Children are Like Arrows

Introduction

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Last week we began a short series called Fighting For Your Family. In case you weren’t with us, or forgot the main point between then and now, here’s a quick review:

God designed us for relationship and built men and women as equally valuable but complementarily different. His goal is that marriage would reflect His divine image as a “one flesh” “us” through mutual, loving, submission. But sin got in the way of God’s original plan and now every relationship experiences sin that pull us apart. The solution is that both the man and woman need to offer grace and forgiveness and continue to seek the lower place in service and love.

Now, let’s add the next component to this family as we look back at Genesis 1.

In Genesis 1 God told Adam and Eve:

Genesis 1:28 ESV

“…Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

It didn’t take them long to start fulfilling this responsibility.

Genesis 4:1 ESV

1 Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord.”

Children are an integral part of God’s design for the family. But how do we manage this responsibility God had given us?

Did Adam and Eve have a parenting handbook to rely on? No, of course not. And even if they did, they’d soon find out, as we all have, that each of their kids is different and requires a little different set of tools and skills.

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Have you heard of the helicopter parents? They’re those overprotective parents who are excessively interested in the life of their children.

At the other end there are Free-range parents — They emphasize independence, self-reliance, and allowing children the freedom to explore and make age-appropriate decisions.

If you’ve been a parent for long you’ve probably read books about attachment parenting that encourages co-sleeping and carrying your kid around everywhere you go. Or maybe you practiced the cry-it-out sleeping method where you put the kid down for bed and then walked out, letting them cry until they finally fall asleep.

People have very strong opinions about what the right parenting method is.

Some of us are motivated to follow our parent’s style of raising kids, and some people are determined to do better than they think their parents did.

I don’t want to suggest a particular parenting style to you today, but I would like to give you a framework to think about parenting, and I hope by the end of this message you’ll find some hope no matter the age of your children or circumstances of your relationship.

Children Are Like Arrows

Turn with me to Psalm 127. Let’s read the whole chapter—it’s just 5 verses.

Psalm 127 ESV

A Song of Ascents. Of Solomon. 1 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. 2 It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep. 3 Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. 4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. 5 Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.

The first verse sets up the two themes of today’s sermon, the first is building and the second is watching. And notice that it is the Lord’s building and the Lord’s watching that the psalmist is emphasizing.

Verse three points out that children are gifts—an inheritance and a reward—from God. Remember, its the Lord who builds your home.

It’s verse four that gives us our title for today’s sermon: children are like arrows in the hands of a warrior.

Let’s take a look at an arrow.

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The point of the arrow is the part that penetrates and accomplishes the work the arrow is sent to do.

The shaft absorbs the intense force that’s put into the arrow by the bow string, and propels the arrow forward with significant inertia. The sharp point would accomplish little without the force behind it pushing it forward.

The fletching allows the arrow to fly through the air with precision. These three feathers keep the arrow pointed forward so your aim can be true.

And then there’s the Nock—the cutout on the back of the arrow that the bow string nestles into.

Psalm 127 clarifies a truth about children that is both sad and inspiring: children quickly become adults and are launched into independence from their parents. Most moms and some dads will tell you that their kids are growing up too fast. They want to keep them at home as long as possible. But, even though its sad to see the childhood years fly by, every good parent knows instinctively that their responsibility is to effectively launch their kids into a life of independence and service, away from the home they grew up in.

Building

Now, consider the first theme of Psalm 127—building.

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If you were to build an arrow, you would start by carefully carving a piece of wood like a Cedar or Douglas Fir or Spruce or Ash. One way to do this is to place a square length of wood in what’s called a shooting board that holds the wood in a little trough. Then you take a plane and cut off one of the corners. Then turn it and cut off another, then turn it and cut off another. You continue doing this until the shaft is mostly round and it is roughly the thickness that you want. Then you take a couple blocks of wood with a round cutout and some sandpaper sandwiched between them. This allows you to sand the arrow until it is a smooth, round dowel. The process is time consuming and very hands on.

Once you have the shaft carved you then saw out a crack on the back end to start the Nock. You’ll fill the crack with something hard, like a bone, for example, that will take the pressure of the string over and over again and prevent the shaft from cracking.

When the knock is glued up and ground out, you’ll take some feathers and cut them and glue them to the sides of the arrow. Then you’ll wind a bit of string around and around, through the feather fletchings, to hold the fletching on even after going through a target multiple times.

I’m explaining the process of building an arrow because the process of building an adult child has a lot of similarities.

The shaft

We aren’t born fully formed, physically, emotionally, socially, or spiritually. Each day is an opportunity to be formed into the person that God has designed us to be. A child may struggle with lying. That doesn’t mean they’ll be a liar forever, it just means they have a sharp edge that needs to be planed and sanded smooth. A kid might struggle to make friends as a child. That doesn’t mean they’ll be friendless forever, it just means that we, as parents, have the opportunity to teach them how to be friendly. Little kids explode with emotion. We get to teach them how to understand their emotions, regulate them, and express them in healthy and appropriate ways.

This process of development in a child’s life is very intimate, personalized and hands-on. It cannot be accomplished from a distance. It cannot be automated. You cannot outsource it to the school or the state or the church.

When done well, this process crafts a noble and godly character in your children.

Fletching

In Deuteronomy 6 Moses talked directly to parents and he counseled them to be very intentional about building their children. This is how he put it in Deut 6:4-8

Deuteronomy 6:4–8 NLT

4 “Listen, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. 5 And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength. 6 And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today. 7 Repeat them again and again to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up. 8 Tie them to your hands and wear them on your forehead as reminders.

fletching

This reminds me of the fletching. Those feathers are carefully glued on the shaft of the arrow so that they will provide direction and focus. And then they are bound tightly to the shaft so they can’t come off, even if it pierces a target. This is what Paul is saying about our children. We must take God’s word and carefully apply it to our children’s lives. We have a responsibility to bind it around their hearts so that it will not be easily forgotten by them. God’s Word is the only truth that will guide them safely through life and point them in the direction God wants them to go.

Nock

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The Nock is a particularly interesting part of the arrow. It’s the part that hugs the string as it is being pulled back and aimed.

If there is a comparison in our children’s life, then it would be the loving bond that a parent has with their children. A child is only effectively launched into life if they are connected to their parents in a healthy bond of love. Love gives them the confidence to embrace the pressures and challenges of independence. Love is the context for sharing wisdom and helping our kids aim in the right direction. Love is the basis for correction and growth.

Proverbs 22:6 talks about lovingly directing our children. Let’s read it:

Proverbs 22:6 ESV

6 Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.

Point your kid in the right direction through his childhood, and when you let go of that string and launch them into the world, they will hit the target that God has set for them. This is the principle that Proverbs is talking about.

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If you’ve ever shot an arrow with a broken nock, you know how frustrating it can be. You pull back the string, but before you can let the string go, the arrow falls out of its place.

Like a broken arrow, when we try to launch our kids without the security and confidence of a loving bond with them, things get all sideways and our relationship gets strained. Like some arrows, kids can just fall down at the feet of their parents, never really launching into a life of independence and responsibility. Others push out into the world, but fail to reach any level of effectiveness because they never absorbed the momentum and couldn’t be aimed.

Now, I want you to know something. It’s possible for us to do our very best and yet our kids don’t land anywhere near where we had planned for them to go. There could be many reasons for this, including that we have the wrong idea of where our kids should end up. Remember, it is the LORD who builds the house, not us. We do not get to decide the life-direction of our children, that’s God’s job. We do have a responsibility to shape them and help them find their aim, but this needs to be done in close and regular council with their Creator and designer.

The point

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The last part of the arrow I want to pay attention to is the point. The point is the working end of the arrow. Without a point the arrow would never accomplish its purpose. I believe the point represents the gifts the Holy Spirit gives our kids, and the calling that He puts on their lives.

Have you thought lately about how God is calling the heart of your child? What mission will He send them on? What direction is He leading their life towards?

We do not create these parts of our kids, but we should be carefully praying so that we, and they, can know God’s will for their life. It is then our job as parents to give them every resource in our power to refine and sharpen their aim in life. This often looks like a college experience or a training of some kind. It can mean an internship or mentorship. But more than any of those things, our job is give our children the kind of spiritual discipline that will awaken their hearts to hear the voice of God’s Spirit.

We should teach them how to understand the Bible. We should have regular devotions with our kids, pray with them and sing with them. If we don’t teach them how to hear the voice of the Lord when they are young, then their aim will not be as true as it could have been when we launch them into the world.

The Prodigal Child

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To summarize, God has invited us as parents into His work of building our children into the adults that He intends for them to be. We should them them develop their character, help them grow their skills in building loving relationships, and help them find their calling from God.

But what if it didn’t work out that nicely? What if your kids missed the mark as they launched, so to speak? What if they have left the faith you tried to teach them as a child?

In his book, What’s So Amazing About Grace, Phillip Yancy retells a parable of Jesus in a modern context. Instead of a prodigal son he tells of a teenage girl from Travers City, Michigan who is fed up with her parents and decides to run away to Detroit. She gets spoiled by an older man, and then pimped out by him. When she gets sick he puts her out on the street to fend for herself. Listen to the battle as she struggles to figure out what to do next.

One night as she lies awake listening for footsteps, all of a sudden everything about her life looks different.  She no longer feels like a woman of the world.  She feels like a little girl, lost in a cold and frightening city.  She begins to whimper.  Her pockets are empty and she’s hungry.  She needs a fix.  She pulls her legs tight underneath her and shivers under the newspapers she’s piled atop her coat.  Something jolts a synapse of memory and a single image fills her mind:  of May in Traverse City, when a million cherry trees bloom at once, with her golden retriever dashing through the rows and rows of blossomy trees in chase of a tennis ball.

“God, why did I leave,” she says to herself, and pain stabs at her heart.  “My dog back home eats better than I do now.”  She’s sobbing, and she knows in a flash that more than anything else in the world she wants to go home.

Three straight phone calls – three straight connections to voicemail.  She hangs up without leaving a message the first two times, but the third time she says, “Dad, Mom, it’s me.  I was wondering about maybe coming home.  I’m catching a bus up your way, and it’ll get there about midnight tomorrow.  If you’re not there, well, I guess I’ll just stay on the bus until it hits Canada.”

It takes about seven hours for a bus to make all the stops between Detroit and Traverse City, and during that time she realizes the flaws in her plan.  What if her parents are out of town and miss the message?  Shouldn’t she have waited another day or so until she could talk to them?  And even if they are home, they probably wrote her off as dead long ago.  She should have given them some time to overcome the shock.

Her thoughts bounce back and forth between those worries and the speech she is preparing for her father:  “Dad, I’m sorry.  I know I was wrong.  It’s not your fault; it’s all mine.  Dad, can you forgive me?”  She says the words over and over, her throat tightening even as she rehearses them.  She hasn’t apologized to anyone in years.

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When the bus finally rolls into the station, its air brakes hissing in protest, the driver announces in a crackly voice over the microphone, “Fifteen minutes, folks.  That’s all we have here.”  Fifteen minutes to decide her life.  She checks herself in a compact mirror and smoothes her hair. She looks at the tobacco stains on her fingertips, and wonders if her parents will notice.  If they’re there.

She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect.  Not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind prepares her for what she sees.  There, in the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs bus terminal in Traverse City, Michigan, stands a group of forty brothers and sisters and great-aunts and uncles and cousins and even her grandmother.  And taped across the entire wall of the terminal is a banner that reads, “Welcome Home!”

Out of the crowd of cheers and well-wishers breaks her Dad.  She stares out through the tears quivering in her eyes like hot mercury and begins the memorized speech, “Dad, I’m sorry. I know….”

He interrupts her.  “Hush child.  We’ve got no time for that.  No time for apologies.  You’ll be late for the party.  A banquet’s waiting for you at home.”

The story of the prodigal is a gut-wrenching story of a kid abandoning their parents, violating every moral guideline they were taught, and wasting every talent and energy they have on the foolishness of the world.

The story might look like a runaway or hedonist; or it might look like a kid who does all the right things in life—degree, marriage, kids, money, nice house—but abandons their faith in God.

Maybe you launched your child hoping they would go about God’s mission for their life only to find that they have landed in and embrace the world. Its easy to feel anxious about your kids. To worry about their choices. To stress about the direction they are headed. To agonize over the mistakes you see them making.

Can you imagine what the parents of that runaway girl were thinking? The fear in their hearts about the unknown dangers she was facing? I know some of you feel that same burden. and what about that father in Jesus’ original parable? What could have been going on in his mind as he looked out over the field his son had marched off through—not as an arrow sent out to impact the world for God, but as an angry, stubborn, willful child ready to experience every pleasure the world could offer. I know some of you know exactly how that feels. Maybe some of you may be worried that soon you may know how that feels too.

What are we to do when our arrows don’t launch well, or don’t hit the mark God was aiming for them?

Let’s remember that there are two parts to our job, the shaping part, and the watching part.

Psalm 127:1 ESV

1 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.

We get to join God in building our kid’s, and then we join God in watching over our house.

We cannot force our children to be what we think they should be. We cannot guilt them into following the path we feel is ideal. We cannot change them.

What we can do is pray for them. From the time they are born until the time we die, we should be praying for our children. Job was a good example of a parent who watched over his house with the Lord. His adult kids would get together at each other’s houses and throw parties.

Job 1:5 NLT

5 When these celebrations ended—sometimes after several days—Job would purify his children. He would get up early in the morning and offer a burnt offering for each of them. For Job said to himself, “Perhaps my children have sinned and have cursed God in their hearts.” This was Job’s regular practice.

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Even if your children seem to be on the right path, you must be their fiercest prayer warrior. And when they seem like they have rebelled so totally that there is no hope for them, you must still pray for them. There is no distance that God cannot go to save our children, and we should never, ever give up on them.

It may also be valuable for us to check ourselves a bit. Are we the kind of parents that our children can safely come to and find shelter and love and joy? Is your home a place where they long to be, or is it a place of judgment and conflict? If its a place of judgment and conflict then there’s a problem that you need to fix. No matter how right you might think you are, don’t speak to your kids with judgment and condemnation.

After telling his modern version of the parable, Yancy says this:

We are accustomed to finding a catch in every promise, but Jesus’ stories of extravagant grace include no catch, no loophole disqualifying us from God’s love. [When we “come home”], to God it feels like the discovery of a lifetime. As Dutch author, Henri Nouwen, points out, “God rejoices not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end,…No, God rejoices because one of His children who was lost has been found.”

Do you rejoice when your children engage in relationship with you? Do they see your loving compassion that extends grace no matter what your differences are? If they aren’t experiencing grace from you, then please, go to God and experience His grace for yourself. And let His grace flood your heart with compassion for the children that He and you have raised together.

Conclusion

If you were with us last week, you may remember that I promised an assignment each week of this sermon series. Last week the assignment was to read 1 Corinthians 13 five times, and at least one time with your spouse. Did you do it? If so, I’m sure you were blessed.

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This week I have another assignment for you, but before we talk about that, I want to ask a question. Do you think that your family could use some intentionality? Maybe a little how-to on character development and helping your kids find their mission in life? If so, maybe God is calling you to start a small group this fall. FAmily Life has a great small group program called The Art of Parenting that uses Psalm 127 as a framework for several important discussions that will help you be a more intentional parent.

If you’re interested in participating with or leading a parenting small group, please send an email to [e-mail] or look our Discipleship Elder, Joelle Worf, on your church center directory and let her know you’re interested.

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Ok, here’s the assignment for this week. Maybe this is something that you’re already doing. I’d like you to pray for your kids like Job prayed for his kids. Pray for forgiveness for their sins. Pray for God to lead them. If you aren’t already, start praying for them every day. Put their name on your fridge or on the dahsboard of your car and every time you see their name, pray for them. Pray for them when you wake up in the morning or before going to bed at night.

If you don’t have children, then pray pick a child in your life—a niece or nephew or a neighbors kid or whoever it is that God puts on your mind—and pray for them. Become a watchman on the walls who joins God in watching over His house. Do that for this week, at least, and if its possible, make it a habit to pray for that person indefinitely. When we launch our children they don’t stop being our children, and so we shouldn’t ever stop watching over them and praying for them.

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Will you join me in singing our song of response?