Proverbs: Sage Advice for a Skillful Life #3 - Wisdom for Family

The reading this morning is a selection of sayings from the book of Proverbs about the home. Please follow along in your Bibles or on the screen. Proverbs 3:33. The Lord's curse is on the house of the wicked, but he blesses the dwelling of the righteous. Proverbs 11:29.

Proverbs 3:33 Proverbs 11:29

Whoever troubles his own household will inherit the wind and the fool will be servant to the wise of heart. Proverbs 12:4, An excellent wife is the crown of her husband, but she who brings shame is like rottenness in his bones. Proverbs 13:24. Whoever spares the rod hates his son but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him. Proverbs 14:1.

Proverbs 12:4 Proverbs 13:24 Proverbs 14:1

The wisest of women builds her house but folly with her own hands tears it down. Proverbs 21:19, it is better to live in a desert land than with a quarrelsome and fretful woman. Proverbs 22:6. Train up a child in the way he should go and even when he is old, he will not depart from it. Proverbs 24:3-4.

Proverbs 21:19 Proverbs 22:6 Proverbs 24:3–4

By wisdom a house is built and by understanding it is established. By knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches. And Proverbs 30:17, the eye that mocks a father and scorns to obey a mother will be picked out by the ravens of the valley and eaten by the vultures. This is the word of the Lord. Well, did you know that the Gold Coast has a significantly higher than average rate of family breakdown?

Proverbs 30:17

When you compare it to national averages, the Gold Coast is higher on most scales. When it comes to divorce, the Gold Coast is 2% higher than the national average. When it comes to single parent families, the Gold Coast is about 1% higher. Now I've also put de facto relationships up there as well and you might think, well, what's the big deal with de facto relationships? But I hope that that you can see that a marriage, if you put a ring on it, it's a bit more stable than a de facto relationship where you haven't entered into a covenant and you vowed for better or worse in sickness and in health to be with that person until you die, marriage is a stronger family bond than merely living together in a de facto relationship.

Now why is this going on in the Gold Coast? We don't know the causation for this. This is from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, by the way. Is it the people that are moving here, why or is it something about the city itself? Is it something about the culture of our city that is eroding the family unit?

Either way, it's not just out there, but we live in the Gold Coast, and so we want to think about how to have strong families, how to have flourishing homes, how to raise children, and have healthy loving marriages together. Whether we like it or not, we all have a family. We all come from a family. Family can be messy and difficult and hard, but it can also be wonderfully precious and meaningful. So what makes for a strong family unit?

What makes for a happy home? These questions and more are addressed by the book of Proverbs. So we're in a series right now called Proverbs, sage advice for a skillful life. We're spending seven weeks in this book of the bible, which is one of the wisdom books of the bible, and listening to Proverbs, it's like listening to a wise sage hand down their insights into life over all their years. They're giving us their insights, and they're telling us, here's how life works.

These are not promises that if you do this, you will always get this. These are observations that, generally speaking, this is how life works. All things being equal, if you put this in, if you live this way, generally, it will result in this. And in our first week of the series, we looked at wisdom's worldview, and we said that there's a square one in our quest for wisdom. There's a worldview we need to adopt, a set of glasses that we need to put on to look at life through, and we called it the fear of the Lord.

Well, at least that's what the Proverbs call it. It's the fear of the Lord. If we're going to become people of wisdom, then we need this trembling delight and awe for God. We need to put on His glasses and see that all of this world and reality has been designed and created by Him, that nothing happens in a dark corner that goes unnoticed, but that He will bring all things into judgement one day, and it helps us to become people of wisdom, people who care about doing what is right behind closed doors.

It helps us to learn how to become an insightful person in life. Now last week, we applied the teaching of Proverbs to the area of work and vocation and career. This week, we're looking at God's wisdom for family, for the household, for marriage, for parenting. And so we're gonna get into it, and we're gonna look at it under three headings, and the first heading is this, wisdom from the household for the household. The book of Proverbs is really wisdom from the household for the household.

The household familial context is dominant in this book. So let me read to you verses 3-4 of chapter 4. You can see it here. When I was a son, the author writes, with my father, tender, the only one in the sight of my mother, he taught me and said to me, let your heart hold fast my words, keep my commandments and live. This is the author's context of the book.

He's saying that this is things that his father and mother sat down and his father instructed him in wisdom. Tremper Longman III, he's a scholar that's written a great commentary on Proverbs. He says family is an important topic in Proverbs. Indeed, the explicit dynamic of the teaching provided in the book is that of a father speaking on behalf of himself and his wife instructing his son. In one sense then, the whole book is relevant to family.

And I want us to just take a moment to realise the implication of this, especially if you've got kids in your home still. Proverbs assumes that the household is a school for wisdom. Proverbs assumes that you can't just outsource wisdom and knowledge and training and righteousness to a Christian school or even to a church's kids program. As wonderful it is for churches and parents to partner together, Proverbs assumes that the household is meant to be a school for wisdom and that parents are meant to be devoting their kids in this way of wisdom and teaching them and having conversations with them about it. And if you don't know where to start, well, take the book of Proverbs.

If you're a parent and you want to teach your children about wisdom, go through the sayings in Proverbs. Or if that feels a little overwhelming, then can I recommend to you a book called Wise Up, ten minute family devotions in Proverbs written by Marty Machowski? He's been a pastor, sort of a reformed evangelical pastor in America, and he's been a family's pastor for about twenty years. And I've actually purchased this book this week, so I'd like to take my kids through it maybe at dinner time, just read a little bit, take them through some of the sayings of Proverbs and just teaching them about how life work and the way to walk in wisdom. If you're a parent, you wanna borrow that after me, let me know and I'm happy to borrow it to you when we're done with it as well.

But it looks like a good book that just helps break down the teaching of Proverbs for the family unit to help you become like this school for wisdom in your home. According to the book of Proverbs, wisdom is key for a flourishing home. Proverbs 24 says, by wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established. Remember, wisdom is not IQ. It's not mere information.

It's more like street smarts. It's insight. It's EQ, emotional intelligence. It's understanding that God designed this world and to be able to insightfully understand, okay, well, the Lord's credit this way and generally, when I communicate gently to someone that's angry, it's gonna calm them down. That's wisdom.

And wise parents will look to cultivate the home... Sorry. I didn't finish the verse. By understanding it is established. Verse 4, by knowledge, the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches.

Now that could be speaking literally because Proverbs isn't negative about wealth. It says it can be a good gift. Although it's not the best gift, and sometimes you need to give it up for what truly matters. But it could be literal. One of the things that comes to my mind though, when I hear this verse about these rooms being filled with all these precious things, I think about a talk that Ray and Jenny Ortland gave earlier this year that I heard them speak about.

And Ray, he's probably one of my ministry heroes. He's a pastor in America. Just love his writings, love his work. And they gave a talk about to parents about how to run their households, and it's just a bit of a talk about here's how we've done things. We're not perfect.

We're not the word of God, but here's some thoughts about how to structure your household. And they talked about how different rooms and different places in your home can be intentional places that you use to bring refreshment and blessing to your family. So they said, well, the living room. Make that a place of fun and laughter and joy. Play board games, enjoy it together.

The dinner table, let that be a place of fellowship, catching up. Let it be a place of reconciliation, where if one of the kids is fought that day, bring them together at the table and reconcile and bring together the family unit again. They talked about the bedroom being a place of refreshment and placing good godly books on your bedside table that will just point your heart to Jesus when you're tired and you need refreshment. They talked about cultivating a home and thinking intentionally about spaces to bless your family, and I was inspired by that idea. I think sometimes we put more energy into career than we put into building a home and building a family.

I think that's a beautiful thing that we can do in our homes. By wisdom, a house is built, and by understanding, it is established. By knowledge, the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches. The Proverbs speak a lot to household dynamics. They're addressed from a father and mother to a son, and this is why they are wisdom from the household for the household.

And according to the Bible, the household begins with marriage. When a man leaves his father and mother and holds fast to his wife and they become one flesh, they become a new family, a new household. So let's continue looking at God's wisdom for family by narrowing down on the marriage relationship itself. Let's look at wisdom for marriage. Now just to let you know, ladies, you'll notice that a lot of these proverbs are addressing men, and that's because in the original setting, these proverbs were used to train up young sons and young men in wisdom.

So keep that in mind, but a lot of the proverbs, even though they're addressing men directly, they can actually be applied to your situation as well, and I'll show you in just a moment how. One of the things that proverbs about marriage do is they teach young people about what kind of spouse they should look for, about the kind of person that they would want to marry. Now we live in a hypersexualised world, especially in the Gold Coast, and the prevailing wisdom to me seems to be about when it comes to finding a partner or a spouse, one thing you're looking for is sexual allure. You're looking for physical attractiveness. I mean, our dating apps are designed to let you look at someone first before you get to know them.

You don't like the way they look before you know their character or anything, you just swipe them off the screen. And God's wisdom says that that's actually a foolish way to look for a spouse. Now I'm not saying that you don't need to be attracted to someone. Sure. That's fine.

But I think in our culture, we tend to put it right at the top of the list when looking at a partner. It's, you know, marriage shows and all that sort of thing. And I think especially about men who are visually wired normally a bit more than women. Sometimes young men are just looking, their radar is attuned just for physical attractiveness, and they're not putting something else that should be higher on the list. And so I think God's wisdom actually challenges that.

It says to young men at one stage, there's a character in the book. She's the adulterous woman. So there's different women who are characters in the book. There's women, the lady wisdom. She's this incredible woman who's wise that you should listen to.

There's lady folly. And then Lady Folly is kind of epitomised by this woman in the book who's called the adulteress. And she's shameless. She's a marriage breaker. And the proverbs say to young men, Proverbs 6:25, do not desire her beauty in your heart and do not let her capture you with her eyelashes.

Proverbs 6:25

So it's saying to young men, there might be women out there who are seductive and attractive and you want to be with them. And ultimately, you choose to be with them, that's your responsibility. You can't blame them and say they seduced you. It's your responsibility. But the Proverbs are trying to train you to say, don't be seduced.

Don't be pulled in by that. Don't think that is the kind of woman I've got to find if you're a young man. Or conversely, women, you might struggle with this as well. I don't know. I'm not a woman, but you can tell me after the service.

But the Proverbs are trying to get us to look a little bit deeper about what we value and what we're looking for in a marriage partner if you're not married and you want to be married. It doesn't matter how physically attractive the woman is, young men. If they don't have character, if they're argumentative, if they don't have humility, you're going to find it difficult living with them. Proverbs 21 says, it is better to live in a desert land than with a quarrelsome and fretful woman.

And again, ladies, you can apply this to your situation. It's better to live in a desert land than a quarrelsome and fretful man as well. So this is what I mean about that can equally apply. Ladies, you can apply that to your situation as well. The Hebrew words for quarrelsome and fretful, they can be translated as disputing, nagging, contentious, irritating, vexatious, angry.

The picture of this person here, they're argumentative, they're complaining, they're nagging, they're not humble, they're not grateful, they're not gentle, they like a fight. It doesn't matter how attractive that person is. If you choose to covenant with them in marriage, you're gonna have a difficult time living with that person. The proverbs say that it's better to live in the desert, which is the Hebrew word midbar, which in their context referred to the Israel's wilderness wanderings, the desert they traveled through. So the sage is saying to young people here, hey, It's better to live in the desert and struggle for food and water than live in a home with a spouse who's fretful and angry and contentious and argumentative.

It's just giving us some wisdom. It's giving us some perspective. Now there are lots of those warnings. I'm not gonna go through the rest of them. You can read them in the bible reading guide this week, in the series guide that we've made available.

But Proverbs also spends time painting for us a picture of the ideal spouse to look for. And at the end of the book, a man called King Lemuel, he writes these words that he remembers from his mother, and she taught him about the kind of woman that he should desire as a wife. And sometimes we call her the Proverbs 31 woman. We don't know if she's attractive or not. So the Gold Coast might be particularly interested in that, but we don't know.

Actually, it says charm is deceitful and beauty is vain at the end of Proverbs 31. But it does say a lot of wonderful things about it. I'm not gonna read the whole chapter. I'm just gonna summarize some of the things that Proverbs 31 says about this woman, this wife who was praised, and some of it might surprise you. It says that she does good and not harm to her husband all the days of her life.

Okay. That's not surprising, hopefully. She rises while it is yet night, verse 15, and provides food for her household. So she's incredibly productive, this woman in Proverbs 31. She's hardworking.

She rises early in the morning. She's up late at night. She's working. She's providing for her family. Verse 16, she considers a field and buys it.

So she's engaged in real estate. She's engaged in commerce and business in Proverbs 31. She's verse 17, she dresses herself with strength and makes her arms strong. She's a strong woman. Verse 22, strength and dignity are her clothing.

Verse 26, she opens her mouth with wisdom and a teaching of kindness on her tongue. So even though she's strong, she's not harsh, she's kind, her mouth is full of wisdom, she's clearly someone who fears the Lord, which it says at the end of the chapter, she loves God, she fears Him and trembles before Him, and it also talks about how she cares for the poor. I'm losing the verse, but that's alright. You get the picture. I don't have to read it word for word.

But she talks about it talks about how she cares for the poor and she's generous to the poor as well. This is the kind of woman that Proverbs 31 summarizes and praises in the book, the kind of wife that king Lemuel's mother was telling him, this is the kind of woman that I want you to be looking for. This is the kind of woman that you should be interested in. God is trying to show you through this chapter how much joy this kind of woman can bring to your house. Now a lot of focus has been given to the Proverbs 31 woman in the church, and for some ladies, it's been difficult because you feel like you're being held up to this perfect ideal standard, and it seems too hard to live up to at times.

And I just want to remind you just quickly that your identity and value is not how much you're like this Proverbs 31 woman. It's the same for all of us. Our identity and value is a gift from Jesus. We are loved and accepted and valuable because Christ has said we are, and He's died for us to cover over our failures, and He set His love upon us. That's where our value is from.

But if we know that, then we're free to pursue these ideals and to grow and to learn how to live for God. It's a beautiful thing. Now a lot of attention has been given to this Proverbs 31 woman, but did you know that there's a similar kind of description about a man in the bible too? This is something I learned this week as I studied the passage. It comes from Psalm 112.

In Proverbs 31 and Psalm 112, there are these interesting connections. So both of them are Hebrew acrostics, originally written in Hebrew. They're both alphabetic acrostics. We talked a lot about that in the Lamentation series because it's full of acrostics. Just to remind you, an acrostic is when in the original Hebrew language, you start the first line with the first Hebrew letter and then the second line with the second Hebrew letter and so on.

It's a Hebrew poetry thing, and it helps you to remember and memorise. So both of them acrostics, that's the first similarity, and both of them have overlap about the way they describe the people. So in Psalm 112, it's describing a man, and just like the woman in Proverbs 31, he fears the Lord. Just like the woman in Proverbs 31, he is not afraid of bad news. That line's almost verbatim from Proverbs 31.

He's confident about the future because he trusts in God. Verse nine, he has distributed freely. He's given to the poor. And you see, I think the reason I point this out is because the Proverbs 31 woman and the Psalm 112 man, sometimes we think, oh, okay. These Proverbs 31 characteristics, this is femininity.

But not all of them are. Some of them are just wise humanity. That's why the man has got some of the similar things. To fear God and to want to do justice for the poor and to not be afraid of the future because you trust in God, that's just wise humanity. That's not necessarily a masculine or a feminine thing.

But I do want to point out the difference between Proverbs 31 and Psalm 112. Proverbs 31, the woman is being praised. In Psalm 112, God is being praised for blessing this kind of man. That's what Psalm 112 is doing. Either way, whether we're a man or a woman, we wanna be pursuing wisdom and godliness.

If you're seeking marriage, start working on who you are before you start searching for who you want. I think pastor once said, become the person who you wanna be with wants to be with. Become the person who you want to be with wants to be with. And if you do find a spouse, it is a wonderful blessing. Marriage is a gift from the Lord.

Proverbs 18:22 says, he who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favour from the Lord. Man, it's a beautiful thing to find a wife. And if you already have a wife, cherish her, nourish her, build her up. In Proverbs 31, yes, we get the Proverbs 31 woman, but we don't often talk about the Proverbs 31 man in the passage and the Proverbs 31 children. But Ray Ortland does in his commentary.

Proverbs 18:22

He's written a commentary as well, and this is what he says. I think it's beautiful. He's talking about Proverbs 31. He says, her children rise up, they stand up and they speak respectfully to their mom. They tell her why they esteem her, why they admire her as a woman of God.

Where did the kids learn that? From dad. He praises her, verse 28. The keyword in these verses is praise. It appears three times in these verses.

A husband cultivates his wife by setting a high tone of praise in their home. No put downs, no fault finding, no insults, not even neutral silence, but rather bright, positive, life giving praise. The picture here is of the wise woman giving herself to her family and to others, and she is receiving praise from her husband and children at home and from her community. God wants to fill our homes and our churches with this beautiful wisdom, where men are not passive, but overtly cultivating the excellence of their wives and those women are thriving. What is it that the wise husband says?

He says in the passage, many women have done excellently, but you surpassed them all. How does your wife excel, men? Tell her. Tell her in front of the children. Have this conversation at the dinner table tonight and tomorrow night.

And if you cannot think of any way in which your wife excels and truly deserves to be praised, then that is your fault because God called you to husband her into excellence. Is your wife becoming magnificent because she married you? The word excellently in verse 29 is the same word translated excellent in verse 10. God wants to see your wife become more and more capable because of your influence in her life, and he wants to hear you and your kids cheering her on all the way. I love that.

I love the way he puts that. It's a challenge for us as men, if you're a husband, to encourage and to build up and to cultivate your wife. Now, I know that this topic is difficult for some of you because either you long to be married and you're not, or you've gone through a divorce and it brings up shame for you or difficult memories, or maybe your marriage is not the happiest place right now to be in, and this is difficult for you to listen to. And I just wanna remind you that the gospel covers over our shame, and I wanna encourage you not to give up hope if your marriage is in a difficult place because God is the God of resurrection. God is the God who brought life out of death.

God can do beautiful things in your marriage. He can turn it around. He doesn't promise to all the time, but He can. And I wanna encourage you with a piece of research in 2002. The University of Chicago published research showing that unhappily married adults who divorced were, on average, no happier than those who stayed together.

So if your marriage is in a difficult space, it actually just encourages you that it might not be a get out of jail free card to divorce. You might actually not be any happier going through what many people say is one of the most stressful life events you can go through. The research goes on, and it says, actually, about two-thirds of the unhappily married who stayed in their marriage reported being happy in their marriage five years later. Many couples who work through a hard season come out the other side of cloud that they did. So it's not just God's word.

Even research is showing, hey, it's worth working through if you're in a difficult space. And if you want to talk to somebody, I encourage you to reach out to someone you trust or you want to talk to one of us elders, we'd love to chat with you and pray with you and support you. Now, disclaimer, this study doesn't apply to you if you're in an unsafe marriage. If you're in an abusive relationship, reach out, share it with someone you trust, tell the police, tell the elders here, God loves you, he cares about you, and he hates abuse. It's a terrible insult to God when we turn something that was meant to be a blessing, marriage, into a nightmare for someone else through our sin.

Now with that important disclaimer aside, Proverbs, generally speaking, says marriage is a good thing. It's a blessed thing. It's a beautiful thing. A man that finds a wife finds favour before God. Proverbs warns us about marrying a fretful, nagging, angry spouse, and it puts before us a beautiful picture of the kind of wife a man should chase after.

And when husbands build up, cultivate, and encourage their wives, it helps wives and marriages to flourish. And one of the blessings and fruit of marriage is children, and they don't come out with an operating manual, unfortunately. We had one a few weeks ago. Didn't happen. So let's search through God's word now and seek out wisdom for parenting.

Wisdom for parenting. This is the final section of our time together today. Now in our cultural moment, I'm finding that a lot of parents my age are reacting to the that they didn't always feel a lot of emotional connection with their parents, and so they're really focusing on emotional connection with their kids now to the point that they're cultivating friendships with their kids. They kind of almost wanna be friends with their kids. Now, don't get me wrong.

I love playing with my kids. It's wonderful. So I'm not saying we keep a strict distance from them, but along with all that warmth and fun, Proverbs encourages us to teach our kids to respect and honour us. You see, we aren't just their peers if you're a young parent. We are their mother and father established as a good authority by God.

Proverbs is really serious about this, that crazy verse that Libby read for us earlier. It says, the eye that mocks her father and scorns to obey her mother will be picked out by the ravens of the valley and eaten by the vultures. Ouch. Children, especially while they're little, need to be warmly and calmly taught to obey their parents. And Proverbs talks about using feedback to do this, positive feedback and negative feedback.

On the positive side, we get that famous verse, train up a child in the way he should go. Even when he is old, he will not depart from it. In some ways, it's infamous because some people feel a lot of guilt about that. Maybe they tried to raise their children in a godly way and they've walked away from God. But remember, Proverbs are not these divine promises or prophecies.

They're not saying if you do x, you will always get y. They're saying if you wisely do x, generally speaking, the way life works, you will normally get y, but not always. There's always exceptions. So you don't need to beat yourself up if your children have walked away. You don't actually have that much control over your child's outcome.

And, actually, another thing that should caution us about being too dogmatic with this verse is how difficult it is to translate out of the original Hebrew into English. Translators have a lot of difficulties. One literal way to translate it from Hebrew into English is this way, train a child in the mouth of his way. That Hebrew word peh, it means mouth, and some of them just sort of ignore it like in the ESV, they, well, they take it as meaning that according to the way that he should go and they do things to try and make it make sense in English, But literally, it's train a child in the mouth of his way. Normally, peh is translated as mouth in Proverbs.

And Proverbs actually has a lot to say though about the mouth. We're gonna have a whole sermon on wisdom for words in our series because of that. It talks a lot about wise words and foolish words, and in fact, the most wicked character in Proverbs is called the scoffer. Literally, they're the boastful big talker. They open up their mouth and they boast and they're proud and they're arrogant.

So another interesting thing in that whole connection is that a few verses earlier, the Hebrew word peh is used in chapter 21 to say, whoever keeps his peh, his mouth, and his tongue keeps himself out of trouble. Scoffer is the name of the arrogant, haughty man who acts with arrogant pride. See, based on the context, my best take on what this verse means, this train up a child in the mouth of his way, is that it's saying train a child in the way of wisdom, train their mouth in the way of wisdom. Use wise words to instruct them so that their mouth might not follow the way of the boastful scoffer, but that they might control their tongue and walk in the way of the wise. I think it's trying to get across that kind of concept to us.

The tongue is an important part of a child's training, whether it's using our tongues to speak wise words into their lives or teaching them to use their tongues to build up others and not beat them down, or observing the words that they use and observing what's in their heart as they speak the words from their mouth. The Lord wants parents to positively instruct and dedicate their children to the path of wisdom. Children won't naturally follow that path though, so sometimes they'll need correction. So let's look at the negative feedback sides. We've got the positive feedback, the training, the positive instruction, and then there's a negative feedback side in Proverbs as well.

Proverbs repeatedly tells us to use the rod for correcting children. Now some of us might worry that's too harsh, that it's more loving to let children have what they want, to give them the world, to delight them, and make them happy. I mean, what person doesn't love to see a child smile and laugh? It's a beautiful thing. But Proverbs is a strong warning for us.

Proverbs 13:24 says, whoever spares the rod hates, not loves, hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him. Tremper Longman III, that commentator, has some balanced words for us here. He says, it is difficult to inflict discomfort of any kind on a child that one loves. However, this verse points out that more harm is done to a child by withholding discipline than by applying it. In this day of appropriate concern for destructive and hateful physical abuse of children, there is an understandable hesitation about proverbs like this one.

Proverbs 13:24

Nonetheless, as is typical in such instances, there has been an equally harmful counter tendency or reaction to refrain from any kind of verbal or physical correction to behaviour, which is not helping children either. Many in our culture have overcorrected and don't want to correct their children in any way. Children need correction, though. None of us are born wise. None of us are born mature.

All of us have fully bound up in our hearts as a child, and we need to be corrected and trained and shown the right way to go. It needs to be done with a gentle and loving and wise hand, but nonetheless, we need correction. And for children, that especially should come from their parents who are schooling them in wisdom for life and helping them leave behind foolish ways. Children need positive instruction, positive feedback, wise words, and they also need loving, thoughtful correction. They need to feel the sting of sin to realise that God's way is better.

Perhaps the most important thing for parents is that they don't just teach with their words though, but that they lead by example. They show the kids that Jesus is real in their own life. Mom and dad, when you live like Jesus is real, when children see that you love Christ and trust him when life is difficult and seek to do justice in this broken world, it makes faith more real to them. God forbid that our kids think faith is just a Sunday thing.

We want them to know it's a living breathing thing because Jesus is alive as Lord on the throne right now. So let's live like He is. If we can live like this in front of our children and let them see us repent and seek forgiveness when we fall short, it flows into their lives as a massive blessing. Proverbs 20 says, the righteous who walks in his integrity, blessed are his children after him. This righteous man who walks in integrity, his kids are observing his life closely, it's a blessing for a child to live in a home like that.

Now the righteous man in Proverbs is not a perfect man, not a sinless man. It's more like Job, someone who's... Loves God, wants to serve God, but they're not without sin. Now I don't know about you, but I found it hard preparing for this sermon and hearing about how to do marriage and how to do parenting, the wise way to do it. I feel shame about my own parenting and marriage failures as I go through this.

For you, it might be the same thing too. You feel some shame about the ways that you failed. We're sinners. We stumble in many ways. And the truth is none of us are the perfect spouse or the perfect parent.

None of our families are perfect. And maybe you're weighed down by your own shortcomings. Maybe you hold guilt or failures in the past. Maybe it was lost temper or a harsh word or some kind of other mistake. Maybe you carry pain because you long to have children, but you're hearing this topic all about parenting and the Lord hasn't granted you them.

Or maybe you long to be married, but you haven't found a spouse. There are all sorts of reasons why this topic can be difficult for us. But whatever your burden is, I want to encourage you to bring it to Jesus today. In Matthew 11, Jesus says, come to Me all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

For My yoke is easy and My burden is light. You see, Jesus is the teacher we all need. He's a gentle, patient teacher, a wise sage who gives us His light and easy yoke, But it cost Him. It cost Him everything to give you this. You see, He took your heavy load packed with all of your sins and failures.

He took my gigantic backpack all the way to the cross. Jesus isn't just our sage, He's also our burden bearer and place taker. He's our saviour. Yes, we've all stumbled and failed, but Jesus has carried it all to the cross and cast it into the depths of the sea. It's not yours to carry anymore.

If you're repentant and you trust in Jesus, the best thing you can do to honour God is to let go of the shame. Why? Because to continue carrying it is to say that Jesus' death wasn't good enough. You wouldn't dare say that, would you? Jesus has laid down His life for us like a husband who'd rather die than see his wife perish.

That's the kind of image the Bible uses to describe Jesus' relationship to the church. It's the image of marriage. See, Jesus is the perfect spouse who has been stuck in the hardest marriage ever with the church. I mean, I'm in the church. It's difficult.

But He's never resented us. Not once. In love, He has loved us to the depths. In the words of the nineteenth century hymn, from heaven He came and sought her to be His holy bride. With His own blood He bought her, and for her life He died.

Jesus is covered over our family sins so that we can devote ourselves to building healthy homes without being driven by shame or pretending that we're better than we really are. Jesus is our wisdom and our salvation. You're free to stop beating yourself up, to own what you need to own. It's not permission to put it under the rug, but to stop beating yourself up and to start living for Jesus, And loving your spouse like Jesus, and parenting your children like your heavenly father patiently parents you every single day. Let me finish with a quote about how God patiently parents us for those who are parents, as we imperfectly parent our children.

This quote comes from Jen Phillips in a book called Parenting and God's Family. Looks like a really good Australian series. Haven't read it before, but here's a quote I found online from it. Parenting in a post Christian world is overwhelming, but God hasn't left us to do it alone, and he hasn't left us to do it perfectly. You are not the saviour of your children.

Jesus is, and that means you can rest. Grace is not a soft cushion for failure. It's the power of Christ in our weakness. Parenting under grace means trusting that the spirit can work through our broken efforts to grow eternal fruit. When we fall short, we fall into the arms of our father, and He parents us with patience, wisdom, and relentless love.

So we press on, not because we've got it all together, but because the gospel holds us together. Let me pray for us. Father, we thank You for instructing us in wisdom today through the book of Proverbs. We thank You that You love us enough to warn us, to point us in the way we should go. And we thank You that You sent Your beloved Son, Jesus, to die in our place for all of our sins and shortcomings, to cover us and cleanse us.

Jesus, all of us would be just a mess without You. And so we thank You for Your grace and Your kindness, and we pray, Holy Spirit, that You'd help us to own what we need to own, to repent when we need to repent, and to receive Your forgiveness. Help us to love our spouses. Help us to love our children. Help us to trust in You as we look for a spouse.

Help us to trust in You as we long for children. Lord, we give all of our burdens to You because Jesus is our burden bearer and place taker, and we pray this in His name. Amen.