God Centric Family-Part 2

I gave a sermon about helping children, creating an environment in which children can learn to honor their parents. And that's just not something you can order children to do. They have to be taught it. And it has to be developed within the whole structure of the family. And we had a little bit of Bible study afterwards, some interesting comments. In Nashville, there are a lot of people saying, I didn't come from a good family. Well, most people don't. And as we talked in that sermon, we have to be careful that we see the ideal family. And I mentioned how many of you knew the Waltons, and many of you had seen the Waltons. I surprised that some of the younger people had even... The ideal family. And then there's the chaos of the totally dysfunctional family. And most of us are trying to be somewhere in the middle, right? You're moving towards the ideal. There is no ideal family. It doesn't exist. We do the best we can as we move towards that ideal. But the thing is, the Bible does give us an ideal. It gives us something to work towards in both marriage and in how we raise children. So we talked about that. And I want to pick that up and get a little more specific with the same subject. I said it would take three sermons to cover all of it and get a little more specific. Another thing I mentioned was that you can't take away a child's free will. You shape it. You mold it. I mean, I knew of a child-rearing book one time that said that you have to beat the spirit out of a child. And I thought, what kind of nonsense is that? You beat the spirit out of a child? What do you want, a dog? And that's a pretty good way of creating a person who's either depressed, probably addicted to drugs, or an outright criminal. You can't do that to a human being. So we have to shape and mold their will, but you can't take away their free will. So how do we do this? And how do children learn in this process? And this isn't just for people who have children. If you have grandchildren, you know, this is a process of creating a family structure. And that's why when you have children, parents, and grandchildren all on the same page, it gets a lot easier for everybody when they're all on the same page. So today we're going to look at more things that we can do as parents, but also what children and teenagers must learn in order to become what God wants them to be. Now, once again, we teach it. We can't, you know, you can't open their head and pour it in, and that's what they become, right? That's not what happens. All we can do is teach it and model it, but it is so important that we do that. So the first thing is that children define who they are, all human beings do, at a certain level. What their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, what their personality is. As parents, we don't do them any help by trying to mold them into what we want them to be, in terms of their strengths, their weaknesses, their talents. You have to encourage them to develop who they're supposed to be. But we do have a responsibility to shape and mold them in terms of their relationship with God, and in terms of what is right and what is wrong. I talked about a moral compass last time. We help shape a moral compass. There's no guarantee, by the way, they won't take that moral compass and throw it out when they get to be 22.

But the more we help them develop that, the more apt they are to keep it, the more they apt are to come back to it sometime in the future, when they go off someplace, and then they come back to that moral compass that they had. So that is what we're to do. Help them to develop a relationship with us, a positive, productive relationship, as they go through all these different stages of life. And remember, the stage of life between you and your two-year-old, and you and your 20-year-old are totally different. And the younger they are, the more control that you as a parent must have on them. Until they get to the place they don't need your control anymore. And you hope they now go out and face life and do well. And they'll make the mistakes, and they'll do their good things, their wrong things, and hopefully they can come to you for help. But the younger they are, the more control we have. There is no concept. You know, I actually heard this one time. I don't want to teach my children, you know, to have all this morality. I want them to decide for themselves. So I will teach them when they get to a certain age where they can understand, like 16, 17, I'll start teaching them, and then they can decide. Well, I'm sorry, they've already decided by then. You've already lost them by that time. You've doomed them to already have been making a lot of wrong choices and decisions about what is right and wrong. And remember this too. Satan does have a part to play in this. And Satan doesn't play by those rules. Satan is going to affect your child as soon as he can. That's reality. The world is going to affect your child as soon as they can. And you can't hide them from everything. You hide them from everything. That's not good either. Because sooner or later everybody has to face the world. Everybody has to face the world they live in. They have to face the wrong in the world they live in. And they have to face Satan at some point. So we have to start at the earliest age. And that's what the principle of Deuteronomy says. Now we didn't read this last time. Let's go to Deuteronomy 6. And of course this is a memory scripture. Many of you know this one by heart. But this is the principle, the core principle of parenting. This is what parenting is. Verse 5, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. He said this is the most important thing. The more we love God, the more we have a relationship with God, the more we are willing to follow Him, to obey Him, to submit to Him, then the more this life has purpose and meaning, and we have eternal life in the future.

And this statement becomes the basis for childing, for raising children. He says, in these words, which I commanded you today, you shall be in your heart, and you shall teach them diligently. There is no passivity to this. It's an active daily operation of parenting to teach and model to our children the best we can how to love God and have a relationship with God and submit to God and do what God wants in our lives.

You shall teach them diligently to your children. You shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. And you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on the doorpost of your house and on your gates. Now, the important thing here is that this is a lifestyle. In order to do this, you have to be talking with your child in your house, when you're out walking and doing things together, when you lie down, when you rise up.

They live in a society where children and parents work together all the time. So they witnessed how their parents acted, how they thought. And it didn't take long as it does every human being to figure out, mom and dad aren't perfect. You think they are until you get old enough to say, well, they're not perfect. But perfection of the parents is never the issue.

Now, we did talk a little bit last time about when you have abusive parents. And we will have to talk about that. That'll be the third sermon of how do you recover from abusive parents? How do you recover from a totally dysfunctional household? Or maybe you didn't have parents? Or maybe there was a divorce and you had one parent? There's all these things that happen. So, I mean, we will discuss how do we grow out of that, how we learn from that, and how we can be healed from that.

But we as Christians, we live our lives living with those children daily and influencing them daily. But, you know, it's been very sad that the Industrial Revolution removed the father from the house much of the time. And then the modern feminism has removed the mother from the house much of the time. And a majority of people now, their children are raised by other people, not by themselves. You know, a couple hours at night is supposed to solve everything, and it doesn't.

They're actually spending more time with other people, where they're learning their values, they're learning the behavior they mimic, they're learning all those things from other people. So this is the foundation. It is we spend time, we spend our lives with them. In fact, you sacrifice some of your life when you have children to be with children. They guide them, they help them, and it doesn't matter whether they're one year old or 19. When they're moving on, you're still there guiding them through those steps, helping them, answering their questions, helping them when they're heartbroken, helping them when they've been hurt or they're sick, and you do those things for them.

And it's not just a mother thing, as the father does that, too. Now they have different roles at times, but it's both working together to be with those children, to model it. Now for children, there's something we need to help them understand, and that's in Acts chapter 2. Acts chapter 2. And they have to be told this. They don't naturally know this, although real young ones will, you know, real young ones will say, this is my church.

Or they have a very simple faith in God. He's there, they believe it, they don't see him, but he, you know, they have a faith in God. But here we have Peter giving a sermon, and it's, there's a lot of people responding, and a lot of, most of the people he's talking to are Jews, and they realize that Jesus is the Christ.

And they realize, well, it was just a few weeks ago, we killed him. You know, our religious leaders killed him. They took him to the Romans, and they're overwhelmed by that realization. And so we pick up here in verse 37.

Therefore, this is the last thing Peter says in the sermon he gives, let all of the house of Israel know, assuredly, that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ. He says, all of you crucified. Of course, we realize that all his death is for all of us. But he makes, I mean, remember, these are people who were there. They had seen him. Many of them maybe even seen him when he was crucified, or when he was carrying that heavy stake up through the crowd. They, you know, there was a huge crowd out there. So this is a group of people that knew who Jesus was, had seen him, or maybe knew him personally. And he says, you crucified him. You turned him over. The whole nation of Israel turned him over to the Romans. Now, when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, men and brethren, what shall we do? If he is the Messiah, we turned him in. What do we do? Now, remember also at this point, you know, there was, he had been resurrected. Hundreds of people had seen him as resurrected. They had told thousands of people. They believed he'd been resurrected. There was too much proof. You know, when you know sane people, and there's numerous people saying, oh yes, I've seen him, I talked to him. He was resurrected. So that's, that has an impact on these people, too.

And so Peter says to them, repent, let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ with the remission of your sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. He says, okay, let me tell you about repentance and what it means now to come and be part of the people of God, not just in this case as Jews, but anybody can come now and be part of the people of God. I think it makes this very interesting statement. For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are far off, as many of the Lord of our God, our God will call. In other words, he tells them that God is now calling you. He's letting you know that who Jesus Christ is, and you have a choice here. And when he calls you, your children are also being drawn towards God. Now, he doesn't say for children to be baptized, okay? It's a different relationship. But the point is, our children have an opportunity to be drawn towards God.

Sometimes we don't think about that when we carry the little one into the hall, you know, the church services, that they have a personal invite to be here also. Children are not just tagalongs.

God opens a door and says, if you want to have a relationship with me, you can develop one with me. Now, if you don't, you give that up, okay. That doesn't mean, by the way, you've lost your eternal salvation, because you haven't yet reached the point of repentance and receiving God's Spirit. But it does mean you can choose, you can choose to leave that.

But the invitation is there.

The invitation is there when our children come into the holy presence of God, so that invitation is there with them every day of their lives. And we need to let them know that. God listens to their prayers too. They mean something to God. They're not worthless. God literally cares for them and wants to be their parent. I want to be your father. Christ says, I want to be your brother. So our children have that opportunity. Now, we can't make them take it. You know, we can't make them do it, but we need to tell them that opportunity is there.

So we let them know God is the only way to understand life. You remove God from this equation and life is nothing but an empty hole, you know. And that's why we have today so many people addicted to alcohol drugs. We have so many people living lifestyles that are just absolutely self-destructive. Our society, our society is worse than we know.

It's, if you ever talk to people who work in clinics that help where they bring in abused children, and sometimes the sheer numbers is beyond comprehension.

How children are sexually abused or beaten or tortured or just, it's amazing.

Of course, we live in a society where they don't necessarily do that, but they do abandon them. By what? By being involved in so many other things, other people raise their children. Now sometimes, I understand, you have to have people come in and take care of your child sometimes. I'm not talking about, okay, both people can't work. I'm talking about abandoning your parenting. You just abandon it so that you're always doing what you want to do, and the children are not receiving the sacrifice you must do to do what Deuteronomy says to do. The giving of ourselves to those children. So let's go now, okay, to a child here. Okay, what's the first thing you do as a child to honor your parents? Well, let's go to Ephesians 6. We did read these two verses last time. Ephesians 6.

Verse 1, Paul says, Children, obey your parents, and the Lord, for this is right, honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise, that it may be well with you, that you may live long on the earth. Okay, you honor them. Remember, we talked about how honor is a deep respect. You show a deep respect. So children are to honor their parents by obeying. Now, human nature being what it is, you are shocked how early on that baby doesn't obey. And you spend a lifetime trying to teach them to obey.

But we must understand, and children must understand, part of honoring is obedience. And we begin to teach that even at a very early age.

And that's not parents who can't say, well, I can't do that because I'm not perfect. No, you do it the best you can.

If you wait for your perfection, you might as well throw your children away, right?

So you do your best to help them obey. Remember the two things that we talked about last time that are so important to this. One is you can't create a parent-centric household. Now, the parents have to be in charge, and the relationship between the husband and wife has to be central. The security children get from a good marriage is one of the most important things you can give them. Mom and dad are okay, they're okay. So that is so important. But if you create a parent-centric family so that the feelings of the parents are what govern everything, then you're yelling at your kids all the time just because, well, you're having a bad day.

Which we do sometimes even the best of times. But if they only obey you because they're afraid of you, or they don't want you to get upset, we're missing something here. Because they're being driven by our emotions, which is a parent-centric.

It's not a God-centric. You know, Deuteronomy 6 is a God-centric family. The other thing was the child-centric family. Well, everything revolves around the emotions of the child, and all that does is produce very selfish people. Yes, their emotions are important, and yes, we have to understand them. And yes, sometimes we have to, I mean, especially, they just can't, the younger they are, they cannot understand sometimes what's going on around them. They can't understand what you're doing. And we get frustrated with them. But it's not always about them. And there's sometimes you have to look at them, especially as they start getting older and older, you know, you have to tell that five-year-old, this isn't about you, kid. This is about right and wrong, or this is about what's good for the family, or this is about, no, you can't, you just can't do that. So we can't create the child-centric or the parent-centric. It's got to be God-centric. And the parents have to have their roles, though. So that means that we have to expect them to obey.

We can't say, oh well, that's just a kid being a kid, you know. I took my eight-year-old and said, clean up your room, and instead they picked up their toys and threw them at me. That's just a kid being a kid. Okay. No.

It may be a kid being a kid, but you must expect and require different behavior than that. Different behavior. You know, even Jesus gives children an example. Any of the young people here that are old enough to turn into a Bible, turn to Luke chapter 2. Luke chapter 2.

Everybody's heard this story, but I want, you know, if you can read, I want you to read this one. Luke chapter 2, verse 40. And we all know who Jesus is. He came from heaven to hear. He even had memories of what it was like in heaven. He talked about him. He talked about God the Father. He's a 12-year-old boy. And his parents go to Jerusalem, verse 41, for the Feast of the Passover. And when he was 12 years old, they went up to Jerusalem according to the custom of the Feast. Verse 43, When they had finished the days as they returned, the boy Jesus lingered behind in Jerusalem, and Joseph and his mother did not know him. Now, I find this very interesting. There was a big crowd, a bunch of family, people. I mean, they're literally, they estimate in the first century, there could be up to a million people going into Jerusalem for the Holy Days. So these are huge crowds. And Jesus is playing with the other 12-year-olds and all the families together, and they're traveling in this massive groups of people trying to, everybody get home. And they suddenly realize, well, what did Jesus say? I haven't talked to him. What do you mean you haven't talked to him? Wasn't he a breakfast? No. Well, he wasn't a breakfast yesterday either. I mean, now they're realizing he wasn't there, which is a remarkable amount of confidence in a 12-year-old. But you know, he's with other family members. They're all Jews, all the same religion, all going in the same direction, and in these almost like giant traffic jams, okay? I just can't imagine what it would have been like. Everybody's moving slow. You know, there's no Ferraris coming around. Everybody's walking or riding a donkey, okay? So... But supposing him, verse 45, having been in the company, they went a day's journey and sought him among the relatives and acquaintances. So when they did...

So this is a whole, let's see, whole day that goes. They're seeking him. Now, it was after three days, okay? So after the first day, okay, the first day is, where is he? I don't know. He didn't come back to sleep with us tonight. So it takes him three days of searching now, okay? The first day, ah, didn't think about it. He's with his friends. Now it takes two more days just trying to find him.

Now, it was after three days that they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, both listening to them and asking them questions. Here's a 12-year-old boy sitting among the greatest religious minds of the day. The men who had entire sections of what we call the Old Testament memorized. Men who knew the Old Testament in a way probably, in, in, in, you and I don't even know, in terms of the depth of the memorization of that, of those books. And he's sitting and talking to them, and all who heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers. So when they saw him, they were amazed. Okay, you know what I mean? We were afraid, maybe someone kidnapped him, or he was off, who knows, you know. No, he's in the temple sitting surrounded by the most brilliant minds in the Jewish world, and he's talking to them. So Jesus, though, you know, he does this because of who he is. But also remember, he is a 12-year-old boy at this point, and he has a responsibility. And his mother said to him, son, you have, why have you done this to us? Look, your father and I have sought you anxiously. He said, well, why did you do that? Don't you know? I have a purpose here. I'm supposed to do my father's business. You know, I, now they knew he was supernatural. They knew he was the Messiah. Mary said he's the Messiah. She understood what he was born. He says, but remember, I'm the Messiah. She says, but we didn't know who you were. We were anxious. You should at least told us what you were going to do, but they did not understand the statement which he spoke to them.

And so what did he do? Verse 51, he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was subject to them, but his mother kept all these things at her heart. He was subject to them. At 12 years old, his example to every 12-year-old, every child here that's 6 to 18 that may be able to read this, his example, personal example to you is you be subject to your parents.

That's his personal example to you.

So children need to understand this isn't just something that you as the parent is making them do, and it's arbitrary, and you're sort of mean. No, this is actually what Jesus did with his parents. This is expected development of a child.

Now, saying this, then, we always go back to, okay, we need to teach them about everything that's wrong. We need to keep them from the world. We need to keep them from sinning, and that's true.

But what we have to teach them isn't all the things that are negative. And we talked about that in the last sermon when I said if we teach children that human sexuality is nothing but evil, they don't understand that it's actually a gift from God. It just has specific applications.

So it has to be seen as a gift from God, and you're supposed to protect that gift from God.

But it's not just about what's wrong, it's about what's right. And this is the concept of virtue. Virtue is a love of what's right, and Christian virtue is a love of what God says is good. Because we come up with all kinds of human explanations of good, right?

It's amazing what humans throughout history will say is good. I do every once in a while, I'll listen to blogs from different Christian groups and people out there just to see what people are saying. I get a newsletter, I get things from all these different groups. And it's amazing how many now will literally say that Jesus didn't understand what was good.

You know, God had to teach him because he was doing a lot of wrong things in his life. And they literally look at the gospels and see things he did. That's wrong. That's not good.

Or they judge God. God didn't kill the people in Sodom and Gomorrah because it would mean he's bad. He's not good. Virtue is a love of God and a love of His goodness. That's what Christian virtue is. And so that we try and we want to learn to be, well, to be like Jesus Christ, right? So 12-year-olds be subject to your parents. That's what he did.

So these virtues begin with the two greatest commandments. So when we start teaching virtue to children, it really starts with, when they get old enough to understand this, is loving God and loving your neighbors yourself. The important thing is loving God with all your heart and all your might and all your soul. In other words, your life is based on loving God.

That's what it's based on. No matter what the cost, no matter what you lose in life to do that, you feel, you believe honoring God and loving God is so important that that, he said, is the greatest commandment. You dedicate your life to doing that.

And then secondly, it's helping and loving your neighbor. It's interesting, and the sermonette, Mr. Perman, was talking about Victor Frankl. Victor Frankl was a marginal Jewish religion. I mean, he was a religious Jew, but I don't think he was overly committed. When he went into the first concentration camp, because he was transferred to different camps, the first thing he did was take all his clothes, because he was, for one thing, his clothes were very high-quality clothes. He was a doctor, and they took his coat, and he had to go to a pile of coats that they'd ripped off of people, taken off of people that they had just gassed, just killed, and he found this old, ratty beat-up coat, and he put his hand in the pocket and pulled it out. There was a slip of paper that said, the Lord our God is one. And he said, that got burned into his head.

That got burned into his head. There is a God, and I will love him even in this. And that was a real struggle. I will love him even in this. And that shaped him from becoming what he could have become, or by giving up. He could have died just by giving up, and he survived a long time, and went on and lived a long life afterwards, although he'd lost his original family. That's where it starts. But when there are very, very little, you know, loving God, loving God, but you can't start teaching loving your neighbor. Don't slap your sister, okay?

You start working through that behavior. It's a constant job, isn't it? With children. It's constant. It's not like, oh good, we taught him something. And no, that's not how this works. Because that's how God is working with you and me, and we're adults. It's a constant job for him with us. So it's a constant job with him, and we have to keep patiently teaching, teaching, teaching. And sometimes punishing. Punishment always has to fit the crime. So once we say, love God and love your neighbor, the next thing we have to do, and this is where virtue can be broken down into the simplest things we teach children. We have to define what love is. We have to define it. We have to define who God is and what love is. And we can do that every day, even with a small child. We can, by our actions, teach them. Because the only concept a little child has of a greater being than them is mom, right? Dad's the guy that comes in and it's fun. Like he comes in, it's fun. But mom, that's the one who protects me, takes care of me. You know, she's it.

And then they can learn more about God as time goes on. So we have to teach them the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments begin to define this is good and this is bad.

When we love the commandments, it's virtue. When people accuse us of keeping the Sabbath because we're trying to earn salvation, I always say, no, no, no, no. I love God. Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath. I love Jesus. It's my virtue. I can't help it. It's I must do it. My love of God drives me to keep the Sabbath. Not because I'm trying to earn salvation. I just despise that accusation. It's condescending.

So we keep the Ten Commandments. As time goes on, we begin to do things like the the Sermon on the Mount, where good and bad isn't just what you do, it's what you think.

Sometimes it's what you feel. We talk about the fruits of the Spirit.

Now let's go to Galatians 5 and look at the fruits of the Spirit.

I want you to think about this in context, because we pull the fruits of the Spirit out of context sometimes. And in teaching children, in Galatians 5 and verse 16, I say, then Paul writes, Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.

So the fruits of the Spirit are contrasted here with what becomes normal human behavior with corrupted human nature. So this is the normal human behavior that our children are having formed in us by Satan, by the world, by everything else. And we're counterbalancing that with these other things. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh, and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish. But if you're led by the Spirit, you're not under the law. In other words, you're not under the penalty of the law, because you're not breaking the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are, and then he lists a bunch of things, that the law forbids. Adultery, fortication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambition, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like. And he even goes on to say, which I tell you, as I've told you before, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. A person can't stay like this and be in the kingdom of God. And yet every human being has been corrupted to be like that. And our children are in a process of being influenced and corrupted their whole lives, just like we are.

And we counterbalance that by teaching them the fruit to the Spirit, even though they don't have God's Spirit yet, they can pray. They can pray for peace and joy and long suffering and, you know, all the things that are there. We also have then, virtue sees the opposite. We just looked at the vices. Virtue is loving these things. That's what virtue is. Virtue is loving 1 Corinthians 13.

Now we can't do this as adults. We're struggling. The point I'm making is we should be trying to emulate this and talking to them about virtue. It's not just wrong to steal. You don't steal because it's somebody else's property. And to do that is you're abusing that person. You're hurting that person, and it is wrong. The love of virtue, which you love virtue, is you want to be generous. It's the opposite. So we have to not just teach them against behavior, but I say this and you say, oh man, how am I going to do this? Well, the thing is you're learning it too. You're trying to pass this on as you learn it. In the parenting from the Tree of Life classes that we had a few years ago, there was an entire list that was in the program of the difference between a virtue and a vice.

And some of them were like compassion versus having no mercy. They're two opposites, and we must love this one. Some people love having no mercy.

At that point, they're usually psychotic, right? They kill people.

The sermon versus short-sightedness, diligence versus laziness. This was a real long list. I just picked out a couple. Forgiveness versus revenge. Obedience versus defiance.

What we're going to find is, or what you find is, all the vices come pretty natural to us.

All the virtues we learned. We learned the virtues. Now, you'll find some children that their personality, they just naturally lean toward certain virtues.

You see this little child? They're just kind to everybody. There's certain virtues that just seem to come natural to them, and that's wonderful. The earlier they learn virtues, the more that actually becomes part of their character.

Sin is God's definition of the dysfunctional, harmful, unloving, evil behaviors that are the opposite of virtues. He decides, you know, behaviors are this, but then he talks about and defines these virtues as mindsets, a whole way of approaching life.

And then children learn from this, and this is where they get tested, and it breaks down, but they learn it, hopefully without hurting themselves too much, is that honoring your parents means you do what's right. Your virtue is internalized, so you do what's right even when they're not around anymore. Yeah, there's an interesting little story here. Let's go to 2 Kings 5. 2 Kings 5.

You know, this is one of those things, little parts of a story that you don't think about much, because all the things around it are such enormous things that are happening.

So we can miss this.

Naaman is a Syrian general who goes to Elisha, one of God's prophets, and asks to be healed, which is quite a thing. I mean, the Syrians were enemies of Israel, and he's a general, and yet he goes to this prophet of God and asks, and he humbles himself, that if he would pray to God so he could be healed. Why he goes there is what is so interesting. Verse 1. Now, Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Syria, was a great and honorable man in the eyes of his master, and because of by him the Lord had given victory to Syria. But he was also a mighty man of valor but a leper, deformed, his whole body being just eaten away. And the Syrians had gone out on raids and had brought back a captive, a young girl from the land of Israel. She waited on Naaman's wife. So, okay, you talk about having a bad experience. This young girl, who knows how young she was, I would guess by the interaction here she's not like eight years old, but she's not 20 years old. Well, young girl, she may be under 13 here in the terms of how they looked at children. They didn't have a concept of teenagers, by the way. You were a child and then you became an adult, about 12 or 13. So, this young girl, there's a raid, who knows her parents may have been killed, something terrible and traumatic in her life, and she is now taken to become a slave in the house of the Syrian general.

So, she comes into the house and she's a slave. You know, the last thing you would think is that this girl's going to hold on to her faith in God, right? She gave him a real strong family background here. And she said to her mistress, if only my master, she had accepted her faith, I mean there was no way to get out of it, if only my master with the prophet who was in Samaria, for he would heal him of his leprosy. And Naaman went in and told his master, thus says the girl who is from the land of Israel. And the king of Syria said, Go now, and I will send the letters of the king of Israel. So, he departed and took with him all this incredible wealth. I'll give all this wealth to this man if he can call on God to heal me. Now, we go through then and we see this interaction between Naaman and, you know, it's just a fascinating story. But we forget how he goes. He forgets because of a child who believes in God.

A child who has gone through a terrible time, been kidnapped, and she's serving in the household, and doesn't say, Good, I hope you die, goes and says, Well, you know, in Israel, there's a man of God that he uses to heal people. That's an important story there about children. We cut them short sometimes. When what God can do through them, when they actually respond to God.

So, I've always found that unnamed girl to be important. Of course, you have in Timothy, where Paul says, Timothy, you learned the scriptures as a child from your mother and your grandfather, or grandmother. His dad was a pagan. Here's a young boy that is, grows up in a house. His dad's a pagan. His mother and grandmother teach him about God, about his way, and counterbalances, you know, the influences dad would have. I mean, he's a it's his dad. Of course, he respects and loves his dad. Counterbalances that so much that God uses him as one of the great ministers of the New Testament.

So, don't, we have to realize what God can do. All we're doing is trying to help prepare that child to respond to God and have a relationship with them and love them. And you want a relationship with your children for the rest of your lives. And it's great when they become adults and you're not, you know, you're friends now. The whole relationship changes, you know, to your friends. You're not, you know, the person in charge of everything. That's a great experience when that happens. Children are a great blessing from God, but they're also some of the hardest work you ever do. Some of the biggest heartache you ever have.

So here's a few things. When you think about virtue, how does that break down into actions? I just want to wrap this up with, okay, how do you make some of this practical? As a child, as a child. Okay, younger children, you honor your parents and show virtue when you don't come to church, run through the halls, knock people down, and get up on the stage and ruin the sound system. Now, I'm constantly and have been for 40 years walking in the church and looking at kids and saying, hey, slow down. And they do. So I walk by. Then they take off again, right?

It's a, we do this over and over and over and over again until it starts to get, until they learn the self-control to do it. That self-control doesn't come natural for most kids. It has to be developed. The self-control is developed. And we develop, help them develop that. Self-control is a virtue, but it just doesn't come natural.

You honor your parents when you show deference to an older person, when you're willing to help an older person get their food in, you know, at the potluck.

Or you're nice to them and say hello. Now, you're not going to get too many three-year-olds to do that, but, you know, at eight they should be able to say hello. Now, you get, I know, specifically, sometimes a child will be just so shy, and that's, it's hard, you know, and so sometimes you have to work with that child for a long period of time. But the average kid should be able to say hello to an adult and be civil, you know, at a certain age.

You honor your parents when you don't interrupt them when they're talking to another adult. Now, children do come up sometimes, and they do have something important.

So you can't ignore them. But, you know, sometimes it just takes a simple, tell them, come up and hold my hand, or come up and stand right next to me. Because after a while, I have to know you're there, and if you're right here, I know it's important. So, you know, okay, this signal is, then you can actually look at the adults and say, excuse me a minute, look down and say, what's, you know, what do you need? They're showing honor to you, showing honor to the other adults, but you have to respond to someone. You just can't ignore them forever.

They come up, they do their part. They're learning relationships, they're learning all kinds of things. And we're teaching some of this at, you know, a fairly early age, not two, but, you know, there's a point where they start learning these things.

You honor your parents when you don't destroy other people's property or steal, right?

Now, the way some older children can honor their parents.

You honor your parents when you fulfill your family obligations by doing your chores, cleaning your room. When they ask you to do that, you do it. You honor them. You're learning virtue.

You're learning virtue. You know why you're learning virtue? Because someday you'll be living in an apartment at 23 saying, I hate living in this messy apartment, and mom's not going to come clean it. In fact, mom shouldn't come clean it.

You're a grown man. She's not going to come clean your apartment.

And you learn that when you learn the virtue of, I must take responsibility for my environment. You learn the virtue. You take responsibility for your environment. You honor your parents when you respond the first time to a request instead of waiting and waiting. The fifth time when the parents finally, you know, when you wait until your parent is actually annoyed with you. This is the fifth time I'm telling you to do it right now. There's going to be consequences. You've shown dishonor. And let me tell you something, parent. If it's the fifth time and this child's old enough to understand, you should have responded long before that with some consequences. There should have been some consequences. Learn the love virtue. You honor your parents when you keep your word. When you say you're going to be home at a certain time, you're home. And if you're not going to be there, you'll call them. You honor your parents when you treat them with respect.

And when you're honest and with your trustworthy. In other words, you notice you honor them by having character. You honor them by having virtue. And what we're trying to do is teach them virtue. The character of God. Christian character is the character of God. It's who He is. And we're trying to teach that to them as we are learning it. You know, we're learning it ourselves. There's a time when you look at a child and say, hey, I understand. I'm learning to be patient, too. So we'll learn to be patient together here. I don't mean a wee little one, but you know, old enough to understand. Yeah, I get it. You're impatient. I've been impatient all my life. When I was your age, I was just like you. I'm a little better now. Because we're growing in here together. So, look, you're going to learn patience. I had to learn patience. And you know what? I'm going to be more patient with you, too. I'm still learning this. That's not losing respect. That's earning respect. That's earning respect. You know, God, it's interesting that the fourth commandment actually has a promise in it. Paul says that. It actually has a promise that you have a longer, better life if you honor your parents. But you know, the promise God makes to our children since their door is open. The door's open for them to come to God.

His promise he's making is, if you come to me, I will be your father and you will be in my family.

That's the remarkable thing.

It's not the same calling you have when God brings you in. The door's open. If you wish to come here, it's here. That's what it says in Acts. It's to your children. So the door's open if you want to come.

And I will be your father. And I think part of what we have to do as parents, too, is help them understand God as parent. The perfect parent. The perfect parent who's going to love you, bless you, and even correct you when you're bad. Because that's what he, if he didn't do that, he would love you. He would let you harm yourself. So that's the second of the three sermons. It'll be probably later this summer when we get to the third one. But we'll talk about dealing with coming out of, you know, where you didn't have any good family. Or everybody's damaged in some way or another from their family. Most of us, not much. And then most, I say most, some not and some a lot. And some didn't even have a family. And that's the reality. So we'll talk more about that in the next sermon on this series.