When Holy Wedlock Becomes Unholy Deadlock

Introduction

You this morning. My wife Paula is with me today, and we’ll be spending the day with you today, and then the Lord allowing and the traffic permitting. I’ll be uh shuttling back and forth between Tampa and Orlando the next three days, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, to be with you in the evenings. So I may be getting some feedback here if I need to move. Just tell me where to move or what to do. We’re good to go, I think. If you haven’t met Jeff and Michelle Cooper, they’re up here visiting from up in the uh Tennessee area, South Tennessee. I was in a meeting with them just a few months ago, and they’re over here at the Kingdom of the Mouse, visiting this weekend. And it uh something I was thinking about uh lately, the lessons that I’ve been doing in congregations when I send ahead information.

Here are some lessons that I can do for some reason this past year about the only thing I’ve been preaching on is the subject of fellowship. And at every one of those meetings, somebody has popped in from a previous meeting, and in the course of that week, they’re there, and they say, Well, that’s the same stuff that we heard you preach before, and it’s like that’s the only thing that I can preach on. So at least I’ve got some testimony now that I do have more lessons than the ones on fellowship, if they’ll spread that around. We’re going to talk this morning in the Bible class period about the subject of what God says about rearing children. What does God say about the subject of rearing children?

What does the Bible say to offer us about that? I’m really glad to be with all of you this morning. It’s a joy to be here. I’ve visited here a number of times, and I’ve done some youth weekends with you in the past, and it’s a joy for me to be back with you. In the 2000 census, we learned some pretty disturbing things about the family. There’s a 72% increase in homes with unmarried partners. Households with single mothers since 2000 has increased 25%. And households with single fathers has grown by 60%. I thought that was an unusual figure. Less than 25% of the homes in America are what we would call nuclear families. A nuclear family is a self-contained unit with a father, a mother, and children.

Now that you know what that is, listen again. Less than 25% of the homes in America have a father, a mother, and children together residing under one roof. One-third of all the babies born in the United States are being born to unwed mothers.

In 1940, that figure was 4%. That figure has gone since 1940, from 4% to 33%. In the Tampa Tribune in September of last year, there was an article that said these days most more Americans are choosing not to say, I do. And in an American community survey, they found that 49% of the households in America consist of a married couple with or without children. 5% of the households are single people living alone. 10% are unmarried. And since 2000, since the year 2000, same-sex couples have risen by 24%. Now who suffers most from those statistics? I dare say it’s children. Many will never know the family that God created. They will grow up and enter adulthood, and if they follow the patterns of their parents, will go until death, having never known God’s plan for a family.

Children are notoriously conservative.

I’m talking about the way they live their lives and the way they think. Children are conservative in their eating, their clothing, and their life habits. Think about it. Ask your child what the child wants to wear, and the odds are he or she will pick something they wore yesterday or the day before. They’re very comfortable in that. They’re happy to wear the same pair of shoes every single day. They’re happy to eat the same thing. It’s amazing. My middle daughter and her husband have just moved back to the Tampa area, and while they’re waiting for their home to sell in Tennessee, they’re living with us. My wife and I have three daughters, all of them got married, and they all moved away. And now we’ve got children back in our home.

And the home becomes smaller as a result of that. But it’s been real interesting watching my grandson Walker and getting used again to having small children in the home. That’s a big adjustment for me. I’m stepping on things and in things. I haven’t stepped on or in in a long time. And sometimes at mealtime, Walker’s like a blender without a lid on it. You know, there’s just stuff everywhere. But what’s interesting about him is how much he likes the same thing over and over and over again. He loves bananas, and he’ll eat bananas three times a day all the time if you’d let him eat that. And that conservatism goes on into their elementary years. They like the same things. They’re comfortable with stability and their life habits.

They like going to bed at the same time. They like seeing the same shows on television. They are very oriented to stability. They need that. Children need that to grow up. And they can thrive and grow in that atmosphere. But I want you to imagine how hard it is for a child to cope with the typical American family today. The breakdown and the breakup of marriages. I did a wedding ceremony for a girl a few years ago who was a very close friend of one of my daughters. And the big issue in that wedding was who was going to walk her down the aisle. Because her mother had been married three times. And she wasn’t sure who should walk with her. And it turned out two of her fathers walked with her down the aisle.

Now that that’s not the kind of stability that children thrive in. That’s difficult for them to live with that kind of instability in their lives. Pat Conroy, who’s a novelist, you may recognize the name of, says, each divorce is the death of a small civilization. Yeah, I want you to think about that. That’s a pretty profound statement. Each divorce is the death of a small civilization. You know, we would say that’s tragic when we think of it in terms of great numbers. An entire civilization wiped out. But that’s really true of a family. It is its own civilization. And a divorce rips it apart. And no one feels that more acutely than the children. So nature, nature requires a balance. Everything in nature has a balance.

There’s a day and there’s a night. There’s rain and there’s arid regions. There are mountains and there are valleys. Nature always has a balance. Physical creation has a duality to it. And the same thing is true in the family. And in this lesson, as we talk about the stability of the family, see, I want to talk to you about how it’s important to have balance on both sides of that. For the next few minutes, I just want to look at some ideas with you that the Bible points out that give us that kind of balance. What do parents owe children and what do children owe parents? How can we have that balance in life that will create the stability? See, when you don’t have one weight on one side, there’s instability.

But when you have balanced weight on both sides, there’s stability. The kind of stability and balance that children need to grow in. So children didn’t ask to be born. They didn’t request that. We brought them into this world. We conceived them. We birthed them. We may have adopted them as our own. But they are ours and they have an eternal destiny. And it is our obligation as adults to make sure that balance is found in our families and in our homes. So let me give you just two things for each group. And that’s balanced in itself. But I think that these are very important factors that many American homes are missing. And when we don’t have that balance in our homes, the children are the ones who suffer.

1. Parents Owe Their Children Provision

Parents may be uncomfortable with it. And we may suffer to some small degree, but the children are the ones who will pay the price. Parents owe their children provision. 1 Timothy chapter 5 and verse 8, if you’ll take your Bibles and turn there with me, please. 1 Timothy chapter 5 and verse 8. If anyone does not provide for his own, I read from the New American Standard Version. That’ll be the version I use this week. If anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. Provision. Now, I want to tell you, I think you probably would say, well, of course, Ralph, that goes without saying. We know that that’s what parents owe children.

That’s why we put food on the table. That’s why we work our jobs. So we can put food on the table, clothes on their back, shoes on their feet. I understand those things. And in its immediate context, that’s exactly what this passage is calling for. The physical provisions of life. But that goes far deeper than that. In Deuteronomy chapter 6, a passage that you can’t talk about the family on without mentioning is that great statement where the children of Israel are told to teach their children how they should love their Lord and to speak of him when they rise up and when they lie down, when they come in and when they go out. So there’s a sense in which we don’t just teach them, or don’t just give them provisions that are physical in nature, but we give them provisions of character.

It’s our responsibility as parents to build character in our children. To give them an understanding of what is really valuable in life. Let me give you a couple of those. It’s important to teach our children the value of hard work. Hard work.

In the past five years, charting children in America has led to this conclusion that generally American children spend twenty four minutes a day doing chores. Whatever those chores are. Whether it’s making their beds or it’s uh folding towels or doing wash or standing at a sink doing dishes or mowing a lawn. They spend about 24 minutes per day doing those kinds of things, and most of those are spent on themselves. That is, it’s chores they do for themselves. They make their bed, they pick up their clothes. They wash their dishes. Now, that’s a contrast with what was true 20 years ago when the amount of time children typically spend on chores was well over an hour. You know, I can remember when our girls were little.

When they were very small, I saw babies. Paula saw dishwashers. And I can remember, we have pictures of our girls when they’re small enough that they can’t, they’re still so small, they can’t reach the sink. Paula’s got them on little stools and chairs, standing at the sink washing dishes and drying dishes. You say, goodness, child labor laws should have gotten y’all in jail for that. No. And you know what? Our children remember to this day doing those chores. They laugh about that. But you know what they say? When they had their children, they saw dishwashers. There is a value in teaching our children. There are some things we do not for pay, and not for the gratitude of others, or because it leaves in us some feelings of well-being because we enjoy doing what we do, but because there are chores that have to be done in life.

That everybody’s got to participate in.

It’s hard for this younger generation to understand it because they say, no, ice is created automatically. Because we have we have automatic things, Mr. Walker. But if you’ve ever been without that or it breaks down and you have ice trays, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You’re hot and you go in there and you want to get some ice, and you grab the first tray and you go to snap it and break the ice out of it, and there’s nothing in it. Second tray, same thing. Somebody got the ice out and didn’t refill them. Or, this one really bugs me. They just kind of ran it under the faucet, and you’ve got these little slivers of ice in the very bottom of it. Somebody’s got to fill the ice trays.

Is that a pleasurable task? I don’t know anybody that says, oh boy, ice trays, leave them for me. Lawns have to be mowed, clothes have to be picked up, things have to be washed, things have to be dusted, light bulbs have to be changed. Teaching our children the value of hard work. The Apostle Paul says in Ephesians chapter 4, let him who stole steal no longer, but rather let him labor. Labor with his hands. And the purpose for that labor is stated. It’s very interesting too. So that he may have resources to share with others. There’s a sense in which it’s not even working for ourselves and for what we get out of it. But because of what we can do to make this world a better place.

That’s not a political message. That’s a spiritual message. It’s what God has called us to teach our children to do. The value of hard work. Isn’t it interesting that in the Garden of Eden, the very first thing God did for Adam and Eve is give them work to do. They were told to tend the garden. With all the fruit that’s around them, with all the blessings they have, of all the things that are growing around them, God says, I also want you to work. It’s important to do that. It is important to teach them the value of failure.

It is important to learn how to fail. To learn that everybody does fail. Now, I want to tell you why I brought that one up. I was reading a book about sports parents. And the book was saying how parents are not teaching their children that anything is their fault. If something happens to them in a sports event, it’s somebody else’s fault. If they’re benched because they’re not the best player. Or if they don’t get to play the entire game, it’s the coach’s fault. It’s the other team’s fault that this happened. Somebody called the wrong play. It’s never the child’s fault. Because we want our children to be full of self-esteem. We want them to think they’re the best at whatever they do. Folks, everybody can’t be the best.

If everybody leaves the parade, there’s nobody to clap on the curb.

And we need to teach our children. We all fail. And it isn’t failing that makes us failures. It is in our improper attitude toward failure. Blame somebody else. Blame the circumstances. But it’s not what I did that led to my failure. When we teach our children that we raise incompetent children. Because all of us at some time or another will be let off of a job. Or fired. Or fail to achieve what we desired to achieve in our lives. And teaching our children how to fail is very important. It’s part of the provisions. Teaching them the value of cooperation, how to work with others, how to give in, and to let somebody else go first. This past week, no, two weeks ago, we had a speaker in chapel, and he was talking about the wonderful beauty of heaven and how great it was going to be and how wonderful it would be to be in a place where everybody is polite and works with everybody else.

I mean, I’ve thought about a lot of things about heaven, but I never thought what a place it must be to live where everybody takes into consideration everybody else. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Well, I made the comment when I got up after that speaker. I said, you know, I’ve never thought about that idea before, but can you imagine what it’s like in heaven when a bunch of people arrive at a door at the same time and they all go, you go first. No, you go first. No, please, you go first. I said, no wonder we’ll be there for eternity. It’ll take that long to get through the door. Teaching our children how to cooperate with each other, how to tell somebody else, no, you go first.

It’s such a valuable lesson. Mercy.

The value of being merciful, of giving consideration to somebody who may not deserve it, of caring for others we don’t even know. These are lessons Jesus would teach us. This Jesus who had a mission of his own and only a limited time to do it is constantly stopping to help those around him that he doesn’t even know. It’s so easy to be merciful to people we love and live with.

2. Parents Owe Their Children Training in Spiritual Things

But it’s the quality that Jesus demonstrates in his life. Secondly, parents owe their children training in spiritual things. Not just taking them to church. But in Ephesians chapter 6 and verse 4. The statement is given to fathers, I think, for two reasons. For two reasons. Because, first of all, the fathers may be the ones who are a little too busy in the other pursuits to stop and do the spiritual training. And so many times that falls to the mothers to do partly because they love doing that, and partly because they realize the importance in that the fathers aren’t doing it. So the Apostle Paul enjoins fathers to do this. The first reason because they may be busy with that, but too busy to do that. But the second reason is the fathers are to take the lead in the family.

They’re to set the tone, particularly for the spiritual welfare of the family. So if the fathers will do that, everybody else will fall into place. Fathers. Do not provoke your children to anger. But listen, bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. The discipline of the Lord. I want you to think about that. The discipline of the Lord. And Proverbs chapter 22 and verse 6. You know this passage. This one’s one you’ve heard and read, but I want you to look at it with fresh eyes. Train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old, he will not depart from it. Train up a child. Now, I don’t know that these two words even have any connection with each other.

But I want you to think of the word train up and the word train, noun. The choo-choo, train. And I want you to think what these two things have in common. A choo-choo train. I feel like I’m talking to little kids here. Choo-choo train, you know. But a train runs in a set track. It absolutely will not run outside those tracks. Take a train as powerful as it is, as strong as its motor is, its locomotion doesn’t happen if it’s not on the tracks. It has to run in the tracks. And the idea of training up a child is it seems to me that very same idea. Put him on the right tracks so he’ll run. Now, here’s the difference. Take a train off the tracks, it goes nowhere.

I mean, it won’t run on an interstate, it won’t run in water, it won’t run on sand, it won’t run on rocky ground. If it’s not on the tracks, it goes nowhere. But that’s not true with our children. Take them off the proper tracks and they’ll find their own. They’ll find some track to operate in, but it won’t have pleasant results, and they won’t arrive at the destination they started out for.

It’s a beautiful word. It’s an easy to see concept. It is more than throwing a book at a child. Whether it’s a Bible story book or whether it’s a class book from a Bible class. It’s more than just hauling them to church and letting somebody else do that training. It is being consciously involved in the lives of our children on an ongoing basis to put them on the tracks they should run in. Train them up. Bring them up in what? In the discipline of the Lord. Thayer says that word is the whole training of mind and morals. I like that. The whole training of mind and morals. This is the training of the body, the spirit, the mind and soul. Bring them up in the discipline of the Lord.

Now we tend to think of discipline as being punitive. Now, that’s generally the way we use that word. Discipline is a punitive thing. But discipline is actually that kind of constant training. It is discipline for our children to rise at a certain time of the morning. It is discipline for us to eat our meals at a certain time.

I’m saying that’s all part of discipline, getting used to orderliness. Raise them in the orderliness of the Lord. And listen what it says. It says train them up. It doesn’t say yell them up. It would be sad for some of us. Maybe most of us. I’d like to think none of us. If somebody went around cataloging all of our conversations with our children and then categorizing it, this is a very positive, warm statement. This is an instructive statement. This is a casual conversation statement. This is a punitive or disciplinary statement. How much of our conversations with our children would be.

How was your day at school? And tell me about your new friend. Or have you ever thought about how a tree grows like that and how God made it to do what it does? Versus, stop doing that. That’s so annoying. Quit playing with your food. Straighten up. Don’t go there. Stop. Stop. Can’t you hear me? Train them up. Don’t yell them up. It’s not constant barrage of do’s and don’ts and stops and quits and be quiet and go away. Train them up. It’s not beat them up. And I’ll tell you one more: it’s not even teach them up. Training is more than teaching. Teaching is just giving them the information. Training is teaching them how to use it. There are. My father is a wonderful man, and I owe him so much of what I am.

My mother and my father, both. But there was one area in which my dad perhaps wasn’t as diligent in training me as he was in teaching me. And I am, as a result of that, to this day, a terrible carpenter. See, my grandfather was a master carpenter. And my dad learned from him because that was part of the chores he had to do. But there were many things my father taught me and showed me. But when it came to carpentry, very often it would get to this point quickly. Just give me the hammer and let me do it. Just move. You’ve ruined too many pieces of wood here. Just move. I’ll finish it. It was that kind of thing. And so, you know, I never, I never developed great skills at that.

And it was, it was a few years ago. I was helping some men build a house. We’re living in North Carolina. And I was helping some men build a house because I wanted to learn how to do those things. And one day, my lack of skills was holding up. And I was supposed to be toenailing studs. That’s driving nails in at an angle into studs so that we could put up a wall. And it’s not easy to toenail when you’ve got studs on both sides of you. And I was hitting the top of the nail, and then it would whing, there went the nails. You know, it’d fly off across the room, and everybody was wearing shields and goggles, not because they needed them for them, but they needed to protect themselves from meat.

And I had hit one more nail and it had shot off across the room again, and in frustration, I threw my hammer down on the ground and I said, out loud to the world, I have got to be the worst toenailer in the world. And one of the other workers, a young guy came over to me and he put his arms on my shoulders and he said, No, you’re not, Ralph. But when that guy dies. When that guy dies, then you will be.

He taught me. He told me what I was supposed to do. But I wonder about the training of our children. Are we training them up in the discipline of the Lord? Or are we just telling them? This is what you do. Read this. Do that. Go here. In the discipline and the instruction of the Lord. What does God say to our children? Our children. You say, well, he says the same thing to the children. He says to us. No, he doesn’t. And he didn’t say the same thing to you as a child that he says to you as an adult. Because you’re more responsible now. What’s God saying to your children? Can you articulate that? Could you put that into words for them at their level?

Because it’s got to be more than be good. That’s pretty general.

And what does God want from them? And what does God offer them? What is their God’s relationship to them as children? Train them up in the discipline and the instruction of the Lord. You owe your children religious instruction. You owe them that. And I just want to say one thing. I don’t even know this congregation, and nobody’s told me, boy, while you’re here, take a couple of shots at this and this and this to get this congregation back on track. Nobody’s told me anything like that. But I’ve got to tell you, in my observation through the years, we’re not doing our kids a favor if we’re not being consistent about their Bible instruction in classes. You know, it’s important. And it says something to our kids about how important this is when we make sure they’re in Bible class all the time.

And that they’ve got their lessons if there are lessons to be gotten. And that they’re prepared when they come in, and it’s not haphazard, and they’re not ten minutes late because we were late getting ready, reading the paper, or putting on makeup or getting dressed ourselves. That we make this a priority in our lives, the school system wouldn’t tolerate what some of us as parents do with our children in the religious instruction if we did that with the physical, secular instruction that the school system offers. This dragging in 15 minutes late and throwing the kids through the door. Or not going because we’re just tired. We were out late last night. Or our children just don’t feel like it and they’re cranky, so we’re going to let them sleep.

The school system wouldn’t tolerate that. Because they know that it’s important to be consistent and to make school a priority. And folks, if anybody ought to make spiritual instruction a priority, it ought to be the true children of God. And in doing that, don’t provoke them to anger. I mean, sometimes we can make religious instruction so unbearable for our children because of the way we present it. That our children end up despising the Lord. Fathers, Colossians 3.21 says, do not exasperate your children. That phrase really speaks to me. Do not exasperate your children. We’ll tell you one more example. I’m using personal examples, and they’re not all good. But they’re important because I’m telling you, I’m I’m where you are too. When my girls were little, if we were in a store or going somewhere, or we were walking and we had come to Disney World and we’d be walking out, if the girls were headed in the wrong direction, I would take my hand and clamp it on top of their head and turn them to go the direction they should go.

It wasn’t hurting them. Some of y’all look, I wasn’t putting a grip on them. But that was my way of just saying, go this way. I really didn’t think anything about that. And to be honest, even Paula, as perceptive as she is, didn’t say to me, Ralph, don’t do that to the girls. But one day one of those girls spoke up and she said, Stop, Dad. And I said, Stop what? And she said, Stop turning me like I’m some kind of toy. I never realized I was exasperating my daughter. It just seemed like a pretty natural thing to do for me. Go this way. Turn them. But I got to thinking about that. You know, I’d be pretty unhappy if my wife was doing that to me.

3. Children Owe Parents Obedience

I’m in the car and she wants to go left, so she just grabs my head and cranks it that way. And I didn’t realize that. So I think it’s important that when we teach our children that we not exasperate them. Don’t break their spirits. In our training of our children, don’t break their spirits. Now let me very quickly talk to the children. And the parents who are raising children to do this. Children know parents’ obedience. Obedience. You know, obedience is not you should do this because.

Obedience is submitting yourself to a higher authority. Whether you agree with it or disagree with it. I’ve gotten tickets before I didn’t agree with. And I’ve had to drive on roads at speeds I didn’t agree with. But I have to do that because I believe it’s important for me to be obedient. Ephesians chapter 6 and verse 1 says, Children, obey your parents in the Lord. Not just give deference to them, not just submit to them because they’re bigger than you are, or because they can hurt you or deprive you. But you are to obey them. And I think it’s interesting that while we may think of disobedience as one of those, no, that’s just a sad thing. They shouldn’t do that. If you go to Romans chapter 1, where the catalog of the disintegration of civilization is found.

Romans chapter 1. That long litany of what happens to man when he is without God. I want you to go down through this list here, beginning in verse 29, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice. Then come a couple of these that are kind of odd ones that are, they are gossips, you know, murderers, gossips. In the same breath. Tells you something about what gossip is. Gossip is the assassination of reputation. Slanderers. Haters of God. Insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil. Now look at this. Disobedient to parents. Folks, it is a major factor in the disintegration of civilization. Being disobedient to parents. Parents should not brook rebellion on the part of their children. And this is a learned thing, disobedience.

I love Hebrews chapter 5, verse 8, which even talks about Jesus. He learned obedience from the things which he suffered. He learned obedience. We learn it. It’s not something inherent. And folks, let me tell you something. It is not something that is just natural for one child and absolutely incomprehensible to another. All of us have to learn obedience. And sometimes we excuse it. Well, that’s the first child. You know how they are. They’re always obedient. There’s the baby. The baby’s always disobedient and rebellious. You better not allow those kinds of differences. So let me just tell you when parental authority is expressed firmly, firmly, it makes obedience advisable. When you’re firm about it, not, okay, don’t make me come back there.

Okay, I’m counting to three. One.

4. Children Owe Parents Honor

All right, I’m counting. 2.1. When obedience, when parental authority is expressed firmly, obedience is advisable. When parental authority is expressed with wisdom, it makes obedience natural. When you’re wise, and when parental authority is expressed in love, it makes obedience pleasant. It’s easy to obey somebody who loves you. It’s always easy to do that. And the last thing, very quickly, children owe parents’ honor. Ephesians chapter 6, verse 2, honor your father and your mother. Honor your father and your mother. I want to tell you something, folks. If you put your children first, they will too. Did you get that? That’s not a good thing. If you put your children first, what they want, what they need, where they are, if you put them first, they’ll think that same way about themselves.

And there will not be the honor of parents that there ought to be. That is a vital concept that’s stated so many times in the scriptures. But I want to look at one passage and then we’ll close. We really will. Mark chapter 7. Mark chapter 7, verses 9 through 13. And he was saying to them, you’re experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition. Moses said, honor your father and your mother, and he who speaks evil of father or mother is to be put to death. But you say if a man says to his father or his mother, whatever I have that would help you as corban, that is to say, given to God, you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or his mother, thus invalidating the word of God.

Let me just tell you what that means. Honor is shown sometimes in the physical provisions. Children owe their parents honor by providing for them when the time comes to do that. That’s a very important concept. Teach your children, and you want me to tell you how you do that? You do that by honoring your own parents. You do that by demonstrating honor to your parents so that your children will learn what it means to honor their parents. Well, those are some things God says about rearing children. We’re going to talk a little bit later in one of our lessons about what God says about disciplining children, particularly now we’re talking about the kind of punitive discipline in rearing. And we’ll talk about some other things concerning the family.

I’m very glad to be with you. Thanks for being patient. We’ll stand adjourned for a few moments.