Honor Your Parents

I was reading in Jeremiah this morning and came across the story of the Rechabites in chapter 35. The context of this story is the continued disobedience of the people of Judah and Jerusalem despite being given clear instructions through the prophets. However, the Rechabites were unique in that they demonstrated a lifelong commitment to the instructions of their father, Jonadab.

8 We have obeyed the voice of Jonadab the son of Rechab, our father, in all that he commanded us, to drink no wine all our days, ourselves, our wives, our sons, or our daughters, 9 and not to build houses to dwell in. We have no vineyard or field or seed, 10 but we have lived in tents and have obeyed and done all that Jonadab our father commanded us. (Jeremiah 35:8-10 ESV)

God valued this honoring of their parents and made a promise to this family that He would preserve them despite all the disaster that would come to the land where they live.

18 But to the house of the Rechabites Jeremiah said, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Because you have obeyed the command of Jonadab your father and kept all his precepts and done all that he commanded you, 19 therefore thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Jonadab the son of Rechab shall never lack a man to stand before me.” (Jeremiah 35:18;19 ESV)

Now, this is a promise to a particular family in time, but it demonstrates the principle of the value that God places on honoring your parents and the process of discipleship. The parents instructed the children, and the children obeyed their instruction.

In my sermon last Sunday, I talked at length about the importance of education as discipleship, but I didn't really talk about the responsibility of the children to honor their parents. Really, though, that is a very important part of the process of cultivating a God-honoring culture. The 5th commandment lays out that children need to honor their parents so that their days may be long in the land given to them. If children grow up with an attitude that their parents are simply killjoys that are to be tolerated until they can break free, then all of the foundational truths needed to withstand the flood of humanism will not help them. The probability is great that they will depart their parents' house with a different view of the world.

We see in our own culture how rebellion is glorified. Foolishness and rebellion has been a problem for all of us since birth, and more and more, rebellion against authority and the previous generation has been presented as "cool" or desirable in the media. When we glamorize rebellion and then remove the conduit of influence for parents by shipping them off to the state schools to be discipled by the state, then we have no expectation that children will do anything but rebel against the world view of mom and dad. The encouragement to rebel goes in direct opposition to the expectations of the 5th commandment. Such encouragement would be like encouraging the children of the wise builder of Luke 6:48 to leave the well built house to go live with the foolish builder of verse 49 during the flood. The obedience to the truths of Scriptures which protect is left behind, and a great ruin in their lives ensues.

Back in Jeremiah 35, God made a point of demonstrating His valuing generational faithfulness by promising to preserve them, just as the 5th commandment says. Even when we aren't perfect in what we teach or how we parent, this chapter gives me hope that our focus on restoring parental influence, dicipleship and home education is pleasing to God. When God looks at our culture and sees a people who do not incline their ear and listen to Him (Jer 35:15), my hope is that he will see a community like ours and be pleased.

The Battle for Civilization

Geoff Botkin is leading the production of a new seven-part television series entitled The Battle for Civilization. This aim of this project is to uncover the events leading up to periods of civility in our world's history in a way that helps modern viewers understand the state of the world today, especially the conditions we find in the United States. When complete, the viewer will better understand the nature of the disintegrating disciplines of economics, science, history, art, politics and religion. Mr. Botkin seems to have a special gift for discerning the culture and times in which we live, and The Battle for Civilization will undoubtedly be a special production.

Protecting the Family

Here is an excerpt from a recent Family Life Today radio broadcast with the hosts, Dennis Rainey and Bob Lepine, and the guest, Voddie Baucham. The topic and the basis for this excerpt is a discussion on the problems with youth ministry.

Bob: So a pastor who would say, "Well, I hear you, and we've got kids in our service as well, and we're trying to challenge dads to do what you're trying to challenge dads to do, but on Wednesday night the youth group gets together, and we've got a young pastor, and he's ministering to those high school and junior high kids and it seems to be a good thing that the families appreciate." You would say it's a problem?

Voddie: I would say a couple of things. Number one …

Bob: Now he's – he's not sure how much he wants this boat to rock, is he?

Dennis: Bob's trying to see how far you're going to rock this boat.

Voddie: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Number one, let's just say, "Okay, great. We've got this Wednesday night service for the youth." What purpose would we have for that meeting? Why do my children need a pastor who is not my pastor? That's my first question. And it automatically assumes this myth called "the generation gap" – that my children somehow cannot understand the language of a culture that is not their own. That creates egocentrism in my children; that creates animosity between my children and myself; it also creates an allegiance with my children spiritually to a person who is seen as being able to minister to them because they understand my children and their culture.

My children's responsibility is to understand culture at large, not to think that the world revolves around them. Well, what if the youth minister is just teaching the Word, and it's solid. Well, if he's teaching the Word, and it's solid, how come they can't come in where the rest of us are having the Word taught, and it's solid.

Again, the Scriptures do not dictate this segregation. They don't even allude to this kind of segregation, and the only reasons that we can come up with for this kind of segregation come directly from our culture and the un-biblical portions of our culture that move toward this age segregation.

I liked Voddie's response to the question because it sounds like a question many of the folks in my church have had to answer in our own minds or from people around us. What's wrong with a little fun on Wednesday nights for our children, given the assumption that great biblical truth is being preached on Sunday mornings? I like the first aspect of his response...

Why? What is the reason for doing this?

For whatever we do, we need to know why we are doing it. Before we talk about whether it's bad or good, first state the reason that it exists. Just accepting things because we did them as youth or because most people around us do them is not sufficient. Without understanding why we do what we do, we are opening up our families to things that could be unprofitable and even detrimental. We should identify what the intended or desired outcome is. In other words, we must take everything back to the vision we have laid out for our families which of course is based on being transformed by Scripture to join in God's good work.

And another aspect of his response...

What is it bringing to the family?

For the so called good that this may bring, what bad comes along with it? We should examine carefully the things we choose to do in order to understand what baggage comes along when we participate. For example, when my family used to rent videos more frequently, we often skipped past the previews because they were typically inappropriate, even to the point of causing us to stumble. Now we're too busy doing other things to rent movies much at all any more.

Sports is another mixed bag. Despite all of the defiling advertising that comes with sports (which might be able to be filtered), what appetites are being nurtured and fed in our children (and us) with sports? Am I giving my children an appetite for something that will consume a large part of their time and attention and compete with the time they need to prepare and train for righteousness? Do I myself struggle with participating in and watching sporting events which takes away valuable time from my family or my own training in righteousness?

And in the youth ministry case, the Wednesday night fun brings into the lives of my children a new Spiritual authority in the form of a youth pastor. With whatever biblical truth he may speak, he is also bringing a temptation for my children to begin listening more to him than to me. Sure it might be biblical truth, but is it necessary or even important enough to expose my children to the temptation? Again, a family vision helps to determine what is worth doing and not doing and what to watch out for when doing it.

And finally....

What does it assume about the family?

This one is tougher. What must be true in the family in order for the good to actually be good? In the youth ministry question, we see that an assumed generation gap must exist in order for the methods and techniques used by so many youth ministries to be good for our kids. It assumes that the parents aren't able to fully reach their children because of a gap, and the hip, funny, cool youth minister can finish the job by "relating" to the children "on their level" and then attempting to squeeze a bit of biblical truth through that relationship.

The church really ought to spend its time and money teaching fathers to turn their hearts back to their children, so that the fathers can recapture trust, obedience, and loyalty of those whom he is responsible to train. And really, this question opens up a big can of worms when you go down the path that flows from it. When you begin asking the questions about what an activity assumes about the family, it often leads to what is assumed about biblical discipleship. And when you take that topic further, you hit the topics of manhood and womanhood. And when you keep going, you end up ultimately at what authority is played out as the basis for an activity. Is it the Bible? Is it man's thinking?

The youth ministry, as demonstrated by its actions, assumes that it is more important for the church to try to reach the children than it is to reach the parents. And this stems from a view that the child's spiritual training is best led by the church. After all, if the church actually believed that it was the job of parents to train their children, then they wouldn't give them "an out" in the form of a youth ministry.

Having now stripped the children away from the parents, the adult spiritual training is so often structured in a way that splits the husband and wife. Women's ministries abound, and it is highly encouraged for a woman to learn and be discipled outside of the teaching of her husband. Husbands, with nothing left to do because the church has convinced them that their wives and children are covered become bored and disinterested and so they go off to the golf course (or wherever). Passivity is encouraged in the husbands because there is nothing left to do, and men recoil away from the idea of stepping up to the plate and doing the jobs themselves. Women grow in knowledge with training that is structured in a way that reinforces their natural tendencies to supersede the headship and authority of their husbands. It builds into the women a sense of spiritual superiority that breeds a victim attitude when the truths of submission are taught and women are faced with the weight of confessing pride and coming under the leadership of their husbands.

And this ultimately goes back to what is the source for our instructions on how to treat men and women in the church. Is the plain teaching on headship and submission taught as sufficient for all husband-wife relations? Or is a rebellion against submission and a weak, soft view of family order mixed in to what the Bible says in an attempt to make it palatable? It really does go back to the concept of the sufficiency of Scripture. Where do you find the authority to do what you do?

What a tangled web we weave in our churches today.

We Shelter, Yet We Teach

Last night I was reading Thoughts for Young Men by J.C. Ryle to my son, who is 6. He's too young to grasp all of the nuances of the warnings that Mr. Ryle gives, but he understands enough for it to reinforce what we've been teaching him already about issues such as pride. I have to admit that I was wondering if he was enjoying Mr. Ryle's emphatic warnings about the natural tendencies of young men, but when I finished a section on the dangers of pride, he very enthusiastically asked me to read more. So I obliged and we went to the next section on the dangers of youthful passions.

Everything was fine, until we got to a section where Mr. Ryle transitioned to the discussion that a certain kind of passion was especially dangerous to young men, that being sexual immorality and lust. Now, I know that he was talking about the types of passions that lead young (and old) men into the throes of sexual sin, but my son had no clue of the depths and ugliness that sexual immorality brings. When we finished, I felt that my son needed a little explanation, since the words "sexual immorality" had occurred so frequently in the reading. I told my son that, for him, sexual immorality means not protecting a girl.

This may seem like a strange way to describe it, but it fits. We have been teaching him for some time that boys are to protect girls, and one sinful aspect of sexual immorality lies in the offending man's taking advantage of the women with whom he is transgressing (whether it be a mental or physical act of sexual immorality). The offending man has moved away from the righteous principle of protecting women and children and landed fully on selfishness and rebellion. That principle is quite understandable to my young son, and he really doesn't need to know (nor does he really care right now) about the gory details.

So, by defining sexual immorality principally to my son, he is able to process the words that he finds in books like Thoughts for Young Men as well as the Bible in a manner that is consistent with the details that he does know. We as parents are training him on the realities of the world, but we are doing so in a manner that works in cooperation with the moral framework that has been built up to this point in his upbringing. We are indeed sheltering him from the full force of the sin in question, but we are not sheltering him from it altogether. As he grows in moral maturity, so also will the force with which he is trained.

So, yes, we shelter. Yet we teach also. And in all things, we choose not to defile.