God's Pattern for Parents, Part 1

It really is of little consequence what you do with your children in terms of the practical issues. What little schedules you put them on or don't put them on is not the issue. What is the issue is that you lead your fallen, sinful child to the transforming grace of Jesus Christ.

That's the issue. Meet Phil Johnson. Providing a safe home where they can grow and learn, giving them a quality education, being a voice of encouragement, those are a few ways you can show your children that you love them. But what's the most important way to express your love for your kids? Find out today as John MacArthur takes a close look at God's pattern for parents. It's part of his landmark series here on Grace to You, titled The Fulfilled Family. Turn in your Bible or open the Study Bible app to the book of Ephesians, and here's John with the lesson. Turn in your Bible to Ephesians chapter 6 and verse 4. Amazingly, when the apostle Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, gives parenting instruction, it's just one sentence, one brief verse. Ephesians 6, 4, and fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

You have a negative and a positive. The negative, do not provoke your children to anger, obviously means treat them with love, treat them in a way that affirms your affection to them so they don't become hostile. The positive, bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. What is parenting?

Very simple, really. Loving your children so that they're not angry with you and bringing them up to know the Lord. You might think that there would be a whole book on parenting or there might be a whole chapter on it, but there's just one verse because the task is so highly defined. That instruction not to provoke your children to anger must be understood, and the instruction to bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord must be understood as well, and there are some component parts to that which we will endeavor to grasp as well.

But how wonderful that the whole responsibility can be refined down to one statement. In spite of the simplicity of the instruction, parents today appear to me to be somewhat frightened about the whole prospect. They are challenged by the times in which we live, the issues at hand, and some of them look at parenting as a frightening responsibility, and it is to some degree a serious and challenging task, but not for the reasons that most people might suggest. If you just surveyed people about having children, they might tell you that they have some reluctance about having children because it's expensive.

You have to have a bigger house and you have to get a bigger car or cars. You have to get a lot of extra clothes and food and you have to pay for all their medical needs and college. You might say, and it's also very time consuming, if you have any personal goals or personal desires or personal plans, personal interests sort of take a back seat to the demand of children. They are highly demanding, and while we might think that that extremely demanding time is only in infancy, as they grow older we find that demands are not less but more and more complex. Some people would say parenting is challenging because it calls for such focus on children's activities.

In other words, there are so many things that they're supposed to be involved in that you wind up spending time and energy and running that endless taxi service to meet all their needs, and the more of them you have the more complicated it gets. And I suppose there are those superficial things which make parenting to some degree challenging. The real reason that child-raising is so difficult, the real challenge before us, and we as Christians know this, can be boiled down to two components. And I think we need to understand these if we are going to love our children in such a way that they aren't angry with us but rather return that love, if we are to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. If we're to do that, we must understand that the difficulty really comes on two levels or in two areas, and we can reduce them to an external component and an internal component.

The external simply means the pressure of the society and the culture that is around us, the internal, the pressure of the nature of the child that is within him or her. Parenting is not difficult because it's expensive. It's not difficult because it's time consuming. It's not difficult because it's distracting from your personal agenda.

It's not difficult because it gets so complex to meet all the demands. It is really difficult because there are such heavy pressures from the society around us and heavier pressures from the nature of children within them. And until we understand that, we're not going to understand what parenting is really all about. Now there are some issues the Bible doesn't talk about. It doesn't talk about common sense things, practical things, personal preferences as to how you raise your children and what are the techniques of childbirth and the techniques of child rearing and all of that. The Scripture doesn't really say much about that except as I pointed out to you in a prior message that you are to spank your child when your child does not obey the Word of God.

So we told you earlier that your responsibility is to teach them the Word of God, hold them to the standard, and if they do not obey the Word of God and your authority as you apply it in their lives, you discipline them physically. First of all, let's talk about the external. And by that I mean the culture around us. Life is frankly no longer simple. It is no longer centered in the home. It is no longer centered in the family as a close-knit and only marginally influenced unit that is influenced from the outside world. That's not true anymore. There was a time when that was true. There was a time when you grew up on a farm and you basically lived your whole life there.

You ate breakfast with the family. You probably went to a little school down the road and went to school with all your neighbors and were taught by a teacher or two from the local area. You went back home, worked in the farm, sat around the house at night and basically were instructed in life by that family relationship, and that home would be only marginally influenced from the outside world.

And that basically has been true for a long, long time. Even families living in more urban areas still had a predominant influence in the home and with the family. Parents, churches, schools had community standards which were established for childhood education even, childhood training. And basically followed paths of measured increments of learning and measured increments of exposure to reality that suited a child's age and capacity to deal with issues. In other words, there were secrets that children didn't know. And it was very important in raising children to unfold those secrets at reasonable times. So that they were not blasted with things for which they were neither intellectually or emotionally able to make a proper response. In other words, we could say that children had controlled exposure and the family and the church and the school and thus the local community was in charge of that until one great invention, electronics, came.

Before that, parents and teachers could decide what children heard, what they saw, and when in their development they heard it and saw it. But then came electronics. And with electronics came the media, first time in human history. And because of electronics, tapes, and then CDs, and then videotapes, cameras, billboards, movies, and particularly television, all forms of modern media directly produced by electronics. Now, we can't even conceive of life without electronics.

What does that produce? It produces an uncontrollably overexposed population of children. Overexposed to everything without regard for any plan or any sequence. All of a sudden in your home, your children are no longer only able to know what you tell them and their teacher tells them, they can turn on the television and be blitzed with any information about anything at any time at any level. Computers now and internet personalize the world's best and the world's worst for anybody who can access it. And the whole educational sequence, the whole educational hierarchy has collapsed under the weight of video. Television is undifferentiated in its accessibility. That is to say, television doesn't make any distinctions between an adult and a child.

None at all. And television is having a massive influence on children and you might be surprised to know this. Three million children are watching television every night of the year between 11 and 1130 p.m. Two point one million between 1130 and 12 a.m. One point one million between 12 and 1 a.m. Somewhere around 750,000 children are watching television between 1 and 130 a.m.

Supposedly the time when the most adult television is being presented. Neil Postman says this, We may conclude that television erodes the dividing line between childhood and adulthood in three ways, all having to do with its undifferentiated accessibility. First, because it requires no instruction to grasp its form. That's easy.

Push the button and look at it. Secondly, because it does not make complex demands on either the mind or behavior. And thirdly, because it does not segregate its audience. Television, says Postman, is without any secrets and therefore there can be no such thing as childhood. Childhood's all about secrets. It's all about not knowing. Innocence is whatever level of innocence we could assign to a child, certainly not moral innocence. But innocence as to the issues of life is completely lost in this environment. A group, and I think you would understand this, a group, any group, just any group, is largely defined by the exclusivity of the information its members share.

What do I mean by that? Well, if everybody knew what lawyers knew, there wouldn't be any lawyers. If everybody knew what doctors knew, there wouldn't be any doctors.

If everybody knew what preachers knew, there wouldn't be any preachers. And if children know what adults know, there aren't any children. So they are overexposed to things their minds and emotions cannot handle. They are consequently hurried into massive temptations which they are unable to deal with. And under the onslaught of this corrupt world with its wrong ideas, its wrong desires, its wrong words, its wrong deeds, and its wrong attitudes, children can become severe problems to parents and society. They are exposed consistently to what they are not able to handle emotionally, what they are not able to handle morally, what they are not able to handle socially or spiritually. And what happens is they do not have the self-control and the self-restraint to deal with the issues that arise because of this information. There is a gradual decline in shame and a gradual loss of all self-restraint. Again, Neil Postman says, In having access to the previously hidden fruit of adult information, they are expelled from the garden of childhood, end quote. And you look at the culture and you see that the whole culture is moving toward homogeneity of style, dress, language, food. I remember when McDonald's commercials were geared to kids.

No more. Clothes, food, language, style, games, all homogeneous...homogeneous. Now sadly, the result is tragic. You have children without the ability to handle the information they're exposed to, and they are exposed to ideas and attitudes, desires and behaviors that they just cannot deal with. They become potentially severe social problems in the home, in the school, and in society.

So we have an immense problem here. We have an overexposed generation of children who have to be treated like adults because they have all the adult information. Instead of parents trying to bring them under control, parents have been taught, don't ever spank your child.

Don't ever discipline your child. And if something's wrong with your child, you've got to understand what the problem is. And the problem is not sin. The problem is a lack of self-esteem. So what you've got to do is build them up. Now this immense challenge put upon parenting from the outside is compounded by an even more immense challenge put on parenting from the inside. The internal.

Let's go to that one. What do I mean by that? Well, children may be ignorant when they come into the world. They may be naive, they may be unexperienced, they may be cute, but they are not innocent with regard to evil.

I suppose the simplest way to say it is this. The seed of every known sin is planted deep in the heart of every child. The seed of every known sin is planted deep in the heart of every child. And the truth, listen to this because it's so important, the truth is not that if things somehow turn out badly, our children might get messed up. Our children are severely messed up when they arrive. It's not that if things don't work out the way we would like, our children may drift spiritually and they may wander morally, but rather, listen, the drive to drift spiritually and morally, the drive to sin is embedded in their natures.

And it is the compelling drive. They don't come into the world seeking God and righteousness, they come into the world seeking the fulfillment of their sinful desires. Listen, all that is required for the tragic harvest is that children be allowed to give expression to their most evil desires. We talk about mass murderers all the time and they're always doing things about them on television. We talk about pedophiles, the horrible crime of molesting children, rapists, homosexual perversions, lifelong chronic criminal behavior. And people are always asking the question, what happened to them when they were young? What did their parents do to them? They must have been in an abusive environment, they must have been in some kind of a situation where they were mistreated and maltreated. The question is always asked, what did their parents do to them?

Let me tell you something. Mass murderers, pedophiles, rapists, perverts, lifelong criminals are not the products of what their parents did to them. They're the products of what their parents didn't do to them. You see, what happened was they just followed the natural course of their sinful nature. It's frightening, folks, because as people bring these little reprobates into the world, as adorable as they are, and have absolutely no commitment to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord and no commitment to use the rod, they are simply allowing the children to give full expression to their depravity.

What we're going to have is adult disasters, if not child disasters. It isn't that mass murderers and pedophilic child killers were made that way by their parents. Do you know that many of them had no parental influence? You see, the problem was they became what they were potentially at birth because they were never instructed and restrained.

And even more, they were never converted. In Psalm 58, and I just read a couple of Psalms to you because I think they're very important as a touchstone for us in understanding this, Psalm 58 verse 3 says this, The wicked are estranged from the womb, and these who speak lies go astray from birth. They have venom like the venom of a serpent. Whoa, they're little snakes. The poison of asps is under their lips. They're wicked when they come out of the womb.

They are liars from their birth. That's called total depravity if you're looking for a theological category for that. In Psalm 51 and verse 5, David says, Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me. He doesn't mean that he was an illegitimate child, he wasn't.

What he means is from his conception to his birth, he was iniquitous. And let me tell you something, understanding the total depravity of your children is the important practical foundation of all parenting. You can bring depraved people under some control by teaching them morality and punishing them in a proper way, a loving way, but nonetheless in a firm way. You can bring your children under control, but ultimately what you want to do is see them pass from darkness to light, right? You want to see their heart transformed so that instead of loving sin, they love righteousness. Instead of wanting to give full expression to their evil desires, they want to give full expression to what is honoring to God.

All this psychological analysis stuff of all these criminals trying to figure out what somebody did to them misses the point. It's not what somebody did to them, it's what somebody didn't do to them. Nobody would deal with them. Nobody would confront their wickedness. Nobody would show them the divine standard. Nobody would hold them to the conformity to that divine standard by the threat of corporal punishment in a loving and affirming way, of course. And most of all, no one led them to the knowledge of God through Jesus Christ so that they would have a supernatural restrainer. It really is of little consequence what you do with your children in terms of the practical issues.

What little schedules you put them on or don't put them on is not the issue. What is the issue is that you lead your fallen sinful child to the transforming grace of Jesus Christ. That's the issue. God, and I know you hate to think of this, and I even hate to think of it when I look at my precious children and grandchildren, but God has not given us holy little angels to be delicately handled so they don't go astray. They're not holy little angels to be delicately handled so they don't get corrupted. They're corrupt little sinners who have to be led to become saints.

If you have trouble with this, just recognize that your children are a miniature version of you. Now the world recognizes this disaster, and the world says, What are we going to do? We've got this tremendous problem with these children. They're out of control. They're angry, aren't they? Boy, we have an angry generation. Listen to their music. Look at their films. Vengeance, anger, brutality, hostility.

And who are they most angry with? Their parents, who have frustrated them, the very thing that Ephesians 6 says don't do, and made them bitter and angry. John MacArthur That's John MacArthur. He's chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. Today he showed you the most important job you have if you're a parent, explaining to your children that they need a savior, and calling them to turn to Christ in repentance and faith. The lesson you just heard is from John's current series on Grace to You, titled The Fulfilled Family. This series is making it clear that every child's fundamental problem is sinfulness. Maybe you understand that and you're trying to lead your children to righteousness, but frankly you're feeling some battle fatigue.

So, John, what encouragement would you have for that mom or dad? Well, again, I think you have to be consistent. I think you have to be consistent in two things. You have to be consistent in loving your child so that there's a secure sense that the child knows you care deeply, profoundly, far more than anybody else.

So you express love in lavish ways to your children. And the second thing is you have to be consistent in discipline. And I think you have to discipline your children.

This was one of the most important things that we did as parents. You have to discipline your children as much for their attitude as for their actions. If you only discipline children for actions, they then believe that attitudes are not as important, when in fact the actions are always a result of the attitude. So as I look back on raising our four children and kind of watching our kids raise their, you know, 15 grandchildren of ours, it's always been an emphasis that the child's attitude is the first thing to be dealt with. And when you get their attitude where it should be, when there's a certain amount of discipline and they have the fear of a bad attitude, you've protected them from a bad action.

So I don't know that parents think about that often enough. There are a lot of things that we can help you with in a book called What the Bible Says About Parenting. It's a full-size book, What the Bible Says About Parenting, and it's not a lot of psychological information.

It's not pragmatics. It's dealing with the responsibility of parenting by biblical knowledge and biblical understanding and the application of biblical truth. So What the Bible Says About Parenting is a great book. I know you feel some pressure to do the best you can to raise your children.

This will help you immensely. So you can get a copy of it from Grace To You. It's reasonably priced, and as I said, it's a full-size book. Just let us know you want a copy of What the Bible Says About Parenting. This book, by the way, takes the guesswork out of parenting. It's a biblical blueprint for godly leadership that both fathers and mothers and also grandparents can follow. To order What the Bible Says About Parenting, contact us today. Shop online at gty.org or call us at 800-55-GRACE. This book, What the Bible Says About Parenting, has practical insights for parents of toddlers, parents of teenagers, even those with kids in college and beyond. To get a copy for yourself or a few to give away, call 800-55-GRACE or visit our website, gty.org.

And when you finish reading the book, let us know what you thought of it and how you're applying its biblical principles in your home. We'd also love to know if the Lord has used this ministry to bring either you or a loved one to faith in Christ. Email us at letters at gty.org. Once more, that's letters at gty.org. Or if you prefer regular mail, you can write to us at Grace To You, Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace To You staff, I'm Phil Johnson, encouraging you to be here tomorrow when John looks at how you can effectively share the gospel with your children. That's on the next installment of his series, The Fulfilled Family. Tune in for a half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.