Biblical solution to stealing

“Would you pray for us? We are having problems with our son stealing.” I was at the end of my parental rope.
“If a child is raise right …” my listener began. I took the issue up with God myself. He understood, The two perfect people He created and taught had not kept their fingers out of his fruit tree. My kid could not keep little fingers off other people’s property.
Everything that had worked with our other children did not work with this one. About once or twice a year I would have to deal with yet another incident of my elementary child having stolen some small item from a store, a friend or a sibling.
My listener had not even bothered to ask how we had dealt with our child.
First, we insisted every item had to be taken back, personally with an apology. The other children had only needed one time before they learned.
Responses had been mixed at best: “Oh keep it. No one missed it.” “We don’t sell that item, it must have been left on a shelf.” After a clerk said, “My children never took anything,” I felt about two feet high that mine had.
Spankings made no impression.
When stolen food or money were gone before I knew about it. My chid had to earn the money to pay for it. We had applied the Biblical: “He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work doing something useful with his own hands …” Eph. 4:28 (NIV). For our child that meant, wash the floor, clean the garage or pick up pine cones from the yard.
And still things were stolen.
Finally frustrated, I asked for prayer, only to be told that we, as parents, had failed. I slouched down, said no more, but determined to find a way to teach my hard-headed child self-control, even when I was not supervising.
That’s when I remembered that the Old Testament punishment for stealing, not jail, not physical punishment but repayment at four or five times the object’s worth. “If a man steals an ox or a sheep and slaughters it, or sells it, he must pay back five head of cattle for the ox and four sheep for the sheep.”
We established a new rule: The next time he stole, the child would have to pay back twice as much as was taken. The multiplier would increase with each subsequent incident. The message did not sink with twice, thrice or four times the value. It took having to pay back five times the value of the item before my child decided, “I don’t like this.”
That final time, my hard-headed learner came cash in hand and confessed to me before I found out.
I wasn’t angry. I was relieved. My child had finally accepted responsibility for personal actions.
It made a big dent in a child’s savings account, but it was worth every penny. A couple days later, we were riding together. “How come, Mom, although I did the right thing this time, I still feel awful?”
“That’s your conscience teaching you to never do that again.”
He hasn’t either. And I have not been as judgmental of parents with a problem child.


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