Dennis Tuuri

# Q&A Session Transcript
## Reformation Covenant Church
### Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Q1:

**Questioner:** We’re their team. We’re their parents in essence here. What are the princes getting so upset about? That’s what they pay us to do. And by and large, that’s correct, isn’t it? You send your children to day schools or daycare centers rather, and then to send them for 8-10 hours a day to a public school system, then after program so the mother can continue to work. You see it over great areas of responsibility to the state.

**Pastor Tuuri:** But in any event, this what God’s telling us is that it’s the father’s responsibility and by implication of course the mother as well to exercise this authority in the families. It’s not the church. It’s not the state. That’s also important to recognize because it’s the fathers after all who having this responsibility are going to best know how to implement it in the lives of their children.

The Puritans have been given a bum wrap on a lot of matters in terms of discipline. One of the things the Puritans tried to stress was you had to know the individual child, know the weaknesses of that child, know the particular temperament of that child, and then adjust your disciplinary procedures accordingly. Children are not—they do not come out as you know little clones of one another here. Children are individual entities that God has created to bring glory to him. We have to understand our children and so adjust our discipline and our instruction of them accordingly.

The Puritans understood that the scriptures teach that the same thing and we should be very careful today not to try to come up with the method of discipline for every child in the church. The individual parents know their children. They know their children’s weaknesses and their strengths, and they’re best able to figure out disciplinary programs for their children.

Now, of course, that has to be bounded by the word of God and also we have an obligation to assist them whatever measure they want us to assist them or need our help in terms of the family. We need to help them and there will be occasions of course where you have unruly children where the church will have to intervene and try to bring the parents to task. But the important thing to remember here is the great emphasis of child rearing is left to the parents. We don’t want to be in a situation and the Puritans wouldn’t have allowed it where everybody else was telling parents how to raise their kids, assuming that they knew best.

God’s given us parents. Our parents know best how to raise us. And so the parents are addressed with this admonition.

—

Q2:

**Questioner:** What are the fathers to do?

**Pastor Tuuri:** Well, it’s interesting here too how God phrases this. “Provoke not your children to wrath.” He begins with the negative. What not to do. Now, it’s interesting that in the correlary passage to this in Colossians 3:21, the parallel passage begins with “wives submit yourselves”—and actually begins with wives the same way that Ephesians did—starts with wives, moves to the husbands, starts with children, moves to the fathers just as we said it. It starts with an Austin relationship there. It talks about our need to in right relationship to God: “Submit yourselves unto your own husbands as it is fit in the Lord. Husbands love your wives and be not bitter against them. Children obey your parents in all things for this is well pleasing unto the Lord. Fathers provoke not your children to anger lest they be discouraged.”

That’s the end of the instruction to the father. He doesn’t even continue with this other part about bringing them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

Now it’s interesting that in those two passages you take them together, the great emphasis that God places is on the negative—what not to do in relationship to your children. You could almost say that the “bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” is a result of or flows out of not provoking them to anger.

What I’m trying to say here, men, and this is primarily directed to you, though to the mothers as well—what I’m trying to say is this is real important. Don’t just slide by this part of the verse and then get to the good stuff about how you’re supposed to teach your kids. You’re going to be prone to sin in this area the same way as it told us in Colossians not to be embittered against our wives. You’re going to be prone to sin in that area.

You’re going to be upset at their shortcomings. You’re going to be angry at your children for their shortcomings and their inability to meet up to your standards. You’re going to have to watch for that because God warns us in two passages here to be very careful about that. And makes it in Colossians the primary emphasis of proper childbearing is to not get them angry, not provoke them to anger.

Now, we recognize, of course, that children will get angry and we tell them what to do with properly sometimes. He’s not saying that it’s always our responsibility to have our children avoid anger. What he’s telling us is to not provoke them to anger. Don’t handle your child worrying in such a way as would give them a cause to become embittered and defiant of your authority. Handle it correctly, teach them in love with nurture and admonition.

And again, remember, not only are we prone to sin there, but again, that stresses the idea of a godly obedience. Fathers are not to be simply exacting slavish obedience out of their children. That’s not the emphasis here. And he warns us, don’t try to handle it that way. It will anger your children. It’ll provoke them to wrath. It’ll be bad for their spirit instead of good for them.

There’s a great deal of empathy needed for this, isn’t it? How do we know if we’re angry at a child? We certainly don’t want to judge our performance here by waiting until the child gets angry and then say, “Well, I guess I blew it.” You want to understand your child. You want to be empathetic toward them and understanding of their limitations. You have to know your child. In other words, fathers, you have to use that knowledge to avoid embittering them against yourself and getting them angry.

Again, at the Puritans, they understood this. Thomas Calbut, one of the Puritan writers at the time that Morgan deals with, says Thomas Calbut had the same opinion of the slavish way of education. He advised parents to make commands to their children in pathetical terms—having empathy. In other words, namely in the most moving expressions which may help us on affectionate attendance and observance thereof. To say: know your child, be empathetic toward your child, be understanding of them, be moved for them, and so avoid this sin of provoking your children to anger.

Now that again should teach us something about God, doesn’t it? One of the great messages of Hebrews 12 is that we have a sympathetic high priest who is tempted in all things such as we were and yet was able to overcome those things. And the basis of that—we’re told that God himself, the perfect father as opposed to us—he doesn’t bring temptations into our path which are beyond our ability to withstand. But the temptation always gives us the method whereby we can resist that temptation and turn to the right. God is empathetic toward us in a sense through Jesus Christ our great high priest.

And he doesn’t just—he doesn’t bring us, he doesn’t provoke us to anger, and we shouldn’t provoke our children either. And remember in Hebrews 12 last week he talked again—we mentioned again this warning that God’s discipline of us always should be an indicator to us understood that way as being love for us, of exercising the proper role in terms of our sonship under him. It’s for our best, is what he’s telling us in Hebrews 12 about his discipline.

We don’t want to discipline our children for our convenience. We don’t want to get our children to enforce a strict discipline on our children simply because it’s going to help us somehow. That’s not the way God disciplines us. He disciplines us for our best, and that should be a model for us as parents when we deal with our children.

Additionally, here it’s in this admonition to avoid a sinful activity—here it’s an instruction to the father the same way that all the Old Testament laws talked about judges. A judge couldn’t be or somebody who’s going to press a charge against somebody couldn’t be guilty of that charge. And you remember the woman taken in adultery. Jesus said, “Who’s going to accuse her?” Well, they couldn’t accuse her because they weren’t innocent in that, and parents are the same way.

When they go to discipline their children, they should be innocent of sin, and that’s one of the things that he’s teaching us here too in this verse—to avoid sin.

Now again, the Puritans understood this. In the Journal of Christian Reconstruction article on Puritan family, article by a man named Flynn, “Puritan Family and Economy,” he said that he quotes from a Puritan writer Greenham. He argued that discipline and correction of children was to be done not primarily for their sin and fault against the parents, but rather for their sin against God.

Moreover, when a parent observed a child’s sin, he should enter his own heart to see whether the sin originated with him. If the answer was affirmative or probable, then the parent should consider how God’s hand of just judgment might well be upon the parent. In such cases, when the parent would be angry at the child, he should have a holy anger toward himself. He should then repent of his own sin and pray for the healing of the child.

Well, that’s great stuff, isn’t it? I mean, to think about that—when you discipline your children, to think when your children act up or disobey or sin in some way: “Am I responsible for this? Is this coming out of my own attitude? What have I demonstrated to them? Are they showing me a mirror of my sinfulness before God?” Ask yourself that when you discipline your children. And if you’re guilty, doesn’t mean they’re off the hook, but it means you begin with making repentance yourself and then repenting to your child and teaching him an incorrect way of sin before God.

We have to be just judges in these matters as well. And that’s one of the things this admonition tells us.

—

Q3:

**Questioner:** Having given us the negative admonition, he then turns to the positive. “Provoke not your children to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” The other thing the parent is to do is not provoke them. And the other side is to bring them up. And he brings them up through two vehicles: Nurture and admonition of the Lord. But what is the end result of that?

**Pastor Tuuri:** The end result of that is to bring them up. To bring up means to nourish, to rear, to maturity—that’s what the meaning of the word there is. The same word is used in Ephesians 5:29. He says that no man ever yet hated his own flesh but nourisheth it and cherish that even as the Lord church. He’s saying that men nourish their own flesh. We feed ourselves. We try to do what’s best for our bodies. And the root word there is a word meaning to stiffen or to fatten up, to nourish, to feed.

And that should be the end result of what we do with our children. Again, it should be for your benefit the same way that God’s discipline of us in Hebrews 12 was for our benefit—that we might have the peaceful fruit of righteousness. So we should have the same goal with our children.

And that’s the context then of discipline and correction. We’re going to talk about discipline and correction. The context of that is it’s to be done with the end result being to nourish them and to raise them to maturity in Jesus Christ.

How do we do that? We do that through nurture. We do it through admonition. We do it through training and we do it through subduing. We do it through educating and we do it also through controlling them.

Nurture and admonition. The first word used there, nurture, is the word that we saw throughout Hebrews 12 for chastisement or chastening—paideia. Remember we talked about the root word of the child himself. Paideia was to train a child. A pedagog is somebody who raised a child or led him forward. He wasn’t his teacher necessarily. We’re not talking about rote teaching here. We’re talking about somebody who trains or tutors a child. And that’s what the root word for nurture here is—chastening.

In other words, chastisement also is part of that nurturing process. There are various pedagogies that God gives us. There are various methods, as it were, of instructing that God gives us to deal with our children. It’s a broad term. In other words, teaching would certainly come under the broad term of training up a child or nurturing a child, but it’s not restricted to that. It’s a broad term.

Corporal punishment, which is what we’re going to talk about next week for the entire length of next week’s time, is corporal punishment. It’s certainly a part of this whole scenario of raising up a child or tutoring a child, but it’s not the only element. And we tried to point out several weeks ago that one of the errors that many people fall into today is trying to put all their eggs in that basket of the rod, saying that the rod is the only way which can bring our children to maturity in Jesus Christ. It simply is not the case.

He doesn’t use a word here that is specifically restricted to corporal punishment or to physical chastisement. He used an overall approach. And again, here the Puritans are said to have relied upon the birch rod, and that certainly is true in certain cases, but it’s also true that they understood the limitations of that.

Cotton Mather, who was one of his famous quotes that you hear people talk about in putting down the Puritans, was that “it’s better to be whipped than damned.” And that’s certainly true, isn’t it? But he didn’t, as a result of that, think that whipping was the only way for a person to avoid damnation.

Mather himself rather said the following in dealing with his own children: “The first chastisement which I inflict for an ordinary fault is to let the child see and hear me in an astonishment and hardly able to believe that the child could do so basic thing. But believing that they will never do it again. I would never come to give a child a blow except in case of obstinency or some gross enormity. To be chased out for a while of my presence I would make to be looked upon as the sorest punishment in the whole family. The slavish way of education carried on with raving and kicking and scourging in schools as well as in families is abominable and a dreadful judgment of God upon the world.”

Now, I could quote lots of other people here. Puritan Cotton’s great-grandfather, the Reverend Richard Mather, Ezekiel Cheever, who kept the Boston Grammar School for 70 years. I could quote all kinds of Puritan authorities, but the point of it is that the Puritans understood that paideia, pedagogy, tutoring up a child, raising a child is a lot more than physical punishment. They always reserve the rod for one of the last means of chastising a child who wouldn’t respond to other methods.

And so it’s important for us to have that understanding as we talk next week about corporal punishment.

R.G. Rush Jr., in section on Institutes of Biblical Law talking about discipline, relates a story of a woman who had a daughter that was now pregnant, no husband, very undisciplined child. The mother said, “I don’t understand it. We always disciplined her. We kept money away from her. We took away her allowance and we spanked her frequently. We always disciplined her. How come she isn’t turning out so bad?”

Now, his point was she probably underwent very little discipline at all. Discipline begins with an education process. To disciple somebody is to rear them in the faith. It’s not simply to exert corporal punishment or negative punishment upon them. And as we look at the disciplinary procedures that God uses and that he’s called us to use, we’ll see that physical chastisement is simply one element of many.

—

Q4:

**Questioner:** What are those elements then of discipline?

**Pastor Tuuri:** First of all, we talked about this again several weeks ago, but I think it’s good to go back over these same things and to reinforce them hopefully in our own minds. That general term of nurture involves instruction in the word of God. Of course, you have to begin with instruction in the word of God. There’s formalized instruction, there’s informalized instruction. Certainly, it’s proper to teach our children a systematic course of Bible study in our homes. But it’s also important that in the words of Deuteronomy 6, that we talk about the law of God in the way as we go through life to instruct them as we go about our daily activities.

Now, secondly, the Puritans understood and I hope we understand that it’s not simply our words that’s going to bring our children to a correct understanding of the way of God, but it’s our actions. By example—our by example—we have to show our children the proper understanding of our relationship to God. We have words, we have deeds, okay? We have the words that we teach our children and we have the way we walk our lives. And both those things are part of this system of bringing up a child in the nurture of the Lord.

Now, one important element through which we can do these things—of course, we’ve talked about this lots in this church—is family devotions. Family devotions. You should try very hard to set up a time of daily devotions in your household. Now, I know that people say, “I’ve tried that. I’ve fallen flat on my face. I’ve failed. I’ve done the same thing myself. I can never seem like I can do this for very many very many months at a time. There’s always something that comes up to interrupt the flow, but it’s something you got to keep coming back to.

You don’t give up on it because you fall at certain times. You don’t quit the race because you get tired sometimes and have stopped. You get up and you start running again. And I’d really encourage you all in the strongest words possible to begin a series of daily devotions in your house.

What do I mean by that? Very simply, what you want to do with your family is get the family together at the earliest time of the day if possible—if it can be at breakfast, before breakfast, lunchtime, or at dinner. The timing is not necessarily important, but it’s important to be consistent in it.

There are many different approaches to take for family devotions, and many of you have very good family devotions. But for those of you who are just getting started, what I’d really encourage you to do is to have three elements present.

First, you want the word of God obviously present. Take small portions of the scriptures. A couple weeks ago, I suggested going through the case laws of Exodus 21-23, the laws of the covenant. Take one little example of restitution or whatever it is in that particular day’s text and talk to your kids about it. Okay, one little example. Make it a short time. Don’t make it burdensome upon your children or upon yourself. You’re going to give up quicker if you do. Short piece of scripture.

Worship God for that. Pray to God over that scripture and thank him for it. Pray for other people as well in the church. We’ve talked about that many times.

And then finally, the third element besides the word of God and prayer would be singing. I think it’s very important we understand that our children—we should teach our children to understand rather—that the worship of God should be a joyous thing. Kids love to sing. And I know a lot of you people out there don’t maybe love to sing a lot and maybe feel a little embarrassed about your singing. But you know, and maybe here—well, it isn’t good to hold back your singing because you don’t know that you can sing good here either, but it’s probably more acceptable here than in your homes, in your own home. At your home, nobody’s going to hear you. You know, your children aren’t going to judge you in terms of your awful singing.

What they’re going to see is “Mom and Dad love God. They want to worship God. They want to sing his praises.” And you teach your children to sing his praises as well.

If you just spend five or 10 minutes a day reading a short passage of scripture, praying real short sentence prayers with your children, teaching them how to pray—short sentence prayers to God of thanks and of request also—and then sing maybe one verse or one chorus of one of the songs we might have sung on Sunday, for instance. That’ll go such a long way toward training your child in the way he should go. You’ll eliminate more and more of the need to actually use the rod as you do those things to instruct your children.

Having said that, we also want to note another convenient method I talked about before of the daily devotion. You could use the five-fold nature of the covenant one day of the week.

On Monday, you can teach them about the person of God—a short scripture lesson with the person of God. On Tuesday, you could look at Psalm 78, great history lesson for your children. And you can just go through a couple of lines of that psalm maybe and teach them that God’s the person of God in relationship to the covenant people’s history. On Wednesday, you might want to teach them one of the laws of God out of case law or maybe the ten commandments—the law of God. Person of God, history, law.

On Thursday, you want to emphasize to them the discipline of the results of our keeping of the law either in terms of rewards or punishments—sanctions, that fourth element of the covenant structure. And finally, you want to talk about the future with them on Friday about the tremendous future we have and the offspring that they’ll eventually have in raising their children in the same way. That’s important.

Having said that, there are other methods of discipline as well—blessings and cursings. We talked about this before. It’s certainly proper. God does this with us. If we don’t perform in certain ways, God will bring chastisement upon us and withhold certain blessings from us. It’s certainly proper for you to have an allowance for your children and teach them that allowance is pegged to their performance throughout the week in terms of obedience and household tasks. That’s applying the biblical standards of rewards and punishments, blessings and cursings, to your children as well.

If your children want to do something—for instance, if they want a bike—you want to teach them that they have to be responsible for caring for that bike. And when they can demonstrate responsibility to you, then you’ll give them the bike and you’ll reward them for their correct action in terms of faithfulness and obedience. God does that with us. Rewards and denials.

There’s also the element of physical restraints that we put upon our children. We have a little baby who likes to crawl on the floor and we have to control his environment. We’ve got to not leave things laying on the floor. If you leave things lay on the floor, he’s going to choke on them, and it happens frequently. You have to control that environment around them. Well, the same thing’s true of older children as well. You don’t want to put things in their way that are going to cause them to come to endanger themselves.

Physical restraint. We talked about in Proverbs, the word for correction in Proverbs 3:11 is also used in another verse in Proverbs where it talks about “the stocks are correction for the fool. They restrain the fool.” Okay, the Proverbs are a great book of course to go through in terms of teaching your children informally as you go through life. So restraints are another important element of our discipline of our children.

All these things are under the general area of raising our church children in the nurture of God. Okay, in the positive teaching of them about God’s scripture, bringing them to correction. But there’s also elements in which the children are still going to sin.

We start off this discussion with saying that children, even given the correct knowledge, correct upbringing, and everything, are going to sin. And so he says here that you raise your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

And admonition there is a very strong word that means to tell somebody a fault, to bring it to mind. The root word there in the Greek is nouthesia. Now those of you who know Jay Adams’s nouthetic counseling—that’s where he bases this word “nouthetic” on is this Greek word which means to bring to mind, to put back into mind, the child. And the idea is when your child sins you’re responsible to admonish him in his sin. You’re responsible to take him back to the word of God and say, “Here’s where you sinned.” You don’t give the child the chance to make excuses for his sin.

There’s always a dozen or one reasons why a child does things that are incorrect or wrong. Your obligation as parents is not to let him develop that habit and that sin of justifying his actions. You’re to give them admonishment. You’re to bring them to mind of how they sinned against the law of God, to bring them to repentance.

Now, that’s very important for us today. We grew up, most of us, in a generation of rationalizers. We’ve grown up not being held responsible for our sins, but saying there’s always all kinds of mitigating circumstances out there that made us the way we are. That’s what psychology, unfortunately, has been used for very frequently in our country. What we want to do is admonish our children.

Having done the positive things—having used the tools that God has given us in terms of instruction, of training, the pedagogy, of liturgy in terms of family devotion, bringing them to church, this kind of thing—then when they sin, we want to use the other side of that tool as it were, admonishing them.

The rebuke is an important element of that admonishment. And that again, as I said, is to bring them back to a mind of how they’ve done it wrong, to tell them their fault. And again in Hebrews 12:5, it uses that word to tell a fault to. Very important that we do that with our children.

By the way, in our communion service, we quote from 1 Corinthians 10:11 every week about God’s chastise of the people in the wilderness. 1 Corinthians 10:11: “Now all these things happened unto them for examples and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world have come.” We read about the various people that God killed in the wilderness for their grumbling. It says that those things should be an admonition to us. They should bring us to mind of our fault. And that’s what the purpose of that reading of that portion of the liturgy during the communion service is—to bring us to mind, to bring our children to mind, to admonish them in terms of the fault of grumbling and of displeasing God.

And we also talked several weeks ago, and I’ll mention it again now. Another form of disciplining when you have a specific violation of the word of God is to admonish them. If they don’t repent, another vehicle which you can use to bring them to repentance is the withdrawal of our presence.

After all, David in Psalm 119 and Psalms—one of the greatest things he feared was that God would withdraw his presence from David for a period of time. And when that happened, David was always brought back to repentance and crying out again that God would address him, would deal with him.

And with our children, there are going to be times when our children are going to, we’re going to rebuke them. They won’t acknowledge their sinfulness necessarily. We can then withdraw our presence from our children and then they’ll be brought to correction for their activity.

That quote from Mather, Cotton Mather, that I used earlier, he said that very thing: “To be chased for a while out of my presence. I would make to be looked upon as the sorest punishment in the family.” Properly used in the proper manner and the proper restraint on your part in terms of using that particular form of discipline. That will be one of the most powerful tools to bring your children back. Your children, particularly when they’re younger, love you. They need you and they know they need you. For you to withdraw your presence from your children and displaying dissatisfaction or anger—righteous anger within the sin of theirs—is a perfectly proper thing to do and will often lead to repentance.

Having said that, then also obviously corporal punishment is a major aspect of what we’re to do with our children. And then finally after corporal punishment, the final method of discipline that God would have us use is disinheritance.

And we talked before and I’ll mention it again here that we have to recognize that Hebrews 12 teaches us the necessity of correcting our children. But it also teaches us that it’s not necessarily going to be effectual. And several weeks ago, I talked about Ezekiel 18—how God there are various portions in scripture where God says “I disciplined them and they wouldn’t hearken unto my voice.” We cannot believe that we can through our disciplinary actions bring about elect children. It won’t happen. We’re to presuppose their election. We’re to presuppose in the covenant. But we may be wrong about that presupposition and God may make that obvious at a particular point in time.

Remember that it says that God’s chastisement yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness under them which are exercised by it—those people through which it takes effect, they’re trained by it. The implication there is that some are not trained by it. And with them, it yields not the peaceful fruit of righteousness. And there will be, and there has been in the history of the church, there will be in the future of the church reprobate children born into covenant households.

And the final phase of disciplinary procedure then, and chastisement from us to them, is to disinherit them because God has clearly instructed us that the righteous shall inherit the earth. Those who are called to God are the ones who inherit his blessings. And it would be sinful for a parent to give their blessing to an unregenerate child, to a child who’s presumed reprobate. It’s certainly proper in very severe circumstances to eventually disinherit a child.

—

Q5:

**Questioner:** So hopefully we’ve seen that this passage should be an encouragement to the children to obey their parents, to honor their parents. It should serve as a goal for us and our instruction of our children—to bring them to obedience, to come under the authority of the parents as we’re under the authority of God, to get our children to a point of reverencing us and so also learning to reverence their Father in heaven. And if we, hopefully this passage has taught us that, to do that, we cannot provoke our children to anger. That’s wrong. But instead we’re to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, to raise them to maturity, to nourish them.

**Pastor Tuuri:** Now Proverbs 3:11 is quoted by Hebrews. I want to return to that as we close this morning. Proverbs 3, beginning at verse one. And hopefully this will be the goal of our instruction—the same thing that the book of Proverbs tells us as children of God. This will be the way we’re instructing our children for these ends.

Proverbs 3:11, verse one:

“My son, forget not my law, but let thine heart keep my commandments. Necessity of teaching our children from the word of God.”

Now men, I mentioned earlier that the primary thing, the primary duty of parents is given to the fathers. That means you’re under increased obligation as heading up that household. You not only have the obligation to work diligently with your children, but if you’re going to teach them the things of God, what does that mean? That means you’ve got to know those things. You’ve got to be in the scriptures and understanding them before you can teach them to your children to apply.

This very first verse is a reminder to us that discipline begins with the instruction from the word of God. And we as men are responsible to understand the scriptures and to relate to our family. That means you’ve got to be studying and then you’ve got to be teaching your kids.

“Forget not my law, but let my let thine heart keep my commandments. For length of days and long life and peace shall they add to thee.”

The blessings there—keeping God’s law—that Ephesians 6 promised the child who would be obedient to the parent.

“Let not mercy and truth forsake thee. Bind them about thy neck. Write them upon the tablet of thine heart.”

Now look at that verse there. You remember that in Deuteronomy 6, we said you have to teach your children informally. They were commanded to wear the law of God bound to their head, bound to their hands. Everything they thought, everything they did was to be governed by the law of God. And here there’s reference to the law of God being written on their hearts: “Write them upon the tablet of thine heart.” That’s the law of God. And what does he call the law of God in the first part of that verse? Mercy and truth. That should be our attitude to the law of God. We should teach our children the same thing in terms of their obedience to us. Our commandment should be displayed to them as mercy and truth to them.

“Let not mercy and truth forsake thee. Bind them about thy neck. Write them upon the tablet of thine heart. So shalt thou find favor and good understanding in the sight of God and man.”

God and man—first and second tablets of the law.

“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart. Lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths. Be not wise in thine own eyes. Fear the Lord and depart from evil. It shall be held to thy navel and marrow to thy bones.

“Honor the Lord with thy substance, and with the first fruits of all thine increase. So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine.”

My son, despise not the chastening of the Lord, neither be weary of his correction. For whom the Lord loveth, he correcteth, even as a father the son in whom he delighteth.”

Now, there’s a parallel there you can look at later on this afternoon where he says in verse 9, “Honor the Lord is the first of your produce.” And then he says, “Despise not the chastening and correction.” And so it was in Ephesians 6: “Children, honor your parents. Fathers, raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” Parallel there that you can look at later on this afternoon.