Parenting 101
I came across a job posting this week that I thought I’d pass along to see if there any takers.
JOB DESCRIPTION: Long-term team players needed for challenging, permanent work in an often chaotic environment. Candidates must possess excellent communication and organizational skills, and be willing to work variable hours, which will include evenings, weekends and frequent 24-hour shifts on call.
RESPONSIBILITIES: Must provide on-site training in basic life skills, in negotiating, conflict resolution, and crisis management. Must be able to think out of the box but not lose track of the box, because you most likely will need it for a school project. Must be able to drive motor vehicles safely under loud and adverse conditions while simultaneously practicing above-mentioned skills in conflict resolution. Must screen phone calls, maintain calendars and coordinate production of multiple homework projects. Must have ability to plan and organize social gatherings for clients of all ages and mental outlooks. Must be willing to be indispensable one minute and an embarrassment the next. Must always hope for the best but be prepared for the worst.
POSSIBILITY FOR ADVANCEMENT AND PROMOTION: Virtually none. Your job is to remain in the same position for years, without complaining, constantly retraining and updating your skills, so that those in your charge can ultimately surpass you.
PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE: None required, unfortunately. On-the-job training offered on a continually exhausting basis.
WAGES AND COMPENSATION: You pay them, offering frequent raises and bonuses. When you die, you give them whatever is left. The oddest thing about this reverse-salary scheme is that you actually enjoy it and wish you could only do more.
BENEFITS: While no paid holidays and no stock-options are offered, the job supplies limitless opportunities for personal growth and the ability to impact future generations.
Anyone want to apply for that kind of job? I want to propose that parenting is not only hard work, it is heart work. Children are a gift from God, not a burden to bear. Psalm 127:3: “Sons are a heritage from the LORD, children a reward from him.
Parents are responsible for raising children who are spiritual champions. The home is the principal delivery system for the transmittal of God’s truth from generation to generation.
There is no fail-safe formula for parenting success. Only by the grace of God! Every parent can learn how to be a better parent. I’m a parent in process not an authoritative expert. Just because I’m preaching this morning doesn’t mean that I have it all figured out. I’m a fellow learner with you. Please turn in your Bibles to Deuteronomy 6. Let’s set the scene. The people of God have been wandering in the wilderness for 40 years and are now on the verge of finally entering the Promised Land. The generation that had disobeyed by not entering the land 40 years earlier has died and now “generation next” was just about there. Moses was not able to go with them so he wanted to make sure they knew their job. Actually, the whole book of Deuteronomy is a restating of the law – deutero means “to repeat” and nomos is the law. We could say that this book is Moses’ final message to the people and a turning point for them.
It’s interesting to me that Moses doesn’t give them instructions on farming or shepherding or economics or construction or even battle plans. What is first and foremost on his mind and on God’s heart is the family’s role in faith formation. God’s people are about to enter a pagan land, filled with over 40 different people groups and yet his focus is on the family. In that sense, isn’t the setting similar to our own situation? We are also strangers in a world that is hostile to God.
We’re going to see in this passage that our parental job description has four main responsibilities.
Learn It The first thing we need to do is learn God’s Word for ourselves. We see this in verses 1-2“Now this is the commandment, and these are the statutes and judgments which the Lord your God has commanded to teach you, that you may observe them in the land which you are crossing over to possess, 2 that you may fear the Lord your God, to keep all His statutes and His commandments which I command you, you and your son and your grandson, all the days of your life, and that your days may be prolonged. Moses knew that he needed to teach and the people needed to learn. Part of trusting God is by taking Him seriously and knowing what He says in His Word. It’s important for us to know as much of the Bible as we can.
As we’ve been learning over the past several weeks, we will never grow in our relationship with God unless we grow in our relationship with God’s Word.
Live It
The second section of our parental job description is to live it. We see this in verse 3Therefore hear, O Israel, and be careful to observe it,/ that it may be well with you, and that you may multiply greatly as the Lord God of your fathers has promised you— ‘a land flowing with milk and honey.’
4 “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! 5 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.
Verse 5 continues with a challenge to love God with everything we've gotYou shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. Jesus quotes this verse in Mark 12:30. Our love is to be wholehearted and is to pervade every aspect of our life. As we determine to love God, we will want to obey Him as Jesus said in John 14:23: “If anyone loves me, he will obey my word.”
Verse 6 reminds us that God’s Word is not to just be in our heads, but to also be in our hearts. The Bible is to be lived out, it’s not just something we give mental assent to “And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. The people knew that God’s commands were engraved on tablets of stone; God wants His holy Word to be resident in their hearts and fleshed out through their hands.
Fellow parents, God must be all-important if we want Him to be all-important to our children. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, “Who you are speaks so loudly that I can’t hear what you’re saying.” Our primary call isn’t to be good parents. Our primary call is to model a vibrant and vital love relationship with the loving God.
We can’t pass along what we don’t possess. We must be vigilant to make sure we are not slipping spiritually. Deuteronomy 4:9: You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
The heart is very important to God. In 1 Samuel 16:7 we read: “The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” Behavior is not the basic issue; what’s going on in the heart is the heart of the matter. Since all behavior is linked to the heart, our discipline must address attitudes of the heart. As parents we must work at shepherding the heart,
Leave It
After learning it and living it, we have the responsibility to leave our faith to the next generation. Check out these verses from the Psalms.
Psalm 71:18: “Now also when I am old and grayheaded, O God, do not forsake me, until I declare your strength to this generation”
Psalm 78:4, 6: “We will not hide them from their children, telling to the generation to come the praises of the Lord, and His strength and His wonderful works that He has done....That the generation to come might know them, the children who would be born, that they may arise and declare them to their children.”
Psalm 145:4: “One generation sahll praise Your works to another, and shall declare Your mighty acts”
Let’s look at Deuteronomy 6:7: “You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the wy, when you lie down, and when you rise up.” Notice the pronoun “you.” Parenting is personal. It’s my job to do this, not the church or the school or someone else. That’s why we want to move from a “church-centered, home-supported” approach to a “home-centered, church-supported” model for faith transformation.
Notice that this should be more than just getting them up for church once a week. We are to make an impression upon them by talking about God at home, in the car, at bedtime, and when they wake up.
The word “impress” literally means to “be sharp, precise, and to the point.” It was used of sharpening a knife so that it was razor sharp. If want our kids to be sharp spiritually, we’ll have to go over God’s truth again and again and come at it from every angle. We are not to just throw our faith out as an option for our kids. The task of teaching is a never-ending, full-time assignment. We are always teaching – through our talking, responses, our attitudes and our behavior. In short, not just through the words we say but also by the way we live.
Look for those teachable moments. Those spontaneous, unplanned opportunities to teach and impress. When those times happen, gently introduce God’s perspective by sharing a verse or principle from Scripture. Allow the Bible to be central in all of life.
Verses 8-9 show us that the Israelites had visual reminders everywhere about their God: “Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” They took this literally but the principle here is this: whatever we need to do to remind us of God, we should do it.
\\ Fellow parents, let’s have our homes so full of the Word of God that our children can’t help but see and hear it wherever they go and whatever they do. The bottom line is this: We are to make God real to our kids.
I heard a story this week about a father who was told the shocking news that his young son had a terminal illness. The son had put his faith in Christ but the dad wondered how he was going to tell him the news. After praying earnestly, he went with a heavy heart to the hospital. First he read Scripture and then had a time of prayer with his son before telling him that the doctors said he only had a short time to live. The father then asked his son a question: “Are you afraid to meet Jesus, my boy?” Blinking away a few tears, the little boy said bravely, “No, not if He’s like you, daddy!”
Launch It
Before you pass the baton, the runners must be prepared. It’s all planned out – the steps and positions need to be figured out beforehand. The person who has the baton never slows down – they’re depending on the one who will receive it to remember what has been practiced because you only have a short amount of time to pass the baton in the “exchange zone.” If you haven’t exchanged the baton before you exit the exchange zone you’re disqualified. The baton is very important to the team – some teams even give a name to it. They work hard at not dropping it. If it’s dropped, everyone is upset.
Once we learn it, live it, and leave it, we then need to do all we can to launch the “belief baton” so that our offspring’s faith becomes their own.
Satisfaction can lead to spiritual stagnation and forgetting can lead to forsaking. Look at verse 12: “then beware, lest you forget the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.” God wants us to be “careful” to not forget. We need to be vigilant or the “things” of life will crowd out the Giver of our things. Did you notice that God wants them to remember what they used to be? They were slaves in the land of Egypt and God brought them out. We need to remember that we were at one time slaves to sin, lost and separated from God. It is only by His grace that we’ve been set free. When we start to forget, we’re in danger of losing our edge spiritually.
Before you can pass the “belief baton” to your kids, and to your grandkids, you have to have faith yourself. Are you in the family of God? Have you trusted Christ yourself? Have you engaged your will and received the greatest gift of all time by asking Jesus to save you from your sins? You can’t give your kids what you don’t have. You can only pass along what has first entered your own life. Over 100 years ago, Woodrow Wilson said: “If you wish your children to be Christians you must really take the trouble to be a Christian yourself.”
Once we come to saving faith, then as parents we can pass it on. Let’s learn it, let’s live it, let’s leave it and then let’s launch it! There’s no greater job description in the world.