God's Pattern for Parents, Part 1

You are an evangelist in your home. his or her child to follow Christ.

But every Christian parent wants an answer to the question, what can I do and can I do anything at all to help my child want to embrace Christ? That's the important question John MacArthur tackles today on Grace to You. It's part of his study, The Fulfilled Family. John, before you continue this series, let's look at some of the mail we get from our listeners. You have a couple of short letters with you, and they strike a hopeful tone in what is really a chaotic world, showing that every day in many situations, no matter how bad the world looks, God is at work.

He's in charge, and lives are being changed. So take a minute and share these letters with us. Yeah, I love doing this, as you know. The first letter is from Christine, and she said, I am blessed to be a stay-at-home mother of three beautiful children. Every day I seek God's Word so that I can pour God's love into my kids. Your sermons on motherhood have encouraged me to fulfill my highest calling with joy.

She goes on, I have been using the Grace to You app for over a year. I listen to your messages, take notes, discuss the topics with Christian friends, and proclaim the gospel to non-believers. Your sermons are thorough and thought-provoking.

Thank you so much for all that you do. And I would say, Christine, thank you for being so serious about the Word of God as you take it in and then invest it in the lives of your children. May God continue to bless you and raise up many like you.

Here's a letter from James. I love the Grace to You podcast. Listening every day helps me to focus on growing in Christ, even as this world tries to steal my joy. I'm a young husband and young father who is diligently trying to lead my family in sound doctrine and by example. I'm so thankful how you lay out doctrine in a very understandable and simple way. Well, again, thank you, James. That's why we're here, and to get that kind of feedback is a joy to us. And then one more letter from Michael.

I'm a college student in Texas. I love your solid Bible teaching. I've been a listener on KHCB for about six months, and each sermon I have heard has strengthened and molded my faith in immeasurable ways. May God richly bless each one who is involved with this ministry and gives to it. I will be praying for you, and he signs his name Michael.

We've been on KHCB for a long time, long, long time. So thankful for the opportunity to reach those folks down in Texas. So from young parents to college students to folks in countless other circumstances across this country and even around the world, Grace To You is connecting God's people with biblical truths that change lives. And when you support Grace To You in your prayers and your giving, you strengthen God's people as they minister to their families and friends and as they present the gospel. So thank you for standing with us, however you're able, and praying that biblical truth will do its matchless work in many, many more lives. Yes, and friend, if you'd like to partner with us as we take the clear teaching of God's Word around the world, you can make a tax-deductible donation at our website, gty.org.

More on that later, but now stay here as John continues his study called The Fulfilled Family. 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. 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.

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, 4 says don't do and made them bitter and angry. So what is the world going to do?

Well, all the psychologists got together and they came up with a solution, a solution right out of hell. The solution is they lack self-esteem. Boy, does that work good from an economic standpoint. People will pay to come and have you tell them how wonderful they really are.

You make a lot of money doing that. They say that the problem, you see, is they don't have a proper self-respect. They don't have a proper pride in themselves, and they need to see themselves as good, noble, wonderful people. In fact, they need to love themselves. And so you take all of these young people and you say, you just need to love yourself the way you are. You need to accept yourself the way you are, and you need to just feel good about yourself the way you are, and you just pour gas on the fire because all they want already is their own will and their own way, right? And you're just telling them they're justified in it.

And you're just telling them they're justified in it. The Newhouse News Service sent an article to subscribing newspapers. The title of it was, Note to California, Drop Self-Esteem. Interesting article.

This is what it says. It has been fashionable to blame these problems on low self-esteem, figuring that people who don't like themselves don't have enough incentive to stay out of trouble. But that's wrong, says a psychologist and professor and author who has spent years studying the choices people make.

The issue is much simpler, he says. It's a matter of self-control. He says the problem is they don't know how to control themselves.

He's getting close to reality, isn't he? The problem is not that they need more self-esteem. The problem is they need more self-control. This author and a number of others who are putting pressure on the state of California have concluded that developing self-control will do more good for you than anything else and will help you stay out of trouble.

Boy, how obvious is that? If you have self-control, you're going to control yourself. You're not going to be out of control. So this psychologist and professor says, and I quote, if we cross out self-esteem and put in self-control, kids would be better off and society in general would be much better off. And I agree.

I agree. But they decry the fact that we've all been told that we have to boost their self-esteem, make them feel good about everything. The article says this and I think it's very interesting. Leaping through a trendy parenting magazine, for example, you will read, we have to be content with ourselves before we have the ability to truly give to our children. Oh, so the parents have to be really working on their own pride too.

And then he says, this is one of the neatest philosophical tropes of the self-esteem movement, self-absorption as altruism. So what's the answer? Back to Ephesians 6.

The answer, fathers, speaking for both really, father and mother, do not provoke your children to anger, which these things do, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Now let's begin at the beginning. What do you need to do to change this? You've got this external world coming at them.

You've got this internal corruption being allowed to run its course, both colliding in tragic consequences. And what is your job? Your job is to teach that little one the law of God and lead them to the knowledge of Jesus Christ, right? You are an evangelist in your home. First and foremost, you are an evangelist. It's not what you do to your children that makes them go astray. It's what you don't do, largely.

So what are you going to do? First of all, children need to know they are sinners. They need to know in no uncertain terms how deep that sin goes in their nature. They need to be taught that they will feel impulses that are wrong and illegitimate and dishonoring to God and emblematic of the fact that they are alienated from God. And they need to be shown clearly the consequences of that sin.

And when I talk about that, I'm talking about the forfeiture of blessing, difficulty in life, death and eternal hell. Children need to know that. Children need to be evangelized with the truth of sin, the truth of death and the truth of hell. When you preach the gospel, any time you preach the gospel really to anybody, it's got to be at least 75 percent law and judgment and 25 percent grace and forgiveness, right? Because you can't preach grace and forgiveness if people don't understand law and judgment.

Your children need to understand that. They need a lot more than to know Jesus wants to be your friend. They need to know about God's law. They need to know that they have violated it, that they have no capacity in them to keep it to the pleasing of God.

They can keep it externally because you forced that, but their hearts have to be transformed or they will die and perish in eternal fire. There is no different way to evangelize a child from evangelizing anybody else. One of the things that I am so grateful for in my life is that I had the privilege of having my children sit at my feet while I preached to adults. They understand the gospel that I preached to everybody to be the gospel that applied to them. If I preached on law and judgment, they heard it. If I preached on hell, they heard it. When I preached on grace, they heard it. There isn't some other message for them.

There isn't some soft sell. Jonathan Edwards said that whenever he preached to children, he liked to preach on hell because he said, quote, it is easier to terrify a child than an adult by setting before it dreadful things. Children should be terrified about eternal punishment, shouldn't they? It's a terrifying reality. Children are more susceptible to those terrors and they are also more susceptible to the winsome glories of heaven.

You don't leave that out. They are more susceptible to truth and they are also more susceptible to error, are they not? Your little child goes marching off to school and for the most part believes whatever some authority tells them. It's easier when their children lead them to the truth as it is to lead them to error. Your children need to know that God is angry with the wicked every day and that includes them. He is angry with them. He is angry with their sin.

He is very angry with their sin and He will punish them in hell if they are not forgiven through faith in Jesus Christ. They need to understand that. They also need to understand that if they put their trust in Jesus Christ, their sins are forgiven and they need not fear, but they can live with the hope and the joy of heaven. So a parent's first task is to pursue vigorously the eternal salvation of their children.

Now let me sum up some things. Remember, your children are ignorant of the gospel which saves. You have to tell them. They are sinful and they lack a solid fear of the consequence of their sin. They don't have that. You can reinforce that by consequence that you bring to them when they break the law of God, which you apply to them in your family. Your children are selfish and they are self-centered and proud. They crave worldly pleasure. They are frivolous and thoughtless about serious matters.

They are influenced by the world around them and they are greatly affected by evil friends. They cannot understand the blessings of salvation. They cannot understand the joys of conversion unless they see them in your life. So leading your little ones to God is a formidable task, but it is a thrilling one.

Should we streamline? Should we abbreviate the message when we teach children the gospel? There's no biblical reason to do that. You want to use terminology they can grasp. You want to be very clear and very patient in communicating the message. You don't want to drown them in a sea of verbiage. You don't want to crush them under the weight of some heavy complicated argument. But when the Scripture does speak of how you evangelize your children and how you teach your children, the emphasis is on thoroughness.

Where do you get that? Listen to Deuteronomy 6, 6 and 7. And these words which I am commanding you today shall be on your heart and you shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. In other words, you just constantly are teaching them the truth about God and about judgment and about grace and forgiveness and salvation. When you stand up, sit down, lie down, walk in the way.

Thorough. You don't have to be confusing and complex, but you don't want to be too simplistic either. Children cannot be saved until they're old enough to understand the gospel clearly and embrace it with genuine faith. But you start as soon as you can teaching them and God knows when that heart readiness has come.

People always ask me, at what age? It's different for every child and different in every circumstance. But they do need to be mature enough to understand sin and righteousness, to understand repentance and faith, to understand punishment. They need to be old enough to understand the seriousness of their sin, the nature of God's holy standard. At what age?

It varies from child to child. But at the beginning, you just start teaching and teaching and teaching. And as they develop that understanding, God will work His work when they reach the point of comprehension. I like to call those steps toward God. And every time your children take a step toward God and say, well, Mom, Mommy or Daddy, I want to ask Jesus into my heart, you affirm that. You affirm that.

God knows when it blossoms into the real thing. You affirm every one of those steps. Don't soften the part of the message that sounds unpleasant. Talk about hell and judgment. Talk about the blood of Christ. Talk about the cross, atonement for sins.

Don't tone down the demand for commitment to Christ, surrender to His lordship. They need to know all of that. Now, specifically, and I'm going to close with this, what do I tell them? What sort of sequential steps of information do I give them?

Let me give you just a little outline to follow. Number one, teach them about God's holiness. Teach them about God's holiness. Teach them to fear God, that God is a holy God who cannot look upon iniquity, that God is without sin, without error, that God never does anything wrong, says anything wrong, or thinks anything wrong. God is perfectly holy.

Start with that. Don't start with God loves you and wants to be your friend. Start with God's holy standard. I am the Lord your God. Consecrate yourselves therefore and be holy, for I am holy. You shall be holy, for I am holy. Leviticus 11, 44, and 45.

Start there. Show them that God is absolutely holy and has set an absolutely holy standard. Matthew 5, 48, be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect and then ask them if they're perfect like God.

They know they're not. Because God is holy, God is holy, tell them God hates sin. God hates sin. Exodus 20, verse 5, I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children of the third and fourth generations of those who hate me. Tell them that God is angry with sinners.

He hates sin. And tell them that sinners will never be able to stand in His presence. Psalm 5, the wicked will not stand in the judgment. So God has a holy standard.

That's where you start. Secondly, show them their sin. Show them their sin so that they understand that they have fallen short of that divine standard. Tell them that the gospel is a remedy for sin.

That the whole emphasis of the good news is it is a message of forgiveness to an otherwise doomed person who will perish forever in hell. Tell them that God will give them forgiveness. Show them that as you deal with them by setting standards, holding them to the standards, but when they demonstrate sorrow and repentance, acting in forgiveness. There are a lot of byproducts to redemption, but the main issue is the forgiveness of sins. So you want to show them their sin.

You say, how do you do that? Well, you can talk about specific sins, bad attitudes, words, lies, failure to do a duty that they were told to do, disrespect, dishonoring their parents. But beyond that, talk about the fact that anything and everything in their life, no matter how good they try to be, falls short of a perfect standard.

And so they are sinners to the core and in danger of hell. Tell them they're not alone. Everybody's in the same situation. So that they don't think that you're just treating them with some kind of ugly attitude that sets them apart in a world of nice people as those that aren't. Tell them that everybody's in the same situation. Tell them there was a time when you were in the same situation too, that before you came to Jesus Christ and received forgiveness for your sins, you were in exactly the same situation they were in. And now you've showed them their sin. You've told them that God hates that sin. You've told them that everybody's in the same situation. And now tell them that they can do nothing to earn their salvation.

This is important. They can do nothing to earn their salvation. Tell them you're in a serious situation from which you have no ability to remove yourself. Your sins have offended God. You can't forgive yourself.

He has to forgive you. Tell them Romans 3.20, by the works of the law, no one will be justified in His sight. Galatians 2.16 says the same thing. In other words, tell them they're sinners like everybody else and they cannot do anything to earn salvation because they're probably going to say, well, I'm going to try to be better.

That won't do it. Remind them that they are in a helpless state, helpless, helpless. They cannot help themselves. That's where you want them. Aware of God's holy standard, aware of their sin, and helpless as sinners before a holy God.

And then the third major point. You've told them about the holiness of God. You've shown them their sin. Thirdly, instruct them about Christ and what He did. Instruct them about Christ and what He did.

That's just obvious. Tell them the good news. Tell the story of Jesus. Tell them that this eternal God who is Lord of all became man.

Philippians 2, 6, and 7. Tell them that He came into the world and took on human form. Tell them that He lived a pure and sinless life. Hebrews 4.15, He was tempted in all things as we are yet without sin. He committed no sin, 1 Peter 2.22, nor was any deceit found in His mouth.

First John 3.5, in Him was no sin. Tell them the eternal God who is Lord of all became man and was absolutely sinless. And then tell them that He became the sacrifice for our sins.

I love that verse, 2 Corinthians 5.21, He who knew no sin was made sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. Tell them that Jesus became the sacrifice for us, that He took God's wrath. Tell them that He shed His blood and died as an atonement for our sin and on His death on the cross or by His death on the cross a way of salvation for sinners was provided. Explain to them that He died bearing our sin.

Congratulations. And then tell them about the resurrection. Tell them that He was delivered up for our transgressions and raised for our justification, Romans 4.25. Tell them that He came alive from the grave to show that He had paid indeed for our sins, had satisfied the justice of God, conquered sin, conquered death, conquered Satan. Tell them the story of Jesus, not just the little stories about His parables or His encounters with men. Tell them the main story. And then the fourth emphasis, tell them what God asks them to do in response.

And what is it? Repentant faith, in a phrase. To repent and to trust Jesus as Lord and Savior. Tell them of Acts 17, 30, God is now declaring that all men everywhere should repent. Repent and turn to God, it says in Acts 26, 20. Tell them to turn from their sin and ask God to forgive them through Christ. Tell them to trust Jesus, to believe that He died for them and that He will save them.

Acts 16, 31, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved. Urge them to put their trust in Christ. Tell them to seek the Lord while He may be found, not the postponement. Plead with them to be reconciled to God in this way. Say, how early do you do this? Early. They'll respond positively if this is done in a loving environment.

Just keep doing it and keep doing it. Only God knows when it becomes their faith and not just yours acceptable to them. Leading children to salvation is no different than leading adults.

No different. Same gospel, but the hearts of children are more tender, more eager, more responsive because they're not filled and cluttered with accumulated years of selfishness, worldliness and cultivated lusts. What a tremendous privilege you have to lead your little ones to Christ. This is Grace to You with John MacArthur. Thanks for being with us. And along with teaching on the radio, John is Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary.

He's titled our current study The Fulfilled Family. Now, going back to something John said before the message, with your help, we can bring biblical truth to people around the world, showing them what Scripture says about the family, the church, eternal life, and much more. And if that kind of personal ministry resonates with you, express your support when you get in touch with us today. You can make a donation online when you visit gty.org or when you call us at 800-55-GRACE.

Or if you prefer regular mail, you can write to Grace to You, Box 4000, Panorama City, California 91412. And thank you for helping us take the life-changing truth of God's word to people across the globe. Again, to make a donation, call 800-55-GRACE or go to gty.org. And when you visit the website, remember that along with over 3,500 of John's sermons, you can also tap into a wide range of other Bible study tools, including daily devotionals, our blog with articles by John and other staff members, sermon transcripts, and streaming video of Grace to You television. All of those resources and more are available free of charge at our website, gty.org. And to keep up to date on all the resources and free offers that are available from Grace to You, be sure you follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson, encouraging you to be here tomorrow as John looks at some of the biggest mistakes parents can make and how you can avoid them. Don't miss the next half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.