"Wisdom for Parents" Proverbs 22:6 Sunday Morning Worship Service

There is perhaps nothing more important a person can do with their life than parenting.

Parenting is a stewardship.

God gives these little people to you, and they are the height of creation.

You go into the book of Genesis, and there's a sequence in Genesis.

God makes the world and he makes light and he makes the planets and he makes the oceans and the fish and the flora and the fauna and the bald eagle, even, and that's a majestic bird, isn't it?

And then all the other critters, and he's not done.

Then he makes people, human beings, Adam and Eve, and then he says, now it's very good.

Everything else just gets the good.

People, very good.

And the scripture says, they are made in the image of God.

Male and female, he made them.

That's what was very good.

It's that people are made in the image of God.

They're the height of creation.

And then God takes that height of creation that the angels clap at.

He takes the height of creation and gives a little one of those to you and your family.

And you strap them in the backseat of your car and you drive them home from the airport or the hospital.

I said airport first hour so many times, and I realize that's the hospital, but some we have adopted kids that maybe came from the airport, so there you go.

And you're driving home from the airport or the hospital, and the person's in your backseat, and you're like, oh my goodness, what is happening?

There's perhaps nothing greater than you can do.

After your relationship with the Lord, the way you're raising these little people in your house, God gives you these people to magnify his own glory.

That's why human beings are made, to magnify and to multiply his glory.

And God gives human beings the capacity to do that.

Only God can give life.

And yet we're made in the image of God, which means a hundred things.

There's a hundred ways you're in the image of God.

It's not one way, it's a hundred ways you're in the image of God.

But one of those ways is that only God can give life, and then you give life.

And I know animals reproduce, but animals don't, you know, rabbits make rabbits, but little rabbits aren't made by God for the purpose of delighting in magnifying and multiplying the glory of God with an eternal soul.

Only people do that.

And so you have this child strapped in the backseat of your car that is made by God to multiply and magnify his glory with a soul, a life that will never, ever, ever end.

Rabbits come and go, but that kid in your backseat is forever.

That's parenting.

And because it's so intrinsically tied to the image of God, of course, our world is hostile towards parenting, hostile towards families, hostile towards children.

You know, in the world's mindset, kids are uh sociological experiments.

Force your gender ideal ideology on them, your political ideology, use public schools to mold them into the contemporary narrative.

They are pawns for a larger issue.

There's nothing to do with magnifying the glory of God in them.

And it's not just the political gender craziness of our world, it's the whole kids are a hindrance idea that takes root in our world.

It's you know a growing movement of the dual-income no kids in our society.

People that get married and have two incomes but don't want kids.

And they write blog posts about it, they go on podcasts about how amazing life is, what vacations they can do, because they don't have other little people crowding their social schedule.

And in a sense, can you blame them?

I mean, kids are kind of an inconvenience.

They do mess up the next roughly 18 to 22 years of your life.

Yeah.

Keep going.

This is not an auction, Mark.

You know, having a kid is an expense.

It is an inconvenience.

It does interfere with your social schedule.

You gain weight, your body changes, you lose sleep.

And I'm talking about the dads.

On top of that, you have the so-called experts that make parenting increasingly complicated.

And I happen to notice that many of the so-called experts in parenting are childless.

And they become, you know, the nannies of parenting.

Do this, do that.

Your kids need to play this instrument at this age, this sport at that age.

Oh, they can't play, you know, wreck soccer, they have to play club soccer.

What do you want to do?

Ruin them?

They make parenting so expensive, so fraught with air.

If you do this, you wreck them.

If you do the other thing, you wreck them worse.

Parenting becomes so expensive.

Technology intervenes in your kids' lives and opens up their eyes, breaks down the horizon that used to be reserved for kids and brings everything immediately, I mean reserved for adults and brings everything immediately to them.

Technology makes kids anxious about how they measure up, makes kids depressed about they see the artificial world around them and they don't match it.

Makes kids distracted where they can't focus for 30 seconds without a video or without checking their phone.

They go to bed playing video games, they go to bed watching, you know, it used to be back in my day, you had to sneak downstairs to watch TV.

Oh, they right in their face in their room at all times, and so they're distracted.

And what do you call a kid, by the way, who is anxious about how he measures up, who is distracted because of technology, and who's depressed because of the artificial world around him?

Well, you call that kid ADHD, depressed, anxiety disorder, and there's medicine for all of that.

And kids become drugged because of their technology, drugged to cope with the technology they have rather than being parented.

As parents become so reliant on medication, it's very easy to see how our world throws up its hands and says, Me and my wife would rather just work and go to Tahiti.

Nevertheless, the Bible puts parenting out there as one of the most important things a person can do with their life.

Proverbs 14, 11 has some to say about this.

The house of the wicked will be destroyed, but the tent of the upright will flourish.

There's probably 20 things going on in this Proverbs that would be fun to draw your attention to.

But for now, I just want to contrast the house and tent.

House is something permanent.

House speaks of your family, house speaks of your legacy, what your kids inherit and your grandkids inherit.

Tent is not that.

Tent is so transient.

If you're living in your tent more than a month, then your house got hit by a hurricane, probably, honestly.

If you're in a tent for a year, then something went very wrong in life.

Unless you're an Israelite in the wilderness and something went very wrong, and buckle up for the next 39 years.

But notice the contrast.

The house of the wicked, it's gonna be over.

The wealth, the strength, the prosperity, the family of the wicked person at its strongest point is gonna be torn down.

But the righteous person, his tent, the righteous person at his lowest point, the righteous person at his weakest point is going to outlive and outprosper and have more joy and delight than the wicked person at his highest point.

This speaks of passing down joy through your family.

Joy of flourishing and blessing in your life.

This proverb shows you that some things matter more than each kid having their own bedroom.

Some things matter more than having enough money to get every kid on the right lacrosse team.

Some things matter more, namely the fear and delight in the Lord, the righteousness that brings flourishing to the world.

And that's the nature of all of the book of Proverbs.

Proverbs is a book of wisdom on how to live in the world.

And Proverbs has a lot to say about parenting, because parenting helps you live in accordance with the way God made the world.

I'll give you four truisms from Proverbs, four truisms about parenting from the book of Proverbs.

And we're gonna look at every proverb on parenting, from Proverbs chapter 11 through chapter 29 today.

Proverbs 11 · chapter mention

So that's scope, every proverb on parenting, we're gonna go through them fast.

You probably have your Bible open to Proverbs chapter 22, verse 6.

Proverbs 22:6

Train up a child in the way he should go.

When he's old, he won't depart from it.

We're gonna end back at that proverb.

But for now, let's start with this truism that parenting is joyful by design.

The book of Proverbs says a lot about parenting, and one of the most foundational things it teaches you is that parenting is joyful.

It's supposed to be fun.

Darn it.

God designed parenting to bring joy into your life.

That's because joy abounds through righteous people.

This is the truth taught by Proverbs 23, 24.

The father of the righteous will greatly rejoice.

He who fathers a wise son will be glad in him.

Now we'll look at this Proverb again in two weeks when we look at it from a child's perspective.

But from now, notice this idea that righteousness in the world makes you rejoice.

Righteousness in your home makes you greatly rejoice.

Proverbs uses fathers and mothers relatively interchangeably.

Sometimes they're paired against each other, but normally they're interchangeably ditto with sons and daughters.

Some temptations in Proverbs are more unique to sons, and Proverbs 31, of course, unique to women, so it's not always the case.

But in the parenting Proverbs, often, you know, a righteous mother is going to rejoice in righteousness in her daughter as much as a father and her son, is the idea.

Proverbs 15, 20 adds to that.

A wise son makes a glad father, but a foolish man despises his mother.

Notice that this is kind of a two-way street.

Righteousness in the home makes everybody in the home happy and glad.

Sin and sorrow in the home makes everybody in the home angry and despondent.

Now, this is true, by the way, I said earlier, this stuff is implying more to just parents because I know if you're here at church and you're single, maybe by choice or maybe not by choice, like you wish you were married.

Maybe you're married and you and your husband or wife have wanted kids and the Lord hasn't granted them to you.

I mean, I that's that's hard.

That brings because parenting is such a joy, there's such a you know a commensurate uh heartache to the other side of it.

I understand that.

So you need to pull your horizon a bit further and recognize that some of these joys are not confined to biological children, but the horizon extends.

I can think of so many people in our high school ministry or junior high ministry that are single, again, some by choice, some not by choice, that don't have kids, and so they're using their singleness, leveraging it to pour their life out into the kids in this church that are faithfully serving in Sunday school, Sunday after Sunday.

They're faithfully serving Wednesday night in the gym, which is a they should get war hazard pay for that, I'm telling you, Wednesday night in the gym.

I know people that have poured their life out.

Facilities, I have names in mind.

I don't see them, so I don't want to say their names without knowing they're here.

David and Laura Leach, that just slipped out.

They have spent their life working on making us a building and a facility that our children's ministry can can flourish in.

Like they're pouring out their lives for kids.

So you have to take this horizon and expand it.

And that's what the New Testament does, doesn't it?

The New Testament takes the creation mandate to have kids and multiply and expands it to go into all the world and make disciples.

And then these truths are true in that world also.

3 John verse 4 that have no greater joy than seeing my children walk in the faith.

And John is not talking about his biological children, he's talking about kids in the church.

And so I hope you understand that these truths about parenting apply also to people who do not have kids.

Again, some by choice, some not by choice.

The Lord still gives you capacity for joy in seeing the people you pour your lives into, delight in King Jesus.

There's no greater joy, John says in 3 John.

But that joy that John's talking about in the church is patterned off of the biological reality.

Proverbs 20, verse 7.

Proverbs 20:7

The righteous who walks in his integrity, blessed are his children.

It's so exciting to see your kids follow the Lord.

Grandchildren, Proverbs 17, verse 6, are a crown of the aged.

Proverbs 17:6

The glory of children is their fathers.

This goes back to what it means to be a, to have faith.

Abraham is the father of faith, isn't he?

Faith comes in a sense from him.

He's the pattern of faith, the source of the Abrahamic promise, the promise to the nations.

But Hebrews 11, verse 12, when it talks about that promise, says that Abraham had faith and took joy in his many descendants.

Hebrews 11:12

Remember the promise that this promise is for you and your offspring.

All who bless you will be blessed, all who curse you will be cursed, and you'll have offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky.

Hebrews 11 refers to that as all the people who come in faith.

Joy trickles down from Abraham to his children.

This is the way God gives grace to the world.

He gives grace in the midst of our sin through his son, by his spirit to us.

That grace then becomes our children's grace.

This is the promise, Peter says.

It is for you and your children.

Call on the name of the Lord, and you will be saved.

That grace is coming through, through the Son, by the Spirit, to the family.

Husbands and wives marry.

Together they become, they have the grace of life, Peter says.

That grace from God through the gospel enters the world through marriage and is multiplied to kids.

Now, of course, these kind of multiplication is, you know, the flip side of this is that as foolish son or sinful son makes his parents sad.

Makes his parents sad.

These promises of joy are limited, of course, by the faithfulness of kids.

Blessed are the children of the who are walking in integrity, but the flip side of that is sad.

I mean, Rehoboam did not bring Solomon joy.

In fact, Solomon has this lived out in his family.

Absalom did not bring David or Jesse, his grandfather, joy.

Hopefully, Solomon brought David and Jesse joy, but Absalom certainly didn't.

And so you recognize the double-edged sword.

Nevertheless, 17 verse 6.

Grandchildren are the crown of the aged.

As that joy goes from you to the next generation and the generation after that, what joy it is.

What joy it is.

And I hey you can even imagine a grandparent saying, you know, there's almost almost more joy in the grandkids because you figure out the mistakes with the kids.

You get round two with the grandkids.

Oh, grandparents, I tell you what.

Just bags of Skittles in the purse.

Mercy.

Parenting brings joy.

Psalm 37, verse 26.

Psalms 37:26

The righteous man has children who are a blessing.

Psalm 127, children are a heritage from the Lord, a reward that leads to blessing.

What joy God designed for the families to have through kids.

And yet, secondly, second truism.

Parenting can also be difficult.

Parenting can also be difficult.

It's difficult because of sin.

It's difficult because of sin.

Parenting is not all field days and orange slices.

There is difficulty and heartache because sin comes into the family.

If a righteous son brings joy to his family, of course, a foolish son brings heartache.

Proverbs 17, verse 2: a servant who deals wisely will rule over a son who acts shamefully and will share in the inheritance of one of the brothers.

This is another one of those Proverbs.

So you can look at this from 20 different categories.

Some people categorize Proverbs put this under working, put this under finance, put this under ethic, put this under discipleship.

There's 10 categories this could be under.

But one of them is certainly a family.

Because if you take a step back and ask, what's going on in a family?

Like try to imagine a family where the parents say we're not giving our inheritance to the child because of how wicked the kid is.

We're going to give it to the cousin, the neighbor, the nephew, the person we know from church, to the person the dad works with.

We're going to hand the family business not to my son, but to the intern we had 20 years ago who's grown up in it.

I mean, that's a real life scenario that happens a lot.

And I want you to just imagine the dynamic in the family when that kind of thing goes down.

It's not joy.

Telling the kid he doesn't get the house because he's squandering every opportunity he has in life does not make him smile.

And there is no shortage of examples of this in the Bible either.

Abraham wanted Eliezer to be his heir instead of Lot.

Because he could see through Lot.

Well, give it to the servant Eliezer.

Daniel was promoted over princes.

Solomon's own life probably had examples of this.

And yet, this proverb, it's not although it is literally true in lots of places, this proverb is given to you more proverbially.

There are sons who act shamefully, and they bring pain to the family, jealousy to the family, division to the family.

Proverbs 19, 13 says it this way: a foolish son is ruined to his father.

A wife's quarreling is like the continual dripping of rain.

And it's easy to dismiss this kind of proverb with a chuckle and a laugh.

But again, imagine the kind of family that has a son who is a punk and is pugnacious.

And it just wrecks his dad's life.

A daughter who is just obnoxious and makes everything difficult.

It makes the home, which should be a source of joy, a source of sorrow and difficulty.

And now imagine the husband coming home from work into that house where the kid is obnoxious and rebellious.

And how do you think the wife is about the kid who's obnoxious?

Well, she's upset at the kid, she takes it out on the husband.

And so it becomes like the continual dripping of rain.

What does that mean?

It's just background noise.

It just settles in as background noise.

That's the way the home life is.

It's supposed to be joyful, but instead of being joyful, there's just the constant background noise of a wife who's upset about her kids, the dad who's wrecked by the kids, and that's just the noise at home for the rest of their life.

Proverbs recognizes that reality.

Charles Bridges, the Puritan, wrote a wonderful commentary on Proverbs, has this to say about this verse, and I'm quoting him because there's no way you could get away with saying this today.

He says, quote, the rebellious son can at least be thrown out of the house, but the wife, the husband will have to endure forever.

Third, training and instruction.

Training in instruction.

Parenting is all about training.

The verse you have open in front of you, Proverbs 22, verse 6.

Proverbs 22:6

Train up a child in the way he should go.

That's the active role a parent should play.

The activity that parents do.

What are they positively doing?

They're training up their kids in righteousness.

It doesn't say be a mama bear and go after any teacher that gives them an A-.

Nope.

It doesn't say make sure he gets in the best team, make sure he gets in the front of the line, make sure he gets every opportunity afforded to them.

Nope, not your job.

No mama bearing here.

Your job is to train the child.

That's your job.

Train him up in the way that he should go.

And when he's old, I'll put it on the screen if you don't have your Bible open.

He will not depart from it.

Now, at this point, it is worth pulling the car over just for a minute here and telling you something that I think should be obvious, but it's it's worth repeating.

Proverbs are not promises, they're not money-back guarantees, they're not scientific principles for you to do detective work.

That's not the way Proverbs works.

Proverbs are, believe it or not, Proverbs are Proverbs.

They're wisdom.

That's generally true.

So if you see somebody with a rebellious kid, an obnoxious kid, a wayward kid, whatever, you cannot take Proverbs 22, 6 and reverse engineer it and go, oh, they they must have parented that kid wrong.

I bet see that kid who's see that kid who grew up to be a miscreant?

Oh man, I bet they didn't have family devotions.

That's not the way Proverbs works.

Nor can you use it proactively, where you say, if I do family devotions, my children will not turn out to be miscreants.

Nope, also doesn't work that way.

It is rather a general principle.

It's given to you, parents and prospective parents, to know I should train up my kids because generally speaking, grace flows down and joy flows down, and happiness and delight flows down that way.

Generally speaking, it is in that sense a proverb.

Now, it's proverbial more than just that.

The word train here requires effort and requires diligence.

Training is an active word.

Training breaks a sweat.

I don't with my soccer team.

I don't like saying we have practice this day in that day.

We have training sessions because you should be, you should hurt afterwards.

It's designed to be difficult.

That's training.

That's training in every area of life.

If you go to the gym to train, you should not just like waltz back out of there to your car and have a milkshake.

It's supposed to be hard.

And that's true with parenting.

Training is pruning, it is cutting back branches, it is shaping the plant, shaping the tree.

It requires diligence.

Now, this training, notice that it says, train him up in the way he should go.

This is training about God.

This is training about worldview.

This is training about righteousness, morality, the fear of the Lord, gospel.

That's what you're training him.

It is less about what fork to use for salad, and more about what to believe about God.

Obviously, wisdom engages with how you make friends, how you cross the street without getting hit by a car.

I mean, that's all part of it.

But more importance than those things is how to think about God.

Theological principles, that God is sovereign, the characters, characteristics of God, that he is holy, that he is a judge.

The gospel, that Jesus takes our sin and dies for it and offers forgiveness through the resurrection of Christ.

Those are the things your kid needs.

Worldview about sin and the wages of sin and anthropology, how people are sinful and rebel against God, and they form a worldview around those theological truths that keep exalting God.

Theological principles are a life vest to kids that are drowning in the world.

Kids are drowning in society.

They're drowning in the moral abyss that is out there.

And what will rescue them is the life vest of theology: how to think about God, how to understand the sovereignty of God, how to exalt the Lord.

That's what they need.

Now, I teach a parenting class, by the way, on Wednesday nights, which is starting again this semester.

That's my little plug.

Sign up for parenting class.

But we spend like eight weeks on this one point.

What does this kind of training look like?

I'll do it in two minutes right here.

You see this kind of training normally in discipleship, like just the as you're going through life.

Think of Deuteronomy 6.

You shall teach them diligently to your children.

You shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise.

That's when you do these kind of things.

When you think through the language of Deuteronomy 6, there's one way of taking Deuteronomy 6 and saying it, that means you're always doing it.

Okay, but drill down a little bit closer in Deuteronomy 6.

What when are you doing it in Deuteronomy 6 again?

Not quite always.

When you get up, when you go to bed, when you're going places, and when you're eating.

That's the four categories in Deuteronomy 6.

What are those all about?

Those are things you do every day.

Deuteronomy 6 is talking, you're this discipleship that I'm talking about, this training, it's less in like a formal time, like now commenceth the training time.

It's more like as you're just doing stuff.

This is minivan time, like you're driving to Trader Joe's and the kids are in the backseat and you see something and you talk to your kids about what that says about God and what that says about man.

You're sitting down for dinner, which is normal, and you can do the structured if you want at dinner.

Like today we're going to talk about this, but you can also do the unstructured.

Just have a conversation about the Lord while you're eating.

And while you're going to bed.

And kids love to talk about these things when they're going to bed.

I mean, little kids become like full-on theologians at bedtime.

Like they've been reading Calvin all day.

You know, you're tucking them in, they're like, Dad, quick question.

How is God sovereign and people have free will?

What?

If God made angels and the devil is an angel, did God make the devil?

Did Adam have a belly button?

And it's followed with like, could Spider-Man beat Superman?

And you're like, okay, this is calibrating what kind of answer I'm giving you right now.

That's just your normal life, is the point.

You have these conversations not just at discipleship time, but at discipline time.

When they're being spanked.

Not every kid is like this, but many kids have a very soft heart at spanking time.

They will listen to anything.

They will memorize the Ten Commandments if it gets them out of spanking right now.

You know, where you're the reason you're getting spanked is because you sinned.

You disobeyed.

Sin brings pain into the world.

The spanking teaches you that sin causes pain.

Ultimately, our sin is paid for by Jesus when he dies on the cross.

You can have your sins forgiven by going to Christ and asking for his forgiveness.

The consequences of sin still remain in the world in the form of the spanking.

And let's pray to God after the spanking for you to have forgiveness.

That's just normal worldview-forming gospel arc conversations at discipline time.

And the third time, you have these kind of conversations of discipleship at discipline.

Third time is at devotionals.

I would strongly encourage parents, I know this is baby dedication Sunday, I'd strongly encourage parents to have family devotions with your kids.

It does not have to be a church service.

You don't have to spend an hour of your lunch break making a three-point outline.

It can be so simple.

You sit down, you read a paragraph from a gospel, you read a chapter from the Old Testament, or that's an or here.

Read a psalm, read something from the Bible, as short as your age group allows.

And then ask a question.

What does this teach you about God?

And then pray for them.

If you're doing that regularly, your kids are going to be trained in the way of righteousness.

It doesn't have to be complex.

You want to throw a little song in at the end?

Extra credit for that.

Again, every family is going to be different.

Every family has their own rhythms.

Every family has between dad and mom how that happens, their own differences.

Every family's different.

I don't have a prescription for you, just a challenge for you to have some form of regular devotional life.

And if you want to go to extra credit here, Proverbs 23 says, apply your heart to instruction and your ear to words of knowledge.

And this is a proverb that is written about parenting.

Proverbs 23 is aimed at parents.

The context is parenting.

You want to be an effective parent.

Apply your own heart to instruction.

The instruction you take in trickles down to your kids.

And again, you're teaching your kids about man, about God, and about the world.

You're preparing them for the world.

You're teaching them God made the world in some way, and you want to live in accordance with that way.

And if you go against it, it hurts.

And if you're wise, you're doing that.

Fourth, discipline for correction.

You're training for instruction and you're disciplining for correction.

Now let me say this right away.

It is so common for new parents to have so much fear about doing something wrong parenting.

It is.

I hear new parents ask these kind of questions all the time.

Like, you know, when do we start thinking about preschool?

And if we do it wrong, we wreck up, we you know, we wreck their whole life.

Do we teach what age for what instruments?

What age for what sports teams, and blah, blah, blah, blah.

If they're not in Pee-wee baseball by age six or whatever, they're ruined.

And I'm just thinking, like, kids biologically cannot play baseball at age six.

They cannot do it.

They can't do soccer at age six either.

My goodness, have you watched six-year-olds play soccer?

Wow.

They switched sides at halftime, and I'm like, I didn't even know which way they're going the first half.

But there is such fear with parents that if they don't do all of these things the right way, they're gonna break their kids.

Let me tell you what will harm your kids.

This is this is kind of the secret of the book of Proverbs, the parenting.

There's nothing you do that will harm your kids.

What will harm your kids is your lack of involvement.

Like you abdicating discipline, that will harm your kids.

Yeah, I don't think I've ever encountered a family in all of my ministry where the parents who are operating with good faith and integrity, I'm there's wicked parents that do evil things to kids.

I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about parents that are operating with good faith and good intentions.

They're not gonna do something that messes up their kids.

God gave the kid to you, He gave you wisdom, they're yours, He gave you a mind after the Lord.

You know, don't listen to experts.

Raise your kids.

You know, you're not gonna break them.

But what would you not gonna break them because they come out of the box broken?

You know, they come back from the airport or the hospital broken.

Like they're that's their default setting.

You know, that's just where they're at.

They love sin, that's the starting point.

What will hurt them though is lack of discipline.

Proverbs 13, 24.

Whoever spares the rod hates his son.

I mean, can it be any more clear than that?

He who loves him is diligent to discipline him.

And it is so common to hear parents say, I don't discipline for a hundred reasons.

I I love my kids too much to spank them, and Proverbs just flips that around.

You know, I hear parents saying, Spanking doesn't work for my kids.

They get so upset when they get spanked.

I put that under the category of working.

You know, it just uh my kid asks, how come I get spanked when I hit my brother, but spanking is basically hitting me, so I don't know how to answer that, so that's why we don't spank.

That's a real moral quandary, isn't it?

Here's a good one.

Proverbs 23, 13.

Don't withhold discipline from a child.

If you strike him with a rod, he will not die.

Yeah, he might disagree with that proverb, right?

I'm gonna die.

No, you're not.

Scripture is filled with parents who refuse this, filled with examples.

Eli becomes a laughing stock in his lifetime because he wouldn't discipline his kids.

By 1 Samuel 4, you're laughing at Eli.

What a joke.

He loved his kids too much to discipline them.

Obviously, parenting isn't only discipline, or you would exasperate your child.

Of course, your life shouldn't just be consistently always marked by only discipline.

Obviously not.

Obviously, you don't hurt your children when you're disciplining them.

You know, abusing your child means you belong in jail.

I'm not talking, get rid of those, I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about parents that love their kids, should discipline and spank their kids.

People use it for all kinds of the rod for all kinds of different reasons.

Here it says, don't withhold it.

It's used for discipline.

Some people use it for counting, for threatening.

You know, if you don't do this now, you'll get a spanking.

Don't make me count two, three, two and a half.

The rod is not for counting, it is for spanking.

And consider the alternative, Proverbs 19, 18.

Discipline your son, for there's hope.

Don't set your heart on putting him to death.

There's more mercy in discipline than there is mercy in apathy.

Look at the verse, Proverbs 19:18.

Proverbs 19:18

There's a season for discipline.

There's a moment for it.

Well, there's hope.

You know.

Soon hope will be gone.

Soon the kid will be too old to spank.

People often ask, what age should you stop spanking?

And my advice for that has always been the same.

When they are little, when they are like, you know, little kids, elementary school, I would say spank them so often at that age that by the time they get old enough to remember it, their work is done here.

You know, when it comes to when the memory kicks in, they they remember they were spanked when they were kids, but the details get kind of fuzzy after that.

You know, you're not shouldn't be spanking middle school kids or high school kids.

You should be doing the work at the early age.

That's my advice.

You can disagree with it or not, but do the work early.

Plow the field while there's hope, man.

That's what Solomon says.

Plow the field while there's hope.

Before the patterns are set, you're driving foolishness from them.

Proverbs 22, 15.

Folly is bound up in the heart of a child.

The rod of discipline drives it far from him.

Your child comes to you as a sinner, that sin needs to be driven from him.

The rod is given to you to correct the heart.

It is not given to atone for sin.

I had a parent a few years ago tell me, you know, like every tenth spanking, I spank myself so that my kid learns the idea that I'm taking their sin for them and becomes a pattern for Jesus.

And like, no, no, please no.

It's weird, firstly, but also spanking is not atonement.

Spanking is not atonement.

Jesus provides atonement.

Spanking is correction of the heart.

It's helping the child realize that they are a sinner.

That's what spanking does.

It doesn't end with that.

You tell the child, you're at the grocery store, all right?

The kid asks for candy and you say no, and the kid throws a fit or whines or complains, then when they get home, they're gonna get spanked.

And so next time they're at the grocery store, your behavior correction, okay?

Can I have candy?

No.

And they're there's the battle.

You see it in their eyes.

They're like, Mommy dearest, why not?

And they're working on it.

Now, the point of this is not behavior correction, the point of this is the next conversation.

The reason for this banking is because you're disobeying.

You're disobeying because you are greedy and you are jealous and you are complaining.

Where does that come from?

So that in the moment of temptation, the next time you're at the store and they want this, they're working through it in their heart and you're helping them recognize this is where this action is at in your heart.

Why do you want it so bad?

Where's this coming from?

They realize, oh, I'm a sinner.

See how spanking gets you there?

And now they realize they're a sinner and it's preparing their heart for the gospel at a young age.

Proverbs 23:14, if you strike him with a rod, you will save his soul from Sheol.

Proverbs 23:14

Solomon is not saying the rod is salvific, he is saying that it prepares the child to receive the gospel.

And failure to do this causes harm.

Listen, Solomon understood the Davidic covenant better than anybody else.

David was his dad.

He understands that the spanking doesn't save a kid, but spanking does prepare their heart to see their own sin and hope in a savior.

Proverbs 29, verse 15.

Proverbs 29:15

So discipline your son.

He'll give you rest.

He'll delight in your heart.

This is at a worldly level?

You know the family that doesn't discipline has the kid throwing fits in the stores, has the kid interrupting all the time, interrupting all the time, and it makes life very, very difficult.

So you discipline to fix that, but that's not what there's part of that.

That's not where Solomon terminates.

He goes beyond that to delight and joy and wisdom.

Now believe me, there are no perfect parents in this world.

There are no perfect parents.

So if you're a parent and you've messed this up, join the club, huh?

I mean, Solomon raised Raya Bohem.

All right.

There's no perfect parent.

I had to ask my oldest daughter for forgiveness last night because I was a jerk to her.

Like I understand there is no perfect parents.

We sin, and so we lived out that same gospel towards our kids.

We asked forgiveness in the same way.

Nevertheless, in our fallen worlds, God gives joy to parents.

He gives joy to families.

Now, if you are a child of God, understand these four points apply to you.

The Lord disciplines those whom he loves.

Are you going through trial right now?

I hope you delight in it because the Lord is doing it to show you that he loves you.

And you can go back beyond that.

The Lord gives you his word to train you.

You can go beyond that.

You need training because sin wrecks you.

You can go beyond that, that God made you to magnify his glory.

You were made for joy.

Sin enters the world, wrecks your joy.

You now have a hard life because of sin.

The Lord saves you through training you in righteousness through faith in his word, and now disciplines you to present you mature and spotless and faultless before the throne of grace.

This goes forward and backwards for every believer, whether or not you have kids.

I hope God seals these truths in your heart.

Lord, we're grateful that the gospel lives us out.

We're thankful for the joy of kids.

Even the crying in the worship center gives us our own joy.

Our church is alive and vibrant, and we're grateful for that.

Take these truths, seal them in our heart.

Help us delight in your discipline.

It reminds us that we are your children.

We give you thanks in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, ibc.church.

If you want more information about the Master Seminary or our location here in Washington, D.C., please go to tms.edu.

Now, if you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.