This morning we wrap up our series on the family with a look at teaching our children. What do parents, grandparents, Sunday school teachers, and nursery workers need to know in order to give our children and teenagers the best possible chance at living life as God intended and enjoying the blessings and benefits of following God.
This is an intimidating topic for a young parent to tackle, and it’s even more intimidating for a young parent to preach on. I don’t have all of the answers and I definitely don’t claim to have parenting down, there are many in here who have walked your children into adulthood who would have much to teach us but unless one of you is willing to come up and speak, I’m just going to keep talking and hope that God will drive home some of the truth of His words this morning.
I can’t think of any moment in my life that had more of an impact on me than watching the birth of my children, especially Ethan. I remember every little detail, the room was a zoo, we had 2 mothers, 2 sisters, 2 nurses, a doctor, one woman in agony, and me. Everything was nuts and then it was like time stood still and the doctor was holding my son. My first thought was, “His heads huge!” A few hours later, I took my newborn and went into another room so Erin could sleep. We sat down together and watched an SU basketball game on TV, they lost, I thought it was good to expose him to that early so he could get used to cheering for teams that liked to lose. I don’t remember much of the game but I remember staring into these huge brown eyes and being overwhelmed by a barrage of thoughts and emotions.
I was scared
I was in love
I was amazed
I was thankful
I was scared!
The reality of the situation began to set in during that time together and I began to experience the wonder and the fear that comes with suddenly being responsible for a life other than your own. And being a Christian makes this responsibility even greater because we know that this life we hold is not just flesh and blood, but an eternal soul.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 says: He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men;
God made us to live forever and not only am I responsible for preparing my children for this life but I am to prepare them for the one to come as well. I am to teach and train my children in such a way that they are open to the work of God in their lives and I can enjoy them for eternity together in God’s presence.
There are times when this seems impossible, but we serve a God who promises us that with His help, all things are possible. With God’s help, we can raise Godly children. Scripture tells us that Children are a reward, a gift from God. When I think of a gift, Christmas comes quickly into my mind and I think of all of the gifts that require a degree in astro-physics to understand and put together. Many of you in this room, I would guess, have lost sleep on Christmas Eve as you tried to piece together a bike or a doll house for there child. Often being too stubborn to consult the directions that come with the gift and would allow you to turn it into what it was made to be. Those instructions are important and need to be followed! For the Christian parent, we need to understand that God does not expect us to handle this gift of parenting a child without reading the instructions that he provides for us in the pages of His Word. He gives us instructions and commands to follow, no matter what kind of personality or character our children have, we as parents can follow God’s blueprint for raising up our kids.
This morning I want to look at a progression of instruction that God gives the nation of Israel concerning raising their children. Each step in the progression is necessary and builds on the steps that precede it. He gives these three specific instructions to the nation of Israel to ensure that His truth is passed on from generation to generation.
I’ll be using the term Truth often this morning and I want to be clear that I am referring to Truth with a capital T, the Truth found in the word of God.
First, in Exodus 10:1-2, when God is preparing Moses to deliver His people from Egypt he says: EX 10:1 Then the LORD said to Moses, "Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may perform these miraculous signs of mine among them 2 that you may tell your children and grandchildren how I dealt harshly with the Egyptians and how I performed my signs among them, and that you may know that I am the LORD."
I. We are to TELL our children.
We are to recite truth to our children in a way that they can understand and hear the wonders that God has done. This is to GIVE TRUTH. The first step in teaching your children is to share the truth with them, make it a habit to share the gospel with them from a young age.
Where do we draw this truth from? Certainly from the pages of Scripture but more than that, it must flow from our experiences and knowledge of God.
The Hebrew word that is used in this verse for tell, literally means to recount, it is the idea of sharing something of which you have first hand experience. When the Israelites saw God’s wonders and experienced His hand moving on their behalf, they were to take that experience and recount it to their children so that their children would know who God was. Many children hear the truth from their parents lips but fail to see it make any impact on their parents lives and so the truth is lifeless and meaningless to them and they are easily turned away form it. For the truth we give to our children to impact them, it must come out of our own experience in the Christian faith and our walk with Christ. Otherwise our telling the Truth to our children is nothing more than lip-service and our children will pick up on that.
To ensure that there is experience behind our words, As parents we must:
1) Reach out to God
As a parent, there is little that moves your heart as much as when your child reaches for you. It shows that they love you and that they want you above any other and need to be in your arms. I love to pick our daughter up from the nursery because her face lights up and she throws her arms up and reaches for me. As parents, we need to continually be in that place where we are reaching for God, focusing on Him and longing to be in His arms.
There needs to be effort in our lives to connect with God on a regular basis. Your children need to see that your time spent with God is important to you and a vital part of your day.
MT 5:6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Above all else, be a parent who desires intimacy with God and live that openly before your children.
2) Recognize God
We need to learn to hear God when he wants to work in us and see his hand at work throughout our lives. We need to be like Elijah and wait for the gentle whisper of God’s voice, He wasn’t in the great wind, He wasn’t in the earthquake, He wasn’t in the fire, He spoke in the quiet, in a whisper. We often expect God to appear and speak in rolling thunder and awesome displays of power and we miss his subtle and gentle touch on our lives.
We need to recognize when He is involved and go where he leads. There are so many times when we brush things off as coincidence or chance when God has moved and we fail to recognize Him. Joseph said to His brothers in Genesis, that what they had intended to harm him, god had intended for his good. After everything he had gone through he had learned to recognize the hand of God when it moved every step of the way.
God is very much involved in our lives and when we reach out to him, our eyes will be opened and we will learn to recognize him and then tell our children what he has done for us.
3) Respond to God
Our children need to see that when God moves in our life we are willing to respond to that and to follow where he leads. They need to see truth translated into action. Share with them what you feel God’s will is for you and your family and let them watch as you take steps to follow His will in your life. Often times, missionary kids are the most solid, well-rounded, spiritually mature kids you’ll ever meet. Why? Because they see their parents respond to God’s call and it gives validity to the Truth that their parents are telling them.
When we are showing signs of a genuine and exciting relationship with God then our children will be much more open to listening to the Truth that we share with them. We are to tell our children what God has done in our lives as we share the truth with them.
Then, we are to take it one step further, we are to:
II. We are to TEACH our children
This is where we begin to get our hands dirty as parents and teachers. We move from giving truth,telling, to instructing, explaining truth. This is the Why? Of the growth process. It seeks to move our child from knowledge to understanding.
Again, this was a command that God gave to the Israelites. In Deuteronomy 11:18-21 he instructs parents: 18
Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 19 Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 20 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates, 21 so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land that the LORD swore to give your forefathers, as many as the days that the heavens are above the earth.
You see again, He begins with a word to the parents to take care of their own spirituality first so that it will be a natural thing for the child to follow. And then he instructs the parents to teach, to take the time to explain to their children the laws of the Lord and the love of the Lord. In the first command God tells them to tell of His wonders, to lay a foundation for learning, now He commands them to teach his ways so that the child can begin to walk in those ways with an understanding of who God is and what He is like and what he expects from us. This is taking the truth and unpacking it with our children to build on that foundation so that they can stand strong for a lifetime.
There are a few qualities of good teaching that parents need to make sure they possess when teaching your children spiritual things. The first is that a good teacher:
1) Seeks Understanding
I’ve had a lot of different teachers in my life and some have been wonderful, some have been not all that great, but there is a common thread between good teachers and that is their ability to go beneath the surface of what is being taught and explain what’s really going on. I had two different Greek professors in college. With one I memorized, with one I learned. The first teacher would give us pages and pages of vocabulary and lists of verb endings to memorize, he was good at telling. He shared Greek with us and expected us to pick it up as fast as he apparently had. I struggled with this kind of learning because I could do the memorization but I had no idea why things were the way that they were.
The second teacher gave us very few lists and concentrated instead on the ideas and principles behind the language. He also had many different angles to attack the problem from, if a student did not understand one way, he would look at things from another angle until the Truth made sense. He taught why words changed the way that they did and we were able to move beyond knowledge (that came with memorization) and into understanding, that came with the concepts being explained.
It’s like in high school math now, it’s not enough to simply have the knowledge of what the right answer is, you need to show exactly what you did to get that answer, you have to understand the concepts and be able to show your work and how you arrived at the answer you did. True teaching enables us to be able to explain that which we know.
Jesus used this method in his teaching, he would tell, he would recite and give truth in the form of parables. Then, to those he was closest to, those who he was investing himself in, whose growth was important to him, he would explain the parables so that the disciples understood the meaning behind them.
2) Never Stops Teaching
A good teacher is able to turn any setting into a classroom and looks for every opportunity to teach. Teaching your children can’t necessarily happen during scheduled times, parents need to be ready to explain and teach when the moment presents itself.
In the passage in Deuteronomy that we read it says that we are to be teaching when we sit at home, walk on the road, lie down or get up. That about covers it! We are to be consistently seizing the opportunity to teach. Teaching takes time and energy on the part of the parent. Children are always learning and they can learn from us as we invest in them or they can learn from what they see on TV or pick up at school, which so often today flies in the face of what we want our children to learn. With the state of entertainment today, and the anti-Christian slant to the media and the homosexual agenda that is being pushed on our children, we need to make sure we are constantly teaching Truth to combat the cultural trends of today in the lives of our kids.
3) Invites Application
This is going to overlap a bit with my last point, but the third aspect of a good teacher is that they teach in a way that allows the learner to see a need for and a place for that truth in their lives.
Ethan and I had a conversation the other morning and I had the opportunity to tell Him truth and then to teach him truth. He crawled in bed with me and we started talking and he said that he loved me. I was able to tell him why love was so important, because God says that people will know we are Christians when we love others. This was Telling. Then he asked me why? Why would people know we were Christians by the way that we loved? I could then move from telling to teaching and explain to Him what Jesus had done for us and how much God loved us and that we are to look like Jesus and share His love with others. The conversation naturally moved towards how he could show love for others in his life, specifically his sister. The teaching was presented in a way (and sometimes it’s a clumsy effort) that invited my son to see how he could incorporate it immediately into his own life.
Good teaching invites application.
So, the second step in the progression of raising up our children is the shift from telling (giving truth) to teaching (explaining truth)
III. We are to TRAIN our children
PR 22:6 Train a child in the way he should go,
and when he is old he will not turn from it.
After we tell, and teach, we are to train, this is the APPLICATION of Truth, to live the truth. This is probably the aspect of raising kids that gets overlooked the most. It is easier to tell and to teach than it is to train. There are many who can help in those first two areas, the church can tell and teach your children, but we have few opportunities to train. This must happen in the home. We live in a society that has done its best to remove God from all aspects of life. Our schools, our government, even some of churches have ceased to turn to God for their strength and hope, our homes cannot allow the same thing to happen to them. God must remain in our homes as we train up our children to love and trust in Him.
Just as in telling it needed to flow from personal experience, so too with training, your children need to see the application of truth in your life first, before they make it a part of theirs. You will train your children one way or another and they are more likely to be trained by what they see than what they do. There is great training power in the parent whose words are supported by their actions.
Think of training your child in military terms. Our soldiers go through intense training to enable them to perform in a hostile environment. They are trained to respond in situations where there is little or no time to think, only to react. Satan will attack your children. Because of this reality, we need to progress to the point of training our children to stand and react Biblically if they are to survive the battle.
In order to train our children there are two things we must do as parents that no one else can do for us.
1) We need to Understand our children
"Homes are built on the foundation of wisdom and understanding." Prov. 24:3 (GN)
Parents need to take the time to figure out what kind of personality your child has and what will be an effective way to train them. We are to train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it. This verse is so often mistranslated to say that if we take our kids to Sunday School and get them baptized and send them to Christian school that, even though they may rebel, they will eventually turn back to God. We know this is not true because all of us know kids who have been raised in Christian homes that turned completely away from God and have died in a separated state from God.
What the verse does mean is that you are to train your child according to their way. The word way in this verse literally means their bent, their style or temperament. Instead of trying to make our children into something they are not, we are to encourage them and train them in the way that God created them. One way of training may not work for all of your children because each one is unique and each one has their own way. If you love sports and your son loves art and poetry, you need to encourage them in that direction, take the time to understand your child.
When I redid the wood floors in our home, I had to make sure that I went with the grain of the wood if I wanted them to be smooth, otherwise, it would leave marks in the wood that still haven’t come out today. To train your children, find the way their grain runs and for the best possible results, work with it, not against it.
The next thing we need to do is
2) We need to Discipline our children
Scripture says two things about the parent who chooses not to discipline their child. These are hard to hear but God’s word is clear on the importance of discipline.
- It shows you don’t love your child
PR 13:24 He who spares the rod hates his son,
but he who loves him is careful to discipline him.
It’s easier to ignore than to address problems. If you let your children get away with anything, it shows a lack of genuine love and concern for their development.
- It shows that you are participating in their destruction
Proverbs 19:18 (Good News) "Discipline your children while they are young enough to learn. If you don’t you’re helping them destroy themselves."
Discipline strengthens and builds up. It’s important for the Christian parent to understand the difference between discipline and punishment. God does not punish his children, he disciplines them. Romans 8:1 says Therefore, there is now no condemnation(punishment) for those who are in Christ Jesus,
Our punishment was taken on the cross by Christ, God no longer punishes His children, but he does discipline them. What’s the difference?
The purpose of Punishment is to inflict penalty. -- I want to penalize you for what you’ve done wrong -- looking backwards
The purpose of Discipline is to promote growth. I want to correct you, train you, make you better.
The focus of Punishment is on the past.
The focus of Discipline is on the future. You did wrong in the past and you’re going to be punished for it. I want you to do right in the future, you’re going to be disciplined for it.
The attitude of the parent in punishment is anger. We punish out of anger. I’m angry at you!
The motivation behind discipline is love: I want you to make it in this world! What’s the result? The result of punishment is always fear, guilt and more anger.
The result of discipline is security. I feel security because I know there are parameters and boundaries in my life.
Rick Warren puts it this way:
How can you know when you’re punishing and how can you know when you’re disciplining? You look at the child’s reaction. You ask yourself, "Is the child afraid of me right now?" I John 4:18 "There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out all fear, because fear has to do with punishment."
When we discipline our children we need to make sure that the underlying motivation of love and wanting them to succeed comes through in our attitudes. Because when they are punished out of anger for failing to meet expectations, they are more likely to conform outwardly but rebel inwardly against those expectations.
To train our children we must understand them, and we must be willing to discipline them. This will guide them and encourage them to live the truth they have been told and that they have been taught.
Being a parent is a huge task and there are few things that can be so rewarding and frustrating at the same time. God wants us to succeed and He has given us commands that need to be followed to raise our children according to God’s standards. They need to be told the truth, this flows from the parent experiencing truth in their own lives. They need to be taught, the Truth must be explained in a way that allows the child to understand. Finally, they need to be trained. This is the application of truth, where the truth becomes a lifestyle. God has commanded us to do these things with our children, it is up to us to expose them to the gospel and up to God to draw our children to himself. Trust that he will do that and trust that if he calls us to these things, he will equip us in every way to do the best job we can.
