This is Father’s Day, a time to think about one of the most important tasks in any society. Being a parent, father or mother, is one of the most demanding, draining, frustrating jobs you will ever do. And it also may well be the most fulfilling job you ever do. They say that nobody complains on their death bed that they wished they hadn’t spent so much time with their children. Nobody says that. The perspective of time always looks back and says, being a parent was really important. I hope I did it well.
In our adult class this morning we talked about this amazing statement in the Book of Genesis, that God created us in his very image. We are, in many ways, like God.
God created this beautiful world and put humans on it who are like him. Through parenting, he passed on the blessing that we, like him, can create other beings, who are in our image, who are like us. And it is deep inside us to create a world for them, a world of order and blessing, where it is safe for them to grow to their fullest potential. When we do that we are just being chips off the old block.
But parenting is much more than bringing a life into the world and providing the physical necessities of life. If we will let it, parenting will draw out of our hearts the highest kind of love for our children. Parenting is our best chance to learn a love like God’s love, a self sacrificing love that just loves them because they are ours, not because of anything we get in return, not because they make the honor role in school or they lead their little league team in hits, but a love for them as they are.
To be a parent is incredibly expensive in terms of money. It takes up huge amounts of time. What if you got paid an hourly wage for parenting? We’d all be rich.
Parenting stretches us again and again as we call out to God and anybody who will listen, “What do I do now?” There are days when it wounds us in ways that we wonder if life has come to an end. Perhaps more than anything else, parenting stretches us to grow to be like God, to understand what real love is. It isn’t love until it costs us something. And the more we sacrifice the richer we find ourselves to be. That’s the glorious paradox of being a parent, a father or a mother. When we love like that we find our destiny as children of God.
Unfortunately we get very little training for being parents. In school I learned the proper way to fill out of a check, all the rules of the road for driving, and gazillions of other things, many of which I’ve used many times and some I never will. But who teaches us to be fathers? Where can we turn for help? Some day I’d love to get a group of parents together and pick out a good book on Christian parenting and go through it together. But until that day, the Apostle Paul gives us a brief, but very important word to fathers. Let’s look at that together this morning.
Our text this morning is Ephesians 6:1-4. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.
“1 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 2 "Honor your father and mother"-- this is the first commandment with a promise: 3 "so that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth."
4 And, fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”
And I see three foundational principles there.
1. Don’t be too hard on them; don’t provoke your children to anger
2. Give them discipline.
3. Give them instruction.
The Apostle Paul lived in a time when it was common for parents and teachers to beat their children. In the short run that’s the quickest way to get them to do what you want, but the damage that does always outweighs any short term advantage. So hear the Apostle Paul warning against that.
Don’t get carried away with controlling. Don’t be provocative with your children. Children need boundaries. Children need to learn to say no to their impulses of the moment. Children need discipline. But each child may need different discipline. Some of us have raised children who often wouldn’t hear a word you said until you really lowered the boom on them. Maybe they needed to be sent to their room or grounded or to be scolded with a strong voice before they heard anything. But that other child is so eager to please and would be deeply wounded by the disciplines the other needs.
Be sure they know that their feelings and ideas are understood and respected, even if they are thinking and feeling like children. Children will be hurt and angry if they aren’t heard. And that’s understandable. Adults are hurt, too, if they aren’t heard. Parents, don’t provoke your children to anger. Treat them with respect, even as you give them the boundaries that will keep them safe.
Paul’s second principle is to raise them in the discipline of the Lord. They still need limits. And sometimes they get angry and they even throw tantrums when you are just doing your job and you haven’t provoked them. And you’d better not let them run the house by throwing tantrums. Let them get their way by throwing a tantrum once, and you have guaranteed yourself a repeat performance before long. Kids need limits. They need parents who are adults for them more than the need parents who are friends.
Woe to the child who grows up thinking that he can just do anything he feels like, regardless of how it affect others. We all have to learn to adjust our own desires to fit in with others.
Stuart Briscoe, Kathy’s home pastor once described very well the disaster of a child who never learned to obey at home.
On his 16th birthday he decided he was an adult and wasn’t going to listen to anybody anymore. He decided he wasn’t going to do any homework at school unless he wanted to. So when his math teacher asked where his homework was he said, “I’m sixteen years old now, I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to.” And the teacher said, then you get an F.
A week later he went to football practice and the coach ended the practice with wind sprints. He decided he had done enough working out and started for the locker room. When the coach asked him where he was going, he said, “I’m sixteen years old now and I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do.” And the coach said, “If you’re on the team you do what I tell you. If you don’t do your wind sprints right now, you’re off the team. Your math teacher tells me you’ll be academically ineligible soon, anyway.”
After that he had a lot more free time after school, so he got a part time job. One day the boss handed him a broom and told him to sweep up the back room. But he didn’t like sweeping, so he said, “I’m sixteen years old now, I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to.” After that his after school hours were all free again. In fact because he didn’t do any homework there wasn’t any sense in going to school at all, so he had a lot of free time.
He got so bored that he joined the army. But he got fed up the first week of boot camp, and told his drill sergeant that he didn’t want to do his pushups. “I’m sixteen now and I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to.” And the drill sergeant said….
Well, my mother told me not to use language like what the drill sergeant said, but you get the picture. A child who doesn’t learn, right from the beginning how to accept discipline, how to work with a team, how to defer instant gratification for a future goal, is a child headed for trouble.
The Bible is just full of boundaries, warnings about things that don’t work, traps and dead ends, things that get us in trouble, things that diminish us. You can set out to learn it all the hard way, by making all the mistakes personally. But life is so much simpler if we learn those boundaries and accept them and focus our energy on living a full life within them.
Fathers, and mothers, both, raise your children in the discipline of the Lord. Do it with sensitivity to who they are. But they need to learn to accept discipline.
And the third principle is to raise our children in the instruction of the Lord.
Every once in a while I hear that lame excuse for parental negligence, ‘We’re not going to force our child into any particular religion. We’re going to wait and let her make up her own mind when she’s grown.’ That’s like saying we’re not going to push our child into any one professional field by making her go to school, we’ll let him grow up ignorant so he can make a career choice with an empty mind.
Children need to be instructed in the ways of the Lord. And they’ll learn. Many years ago, when I was a child in Vacation Bible School, one of our projects for the week was to learn the hymn that Linda just sang for us, ‘This is my Father’s World.’ We had the privilege of doing VBS in a campground, surrounded with beautiful nature. I don’t remember all the words to the hymn, but the message that the beauty of nature shows us what God is like has stuck with me and enriched my life many times. I’m so glad that my parents were faithful to bring me to Sunday School and Vacation Bible School.
I understand that this week’s VBS will be learning about some adventures of Gigi the giraffe, here. Some of those lessons will mold them for Christ for the rest of their lives.
Children need to be in Sunday School and church, where they will learn the grand stories given us in the Bible, the stories of the faith of Abraham, the sibling rivalry of Jacob and Esau, the impetuousness of Peter, the zeal of Paul. Those stories become our stories as we live in them and they guide us in all those decisions about who we want to become and who we don’t want to become. Children need to learn the Ten Commandments, not just the words, but the grand principles for life, so that they don’t have to learn by making all the mistakes themselves.
They need to know inside and out the greatest gift God ever gave us, the life of Jesus, who lived out for us the most important elements of who our God is, who died for our sins and rose again and is here through the power of the Holy Spirit to raise us to new life.
Kids learn the most from their parents by the example they see. Kids need to see their parents and grandparents in church, in Sunday School. That’s the strongest message you can send your children that the things of God are important. My parents didn’t drop us off at Sunday school and then go buy groceries. That would shout out to us that this Bible stuff is for kids and we would outgrow it in time. No, my parents went to their adult class. That said that learning God’s ways is a lifetime challenge and opportunity.
Kids need to see how you wrestle with the challenges of life, sense of how you deal with ethical dilemmas, how you deal with your frustrations and anger, how you deal with conflict, how you handle money, how you find the proper balance between work and rest, and all issues of life. Every day has an opportunity to share some wisdom with a child. They need to hear your faith, from you. They need to hear how the lessons of Sunday School and church have worked out for you.
Being a father, being a parent, may be the most important task we ever do. When we rise to the occasion and we do it well, we leave a wonderful gift for our children and we find our fulfillment, loving like God does. AMEN
