Ephesians 6:4
Let us hear from God’s word now.
This is Ephesians chapter 6 verse 4. It says, Fathers, do not provoke
your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and
the instruction of the Lord. Let us pray together. Our Lord
and God, we thank you that in your word you speak. We thank
you that in your word you tell us that you have sent your Holy
Spirit to guide us in all things. And so we do ask now that your
Holy Spirit might guide us in all things, especially the understanding
of Ephesians chapter six, verse four. And we pray that our understanding
would lead to obedience, that our understanding would lead
to generations who know the Lord and all that he has done. And
we pray that where your word medals in our lives, where it
presses in on areas where we may be falling short or even
failing. We pray that your grace would
lift us up to do what is good and right and true for your glory
and for the good of others. This we pray in the name of Jesus.
Amen. A couple of weeks ago I was flipping
through local news app on my telephone, and a little video
caught my attention. It may have caught some of your
eyes as well. And it was a video of a group
of boys, and they were making their way around to various Bass
Pro Shops. Now, you know, these giant super
stores. They’re the what are they, the
Taj Mahal for all men who love the outdoors. And in these Bass
Pro Shops, there are these massive aquariums, two stories tall.
And the video showed that these boys were climbing the tower,
the stairway, and they were videoing themselves as they were cannonballing
and can opener-ing and doing whatever other large, splashy
dives they could into the water. They were putting on video. They
were posting it. It was going viral or whatever you call it.
And I remember watching one of the videos and one of the bystanders
commented, these boys need a dad. And what a good comment. They
needed a dad. probably a woodshed, probably
a couple of other things as well. And you watch a video like that,
and it gives us a picture of where culture is. Some of you
would say, during my childhood, we never would have done that.
We never would have disrespected someone else’s property. And
if we had, boy, we would have had it coming. Some of you teach
school. Some of you serve in the public
community. You know what this generation
is before us. Some of you read statistics.
You know what’s out there. Many homes are godless. Many
homes are full of absentee parents or no parents at all. And on
and on we could go. We can diagnose that there is
a problem. But what is the solution to the
problem that we have in our culture today? Before we look at it,
let me also mention that the Christian community is not innocent
either. We can say, oh, this is just
a problem outside the church. Oh, this is just a problem outside
the Christian home. Oh, this is a problem outside
the Christian school. But listen to the news recently
where a Christian school in another state had a young lady who had
become pregnant. And so the Christian school sought
to discipline her. banned her from coming on the
school grounds. They made her take her classes
at home. She was not to come and be in the presence of her
fellow classmates because her pregnancy had brought great shame
upon her in the school. And when it came time for graduation,
they said, you will not be able to walk with your graduating
class. Well, this young lady in a very, I think, godly response
along with her parents and her minister and the support of her
church leaders, stood in front of the school on her own volition,
own will, her own desire, and she repented for what she had
done. And do you know that the school still refused to offer
her grace? And so you see, everywhere we
go, we’re getting it wrong. We’re getting it wrong, but the
Bible gives us so many great answers for how to raise and
train the next generation in the ways of the Lord. Oh, we’re
busy parents. Time does whiz by. And before we know it, our children
are all grown up. And some of us may say, did I
miss the mark? Some of us wonder about our children.
Some of us lie in bed at night and say, did I do everything
I could? Did I offer them Jesus? Did I
train them and nurture them and provide for them? Some of us
have hit the mark. I was joking yesterday with Audrey
Turner, who, as many of you know, has not felt well these last
many months. And every week, one of her three boys, or a daughter-in-law,
stays with her and makes sure that she’s safe and healthy.
And if she needs medical attention, that she gets it. And so yesterday,
I was joking with her. One of her boys was with her.
And I said, Audrey, you must have done something right. Because
her boys pay her such good and careful attention. So have we
missed the mark? Have we done the right things
and hit the mark? Or maybe the jury is still out. Let me encourage you in this
way. It is all by grace and by God’s promise and his faithfulness. Oh yes, there are things we must
do to serve our children and our generations. And the Bible
speaks of difficulty. We read in the Bible of the sons
of Eli. Some of you remember the story
of Hannah, who in 1 Samuel, it tells us she wanted a child.
She wanted a child badly. Her loved ones and her family
seemed to be able to produce children about at the same rate
as maybe your rabbit hutch. But she could not have a child.
And she was found in the temple praying, oh Lord, give me a child. And the priest thought she was
mad, but she was praying for a child. And when she finally
had a child, she said, I will give this child to the Lord.
And do you know that God was replacing the wicked children
of Eli? Hophni and Phinehas were wicked
men. They were serving the Lord. No, they were really serving
themselves. And God was going to wipe them out. And little
Samuel would soon replace these wicked boys who fell dead before
the presence. of Almighty God. So there are
examples in the Bible of where it doesn’t go so well. And it
says that Eli did not reprove. He did not challenge. He did
not chasten. He did not teach his boys what
was right, and they were wicked. Or we read of a positive example.
We read Paul’s admonition to Timothy, where Paul is telling
Timothy, as the pastor at the Church of Ephesus, in fact, where
this letter was written, he tells Timothy, to remember where you
heard the word of God. You heard it from your mother.
You heard it from your grandmother. They taught you the things of
almighty God. And so Timothy grows up in the
faith. He grows up and becomes a minister
of the gospel of Jesus and serves the church. And so the challenge
for us is to raise our children. You know, sometimes we hear,
maybe we read a little blip in the newspaper, the cost to raise
children, you know, it costs $240,000 or whatever it is to
raise a child. Well, if we thought of raising children that way,
we would never do it. I mean, who of us ever has $250,000,
but I want us to think this way. It costs too much not to raise
your children. And we think of all the ills
and problems of society, particularly the jail systems, the prison
systems, the problems of society are generational. It comes from
parents not raising their children in the nurture and the admonition
of the Lord. So let me encourage you from
this passage. It speaks in a very large or umbrella type way of
giving our children an atmosphere, a place of nurture. And in that
atmosphere, what we say really matters. Now you’ve probably
heard me say over and over again, and this is a good, great place
to say it again. Raising children is like having
a greenhouse. We provide all the right sunlight,
all the right food, all the right water and nurture the safety
out of the wind and the rain and the storms. All the right
elements are there and all the wrong elements are kept out. And we raise our children in
that greenhouse, in that place of nurture. And as this passage
will tell us, what we say matters to our children and their future.
But we raise them in that greenhouse so that when they enter the world,
they are ready for the real things, the storms, the rain, the wind,
the pest, and all that can endanger plants. You get the picture in
the same way we have to think of our children in that way. We’ve just planted a magnolia
tree on the side portion of our yard. And when we bought the
tree, the lady at the nursery told us a little bit about the
tree. She said it will drop leaves about 330 days out of the year.
She said their root systems are very short. And she told us when
you plant the tree in the ground, you need to stake it. You need
to put a stake on either side or three states and you need
to tie it off. Because she said a good windstorm will come and
if the ground is soggy from rain, that tree will just blow over
and you’ll be picking it up and putting it back in the ground
over and over. So we’ve staked the tree. Makes cutting the yard
a little more difficult. We have to pull the stakes out
and mow, put them back, all that. But you see, staking that tree
gives that tree the opportunity, while it is young, while it is
being rooted into the ground, while it is being watered and
all these sorts of things, it gives it the opportunity to stand
tall. And as those roots spread into
the ground and as the tree grows up, At some point, those stakes
and strings and ropes will be unnecessary. That is what I want
us to think about today, is we want to provide the atmosphere,
the greenhouse, the proving ground for our children. Now, let me
speak first about this atmosphere. The passage of Scripture tells
us in verse 4 of chapter 6 of Ephesians, it says, Fathers,
do not provoke your children to anger. but bring them up in
the nurture and admonition of the Lord. The atmosphere that
we are to provide, you see, is don’t do it the negative way,
but do it the positive way. He’s saying provide, but do not
provoke. Do not provoke your children.
What does he mean by that? Do not provoke them to anger.
Don’t chide them all the time. Don’t condemn them all the time.
Don’t be angry all the time. Don’t run your mouth at your
children. You know how it can get. Life gets busy. We forget
to serve our families as we ought. And so we create an atmosphere
in our homes where no one can succeed, where no one can thrive,
where no one can survive. And so we wonder why when our
children hit a certain age, they’re sullen. Or when freshman year
of college comes, they can’t wait to get out of the house.
And we kind of strangely wonder why they don’t come back. There
may be all kinds of reasons, but we need to think hard about
the atmosphere that we are providing. Why does the Apostle Paul say
this? He knows the tendency of fathers to be harsh. and to not
be tender. But he’s also speaking here to
the head of the households. He’s speaking into a Roman culture
where the man was the head of the household. And biblically,
that is still something we believe is true. So he speaks to fathers,
don’t provoke your children, but do bring them up in the nurture
and the admonition of the Lord. Provide an atmosphere where they
can learn and grow and succeed. A place where they can fail,
but a place where their failures are an opportunity to learn and
to live and to one day stand on their own two feet. It’s a
place of personal formation. Now, there is a, I think, a direct
parallel to the church. The church is to be a place where
we can learn and where we can grow and where we can fail and
fall short, but we can also repent and pick up again and start over. And so the church and the home
are two very important places God has provided for us that
we might learn to know God and to walk in his ways. But the
home, fathers and mothers, is to be a place of personal formation
for our children. And there are two means for that
personal formation, and that’s what we want to focus on for
the next few minutes. And there are two things that we are to
say. Notice Ephesians 6, verse 4, it says, fathers, do not provoke
your children to anger, but bring them up in two ways, in the discipline
and the instruction of the Lord. I’m using the English Standard
Version, and it uses the word discipline and instruction. We’ll
look at each of those words, and maybe you have another translation
that may use a similar word, but different word. But we want
to look at two things we ought to say. Now, the first thing
we ought to say is really something we ought to do. But the first
thing we ought to say, and maybe some of you parents have said
this and I didn’t figure this out until I was a parent what
it really means, but we should say to our children, it’s gonna
hurt me. How does it go? More than it’s
gonna hurt you. And the apostle Paul here is
speaking of physical discipline. He is speaking of bringing our
children up in the nurture or the discipline of the Lord Jesus. Now, we live in a culture that
sort of, well, no, it doesn’t sort of, it looks down on corporal
punishment. But we know what the Bible says.
What does the proverb say? Any man who does not discipline
or chasten or punish his child hates his child. And what man
wants to say, I hate my child. Or we have the old proverb that
many across the world know, but it’s from the scripture, spare
the rod, spoil the child. And so the apostle Paul is saying
to us, If you’re going to be a faithful parent, you’re going
to have to do the hard task of disciplining your children. And
so we’re going to have to say, it’s going to hurt me more than
it’s going to hurt you. Now, what is the purpose of physical
discipline? Well, let’s start in a big picture
way. The book of Hebrews, which we
have made our way through in months past Hebrews, the 10th
chapter speaks of our fatherly discipline from almighty God.
And in chapter, I believe it’s chapter 12 of the book of Hebrews,
it says, consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against
himself so that you may not grow weary or faint hearted in your
struggle against sin. You have not yet resisted to
the point of shedding your blood. So you’re not dead yet. It won’t
kill you. Have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses
you as sons? Now, this is God speaking to
adults and he’s saying, God, your heavenly father chastens
you. He disciplines you. It says,
my son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor
be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the
one he loves and he chastises every son whom he receives. Verse 7 says, it is for discipline
that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons.
For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If
you are left without discipline in which all have participated,
then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we’ve
had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall
we not much more be subject to the father of spirits and live? You see, there’s a parallel here
between the way God treats us as his children and the way a
father and a mother should treat their children. And so the apostle
Paul says we are to raise our children in the discipline of
the Lord. It’s to tutor them. It’s to chasten
them. It’s to shape their wills. Now, we all understand that when
a child is born, they’re sweet and cute and innocent, but something
changes. Something changes when they want
something. Something changes when their will becomes more
evident. When their will and their mobility,
which is developing, gain power over you. We joke about having
one child, and then the second one’s on the way, and then you
get that third one, it goes from two-one defense to man-to-man,
and then it goes to zone. And you understand that children,
when you have them, You know, paper, it’s one thing. But when
you have children, you see that their will is to rule the house. Their will is to live like Adam
and Eve and to make choices for themselves. But what is God’s
will for children? It’s to be shaped and formed
and nurtured in such a way that when children obey parents, and
it comes through the hard work of discipline and chastening
them, when they get older, They will not be jumping into fish
tanks and posting it on video, but they will be worshiping God
and fearing Him and living. Because you know what? If your
children can’t obey you, they will never learn to obey God. And so what a great grace it
is for children. We look back and remember some
of the hardships of discipline and the pain it brings, the therapy
that we’re in now. But isn’t it so much more of
a grace to have been stopped at an early age than to grow
into an adult and to face the utter hardships that may come
because our parents weren’t faithful to us? You see, God is a wise
God. He is at work in our lives. And so we start little. I remember
taking a parenting class. I think down in Huntersville,
where we first were when Carolyn was on the way, the moon had
been full and there were about eight families of us in the church
who all were with child. There were children on the way
and we were all in a little panic. What do we do with the things?
They come and the instruction manual is not there. And so one
wise elder in the church said that eight of you families need
to sit down and you need to listen to this teaching on what it means
to be a Christian parent and how to raise these little ones.
And so we did for like eight or 10 weeks, we sat. and we listened
to this teaching, we took notes, we discussed it. And so for years
there, we all raised our first babies together. Some of us loved
what we were taught, some of us didn’t love it, but it was
like a little group effort to learn to raise our children.
And I’ll tell you, to this day, when we keep up with every one
of these families, we hear because of the parents’ faithfulness
and hard work, even doing hard things that aren’t popular in
this world and even aren’t popular in the church today, These children
are walking with the Lord and they are faithful. And I am thankful
for the grace to have heard these wonderful things and to be blessed
in such a good way. One of our children was asking
us over maybe the last year or two, daddy, do you ever, do you
ever get us thinking? And I said, well, I got plenty
of them growing up. And sometimes I’ll tell the stories about that,
but I’ll say, you know, God, God still disciplines us and
it’s much worse. And it comes through the forms
of sickness, where it comes through financial struggles. It comes
through the means of struggle in this life where God says,
I want your full attention. And he puts his hands on our
shoulders in a way of grace and says, look me in the eyes and
forget not that I am your father. And though I chasten you, as
the book of Hebrews says, it’s because I love you and want to
rescue you. And so dear brothers and sisters
of the Lord Jesus, we must raise our covenant children in the
covenant ways. We must trust that God’s covenant
promises, his covenant blessings and his covenant means are the
way to raise our children. The apostle Paul says to us to
raise our children in the nurture and the discipline, the instruction
of the Lord. So the first thing we ought to
say to our children is this is going to hurt me more than it’s
going to hurt you. And it is a hard thing to discipline your
children. But it’s the right thing, biblically. The second
thing we should say to our children is this. This is the way. Walk in it. If the first way
is something we do, the second way is really more about what
we say to our children. This is the way. Walk in it.
The passage literally says we’re to nurture them in the instruction
of the Lord. We’re to call their attention
to the content of the scriptures. We’re to call their attention
to the indicatives, as I mentioned earlier, the things that are
true about God, the Father, God, the Son, God, the Holy Spirit.
We’re to call their attention to the things that are true about
salvation and grace. But we are also to call their
attention to the things the Bible says that we are to do. We are to call their attention
to it. We are to train them by the word
of the Lord. They are heaven’s children. And
so we should train them in heaven’s ways. Now, the home needs all
the help it can get. And sometimes we need the assistance
of the Christian school. Sometimes we need the assistance
of the church. But at the end of the day, the
responsibility of raising children, both of disciplining them and
of teaching them in the ways of the Lord, it falls squarely
on the shoulders of parents. And there’s a two sided coin
that the apostle Paul speaks of when he says that we are to
train them in the instruction of the Lord. There’s a positive
side and there’s a negative side. The positive side is encouragement.
We think of the word discipline as a negative word, but discipline
first is positive. We teach our children what is
good and right and true. And it’s when they fail or fall
short, then the negative discipline comes. And so we teach them. We teach them what is good and
right and true and necessary. And we have rules about our house.
Maybe it’s no running or no throwing the dishes or clean up after
yourselves or help with after supper. There’s house rules,
but there’s also God’s rules. We worship God. We don’t hate
our neighbor. We tell the truth and on and
on it may go, but we are to encourage positively the things of the
Lord to our children. But there’s a negative side.
And this is probably where we see Eli’s failure in the scripture. He failed to offer reproof to
his boys. He failed to confront them and
say, boys, I’ve taught you what is good. I’ve told you what is
right. I’ve shown you the scriptures
to show you what is true. And yet you continually live
in idolatry. You continually go after the
women of the land of Canaan. You continually go and do whatever.
And he never does what is godlike. He doesn’t put his hands on his
grown boy’s shoulder and look them in the eye and say, what
you’re doing is wrong and God will put you to death for it. He fails to reprove. But we need
to remember this is a two sided coin. To teach our children in
the instruction of the Lord is to encourage them. It’s to speak
into their lives the truth and to confront them when they are
wrong. How does this happen? Well, it
happens in all of life. Deuteronomy chapter 6 says, Hear,
O Israel, the Lord your God is one. You shall love the Lord
your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. You
shall love your neighbor as yourself. And then it continues on and
gives instruction for the family. When you sit, When you rise,
when you lie down, now I’m starting to paraphrase here, but when
you’re riding in the car, when you are headed to soccer practice,
when you’re in the grocery store, when you are on your way home
from church, wherever you are with your children, you ought
to be speaking the word of God into their lives, hopefully in
an encouraging way. but when necessary in a reproving
way. But we need to have table talk.
There’s a restaurant in Greensboro that has a lot of quotes on the
wall. And if you read these quotes, you think, golly gee, somebody
who owns this company is a Christian. But one of the quotes, I forget
who it’s by, it’s a famous person, can’t remember right off, but
it says, the generations or culture will be changed at the dinner
table. And so brothers and sisters,
we need to eat together. And when we eat together, we
need to talk together, but we need to worship together. We
went to a little parenting thing across town that another church
was hosting last fall. And one of the Friday evening
admonitions that this man was giving was about weekend sports. And this man had been a pastor
for 40 years. And he said, I watched through the years, sports become
the new God of the family. And he said, a child can grow
up in a home and never enter the worship of almighty God.
Friends, that is the most important thing we can do is worship with
our children. And so we have table talk, we
have worship, we have pillow talk. Get on the bed with your
children and talk to them. Talk to them about the things
of life. Fathers, you are the heads of
the households. Parents, you’re responsible for the next generation.
And some of you may say it’s too late. Well, let me encourage
you to start. Start somewhere. Some of you
say, maybe I have failed. But God offers repentance and
grace. Some of you have not yet had
children. They’re on the horizon. Let me encourage you to read
up and be ready for when children do come. You see, children, we
need to understand you young ones in the room. Maybe you roll
your eyes at your parents. Maybe their rules are a little
too heavy. It seems you need to understand
this. is as flawed as your parents may be. And yes, they are sinners.
God’s provision for you until you can stand on your own two
feet as your parents and their job is to birth you into the
world. Oh, they birthed you physically.
You are born. You come into this world. But
their job also is to birth you into the ability to live life
in the real world that is outside the doors of the home. There
are so many people in this world without parents. There are so
many without a place of nurture and grace that we have just spoken
of. And so our hearts and minds need to remember that and to
pray. But thanks be to God that he
gives us his grace to live a life and by his grace to be faithful
parents. What is the goal of the home?
Let me end just by reading for you from Titus chapter two. It
says the grace of God has appeared. He brings salvation for all people.
This is the goal. He trains us to renounce ungodliness
and worldly passions and to live self-controlled and upright and
godly lives in the present age. And that we might wait for the
blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great savior,
God and Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from
all lawlessness and to purify us for himself. people for his
own possession, who are zealous for good works. May God give
us grace to serve our homes. Let us pray together. Heavenly
Father, on this Father’s Day, we joyfully affirm that you are
the Father we’ve always longed for and needed. At best, our
earthly fathers offer a mere taste of what it means to be
your beloved children, but nobody can love us or care for us or
delight in us the way that you do. Our hearts overflow with
thanksgiving as we cry Abba, Father. We thank you for adopting
us into your eternal family, for forgiving us, and for roving
us in the righteousness of Jesus. We thank you for freeing us from
our slavery to sin and our orphan-like ways. Thank you for giving us
the spirit of sonship, a secure place in your family, and an
inheritance that can never spoil, spot, or fade. What a blessed
and beloved children we are. Thank you for being the father
of compassion, the God of all comfort, always present, always
encouraging. Thank you for promising to complete
the work you began in us and for always disciplining us in
love, never shaming or chiding or withdrawing from us. And Father,
thank you for the grace to forgive our earthly fathers who didn’t
love us as you intended. Continue to heal us, Lord, and
help us to love them to your glory. And lastly, Father, we
thank you for the spiritual dads you’ve given us, the gospel fathers,
who help us discover more and more of the multidimensional
love of Christ. So very amen, we pray in Jesus’
merciful and mighty name. Amen. Let us stand together and
sing from Psalm 128. You’ll recognize the tune, but
this speaks of the blessing of family.