God's Pattern for Parents, Part 1
Ephesians 6:3
Tonight as we continue in our look at what the Word of God has to say about the family, we come to the responsibility of parents. Turn in your Bible to Ephesians chapter 6 and verse 4. Amazingly when the apostle Paul inspired by the Holy Spirit gives parenting instruction, it's just one sentence...one brief verse. Ephesians 6:4, "And, fathers, do not provoke your children to anger but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord."
You have a negative and a positive. The negative--do not provoke your children to anger, obviously means treat them with love, treat them in a way that affirms your affection to them so they don't become hostile. The positive--bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
What is parenting? Very simple, really, loving your children so that they're not angry with you and bringing them up to know the Lord. You might think there would be a whole book on parenting, or there might be a whole chapter on it, but there's just one verse cause the task is so highly defined.
That instruction, "Not to provoke your children to anger," must be understood, and we'll endeavor to do that in weeks to come, and the instruction, "To bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord," must be understood as well, and there are some component parts to that which we will endeavor to grasp as well. But how wonderful that the whole responsibility can be refined down to one statement.
In spite of the simplicity of the instruction, parents today appear to me to be somewhat frightened about the whole prospect. They are challenged by the times in which we live, the issues at hand. And some of them look at parenting as a frightening responsibility. And it is, to some degree, a serious and challenging task but not for the reasons that most people might suggest. If you just surveyed people about having children, they might tell you that they have some reluctance about having children because it's expensive. You have to have a bigger house and you have to get a bigger car or cars. You have to get a lot of extra clothes and food and you have to pay for all their medical needs and college. They might say, and it's also very time consuming. If you have any personal goals or personal desires, or personal plans, personal interests sort of take a back seat to the demand of children. They are highly demanding. And while we might think that that extremely demanding time is only in infancy, as they grow older we find the demands are not less but more and more complex.
Some people would say parenting is challenging because it calls for such focus on children's activities. In other words, there's so many things that they're supposed to be involved in that you wind up spending time and energy in running that endless taxi service to meet all their needs, and the more of them you have, the more complicated it gets.
And I suppose there are those superficial things which make parenting to some degree challenging. The real reason that child raising is so difficult, the real challenge before us, and we as Christians know this, can be boiled down to two components. And I think we need to understand these if we are going to love our children in such a way that they aren't angry with us but rather return that love, if we are to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. If we're to do that, that we must understand that the difficulty really comes on two levels, or in two areas. And we can reduce them an external component and an internal component. The external simply means the pressure of the society and the culture that is around us. The internal, the pressure of the nature of the child that is within him or her.
Parenting is not difficult because it is expensive. It's not difficult because it's time consuming. It's not difficult because it's distracting from your personal agenda. It's not personal because it gets so complex to meet all the demands. It is really difficult because there are such heavy pressures from the society around us and heavier pressures from the nature of children within them. And until we understand that, we're not going to understand what parenting is really all about.
Now there are some issues the Bible doesn't talk about. It doesn't talk about common sense things, practical things, personal preferences as to how you raise your children and what are the techniques of childbirth and the techniques of child rearing and all of that. The Scripture doesn't really say much about that except, as I've pointed out to you in a prior message that you are to spank your child when your child does not obey the Word of God. So we told you earlier that your responsibility is to teach them the Word of God, hold them to the standard. And if they do not obey the Word of God and your authority as you apply it in their lives, you discipline them physically.
But you need to understand the two great challenges, and I want to help you to understand them tonight, if I can. First of all, let's talk about the external, and by that I mean the culture around us. Life is frankly no longer simple. It is no longer centered in the home. It is no longer centered in the family as a close-knit and only marginally influenced unit, that is influenced from the outside world. That's not true anymore. There was a time when that was true. There was a time when you grew up on a farm and you basically lived your whole life there. You ate breakfast with the family, you probably went to a little school down the road and went to school with all your neighbors and were taught by a teacher or two from the local area. You went back home, worked on the farm, sat around the house at night and basically were instructed in life by that family relationship. And that home would be only marginally influenced from the outside world. And that basically has been true for a long, long time.
Even families living in more urban areas still had a predominant influence in the home and with the family. Parents, churches, schools had community standards which were established for childhood education even, childhood training. And basically followed paths of measured increments of learning and measured increments of exposure to reality that suited a child's age and capacity to deal with issues.
In other words, there were secrets the children didn't know. And it was very important in raising children to unfold those secrets at reasonable times so they were not blasted with things for which they were neither intellectually or emotionally able to make a proper response. In other words, we could say the children had controlled exposure. And the family and the church and the school and thus the local community was in charge of that.
All of that is gone now in what Neal Postman(?), a writer and professor at New York University in the area of communication, has called The Disappearance of Childhood," in a book republished from its original 1970's publication, republished in 1994, the book, The Disappearance of Childhood, helps us to grasp what is happening around us.
Childhood, as we know it, is disappearing, or has almost disappeared. The thesis that Postman sets forth, and I think ably does, basically is the idea that childhood as a unique period of human development is disappearing. He, by the way, is building on a thesis that has been studied for a number of years now and there have been a number of books written on this particular thesis, it is quite a topic of discussion in academic circles.
Let me tell you why he believes and others believe that childhood is disappearing and what are the manifestations of it. First of all, clothing used to be different for children. Now it is as much like adults as possible. And while that isn't the issue itself, that is reflective of the issue. Children now demand to be dressed as closely to the dress of their parents as they possibly can be.
Childhood games. I remember when I grew up we had games, games that we invented. Sometimes we had games that nobody else ever heard of. But I remember games like Hide and Seek, and Kick the Can, and Stickball, and I remember sandlot baseball where we made up our own rules and we played with anything and everything we could find...sometimes a rock in the middle and a bunch of old socks wrapped around it and then it was wrapped in black electric tape and we hit it with a stick and called it baseball. Childhood games. If you grew up in Philadelphia or Baltimore or an eastern city, you probably played stepball, a childhood game that we invented.
What was really great about it was, it was played without any adult supervision. In fact, there weren't any adults around. And that was fine. There weren't any uniforms. There weren't any umpires or referees and there wasn't any equipment and there weren't any spectators. And you know what? There weren't any unrealistic expectations. And we played those games just for the fun of it and we played them by the hour.
Where are the childhood games today? Today's children play copies of adult games, like Little League baseball, six year olds standing out there at all the appropriate positions trying to play a game that is impossible for them to play, absolutely impossible. PeeWee Football, PeeWee Basketball, PeeWee Soccer, and PeeWee whatever else, totally supervised by adults. In fact, there are adults all over the place, clogging up the field and base paths and everything else. Lots of sophisticated equipment, special fields, umpires, referees, a whole bunch of spectators and the kids could care less about the game. For the most part the game is not for the fun of the kids and the expression of childhood imagination...listen to this one...it is for the reputation gained by gloating parents. It's not for the fun of the kids, it's for the reputation of the parents who have systematically eliminated all the child's imagination and most of the fun.
And then there's behavior and language and attitudes and desires and all of these things now are basically indistinguishable between children and adults. Children don't talk like children, they talk like adults. Their attitudes are adultlike. Their vocabulary is adultlike. Many today are now crying for equal rights for children, because they're nothing other than short and light adults.
In the past we were convinced the children needed to be protected. They needed to be processed in a series of sequential developmental opportunities and we called those grades in school. Remember those? And what you learned in those grades was all categories that were refined and defined according to your capabilities as you grew. Information was phased out to you carefully prepared and dosed in prescribed degrees and amounts as the child was being shaped into an independent individual.
And, frankly, "The maintenance of childhood," says Neal Postman, "depended on the principles of managed information and sequential learning," end quote. That's how a child really was a child because a child only knew certain things. And there were secrets about life that a child didn't know yet.
Until one great invention, electronics came. Before that parents and teachers could decide what children heard, what they saw and when in their development they heard it and saw it. But then came electronics and with the electronics came the media...the first time in human history. And because of electronics, printing presses were built and books and magazines and then radio and then recordings and then tapes and then CDs and then video tapes, cameras, billboards, movies and particularly television, all forms of modern media directly produced by electronics. Now we can't even conceive of life without electronics.
What does that produce? It produces an uncontrollably overexposed population of children...overexposed to everything without regard for any plan or any sequence. All of a sudden in your home, your children are no longer only able to know what you tell them and what your teacher tells them, they can turn on the television and be blitzed with any information about anything at any time at any level. Computers now and InterNet personalize the world's best and the world's worst for anybody who can access it. And the whole educational sequence, the whole educational hierarchy has collapsed under the weight of video.
Television is undifferentiated in its accessibility. That is to say television doesn't make any distinctions between an adult and a child, none at all. And television is having a massive influence on children, and you might be surprised to know this, three million children are watching television every night of the year between eleven and eleven-thirty P.M. Two point one million between 11:30 and 12 A.M. One point one million between 12 and 1 A.M., somewhere around 750 thousand children are watching television between 1 and 1:30 A.M. Supposedly the time when most adult television is being presented.
Neal Postman says this, "We may conclude that television erodes the dividing line between childhood and adulthood in three ways...all having to do with its undifferentiated accessibility. First, because it requires no instruction to grasp its form." That's easy, push the button and look at it. "Secondly, because it does not make complex demands on either the mind or behavior. And thirdly, because it does not segregate its audience."
"Television...says Postman...is without any secrets. And therefore there can be no such thing as childhood." Childhood is all about secrets, it's all about not knowing. Innocence is, whatever level of innocence we could assign to a child, certainly not moral innocence, but innocence as to the issues of life is completely lost in this environment. A group...and I think you would understand this...a group, any group, is largely defined by the exclusivity of the information its members share."
What do we mean by that? Well if everybody knew what lawyers knew, there wouldn't be any lawyers. If everybody knew what doctors knew, there wouldn't be any doctors. If everybody knew what preachers knew, there wouldn't be any preachers. And if children know what adults know, there aren't any children.
So they're overexposed to things their minds and emotions cannot handle. They are consequently hurried into massive temptations which they are unable to deal with. And under the onslaught of this corrupt world with its wrong ideas, its wrong desires, its wrong words, its wrong deeds and its wrong attitudes, children can become severe problems to parents and to society. They are exposed consistently to what they are not able to handle emotionally, what they are not able to handle morally, what they are not able to handle socially or spiritually. And what happens is, they do not have the self-control and the self- restraint to deal with the issues that arise because of this information.
There is a gradual decline in shame and a gradual loss of all self-restraint. Again, Neal Postman says, "In having access to the previously hidden fruit of adult information, they are expelled from the garden of childhood," end quote.
And you look at the culture and you see that. The whole culture is moving toward homogeneity of style, dress, language, food. I remember when McDonald's commercial were geared to kids. No more. Clothes, food, language, style, games, all homogeneous. Sadly the result is tragic. You have children without the ability to handle the information they're exposed to. And they're exposed to ideas and attitudes, desires and behaviors that they just cannot deal with. They become potentially severe social problems in the home, in the school and in society. And I'll show you that by simple statistics. In 1950, in 1950 adults committed serious crimes at a rate 215 times the rate of children's serious crimes. When I'm talking about children, I'm talking about fourteen and under, according to this study. I'm talking about serious crimes which would be classified as murder, rape, aggravated assault, and armed robbery.
All right, in 1950 adults committed those kinds of serious crimes at a rate 215 times the rate of children's crimes. By the way, you might want to know that in 1950 in the United States of America there were 170 children arrested for serious crimes the entire year...170. Which as a percentage of the crimes .0004, children didn't commit crimes.
That's changed. How are you going to restrain a child in a world of unrestrained adults when the children know everything the adults know? By 1960, between '50 and '60 television came, electronic media began to have its impact, things began to expand, the world began to be made available. It seemed an innocent time but here's an interesting statistic, by 1960 adult serious crimes were committed only eight to one times that of children's crimes. It went from 215 to one--to eight to one in ten years.
By 1980 the rate was five to one.
So between 1950 and 1980, there was an eleven thousand percent increase in crimes committed by children fourteen and under. And when I'm talking about serious crimes, there was an eight thousand, three hundred percent increase in lesser crimes. Crime is no longer an adult activity. But neither is anything else.
If American can be said to be drowning in a tidal wave of crime, then the wave has mostly been generated by our children. Crime like most everything else is no longer an exclusively adult activity, it has become a child's activity. Almost daily the newspapers tell us of arrests being made of children who like those who play tennis at Wimbledon are getting younger and younger all the time.
In New York City, a nine-year-old boy tried to hold up a bank. In Westchester County back in 1981 in July, Westchester County in New York, the police charged four boys with sexual assault of a seven-year-old girl. The alleged rapists were a thirteen year old, two eleven year olds and a nine year old, the latter being the youngest person ever to be accused of first- degree rape in Westchester County.
Ten to thirteen year olds are involved in adult crime as never before. Indeed, the frequency of serious child crime has put youth-crime codes to their absolute limits. The first American Juvenile Court was established in 1899 in the state of Illinois, and the idea established in 1899 for juvenile courts, the idea could come to its end before this decade is over because legislators throughout the United States of America are hurriedly trying to revise criminal laws so that children who commit crimes are treated exactly like adults.
In California a study group formed by the Attorney General has recommended sending juveniles convicted of first-degree murder to prison, rather than to the California Youth Authority, where they've always gone in the past. It is also recommended that violent offenders be tried as adults.
In Vermont, the arrest of two teenagers in connection with the rape, torture and killing of a twelve-year-old girl has driven the state legislature to propose hardening all juvenile codes. Again in New York, children between the ages of 13 and 15 who are charged with serious crimes can now be tried in adult courts and if convicted can receive a normal long prison sentences. Prisons are going to be populated with these young people.
In Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, South Carolina, Tennessee, laws have been changed to make it easier to transfer children between the ages of 13 and 15 to adult criminal courts if the crime is serious enough. In Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon and Utah, the privacy that usually surrounds the trials of juveniles has been eliminated and newspaper reporters may now regularly attend all the proceedings. They're being treated like adults because they're acting like adults.
This unprecedented change in both the frequency and brutality of child crime indicates that the concept of childhood is rapidly slipping from our grasp. Our children live in a society whose psychological and social contexts do not stress the differences between adults and children. As the adult world opens itself in every conceivable way to children, they will inevitably emulate adult criminal activity. Not only adult criminal activity, but adult immorality. And one of the consequences of this is has been a rise in teenage pregnancies, we all know about it. Births to teenagers continually rising, particularly in the age group between 13 and 17. Millions of babies born every year illegitimately to teenaged kids. Babies being born, we read about occasionally, to twelve year olds and thirteen year olds.
Alcohol, drugs, obviously a large part of consumption of these things is by children. The statistics are staggering, I won't labor through all of them. You're aware of that.
So we have an immense problem here. We have an overexposed generation of children who have to be treated like adults because they have all the adult information. Instead of parents tying to bring them under control, parents have been taught...don't ever spank your child. Don't ever discipline your child. And if something's wrong with your child, you've got to understand what the problem is. And the problem is not sin, the problem is a lack of self-esteem. So what you've got to do is build them up.
Now this immense challenge put upon parenting from the outside is compounded by an even more immense challenge put on parenting from the inside. The internal, let's go to that one.
What do I mean by that? Well children may be ignorant when they come into the world, they may be naive, they may be unexperienced, they may be cute, but they are not innocent with regard to evil. I suppose the simplest way to say it is this, the seed of every known sin is planted deep in the heart of every child. The seed of every known sin is planted deep in the heart of every child. And the truth, listen to this because it's so important, the truth is not that if things somehow turn out badly our children might get messed up. Our children are severely messed up when they arrive. It's not that if things don't work out the way we would like, our children may drift spiritually and they may wander morally, but rather...listen...the drive to drift spiritually and morally, the drive to sin is embedded in their natures. And it is the compelling drive.
They don't come into the world seeking God and righteousness. They come into the world seeking the fulfillment of their sinful desires. Listen, all that is required for the tragic harvest is that children be allowed to give expression to their most evil desires. We talk about mass murderers all the time, and they're always doing things about them on television. We talk about pedophiles, the horrible crime of molesting children, rapists, homosexual perversions, lifelong chronic criminal behavior and people are always asking the question..what happened to them when they were young? What did their parents do to them? They must have been in an abusive environment. They must have been in some kind of a situation where they were mistreated and maltreated. The question is always asked...what did their parents do to them?
Let me tell you something. Mass murderers, pedophiles, rapists, perverts, lifelong criminals are not the products of what their parents did to them, they're the products of what their parents didn't do to them. If you're running around trying to find some traumatic event in the life of a Jeffrey Dahmer(?) when he was a child, you might not find it. Now how do you explain a homosexual murdering cannibal? What did they do to him? That's not the question. The question is, what didn't they do to him? Cause the Bible says, "Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of righteousness will drive it from him."
You see, what happened was they just followed the natural course of their sinful nature. It's frightening, folks, because as people bring these little reprobates into the world, as adorable as they are, and have absolutely no commitment to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord and no commitment to use the rod, they are simply allowing the children to give full expression to their depravity, what we're going to have is adult disasters, if not child disasters. It isn't that mass murderers and pedophilic child killers were made that way by their parents...do you know that many of them didn't had no parental influence, many of them were foster children?
You see, the problem was they became what they were potentially at birth because they were never instructed and restrained. And even more, they were never converted.
In Psalm 58, and I'll just read a couple of Psalms to you because I think they're very important as a touchstone for us in understanding this. Psalm 58 verse 3 says this, "The wicked are estranged from the womb and these who speak lies go astray from birth, they have venom like the venom of a serpent." Whoa...they're little snakes. "The poison of asps is under their lips, they're wicked when they come out of the womb, they are liars from their birth." That's called total depravity, if you're looking for a theological category for that.
In Psalm 51 and verse 5, David says, "Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin my mother conceived me." He doesn't mean that he was an illegitimate child, he wasn't. What he means is from his conception to his birth he was iniquitous. And let me tell you something. Understanding the total depravity of your children is the important practical foundation of all parenting. You can be depraved people under some control by teaching them morality and punishing them in a proper way, a loving way, but nonetheless in a firm way. You can bring your children under control, but ultimately what you want to do is see them pass from darkness to light, right? You want to see their heart transformed so that instead of loving sin they love righteousness. Instead of wanting to give full expression to their evil desires, they want to give full expression to what is honoring to God.
All this psychological analysis stuff of all these criminals, trying to figure out what somebody did to them, misses the point. It's not what somebody did to them, it's what somebody didn't do to them. Nobody would deal with them. Nobody would confront their wickedness. Nobody would show them the divine standard. Nobody would hold them to the conformity to that divine standard by the threat of corporeal punishment in a loving and affirming way, of course. And most of all, no one led them to the knowledge of God through Jesus Christ so that they would have a supernatural restrainer.
It really is of little consequence what you do with your children in terms of the practical issues. What little schedule you put them on or don't put them on is not the issue. What is the issue is that you lead your fallen sinful child to the transforming grace of Jesus Christ. That's the issue. God, and I know you hate to think of this, and I even hate to think of it when I look at my precious children and grandchildren, but God has not given us holy, little angels to be delicately handled so that they don't go astray. They're not holy little angels to be delicately handled so they don't get corrupted, they're corrupt little sinners who have to be led to become saints.
If you have trouble with this, just recognize that your children are a miniature version