God’s Pattern for Parents, Part 2

    • "And, fathers, do not provoke your children to anger but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord."

    • As God’s redeemed people we are called to be unique, we are called to be different.

    • In Leviticus chapter 18 when God established the standard of behavior for Israel

    • "You shall not do what is done in the land of Egypt where you lived, nor are you to do what is done in the land of Canaan where I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes. You are to perform My judgments and keep My statutes and to live in accord with them."

    • And God has maintained this desire for his people through all time. We are separate. The standards, the principles, the statutes, the commandments by which we conduct our lives before God in the family and before the world are unique.

    • This is not the message of conventional wisdom. This is not the message of political correctness. This is the Word of God.

    • And the place we have to begin is with the recognition that all children come from God. God gives them to us and then has given us the manual on how to raise them. Genesis 4:1, "And she conceived…that is Eve…and bore Cain and said, `I have gotten a man from the Lord.’"

    • Now the standard that is established here is not only unique in our society but it was unique in Paul’s as well. For example, just to illustrate what was going on in the world in which the apostle Paul wrote this, there was a Roman law called patria potestas, literally means the "father’s power." And under patria potestas a Roman father had absolute power over his family.

    • For example, a father could sell his children as slaves. A father could make them work in the fields in chains, if he wanted, and there are illustrations of this in ancient literature.

    • He could take the law into his own hands to punish his children. And he could even by Roman law execute his own children.

    • So Paul was writing to a world where children were abused and children were murdered, just like our world where they are slaughtered largely before they can ever come out of the womb by the millions through abortion.

    • Two hundred…pardon me, two thousand of such die, killed by their parents through burning, drowning, being thrown out windows, off bridges, killed with knives, hammers, razor blades, you name it.

    • Against that background of ancient Roman society and the background in which we live today, we hear the words of Paul, "And, fathers, do not provoke your children to anger but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord."

    • A study was conducted several years ago covering a span of years by sociologists Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck from Harvard and they identified after all of this study four crucial factors in predicting children who were not delinquents.

    • One, the father’s discipline, fair, firm and consistent.

    • Two, the mother’s supervision in the home, knowing where the children are all the time, knowing what they’re doing and being available to them.

    • Three, the parents unceasing affection demonstrated to each other and to the children frequently.

    • And fourthly, the family’s cohesiveness, time spent together.

    • That’s how the Word of God sums up what you don’t want to do, you don’t want to make your children mad, you don’t want to make them angry, you don’t want to make them hostile or bitter, you don’t want them to turn against you and all that you hold dear.

    • Provoke, you will notice, is used only here and in Romans 10:19, that term. And it means to irritate. It’s an intense form of "to make angry." Don’t do that which angers your children. Don’t do that which irritates them, provokes them, frustrates them, exasperates them or embitters them.

    • Los Angeles Times article from some years back said, "The eleven year old had slashed his wrists. `I want to go to heaven,’ he sobbed, `I can’t stand these stomach aches and being unhappy. If only I could die, it’s hard to live, living is horrible, I just want to die because nobody cares if I die so I just want to die.’"

    • A twelve-year-old girl hanged her doll by its neck, drugged her little sister, cut both her legs with scissors, slashed her wrists and overdosed on hypnotic drugs. "I would be better off dead," she explained, "then no one will ever have to look at my ugly face again."

    • eleven-year-old boy tried to kill his dog, attempted to suffocate his baby brother with a pillow, jabbed pins and needles into his stomach. And asked why, he answered, "Because mother doesn’t have any love in her for me."

    • Said one six year old, feeling emotionally rejected by his mother, "I want to die because nobody loves me."

    • An eleven-year-old boy preoccupied with death and the idea of joining his dead grandmother threatened to throw himself in front of a car, did so, beat and disfigured his face, didn’t die, finally jumped out of the window of a two-story building. He wanted to go to be with somebody he thought loved him.

    • You can turn your child into a tragic child, you can turn your children into a story like that. And it may not be because of what you do to them, it most likely will be because of what you don’t do to them and for them.

    • How can you provoke your child into tragedy? How can you provoke your child into anger? How can you get a bitter, sullen, antisocial delinquent?

    • Spoil him.

    • Give him everything he wants, even more than you can afford, just charge it so you can get him off your back.

    • hen he does wrong, nag him a little but don’t spank him

    • Foster his dependence on you. Don’t teach him to be independently responsible. Maintain his dependence on you so later on drugs and alcohol can replace you when he’s older.

    • Protect him from all those mean teachers who want to discipline him from time to time. And threaten to sue them if they don’t let him alone.

    • Make all of his decisions for him because he might make mistakes and learn from them if you don’t.

    • Criticize his father to him, or his mother, so your son or daughter will lose respect for his parents.

    • Whenever he gets into trouble, bail him out. Besides, if he faces any real consequence, it might hurt your reputation.

    • Never let him suffer the consequences of his behavior. Always step in and solve his problems for him so he will depend on you and run to you when the going gets tough and never learn how to solve his problems.

    • If you want to turn your child into a delinquent, let him express himself anyway he feels like it.

    • Don’t run his life, let him run yours

    • Don’t bother him with chores. Do everything for him then he can be irresponsible all his life and blame others when things don’t get done right.

    • And be sure to give in when he throws a temper tantrum

    • Believe his lies because it’s too much hassle to try to sort through to get the truth.

    • Criticize others openly, criticize others routinely so that he will continue to realize that he is better than everybody else.

    • Give him a big allowance and don’t make him do anything for it.

    • Praise him for his good looks, never for character.

    • You want an obsessive child, be critical, snobbish, domineering, legalistic. You want an accident-prone child, fight with each other, ignore the child and the child will hurt himself to get your attention.

    • But let me give you my own list here of how to provoke a child to wrath.

    • Ten ways. Number one, by overprotection…by overprotection. Fence them in, never trust them. Don’t give them the opportunity to develop independence. And deprivation will instill an angry mood. Parents must give children room to express themselves, to discover their world, to try a new adventure, gradually releasing them to live independently. Let the rope out. Overprotection frustrates and angers a child.

    • Secondly, you can do it by favoritism. Isaac favored Esau over Jacob. Rebekah favored Jacob over Esau. And the sad results are well-known. Don’t compare them against each other, they’re each unique. Love them the same without regard for each, without special regard for each, no respect of persons. If a child feels that you love another in that family more, that is a very, very frustrating experience.

    • Thirdly, you can cause a child to become angry by setting unrealistic achievement goals. Some parents literally crush their children with pressure, pressure to excel in school, pressure to excel in sports, in music, in any activity they do. And it really has little to do with the child and everything to do with the reputation that the parents want. This becomes very frustrating when the child has no sense of having reached a goal, no sense of having fulfilled an expectation. It leads to being angry and bitter.

    • You can frustrate your child to anger by over-indulgence, by giving them everything they want, by picking up after them always, by allowing them to throw all responsibility and accountability on others. You can exasperate them by letting them sin and get away with it so they learn to do that successfully. Ultimately when they face the world and people don’t serve them and don’t take all the responsibility for them, and for their misdeeds, they will get angry and bitter and violent.

    • Fifthly, you can exasperate your child by discouragement. And I think that comes in two ways…a lack of understanding and lack of reward because both of those destroy motivation and they destroy incentive. You must understand your children. Understand what they’re thinking. Understand what they’re trying to accomplish. Understand why a certain thing happened, why a certain behavior occurred, why a certain incident went a certain way. Grant them a listening ear and an understanding heart and reward them graciously and generously with love. Give them approval and honor and be patient with them or they get very defeated and discouraged. And that turns to anger.

    • You can provoke your children to anger, number six, by failing to sacrifice for them. In other words, by making the child feel like he’s constantly an intrusion into your life, constantly an interruption, always a bother. You want to do what you want to do, you and your husband want to go where you want to go, you just farm these kids out somewhere, leave them. Let somebody else take care of them. You’re not about to change your life style, you’re going to do what you want to do. You’re going to have your fun and your pleasure and the kids are just going to have to fend for themselves. Leave them, make them prepare their own meals; don’t take them places because you can’t be bothered with them. And they will resent your being uncaring, unavailable and self-centered.

    • Number seven, you can provoke your children to anger by failing to allow for some growing up. What does that mean? Let them goof up a little. Let them make mistakes. So they knock something over at the table, laugh it off. They just don’t quite have the manual dexterity yet, or the coordination. Give them a little job and if they do it in an unacceptable way but it’s a little bit of progress, commend them. Let them share some of their ridiculous ideas. Let them plan some silly things to do and do them. And don’t condemn them, just expect progress not perfection.

    • Number eight, you can provoke your children to anger by neglect. If there’s any biblical illustration of this it’s probably David and Absalom. David spent no time with him. No time shaping him and Absalom ultimately hated his father with a passion, tried to pull a coup to dethrone his father and take his place. Neglect, and the worst kind of neglect? Lack of consistent discipline. That’s the worst kind of neglect. I’m not talking about the neglect of time and things, I’m talking about the neglect of discipline. Teach them, discipline them, consistently using the rod in love.

    • Number nine, you can provoke your children to anger by abusive words. You understand that a little child has a very limited vocabulary and you have a very comprehensive one, verbal abuse is a terrible thing. A barrage of well-chosen words from your adult vocabulary can cut that little heart to shreds. And what is as devastating as anything are words of anger, words of sarcasm, or words of ridicule. Frankly we say things to our children we would never say to anybody else.

    • And then lastly, by physical abuse. An angry child is often a beaten, abused, over-zealously punished child, usually from an angry, vengeful parent who only cares that he has been inconvenienced or irritated, not that the child needs correction for his own good.

    • Turn to the positive with me.

    • "Bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord," or the nurture and admonition of the Lord, as the Authorized says. Bring them up. They won’t get there themselves, I might add hastily. You’ve got to bring them up.

    • Proverbs 29:15 says, "A child left to himself brings his mother shame." And that is what I told you earlier. It is not what parents do to children so much, although obviously if they do things that are abusive and painful it has effects. But it is what parents do not do that exasperates children, the lack of discipline, the lack of love, the lack of care. You must bring them up.

    • How do you do this?

    • I’m going to give you the key. Turn in your Bibles to Proverbs 4:23

    • Now what you have here is a clear cut divinely inspired statement that the issues of life come out of the heart. All the matters of life proceed from the heart. In Mark 7 and verse 21, Jesus said, "For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness as well as deceits, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness." All of these evil things proceed from within.

    • Now what you want to recognize with your child is this. You have a heart problem. You’re not dealing with behavioral issues, you’re dealing with the heart. In fact, let me go beyond that and say, behavior is not the crucial issue, changing your child’s behavior is not the crucial issue.

    • In fact, a change in behavior without a change in heart is nothing but hypocrisy; it is a sham because the sin and the rebellion is still there and is only delayed as to its expression. All behavior, all conduct is linked to some heart condition, some heart attitude.

    • First of all, to help the child understand that he or she has a very sinful heart. And that it is that inner corruption that rises to cause all evil words, thoughts and deeds. Parenting must target the heart. It cannot target the behavior or it is shallow and superficial.

    • And as I told you last time in our study, parenting, first of all, is redemptive.

    • One writer says it this way, "The world’s smallest battlefield is the child’s heart. And the conquering of it calls for all-out-hand-to-hand combat."

    • Your child’s heart is a battlefield where sin and righteousness are in conflict.

    • The problem with your child is not a lack of maturity. The problem with your child is not a lack of experience or a lack of understanding. Those will exacerbate the problem. But the problem with your child is a wicked heart.

    • So the goal of parenting is to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. The goal of parenting is not control. It’s not to get them under control. It is not to produce in them socially commendable behavior. It is not to make them polite and respectful. It is not even to cause them to conduct themselves in a morally acceptable manner. It is not to make them obedient. It is not to give you as a parent something to be proud of. The goal of parenting is not to get them to perform for your approval.

    • The goal of parenting is salvation and sanctification. The goal of parenting is to see your child saved from sin and its eternal wages and then to follow the path of sanctification.

    • Listen any objective less than that is only behavior modification. And frankly, Muslim children can be made moral and Muslim children can be made obedient. And so can Mormon children, on their way to eternal hell.

    • Train your child to understand temptation and resist it because the sins of greed and lust and selfishness and covetousness and indulgence dishonor God and pander a wicked heart.

    • You never use the rod as payment for sin. You use the rod as correction to avoid payment at the hands of God.

    • In Deuteronomy chapter 6 you have a very important formula given here for the raising of children.

    • The first thing you teach them is to recognize the true God and that He is sovereign.

    • Secondly, verse 5, teach them to love God.

    • hirdly, verse 6, teach them to obey God.

    • Then fourthly, teach them to follow your example.

    • And also, it is essential in bringing them up, verses 8 and 9, that they be reminded repeatedly about these truths

    • And then one other lesson. Teach them to be wary of the world around them.

    • With that in mind we go back to Ephesians 6 and we’ll draw this to a conclusion. In Ephesians chapter 6 here, a couple of key words. The first one, "Bring them up in the discipline…" The Greek word is paideia, it means to "rear a child." Involves training, instruction, learning. It is used also in Hebrews 12 verses 5 to 11 of chastening or disciplining. It essentially means training. It encompasses discipline.

    • The word "admonition," bring them up in the admonition or instruction is the word nouthesia. It has the idea of warning in it. And it takes us back to what we’ve been saying before. We have to warn our children that there are not only obviously physical consequences in the family to their behavior, but there are much more serious consequences from God.

    • Training…the word "training," or "discipline" may refer to what is done to the child in terms of discipline, but the word "instruction" refers to what is said to the child. It’s verbal instruction with a view to judgment. In other words, you must do this because if you do that, here are the consequences.

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