Introduction

Please pray Judges 13:8 with me.

Judges 13:8  Then Manoah prayed to the LORD and said, "O Lord, please let the man of God whom you sent come again to us and teach us what we are to do with the child who will be born."

 

Primary burdens

As I have prayed over this seminar, about how to best serve you all, three things keep jumping out at me regarding parenting:

1.   We’ve got to decide, as parents, what we want from/for our kids.

Jeremiah and Daniel have both spanned the possibilities of mankind in deciding what they want to do for a living as they get older.  From police men to missionaries to Habitat for Humanity workers to farmers to hunters to golfers and football players.  

Consider Payton and Eli Manning’s dad.  He has two Super bowl champion/MVPs for sons.  In just about every discussion about how the kids are doing he’d win. 

Here’s the question, is this enough for you?  If your sons were to become Super bowl champs or successful doctors or wealthy business owners or college professors or military generals…if your daughters were to become famous singers or world-class chefs or best-selling authors or brilliant artists…would that be enough for you? 

This is probably fairly unrealistic.  Let’s lower the bar a little bit.  What if your kids were well educated and happily married with nice jobs and kids and homes?

Honestly, what do you want from your kids?  What would it take for you to sit back in 20 years and think, “I really did a great job as a parent…my kids really turned out well”?  What do you want from/for your kids.

Our aim as parents must be to make sold out, hold-nothing-back, all I have is Christ followers of Christ out of our kids.  It’s too easy to want nothing more than happy, well adjusted, well educated, well employed, happily married adults.  Certainly none of these things are bad in themselves, but we must want more because if we don’t give them more, they’ll go to hell. 

They need to know and love Jesus.  They need to be satisfied by and infatuated with Jesus.  They need to joyfully follow Him wherever He leads and whatever it costs. 

What most of us call radical, the Bible calls Christian.  What most of us think of as exceptional faith, the Bible just calls faith.  What most of us describe as remarkable devotion, the Bible calls expectation. 

We, as parents, need to decide now whether or not we really want our kids to follow Jesus or just something that we’ve softened up, lowered down, and called Jesus. 

We, as parents, need to decide now whether or not the Bible is really going to be our standard for all things including raising our kids or if we’re just going to take the parts that we like and fit in with our wants and wishes and desires.

We, as parents, need to decide now whether or not we’re going to come together as a Church to pray for one another, come alongside one another, and build a grace-filled expectation of Biblical parenting at Grace or if we’re going to just look for other people to get the God stuff into our kids so that we can focus on other things. 

Every statistic out there tells us that if you try to sell your kids a gentle Jesus they’ll walk away as soon as they get out of your house (and probably before). 

Do you want your kids to have a form of religion—perhaps so that they’ll behave better or be more socially acceptable or so that you won’t have to be embarrassed in front of your parents or because it just seems right—or do you want them to follow Jesus?

You must decide.

2.   If we want our kids to truly follow Jesus, we must truly follow Jesus. 

Your kids are looking at you, learning from you, and becoming like you whether you know it or not. 

If we want our kids to sell out for Jesus, we must sell out for Jesus.  We must stop domesticating Jesus.  We must love him passionately and radically and even recklessly.  Parents, if our aim is to make sold out, hold-nothing-back, all I have is Christ followers of Christ out of our kids, we must become sold out, hold nothing back, all I have is Christ follower of Christ ourselves! 

Typically, the spiritual maturity of a child is very closely tied to the spiritual maturity of their parents. 

If we’re not convinced in the supremacy of Jesus above all things, involving our kids in “spiritual” things is often one of the most destructive things that we can do.  If we present to our kids, in our own lives, the example of following a domesticated Jesus we will ruin them!  Being honest with our kids about the fact that we’re not following Jesus because it’s too hard is far better than convincing ourselves and our kids that we’re and they’re safe in following an imposter (no matter how much he looks like the real thing). 

As I mentioned earlier, I’m an example of the fact that God is sovereign and can overcome any parenting situation, however, we must not use God’s sovereignty as an excuse for disobedience.  If you want your kids to truly follow the true Jesus you must truly follow Him first. 

We’re not supposed to tell our kids where to go.  We’re supposed to ask them to join us on our journey.

3.   We must know what it means to truly follow Jesus. 

How many of you have kids?  How many of you believe that you’re called to raise Christ-followers?  How many of you believe that this is a higher calling than being a general or NFL coach or professional musician?  How many of you have a clear, written out description of a Christ-follower and how to make one?

We must know what it means to be and make sold out, hold nothing back, all I have is Christ followers of Christ.  We are called to be something specific as parents and to make something specific out of our kids.  We can’t just go with the flow.  The best flows will lead us and our kids into bad places.  We must be clear on what we’re working towards.

The bible isn’t ambiguous about our calling as parents.  And the bible isn’t ambiguous about what we are to work towards in our kids.

“Many families have been lulled into what I like to call a full-screen view of parenting.  We look at the biblical mandate and compare it to societal norms, and there appears to be something missing.  We believe that somehow we are depriving our children of experiences that will make them more liked, more respected, more normal.  Hence we trade in the biblical standard for a cultural norm that hovers just below mediocrity.  All of a sudden our desires for our children change.  Now all we want for our kids is what “every other parent” wants for their children” (FDF, 18). 

We’ll get at this directly in a minute, for now, though, I want you to consider how well you grasp the Biblical description/prescription for spiritual maturity.

Lead your kids to the cross

Let’s talk about what all this means…

You cannot make your kids accept the gospel. You cannot force your kids to follow Jesus. It takes a work of God to give your kids eyes to see and appreciate the glory of God. But you can lead them to the cross.  You can, through your life, your words, and your practices demonstrate the existence and satisfyingness of God and the presence and preciousness of Jesus and the urgency and freedom of the cross.  And you can do it at a very early age.

Parents, we must know the gospel, love the gospel, teach the gospel, live the gospel; in order that our kids might repent and believe.  Pray it for your kids from birth.  Talk to them about it in the crib. 

Your discipleship of your kids begins with loving and sharing the gospel with them.

God is greater than you could ever imagine.

Psalm 145:7-9  Great is the LORD! He is most worthy of praise! His greatness is beyond discovery!  ⁸ The LORD is kind and merciful, slow to get angry, full of unfailing love.  ⁹ The LORD is good to everyone. He showers compassion on all his creation. 

God’s greatness is called His glory and God’s glory never ends!  No matter how hard you try you can’t even imagine how great God is.  God is always good and fair and kind and loving and holy and strong and with us.  There is no one and nothing else like God in the entire universe. 

God created you to love and enjoy Him forever.

Romans 11:36   For everything comes from [God]; everything exists by his power and is intended for his glory. To him be glory evermore. Amen.

God planned you and made you to love and enjoy His glory and greatness.  You were not made for parents or toys or vacations or presents or candy.  You were made for God.  God created you to know how great He is and to love and enjoy Him forever. 

You do not love and enjoy God rightly. 

Romans 3:10-12; 23  "No one is good—not even one.  ¹¹ No one has real understanding; no one is seeking God.  ¹² All have turned away from God; all have gone wrong. No one does good, not even one." ²³ For all have sinned; all fall short of God's glorious standard.

No one loves and enjoys God the way that we should.  Instead, you and I love other things more than God and we enjoy things that God has told us not to.  When we love and enjoy bad things or things more than God, the Bible calls it sin.  We have all sinned.

Because you do not love and enjoy God rightly you deserve to be punished.

Romans 6:23  The wages of sin is death

When we sin and do not do what is right we deserve to be punished.  We have not loved and enjoyed God rightly.  Therefore, we deserve to be punished.  The Bible says that the punishment that we deserve is death.  The place where we are punished for our sins is called hell.

Because God is loving and fair and great He punished His own Son, Jesus, for your sins. 

1 John 4:9-10  God showed how much he loved us by sending his only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him.  ¹⁰ This is real love. It is not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.

Because God loves you, He wants to forgive you of your sins.  Because God is fair, though, your sins must be punished.  But because God is great He is able to be both fair and forgiving.  God punished His own Son, Jesus, on the cross for our sins so that we do not have to die.   

You can be forgiven of your sins by trusting in Jesus.

Romans 3:22  We are made right in God's sight when we trust in Jesus Christ to take away our sins. And we all can be saved in this same way, no matter who we are or what we have done.

You can be forgiven of your sins and made able to love and enjoy God forever by trusting in Jesus.  Trusting in Jesus means believing that He died for your sins, turning away from your sins, obeying His commands, and loving Him more than anything.  Being able to trust in Jesus is a gift from God. 

Lead your kids from the cross to glory

While we never move away or graduate from the gospel (it must always be at the front of our minds and hearts and actions, because we are constantly dependent on Jesus to live and move and have our being), we do need to move, and help our kids move, away from immaturity. 

We want them to keep a childlike faith, not a childish faith. 

So, if we’re going to help them to press on to spiritual maturity, we must be clear on what a spiritually mature person looks like. Our ultimate example is Jesus Christ. His disciples are called to be like Him. So a disciple is one in the process of becoming more like Jesus. And so when we talk about making disciples of our kids, we’re talking about helping them to become more like Jesus.  What’s Jesus like?

  

 

  

  

  

  

  

 

There are three phases to this process

In his book, Family Driven Faith, Voddie Baucham refers to three phases of child rearing: the discipline phase, the catechism phase, and the discipleship phase.  I don’t think that these are the most helpful names.  I call them the discipline phase, the instruction phase, and the maturity phase. 

1.   Discipline phase (Ephesians 6:1; Colossians 3:20). 

Colossians 3:20  Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.

Children must learn to obey.  Obedience, Colossians 3:20 (and Ephesians 6:1) tells us, is a spiritual matter.  Therefore, not to teach obedience is sin on our parts and not obeying is sin on the part of our kids.  We’ll spend a lot of time on this tomorrow, but for now, please understand that this means at least three things that flow from Ephesians 6:1-4…

Our kids must learn to do what we tell them to do. 

Read FDF, 109-110

They must learn to do it when they tell them to do it

Read FDF, 111

And they must learn to do it with a respectful attitude. 

Read FDF, 111-112

Again, if we do not set this as the standard and expectation in our homes we are not teaching our kids to obey God.  This isn’t simply a matter of parenting philosophies.  This is a matter of the standard of the Word of God. 

Lastly, in this heading, as every parent, school teacher, and church worker knows, if parents don’t discipline and teach discipline to their kids you simply can’t move on to the next phase, the instruction phase.

2.   Instruction phase (Ephesians 6:4).  Children must learn what to think.  The important thing here is that we’re not just teaching facts.  We’re creating a lens through which to view the world.  We have to give our kids categories to file their experiences.

I want to reiterate here the fact that all the sound teaching in the world is quickly overcome by hypocritical parents.  You simply can’t teach your kids to think godly while watching you live worldly.

I didn’t have a lot of theological categories at that time, but I knew that something wasn’t quite right about it.

When your kid sees a rainbow does he think immediately of the promises of God or a pot of gold?

When your kid thinks of Christmas does she think immediately of the birth of Jesus or piles of presents?

When your kids look up at the stars at night do they think immediately of the glory of God or making a wish?

When your kids do something wrong do they think immediately of the gospel or of spankings?

When your kids think of what they want to be when they grow up do they think immediately of how they can best glorify God or make the most money and have the most fame?

When your kids think of what they’re good at do they think immediately of what it’s going to get them or how they’ll be able to use their gifts to serve others?

Parents, the answers to all of these questions are directly and immediately tied into how we’ve instructed our kids (or perhaps allowed them to be instructed); with our words and lives.  

The best place to start is making sure that you’re reading the bible together daily.  Focus more on the stories as your kids are young. 

Another great resource is the Westminster Shorter Catechism.  You’ll find a copy of it in your folder.  It is an excellent tool to help your kids learn truth early. 

A couple of other books that have helped our family are by Susan Hunt.

One last note here…Make sure that there are times of formal teaching (catechisms, Sunday School, Scripture memory, etc.) and informal times as well (Everyday Talk, John A. Younts).  Again, we’ll talk more about this tomorrow. 

3.   Maturity phase (Ephesians 4:13-14; 1 Corinthians 14:20).  Our kids need to grow into maturity.  We are called to prepare our sons to find and lead a family on his own.  We are called to prepare our daughters to be a good helpmate and nurturer of a family of her own.  This means that we must allow them to come alongside of us as we do these things, sharing in responsibility, failures, and successes.  By their mid to late teens we should be walking beside them as fellow adults more than in front of them as children. 

1 Corinthians 14:20  Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature.

Again, if we don’t discipline and train our kids we can’t instruct or press on to maturity with them.  Each phase builds on the previous phase.  Some parents need to go back to phase one with 5, 6, 7, and 15 year olds. 

We must always have a multi-generational view to our parenting

Exodus 20:5-6; Exodus 34:6-7; Genesis 17:7; Deuteronomy 7:9; 1 Chronicles 16:15-18; Psalm 100:5

Deuteronomy 6:4-9  "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.  ⁵ You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.  ⁶ And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.  ⁷ You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.  ⁸ You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.  ⁹ You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Additionally, we read of the many feasts and monuments and other traditions designed to show God as the God of all generations.  

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the Fifth Commandment is its purpose, I have often looked at Ephesians 6:2-3 and thought the promise was for my individual children. "Jasmine," I would say, "If you honor me, you will live a long and prosperous life." Or I would use it in the negative: "Trey, the Bible says that if you honor me, you will live long. Thai means if you don't do what I say, I'll take you out." How many times have we viewed these words from this perspective?

The key to understanding the role of the family in discipling children is understanding the purpose of the Fifth Commandment. This commandment was not given for the sake of the individual child as much as it was given for the sake of the community. The Fifth Commandment was the foundation upon which the concept of multigenerational faithfulness is built. God designed the family to disciple children and insure the faith fullness and perpetuation of the community of faith throughout the ages- In other words, God says to us (through the Fifth Commandment), "If you want to continue to exist as the people of God in the midst of the pagan land that I am about to give you, you will have to do so by training and discipline your children."

This is the linchpin in every argument I have made or will make in this book. God has designed your family—not the youth group, not the children's ministry, not the Christian school, bat your family—as the principal discipling agent in your children's lives. The most impor­tant job you have as a parent is to train and disciple your children. This truth completely transformed the way Bridget and I viewed our role as parents. Suddenly we realized that if we raised our children to be great doctors, lawyers, athletes, or musicians but did not train them to honor us and obey God, we would have failed. Thus we had to rethink our schedule, our priorities, everything. In fact, this is one of the key truths that led us to home education- It was inconceivable to us that we could accomplish this monumental task without giving our children an education that completely embraced and undergirded [his philosophy (FDF, 118-119).

Recap and questions

1.   We’ve got to decide, as parents, what we want from/for our kids.

2.   If we want our kids to truly follow Jesus, we must truly follow Jesus. 

3.   We must know what it means to truly follow Jesus. 

4.   We must lead our kids to the cross.

5.   We must lead our kids from the cross to glory.

6.   There are three phases in our parenting: the discipline phase, the instruction phase, the maturity phase.

7.   We must always have a multi-generational view to our parenting.

Questions?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

introduce pastor daniel

What does all of this mean for the programming of Grace Church?  That is, what does all of this mean for children’s ministry, Sunday school, nursery, Grace for Kids, youth group, etc.?  The short answer is that we’re not sure.  We’re convicted that these are the principles that Scripture lays out for us and that we need to follow them.  But we’re not sure exactly what it is going to look like when we do. 

In the mean time, we’d like to do two things:

1.      Continue the current programs for children and look for creative ways to serve the families with teens.

2.      Begin to focus on four guiding principles. 

In a minute, Pastor Daniel is going to come up and talk about the four principles that will guide us as we wait on God to see what He will do with our obedience. 

After that we’re going to give you a chance to ask questions about what you’ve just heard and to tell us how we might be able to serve you in making this happen. 

Then, tomorrow, we’re going to look at how to practically implement this all of this in our homes.  While we have a ways to go to figure out what all this means for us as a church, we can all begin living these things out in the primary discipleship venue: our homes. 

 

principles that will drive us as a church

1.      Promote a biblical view of marriage and family (Psalm 127:3-5; Proverbs 18:22; Malachi 4:5-6; Genesis 1:28; Ephesians 5:2-6:4).

2.      Promote family worship/discipleship (Ephesians 6:4; Deuteronomy 6:4-9; Psalm 145).

3.      Promote Christian worldview through education (Eph. 6:4; Deut. 6:4-9; Matthew 22:37; 2 Cor. 10:5).

4.      Promote biblically qualified leadership (1 Timothy 3:1-7; 1 Peter 5:3; Titus 1:6; 1 Timothy 4:12).

 

Question and answer