Putting Down Roots: Week 5

Well, good morning, Welcome to the Church of Chrolsa. My name is

James, and today we are in our fifth week of our Colossion series and

last week was a very challenging verse. We talked about sexual sins, social

sins, and keeping our eyes on Christ so that we all can fulfill the

purpose and the plans that God has called us to. Now today we're shifting

into Paul begins talking about the ideal family. What does a Christ centered family

look like? So let's take some time us pray and let's ask God to

speak deeply to us. God, we love you today. We thank you

for the opportunity to dive into your word. We thank you for the opportunity

to just worship in your presence day. So, God, we just want

to clear our minds. I just want to clear our minds and allow you

to speak directly to us in Jesus name. Amen. My daughter turns eighteen

here in a couple of weeks, and she's graduated high school, which I

find just really hard to believe considering how young I look. But when I

think back over the years and raising a child, being a parent, I

think a lot of you would agree with me that it kind of feels like

the opening line to the Tell of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. It was

the best of times, it was the worst of times. Can I get

an amen? Yeah? All of those who are parents, we know and

we love our kids, and I could go back. And I just had

fun the last couple of weeks thinking back over some of those precious memories,

like the first time I took her to a big Easter egg hunt, and

I had all these hopes and aspirations that she was going to fill her basket

where it was overflowing, as she was gonna have the greatest day of her

life. And so we get to the Easter egg hunt and you know,

there's all these other three years old that's starting, and you know, and

I'm kicking them over and I'm walking my daughter through. But she won't touch

the grass. She won't grab for the egg and she keeps doesn't like the

grass. And I'm going nuts here. Okay, I don't know what to

do. And so finally, like, you gotta grab the eggs. If

you don't grab the age, you're not gonna get any chocolate. If you

don't get any chocolate, you won't have you talk about to eat to night.

If you don't have you talk about eat tonight, you're gonna depressed.

You're gonna go to school money. All the other kids are gonna have chocolate.

Grab the egg, and she wouldn't grab the egg. Thankfully, the

organizers went to our church and so we got sympathy eggs afterwards. Come to

find out a couple of years later that she was allergic to grass, so

that might explain why she did not like to touch the grass. Anyways,

for more information on how to be an understanding parent, please read my book

Somehow She survived. Huoni had or has a picky eater for a child.

Yeah, they're the worst. Listen. She wouldn't eat anything. And then

finally, when she was just a little baby, she finally decided that she

would eat sausage. McDonald's sausage. And it was my day. It was

a Friday, on my day off, and I had her all to myself,

and so I went out to McDonald's and I got three breakfast burritos.

I came home, I did a biopsy, and I took all the sausage

out, set her down, and I start feeding her all the sausage and

she's having the time for life. It's all over her hair, it's all

in your ears, it's all over the place, all over the floor,

and she's having the greatest time in life. And I'm thinking, man,

Mom is gonna be so proud of me that I got our daughter to eat

all this sausage. And so I was excited. So I brought her into

the living room, put her in a bouncy and she just bounced and bounced

and bounced and bounced and bounced and bounced. And then something happened, something

that we shall not talk about today, but it was a horrible thing that

happened years later. By the way, she became a vegetarian. That's true.

For more information on how to clean carpet stains, please refer to my

book titled I Won't Make That Mistake Again. Now. I could literally go

on telling story after story after story about my parenting mishaps and misadventures, and

about how we would fight for her to go to bed, fight for her

to eat normal, fight for her to not talk back and are clean up

after herself. But those memories seemed to fade when we moved from fighting with

her over these things to fighting for her when she became clinically depressed. Where

we began fighting for her when she no longer wanted to live in this world,

when we began fighting for her when she felt she was unlovable. And

all of this was before she even learned how to drive. And I'm just

so thankful for God's mercy. And let me tell you the last couple of

years, my little philosopher and historian, I've had some of the greatest conversations

I've ever had in my whole life on our back patio, and I just

praise God for every one of those conversations. But I think that I think

you would all agree parenting's hard. It's a lot harder than people told us.

It's really hard. And I think that people like to think about families

and almost trying to capture families in a portrait. And I don't think you

can capture a family and a portrait. A family is better captured in a

novel. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,

you know, being married, having a family, being a grandparent.

This is tough stuff sprinkled with moments of joy and bliss. And our family

struggles they're real. And if we're not careful. Our families can easily split,

they can fight, they can hurt each other. Yet, in God's

wisdom and his vision for our family, he wants our families to be full

of love and forgiveness. But by the way, that does not come automatically.

We have to fight for families that will love each other and be unified.

Let's look at the first verse today. The Amiah board fourteen says,

remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your families.

Fight for your sons, fight for your daughters, fight for your wives,

fight for your homes. Listen, in life, we're all gonna have

a lot of battles that we could choose from, and some battles are worth

to fight, like fighting for your family, fighting for your marriage that honors

God. Yet sometimes I think we fight the wrong fight, and if we're

not careful, this is our first feeling today. Our families can easily fight

over the wrong things instead of focusing on the right things. We can easily

fight over the wrong things instead of focusing on the right things. We fight

for control, dominance, inheritance. We fight for our adult siblings over trivial

things. We fight with our adult parents over parents and nuances. In our

household, we fight over everything. Who's gonna do the dishes, who's gonna

sit here, who has remote control? Who gets the last cookie? And

by the way, fighting is not new to families. Historically, families started

out fighting. Let's go all the way back to Jennis. Ready, let's

talk about the very first family in Genesis. Cain and Abel, two brothers.

They got to fight over who gave God a better offering? How did

that end with murder? The very first sibling relationship ended with murder. Not

a good start for families, all right. Then we go down to Abraham

and Abraham's grandchildren. You know, or excuse me, Abraham's grandchildren. They're

Jacob and Esau. And Jacob and Esau hated each other so much that they

split the family in half and became two tribes that war together for many,

many years. Then we followed Jacob's line, and Jacob just has some really,

really lousy kids. And Jacob's sons decided, well, let's not kill

Joseph, our younger brother. Let's just sell him into slavery. Then we'll

tell Dad that he was killed. So when we look at the first families

in the Book of Genesis. They were lousy. Okay, they did not

do a good job. They fought with each other like crazy. They fought

each other, they killed each other, they sold each other. That's not

a good family. You know. People say, look to the Bible,

don't look there for advice on how to have a good family. Don't look

there. But then we see that they went to Egypt and then they became

slaves, and then we see some shifts, some amazing shift. Something fascinating

happened out of that horrible experience when they came out on the other side of

the exodus. See, instead of fighting for each other, they learned to

fight for one another, instead of against one another. They fought for unity.

They fought for their tribes. They fought to honor God and obey the

commandment and say, they fought for God's name to be glorified. They fought

for the dream to become a great nation. And by the way, most

of the history of Abraham's family, the Israelites, in this one season,

through all of their history, it's in this one season that they were unified,

and they accomplished so many great things that all the nations around them said,

your God is awesome. Your God is awesome. So after these centuries

of fighting, they come together in this one season. So we have to

ask what was special about that one season. Well, we look at things

like leaders like Joshua who said, ask for me and my house, we

shall serve the Lord. The kids walked around wearing full actories that has scriptures,

and so they were memorizing scriptures. The families came together on Saturday and

they worshiped, and for this brief moment in history, God built a great

nation. Now how it's because they chose to fight for the right things and

be focused on the right things, and as a result, they were blessed

by God. One of my very first weekends here as a senior pastor,

I was asked to go sitting on the volunteer launch for the Children's Ministry,

and I was asked not to do anything, just sitting there and hang out

and encourage the volunteers. So sitting there and the children's pastor looked at me

and says, Pastor James, it'd be great for you to come up right

now and share your vision for Children's Ministry. I'm like, oh, okay,

what expecting that? So, but you know what, I didn't have

to have any research because I've been a youth pastor for eleven years. I

already knew what type of children I wanted to see come out as CTC,

to come out of the Church of the Crossing. I didn't say that I

wanted us to have slides and bounce balls and all this time now I think

that'd be great. I didn't say that I wanted us have a bunch of

great children events. I'm so thankful what we do, but that's not the

goal of our children's ministry. I said, here's the goal of our children's

minstry. I want our children, the children of the Church of the Crossing

by the time they get to middle school, that everyone around them knows these

kids are different. They're the ones who are calm in the midst of drama.

They're the ones that when they see the kids sitting by themselves, they

leave their friend group and they go and have lunch with the person who is

lonely. They're the friend that can be counted on. They're the friend that

everybody knows won't gossip behind their back. They're the kid that doesn't follow the

crowd. They're the kid that has character, and they know that they're different,

that they know that this that our children are, they're just something unique

about a child who comes from the Church of the Crossing. And that's my

vision that all around all these school districts, that our students will be a

light in the midst of darkness. But let me tell you something that's not

only my vision for our children, but that's my vision for every single one

of the families, that we would be a light in our community, and

that we will be a light in this nation that so desperately needs transformation.

So here's what we're gonna do today. We're gonna jump over to Colossus,

chapter three, and we're gonna watch as Paul transitions here to talk about the

family. Now, by the way, there's major misconceptions with this passage,

so hang with me because there's a good chance you might be offended at first.

Okay, so just hang with me and let me explain the verse.

All right, here we go. We get to Paul's teaching on the family.

Verse eighteen. Wives submit yourself to your husbands as us fitting to the

Lord. No, amens, please don't, this is not the time for

that. Okay, Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with

them. Children. Obey your parents and everything, for this pleases the Lord

Fathers. Do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged. So

here's what Paul does. He gives some bullet points for what he desires to

see coming out of the family, you know, the biblical family, the

Christ centered family. But it's very fortunate for us today that Paul actually has

the exact same team from Colossians in the Book of Ephesians, except for Ephesians

is much more developed and it has much more context, and it's so much

more helpful. And by the way, this is a common thing. So

when we come to the Gospel of Mark, it's one of the smallest gospels,

and often it will be a shortened version of a Jesus event. So

it's common for theologians to shift over to Matthew our Luke and look at the

more developed story so they can have more contexts. So here's what we have.

We have a parallel passage in Colossians and Ephesians. But thankfully Ephesians gives

us so much more context and things to interpret. So that's what we're gonna

do. We're gonna go to a parallel Passage and Ephesians, and we're gonna

look at this, so let's jump over to Ephesians. He says, all

right, and I pay attention. It's because there's a shift starting my first

twenty one. He says, submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Wives, submit yourself to your husbands as you do to the Lord.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ love the church and gave himself

up for her. Now, this text over centuries has triggered so many negative

reactions. A matter of fact, this text has been used to oppress people,

to harm people, to abuse people. That's because there's a misunderstanding in

this text. Besides the scripture that says Jesus wept, this is also the

probably the most quoted text because husbands always thinks it's funny to quote this text.

Wife, submit to your husbands. I would encourage you not to do

that today. Okay. Now, at first, when we read this text,

it looks like a very demeaning text. So we need to unlearn what

some of us think that this text is doing. So if you look at

Paul's immediate context, you're going to discover, to your amazement, this is

a radical text. Okay, he is doing more for the emancipation of women

and oppressed groups than anyone had ever done up to this point. This was

a huge moment. This was a revolutionary moment in history where Paul is flipping

the script on family life. But we won't understand it unless we see it

in the context. Okay, first of all, you have to understand that

Paul is living in the first century Roman Greco worlds. They're spread out all

through the empire. It's Gargageman, and so they're very concerned about managing society.

The easiest way to manage society was to bring it down to the smallest

manageable unit. So you go from country to city, to town to neighborhood,

and then you get down to the family. And the family is the

most manageable way to run the kingdom. And so in order to manage the

families, well, the Roman Greco world put the men in absolute control.

The husband, the father had complete authority. Okay, understand this. So

if the and he could rule for you know, rod of iron. All

right, So if the wife had too many baby girls, the husband can

go to the wife and say, all right, take the baby girl,

take her outside. The city and just leave her there to be exposed and

die. And by the way, that was okay in our society. Sounds

crazy to us, but that's just the way it was. If the sons

were disobedient, he could beat his son or this very fascinating. If this

son was disobedient to the father, often the father can just have the son

imprisoned. So understand this that everybody in our household, the wives, the

children, the slaves, everyone, they were just a piece of property.

So Paul is riding into this system where everyone's a piece of property, and

all of a sudden, Paul comes with this gospel and he says, hey,

because of Christ, thinks of change. See the wife, the slave,

the child. We were all made in the image of God. And

because we were made in the image of God, the matter if you're a

Jew or Greek, if you are a Barbarian, a skiff, and it

doesn't matter if you're a slave, all of us are in Christ Jesus,

all of us are a part of the family of God. And Paul says,

let me tell you something. Our family's going to operate differently. Our

family is not going to run our family the way the rest of the world

runs our family. Our family's going to reflect the vision of Christ and God

for the family. So Paul flips the world upside down when he's teaching on

the families. It is a radical, radical message down. For those of

us who have grown up in a church, you're like, this is an

old hat. James wants the fuss about this. There's no fuss. I

just want you to understand something you can't separate Verse twenty one from twenty two.

Let's look at it again. Submit to one another out of reverence for

Christ. Wife, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do for the

Lord. You don't start with wife, submit, you start with you submit

to one another. And submitting is an accurate translation here, and it's connected

to the verse above. So we submit to one another. And so this

is a huge shift in a Christian family. And now we come to the

second big shift and husbands. This is for us. So husbands, pay

attention, okay, big time. It says, now here's a big shift

where the wives are not just the property. The wives are not just servants

in our home. He says this, husbands, love your wives as Christ

loved the church, and he gave himself up for her. No, this

was huge. He says, husbands, love your wife. Is Christ loved

the church? Now? How did Christ love the church? He gave his

life up for the church. The apostle. Paul takes a dramatic picture and

applies to the husbands. He says, husbands, here's what I want you

to do. And every husband in this room, I want you to pay

attention this. This is what Christ is calling you to do. Took a

good, hard, long look at the love of Christ manifested on the cross,

and that's how you treat your life self sacrificial love. And guys,

I know this doesn't come naturally. And by the way, this teaching that

we're talking about today is not oppressive. It was a radical teaching because Paul

was calling the family to be a family that loves each other and honors each

other. And so we get to this point in church all the time,

and over the years, I've heard this conversation over and over again. People

think, if we can just get this one question answered, their marriage will

be fixed. All the problems in their marriage will be fixed if we can

just answer this one question. You guys know what that question is. Who's

in charge and always joke and say, well, if you're asking me,

I promise, I promise, you're not in charge. If you're asking this

question, you're definitely not in charge. This was not what Paul was getting

at. Okay, okay, let's I want you to pay close attentionness.

Here's what I believe Paul is saying. Paul is saying that the primary goal

of marriage is not to figure out who rules over. But the goal of

Christian marriage is for a husband and wife to become one because look at a

couple of verses. Down says, for this reason, a man will leave

his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become

one flesh. The goal of marriage is not to figure out who's in charge.

The goal of marriage is to respect each other, to love each other,

to honor each other to the point that you become one. That's the

goal of marriage. And this is a high calling. And by the way,

Paul is very clear as well that men were to lead our family when

it comes to faith. He has a high calling for men to sacrifice our

lives for our wives as Christ love the church. And as we do this,

men, God does some powerful and we become one and we enter into

the marriage that God design for us. So Paul does a radical shift to

marriage, and then he switches to the child parent relationship. And we're gonna

spend the rest of our time today talking about uaranting. Okay, So let's

look at this verse six. He says, children, obey your parents and

the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother, which

is the first commandment, with a promise, so that it may go well

with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth. Fathers,

do not exasperate your children. Instead bring them up. In other words,

disciple your children. Disciple your children, train them in any instruction of the

Lord. And here's what Paul is doing. He's disturbing status quo. Here

he's saying, our families are going to go from a dictatorship to a loving

relationship. We're going to nurture and honor our children. And this is such

a contrast to culture back then. It was revolutionary. And let me tell

you something, And I hope that none of you cry when you hear this.

I don't want to upset you. But here's what I've learned just from

watching congregations over the year. You're not done parenting when your child turns eighteen?

Is that okay? You understand that you're not done a matter of fact?

For me, pup this next point. You're a parent until you die.

Okay? Can I can I get an amen on that you're a parent

until you die? Because see, here's the thing. What I've learned is

sometimes it's harder to parent your child after they get out of the house.

It's harder to deal with because all of a sudden, now they got a

family, they got kids, they got a mortgage, they got a career,

and all of a sudden, thanks blow up. And now all of

a sudden they come to you. And it's not about a broken arm or

they have a fender bender. Now it's like mom, Dad, I blew

my whole life up. Help me. That's hard parenting. And so we

parents until we die. We're in this lifelong relationship. And so that's another

reason why Paul is saying don't exasperate your children. In other words, if

as your children are growing up, you get into so many fights with them

that at a certain point when they eat you later on, they're not going

to come to you because the relationship has been so bad. So keep that

relationship going because you're going to pare it that child until you die someday.

And by the way, this is where the Robert meets Rosen. It's the

family unit. It's a family unit where we truly show that we are the

light of Christ. And so here's what I'm gonna do now. I'm going

to talk about how do we as parents, how do we prepare our kids

in such a way that the rest of the world can see their witness?

How do we as a family unit live in such a way that the rest

of the world sees that we just live differently and through that we have families

that bring glory and honor to God. But also we have families that reach

other people for Christ. All right, So may ask a couple of questions,

how can we bear witness? I believe whole harriedly that it comes from

how we handle ourselves in life's tough situations. All of us are gonna have

our lives blown up. But how we handle ourselves in life's tough situations,

that's when people stare at us. That's where people look at us and people

find out who we really are. Are we truly followers of Christ and is

our family truly Christians. I saw this on Facebook this weekend. I also

prosed. I found something that was helpful. There was a man who came

up to an amish Man and he asked the amish man, Hey, are

you a Christian? And the amish Man said, I don't know, go

ask my neighbor. And I think that's how the world works. And so

we want to build families that bring honor and glory to Christ. And see,

that's when our light shines the brightest. So here's what we're gonna do.

Okay, I want to talk about how to increase our witness significantly.

I got a few minutes, and I just want to focus on these three

lessons. Number one lessons handed down from a Christ and our family. We

got to teach our children how to deal with through emotions. We've got to

teach our children how to deal with emotions. It is one of the most

important skills in life. How do you handle your emotions? The pandemic,

by the way, it really showed us the importance of learning how to deal

with how you feel. Our culture has become a culture of rage. I've

seen the vision unlike I've ever seen him before in my life. During the

pandemic, I actually had to get off the social media because I was so

disappointed in watching Christians who've been Christians for thirty or forty years and I'm doing

them for years fighting with each other. And here we were, in this

moment during a pandemic. We had an opportunity as a church world to shine,

to show everyone else what does it mean to walk in the peace of

Christ in the church world. I think we fumbled the ball. Okay,

So there's a lot of lessons to learn from that season. So let's learn

them that we were The next time there's a crisis. I'm gonna learn how

to deal first of all, of how we feel. Because, by the

way, if we don't learn how to deal with how we feel, either

do two things. We either lash out are we stuff it down? We

either lash out are we stuff it stuff it down? On the flip side,

I watch a lot of mature followers of Christ who walked in peace,

who walked in their witness, and God use them to bring other people to

Christ. Let me tell you something, the world will notice the difference,

and hopefully, as a christ in our family will teach our children how to

recognize our feelings, how to name your feelings, how to own up to

your feelings, how not to stuff them down or lash out, or how

to know how we feel. And by the way, families are the safest

place to learn how to deal with for our emotions. Families are the safest

place to learn how to deal with how we feel. Now, I've shared

this a few years ago, but I'll share it again. I grew up

one of those households that did whippings, and so my dad and my mother

they whipped us with the belt. And so whenever we got in trouble,

we got a belt. I got one brile every other week. My brother

had a weekly schedule, a weekly appointment. He was horrible. Mine was,

as you would guess, mostly from my mouth. And so my dad

would whip us. And what do you do when you get whipped? You

start crying? Right, And then my dad always said this, he goes

stop crying, or I'll want to give you something to cry about, which,

by the way, just like befuddled me. I couldn't understand it because

I'm crying because he whipped me. But that was not the time to bring

this up. Okay, So and so every time I would get a whip

and I would start to cry and he would say the same thing. He

would whip me more if I didn't stop crying. So I stuffed it down,

all right. Many years later, I became a youth pastor, and

guess what middle school girls do. They cry? And so as a youth

pastor, we would have an emotional service and lives are being changed. And

I walk around the corner and I would see a middle school girl crying,

and all of a sudden, I would stop and I would have a physical

reaction to this young girl crying, like fear would come over my body.

And so I would go get another leader and say, hey, pray with

her, let me know if you need anything. And I did this for

a decade. Come to find out that whenever I saw someone crying, I

associated crying with fear and punishment. I didn't understand, but that's that's what

I was taught. I was taught to stuff my emotions, not allow them

to come out and see it. And I didn't understand that that our emotions

are a gift from God, because our God's a very emotional god. But

we got to teach our children and by the way, parents, we got

to teach our older children still how to deal with our emotions. If we

don't learn that, and by the way, we just can't teach our kids

to to you know, how to control our emotions. We also got to

pay attention to those who just let their emotions go do anything. You know,

we can't go to our kids and say, hey, why did you

hit timy in it half a toaster? No, we can't just say,

you know, we got to say, hey, is there something else you

could have done? What were you feeling when you did that? Why did

you do that? No, we got to make sure that we're not letting

them just stuff it down. But we also just can't let our kids lash

out. We got to teach our children how to control their emotions. And

that way, when they're in middle school and high school, in college,

and when they getting married, when things are become chaotic, they're able to

control their emotions. They're able not to make dumb decisions mess their life up.

When they're at their career and they get really upset, they don't go

yell at the boss and lose everything. They learn how to control their emotions,

and then when everyone else in the office building is freaking out, and

they go, why are you calm? Then they get to witness. So

we've got to teach our children how to control emotions. By the way Jesus

did this. Jesus had a really great check on his emotions. When he

stood before Lazarus's tomb and Lazarus is dead. Jesus cried when he looked over

Jerusalem. He cried when he walked into the temple and they were ripping off

poor people. He got angry and flipped tables all right, And when his

disciples fell asleep on him on that night for prayer, he was disappointed in

them. Jesus had the right emotions for the right moment. And so we

have to do that because as we sold during a pandemic, people's emotions were

so far away from reality that we crashed our witness in many ways. So

it's really important we learned how to deal with how we feel. Number two,

we got to teach our children how to handle loss. You got to

handle how to lose, because if you have a child who never loses,

eventually when they get older, it will be bad. See, you want

your child to learn to hey, when you fail, it won't destroy you,

a loss is not the end of your life. You don't win everything

because you want your child to be able to maintain their witness in the midst

of a loss. Because what happens to those who never lose. They get

into a marriage and they have to win every single fight. And guess what

happens when someone wins every single fight. Someone gets a lawyer to fight for

them and the marriage breaks up because they never learned how to lose. They

never learned how to compromise, so they fight, fight, fight, fight

fight. When they lose their job, they're so devastated because they've never lost.

They turned to addictions and just blow their life up because they just never

learned that, Hey, sometimes life happens and you can't control it. We

gotta teach our kids it's okay we lose sometimes your pastor. Man, I'm

one of the biggest losers you will ever meet. I've taken the shot in

the big basketball game from the foul line that could have won the game,

and I've bricked it, and I was devastated. The girl all I came

up and gave me a big hug, so that was cool, and that's

when I learned. As some women just love losers. Some of y'all thought

to say amen. And then in an all star tournament, I throned the

pitch that could have won the game, but instead the person knocked the ball

out and we lost the game. My parents did a great job saying,

did you give it your best? Yeah? All right, that's all you

can do. Go back out there and fight again. And let me tell

you what that have resonated. That was such a great teaching because when I

went in the ministry, there's a lot of things I launched and went really

well, and there's a lot of things I've launched that has not gone well.

So here's what I do. When we launched ministries at this church,

here's what I do. I say, we're gonna try this for a while.

If it works great, If not, we'll try something else. I

tell you guys this all the time too. It's okay to fell around here.

It's okay not to be perfect. It's okay to mess up. We're

not going to have a perfect church. We're just trying to become a better

church. Okay. That's all. So you can blow it around here,

and it's okay. It's okay to talk about it. You don't have to

stuff it down and hide it because it's okay to lose. And we got

to teach our kids at it because we don't teach our kids that it will

blow their marriage up. Someday it will blow their career up. And here's

I think a great family verse. Proverbs twenty four to sixteen says, even

if good people fall seven times, they will get back up. They got

to know everybody's gonna mess up. This is what psychologists call resilience. Resilience

is one of the most important characteristics that you can teach a child and in

order for them to succeed as an adult. Resilience is learning just to get

back up again because there's no marriage, no career, no relationship will ever

survive without resilience. Lastly, today, families, if we teach our kids

how to control their emotions, we teach them how to learn it's okay if

we lose. But lastly, we got to teach our kids to value what

God values most. We got to teach our kids to value what God values

the most because let me tell you something, the world is going to try

to teach your kids. The world is going to try to teach your kids

what to value. The world teaches you, Hey, all that matters is

how you look images everything. It doesn't matter about your character. It's all

about how you look. Wrong. The world teaches you it's all about money.

The more money you have, the more important you are. The more

successful you are, the more significant you are. Wrong. The world teaches

you that life is about sex. Wrong. The world teaches you that the

more people that praise you, the more valuable you are. Wrong. And

we're learning these things from Instagram and Facebook, social media and movies and advertisements.

There's three basic temptations that every child needs to know about. Parents,

teach your child these three basic temptations because almost every temptation is going to come

under one of these three. Here's a good thing about Satan. He's entirely

predictable. They've been the same since the beginning of time. Sex salary,

status. Almost all our temptation is going to be of sex, salary or

status. Sex. Go get pleasure wherever you can. Life is about pleasure.

It's about sex or number two salary. Do everything you can to get

all the things you can on this earth. It's all about collecting goods materialism.

Number three status it's all about how important you are. And parents,

we've got to realize and grandparents these are false values. And every one of

us, every single day we're gonna we're gonna advertisements are gonna hit one of

these three temptations. But we have to understand that we have to be intentional

about teaching our kids. At Number one, sex is blessed by God through

marriage between a man and a woman. Number two, it's not about how

much salary you make, but it's about how much you give away and honor

the Lord. And when it comes to status, it's not about how important

you are. No, because the longer we follow Christ, the less we

become, and the more our life reflects Him, not our achievements. Now,

I'll tell you right now, I have a seventeen year old or eight

turn eighteen year old, and I can testify right now. They make all

their own decisions. You can do everything that I told you do today,

but they still have their own brains. What we're praying for is in the

long run, they will live the life to honors God. So how do

we help our family focus on the right things instead of fighting the wrong things?

As we close up today. Number One, we got to do this

through example. People, We got to do this through example. Did you

know that by the time of your child is five years old, they know

pretty much all their morals. They got it down, and from age six

to eleven they watch you live them out, and then from middle school to

high school they will live out their morals according to how they watched you live

out what you taught them. So by the time of kid is five years

old, they know right from wrong. They know that it is wrong to

lie, it is wrong to lie. But when they're about nine years old,

if things watch you pick up a phone one day and talk to your

boss and say, well, yeah, I'm sick, but your child knows

that you're not really sick, you just want a day off. Then your

child says, oh, yeah, it is wrong to lie unless it gets

me out of trouble. And then in high school they say it's wrong to

lie unless it gets me out of trouble, and then they live their life

like that. So we gotta live it by example number two, through conversations.

We got to talk to our kids, and lastly today through encouragement.

I don't know anybody who grows through criticism. We got to be the biggest

encouragers. Parents. I'm talking to you, grandparents. Grandparents, you got

to be the biggest encouragers to your children and your grandchildren. Be the biggest

encouragers because that's how people grow. Can And let me tell you, at

the end of the day today, I think we could all use some encouragement.

Some I'm gonna pray for you. Okay, let's pray. God.

We just come to you right now, and Lord, there's all of us

in this room and say, yes, Lord, we want a family that

honors you. We want a family that brings you glory. We want a

family that does the right things, that's blessed by you. But God,

it's hard. Lord. We need your mercy, we need your grace,

we need your head. For those of you here today who feel like the

teaching that I gave today you've totally missed in your life, today is day

to number one. Okay, let the pasco and start from today. Even

if you've got adult children, start today, Start worker in that relationship,

Start living out this example, start to encourage in love. And then for

those of you who have young children and the missing the anxiety into the day

to day complexities, simplify your life down to just a few things. I'm

going to teach my child this, and God, I just pray that you

will bless these young families. Help them not to become overwhelmed and feeling life.

They're just being flooded by all the anxieties of life. Love on them

and help our church surround them and be a blessing to them. Help us

to disciple their children as well. For all the grandparents in the room today,

God, we just give you praise, give you praise for their faithfulness

and their love. And got to just pray your anointing in your hand be

upon the grandparents today as they try to continue to lead their family. But

God, we just came uta and we say we need your help. Help

us become families and honor You and Jesus name.