Proverbs 23:12-14

First the foundation: bend your heart to be taught and your ears to truth. The verse is repeated from earlier because we genuinely need it again — our nature recoils from divine instruction, and a careless heart always produces a careless ear. But when God graciously opens the heart, the ear locks on instantly; it is His sovereign work, done through the ordinary means of a man simply deciding to listen.

Now a hard word that frightened parents need to hear: do not withhold correction from your child. Loving discipline will not destroy him — it rescues him; God has appointed it as a means of driving out the folly that would otherwise ruin his soul. Read the aim in the second verse, because it lifts the whole thing far above mere behavior management: the goal is to deliver his soul — to keep him off the road that ends in death. And so comes the question every soft-hearted parent must answer honestly: is it not better that the flesh should smart, than that the soul should die? The world calls a man cruel who denies his child food and clothing; Scripture calls a man cruel who denies his child the correction his soul needs — are their souls less precious than their bodies?

But fence this carefully on every side, because it is so easily abused. Correction is medicine, not food — the remedy for real faults, not a daily diet of harshness. It is never to be administered in a temper; an old saint said a parent should correct only in a praying frame, never in a passion. It must be real, not the empty threatening that teaches a child your words mean nothing. And it must be ruled, from first to last, by love for the child's soul and not by the venting of a frustrated parent. The model is not a man with a short fuse; it is the heavenly Father, who "chasteneth us for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness" (Hebrews 12:10) — firm, never furious; for the child's good, never for the parent's relief.