I would say that communicating grace to your children is probably the most important thing that you can do. And at the same time, you can't really communicate grace unless you also communicate law. Law and grace always have to go together. And they do go together in scriptures. The law, as Paul tells us in Galatians, is our schoolmaster, our child conductor, to lead us to Christ.

And so we teach our children the law, we give them the rules, and then we also teach them grace by extending forgiveness to them when they break the rules, and we teach them grace by exemplifying repentance on our own part. When we fail, when we sin against our children, losing our temper for instance, or breaking a promise to our children, anything like that. We should be quick to confess that sin, to go to them, to ask their forgiveness, and to show them the asking of forgiveness from God and then resting on his promise that if we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all our righteousness. You know I think really in my own raising of my own family I probably erred on the side of a little too much sternness with my children. And I can wish now that I had shown more of the gentleness, more of the grace.

You look back and you thank God that He works anyway.