The Spiritual Instruction of Children – Part 1

Introduction

I’m still figuring out the order of worship worship, obviously. Uh somebody had to remind me it was my turn to come up. I’m used to the a song before I come up, but uh anyway, it is a wonderful blessing to be here to see all of you. You might turn your Bibles to Ephesians the sixth chapter. And once you’ve marked that, uh you might turn also to Deuteronomy the sixth chapter. So Ephesians six and Deuteronomy six. And if you have an outline, I have provided outlines with uh blanks that can be filled out, and I plan to to do this when I preach. Um I don’t want to commit myself to something that I’m not able to do all the time. So I’m gonna say I plan to do this, what I did this morning.

So if you did not get one, that’s okay. They are in the back, but next time, Lord willing, if things go as planned, then uh you can grab you can grab one of those or your your kids. Originally when I did this in Trillicuchi, I did it for the children, and then I started having a lot of the adults say, Hey, I want one too. And so I’ve provided enough where anybody can have one and follow along. In Deuteronomy chapter 6. This is, of course, when the Israelites were on the east side of the Jordan River, ready to go in and enter the promised land. Moses said to them, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

And these words which I am commanding you today shall be in your heart. And you shall teach them diligently to your sons, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up. In the New Testament, in Ephesians 6, Paul writes, Children obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with a promise, so that it may be well with you, and you may live long on the earth. Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Passages like these two emphasize so powerfully the nucleus of the home for the spiritual training of children.

So that’s what I want to talk to you about this morning and next Sunday as well. I have a two part lesson, two part series, on this the nucleus of the home for the spiritual training of children. My father told me that many years ago, he heard a preacher preach a lesson, ten surefire ways to raise your children in the Lord. Well, that preacher did not have any children.

And some years later, after he had had children and raised them, he reworked that sermon. And he preached it three suggestions for raising your children in the Lord that might or might not work. I say that to say this. I preach on this topic with a great deal of humility. Realizing that though I do have children, my oldest is eight, and my youngest is two, and the one in the middle, we won’t forget him either. He’s six.

1. A Problem: Losing Young People

And you’ve risen you’ve raised children all the way up, or you have grandchildren, or even great grandchildren. And so for this young guy to stand up and tell you how to raise your children, well, this young guy needs to make sure he does it with humility. But there’s one thing that we can all do, and that is look to the Word of God. And I do that without apology. I don’t apologize for the lesson. But I do this with a great deal of humility. And I admire those who have who have much more experience than I have in raising children. There’s a problem going on in the church. And that problem can be seen in many places. I don’t know if it’s a problem here. I don’t think it’s a problem here.

But when I visit places, very often I will see this, or some of the congregations I’ve worked with in the past, that there is an aging population. And that’s nothing negative against those who are aging. In fact, those are the ones who have proven to be the most faithful. And while that old faithful generation is holding on to the Lord so diligently, it is the younger generation of my own age and the younger generations from me, even, that are not clinging to the Lord as fervently. And so, don’t you see this so often? There is a lack of young people in many churches. Well, not only have I seen this from my personal experience, but there is statistical evidence of this, people who have studied this.

So this would include liberal as well as conservative. But according to that book, churches of Christ in general are losing 40% of young people once they graduate high school. So four out of ten teenagers, once they graduate high school, they stop coming to church. And if they’re Christians, that means they’ve just given up on God. Four out of ten. Now, my experience has been that we’re losing more than four out of ten. To keep six out of ten, I would view as a generous number. But according to this book, we’re keeping six out of ten. Now you might say that that’s pretty good. Hey, at least we’re keeping more than half. Well, not much. We’re losing almost half of our young people once they graduate high school.

That is a problem. And when you consider America’s birth rate, which is 1.8, so on average, families in America have 1.8 children. Not that any one family has 1.8 children. You put these two figures together, that means that it, on average, it currently takes one entire Christian household to get one single Christian into the next generation. Because families are having a little less than two children on average, and about half of them are being lost. So it takes one entire Christian family to get one single Christian into the next generation. And that’s a generous conclusion, based on those generous numbers.

I think that we see this. That the church is being cut in half from one generation to the next. At least cut in half.

I mean, isn’t there evangelism being done? Well, something you might hear me say often is we’ve given up on being fishers of men and have become keepers of the aquarium. We really have, I think, given up in a large way of being fishers of men.

If just one in 20 of us reached a reached a lost soul and converted them within a year’s time, one in 20. That means that in a year there would be 10 conversions. I don’t mean children who’ve come of age. I mean outside conversions, people from the world. We might say that’d be fantastic. That’s one in 20 of us reaching somebody. What if one in ten of us reach somebody? That’d be 20 outsiders converted to Christ in a year. We’d say that’s fantastic. I don’t think one in ten is a good ratio. What if half of us? What if five out of ten of us reached a lost soul and converted into Christ this year? There would be a hundred conversions.

That is not unrealistic when you think about it in theory. But putting it in practice, that’s hard. Do we do enough evangelism? I think you would have to agree with me that we don’t do enough evangelism. And this is the state of the affair of affairs across the board in the United States. So when you consider this rate at which we’re losing young people and this low rate of evangelism that is being done, what we are doing, brethren, amounts to nothing more than filling up a bucket that’s got a big hole in the bottom. And the tool that we’re using to fill the bucket is a lot smaller than the hole in the bottom of the bucket.

2. Wrong Solutions: Youth Ministries and Entertaining Classes

But that is happening. And growth is always a goal. So what’s the solution to this problem? We’re losing young people. You know, Christendom across the board recognizes we’re losing young people. And so what have been the efforts made in the denominational world and among churches that have the sign Church of Christ in the front many times? What has been the effort made to try to fix this problem? Well, one of the solutions, which is a wrong solution, is more and better youth ministries. And when I say youth ministries, I mean a program by a church that is intended to provide enjoyment, entertainment, socialization, and spiritual training to teenagers and younger. So, youth ministries, that’s the key. That’s how we that’s how we’re going to keep all these young people.

That’s how we’re going to bring them in. If you look at mission statements of youth ministries, they’re all pretty similar. They all basically come out to say this. The purpose of so-and-so youth ministry is to uh evangelize teenagers, to equip teenagers so that they can go out and evangelize others. Something like that. In other words, it’s an effort to do the work for teenagers that parents ought to be doing. That’s what it’s an effort to do. It’s as if they are saying, and I understand it comes from a good motive. They want to help. But they are they are switching things around and they are hijacking the system. And it’s as if they are saying, hey, parents, we’re trained professionals. Don’t try this at home. Let us let us handle it for you.

In fact, I found this on a church website. This was a church entitled Church of Christ that had a youth ministry. And this was a letter to the parents on the youth ministry page. You do not need all the time in the world. You can successfully minister to children with a minimal time commitment. Whether it is one Sunday a month, Wednesday after Bible study, or two hours on a Saturday, we have many ways that you can minister to children in a time frame that will work for you. That’s our McDonald’s culture. We don’t want anything that takes time. We want a minimal effort. And the way that this is stated, it’s telling of the mentality of many people who conduct these youth ministries. You can minister parents by bringing your children to our youth ministry.

We’ll do the work for you. And what it has created is a spiritual welfare system. So that you have parents who have come to depend upon these youth ministries, and they don’t know what they’d do without them. Often, the first question that young parents will ask when they’re visiting, looking for a church, is does your church have a good youth ministry? They’ve come to depend upon it. They need it for the enjoyment and the socialization that their children need and some positive things too. But I believe that this dependency is crippling. And it robs the parents of their duty to train their children.

I hope this doesn’t rub you the wrong way. I heard from a sermon by a Baptist preacher. I did a gospel meeting one time, and somebody handed me the sermon by a man named Vodie Bacham. Said, listen to this sermon, Centrality of the Home. And here’s this Baptist preacher that stands up in front of a Baptist audience and he says, our youth ministries are wrong. And he says they’re wrong for three reasons. First of all, they’re wrong because the scriptures don’t teach that youth ministries are the way to evangelize and equip young people. Secondly, he said they’re wrong because they’re actually antithetical to Scripture. Not only do the scriptures not mention them, the scriptures plainly teach that the nucleus is the home for the training of young people.

And thirdly, he said they’re wrong because they don’t work. And he read this thing from a book he had about how, in the world of Christianity at large, in today’s world of Christianity, there are more youth pastors than ever before. Making all these efforts, but there are fewer baptisms, fewer conversions than ever before. It’s not working. So it’s the wrong solution. We don’t need a youth ministry. We need parents who teach their children. A second wrong solution is fun and entertaining Bible classes. So that when our children go to Bible class, they’re not, you know, doing the old-fashioned thing of studying the Bible. They’re watching fun videos. And they get to eat quail, like the Israelites ate quail. I’m not making this stuff up. I had a man tell me.

3. The Right Solution Is the Home

My kids used to be so bored, but then they started this fantastic program where you have all these things they do, and they get to cook quail and eat it in Bible class. And they love going to Bible class. Had a lady ask me if my son could come visit church with her. She said, in our Bible class, the kids get to jump on a bouncy thing. I said, no, thank you. Now, I think that Bible classes ought to be engaging, interesting, and exciting, but not fun and entertaining. That’s the wrong solution to keep young people. So I think you know what the right solution is. You see, the responsibility of the church is to equip parents to equip their children. The responsibility of the church is not to do the work for the parents.

In Ephesians 4, 11 through 13, which is not talking in the context about parents, but we can make application there. It says, and he that is Jesus gave some as apostles and some as prophets and some as evangelists and some as pastors and teachers. Now just Paul’s there. So apostles and prophets, we don’t have those today, but we do have what they wrote. We have the word of God. Evangelists, that means like a preacher. Pastors and teachers. Oh, the eldership in the church. We have those today. So, what are these roles of leadership there for, brethren? For the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and to the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

What the leadership is here for, brethren, is not to do the work for us, but to equip us to do the work. And if you’re a parent, what that means for you is that the leadership here is to help to equip you to do your job as parents to teach your children. So the right solution, brethren, is the home. It’s not a youth ministry. It’s not fun and entertaining Bible classes. It’s not a youth pastor with spiky hair who has no kids of his own. Or with no hair. But I do have kids, and I’m not a pastor. I’m a preacher. So is the preacher the answer? Preacher’s good with kids. That’s not the answer. Well, we have a great Bible class program here. Is that the answer?

That’s not the answer. You say, well, what about? I mean, isn’t the church, 1 Timothy 3.15, the pillar in support of the truth? The church is supposed to teach my children, right? Absolutely. And I think that we do a good job with that. And I appreciate and applaud the teachers who work so hard in teaching our children. But that’s not where the meat is. That’s a supplement. The church provides a needed supplement. If I decide that what I’m going to do is feed my children vitamins, they don’t need food anymore. That’s not going to last very long. They’re going to be very sick. Eventually they’re going to die if all I feed them is vitamins. If all we do is feed our children the supplement of the Bible class, one or two hours of studying God’s Word a week, they’re going to be starving for what they need.

The parents are to provide the bulk of the instruction on their own so that the Bible class is almost unnecessary. It’s a nice additional supplement. But that’s all it is. The home is the nucleus for the spiritual training of children. Now we looked at Ephesians 6 earlier. I want to look at that again, and we’re going to keep coming back to Ephesians 6. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with a promise, so that it may be well with you and you may live long in the earth. Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Now, in this passage, Paul is not trying to argue for the centrality of the home.

It’s understood. He’s arguing in this context about submission and about authority in various relationships, and here it’s on children and parents. But the nucleus of the home for the spiritual training of children is understood here. Fathers bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Well, I guess mothers are off the hook. Well, no. We have many passages like the last verse of 1 Timothy 2, which says, Nevertheless, she, speaking of women, will be saved through childbearing. If they continue in faith, love, and holiness with self-control. Well, what’s that childbearing? Does that mean as long as a woman gives birth, she’s going to make it to heaven? Because if that’s the case, then Jezebel made it. No, the point of this word childbearing is raising children.

4. Paul’s Use of the Fifth Commandment: Honor

The home is the nucleus for the spiritual instruction of children for fathers and for mothers. Now, going back to Ephesians 6, I want to focus in on verses 2 and 3 on Paul’s use of the fifth commandment. And this will exhaust the rest of our thoughts once we get through this for this morning. Paul’s use of the fifth commandment. Honor your father and mother.

Honor.

Really, it is. A father says to his son, go clean your room, please. Well, Dad, I’m doing something else. I understand that, but I need you to go clean your room now. But mom said I didn’t have to till later, and I was busy doing a project and son, clean your room. Okay, fine. And he goes in there and just stomps around and puts everything where it needs to go and comes out and says, There, I’m done. Obedience, sort of. But definitely not honor. The idea of honor is to hold someone up in a high and lofty position. And so it is the idea of not only doing what you’re told, children, but doing it with joy and with respect. I tell my children, do that with a smile on your face.

I’ll make them redo it. And oh, they hate that. And they paint the grin on. It’s not just in obeying what your parents tell you, but in all of your interactions with your parents. In every communication with them, in everything you say and do, remember they are not your pal. They are not your buddy. They are your parents. And because they are your parents, they deserve to be honored as such. So it’s more than just obedience. It’s honor your father and your mother. That is all but forgotten in today’s society. I mean, it’s sickening to go into Walmart and to hear the kids screaming and screaming and screaming and screaming. And you just want to go and you don’t want to get on to the child, you want to get on to the parents.

5. The First Commandment with a Promise

But for the parents allowing that kind of thing to go on without disciplining their children, without taking care of the matter. Children don’t honor their parents. We back talk. Kids don’t do that. Oh, I’ll get more into that next week. Okay? So that all was bonus material. Honor your father and mother, which is the first command, commandment with a promise. The first commandment with a promise. Now, let’s go on a little journey. Go back, if you will, to Deuteronomy 5. In Deuteronomy, we have a repeating of the law of Moses. The first time that the Ten Commandments are given are in Exodus 20. But this is shortly before the Israelites are going to cross over into the land. They’re in the plains of Moab. Moses is given the speeches that are recorded in Deuteronomy.

Deuteronomy second, Namas means law. So a second giving of the law, a repeating, a repetition of the law. So he’s repeating here the Ten Commandments in chapter 5, starting in verse 7, we have the first commandment, which says, You shall have no other gods before me. Well, God, can we get a promise with that one? No, just do what I said. The second commandment, verse 8. You shall not make for yourself an idol or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them. Well, God, can we get a promise with that one? No. Just do what I said. Third commandment, verse 11, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

God, can we get a promise with that one? No, just do what I said. Verse 12, fourth commandment. Observe the Sabbath day to keep it holy as the Lord your God has commanded you. God, can we get a promise with that one? No, just do what I said. Then we get to verse 16, the fifth commandment. Honor your father and your mother as the Lord your God has commanded you. God, can we get a promise with that one? Yes. With this one, you get a promise. That your days may be prolonged and that it may go well with you on the land which the Lord your God gives you. This is the first of the Ten Commandments with a promise. That is significant. That is very significant.

Now, some people say, Well, isn’t a promise given with, you know, the second commandment? You see there in verse 9, part of the way down, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and on the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, showing love and kindness to the thousands, to those who love me and keep my commandments. Well, I believe that that’s just a statement of who God is. Don’t worship idols, because God hates wickedness and he loves righteousness. Or someone says, Well, third commandment, verse 11, isn’t there a promise there? For the Lord will not leave him unpunished, he takes his name in vain. Well, I don’t view that as a promise in the sense that it’s being used by Paul in this positive sense, a promise.

So we have the fifth commandment is the first one with a promise. And is the only one, too. You look at the rest of the Ten Commandments. You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, shall not bear false witness against your neighbor, shall not covet your neighbor’s things. Any promise connected with those? No promise connected with those. So this one commandment about honoring your father and mother, it’s the first one and the only one of the Ten Commandments that has a promise. That makes it significant. And what is the promise that is connected there? That it your days may be prolonged and that it may go well with you on the land which the Lord your God gives you. Now, Paul quotes that and rewords it a little bit to adapt to the gospel age, so that it may be well with you and that you may live long on the earth.

6. Perpetuate in a Culture of Opposition

What does that mean? Well, I think that at least it means that when children obey their parents in the Lord, that they will be guaranteed a full and rewarding life, protected from the pitfalls of wickedness. But I believe there’s more to it than that. This promise made back here in Deuteronomy that it may be well with you on the land which the Lord your God is giving you, that was in reference to the land of Canaan, which the Israelites were about to go in and invade and take. And that promise is made many other times in Deuteronomy in connection with just obedience to God. For example, look starting at the last verse of chapter 5, and we’ll go on into chapter 6. You shall not, you shall walk in all the way which the Lord your God has commanded you, that you may live, and that it may be well with you, and that you may prolong your days in the land which you will possess.

Now, this is the commandment, the statutes and the judgments which the Lord your God has commanded me to teach you that you might do them in the land which you are going over to possess it, so that you and your son and your grandson might fear the Lord your God to keep all his statutes and his commandments which I command you all the days of your life, and that your days may be prolonged. Oh, Israel, you should listen and be careful to do it, that it may be well with you, and that you may multiply greatly, just as the Lord the God of your fathers has promised you in a land flowing with milk and honey. What this promise means, brethren, is that God’s people will continue to perpetuate in a culture of opposition.

So by obeying God, God’s people, the community of faith, would be able to enter the promised land and would be able to perpetuate in the community of faithlessness around them, which was Canaan. For you and I, we’re not in the land of Canaan, but we’re surrounded by Canaan. So that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth. When children obey their parents, that is the guarantee that the community of faith, which is the church, will continue to perpetuate in this culture of opposition that we call the world. Parents, when you enforce discipline and you teach your children to obey in the Lord and you instruct them and you discipline them, you nurture them and you admonish them in the Lord, as the scripture teaches, that is guaranteeing that God’s people will continue to perpetuate in this culture of opposition around us.

Conclusion

God has a plan for generational faithfulness. And that plan is not some superficial thing like a youth ministry. It’s parents, teach your children, and children obey your parents, which is what Ephesians 6 verses 1 through 4 tells us. We’re going to continue to have fun on this next week. But brethren, if we do this, parents, if we do this, and children, if you do this, we not only plug the hole, we fill the bucket. Would you bow your head with me in prayer?

Our God, our Father, we are humbled at this responsibility you have given us as fathers and as mothers to raise our children up in the discipline and the instruction of the Lord. And we pray that you might help us that we will do exactly as we ought to do, and that we will not leave the teaching of our children to a Bible class or expect somebody else to come in and fix the problem for us, but that we will see our own responsibility to raise our children in the Lord. We pray for the children of this group that they will obey their parents and that they will honor their parents so that this community of faith may continue to perpetuate in the culture of opposition around us.

Through your Son we pray. Amen. Take your song books, please, and turn to the song that has been selected.