The Power of Parenting and God's Guidance

I remember when our first son was born, we brought him home from the hospital and I can remember thinking how powerful this responsibility was, how overwhelming it really was, and I knew then that the life that this young child had in the future would depend a great deal on me and my wife, and I knew that God gave guidance and direction and that God was reliable, but that moment of time in which you stopped to say, this life is now mine and will be shaped by my life was a very powerful experience for me. In the Bible it tells us that the government is not the one responsible for raising children nor the laws of the state are responsible for producing a society of people as it ought to be. The Bible doesn't tell us that we must make sure that the schools teach the kind of things they need to so we'll have good citizens in our land. The Bible places fully the responsibility of producing citizens, good people, in the hands of parents, not even the church has that full responsibility, it's the responsibility of the parents. The primary principle or the law of parenthood is found in Proverbs chapter 22 verse 6, train a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not turn from it. In this passage is a promise about something positive, but there's also a negative promise about this too. The indication is that you train a child in the way they should go and when they're old they'll still remember it, but many of us can testify to the fact that whenever you learn things from your parents that are not necessarily good, they hang on to you too. For you grow up in a family and you watch what happens with your parents and you watch what they do and you listen to what they say and those things have a profound impact on us. We sort of take it for granted I guess. You are born into a family where they speak English, I don't know of a single child I've ever met that ended up speaking Spanish as a baby instead of English. You listen to what your parents say and automatically you begin to mimic or to practice exactly what you're hearing. You watch what your parents do and without even knowing it you begin to practice what they're doing. When the big election times comes for the president, they oftentimes will take the microphone into schools and go to fourth and fifth graders and say, who would you vote for as president if you were going to vote? And you hear those children repeat what you know that they've heard in their own homes around the dinner table. They don't have any idea about these people or who they are or what it means, but they've heard their parents talk about it and so it's truth to them. They believe it's real and they say it with all the convictions of someone who's studied the political issues carefully, even though they don't understand them. For what our parents do impacts us in a powerful and strong way. It teaches us the things that they do to be right and to be wrong. We don't think about it that way. We don't sit down and say, now today we're going to have a class here at home on how to do this or that or the other. Instead, they watch what takes place. My wife drinks coffee every single morning of the world. The coffee pot comes on before she ever gets up. She takes the coffee and it'll be in the bathroom on the counter. It'll be in the microwave. It'll be in some other room. Wherever she happens to be, there's always the coffee pot there, always the coffee mug. I tried coffee one time. It tastes bad. I never tried it again. It's through with it. So our children grew up in a home where my wife drank coffee. We went to visit some friends one time on a trip and we were getting dressed and one of our boys rushed into the room and he said with excitement and a little bit of puzzle, Mom, Dad, there's a man downstairs and he's drinking coffee. We didn't have a class saying coffee is a woman's drink at our home. We didn't have a class saying men don't drink coffee. But by the behavior in our home, he came to the conclusion that men do not drink coffee. And to find a man doing something that only a woman had the right to do was astonishing to him. What the Bible is saying is a very powerful principle about parenting. That is you will pass on to your children the things they see you do and the values that you hold. You can't help it. They will watch you. They will learn by what they see you do. And it will become to them a pattern of life and lifestyle. And if you're in a home in a family where you do things that are negative or evil or wicked, people learn to expect that as the norm. There's a lady one time who taught in middle school and she told me that after school started in the fall, they had a task of having all the kids to write an essay about what they had experienced over the summer. And one boy was trying to write his essay and she was trying to help him correct it. And it had to do with the fact that his uncle and one of his brothers had been arrested over the summer and put in jail. And that was what he was writing about. He was helping him and trying to get him to write this down. And he said to her, has your husband ever been in jail? And she said, no, he's never been in jail. And he said, well, has any of your family members been in jail? She said, no, none of my family members have ever been in jail. He seemed genuinely startled by that. And he said to her again, you mean none of your family has ever been in jail? She said, no. He said, I can't believe it. Now, nobody sat down with this kid and said, all families have people in jail. He just noticed that his family had people in jail, his cousins had people in jail. All of his family members somewhere or other had people in jail. Their behavior caused him to think that it was the norm for everybody in the world. It's the power of parenting, this principle or law that what parents do before their children, what families do before their children are ingrained in their mind and heart as the norm as to how a person ought to live. And so when you have a family where there is lawlessness that takes place, the children tend to think that's the normal mode by which you should live. We have a family where people get mad at each other and cuss and throw things and those children grow up, they think that's the norm as to how life ought to work. For you see, the practice that we have is embedded in the minds of those children and they think that's what we ought to do because that's all that they've seen done from the time they're babies until they begin to go to school and then they are sort of entrenched in one way of thinking. This is what the Bible is saying. If you teach a child from the very beginning of their life how they should live, they will live that way and think that way all the rest of their life. It's sort of a discouraging thing on that side of it to know that these negative things about us mark our lives all the way to the end. But the Bible also helps us to know that people's lives can be changed. That's what it means when it talks about being born again. It means that a grown person, an adult person, a child can come before God and say, I know there is something in my life that is not right. I want something different than what I have. And they can say to God, I want to surrender my life and its direction to you. I want to begin to learn how you want me to live and to put those things in practice. And a transformation can come. But every person who has come to that position later in life has found out how difficult it is to erase those messages and those thoughts and those behaviors that are so deeply embedded in their life. For you start trying to do the things that you know God wants you to do and you find that the thoughts and the ideas and the practices just come so naturally to you that growing to be more like Christ is very, very difficult. And the older you are when you come to make this transformation in your life, the more difficult it is to become a disciple of Christ because there is embedded in you all the things that you've been taught. Now that's a depressing thing when you think about all the people in the world who are trained in ways opposite of what God wants. But the Bible is giving it to us also in a very positive form. Train a child in the way he should go and when he's old he will not depart from it. It's a message God writes to his own people. Train a child in the way he should go. We don't know what the writer of Proverbs had in mind at this particular point, but we do know what they were teaching in those days. It was the law, the Old Testament. You look in the book of Exodus and there's the Ten Commandments. Moses gets ready to lead the people of Israel into the land of promise. He starts the book of Deuteronomy. It's a very long book, a message, a sermon of Moses. He begins the book of Deuteronomy by listing the Ten Commandments again. And then all the rest of the book of Deuteronomy, 30 chapters or more, takes one of those commandments and it will cover maybe two or three chapters where they tell exactly how you do honor God. What does it mean to honor your parents? And they give specific concrete examples about how in everyday life if you keep this commandment your behavior will be affected. What Moses was trying to do was to help them understand this is how you live out the promise that you've made to God. And the most important of all these, and many of the chapters in Deuteronomy cover only one of those commandments. That is the very first. You're to have no other God before me. No other God more powerful in your life than me. What this commandment means is that every Israelite was to come before God. Every male who was the head of the family was to come before God and say there is no God but you. You are the Lord and ruler of my life. And then you became a part of the Israelite nation. And every decision was to be shaped by what God wanted for you. This primary commandment was to guide your life. And how it was to happen was when the Sabbath day came and children got up it was different than the other days. They didn't go outside and play. Dad didn't go to work. They made everything carefully. They went to sacrifice. They went to the temple. They made this a day when they focused on God and that was the only thing. It wasn't that they taught simply to memorize that verse of scripture. By their activities they said this is a day when God is honored in our home. The commandments and requirements to honor your parents was lived out for them. People lived in sort of communes, you know, a family all together in one place and they saw how their parents treated their parents. They saw how their parents respected and honored their parents. They saw how their treatment was, the respect given to the father and mother who were the heads of the family until the day that they died. And the children never were, as long as their parents lived, able to say I am in charge. Always mom and dad were in charge. They saw what it meant to honor your father and mother by the way they treated their parents. What the Bible is talking about here is you are to live a life so that the things that God wants you to do are done in your life and that everyone in your family is to understand that decisions are made based on God's instructions to you. To live out this passage what it means is when your family goes to make decisions how they make them. If you are going to buy something do you say well I want to buy a house and I am going to buy whatever I want. I am going to look for a good deal, one that I like. Or do you make it clear to your family we are going to buy a home and we are looking for God's direction in this decision. We are going to talk to God about what He wants us to have. We are going to talk about how much we should spend. We are going to be careful to make sure that we follow God's direction and advice about the things we buy. Whenever you are angry and people have hurt you and your family knows about it they watch what you do. Do you lose your temper? Do you get angry? What do you say? They are watching to see what it is that you do because you are teaching them in that moment here is what you do when you are angry. They are looking at how husbands and wives relate to each other. What does it mean whenever your wife does something you don't like? What does it mean when your husband is not nice to you? How do you react to that? All of these are classroom times for the children. And what the writer is saying is if you will do the things that God wants you to do those will be deeply ingrained in the mind and heart of your child. Now it is true that most of the things that kids learn from us are everyday activities. But when we teach them about God and the rule that He has over our lives we have an extra special advantage. Your child may forget some of the things they learn in school about history or about math because it just depends on their minds and what they can remember. But you see when you teach them the things about God not only does it go to their minds but the Holy Spirit of God takes what you have shown them by your behavior and words and fastens it in their mind. And all of their life whenever a circumstance arises that they need that information the Holy Spirit of God will make that thought come alive to them and they will know what they ought to do. This is a promise of God. Not only in the ordinary sense that your children will learn how to live from how you live but that when you do the things that God wants you to do there is an added power of God to make sure that they never ever forget it. Our normal memory will forget some things but it doesn't have necessarily the presence of God to remind us. But the promise of God is that not only will the things you teach them about Him be retained in their head but He will make sure that they will have that all the rest of their lives. You see the task of changing the world is the responsibility of parents. To begin by saying this is who God is and by living in such a way so they will know what it means to submit to the authority of God in all the parts of your life. And it would be hopeless for us if we thought that only a child who has been raised in that environment has that opportunity but it's not true. For you see the Bible describes our relationship with God as a relationship of a father and a child because all of us are created by God. But that relationship of intimacy comes to reality and to fruit when a person says to God at some time in their life, I recognize that you are the ruler of all of the earth. I recognize that you have made rules by which I ought to live. I recognize that you have plans for me, my life, my home, my family. And today I want to acknowledge I will follow them. The moment that you make that kind of promise to God, the Holy Spirit of God comes into your life. Physically, spiritually, you and God are connected. For God's presence in your life allows you to see and understand things as God sees and understands them. When you read the Bible after this happens, the words will become more real and meaningful to you. When you begin to try to make choices, suddenly you will find the wisdom of God available to you. This relationship is now a relationship between a father and a child and he will begin this life of developing in you his very character and nature regardless of what's happened to you before. Now the very character and nature of God will become developed in you. God changes people. The power of our families always holds on to us. But once we surrender to the authority of God, then day by day he begins to shape us so that even those powerful holes can be changed and transformed by the strength and the power of God. What the Bible tells us is that as Christian parents, if we live with our child, with our children making the choices God wants us to, we give them a head start in this great task of living. For they begin to see from their earliest days what it means for God to be in charge of a family and to be in charge of a life and to be in charge of a home. And it builds within them the practices that will be ready for them when that day comes and they say, now I want God to rule my life. Already some of those things have begun to happen. They will have practiced them and now they will understand what they really mean personally. God makes a great promise, this fundamental law of parenting. If you live and practice obedience and submission to God, I will guarantee you, God says, that this will remain in the heart and life of the child the rest of their life. They may not obey it, but they will always know that it's there. They may actually rebel against it, but they will always know what's right. As a parent, you can say a lot of things, you can look at a lot of circumstances that you wish you might have handled in a different way. But if you've tried to live this life of obedience, God gives us the promise that those things that we've done in obedience to Him will never be lost. They will always have power. We live in a world where not everybody's a follower of Christ. We're having vacation Bible school this summer. We have activities that allow us to reach out in the community and children homes of people that don't go to church and don't have the influence that maybe some of us have had growing up in homes where our families made decisions based on God's instructions and obedience to those. We have an opportunity to change the lives and homes of people who've never heard Him. For if we can take them and for even one week teach them about God and live in their presence before God, live in their presence as a person who's obedient to God, they will see it. I talked to a woman one time who was troubled. She'd had a lot of problems in her life. People had abused her. She'd been in all kinds of immoral circumstances and situations. I was asking her about her life growing up and she said, well, my dad abused me and my uncles abused me and even my brothers abused me. It was a pretty bad life. She said, but we lived in a town one time where there was a church. I would get up on Sunday morning and walk to that little church. When I got in the church and walked in the door, I felt the peace that I'd never felt before in my life. I knew that there was some kind of life different than what I'd experienced. I knew that there was people who weren't like my parents and my cousins and my uncles. I knew that there was something that I wanted that was available in the world. You do not know if Christ controls your life. It becomes so normal to you that when people are with you, they sense the difference that you have. That's why when we have children in Vacation Bible School, we want you to be sure that you've committed your life to Christ, that you're asking God to give you guidance because when those kids come in those classes, we want them to sense the very presence of God that they may never see or hear at any other time in their life. Because God has made us a promise. If you will teach children what is right and who God is, they can never, ever forget it. Would you bow your heads, please, for a moment? The most important thing that the Bible teaches us is to live a life that is obedient to God. Becoming a child of God means that you say to Him, I now accept you as my Father, and I will live in obedience to you as any child should. This is the transformation of every life. If that's never happened to you, if you've never made that kind of promise to God, there is something in your life that is yet to be fulfilled. That's how God made us to be His children. You can today or at any time in your life stop and say, I believe, God, that you are who you say you are, and I want to say today that I'm going to live in obedience to you the rest of my life. The moment you say that to God, you will feel and sense a transformation inside of yourself. God will begin to teach you how He wants you to live, going to church, reading the Bible. All these things are critical and important for that to happen. But your life will change. If that hasn't happened to you, today it can. What God wants is for us to be able to serve Him faithfully. It means doing at all times what He wants for us. If today, in this time of service, God has reminded you of something in your life that He wants changed, it's time for you to say to God, Okay, I admit to you that I haven't done what you wanted. But today, I promise, you have full authority and control over my life. You may have a strange feeling that you're not used to, that you ought to leave your seat where you are and come to the front and make a promise to God. If you have that feeling, it's the Holy Spirit of God talking to you, saying, Here's what I want you to do. You will find the peace of your mind and heart when you do what God tells you. So this moment of quietness is a time for you to say to God, Is there anything you want in my life different?