Children, Obedience is Good

Ephesians 6:1-4

Please stand…

English Standard Version Chapter 6

6 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 2 “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), 3 “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.” 4 Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

Pray

There is a lot of instruction in these last three chapters of Ephesians. We have been told so far that if we are to walk in a manner worthy of our calling, we shouldn’t lie, be angry, be greedy, we shouldn’t give into our carnal, fleshly desires. We should not walk in the darkness or even have close association with those that do. We are to do honest work with our hands, and we are to not have bitterness or course talk coming out of our mouths.

That is a lot to take in. Especially to someone new to the faith. When I was 11, I had a job picking vegetables for a farmer. I didn’t know the first thing about that. He showed me all the plants and vegetables and how I was supposed to tell when they were ready, he told me to do a bunch of other things I was unfamiliar with and I was overwhelmed. I wanted to quit early because I thought, “How am I ever going to know this?” I was struggling. He wasn’t the greatest teacher and he also had very little patience, so when I would pick something not quite ripe or would do something not how he would do it, he yelled at me.

Some of you think this is what God is like and are probably tempted to look at this list as a list of rules to get right or you are out of the Kingdom. As we talk about children and obedience today, some of you had fathers and mothers that were awful. You had graceless and merciless parents that hated themselves and that hate spilled over to you. Some were doing the best they could which might have been just a hair’s breath better than how they grew up, which was not great. Some of you had parents that were just selfish. If that was you, I am sorry that you had that experience and I can’t imagine the hurt that that kind of childhood cause. I urge you to try and put that aside when you think about the Lord being a Father. He knows that you don’t know where to shine the flash light in the engine. He knows that you don’t know the difference between a ripe green bean and an unripe one. He knows that you couldn’t find your way out of a paper bag without Him and He loves you and cares for you anyway.

He knows that life is hard and what He is promising us is if we give ourselves over to Him; our hearts, our minds, our strength and our souls, He will start to change us into the people that He wants us to be for our good and His glory. This list of “Do’s and Don’ts” start to become a destination and not a box you have to check so you can get to heaven. That list is to see where your heart is. How far have I come and how far do I need to go? Am I really submitting everything to Him?

This is the idea of submission that we talked about last week with husbands and wives. If I have a hard time serving my wife the way Christ served the church, what am I missing? It shouldn’t be me pointing a finger and saying, “Look what she’s not doing.” The text doesn’t say, “Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church only if she loves you back.” It is quite the opposite. Love in spite of how she loves you back because that is how Christ loves the church. The church never loves Christ back the way that they should.

Wives, submit to your husband as to the Lord. If you can’t submit to your husband in a Godly way, why? I’m not saying that you blindly submit even as he is driving the car off the cliff, by all means speak up and say something, but if he is striving after Christ and trying to love you like Christ, love and help him. Both husbands and wives serve each other because that is what Christ came to do. He came to serve and not be served so that we could follow that example. If your marriages do not look like service to one another, casting little things aside, forgiving with the grace you have been given by Christ, you probably need to restructure things.

The Lord wants to be involved in every aspect of our lives. He gives us this instruction so that we can walk in the purpose that He has created us for. Submission to each other in marriage is a shadow to walking in submission to the Lord. Serving each other is a shadow of how Christ serves the church.

There is wisdom in this instruction and if God is our Father and gives us this instruction then it would follow that we, fathers and mothers, would be a type and shadow for our children’s obedience to the Lord.

English Standard Version Chapter 6

6 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.

Why is this right? Children do not know anything. They need instruction. Children in here, teenagers, this room is not big enough to fill all the things that you do not know that you think you know. A little knowledge is the most dangerous thing in the world.

I have heard stories of parents raising their children, sending them off to college and that first semester they take psychology or sociology 101 and all the sudden they are Sigmund Freud at Thanksgiving dinner or they take a semester or Political Science and they want to lead a political revolution because they “know things” and you aren’t that smart. All of the sudden, the way that they were raised was shaken and now in their “new enlightenment” they want to rise against their parents.

Learn, grow, challenge presuppositions, but …. verse 2 says,

English Standard Version Chapter 6

2 “Honor your father and mother”

We are all humans and we think differently, we come to different conclusions and your conclusions may turn out to be right, but we are to obey them while we are children. There will be a time when children leave their mother and father and cling to their spouse and they can try those ideas out then, but as believers we are to submit to those who God has put over us; especially our parents. Why?

Paul says…

English Standard Version Chapter 6

” (this is the first commandment with a promise),

Paul is quoting Exodus 20:12 when Moses is laying out the Ten Commandments.

English Standard Version Chapter 6

2 “Honor your father and mother” 3 “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.”

If we read this, it seems to say that if we listen to our parents, life will go better and we will have a long life. Is this right? Obviously, this is what the bible says, but could it be that easy?

The answer is “yes”, assuming something. Like last week, about husbands and wives, the text starts with “wives submit to your husbands as to the Lord.” There were a bunch of guys last week that were waiting for me to really tell the women that they needed to be better listeners at home. That text last week was really for the husbands. Love your wife well and be the example of Jesus to her and she will have no problem submitting to your authority. If you both are drawing close to the Lord and you lay down your well-being and selfish desires so you can serve her better, most women in that position would have no problem following you.

Today, the text is about children obeying their parents, but what the bible says about raising children is not pointed at the child, but at the parents. Here are a few examples for you.

Deuteronomy 6:7 (Speaking of the law of the Lord) “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.”

Proverbs 13:24 “Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.”

Proverbs 22:6 “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.”

There are about 100 of these passages on parenting and children, but just looking at these examples, the parents should teach the child the laws of God and talk about them every day. It should be part of your conversations in your house.

Your kids should know who God is and who their Savior is from an early age. They need to be taught what God likes and what He doesn’t. It could be memorizing Scripture or just teaching It’s truths. Kids will get it wrong. They will not understand somethings and sometimes they will use it to their advantage.

This is a great example of that. Lainey Rollins is the daughter of Andrew and Kelsey who go here and I love her. She is a ball of sunshine. Andrew told me that at the preschool she goes to they are teaching them that when they hurt their friends, it breaks their friend’s hearts and it breaks Jesus’ heart. That’s true. Jesus tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves, when we don’t do that, we hurt our neighbor and we hurt Jesus. Lainey, learning how to put this together, asked her dad for a popsicle and Andrew said, “No”. Lainey, feeling hurt, looked at her dad and said, “Dad, you are breaking my heart and that means you are breaking Jesus’ heart.”

We talk to our kids about these things. We expect them to live under the rules of our house and the law of the Lord. When they break that and become defiant, we should discipline them. Some spank, some don’t, but discipline is loving. If we let the children run our lives, we are not stewarding the gifts that God has given us. We need to teach, lovingly, but seriously, the obedience of Christ. When we refuse to do that, children go their own way.

Not only that, but if you are a Christian father and you know the right thing to teach your children and you don’t, Jesus has harsh words to say to you.

English Standard Version Chapter 18

5 “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, 6 but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.

It is so important that we teach what is right to baby Christians and to our own baby Christians in our house, because as my friend, Twila, who works in Christian childcare says, “God doesn’t play around when it comes to the babies.”

We should be so involved in our children's lives and communicate why we are so involved, that they may not like it but they understand. I want my children to love Jesus, be successful and not go to jail. By teaching them the commands of Jesus, we can give them a cheat code for life. If the child grows up in a home with parents that love the Lord, that have taught them to love the Lord, no trauma, plenty of loving discipline, communication and support, think about how much less junk that child will have to jump over to start running into their future.

Everything Christ directs us to is better for our lives and cuts out a lot of stuff that will trip us up down the road. The bible teaches us to be wise with our money, don’t have sexual relations with anyone you aren’t married to, when you get married, love your spouse and stay married, don’t worry, don’t be anxious, work hard with your hands, submit to the authority over you. All this instruction is meant to lead us to a quiet life full of peace and joy. Everything outside of His counsel leads us to chaos, disruption and the opposite of peace.

As parents, we are to protect and love our children and raise them up with the peace and instruction of the Lord so that when they are old they will not depart from it. This life that we give them should be so great that they want to share it with their families as they leave our house.

When that child submits to that authority of the parents, they will take that Godly wisdom and be free of the trappings of the world. That is the hope. We all get dinged up, no matter how perfect our parents were, but we can minimize the dings if we can teach them the things of the Lord.

What do we say about the promise of long life? John Wayne said it best, “Life is tough, but it’s tougher when you’re stupid.” There are a lot of traps. Alcohol, drugs, pride, ego, arrogance, greed, lust, lack of self-control, anger, ungodly ambition, all these things can lead to health problems, accidents, stress, long stays at certain hotels run by the state that you can’t leave for an extended period of time, people that you shouldn’t be associating with. Some of us know this because some of us have played around with such things.

Some of you are dealing with those consequences of disobedience now, whether it is a divorce, legal trouble, trying to recover from a financial disaster. You would probably say, “It sure would be nice if I hadn’t have gone through that.” The applied wisdom of the Lord could have saved you from those things. Wisdom is a gift from God and we should search it out. That is what the entire book of Proverbs is. Read it to your children, children obey its commands.

If you were one of the disobedient ones, there is a passage of Scripture that is troubling to say the least…

Deuteronomy 21:18 "If any man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father or his mother, and when they chastise him, he will not even listen to them, 19 then his father and mother shall seize him, and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gateway of his home town. 20 "And they shall say to the elders of his city, 'This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey us, he is a glutton and a drunkard.' 21 "Then all the men of his city shall stone him to death; so you shall remove the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear of it and fear.

If we are honest, we have all been this from time to time. Some of you have children that were like this, they pushed your buttons, they didn’t listen, they are in their rebellion, they have cost you not only resources but countless nights of sleep.

This is nothing new. The bible, knowing this law, tells fathers, in Proverbs 19:18 “Discipline your son, for there is hope; do not set your heart on putting him to death.” Paraphrased, “I know he is driving you crazy, but don’t kill him.” We all can relate to that to some degree.

Verse 4 of our text today says,

English Standard Version Chapter 6

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

It is a plea for fathers to have mercy and grace toward their children. Don’t provoke them so you have an excuse to write them off, love until the end and discipline them. Sometimes that discipline is heartbreaking. We should never discipline in anger, but always out of love so that the child can be corrected. We want to be disciplined in love so why wouldn’t we also discipline with love? We love our children even when they stray from God’s law.

That text in Deuteronomy seems really harsh. If they were disobedient they were stoned to death? What do we do with that? Atheist will bring up this text and say, “See, you don’t believe in your book because you aren’t doing this.”

When you examine that text and the rabbinic tradition that explains it throughout the centuries, you find something fascinating.

According to scholars, “records indicate no rebellious son was ever put to death under this law. Every father elected to spare his own son, no matter how sinful the son might have been. Only Christ, the perfectly obedient Son was not spared.”

Like last week, obedience is required for faith. They cannot be separated. The obedience is not to gain the salvation, but to show that you have it. We should strive, as sons and daughters of the Father, for perfect obedience, but since God knows that is impossible for us, His perfect Son was not spared so that we might live. He no longer requires blood sacrifices like He did in the Old Testament under the old covenant. He requires our heart and our willful obedience. He requires our life. He requires us to die to ourself and take up His life which is perfection. He wants to renew our mind and take out everything that does not line up with His will.

He wants us to take His yoke upon us which is easy and light and to choose our hard. I saw something the other day that helps illustrate this point.

Marriage is hard. Divorce is hard. Choose your hard.

Obesity is hard. Being fit is hard. Choose your hard.

Being in debt is hard. Being financially disciplined is hard. Choose your hard.

Communication is hard. Not communicating is hard. Choose your hard.

Life will never be easy. It will always be hard. But we can choose our hard. Pick wisely.

You could add to that “Obedience is hard. Living in rebellion is hard. Choose your hard.”, “Life is hard. Death is hard. Choose your hard.” There is obedience that leads to life and it is a lot less hard than disobedience and rebellion that leads to death.

Children, CHURCH, obey your mother and father. There is wisdom in their leadership. They have traveled down the road that you are starting on. They know where the potholes are, they know where the dangers are and they are trying to keep you from them. Christ lived this life and left us His Word for us to navigate the best way to do it. The beautiful part is that when we follow our parents who are following Christ, we trust Him to find us when we get lost on the road. He is the one that gets us to the destination we are going. In that life, there is no need to worry or fret, He is in control and you can have peace. You can love your parents well and, when the time comes, you can take what you learned and teach your children.

I pray for a long life for all of us so we can enjoy Him and further His Kingdom and raise up so many behind us with the flame of Christ that it would ignite everything they touch on fire.