God Centric Family

When God gave the Ten Commandments, which are the basic, just the basic, simplest rules of life, I've been looking through Jordan Peterson's book on the 12 Rules of Life, which takes him a book that thick, and he's a brilliant man, but takes him four pages to say what should take a paragraph.

But it's a brilliant book, but they're not as good as these. These are the basic building blocks of life. It's not everything. Actually, the Ten Commandments don't give you salvation, but they tell you how to live, how we're supposed to relate to God and relate to each other in the most simplest ways. And there's two commandments in there that have to do with family. One, of course, is the command not to commit adultery.

Which is stating that the marriage covenant between a man and a woman is sacred. It's so sacred that God himself says there are rules to this, and he sets up the rules for it. The other one is to honor your father and your mother, which actually means that parenthood is sacred, too. Parenthood is ordained by God as part of the structure of the way humanity is supposed to work. Both humanity as a whole, but really specifically, when you get into the church, family is so important.

Now, 1500 years or so after he gave the Ten Commandments, the Apostle Paul quotes this commandment in Ephesians. We're going to go through some very basic scriptures here today, but I want to help us to look at this.

This sermon is actually because of a number of requests I've had for some sermons on family. So I started to make one, and then I ended up outlining a second one, and now I have three sermons. So throughout the next three months, we're going to have three sermons on family. And the real questions that came up that I was asked many times was, can you give a sermon on how to recover from a dysfunctional family, if you come from a very dysfunctional family? And one of the things I told the people that have asked that is, there's one misconception you have, and that is you came from one of the few dysfunctional families, and everybody else has it all together.

So we'll talk about that over the next three sermons. How many know who the Waltons are? They were the greatest family in television history, right? The perfect family. We're on for many years, so it was in the 80s and 90s, whatever it was. Okay, if you took a line and said, here is the most chaotic dysfunctional family, and here's the Waltons, right? And everybody thinks everybody else is the Waltons. The truth is, that's a myth. There is no perfect family. It doesn't exist. So what God's doing is taking us from one end to the other. And you know where we usually end up somewhere in the middle, moving, keep moving in this direction. So if you're in the middle between the chaos and the Waltons, that's actually pretty good. Okay, so let's just settle that issue right here. We're moving towards something. We have this ideal family we see in the Scripture. We're moving towards that. Nobody has obtained it. Nobody in the Bible obtained it. So we're moving that way. So it's a constant growth process for all of us, for the children, for the parents, for the grandparents, as a community, how we help people and their family, how their family works by being a support. So Paul here, in Ephesians 6, he's now going to quote that commandment as he instructs the church. He says, Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother, for this is the first commandment with promise, that it may be well with you, and you may live long on earth on the earth. There is a blessing that comes, a physical blessing that comes with this, obeying this commandment.

We need to define what that behavior looks like. As parents, we need to understand what that behavior is. Sometimes we actually misinterpret what that should look like. We have to know what that should look like and what we're teaching our children. But before we go there, we have to first start with, how do we teach it? What are the principles we teach, and how do we teach it? Then we'll go into a sermon here in the future. What does that look like in the behavior of our children? The most important teaching tool we have is our example. Children mimic their parents. Now, each child has their own personality. Sometimes it's shocking as a parent to have a child, and you say, wow, this is just like grandma. You can see the genetics that are in there. But how they learn, especially the younger they are, they learn from what they see, how they see others. And remember, the younger a child is, the less it understands the world around it. It doesn't understand it.

The most important thing a child needs growing up, besides physically being taken care of, is a sense of security that they're okay. And as they get older, they have to learn to deal with the traumas of life. And it begins with, feed me. I'm crying because I'm hungry and I have no idea where food comes from, except from you. So, feed me. It's physical things. And then it's a sense of security. Am I okay? You see that panic in a child? The first week the rains were here, their little guy. The only other person he knew here, man, was me. He didn't know me very well, but he lost his dad. And I'm standing there and I look and he's hanging onto my leg, looking around in panic. It's like, I don't know you, but at least you're the one person I recognize. And then he saw his dad and off he ran to him. He never said anything to me, but I realized, this is a pretty insecure moment, isn't it, boy?

He's hanging there and looking around, you know, protect me because I don't know where I am. That's just a natural feeling from a child. Children aren't very logical. In fact, their brain is amazing, what it's absorbing and what it's learning every second.

But it doesn't all fit yet. It does start to fit quicker than we think sometimes. But it's still, you know, it's a real growth process. The human brain isn't totally developed until you're in your late teens and early 20s. So this is a whole development process. And so we have to teach them honor. Honor means to hold someone in great, as having great value, you respect them because they have value. They are important and you respect that, and you show them respect. Now, once again, there's no perfect families, but we're going to look at how to try to move towards this perfection we're looking at. I'll tell you when there's a perfect family. When Christ returns, there's a resurrection, and then there'll be perfect families.

So we have to give up the idea that everybody else has a perfect family except us, because it's not true. Now, some people are more on the dysfunction scale, okay? Some are down in absolute chaos and violence and all kinds of things that they're far into that scale. That doesn't mean you're trapped there the rest of your life, and it doesn't mean that you can't heal from that. It takes God. That's a whole other subject. We have to learn how to move from that in the way that God takes us and where He's taking us. I mean, I could get up here and give you, and I have, I don't know, 75 books on Christian counseling, and I could tell you the five points how to come out of a dysfunctional family. But the bottom line is, if God doesn't help us do it, we're pretty much, we don't get very far. God has to help us. So how do we teach them? How do these parents say, what do I do? Well, let's see. I will set up more rules. Now there needs to be rules. I will do more punishment. Well, there needs to be punishment. I need to, and you can come up with all different things we need to do. But this is the starting point. The starting point is, is that you teach your children to honor God because they see you honor God. That's where you start.

It's interesting, this commandment comes after there's four commandments about honoring God.

You know, this isn't the first commandment. There's four commandments before it that are all about, here's how you honor God. And then, by the way, children, you must honor your parents. This is the basic structure here of how this works within the family. So how do we teach that?

How do we teach that? They need us as babies, but they have emotional reactions to us all the time that can be very negative. You know, come here and they run away. Please pick that up. And they throw it, right? There's all kinds of emotional reactions happening here as they're testing what is independence. You know, hey, I have the power to throw this. What happens? Well, it probably won't be very positive. But they're learning, and they're learning by watching us. And that means that we the first thing we do is we teach them by our example of honoring God. This is why simple prayer with children is so important. You pray with them. You do little Bible studies with them. You talk about God in front of them. They see how serious you are about Sabbath keeping.

They understand there's something special here in their relationship with whatever God is, and it becomes something attractive to them. It can become something that they begin to need and they begin to feel because we are exhibiting that. And that means that there's three different ways that families become eccentric. In other words, what's the core of who they are?

And we have to create God-centric families. So, why not? We're going to talk about how I should teach my children first. Have a God-centric family. God is the center of your family.

God and Christ are talked about. They understand, like I said, prayer. They understand that the Bible means something. They understand that you share these stories. There's nothing more powerful in child development than stories. And Bible stories is a great way to use the Bible. So much of this is stories because that's how we learn. And children, you know, my children, my grandchildren, I don't know how many times over the years they run and say, I'll grab a tell us a story. Or daddy, tell us a story. They want to learn something. But it's in a story form. And we share the stories of the Scripture. We share the stories of our lives in a relationship with God. And we just share those things with them. A God-centric family is when all of our relationships and behaviors are connected to some kind of scriptural instruction. We don't steal because God says not to steal and it's bad and it hurts other people. And that can be a very hard concept when you're two years old. You know, oh, that's a pretty toy. Thank you. And you walk away with it. No, that's stealing. And it can take a while for that to actually develop in the brain. Why that's wrong. But it doesn't feel wrong. It's a pretty toy.

It sure doesn't feel wrong to pick it up and walk out with it. Besides, why should they get it? Not me. I don't understand any of this. And so we train and train and train on a God-centric way.

God is the center of the family. That's what's so interesting about the instructions to ancient Israel when you look at how they were taught to teach their children, right? Where you walk, where you sit, where you eat, wherever you go, you're teaching them through your example and your words about God. Now, a lot of times as they get older, you know, you just can't keep preaching at them. But they see it through behavior. They see it through who you are. Now, here's two of the mistakes we make. One is we make a parent-centric family. What I mean by that is that the whole atmosphere of the family is driven by the emotional state of the parents. My wife pointed that out to me when our kids were real young. I would come home, walk in the house, and the two little ones we didn't have Christian, would come running up. Daddy, daddy! Because they didn't see me all day. And she said, I know how the rest of the evening is going to be by that 30 seconds.

She said, because when's daddy coming? He walked in the house. They run up. And when I say, oh, kids, just leave me alone. You know, I don't pay him attention. She said, we'll be paying for that for the rest of the evening. She said, when you come in and you give him a hug, and you play with him or do something with him for 10 minutes, it's going to be a much better evening. She said, you determine whether you like it or not, what it's going to be like in this house after you get home by that first little period of time. Because they'll just absorb it, right? Whatever it is, they'll absorb it. A parent-centric family means we're being driven by our own emotions and our own feelings, which isn't what they need. This is what's hard.

We're having children sometimes at very early ages. We're still struggling with how do we control our emotions? Well, you struggle with that to the day you die. How do we control our emotions, right? And you're struggling with that, and now you've got to have these little kids where your emotions affect them dramatically. And it has nothing to do with them much of the time.

Or it can, because what happens is what? We become short-tempered with them. We lose patience with them because they're children acting like children, and they may need some attention.

They may need some correction. But what happens is we're driven by that emotion. Sometimes, you know, children will say things like, oh, don't get daddy mad or don't get mommy mad, because then we'll be punished. See, they're not equating punishment with their bad behavior. What are they equating it with? The emotions of the parents. That's a parent-centric family in which the emotions of the parents control what's happening all the time. We have to be careful not to do that. The other mistake we make is the other extreme where we have a child-centric family. Now, children take an awful lot of attention, don't they? They take a lot of time. They take a lot of effort. But there's times when they, as they get older especially, and I mean at a very early age, I mean it's hard to learn this at two months old, but they start to learn that there are times when, no, you are not in control of the situation, or no, your emotions right now aren't the what's going to motivate what happens next.

A child-centric family is where everything is done to make the child feel good. I don't want to hurt their feelings. I want them to be happy. Well, you know, if you drive that long enough as the parent, what you end up with is with a selfish child. In a child-centric family, see, in a parent-centric family driven by the parent's emotions, what you end up with is a dysfunctional child. Don't understand how relationships work. Don't sometimes understand the difference between right and wrong. Right is when daddy and mommy are happy, and wrong is when daddy and mommy are unhappy, and that's how we live our lives. Or, in the child-centric family, they just become selfish. You know, they throw a temper tantrum, they get whatever they want. Right? They learn that. Those are two extremes, and what we have to do is start with a God-centric family, and that means we honor God first, and children know that. No, we don't do that because God tells us not to because it's bad. So, no, you can't steal this toy. Or you can't, you know, lie about this. Because lying is wrong, and no, you can't be trusted when you start lying, and that needs to be explained. And lying needs to be punished. Not because you've lost your temper, but because lying is wrong. That's what's so hard. You can get so angry with them, but your anger can't be the driving force. The driving force is what you did, what you did was wrong. There's consequences to that. And when you get older, I won't be around, and you'll get really bad consequences from this.

And of course, the younger they are, they don't... it takes a lot of effort to get them to understand that. But as they get older, that can become more and more real. If we honor our children more than God, we are actually dishonoring God. 1 Samuel chapter 2.

You know, when you build a child-centric home, eventually they will dishonor you.

Because if you don't give them what they want, they will dishonor you. Because the center of the universe is them. The parent-centric home, the center of the universe, is the parents and how they feel. But when God's the center of the universe, you're in reality now. Because of self-consciousness, it's very difficult for every one of us not to sometimes feel like we're the center of the universe. And so it's something that, you know, every human being struggles with some, simply because we're so limited. We have self-consciousness, but we're so limited. Unlike God, who is self-conscious and has no limits at all. But 1 Samuel 2, it's interesting here because Eli, of course, was selected by God to be the high priest.

But he had a problem with his sons. And this is a problem when you have a child-centric environment.

Verse 27. Then a man of God came to Eli and said to him, Thus says the Lord, Did I not clearly reveal myself to the house of your fathers when they were in Egypt in Pharaoh's house? He says, Your position started way back hundreds of years ago when I picked members of the the house of Levi to fulfill this office.

And I've done this, God, saying, Look what I've done for hundreds of years.

And you're in this office because I prepared it for you and because your family has been doing this all these years. He says, Did I not choose him out of all the tribes of Israel to be my priests, to offer upon my altar, to burn incense, and to wear an ephod before me? And did I not give to the house of your father and all the offerings of the children of Israel made by fire? He says, You live a really nice life as a priest. You know, you have a nice place to live. You're honored by everyone and you eat better than anybody. Because of many of the offerings that were brought to be at, of course he didn't have a temple yet, but it's a tabernacle, they got to eat part of it.

They got to eat the best of the food that was being offered.

He says, Even your lifestyle has been blessed because of me. He says, verse 29, Why do you kick at my sacrifice and my offering, which I have commanded in my dwelling place? And listen, and honor your sons more than me to make yourselves fat with the best of all the offerings of Israel, my people. He says, You honor your sons by allowing them to do very immoral things. Then you read about his sons and they were just taking advantage of people. They were using people. They were abusing people. They were stealing from people and using their office as priests to do this. And he says, You, by allowing them to do this, have honored them more than me. This is the problem when we create a total child-centered home where they could do whatever they want. We're honoring them more than God. And the price you will pay is that they will not honor you. And if you have a parent-centered home, they may honor you, but the relationship is going to not be very functional. And all of us have seen this. All of us have been part of this in one way or another. And so that's the very first step you must take. In order to teach children that commandment, the fifth commandment, to honor you, you must first show them by honoring God.

That's the first thing you do. And you teach them when you walk and when you sit down. And when you wherever you do, at some point, I don't mean you're constantly preaching at it, but you know what I mean. There's some lesson being learned. Watch a child, watch their mom or dad do something and try to emulate it. They try to imitate it. Oh yeah, okay, that looks, you know, you'll go out and dig in the garden and you'll look out and nobody will dig in in the grass.

They're not sure what they're doing, but they did it so it must be important I'm going to do it.

And every day there are thousands of these little interactions.

The second thing. Oh good, now we're going to, you're going to tell me how to specifically teach my child. No. The second thing you do, and this is real important, you honor each other as parents.

You honor each other as parents. 1 Peter 3. We covered this in the Bible study Wednesday night because we're going through 1 Peter. There was an interesting question I got, and I'm just going to take a second to answer that. I answered it in the Bible study. When you go to the last part of chapter 2 of 1 Peter, it's talking about slaves, and then it jumps into wives.

And the question was, is Peter's point that wives are like slaves? They have to submit to their husbands the way slaves submit to their masters. Well, no. The context of this starts clear back in verse 11 of chapter 2. Peter's talking about in that second chapter how they are the special people of God, called by God to imitate Him, called by God to be part of the temple. The church is the temple on earth. There's no physical temple in Jerusalem anymore.

It's the church. So he explains all that, and then he says, okay, here's the problem then. You are sojourners and pilgrims on this earth. You don't really belong. You don't really belong. So he says to abstain from the normal things that human beings do that war against us, and by having...this is very interesting, verse 12, by having your conduct honorable. So he's talking about honor here again. What is proper honor? Which means that there's a value to it.

There's something worth it. There's something that people see and say, yes, that's good. Having your conduct honorable among the nations, among the Gentiles, against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they observe glorify God in the day of visitation. So this is the introduction to the rest of chapter 2 and much of chapter 3, which is, you are pilgrims on this earth, and you must have honorable conduct. And other people will condemn you for this, but when Christ comes, the day of visitation, they will say, they will honor God because they will remember what you did. They may, you know, you're going to be dishonored as a Christian, is this point, at times in this life, but you you will be honored because God will be honored.

When they say, oh yeah, I remember that person, I get it now. God is honored. And then he cuts it down into three examples. Now these three examples we have to remember are important things that Peter's dealing with in the church at the time. I mean, this letter was written to all the churches in basically all of Asia Minor. There was a whole bunch of churches these letters were written to. They're not specific like most of Paul's letters.

So he writes this, and these are things that are happening in the church. So the first thing he tells them is, submit yourself to the government as long as it doesn't go against God. Now that was pretty hard. We say, wow, you know, they didn't have to live under our government. No, this one is a thousand times better than the government they lived under. Most of the emperors of the first century were absolute, well, they were insane. Absolutely insane. And he says, look, first thing, as Christians, let's just try to get along and not create problems by going out and protesting. Okay, let's just let's try to get along here with the government, this evil government.

He didn't say obey it when he tells you to do something wrong. He didn't say worship Nero as a God, which was required. No, you don't do that. Okay, but he says, okay, first thing is be a good citizen as long as it's in relationship, right, relationship with God.

The second thing is slaves and masters. This is very offensive to us in the modern world, but it's hard to understand that the entire world was based on slavery at the time, not just the Roman Empire.

The entire world was based on slavery. To refuse your master was a death penalty. To run away was a death penalty. To cause a slave insurrection was a death penalty. There was, it was a enforced constitution or institution that could not be broken.

And so what Peter does exactly, Paul says, look, if you're a slave, follow the master, but obey God first, but follow the master and be a good slave. And masters, if you're in the church, you have to treat them like brothers. Well, remember, Mr. Raines gave a sermon here a few months ago on Philemon. You read the book of Philemon, Paul literally destroys the entire institution of slavery by saying, the slaves and the masters are brothers. At that point, it just destroyed the institution. He does it without insurrection, though. It's just brilliant.

He does it by simply teaching Christian principles that would have dismantled the institution inside the Christian church. The whole relationship changed. But they live in this, and he says, look, don't run away and end up being hunted down and killed.

So try to serve that master the best you can, but follow your religion. Remember, this is in the context of following the religion so that they praise God when Christ comes. Oh, that's the religion!

So in the context, he now goes to wives.

And notice how this starts. Wives, likewise, this is verse 1 and chapter 3.

Be submissive to your own husbands, that even if some do not obey the word, they without a word may be won by the conduct of their wives when they observe your chaste conduct accompanied by fear. This begins in the same context. Now he's going to expand it out to Christian marriage, too. But it starts with, okay, you're in a bad situation. You're married to a pagan.

Worship God and be a good wife even if he's a pagan. That's what he's saying.

So that he can see what a godly person really is. He will see through your conduct what a Christian really is, which is the whole point of this whole passage. Whether it's with the government, whether it's with your whether you're a slave, or whether here you're in a situation where certain parts of the Roman Empire, a wife, could be almost a slave.

In other places where they had some Greek and Roman influence, a wife could have a lot of influence on what went on because she would be in charge of the household, which actually meant all the slaves reported to her, which is very interesting, or most of them. Household slaves reported to the wife. So he starts this in the same context, and now he's going to expand it out a little bit. Okay, here's what you're supposed to be if you're married to a pagan, but let's also apply this if you are a Christian, married to a Christian husband, because he's talking about husbands in a minute. He's going to include both. So now this is showing us how we are to honor each other, and this is the second point of how you honor children, or teach them honor. You honor God, and you honor each other. Children, and depending on their personalities, some of them get very good at it. They'll turn mom and dad against each other. They'll play that game. They'll just play that game.

Can I do this? Did you ask your mom? Yeah. What did she say? Ask you. Okay, she and I'll talk about it. But it'll be too late then. You have to decide now, dad. Actually, I don't. I'm dad. I don't have to.

Besides, I will not make this decision without your mother's input. She sent you to me for a reason.

I had that conversation a hundred times. Because every once in a while they do manipulate you, and you think, oh man, I just got conned by my own child. Okay, it happens.

So, we honor each other. So let's look at now how he's talking to wives about being honorable here. And specifically starting with, if you have a pagan husband, this is not going to be easy. Do not let your adornment be merely outward, arranging the hair, wearing gold, or putting on fire and apparel. But let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God. So the point he makes here is, okay, the worldly values were the same then that it is now. That a woman's core value is how she looks. Well, God made women to want to be to look nice. I mean, that's how he made you. You want to look nice. You know, I'll forget to comb my hair in the morning. So my wife says, hey, you didn't comb your hair, right? Oh yeah, okay. She never forgets to comb her hair, right? She never, she gets up and she looks nice real quick. You know, I can get a little bit of a sense of how she looks.

You know, I can get up, stagger into my office, and realize at 10 o'clock, huh, I've been working in this office for two and a half hours and I never even took a shower.

And go look in the mirror and it's like, oh my, I didn't even buff my shirt right. So, it's not a bad thing. He's saying, though, that that has no value unless you have, what, a right relationship with God. This is making this God-centric, right?

God-centric. You honor God first. Number seven, because he goes on and talks about, gives more instructions to the women. He says, husbands, likewise, dwell with them with understanding, giving honor to the wife. Whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, we know that women are commanded to honor their husbands. Here, we're commanded to honor them. We have to hold them in high value. We have to see them as someone who is special to God, and we have to show them respect also. So, we have to honor them. So, he switches here from, okay, if you have an unconverted husband, this is tough, to, okay, women, this is what you are. You are in your core, then, precious in the sight of God, right? It is God who you please. It is God who you honor first. And then he comes to the men and says, now, remember, you have to honor her, because the whole point is, okay, you got to honor your husband. Okay, you got to honor her, too.

Husbands likewise well with them with understanding. We have to understand how the relationship works, which is always a shock to every man. We think we know how the male-female relationship works, and then find out we don't. So, we have to do this with understanding. Giving honor to the wife as the weaker vessel, this doesn't mean, once again, that women are mentally weaker than men, or spiritually weaker than men. It does mean they are predominantly, physically weaker than a man. And you want to destroy a marriage faster than anything, physically hit your wife, and she can't trust you. It destroys her ability to trust. It destroys her ability to give. It destroys her ability to emotionally be connected to you, except in a very wrong way. So, he says, honor her and never, never physically abuse her. You can't. You can't physically or sexually abuse your wife. You honor her so that never happens. And as being heirs together of the grace of life, that your prayers be not hindered. So, we have a statement here that he tells men, I mean, there's all these verses about women and how they are to trust in God. Verse 5, for in this manner, in former times, the holy women who trusted in God also adorn themselves being submissive to their own husbands. So, there is a certain submission that women are supposed to have in the interaction between the husband and wife. But remember, that's based on honor. She's honored him and he's honoring her. It's based on honor, trust. It's based on holding that person in high value and respecting that person for who they are. And because of that, we remember before God, we are both the children of God, that your prayers be not hindered. In other words, men, don't you mistreat your wife, don't come talk to me, is what God says, fix that and then come talk to me. That's what it is to be the leader, by the way.

The leader is, no, I put you in charge. You go to her and you fix this and then we'll talk. It's the price of leadership, gentlemen. That's the price of leadership. And that's what we're commanded to do. So, yes, wives, you honor us when you submit to us, you work with us, you're our helper, we work together as a team. We honor them when we don't misuse them, abuse them, use our personalities or our just physical presence to intimidate them.

We honor them. When children see this, they learn what honor is.

They learn what honor is when they see mom and dad treating each other this way.

It doesn't mean they see mom and dad never having a trouble, never having a disagreement.

It means we should not fight in front of them. But the reality of life is, you know, a little disagreement. If you're going to have a fight, go to another room. But don't do it in front of them. But don't try to be perfect in front of them, either. Right? They learn life by watching us. They learn how we solve problems.

And one of the most important things we give children, and this starts at a very early age, because as they grow older, they will decide more and more for themselves. So we begin at an early age to give them security. Why?

Why? Because if that security matures properly, someday they'll leave us.

They won't need our security anywhere. If we don't help them develop security, they have real problems in teen years and in their 20s and 30s.

So they learn security first from us, and they learn a moral compass. We give them a moral compass, an idea that there is right and wrong beyond ourselves, outside ourselves, and it's not based on our feelings. Right and wrong isn't based on how we feel. Right and wrong is based on what's right and wrong. So it is wrong to lie about somebody, even if they're bad.

It is wrong to lie about somebody, even if they're a bad person.

It's not wrong to say that's a bad person, and let me show you why, but it is wrong to lie about them.

This isn't based on our feelings. Right and wrong is based on an object objectivity given to us by God. And we start with the Ten Commandments. That's why they need to know that as parents we subject ourselves to a higher authority than ourselves. Well, God tells us to do this. Now you can't use that as an excuse sometimes, you know.

It's what you want, but well God tells us to do this. But we literally have to let them know, no, God this way God wants it done. And there are times in life as they get older that you may actually admit to them you're wrong. There's times, you know, they don't understand that. But you know, even at five or six years old you look at them and say, I'm sorry, I didn't understand what you were saying. I was wrong. Let me fix that. You say, oh, now they'll never honor me. The opposite happens. No, no, no, no, I understand what you're saying now. I misunderstood. I was wrong.

Here's what we're going to do. So, oh, they can never see I'm wrong. You know what? Eventually they're going to figure that out. Now that doesn't mean we go apologizing for everything we do, but there are times when we face them and we say, okay, I was wrong with that. Now here's what we're going to do to fix it. They have security. Oh, good, they fix things. Right? They also learned that once again, moral compass is based on a morality and of what's right and wrong outside of themselves. It's outside of us, too. God gives it to us. It becomes part of us, but it comes from outside of ourselves. Now, the third point. Oh, good. Now we're going to talk about discipline. No. We'll get to that. The third point is parents teach children honor, and this is going to sound a little strange until I explain it, by honoring their children. Now, remember, you can't become a child-centric home. This doesn't mean they control everything. This doesn't mean that everything is driven by their thoughts and their feelings.

Or, you know, that's not reality, and that's a bad thing to teach a child.

They'll never really grow up. They'll never really grow up if you teach them that.

But we must understand that there is a certain honor we give them.

There's something, if some of you might have been around long enough back in the Radio Church of God where we had a booklet on child-rearing, and there was something said in there that was absolutely tragic. That you must basically spank the will out of them. You must spank them until you have control of their will. You know, God doesn't even do that to us. That is not right.

You're shaping that. You can't take away their will. You help shape their will. And if you took away a human being's will, they'd just be like a beaten puppy dog, you know? Unable to even function in life. So we do honor them. That doesn't mean we say they're perfect. They're right.

One of the things they learn right early is, no, you're not always good. Sometimes you're bad.

And we deal with good and bad in this house. We teach our children honor by placing a high value on them because they are a gift from God. And we see that, and we put a high value on them. We, as we put a value on them, we wish to take care of them. We wish to help them. We wish to make them happy. Realizing, as a parent, you can't always make your child happy. That's some kind of fairy tale. Life won't let any of us be happy all the time. But you can help them learn to be functional. You can help them to learn their abilities. You can help them to have faith when times aren't happy, right? That we have the trust in God. We honor our children by showing them love. Now, you've all heard of the five love languages. Each child experiences love as they get older in a different way. At first, they experience love by any way you can give it to them.

But we all have seen the little one that just hugs everybody, and the one that doesn't want to be hugged by anybody. That's just a personality trait. And so the one that doesn't want to be hugged by everybody... I have a granddaughter like that. She's not here, so I can say this. The one just wants to be hugged all the time. You know, I give her a kiss and she pretends to faint. Oh, I want to go.

The other one's like this. So I just give her a little...

just a little peck on the top of the head, and then she sort of grins.

Okay, that's fine. Come here. She'll come over, you know, and I'll give her a little peck on the top of the head. And she's okay. The other one is to be hugged and kissed.

We honor children by being good parents. We dishonor children when we let them break God's morality. You know, there's sort of this idea sometimes, well, we have to let them experiment with life. We have to let them learn certain things. And we allow our children to do things that are absolutely wrong. You're dishonoring them, because if we're supposed to teach them a moral compass, and we allow them to do what's wrong, what are they learning?

They have no moral compass at all. So we can't dishonor our children by letting them do whatever they want. Now, there is an interesting passage here back in Ephesians. Let's go back to Ephesians 6.

We're going to talk some about this in the Bible study, because I want to have some more discussion on this very subject and get some input from all of you. Ephesians 6 verse 4.

It's not Ephesians. And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord. The point here is, bring them up in training and admonition. So you're training them and you're admonishing them. You're sometimes correcting them. The flip side of that is provoking them to wrath all the time.

If we only deal with children as evil people that needs corrected, if that's the only way we deal with them, because they need something from us. They need love from us. They need security from us. They need affirmation from us. They need support from us. And if they don't receive that, and they only see themselves as people that mommy and daddy don't like, and have to be corrected all the time, what we do is we end up making them angry. We either make them angry or we just suck the life out of them where they become so placid they can't even function. We do one or the other. So we have to focus on not only helping them despise evil, okay, hate evil, but how to learn to love good and how to love virtue. So it's not just not stealing, it's learning to be generous and give to others. I love virtue. I receive a benefit for, you know, I receive a benefit for not stealing. I didn't go to jail. I received a benefit from being generous and helping somebody. That made that day worth living. So yes, we help them hate evil, but we must help them love good and love virtue, love doing the good things. And there are times when they don't need punishment, especially as they get older, they need a discussion over the natural consequences of what they did. I told this story once a few years ago, I'll tell it again, because there's some stories worth giving. Sometimes people say, Gary, you gave that story three years ago, don't give that one again. Okay, but this one I gave a while back. It was just something that taught me a lesson.

We're at a youth camp out in the South Dakota Custer State Park, huge park.

Herds of buffalo, bison all over the place. Just a great place to have 30 kids and, you know, half a dozen or a dozen adults. And I had to leave the campground for a minute and go up, get some ice or something. And I came back and I met by three of the dads and they are furious. They said, we want to know what you're going to do about this in correcting our sons. I said, what in the world they do? I mean, you know, only selling drugs or something? What in the world they're all meant? They said, no. And what happened was three 15-year-old boys, there was an outhouse. You know, we were camping and there was an outhouse. And they talked about it and they went and got a big rock, heavy rock, just big enough to fit through the hole.

They dropped into the hole and all bent over to see what would happen.

And the law of physics, to be the way it is, they come running out of there screaming, just covered, running down and jumping to the lake.

I said, okay, I'll take care of it. So I got them and I pulled them over to the side and we got away. But everybody now, everybody's watching to see what's going to happen, right? And they all just look petrified. And I set them down and I said, okay, guys, I said, what you learn from this one?

You know. And I said, one thing is, you know, what's going to happen from this is, you know, no girl will talk to you now the rest of the week.

And they said, yeah, that's the first thing you're going to pay. And then one of them started to say something and he sort of grinned and I said, no, no, no, everybody's watching. Look like I'm chewing you out. So they looked real sad. And they said, they're looking real sad. Well, I said, guys, sorry, this is a typical male stupidity and you have to learn not to think this way.

Some simple thoughts would have told you, go out and throw that rock into the lake and see what happens. Now you're going to throw it down a hole where every come things and then you look over the hole. I said, so everything had happened to you, you deserved it. But you don't deserve any more than that. So when they ask you, what did I tell you? Just say, he said it was just between us and just leave it at that. Yes, sir. I mean, and off they went. And I'm trying not to laugh the whole time. Sometimes it's just sitting down and saying, that did not work, did it? And yet's gone to hurt. There's a penalty for that, guys. Girls, whatever, you know. There's a penalty for this. And there's nothing I can do to you worse than that. This is a lesson in natural penalties.

And there's a time when the natural penalty is enough. The natural penalty is enough. And we explain that to them. And I guarantee you, they never did that again. I should ask one of my team every once in a while. You know, remember that 35 years ago? You're now, you know, 50 years old.

Have you ever did that again? You know, of course they didn't do it again. They learned their lesson.

The fourth and final point I'll bring out, and then we'll go ahead and wrap it up so we can have our lunch.

Children need to learn to honor their own bodies and minds.

Now, this can go off into a lot of different directions. I mean, it has to do with alcohol abuse, drug abuse, to learn to honor their bodies. We think of this a lot in sexuality.

The problem is, is that we can become so obsessed with helping them not commit sexual sins, that we put human sexuality in a bad light.

Human sexuality becomes something in itself evil, which it is not. Let's go to Hebrews 13 verse 4. Hebrews 13 verse 4.

Paul writes, Marriage is what?

Honorable. It's respected. Marriage is a good thing. Marriage is designed by God.

Marriage is honorable among all, and the bed undefiled. Then he goes on and talks about how sexual sins are judged by God. But he introduces this with marriage is created by God and sexuality, he says in a very nice way, human sexuality and marriage is blessed by God. It is a good thing.

We have to help children understand that, yes, sexual sins can be some of the most destructive things that happen in your life, and that's why we teach that so much. But we also have to bring out the honorable part so that they understand your body of itself isn't evil. It's what we do with it. That's the issue. Isn't that we're honorable? We're talking about how to get our kids to honor us, and we've talked about four things that haven't talked at all really about or the scriptures are specifically about children honoring parents. But this is how we teach them.

We teach them with, by first, they're in a God-centric home. Now there is no perfect God-centric home because if you're having a bad day, you may not be God-centric for a while, right?

Or something bad's happening, or there's some conflict within the family. This is a mess, this is a mess, but we're always moving towards, remember, we're always moving towards this ideal, and we're always coming out of the chaos at the other end. We don't want them to end up in that chaos. Many of you here have come from very dysfunctional families, and you know what that chaos could be, right? So we don't, we're not headed in that direction, we're headed in this direction. Parents teach children to honor by God, by honoring them, parents by honoring God.

Parents teach children to honor by honoring each other as husband and wife. That is so important.

That is, that is so important. When they see mom and dad have a little spat, and they watch him walk over, and he puts his arm around her, say, yeah, I, I was, I shouldn't have been that gruff with you. And she says, it doesn't matter. And she gives him a kiss on the cheek. They just learned something. They're watching that. And when they know they can't come between mom and dad, that's the greatest security you can give them. Because you let them come between you enough, and they'll learn how to manipulate anything. And now they'll spend their whole lives trying to manipulate everybody. Sorry, you don't manipulate mom and dad. You just, that, that relationship is secure here. You can't hurt that one. That's the best, one of the best things you can do for your kids. Honor each other. Parents teach children honor by honoring their children.

And that means not letting them get away with everything. Because that's not honoring them.

That's actually teaching them to be evil, or allowing them to be evil. And then parents must teach honor how to have their children honor their own bodies. There is a, there is a value to your body given to you by God. And that would include not only their sexuality, substance abuse, just eating junk food all the time. That's not honoring your body. God gave you a body to honor it. It's a temporary thing, and it'll wear out. But we are to honor it. When we do these things as parents and grandparents, we honor our common parent, God the Father. We honor Him. As we do that, we show others the way to honor.

And in doing so, in our children, we sow the seeds of them actually honoring us.

Thank you.