Fathers, Do Not Discourage 			Col.3:21     1-20-2002 

Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. 21 Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.

God’s Attitude Toward Kids
This is one of those passages that stands out in stark contrast to the culture in which it was written.  

You can read through all the ancient literature you can find, and you will have a tough time finding any writer in any context who was concerned about the psychological sensitivities of children.

But one thing we know for sure about God – He cares deeply for children.
V.21 is drastically different than anything else we read in that culture. 

I read a letter this week that was written in 1 BC (when Jesus was 3 or 4).  It was a personal letter written by a man named Hilarion to his wife Alis.  He had made a trip to Alexandria and was writing home.  

“Hilarion to his wife Alis, hardiest greetings…Know that we tire even now in Alexandria.  Do not worry if when all others return I remain in Alexandria.  I beg and beseech of you to take care of the little child, and, as soon as we receive wages, I will send them to you.  If – good luck to you – you have a child, if it is a boy, let it live; if it is a girl, throw it out.  You told Aphrodisias to tell me “Don’t forget me.”  How can I forget you?  I beg you therefore not to worry.” (Barcley)

As he writes the letter he is not in a bad mood.  He is full of affection and tenderness and love, and yet so callous toward the baby.

Children were customarily placed before their father after birth to see if the father would accept it or reject it.  If there was any deformity or any reason at all he didn’t want the child, they would just leave it out in a field where it would either die of the elements, or be picked up and raised as a prostitute or slave.

Seneca: “We slaughter a fierce ox; we strangle a mad dog; we plunge the knife into sickly cattle lest they taint the herd; children who are born weakly and deformed we drown.” (Barcley)

Contrast that with Jesus’ attitude.  The King summons Jesus in Lk.13, and Jesus says, “Tell him I’m busy.  I’ll be a few days.  Maybe I’ll get there, maybe I won’t” (and He never did).

He replied, "Go tell that fox, `I will drive out demons and heal people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal.' 33In any case, I must keep going today and tomorrow and the next day Lk.13:32-33

That’s how Jesus responded to a king.  He was too busy to make time for a meeting with the king, but when the children wanted to come to Him, and the disciples, who were a product of their culture, tried to rebuke them and keep them away, Jesus said, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." 15 When he had placed his hands on them, he went on from there. (Mt.19:14-15)

He didn’t have time for Herod, but He made time for kids.
What a contrast.
It’s timely in the providence of God that we come across this passage this Sunday, because today marks the beginning of sanctity of life week.  

This is a time for us to remind ourselves that we are battling exactly the same ungodly attitudes toward children that were present in Jesus’ time.

That letter I read is tragic, but not much different than our culture.  Our culture has a low view of children, and nowhere is that more painfully obvious than in the abortion crisis.

There are 126,000 unborn children who are alive right now, but by this time tomorrow will have been intentionally killed – 126,000 every day worldwide (http://www.abortiontv.com/AbortionStatistics.htm#United States)

I looked up the Planned Parenthood website where they have a list of 9 reasons why abortion should be legal.         
2. Legal abortions protect women's health. 
3. A woman is more than a fetus. 
There's an argument these days that a fetus is a "person"… To impose a law defining a fetus as a "person," granting it rights equal to…a woman's…is arrogant and absurd. It only serves to diminish women. 

They don’t even offer any arguments against the personhood of a fetus.  They just take it as being obvious.

4. Being a mother is just one option for women. 
To be able to choose an…abortion makes many other options possible. Otherwise an accident…can end a woman's economic and personal freedom.
5. Outlawing abortion is discriminatory. 
(It discriminates against poor women who have a tough time breaking the law – that’s true of any law).
6. Compulsory pregnancy laws are incompatible with a free society.
1. Laws against abortion kill women. 
7. Outlaw abortion, and more children will bear children. 
8. "Every child a wanted child." 
9. Choice is good for families.
Accidents can and do happen…such an event can be catastrophic. 

Children are accidents.  They are enemies of a woman’s freedom.  They are catastrophies.

I looked in vain on that entire web page to find a single positive word about children.

Nowhere on there did they mention that children are a wonderful blessing and a sign of God’s favor, and should be cherished.

The most positive term they can muster is “wanted.”  The only children that shouldn’t be put to death are the ones that are wanted by the mother.

But even that doesn’t place any inherent value on the child – the only value the child has is as a commodity that a mother may or may not want.

One thing they will never do is offer a reason why a baby is a human being a moment after having passed through the birth canal, but not a human being a moment before.  

And, of course, if it is a human being even inside the womb, none of those arguments have any validity.  (For example, is it discriminatory to prohibit the killing of teenagers?  We have this law against killing teenagers, and the result is poor people are put under all kinds of financial strain trying to support their teens.)

If we accept evolution, we can understand why people would get abortions.  If the greatest good is achieved by the survival of the fittest, then you are doing society a favor by destroying the weak.  

If people are just highly developed animals, then it’s no big deal to put one of them “to sleep.”  

But Scripture teaches us that personhood is not a function of usefulness to society, or age, or attractiveness, or whether or not one is desired or wanted.  

Personhood is a function of being in the image of God.  That image is what gives someone value.  

Most people would agree (even most evolutionists) that we shouldn’t murder healthy adults.  Why not?

God’s answer is in Gn.9:6.  One of the first laws God ever gave was against murder, and here’s why:  "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.” 

Murder is bad for a lot of reasons.  It is the stealing of someone’s life, it creates pain for his loved ones, etc.  But those aren’t the most compelling reasons.  

The biggest reason why murder is such a bad thing is because it strikes a blow at the image of God.  

That’s why it’s OK to kill animals, but killing people is murder.

So when does a person first bear the image of God?  Does the Bible ever tell us if someone who is in the womb is a person?   Yes.

When Eve became pregnant, she didn’t say, “God has given me a potential man.”  She said “God has given me a man” (The Hebrew term translated “man” just means “human being”).

Job says he was a “boy” (a term only used of human beings) on the day of his conception.  (Job 4:4)  David said he was sinful all the way back at the beginning of his existence which was not birth, but conception (Ps.51:5).

When we call a fetus a “baby” that is not just inflamitory rhetoric we use in the abortion debate.  That’s the language God Himself uses.

In Lk.1:41,44 the 6th-month fetus inside Elizabeth is called a “baby.”  And that baby was full of the Holy Spirit.

In the next chapter, Mary is in her first week and the little conceptus inside her is called a baby (Lk.2:12,16).

God speaks of Himself as personally relating to people while they were in the womb (Ps.139, Isa.49:1, Jer.1:5, Jdg.13)

A college professor presented this challenging situation for his ethics class to consider. "A man has syphilis and his wife has tuberculosis. They have four children. One has died; the other three have terminal illnesses. The mother is pregnant again. What do you recommend?" The class voted to terminate the pregnancy. The professor noted they had just killed Beethoven. (HIS magazine, February 1984)

Ethel Waters, the great gospel singer, was born to a 13-year-old child who had been raped.

There’s no question at all that Planned Parenthood would have put considerable pressure on Mary and Joseph to get an abortion.

Illustrations like that help remind us that people are valuable whether they seem to be or not, but we should understand that it would have been wrong to kill Beethoven even if instead of turning out to be a great composer he turned out to be nothing but a 5th sick baby who created more difficulty for his mother who had tuberculosis.

Because a person’s worth is determined not by his usefulness to use but by whether or not he bears the image of God – and that is determined by whether or not God considers him a person.

Now I realize that you don’t need me to stand up here in a message on parenting and tell you that the first step in Christian parenting is, “don’t kill your children.”

But being pro-life is really a lot more than being against killing.  The idea is to honor the sanctity of human life.  

And that really is the starting point of Christian parenting.  

My goal is not to convince you that children are human beings so you won’t kill them.  As far as I know we don’t have a big problem with a lot of families at Creekside having abortions.

But the fact that we live in a culture that has that attitude toward children has had an effect on us.  If we think we are immune to be influenced by our culture, we are mistaken.

Our goal as Christians (whether you are a parent or not) should be to cultivate the same attitude toward children that God Himself has.

We want to become Christ-like in every way, and so one important way is to think about other people the same way Christ does.

Scripture teaches us to have a high view of children from beginning to end.

In our depravity our tendency is to look at something God calls good and think of it as being bad.  

People think of children as a nuisance, an annoyance, a headache, and expense, a liability, a hindrance to our career or our recreation…

 Contrast that with the biblical perspective.

When Eve became pregnant in Gn.4:1, even though she obviously understood Adam’s involvement, said  I have gotten a man from the LORD. (KJV)

Later when she became pregnant with Seth she said God has granted me another child. (Gn.4:25)

Throughout Scripture children are a blessing and cause for rejoicing.  And God is always the Lord of the womb.  We are instructed to be wise about many decisions in life, but never are we told to make decisions about how many children to have.  

No one is ever rebuked are called foolish for having too many.

On the other hand, nothing in Scripture requires you to have any certain number either.  No one is ever rebuked for have too few.

I’m not concerned with the size of your family.  But it is of great concern the attitude of our hearts toward children.

Children are treated as sub-human in many ways in our culture.  

But children are a blessing, and those who sacrifice in order to raise godly children should be honored.  

Some people look down on people with large families.  If you do that, you need to re-adjust your perspective to match God’s.  God considers that a good thing.

“But what about over-population?”

The world isn’t even close to being over-populated.  In fact, it’s not even fully populated.  

Mona Charen’s article:
You may have heard that you could fit the entire population of the world in Texas.  I heard that and thought it was ridiculous, so I set out to disprove it.

If you take the world’s population of 6 billion people (if it really is that many, which I strongly doubt) – and divide them into groups of 4, you have 1.5 billion “families.”  

Texas has 267,277 square miles.  At 640 acres per square mile, that’s 171,057,280 acres, which is almost 1.4 billion eighth acres.  So 6 billion people could fit in TX, and each group of 4 could have almost an eighth acre.  The rest of the globe would be empty.

But the danger of the Earth's population multiplying into starvation or ecological disaster, which certain people have been warning us about for 50 years, has not only failed to materialize, the exact opposite has happened.

Despite an expanding population, Earth is experiencing a food glut.  Even China has a problem with obesity. 

Stephen Moore in the National Review: "Global food prices have fallen by half since 1950, even as population has doubled. ... Enough food is now grown in the world to provide each resident of the planet with almost 4 pounds of food per day." 

There are still famines, but generally speaking they are no longer the result of natural disaster, but instead the purposeful acts of evil governments. Recent famines in Ethiopia and Sudan were engineered by governments to punish rebellious subjects. 

But for the vast majority of the world's people, population increases have gone hand in hand with improvements in living standards. 

The population control effort has not had good effects.  In fact, the result in many cases has been downright gruesome.   

In China the one-child-per-family policy has resulted in the exposure and infanticide of an estimated 10 to 20 million female babies. 90% of the children in Chinese orphanages are female.

Forced abortions are inflicted upon the women there who get pregnant with a second child, and now China has created a society without brothers, sisters, aunts or uncles. 

And millions of young Chinese men will never marry or have even child of their own because there aren't enough women to go around. 

The negative attitude our culture has toward children is tragic, and it we should not let it infect the church.

When you see a Christian with a large family, instead of responding with selfish, worldly responses (“Those people are helping crowd this planet.”) our response should be one of gratitude: 
“Those people are building the Kingdom of God.”

Ps 127:3-5
Sons are a heritage from the LORD, children a reward from him. 4 Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth.  5 Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.

They are a heritage, and they build the kingdom.

John Stott in Portrait of a Preacher: “I quote from Al Sanders in Crisis in Morality!”:
Max Jukes was an atheist who lived a godless life. He married and had children, and over the years ended up with 540 descendants.

As a result of that one union there were 310 who died as paupers, 150 criminals, 7 murderers, 100 drunkards, and more than half of the women were prostitutes. His 540 descendants cost the State one and a quarter million dollars.

Jonathan Edwards lived at the same time as Max Jukes, but he married a godly woman. An investigation was made of 1,394 known descendants of Jonathan Edwards of which 13 became college presidents, 65 college professors, 3 United States senators, 30 judges, 100 lawyers, 60 doctors, 75 army and navy officers, 100 preachers and missionaries, 60 authors of prominence, one a vice-president of the United States, 80 became public officials in other capacities, 295 college graduates, among whom were governors of states and ministers to foreign countries.  

Children are a heritage.  One of the greatest things you could ever accomplish for the Kingdom of God is to simply raise a godly family.

Most of us will never write a book that will still be in print 100 years from now, but if you raise a large, godly family, your impact on this world will be profoundly felt even 1000 years from now.

The Father’s Responsibility

Last week I pointed out the significance that the children are addressed directly in v.20.  In v.21 we may be a little surprised to see the fathers singled out.

Since he just used the word “parents” in v.20, it seems that Paul is going out of his way to specify fathers (rather than the term being used as a synonym for “parents” as in Heb.11:23)

Two reasons have been suggested for this.  One is that fathers tend to be the worst offenders when it comes to embittering and exasperating children.
But another reason is the ultimate responsibility for child rearing is on the shoulders of the father.  The mother spends much more time parenting in the scriptural pattern, and yet the overall responsibility ultimately rests upon the father.

Recently I heard of a family having some difficulty with a child’s attitude, and the father was planning on making a phone call from work the to the child the next time it happened.  If that didn’t work, he would come home from work one day and deal with it.

That’s the kind of attitude I think a father should have.

Some men are so busy earning a living, and so tired when they get home, and so far out of the loop of what is going on with the kids anyway, that he defers almost all parenting to his wife.

But God calls men to take responsibility in raising children.
 
Christian Parenting 

As we saw with husbands and wives, Paul’s purpose here is very limited.  He is not trying to give a comprehensive explanation of how we are to carry out our relationships in the home.  He is only addressing two specific aspects of it.

With husbands and wives he took for granted that the reader already understands the biblical roles for men and women.  The man is to be the leader and the woman the helper.  

The point here in Col.3 is, with those roles in mind Paul tells us that those roles are to be governed by the right attitudes.

The readers already know the husband is to lead, but Paul’s concern here is that the husband’s leadership be governed by gentleness.

Because of the fall, men tend to take their leadership role and degenerate into chauvinism, harshness – even brutality.   And so Paul say, “Go ahead and lead, but never let your leadership jump off the track of tenderness, love and gentleness.”

With each pair, the subordinate is addressed first and instructed to have a submissive attitude, then the one in authority is addressed, and limitations are placed on his authority.

The duties of the husband and wife, and their roles are addressed elsewhere in Scripture.  Here in Col.3 he is concerned only with the attitude one has as he carries out his role.

And it’s the same here in this section with parents.  He doesn’t give a crash course on parenting.  He doesn’t give a lot of detail about discipline or training.  All that is handled elsewhere in the Bible. 

Here he just gives us the attitude that must govern our discipline and training.

So let’s take a little time to get an overview of what Scripture says about the parents’ role, and then we will come back to Col.3 and study the attitude that must govern our actions as we carry out that role.

TT Eph.6

This is a parallel passage to Col.3, and Paul expands a little to give a summary of Christian parenting.

Eph.6:4
Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up

This term bring them up
means “to nurture.”  Literally “to feed.”  

Bringing up children means providing for them what they need.  Giving them what they need to grow – both physically and spiritually.

This is our responsibility as parents.  You owe this to your children.  Just by being your child, that little person has the right to be disciplined by you, and the right to your unselfish affection.  

It’s wrong for us to think of our kids as an intrusion or an annoyance.  You have as much responsibility to provide nurture and love as you do to put food on the table. 

And you do that, 
 in the training and instruction of the Lord. 

Verbal Training

instruction  means “warning.”
1 Cor.10:11 These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us
Tit.3:10 Warn a divisive person once, and then after the second warning have nothing to do with him.

The idea is you make crystal clear to the child in advance what the negative consequences are for wrong behavior.

This is a point where we so often fail.  

We fail to set clear boundaries.  One of the surest ways to exasperate your child is make it impossible for him to know what will bring a spanking and what won’t.  

If the last 3 nights you told him to get his pajamas on and he didn’t do it, and there was no spanking, but tonight he doesn’t do at and gets whacked – that doesn’t teach him to obey.  That teaches him one thing: “I can’t win.  I never know when I’m going to get it.”

The child’s goal then becomes not obedience but trying to keep tabs on your mood.

Now, for a warning to work, a couple things are necessary.  First, it must be a severe consequence.  

There is an ad that comes on the radio all that time designed to discourage drug use by children, and the point of the ad is if you use drugs it can effect your memory.  The commercial begins with a big, long number that has no meaning or connection to anything, and the point is that if you use drugs it will make it harder to remember numbers like that.

I would like to the person who created that ad thinking that will discourage a teenager who wants to take drugs.

Every time it comes on I cringe as I imagine some borderline teen hearing that and thinking, “That’s all that will happen to me?  Pass the pot pipe!”

Warning of a mild consequence can have the effect of actually encouraging wrong behavior.

For a warning to have an effect, it must be a warning of something the child absolutely dreads.  If you doubt that, read a few of the warnings in the Bible that God directs at His children.

Secondly, a warning must be credible.  

What do we think we are accomplishing when we tell our 10-year-old, “If your room isn’t clean by tonight you can never have a friend over again”?  Never?

“If you’re not ready to go in 5 minutes we are going on vacation without you.”  Right mom.

It must be something serious, but it must also be something that the child knows for sure will happen.

There is also a positive side to this idea.  The concept primarily means warning, but it also stretches beyond that to refer to all verbal training.

On the positive side, it is critical that we teach our children God’s Word.

Teaching God’s Word
TT Dt.4

The first & highest & greatest responsibility of a parent toward his children is not to discipline them.  That is important, but there is something that rises even above that in importance.  

Our first responsibility is something that many, many Christian parents today have ignored to an alarming degree.  

It’s as if many parents don’t even realize this is their responsibility. 

Dt.4:9-10
be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them. 

A parent should protect his children, provide for them, discipline them, etc. but at the very beginning of what parents are to do is teach their children – give them an education in God’s Word.  

Dt.6:1-9
These are the commands, decrees and laws the LORD your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess, 2so that you, your children and their children after them may fear the LORD your God 

4Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.   5Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. 

Dt 11:18-21
Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 19Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 20Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates, 21so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land that the LORD swore to give your forefathers, as many as the days that the heavens are above the earth. 

Dt 32:46-47
"Take to heart all the words I have solemnly declared to you this day, so that you may command your children to obey carefully all the words of this law. 47They are not just idle words for you--they are your life.

In Gn.18 God tells why he chose Abraham: 19 For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing what is right and just

Your child’s education is your responsibility.  You can use a school or church – Sunday School, children’s church, VBS, Bible club… whatever you want as a tool.  But the overall coordination of their education is your responsibility.   

Systematically teach God’s Word to your kids.

And the older they get, the more you can move from threatening a spanking to describing the kind of spiritual damage that can be done by disobedience.  So that by the time they are old enough to where your discipline is no longer a factor, they have a healthy fear of the spiritual consequences of sin.

And we should also keep in mind that teaching God’s Word is not just teaching a bunch of “Thou shalt not”s.  

Not only do we warn our kids of the dangers of doing wrong, but we use words to create in their hearts a longing for virtue.

When our kids were real little, we played a tape with songs that defined virtues.

Now we go through 1 Co.13, Php.4:6ff, the fruit of the Spirit, etc.  And we play the game “Character Clues.”  

All that to familiarize them with what the virtues are.  

But that’s not the ultimate goal.  The other part of what we do is to try to make them desirous of those virtues.  

If we are driving in the car, and something comes up in conversation that involves some virtue (generosity, honesty, diligence, etc.) I will do my best to point out to them how beautiful that is.  My goal is to get them to long for those virtues.

Some parents have the goal of raising the world’s greatest athlete or musician.  They watch for the slightest clue that a child might have a natural proclivity toward some skill, and when they find it, that kid is in training.  

That kid shows a little interest in the trombone, and instantly he has a trombone, he’s in trombone lessons, he goes to trombone camp 3 times a year…

We do the same things with sports.

I’m not suggesting there is anything wrong with sports or music.  We do our kids a favor when we teach them these things when they are young.

But do we put the same kind of energy into their character?  

When I daydream about my kids’ future, and when I pray for them – I don’t think about them being olympic gymnasts or classical musicians.  

I daydream about them having some extraordinary character trait that is of great use to God.

You know how sometimes you meet someone who so excels in some virtue, that they have a powerful impact on everyone they meet?  That’s what I want for my kids.

So I’m constantly on the lookout for areas where my kids might excel spiritually.  

Faith is naturally gifted in the area of loyalty.  For Nikki it’s compassion.  So I try to encourage her in that area as much as possible.  I figure God must have a reason why He made her good at that.  By age 20 I want her to be one of the best in the world at it.

This is much more effective than always trying to shore up their areas of weakness.  We need to do some of that, but it shouldn’t be our main focus.

Our main focus should be on their strengths, because that’s how God designed them.

And that’s much more encouraging for the child.  If I’m on Nikki’s case about improving in her areas of weakness, that will discourage her.  

But if I make it clear that what I really want is for her to excel in the area of compassion, she will be encouraged.  She will like that.  It will come easy to her, and she will be more likely to pursue it.

But she needs instruction from me to even know that it is a virtue, that she’s especially good at it, and how to improve at it.

I hope you understand that the end product we are shooting for is a spiritual product.  We have a spiritual goal.

The goal is not just to adjust their external behavior or to keep them calm and quiet.  

Our goal is to shepherd their hearts.

If one of my kids is careless and leaves my nice tools laying in the driveway where I’ll back over them, that’s not a big deal.  
But if one of them answers Tracy with a sarcastic tone of voice, that’s serious.

If one of them just can’t do well in school because of low intelligence, I can live with that.  But if it’s because she is lazy it’s more serious.  Because I know if I don’t teach her how to have command over her body in her childhood, I sentence her to a whole live of trouble.

We could probably spend hours having people come up here and give examples of how much better their lives would have gone if they just would have learned self-control in childhood.

Can your kids tell from the way you discipline that spiritual things are more important than anything else?  

When I was a youth pastor, it wasn’t uncommon at all for a kid to tell me, “Mom won’t let me come to youth group tonight, because my homework isn’t done.”

Never once did I hear of a parent telling a kid, “You can’t go to school today, because you’re not doing well in youth group.” 

Or “You can’t go on that school field trip, because you haven’t learned your verses for Sunday School.”  

What are we teaching our kids about our priorities?  I hope your kids understand that you care more about their hearts than about their grades or anything else. 

BENEDICTION:
2 Tim 3:14-17 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, 15 and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work