Trinity Evangel Church

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

Like to welcome you to this year's seminar and This emphasis it's a parenting seminar, but it's a little bit of a different emphasis if you're coming expecting a lot of very Specific parenting things to do When to discipline when not to discipline that kind of stuff. That's not this seminar. This seminar is focused on thinking generally generationally But we want to be thinking generationally. What's it going to take for us to be able to raise those kind of People who are going to be a cut above what's the likelihood that they're going to live a rarefied life onto the Lord? Sadly the statistics are not in our favor even within the Christian community about What happens to a young person when they get to a certain age?

And we're trying to see what we can do as far as it's up to us to be able to change that In 2022, Ligonier Ministries and LifeWay Research Group conducted a survey titled, What Do Americans Believe About God, Salvation, Ethics, and the Bible?

And they had a survey that after the survey they had a findings and this is part of what they said, hopefully you can read that, they said quote, the 2022 survey results for U.S. evangelicals reveal concerning trends related to the exclusivity and the deity of Jesus Christ, the historicity and divine nature of Scripture, objective truth, gender identity, and homosexuality. Now the summary did go on to add a bit of good news and they said at the same time encouraging trends include evangelicals increasingly biblical views on abortion and sex outside of marriage. So what I want to do is I want to share with you a few of the responses to some of the doctrinal statements that were put before the people that were taking this survey. And I've filtered the respondents down to just those who claim that they belong to an evangelical church and who go to church at least once a month. And so I want to take a look at the survey results and then I further limited the the respondents down, or I broke them into two age groups.

So what we're gonna see here is we're gonna see the people who are between the ages of 50 and 64 in one column and the people who are between 18 and 34 years of age. We wanna see if we see any discrepancy, any difference between what these so-called evangelicals who go to church once a month, how they responded to these statements. And they were presented with a whole slew of statements. You can find this online if you wanna go back and look at it. I've only pulled out some of the statements. Let's take a look at what the survey says. So first statement was, God learns and adapts to different circumstances. God learns and adapts to different circumstances.

20% of the older set agreed with that statement and 42% of the younger people agreed. God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. There we had 27% of the older generation agreed, which is already concerning. And 47% of younger evangelicals agreed with that statement.

Jesus is the first and the greatest being created by God. This one was really bad news on both sides. 59% of the adults older agreed 62% of the younger agreed. Jesus was a great teacher but he was not God. 13% of the older agreed. 36% of the younger agreed. The Holy Spirit is a force but is not a personal being. 32% as you can see older agreed. 67% of the younger. Everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature. 31 percent, again, of the older agreed. 48 percent of the younger agreed. Worshiping alone or with one's family is a valid replacement for regularly attending church. 26 percent, 46 percent. Gender identity is a matter of choice.

14% versus 31% agreed with that. God is unconcerned with my day-to-day decisions. 3% of the older agreed, but 17% of the younger did. And then one more. Religious belief is a matter of personal opinion. It is not about objective truth. 12% of the older agreed, 23% of the younger. It's a sad fact that many young evangelicals today are either ignorant of the faith of our fathers or they're abandoning it all together. And again, I wouldn't give the older population necessarily a high score on that either. But you can see the decline. Why is this decline in biblical faith occurring? Even outside the area of religion, there often is a failure to successfully transmit the wisdom of one generation to another. The old ways are being cast off in favor of new, more so-called enlightened ideas. Sometimes this is a good thing, but often it's not.

History is full of examples of nations rising only to crumble from within. Why does this pattern seem to be the norm and not the exception? Another sad state of affairs is the fact that we have the rise of the stupid. An article I recently read suggested there is a threat lurking in our nations greater than the rise of wicked despots. That threat is stupid people. I read this article I was reading that was on the website BigThink.com. You can see the references up there. The author, Johnny Thompson, wrote, it's easier to deal with evil people than it is stupid ones. But stupidity is much harder to weed out. That's why it's a dangerous weapon.

Because evil people find it hard to take power, they need stupid people to do their work. Like sheep in a field, a stupid person can be guided, steered, and manipulated to do any number of things. Evil is a puppet master, and it loves nothing so much as the mindless puppets who enable it, be they the general public or inside the corridors of power. Evil is easy to identify and fight against, not so with stupidity," end of quote. And he goes on in this article then to quote Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer, as you know, was a German pastor who died in prison during the days of Hitler. And from that prison, he had written some letters that are referred to now the letters from prison.

But Bonhoeffer also believed that it was the stupidity of people in Germany at that time that paved the way for the rise of Hitler. He wrote, quote, neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here. Reasons fall on deaf ears. Facts that contradict one's prejudgments simply need not be believed. In such moments, the stupid person even becomes critical. and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this, the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and being easily irritated becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

Bonhoeffer did not see stupidity as an intellectual problem because there were plenty of intelligent people who had bought into Hitler's lies. He saw primarily as a moral problem. He said pride and selfishness then helped fuel this kind of stupidity. So continuing on to the bad news, modern education won't save us. If it's true that stupid people are part of the problem, then one would be tempted to find the solution and better education. Unfortunately, that's got its own set of problems nowadays. The veil is being pulled back on the educational system, showing that it too often is adding to the problem of stupid people.

In C.S. Lewis's Hideous Strength, there's a scene there where Miss Hardcastle, she's part of the NYSS police, she's talking to Mark Studick and dropping hints about what the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments, NYSS, what that is, what they're up to. And Stuttuck wants to know what Nice's political affiliation is. And Hardcastle says they don't have any. They play both sides. She says it is absolutely essential to keep a fierce left and a fierce right on their toes and terrified of each other. She says they do this by manipulating what people read in the newspapers. But then Stuttuck says, well, that's not going to work.

He says, I don't believe you can do that, not with the papers that are read by educated people. And Miss Hardcastle says, tells them, she says, you don't understand. NICE doesn't have a problem with the educated people because they are more easily manipulated because the education system has taken away their skepticism. It's the common workman who will be the problem for NICE because they don't easily swallow what they're being sold in the news.

Now, does that sound downright prescient given what's going on in our educational system today. I mean, just a fun fact, 57% of people with postgraduate degrees, 57% of people with postgraduate degrees identify with the Democrat Party in America, as opposed to 35% for the Republican Party. Given the two parties' platforms, that's just an interesting statistic. And a little bit more bad news before we move on. Deconstructionism. I titled this session, Repairing the Reconstruction Destruction. I have in mind the reconstruction that follows after one deconstructs what they once held to be true. Deconstructionism is a word you hear a lot lately from various celebrities.

Several notable Christian pastors have made headlines for having turned apostate after deconstructing their faith. think Josh Harris and Rob Bell are two examples. The term is used by historians, sociologists, psychologists, religious scholars, and others to justify their rejection of orthodox views that were once settled matters. Deconstructionism was originally developed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, I believe. His idea was to deconstruct text to find what the bare assumptions were behind them. The core belief in this approach is that objective meaning is impossible to discover. So to understand an author's view, you had to find out what their subjective assumptions were behind what they wrote.

Deconstruction tries to identify the assumptions behind assertions and show how cultural, religious and other biases have affected those claims. And by doing this, the veracity of those claims then can be shown to not be based on any real objective truth at all. Deconstructionism has become a core principle in the postmodern era that we live in. With respect to Christianity, Apologist Alisa Childers offers this definition, and you had it up there. In the context of faith, deconstruction is a process of systematically dissecting and often rejecting the beliefs you grew up with. the Christian will deconstruct all the way down to into atheism. Some remain there, but others experience a reconstruction, but the type of faith that they embrace is almost never resembles the Christianity that they formerly knew. Now, not all attempts at deconstruction are bad. There are times when certain biases have entered into people's ideas that they hold as gospel truth.

In those cases, it can be useful to identify those biases so that we can get better at the objective truth of the matter. So you have to ask yourself the question, why? This is a, this is, it's sadly as rare today as many people simply want to abolish any notion that there's any truth that transcends mankind and holds him accountable. So why this decline that we've seen going on, and I would suggest to you it has to do with the great lie. Deconstruction, as it is commonly used today, is just the latest incarnation of Satan's original question to Eve in the Garden. Has God said? And I want you to keep that question in your mind throughout the session because to me that explains pretty much everything that's gone wrong with the world since the Garden is constantly asking, has God said?

Examples of that that we see, it shows up throughout history in various forms including these modern mantras that we are familiar with question authority, do your own thing, speak your truth, my God would never dot dot dot. These are all just manifestations of the big question, the big lie, as God said. The result is that we have reached a point in time where subjective feelings overrule objective facts. Carl Truman, in his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, traces from the days of Russo and Romanticism to the present the development of the quest to understand human identity. He shows how the sexual revolution of the 1960s was just a symptom of the changing definition of personhood.

On page 27 of his book, he writes, quote, So in the hands of men like Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin, the world loses its innate teleology. These three men effectively strip away the metaphysical foundations for both human identity and for morality, leaving the latter, as Nietzsche is happy to point out, a matter of mere taste and manipulative power games. And you'll notice at the bottom there, sometimes you'll see I've got references to these books. I've read this one. I recommend it. It was a good read. Historically, the concept of self had been rooted in external objective facts. Your gender, for example, you just had to look in a mirror and figure out what your gender was.

Over time, objective facts have given way to subjective feelings. A person's sense of self is now determined by how they feel rather than what they objectively are. Truman insightly shows how this explains the need to force others to accept one's self-declared identity. An example would be when the person goes into the baker and wants to have a cake to celebrate their coming out or whatever it may be and the baker refuses. In the past, that person, irate customer would just walk out, be unhappy and put something on Facebook and say, don't buy a cake there. But today, because identity is so tied up to who that person is, it's now the equivalent of a physical assault on that person, and therefore, I can't just let it go and just be mad.

You actually now have to punish that person. It's no different in their brain than if you reached out and punched him in the nose, and Truman does a good job of showing how that happens. Now Truman's book stopped short of giving a gospel solution to the problem, but it's well worth a read if you want to understand how we got to where we are today regarding gender identity chaos. So what can we do to prevent ourselves and our heirs from joining the ranks of the stupid? If you keep Satan's question has God said in your mind it will help explain much of the craziness that's going on today. You'll find it the root of every effort to upend the cultural beliefs and values that have shaped Western civilization. It's in man's nature to rebel against anything that constrains him. Satan knows this and he has subtly worked to sow the question, has God said, into every human mind.

Training ourselves and our children and their children to detect this lie will play a big part in raising rarefied errors that avoid the various snares of the devil that so many have fallen into. As we discuss raising rare fight errors, it should be obvious that you can't preach what you don't practice. The starting point for training your errors is to make sure you are living out the principles that you are trying to inculcate in them. One of the top reasons that young people give for leaving church life is the hypocrisy they witnessed growing up, and Jonathan's whole session is dealing with this topic of hypocrisy.

Almost anywhere you look, you can see the big lie affecting life. If you don't have this 30,000-foot high view of what is going on, you can find yourself playing wack-a-lie with every manifestation of the original lie, and for every lie you whack, two more pop up. We need to start thinking more strategically about what's going on so we can train ourselves and our heirs to understand the nature of the attack and how to gird up the loins of our minds so that we can defend against it. I suggest to you that a key strategy to combat Satan's lie is to embrace the claim that the values of the true, the good, and the beautiful are objective truths and they're not subject to human opinion and then train ourselves and our heirs to live accordingly.

We could spend the next 100 seminars talking about the true, the good, and the beautiful, and I'm not going to dive into what those mean. That's going to be a, you ever remember back in college when they said this assignment has left us an exercise for the student and that was actually the hard part. The teacher did the easy one on the board. The hard part for you is to go home and think about the true, the good, and the beautiful, and if you buy into the statement that they are objective truths. These three core values have long been recognized as universal givens in the cosmos. Plato and Aristotle are among the philosophers who viewed them as transcendentals.

To say something's transcendental just means that it exists beyond time, space, and matter. It's a universal reality that extends beyond everyday, sensory experiences. The true, the good, and the beautiful are discovered. They're discovered. They're not invented by men. The Greek philosophers identified then, along with that, three basic capacities in men. Lagos, ethos, is it ethos or ethos? And pathos. So Lagos had to do with reason, ethos with morality, and pathos with emotion. They saw the true, the good, and the beautiful as corresponding with these three internal capacities. The logos are corresponding to truth, the ethos corresponding to goodness, and the pathos, pathos corresponding to beauty.

In his book, Awakening Wonder, A Classical Guide to Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, and this would be a book I've ordered, I've got it, I haven't read it yet, but it looked very interesting because I'm interested in this topic of what is the truth, the good, and the beautiful. But in this book, he describes this relationship that I just read this way. He says, quote, truth, goodness, and beauty are cosmic values that communicate divine meaning to the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic capacities of the human soul, which brings a balance in the soul, which in turn harmonizes the human person with divine meaning and purpose of the cosmos, which was considered the prerequisite to human flourishing, end of quote.

As classical antiquity gave way to the rise of Christianity, Christian theologians added to the understanding of these three values, showing then that they were a part of God's revelation to man. Hence why we view them as objective and not subjective. In their understanding, these three values are not outside of God, but are literal parts of his divine nature. We can say God is truth. He is goodness. He is beauty. Or put another way, all truth is God's truth. All goodness is God's goodness. All beauty is God's beauty. When he created the cosmos, he infused it with these three. Creation teaches us what is true, good, and beautiful by way of natural revelation, and then scripture does so by way of direct revelation. We can look to those two sources to begin to figure out what true and good and beautiful are. Creation, scripture. As God's image bears, the true, the good, and the beautiful appeal to us, but because of the fall, sin now interferes with our capacity to rightly know love and fight for these things."

Peter Krieft, who's a Catholic philosopher, says everything that exists in some way is in some way true, good, and beautiful. If that's a true statement, and I think he's right, then again, think about everything. So all the decisions we're making down to the lowest level decisions in life are in some way working with or working against the true, the good, or the beautiful. And I would suggest to you that if he's right, it explains why Satan has man continually asking, has God said? Has God really said that's true? That's good. That's beautiful.

He begins to sow that doubt constantly in our minds. In the rest of the session then I want to briefly discuss what these core values are and show by example how they are being perverted to accommodate man's sinful desires. And then I want to leave you with a challenge to examine your own views regarding what's true, good, and beautiful, and see if Satan's lie has perhaps crept into your own thinking. And I suspect if we're all honest and to some degree in some place we'll probably find that we have bought in to the notion that these values are actually somewhat subjective. With a proper understanding of these core values and who gets to define them, the need as it relates to raising rarefied errors is then to teach them to know these things, to love them, and to defend them against wherever Satan's lie, as God said, shows up. So now for the hard part. Trying to define good, true, and beautiful, and I'm actually not going to give you a definition you can write down. I'm going to talk more about them

and around them. Like I said, you can join the ranks of the philosophers to debating and discussing that, but I want you to grab a hold of the idea that there is the true, the good, and the beautiful. They are fundamental values and transcendental, something that is a reflection of who God is, that he is built into the universe, that we spend a lifetime identifying and discovering and ordering our lives according to it. And Satan, meanwhile, is chipping away at that idea that those come from God and that we're free to define those for our own terms. Getting consensus even among Christians on the definition of true, good, and beautiful would be challenging. What the precise definitions are is less critical than in agreeing on who makes the definitions. Human definitions are what have gotten us into the mess we're in. What Christians should agree on is that God gets to make the definitions. If you're a Christian, if If you, as a Christian, oh, I'm sorry, if you ask a Christian if God has a definition for truth,

most people would say he does. Obviously, you pull out the Bible. After all, Jesus said he's the way, the truth, and the life. So that one's an easy question. If you ask them the same thing about good, they would agree that he probably has a lot to say about the topic. Jesus asked the rich young man why he called him good since only God is good, Luke 18-19. If you ask them the same thing about beauty, they might start to waffle a bit and suggest that while God probably has an opinion, he has largely left what constitutes beauty to man's own judgment. Suppose God declared a certain artwork or a musical composition beautiful, but you didn't care for either.

Would it be okay for you to disagree with God? Does God even have an opinion about such things? How much liberty does man have to decide for himself what is true, good, and beautiful? I mean, think of it, it's an interesting thought exercise. One day, you know, you see God, you know, listening to a piece of music, and he says, wow, that's really beautiful. And you're like, oh man, I hate that genre.

Is that tension okay? God says, well, okay, each to his own. Beauty's in the eye of the beholder, I get it. What would God say about such a conversation? When it comes to beautiful, Most people buy into the saying that beauty is a nigh of the beholder. One example of this comes from a woman named Sue Naabe, the CEO of Cody. It's a beauty product company. She and her company created a campaign to redefine what physical beauty means. Naabe says the current entries for beauty across the leading English dictionaries are outdated, limiting, and exclusive. She wrote an open letter calling for change. She doesn't say which leading dictionary definition she's opposed to, but if we look at something like the Merriam-Webster, for example, its first definition for beauty says, the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit.

Sounds like a reasonable definition to me. Does she have a problem with that definition? She created a change.org petition as part of Cody's hashtag undefined beauty campaign. The petition states quote the term beauty doesn't reflect the values of today's society. I would probably agree with that statement. To her the current definition of beauty is more than inaccurate. It's ageist and sexist. She writes quote the definition of beauty hasn't aged well. The implicit ageism and sexism were born in a different time. We believe it's time to bridge the gap, time to bring the definition to where society is today. By changing the definition, if more people feel included, feel beautiful, there will be a ripple effect which touches us all.

At Cody, we believe that no one can control or dictate what is or is not beautiful." She's calling for all of the dictionary publishers to then review their definitions and rid them of the, quote, implicit ageism and sexism they currently contain. Clearly, she sees beauty as a human-defined idea that needs some updating. In C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, he's in there. He's criticizing. It doesn't say it explicitly, but if you read the biography or if you read the backstory of the book, he's criticizing the rise of a philosophy called logical positivism. and then its follow on, which was subjectivism. These were coming into the English classroom, the school classrooms at that time, and he was very bothered by it.

And one of the books that was coming into the classroom was called the Control of Language, and so in the abolition, he refers to it as the Green Book. Logical Positivism is a philosophical movement that started back in the 20s, 1920s, that states, quote, scientific knowledge is the only kind of factual knowledge and that all traditional metaphysical doctrines, i.e., thank God, are to be rejected as meaningless. And there's the book there in case. Oh, note that book. I have read this one. I thought it was very helpful to understanding abolition of man. I recommend reading this so that you can get a handle on what Lewis was driving at in abolition.

So one of the authors of this green book, which Lewis was was objecting to, his name was Iver Richards, who was an educator and a literary critic. And again, he's not called out by name in abolition. Lewis took exception to an illustration in the Green Book where two men are observing a waterfall. One man calls it sublime and the other one says it's beautiful. But the author then of the Green Book criticizes these statements as being meaningless because they don't state any objective facts about the waterfall, but only are comments about how the viewers feel about it. You can't say the waterfall is objectively beautiful.

You can only say, I feel it's beautiful. I think it's beautiful. And Lewis was taking exception with that line of thinking. Well, Richards, in his own book, Principles of Literary Criticism, he elaborates on this idea so we can get a little better understanding of where he's coming from. He wrote, quote, we are accustomed to say that a picture is beautiful instead of saying that it causes an experience in us which is valuable in certain ways. We continually talk as those things possess qualities when what we ought to say is that they cause effects in us of one kind or another. Few competent persons are nowadays so diluted as actual to hold the mystical view that there is a quality, beauty, which inears or attaches to external objects.

The remarks we make as critics do not apply to such objects but only to our states of mind." Well, if people like Nabi and Richard are right, then there is no objective truth to the statement that something is beautiful. We see many examples today where those who work in areas dealing with aesthetics purposefully attempt to turn the concept of the beautiful on its ear and challenge any claim that beauty is in fact objective. Have you seen what the latest fashionistas and the artists are trying to pass off as art. This is from a recent, I think Paris, fashion. So I can see Glenn running out right after this to go by himself and outfit like that. We see similar effects to challenge the concept of objective truth. As Christians we accept that God is the ultimate source of truth. Once Satan's lie interrupts that belief, everything is up for grabs. A quote often attributed to Chesterton notes that if we don't believe in God, the problem is that we believe in nothing, but that we will believe in anything. And he's exactly right. Without God, the whole realm of

epistemology or how we know things is upended. Without truth, it transcends.

We're left with opinion to back facts. Truth is no longer objective. It is only what the majority says it is, but without any authority to back it up. And it's part of again why you see you know the woke campaigns and the cancel culture. This is all part of this. This is the effort. You don't go with the majority. You know you're silenced and they define what's objectively true. George Orwell envisioned such a world in his novel 1984 where the Ministry of truth is a government agency whose sole purpose is to falsify history and rewrite it for its own purposes. The entire population is required to speak the new language of new speak or else be punished. Does project 1619 come to mind when one, where they're trying to rewrite black history? Again, you just can't make this stuff up, you know, that we're living out what these people wrote about a long time ago. There are so many examples of denying the truth, and it's becoming almost laughable. Facebook infamously now lets you choose from a list of some 50 gender options in opposition to the true choice of male-female.

And it's insane, and if you can't read it, that's probably just as well. These examples are some of the more outlandish attempts to deny the truth, but the underlying belief that truth is something we invent permeates every part of her culture. Oprah Winfrey, the queen of talk show hosts, popularized the saying, speak your truth. We are told to be respectful of each other's truths unless we say there is only one truth. I actually had a young gal, she's a junior in high school and her parents came to my door last Sunday trying to see them get my vote for the school levy. And we had a great 20 minute conversation.

And she was waxing on eloquent about, I raised these concerns about what's going on in our schools and what they're being taught. And she says, well, the Christian viewpoint is just as valid. And we've created a space where everybody can share their truth. And I says, well, that's part of the problem, sweetie. I didn't call her sweetie. That's part of the problem is that there is only one truth. And you're telling these people that everything's true. It's your truth. And I said, that's a concern. And that's a problem. We got in the pitch for ECS while we were talking. The human mind is quite adept at twisting truth.

Once it accepts the notion that truth is subjective, it will always find a way to distort it. The truth has been revealed in both creation and scripture. We need to be good students of both to submit to the fact that truth, wherever it is found, is not a matter of man's opinion. Similar things can be said about the definition of good. I've briefly touched on the beautiful and the true, but the same things can be said about good. The scripture records several times in history where things had degenerated to the point where everyone did that which was right in their own mind. These are not described as times when man was at its finest.

Every time man decides to be his own judge of what is good, it ends up badly. A modern example of this, a fairly modern, is the situational ethics. This was a branch of study developed by, of all people, an Anglican theologian named Joseph Fletcher. His book, Situational Ethics, The New Morality, was written to try and find a balance between moral absolutism and the view that things are fixed universal moral principles, and they're binding on all creatures. So that's on the, your, would that be the left side? And then, and she's trying to find a balance between that view and a balance between the moral relativism on the right that says that there are no fixed moral principles at all.

And so on the website, Britannica summarizes Fletcher's ideas this way, quote, Fletcher based situational ethics on the general Christian norm of brotherly love, which is expressed in different ways in different situations, according to him. He applied this to issues of doctrine. For example, if one holds to the absolute wrongness of abortion, then one will never allow for abortion, no matter what the circumstances within which the pregnancy occurs. Fletcher held that such an absolute position pays no attention to the complexity and uniqueness of each situation and can result in a callous and inhumane way of dealing with the problem.

On the other hand, if there are no principles at all, then the decision is reduced to nothing more than what one decides to do in the moment with no real moral implications involved. Rather, Fletcher held, within the context of the complexities of the situation, one should come to the most loving or right decision as to what to do. Notice how the morally right thing to do comes down to weighing the pros and cons from a human perspective. I assume being an Anglican, he factored in biblical teaching, but it isn't clear if he viewed them as authoritative. His approach boils down to subjectivity over objectivity when it comes to deciding what is good, better, and best.

This criticism of Fletcher's work is not to say that there aren't times when the scripture gives no clear instruction and so men need to prayerfully discern what the best course of action is. The problem with Fletcher's middle-of-the-road solution is that it puts man in the judgment seat as to what is good. While he meant the book for good, it ended up really adding to the fuel to those who subjugate the good to pragmatism. Given man's sinful nature, pragmatism has led, often led then to moral relativism. So while he was trying to strike a balance, all he did was he put us on the highway to moral relativism where we're at today.

i.e. if it's good for you, then it's good. This kind of relativism is at the heart of the so-called right to abortion. So far, I've given examples of the mess that occurs when men treat the true, the good, and the beautiful as subjective, rather than objective values. The rejection of these values, as God gives, as God-given universals, explains how we have come to where we are as a culture. Embracing as good and normal all manner of behavior that was once deemed immoral or criminal. By having rejected the absolute nature of those values, you can trace the straight line to how we got to where we're at, where things that we, our own culture once said were wicked, are now celebrated and praised.

There are several steps that need to happen for our heirs to escape joining this cultural death march and stop the destruction and repair the ruin. The first step I suggest to you is that we need to humble ourselves and recognize that God is the one who decides what is true, good, and beautiful. I'll give you the word defer there. We defer to God when it comes up to discussions about the true, the good, and the beautiful. The next step is to engage in the process of growing in our understanding of what is the true, the good, and the beautiful, and how they relate to the daily choices we make. It would be nice if there was a manual that covered every situation there is, but there isn't.

Beyond the Bible, wisdom is called for when making decisions. Those wisdom calls can be aided by seeking input from others who have committed themselves to discovering what God has revealed about these values. As you think about these virtues, you'll quickly realize that pretty much all of life's decisions from big to small involving from what we wear and how we groom to what we attach our affections to and spend our time on is all impacted by our thinking about the true, the good and the beautiful. And so again, as you're trying to think, well, how can I apply this in my parenting process? What diet are your kids consuming when it comes to what they're reading, watching, spending time with, entertaining?

Where are they at? being introduced to great works and being taught to understand them. Or are we allowing them, do we just recognize, oh, they just like, I'll reach them back into my past, they just like mad magazines, so we'll just buy them mad magazines. Or should we be steering them in a different direction? But being able to define what's true and good and beautiful is not enough. There's even a bigger step here and that is to learn how to delight. We need to teach them to develop a genuine delight in them. That was one of Lewis's points he was making the abolition was if somebody looks at that waterfall and says it's not beautiful to me, the problem is not the waterfall. The problem is the person.

They need to be trained to recognize that that's beautiful. If you don't like beautiful, you don't have to like beautiful, but that's beautiful. You need to train them. Of course, would work against teaching them the delight in it, so you would want to say you need a delight as well. Often this will require training our affections to let go of subjective feelings that do not agree with the objective standard. This is an area that parents should be proactive in when it comes to training their kids. Do not let them develop their own delights without guidance from you.

Satan is dangling a lot of shiny baubles before them, and without your guidance, they easily develop sentimental attachments to things that are contrary to the true, the good, and the beautiful. How your children spend their educational and leisure hours in addition to watching you will largely shape what they embrace as the true, the good, and the beautiful. And then once they've learned to defer to God and to be able to define these terms and to be able to delight in them, they need to be willing to defend them. Now I don't mean defend them as if they can be defeated. They can't. They're universal. They're from God. They can't be lost. They can only be partially buried by the lie, as God said. We defend by pointing out the lie and upholding what is true, good, and beautiful. A lot of cultural shifts for the worse happen because the silent majority lets the minority get away with a lie. The majority grumble in private, but then the fear of sticking one's neck out causes most to stay quiet. This only emboldens the minority to become

more extreme. It's going to require work and sacrifice to rebuild the ruins caused by letting Satan's great lie run on check for so long. So think of your workplaces, of you that are working big companies like Boeing and I used to work for Hewlett Packard, think about back when they first started introducing woke ideology and the things that were being said and the uncomfortableness that was going on, unstated uncomfortableness, but I don't want to lose my job. I don't want to hurt my promotional chances. And so people keep their mouths shut. And then the ding-dong up there, given the presentation, is empowered and says, oh, hey, but they all bought into it.

And that's a lot of times that's how this stuff works its way into our culture is that people who know better don't stand up and say that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard and be willing to pay the price, you know, if that's what it takes. Now, I'm not saying every time it's the right time to stand up in the middle of a meeting and say that's stupid, but there is a time and a place to stand up where it may cost you everything. But if we don't do that, we're letting the, uh, these, uh, evil people dictate the new definitions as I bring the session to a close. Let me recap what I've said. All of creation is an expression of God's perfect truth, goodness, and beauty from the beginning of time.

Satan has successfully gotten men to ask themselves, has God said this challenge to God's authority has become so woven into man's thinking that even good people today accept some level of subjectivity to these God-given universals. And that's a challenge to us as Christians to kind of think about that and have we allowed some of that subjectivity to creep in. This subjectivity has resulted in greater and greater levels of perversion of the truth, of true goodness and beauty, to where many believe that there really is no standard at all. To address the damage that's being done, we and our heirs need to know, love, and defend what is true, good, and beautiful.

Now this is a lot easier to say than it is to do. Everything we say and do should be consistent with what constitutes these three virtues. Does what I wear comport with them? How I groom myself? The music or the art that I love? The things I value most and give my time and energy to? My identity? Who I love? My reviews of what it means to be autonomous, my views of what it means to be autonomous. The heroes I admire. The things that I find most meaningful. The things that bring me the most pleasure. Do those all comport with the true, the good, and the beautiful? There is nothing about us that can't be passed through the filter of what is true, good, and beautiful.

How many of the things in your life I just mentioned would pass through this TGB filter, if you will, if God's definitions were being used? It is evident that our nation is rapidly shedding any vestiges of the Christian faith that was once integral to its formation. There was a time when there was a lot more agreement as to what constitutes true, good, and beautiful because the word of God was held in higher esteem. It is shocking how quickly lessons learned by one generation are often forgotten by the next. And so as I close, I just want to read a little, a few verses out of Psalm 78 is a very poignant reminder of the need for each generation to diligently pass on its beliefs and values to the next.

Four generations in this passage are identified in it, including one that doesn't even exist. Now the Psalm is specifically talking about the requirements of the law to rehearse Israel's history to each succeeding, succeeding generation so that they can learn from past mistakes. At the point that the psalm is making is still valid today. As I read these first eight verses, consider what you are doing to help ensure your children and their children will know, love, and be able to defend what is true, good, and beautiful. So Psalm 78, verse 1, Give years, O my people, to my teaching, incline your ears to the words of my mouth.

And as your image bearers, you expect of us to be, to use them and to appreciate them, to learn from you of them. And Father, we just, we have to confess the sins. In many cases, our own sin, but certainly the sins of our nation as we have foolishly thought these things are up for grabs. And we see the mess that men have made of it. As we all as parents, grandparents, wherever we're at in the parenting process, we think about these things, may you really help us in our heart to grab a hold of them, to do the work, to understand what they are, and then to do the even harder work to make them a delight to ourselves. And again, to be willing even to stand up and defend them if it's going to cost us in this culture we live in. It's a pleasure for all these things. We just ask in your Son Jesus' name. Amen.

And as your image bearers, you expect of us to be, to use them and to appreciate them, to learn from you of them. And Father, we just, we have to confess the sins. In many cases, our own sin, but certainly the sins of our nation as we have foolishly thought these things are up for grabs. And we see the mess that men have made of it. As we all as parents, grandparents, wherever we're at in the parenting process, we think about these things, may you really help us in our heart to grab a hold of them, to do the work, to understand what they are, and then to do the even harder work to make them a delight to ourselves. And again, to be willing even to stand up and defend them if it's going to cost us in this culture we live in.

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

Okay, my subject is discipline, repentance, and you and your children. Jim's discussion about our big society was an interesting one and somewhat sad, but that's why we're raising the next generation, right, to change this back and to correct the mistakes my generation made. So that's all good information. Bottom line, my talk is only to those who are in the family of the Lord, believers. So our issue is, or my issue in this discussion, is how you should discipline and repent to your children and how they should be disciplined and repent to you. So that interchange is really important and I think it needs to be generated from the top down first.

So I have, my talk probably will not go the whole 45 minutes, which you probably will appreciate. You'll have a little longer break. But the real issue is that you just need to do what the Bible says. Now, the problem with that is that gets a little tough when we have our lovely sin nature that keeps creeping up and telling us to do something different. So my first structure is what kind of family are we seeing and what do you and your wife have to give to your children as that example? So my first verse is Ephesians 5.25 And it says, husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

Now, obviously Christ died for the church and you can push that as hard as you want, but you need to die for your wife and your kids know that you would do that.

Now, when you do that kind of thing, it's amazing how they do notice and they ask questions you then have to answer those questions and live that out. So just on that one principle alone you would get a lot done. Then in Proverbs it says, my son give me your heart and let your eyes observe my ways. So when you're talking to your kids you're telling them to observe you. That's problematic when you're a jerk like I am. So they can do some pretty dumb stuff and you know the little woman gets you aside and says but you just did what they're doing. So during that time coming to Christ late in our lives we Morgan I think was five right when we came to the Lord. I don't know where it is. Oh, she's over there. And that a lot of bad things to correct, but I think in a way it was very helpful because I realized being 37 that, oh, that was me then and I'm trying to be this now through a whole new power base in me that can make that happen. So I was quick to say, what I did there was wrong, will you forgive me for that and let's move on to this and

That was huge and that that is a big lesson that I'm trying to talk about here with these verses is that a Lot of times if you ask your kid for forgiveness when you know you were wrong Instead of trying to bluff your way through as the dad it's huge because because then the kid sees, oh, he's trying to do what he wants me to do, and I want to please him. Your kids do wanna please you, believe it or not. They want your approval. That's just a natural thing. They like that. And we like it too, you know, to see that reciprocated. So in those two verses, give me your heart and let you observe my ways and loving your wife as Christ loves the church, you are teaching your children to love the standard, you demonstrate the standard.

So if you want your kid to do something, demonstrate that standard. Now, some of them can be pretty hard-headed and not get that. And so you say, did you observe when I did this? Yeah, but you're the dad, I'm the kid, you know. Usually you should be teaching this way younger then you have those kind of discussions back at you. So as you do that, you'll be amazed at how they show those things out and play them out. Matthew 22, 39 through 40 says, and the second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself on these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets. This is an interesting comment that Wilson makes in his Future Men.

And the issue is, give your children the Torah, not the Talmud, okay? The difference there is the Torah is the first five books of the Bible, all right? The Talmud is the commentary on the first five books by many rabbis adding it layer after layer of commentary. So the issue is, give them what God says, not necessarily your opinion, which then requires you to be a theologian.

As Jim was saying, you know, all these scientists tell you about the good and the beautiful and all that kind of stuff. Remember that the queen of the sciences was theology until, you know, the Renaissance and everybody decided, oh, we're so smart, we'll just invent all these things. Now, God invented them, God put them in categories, read the book, follow the book. So you give your kids the Torah, not the Talmud. That's a tough one in this day and age and all the little wrinkles in that. And that constantly makes you go back and check your truth. In Psalm 103, 13 through 14, it says, as a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.

The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. He shows compassion to you as you do these things. For he knows our frame, this is the second, or 14. For he knows our frame and he remembers that we are dust. Big truth here, know your children's frame. For those of you that have more than one kid, you realize, well that first kid was interesting and then the second one comes along and you go, That one's totally different. And the two of us made these same two kids, and one is totally different than the other one. What do I do with that? Well, you adapt, and you know the frame of that kid. So you just can't have this robot-like situation and just grind them through and hope you get a good thing out of it.

That relates to the kind of boot camp parenting. There are times where you've got to lay down the law, make them do the law, and just, no excuses, you will do this, you'll march, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but that isn't really demonstrating their frame. So getting them in line, it's like, some of you have heard about growing kids God's way. It was a thing created back in the 80s. It was good. Families that were out of control and had just had free will parenting or free reign parenting. They got a hold of these books and all of a sudden the book said, oh, I come home from work and I sit down with my wife and I have family time and the kids observe that, that I love my wife and I'm interested in what happened in her day, she's interested in my day and the kids see what?

They see the two of you are compatible and doing well and that model gives them the security for you to instruct them under that umbrella. So there are times where you've got to get your family together at least in some form of semblance. Now, I'm hoping that in our congregation most of you are believers and that you have that semblance. So I'm looking for you to fine tune that beyond just having this structure or just following a rule set that, you know, we're all going to do this and we're all going to mark those out little, you know, mechanical people. Now, we are all individuals. God made us and made our frames differently, raise them up in that frame, make them to be the best in the frame that God gives them.

So in Genesis 2, 16 through seven, the Lord commanded the man saying, you may surely eat out of every tree of the garden, but the tree of knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat. For in the day you eat of it, you shall surely die. Your family should have security that your kids feel wonderful being in it. And it's a great playground. But in your family and in your big fence that you're raising them all in, they've got to know there is a tree of no in it. So they need to know right and wrong, wrong, but you should have a wonderful field for them to play in and experiment and stub their toe and flunk on some of their homework and learn how to be responsible and all the rest of that.

So you want to have a healthy environment for them to learn things, but you're not making such an environment that they're just hemmed in, that they actually know when they've stepped out of bounds that that's wrong and you demonstrate that. But in the whole thing, let them experiment with all kinds of things. I want to do this, I want to do that. Well, okay, we've got time to give you a try at that. What do you think? You know, go do it. So that kind of thing is demonstrated in that. There is a big thing now that this purpose statement or this finalization of this I'm putting now in this front part and I'm also going to put it at the end part. To remember that discipline is not punishment. Punishment is retribution from God which is intended to do us harm. When God punishes somebody, he punishes them and wants to do them harm. When we discipline somebody or when and God disciplines us, discipline is purposeful hardship through which God intends to do us good.

So a spanking can be a good thing if administered properly or it could be retribution given to give harm to the kid. That's an interesting judgment there. And that is part of the reason that I'm talking about You have to know your own heart before you do these things and know your kid's heart too. There are times where the punishment be more severe if the kid intended and with intent is disobeying, where sometimes they're just being dumb kids. Dumb kids are okay. We're all dumb kids. We do stupid things. But you have to, the punishment needs to be within a wisdom kind of call. on that thing. The other thing that you've gotta be careful of is Ephesians 6, four.

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and the instruction of the Lord. Don't ride Johnny and keep poking him until you get the desired result that now I can punish him. You didn't do it just right. Mm, mm, mm. And then Johnny blows up, okay, Johnny, you know, now you get a spanking. that. That's not what you're doing here. Colossians 3 20 to 21, Children obey your parents and everything for this pleases the Lord, but fathers do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged. Discipline should be an encouragement. Remember, discipline is the purpose purposeful hardship through which God intends to do us good, not to punish you, but to do you good so that you correct your attitude or your behavior.

Proverbs 21 and 28 says, a false witness will perish, but the word of a man who hears will endure. Listen to your kids. They are people. It is not, I mean, you're not going to have much of a discussion with a two-year-old, But once they get to be three or four, five, when they can speak in sentences, they become little people, and they are really observing a lot of stuff. So you need to be patient to sit down and actually understand how they're viewing what you're trying to do. It's a big thing maybe that the kid is told to pick his toys up and keep his room as nice. But you can kind of overdo that sometimes. We instructed our son to keep his stuff picked up.

He was a bit of a character. He would run through our house, we had a big long house, and he would run down and he would run into this door at the end of this long hallway and crash into it and fall on the floor because he saw that on TV. He thought football players did that and he thought that was funny. And sometimes when he would get upset with us or didn't like something, he would spread his legs and then do like this and bang his forehead on the floor. Now we had, like linoleum, it wasn't a concrete floor and it had a little give in the wood, but we would just look at him and laugh that he's teaching us a lesson by banging his forehead on the floor.

Well, in that respect, I should have been able to sit down with him and have a talk on his level. What are you doing that for? Instead of laughing at him. Laughing at him probably wasn't his thing. But anyway, he survived. And he's not too dumb, so it's okay. But those kind of things, you know, if you can sit down and find out what perspective they're coming from, like we thought it was crazy that he was running and hitting the door, and then he showed us that one time we were watching a football game, and he said, that's what I'm doing. Oh, okay. So anyway, so communicate with them. Know where they're coming from.

What's their interest? That kind of thing. Children need to be converted. This is a big one. And in a lot of churches that we have come from, we meaning as fundamentalist types, they won't baptize kids as believers until they're maybe 15, 16 years old. You notice we baptize children when they can make a profession of faith and their parents testify the kid is changed. He seems to really, you know, believe these things and he's being convicted, we want to encourage their faith. If you're training up a pagan and he's a well-behaved pagan, that's nice, that's good for society, but we want to have well-behaved Christians.

And God does the saving, but we can do a lot of the churning the ground and doing that up with them. So we need to remember always in this Ephesians 2, You and you were dead in your trespasses and sin, and once you walked following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now in work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of our body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. We at one point were bad camp. God brings us over to the good camp. We want our kids to be in the good camp. We can't force that. We can teach them about it, pray to God that he would convict them, but when they convict them or in there in that process, we want to be those encouragers. We want to encourage faith, not discourage it. That's the big difference in what we're doing. We do not believe that we are going to baptize the children and bring them into the covenant and all of that.

We do believe that you believe and be baptized. So that's a difference. But that doesn't mean that we aren't, by our Christian family, giving that kid a great advantage and a blessing to be born in that family. But that family then needs to treat the kid and build him up in the faith. And when he can make that profession, we want to encourage him in that. So children need to be converted, obviously, everybody would agree with that. Then Deuteronomy 6, 4 through 7 says, hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.

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, provide your children a Christian education. Give your children quality time. That verse is what convinced Gail and I after we had been saved for right at like a year and three months that we needed to homeschool our kids. And Gail had helped in Morgan's classroom and one day she said, you need to go into the classroom and help to see what's going on. And both of us were a product of public schools. And I went in to help this lady. She was an older lady getting ready to retire. And it was a second grade classroom. And there was this one little boy that got up and started walking around. And she said, you know, little Jimmy, whatever his name was, can you go back and sit in your seat? And the kid just looked at her and just kept walking around.

Well, I had volunteered to be the teacher's helper, so I got up and went over and grabbed little Jimmy and put him in the seat. This lady just, you know, whoa, you can't do that. And I said, what are you talking about? Little Jimmy needs to be in the seat. He told him to get in the seat. He wasn't going to get in the seat. And she said, oh, you can't do that. And I said, okay, I'm sorry, I didn't know that was a rule. And little Jimmy didn't sit in his seat though. He didn't get up. So the class got over. She got me aside and explained that, you know, we could get, you know, if a person complained, you could go to jail for child abuse.

And I said, I'm sorry. You're telling me as the second grade teacher that you can't physically put little Jimmy in the seat if he doesn't obey you. And she said yes. And I said, what are you going to do with that? That's crazy. You can't teach these kids that. And she just looked at me and said, that's why I'm retiring. And Gail had asked her about homeschooling. And she said, oh, if I could do that, if I would go back and change, that's what I would do. I wouldn't put them in here. And this was 1985. So you can imagine what it is today. But stuff like that is just so crazy. It's like the whole gender list that Jim put up there.

I mean, are you kidding me? Reading all these descriptions? What are you talking about? It's just nuts. So you do want to give your kids a Christian education. That can be given to them by you. You can have your kids in the public school system, but you then have to do the double duty of un-teaching them certain things and instructing them in that way. You can do it at home so that you're the filter and giving them everything, or you can put them in a school like ECS or whatever. And I think we're doing a good job in that school, but you are the parents. You are the ones responsible. You're the ones that with the kid on the road, in the road, all those things described in Deuteronomy 6.

And we want to come alongside you at ECS and homeschooling people can come and take advantage, possibly for certain classes or whatever. It's a tough road to hoe though, if you wanna put your kid in public education and then filter all that stuff out. That's a tough one these days and it doesn't seem to be getting any better. So the next one is that we want to have a home that is inviting and pleasant. Your kids should love to be at home, and you guys should have a lot of fun at home. Ephesians 5, 18 through 21 says, do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart, giving thanks always for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Colossians 3 16 says, let the word of Christ dwell on you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing songs and psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. Have a home full of scripture, full of joy, full of music, full of good discussion, full of fun things. Baking cookies. We had friends that when they bake cookies, their kids love baking cookies so much, the cookies never made it to the oven. They ate all the cookies raw before they cooked them. And it was interesting. I had never seen that, and I tried some of it, and it was pretty good raw. But anyway, you should have fun.

They should enjoy all these fun kind of things, whether it be helping you do the yard work or taking three times longer in the project because your kid is helping you then you could have done it with yourself. Those times can be really good times of interchange and getting together and understanding each other, having interchange, all of that.

Then we have the problem of what happens when something goes wrong. Galatians 6-1, brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him to his in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself lest you too be tempted. Discipline is a gift, not a retaliation. Okay, the kid is gonna help mommy serve the dinner.

Comes with a little tray and off goes the milk or the glass of water or the food slides down breaks. The kid is like, yes, the kid was being stupid and didn't, you know, tilt the tray right, all the rest of it, but what you do is that's a good try, but let's see if we can't do that a little better. How about if we took one plate at a time or just a glass at a time? At our house, Morgan and Sean have the kids clear the table, and Kela, who is very excitable and just Johnny on the spot, you know, I'm gonna go 100 miles an hour with the volume cranked up to 10, goes around and collects like eight plates, you know, whoop, whoop, whoop, and Shawn Caesar goes, put that down and just put a couple plates to the side and now just take two at a time or whatever.

Oh, okay, and she's just that way. So instead of going, buddy, that stupid kid, you know, you can say just take two at a time. Now my method with Keyla is you're just being stupid, don't do that, you know. But, you know, all of that is just to, when you're involved and the people know you and they know your way, you can get away with a lot and have a lot of fun in the process of learning those things. And that's another thing too, is if you're a little lighthearted, it helps everything. You won't get so mad, you won't be frustrated, that kind of thing. It's, I don't know, you just live it out that way. Proverbs 1817 says, the one who states his case first seems right until the other comes and examine him.

Discipline should be judicious and not occasion for you to jump to conclusions. That's the whole thing of maybe the kid is just trying to help when they crashed and dropped all the stuff. And maybe they just tripped and did the stuff. They weren't quite old enough or had a good enough system and they screwed it up. Now, should that kid get spanked because they broke dishes because they tripped up? I don't think so. Now, should they be instructed a better way to do it? Yeah. But also, you know, you've probably broken a few dishes and done some stupid things in your life too. So you have to kind of balance all that out and let them know that also.

Honor your, this is Exodus 2012, honor your father and your mother that your days may be long and the land your Lord, your God has given you. Divided discipline is dangerous. Honor your father and your mother. How many times, and this is really not a good thing in your family and you need to cut it off in a New York minute, when the kid plays both of you off against each other. Dad's not here and they know if they ask mom 30 times, especially when she's trying to do the laundry or she's cleaning, that she'll probably go, oh, all right. When they know if they ask dad, it would be a no. You two parents need to be together so that the kid sees a united front.

And they are genius at playing this game. They can tell with just a look or a ugh, that, oh, I've almost got them to where they're gonna say yes. So don't let that happen. Now, don't be a jerk about it, but be aware of all those things and let them know you're aware of it. And then the next time they try it, maybe you can cure it just with a laugh like you're trying it again, we're not gonna do that. And they might go, oh, okay, you caught me, whatever. All right, now at this point, I want to show you some books. This is really a good one. This book is good. This is the one. Now, if you want little short books, though, that get right to the issue of these things, these two books that I'm going to show you first are what I always give to people that I am doing marriage counseling with.

This is for the woman, the fruit of her hands. This is for the man, future men. After the man reads this and talks about it with me, and the woman reads this and talks about it with me, then the man reads this one, and the woman reads this one. And that's so both of you understand what both of you should be. So once you have these two roles straightened out, then this one, it was his newer one, and it's Jim Wilson, it's Doug's father wrote this. And like Shawn has mentioned, and the women are doing this when now in Titus 2, right? This book cover says everything you need to know about this book. If anybody know anybody that's bitter, they'll scratch the faces of the people out of old family pictures.

Gail's sister took scissors and cut faces out of people in pictures and then put them back in the inner photo album. So when you're carrying around that much baggage, you probably are not making good judgments. So you want to be free from bitterness, and you also want to understand your position and have your husband understand your position and have free flowing talks between the two of you so you both understand those positions and then try to work them out the best you can. Now does that mean just because you read these stupid books that you're going to be perfect? No. But it does mean, OK, I got a basis here.

And yeah, you're right. I should try to not do that. And on it goes. One of the things Gail uses with me that is quite effective, and Morgan knows this too because she was old enough to know my dad. And they called him Fata instead of Grandpa. And when I get to be a jerk, they look at me and say, you're acting just like Fata. That's probably the worst thing you can say to me. You could give a stream of expletives to me, but that wouldn't hurt as much as you're acting just like your dad, because he had a lot of bitterness and a lot of stupid things. And hopefully, I've buried a lot of that. My sister and I, we should be the biggest bigots and jerks in the world, but I think both of us have come out of that in a pretty whole position.

But the reason we have is because we're Christians and we try to live that way. So that part is good. But you do need to guard against that, especially some of us that came out of bad situations. Your bad situation's bad. You're right. But that's back here. Now look to tomorrow. Tomorrow doesn't need to be that bad situation. Move on from there. So now we're to probably the verse everybody's heard about discipline, but it's a great one. And in this section it's Hebrews 12 5 through 13 and Hebrews 12 11 is the killer verse. So it says, and have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons? My son do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him.

For the Lord disciplines the ones he loves and chastises every son whom he receives." Notice the discipline is bringing you to a knowledge of God. And he chastises. Those things are not punishment meant to do your harm. Those are things that he chastises whom he receives. It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom the father does not discipline? You're a pretty bad father if you're not disciplining and controlling your sons to be better people than you were. Well, that's another side comment that too. There are people, my father was one of these, was very angry that I was turning out better than he was.

He did not like that. And my dad was quite successful in a lot of things, but when I got saved and we had a whole different value system, it really made him angry. And it was sad, it was really sad. But that's something that, when that happens and that people that are mad at you because of that, you just have to realize it's sad for them and they're the ones you need to pray for. Pray for your enemies. So let's see, God is treating you to sons. Four, what son is there whom the father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline in which you all have participated, then you are illegitimate childrens and not sons.

Besides this, we have an earthly follower who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the father of spirits and live? For they discipline us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good that we may share his holiness." The old conundrum of the Christian life. You get saved, you get to this plateau, and you go, man, I've conquered that, I'm really living good. then you realize this, and you get up on this plateau, and then you get that one and you think, oh man, now I've arrived, I've conquered that. You never conquer it. The more holy you become, the more evil you know you are, because you realize the base sin that you are fighting against is always there until we get to our state of grace after we die and get to be with the Lord.

But that is just the conundrum of the Christian life. you get better and better, the dial gets dialed up and you just realize, oh my goodness, I still have all that rottenness in me, but I can overcome that. So that's just part of the Christian life. Live with it, like it, and that's just the way it is. Beside this, we have an earthly, let's see, for the moment, all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. Therefore, lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees and make straight the paths for your feet so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed."

So verse 11, for the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. And there again is the pain of discipline should be acute but not chronic. When you swat a kid, you're not trying to hurt him. You want him to feel it, but you're not there to chronically hurt your kid. Never discipline a kid out of anger. If you're angry, take a deep breath, get some time, have Junior go into his room or little Sally go into her room and you stay over away from there and everybody calm down before you discipline. Never discipline in anger. Okay, that's just a rule. Don't do that. The point of discipline is to restore fellowship not retribution. The whole purpose is to correct the behavior so that the people or in line and doing what God wants them to do.

Until you get the forgiveness and you accept that forgiveness, and it's not, I'm sorry, daddy, I'm sorry for doing this, will you forgive me for doing that? Particular, you know, I need to be forgiven for this, will you forgive me for that? The other party, yes, I will forgive you for that. So everybody's in clear understanding what's happened. I'm sorry, doesn't really cut it, okay? That's just a blanket kind of throwaway kind of thing. But once those conversations go on, well, why didn't you like me doing it that way? Well, you remind me of your father. That would be me reminding Gail, my dad.

That's not good. I don't wanna do that. So those kind of discussions always need to be had. The other thing is when you discipline a child, That discipline is between the parent and the child. It's not for everybody in the room. It's not for the whole thing. I mean, like if a kid's misbehaving here in the auditorium and you want to go out and have a little meeting with him somewhere, you go out and have a meeting with him, but you don't discipline him in front of everybody. So everybody's going, oh, look at that. Little Jimmy got whacked. How about that? Little Jimmy's looking around, you know. Look at this. I'm head of the entertainment.

Don't be doing that. Off privately between you and the kid, and then when it's over, you make sure that there is a bond between you before you leave that situation. So that's the thing. Now, the other thing in this, and this is where lordship salvation or whatever you wanna call it, this is where we want to see the child understand Jesus is Lord, God is God, you're not God, you're his representative. And the issue is their repentance, and your repentance if you've done wrong. Again, I've told you that one of the best things you can do is ask for forgiveness from your kid if you did something wrong. And when you do that, especially once they get to three or four where they can really understand you, You know, I'm sorry little Sally that I yelled at you in the car.

I was frustrated. I was wrong. Will you forgive me for yelling at you? Now, your three-year-old or four-year-old is going to look at you and go, wow, yeah, it's okay dad. It's okay. And I said, well, it's not okay. And will you forgive me for that? Yes, I will. That kind of interchange is huge. because now that child knows if they're wrong, I mean, if you're wrong, that you will not punish them for that. So they're not looking out if they're gonna get caught, they're looking out what they're doing. So then when they get punished, the end of that is they need to have the spirit in them to ask forgiveness for what they did with you.

Even though they've gotten a spanking, and they still need that forgiveness for what they did. So there's that interchange all the time. It's just like God's, just like why we get on our knees every Sunday and to get ourselves right so we can get on with it. So these verses are discussions of how you get saved and notice that in the middle of them, always repentance. It's always a thing that has to happen. 2 Timothy 2, 22 through 26. So flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace along with those who call on the Lord from the pure art. Have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies.

You know that they breed quarrels. And the Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may escape from the snare of the devil after being captured by him to do his will. They may, perhaps, God may perhaps grant them repentance. God granting them repentance, right? Second Corinthians seven, eight through 10, "'For even if I made you grieve with my letter," remember that Paul does the second Corinthians, he wrote them first Corinthians just chastising them for them being a bunch of idiots.

And he says, for even if I made you grieve with my letter, I do not regret it, though I did regret it, for I see that the letter grieved you, though only for a while. So he's, you know, I'm not sure you really got it. As it is, I rejoice not because you were grieved, but because you were grieved into repenting. Those that repented, they're good. For you felt a godly grief, so that you suffered no loss through us. For godly grief produces repentance that leads to salvation without regret. Whereas, worldly grief produces death. For godly grief produces repentance that leads to salvation without regret. So just being sorry or grieved over a bad thing, unless you're making it right and understanding it from that God point of view, you haven't really solved that problem in your life.

A lot of people are hanging onto that and it can be a root of bitterness too for people. Hebrews 12, 15 through 17, see to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God, that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble. By it you may become be defiled, that no one is sexually immoral or unholy like Esau who sold his birthright for a single meal. For you know that afterward, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears."

That really speaks to the issue that we're talking about in Romans nine also. Then the last one is Acts 2, 37 through 39, Peter's sermon. "'Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, brothers, what shall we do? And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized, every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, for the promises for you and your children, for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself. Repent, okay?

The last thing you wanna do with your kids is prepare them for independence, Genesis 2.24. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. Prepare your children for the time they leave your home. They may have the gift of singleness given to them and they may not get married, but you still want to prepare that child to go out into the world and reproduce and maybe do it better than you did. Our prayer was always that our daughter and our son would do better than we have done. And it's a pleasure to see our grandchildren now living that out and even seeing a great grandchild.

That's an amazing thing that I thought I'd never see. So anyway, so prepare your children for independence. And then I think the interesting sentences to remember are, punishment is retribution from God, which is intended to do us harm. Discipline is purposeful hardship through which God intends us to do good, and should be the same for you as parents. And again, future men, the fruit of her hands, and how to be free from bitterness are good short things on this, but it always gets back to the whole counsel of God and how you handle that. So let's pray and we got done exactly what I thought. So we'll have about 12 minutes to have a party or whatever.

So Father, thank you for this time together. I thank you for your word and for those faithful servants through the ages that have broken it down and maybe you can write books that can help us and for preaching and just all the ministries that we have access to. Help us to be wise, though, to filter those, to have the good information and not the bad information. But help us to be good students of your word and to be good theologians, also, in our own theology. For we all are theologians as we try to understand what you are telling us. So we thank you for all of those things, and of course we thank you most of all for your Son, Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, amen.

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

Well, yes again we arrive at session three hypocritical households and apostate adolescents and As the title would suggest this does deal with Not just getting our kids saved but keeping them saved when we launch them out into the real world the question That has been on the minds of many Christians of late actually for a long time but increasingly of late is why so many young people walk away from the faith. They grow up in Christian homes perhaps, they go to church, week in week out like clockwork, they go to their prayer services on Wednesday night, they go to Awana, they pray before meal times. But when they go out on their own they walk away from the faith and we wonder why. Well maybe we we can start by looking at ourselves.

I mean, how many times have your kids seen you sin? Sure, fair enough. How many times have they seen you repent? If you're anything like me, the first number is unfortunately far greater than the second number, and it's not something I'm particularly proud of. That is bad. And especially considering how many times I've called my own children to repentance, or perhaps you've done the same thing. This is a dual standard, this is hypocrisy, this is not living consistently with our confession. And while of course there are likely a host of reasons why Christian children walk away from the faith, a good place to start then would be to look in the mirror.

We understand God's prerogative to save. We understand God's prerogative and his power to preserve, to keep people safe, to preserve his saints unto the end. But we have clear responsibility here too. And there are no doubt a lot of earthly explanations to this problem. Blogger Brandon Darryl Lane Flannery conducted an online survey related to this question. And he posted his findings on the Baptist News Global website in December of 2022. So just a couple of months ago.

The question centered on why people are leaving the church and the top reasons that he cited from his findings from conducting that survey with over 1200 people was number one, discrimination against the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups. Number two, the behavior of Christians. And then three, intellectual integrity. Namely, they didn't believe that Christianity was actually intellectually tenable. So the first point, of course is worth talking about, the discrimination piece. I mean, to be perfectly honest, there is no faithful treatment of Scripture, adherence to scriptural principles, and then treatment of those who are living in sin that they're going to actually appreciate and enjoy most times if we're being honest. We'll be focusing primarily on number two, but in the interest of looking at the sort conundrum that faces our young people when they leave our homes. Entertain this with me for just a moment. Flannery is himself a gay man and so when we look at the social media crowd that is likely to respond to his invitation to comment

that has to be factored into account as well. So it's not so that may or may not have been a fair cross-section of our culture responding to that that invitation to say why they're walking away from the church. So those numbers may in fact be skewed, but at a rate that we haven't seen before, people are walking away from the faith. Can we really be surprised though? Western culture has been shaped by the gospel and by Judeo-Christian morality. The Christian worldview teaches that all humans are deserving of respect and they bear dignity as image bearers, no matter their lifestyle or their creed. So that is something that is common to humanity. They may hate God, they may change genders as often as they change their socks, and our worldview teaches that they have value as humans. It also teaches that to condone an unbiblical lifestyle is actually loving. Our culture preaches a different message.

Today, identity politics has helped us to blur the lines distinguishing a person's behavior from his personhood. So we're told that if we do not affirm a person's identity which he alone determines. So he determines his identity. If you don't affirm that, you're actually denying his personhood. Or they'll even go a step further and say his very existence. So Jim talked about that just a little bit. Strangely, this sort of conflation and this demand for affirmation presupposes the cultural grace that is brought about by the influence of the gospel over generations. It depends on that cultural grace and where grace is present, you can count on it. Grace will be abused. And like entitled children, we find we depend on God's common grace and do so to demand our rights. Then we wonder how we got here.

We find ourselves culturally poised on the branch that we are sawing off with our chainsaws of identity politics. So I've taken a moment to key in on that as a sort of an example of the sort of curve balls that we are thrown and that we miss in spectacular fashion when we're at the plate. We are not equipping our kids with the philosophical, theological, or the practical tools to combat these competing ideologies. Sadly, many of our young people today are not equipped to address these objections on the part of their contemporaries and using a morality that depends on Christian categories, they call God cruel. They call him wicked.

They call us hateful. And when then Christians push back instead of being pushed around, they call us unloving. And they tell us to turn the other cheek because Jesus told us we have to. And if we don't, then we're being hypocrites. So they're defining the terms, defining the categories, they're using enough of our language against us to think that they're doing so strategically. This sort of resistance from the world is hard to face without a thorough grounding in scripture and in the Christian faith. But that's bad enough, but then when coupled with hypocrisy in the home, it's just too much for many Christian young people to survive. Christian kids are in fact in a cultural river, the current is strong, and just treading water will carry them downstream. If they wish to make any cultural headway, they have to swim hard and be in pretty good shape. In the church where part of the aim is to get into this spiritual shape, the situation is decidedly better, I think, because at least we know the solution. We may not be

fantastic at executing it all the time, but we do have the handbook. This is a time where facts are fluid and where confusion is clarity and we sound like George Orwell and in this time we need to live by faith. Otherwise, like so many Christians today, though we hand our children a monetary inheritance, their souls will be lost. The theme verse for this seminar is Proverbs 1322, a good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children, but the sinner's wealth is laid up for the righteous. Solomon here is talking about material inheritance, and it's a good thing for a man to provide for his children and for his grandchildren, monetarily and materially, absolutely, to be sure. But I don't think the Solomon would mind us too much, broadening the application of the principle to include a spiritual inheritance as well. Many good men are are unable to hand down wealth to their children, yet they are still able to establish and grow for their families a godly heritage.

And that is a rich inheritance that will yield dividends for generations. Though both types of inheritance are important, our focus is the spiritual inheritance, not because wealth is unimportant, but because the spiritual is more important. And I don't style myself a dualist, but I don't really make apology for that.

the spiritual inheritance of greater value. Jesus seemed to think so. If a father builds a tremendous inheritance to hand down to his sons, but has not trained them to receive it well, to steward it well, to use it for God's kingdom, he's missed Solomon's point and has not actually provided for his household at all. If, in the name of providing for his household, a man has built transferable wealth at the expense of his children's souls, or at the expense of fellowship with his wife or at the expense of a harmonious and godly family culture, he's not ultimately provided for them at all. What is such an inheritance but a reminder to his son of his father's years of neglect? What child would exchange the affection of a doting grandfather for a million dollars? Jesus himself asked rhetorically, what is a profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul in Mark 8 36. A concern for our children's future bank accounts without a concern for their souls is a wickedness. So if we would honor the spirit as well as the letter of Proverbs 13 22, we must

work to grow wealth, to be sure, grow assets, to be sure that will bless our children and their children. But we must work even harder to ensure that we transfer to our children an inheritance of of godliness. We must work to rear our children in a Christian culture, in the arenas of the household, school, the church, our neighborhoods. If we do, their presence in the community will be potent, whether it is on a youth soccer team or in the line at the grocery store or in your neighborhood. I've had opportunity over the years to interact with a lot of different types of Christian families. I've been able to see some trends over the years in terms of which families leave an inheritance of godliness to their children, and of course their exceptions.

There are tremendously faithful Christian parents whose children walk away from the faith, and there are plenty in this room who came from unbelieving homes themselves, or even moderately Christian homes. Many Christians didn't come from Christian homes, that's true, but most of them did. As often as not, children are reared in a Christian home and walk away from the faith, I don't say that flippantly, as often as not. And especially when you take it to university, when Christian kids go off to universities, between two-thirds and three-quarters of them deny the faith by the time they're done. And sometimes though, even very faithful Christian families produce unbelieving children.

But we can also observe trends among those who raise children who remain in the faith. And more often than not, Children who remain in the faith have parents who parent by faith and who take their own faith seriously. You don't want your kids to remain in the faith in spite of you. It won't be because of you, but hopefully it's not in spite of you. God is the one who saves. And he blesses faithfulness and ordains means as well as ends. And while salvation and sanctification are of the Lord, he does routinely use our obedience to bring about his will, his will to effect his will. Our job is to be faithful as parents and to raise our children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

So my aim with this talk is to consider how we can do our part, to ensure that we are giving our children a godly spiritual inheritance. What can we do to demonstrate for our children that our faith is real, that it matters, that we actually believe what we say? My suggestions here center on the elimination of hypocrisy from our homes and our lives every day, all the time. We must fight hypocrisy all the time at every turn, taking our own faith seriously before we expect our children to do so. Now hypocrisy is a pretty broad term.

Oxford defines it as, the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform or pretense. That's helpful. So hypocrisy is behavior that is contrary to your confession. And hypocrisy is a cancer to Christian culture. The opposite of this word would be integrity, at least for our purposes. A wholeness of character as one lives consistently with what he believes. So my exhortations here, or he says he believes, my exhortations here are intended to help us live consistently with our profession unto the rich spiritual inheritance of our children as they continue in the faith.

So my exhortations here are intended to help us live consistently with our profession unto the rich spiritual inheritance of our children as they continue in the faith. My suggestions here are about killing hypocrisy in in yourself and hedging against hypocrisy in our kids. So let that be the sort of program that's running in the background as we consider these things together. Allow me to suggest some ways to kill hypocrisy and keep our kids saved. First, get integrity. Yes. I mean, Solomon says the beginning of wisdom is this, get wisdom, right? If that's the case, then perhaps we could say this, the beginning of integrity is this, Get integrity, dude.

It's not complicated. It's not easy, but it's not complicated. Actually think about it and you will be better off. In many cases, mindfulness is all one needs to start making progress toward your goal. So being attentive to integrity in this case is an important step to being characterized that way. If you think about what you put in your mouth, soon you'll be healthier. Just pause for a moment and give it some thought before you eat the candy bar or the choc-chip cookie or the carrot stick. Or the piece of steak and then do it with relish. Go ahead. Think about every dollar before you spend it and soon you'll be wealthier.

You'll find that you're spending a lot of dollars mindlessly. Think about every word before it comes out of your mouth. Just take a moment and be quiet and think, then speak. And you'll be wiser because you'll find yourself listening more than you're speaking. Likewise, if you think about what you're doing and whether it is consistent with your profession of faith in Christ, soon you will grow in integrity and wholeness of character. If you are mindful of integrity, living consistently with your confession, the Spirit will convict you of any hypocrisy. I mean, you know that's the case, right?

When you're working on a certain character attribute or you have something, a defect in your own character that you're attentive to and you're working hard on at the moment, noticeably attentive to it and others as well. So you see if you're working on patience when somebody else is acting impatient and so on. But so that that's an evidence that when you're working on it you're mindful of it and if that is the case the spirit will point out to you when you're acting hypocritically. And in case it's not obvious we're not looking for a wholeness of character among pagans. Right? A person could listen to this and go, Well, since I don't want to be a hypocrite, I'll just walk away.

I will embrace godlessness." Well, this is a different talk from that one. That person needs to get saved and give his life to Christ and bow the knee to Jesus. I'm talking to Christians who are struggling to live Christianly everywhere all the time.

If you need a reference point beyond the Bible, consider whether your behavior matches up to the standard that you're holding for your children. And you're believing children in particular. How would you counsel your kids? If you don't have kids, how would you counsel somebody else in your situation? I use this one all the time to talk sense into myself. I try to remove myself from the context for a moment and say, how would you counsel somebody else who's in your predicament? And then that allows me enough distance and objectivity to think a little bit more clearly, well, likewise, are you behaving in a way different from how you would counsel yourself, all things being equal? Then in the Bob Newhart thing, stop it. I'm surprised Dave made the whole talk without referencing that. When it comes to morality, work to be the same person wherever you are. Now, you may let your guard down in certain circles, but you should be the same person morally wherever you are. Would your co-workers or your friends from church be surprised

to witness your dinnertime behavior in conversation? The morals and the principles that inform our decisions come from the Bible and they transcend contexts. They're the same principles that should come to bear on other decision-making no matter where we are or when. This should be self-evident, but how many of us are guilty of behaving one way at church in a different way when we're alone, at home, or with our families? Why is this? Well, whether household or national culture, there's little that I can think of that will undermine the power of our testimony, the living inconsistently with our profession. We must get integrity.

What else? Educate Christianly. So I am revisiting a couple of points that Dave said far more completely. So I'll be skating over the top. Educate Christianly. Parents are to raise our children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, Ephesians 6.4. If we do that well, they are more likely to keep the faith. And done well, it's also a very powerful weapon against parents' hypocrisy as well. So whether homeschooling or day-schooling your children, they need a Christian education for a hundred reasons. And some of that triage may come around the dinner table in the evenings. But as I said, this is for a bunch of different reasons.

Among them, an education according to reality will be necessarily a Christian education. The starting point is the word of God. Educational models that omit or deny the word of God are like guacamole without avocados. Let's think about that one for a second. A proper study of history will include the culture-shaping influence of the gospel, and not only in Western culture. You'll see what happens when the culture is influenced by the gospel outside of the West as well. A Christian education gives them practice in living in Christian community. Again, that may be a tiny Christian community in your home. It may be a Christian school.

particularly how to resolve conflict biblically with a view to full Christian fellowship. Man, that's a good habit to get into. And if our children practice biblical conflict resolution throughout their childhood, they're more likely to practice it when they get older. So as we talk about how to keep our children from walking away from the faith, if they're allured by Christian fellowship, they're less likely to do that, are they not? It also includes an honest examination of worldview which will then compare the Christian worldview with the alternatives and in a context of discipleship. The Christian worldview teaches the value of Christians and work and their relationship with one another. If it's a good education they're going to develop an interest in work and a big capacity to do lots of it. For my part I'm a fan of classical and Christian education and it is heavy on the study of the great books of Western civilization, which have been the vehicles of the great ideas that have helped us shape our culture.

Classical education trains students in logic and rhetoric, which is different from most modern counterparts today, and helps students to be able to combat the lies of the world around us.

I'm not in the classroom very much these days, but when I was, I used to enjoy asking my students periodically throughout the year about their greatest fears and hang-ups about the Christian faith. Like, given to me, what are you afraid of about Christianity that may not be true? What, you know, does God actually exist? How can we know the Bible is true? Does the Bible endorse slavery, capital punishment, polygamy? Does God hate homosexuals? How is the doctrine of God's sovereignty different from the fatalism of the Greeks and the Romans? How about the crusaders who killed Muslims in Jesus' name or the reformers who executed Anabaptists. Like, give it to me. So first, if we're afraid of questions like these, it won't keep our kids from asking them. Don't tell your kids that good Christian kids don't ask questions like these. Shame on you if you do, because they're not going to stop asking them, and if we don't, the world will. Even if we manage to convince them that good Christians don't ask questions like

these, the world's still going to ask them. And they, and will also do so in a culture of discipleship of a different nature. The world is trying to make disciples of your kids. And so I would much rather have the students wrestling with those things and reading Nietzsche and Hitler and the rest in this context from a Christian worldview with a teacher who is interested in loving the student, rather than a teacher with an extra grind and an agenda to remove the faith of Christian kids. But the world will ask them, our kids need to be grounded in the faith to be able to answer them. And as a bonus, it turns out that giving our kids, as I mentioned before, a thorough Christian education serves not only to help them, but also it helps us.

I've seen lots of parents benefited greatly by their children's education, myself included. So then, because this is a talk about hypocrisy and keeping our kids safe, be ready for your kids to ask these questions of you. Position yourself to be sharpened and held accountable by your own children. Third, love Sundays. Love them. Sunday should be central to the week. you know, Shawn's illustration of the fat kid, given the big push to the merry-go-round out on the playground. He's awesome at that. On Sundays you gather with your church family. You behold the image of Christ and are conformed a bit more to his image week by week by week. On Sundays you take communion. You're compelled week by week to confess your sins, to ensure that you're actually in fellowship with others.

Like how many times have you been prodded to repent because you knew that confession time was coming, you didn't want to wait to deal with it then, or you did wait to deal with it then, and you dealt with it in confession time, and there's a good thing you did because communion was coming, you didn't want to miss out on that. How many times? Don't tell me. Lots, I know, me too. On Sundays, you see many of your favorite people, and you take your position beside them, and you grab your handle on the battering ram of corporate worship, When you take another swing at the gates of the citadels of unbelief, it is potent, it is relentless, it is coming again another week, it is sweet.

We should do our part to help make Sundays alluring for our kids because they're going to have Sundays after they leave our homes. What are they going to do on those Sundays? We want for them to love corporate worship and fellowship. This is something that the SARS have tried to be intentional about for years, but before that, before we were intentional about it, our kids already loved Sundays. And I think it's because of the people in large measure. Our kids were already loving Sunday before we made it an explicit aim. When we were planning a vacation, I'm not kidding you, the first question they asked is, will we miss church?

Will we miss a Sunday? sooner cut a vacation short than Miss Church. At least giving me a nod right now. This is not because of Sonia and me because they'll have Sonia and me on vacation, right? It's not like they're they're afraid of missing time with us.

They've got us. It's you. They don't want to miss you. Hopefully though, it's not in spite of us as parents. Hopefully part of the reason they were liking it before is because we were, hopefully. We do some big things, some little things to help make Sundays more alluring for our kids to make them not hate Sundays and none of it is magical. Like I give my kids mints during the sermon. I got that idea from Matt Whittling who wanted his kids to associate worship and the Word of God with sweetness. That's my aim for my kids too. I hope that when they're my age and they pop a peppermint in their mouth they'll be taken back to Sunday mornings of corporate worship in their minds and enjoy some sweet memories. A couple of Sundays a month ahead of Trinity Family Fellowship Sundays or a couple of Saturdays a month we have a big Sabbath dinner and part of the aim there is to make Sundays a feast in every way and that starts for us on Saturday nights ahead of time and that is something my kids enjoy. I enjoy it but it is it is different doing so

strategically with a view to helping my children to love Sundays and to anticipate them with intentionality. Also another benefit of that is if we make enough food on that sort of day of preparation then the hardest working part of our home on Sunday is the microwave as we reheat some glorious leftovers. So we make Sundays as restful as we can. Sunday is a day that we consciously relax between services. We are not Sabbatarian strictly speaking. Our rest on Sundays is more out of delight than duty. It's a get to it's not a got to. And I mean, Sundays are not crazy restful for me. Um, but even I, for myself, I'm doing my part to make Sunday something that I look forward to. And I I love Sundays. I love locking arms with musicians and technicians in the morning to help prepare worship and song, and it never disappoints for me.

In 11 years of doing it, I still love it. My heart is transcended like clockwork every Sunday as I join with you all in that worship. Then I go home and I take a nap, or I mow a lawn or read a book or watch a movie, or it's usually a nap, or whatever else I feel like doing, but I do it because I feel like it. My family does the same, and we look forward to that sort of reboot every week. A couple of times a month, we go back in the evening we do it again. And these are these are these are what we do. You don't have to any of this. But my point is I want for my kids to look forward to Sundays. My kids don't do homework on Sundays barring some extenuating circumstance.

So we plan for this. They're they're still expected to act like a sour on Sundays. So they may be dishes to do or meals to repair or things like that.

But over time we're trying to make even that alluring as well. The idea here is that corporate worship on Sunday is important and we want our kids to want it for the rest of their lives. We want for them to view it as essential and as sweet. Want them to love Sundays. Fourth, suggestion, parent faithfully. Psalm 127 1 tells us that unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain, unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. While the builders and the watchman alike have a job to do, the ultimate builder is the Lord and the ultimate watchman is the Lord. The same is true of parenting. We must work as though the salvation of our children hinges on our faithfulness, knowing full well that it actually depends on God's grace. Our job is to be faithful and then trust that God will, as you've said before, affect the outcome. He will make it happen. And we must also know that he blesses the faithful labors of parents in the salvation of their children. This sort of faith, this sort of resting in the

sovereign grace of God, hedges against temptations to freak out. We don't need to freak out. It's kind of nice not having to freak out. If the outcome does not finally depend upon us, and if God tends to bless faithfulness, then we can rest and then we can work. We can rest in the knowledge that God is going to work his will and we can work hard knowing that he will bless our labors. Sometimes Christians take their faith so seriously, unfortunately, that they then cram it down the throats of others, including the throats of their children.

Well, that's not parenting by faith. That's actually a sort of hypocrisy that I'm trying to help us combat. It is professing the sovereign goodness of God while denying it in practice. I mean are you really so convinced that God is sovereign that you're going to force your spirituality on your children while acting like a pagan? It's no surprise when children resist this. It takes faith to believe what we know, but we know that the gospel is effectual and we know that grace shapes hearts, including the hearts of our children. So don't hold your children to a different standard from yourself. Your grace to them will be effectual, provided that it is a means that God is using to save them, to preserve them. That grace works. So you can be patient It's not as though, and think about this, how would you counsel another parent who's struggling, man, what am I gonna do?

I've told my son twice to take out the garbage this week and he actually still hasn't done it. And I mean, take a step back, how would you counsel somebody? Wow, have you ever needed to be reminded of anything? Well, yeah, but I mean, I've told him twice, okay. Have you ever needed to be reminded more than twice? more than three times, did God remind the Hebrews in the wilderness a few times? Yeah, I mean, just don't be super surprised if it takes reminding. It doesn't mean that he is being a rebellious punk. Maybe he's being a rebellious punk, but maybe you need to chill out and be faithful and remind him and be patient.

Have a little levity, as Dave was saying, have some fun, and then maybe it'll be alluring in time. That's parenting by faith. Freaking out, well, you know what that is. So I don't need to tease out that illustration because we've got far too many examples from our own. Just look at your diary. I'm sure it's got something in there. But don't hold your children to a different standard from yourself. In the end, you don't get them saved and you don't keep them safe. God does that. Your part is to parent faithfully. Last, repent frequently. Some of you are like, he said last. It's number five. Repent frequently. Now, this is a review and brief of what Dave said more extensively.

I thought about dubbing this one, preserve fellowship. Are they really different? If you repent frequently, you're preserving your fellowship with your creator, as well as those you've sinned against. But repent frequently is a bigger umbrella and encompasses more. If you repent frequently, you will be preserving fellowship. So we're going to stick with this one. But first, let me get too pokey, let's talk about somebody else. Not you. Not you. If other people are going to sin, don't you like it when they ask for forgiveness? If they sin against you? And if somebody sins, don't you like it when he does it on his own?

As opposed to seeing how much he can get away with? Or, okay, fine. You got me. I'm sorry but you forgive me. Or do you like the reverse? Well, if you like it when he confesses and repents on his own with a view to making it right, actually making it right and restoring fellowship, then go and do likewise. I have put this one last because it's powerful, but also because it never ends. So we're going to leave with this one. Your kids see you sin. Right? Your kids need to see you repent. This needs to happen. And I opened with the how many times they've seen you sin, how many times they've seen you repent, and in many cases, it's not a one-on-one.

It's not a, they've seen me sin five times and five times. I've repented and asked for forgiveness. Who's going to teach them? I mean, even like the best literature with repentant people very rarely has demonstration of Dustin Asch's repentance that has not been born out of some colossally bad story. I think of a, what is it, is it Psalm 32 where David is wasting away because he's harboring sin. And he gets confronted by Nathan the Prophet and he writes Psalm 51 afterward and you know that David held on to his sin for a long time before he broke? I mean David's not in my notes but it's true. If you do the math and look at when Nathan confronted him, there were some good months of misery for David.

And you don't want that. Like that did injury to David's household. And I can think of no more potent way for a Christian parent to illustrate an integrity and a love of fellowship and a commitment to his Christian testimony, his profession of faith, than to be quick in his repentance. I can see no more potent example for a Christian parent to set for his children than to be quick in his repentance. Doing so shows our children that we take seriously the fellowship to which we are calling them. Kids, we want you with us in fellowship. Show them. It builds trust at some kind of supernatural speed.

If I confess my sin and I seek the forgiveness of those against whom I have sinned, especially when I don't have to, like I didn't get caught, I confess before I'm caught, they can trust that there's nothing I'm harboring secretly. Our household is a safer place for everyone too if I'm not harboring secret sin. Dave also mentioned it builds trust because it shows them that I'm not going to punish them for my sin. I'm not going to blow up at my sin, maybe my son even if it's provoked and punish him for my sinful response. If I am owning my stuff, if I'm repenting, if I'm asking him for forgiveness and I'm showing him what that sort of, that sensitivity to sin and repentance looks like, then he will, he will see that benefit and that will build tremendous trust. It's brutal and it's hard, it is humbling, it's even embarrassing, and it's also powerful. The reverse is also true. When we sin and everybody knows it and we do not kill it quickly, we also do some terrible things. Among them, we prioritize our pride,

which actually needs to die. You are nursing your pride. We choose our own personal comfort over fellowship with those against whom we've sinned. So the the SARS routinely pray that we would love fellowship more than we love our own comfort or sin. We teach our kids that these sorts of things, these behaviors, when we don't confess our sin and repent, we teach our kids that that's acceptable. We teach our kids that that is a legitimate option. By our example, we may not say it with our words, but we teach them that tolerating sin is just fine and there's no need to be fighting it. We teach our kids that you don't need to seek forgiveness unless and until you're caught or confronted.

Man, that's bad. Don't do that. Because you won't get caught all the time. And examples abound. I'm sure I could say, now take five minutes and share with your neighbor an example of a time. Like, if I lose my dinner table of temper, I'm sitting there and I'm cool until I'm not cool anymore. And everybody knows it because they're all looking at me while I blew my stack.

My job there is to show my kids it's how a faithful Christian ought to act and ask for forgiveness even if I was provoked. So even if I blow my stack, I'm just thinking of an example here, because... no, I won't share that example. Because my children have done something that I've asked them not to do and dang it, they're teenagers, they should know better. So I lose my cool. I am teaching them about a value of fellowship and how to deal with sin when it happens by my hesitancy to repent or my waiting for them to do so and then once they've done so that I mean do I really let my kids lead in that situation? Is that a good idea? Well God bless that. The aim is to restore the damaged fellowship and get back into fellowship as soon as possible.

Now here's the point here. Repentance yields a pleasant and an enticing spiritual aroma. Your sinful family will be shaped by this. They're not your enemies, but when your children who provoke you to anger see you humbly asking for their forgiveness for getting irritated, it has the same effect of heaping coals. They're shaped by that. They're not your enemies, of course, but they are the recipients of blessing that may or may not be deserved in that situation. Our repentance can be used by God to shape others, and it does forge a family culture that is alluring for Christian kids. A refusal to repent is a gross sin. It is a recipe for relational weirdness of the sort that like most humans our kids will want to get away from as soon as they possibly can. So if you wish to keep your kids in the home, let alone in the faith, then cultivate fellowship, preserve fellowship, and this necessarily includes repenting frequently.

If you wish for your children to pursue Christian fellowship and community tomorrow, then for pity's sake, cultivate Christian community and fellowship in your home today. So if we don't take our faith seriously, we should not expect for our children to do so. Our children are like plants, and our homes are like greenhouses. The home offers shelter for the establishment of a firm foundation and deep roots. And then the idea, of course, is to move them beyond the greenhouse. Hypocrisy is a poison that leeches spiritual nutrients from our children's soil. If the plants actually manage to survive their spiritual nutrition, they flee the greenhouse as soon as they can and they search for the nourishment that we've kept from them.

And the world is happy. I mean, we can just tease this illustration out or this example that breaks down, but happy to offer all sorts of synthetic artificial fertilizers of worldliness and identity politics and the rest that may sound alluring but will actually kill them. So for our part then, let's allow fellowship and integrity and love to be the food that is in the spiritual soil of our homes. But I'll finish with a word of warning and that is this. If you commit to the elimination of hypocrisy in your home, living consistently with your confession, there's a chance that everybody will soon find out who you really are.

Well, news flash, your kids already know. If they see you living differently at home from everywhere else, expect for them to do the same. Let's pray together. Father, please grow our faith and help us to parent by faith. And we do delight to know that you even enjoy using fallen vessels for glorious purposes. We are far from perfect. We depend upon your grace. And as has been said, plenty of times before, you draw straight lines with crooked sticks, and we are very crooked. But please help us to be faithful and to do what we know is right, and then you, and And then help us to trust that you will bring about your desired end.

So for all the families that are here this evening, we pray that you would help us to parent by faith and for our children to be reared effectively in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. And we depend upon you to bring this about and we make our requests in Christ's name. Amen.

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

I was thinking that some good summaries of my fellow elders talks would be, be bold to know that there are things that are better. That would be my summary of Jim's talk. When your kids are like, but I really think this tramp stamp on my face would be super cool and beautiful. You could remember Jim's talk and be like, no, be bold with my kid. There is something better. I believe it. Sure you can get a tramp stamp on your face, that would be extra irony. Dave Sock I would summarize as don't bluff your sin to your kids. So be bold to know that there are better things, don't bluff your sin. Jonathan's I would summarize as be mindful of Michael Jackson.

And start with the man in the mirror, that's right. You gotta start. The man in there. You gotta look at yourself and then make that. Woo! Yeah. Exactly. Okay, good. So, questions that you guys have first before we make ourselves answer other ones. Doesn't the Bible teach covenantalism? Wasn't that your question? Yeah. Did I get that right? Did I get that summarized? Good. Excellent. You know, you always want to make sure you know what the other person is asking before you.

Yeah, there seems to be some kind of generational promise referred to in the passage in Ephesians 6, in the children needing to obey, based off of a promise that is connected to the Fifth Commandment of obeying their parents. So doesn't that and since Ephesians is likely written to we can assume predominantly Gentiles how is Paul applying the fifth commandment promise to To kids if there there isn't some greater Even covenantal obligation is that actually a better fair summary of your question the new covenant He just dropped the mic, yeah. I mean, though the 6-1, 6-3, 6-1 through 3, based on that would suggest that the kids are part of the Mosaic Covenant, that's what's explicitly being referenced, is the fifth of the Ten Commandments of the Mosaic Covenant, which we would say is fulfilled in Christ.

And I would say that the fact that he's pointing out not necessarily that every one of them are getting the land, but that that was the kind of promise that if you obeyed your parents, you actually got something better from it. So I don't take Ephesians 6, 1 through 3 as saying that those kids are going to get the land, but rather that in its original context there was immediate, even temporal promise and benefit from obedience. And so Paul is likening that promise of blessing, promise of even tangible blessing. He's pointing out that when you obey your parents, that's not just because they said so or even just because God says so, but because God makes that fruitful.

And so I would say that's not Paul bringing them into the Mosaic Covenant. That's Paul pointing out that that's how God works even in that first time when it's summarized like that to obey your parents. That there's a sweet reason for that. And so likewise any kid in any generation who obeys their parents in in Jesus' name can anticipate good things coming from that. It's not just a thing that they have to slog through, because God says, no, God says, you do this, it's right. And there's good that comes from it. So I take that as a broader, as an example of how God works, rather than saying that those kids are, Paul is thinking that they're in the Mosaic covenant.

Well, the land and the promises to the Israelites are still going to be fulfilled in the future. So that has not been made good to them yet, the new covenant. We got in due to when we got the Holy Spirit to live inside of us and became new believers through Jesus. But the land promises and all the rest of that stuff still is to be given to them in the millennium. So the Jewish kids listening to Ephesians 6 actually did have the land of Israel in mind. Yeah, they would say they would. Uh-huh, sure. I accept that. Hi, Chris. Jim, Jonathan.

I mean, I really, the only thing I would add is just to reemphasize what you said about good things to come, even of a material nature. But as the whole of scripture, kind of the general thrust of it, whether you read from Proverbs or the first command with a promise, they are. So Jim has talked about this, it meant to men, I think even on Sunday night to when there is a promise given in Proverbs, for instance. It is a reasonable expectation that God will consistently work in that way and not a guarantee that its airtight will happen in every case because that you may live long in the land. What if somebody died prematurely? Does that make God a liar? Well, no. But generally speaking, if you obey your parents, it will go well for you materially in this life.

And that principle is clear in Ephesians 6, and obviously from Proverbs 2. Which would mean in light of the New Covenant bringing that about for the House of Israel and the House of Judah that there would have been in all of the remnants so far of Jewish kids obeying their parents. They actually haven't seen the fulfillment of the land parts of the promises. But even whatever temporal benefits they're getting are sort of even like a foreshadowing of when it is finally and fully fulfilled. Even though Ephesians is of course an emphasis of the Gentile city, the clear, you know, like with Romans, like with Ephesians 2, we know that there are distinctly Jewish and Gentile intended target audiences as well.

So yeah, that's reasonable. So Ian is asking, in light of the fact that we're going to gender hell in a handbasket, and we see male and female not being even really recognized, let alone promoted, what can we as Christians do to appropriately exalt the male-female distinctions that God has given us for the sake of our children's children. Okay? Yeah, at a high philosophical level, again, I do think to take the true, the good, and the beautiful, whatever that is, And you think of that as a filter. So you're going to drop into that filter whatever the wisdom of the age is telling you. Boys can be girls and girls can be boys.

And then you start asking questions. Okay, does this comport with what's true, what's good, what's beautiful? Obviously in that one it's a little easier in terms of the gender confusion because Scripture is pretty clear in that you go back to the creation and Genesis. You can also, I believe again, God's revealed the truth of the good and the beautiful in nature. So you can observe how nature works. Is it, does the rest of nature look like it's this gender whatever, or does it just go against nature? And I would suggest in that particular instance it goes against nature. It goes against what God's word indicates, and it goes against nature.

I believe God's given us as his image bearers, just a certain little, can I say, BS meter, where we just, you know, you look at the head of the health department, you know, for our nation, and you look at that and you just fundamentally go, that doesn't work. What's his name? Well, he goes by Rachel Levine. But so there's a lot of tests that can be applied. And so then helping our kids to think these things through. When my kids would come to me with lesser issues, but still important, I've used in our parenting seminars example of the one kid that wanted purple hair. And he was trying to make the case that he just woke up that day and just thought purple hair would be nice.

And I insisted that, no, you haven't thought about it deeply enough, that there's some other issue of the heart going on that's driving that desire for purple hair. So helping our kids to really examine their hearts in light of whatever is true, good, and beautiful. And I keep going back to true, good, and beautiful, but it's it's problematic in that. Again, we don't have, it's not like you're going to go to a dictionary of true, good, and beautiful and look it up. You're going to have to use wisdom starting with the Word of God, opening your eyes and looking at how He created the world, and then ask yourself, does this seem to go with that or go against that? And more often than not, a lot of these reasons, the lie is trying to get people to rebel, bottom line, that, you know, as God said, it's all about rebellion. And so in my case, I perceived that with my kid, it was a form of rebellion, a rebellion against what's normal, against what's acceptable.

He wanted to push the edges, and that wasn't a good motivation. So, in helping your kids, do draw their attention to the truth, the good, and the beautiful, and that's anything from, obviously again, the Word of God, training the Word of God. It's studying nature, exposing them to good music, good art, all of that. If you go back to a church, throughout church history and you look at the major figures in church history, they were pretty good scholars in a lot of other areas of life besides just Bible. I know Jonathan Edwards was quite the botanist, and I don't think that was just because he had a lot of free time, But I just think those guys also saw that was another way to get close to God and understand who God is in His nature by just studying the creation.

So I don't know, you guys can add to that. We had a code word in our house in particular because I try not to go shopping ever. So it applied less for me. But during a time when Moe was taking the kids shopping and they were listening to a lot of cross politic, Toby Sumter had apparently written a blog post about purple hair. And the kids had listened to that with Moe and then they decided that any time that they were out in public and one of the kids saw something that they had a question about, And they're like, if they saw Rachel Levine walk by in Costco, the kids would immediately, without saying, hey, what's up with that person, they would say Toby to Moe, or to myself, but it happened more often to Moe.

So they'd say Toby, and then she would know she needed to look around to see, yeah, to see the purple hair, or to look for the equivalent of the purple hair, so that then they would remember when they got in the car to have a conversation about that and talk through it. So it wasn't an effort to try to deny that there were people, you know, who were consciously trying to embody, you know, something that was not masculine or feminine, but then we would talk about it. And generally speaking, we would try to even at home not be entertained by, you know, thinking that the people doing that were funny like we were laughing along with them. So if they were a total clown show we might laugh at how ridiculous their behavior was but we would try to not watch movies or things where we sympathized with the gay character or the effeminate dude you know who was barely leading his house. So we tried to not enjoy that like we shared in that culture but identified it and did bring it up and again when we saw it out in

the wild you know work through it talk talk through it. Yeah and I want to emphasize like go back to purple hair just it's not the purple hair that's neither here nor there. It's why the purple hair is what you have to get. Because, you know, like my son was old enough at the time to say, well dad where's the verse? It says, I'll shut up, I'll have purple hair. Yeah, well okay, you win, go get, go dye your hair. You know, it's no, I said yeah, there is no verse but there is an issue of the heart going here. You are attempting to go beyond what would be deemed normal in our culture, in our society. Why? Why are you seeking to do that? And again, you're going to almost always drill. When you find these cases, the refusal to accept your gender, you're going to find at the root of it a form of rebellion, a non-willingness to accept the way God has made things. My answer is pretty simplistic, and that is just for us to be faithful where we are and love our young ladies and young men unto loveliness and masculinity.

Just spent the weekend with a bunch of artsy types, and I honestly did, and there were a lot of dudes with skirts, and there were, and actually a stunningly beautiful dude on stage last night where I was actually convinced that it was a lovely young lady until he sang a bass solo, which turned it from lovely to grotesque instantaneously, and also saw lots of young people. And I mean, it's not like we have everything dialed, but we love our kids. I will say that without apology collectively. And when you see young people who know how to look like they're loved, that is a compelling thing. And it comes to wearing a dress well, wearing a suit well and conducting yourself well, actually engaging people in conversation.

So there is something that, the bar today is so incredibly low that we just have to step over it. So when we, if we parent well, if we love our kids well, provide for them security and shelter the sort of upbringing that we're trying to do by intention. It will stand out like a sore thumb in this culture and look compelling. So that sounds like a simple answer, but it has gotten that simple in the last handful of years.

Well, and I mean, like you guys do at your house, so praising your wife for what she's doing at home in front of the kids, praising the girls when you give them. So praise and providing opportunity for them to see what that's like, where they don't have to go run a company to get their dad's attention. They don't have to go be the boss of somebody else to finally get somebody to say thank you to them. They actually do what they can at their age and they get praised for that. And we look for ways to provide them opportunities in those different avenues like you were talking about. So the dudes get praise in one way, the daughters get praise in another way.

So the husband praising his wife for what he sees her doing, not being a CEO, but the CEO of the house, for jizzle. And the wife also giving her kids a good example of being strong while expecting expecting her man to be leading. So the wife showing the son, the wife showing her daughters as well. No we're going to find out what dad has to say. We need to hear what dad has to say. And then dad might ask mom for her thoughts on it as well. Give me some help. But she is not running ahead of him. And then you'd think over time that would add up in their little minds of, oh, that's how it works. guys responsible, the wife helps in all of the ways that she can, not because she's lesser, but because she has a supporting role. So if I was summarizing that, how can you guarantee perfect obedience without ever yelling?

Okay good, that's it, ready go. The only ones who are not yelling, okay Jim, yes go ahead. Well speaking from all the mistakes I made in that department, yeah, going back to what some of the stuff the other guy said, you are going to yell. We're going to sin in that regard. Then you repent. When your kids begin to see you growing, you repenting, you changing. What's coming to mind for me right now is this happened more with my older sons who were getting to be young men and I I had found myself getting into the trap of trying to always bend their viewpoints to my viewpoint. So I'm talking now, I'm talking to a 19 year old, some gay 20 year old.

And you know my son Jesse, and Jesse's not shy and has opinions. And we would get into some debate and something would come up at the dinner table, and pretty soon we're verbally tussling to try to persuade the other person. And to the point that would then get sinfully heated, and one of us would have to take a walk around the block to, you know, cooler jets. And when I learned that I was wrong in trying to coerce my kid to think like I think at all points, and didn't give him the freedom to differ from me, especially in areas where there was biblical freedom to differ. That was a huge event today, now that they're all in their mid-30s.

They love getting together with their old man and spending time, and I love getting together with them. But that took me coming to a place where I just was allowing them to be individuals. But then going back to the repentance theme, when they're younger and you blow it, When they see that you're real, that they don't expect you to be perfect, your kids are, I know you're not perfect, but when they see that you're humble, you repent. Over time, that pays dividends, and then they start to become more responsive to your instructions and fight you less. If they too are growing and being accountable to the Lord, if they're not, then you have discipline things you have to deal with there.

I mean, they say measure twice, cut once. If you reverse that, yell once, take twice as long to do the job. So like, especially with my kids, I'm thankful, I think, yeah, I mean, I'm thankful, I'm I'm thankful that they don't even respond well to my yelling. So it's not even a shortcut. And as I have tried to recalibrate that of what I want. So okay, the thing that I actually want is to be in fellowship, which happens through obedience. It doesn't happen through disobedience, but if what I actually want most is fellowship, that changes how I am wanting them to get the job done. Whereas if what I actually want the most is for them to get the job done, then that is setting me up for methods to make that happen that are probably again going to make it take longer and even the older that they get, you know, they are not, which is good.

I am thankful that like they are too strong at this point to really be thinking it's their fault when I yell. So Mo has helped, I mean in my better moments maybe, I have helped to communicate to them a strength, and obviously it doesn't work like with your boys, they're not ready to be that kind of strong. But when they are in fellowship and confident enough in the Lord that Dad getting mad they know is dad's problem, not theirs. Then that kind of immediately, that feedback immediately to me is like, oh yeah right, I'm not even pushing a button that works. I can't even get that button down. So yeah, wanting fellowship more and then them being strong enough to realize to, they're the mirror that says I'm actually the one out of fellowship, not their lack of having done the thing yet.

But I mean that recalibration can get off. Should I sin that I could have a parenting opportunity? Yeah, no, right? So should... Yeah, what gives some practical... Repeating the question gives some practical scenario situations in which you're repenting in front of your kid, obviously, when you're sinning against them. What if they don't know that you're sinning? Do you need to make that right or repent in front of them in that moment? Painstakingly so? Or as a pattern that is obvious that makes it clear that that's what's happening? Well since I rolled that hand grenade into the room, I'll go first and off the top of my head so other guys obviously can chime in.

I would say that, well, first of all, as public as the sin is, as public as the repentance ought to be. So, you know, if you take the dinner table blow up conversation and my family is a family of six and all six of us are there at the table and I lose my cool and snap at one of the kids, my repentance and confession of that and asking for forgiveness of that it ought to happen as publicly as the offense was and as soon as possible. And what I've been praying for myself lately and consciously is repenting before you feel like it. So I think there's a temptation to cool your jets. Well, like, no, get right and maybe the jets will follow.

Now but mean it. I mean, don't lie, of course. But then, if I were cheating on my taxes, and I were audited and Sonya knew about it, but then it affected the family in such a way that we were penalized by the IRS, or I went to jail or something. I mean, it is clear that though they don't witness it, my sin has an effect on the family. And so that would absolutely be the kind of thing that would be appropriate for me to seek the forgiveness of those who have been affected directly by my, I mean, and of course to the congregation or even to the school, I would have to own that and say, I did this and I invited in this kind of consequence.

Again, if it were for the school, For instance, it would be affected by my absence immediately. So then a public confession is appropriate at that point. Are there sins that are just of the heart that we're just dealing with on a constant, on the regular repenting of and moving on? Yes. I don't think that our problem, though, is that we are going to be confessing sin too much. When in doubt, go ahead and repent directly to those that you've wronged or who are affected by your sin as soon as possible and as publicly as the offense was. So sins from the past that maybe are brought afresh to our consciousness and we want to deal with them.

Well, I think the principle would be the same. And that is, I think that we dispensationalists tend to sell short the reality of what does Wilson call it, covenantal permission? Is that what it is? So bringing in. Which is the household covenant made between the husband and the wife before God as a vow, not an Old Testament one. Right. Yeah. Well, and that is the sort of thing where... I mentioned in my talk that if Dad is harboring secrets, sins, then everybody's in trouble. Right? And because supernaturally, God has a thousand different ways of bringing that to light, whether it is in the behavior of my kids or myself.

So you want to deal with things from the past, right? And so the principle would be to not to give those things a foothold, not to give them an opportunity to take former gang traction in our households. So now you're nodding. What would you say, Dave? I would say that if you feel like the child isn't understanding or you feel guilty about maybe you haven't been paying attention to something to them in the proper way, that you need to tell them that seek forgiveness of your inattention. And even if they are not quite realizing it, you know, I want your forgiveness for not paying attention to you a little more the last couple weeks.

And it seems to me you want that and need that or something along those lines. I would definitely though say if your conscience is pricking you, it is definitely somebody you need to clear up with them. Now there are wisdom choices there. I mean if you're screwing around, you know, in something that the child doesn't need to know about, dad hasn't been right with you the last couple weeks and I want to pay attention do you more, let me know how you feel about that, that kind of thing. And it all depends on the age you're talking to and how much they understand that. But if your conscience is pricking you, you want to make that right with whatever that's doing so you can have a free reign with that person or that group, whoever it may be.

Kids, here we are watching the State of the Union. Daddy had a bad thought about the president. You need to forgive me for that? Probably not, Mrs. Not that one, but don't have that either. And how about we have Dave pray and we can be done. Father, we come to you and say that it does appear to me that we have a congregation here that wants family and their children and their parenting. And the blessings that you give us through all the youth and the young lives that are being raised up in our congregation. Help us that have been around longer be wise in giving them advice and help them to go way beyond what we understood about this, as they have the blessings of all these discussions.

And I hope that they understand that we want them to be much better than we are and that we're raising up a generation that reaches higher and pleases you more. And it's a great privilege to be with people that want to do that. So we thank you for those things. We thank you for these people and all the hours that they're putting in raising up that next generation. And of course we thank you most of all for your son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

The last time I talked about parenting my title was “Raising Parents.” We’re raising kids, yes, but we don’t want them to stay kids. We can, or should, see far enough ahead to realize that how we train them today will affect how they train their kids some future day. It’s still by God’s grace; thank God He fixes many of our failures. And yet we also know that God’s grace can work through our good works. We want our kids to grow up and be fruitful, joyful, #blessed.

Toward that end we parents talk up the glories of parenting and we try to live the way God says to. If we get to see our children’s children, and if we get to hear our children talking to and playing with their children, we’d want to see our grandkids being loved in truth. So we love our kids in truth. That’s not less than an example, but it’s also an investment that matures. If we sow hypocrisy, then we’ll reap generational hypocrisy. But if we demonstrate the good of parental responsibility, it won’t be a surprise that our kids want to have kids. We are raising parents, and we’re leaving an inheritance of prizing parenting.

My emphasis for today is that we are raising Christians. It depends who you hang out with, but there are more Christian parents who are waiting to see if they have Christian kids than raising kids to be Christian, as if it were a spiritual lottery. Maybe the difference sounds subtle, but I hope to show that the mindset matters. How you view your kids has a lot to do with what they grow up to be.

We want them to be Christians in a family of Christians who are part of a church of Christians. A Christian is an individual believer, who has personally repented from his sin, who learns the ways of obedience as a disciple of Christ, and who worships and serves as part of the Body of Christ, expressed in the assembly of a local church. A Christian loves God and fears the Lord and walks in the Spirit for sake of fruit. A group of Christians living together have a kind of culture, a way that they do things, a shared vocabulary, a common set of values.

Toward that end we Christians talk up the glories of Christ and we seek to live according to all that He’s commanded (Matthew 28:20). Part of what it means to be a disciple is to make disciples; there should be no fruitless/barren disciples. Each Christian is gifted by God in different ways to serve the body, and every different part is necessary. But giftedness relates to the analogy of being a church member, not to whether or not you are a disciple-maker. Disciples reproduce. Disciples who don’t reproduce are disobedient. You ought not be a single-generation disciple of Christ. Speaking figuratively, you ought to see your spiritual children’s children. We are raising Christians, and we’re leaving an inheritance of prizing Christ.

This is all the life of faith. Salvation is for all who believe (Romans 1:16). We live from faith to faith. “The righteous shall live by faith,” from justification through sanctification. We are born again in faith, we are guarded by faith (1 Peter 1:5), and “we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).

What I’m about to say is fundamental, vital, urgent, consequential, pressing, high-priority, essential, of upmost importance, and so kind of a big deal. Believe in your heart that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead and you will be saved (Romans 10:9). Believe in your heart that God will work through you as you raise your kids to believe in Jesus Christ. Have faith in God to be a Christian, have faith in God that He will bless you to raise blessed Christians.

Some parents might object, “But they’re not Christians!” It depends on what age your kids are, but think with me about what “ideal” looks like for our children’s children. If your kids are still really young, this message should be like a softball right across the plate. If your kids are older, or even grown up, fine, but think about what we want our church culture to be. This is just as much about for all our children’s children.

What does damage is when mom starts getting more and more anxious about her kids’ salvation, and/or when dad buries his apathetic head in the sand. Maybe even worse is when both parents go all major prophet toward the Assyrians about it. “Woe to you, little pagans, who call evil good and refuse to eat your vegetables. How long until you clean your room, and your hearts?!” And professing Christian parents can raise pagans. Parents who think about their kids as enemies often find that they’ve raised enemies.

I got a timely email just two days ago from a friend. He wrote,

“My wife and I are two (sometimes seemingly lonely) kuyperian dispensationalists…. We're surrounded by many baptists we love, but sometimes they're a little too glum. Particularly when it comes to how we raise our children.

How should you view your kids? At birth? While little? When should your kids be baptized? What does their baptism mean? How do you treat them after baptism? How can you, as a good man, leave an inheritance of faith to your children’s children?

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and have had multiple conversations about in recent years. It does not require baptizing infants (or having a “dry baptism” public parent dedications) to believe that God is gracious and to make disciples of your kids, to raise them as Christians. The proof is in the Presbyterians, or rather, the negative proof is there. Some of my favorite people, the people who I depend on most for edification and sharpening, are Presbyterians who don’t seem very self-aware of their own history. The Cross-Politic guys are a good example (they have some helpful things to say, and many of you listen to them), they’ve basically turned baby baptism into a brand. They talk like baptizing your babies is the answer without acknowledging the generations of the baptized-as-babies that have gone after all kinds of false gospels and woke versions of Jesus; Presbyterianism has a lot to learn from, but it doesn’t guarantee anything. There are by God’s grace a remnant of Presbies making great parents, not necessarily because of their Presbyterian theology but because of their faith.

It doesn’t take too long to look back in history or look around in our generation to see that baptizing a baby “into the covenant” doesn’t guarantee generations of faithful Christians. There is often high presumption that comes (which, ironically fits with many who maintain a kind of Jewish-replacement theology) from being “in the covenant” (while many of them aren’t sure which covenant that is anyway). Their kid is baptized, done deal.

Many Baptists have a worse approach. Typical Baptist parents, apart from a remnant, often refuse to accept an immature profession of faith and question seeds of faith any time they sense sin in their kid. They withhold the spiritual food until their kid can prove that he can live without food; they treat their kids like the dogs who only get the crumbs that fall off the table (Matthew 15:27).

Baptism isn’t really my primary subject, but it applies to the subject of how parents think about their kids. Some baptize too early, and tend to leave an inheritance of presumption. Some hold baptism off too long, and tend to leave an inheritance of doubt. The problem is the same: a lack of faith and discipleship to faith. They are not raising Christians. One isn’t worried about the “raising” part, they think they already have a Christian. The other thinks that there’s nothing they can do to “raise” a Christian.

While they sometimes go together, the talk of our kids being “in the covenant” has some of the same problems as infant baptism. Covenant language sounds great, regularly to those who grew up in Baptist circles where kids were seen more as on the outside than inside. I’m not picking on anyone, I’m interested in understanding the best way to leave an inheritance for my grandkids. The trouble with using covenant language about our kids is multi-headed. It starts with, which covenant?

One option is the "covenant of grace," which in Reformed theology is an extra-biblical name for "all of the saved of all time" (Pascal Denault, The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant Theology, Loc. 704). In much capital "R" Reformed theology the Abrahamic, Mosaic, and Davidic covenants are seen as different administrations of this one covenant of grace. The Jews were born into those covenants though non-ethnic peoples could convert (to Judaism).

In order to say that kids of Christian parents are born into the covenant of grace, one must make a distinction between being in the covenant "naturally" (by birth) and "spiritually" (by belief). Covenantalists typically don’t think their infant is a believer (though this is common among Lutherans), but has obligations to believe because of being in the covenant. Put another way, to use this language we would need to make a distinction between the administration of the covenant (which Presbyterians initiate at infant baptism) and the substance of the covenant (which is salvation accomplished by Christ for all the elect, and which becomes visible when the elect are regenerated and profess faith).

But this changes the definition of "covenant of grace" if you can be “in the covenant” it but not actually be saved.

Birth guarantees nothing, which ironically is the part of the Jewish problem with the other covenants, Isaac and Ishmael were both sons of Abraham; Jacob and Esau were both sons of Isaac (Romans 9).

We might also be tempted to say that our kids are born into New Covenant. Many Reformed theologians, when they do give attention to the New Covenant (first named in Jeremiah 31:31-37, see also Ezekiel 36:22-38), understand the New Covenant simply as the summary of the others, as a new administration but not different in substance (Denault, Loc. 2229). But beyond the explicit reference to “the house of Israel and the house of Judah” there are at least two problems. First, the revelation of the New Covenant clarifies that the Lord saw it not as the summary of the others but as something different from the others.

Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers…my covenant that they broke…. (Jeremiah 31:31–32 ESV)

Second, the great difference is that New Covenant promised/guaranteed new/spiritual/believing hearts, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33). Or as stated in Ezekiel:

I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. (Ezekiel 36:26–27 ESV)

The Lord effects effectually, and it will not be broken. If the New Covenant has a distinction between administration and substance than it is no different from the others, covenants that included salvation blessings only for some. There were elect within the covenant nation (Romans 9:6), but there cannot be non-elect within the New Covenant. The glory of the New Covenant is that no one “walks away” from the New Covenant.

Henry Lawrence wrote, "Now we pretending to be Abraham’s children by faith, not by carnal generation, cannot pretend to ordinances by carnal generation as the others did.” The paedobaptists did not purport to be in the covenant of grace as the natural descendants of Abraham, but as his spiritual descendants; however they practiced a spiritual ordinance (baptism) on the basis of natural generation. (Denault, Loc. 1423)

To use the word covenant as a reference to external and temporary privileges for our kids is to gut the word of its power and what’s worse, it denies the actual New Covenant terms. That does not mean that there are no external and temporary privileges for our kids. It means they are providential blessings, for which we are accountable to God, but not the same as being being guaranteed salvation blessings.

You don’t need covenant language to believe that God will help you to raise Christians. And again, the covenants given by God were an advantage to the Jews, and yet we know it didn’t guarantee that every one of their kids would believe. The Jewish “covenantalists” presumed on the sign of circumcision and tried to establish righteousness apart from faith in Jesus (Romans 9:31).

We are sons of Abraham by faith, but not even all Abraham’s sons were in the covenant? We and our kids benefit from the Noaic covenant, because we’ll never see a global flood again, but that’s not the same as faith. The Davidic covenant is about a Messiah ruling from Jerusalem. And again the New Covenant affects faith, it doesn’t obligate faith.

It is ironic, especially for those with covenantal leanings, for them to depend on the covenant, when that is what messed up the Jews.

If there is a kind of over-presumption by some, there is also a catastrophic and treasonous over-scrupulous, burdensome-pessimism by others. We want to be precise with our language, but we should also have high standards for our attitude. Too many professing Christian parents are the “glum.”

There are multiple ways to raise kids to doubt. The most obvious way is to disciple them in doubt. “They’re too young.” “They don’t know everything about what they’re saying.” “They keep sinning, struggling with the same sins over and over.” And a lot of us have been discipled to question our salvation in exactly the same way. For as much as I love the Puritans, they were preaching to a culture of presumers, most of whom had been baptized as babies, and trying to get men and women to actually examine their souls. The Puritan preachers took sin seriously, and that is good. But not all of them discipled how to believe, to then water faith and weed and water some more.

Other parents say things like, “I don’t want my kids to have my faith. I want it to be their own.” And we are living in a culture where our kids really took that to heart; they are spending the inheritance we gave them. They don’t have our faith, and they’ve made self-discovery and self-affirmation/self-transformation and unbelief their fown.

We’re trying to give our kids a culture, of feasting and gratitude, of worship and Kuyerian-sized interests in all the things Jesus is interested in. But that’s all in faith.

We confess our sins as Christians. We understand baptism as obedience not by the parents but by the one professing faith, and we understand that baptism as a weapon in the battle against sin (Romans 6:2-5). Why withhold it until they prove their sanctification?

I came across this statement of the Capital Hill Baptist Church elders about the baptism of children again recently.

We believe that the normal age of baptism should be when the credibility of one’s conversion becomes naturally evident to the church community. This would normally be when the child has matured, and is beginning to live more self-consciously as an individual, making their own choices, having left the God-given, intended child-like dependence on their parents for the God-given, intended mature wisdom which marks one who has felt the tug of the world, the flesh and the devil, but has decided, despite these allurements, to follow Christ.

Is really this the path of wisdom? Does this promote a culture of faith?

Yes, some seed falls on bad soil (Matthew 13). But, parents, this illustration is different for you. Keep tending the soil. It’s not one seed sowing and done. And it’s not baptism as end, but as beginning of their life of discipleship, and you are making disciples.

We will leave an inheritance of anxiety to our children’s children, or an inheritance of fearing the Lord (Proverbs 14:26, Psalm 103:17). We ought to be investing today in an inheritance of faith. Faith is a gift of God, faith is powerful, faith is fruitful. Faith begets faith.

The Bible does not start the call to faith with a call to examine one’s covenantal responsibilities, among Gentiles or even among Jews. “Brothers, what shall we do? And Peter said, to them, ‘Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.’” (Acts 2:38 ESV) The call is to Christ.

And Peter continued: “For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” (Acts 2:39 ESV) This promise is the gospel of Jesus Christ, for all who believe.

That said, there is something special about Christian homes. When Paul wrote 1 Corinthians many marriages were newly unequally yoked, meaning that they got married when both were pagans and then one got saved. He gave instructions for spouses living with an unbeliever, whether as a husband or as a wife.

For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. (1 Corinthians 7:14 ESV)

The phrase “made holy” doesn’t mean that you only need one parent with faith in the house and everyone is guaranteed to go to heaven; kids don’t get to ride on mom or dad’s ticket, so to speak. But it does mean that there are practical and spiritual privileges. Paul summarizes it as a kind of holiness, a setting that is not common but set apart. These relationships have someone with light living in the home.

In addition, there is an imperative for Christian homes.

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. (Ephesians 6:4 ESV)

ἐν παιδείᾳ, training or even culture of the Lord. One way to provoke them is to barrage them with doubt. Instead parents, and fathers in particular, are commanded to bring kids up to know and believe and love and obey the Lord.

as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. (2 Timothy 3:14–15 ESV)

The Word should dwell in you and in your home. The Word is living and abiding and causes people, and young people, to be born again (1 Peter 1:23). How kind that you don’t need blessed feet to cross the mountains to bring good news (Isaiah 52:7, Romans 10:15). There you are! You have it! Share it! Show it!

Train up a child in the way he should go;

The way of righteousness, yes, but in the fear of the Lord. The way of wisdom, yes, in faith.

In the fear of the LORD one has strong confidence,

We are saved by faith alone, thank the Lord. This is good news when you realize how many ways you've been a ridiculous parent. Have faith that Jesus forgives and cleanses, and have faith that He will continue to transform you, your parenting, and generations.

So in summary, what is the spiritual status of our kids? I am trying to work toward clarity, not being combative. While this presents a tension (for a time), it prevents other inventions and confusions. We serve our kids, and one another, better by building a culture of faith (paideia of the Lord) than by telling them they are in the covenant by birth. (Note: We could say that by birth our kids live in a covenant household, as fruit of the marriage covenant between the husband and wife. We could also say they live in a covenant community, being brought up among Christians who receive many of the fruits of the New Covenant. I would still want to make a distinction about whether they are “in the covenant” prior to faith.) Here’s a first-pass toward answering the question about how Christian parents should think about their kids in order to raise Christians.

Kids born to (one or more) Christian parents are holy, which includes spiritual blessings of protection/refuge and opportunity. Kids are to be discipled in faith to faith, then affirmed by the church as members upon their public profession of faith in baptism and received into communion with the assembly.

Prior to their profession of faith they have temporal and spiritual blessings/privileges, and so therefore they also have greater accountability. They not only have no excuse before God as their Creator but also no excuse for repenting from their sin/rebellion and confessing faith in Jesus Christ as Lord.

As with all Christians, their faith is what identifies them as participants in the New Covenant and that identity is renewed at the Lord’s Table (not baptism, per Luke 22:20). Their faith only needs to be as big as a mustard seed.

Living faith is rare, Matthew 17:20, and we want rare heirs of faith. Faith moves mountains and generations.

It is really remarkable how much men are driven by dissatisfaction. It’s not a discussion too far removed from the law of diminishing returns, which means that the gains, or our appreciation of the gains, get smaller even as the requirement of our investment of money or energy gets higher. God created us with the privilege of His likeness (Genesis 1:26), but it didn’t take much for the serpent to convince Eve it was better to be God (Genesis 3:5). God made us to have dominion taking stewardship for Him, we decided we’d just rather have the dominion. God promises to glorify His people by grace, we want the glory without all the humbling transformation He works to get us there.

We prayed for our daily bread, the Lord gave it to us, we gave thanks, and now we want security for a month, a year. We didn’t know what to do, we asked the Lord for wisdom and guidance, He provided direction and a fruitful outcome, and now we’re dissatisfied that we still have to be so dependent on Him. We acknowledged that we needed Him…once, why do we have to go through all of that again?

The remedy is not poverty, as if being destitute fixes dissatisfaction. Scarcity makes some steal and profane the name of God. But riches have their own dissatisfaction ditch, causing some to “be full and deny [God], and say ‘Who is the LORD?’” (See both sides in Proverbs 30:7-9). We’re not good at consistent contentment. We’re not good at maintaining perspective on reality, and knowing where we’re at on the map. Men are bad at being men, meaning they are bad at not being too big for, or bitter about, their britches. Stated otherwise, men are bad at remembering they are not their own.

The end of the broader context in Romans 9-11 is a doxology: praise God from whom all blessings flow, Almighty God who has never needed or asked for man’s counsel. His judgments and ways are infinitely and eternally glorious (Romans 11:33-36). And when we are being transformed by His mercies, we learn not to think more highly of ourselves than we ought (Romans 12:1-3).

And in the more narrow context of Romans 9, Paul has drilled in on some critical issues of covenant and hope and world history, of some men who receive mercy and others who receive wrath. Can we trust what God has promised? Is God unjust to limit who His promises are for? Is God fair to find fault with those who aren’t chosen for salvation and who sin in ways that He uses for His own glory? We are close to getting back to a discussion on what’s happening with the Jews (addressed again in verse 24). But Paul has brought us to some ultimate questions about what it means for God to be the God of men.

Last Lord’s Day we spent a good amount of time setting up this question. You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” (Romans 9:19). The concern is about God’s sovereignty over sinners before it is a question about God’s sovereignty toward sinners. If God chose Pharaoh to be a supervillain in the story because Pharaoh was already a villain, then the fault was in Pharaoh. And if the fault was in Pharaoh, then Pharaoh did everything Pharaoh wanted to do, and God sovereignly responded. Pharaoh’s will was the problem.

But the actual question in verse 19 assumes both that Pharaoh did God’s will and that God held Pharaoh responsible for Pharaoh’s fault/will/sin that God purposed (verse 17). God hardened Pharaoh not because Pharaoh deserved it (though he did), but because God wanted to.

It’s reasonable to want to know how this works. It’s a question you might expect in philosophy class, and actually, it’s even more a question you might expect in theology class. Philosopher’s were largely sticking a licked finger into the wind to find their direction, but those who have God’s Word, like the Jews who had God’s law and even the Gentiles in Rome who had heard the first three chapters’ worth of this epistle would ask about God’s fault-finding. In Adam we all sinned (Romans 5:12, 14), so we all sin and fall short of God’s image (Romans 3:23). We all deserve death (Romans 6:23). But Paul is showing that there’s something bigger at play, and that the will of man is not the determinate will in the universe.

So there are a number of answers, and I hope to point out any leftovers next week. But we dare not miss Paul’s own answers, or perhaps it is more accurate to call verses 20-23 his two responses.

In this critical moment, Paul answers a question with a question, actually three questions. Immediately he writes, But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? (Romans 9:20) There’s good reason from reading the Greek text to understand the question in verse 19 as coming from a hostile witness. A translation following the original word order might be, “O man, on the contrary, you are who (or who are you), the one talking back to God?” It indicates that the man he has in mind has put himself forward to make claims about things above his pay grade.

My parents called this sort of argumentative attitude “talking back.” “Are you talking back to me? Don’t talk back to me.”

If you have an ESV, NASB, or KJV edition with cross-references, they all look to Job 33:13 for the phrase “answer back to God.” In Job 33 the younger man Elihu has already rebuked Job’s friends for a chapter and turns his rebuke to Job directly. Elihu tells Job that Job’s criticisms/accusations against God are wrong. In particular, Job has complained that God won’t give an account for His actions. Elihu’s rebuke was a feather compared to the weight of the heavens that lands on Job. Through the rest of Job, the main refrain from God is that Job has no place to question God. God Himself interrogates Job:

Finally Job repents from his complaints against God’s sovereignty.

“I know that you can do all things,

I had a very edifying conversation recently that pointed out that since Job is probably the oldest book in the Bible, the questions Job asks—his fear of the Lord that turns into frustration in the midst of great loss—are the questions that set up the rest of God’s revelation in Scripture. God is God, God writes the story, God is not accountable to us, and yet also God is merciful to many.

God is the sovereign Potter. The next two questions use the pot/Potter analogy.

Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? (Romans 9:20–21)

There are at least three relevant passages from the prophet Isaiah about the place of a pot.

Of course people are not mere pots. Human beings are crowned with glory and honor, given dominion so that all things are under our feet (Psalm 8). We have wills, thoughts, affections, consciousness, conscience, intelligence, breath, life. We mean more than a pot, so we regret more. It doesn’t feel like we’re pots. But we have none of those apart from God. And in a discussion of power, we have none of our own. All we have is derivative and dependent. The cosmos is the result of God’s ultimate power and God’s elective purposes all the way down: gender and geography and generation, height and hair color, human humility and hard-heartedness. The closest we come to controlling things is complaining. Ours is pretend power; His is ultimate.

Back to Job, Elihu begins, “Behold, I am toward God as you are; I too was pinched off from a piece of clay” (Job 33:6). Compared to the bottom side of tree bark, we rock. Compared to the foolishness of God, our wisdom and strength is like a piece of cast off bisqueware/clay, fired once, without even a coat of glaze, and more fragile than ever.

Paul used the honorable and dishonorable vessel analogy in his second letter to Timothy (2 Timothy 2:20-21), but there the illustration is about life in the church and how to cleanse oneself to be set apart for honorable use. Here the illustration is of God’s power as Potter, period.

All three questions in verses 20-21 are the obvious kind, the kind you use to those who are committed to missing the point. They are questions that put proud pots in their place. God does make vessels for different purposes, but a pot acting pompous over other pots is a dishonorable pot (especially if that pot is a reprobate teaching Calvinism). What that sort of pot dumps stinks. Being elected for salvation, for honorable use, is not about the inherent glory of the pot.

This is yet another question, a longer one, that grammatically ends in verse 24 but rhetorically ends in verse 23. We’ll consider God’s ultimate purpose next week.

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong. (Job 1:21-22)

It wasn’t until he thought he knew better than God that Job got himself in trouble. Let’s avoid trouble with God, and trust Him to use us as vessels of mercy to cause the right kind of trouble for His glory.

Beloved, some of you are weary. Look to His mercy. Some of you are feeling good and ready. It is by His mercy. All of us are called as jars of clay for His honorable use. Let the surpassing power and mercy of God pour out.

[May you be] strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. (Colossians 1:11–12, ESV)

It is really remarkable how much men are driven by dissatisfaction. It’s not a discussion too far removed from the law of diminishing returns, which means that the gains, or our appreciation of the gains, get smaller even as the requirement of our investment of money or energy gets higher. God created us with the privilege of His likeness (Genesis 1:26), but it didn’t take much for the serpent to convince Eve it was better to *be* God (Genesis 3:5). God made us to have dominion taking stewardship for Him, we decided we’d just rather have the dominion. God promises to glorify His people by grace, we want the glory without all the humbling transformation He works to get us there.

We prayed for our daily bread, the Lord gave it to us, we gave thanks, and now we want security for a month, a year. We didn’t know what to do, we asked the Lord for wisdom and guidance, He provided direction and a fruitful outcome, and now we’re dissatisfied that we still have to be so dependent on Him. We acknowledged that we needed Him…once, why do we have to go through all of that again?

The remedy is not poverty, as if being destitute fixes dissatisfaction. Scarcity makes some steal and profane the name of God. But riches have their own dissatisfaction ditch, causing some to “be full and deny [God], and say ‘Who is the LORD?’” (See both sides in Proverbs 30:7-9). We’re not good at *consistent* contentment. We’re not good at maintaining perspective on reality, and knowing where we’re at on the map. Men are bad at being men, meaning they are bad at not being too big for, or bitter about, their britches. Stated otherwise, men are bad at remembering they are not their own.

The end of the broader context in Romans 9-11 is a doxology: praise God from whom *all* blessings flow, Almighty God who has never needed or asked for man’s counsel. His judgments and ways are infinitely and eternally glorious (Romans 11:33-36). And when we are being transformed by His mercies, we learn not to think more highly of ourselves than we ought (Romans 12:1-3).

And in the more narrow context of Romans 9, Paul has drilled in on some critical issues of covenant and hope and world history, of some men who receive mercy and others who receive wrath. Can we trust what God has promised? Is God unjust to limit who His promises are for? Is God fair to find fault with those who aren’t chosen for salvation and who sin in ways that He uses for His own glory? We are close to getting back to a discussion on what’s happening with the Jews (addressed again in verse 24). But Paul has brought us to some ultimate questions about what it means for God to be the God of men.

# The Question: How is God fair? (verse 19)

Last Lord’s Day we spent a good amount of time setting up this question. **You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?”** (Romans 9:19). The concern is about God’s sovereignty *over* sinners before it is a question about God’s sovereignty toward sinners. If God chose Pharaoh to be a supervillain in the story *because Pharaoh was already a villain*, then the fault was in Pharaoh. And if the fault was in Pharaoh, then Pharaoh did everything Pharaoh wanted to do, and God sovereignly responded. Pharaoh’s will was the problem.

But the actual question in verse 19 assumes both that Pharaoh did *God’s will* and that God held Pharaoh responsible for Pharaoh’s fault/will/sin that God purposed (verse 17). God hardened Pharaoh not because Pharaoh deserved it (though he did), but because God wanted to.

It’s reasonable to want to know how this works. It’s a question you might expect in philosophy class, and actually, it’s even more a question you might expect in theology class. Philosopher’s were largely sticking a licked finger into the wind to find their direction, but those who have God’s Word, like the Jews who had God’s law and even the Gentiles in Rome who had heard the first three chapters’ worth of this epistle would ask about God’s fault-finding. In Adam we all sinned (Romans 5:12, 14), so we all sin and fall short of God’s image (Romans 3:23). We all *deserve* death (Romans 6:23). But Paul is showing that there’s something bigger at play, and that the will of man is *not* the determinate will in the universe.

So there are a number of answers, and I hope to point out any leftovers next week. But we dare not miss Paul’s own answers, or perhaps it is more accurate to call verses 20-23 his two responses.

# The Potter has ultimate power. (verses 20-21)

In this critical moment, Paul answers a question with a question, actually three questions. Immediately he writes, **But who are you, O man, to answer back to God?** (Romans 9:20) There’s good reason from reading the Greek text to understand the question in verse 19 as coming from a hostile witness. A translation following the original word order might be, “O man, on the contrary, you are who (or who are you), the one talking back to God?” It indicates that the man he has in mind has put himself forward to make claims about things above his pay grade.

My parents called this sort of argumentative attitude “talking back.” “Are you talking back to me? Don’t talk back to me.”

If you have an ESV, NASB, or KJV edition with cross-references, they all look to Job 33:13 for the phrase “answer back to God.” In Job 33 the younger man Elihu has already rebuked Job’s friends for a chapter and turns his rebuke to Job directly. Elihu tells Job that Job’s criticisms/accusations against God are *wrong*. In particular, Job has complained that God won’t give an account for His actions. Elihu’s rebuke was a feather compared to the weight of the heavens that lands on Job. Through the rest of Job, the main refrain *from God* is that Job has no place to question God. God Himself interrogates Job:

- “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” (Job 38:2)

- “Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty?” (Job 40:2)

- “Will you condemn me that you may be in the right?” (Job 40:8)

Finally Job *repents from his complaints against God’s sovereignty*.

> “I know that you can do all things,

> and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.

> ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’

> Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,

> things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.

> I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,

> but now my eye sees you;

> therefore I despise myself,

> and repent in dust and ashes.”

> (Job 42:2-3, 5-6 ESV)

I had a very edifying conversation recently that pointed out that since Job is probably the oldest book in the Bible, the questions Job asks—his fear of the Lord that turns into frustration in the midst of great loss—are the questions that set up the rest of God’s revelation in Scripture. God is God, God writes the story, God is not accountable to us, *and yet also God is merciful to many*.

God is the sovereign Potter. The next two questions use the pot/Potter analogy.

**Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?** (Romans 9:20–21)

There are at least three relevant passages from the prophet Isaiah about the place of a pot.

- Isaiah 29:16 says “You turn things upside down! Shall the potter be regarded as the clay…?”

- Isaiah 45:9 says “Woe to him who strives with him who formed him, a pot among earthen pots! Does the clay say to him who forms it, ‘What are you making’?”

- Isaiah 64:8 acknowledges in praise that “we are the clay, and you are our potter.”

Of course people are not mere pots. Human beings are crowned with glory and honor, given dominion so that all things are under our feet (Psalm 8). We have wills, thoughts, affections, consciousness, conscience, intelligence, breath, life. We *mean* more than a pot, so we regret more. It doesn’t *feel* like we’re pots. But we have none of those apart from God. And in a discussion of power, we have *none* of our own. All we have is derivative and dependent. The cosmos is the result of God’s ultimate power and God’s elective purposes all the way down: gender and geography and generation, height and hair color, human humility and hard-heartedness. The closest we come to controlling things is complaining. Ours is pretend power; His is ultimate.

Back to Job, Elihu begins, “Behold, I am toward God as you are; I too was pinched off from a piece of clay” (Job 33:6). Compared to the bottom side of tree bark, we rock. Compared to the foolishness of God, our wisdom and strength is like a piece of cast off bisqueware/clay, fired once, without even a coat of glaze, and more fragile than ever.

Paul used the **honorable** and **dishonorable** vessel analogy in his second letter to Timothy (2 Timothy 2:20-21), but there the illustration is about life in the church and how to cleanse oneself to be set apart for honorable use. Here the illustration is of God’s power as Potter, period.

All three questions in verses 20-21 are the obvious kind, the kind you use to those who are committed to missing the point. They are questions that put proud pots in their place. God does make vessels for different purposes, but a pot acting pompous over other pots is a *dishonorable* pot (especially if that pot is a reprobate teaching Calvinism). What that sort of pot dumps stinks. Being elected for salvation, for honorable use, is not about the inherent glory of the pot.

# The Potter has ultimate purpose. (verses 22-23)

This is yet another question, a longer one, that grammatically ends in verse 24 but rhetorically ends in verse 23. We’ll consider God’s ultimate purpose next week.

# Conclusion

> “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong. (Job 1:21-22)

It wasn’t until he thought he knew better than God that Job got himself in trouble. Let’s avoid trouble with God, and trust Him to use us as vessels of mercy to cause the right kind of trouble for His glory.

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## Charge

Beloved, some of you are weary. Look to His mercy. Some of you are feeling good and ready. It is by His mercy. All of us are called as jars of clay for His honorable use. Let the surpassing power and mercy of God pour out.

## Benediction:

> [May you be] strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. (Colossians 1:11–12, ESV)