents found out they made me call the Fire Department. Lesson learned. I don’t play with matches anymore.

* Enforce consequences. I came across a very helpful article this week called, “13 Ways to Really Mess up Your Children.” I posted it on the blog if you’d like to read it (www.pontiacbible.org). For the sake of time, I’ll just mention one that applies to our topic today. #4: Always do what you can to keep your child from having to experience the consequences of their behavior. Pay their traffic tickets. Pay for overdue books. Pay their parking fines. Run interference for them. If their paper is late, insist that a teacher is unfair for picking on your child.

* Don’t play the victim. When kids try to shift the focus away from their responsibility and start making an excuse or play the blame game, our job is to say Mommp! and then shift it back from excuse to responsibility.

* Don’t make excuses for them. Sometimes parents can inadvertently fall into the blame game by making excuses for their kids. For example, when you see your child ignore an adult here at church, don’t say, “Oh, she’s just shy or tired or not feeling well.” There’s really no excuse for rudeness.

Don’t play the blame game; own it by name and avoid the shame. As the ushers come forward this morning for our offering, aren’t you grateful that our chains are gone? It’s all by His amazing grace that we can stop playing the blame game.

Music

It’s difficult for some of us to worship because we feel so much shame. Some of you blame yourself for the way your kids are living. Friends, there’s such a thing as true guilt and false guilt. True guilt is remedied through the forgiveness of Christ. False guilt paralyzes parents.

Can I share some really good news with you? After Adam and Eve sinned, God made garments of skin for them and clothed them. Their guilt and shame and blame were now clothed by God but a death had to take place. Instead of executing them, which they deserved, God took the life of a substitutionary animal instead. Their fig leaves weren’t going to last. No matter what we do to try to cover up our sin, it won’t work in the long haul. We can’t run away and hide, we can’t minimize our sins, and blaming somebody else won’t take away our guilt.