Provoke Not Your Children, Ephesians 6:1-4 (February 28, 2016)

Provoke Not Your Children, Ephesians 6:1-4 (February 28, 2016) 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 We have been looking at the subject of relationships all month long, and this morning we finish by looking at what the Bible has to say about parents and children. And while Paul does give specific instructions on this subject, mostly I think Paul is giving encouragement to both parents and children. And that s what I hope to do this morning as well. I thank God that in our church we have it seems to me parents who are very conscientious and want more than anything else for their children to grow up and love the Lord. But of course when you want badly for your children to turn out ok, when you want to be faithful in how you raise them, it is easy to get discouraged. It is easy to be fearful. My prayer is that this morning God will work among us so that those fears and anxieties will subside and that you ll see the most important truth of all for parents: that God loves your children more than you do, and he is faithful even with our children. Two points: first, Paul s instruction to children. Second, Paul s instruction to fathers. First, to children. The first thing to note is that Paul addresses children at all. You simply did not see this in the ancient world. Children were not considered important by the authority figures and culture-makers back then to even address, so that Paul talks directly to children at all tells us that in Christianity children are taken seriously, they matter, they are important. They are not to be ignored. At one point we read in the gospels how parents were bringing their children to Jesus so he could bless them, but the disciples started rebuking the parents, basically saying that you shouldn t bother Jesus with such important things. But Jesus then gets angry at the disciples, and says, Let the children come to me and do not hinder them. Mark 10:14. So, kids, you matter. You are matter to the only person who matters the Lord Jesus Christ. That means you should never be mistreated or abused or yelled at by anyone, including your parents. And it also means that your opinions matter, your thoughts matter, your insights matter. They may not be right; in fact, the younger you are the more likely they are not right you just don t have the wisdom yet. But because you are made in the image of God you do deserve the attention and respect of all adults, certainly including your parents. And Paul says there are two things, two duties, you owe your parents. And you do owe them; this is required of you. But I m going to encourage you think of these two things 2016 J.D. Shaw 1

as gifts, because when you do these things for your parents they probably won t receive them from you like you owed it to them, but they ll probably receive them like gifts. You ll make your parents overjoyed if you do these things for them, hopefully they ll show their joy, so think of them like wonderful gifts you can give them. Re-read verse 1: Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. The first gift you give your parents is the gift of obedience. It is hard being parent, it is stressful, it is a lot of work. And you can make life so much easier for them, you can serve them so well, if you will only do what they ask you to do the first time they ask you to do it. Of course, they should tell you to do things politely; of course, they should consider if you are currently doing something that s important to you and maybe the thing they want done could wait another twenty minutes. But often they won t, yet you should give them obedience anyway. You know why? You re not primarily giving them obedience for their sake, but for yours. Verses 2-3: 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. Now that promise that it may go well with you if you obey does not mean that if you are a good boy or a good girl then your life will be easy. It s not so much a positive promise but a negative one. This is like a lot of the proverbs in the book of the Proverbs. If you don t obey your parents, then it will not go well with you. In other words, Paul is saying here, Children, your only chance for things to go well with you in your life so that things may go well with you is if you obey your parents. Kids need above all else to learn self-control. No one is born with it; it is something you must learn, and at home with your parents is a safe place to learn it. You need to learn how to be self-controlled with people in authority because you re going to have to give obedience all through your life at school, with your teachers and coaches. At work, with your employers and supervisors. When you get pulled over, with police officers. And if you can t control yourself in those situations and give obedience to the proper authorities, it will not go well with you. You must learn to obey and learn self-control. Now of course you can obey your parents and still have a bad attitude about it. You can basically say to your parents, I ll do what you tell me to do, but I won t be happy about it. I ll scowl and give you the silent treatment and go to my room and pout and make life as miserable as I possibly can without technically disobeying you. I ll give you obedience, but I ll make it very clear I don t like it. Around the time I was in the fifth and sixth grade I think I mastered this technique. But Paul says that s not an option, because he doesn t just say Children, obey your parents, but he quotes from the Fifth Commandment and says, Honor your father and mother. It s not very honoring of your parents to obey them but then refuse to talk to them. So, you re called to give your parents the gift of obedience and the gift of obeying with a good attitude. 2016 J.D. Shaw 2

And all the kids say, That s really hard, J.D. I know it is. I was a kid once, too. But I want to urge you to continually look to the example of Jesus. Do you know what his Father in heaven told him to do? He came to Jesus and he said, Jesus, I want you to go down to earth and live a perfect life as a human being, then I want you die in the place of all mankind. I want you to die on a cross, and when you are hanging on the cross I will punish you for the sins of the world. Will you do that, Jesus? What did Jesus say? Did he say, Father, you want me to do all that for them? Those sinners who hate you and want nothing to do with you? Who break your laws every chance they get and continually hurt themselves and others? You want me to do that for them? No, Jesus obeyed his Father and he didn t just obey. He didn t say, Well, ok Father. He didn t pout or sulk. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Hebrews 12:2 (NIV 1984). I know it s hard to be a kid, I know life often feels unfair, but if Jesus could obey his Father with joy when the Father asked him to do all that for you, then if you fix your eyes on Jesus you can obey and honor your parents as well. One last thing: there does come a time when children no longer have to obey their parents. We never stop being the children of our parents, but the relationship does change as kids become adults, usually around the time they graduate high school and go off to work or college. We have a lot of people obviously in our church going through that change right now. The relationship changes, and parents must realize that it s no longer their place to command their children. Advise, yes; command, no. Yet, Christians have a never-ending obligation to honor their parents. Until they die, Christians must honor their parents, even if on occasion the children feel they must act against their parents wishes. That s easy with great parents. If you have great parents, honoring them will come naturally. You won t disagree with them much, if at all. But what if you had awful parents? What if you had mean, manipulative parents? What if you had abusive parents? You must still honor them. The commandment is honor your father and your mother, without condition. And it s going to look different depending on the family dynamics but here are three general ways you can honor even bad parents. First, keep them involved in your life. If there was real abuse you have to use wisdom here, but you can still call them, send them pictures of the grandkids, maybe (depending on how bad the relationship has gotten) perhaps even invite them to stay with you from time to time. Second, you can let them know that even though the relationship really was bad, you are thankful for some things. You know, if you had a father, for example, who was really hard on you and demanding of you, and it caused a lot of hard feelings, it s still possible to give him some credit, because you did learn something from him. You might say, You know, everything I learned about hard work I learned from you, and I really appreciate it. Few if any parents were 100% evil all the time there are some things your parents did or emphasized, if you are just willing to admit it, that you be grateful for. 2016 J.D. Shaw 3

Third, you must forgive them. I didn t have bad parents, I had a really good home environment, so I don t know how hard this is, but I can imagine it s really hard to forgive a parent who did terrorize you when you were a kid. And that s a terrible thing, because your parents are there to provide for you and protect you and keep you safe and love you. The one couple of the planet you most desperately want to hear is proud of you and smile on you is your parents. So when that doesn t happen, it is a great injustice, and it s incredibly hard to forgive. But if you don t forgive your parents the crazy thing is that even if you cut them out of your life they ll still wind up controlling you and hurting you. Did you know that? So many of the foolish and destructive things people do with relationships, with sex, with money, with their bodies can all be traced back to the bitterness they feel toward their parents. The examples are legion. Let s be clear what forgiveness is. Mimi and I used to live next to a woman who had an abusive father, and she said she would never forgive him for what he did because in her mind it would mean she was saying that somehow it was her fault or that all the evil he did doesn t matter. That s not forgiveness nor is it necessarily having a relationship with the person who hurt you. Forgiveness means seeing all the ugliness of the sin that committed against you, but refusing to remain bitter at the one who wronged you, for you see how in Jesus Christ God refused to hold your sin against you. Here s what you have to see. If you follow Jesus Christ you now have a Father in heaven who will perfectly protect you, provide for you, keep you safe from harm, and love you not that you will never experience pain and hurt and disappointment, but those hurts will not do you any ultimate or eternal harm. You have a Father in heaven who is determined to bless you and be far more for you than the best parents on earth ever could be. To the degree you really believe that, you will feel like you can afford to forgive your parents. You can let go of the resentment, and even if you can t have a relationship with your parents you can let go of all that anger and not let it warp your life. Second, Paul s instructions to fathers. The first thing to note from verse 4 is the Paul addresses fathers here, not parents. Paul could have said parents (because he uses the word for parents up in verse one), but he focuses on fathers. Mothers, just about all of what I m about to say applies to you, too, but Paul addresses fathers so that s who I ll primarily speak to as well. Now, why is it that Paul zeroes in on fathers? Probably because fathers are just more likely to check out when it comes to raising children. And what does Paul say to the fathers? Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger [the old KJV: wrath ], but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Ephesians 6:4. This verse is so incredibly dense. I almost want to apologize because this needs to be two or three sermons but it won t be. Paul tells fathers four things. First, Paul warns father against provoking your children to anger. What does that mean? It does not mean that 2016 J.D. Shaw 4

fathers must never make their children angry. That s impossible. Good parents will do things, regularly do things, that their kids don t like. Instead, it means this: fathers (and mothers), refrain from behaviors or family policies that unnecessarily frustrate your children. Some examples: 1) showing favoritism among your children will provoke a child. If you don t believe me, read the account of Joseph and his brothers from the book of Genesis (or go see Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat). Children are provoked when their siblings are favored over them. 2) Sarcasm will provoke a child, where your child is regularly subjected to this form of ridicule. You may honestly think you re just kidding around, but I guarantee you your child doesn t. 3) Deliberately antagonizing your children, especially your boys, to toughen them up literally provoking them to get them mad does it. Fathers, your sons don t need you to toughen them up the world will do that just fine. 4) Hypocrisy will provoke a child telling your child one thing and doing just the opposite. Do as I say and not as I do. I know one father who, when he caught his son with a can of dip, proceeded to sit his son down on the couch in their living room and lecture him on the evils of smokeless tobacco and then, as his grand finale, the father opened the can he confiscated from his son and took a dip from it himself. How do you think that lecture went over? 5) Withholding your love and affection from your children as punishment for some mistake they made or bad grade they got at school will provoke a child to wrath. 6) Finally, and it s a big one: never admitting your mistakes to your children. Never asking them for forgiveness. If you have never asked your children to forgive you for something, that s just about the most hypocritical and exasperating thing you could do, because you re for all intents and purposes telling your children that you are perfect, and of course that s a lie. So, what must we do instead? Second, Paul says instead fathers should bring [their children] up. The Greek word translated there as bring is literally the word for nourish. And this is how John Calvin translated verse 4: Fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but let them be fondly cherished in the training and instruction of the Lord. John Calvin! Not exactly known for being a cuddly, teddy bear kind of dad. Fathers, do you know what your children need more than anything else in the world (with the possible exception of food and water)? Do you know the one thing you can do that, more than anything else, will guarantee your kids grow into a happy, healthy, productive, well-adjusted adulthood? Cherish them, love them, and make it clear to them that they are important to you. Not that their skills are important to you (because then your children might think you love them because they are good at sports or pretty or good at school), but that the child is important to you, is a priority to you. Fathers, the essence of being a good dad is a matter of the heart not your child s heart, but your heart. That s where the battle of being a good dad is won or lost. Do you cherish your kids? Do you love them? More than your money, more than the doors you can open for them, more than anything else your kids need your love. Do they have it? 2016 J.D. Shaw 5

Or do you primarily view your children as a bother to you? As a hindrance to your happiness? That s how I viewed our kids, especially our oldest ones, when they were little. Until our oldest child was about five, I considered them to a great degree a hindrance to my happiness. I would look for reasons to get out of the house and away from the kids. I dreaded Saturdays, because that meant I d have to be home with them all day. I d go to the church and check the mail three times on Saturday. I d look for reasons to go to Wal-Mart I d beg Mimi to let me do the grocery shopping on Saturday, but of course she d been home with them all week long so there was no way she was going to let that go. Do you enjoy spending time with them? And not, by the way, spending time with them doing things you like to do but doing things they like to do. If you like baseball, and you throw the baseball with them all the time, but they don t like it, that s a problem. That s not cherishing your children. Instead, do you find yourself regularly doing things they like to do and you don t particularly care to do? Are you regularly sacrificing the things you d rather do to do the things they want to do? That s the sign of a father cherishing his kids. Being a good father (and a good mother, of course) is all about the heart. We spend a lot of time at Grace studying the Bible in our worship services, and when we do we typically pick a book of the Bible and work straight through it. So, this series on relationships is definitely the exception, not the rule, at our church. And I know sometimes you have to be frustrated, and wish that we d do series like this on practical, felt needs (like marriage, money, parenting, dating, work) more often. In fact, I may be in danger of provoking you to anger because I m not going to get very practical in this sermon. I m not going to give you any techniques or quick tips to use on your wild three-year old. I would have hated a sermon like this at one point in my life. I know that, I understand that, but if you do feel like you need more practical help on how to handle your kids and you don t have anyone to turn to, then call us during the week, fill out the tear off tab, and we ll make an appointment. We ll get real specific one-onone in the details of how to practically apply everything we re talking about today. But believe it or not you need to be taught the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation (and not just the parenting verses) to work on your heart so that you can be a good father and a good mother. It s all about the heart. See, if we just came up on a Sunday and gave you techniques on how to be an effective father but we never addressed the heart, I promise you d mess it up. You d take those techniques and apply them to your kids, and maybe their behavior would improve, but they would know: the heart behind these new techniques hasn t changed. Daddy still doesn't really love me, and that s what they need. You d be like the dad in Mary Poppins. Remember him? He comes home from work at the beginning of the movie and sings: I run my home precisely on schedule, at 6:01 I march through my door. My slippers, sherry, and pipe are due at 6:02, consistent is the 2016 J.D. Shaw 6

life I lead. It s 6:03 and the heirs to my dominion are scrubbed and tubbed and adequately fed; and so I ll pat them on the head and send them off to bed, ah lordly is the life I lead. Yes, the house runs on schedule but he s totally clueless about the kids (because in this part of the movie they re missing) and doesn't really love them. But see, the dad in Mary Poppins isn t really a bad guy, but what if you are a bad guy? What if biggest need in your house is not obedient children but a radical change of your heart? If we only give you little techniques to make your children obey you then we d be accomplices the destruction of your children s lives. When you give mean fathers techniques to make their children obey the fathers wind up being strict where God is merciful (majoring on the minors, making big deals out of nothing) and merciful where God is strict (winking at sins that don t really bother the dad), and the result is (as one pastor puts it) these dads are busy populating the strip clubs of the future with their dancers and customers. Plus, if you never see that parenting is really about your heart and your child s heart, you ll never pray for them, and that s what your children desperately need. Paul Miller: It took me seventeen years to realize that I couldn t parent on my own. It was not a great spiritual insight, just a realistic observation. If I didn t pray deliberately and effectively for members of my family by name every morning, they d kill one another. I was incapable of getting inside their hearts. It didn t take me long to realize I did my best parenting by prayer. I began to speak less to the kids and more to God. It was actually quite relaxing. It really is all about the heart. Third, Paul says in verse 4 to bring them up in the discipline of the Lord. Paul says being a good father (again, or mother) does require bringing discipline into your child s life because children, particularly little children, don t have the self-control they need to survive. They must be taught to obey; it doesn t come naturally. They must be taught not to run out into the street in front of cars. So you must discipline your children in other words, bring just enough unpleasantness into their lives to help them change their behavior or go in a different direction. And this unpleasantness can include spanking it certainly involved corporal punishment in the ancient world. It means spanking at the Shaw house. But it doesn t have to include spanking that s not mandated in Scripture. And if you ask, Well, what about all those verses about applying the rod of discipline in the book of Proverbs? The word translated as rod literally means a small tree one or two inches in diameter. Have you ever seen footage from Thailand or Burma of someone being caned? That's what the rod was in biblical times. It was a caning, and it was applied to the back of the person, not the backside. So, obviously, when the Bible talks about applying the rod to a child, it doesn t mean caning your three year old for disobedience. The rod is a metaphor for discipline as a whole, and the discipline, the unpleasantness, can take a variety of forms. But here s the key: it is the parents responsibility to discipline their children so that they understand and obey when you say, No. So that they learn self-control and obedience. 2016 J.D. Shaw 7

And fathers are to bring them up in the instruction of the Lord. We must teach our children not just how to hunt and fish, not just how to play the piano, and not just their multiplication tables and state capitals, not just a strong work ethic, but we must teach them the Bible and teach them to pray. We must put a higher premium on teaching them the Bible and prayer than on anything else. This of course means that fathers need to make sure their children involved in a church that teaches them the Bible, but it also means that fathers must themselves teach their children the Bible and how to pray. Fathers, one of the biggest ways, believe or not, you can exasperate, provoke your children to anger, is by having your children in church yet never providing instruction in the Lord at home. When that happens, children get a very dangerous message they think you re saying to them, Going to church is something good people do, it s the proper thing to do, but nobody really believes all that stuff we talk about at church. Yes, at church we say Jesus died for our sins and our lives now belong to him, but no one really believes it. Outside of church we live by a different creed. Fathers, you raise hypocrites when you take your kids to church but fail to personally provide instruction in the Lord at home. It is incredibly frustrating to them. Your children need to see this matters to you, that it s important to you. The best way they will learn the Bible and prayer is through your example. In fact, I wonder if we as parents have the guts to go home and ask our children one question (they ll have to be at least 9 or 10 before they can really answer you, but here it is): Honey, what do you think is most important to daddy? What do you think is most important to mommy? What do you think they d say? If the Lord Jesus isn t somewhere in their answer, there s a problem. See? It all comes back to the heart. You can t get away from it. And that gets us to the last thing: fourth, Paul says, Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up The goal of being a parent is to bring your children up into independence so that they are prepared for life in this world, of course, but also and most importantly life in the next. You see, in heaven, our children will not be our children they will be our brothers and sisters, for God has no grandchildren. This phase in which we treat these creatures made in the image of God as children is very brief just eighteen years or so, and the last several years we do a lot of letting go and allowing these individuals to make decisions on their own. And of course that s a terrifying thought. What if they screw it up? What if they make foolish decisions? Guess what you did, too, and you re here, aren t you? Here s what you need to know: for Christian parents, there is grace upon grace. You are going to blow it so many times as a parent, but if you know you need God s grace and you rely on that, your kids will know it, and God will bless it. Just this morning Mimi told me her prayer every morning is, God, please give me the grace to be nice to my kids 2016 J.D. Shaw 8

today. But you know what God is so good at and is so faithful in? Giving grace to parents who want desperately to love their children and bring them up in the discipline and instruction from the Lord. And you know what? One hundred billion years from now we will sit around the throne of the Lord Jesus Christ, lost in wonder, love, and praise, with these people who on earth were our children, and now are our brothers and sisters, and you know why we ll be there? God s grace. To him be all the glory. Amen. 2016 J.D. Shaw 9