Parents as Mediators of Blessing

Morning.

Today's text is from the book of John, chapter 17, verses 6 through 19.

John 17:6–19

I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world.

Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word.

Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you, for I have given them the words that you gave me, and they have received them and have come to know in truth that I came from you, and they have believed that you sent me.

I am praying for them.

I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours.

All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I am glorified in them, and I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you.

Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.

While I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given me.

I have guarded them, and not one of them has been lost, except the Son of Destruction, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.

But now I am coming to you, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves.

I have given them your word, and the word has hated them.

The world has hated them, because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.

I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.

They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.

Sanctify them in the truth, your word is truth.

As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world, and for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.

This is the word of the Lord.

This is a sermon series on parenting.

And we have a uh object lesson right here.

All right.

Thanks for joining us uh this morning.

It's great to see you all.

My name is James Rathman, I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

And uh this is our sixth sermon in our series called The Christian Home.

And this morning we are continuing the theme of parents as priests in the home.

This is our second Sunday on Parents as Priests in the Home.

Uh, before we get into our text today, would you pray with me?

Holy Father, we praise you because you have worked this incredible miracle of reconciling us to yourself.

Lord, we praise you that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Such is your love towards us, Lord.

Father, we pray that as we gather together this morning, Lord, that your name would be glorified, and that you would be glorified in our praise of you.

You'd be glorified in the proclamation of your word.

You'll be glorified in our songs of praise towards you.

You would be glorified in the administration of your sacrament, Lord.

Lord, we pray that as you are glorified, Lord, that you would work in our hearts to transform our hearts more and more into the image of your Son.

Lord, we praise you for the incredible gifts that we have received.

We praise you for the gifts of one another.

Lord, for the gifts of our families and our children and spouses, Lord, for the gifts of our friends.

Father, we praise you for all that we've received from your hand, which is unthinkably glorious, Lord, and wonderful.

Father, as we consider these wonders that you have given us, Lord, we confess our ingratitude for them and are taking them for granted, Lord.

We pray that you would look past that.

And Lord, that you would instead transform our hearts so that we might be able to see with fresh eyes that you give us, that you would remove our blindness, so that we would be able to see and receive with gratitude the wonderful gifts that you have given to us, especially and most wonderfully, the gift of your Son, Jesus Christ.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So as we've been moving through this series, we've looked at how it is that uh we are formed by our families, and that rather than thinking of individuals or as families as being the types of things that are just composed of individuals, or perhaps not rather than, but alongside thinking of families as the types of things that are composed of individuals, we should also think of individuals as the types of things that are composed by families, that we are formed by the families that we are a part of.

And that God has, in his sovereign good pleasure, placed us into the particular families that he has placed us into.

And that means we receive the wonders and the glories of the families that we are a part of, along with the difficulties and the challenges of the families that we are a part of.

God intended the family to be the sort of the incubator, the place of formation for the hearts of his people.

And that in this place of formation, that our families would be guided towards the eternal things, the glorious blessings that we receive from him most completely towards eternal life in his son, Christ Jesus.

But of course, sin has corrupted our families.

And just as sin has corrupted our ourselves and our own hearts, we are corrupted by sin, and our families are corrupted by sin as well.

So one of the refrains that I've liked to come back to is that if you were to ask any of the Bible characters in their 40s how their family is going, you would hear wild stories of what's taking place in their families.

You would hear stories of uh Jacob and Esau, who just still can't get along.

I can't believe this is my brother.

We have nothing in common.

He's hairy, I'm smooth.

And this is the smallest of our differences, although still barely surmountable.

You would ask Joseph, how are things going with your family?

And he would say, Well, what family are you talking about?

My my immediate family, my wife and two sons, things are going great.

And be like, Yeah, what about your father and brothers?

How are they doing?

And he'd be like, Well, let me introduce you to my son, forget where I came from.

That's what I named him.

I named him Forget Where I Came From.

Does that answer your questions?

That's uh something that we might hear from these Bible characters.

And you and you might answer the same way.

You might answer just the same way.

But the Lord, in seeing the brokenness of families, he did not stand back and say, you know what, this pattern of family being the place of blessing, which now we see a pattern of family being a place of cursing.

I'm going to get rid of the pattern of family.

And I'm just going to say, that was a mistake.

I shouldn't have oriented these things this way.

You know, now if one of them fell, if just the head fell, they all fell.

I'm going to get rid of that pattern of the way that families work.

The Lord doesn't do that.

The Lord does not allow sin to come in and remove the goodness of his intentions for creation.

He saw that it was good.

And so when the Lord redeems creation, he does not get rid of his old way of doing things.

Instead, he says, I'm going to bring this back into the position of function.

When the Lord Jesus heals someone, he does not say, it was such a it was so painful for you to live that life of blindness for so long, surrounded by a world that was structured around sight.

So instead, I'm going to no longer structure the world around sight when I redeem it.

That's not what he says.

Instead, he restores the man's eyes.

He brings them back into the position of function so that it might be healed.

The Lord does this with our hearts towards him by grace alone.

This ethical failure that we have made towards him, the Lord restores on our behalf through the sacrifice of his son, Jesus Christ.

That restoration means that we have a hope for the restoration of all things.

And that includes the family.

And so we should not look at our families and think this is too far gone, this can't be restored.

We should look at our families and think this will be the very site of the miracle.

And one of the things that I want to encourage us in is that this same hope that you have for yourself, the hope that you have for yourself in the eyes of the Lord, yourself before the Lord Jesus Christ, that he would work this work of redemption, that you might extend that hope even to your families.

And that in that extension of hope it would be faith, not in some, not in some magical wisdom or some something that you're able to accomplish perhaps within your families, but it is, it is a hope in Jesus Christ, in his work of redemption.

And that by that hope we might structure the families that we are a part of.

The way that the Lord describes the ethical realities for families is mostly from parents to children.

That's where most of the commands lie, from parents to children, the requirements of how to be parents to children.

So that's the shape that this sermon series has taken.

That we are looking mostly at this dynamic of how can we be parents who parent children, or what would that look like to have parents that parent children where their homes are shaped towards this original intention, which is that the ends of their homes are those highest ends that we are oriented towards the eternal things in our Lord Jesus Christ.

So we've looked at how it is that Jesus is the pattern for this.

Jesus in the church is the pattern for how we ought to parent.

We saw that we parent by the promises of God.

That God has promises for our children, the promises for you and for your offspring and for all those who are far off.

This morning it's been laid on my heart, and partly it's because of this week.

I was talking with Megan beforehand, and I was like, huh, I'm preaching on parenting this week.

And I give myself like a B.

That's so generous.

For uh what that's looked like this week.

And you think, like, man, they I'm facing problems or see these issues, and I'm like, man, how could we ever restore this?

How could this ever be restored?

And I'm sure many of you are coming in thinking that same way or feeling that same way with regards to your homes, your households, or your uh family of origin.

And the way that we can have hope in those situations is we remember the promises of God towards us.

Because you experience that same thing in your own Christian life, where you recognize a pattern of sin and you are shocked that this is still present, you know, or you can't believe that you fell into this pattern again.

And then where do you turn in a situation like that?

The only place to turn in a situation like that is towards the promises of God.

This is what sustains us.

That the Spirit applies the promises of God to our hearts.

And so that's what I want to encourage us to do this morning as we look at the ways in which Christ applies these promises to us.

We've looked at how Christ models the perfect parent because he is the perfect prophet, priest, and king.

And these are ways of, these are aspects of the offices of being a parent.

That we are prophets to our children, we are priests to our children, and we are kings to our children.

We've looked at the office of prophet, and the importance of the office of prophet is that we tell our children the story that they are in.

This is your role as parents.

And the story that they are in is the story of the Bible.

That they are those sinners who fell, and they are the ones who God saw fit to by his grace send his son that they might be redeemed to him, and that by faith in Jesus Christ they might have eternal life.

This is the story that our children are in.

And we are to tell them that story.

And then we've moved on to looking at how we are to be priests to our children.

In the summary of last week's sermon, the one thing that I wanted you to take away from last week's sermon is how are you priests to your children?

You pray for them.

You pray for your children.

That is that is the that's it.

That's the whole sermon from last week.

You don't even have to go listen to it if you missed it.

Pray for your children.

Pray for your children.

This week, we are looking at this second aspect that I want to highlight of our role as priests in the home for our children, and that is we are to mediate blessing to our children.

We are to be mediators of blessing to our children.

This is the central role of the priests.

The central role of the of the priestly office is to be a mediator of blessing.

In Numbers 6, 22 through 27, the Lord instructs Moses what the uh line of Aaron, what Aaron's sons, these priests, are meant to tell the people of Israel.

How as priests are they to bless, how are they to mediate this blessing to the priests of Israel?

And it's it's called the Aaronic Blessing.

And you've probably heard me they make this joke before, but I like to say of it, isn't it ironic?

Don't you think?

A little too ironic.

And I really do think.

Numbers 6, 22 through 27, the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, Thus shall you bless the people of Israel.

You shall say to them, and this is familiar, the Lord bless you and keep you.

The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.

The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

So shall they put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them.

God tells them, tells the priests, you are to speak blessing over my people.

And by speaking this blessing over my people, I will bless them.

So here's the central theme of this.

Uh if last week was just pray for your kids.

This week is speak blessing over your children, and God will bless them.

You know, like how do you bless something?

Like, what do what do we do to bless something?

Like, do you need some sort of magical spell, incantation, magic words, and then it is blessed.

You bless things.

You know, like when you pray and then somebody was in the bathroom and they they sit down and you're like, don't worry, the food's already blessed.

You can jump right in.

You can just pray.

Just sort of like a magical way of thinking of our prayers, like it's blessed, we cast the right spells.

Whenever I marry someone, I always ensure them, don't worry, I will cast the proper spell, and you will leave the stage married.

But that's of course not what it is.

This is not some magic in the words, although there is a wonder in the words.

So here's so what's happening, what's happening there?

Why is it that just by speaking over our children, blessing, we can bless them?

Well, it works the same way that it worked for the sons of Aaron when they spoke this blessing over their people.

What they were trusting was this promise of God, which is that when you bless them in this way, he says, and I will bless them.

God, of course, is the one who does the blessing.

God is the one who does the blessing.

But the wonder of God towards us, one of the many wonders of God towards us, is that he loves to include us in the work that he is doing.

He likes to say, come on out here, I'm fixing the door, you can hold the flashlight.

And he and he we when he has us hold the flashlight, he doesn't even freak out at us.

You know?

But he likes to include us so that we are a part of the blessing.

You know, we we don't we don't need our kids to help us with the little projects around the house.

We we can take care of it on our own.

Oftentimes we could probably be more efficient in our taking care of it on our own, but we desire to include them because we want them to see these things.

We want them to participate in the in the joy of the of these things that we bring them in to be a part of.

And our Lord is the same way.

Now we might think, now, what is it though?

Like it this sounds like the priestly role just became the prophetic role, because the prophetic roles were we're just supposed to tell them things, tell them who they are.

And of course, these offices they do blend together a lot because the the priests often do kingly things.

The priests distribute gifts, that's a kingly thing.

They speak over the people, they speak blessing over the people, that feels like a prophetic thing.

Sometimes the priests take up swords and they go and kill uh enemies of God's people.

That seems very kingly to me.

But all these offices we should think of as not like uh hermetically sealed off from one another.

They're different perspectives on what the Lord does for us and how the Lord perfectly fulfills these offices for us.

So perhaps to make this a little more simple, a little more accessible, there's this wonderful little book that Blake Arnsdorf recommended to me.

I think I'm saying that right.

And he said uh there your name is like a Rorschach test.

There's no way we we just express our personalities by the way that we say your last name.

Could be anything.

The book is called A Man as Priest in His Home.

Uh it's by uh uh another pastor named Samuel E.

Waldron.

And it's got this great picture of a Puritan family and the father standing up and praying.

And my wife saw it and she said, Is that like a horror book?

Which just shows like Puritans in our culture are exclusively used for horror settings.

That is, I don't know, it's definitely a psyop that runs very deep because these are like the most joyful, happy people to ever populate our, you know, the new world.

But we, when we tell their stories, it's like horror stories.

So I don't know, you know, it's complicated out here.

In that book, he says this in one sense, there's nothing very mysterious about how we are mediators of divine blessing to our families.

The force of our parental example, character, and life bring that blessing.

So, how are you a mediator of blessing to your family?

Well, it it's everything.

It's everything you do for them is a mediator, is being a mediator of blessing to your family.

And I want to consider that and I want us to sort of seek like to embody this and to sort of have this new category for yourselves.

I want to be a blessing to my children.

I want them to be blessed that I was their parent.

And the way that we do that, it's it's the force of our parental example, our character, and life brings that blessing.

So last week we saw we pray.

This week we say we we bless, we speak blessing over our children.

We are being a blessing to our children.

Now, I wanted to look for this.

I wanted to look at Christ as the model high priest.

Christ as the model priest for us.

And of course, the things that Christ does as a priest for us are different than how we are parents to our children.

I don't give myself as a once-for-all sacrifice for their sins.

That would be inefficient, and they would still be dead in their trespasses and sins, no matter how much faith they would put in that sacrifice.

I don't stand at the right hand of the Father and intercede for them.

I can't point to my wounds and say, look, they are justified in my presence.

But in Christ's priestly office, we can see that by analogy, he is perfectly fulfilling the office of a priest.

And I want to see what he does for his children, what he does for the people who are his people.

That's what we ought to do for the people who are our people, for our children.

In John 17, so the there are three things that I want us to see that Christ does.

The first is he receives, he receives his children as a gift.

Second is he keeps them, he keeps them as his own.

And the third is he gives them.

He gives them back to the Father.

Receive, keep, give.

This is how we might be a blessing to our children.

John 17, 6 through 7, this is a part of Jesus' high priestly prayer.

And he prays this in front of the disciples on behalf of the disciples as this prayer of intercession to the Father before he goes to the cross.

In verses 6 through 7, he says, I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world.

Yours they were, and you gave them to me.

And they have kept your word.

Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you.

The first thing I want us to recognize that Christ does in his office of a priest for us in this prayer, first thing that I want us to see that's analogous to us as parents is he receives those who are given to him as a gift of God.

See, those who you're called to be a blessing.

Two, the first thing that I want you to recognize is that you are blessed by them.

They are a blessing to you.

They are a gift to you.

Your children are a gift of God to you.

You are a gift of God, a blessing to your parents as a child.

In Psalm 127, verse 3, it says, Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb, a reward.

Psalms 127:3

One of the greatest ways that we can bless our children is to treat them as a blessing.

To remember that these are glorious things to receive.

This is a beautiful reward to receive from the Lord.

It is a beautiful, it is a wonderful thing to have children and to receive children.

This is a beautiful and glorious gift of the Lord.

This means that we should consider our children.

One way we can make the word blessing, I think, more accessible for us is we can use the word happy.

You should use the word this is helpful.

You know, like when you read the Beatitudes, it's like happy are the poor in spirit.

If you're blessed, you're happy about it.

You're glad to be blessed.

That's one of the things that it's that blessed means.

So that means our children are not in the way of happiness.

Our children are not received as those things which stand in the way of our ability to be happy.

You know, there's all sorts of studies on uh the on the effect of children on happiness in a parent's life.

And speaking of Rorschach tests, they're just like uh a description of what the person doing the study thinks, you know?

And it's like people find that uh uh when parents have have children that their happiness declines.

They have less happiness compared to like the uh person who has no children, and we ask them, like, are there in their happiness is more, more happiness.

So what you should do, you should not have children in order to cultivate happiness.

But this is this completely misses the point because it what it what it neglects is there are two aspects of happiness.

There are the thing itself, and then there's our ability to receive it.

You know, God gives us lots of gifts, lots of good things, but in order to receive it as a good thing, your heart has to be transformed.

You have to be able to enjoy it.

There's uh this is the wonder of what needs to be worked in our hearts.

God has surrounded us with good things.

And often the issue is our hearts do not have the ability to receive them with joy.

But we are given the ability to receive them with joy by the work of the Spirit.

So we are to receive our children with joy, and we should bless our children by letting them know we are blessed by them.

Our children should know that, man, my mom and dad love having me as a child.

They are so thankful for me.

They think I am a blessing.

Our children should think things like, I think my parents think too much of me.

They should have thoughts like that.

Maybe not, you know, when they're little.

When they're little, they should be like, yeah, my parents think probably about the right amount.

But as they get older and reflect, they should think like, my mom's like foolish the way that she talks about me.

She thinks I'm so wonderful.

She thinks I'm so great.

My dad's absurd with how proud of me he is.

Like I have I have grown to the level of like a regular dude.

And he it's it's absurd how proud he is of me.

You know, this should be the disposition.

And the reason is because they should understand and know uh my parents have received me as a blessing from the Lord.

Because that's the truth.

That's what the scriptures say.

So when we don't receive our children as a blessing from the Lord, and there are times when it's late and you're tired, and you you can't figure out how to get through to this one child, and there's all you're trying to give them is things that would be great for them, and they're they're treating you like a terrorist.

This is times where it's like, this is the blessing from the Lord?

This is this is the this is a blessing?

Yes, this is the blessing.

This is the blessing from the Lord.

You have to be able to receive it that way.

Consider speaking that ironic blessing over your children.

How can we say, the Lord, how can you say to your child, the Lord, make his face to shine upon you?

If your children's experience of your face is not one that's shining upon them.

If your children's experience of your face is they're hunting for criticism, if your children's experience of your face is, I'm probably going to be reminded, first of all, of something that I've done wrong.

That will be my first initial, that will be my initial interaction with my parents.

No, though how how will your children know God's face shines upon me?

God is delighted when he sees me.

If their experience of their own parents' face was not delight when you saw them.

So how do we do that then?

Well, well, sometimes you just sometimes you hear things in in the scripture and it's like, well, you just do it.

You you light up your face when your children enter the room.

You light up and give them attention.

You delight in them, you enjoy them.

You sh you make your face to shine upon him.

And sometimes you'll have to make your face to shine upon them.

And you should.

It's not inauthentic to do that.

It's not like some violation, it's not some hypocrisy, it's not putting on a face, it's obedience.

It's obedience.

And then when you practice that obedience, what you'll find is you will be able to delight in your children.

The Lord will honor that, he will give you that, he will transform you.

The Lord does not look at your obedience and say, no, no, that's insufficient.

Wait till it's wait till it's better obedience.

He sees your obedience and he delights to make it sufficient in Christ.

He delights to do that.

And so you should make your face shine upon your children.

You should light up when you see your children.

The lighting up, just some practical advice, the lighting up will be different for boys and girls.

Um John Khrushchev gave me this great podcast a while ago that was uh a Doug Wilson parenting podcast, and he was talking about the differences between boys and girls and how we bless them in this way.

And he said, you know, boys, uh well, he says, look at the scripture's instruction for husbands and wives.

It says, wives respect your husbands, and husbands love your wives.

He says, the reason that it's not the same thing is commanded to each of them, is because he knows that men are the type of thing that he made men in the type of way where the the ty uh the food that they need to live on is respect.

That this is this is like the this is like food for them.

And for wives, for women, the the food that you should give there is is love.

It's it's love.

And so God made this distinctness among us, and he says, I've made these these types of animals over here.

This is like a horse, this is like a sheep, you should give the sheep sheep food, and you should give the horse horse food, and it will go they'll both be very happy to have received these types of things.

And so that means that the way that you should do this for your sons and for your daughters is you should offer respect for your boys and you should offer love for your girls.

Now, you should also, of course, offer respect for your girls and love for your boys.

This is not like all I no love for you.

No respect for you.

That's not, you know, we're we're all adults here, we can use art.

We get things, senses of proportion, that sort of thing, you know.

But this is why you can see this.

Like when a little boy runs up to you, I see this in my sons and my daughter.

There's this is like JT, hey JT.

He will show me how fast he is.

So from like since he was very very little.

He's like, check out how fast I am.

When he was, when he when you were very little, JT, sorry to do this, but this is one of the pastor's son things, and you just but he uh when when you were Bodie's age, he he was he like saw somebody run with his hand straight like this, like how Tom Cruise runs.

And he was like, that's the key to speed.

If I keep my hand straight like this, and he was like, Dad, check this out.

And he ran like that, and I was like, I think that's the fastest thing I've ever seen.

And so what boys do is they impress, they show you things to be proud of, they give you, they they score goals, they want, and then they want to see like, see, isn't this respectable?

Isn't this worthy of honor?

Isn't this worthy of respect?

And what you do, what you should do is you should give that to them.

You should show that you're delighted in them.

Should show, like, yeah, that is, man, that's fast.

Great work, great job.

That's awesome.

And then little girls, what little girls do is they they they're creating opportunities for you to delight in them.

You know, my my daughter is always dancing and coming up with dance dances.

And she'll say, Okay, gather around, everybody.

We've got this dance.

And then what you say is that's the most beautiful dance.

I can't believe how beautiful that dance is.

You're so you're so sweet when you dance, and then she'll JT, when you say, like, oh wow, that was really fast, he'll be like, Yeah, you know, high five.

And Mabel, you'll say, like, wow, that was such an amazing dance.

It was such a beautiful dance.

She'll run up and give the biggest hug ever.

It's because she the the food that you should give her to delight in her is love.

And so to JT and Bodie, I'll say things, not so much Bodhi, he's very small.

But to JT, like I'll say, like, you're the man.

You are the man.

Great job.

Keep it up.

You're the man.

I'm so proud of you.

And to Mabel, I'll say things like, I love being your dad.

I'm so thankful to be your dad.

I I'm so glad you're my daughter.

I'll always be your dad.

Say things like that.

This is the way that we delight in our children.

You're I I I I received a lot of this.

That's why I probably I received so much of this that as a career I thought, like, yeah, I can stand in front of people and tell them things about God.

That's how confident I was made by the absurdity of my parents.

Because my my dad would just constantly say, You're the man, you are the man.

Hey, can you go get me that wrench?

And I'd bring it back, you're the man.

You know, like I got a I got a wrench.

You know?

And it but what I thought when I heard that was, yeah, I am.

I am the man.

I went and got that wrench.

And your children should should think that.

You you you know what that is.

That's that's blessing.

That's blessing with your words.

And what does the Lord do when you use your words to bless?

I will bless them.

And I will bless them.

You know, my uh when my mom comes to visit, and when my mom comes to visit our church, she's like the mayor of our church.

And when she uh when she comes to visit afterwards, she'll come to me and she'll give me a big hug and she'll say, that's just the best sermon.

That's just the best sermon.

And uh I'll be thinking like, okay.

Like it was, it was, it's it's fine.

I should send you some podcasts so that you can hear what this can really be like.

And there it but also I'm thinking like, I mean, she's kinda maybe kinda.

And that's good.

That's good.

This is a this is a good thing.

We should bless our children in this way.

You are a mediator of God's blessing to your children.

So how do you do this?

How do you do this?

Well, one way, one way that you do this is you should think, what does God think of my children?

You can think, well, what does God think of me?

What do I believe about what God thinks of me in Christ?

If you believe that that God is constantly disappointed in you, if you think that this is his ordinary disposition towards you in Christ, you've misunderstood what it means to be in Christ.

God's gracious to you, he's patient with you, he's kind, he delights in you, God delights in you.

You should pass on that blessing.

What is God's face like towards you, you know, when you walk into the room.

His face shines upon you.

God's face shines upon you.

Mediate that blessing to your children.

Mediate that blessing.

Second thing that we see Christ pray for is He He keeps His children.

He receives them as a gift, he treats them like a gift, he keeps those who are given to him.

In John 17, 12 it says, While I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given me.

I have guarded them, and not one of them has been lost except the Son of Destruction, that the scripture might be fulfilled.

Jesus kept all of his disciples, he kept them with him.

Even at the end, when he is being arrested, Jesus makes sure to send himself in front of the disciples while the arrest is happening.

It says, He does this so that he might fulfill the scripture which says, I have lost none of them that you have given to me.

So Jesus puts himself in front of the enemies of his children, so that his children might be kept.

That's what Christ has done for you.

He guards them with a jealous zeal.

He says, These are mine, and I am keeping them.

To mediate the blessing means guarding against the curse, means guarding against the enemies which would come in to try and steal that blessing.

Those enemies are simply the world, the flesh, and the devil.

And so we guard our children against these things.

We see the zeal of the priests demonstrated against this.

We see the uh think of the zeal of Phineas.

When he sees the plague happening, he recognizes the two that have married wrongly and therefore are out of accord with the uh the commands of God.

And so what does Phineas do?

He grabs a spear and he goes and he kills both of those people, and the plague stops.

This is the jealousy that Phineas has for the house of the Lord.

We are to have that sort of jealousy over our children.

You should say, they are mine.

These kids are mine.

And so I'm going to jealously guard against the influences which would come to try and take them away.

You ought to jealously guard against that.

We we um to hear to hear jealousy is a uh um, you know, that word has a negative connotation.

Um like, oh gosh, I dated this guy who's so jealous, and he just wouldn't let me I don't know.

Like that?

You know what I mean.

Has a negative connotation.

But what should have a negative connotation is covetousness.

Covetousness is when you're saying, This thing is mine and it's not yours, and then you ruin your day because it's not yours.

Jealousy is when you say, This thing is mine and it is mine, and I'm going to treat it as mine.

Now you can do that, you ought to do that, when you see your children are a gift to you from the Lord.

And so you should be protective of the influences in their life.

You should guard them against those things which would attack them.

These influences of worldly desires, lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, boastful pride of life.

You should guard them against those things.

When you see the lust of the flesh start to take root in their lives, you should you should move in and you should discipline so that that might not take root in their hearts.

When you see when you see influences that can come into their lives like like bad friends, then you should go in and you say you can't be friends with them.

Crazy, right?

But this is your responsibility.

This is your place of influence.

When you consider their education and the things that they are being taught, you think, are these is this curses that are being brought upon them?

And this is your responsibility, the place of your agency to zealously guard, to zealously protect.

There's this there's this myth in our culture.

And the myth is when children are raised in a home with a with a strong religious identity, that you are preparing your children for rebellion.

That's the that's the myth in our culture.

I think that this is like the general assumption that when when uh it's like, wow, those those parents, they didn't let them watch this or they didn't let them see that or whatever, like, man, wait till wait till they get to college.

They're gonna be crazy.

They're gonna lose their minds.

Man, when they're in their 20s, it's gonna be outrageous what we see that type of person doing.

It's not true.

That story just doesn't bear out in any of the data.

It doesn't, it doesn't reflect that way.

There's what we see instead is that children that are that are raised, and these are you know broad secular studies, so they're just using a religious category, but children who go weekly to a uh church, their outcomes throughout their 20s, lower anxiety, better sense of self, higher agency, these are the things that we see.

There's one study that I saw and looking at this, uh, and what one of them said that uh children raised in secular environments end up being more generous than children raised in religious environments.

And I was like, man, that just doesn't intuitively make sense to me.

And it was a very popular study that came out in 2015 that a secular environment, these are more generous children than children raised in um religious environments.

And it turns out the study was fake.

It was a lie.

They mixed up the they did an international study and they changed the country codes and then hit it in order to make that outcome.

That's funny.

These uh the the that's that's parenting according to the myth.

You're not priming your child for a crash out.

I think when that happens, because of course that does happen, we've seen that that story does happen.

I think oftentimes what it's related to is a recognition of hypocrisy in in their parents.

And seeing that there wasn't there was no heart level uh of uh joy in the things that they were receiving in their faith.

And the children see that and they rebel against that, I think is often the shape of that story.

So we are called to keep our children.

You should think of them like they're yours, because they are, and that you have a responsibility for them before the Lord.

Third, so we receive, we keep, and then this third one is we give them back to the Lord.

John 17, 14 through 15, Jesus says, I have given them your word, and the world has hated them, because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.

I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.

And then I'm gonna mix this up a little bit for our slides, but I want to go ahead and read seventeen through nineteen as well.

Jesus prays, sanctify.

Sanctify them in the truth, your word is truth.

As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world, and for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.

Now there can there can be this mistake in our keeping of our children.

And the mistake in our in the command to keep our children is that we mistake that for we ought to prepare, we ought to keep our children in safety so that they are prepared for safety, and so that they never experience any danger.

This is precisely the opposite of what Jesus does.

Jesus' keeping of us is his preparation of our hearts to be able to move into the territory of danger.

If we make our children friends of the world, they will not live in danger.

Instead, they will be received well by the world.

If they are friends of sinful desires, they will be able to make friends around sinful desires.

But if we keep our children, what we are actually doing is we are making them enemies.

This is the risk of keeping our children.

When you keep your children, you are putting them in a position where Christ's enemies will be their enemies.

And so the enemies of godliness will be enemies that they experience adversarially, that they will be prepared to be taken down by the wicked forces in the world.

So what do we do when we see that this danger that exists in the world for our children is out there?

And that there is a risk of the world of their hearts falling away from the most important things, we do not, we, our keeping of our children is not a keeping forever of our children.

It is not a holding them to ourselves.

Our keeping of our children is our keeping them in the Lord, so that they are equipped and prepared to face the slings and arrows of the enemy.

And that when they face those, they know how to hold fast to the Lord.

And in this, we show this highest of parental courage.

And this is that courage that is most especially expected of mothers throughout the scriptures.

The great courage of mothers throughout the scriptures is returning their children to the Lord, giving their children at great risk into the hands of the protection of God.

This is that in unthinkable courage of Mary, the mother of Jesus, who sees her son on the cross and remains faithful to the Lord, and does not clamor to try and take him down from this terrible pain and suffering that he will be experiencing.

This is the wonderful pattern of the mothers throughout Scripture is that they return courageously their children to the Lord because they understand they have received them as a gift.

And in receiving them as a gift, they have blessed their children.

And in blessing their children, they seek to protect the blessing of their children for them.

And in protecting this blessing, they are able to confidently return their children to the Lord, so that the Lord's good purposes for them, which are courageous, adventurous, glorious, good purposes, might be fulfilled.

This is what Jesus does for us.

This is how Jesus tends to us, his people.

As you sent me, I sent them.

For their sake, I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.

When you hear the call to be a blessing to your children, you realize what's going to have to happen is I'm going to have to be consecrated.

I'm going to have to be a transformed person in order for them to be able to receive me as a blessing.

And you are.

You are.

That's exactly right.

Parenting is a school of virtue.

It is a place where you get to grow in patience beyond what you could have imagined.

Where you have to grow in self-control beyond what you can imagine.

You know, a three-year-old can has the power within them to reduce me, to reduce me to having the emotional capacity of a three-year-old.

They can do it.

We have to trust that the patient endurance that the Lord is requiring of me, He will provide to me for the sake of my children and for the sake of my own heart.

So here's where you draw that strength.

You recognize that all of these things that the Lord requires of you for your children, the Lord has done for you.

Jesus Christ does this for you.

Jesus blesses you.

You can know that, Christian.

It's true.

The Lord's face lights up as he considers you.

He desires to be gracious to you.

Know that.

That the Lord keeps you.

The good work that he has started in you, he will see it through to completion at the day of Christ Jesus.

You may think we've fallen into the same pattern again.

There's no way out of this.

There's no way this can change.

Where do you look in those moments?

Well, the Lord will keep me.

The Lord will work what he desires to work in my heart.

And you submit to him again, you repent to him again in trust of his faithfulness to you.

You know that he keeps you.

And you think the Lord has sent me.

The Lord has sent me to be parents to these children.

This is a task you don't have to wonder about at all.

You can wonder about your career, comes and goes, those things change.

You can wonder about friendships and relationships, time and circumstances change those, and the nature of those and the shape of those.

And your calling will shift in all of those areas throughout your life.

But you can know there are some things that you can know.

One thing that you can know is the Lord has said these kids for you.

And the Lord did that, and he didn't say, I'm gonna mix up this cocktail, and it's gonna be horrible for them.

It's not the way the Lord does things.

The Lord says, This is going to be perfect.

This is going to be perfect for my purposes for them.

So entrust yourself to the Lord.

In the way that he is your high priest, in the way that he mediates all of the blessings in the heavenly places to you.

Draw on that for strength.

The Lord is not hanging you out to dry in your parenting.

He's not just putting you in circumstances to demonstrate your failure over and over again.

That's not the way that the Lord is.

You can trust him with that.

Let's pray.

Lord, we praise you as our high priest who sanctified yourself.

Lord, that we might also be sanctified in the truth.

Lord, your sanctification was perfectly effective.

Father, we we discipline according to what seems good to us.

Lord, you discipline us perfectly.

And it's always effective for your good purposes for our hearts.

Lord, let us hold fast to your promises.

Your promises of blessing, which are spoken over us, your people, in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Strengthen our faith in those promises.

And might our faith in those promises go up as a joyful place of thanksgiving and blessing, Lord.

Let us participate in the blessing that you have given to us by being blessings to our children within our families, Lord.

Father, we ask for these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.