Sermon Transcript
Well, good morning, everybody. Why don’t you go ahead and take out your Bible or the message note sheet that you got when you came in, or your tablet, or whatever you’re going to use to follow along with us today. We’re finishing up a series that we started a few weeks ago on the family, and we’re in Colossians, the book of Colossians. We’ve been teaching through that book this year, but we’re in Colossians chapter 3, we’re at verse 21. We’ve been taking a verse a week the last 4 weeks, or actually 4 Sundays.
We had one in between where we celebrated coming back into this building. But we already talked about the matter of a wife and her responsibility. We talked about a husband and his responsibility. Last week we talked about children, their responsibility. Today we talk about parents, their responsibility.
So just to even introduce that, some of you already, like I mentioned last week, are ready to check out. Well, let’s see. I’m not on the parent list, so I’m okay. I’m gonna get out of here, at least mentally. I’ll at least sit there, Dave.
You think I’m here, but I’m not really here right now. But let me just again just say what I said last week. You know, for every one of us, there’s something in what we’re gonna be talking about this morning. If nothing else, just so you know how to pray for parents, okay? And I’m sure some of you that are students or children or teens or young adults, wherever you are in this whole thing, You know, your parents really need your prayers, and you need some perhaps understanding with regard to this whole parenting thing.
And so this is going to be helpful to you if you’re a child who’s in the home. At the same time, if your children are out of the home, there’s something here for you this morning. If you don’t have children, you’re not married, maybe someday you will have children, you will be married, so we’re going to talk about something that could be helpful in into the future. But we’re all called to disciple others. And so even as disciplers, mentors to others, we want to do what we can to know these matters so that we can be helpful to other people.
So everybody this morning can benefit by what we’re going to talk about. And the focus this morning is on not embittering our children or not exasperating our children, because if we exasperate or embitter our children, they can become discouraged. And I don’t think there’s a child here this morning who would enjoy being discouraged, or maybe you feel discouraged right now and it’s directly connected to your parents. So this isn’t something that God wants, and we want to learn what we can from the passage this morning so that we don’t end up embittering or exasperating our children. When I think about this exasperating or embittering children, there are celebrities that come to mind, or there are people that, you know, got a lot of press.
For instance, I think about Jennifer Capriati and Todd Marinovich. There are others. This goes back a few years, but if you followed the story of Jennifer, Jennifer was brought up to be a tennis player. From age 5, she was pushed by her dad in that direction. At the age of 14, she signed a $6 million endorsement contract, and then she began her professional career.
Her father just relentlessly pushed her. He didn’t allow her to be involved in social activities that a typical teen adolescent would want to be involved with. Ultimately, at the age of 16, so 2 years after she signed the professional contract, at the age of 16, she was a burned-out, exasperated teenager who stopped playing tennis. She gave in to drugs, shoplifting, and binge eating, and really her life fell apart. Now, she was like that for a period of time.
She was able to get back into the sport, but She was never the same. I think also about Todd Marinovich. Todd’s dad, Marv, wanted his son to be a superstar football player, so from the beginning he put a football in the kid’s crib even when he was just a baby. Before he could walk, Todd’s father Marv had Todd doing push-ups and also playing around on the balance beam. That’s interesting.
He also teething on a frozen kidney. That just seems like abuse from a parent’s perspective, you know? You’re giving your— yeah, hey, here, kid, why don’t you teethe on this kidney? It’ll probably help you grow up to be strong like me. But anyway, so Todd grew up under this sort of tyrannical training from his father.
His father hired experts to work on every aspect of Todd’s physical condition: his speed, his agility, his strength, his flexibility, his quickness, his body control, his endurance. And his nutrition. So he had all these experts working with him. His diet as a kid was restricted. He never ate Big Macs, which might have been okay, but he didn’t allow him to eat Oreo cookies either, or Ding Dongs and all the rest of that stuff.
When he went to birthday parties, he took his own cake, he took his own ice cream to avoid sugar and refined white flour. He only ate ketchup that had been prepared with honey. He ate only unprocessed dairy products, and all of that evidently paid off, at least during his high school years, because as a senior he was the most outstanding high school quarterback. In his senior year, he threw more— for more yards than Jim Kelly, Dan Marino, or John Elway. But when he got to the pros, he washed out.
He never made it. You know why he never made it? There are a number of reasons people will talk about and speculate on all of this, but many people connect it to his tyrant, fanatical father’s behavior. It evidently finally got to him. Even his father later said, I suppose it was a little overdone.
Well, maybe. So anyway, when I look at this passage, Colossians chapter 3 and verse 21, this is addressing that crazy-making approach that some parents can take. Where it says, Fathers, do not embitter your children or they will become discouraged. Let me just ask you a question. Do you know anybody who’s living in a home and that home is discouraging them right now?
Do you know any children that are discouraged, who have lost heart, who are embittered, who are exasperated? Does that ever happen in the Silicon Valley, that drivenness to be more, to do more, to accomplish more so that you might have more? Does that ever happen around here? If you ask me, if it’s happening anywhere, it’s happening here. I really believe that.
I mean, when you see the crazy-making behavior that often manifests itself through our homes, it is really tragic. I don’t know how else you explain the high rate of suicide that is around us in this community. Now, the question you want to ask is, what embitters children? What is it that causes them to lose heart? How do they end up discouraged?
And obviously, there’s a connection here directly to who? To who? Say it. To fathers. To fathers.
Colossians 3:21, fathers.
Actually, when you look at the word that’s translated there, it’s a word that could refer to parents, to parents. It’s the same word that’s found in Hebrews chapter 11, verse 23, where it says Moses’ parents, and the word parents is the same word that’s found in Colossians chapter 3, verse 21, but it’s translated fathers. So, it could be that this has amazing amounts of application to mothers as well. You’ve got to believe that. But why fathers?
Well, evidently, those who were translating it perhaps felt that the father had more of a propensity toward exasperating children. You know, talk about that among yourselves. You can decide that. All we know is that there is a direct connection potential here to how the child is raised, to how the child is parented. And the end result could be that the child ends up embittered or exasperated, and that leads to discouragement.
So how do you look at it? I mean, what causes that to happen? What I want to do is I just want to look at 2 fathers that this happened in their homes, okay, that the children ended up discouraged, they ended up embittered. They ended up angry. We’re going to first of all look at Saul.
You heard of King Saul? If you got your Bible open, you might flip over just for a moment to 1 Samuel, to 1 Samuel chapter 19. King Saul was the first king to reign over Israel. David, you’ve heard of David before. David came along during the reign of Saul and he slew Goliath.
Do you remember that whole story? This little kid David. And, and what came out of that was an almost jealousy from King Saul toward David. There was a saying that people developed that, uh, David has slain his tens of thousands and Saul his thousands. And so there was this relational challenge, we might say, between David and Saul.
And Saul evidently didn’t have, you know, kindness in his heart toward David on one particular occasion, which is penned here in 1 Samuel chapter 19. It says in verse 10, Saul tried to pin him, that’s David, to the wall with his spear. That’s a strange way to treat a houseguest, wouldn’t you say? He tried to pin him to the wall with his spear, but David eluded him as Saul drove the spear into the wall. That night David made good his escape.
So, David found a way to to get out of there. Now, you might not think much of that, except when you get over to 1 Samuel chapter 20, you see that Jonathan, Saul’s son, is trying to do what he can to smooth the relationship between David and Saul, to, you know, get Saul to back off in terms of his anger toward David. And it says this in 1 Samuel chapter 20, verses 30 through 34, Saul’s anger flared up at Jonathan. Saul’s anger flared up at Jonathan, his son, and he said to him, you son of a perverse and rebellious woman! Don’t I know that you have sided with the son of Jesse— that’s David— to your own shame and to the shame of the mother who bore you?
As long as the son of Jesse lives on this earth, neither you nor your kingdom will be established. Now send and bring him to me, for he must die. So Jonathan is told by his father, go get David, we’re going to kill him. And Jonathan asked, why should he be put to death? What has he done?
But Saul, verse 33, hurled his spear at him to kill him. Evidently, this was his, you know, go-to behavior when there was a problem in relationships. He hurled his spear at him to kill him. Then Jonathan knew that his father intended to kill David, and Jonathan got up from the table. So, this is evidently You know, around the dinner table.
You talk about a bad dinner evening as a family. Jonathan got up from the table in fierce anger on that 2nd day of the month. He did not eat because he was grieved at his father’s shameful treatment of David. What’s that a picture of? Well, we’ve seen this.
Some of us have seen this in our own homes, or maybe we’ve been at somebody’s home, or maybe this was a part of the home that you grew up in. Where around the dinner table a parent exploded, and the result was that somebody got up from the table and said, I’m out of here. You went to the room and just to get out of there. The whole dinner turned into a nightmare, or maybe you walked out of the house, and in some cases it’s this kind of behavior that leads to a person walking out of the house and out of the lives of the parents for good. And so what you see here is Jonathan is grieved.
He’s grieved. He’s discouraged by his father’s behavior. His behavior has changed his conduct. And how does that happen? Well, it happens on the one side— we’ll just talk about 2 extremes here from the Scriptures— it happens from an angry father.
It happens from an angry parent. It happens from a parent who physically— in this case, it was physical, who took a spear and wanted to thrust it through this person. Sometimes it happens because of a slap. Sometimes it happens because of a fist. You name it.
It could be not just physical abuse, it could be verbal abuse. In this case, Jonathan is verbally abused by his father, by what his father says to him. In some cases, a father or a mother will say things to a child that slams them and curses them and says things like, you’ll never amount to anything, and nothing good is ever going to come in your future. Count on it. Or it could be just an emotional abuse where the parent distances themselves from their kid.
They abandon their kid. They are unempathetic, or in this case, they don’t want to understand. Jonathan just tried to have a conversation to make sense of this. Does this make sense? Does this make sense that you would go after David in this way?
This is— this is not right. Angry parents can embitter their children. Now, is that a biblical approach? No. The anger of a man, we’re told, the anger of a man does not achieve— what?— the righteousness of God.
You want to see your children blossom? It’s not going to happen through your angry parenting style. That’s not going to do it. James, chapter 1, verse 20. Don’t even go there.
So, on the one extreme we have the angry parent that can embitter or exasperate a child who ultimately ends up discouraged. On the other extreme, you have David, King David. What do we know about David? We know he exasperated his kids. In fact, if you look at his family, he had evidently 20 sons.
It’s kind of hard actually to know how many sons he had, but he had 20 sons, and he had these 20 sons through many different wives. His first 4 sons were Amnon, Daniel, Absalom, and Adonijah. If you look closely at the account, you find out that not one of those sons is born to the same mom. They’re all born to 4 different wives that David had. Now, that would be an interesting discussion.
We could spend the rest of the time talking about that this morning, but we won’t. But let’s just walk through just a couple of factors related to the sons. There’s Amnon. Amnon’s the first son. Amnon ended up raping his half-sister Tamar.
Now what’s interest— of interest to this, besides the fact it was terrible and that Amnon raped Tamar, is how King David responded to Amnon, how he responded to this situation. We’re told this in 2 Samuel chapter 13, verse 21. When King David heard all of this, he was furious, which you can understand. And hopefully, maybe it would lead to some kind of, you know, work in the relationship, some kind of resolution, some kind of discipline or something. But that’s it.
That’s all you get. He was furious. And then it says, Absalom never said a word to Amnon. So, this is the 3rd son. The 3rd son is upset at the His brother, the first son.
He never said a word to Amnon, either good or bad. He hated Amnon because he had disgraced his sister Tamar. He hated him. The implication here is that something should have come from David toward Absalom and Amnon, some kind of response on the part of David to handle this rape situation. But nothing ever comes.
So ultimately what happens is Absalom, and this is where the story gets really tragic besides the fact that it’s already tragic that there’s been rape in the family, Absalom ends up nursing this grudge that he has toward Amnon, his brother, until he finally, Absalom finally explodes and he orchestrates Amnon’s murder. So Amnon is murdered. How does David respond to Absalom who set this whole thing up? How does he respond to Absalom or Amnon’s death? We’re told in 2 Samuel 13:37, Absalom fled, so he got out of town, and King David mourned for his son every day.
That’s he mourned for Amnon. But then it says, and the spirit of the king longed to go to Absalom, that’s the 3rd son, for he was consoled concerning Amnon’s death. So he wanted to do something. He wanted to in some way console Absalom or talk to Absalom about what had happened, but the passage says he never did. And for the next 3 years, David was an absent parent, an absent parent, and doing anything about this situation, the situation that started with Tamar’s rape that ends up with Absalom leaving town, walking away from the family and the relationship and all of that.
3 years after that, David’s general Joab does what he can to try to put the relationship back together, so he arranges for Absalom to be brought back to Israel. He came back to Israel, and you’re thinking at this point, so now David’s going to fix the relationship, right? He’s going to do something. Answer: no. It says in 2 Samuel 14:28, Absalom lived 2 years in Jerusalem without seeing the king’s face.
So in other words, put it together, it’s 5 years, 5 years there’s a rift in this relationship, and David does nothing. Eventually that led to all kinds of problems in the family. It also led to all kinds of problems in the kingdom. Absalom started a movement to start his own kingdom. People started following Absalom.
Did David do anything at that point? No, basically he moved out of town. As David’s reign decreased, Absalom’s reign increased. But then you end up with this comment in 1 Kings chapter 1, verses 5 and 6 regarding the 4th son, Adonijah, where it says, now Adonijah, son of David and Haggith, was promoting himself, boasting, I will be king. He managed to acquire chariots and horsemen as well as 50 men to serve as his royal guard.
And then it has this parenthetical statement. It says, now his father, that’s David, and watch these words, his father had never corrected him.
He had never corrected him by saying, why do you do such things? Then it has this comment, he was also very handsome and had been born right after Absalom.
So what’s David’s deal? ‘Cause he’s exasperated his children, he’s embittered his children, his children are angry against him. I mean, they’re basically walking away from the family, they’re starting their own kingdom. What’s David’s deal? There was some anger, yeah, but the bigger problem here is his absenteeism.
He was a passive parent. So on the other extreme here is the passive parent. You got the angry dad, which is Saul, And then you’ve got the absent dad, which is David. Neither are right. Neither are going to end up with exasperated, discouraged children, embittered children.
The 2 extremes of destructive parenting. One is a driven parent, one is an overreactive parent. One is an intense parent, one is the parent who’s in your face.
And the other is the passive parent, The under-reactive parent, the too-far-removed parent, the, well, it’ll all work out parent. And of course, the last thing you want to do is exasperate or embitter your children. So obviously, neither of these approaches is the approach that we as parents want to take. Now, what’s fascinating about this as you think about it is all of us tend to have a a propensity toward one side or the other. You, if you’re a kid, you already know where your parents are on this thing.
You guys got this figured out. I was more toward the angry side. I would have a tendency to have a temper. So the best illustration I can give you, you’ve probably heard the story, is the time that we were all out as a family doing yard work. That, first of all, is a dumb idea.
But anyway, so I learned that after this whole situation. But we were all out there to do yard work because it was the yard day, and I hated doing yard work. So I just wanted my family to hurry up and get out there. Let’s get this job done because I hate doing this job and you’re going to hate it too. And so all the rest of that.
And they didn’t get out there and do it fast enough. So I elevated my voice and I got angry. This wasn’t about them, this was about me. It was how I was gonna handle the situation now. In the scheme of things, how important is doing yard work?
Come on, in the scheme of things on a scale of 1 to 10, what do you think? If 10, you know, is like really important, how important is yard work on a scale of 1 to 10? Some of your students are saying it’s about a half, you know, a 1 or something. That’s why I don’t wanna really do yard work, whatever it is. But, you know, I mean, and thinking back on this, maybe it was a 2.
I don’t know, maybe somewhere around there, but it certainly wasn’t an 8 or a 9 like how I responded. I basically hurt my children because of how I raised my voice and the things I said out there on the driveway when they weren’t moving fast enough and quick enough and picking up all the stuff good enough and all the rest that went with that whole thing. And I remember a couple years after that, Bernice and I were doing a marriage checkup with a counselor. And we started talking through different situations, and we talked about the tendencies that we have, me to being angry and Bernice in some ways to be passive. She was never absent, never absent.
But so we’re talking about these tendencies anyway, the counselor looked at me and he says, you know, it’s interesting because, and this is where he helped me understand this, he said, let’s just take the driveway situation, the lawn thing. You responded, let’s say, with an 8. I’m gonna be graceful to you here. Okay, it was an 8, maybe, probably it was a 9, but anyway, so it was an 8. And he said, and what do you think it should have been?
I said, well, probably maybe somewhere around a 2. He said, okay, and then he drew a circle between the 2, the 8 and the 2, and he wrote this word, W-H-Y question mark, why? And that is a good question, isn’t it? I mean, what is it in me that wants me to get down on my kids with that kind of anger? There’s something going on there, and ultimately, if a parent keeps going in that direction, it is going to discourage the kids.
It’s not gonna blossom them to become the people that God made them to be. It may end up turning them against you so that the relationship is completely lost. On the other hand, you’ve got the absent parent, the parent that says, well, you know, I really don’t wanna talk about this. I mean, this is too difficult for me to talk about this. Yet at the time, the pornography problem needs to be talked about, and the, you know, anger problem needs to be talked about, and the lack of responsibility needs to be talked about.
But the approach is, it’ll just— well, we’ll just sweep it under the carpet because we don’t want to make an issue out of this. Are you kidding? And so we don’t deal with it. And ultimately, that can end up discouraging a child as well. Do you really care?
Are you really going to help me? I mean, you’re always away on a business trip. Do we ever have time to just be able to get together and just talk about these things? You see, what Colossians chapter 3, verse 21 is going after is the problem in parenting, the problem that parents ultimately can have, and that is to discourage their children by embittering them. None of us, if we’re parents, none of us— please hear this if you’re a child— none of us as parents want to discourage you, and none of us want to exasperate you, and none of us want to embitter you.
So what’s the solution to this? Well, it’s actually not found in Colossians 3:21, is it? The solution is found in Ephesians 6:4, which is the parallel passage if you want to just flip over there or see it on the message note sheet, where it says, Fathers, do not exasperate your children. So essentially he’s saying the exact same thing there. He uses the word exasperate instead of embitter, same concept.
But then he says instead, okay? So instead of taking this approach, instead of taking the angry, absent approach toward parenting, and there are a number of other factors that would exasperate children, but You get the idea on extremes here. Instead, he says, bring them up in the training— that is, discipline, some translations— in the training and instruction of the Lord. So instead of using destructive parenting through anger and absence, use constructive parenting through training and instruction. Instead of discouraging your children, Use parenting styles that will encourage your children.
And encouraging your children is found on the side of properly instructing them and properly correcting them. Now, Paul took that approach evidently to the church at Thessalonica, and I just want you to see this, and then we’ll say a comment or two about this verse, Ephesians 6:4. But in 1 Thessalonians chapter 2, verses 11 and 12, Here’s how he dealt with people he considered to be his children, his spiritual children. He says, for you know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his children. Men, if you want a great example of a father and how to best do this fathering thing, here it is.
As a father dealt with his children, encouraging, comforting, and urging, you to live lives worthy of God who calls you into his kingdom and his glory. You talk about constructive parenting. There it is, encouraging. Instead of the children ending up discouraged, this is a father who lifts up his children by his words, by his words of encouragement. Think, think for a minute.
Would your children say, my dad is an encourager? My mom is an encourager. And comforting, what’s that? If there’s some pain in the family, if there’s an emotional trauma, whatever it is, instead of buck it up, words of comfort, words of empathy, words of understanding, encouraging, comforting, and then urging. And this urging is along the lines of You could do better.
In fact, the Scriptures tell us that God wants us to live— and you see the rest of the context here— live lives worthy of God who calls you into his kingdom and his glory. So God has put us in his kingdom, we’re in his family, and he wants us to live lives that are worthy of his family, of his children. And so there’s this urging of our children to become everything that God intended them to be, not what we intend them to be, but everything that God intended them to be. See, that’s a constructive parenting style, a style that we want to aspire toward, a style that we want to pray for, don’t we? And Paul in Ephesians 6:4 says it’s directly connected to 2 things.
It’s directly connected to godly correction, and it’s connected to godly counsel. So those 2 things working together are absolutely essential. There is the discipline and there is the instruction. So, there’s the discipline that is necessary. We’re not going to be able to avoid this.
I mean, we all have to learn through discipline to do the right thing. And so, discipline is necessary in the home. It’s a part of the maturing process. And it’s to be done, it says in Ephesians 6:4, it’s to be done in the Lord. So, there’s the godly part of this.
It’s not just to be done. But it’s to be done in a way that’s going to be honoring to the Lord and appropriate to what the Lord wants for our children. So the approach that we took here, my wife and I, some of you know that we have 3 children. They’re grown children now. They’re all married.
They all have children of their own. And so we’re able to kind of look back and try to get a, you know, picture of how did we do these things. And I’ll tell you straight up front, we weren’t perfect. We did the best that we could with the circumstances and, you know, the challenges of parenting that we all have. But I will tell you this, when it came to the area of discipline, we had at the very front of our minds the whole matter of choices, limits, and consequences.
Choices, limits, and consequences. You see, part of parenting is helping our children make wise, responsible, mature choices. In fact, the hope is, and if you’re a student, I’m sure you got the insight on this, the hope is, is that you learn to make choices without us making the choices for you. The hope is, is that you make mature, godly choices that ultimately please God, that you make the kind of choices that are ultimately going to be best for you and best for others. We don’t want to be making those choices your whole life long.
In fact, we won’t. But the discipline process is for the purpose of teaching, Proper choices, to make proper choices. But necessary to that are certain limits and consequences. God gave Adam and Eve a choice, but he also gave them a limit. He said, don’t eat off of that tree.
And there was a consequence: in the day you eat off of that tree, you will what? You will die. All right, they didn’t physically die, that came later, but there was a spiritual death. There was a separation. In their relationship.
Things changed in their relationship with each other. There were choices, there were limits, and there were consequences. And when it comes to the whole discipline process, we want to use choices and limits and consequences. If you’re not familiar with this process, you’re probably driving your kids crazy, or you’re driving yourself crazy because you’re nagging all the time. Nagging happens when there are not clear limits or clear consequences.
So let me illustrate that for you. You say to your son or daughter, I want you to empty the trash. You walk out of the room. That was all you said, I want you to empty the trash. In your son or daughter’s mind they’re thinking, Okay, no problem.
I could probably do that about 4 days from now.
I mean, there was no limit there and there was no consequence there. So you come back in 15 minutes later and you say, Did you empty the trash? And they say, No. Why should they? They’re thinking, you know, I don’t have to empty it yet.
It’s okay. In fact, you may have already trained them that they don’t need to empty it until you come in the 5th time, and this time you’re on the angry parent side of things and you’re screaming. You’re screaming now. At that moment, they begin to understand, oh yeah, now I know I gotta empty the trash, ’cause that’s like the ultimate limit, even though you didn’t talk about it. It’s just so much easier to just establish a limit with what it is you’re trying to get them to do.
So you, you need to empty the trash. They’re watching television. I see you’re watching, uh, whatever that is, so let’s do this. Uh, before you watch another show— would you like to watch another show? Oh yeah, I really would.
Well, great. Before you watch another show, I would like you to empty the trash. And if you don’t empty the trash before that show begins, the next show begins, we’re gonna turn off the television for the rest of the day. Now we got a limit, and now we got a consequence. It will eliminate nagging.
You won’t have to walk in 5 times and say, did you empty the trash? The point is, is that that kind of discipline is necessary so that children learn to make wise choices. That was the whole point, a choice that ultimately demonstrates love, love for God and love for you as their parent. The other side of this, not only is there necessary godly correction, but the necessity of godly counsel. We can’t be absent in this area.
You don’t have to be perfect in this area. Bernice and I were not perfect as perfect parents. I mean, if a perfect parent was You know, the parent that has devotions every day with their kids, that was not us. We heard about other people who did that every day with their kids. I don’t know how they did it.
We did not do that. We had prayer times together, usually every day, at least at bedtime. We prayed together around the dinner table. We did plan devotions as a family, but even though if Thursday night was the family night where we were going to do devotions, sometimes it just didn’t work out. And you know what?
It worked out. It honestly did. But we understood that it was our responsibility as parents to, in formal and informal ways, continue to train our children so that that was not something that we wanted to be negligent about. We wanted to be actively involved in the instruction of our children. Why?
Because that’s constructive parenting. I saw a father yesterday. I was out for a walk and came up to a signal, and he came up to the signal with his 3 daughters behind him. Figured it out just briefly there in the exchange that took place that they were his 3 daughters, you know, and they’re all in single file on bikes, and he was at the front. And I don’t think it was like the Van Trop family where, you know, the youngest was in the back because you don’t want her to die, so I think she was sort of The youngest was kind of up there near Dad.
But anyway, so they got to this signal and, you know, everything was fine except then he looked to the left and saw that somebody was walking across, you know, the pedestrian crosswalk there, and they’re actually blocking the pedestrian crosswalk with their bicycles. So what does Dad do? Out of respect, out of interest of others, you know, obviously, he’s going to try to do what he can to rearrange the bike situation, so he looks at his daughter behind him and says, Come on up here, honey. And so she moves up next to him, but when she moved up, the next bike moved up and the next bike moved up. And so now it didn’t accomplish anything.
You know what I’m saying at this point? And it’s kind of playing out right there. And it was just this little funny thing. And I thought, well, there it is. You know, a lot of times a kid doesn’t see something else that’s going on, but a parent does.
And a parent needs to take action to do something about the circumstance that has now developed. That’s the whole point.
And if there’s something developing in your home and you’re the absent parent and you’re just ignoring it and you’re neglecting it, or you’re hoping, maybe my wife will pick this up, or, you know, let’s just send them to school and pray the teacher will say something, you’re missing the point. It’s all about godly correction and godly counsel. So what does this text teach us this morning? The one thing a parent doesn’t want to do is embitter or exasperate our children. We don’t wanna do that.
We don’t want our children to be discouraged. If we have discouraged you, if you’re a kid and we have discouraged you, we do not wanna do that. We apologize. We don’t wanna go that direction. We wanna make things right.
In fact, one of the best things that I found as a parent was apology. I can’t tell you how many times I apologized to my children because I did not want to be a bad dad. But in the flesh, I did things at times, right? We all do that. But hopefully there’s forgiveness and there’s understanding, as we saw last night.
You know, we’re all in process. We’re a construction project. In process. So hopefully there’s that understanding. But to the best of our ability as parents, we don’t want to discourage our children.
We don’t want to embitter them. We don’t want to exasperate them. We want to do everything that we can to blossom them to become the children that God intended them to be. And key to that happening is godly correction and godly counsel. Let’s pray.
Thanks, Lord, for this passage and really this series. It’s not complicated, I mean, at least to understand what a husband needs to do, what a wife needs to do, what a son or daughter needs to do, and what a parent needs to do. It’s not complicated to understand, but when we think about this, we realize again how desperate we are for your strength, for your leading, for your wisdom, for your help, for your guidance. And so we pray for that. And we pray that you would do more through us than we could do.
That when we blow it, there will be forgiveness, there will be apologies, there will be understanding.
But that we would be moving in a direction to do that which is best so that we as parents fulfill the roles that you’ve given us and please and honor you and see our children become the people that you’ve designed them to be. So I pray that for everybody here this morning. I pray that if there are hurts and wounds from Saul-like dads or David-like dads, that you would enable us to just let that go. Maybe there’s a conversation that needs to happen. I pray for those conversations to happen between dads and sons and daughters or moms and sons and daughters, Lord, that there would be no friction in these relationships, but these would be quality relationships.
May there be a change. Where people are trying to do this in their own strength, Lord, I pray that first of all they have a relationship with you so that they don’t have to be trying to do this in their own power. In fact, if you’ve never received the gift that Christ offers, that’s where power is found. It’s found in a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. And we really urge you this morning to just reach out and receive that gift of life that’s found in Christ.
God longs to have you as a member of his family.
The Bible says if you’ll confess with your sins Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Jesus from the dead, you’ll be saved.
And if you know in your heart God’s working in you right now to draw you to him, don’t push it away. Say yes to it. And God, as we have that relationship, then may that relationship change the relationships that we have with each other. For we ask and pray all of this in Jesus’ name, amen.
