Turning Houses Into Homes (Part 3)

As you heard, we are in a series called Turning Houses into Homes.

And when we started this a few weeks ago, I said that it is always a little unnerving for me to teach on family or home.

And one of the reasons it's a little unnerving for me is I realize that there are some people who will be here and listening and butler the strip online who will say, you know what, I'm a long ways from that.

I'm, you know, kind of growing into my adulthood and not really thinking about it, don't really care a whole lot about it.

And then for some, you'll say, you know what, I've kind of gone through the child rearing years, I've got to figure it out.

I don't need any help with this.

And then some of us, this is a really painful area.

Maybe we've wanted kids and it hasn't happened.

Maybe we've wanted to be married.

Maybe we have been recently through a hard breakup or something has caused this to be a painful, hard subject for us.

And yet, here's what I would guess is true for most of us in this room and watching online.

And that is most of us want somebody in this world who knows us well and loves us thoroughly.

What we want is we want to be known, we want to be loved, and we want to spend our time with people who know us and love us.

That's really the essence of what a beautiful home is.

And that is a yearning that most of us have, whether we've articulated it as wanting to be parents or be married or not, that is something that we want.

And today I'm going to talk a little more specifically about parenting than any of the other weeks in this series.

But I know that even if you're before all of that, that this can still be helpful, or if you're thinking you're kind of after it, this can still be helpful.

Now, when it comes to parenting, parenting's hard to talk about.

I heard about one speaker who used to travel the country giving messages on parenting.

And his title, when he had really young kids and was in his 20s, was 15 Ironclad Principles for Raising Great Kids.

And then when his kids got to be a little older and he was in his 30s somewhere, he changed his title to 10 suggestions for raising your kids.

And then when his kids were still older and he was in his 40s, he changed his title to 5 ideas that may or may not help you raise your kids.

And anybody who's raised kids knows exactly this tension because you start and your kids, you kind of think, I'm gonna figure this out, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do it well.

And then you have these kids, and nothing goes exactly like you think it should.

I remember still when my wife and I had our first son, we have four sons.

My oldest son was born, and I remember taking him out of the hospital, putting him in the car seat in the back of our sky blue Oldsmobile sedan to drive him home.

And I remember thinking, why are they letting us take this child home?

We're not ready for this.

You get certified to do everything in this world, and yet you have a baby, and they're like, here, 25 years, good luck.

And you start down a path.

And then a couple years later, we had our second son, and I still remember the first time that my wife left home and left me with a two-year-old and a newborn, I'm sitting here thinking, I'm outnumbered.

This is overwhelming.

And one of the questions you have, whether you you have young kids or your kids are are older, is have I done right by my kids?

Will I be able to do right by my kids?

Will I be able to raise them and give them what they need?

This question led one woman to travel the world in search of an answer.

Her name is Michelleen Doosliff.

She's an MPR reporter.

And she traveled the world to say, what can I learn from other cultures about parenting so I'm not blinded by my own culture?

And the result of this is a book that she wrote called Hunt Gather Parent, What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans.

And she came to all kinds of conclusions.

Here's one.

She said, one of the craziest things we do is praise children constantly.

When I was first working on the book, I recorded myself to see how frequently I praised my little girl Rosie.

And I noticed that I would exaggeratedly react to even her smallest accomplishments, like drawing a flower or writing a letter with a comment like, Good job.

Wow, what a beautiful flower.

This is insane.

If you look around the world and throughout human history, everywhere I went, I don't know if I ever heard a parent praise a child.

Yet these kids are incredibly self-sufficient, confident, respectful.

Everything we want praise to do, these kids already have it without the praise.

It's hard to cut back on praise in our culture because it's so baked in.

But later on I decided to try.

And it's not that I didn't give any feedback, but it was much gentler feedback, like a smile or a nod, when I caught Rosie doing something that I would want her to do.

And I started to notice that Rosie's behavior really improved, and a lot of attention-seeking behavior went away.

So one of her great conclusions, traveling the world, was give your kids less praise.

All right, how does that how does that strike you?

Anybody, anybody think that's good?

Um, I don't really know if her idea is good or not in terms of less praise.

Her other big ideas were yell less, so praise less, yell less, and do fewer child-centered activities.

Those were her takeaways.

I just saved you the purchase of the book, by the way.

And what she basically said was we praise our kids too much.

You need to lower that bar, don't yell at them and stop like going to kids' museums every weekend or doing something so child-centered, but let your kids adjust to you.

That was her advice.

Now, I don't know if she's right or wrong, and here's my point.

You and I don't know if we're right or wrong with all of the advice that's coming at us.

There's no shortage of things that people will tell us we need to do in order to parent well.

We hear it from all angles.

And you can be bombarded and go crazy with the, you know, is my kid potty trained in time.

Maybe I potty trained them too early.

Maybe, maybe I didn't get them into the right preschool, and they'll never amount to anything, kind of thinking.

And so what I'd like to do today is show you two of the primary things that the Bible says about parenting.

And my hope is that it'll free you to say, my job is not as complex as figuring everything out, but it's these two things.

Now, in order to get there, we we've been basing our teaching in Colossians 2, 6 and 7.

And what Colossians 2, 6 and 7 does is it doesn't speak directly to parenting, it speaks in general to people.

And it says, as you've received Christ, now live your lives around him.

So this is an instruction to people in general saying, if you're a follower of Jesus, if you're you're you're spiritual in your orientation, here is what I want you to do.

I want you to orient your life around that spirituality.

And then there's four participles that tell us how to do it.

There's the participle that says being rooted, it's an agricultural imager metaphor.

And being rooted means to make hundreds, thousands of choices day after day that seem almost imperceptible, that go so deep that you become unmovable.

So one of the ways you strengthen your faith is with this agricultural metaphor by being rooted.

Then he uses an architectural metaphor, be built up.

And we talked about this last week, where what we do is we we intentionally pursue something over time with effort.

And now I'm going to say that he uses an athletic image to say be strengthened, because to be strengthened implies that what you're doing is you're putting stress on something so that you have an increased capacity, so that when you have an increased capacity, you can do in the future what you can't do currently.

That's what it is to be strengthened.

Now, to be fair, the ESV, we read the NIV here often, the ESV, a different translation of the New Testament, uses the word established instead of the word strengthened.

And it seems to have a different connotation.

In fact, you could say that this word has the idea of commerce or intellect.

And what happened was this this Greek word could be translated either way because the word had a rich nuance of basically saying, as you've received Christ, one of the things you want to do is you want to be established or strengthened in your faith.

So now let me take the step and say, how does this apply to parenting or families?

Well, if you want to help your kids embrace faith, then you want them to be rooted, built up, and strengthened in their faith.

And I said that there are really two primary commands in the New Testament about parenting.

Both of them appear in Ephesians 6 4.

And you could really say that of all the things in the Bible about parenting, these are the two most clear.

There are other things you could get by inference, but this is what the Bible says directly to parents about parenting.

Ephesians 6 4, it says this.

Fathers, do not exasperate your children.

Instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.

There's a parallel in Colossians 3 that says, parents or fathers, do not embitter your children.

So what is the two, what are the two things that the Bible says to parents?

Don't exasperate or embitter.

I'm putting that together, saying that's the same idea.

And train your children in what it means to follow the Lord.

So training and don't embitter, don't exasperate.

That's what the Bible says to parents about what they need to do.

Now there are some other places that talk about training.

In Proverbs 22, verse 6, it says, Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he's old, he won't depart from it.

Proverbs 22:6

And that's led some people to say, well, this is an ironclad promise.

If I do acts, I'll get an outcome over here.

And others have said, no, Proverbs isn't meant to be read that way.

And they've even kind of gone into the Hebrew and tried to look at the Hebrew and said, this just means raise a child according to their own bent, and then you don't have any like trying to shape them, you just find what they're good at and support it.

I think that's a twisting of the Hebrew, actually.

Others have said, well, there's a translation here that says, train a child in the way that he should go, and it will not depart from him, meaning the training.

Meaning you can look back and say, what we've put into our child, it's there, even if it doesn't appear like it right now.

In the Old Testament, there's another passage that talks about training.

Again, training and do not exasperate.

Those are the two things.

And this is in Deuteronomy chapter 6, verse 5, and following.

Deuteronomy 6:5

It says, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

These commandments I give you today are to be on your hearts.

Impress them on your children.

Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up, tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.

Write them on the door frames of your house and on your gates.

And this is the instruction of saying, here's how you influence or train your kids.

And so what I'd like to do just for a moment is talk about three modes of influence.

And this is specific to kids, but it's true in general.

And the first, I'm just going to say, is modeling.

This is the idea of Deuteronomy 6 that as you walk, as you're living your life, that you are modeling something that is true for you.

And as it's true for you, it becomes something that is observable and desirable for your children.

I saw a study years ago, and I haven't been able to find it again, so I don't have the source on this.

But the study tracked kids who were part of a Christian home and a Christian church, and then when they went away to college, kind of dropped off the chart from faith.

And some statistics suggest that nearly 60 to 80% of kids who grow up in church, when they go away to college, just say, I don't need this, don't want this.

I think that more return in their 20s and 30s, but but that's what statistics generally say.

And so they tracked this.

And what they tried to do was say, what's the correlation between public school, Christian, like private school, and homeschooling and that outcome?

And do you know what they concluded?

That there was no correlation between public school, Christian school, or homeschool.

In other words, it isn't about what schooling you choose for your kids.

What they found is that the biggest single determination in terms of kids coming back to faith or staying in faith when they left home was what they considered to be the authenticity of their parents' faith.

In other words, they were watching and saying, Is this true for you?

Do you live this?

Is this winsome?

Does this work in your life?

And whether you put them in a Christian school or a private school or a public school didn't matter nearly as much as how the kids answered that question.

Last week I was in our chapel service.

We have a 10:30 a.m.

chapel service here in Wexford.

And just as the service was beginning, um, one of the singers kind of motioned to me, like, like, come, you know, let me talk to you for a moment.

It'd be like in this room, except it's a little smaller, somebody motioning to me as I'm sitting here beforehand, say, Hey, let me talk to you.

And so the whole room was like watching, and she whispered something in my ear.

She said, Hey, we can hear everything you say in our ears.

Because they have these little in-ear monitors to be able to hear the band really well.

So, what had evidently happened was that the soundboard hadn't turned my microphone down.

So everything I was saying was going straight into their ears.

And here's what she was saying really politely.

Please don't sing.

Because if you do, you're off tune and we're gonna be off tune and it's gonna be awful.

And if you've ever heard me sing and you won't, um she's right.

I can't sing, it's off-tune, it's awful.

But what she was saying was if we have you in our ears, we can't help but mimic what you're doing.

And I thought, boy, is that an example of how much influence matters in parenting.

You can say anything you want, but what you do shapes, and who you are shapes how your kids see you and see life.

So first is modeling.

Here's the second.

I'm just gonna call this informal training.

Notice in Deuteronomy 6 where it says, as you're at home, as you walk about, as you sit, what that's talking about is just your everyday life, how you're living.

There's a place for formal training, but much of your most important training happens in informal moments.

It's conversations.

It's as you're driving all over the place to take your kids somewhere and you're having conversation after conversation, that you're influencing their values, shaping the way that they see things.

In fact, I would say that this is way more significant than formal training.

Not that formal training doesn't have a place.

I remember years ago when one of my kids was playing youth sports and he had a conflict with another kid.

I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but he came home and we started to talk about the conflict, and I got kind of amped up because I thought, you know, hey, this isn't right.

And so I started telling him all the things he should do, the things he should say, the you know, a little shoulder he should give the kid, you know, all this stuff.

And my wife came into the room, and uh and and she she threw down a little bit.

She said, What do you think Jesus would do?

I have to admit, I was kind of like, I don't care what Jesus would do.

I want to tell you what Kurt would do.

And what Kurt says is get the kid.

Now here's my point.

My wife wisely had that moment of saying, you know what?

Let's let's think about this, let's talk about this, and here's what I know.

I can sit and talk with my kids about the fruit of the Spirit and gentleness and show them a nice Bible study about how this works.

But if when they have a conflict with another kid, I'm like, hey, give them a shoulder, tell them where you know what's going on, I'm not helping them.

Do you see how informal training matters?

And then there's formal training.

And this is to say it does matter to a certain extent that you tie these commands, it says, uh, on the doorpost of your house.

In other words, that you make this part of your life, and this is talking about church, maybe schooling, your own family time, in order to bring about moments that are important in your kids' lives where they have the training.

But here's what I want to say to you.

Influence is not as simple as saying, I said it, now they get it.

In fact, if that's the way that you approach this, you will have a hard time, especially as your kids get older, because as kids get older, what happens is they become more like adults, and as they become more like adults, they don't want to be told what to do, just like you don't want to be told what to do.

One author put it like this He said, faced with a choice between changing one's mind and proving there's no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy with the proof.

And here's what he's saying he's saying, so many of us, if we're told that we're wrong, we'll spend more time trying to convince somebody that we're right rather than listening to what they have to say.

And the reason that's true is because we don't like to be wrong.

Now that doesn't mean that you never say anything to your kids about where they're wrong or what they need, but what it means is you come to understand that there's a point where you can exasperate or embitter somebody because you aren't keeping their hearts open to you because you're so intent on training that you've lost the development process.

I was thinking about this and I have this chart I want to show you that I kind of thought through.

So on the top axis is the approach to what, how, and why, and then the age range.

And I'm gonna start just kind of with littles here, and by littles I mean little, little kids.

And so with little kids, the what is all up to the parent.

The how is up to the parent, and you'd spend maybe a little time talking about why.

So, for example, your two-year-old.

When you have a two-year-old, you don't say to the two-year-old, hey, I was thinking of going to the store today.

Do you think that's a good idea or a bad idea?

Would you like to go tomorrow or the next day?

Or do we ever go to the store?

No, you say to a two-year-old, we're going to the store, get in the car.

Okay, and and you might say why, but but there's not a lot of that.

So then you get a little older, and I'm just gonna call this kind of the mid-years, I'm thinking late kind of single digits, early teens kind of a thing.

And here the parent is still generally driving the what, but there's more give and take on the how and a lot of explanation of the why.

For example, you might say to your 10-year-old, you know what?

I want you to clean your room.

We do clean rooms in our house.

That's the what.

Okay, everybody has a clean room, it's what we do.

Um, some of you are saying, no, we don't do that in our house.

But but but if you said clean rooms, that's one of the things we do, you for this kid will say, you know what, there's gonna be some give and take on the how.

Do you want to do this before dinner or after dinner?

When do you want to clean your room?

And you explain why.

You say, you know what, if we leave pizza boxes in our room, we get mice, and mice are nasty, and we don't want mice in our house.

So we clean up our rooms.

That's why we do it.

That's the example of what we're talking about here.

Now, as the kids get older, now I'm thinking kind of later teen years, now you start to get a lot of give and take on the what.

You let the kid determine the how, generally, and you spend a lot of time exploring the why.

I can still remember one of the best pieces of parenting advice that I got was from some parents that were 15, 20 years ahead of us in parenting.

Their kids were raised as I was kind of raising my kids.

And one time I was sitting with them and I just said, I said, tell me what worked for you in parenting.

And I'll never forget the woman said to me, she said, Well, as my kids started to age, I realized that telling them what to do didn't work very well.

And so I started to ask them questions.

And what I would do is I would just simply keep asking them questions until they came to a good conclusion about what it was that was a good choice.

And I heard that and I thought, as my kids grow, I want to explore the why with them.

And then as your kids reach adulthood, and I mean here not like 40, but like young adulthood and still somewhat dependent on you financially, but really adults, they start to control the what, they control the how, and your why is a lot more when asked, and that's about it.

So take something simple, and this isn't in the Bible, this is just kind of above and beyond the Bible, but let's say that that for you, when you're raising your kid, you think it's important that they brush their teeth, okay?

So when they're little, what do you do?

You say, We're gonna brush our teeth, and every night you have them brush their teeth, you do the little examination, and you're like, Oh, you missed a spot.

Let's do that again.

And and and there's not a whole lot of debate.

They get a little older, and you say, Okay, are you gonna brush your teeth?

You know, when are you gonna do it?

We still wanna do it.

But then there comes a time when you have to say, if you want dirty, grimy, nasty teeth, you don't have to brush your teeth.

That's your deal.

I'm not gonna pay for, you know, like dental care if you don't do something, but that's your deal.

Do you see how that works?

And one of the ways that people embitter or exasperate their children is they hang on to these things too long and they try to control behavior rather than influence thinking.

And what they're doing is they're saying, I have to control the outcome.

Instead of saying you're an individual who can make your own choices along the way.

By the way, let me just ask you, where does your spouse fit on this chart?

In terms of what, why, how.

If you try to control your spouse's what and how, you will exasperate your spouse.

And if you say, Well, you know what, yeah, I mean, my spouse, they don't get it, they won't ever like get the right thing.

If they you married them.

We have a counseling center.

You influence equals adults, modeling, and why.

How and what you will exasperate people if you're always telling them what they should do and how they should do it.

And the same thing's true for kids as they grow.

Now, why is this important?

Because this assumes that you and I understand something and believe in something enough to train them.

You have your kids brush your teeth because you know if they don't, that they'll get cavities and there will be all kinds of bills and pain and stuff like that.

So even when they think, oh, it doesn't matter, you're you say, no, you're gonna brush your teeth.

Spiritually speaking, when you become convinced that something is important, something is true, then you say, I believe this enough that I want you to be strengthened or established in this.

And the Greek word that's the participle in Colossians 2, where it says that you should be rooted, built up, and established or strengthened, that Greek word is passive in its original language.

And what that means is it's not something we do just through direct effort, but we're strengthened, and it says, as you were taught, we're strengthened by the word of God, by taking that in, by letting that be a part of our lives.

And when we aren't taking in the word of God, what happens is we lose our ability to be strengthened.

Maybe you know somebody who is older who went through the pandemic, and as they went through the pandemic, they didn't get out because of concerns, right concerns about the virus, but you could see their capacity drop because they weren't doing the things they used to do.

Well, that is exactly what happens when we're not being strengthened by the teaching of what God gives us.

So we've talked about training and not embittering, kind of this balance.

And here's what embittering really is or exasperating, and that is when you try to control behavior too long.

In other words, you try to dictate behavior and put barricades around kids way too long, or when you let them make their own decisions, you abdicate responsibility way too early.

In other words, they don't feel like you gave them enough boundaries, enough direction, enough help along the way.

Or when you just vacillate back and forth between the two, dictating and abdicating, that is when you exasperate your children.

And again, the two primary commands in the Bible toward parents are train your children, don't embitter them, don't exasperate them.

That is what the Bible says about parenting.

But I want to show you one more thing.

And it's this in Isaiah 1, we read about God as a parent.

And here's what it says: it's verse 2.

Hear me, you heavens, listen, earth, for the Lord has spoken.

I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me.

Now, why do I read this?

Well, God, by definition, is perfect, meaning God is a perfect parent.

And what does this say about God's parenting?

That even as a perfect parent, what?

Kids rebelled against him.

Now, this is written about the children of Israel and everything that took place in that culture.

But here's what this means.

If you're a parent and you do everything perfect, it's not a guarantee that your kids will turn out perfectly.

In other words, some of us, what we we do when we hear this is we say, well, if I had it, maybe if I should, maybe if I did, I could.

And what we need to do is say, even perfect parenting is not a guarantee.

God was a perfect parent and people still rebelled.

This also means if you're a child and your parents have let you down in some substantial ways, that you can say, even with imperfect parents, it's not a reason for me to choose the path that I've chosen.

I choose my own path regardless of what my parents do.

And it means this.

And that is, all of us have rebelled against the perfect love of God the Father.

And if we understand this and embrace this message, what Isaiah 1 does is later in the chapter, verse 18-19, it says, Though your sins be as scarlet, I've made them as white as snow.

Well, what this is, is this is a presentation of what we call the gospel of Isaiah saying, here's the issue.

God has been perfect as a parent, he's raised rebellious children, and yet he still is loving and accepting and creating an environment where you can come home.

In fact, it says in verse 18, come let us reason together.

And here's again why this matters.

One of the ways that you embitter family members, spouses, kids, brothers, sisters, is by having to have everything be perfect because you think that it says something important about you.

When what is most healthy is to say none of us are perfect, we've all rebelled, and yet God has chosen to love us anyway in the person of Jesus Christ.

And when that becomes your dominant rubric, what happens is all of a sudden you're able to say, I can love you even when you've let me down, even if you haven't done the right things, because I haven't done the right things.

And the atmosphere changes.

It doesn't take away the training or the desire to be somewhere or to go somewhere, but what it does is it allows us to instead of demanding things because we think we need something from our kids, from our spouse, from our siblings, from our parents, what we're able to do is say, we have all rebelled.

And that is the good news of Christianity, is that religion basically says, perform so that God will accept you.

And what biblical Christianity says, Jesus has done for you what you could never do.

You are accepted because of Jesus.

And when we live from that in our homes, we will change the very environment to not be an embittering, exasperating environment.

And that is where we will find our houses becoming truer homes.

And even if you're here and you're saying, you know what, I don't know if I believe in Jesus or want to train my kids in Christianity, and I'm sure I want to be a Christian.

What I know that you do want is you want a place where people are loved and accepted.

And what I know is that when you understand God's love for you, you will be able to give love to the people that matter most in your life better than you can when you just are trying to trade love back and forth.

And that will give you a better potential home than maybe you have today.

Father, I thank you that your word speaks so clearly to things that matter to us.

And God, I pray for each one of us here that you would help us to live in a place where we so experience your acceptance that we can give that to people in our lives.

And from that, that we'd be able to, without fear, train and not embitter, because we've already got all the verdict we need.

And that's the one from you that says, Though your sins be as scarlet, I've washed them white as snow.

And we thank you in Jesus' name.

Amen.