Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Inhabiting Parent-Child Relationships in Jesus

Sermon text for today is Colossians chapter 3, verses 20 and 21. The title on the order of worship is “Inhabiting Parent-Child Relationships in Jesus”—kind of a mouthful. Last week I thought using the term heavenly—how to be a heavenly husband, a heavenly wife, how to be heavenly children, heavenly fathers united to the ascended Christ. So that’s essentially what we’re doing here: looking at our lives in Christ in his ascension and seeing how it changes the relationships we have.

So, please stand for the commands of God to children and parents found in Colossians 3:20-21. “Children, obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing to the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children lest they become discouraged.”

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you as our heavenly father. You, Father, correct us perfectly. And you, Lord God, have sent your only begotten son to die for our sins. So that your covenant love that we just sang about flows to us—not through our works, but through your grace, not through our merit, but through what Jesus has merited and given to us. We thank you, Father, for our standing with you. And we pray now that your Holy Spirit, given to us on the basis of Christ’s shed blood, his resurrection and ascension, that Holy Spirit would teach us things from this scripture, that you would cause us to be transformed day by day, week by week, more into the image of the ascended Christ. In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated. It is easy in a church like this to stress family and bringing up children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord and schooling them in that way, etc. It’s easy to give the false impression—to give the impression through the preaching of the word and the culture that we try to cultivate—that the family is the best place in the world, that the Christian family is a great place of love and security and warmth.

But sadly this is often not the case. And why is that? Because sometimes when we go home, we just want to be ourselves. We come to church and act a particular way and we go home and we want to let our hair down and just relax and be ourselves. And all too often being ourselves means being our sinful selves. It means allowing ourselves to say things to our wife or to our husband that if you said to another adult in the street, they might punch you right in the nose for it.

That’s what we do. And it means treating children improperly. So Paul’s commands here are very significant to us, very needed for us, so that our homes can reflect the love and the beauty and the heavenly aspect of heavenly fathers, heavenly children, heavenly husbands, heavenly wives united to Christ—Christ who is at the right hand of the Father seeking those things that are above. So that’s what we want to do with this text: reexamine some of these roles.

Now, this is a huge issue and let me do a little bit of promotion. First, let me thank all the people that put together the Trinity Arts Festival. It was such a delight. So thank you all so much. I won’t start mentioning names, but I should mention Brad at least. This has been his vision and the team that worked with him. So thank you so much for that. That was great.

And let me also mention how exciting it’s going to be to have Gordon Murray lead the kids next week on Palm Sunday in the processional. That’ll be fun. He’s a happy guy, a cheerful fellow. I don’t know—is he going to be carrying Jack? Maybe. That’d be good. Maybe Jack will have a little palm in his hand.

Now, this topic is huge—parent-child relationships. And I’ve got one week to talk about this. So what I want to do is promote something else: at the end of April or the first part of May, we’ll start a Sunday school class that I’ll be leading, probably using some video material and other material on Christian parenting. So we’ll get to talk about the issues that are just touched upon today in some depth for parents here. So I hope you make use of this opportunity in order to make it a really good opportunity for our parents.

We’re going to need some of you—not the parents but others—to step up and be nursery attendants during the Sunday school hour, which we don’t normally do. But if we want parents to be in that class and to receive instruction, encouragement, and discussion with other parents about child rearing in a Christian way, I think we want to make it easy for them to attend that Sunday school class. And that means having some nursery attendance during the Sunday school hours. So please pray about that.

One of the things we’ll be talking about is how God is a father to us, of course, and we’ll mention that today as well, but we’ll look at how—in that Sunday school class—God as a father trains up his children. And we’ll look specifically at some of the things that happened in the context of the wilderness. God is preparing a people just like the Lord’s service is preparing a people to go into all the world and to have effectual witness for him. And so one generation is dying off in the wilderness and the other generation is being trained.

How does he train them? Because we’re kind of Greeks. We’re homo sapiens. We think we’re “man the thinking man.” The big thing we think about is instruction. Instruction. Yes, this is a long introduction—hang with me. We’ll get to a simple three sets of three points in a minute. But instruction. And that’s important, of course. But we’ll also talk about how God not only gave them the law and daily readings in the law, etc., in the wilderness; he also gave them habits.

Habits. So if you look at the wilderness wanderings on a map for 38 years, they go all over the place. What’s he doing? He’s training them in obedience. If you go into the army, they drill all the time—”turn right, turn left, hut,” whatever it is. Why? Because they want you to be able, in the context of battle, to obey commands quickly and competently, and they’re training you into a community of people. Okay?

And so that’s what God does with his people. He gives them instruction, but he also gives them habits, drills. Every day mana. Got to get up except on the Lord’s—the Sabbath. No mana. Then on Friday, two pieces of mana, twice as much mana. There’s a habit, a ritual of eating that develops in his people. And I’d suggest that in our families—we’ll talk about this in the class, the parenting class—in our families, right, patterns and rituals are very, very important. We have liturgy in this church. It’s a pattern. It’s a ritual. God is drilling us. He’s giving us habits that help form us as people, because we’re not just homo sapiens. We’re homo liturgicus. We’re people that do things in liturgical order. People have patterns and habits.

You know, I’m diabetic. If I don’t change my habits of how I eat, my blood sugar will continue to be bad. So that’s a hard thing to do. And the diabetic coaches will tell you it’s really tough to move your big meal from the last hours of the day to the first hours of the day. And for a while, your body won’t like that because you’ve habituated it to certain things. Okay, enough.

So God instructs people. He also habituates his people. He gives them drill habits. And then finally, he gives them boundaries, right? You can do this, you can’t do this. If you do this, you’re going to be blessed. If you do this, you’re going to be cursed. They’re not earning their salvation. They’ve already been saved. They’ve come out of Egypt. But what he’s telling us is that the way our heavenly Father trains his children up to be the army that he wants to be—to proclaim his word into all the world—is not just through instruction. And it’s not just through habits or liturgy. It’s also through boundaries. A very significant aspect of child rearing is establishing boundaries that don’t move around all the time so that kids have a sense of security.

So we’ll talk about that in the Sunday school class. And I hope we can get a lot of people going to it and, to facilitate that, get some folks that are willing to be nursery workers as well.

All right. So what I’m going to do now is three points with three sub-points under each point. First, I’m going to give some general observations—three observations on this text in its context. And then second, we’ll talk about children. And the three points under children will be their mandate: what are they supposed to do? The measure of that mandate: when are they supposed to do it? And then the motivation for that mandate.

Okay? So first, three general observations, then stuff on the child side of this. The first verse will have under three M’s: the mandate, the measure, and the motivation. And then we’ll talk about the father portion of the verse as our third point in today’s sermon. And there as well, we’ll look at the mandate to the father. Okay? And then we’ll look at the motivation for the father, which is given. And we’ll look at a model for the father that’s implied in the text but not explicitly stated. So again, we’ll have the mandate, we’ll have a motivation for the dad, and then we’ll look at the model: what should we do positively?

All right. So first, three general observations on the text. So if you’re taking notes, this is quite easy: 1, 2, and 3.

**The first point is: Children are addressed as part of the church.** Now you could easily blow past this verse and miss that, but it’s quite important. Now I should say that “children” here—it isn’t obvious from this text—but if you look at the parallel passage in Ephesians where we have the same basic instruction but it talks about fathers bringing up their children, so by parallelism we know that the children here are not adult children. These are children who are being brought up and nurtured into adult life. So that means all you kids here today are the recipients of this verse in this epistle given to the church at Colossae.

Children are directly addressed as members of the body of Christ, united to Christ, and recipients of the word of God. That’s so significant, really. It’s just astonishing in a way. And if you want to think about infant baptism, Lord’s supper, inclusion of children, etc., this verse, although seemingly not really talking about any of that, I think ties right in. It tells us that our children are united to Christ. They receive the Spirit’s words to them. And so I think that’s a very significant point.

So that’s my first general observation: children are direct recipients of this. They have responsibility. They already have responsibility to receive commands and begin to exercise obedience to them in the power of the Spirit, even while little kids. Little kids. Very significant. They’re full members of the church here. They’re included in the body of Christ. They are disciples who have been united to the Lord.

So children are directly addressed in this text to the church. That means they’re part of the church.

**Secondly, my second general observation is this:** These are—and I’ve made this point before—but what’s not given here are the rights of the child or the rights of the father, just like it’s not the rights of the mother (or I’m sorry, the wife) or the rights of the husband. In God’s structure, if we’re united to the ascended Christ at the right hand of the Father, and if we’re going to inhabit these roles correctly, these are roles that we don’t inhabit by thinking about our rights. The text stresses responsibilities.

Children have responsibilities. Parents have responsibilities. Dads have responsibilities. The husband has responsibilities. The wife has responsibilities. And those responsibilities are not to exercise authority. The dad, the husband, isn’t told “exercise authority over your wife.” What does it say? “Love your wife.” And the fathers aren’t told to exercise authority over their children. No, it says “don’t exasperate them.” Right? And to the husband, “don’t make your wife bitter.” So these are responsibilities given in this so-called New Testament family code—what the Bible says about this.

So privileges, rights—all that stuff goes to the background. Now don’t get me wrong, we could deduce certain rights, you know, of humans and social justice and kids and we could do that. But what I’m saying is the stress in the scriptures. And this means that if you’re a husband relative to your wife, a wife relative to your husband, a parent relative to your kids, kids to your parents, you’re not thinking about your rights. God wants you thinking about your obligations, your responsibilities that you’re supposed to do.

In other words, the husband isn’t supposed to be thinking about what the wife should be doing. He’s supposed to be thinking about what he’s doing. And the wife isn’t supposed to be thinking about what the husband’s supposed to be doing. She’s supposed to be majoring on the major, which is what she’s supposed to be doing. And you kids, you’re not supposed to be thinking about what your dad should do or your mom should do. You should be thinking about what you should do. And the parents are not to be thinking about what the kids should do. They’re thinking about what they’re going to do.

Do you see? It’s all about our obligations, not privileges, not “I’m owed this,” but rather “I owe this other person.” Huge. Huge. And I think many Christian homes, if they just got that much down—a lot of them do, a lot of us do—but there are homes that go into shipwreck because this is not really the deal. Everyone’s looking for their rights and their privileges and getting offended by this, that, or the other thing, thinking about what the other person didn’t give them that they owed them, rather than what they owe the other person.

So tremendous power in understanding that the second observation is that this is talking about responsibilities, not rights.

**Third general observation:** Children and slaves, and we’ll get to slaves next week—servants, masters, that kind of thing—they’re told to obey. But the wife is told to submit. Big difference. Okay. And so that’s a third observation: within the context of these relationships, wives are enabled, are brought up relative to the Greek cultural codes, through not being told to obey, but rather to become submissive. Okay? And as I said, these are all mutual obligations, reciprocal responsibilities, right?

I mean, you hear today’s verse as a dad and you say, “Children, obey your parents, and dads don’t exasperate your children.” You say, “Well, that’s why they get exasperated because I tell them something they don’t want to do. How does that work?” And so the dad also can say, “Hey, I’d like you to tell my kid that too. I wish you wouldn’t exasperate me.” And there’s a sense in which there’s some truth to that, right? Children aren’t supposed to exasperate their dads. And, you know, dads have a positive obligation to raise their children. So all that’s there, but the emphasis here—with husbands and wives—is the bringing up of the wife, not to be obedient to the husband, but rather to be submissive. Different word used.

And that’s connected to this verse in this way. You notice it doesn’t say in the text—see, details are important. That’s what I’m trying to stress. It doesn’t say “Obey children, obey your dads in all things.” No. It says “Children, obey your parents in all things.” What does that do? Well, again, in contrast with the Roman Greek cultural codes of the time, household codes, in contrast with pagan cultures where men are tyrants, and in contrast with the perverted Judaistic view that had rejected Messiah—in contrast to those things, it’s not the dad that the children are to be ruled over by. We could say that they have to obey. It’s the parents. So the mother has an exalted status in the Christian home as mother that she didn’t really have in the Greek, pagan, or Jewish—you know, fallen Jewish—culture. And so that’s very significant.

And of course, this is not a New Testament deal. You know, what is the fifth commandment? All this is obviously based on the fifth commandment: “Children, honor your mother and your father,” right? The fifth commandment is just as equal in terms of dealing with the wives as an equal entity that has to be honored and obeyed by their children. Alright?

So children are directly addressed, and wives are brought up, and the whole focus in these texts is on our responsibilities, not on our rights. Now, that alone is enough to revolutionize many families. Many families—if you just get a hold of those general observations on the text, that’s revolutionary.

But we want to go a little bit deeper than that. By the way, when you read in 1 Timothy 3:4, the qualifications for deacons and elders—it never (well, let me read what it says). I think it’s kind of interesting what we think about these things. 1 Timothy 3:4 says, “The elder must manage his own household well with all dignity, keeping his children submissive.”

Now, that’s interesting. The household is the affairs of the home, right? And then it talks about his children being submissive. It doesn’t talk about his wife. Okay? So when we’re told to manage, to rule our households, and then it talks about children, those are the direct things that elder candidates are to be evaluated for. Now, the wives are important in terms of the husband and what he, you know, how well he’s fulfilling the commands of scripture. But my point is that the whole ruling thing is not emphasized here in these texts and you can look at the other ones in terms of any kind of ruling over your wife.

Years ago, when we did our anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment, there was a group that was trying to dig up dirt on me and the other two or three guys involved. And in their union newsletter they put out: “Wow, this is a pastor who teaches, preaches sermons like ‘How to Make Your Wives Submit.’” And you know, I did preach that sermon, but the sermon was a joke. Probably a lot of you know this story. But a certain person—I won’t name or embarrass—came to me and said, “I need a sermon: how to make my wife submit.” And I’m like, “Oh, you do need a sermon. And I’m going to tell you what the sermon is when I preach it, okay?”

And it wasn’t about making your wife submit. It was about loving your wife. “How do I make my husband not make me bitter? Well, you submit to him. You love him the way he loves you.” It’s not our responsibility to make the other person do X, Y, or Z. Okay? Now, if the husband or wife is in sin, of course, you have an obligation as a brother or sister in the Lord to deal with it—Matthew 18, all that stuff. But anyway, okay.

So now we’re going to talk about kids. We’re going to talk about the mandate, the measure of the mandate—how far it extends—and then we’ll talk about the motivation for the mandate. It’s simple, right? You just got to read the verse and it’s right there. But we’ll do it anyway.

**What’s the mandate?** Mandate is a law, but I’m using an M so I can get the alliteration thing going down. You know, next Sunday is Palm Sunday. A week from Thursday is Monday. And “mandate” comes from the Latin mandatum, which means “mandate.” It just means a new law. I’ve given you. Christ said at the Last Supper, “Love one another.” So Maundy Thursday is Commandment Thursday. And that’s important because it reminds us that we are not lawless. We don’t distinguish between law and grace. We believe in the grace of God’s law. Okay?

So my first point on this mandate thing is: **There’s a requirement to obey.** Their mandate is to obey. Obey not just dad but dad and mom—your parents. To obey your parents. That’s the simple mandate. But think about how significant it is, right? It’s a law and it’s a law that says “obey this law.”

So often in evangelical circles, people start to get this mindset. It’s never necessarily openly preached. Sometimes it is, but they get this mindset: “Old Testament law, New Testament grace. Law and obedience—Old Testament. Now we walk by the Spirit in the New Testament. So we’re not under law; we’re under grace.” But that’s clearly not the case. We could go through a number of scriptures. Do a concordance search on “obedience” or “obedient” in the New Testament. You know what you’ll find? You will find Paul over and over again saying that his job is to bring the Gentiles into the obedience of the gospel, the obedience of the faith. Obedience is kind of a summation of what his job was: to bring people into obedience.

The gospel is not something that says, “Oh, you can’t obey. Forget about obeying. It’s all about grace.” That’s a perversion of both obeying and grace. It’s not like that. And it’s because of a radical misunderstanding of law. What do you think law is?

Well, you know what? You have to think about it a little bit if you’re actually going to study a text. This is what I do for a living. And you find out that law is used in a lot of different ways. There’s really one law from the beginning of the Bible to the end of the Bible. Okay? And it is a law. Right?

Now, it’s not a law that ever was meant to create a relationship with the Father. How did the first law work? Was it a means for Adam to get eternal life? It was not. He had covenant relationship with God. He was made in covenant with God. He had all the blessings. Okay? That’s not what the law was about. Okay?

The law was about something else. And this law was given—one law, one law only. And you know what? It’s the same law we’re talking about today: “Children, obey your parents.” I mean, you know, that’s what happened. Adam didn’t obey his father. That’s the first sin—a violation of this text: “Children, obey your parents.” And it’s interesting the manner in which this disobedience occurs, by the way.

What happens? Well, the law is “Don’t eat from this tree, this fruit, yet.” I think it was probationary. I don’t want to get into an argument about it in Q&A or any place else. I think eventually you’re going to get to eat that tree—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that fruit. So there’s a law: “Don’t eat that yet.” Okay? And Adam ate it.

Now, you children—any of you, or you adults when you were kids—you got a pile of chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen, right? Piled up there. And mom says, “You can have those after dinner. Don’t want to ruin your dinner.” And then she’s out of the room for this, that, or the other thing. And you go in and you sneak a cookie. Okay? Well, it’s a pile. She won’t really see me. Or maybe you grab one out of the cookie jar. Your hand’s caught in the cookie jar, right? What are you doing? You’re not obeying the commandment that God gives your children: “Obey your parents.” She said, “Don’t eat it yet.” That’s exactly what Adam did.

If you want to know how the human race fell into a situation of being headed for hell apart from the grace of Jesus Christ keeping the law for us, well, just look at, you know, your own cookie jar sin or any other set of these things that parents say “You can’t do that yet.” Drive the car, drink this or that, engage in this or that romantic relationship, whatever it is, right? That’s what Adam did. He disobeyed his father.

And you know, it’s interesting if you look at the Ten Commandments. Okay? So you got to—you might write this down. So you got one through four, right? They’re a unit. They lead to Sabbath rest. And there’s sins against—I think—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One, two, and three leading into Sabbath rest.

What’s the first commandment? Right? The first commandment is “No other gods.” No other gods. I’m the sovereign. Obey me. “Children, obey your parents.” People obey God first and foremost. That’s it.

And then we get some commandments. Then we get to the fifth commandment. It’s interesting in Ephesians in the parallel text to this one, Paul cites this fifth commandment and he says, “You know, this is why I’m telling you this because the fifth commandment says this.” And then he says “The fifth commandment is the first commandment with promise.” Now I suppose that means it’s the first commandment that actually has a promise attached to it. And he goes on to cite the promise: “Long life and a good life. A good life and long life. You want to have a good life and a long life? God says, ‘Obey the fifth commandment. Obey this. Children, obey your parents. Honor your parents.’”

Okay? But in a way, it’s kind of the first commandment again: “Have no other gods, Adam. Obey me above everybody else.” Okay? And then the fifth commandment sort of starts the cycle back up again and it says, “Honor your parents, Adam. Honor your dad.” You know, Adam is called the son of God in one of the chronologies in the Gospels. Chronology goes back all the way back to Adam. Adam the son of God. So he was the son, the child who didn’t honor and obey his parent. Okay? And he was the son who didn’t honor and obey—wanted some other god in front of him.

And then we get through to commandment 8 and it kind of starts back up. So we go: “Honor your parents, okay, Father, right? Don’t kill people. That’s your brother. Don’t commit adultery. That’s a sin against the Holy Spirit. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And then what’s the next one? Do you know? Commandment 8. Nobody knows. We’ll have a Sunday school class on the Ten Commandments, maybe. Does anybody know? Really? Steal. That’s right. Don’t steal.

And it’s easy to remember because it’s the Adam thing again. Adam stole that fruit by using it improperly, eating it before he was ready. Children steal the cookie, and they’re not honoring their parents and they’re ultimately not obeying God first and foremost above everything else. It’s all connected.

Now, the point here is: obedience is good in the Bible. Okay? It’s not a non-Christian deal. It’s a good deal. And law is good. Here’s the situation. One law in the garden, right? Now, what is that law based on? It’s based on the character of God. It’s the reflection of the character of God to those he created, fitted for fellowship with him. Okay? And he gives them a law to reflect his character: “Love me by keeping my law.”

That wasn’t—it’s not just Jesus then. It’s Jesus. Well, it’s the second person of the Trinity in the Old Testament who spoke the words in Leviticus, the commandments. I believe it was the second person of the Trinity. If you have a red letter Bible, all those speeches—which is mostly what Leviticus is—they should all be in red letters because Christ reveals the Father. And it says that nobody has seen God at any time, but Christ executes him. And I believe that’s true of the Old Testament. I believe that when God speaks to Moses, those words—if we’re going to tag it to anyone in terms of the Trinity—it’s Christ, the second person, the Word. Okay?

So it’s Jesus’s words, commandments from beginning to end. Now, they change when we get to Noah. Things are a little different. The commandment is still general for all mankind. We get to Abraham and now the commandment has a circumcision thing going on. And now there’s a distinction between Jews and Gentiles. We get to Moses and that covenant. You know, the covenants are what define how the law is patterned or looks like.

So we’re going through the covenants. And we get to Moses and now there’s all kinds of laws. And a lot of these laws treat men and women separately or differently, teach Jew and Gentile differently. And that’s going to all be resolved when Christ comes to bring everybody together.

So do we obey? Are we under Moses’ law like we’re supposed to obey the law of Moses? No. Are we under Davidic law because there was a difference in how things worked under David? No. But it’s not as if we’re not under law in the sense of being guided by law. Now, we’re not under law’s condemnation. I think that’s what the verse means: “Not under law, but under grace.” We’re not under law’s condemnation. But we have laws, brothers and sisters. I don’t know how you could ignore that fact. But this one’s staring us in the face: “Children, obey your parents.” Obedience is tied to a command. This is a command to us.

And what I’m trying to say is: the word “law” is most—you think of it as the reflection of the character of God in a particular time and place. Okay? So this side of the cross, new covenant, new law, new priests, new stuff, but it’s not radically different from the old laws because it’s the same God. They’re all Jesus’s laws given at particular times.

Now, I suppose I’d labored that point, but it’s so fundamental to what we believe as a church and what we think the scriptures teach. And so you could blow past this too. But it’s significant that there is a mandate, and that mandate in Ephesians is tied directly to the fifth commandment. Well, why would Paul do that when, under Moses, no. But he has no problem citing the fifth commandment as the justification for what he’s talking about here. He expects us to know how to apply all those covenant administrations of law in the Old Testament correctly this side of the cross. Some are different, some are the same. And he wants us to see that.

Alright. So anyway, okay. So the kids have a mandate. They have a call to obedience. And it’s very interesting how it is, sort of, the first commandment: to honor God. Honor your parents. Don’t steal. Don’t use what God has provided you for his purposes apart from his stewardship. Alright.

**Second child point: What’s the measure of this commandment?** Well, it’s right there in front of you. “Children, obey your parents in what things? In all things.” Now, why would he say that? I mean, we know “all things” doesn’t mean if dad tells you to go shoot your neighbor, you’re supposed to do it. We know that ultimately you’re honoring your father because he’s a representation of God. And if he would have you do something against what God’s told you, you can’t obey. It’s not a question of should I or should I not. If he tells you to go shoot, steal, kill somebody, whatever, you say, “No, I can’t do it. God doesn’t want me to do that.” Okay?

But what about—and you know that if your father tells you “read your Bible” or “pray” or “come to dinner on time”—you know, okay, so I’ll obey him in those things. But what about if your dad tells you, “I want you to wear loafers next week.” Okay, “I want you, for the next week when you go to third grade, here’s how we’re going to dress.” Do you have to obey that? Well, yeah, you do. And that’s the point of the measure of the thing.

You have to obey your father in everything. Not your father—your parents. Sorry, patriarchal slip. You have to obey your parents in everything. And that means, of course, not if they cause you to violate God’s word. But if anything other than that, if it’s a thing indifferent, if it seems stupid, if it seems unreasonable, if it seems unwise to you, it doesn’t make any difference in terms of your obedience. You do it.

So that’s the measure: the breadth of the obedience of the child, and it’s significant because you know parents are going to make unreasonable requests at times. And what you got to remember as a child is: “I’m trying to obey God and I didn’t pick my dad. I didn’t pick my mom. God did. And God’s going to work through my parents for my good.”

Now that’s what it says, right? There’s this promise attached to it. And that’s number three for the children.

**Motivation for the mandate.** The measure. Now, the motivation: what is the motivation given to us? Well, in Colossians, it says, “This is well pleasing to the Lord.” Oh, I just love that phrase. Don’t you? Maybe you think I’m goofy, but to me, you know, to think that I can do things that are well pleasing to the Lord Jesus Christ, to my heavenly Father, to the Holy Spirit. Isn’t that what you want to do with your life?

I mean, if you think about it, when you grow up in a family, you’ve got a dad, mom. What you want is you want them to be pleased with you. Okay? And that gets off the rails early on because of sin on everybody’s part. But that’s what life is: living in that context of having a pleasing relationship to our heavenly Father.

And children, this is—you know, don’t blow past this motivation. You have the ability to please Jesus today. When you got up on time this morning in obedience to your parents, when you ate what they put in front of you, when you got dressed for church because they told you to, and when you got in the car obeying your parents, you were pleasing Jesus. You were well pleasing to the Lord. Now, that’s high motivation, right?

Why should I do it? Not ultimately because you’re trying to please your parents. That’s it. But the parent is a picture of God the Father. And so you have this tremendous motivation.

Well, in Ephesians, the motivation is a little different in the parallel text. “Ephesians: Honor your father and your 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.” “Live long and prosper, child.” That’s what he says in Ephesians. The motivation is “live long and prosper” or “prosper and live long.” Reversal of order, but you get the meaning, right?

You want to prosper. Do you want to have a good life? And you want to have a life that goes on a long time. Covenantally speaking, to the covenant group of the church, the key to that is honoring your parents. It’s that simple. Obeying them, honoring them, right? Obeying them with your actions, honoring them with your mind and with your heart. Okay?

And the motivation is you can have a great life. You can have a long life. You’re to expect that. And most importantly, in Colossians, you are well pleasing to the Lord. Praise God. Hey, that’s cool stuff. That’s great stuff. Good life, long life.

So 2 Corinthians 5:9 says, “Therefore, we make it our aim, whether present or absent, to be well pleasing to him.” That’s a summation of the entire Christian life. Your goal today, from one perspective, from the perspective of 2 Corinthians 5, is: when you get up in the morning, your motivation is to be well pleasing to God. What’s the chief purpose of man? To glorify God, to be well pleasing and enjoy him forever. Long life, prosperous life, right?

Now, that’s a covenantal promise. Not to be taken as applying to every individual. Great godly people die in youth as well. But generally speaking, people that honor God by honoring their parents and obeying them have a long and prosperous life. And remember, this is a response to the gospel, right?

I hope I don’t have to keep saying this, but you know, clearly kids, there’s nothing you can do to merit your salvation. There’s no amount of good works that can be good enough to cause you—when you die—to go to heaven instead of hell. If you’re counting on what you do in this world and God’s going to count it all up and see if you’re good, bad, whatever it is, and then send you to your destination, I’d tell you: you’re going to hell. Because only those who put their trust and faith—not in their own works, not in how well they honor and obey their parents, not even in terms of how much they honor and obey God, come to church, whatever it is—nobody who puts their trust in their works or deeds, rather, is going to heaven.

The only people that are going to have eternal life with God are those who trust. Those who know that we can’t do any of this. That the Lord Jesus came to obey where we couldn’t obey in all things, right? When we prayed the prayer of confession this morning, “I have not always loved my neighbor as myself.” You do sometimes. You don’t always do it. And sometimes your external actions are not matched by your thoughts.

Children, you know, you didn’t obey your parents today. Most of you children here today at some point—either in your thoughts, your heart, or even your actions—you didn’t obey, right? But Jesus’s grace and mercy makes up for all of that. Okay? It’s not a matter of you meriting, working, trying to be good enough to please Jesus and get to heaven. No, you’re pleasing to God because you’re united to that ascended Christ. You believe in him. And now, because you believe in him, you want to love him and you want your actions to align.

So the motivation here is not to merit salvation, but this is a result of people that are already saved. Okay? Yeah, we can do this. Okay.

So now then we have the requirements of fathers, right? Or yeah, fathers specifically here. Okay. As with the husband, men are given one command and it’s a negative one. Well, actually, with the husband they’re told to love their wives. They’re also given a negative command: “Don’t make them bitter” or “Don’t be bitter towards them.” And here it’s the same thing.

The man is warned. Okay, we said that you know our job as Christians is to guard and nourish wherever we’re at, right? And the people we’re with. So the husband’s primary job is to guard and nourish. And he does that with his family as well. And it’s very instructive, I think, to men to realize that the first thing—the only thing you’re told—to guard them against, your wives and your kids, is yourself, your own sin. Right?

“Don’t make your wives bitter. Don’t exasperate your children.” You have tremendous influence and power in the family by your presence, by what you do and say. And you’re told the first thing you need to guard your kids and your wife against is not getting a .45 to protect your home from burglars. It’s to protect your family from you. From you. Because men in our fallen natures, we’re tyrants. We’re bullies. We see it being played out in our presidential election politics right now. Men resonate to that stuff, fallen men, because that’s who we are in our fallen state.

And the world needs protection, you know, against tyrannical bullying men. I mean, I don’t know how else to read these verses when he says that to dads and then the same thing he said to husbands, you know: guard them against yourself.

What are they to be guarded against? What’s the mandate? **The mandate is simply stated and very simple. Fathers, do not provoke your children.** And it’s interesting that now we turn to the father’s primary responsibility. I mean, they’re the ones who are going to sin most, it appears.

Fathers, do not provoke your children. Don’t exasperate your children. Don’t get your children stirred up. Don’t frustrate them. Don’t make them angry if you can avoid it or, you know, by doing—don’t let your sinfulness be irritating, nagging, deriding, perpetual fault-finding, irritation, provocation, immoderate harshness, too many demands, unrealistic demands, or simply ignoring our children. All these are ways to exasperate them. Okay? So your mandate is: stop it. Don’t do it. Don’t find a justification for it. Don’t say, “I’m just trying to represent Jesus’s power and authority.” No.

When you see yourself exasperating your children and your wife can help you and your husband can help the wife see this, and others can help you see this—we’ll talk about this more in the parenting classes. But when you do these things, when you’re unjust, too severe, unreasonable in your demands, overbearing attitudes, deriding and mocking your children, right? When we do that or when we swing between laxity on the one hand and undue severity on the other, all these things I think are included in the things we’re not supposed to do to exasperate our children. Those are the ways—some of the ways—we commonly exasperate them.

Psalm 64:3 talks about the evil who sharpen their tongues like a sword and bend their bows to shoot their arrows, bitter words. Proverbs 12:18: “There is one who speaks like the piercings of the sword, but the tongue of the wise promotes health.” Stop it, dads.

And you know that’s the tense here. It doesn’t mean “don’t do it.” The tense of the Greek verb here is “stop doing this thing.” The assumption is we’re all doing it, men, dads. We’re all doing it. So he says “stop it.” Okay? Stop doing that. That’s the commandment. That’s the mandate for dads.

What’s the motivation? So go now to the second part of this. **What’s the motivation?** Fathers, don’t provoke your children. The motivation is a negative one: you can make them discouraged. The word “discouraged” means not having heart, not having a fire anymore, and excitement about life. It means you can make them depressed. You can make your children depressed. You can make them discouraged. They can lose heart. They can just slip back. They can become slothful about life, not really caring about anything.

And your motivation to stop that tyrannical browbeating stuff is because you don’t want your children to lose heart. That’s what’s going to happen. So the motivation to their dads is that their children wouldn’t lose heart.

You know, we have to show our children that not that we’re guys that have authority over them, but that we’re men who exist under authority. And the children see that and they’re encouraged because they know their authority—your authority in their life. It’s just a reflection of God’s authority. And you’re the one authority who’s submitting. Doesn’t he want them to submit?

You know, if the dad is cranky about church all the time and goes home and his kids hear him griping about church and the elders or the deacons, or if they hear us go home and—Lord knows this happens a lot—complaining about the elected officials we have and the rulers in our state. What do you think that kid’s going to be like by the time he gets old enough to do something significant? You think your authority is going to hold when you have it modeled for him? Authority to the church and authority in the church and submission to the state? No, it’s not going to hold. You’ve exasperated your child for doing what’s right and you’ve created discouragement in him.

So that’s the motivation here: to avoid harming our children in—apart from the grace of God—irreparable ways. Children can be absolutely devastated by parents (fathers or mothers either one, but the directions are to fathers) who exasperate them routinely.

And then **third, a model.** You know who’s the model? We’re going to pray in a minute. “Our Father who art in heaven.” We’re here because the Father is giving us good gifts because he loves us. He thinks about us. He cares about us, right?

Our Father is involved in our lives. Our heavenly Father, he’s our model for how we’re supposed to father. We’ll talk about it a lot in parenting class, late April, early May. But just setting up the idea in your head: the model for yourself as a dad is to think about your dad in heaven. And maybe that’s where the problem is because you don’t really know your dad in heaven. You think that somehow you’re still trying to make him happy with you, rather than that he’s happy with you because of Christ.

Maybe you still feel guilty about your Father in heaven. And you know, if you’re in that state, lay it at the foot of the cross. Confess your sins. Say, “Lord God, I know there’s no way I can earn your pleasure, but your pleasure has been poured out to me through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ and his love.”

You know why Mary became somebody to be prayed to? Because strong, powerful, magisterial churches and stuff—oh, Jesus and the Father were so magnificent, so mighty, but so stern—that we needed somebody to pray to that we thought actually loved us. So Mother Mary, right? God is not that to you. He’s your loving heavenly Father who provides everything you need. Okay? He’s brought you here today to taste of the manna from heaven, as it were, union with Christ. He loves you.

Now, when you know that, that’s what you’re to model. That’s the model for you in your direction to your kids. Of course, you got to correct them. God corrects us. Of course, you got to discipline. You got to drill all that stuff, of course. But underlying it all, there should be completely obvious intent that you’re involved in their life and your involvement is because you love them. You want their best. You’re on their side. You’re encouraging them. You’re coaching them. You’re loving them. You’re involved in their life.

You know the great Shema, right? Deuteronomy 6:4-7: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.”

What is that? That’s presence. The Great Commission ends with a promise: “Lo, I am with you always.” The presence of Christ is here through the Spirit. And we’re supposed to be present in our children’s lives, raising them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord by teaching them, yeah, but by being with them, walking by the way, recreation, at home, spending time with them, spending time with our kids because why? Because that’s what God does. He is always near us. Jesus is always—”I’m with you always.” And that’s the model for us as well to our children. We’re supposed to nurture them.

Now, one commentator—who I don’t normally like—but he said this by way of conclusion: Dads, a loving heart, a watching eye, a listening ear, and a helping hand. A loving heart, a listening ear, a helping hand, a watching eye.

You know, think about yourself today. Think about your eyes. Are they watching the kids? Are they attentive to them? Are your ears listening to your children? Do you let yourself be interrupted? God does. We’re interrupting him all the time with our prayers, so to speak. He wants that. Do we let our kids interrupt us or not? Right? Do we have listening ears? Do we have watching eyes? Do we have loving hearts to our children?

If we do, we’ll repent today when we come forward with our tithes and offerings for the various times—maybe today, this last week, this last month—when we know we sinfully exasperated our children and caused them to lose a little heart. Do we have loving hearts? Let’s repent for not having that all the time. And let’s recommit ourselves to that loving heart, that watching eye, that listening ear, and then the helping hand to nurture and bring them up like a plant—grown up, sturdy and strong and productive for the Lord Jesus Christ.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for these simple yet profound commands that contain so much truth for us, so much encouragement, and yet also great warnings to us. Father, I pray particularly for the dads here today. I pray that they would see that the children would honor both parents—moms and dads—so as not to become twisted up that way. And I pray that the dads as well would take seriously this command not to irritate, exasperate, make our children be provoked to anger. Lord God, help us to deal with them as effective fathers the way you deal with us. In Jesus’s name we pray. Amen.