Rob Morgan:Childhood is Good

A Pocket Paper
from
The Donelson Fellowship
______________

Robert J. Morgan
August 5, 2007

Today, I’d like to begin a series of summertime messages on the subject, “Life is Good!” This is a theme that comes across loud and clear in the Bible from the very beginning, for we read in the book of Genesis that God made the light and saw that it was good. He made the land and sea, and He saw they were good. He made the sun and stars and they were good. He made man and woman, and He said they were very good.

Even though in Genesis 3 sin and Satan entered the picture and tried to spoil God’s goodness, the word “good” keeps recurring throughout the Bible. In fact, it occurs too many times to recount—over 600 times.

The Psalmist said that goodness and mercy follow us all the days of our lives. The Gospels tell us that Jesus went around doing good and preaching the “Good News,” and on one occasion He said that if we, being evil, know how to give good gifts to our children, how much more will God the Father give good gifts to those who ask Him. James said, “Every good and perfect gift comes down from above, from the Father of Lights, from whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.”

I believe that God wants to bless us with His goodness and with His good blessings at every stage of life. He certainly wants to bless our children, and that’s the subject of my message today.

He primarily does that by placing them in loving families. For our text today, I’d like to direct your attention to Ephesians 6:4.

This is arguably the premier text on the subject of parenting in the New Testament. It’s only one verse, but it’s profoundly important. Let me say a word about the context. In Ephesians 5:18, the Bible tells us to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Be sold out to Christ, be devoted to Him, be filled with Him and with His Spirit. The text says:

Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead be filled with the Spirit. Speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Then the next verse tells us that one of the evidences of being Spirit-filled is having a submissive attitude. Spirit-filled people are concerned about meeting the needs of others. Look at verse 21: Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

And now the last part of Ephesians 5 and the first part of Ephesians 6 tells how this works out in the home, between husband and wife and between parents and children. And it’s in that context that we come to Ephesians 6:4, which is addressed to parents.

Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. (Ephesians 6:4)

Notice that this passage is addressed to fathers, and by extension to parents. The word Paul used here is γονεύς, which comes from a word meaning to generate. It is usually translated in the New Testament as father, but the lexicons suggest that this word has a broader meaning as parents. In fact, this is the same Greek word that is used in Hebrews 11:23 when it says, “By faith, Moses’ parents hid him for three months after he was born.” So here in Ephesians 6:4, it means parents, but with special stress on the father. In other word, it is the masculine form of the Greek word for parents.

Notice that it’s addressed to parents and not to churches. Now, churches certainly have a role to play when it comes to the spiritual formation of children. That’s why we’re excited about opening our Children’s Ministry Center. I want to reach and teach more children for Christ, and churches have been doing that for a long time.

I was telling someone the other day the history of the Sunday School movement. In the mid-1700s, just as George III and George Washington were battling it out during the American Revolution, there was a Christian newspaper publisher in Gloucester, England, named Robert Raikes who developed a burden for the children who lived in the city’s slums. The youngsters (some of them very young), worked long hours in the factories six days a week, and there was no provision made for their schooling.

Robert Raikes, a wealthy Christian publisher, hired a woman to teach these boys to read and write on their one day off—Sunday. He used his newspaper to promote his Sunday Schools, and the Christians and the churches across England caught the vision. Many of these schools were held in churches, and the Bible was the primary textbook. In the course of time, Sunday School became a major tool in many churches for teaching children the Bible.

It has been a tremendous movement, and I’m indebted to my own Sunday School experiences as a youngster. I learned my first Bible verses in Sunday School, and it was there and in Vacation Bible School that I learned the great stories of the Bible.

It was in Sunday School, as a teenager, that I began to have some opportunities to teach and preach on my own. So I love the Sunday School. But one of the unintended consequences of Christian education in the church is that sometimes we get the idea that the church is the primary place where children are to learn about God.

The Sunday School and church have an important part to play in the process, but they are not the primary places where children are to learn about the Lord. This verse does not say, “Churches, do not exasperate children but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” It tells parents to do it, with fathers taking the leading role.

And that is the consistent teaching of Scripture. The book of Deuteronomy established this without question in the Jewish culture—in the home, in the home, in the home—that’s where children are to learn about the Lord. We’re to talk about the Word of God when we get up and when we go to bed, when we stay at home and when you walk along the way. We’re to tell these things to our children and to their children after them.

Much of the book of Proverbs is simply made up of godly advice that a good father is sharing with his sons.

In the book of 1Timothy, Paul talked about Timothy’s spiritual heritage. Though He did not evidently have a Christian father, his mother and grandmother were women of faith, and from them he learned about the Lord and developed a spiritual foundation that served him all his life.

Here at TDF, our children’s ministries should supplement what children are learning in the home, but we can’t replace the home. So this verse is addressed to parents in general, and to fathers in particular. In this verse, we find three instructions for us as dads and moms.

Avoid Anger in the Home

First, avoid anger in the home. Fathers, do not exasperate your children.

In other words, do not treat your children in such a way as to cultivate an angry attitude within them. You know, there are so many angry people today; I’ve never seen so much anger. You see it at the airports and on the airplanes. You see it on television and in politics. But nowhere is anger more destructive than in the home, and if children grow up with angry parents, they’ll grow up angry. Years ago, I saw a comic strip. In the first panel, a man at work was being chewed out by his boss. In the next panel he’s driving home, and then, arriving home, he snaps at his wife. In the next picture, the wife is snapping at the oldest child, a son. In the next, the boy is snapping at his sister, and in the last panel, the little girl is kicking the dog.

There’s a pass-along effect to anger, but we don’t want to pass anger down to our children or to exasperate them. Now, all dads and moms sometimes become angry; I certainly did during our child-rearing years. Who wouldn’t? I was interested in something I read recently from Virginia Satir, a leader in the field of family therapy, who put it very well:

Parents teach in the toughest school in the world—The School for Making People. You are the board of education, the principal, the classroom teacher, and the janitor…. You are expected to be experts on all subjects pertaining to life and living…. There are few schools to train you for your job, and there is no general agreement on the curriculum. You have to make it up yourself. Your school has no holidays, no vacations, no unions, no automatic promotions or pay raises. You are on duty or at least on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for at least 18 years for each child you have. Besides that, you have to contend with an administration that has two leaders or bosses, whichever the case may be—and you know the traps two bosses can get into with each other. Within this context you carry on your people-making. I regard this as the hardest, most complicated, anxiety-ridden, sweat-and-blood producing job in the world.

There’s no way to avoid miscellaneous moments when your children get on your nerves, and there were certainly incidents in my own parenting years when I lost my cool. But by and large, I don’t think that I was an angry parent.

But if your anger is just below the surface, if you fly off the handle easily, if you’re always snapping at your kids, if you say hurtful things, if you are always walking around with a layer of anger around you—then you’re creating an environment in which your children will become exasperated.

Anger begets anger, but the Bible says that human anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires (James 1:20).

Proverbs 29:11 says that a fool gives full vent to his anger and a wise man keeps himself under control.

Proverbs 15:1 says that a gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.

Proverbs 17:1 says that it’s better to have a dry crust of bread with peace and quiet than a house full of feasting with strife.

So if you’re having anger issues in your own life, you need to get some help—perhaps seek some counseling. You can memorize some of those verses and check into anger management techniques and get some counseling; because anger in an adult creates an angry spirit in a child—and that violates God’s primary New Testament rule for parents: Parents, do not exasperate your children.

Provide Discipline for your Children

But here’s the counterbalance. That doesn’t mean that we should be so easy-going that we don’t provide meaningful discipline for our children. This verse goes on to say, (Parents), do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training…. And the Greek word here conveys the idea of discipline.

It’s the word: παιδεία (paideía), which is usually translated discipline, even to the extent of chastening.

Somehow that idea is out of vogue nowadays, but I’d like to read you something that Elizabeth Eliot wrote. I love Elizabeth Eliot’s books, and the other day at a book sale I found one I didn’t have. In it, she included a chapter on this subject, and it was so timely that I thought I’d read a portion of it to you.

Too many parents today hate their children. We saw it a couple of weeks ago, and in church at that. Lars and I attended a very small church where there was a very large number of small children. The creaking of pews, rustling of books and papers, dropping of crayons and toys and offering-plate nickels, talking, crying, and traipsing up and down the aisles for trips to the rest room all made it quite impossible to listen to the sermon. One child who was sitting with his father in front of us was passed forward over the back of the pew to his mother. Immediately he wanted daddy. Back over the pew again, headfirst into his father’s lap. In a few minutes, up to mommy. So it went.

A week later we went to a much larger church with over a hundred children present. They were quiet. We were amazed, and later questioned a couple who were members there. “We believe Christian parents should control their children,” they said simply.

Where did they get that idea, we wanted to know. Well, from the Bible. The book of Proverbs speaks repeated of the use of the rod. One reference is in chapter 13: “A father who spares the rod hates his son, but one who loves him keeps him in order.” (Elizabeth Elliot, All that Was Ever Ours (Tarrytown, NY: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1988), pp. 23-24.)

My father certainly had that attitude, and I remember him hauling me out of church more than once. Now, when we say things like this nowadays, it makes people uncomfortable because it’s not politically correct. We’ve stigmatized spanking, but look at what an undisciplined age we’re living in as a result.

Here’s the biblical approach. Self-discipline is one of the most important qualities we can ever develop. The Bible says that a person without self-discipline is like a city without walls. The devil can rush in and pillage and plunder at will. If you develop the capacity of self-discipline, it protects you from so many of the devil’s attacks. Satan has a hard time doing anything with a self-disciplined person.

But we aren’t born self-disciplined; and so one of the most important functions of parents is building a sense of self-discipline into their youngsters. There are many ways of instilling discipline into a child, and spanking should be rarely used. But the Bible does allow for it. Look at this passage in Hebrews 12:

In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood. And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons….

And now, the writer of Hebrews is going to quote from the Old Testament. Now, think about it. Here the writer of the book of Hebrews wanted to quote an Old Testament passage to encourage the Christians of his day who were going through a period of hardship and persecution. If you had to encourage someone who was going through a hard time, and you had to choose an Old Testament text, what would it be? The 23rd Psalm? The 40th chapter of Isaiah? The writer here pulls up a passage from Proverbs about a man spanking his son! And that passage was supposed to encourage them!

You have forgotten that word that addresses you as sons: My son, do not make light of the Lord’s παιδεία paideía (the same word Paul used in Ephesians 6—discipline), and do not lose heart when He rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those He loves, and He punishes everyone He accepts as a son. Endure hardship as παιδεία paideía (discipline); God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes παιδεία paideía—discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live! Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in His holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.

The is an amplification of Ephesians 6:4—we are to bring up our children in the παιδεία paideía or discipline of the Lord.

Nourish Your Children with Biblical Instruction

Third, we must nourish our children with biblical instruction: Parents, do not exasperate your children; instead bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.

Children need the Word of God, their hearts are hungry for it, and it needs to be written on their hearts at a young age. Jesus said, “Let the little children come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Ø Right now we’re raising a generation of watchers instead of readers. They’re more at home in front of a screen than in front of a book.

Ø We’re raising a generation of children who want to be celebrities instead of saints. A recent survey in Great Britain asked children what was the best thing in the world, and the #1 answer was being a celebrity.

Ø We raising a generation of children who are secular to the core instead of Christian in their thinking.

Whatever you can do to get the Word of God into your children’s minds—do it. The verses I learned in childhood have stayed with me all my life, but the ones I’ve tried to memorize recently don’t seem to stick as well. I’ve never outgrown the simple Bible stories I learned in Sunday School or the hymns I heard my mother sing as she did her housework. I’ve never forgotten my father reading his Bible or his buying copies for me at various points through my childhood. I think as parents we need to ask, “When was the last time I read the Bible to my children? When was the last time they saw me reading my Bible? When was the last time I helped them memorize a verse in the Bible? Is learning God’s Word as important to me and my children as their school work, their sports, or their other accomplishments?

We have a generation of children to save, they need the Lord and His Word, and there isn’t much time.

All of us were horrified this week as we saw the twisted remains of the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis, and without doubt the most poignant image was the picture of that school bus trapped amid the rubble.

Inside were 50 small children, some as young as four years of age. When the bridge collapsed, the bus evidently plunged 65 feet into the chasm, and was instantly engulfed in a thick cloud of smoke and dust. The children began screaming, “We’re going to go into the river. We’re going into the river!” The youngsters and their adult sponsors realized they were trapped inside that bus, and they could feel it beginning to slide down the bridge, closer and closer to the water. Just a few feet away, a tractor-trailer burst into flame. The main door of the bus was wedged closed, but there was an emergency exit in the back; and a 20-year-old volunteer named Jeremy Hernandez ran back there and opened the door, kicked out the coolers, and started grabbing kids and lifting them off the bus. Some of them didn’t want to go without their backpacks or towels. Others were trying to call their parents on cell phones. Others were paralyzed in shock and fear. He saved them all. Some of the children were hurt and bleeding, but only one required an overnight stay in the hospital, and people are calling it a miracle.

Our children need a miracle today if they’re going to grow up healthy and strong in our collapsing culture; but our God is a God of miracles and I believe He’s going to use our homes and our church to bring the little children to Him—if we obey His instructions and minimize anger within the home, provide godly and wise discipline, and teach them the Word of God.

Parents, do not exasperate our children, but bring them up in the nurturing discipline and in the instruction of the Lord.