Sermon Transcript
The following is a lightly edited transcript generated from the audio; it may contain small errors.
Opening
Proverbs 4, starting in verse 20, says, My son, my child, my daughter, give attention to my words, incline your ear to my sayings. Do not let them depart from your eyes, keep them in the midst of your heart, for they are life to those who find them, and health to all their flesh. Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it springs the issues of life. Put away from you a deceitful mouth and put perverse lips far from you. Let your eyes look straight ahead and your eyelids look right before you. Conder the path of your feet and let all your ways be established. Do not turn to the right or to the left. Remove your foot from evil. As I was telling my wife the other day, I really don’t like preaching on special occasions. Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, those kinds of days. I don’t know why, I just don’t.
I just like to preach the Bible and I don’t like special occasions because I think every Sunday is special. But having said that, I want to say a few words since it’s Father’s Day about parenting, about fatherhood. Really a lot of what I have to say applies to both parents. Now before I do that, I just want to tell you dads, my goal today is not to make you feel guilty. And I say that because I think most dads go to church on Father’s Day and then they leave feeling like a failure. Because the standard is raised, the standard is expounded, if you will. They look at the standard and they go, oh man, I’m not hitting the markrk. But the reality is, I think many dads feel like that before they even come in church on Father’s Day. I think many dads labor under a sense of failure, a sense of they know in their hearts they’re not all that they could be. And so my goal is not to exacerbate that feeling, to make that feeling worse in the heart of any dad because I think that dads need to be actually encouraged. I think dads need to be exhorted and encouraged and not shamed because that’s just not going to work. I think dads carry enough sense of failure. And I think any dad who, Christian dad who is honest would admit that he struggles at times with feeling that he’s not what he knows he should be. Any dads want to say amen to that?
So I don’t want you to hear anything I say today, through that lens. That’s very important to me. That’s not my goal today. So I do want to talk about a few things about parenting in light of it being Father’s Day. And I’m probably not going to say anything I haven’t said before, but there is a principle of teaching called repetition, where sometimes we need to hear things more than once before it really sinks in, and sometimes we just need to be reminded of what we already know or we think we know. So, probably no new revelations today, reminders regarding parenting and fatherhood.
The Parent’s Heart
And the first thing I want to remind you of today is that the most important thing about parenting is not principles. It’s not techniques. It’s not the child. The focus of parenting, ironically, is not the child. The focus of parenting is the parent. The focus of parenting is the parent. Here in this passage in Proverbs, notice what it says. It says, keep your heart in verse 23, with all diligence, for out of it springs the issues of life. This verse actually was the basis of a parenting book, and the point of the book was to tell parents to shepherd your child’s heart, because out of your child’s heart springs everything about their life. And that’s true. But it’s also true of the parent. [audio unclear] There are many, many good books out there in parenting, and they’ll talk about various techniques and various principles, and there is value in these things. There are certain things that are biblical. There are certain things that are useful in terms of how you parent. And we should do those things. We should adopt those techniques. those techniques. But we need to be careful because the father-child relationship, the parent-child relationship, is not a mechanical thing. It’s not simply about techniques. That’s very impersonal. The parent-child relationship is all about relationship. And what real relationship real relationship is, is when two hearts are communicating. That’s what relationship is. It’s very simple. So the most important thing for the parent to understand, the most important thing for the father to understand is the condition of their own heart. That is fundamental to everything because as this text says, keep your heart, and we You could say, keep your heart, Dad, with all diligence, or keep your heart, Mom, with all diligence, because out of it springs the issues of life. In other words, the condition of our heart colors everything about our lives, and it especially colors our home life and our parenting, if you will. So it’s very important for us to understand that both, that our habits and our lifestyle is ultimately a reflection of our character or our heart. I’ve read you this quote before, but I want to read it again. It’s from C.S. Lewis. And he’s actually talking about education and in the context he’s talking about the British public schools and the fact that in those schools they were teaching Christianity and was that really smart and wasn’t working and that sort of thing. But there’s an important principle here we need to be reminded of. He says, there’s a very obvious fact that each generation is taught by an earlier generation and this must be kept firmly in mind. The beliefs which boys fresh from school now hold are largely the belief of the 20s.
The beliefs which boys from school will hold in the 60s will be largely those of the undergraduates today. The moment we forget this, we begin to talk nonsense about education. And we could say we often talk nonsense about parenting. We talk of the views of contemporary adolescents as if some peculiarity in contemporary adolescents had produced them out of itself. In reality, they are usually a delayed result, for the mental world also has its time bombs. Isn’t that a great line? He says, hence the futility of many schemes for education. None can give, this is the line, this is what you need to hear, if you’re a parent, None can give to another what he does not possess himself. That’s a great line for the staff for the camp. None can give to another what he does not possess himself. Now, he can talk about it, but he can’t really transmit it. He can’t give it if he doesn’t really possess it. No generation can bequeath to its successor what it has not got. You may frame this syllabus as you please, but when you have planned and reported ad nauseam, if we are skeptical, we shall teach only skepticism to our pupils. If fools only folly, if vulgar only vulgarity, if saints sanctity, if heroes heroism.
Education is not the most fully conscious of, excuse me, education is only the most fully conscious of the channels whereby each generation influences the next.
It is not a closed system. Nothing which was not in the teachers can flow from them into the pupils. In other words, what we are is what we possess, and what we possess is ultimately what we transmit. Now it’s very possible for us as Christians as well as parents to be one way and to think we’re a different way. Right? The Bible calls that self-deception. And we all do it. And if you don’t think you do it, then you really do it. Because we all do it. We all think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think, which is why God tells us not to do it. don’t think of yourself more highly as you ought to think. because that is human nature to do so. the It’s the beat, you know, St. Paul and the Virgin Mary, and you want, you know, you want the perfect family and all this kind of stuff. And you have all this stuff in your head. You have kind of a head religion and a head vision, and the hearts are being neglected in the process. So you get this weird thing where like parents are telling their kids to be nice when the parent is angry. Be nice! Think about it. Pause on that. Our description says, Selah. Meditate on this for a moment. Be nice! So what did the child learn? Niceness or anger? So this inconsistency that we see in Christian homes is partly a problem of the fact that There’s a divorce from the mental and the spiritual. Or yeah, the mental and the spiritual. There’s this unfortunate separation between what we know to be true, what we want to see, and who we really are. It’s true. Now the only progress in any discipline is rooted in the admission of where one is. Now I’ve done a lot of counseling over the years. And I can pretty much tell in the first meeting if it’s going to be of any value. Because you have people. They come for counseling, and they don’t really want to be there. So there’s really no, there’s not going to be any progress there. Now when people come in and they want to be there, that means they want to change. Guess what? They change. People that want to change, change. And people that don’t want to change don’t change. Now I’m not saying they don’t need help. They don’t need counsel. They don’t need whatever, prayer. But my point is, real change is rooted in the fact that we desire to be something other than what we are. But the problem is, if we think that we’ve arrived, we have no desire to change. I don’t need to be more spiritual. I’m fine. So as that relates to the parenting issue, we have to assess where we’re at. We have to assess ourselves, because out of our hearts flows the issues of life. Out of our heart flows the hearts of our children. Just as your children flow out of your body physically, they flow out of your heart spiritually. Now, don’t, don’t mishear me, because some of you are thinking, I don’t know, I don’t agree with you. I’m not saying every sin your child commits is your fault, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a general reality here, and I won’t even call it a principle, because I don’t want to get in, I don’t, you know, a general reality. in our parenting, the condition of our heart is more important than the principles that we apply. Amen? So when we ask our children to be something, we have to ask ourselves this question. Am Am I asking them to be what I am? Or am I demanding of them what I am not demanding of myself? Clean up your room and then your kitchen is a mess. If you want your children to be grateful, are you grateful? If you want your children, to be productive and hardworking, are you lazy? I mean, you could go down the list of the things that parents want their children to be, but then we need to take that list, whatever that is, gratitude, obedience, submission, uh-oh, Mom, uh-oh, Mom, uh-oh. All the things that we want our kids to be, need to take that list and flip it over and look at it as a mirror and say, is that me? Is that me as a dad? Is that me as a mom? Is that me? Because if that’s not me, I can’t flip it around and use it as a light to shine on my children. You know why? Because that’s hypocrisy. To demand of another, what I am not willing to do is hypocrisy. There’s no other word for it. Now you’re thinking, wait a minute pastor, you said 10 minutes ago you weren’t going to make me feel guilty. That’s not my goal. That is not my goal at all. But I do want us, us parents and us dads, to realize that if you want your kids to follow the Lord, there’s one thing you cannot do. If you’ve learned anything, there’s one thing you can’t do. You can’t tell them to do what you are not willing to do. You can’t do that because they smell hypocrisy a mile away and it is repulsive to them and they will identify that with your faith and they will reject the faith. And I’ve seen it so many times over the years. So many times. So many Christian kids who crash and burn, and when you look through all the smoke and all the tragedy of it all, there’s usually something going on at home. Now, not in every case, don’t get me wrong, not in every case, because it’s not a simple one-to unfocused rate. It doesn’t work. Life isn’t like that. Life is more complicated than that. But my point is, is that we as parents need to take that list, we all have a mental list, and flip it around and say, okay, I need to look at myself. What am I like? What am I really like? Because what I’m like is generally what I’m going to produce. And Jesus even talks about this. What does Jesus say? He says that that which is born of flesh is flesh, that which is born of spirit is spirit. If you want to know what kind of tree it is, look at the fruit. Like produces like. Mean people don’t produce nice children. Angry people don’t produce kind children. It doesn’t work that way. It’s not in the nature of things. Granted, there are exceptions. You’ll always see exceptions. The point is that as parents, we have got to shepherd our hearts first, before we deign to shepherd our children’s hearts. We must shepherd our hearts. So what this means on a practical level is that as parents and dads, parenting, fatherhood It requires sanctification, and it’s also a means of sanctification.
One of the reasons parenting is so hard is because of what it demands of the inner man, what it draws out of us, good and bad. So to be a parent requires sanctification, but it also is a means of sanctification. You often joke about how my wife, who often joke about how I was first born, was a great means, a great tool of God breaking her. And it’s true. And it’s true. That God used the fact that we had a strong willed child to break the strong will in the mother. So God, will you sing as your children to break things in your heart? Because what we are as parents, what our hearts are, out of that flows the issues of our life.
The Priority of Prayer
So a couple more things then we’re going to pray some more. As far as priorities as dads, I think the most, I’m going to mention three, and I’ll do it briefly. Ha, you believe that? The first one is this, which really I’m already hitting on. The most important priority for a dad or for a mom is your own walk with the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s the most important priority. I have read books on parenting. I have said nothing about the parent’s relationship with Christ. To me, that’s like saying, let’s build a house with no foundation. Your relationship with Jesus Christ is the most important thing about your life and Therefore, it’s the most important thing about your home, the most important thing about your parenting, your walk with Jesus Christ. So we need to shore that up, if you will. What we need to do as parents and as fathers, we need to shore up our walk. Are you in the word of God? Are you renewing your mind through the word of God? Are you a man who prays alone with the Lord? Are you a man that prays, that comes and prays at the prayer meeting? Are you a praying man? And I don’t mean that, you know, I’m going to work prayer in the car. Now, pray in the car. That’s awesome. Just don’t close your eyes. I mean real prayer, where you set aside time, you set aside distractions, you have If your Bible opened, you are seeking the presence of God kind of prayer.
You know what I mean? Raise your hand. You’re seeking the presence of God. We dads need to be men of prayer. So we need to look at our time in the Word. We need to look at our time in prayer. We need to look at our example. time and reflect on these things because our walk with the Lord is going to color everything.
Tend Your Marriage
The second thing we need to look at is our relationship with our spouse. Bad marriages generally do not produce good kids and that’s another problem I’ve seen over the years. When the parents are in trouble, the parents are fighting and there’s conflict there, there’s a lot of damage done to the children. As, as a matter of fact, a lot of studies have shown that in the home, the most [audio unclear] psychological well-being. When there’s conflict between the parents, it rocks the world of the child. And it is so destructive. And what some parents do is they substitute their love for their children in place of their love for their spouse. And they fool themselves, thinking, well, my child’s going to be fine because I love my child. And unfortunately, Unfortunately, very often it produces very unhealthy relationships with the parent and the child, and the child ends up much later having issues. And so I hear things in my office like, yeah, in my relationship with my mom, I really took the place of my dad, and she got all of her affection for me. And it screwed me up. Or vice versa with the father and the daughter. So there’s an unhealthy substitution that goes on. If you want your kids to do well, then you need to tend to your marriage first.
Marriage first, parenting second. Marriage first, parenting second. Tend to your marriage. It is more important for your child to know that you love your spouse than that your child knows that you love him or her.
Look at Your Kids
Thirdly, then you tend, then at that point you begin to take a look at your kids. After shepherding your own heart, after shepherding your marriage, then you want to take a look at shepherding your kids. And the things that you know that need to be in your life, well, after you tend to those things then all you do is you take that and you flip it over. If I’m supposed to be in the Word, well, my kids should be in the Word. If I should be in prayer, my kids need to learn how to pray. If I should be a worshipping saint, then my kids need to learn how to worship. Whatever I am as a Christian, not as a parent, that’s what I want to see in my kids. And it’s really not complicated. Read your Bible. It’s not complicated. You as a parent are called to walk with Jesus Christ. It is not what you want your kids to do. Look at yourself. Look at your marriage, look at your kids.