Redirecting Our Families (Part 2 of 2)

The Truth Network Podcast is brought to you by Zola Levitt Ministries. Jesus impacts every aspect of our lives, including the way we lead our families and prepare our children for life beyond the nest. Today on Truth for Life, we'll learn why our children need us to be their parents rather than their pals.

Alistair Begg is teaching from Nehemiah chapters 9 and 10. Now, if then parents are going to take seriously the issues of anchoring their faith within the framework of the home, then it will be expressed at least in these three ways. First of all, in the gathering of our families, then in the guiding of our families, and then in the giving of our families. We said last time that to obey God's Word from the heart will realign our focus. Secondly, to obey God's Word from the heart, we're saying it will redirect our families.

Well, how? Well, first of all, it will determine where we gather, why we gather, and how we gather as families. Secondly, we will guide our families. If we're going to take seriously the Word of God in our hearts, we will establish the guidance of our families. Not simply on the basis of our own little personal preferences or our own little family values—because there are plenty, again, of plenty wonderful families who play games and spend time together, but they're devoid of any knowledge of God—what is it that makes the Christian family distinctive?

It is the fact that they gather within the framework of the instruction of God. I'm not going to go back and reiterate the wonderful story of the reading of the law in chapter 8 and then the discovery of the fact that they were supposed to build booths and have a wonderful celebration on their rooftops and in their courtyards. I've mentioned it to you before. It bears repetition.

I'll move quickly by it. But when they all went and heard the Word of God proclaimed, they then went out from there, and the children heard, and the parents heard, and they heard that there was supposed to be the building of booths. So the children inevitably had the question in their minds, Are we going to do it? I'm not calling this congregation to a standard that doesn't wrestle my own heart to the ground.

To give any impression that saying these things is representative somehow of a hundred percent success in the doing of them is to create an illusion in the minds of the listeners and is to create craziness in the mind of the speaker. Children are inevitably going to ask, Are we going to do it? And on that occasion, the father said, Yes, we're going to do it. We're going to go and gather sticks. I don't want to gather sticks, and we're going to build little booths.

I don't want to build a booth. And furthermore, we're going to build them on the roof. And after that, we're going to sleep in them.

So when the school bus comes, if you're not up in time, your friends are going to see you coming out of this thing on the roof. See, the more and more and more that we are absorbed into the culture, the more that we endeavor to tell people that Christians are just the same as everybody else, the less we have the opportunity to bear the distinctions which mark the people of God. And there needs to be on the part of parents what we find here in these chapters the clear emphasis to establish biblical principles in the hearts and minds of our children. When the Jewish people established instruction for their kids, it was very, very clear.

They didn't leave anything to doubt. They wanted every one of their children to understand that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. They wanted their children to know that the reason they were not left to their own devices was because they were immature and they were sinful. The kid says, Well, why can't you just leave me at home? I'm seventeen, I have a driver's license, and I'm smart. Don't you trust me? No. Why not? Because of Psalm 51.5. Oh, why do you keep bringing the Bible up? Because the only thing we can bring up. What does Psalm 51.5 say?

Well, look it up for yourself. So they go and they look it up. Go up in their room, Psalm 51.5, 51, I don't know. Where's Psalms? Before Proverbs? I don't know. Oh, surely I was sinful at birth?

Sinful from the time my mother conceived me. Was it 51.5? Yeah. Oh, I got it. All right. All right. Yep. Yep.

I'm not sure I accept it, but I got it. Now, these things underpin their instruction. No foolish stuff. No silly stuff.

Basic biblical foundational principles to guide our children, to establish them. It is absolutely daunting. It is devastating.

It is demanding. Some days it's totally impossible. Without the help of God, I don't know how you do this stuff. Tim Hansel, writing in a little book that he put together, said that when he began to wrestle with this as a young father, he wrote himself a fact sheet. And here are the facts that he wrote on his sheet when he thought about the responsibility of guiding his children. Number one, I am a dad. Even on the mornings when I don't feel like it, even when I know I blew it, even when I think I'd rather be doing something else, the central fact of my existence is that I am a husband and a father. Fact! Fact two, the home is the single most important influence on my family. I can delegate my responsibilities at work, but I can't delegate the hopes for my family. Fact three, because of its inherent difficulty and importance, fathering is the most dignified role I will ever play. Fact four, being a parent is one of the greatest sources of joy we can ever know.

Five, we all can improve. For there isn't a father on Father's Day when they get the card or the little thing or whatever someone gave you, you don't feel a bit of a heel. Oh, honey, why would you write that nice thing about me? And you get in your car, and you say, If only I could be what it says in the card. If only I could live according to their approximation. And I don't mean meeting our children's standards.

Fact six, everyone is unique. You can't be the father down the street. You can't be the dad up the road. Oh, my dad always takes me to the orchestra, and you're like, orchestras and funerals are not places I want to hang out. So now you're going to go and do all these things to try and be Mr. So-and-so three doors down.

Meanwhile, he's never been seen with a baseball in his hand for all of his life. And so it goes on. You're unique.

You just be yourself. The seventh thing he wrote was, It is difficult to be a good parent. No magic potions, no special formulas. One of the great myths in our society is that we can be great parents without the real investment of our time and energy. And the great truth is that there is no substitute for the investment of time and effort. Once we've genuinely realized that being a quality father is difficult, then the problem no longer matters. We can get on with what we have to do. And what we have to do is described here, enabling our families to gather, guiding our families, and thirdly and finally, getting prepared to give our families away. This, of course, is the great challenge and the daunting responsibility of parenting. It dawns on us all too late that what we're doing here is we're putting these children together in order that we might give them away. And since we're going to have to give them away, we better make sure that we decide today in the light of dawn to whom we're prepared to give them and to whom we're unprepared to give them.

And that's what they said. We're going to obey carefully all the commands and regulations and decrees of the Lord our God. What does that mean?

Number one, we promise not to give our daughters in marriage to the peoples around us or to take their daughters for our sons. So you say you're a Christian. What does it mean, Mr. X? Well, what it has meant this week is that my daughter and I, we've been having some significant discussions about a boy who insists on fawning her, and he's planned to come driving up our driveway a number of times. Who's that? Mr. So-and-so's son. Oh, says the guy. What a nice guy he is. Is he not? Yeah, he is. So you must be pleased that your daughter is dating him. No, she's not. Oh, she's not? Why not? Well, he doesn't share the faith that my daughter has or the faith that we embrace as a family. Now, don't you think you're making a little bit much of that, sir? I mean, isn't that going over the top a little bit?

You sit having completed a number of the courses, having run around the laps, many of you, others are coming behind. I recognize that one day the words I speak may stand up and laugh at me. That is, words of my affirmation that would be unfulfilled. But I want you to notice what the Bible says.

It's so straightforward you can miss it. We promise not to give our daughters in marriage to those who do not share our faith. Who do the parents think they are? The parents. That's who we are. Now, the fact that we have democratized society and democratized the family unit to such a degree that we believe we're all to sit around the kitchen table and vote on everything is merely a capitulation to the thought forms of our secular culture.

But when we open our Bibles, it's clearly not that. And the dad has a responsibility to look after these kids. Along with the mom, but the dad bears the burden.

In the process of doing all of these various weddings at the moment—and they're coming faster than baby dedications right now—I have been intrigued, and I have set myself the task of asking fathers, Tell me about it in relationship to giving away your daughters. Well, he said. You know, and then we've had these unbelievable stories. And the chap told me a couple of weeks ago out of state, he said, you know, the first time this fellow came to my house, I invited him in. He sat down in our living room, and it was thirty minutes before he got out of the living room, and the perspiration was bursting out of the young guy, and he was only trying to take my daughter out on his first date with her.

But I gave him the ninth degree, he said. Where are you going? Are you going alone? Are you going with another couple? Are you going in the car? Are you driving the car? And when will you be back, and where will you be then, and everything else? The kid went out the door and said, Who in the world? What's the deal with your father?

It's pretty good. I don't know what she said. She maybe said, Well, you know, he goes to this thing, and a guy stands up on a platform and reads from a book like Ezra, and then he finds these things out, and as soon as he finds them out, we're done. Every time he finds one out, we're doing it in the house. No, you're not doing that. Why not?

It's in the book. But he tells me it's all for the best. Well, says the boy, you know what? He cares about you. I'll give him that much.

He cares about you. Speaking with a fellow yesterday in one of the two weddings, he said that he was trying his best to find a way to ask this man for the hand of his daughter in marriage, and he was annoyed with himself, because he couldn't put it together and find an introduction and begin to speak and everything else. And he was in the house, and he decided, I'll just go down the stairs, and I'll just blurt it out to the guy. And so he went down in the basement area, and the man's back was offset to him, and he said, Mr. Rex, I want to marry your daughter. And the man turned around, and he was loading shells into a shotgun in the basement.

I like that, you know. Blanks, but shells, nevertheless. Put them in, I say. Get the German shepherds. Those little boxes—you know, since I've been here, they have those little houses at the end of driveways, little wooden things?

I finally worked out what they are. That's the guard post put there by fathers when you get teenage daughters—that you have a guy down there, a soldier, that sits in that thing. Because I've never seen anybody waiting for a school bus in it. Every dad's got to feel that way. Did you see Steve Martin in Father of the Bride?

Huh? She comes home, and she says, I met a man. And the mother goes all googly, and Martin's face is a picture in poetry. You know, it's like… Every father in the world says, That's right, Steve.

Stay with it, man. That's it. There's not a father in the world. Watch the scene in the early hours of the morning as Martin awakes, and he hears the basketball bouncing on the driveway outside and goes out and finds his daughter shooting hoops. You're a father, and you watch that with a dry eye.

You've got a problem. The giving of our children away is the most significant thing that we are ever gonna do with these children. We have constrained their educational choices. We have endeavored to lay out for them wise paths in which to walk. We have helped them in the choice of their clothes. We've helped them with their diet. We've established friendships for them. We've chosen recreational times for them. We've done all of these things.

Why? Because we love them and we want the best for them. Well then, at the crunch, are we gonna step back from it and just say, Oh, hello, I'm very pleased to meet your bride?

It's because we're chicken, that's why. I think probably we need to allow our children the opportunity to ask the tough questions in our homes. Encourage them to be talking openly about their likes and their aspirations, about friendships, not least of all with the opposite sex. Engage them in conversation about what they think matters most. Help them to see that character matters more than style.

That character matters more than splash. Someone wrote, We live in a day when image rates higher than character, when style counts more than real accomplishment. We're impressed with outward appearances. We're easily distracted from unspectacular disciplines that lead to excellence. Life is skimmed from the surface.

The depth remains largely unexplored. We need to allow our children to ask their mom, How in the world did you end up with Dad? Or we need to be driving the car with our son and allow him the freedom to say, You know what? I don't know how you did it, but you did pretty good when you got Mom. Because after all, look at you.

We need to beware of a naivete which says it doesn't matter who they're mixing with, it doesn't matter who they're spending time with. I don't know, but I think I'm going to have this discussion for the rest of my life if I die prematurely or until the day my children leave the home. It goes right along the same lines. I should have just kept the tape recording from my dad. Isn't it amazing?

It's all the same stuff. Well, it's because I love you that I do this. Well, if you love me, you wouldn't do this. Da-da-da-da, same old John. Here's the bottom line this morning, dads. If the Word of God is going to take root in our lives, it's going to affect the way we establish the giving of our children.

Therefore, we need to cherish them fondly, we need to sustain them spiritually, we need to treat them individually, and we need to make sure that they understand that we are dad. Let me conclude with a quote which I've carried since 1988. A young man in the New York area, I think it was, having come across a letter which was very apropos his own experience as he remembered his dad. I took the letter that I'm about to read to you and took a separate letter which he had written, and he created a little makeshift mailbox out of a curtain rod and a little cardboard mailbox. And he drove the curtain rod into the gravesite of his father, and he inserted the two letters in the box. And here are the letters.

The first letter came from a Brooklyn man given to his son on his son's seventeenth birthday. And it said, Dear son, as long as you live under this roof you will follow the rules. In our house we do not have a democracy. I did not campaign to be your father.

You did not vote for me. We are father and son by the grace of God. I consider it a privilege, and I accept the responsibility. In accepting it, I have an obligation to perform the role of a father. I am not your pal. The age difference makes such a relationship impossible. We can share many things, but you must remember that I am your father.

This is a hundred times more meaningful than being a pal. You will do as I say as long as you live in this house. You are not to disobey me, because whatever I ask you to do is motivated by love. This may be hard for you to understand at times, but the rule holds. You will understand perfectly when you have a son of your own.

Until then, trust me. Love, Dad." And the boy put that letter and then his own note into this makeshift mailbox, his own note read, Dad, this letter and these feelings have been with me for a long time. It did take having a son to realize how right you were.

I now have two sons of my own, and I'm sounding more like you every day. I wish we had more time together. I wish I had a chance to tell you how much I've learned. Thank you for the time we did have. You taught me well, Dad.

I'm just sorry it took me so long. May God bless you. Love, David. I think it was Mark Twain who said, When I was fifteen, I thought my father was a fool. When I became twenty-five, I realized what a wise man he was.

It seems to me that if fathers were unprepared to be thought foolish and mean when our children are fifteen, we will not know the joy of them reaching twenty-five and thanking us for our faithfulness. When we obey God's Word from the heart, it realigns our focus. It redirects our families. And when we come together to study again next time, we will see that it reconstructs our finances.

It just gets worse and worse. You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life with some countercultural parenting advice from the book of Nehemiah. If today's message inspired you to become more intentional in the way you share your faith with your children while they're still under your roof, here's a suggestion for you. Start each day with a brief time of family devotion and use Alistair's devotional, Truth for Life, 365 Daily Devotions. There are two volumes in this series.

You can choose from either one. Both books will guide your family through scripture meditations with a corresponding commentary that focuses on God's character and his work. While these devotionals are written with the intention of starting each day in God's Word, you can easily adapt them to end the day focusing on God's goodness, if that works better for your family's schedule. These are sturdy, hardcover books that can be used year after year, and they're priced so each family member can enjoy his or her own copy. Each volume is available for purchase at our cost of just $8 at truthforlife.org slash gifts, or if you'd prefer, call us at 888-588-7884, and whether you purchase a single book or a box of 10, shipping in the U.S. is free. While you're on our website, be sure to check out another devotional written specifically to be read during the Advent season as you look forward to celebrating Christmas. You may have heard me mention the book. It's called O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. Ask for your copy today when you donate to support the teaching ministry of Truth for Life.

You can give through the mobile app or online at truthforlife.org slash donate. Now here again is Alistair with a closing prayer. Our God and our Father, we thank you for your Word.

We want to be like the people in Nehemiah's day who, when they heard it, accepted it, obeyed it, and applied it. We thank you this morning for happy memories. We give in to your care this morning—sad hearts, difficult circumstances, deep loss, great disappointment. May we find our confidence in you, our hope, our friendship.

For you are a Father to the fatherless. May the love of the Lord Jesus fill our hearts and homes. May the joy of the Lord Jesus establish us on the right path. May the peace of the Lord Jesus guard and keep us today and forevermore. Amen. I'm Bob Lapine. Join us tomorrow as we learn why worship that costs us nothing is worth nothing. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.