This week, I ran across this article. Although it is attributed to a pamphlet put out by the Houston police department, the author is actually unknown and no one can produce a copy of any such pamphlet. Nevertheless, it gives us some good food for thought this morning:
TWELVE RULES FOR RAISING DELINQUENT CHILDREN
1. Begin with infancy to give the child everything he wants. In this way he will grow up to believe the world owes him a living.
2. When he picks up bad words, laugh at him. This will make him think he’s cute. It will also encourage him to pick up "cuter phrases" that will blow off the top of your head later.
3. Never give him any spiritual training. Wait until he is 21, and then let him "decide for himself."
4. Avoid the use of the word "wrong." It may develop a guilt complex. This will condition him to believe later, when he is arrested for stealing a car, that society is against him and he is being persecuted.
5. Pick up everything he leaves lying around--books, shoes, clothes. Do everything for him so that he will be experienced in throwing all responsibility on others.
6. Let him read any printed matter he can get his hands on. Be careful that the silverware and drinking glasses are sterilized, but don’t worry about his mind feasting on garbage.
7. Quarrel frequently in the presence of your children. In this way they will not be too shocked when the home is broken up later.
8. Give the child all the spending money he wants. Never let him earn his. Why should he have things as tough as you did?
9. Satisfy his every craving for food, drink, and comfort. See that every sensual desire is gratified. Denial may lead to harmful frustration.
10. Take his part against neighbors, teachers, policemen. They are all prejudiced against your child.
11. When he gets into real trouble, apologize to yourself by saying, "I never could do anything with him!"
12. Prepare yourself for a life of grief. You’ll surely have it.
I don’t know if the person who wrote that was a believer, but the points that are made certainly fit in with the principles we find in today’s passage.
Last week, we examined Paul’s commands for children to obey and honor their parents. This morning, we’ll look at the other side of the coin. Let’s read our passage out loud together:
Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
Ephesians 6:4 (NIV)
Before we go any further this morning, let me offer you a few words of encouragement. My purpose this morning is not to make those of us who are parents feel guilty. I think most of us already carry around enough guilt because we’ve all fallen short at times as parents. As Dana shared last week in our “Connections” class, there really aren’t any examples of successful fathers in the entire Bible.
And even if we do a pretty good job as parents, there is no guarantee that our kids will not go astray. To prove that, all we have to do is to go back to the very first parents in the Bible – Adam and Eve. Although they were sinful just like us, they had a lot of advantages as parents that none of us ever had. They certainly didn’t have a culture that was fighting against them – they were the culture. And, in spite of their sin, they still knew God and had experienced intimate fellowship with Him. There is every reason to believe that they had raised their children to follow and to honor God. And yet their firstborn became a murderer. But the Bible makes it clear, that was not his parents’ fault. He did it because of his own evil heart.
Ultimately, no matter how well of a job we do as parents, our children bear the ultimate responsibility for their own actions. So there is no guarantee that, even if we don’t exasperate them and even if we bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord, they will live the kind of lives before God that we hope and pray for. On the other hand there are some principles that we can apply that will provide a much higher likelihood that our children will become Christ-followers who will live a life that is pleasing to Him, and bring joy to us.
One of the difficulties we face in applying these principles is that many of us never had godly fathers who were able to apply these principles effectively in their own lives because in turn, they never had fathers who understood how to apply them either. Unfortunately, in our culture, we have many generations who have grown up without the kind of godly roles models that Paul envisions in his letter. But we have a responsibility as part of the body of Christ, to do our part to end that downward spiral and help raise up a generation of fathers who can become the kind of role models that will begin to provide a legacy of godly fathering that can be passed on from generation to generation. So it’s up to all of us to understand these principles and do what we can to help the parents in our body to apply these principles in their families.
You’ll notice that, just as Paul does in this verse, I’ve addressed much of what I’ve said so far to fathers. But, obviously the responsibility of raising godly children is a team effort that involves both parents.
The word that is translated “fathers” in verse 4 is used in other places in the New Testament to refer to refer to both parents. For instance, in Hebrews 11:23 the same word is translated parents when speaking of how Moses was hidden by his parents at birth. However, in the context of Ephesians 6, Paul has already used the more common word for parents in verse 1 and could have used it again here had he intended to address both fathers and mothers. On the other hand, other Bible passages, especially many in Proverbs, make it clear that both parents are responsible for developing, disciplining and teaching their children.
I think Paul addresses the fathers in particular here for a couple of reasons. We’ve already seen at the end of Chapter 5 that God has established the man as the head of the household. That is true in his relationship with his wife and it also holds true with his children. So even though both parents have an essential role in raising their children, there is a sense in which the father bears the overall responsibility for that process.
The other reason Paul writes to fathers is that we men have a tendency to abandon our responsibilities in training and teaching our children and to expect our wives to handle all of those responsibilities. So Paul wants to make sure that the fathers understand this is not a responsibility they can just pass off to their wives.
This verse is another one of those that seems so simple on the surface and yet it is so profound and so difficult to apply in practice. My initial plan was to spend just one week looking at this passage. But the more I worked on the message, the more it became clear that I was not going to be able to cover everything I wanted to cover in just one 30 minute sermon. So I had to resort to the proverbial “how do you eat an elephant?” solution and take it one bite at a time.
Fortunately, this is a really easy verse to break up into two messages. Paul give his readers two commands here – one negative and one positive. Originally my plan was to cover the first, negative command rather briefly and then spend most of my time dealing with the second, positive one. But that would not have allowed me adequate time to make this message really practical and provide you with some principles that you can begin to apply in your daily lives. So this morning, we’re going to spend our time discovering…
HOW TO AVOID EXASPERATING YOUR CHILDREN
Although Paul directs this command directly to fathers, and as we’ve seen, indirectly to mothers as well, I think that there is much that all of us can learn here that can be applied to all of our relationships. As we develop some principles that will allow us to avoid exasperating our children, we will find that those same principles can be applied at home, in the workplace, in the community, and even within the church body.
Other translations render this command a little differently:
“do not provoke your children to anger” (NASB)
“provoke not your children to wrath.” (KJV)
All these translations together help us to understand what it means to exasperate others. The word Paul uses here means:
• “to irritate”
• “rub the wrong way”
• “to incite”
Paul expresses this principle in a slightly different way in a parallel passage in Colossians:
Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.
Colossians 3:21 (NIV)
The word translated “embitter” is a different Greek word from the one translated “exasperate” here in Ephesians, but the two words have nearly the same meaning. The verse from Colossians gives us some additional insight into why parents must guard against exasperating or embittering their children. Those actions discourage our children. They break the spirit of the child and the end result is that the most powerful motive to obedience - the desire to please - is taken from them from our children. Once we do that it’s like Humpty Dumpty. Not even all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can put that child’s spirit back together again. Fortunately for us, God can do that, but the process certainly isn’t easy.
In much the same way that honoring our parents involved two separate, but equally essential elements – right attitude and right behavior – exasperating our children stems from two related sources:
• A wrong spirit
It is quite easy, in our efforts to properly disciple our children, to become godless tyrants. That was certainly true in Paul’s culture. The gentile believers were strongly influenced by the Roman law called the patria potestas, which literally meant “the father’s power.” This particular law allowed the father to have absolute power over his family. He could sell them all as slaves; he could make them work in his fields in chains; and he could even take the law into his own hands and punish any member of his family as severely as he wanted, even to the point of inflicting the death penalty. And he had that power as long as he lived. The Jewish culture of the time wasn’t much better. Jewish fathers also ruled their families in a very rigid and domineering manner, with little concern for the welfare of his wife and children.
Jesus very clearly addressed that kind of spirit that desires to authoritatively rule over others when he had to rebuke James and John for their desire to rule over others in that manner:
Jesus called them together and said, "You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.
Mark 10:42-44 (NIV)
Martin Luther had to deal with a culture that hadn’t changed all that much from the time of Paul. His childhood was filled with severe punishment, judgment, harshness and cruelty to the point that as an adult he had trouble praying "Our Father who art in heaven." In his mind the word “father” was associated with his earthy father who had continually exasperated him because of an authoritative, domineering spirit. So we shouldn’t be surprised to find that Luther wrote:
Spare the rod and spoil the child. It is true. But beside the rod keep an apple to give him when he does well.
Although Luther’s words obviously addressed his father’s wrong spirit, we can see that they were also aimed at the resulting…
• Wrong methods
Even if we don’t start with the kind of overbearing, tyrannical attitude I just described, we can still very easily fall into some practices that will exasperate our children and others. I want to be very practical here and give you some food for thought, so I’m going to share with you some practices and methods that have a tendency to exasperate our children. This was a very difficult exercise for me, because it made me realize that I was guilty of nearly every one of these practices at one time or another in raising my own children and it breaks my heart to think how many times that I needlessly exasperated them.
This list is by no means complete, and the individual points are listed randomly, so they are in no particular order of importance.
o Lack of standards
Although our children may complain about not having enough freedom, a lack of standards actually makes our children feel unsecure and unloved.
In his book, Christian Child-Rearing and Personality Development, Dr. Paul Meier described five keys to right parent-child relationships. One of those 5 keys was consistency and Dr. Meier made this observation:
Both parents should stick together, using the same rules and consistently enforcing those rules so that what a child gets away with on some occasions is not the cause for which he is capriciously punished at another time.
So if we want to avoid exasperating our children, both parents need to establish appropriate standards that can be consistently applied.
o Lack of trust
This generally results when we go to the other extreme and set up a bunch of arbitrary, overly strict rules that we enforce with an iron fist. We have a responsibility to protect our children appropriately, but when we carry that duty too far it communicates a lack of trust.
A familiar verse gives us some help here:
Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.
Proverbs 22:6 (NIV)
Our ultimate goal as parents is to prepare our children to face the world as adults some day. And when we fail to give them appropriate liberty as they get older, we are really communicating that we don’t trust them and that exasperates our children.
o Favoritism
Isaac favored Esau over Jacob, and Rebekah favored Jacob over Esau and most of us are familiar with what terrible agony that caused. Much of the time our favoritism is not nearly as deliberate and obvious as that, but when we favor one child over the other, even unwittingly, it is going to exasperate our children.
o Not listening
When we fail to listen to our children, they become convinced that they are not very important to us. And then we wonder why they withdraw and give us trying to communicate with us. We need to practice these words written by James:
My dear brothers, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak…
James 1:19 (NIV)
o Not allowing children to be children
In his classic book, The Strong-Willed Child, Dr. James Dobson develops six principles to help shape the will of our children. One of those six principles is that parents need to distinguish between willful defiance and childish irresponsibility. Our children, especially when they are younger, have accidents and make mistakes just because they are kids and don’t know any better. And we need to be careful not to break their spirit by punishing them inappropriately for behavior that is just consistent with the fact that they are children.
o Unrealistic goals and expectations
There is nothing wrong with having high expectations for our children or for wanting them to achieve to the best of their capabilities. But when we consistently set unrealistic goals that they can never reach, we are going to frustrate them greatly.
As adults, we get stressed out enough by unrealistic goals and expectations that are placed upon us by others. So why would we want to do that to our children, who are much less equipped to deal with it?
o Criticism
There is a difference between correcting and rebuking our children, which is commanded of parents, and constantly criticizing them. I think one of the most practical ways to avoid undo criticism is to establish a practice that every time I have to correct or rebuke my child, I’m going to make sure that at the same time I also have at least two things that I can praise or honor him or her for. In fact, that’s a pretty good principle to follow in all our relationships.
o Withdrawing love
How many times do we unwittingly use the withdrawing of our love, both physically and verbally, as punishment? That is probably the fastest way to make our children unsecure. Our heavenly Father never withdraws His love from us, no matter what we do. We owe that same debt to our children.
o Hypocrisy
Another of Dr. Meier’s keys to successful parent-child relationships is for parents to be a good example to their children. He writes:
In healthy families, the parents don’t expect the children to live up to standards they themselves don’t keep. Parents should expect their children to live up to the standards they themselves observe.
Our children are looking at us to be the kind of role models that they can follow. I’m reminded of a woman who invited some people to dinner. At the table, she turned to her six-year-old daughter and said, "Would you like to say the blessing?" I wouldn’t know what to say," the little girl replied. "Just say what you hear Mommy say, " the mother said. The little girl bowed her head and said, "Dear Lord, why on earth did I invite all these people to dinner?"
I’m convinced that our children can spot hypocrisy a let better than we give them credit for. That doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t honestly admit our past mistakes and explain to our children that we were wrong and that we would not choose to make those same bad choices again.
o Physical and verbal abuse
We need to be very careful never to take our anger out on our children. When we use our physical strength in a way that it harms our children or our intellectual capacity to harm them with our words, we will most certainly provoke them to anger as well.
o Making children feel like a burden
The Bible is so clear that children are a blessing from God:
Sons are a heritage from the LORD, children a reward from him.
Psalm 127:3 (NIV)
But let’s be honest. There are times when it’s really frustrating to be a parent. Being a good parent is hard work and as we’ve already seen this morning, even being a good parent is no guarantee that our kids will turn out OK. So if we’re not careful it’s so easy to make our children feel like they are an intrusion into our lives. And even though we often do that very subtly, our children still pick up on that. Have you ever said something like, “Well, we’d love to go with you, but I don’t know what we would do with the kids. We never get to go out any more.” Seems pretty innocuous, but think about that from your children’s perspective. How do you think that makes them feel?
Obviously this is only a partial list, but there is more than enough here for most of us to work on. And as I said before, even if you’re not still raising children, there are some principles here that you can apply to all your relationships with others.
In 1954, Dorothy Law Nolte wrote an inspiration poem titled “Children Learn What They Live”, which later became the basis for her book of the same name. That poem is a pretty good summary of everything we’ve learned today:
If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn.
If children live with hostility, they learn to fight.
If children live with fear, they learn to be apprehensive.
If children live with pity, they learn to feel sorry for themselves.
If children live with ridicule, they learn to feel shy.
If children live with jealousy, they learn to feel envy.
If children live with shame, they learn to feel guilty.
If children live with encouragement, they learn confidence.
If children live with tolerance, they learn patience.
If children live with praise, they learn appreciation.
If children live with acceptance, they learn to love.
If children live with approval, they learn to like themselves.
If children live with recognition, they learn it is good to have a goal.
If children live with sharing, they learn generosity.
If children live with honesty, they learn truthfulness.
If children live with fairness, they learn justice.
If children live with kindness and consideration, they learn respect.
If children live with security, they learn to have faith in themselves and in those about them.
If children live with friendliness, they learn the world is a nice place in which to live.
