Teaching children about redemption

I am reading a book called Shepherding A Child's Heart and it is one of those books I am going to need to read over and over again. I am reading a borrowed copy, but will be keeping my eyes open for a good deal on a used copy. Here is a passage about teaching children about redemption (and not just obeying the rules).

Correcting With A Central Focus on Redemption

The central focus of child-rearing is to bring children to a sober assessment of themselves as sinners. They must understand the mercy of God, who offered Christ as a sacrifice for sinners. How is that accomplished? You must address the heart a the fountain of behavior and the conscience as the God-given judge of right and wrong. The cross of Christ must be the central focus of your child-rearing.

You want to see your child live a life that is embedded in the rich soil of Christ's gracious work. The focal point of your discipline and correction must be your children seeing their utter inability to do the things that God requires unless they know the help and strength of God. Your correction must hold the standard of righteousness as high as God holds it. God's standard is correct behavior flowing from a heart that loves God and has God's glory as the sole purpose of life. This is not native to your children (nor to their parents).

Discipline exposes your child's inability to love his sister from his heart, or genuinely to prefer others before himself. Discipline leads to the cross of Christ where sinful people are forgiven. Sinners who come to Jesus in repentance and faith are empowered to live new lives.

The alternative is to reduce the standard to what may be fairly expected of your children without the grace of God. The alternative is to give them a law they can keep. The alternative is a lesser standard that does not require grace and does not cast them on Christ, but rather on their own resources.

Dependence on their own resources moves them away from the cross. It moves them away from any self-assessment that would force them to conclude that they desperately need Jesus' forgiveness and power.

I have spoken to many parents who feared they were producing little hypocrites who were proud and self-righteous. Hypocrisy and self-righteousness is the result of giving children a keepable law and telling them to be good. To the extent they are successful, they become like the Pharisees, people whose exterior is clean, while inside they are full of dirt and filth. The genius of Phariseeism was that it reduced the law to a keepable standard of externals that any self-disciplined person could do. In their pride and self-righteousness, they rejected Christ.

Correction in shepherding must focus on Christ. It is only in Christ that the child who has strayed and has experienced conviction of sin may find hope, forgiveness, salvation and power to live.