Few relationships touch our hearts deeper than the one between parent and child. Surely you can recall those tender moments when you brought your first child home from the hospital to start the brand-new adventure of child rearing. Well today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll is teaching from Ephesians chapter 6 where Paul offers timeless wisdom to moms and dads about cultivating a healthy home.
Whether you're in the throes of family life or perhaps watching your children raise a family of their own, there's practical help for everyone. Chuck titled today's message, Secrets of a Nurturing Home. I'd like to read for you first from Ephesians chapter 6 and then have you put your finger also at Proverbs 22. We'll read a verse from there as well. Let me read from the both New Testament first, Ephesians 6, 1 to 4, and then I want to read verse 6 of Proverbs 22.
Just have that ready. Remember every time we open the scriptures we are hearing the Word of God that has been preserved for our instruction that we through patience and comfort from the scriptures might have hope. Paul writes in Romans 15, 4.
This is to give us hope. Ephesians 6, 1, children obey your parents in the Lord for this is right. Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with a promise, so that it may be well with you and that you may live long on the earth. Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Then if you will turn back to Proverbs 22 and verse 6. Proverbs 22, 6. Find that if you will. Train up a child in the way he should go. Even when he is old, he will not depart from it. You're listening to Insight for Living.
To search the scriptures with Chuck Swindoll, be sure to download his Searching the Scriptures studies by going to insightworld.org slash studies. Today's message is titled Secrets of a Nurturing Home. Today I want to talk about parenthood. Knowing people as I do, when you just use the word parenthood or parenting, you immediately raise up all kinds of emotions. Some of them good.
Some of them even great. When you remember, you're being raised by parents as you were. Perhaps it was your joyful experience to know a father who was faithful and a mother who was diligent. Both of them loved and almost adored you as you grew up. Their arms were often around you and they affirmed you at every turn it seemed. And looking back to the parenting of your past, you have feelings of days when you were made to feel secure, encouraged to go on, so that you were prepared for life as it unfolded in before you.
And the converse is also true. Many of you, I dare would guess, most of you find yourself with darker feelings and more disappointment. Perhaps yours was the horror of a parent who was not faithful and maybe you hardly even remember your father and you do your best not to call to mind even your mother. They were neither faithful nor caring. You were just sort of brought up and let go.
To add to the possible tragedy, you may have known abuse in your past and unfair treatment that was permitted by parents who should have stopped it and didn't. And while we're journeying here into the past, we could also mention the very real factor that none of us has known, perfect homes and families. We may have come from good homes but they weren't perfect. Our father was not all he could have been and our mother, while we needed more, did not provide it.
But she wasn't a bad mother, just wasn't everything we needed. Knowing that there's the full spectrum of those individuals sitting and listening right now, I took this message to the Lord a long time ago and said I need just the right way to begin to get everybody on the same page because I know we're not. My story isn't your story and the person sitting next to you has a story different from both you and me. Interesting, it so happened that on that very day when I was asking for those directions, a book arrived at my home in a package from my longtime and wonderful friend Dr. John Trent, a new book he's written.
I would that all struggles I had in preaching were solved with a delivery to my door and he opened the package and here is the answer. And yet this one brought an answer. This brought a story and it's John's story, not mine, but listen to it. Don't miss a word.
It'll help put us all on the same page. She should have been bitter and broken and frozen inside. She had every reason to be, every right to be, if you want to be politically correct. Her father had chosen to spend her childhood years far away from his family as he tried and failed to keep a dying farm from sinking into the dust bowl. Years later, after only a year of marriage, her husband walked into the big sun parlor in their house in Indiana and announced that their relationship was over.
There was another woman. Then came a move to Phoenix to see the sun again, a new start and one day a new marriage. Then the long-awaited birth of children, three boys, an older son plus a set of twins in just three years. Then a replay of the conversion in the Indiana sun parlor.
Let me read it again. Then a replay of the conversation in the Indiana sun parlor. Another husband came home to say there was another woman and he was leaving. No, there would be no further discussion and in the future no financial help nor even a card or visit with the boys as they grew up. The three most significant men in my mother's life all walked away from her. Her father, when she was a child, and then two husbands who didn't merely leave, but who underscored their sudden departures by choosing someone else over her. I find it interesting that God gave my mom three young boys to raise. Did the Lord intend this as a way to make up for the missing men in her life? I'm not sure, but I do know that she could have grown full of anger and hurt and shame and self-pity.
Instead, she remained vibrant and alive, warm and loving, which always amazed me. It doesn't usually happen that way. We live life as if it were a motion picture, says author Gerald Sitzer. Lost turns life into a snapshot. The movement stops.
Everything freezes. That's what I've seen over the years in the lives of so many people I've counseled, people who have suffered great loss, people shrink wrapped and shelved by crushing failures or turned to stone inside because of grief or a love lost forever. It should have happened to her. She should have shut down, closed the book on growth and creativity and connection. If not for the people losses she suffered, then certainly for all the physical losses that added injury to insult. Rheumatoid arthritis would twist her hands, tear up her knees, and take away an outstanding career, a corporate vice presidency significant enough to merit a write-up in the Wall Street Journal. All ripped away. So too was any realistic chance of remarrying.
As her bones dried up, her spirit too should have dried and cracked and broken. She should have given up, particularly on me. I was the one who was asked to leave grade school for a stupid mistake. I was the one who police carded home late one night.
I was the one who brought home report cards so dismal they wouldn't qualify me to ask, paper or plastic? But mom never gave up on life or learning or friends or needy people or the Lord or her sons. Without a doubt, she was the most giving, loving person I've ever known. Even in her last days, she glowed a description given by one of her hospice nurses.
But why? What enabled her to carry on? What gave her the strength to continue? How could she do it? After a night of crying out in pain from the arthritis, each time she rolled over in bed, she could still greet us with a genuine smile in the morning.
For years, I wondered how. And what was it that allowed her to look beyond her own pain and loss and adopt hurting kids the way other people bring home stray cats? What was it that kept her mind alert and her arthritic fingers still tapping across her computer keyboard?
She got on the internet before I did. Why didn't she daily rev up her regrets and hurts, put down my father in front of us or take the counsel of Job's wife and curse God and die? What was her secret? Today I realize that she really did have a secret.
A secret that all of us can discover and learn and use. Mom had a way of continually connecting to a source of strength and energy in life and recovery and wellness that filled her life to overflowing. In the process, she changed so many lives that her funeral, at her funeral, the chapel couldn't begin to contain the throngs who arrived to pay their regrets or their respects.
And those who couldn't get inside hung around outside for the whole service. What I first saw in my mother I've since seen reflected in the lives of many courageous, authentic, empowering people of every race, age, and tax bracket. This secret helped mom keep a positive perspective through all her years of chronic pain and soured relationships. So what was her secret? What enabled her to thrive, to glow, despite the tragedies in her life? In two words, she chose to be there for others.
She lifted her eyes to others carrying even deeper hurts. The template we're given in the scriptures for how to be there is exactly what my mom followed to connect so deeply with us boys. And it's reflected in countless studies of strong families, great marriages, and deep friendships. What John Trent calls being there, in two words, I call in one word, nurturing. Now that we're all on the same page, since that story is so full of reality and the potential of a home that could have self-destructed, and yet the hope of a woman who chose another way, I want to hold out a fresh hope to every person listening to me today. Regardless of the home you've come from, regardless of the mess you have made in the home where you are now, it is never too late to start doing what is right.
And the secret is nurturing. In our study of the letter to the Ephesians, we've come to the last chapter. Believe it or not, some of you wondered if we would ever, ever get there.
We have arrived. I'm not saying we'll be through quickly, but we've come to the last chapter. And it is full of some of the most practical words Paul ever wrote. He's written to wives at the end of chapter five, and to husbands at the end of chapter five, and now he writes to children at the beginning of chapter six, and to fathers in verse four of chapter six.
And everything within this preacher is tempted to come down hard on children. Obey. It's right there in the Bible. Honor.
If you don't, you won't live well and you'll die young. It's all right there. I could come down like that and pound this pulpit, and then I could say, fathers, stop provoking your children to wrath. You know how impatient we all are. Quit it. And then I could pray and we'd all go home. None the better for it, but I'd feel good because I taught what the Scriptures taught. But wait a minute.
You know what? That kind of instruction, that kind of preaching, helps nobody. Not even the preacher. In fact, it leaves the preacher thinking he did some good when in fact he could have driven a situation even deeper.
Let's all get on the same page and understand we are all sinners. We all have failed and we all will fail. Our parents failed in areas with us. They didn't want to. They didn't sit on the bed in the morning saying, let's see, how can I make a real mess of my family today and then carry it out?
It's not like that. No one in his or her right mind ever starts a day like that. But in spite of how positive we may feel as we get started in the day, something snaps. Something happens and we turn back to habits that were formed by those who raised us, who formed their habits from those who raised them, and there's no break in the cycle and we find ourselves just like our parents and their parents. I suggest the secret is in nurturing and you'll break the cycle.
Nurturing. I don't want to start in Ephesians 6. I don't want to yield to the temptation of jumping right in with both feet. I want to go back to Proverbs 22 in verse 6. And I want to surprise you with the words this verse does not teach what you thought all your life it teaches.
How's that for encouragement, huh? All your life you thought you knew what it meant. Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it. Meaning what? You're the parent, he's the child or she's the child.
You know the right way and you're gonna make it happen. Which means you take him or her to Sunday school every Sunday. You make sure they sit through church, though they may be terribly bored, they stay there. You make sure the senior pastor dedicates the child to the Lord. You teach him to pray, to sing the songs of the faith, to go to Vacation Bible School, religious summer camps. You make certain if you can afford it to put him into a Christian school. You pray at every meal. You read Bible stories every night. You force him to memorize scripture because the memorized scriptures will help his mind and you go after that with both barrels and you make sure he's in the youth group and he runs around with the kids at church.
That should have given you a little hint right there. Because you do all of these things, you take him in the way he should go. You know the way because that's the way you were raised and that's the way they were raised, but that is not the way. The verse in Proverbs 22 6 begins with train up. It doesn't say jerk up. It doesn't say force in.
It says train up. In fact, the original Hebrew verb comes from the action of a midwife who would take her finger and after helping in the birth of this child would dip her finger in the pool of crushed or yes crushed dates or grapes and would reach inside the mouth of the newborn and would create a sucking sensation, create a thirst, cleanse the palate and they believe to cleanse the system. It came to mean the whole idea of dedicating or setting apart by the cultivation of a thirst.
So right away we're disarmed. The parents immediate task is to create and cultivate a thirst for that which pleases God and that which will be for the well-being of the child. So we have that on our hearts when children are born. We do what we can to cultivate a thirst. Please observe the next phrase, a child in the way he should go.
If we are to cultivate a thirst in a child of whatever age who's still living under our roof, what is the way he should go? Look in the margin of your Bible if you're carrying a new American Standard Bible. It may help you with the rendering according to his way.
Now don't turn it off yet, stay with me. Train up a child according to his way. The term way is the Hebrew word derek, D-E-R-E-K, transliterated. It's used to describe mannerism or characteristic. In fact it came originally from the idea of making a path, a way. It later was used by the psalmist for putting one's foot on a bow and pulling the bow taut to where you could string the bow before you would shoot an arrow.
The idea of bending the bow so that it now can handle an arrow to send it to its target came to mean bent or bends, the whole idea of shape. We're talking about the secrets of a nurturing home, and as you can hear we've only touched the surface in this presentation from Chuck Swindoll. To learn more about Insight for Living Ministries, please visit us online at insightworld.org. Now we've set aside several minutes to hear a personal comment from Chuck and our study in Ephesians 6 will extend into the next two programs as well. Just before I turn the microphone over to Chuck, I'd like to direct your attention to a classic book that's become a favorite in the Swindoll household at this time of year. It's a one-of-a-kind coffee table book that illustrates with paintings and stories 250 favorite Bible stories. Now the pictures are masterpieces and the stories are written in simple language, making this the perfect book to read with your children and grandchildren at Christmas. It's called Kregel's Treasury of Illustrated Bible Stories. Either for yourself or to give to a friend or family member, this keepsake will elevate your understanding of the true Christmas story. To purchase the coffee table book called Kregel's Treasury of Illustrated Bible Stories, call us. If you're listening in the United States, dial 1-800-772-8888 or go online to insight.org slash store. In these more than 40 years of ministry that Insight for Living has been teaching the Bible, I've never witnessed a year quite like 2020.
Chances are you haven't either. This was a year defined by ginormous disruptors. The disruptors are personal disasters that derailed our plans and stole any modicum of peace we'd come to enjoy. The number one disruptor of course was the unnerving coronavirus. But make no mistake, the chaos cannot be isolated to a contagious flu bug alone. In addition, Covid seemed to ignite a powder keg of emotions that exploded like bombshells in our political and civil discourse.
And the end result? Our world is embroiled in a diabolical war against itself. These are serious days. And now you're probably thinking, come on Chuck, lighten up a little.
I know, I know. It's not like me to paint such a dark and hopeless picture, but I would deny the obvious if I didn't acknowledge the minefield of troubling issues that litter our path today. So here's where I turn the corner. Lest we think we're trekking through uncharted territory, let's pause to remember Jesus has been down this road before. In fact, when you think back, his times were rife with crisis, just as ours are. In fact, when the baby Jesus broke onto the human stage in Bethlehem, the political climate in Rome was deep and treacherous.
Caesar Augustus was demanding a census, and Herod the Great was on a rampage of fury. And it was no accident that Jesus arrived when he did. Remember Paul's words? When the fullness of time came, God sent forth his son, Galatians 4.4. What he meant was Jesus arrived right on time. Ultimately, Jesus died on the cross right on time, and later walked out of the grave right on time. I believe that God has appointed Insight for Living Ministries to declare the truth about Jesus for such a time as this.
It is right on time. He is our only hope. Christ is still the one who is able to bring light when all around us is dark as night. God is still with us in this year of loss and violence, division, arguments, and pandemic. So now, as we turn the page and come to the end of this chapter called 2020, I'm asking you to join me in proclaiming the truth about Jesus with a world that's overcome with fear. Look, I'm keenly aware that many of our listening family have endured financial setbacks this year.
I realize that, and I stand with you. Some, however, are capable of giving on their behalf, above and beyond. In any case, I can assure you that your much-needed year-end gift will become a light to those who are walking in darkness. Any amount God places on your heart to give to Insight for Living Ministries will make all the difference you can imagine, and it will make a difference to those in need. Together, let's assure them of this.
You are not alone. God is still on the throne, and He's always right on time. Thanks, Chuck. Perhaps you're in a position to give on behalf of others who have come to rely on Insight for Living, just as someone once did for you.
Your generosity will make all the difference in their lives. There are a couple of ways you can connect with us right now. If you prefer the old-fashioned way and you're listening in the US, dial 1-800-772-8888.
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Just click on the donate button and follow the simple instructions. Chuck Swindoll continues his practical message about the secrets of a nurturing home, Thursday on Insight for Living. The preceding message, Secrets of a Nurturing Home, was copyrighted in 2000, 2001, and 2009. And the sound recording was copyrighted in 2009 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. All rights are reserved worldwide. Duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited.
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