Colossians 3:20-21 Parents & Kids

Intro

Backpack outreach video

over 150 backpacks handed out

Kids loved all of the activity

bracelet & facepainting booths were busy the whole time

Great team of volunteers

Pistol shooting meme from Olympics

Gold Medal winner all decked out in gear

Silver medal guy just had his gun

That was a great metaphor for parenting

Parenting is the hardest job in the world

Nothing exposes your weaknesses more than raising children

Paul gives instructions to the Colossians

In two very brief verses he gets to the point on what is most important

Teach your children to obey and do not provoke them

Easier said than done

Read Colossians 3:20-21

Transition:

Again, as we observed with wives, this teaching beautifully elevated the position of children in the culture of that day.

Under a section of Roman law entitled Patria Potestes, “The Power of the Father,” the father could do anything he wanted with his children.

He could sell them, turn them into slaves, even take their lives.

But here, as with husbands and wives, both children and parents were presented as under God.

If a family was going to live as a Christian household there were a few rules

Children must obey their parents

Parents must not provoke their children

Parents must also raise their children in the ways of the Lord

Ephesians 6:4 ESV

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

Children have the right to have godly parents who will teach them the Word of God and discipline them in love.

Children have rights, but they also have responsibilities; and their foremost responsibility is to obey.

They are to obey “in all things” and not simply in those things that please them.

Instructions to Children vs. 20

The first instruction we see this morning is for children to obey your parents

Let’s look at this single verse and break it down to understand

Children

This is referring to children who still live in the house under their parents guidance

Rules change once a child leaves the house

They move from obedience to honoring

Parents can’t expect the same kind of obedience from grown children on their own as they can from those under their roof

But those under their roof are to obey their parents

Obey Your Parents

The word obey has two meanings

Carry out a command

Behave according to laws and principles

Parents need to teach obedience to their children

Start early, it’s a whole lot easier

Stop giving them a choice

Parents giving their child a choice is the reason Raising Canes is such a popular restaurant chain

Some entrepeneur saw kids only eating chicken tenders and fries in the 90’s and knew there would be an adult customers in the 2000’s

This verse also demands continuous obedience

It is written in the present tense which means its on going, not a once off

The best piece of advice my mom gave me while she was alive was as a kid she told me, “I’m not your friend, I’m your parent. When you are an adult we can be friends, but right now my job is to raise you into a responsible adult, so take out the trash.”

You don’t take your child’s best interest to heart when you do things for them, ask them over and over, and try to reason with them

Speak firmly, set expectations, and follow thru on consequences

There is blessing that comes from obedience

Exodus 20:12 ESV

“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

The child who does not learn to obey his parents is not likely to grow up obeying any authority.

He will defy his teachers, the police, his employers, and anyone else who tries to exercise authority over him.

The breakdown in authority in our society reflects the breakdown of authority in the home

For the most part, children do not create problems; they reveal them.

Parents who cannot discipline themselves cannot discipline their children.

If a father and mother are not under authority themselves, they cannot exercise authority over others.

It is only as parents submit to each other and to the Lord that they can exercise properly balanced spiritual and physical authority over their children.

Disobedience to parents marks the ungodly

In everything

Paul gets specific and tells us that obedience is in everything

This is where parenting becomes the hardest job in the world

Getting your child to develop a pattern of obedience is a full-time job

The absence of discipline means fatherhood is not being practiced

Weak, inconsistent discipline shows a lack of love.

Discipline is therefore a key to child-parent fullness!

This pleases the Lord

Your child’s obedience pleases the Lord

Not only that it has long lasting benefits

Even secular psychologists are starting to acknowledge this

Dr. Stanley Coopersmith, associate professor of psychology at the University of California, surveyed 1,738 normal middle-class boys and their families, beginning in the preadolescent period and following them through to young manhood.

After determining the boys with the best self-esteem, he then compared their homes and childhood influences with those of the boys having a lower sense of self-esteem.

He found three important characteristics which distinguished them:

1. The high-esteem children were clearly more loved and appreciated at home than were the low-esteem boys.

2. The high-esteem group came from homes where parents had been significantly more strict in their approach to discipline. By contrast, the parents of the low-esteem group had created insecurity and dependence by their permissiveness.

3. The homes of the high-esteem group were also characterized by democracy and openness. Once the boundaries for behavior were established, there was freedom for individual personalities to grow and develop

Instructions to Parents vs. 21

Next Paul turns his focus on parents

He tells Fathers not to provoke their children

Provoke: To stir to anger

Ephesians 6:4 ESV

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

Parents can provoke their children by being too harsh, too demanding, too controlling, unforgiving, or just plain angry.

This harshness can be expressed through words, through actions, or through non-verbal communication.

It gives the idea of being incessant

Notice that the advice is primarily to “Fathers,” the reason being that this would be more typically a father’s sin.

The husband is naturally away from the children more than the mother and is thus less in touch with their feelings and more prone to false judgments and unwise direction.

The specific sense of the Greek word is to irritate one’s children either by nagging or deriding them— putting them down.

Father’s often do this because they don’t want their children to make the same mistakes they did growing up

But it can also come from a child not being like or able to relate to what the father is like so the father is critical

Children are the most loving, gracious, forgiving beings on the planet

They most want approval and acceptance from their parents

To bring a child to anger or for there to be perpetual anger shows a pattern damaging behavior on the part of the parent