Turning Houses Into Homes - Part 3
Message Description
Dr. Kurt Bjorklund continues the series Turning Houses Into Homes teaching parents how to bring up children without embitterment and exasperation.
Message Transcript
We are in a series called Turning Houses into Homes. When we started this a few weeks ago, I said that it is always a little unnerving for me to teach on family or home. Now one of the reasons it’s a little unnerving for me is I realize that there are some people who will be listening here, in Butler, the Strip, and online who will say, you know what, I’m a long way from that. I’m kind of growing into my adulthood, not really thinking about it, and don’t really care a whole lot about it. And then for some, you’ll say I’ve kind of gone through the child-rearing years, I’ve got it figured out, and I don’t need any help with this. And then for some of us, this is a really painful area. Maybe we’ve wanted kids and it hasn’t happened, maybe we’ve wanted to be married, maybe we’ve been recently through a hard breakup or something has caused this to be a painful, hard subject for us. And yet here is what I’d guess is true for most of us in this room and watching online, and that is that most of want somebody who in this world knows us well and loves us thoroughly. What we want is we want to be known, we want to be loved, and we want to spend our time with people who know us and love us. That’s really the essence of what a beautiful home is. And that is a yearning that most of us have whether we’ve articulated it as wanting to be parents, or be married or not, that is something that we want.
And today I’m going to talk a little more specifically about parenting than any of the other weeks in this series. But I know that even if you are before all of that that this can still be helpful or if you’re thinking you are kind after that, this can still be helpful. Now when it comes to parenting, parenting is hard to talk about. I heard about one speaker who used to travel the country giving messages on parenting. And his title when he had really young kids and was in his twenties was 15 Ironclad Principles for Raising Great Kids. And when his kids got to be a little older and he was in his 30’s somewhere, his title changed to 10 Suggestions for Raising Your Kids. And then when his kids were still older and he was in his 40’s, he changed his title to 5 Ideas That May or May Not Help You Raise Your Kids. And anybody who has raised kids knows exactly this tension because you start with your kids and think I’m going to figure this out and I’m going to do this well. And then you have these kids, and nothing goes exactly like you think it should.
I remember still when my wife and I had our first son. We have four sons. My oldest son was born, and I remember taking him out of the hospital and putting him in the car seat in the back of our sky-blue Oldsmobile sedan to drive him home. I remember thinking, why are they letting us take this child home? We aren’t ready for this. You get certified to do everything in this world, but you have a baby and they’re like here, 25 years, good luck. And you start down a path. And a couple of years later we had our second son. And I still remember the first time that my wife left home and left me with a two-year-old and a newborn. I’m sitting here thinking, I’m outnumbered. This is overwhelming and one of the questions you have whether you have young kids, or your kids are older, is have I done right by my kids, will I be able to do right by my kids, will I be able to raise them, and give them what they need.
This question led one woman to travel the world in search of an answer. Her name is Michaeleen Doucleff. She is an NPR reporter. She traveled the world to see what she could learn from other cultures about parenting, so she’s not blinded by her own culture. And the result of this is a book she wrote called Hunt, Gather, Parent. What ancient cultures can teach us about the lost art of raising happy, hopeful, little humans. And she came to all kinds of conclusions. Here’s one. “One of the craziest things we do is praise children constantly. When I was first working on the book, I recorded myself to see how frequently I praise my little girl, Rosie. And I noticed that I would exaggeratedly react to even her smallest accomplishments. Like drawing a flower or writing a letter with a comment like, good job, what a beautiful flower. This is insane. If you look around the world and throughout human history, everywhere I went, I don’t know if I ever heard a parent praise a child. Yet these kids are incredibly self-sufficient, confident, respectful, everything we want praise to do. These kids already have it, without the praise. It’s hard to cut back on praise in our culture because it’s so baked in. But later on, I decided to try. And it’s not that I didn’t give any feedback, but it was a much gentler feedback like a smile or a nod when I caught Rosie doing something that I would want her to do. And I started to notice Rosie’s behavior really improved. And a lot of attention-seeking behavior went away.”
So, one of her great conclusions, traveling the world, was give your kids less praise. How does that strike you? Anybody think that’s good? I don’t really know if her idea is good in terms of less praise. Her other big ideas were to yell less, to praise less, and do fewer child-centered activities. Those were her takeaways. I just saved you the purchase of the book, by the way. And what she basically said was we praise our kids too much, you need to lower that bar, don’t yell at them, and stop going to kid’s museums every weekend or doing something child-centered. Let your kids adjust to you. Now I don’t know if she is right or wrong but here is my point, you and I don’t know if we are right or wrong with all of the advice coming out. There is no shortage of things people will tell us we need to do in order to parent well. We hear it from all angles, and we can be bombarded and go crazy with the is my kid potty trained in time, maybe I potty trained him too early, maybe I didn’t get him into the right preschool, and they’ll never amount to anything kind of thinking.
And so, what I would like to do today is show you two of the primary things the Bible says about parenting. And my hope is that it will free you to say my job is not as complex as figuring everything out, but it’s these two things. Now in order to get there, we’ve been basing our teaching in Colossians 2:6-7. And what Colossians 2:6-7 does, is it doesn’t speak directly to parenting but speaks in general to people. And it says as you received Christ, live your lives around Him. So, this is an instruction to people in general saying if you are a follower of Jesus, if you’re spiritual in your orientation, here is what I want you to do. I want you to orient your life around that spirituality.
And then there are four participles that tell us how to do it. There’s the participle that says being rooted, it’s an agricultural image or metaphor. And being rooted means to make hundreds, thousands of choices, day after day, that seem almost imperceptible, that goes so deep that you become unmovable. So, one of the ways you strengthen your faith is with this agricultural metaphor by being rooted. Then he uses an architectural metaphor, be built up, and we talked about this last week where what we do is we intentionally pursue something over time with effort. And now I’m going to say he uses an athletic image to say be strengthened because to be strengthened implies that what your doing is you are putting stress on something so that you have an increased capacity so that when you have an increased capacity you can do in the future what you can’t do currently. That’s what it is to be strengthened.
Now to be fair, the ESV uses the word “established” instead of the word “strengthened”. It seems to have a different connotation. In fact, you could say that this word has the idea of commerce or intellect. And what happened was, this Greek word could be translated either way because the word had a rich nuance of basically saying as you receive Christ one of the things you want to do is you want to be established or strengthened in your faith.
So now let me take this step and say how does this apply to parenting or families. Well, if you want to help your kids embrace faith, then you want them to be rooted, built up, and strengthened in their faith. And I said that there really are two primary commands in the New Testament about parenting. Both of them appear in Ephesians 6:4. You could really say that of all the things in the Bible about parenting, these are the two most clear. There are other things you could get by inference, but this is what the Bible says directly to parents about parenting. Ephesians 6:4 says this, “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” There’s a parallel in Colossians 3 that says parents or fathers do not embitter your children. So, what are two things the Bible says to parents? Don’t exasperate or embitter, I’m putting that together saying that’s the same idea, and train your children in what it means to follow the Lord. So, training and don’t embitter, don’t exasperate, that’s what the Bible says to parents about what they need to do.
Now there are some other places that talk about training in Proverbs 22 verse 6, “Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old, they will not turn from it.” And that’s what some people say of that this is in an ironclad promise. If I do “x” I’ll get an outcome over here, and others have said, no, that Proverbs is not meant to be read that way. And they’ve even kind of gone into the Hebrew and tried to look at the Hebrew and said this just means raise a child according to their own bent. And then you don’t have any way to shape them, you just find what they are good at and support them. I think that’s a twisting of the Hebrew actually. Others have said there’s a translation here that says train a child in the way he should go, and it will not depart from him, meaning the training. Meaning, you can look back and say what we’ve put into our child is there even if it doesn’t appear like that right now.
In the Old Testament, there is another passage that talks about training. Again, training and do not exasperate, those are the two things. And this is in Deuteronomy 6:5-9, “5 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.
7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”
This is the instruction of saying here is how you influence or train your kids. And so, what I’d like to do is talk about three modes of influence. And this is specific to kids but true in general. The first is modeling. This is the idea of Deuteronomy 6 that as you walk, as you are living your life, that you are modeling something that is true for you. And as it’s true for you, it becomes something that is observable and desirable for your children.
I saw a study years ago and I haven’t been able to find it again, so, I don’t have the source on this. But the study tracked kids who were part of a Christian home and a Christian church. And when they went away to college, they kind of dropped off the chart from faith. Some statistics suggest that nearly 60-80% of kids who grow up in church, when they go away to college, just say I don’t need this, or I don’t want this. I think that more return in their 20s and 30’s but that’s what statistics generally say. So, they track this and what they tried to do was say what’s the correlation between public school, Christian private school, and homeschooling and that outcome. And you know what they concluded? That there was no correlation between public school, Christian school, or home school. In other words, it isn’t about what schooling you choose for your kids. What they found is the biggest single determination in terms of kids coming back to faith or staying in faith when they left home, was what they considered to be the authenticity of their parent’s faith. In other words, they were watching and saying is this true for you, do you live this? Is this winsome? Does this work in your life? And whether you put them in a Christian school, a private school, or public school it didn’t matter nearly as much as how the kids answered that question.
Last week I was in our Chapel service. We have a 10:30 am Chapel service here in Wexford and just as the service was beginning, one of the singers motioned to me. She whispered something in my ear. She said, “Hey, we can hear everything you say in our ears.” They have those little in-ear monitors to be able to hear the band really well. But evidently what happened was the soundboard hadn’t turned my microphone down, so everything I was saying was going straight into their ears. And here’s what she was saying really politely, “Please don’t sing.” Because if you do, your off-tune and were going to be off-tune and it’s going to be awful. And if you’ve ever heard me sing, and you won’t, she’s right. I can’t sing. It’s off-tune. It’s awful. But what she was saying was if we have you in our ears, we can’t help but mimic what you are doing. And I thought, boy, isn’t that an example of how much influence matters in parenting. You can say anything you want, but what you do, who you are, shapes how your kids see you and see life.
So first, is modeling. And here’s the second. I’m going to call this, informal training. Notice in Deuteronomy 6 where it says, as you’re at home, as you walk about, and as you sit. What that’s talking about is your everyday life, how you are living. There’s a place for formal training but much of your most important training happens in informal moments. It’s conversations, it’s as you’re driving all over the place to take your kids somewhere, and you are having conversation after conversation that you’re influencing their values and shaping the way you see things. In fact, I would say that this is way more significant than formal training. Not that formal training doesn’t have a place.
I remember years ago when one of my kids was playing youth sports. And he had a conflict with another kid. I don’t know if any of you have ever experienced this. But he came home, and we started to talk about the conflict. And I started to get amped up because I thought hey, this isn’t right. So, I started telling him things he should do, should say, you know the little shoulder he should give the kid. My wife came into the room and she threw down a little bit. She said, what do you think Jesus would do? I have to admit I was kind of like I don’t care what Jesus would do. I want to tell you what Kurt would do. And what Kurt says is get the kid. Now here’s my point. My wife wisely had that moment of saying you know what let’s think about this and talk about this. And here’s what I know. I can sit and talk to my kids about the fruit of the spirit and gentleness, show them a nice bible study about how this works, but if when they have a conflict when another kid, and I tell them give them the shoulder, I’m not helping them. Do you see how informal training matters?
And then there’s formal training. And this is to say this does matter to a certain extent that you tie these commands on the doorposts of your house. In other words, you make this part of your life. And this talking about church, schooling, your own family time in order to bring about moments that are important in your kids’ lives when they have the training. But here’s what I want to say to you. Influence is not as simple as I said it and now, they get it. In fact, if that is the way you approach this, you will have a hard time especially as your kids get older. Because when kids get older, what happens is they become more like adults and as they become more like adults, they don’t want to be told what to do just like you don’t like to be told what to do.
One author put it like this. He said, “Faced with a choice between changing one’s mind and proving there’s no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy with the proof.” And here’s what he’s saying. He’s saying so many of us, if we are told that we are wrong, we will spend more time trying to convince someone that we are right rather than listening to what they have to say. And the reason that’s true is because we don’t like to be wrong. Now that doesn’t mean that you never say anything to your kids about where they are wrong or what they need, but what it means is that you come to understand that there comes a point where you exasperate or embitter somebody because you aren’t keeping their hearts open to you because you are so intent on training that you’ve lost the development process.
I was thinking about this, and I have this chart I want to show you. So, on the top axis is the approach to what, how, and why, and then the age range. And I’m just going to start here with the littles. With little kids, the what is up to the parent and the how is up to the parent. And you’d spend a little time talking about why. So, with a two-year-old, you don’t say hey I was thinking of going to the store today. Do you think that’s a good idea or a bad idea? Do you want to go tomorrow, or the next day? No. You say to a two-year-old, we’re going to the store. Get in the car.
So, then you get a little older and I’ll call this the mid-years. I’m thinking late single digits early teens kinds of thing. And here the parent is still generally driving the what, but there is more give and take on the how, and a lot of explanation of the why. For example, you might say to your ten-year-old, I want you to clean your room. For this kid, there would be some give and take on the how. Do you want to do this before dinner or after dinner? When do you want to clean your room? And you explain why, and you say if we leave pizza boxes in our rooms, we’ll get mice. And mice are nasty. We don’t want to get mice in our house, so we clean up our rooms. That’s why we do it. That’s the example of what we’re talking about here.
Now as the kids get older, the later teen years, there’s a lot of give and take on the what. You let the kids determine the how generally. And you spend a lot of time exploring the why. I can still remember one of the best pieces of parenting advice that I got was from some parents who were 15-20 years ahead of us in parenting. Their kids were raised as I was kind of raising my kids. One time I was sitting with them and I said tell me what works for you in parenting. And I’ll never forget. The woman said to me that as my kids were getting older, I realized telling them what to do did not work so well. And so, I started to ask them questions. What I would do is I would simply keep asking them questions until they came to a good conclusion on what it was that was a good choice. Now I hear that, and I thought as my kids grow, I want to explore the why with them.
And then as your kids reach young adulthood, they start to control the what. They start to control the how. And your why is when asked. And that’s about it.
So, take something simple. This isn’t from the Bible. Just an example. Let’s say when raising your kids, you think it’s important that they brush their teeth. So, when they are little, you say we are going to brush our teeth and every night you do the examination and are like you missed a spot, let’s do that again. And there isn’t a whole lot of debate. When they get older. And you say are you going to brush your teeth, when are you going to do it, we still want to do it. But there comes a time when you say if you want dirty, grimy, nasty teeth, you don’t have to brush your teeth. That’s your deal. I’m not going to pay for dental care if you don’t do something but that’s your deal. You see how that works? And one of the ways people embitter or exasperate their children is they hang onto these things too long, and they try to control behavior rather than influence thinking. And what they are doing is they are saying I have to control the outcome instead of saying you are individual that can make choices along the way.
Now let me ask you. Where does your spouse fit on this chart in terms of what, why, how? IF you try to control your spouse’s what and how you will exasperate your spouse. And If you say, well you know what, my spouse won’t get it, they won’t get the right thing, you married them. We have a counseling center. You influence equals, adults, modeling, and why. How and what you will exasperate people if you are always telling them what they should do and how they should do it. Same thing is true for kids as they grow. Now, why is this important? Because this assumes you and I understand something and believe in something enough to train them. You have your kids brush their teeth because you know if they don’t, they will get cavities, and there will be all kinds of bills, pain, and stuff like that. So even when they think it doesn’t matter, you are still going to say brush your teeth. Spiritually speaking when you become convinced that something is important, is true, then you say I believe this enough that I want you strengthened or established in this. And the Greek word that’s the participle in Colossians 2 where it says you should be rooted, built up, established, or strengthened, that Greek word is passive in its original language. What the means is it’s not just something we do through direct effort, but were strengthened, and it says as you were taught, we’re strengthened by the word of God. We are taking that in by letting that be a part of our lives. And when we aren't taking in the word of God, we lose our ability to be strengthened.
Maybe you know somebody who is older that went through the pandemic. And as they went through the pandemic, they didn’t get out because of right concerns about the virus but you could see their capacity drop because they weren’t doing the things they used to do. Well, that is exactly what happens where we are being strengthened by the teaching of what God gives us.
So, we’ve talked about training and not embittering and this kind of balance. So, here’s what embittering really is or exasperating. And that is when you try to control behavior too long, in other words, you try to dictate behavior and put barricades around kids way too long or when you let them make their own decisions. You advocate responsibility way too early. In other words, they don’t feel like you gave them enough boundaries, enough direction, or help along the way. Or when you vacillate back and forth between the two, dictating and abdicating. That is when you exasperate your children. And again, the two primary commands in the Bible toward parents is train your children, don’t embitter them, don’t exasperate them. That is what the Bible says about parenting.
But I want to show you one more thing and it’s this. In Isaiah 1 we read about God as a parent. And here’s what it says, verse 2, “Hear me, you heavens! Listen, earth! For the Lord has spoken: “I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me.” Now, why do I read this? Well, God, by definition is perfect. Meaning God is a perfect parent. And what does this say about God’s parenting? That even as a perfect parent, kids rebelled against him. Now, this is written about the children of Israel and everything that took place in that culture. But here’s what this means. If you are a parent and you do everything perfect, that is not a guarantee that your kids will turn out perfectly. In other words, some of us, what we do when we hear this is we say if I had, maybe I should, maybe if I did, I could, and what we need to do is say even perfect parenting is not a guarantee. God was a perfect parent and people still rebelled. This also means that if you’re a child and your parents have let you down in some substantial ways, that you can say even with imperfect parents it’s not a reason for me to choose the path that I’ve chosen. I choose my own path regardless of what my parents do. And it means this, and that is all of us have rebelled against the perfect love of God, the Father, and if we understand this and embrace this message, what Isaiah 1 does is later in the chapter verse 18-19, though your sins be a Scarlett, I’ve made them white as snow. This is presentation of what we call the Gospel of Isaiah saying here’s the issue. God has been perfect as a parent, he’s raised rebellious children, and yet he is still loving and accepting and creating an environment where you can come home. In fact, it says in verse 18, come let us reason together. And again, here is why this matters. One of the ways you embitter family members, spouses, kids, brothers, sisters is by having to have everything be perfect because you think it says something important about you. When what is most healthy is to say none of us are perfect, we’ve all rebelled, and yet God has chosen to love us anyway in the person of Jesus Christ. And when that becomes your dominant rubric, what happens is, all of a sudden, you are able to say I can love you even when you have let me down, even if you haven’t done the right things, because I haven’t done the right things. And the atmosphere changes. It doesn’t take away the training or the desire to be somewhere or to go somewhere e but what it does is allows us to instead of demanding things because we think we need something from our kids, from our spouse, from our siblings, from our parents, what we are able to do is to say we have all rebelled. And that is the good news of Christianity is that religion basically says perform so that God will accept you, and what biblical Christianity says, Jesus has done for you what you can never do. You are accepted because of Jesus. And when we live from that in our homes, we will change the very environment to not be an embittering, exasperating environment.
And that is where we will find our houses become truer homes. And even if you are here and you’re saying I don’t know if I even believe in Jesus or want to train my kids in Christianity, not sure I want to be a Christian. What I know that you do want, is you want a place where people are loved and accepted. And what I know is when you understand God’s love for you, you will be able to give love to the people that matter most in your life better than you can when you are just trying to trade love back and forth. And that will give you a better potential home than maybe you have today.
Father, thank you that your words speak so clearly to things that matter to us. And God I pray for each one of us here. That you would help us to live in a place where we so experience your acceptance that we can give that to the people in our lives. And from that that we’d be able to without fear, train, and not embitter because we’ve already got all the verdict we need. That’s the one from you that says though your sins be as scarlet I wash them as white as snow. And we thank you in Jesus’ name, Amen.
