Raising Sane Children

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

Thank you.

I'm Dylan Hamilton, and with me are.

Michael Durham.

Chris Giesler.

David Gasson.

We have a question from one of our listeners that they sent in online, and the question reads, how do you raise kids in today's insanity? And they also have a bonus question, which would be, what if you and your spouse are not in agreement about homeschooling?

Raising Children in an Age of Cultural Insanity

So we'll take a shot at that first one. How do you raise kids in today's insanity, Michael?

Well, today's insanity sometimes gets spoken about in such a way that indicates we believe the insanity of our culture is more special than any other insanity of any other generation. We are so special, and actually we're not.

It is a common thing for us to think that the difficulties that we see today are unique to our time period, and we've not seen these things before. How can we even begin to have godly families and raise godly children in this very difficult time?

And although we can observe that we are in something of a transition in our culture, many cultures have been in transition before, even godly cultures in transition into less godly cultures, and so on.

So first of all, let us not be too burdened with the specialness of our own chaos in our own particular time period, and we may reflect on the many blessings that God has bestowed upon us, and advantages and opportunities we have to raise children in a godly fashion.

Raising Children Under the Reading and Admonition of the Church

But when we read the Bible, when we read the Bible, we are, of course, reminded of Jesus' welcoming of the children to himself, that he welcomes the children, suffer the little children to come unto me and do not forbid them.

He rejoices in the lives of children, and we have instructions given to parents about how to raise their children. So for example, in Ephesians chapter six, this letter being read to a local church, and one indication of how to raise kids is that the children are listening to what's being read to the church.

Husbands are hearing instructions read to them, wives are hearing instructions read to them, the children then hear instructions read to them, and then parents, and the slaves, and the masters. Everybody of various types, different roles, different hierarchical roles in the family and in the household, in the culture, are all sitting together, all together in the church, hearing instructions together.

So there's one indication about how to raise kids in this time period, raise them in, raise them under the reading and expounding of God's word. And so what is said to them? Ephesians six, verse one, children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.

How do you know it's right? Well, something God said a long time ago, may ring a bell, right? Honor your father and mother. And this is the first commandment with promise. So an observation, not only do we know that this is the right thing to do because God said it a long time ago in the 10 commandments, hey, but note what a positive thing it is that this is a commandment that came along with a promise.

And this promise gets really, really big in Christ because the promise of old said, if you honor your father and mother, you live long in the land, right? As generations follow one another, if they were to be faithful to God, then they would be blessed and they would get to live in the land rather than be cursed and be kicked out of the land.

But this promise gets rather large here in Ephesians six, as it says that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth because of course the earth was given to Christ as the true Israel who inherited all the promises of God.

So the instructions to the children from the scriptures is to obey their parents in the Lord, for this is right to honor father and mother and to look at the promise and hold to the promise that comes with that.

And you fathers do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord. And who is the Lord? It is Christ. So teach your children Christ, train them in Christ, show them how to follow Christ.

Who is Jesus our Savior? Who is our King of Kings and Lord of Lords who has all authority? What are the things that he said? And what are the things that he did? And what did he value? And what's he all about?

And what are his promises? And where is everything heading in our world today, right? Help them think the way that Christ would want them to think. Raise them as citizens of his kingdom, right? Show them what it's like to live under his authority and rule.

That's how we should be raising children in these times. Fathers do not provoke your children to wrath, right? Many different ways to exasperate your children and none of them have to do with helping them follow Jesus.

You know, we may want them to perform well so that we don't look bad in the face of others. We may want them to function and behave in certain ways that selfishly enhance our wives. You know, I want my children to behave in a certain way because I want to enjoy myself.

I want more, you know, quiet time. I want more benefits to me. So I'm gonna train my children to basically do whatever I want them to without complaint because I don't like to hear complaints and a very selfish kind of focus.

But that's not how we're supposed to raise children. We're supposed to raise them in the fear and the admonition of the Lord. Teach them to honor their father and mother in the Lord. Be ready, Lord, to minister to them Thank you, Amen.

So that's it from the two groups for this week.

Boy's out.

And we'll talk about that in a moment. Thank you!

Bye!

And we will see you in the next video. Bye-bye! Be in church again. And then we have instructions to wives and husbands and once again to children. Verse 20 of Colossians 3, children obey your parents and all things for this is well pleasing to the Lord.

And so teach children to obey. What's the motivation? Don't you want to stay out of trouble? Don't you wish we didn't have to have these lectures? Don't you wish you could avoid punishment? So on and so forth.

Okay, well what's the actual motivation? Because you want to please the Lord well. You would like him to be rejoicing in how you treat your mother and your father. And then verse 21, fathers do not provoke your children lest they become discouraged.

In other words, you are to teach your children to please the Lord in a way that they don't become discouraged in the process. Find a way to exhort them and encourage them on in pleasing the Lord. This is just two very basic passages that immediately begin to talk about how to raise children.

And I would say that Paul is writing to people who lived in Ephesus and people who lived in Colossae. And if you're wanting to know what kind of culture was in Ephesus and what kind of culture was in Colossae, there's some great Bible dictionaries and some Bible background commentaries that you can go read and you can go learn about the pagan crazy times that was going on in these places to which Paul is writing.

One verse that came to my mind is Deuteronomy 6 where he's instructing them on raising their children. Deuteronomy 6 starting in verse 4. Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children and you 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.

You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as front lints between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. So a couple of things that came to my mind is obviously the content, what are you teaching your children?

But one thing that really stood out to me is when are you teaching your children? The amount of time that goes into teaching your children. If we're talking about this insane time, well like you pointed out, there's always been insane times.

Who gets the most time with our children? I think that kind of leads into the bonus question, but here it gives examples of when you're supposed to be teaching them. And I'm somewhat remiss, I go to work you know every day and I'm away, but I'm grateful that my wife gets to walk with them and teach them during the day.

When they rise up she's there and when they go to bed I get to put them to bed and teach them and and read to them and sing with them. Here it seems to be all-encompassing, like who is training the children?

I think is a big question and at least here and the verse about fathers not provoking their children to wrath, I think is very important because it tells the fathers to teach their children. So if we are remiss on what we teach our children or even remiss on how often we're teaching our children, maybe because we are present but we're not present or we're not around and the children are somewhere else besides where we are, then we are provoking them to wrath because we are not doing the things that that would teach them about Christ.

So someone else is teaching them. You said all-encompassing, would you kind of be referencing the word paideia that was used in the first text that we were talking about? Yeah, kind of a lifestyle.

A culture. Yeah. Well I liked how you summarized it. You say well first I mean the impetus with this question is how do you raise kids in these insane times? Well one, recognize that our times are not unique, that the Word of God applies today as it did when it was written, as it did before, where it was actually before it was the letter was penned to Colossae.

You read the Shema. Those principles are the same. So one, you would say these times are not unique. Two, we teach Christ. And you read out of the Old Testament the principles of, you teach someone these principles of the Word of God, sunrise to sunset, and not just with your words but with your actions and your lifestyle.

And I would say we didn't actually articulate it, but you heavily implied that you, parent, are the one doing the teaching. That's authority that's been delegated to you. You're primarily responsible.

Now not everybody does, runs a formal homeschool in their house, but everyone is running some kind of home education. You are teaching your children. And I would say it's difficult to put these principles into real practice in your child's life if, for the most of the day, somebody else is teaching them.

So especially when they're young, if you have the means, being at home all the time helps to communicate that more clearly and succinctly. But regardless, you are the primary educator of your children.

You are the one that is teaching them Christ, and you are the one that's going to be held most personally responsible. So how do you raise your kids in insane times? Well, the Bible does say that you're the one who's doing it.

Teach them Christ from sunrise to sunset as much as you are able. And if you have the means to keep them at home, that'd be great.

Christian Education, Parental Responsibility, and the Home

What about, because I think of different spheres of education, so it's either Christ or chaos. And so if a parent is saying, well we're gonna teach our children Christ, and they think, but I'm not a very good educator, but I want them to have a Christian education.

And they consciously make the choice, I'm going to send them to a Christian school or another family that's homeschooling that they feel it would be more equipped to teach them. But they're intentionally making the choice to teach the child about Christ.

Yeah, how that works out is.

Gonna be different, I would think. But I think you're on the right track that that parent is making that decision for that child, and they're taking personal responsibility for that child because they are the one responsible.

That responsibility has been delegated to them by.

Their Creator. Yeah, the question as it reads today's insanity, we already agreed we're no special case. Now understanding that times are usually insane, and we have the depravity of man before us at all times, we're not talking about isolating our kids from the reality that the world is depraved.

We're not talking about exposing them unnecessarily to things that they should not be exposed to. But what is, for parents, and the one asking this question, what are we, as we're teaching them the fear and admonition of the Lord, and we're not trying to advocate isolationism, what does it look like to show your kids the reality of the times that they do live in?

And then, as we talked about earlier, apply Christ to those areas, shine the light in those areas, showing them this is not a dark place to where you go by yourself and try to figure it out on your own.

Jesus has already said something about this here. How does that work out, Michael? Yeah, I think it would.

Kind of look like the best example of a family who immigrated to America, whether they be from, you know, Poland or Italy or Mexico or something, and they've immigrated to the U .S. and things are just different here.

A different type of primary language, the value systems, the pace of life, the, you know, just kind of everything just different. But they really relish their culture. They love their food, they love their conversations, they love their traditional stories, they love their holidays.

They just, they really rejoice in that, and they even, their neighbors find them to be so pleasant and robust and generous, and very often they're bringing their neighbors in to experience authentic Polish culture or authentic Italian culture or authentic Mexican culture or so on.

And their neighbors think, man, this is great, you know, our neighborhood's better because of these kinds of people and we're learning so much. And people can celebrate that and recognize that. And meanwhile, the grandparents and the parents and the children all living together and rejoicing in their culture, they recognize what goes on around them.

They know, well, that's not our culture, but we understand what that is and what goes on there. And when they come into conflict with this foreign culture, they say, well, the way we do things and the way that we think about this particular subject matter, the way we would handle this would be like this.

And even the kids know. The kids have no qualms at all just saying, well, you know, in our house we do it like this, because we're Polish or whatever, you know. And they just, they explain, hey, we have a different culture than you all, and when you talk about these subject matters, oh, we don't do that.

We do this instead. That's what I think it would look like, right? Because, again, you were not called to be monks or to turn our families into isolationist compounds. We're not to embrace any kind of bunker theology where we hunker down and wait for the rescue squad to come, you know, extract us from this terrible place.

That's not what Jesus said. Jesus says that a city on a hill cannot be hidden. A lamp is lit to fill the room with light. The salt of the earth is to be useful because it's salty and being, you know, disseminated so we know that we're not supposed to be, you know, hiding out.

Nobody, you know, mess with us. We're not supposed to go find a corner of Pennsylvania and become Amish, okay? That's not what we're supposed to do. But we are to conduct ourselves in a way that is, we're in the world but not of the world, meaning that we are distinct from everything else.

So Christian culture is going to be absolutely distinct from everything else. Not because we're always trying to find a way to be different just for the sake of being different, but in following Christ and teaching our children to relate to their parents, one of the most important things for a child, to relate to their parents in a way that honors God, in a way that honors Christ.

Okay, what does that look like? There's going to be a distinct culture in the home. So whether your kids are being educated at, let's say, a Christian school like Christian Heritage Academy, which this church is a founder of and a supporter of, or in a homeschool situation, which most of our families here are homeschooled, whatever you're doing, think about this passage here from Deuteronomy 6 that Chris read, okay?

And again, who is the fulfillment of the law? And who's greater than Moses? So when you read this, think of Christ, right? These words which I command you, they shall be on your heart. This is Deuteronomy 6.

Deuteronomy 5 is the Ten Commandments, okay? But who's greater than the Ten Commandments? Who's fulfilled the law of God? It's Christ. So how am I going to apply this in my household? I want the fulfillment of all of God's righteousness and all of his promises and what it really means to be holy, the true revelation of God, the superior revelation of God, is Christ.

I want him to be on my heart. Who he is, what he has done, what the words that he has given to us in all of Scripture, both Old and New Testament. And I need to teach Christ diligently to my children.

I need to talk of Christ when I sit in my house, when I walk by the way, when I lie down, and when I rise up. I want to talk about Christ. I want to bind Christ as a sign upon our hands. There'd be a front lens between our eyes.

I'm gonna write Christ in the doorpost of my house and on my gates. Because he's King of Kings and he's Lord of Lords, and as Jesus was fond of saying in many of his parables, he's gone to a far country and he's received for himself a kingdom and a dominion which has no end, and he's gonna come back.

But he's still King. He's still King of the whole world and he's King of this country, he's King of this state and the city in my home. And even though we live in the midst of a culture that admittedly is pagan and crazy, my family is from a different place.

We are citizens of heaven. We are citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem. We are citizens of Mount Zion. We are citizens of Christ. We bow the knee to Jesus Christ. That means that we're gonna have a different culture in our household, and as we go out and we encounter people with a different way of talking, a different way of living, a different way of decision-making, and so on and so forth, we're gonna say, well here's how we do things in our household, and here are the things that we celebrate, and here are our holy days that we celebrate, and we're going to be encountering people that are pagan and different, and we're gonna be teaching them about a foreign culture.

A culture that is foreign because it's from a far country where our Savior reigns. And so that has to be built up in the home. Where else is it gonna happen? It's not gonna happen in a Christian school.

It's not gonna happen there, because that's the parents job. You can't build a culture by going someplace and going to a school with a bunch of other kids and some teachers. That's not gonna build Christian culture.

Christian schools are only Christian if the families who send their kids to that school are building Christian culture in the homes. That's what makes a Christian school Christian. It's the families building Christian culture and sending their kids to that place.

It's not the school that does it. It's the families that do it. They bow them to Christ because that's their job. So whether you homeschool or send your kids to Christian school or so on, it has to happen in the home.

It has to happen in the home, and you have to build that day in and day out. Now some people are like, well, you know, what about the formal practices of family worship and catechisms and so on? And so there's a lot of tools out there we could use, but the text indicates just a common everyday, all-the-time, lifestyle kind of situation where I'm gonna be demonstrating to my kids how to think and talk and act and live in light of who Christ is.

The most common sense thing in the world is for them to think.

Jesus is King. So you've talked about glory a lot in the past and it being light, weight, and direction. I think right there, if you're filling your home with Jesus, you're filling it with light, you're filling it with weight, and you're filling it with direction.

And anybody who comes into contact with that home, they are going to sense that, for better or worse for them. It's something that is, you sense cultures, you sense Polish cultures, you sense the Mexican cultures or Italian cultures, but there is so much more glory, there's so much more weight, and there's so much more direction to a Christian household that that's why it feels foreign.

It doesn't feel foreign because I'm trying to make it feel foreign. It feels foreign because Jesus is filling up that space. We're going to address the second part of that question, which asks if there's a disagreement between a husband and wife about the subject of homeschooling or homeschooling their children or home education, as you said earlier.

Michael, where would you.

Marriage, Patience, and Unity in Homeschooling Decisions

Start with that in the Word? So I would say that if there's a disagreement about the education of the children, there needs to be some patience from each spouse to the other. It's important to remember the instructions of the one and others in the Word of God and the primacy of the marriage relationship in the created order.

The very first human relationship, of all human relationships, was husband and wife, and there were some roles set down in which the man is supposed to provide leadership, but let's say there's a mother, a wife, and a mother who wants to homeschool her children, and let's say the husband, the father is not in agreement.

Now we could begin to try to dissect all the reasons why, begin to analyze the uniqueness of that situation, but in general what needs to be recognized is that, as we were talking about when we were in Titus, that older women are to encourage and admonish younger women to love their husbands, love their children, and be obedient to their husbands.

And in Ephesians 5, in the description of the relationship between husband and wife, the wife is to be submissive to her husband and respect him in all things. Now this doesn't mean that she's not to speak with her husband and talk to him about why she has this value in her heart, why she thinks this is important, because God did give her as a helpmeet to him, and the calling that he has upon his life to lead his family and to glorify God, to pursue that creation mandate of being fruitful, multiplying, and so forth, he needs his wife.

God gave his wife to him for that, and so when she shares those things with him, that she intends to be a help to him, that should be a blessing to him. Also, vice versa, if the husband wants the children to be homeschooled, okay, and this is the way he wants the whole family to go, and let's say the wife is, the mother does not feel up to it, and doesn't agree with the concept, and so forth, of course he could try to push the family forward in an impatient way, but how does Christ show patience and love and sacrifice himself for his church?

How does he work with his church? He's patient, he washes her with the water of the Word, he's loving towards her, he has given his life for her. How will the husband lead his family towards this good value, this good thing that he wants to see at work in his family's life?

Well, he needs to be patient with his wife, and to work with her, and to show her from the Word of God the values, and so forth. Now, I would say that very often one spouse, in any given situation, will be way farther down the road than the other spouse about a particular issue, and those types of conversations are difficult.

When you want to go on a walk with your spouse, husbands, when you want to go on a walk with your wife, you generally walk hand in hand at the same pace on the same street. It's not a race? Yeah, it's not a race.

You know who wins. Not only is it not a race, it's also not hide-and-go-seek. Right. Okay, and there will be accommodation. One will slow down for the other. One will adjust their pace, adjust their gait, adjust what side they walk on.

They have to accommodate to go walking together. What time will you be able to walk together? How long? How far? Is it too cold? Too hot? So on and so forth. There's an accommodation that occurs between husband and wife when you go on a walk together.

This is a good metaphor for unity in a marriage, on any given issue. Now, there's a lot of agreement many times with husband and wife about principles and big thoughts about what direction everything is heading, but the particulars are where the unity breaks down.

This can happen because the wife has been meditating on something for a while and she is five blocks down the road by the time she begins to yell the details back to her husband and vice versa. Sometimes the husband has this big plan that he's gonna have done.

We're gonna do this, this, this, and this and the wife is nowhere near him when he's trying to move the family in that direction and that's where there is a lot of conflict. We want to walk together. How can two people be agreed unless they walk together?

So you need to be patient with one another, loving towards another, so on and so forth, but the husband does need to lead. Now, if the wife says, look, I think homeschooling is the best and the husband says, no, I don't agree, you know, there needs to be still a walking towards building that Christian culture in the home, okay, and that may end up turning into homeschooling and we are reminded that wives sometimes win their husbands over to things without ever even saying a word by their submissive and chaste and loving conduct.

So if a wife is not in agreement, if the mom is not in agreement about the homeschooling, well, the husband needs to be patient with his wife as they head in that direction. It may be a little while till all the pieces come together, okay, but there needs to be patience with one another.

And if there are further concerns about what this looks like and how this can function and so on, that's when you should be relying upon resources like.

Your elders. I mean, we're talking about general principles of unity in marriage as you're making these decisions for the home that affects not just the marriage relationship but all the children and has that second and third order effects of changing Christian culture generally over generations.

There are some practical questions that couples do have to talk about regarding, well, how long do you homeschool? I mean, if I have a son who wants to be a doctor, I can't homeschool me a medical school when he's 25, 26.

If he wants to be a pilot, I can help you with that, but I'm not trained. So we're not talking about all the way through college or whatever, but maybe there's apprenticeship or there's other things. So we're talking about home education or homeschooling or keeping young children at home.

That's a separate question from, well, there is career training when you're dealing with a 17, 18, 19 year old. So there's some practical and logistical things that you have to address, but I think you have to start from the position of husband and wife.

What is the direction for the family? How are we going to practically work this out? Are we in agreement? And if we're not, how can we kind of get to that place? The answers that you have for a newborn, two years old, four year old child versus a 19, 20 year old who's never been homeschooled, there's obviously some different answers.

You're going to get different answers ultimately, but it still comes from the same place, a unity in the home. When you.

Were talking about earlier, Michael, walking with one another, we're talking about trying to understand each other's frame. Understanding the frame of your wife and the wife understanding the frame of the husband, kind of how Paul gives his instructions to husband and wives.

He doesn't give them the same ones because he understands their frame that we have a predilection to not love our wives correctly in an understanding way. That's the admonition that we receive in these situations and then with the wife, it's to respect the husband in these situations.

So when we're walking alongside each other, how important is it to understand the other one's.

Creational frame that they've been given? Yeah, otherwise, and also Paul says, he warns against husbands becoming embittered against their wives because obviously they're not thinking of them appropriately with the right categories and expectations that Christ would have us do.

We have to think about that the patience and the inexorable victory of Christ in the lives of his people, in the life of his bride, he is going to sanctify her and he is long-suffering with us and he is going to win.

He's going to succeed in that. So we have to keep that in mind as we work through these value changes in our own families where we want to become more and more conformed to Christ. It's more important that these conversations about homeschooling and education of kids, it's more important that this is a sub sub heading under the larger discussion of Christian culture in the home, of Christ as King over everything.

You know, we want to rejoice in him and make him the center of everything. The particular way in which we educate our kids is important, but very often that discussion is particularly about reading, writing, and arithmetic.

How are we going to get that done? Okay, that's an important topic to talk about, but educating kids is much larger than that, it's more robust than that, and if in the home, if in the home there is a robust education of the kids going on in terms of fearing the Lord, of seeing the world through the eyes to the perspective of Christ, that should be going on whether or not they're getting their reading and writing and arithmetic from, you know, homeschool curriculum around the kitchen table or they're getting that in a classroom setting across town.

And ultimately, as the husband leads the family towards Christ and they work together as husband and wife as mother and father of these children, it may become apparent, it may become apparent that it's easier, more cost-efficient, more effective, more time-efficient and effective to do that in the home.

Or it may become more apparent that for one particular kid who's got a mind that is not on the same level as the other kids, and this one's gonna head off to be an engineer, we're going to do something different for this one than the others.

Because, again, you know, we're going to train the children the way that God made them, not, you know, subject them to some sort of, everybody has to have the exact same.

Cookie cutter. Yeah. Amen. I would like to say to anyone that's listening and you're in that place where you're not in agreement, not to panic, as someone, as a street, and off to a different road, and you don't see where your wife is anymore, and you're calling out, it could be easy to panic.

So for either spouse, know that this is not a surprise to God, and it's part of your sanctification. So although there may be disagreement there, it's an opportunity for prayer to grow closer together.

It's an opportunity to get to know each other better for the purpose of glorifying God, because ultimately that's what that's what you're trying to do. Christ is King, and you're trying to show your children.

This is an opportunity to show your children how you work out disagreements as a married couple, which will be beneficial to children to see that. So don't think of this as a negative thing that's in the way, but as an opportunity.

Well, I think that about wraps that up for today on that question. We'll go to our our segment where we recommend content for.

The week. Michael, what do you have for us today? My recommendation is Kingdom through Covenant by Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellam. It is a heavy work, 840 pages of reading, dealing with the progress of the covenants throughout Scripture, and showing how it is that they all find their fulfillment in Christ.

So it is incredibly encouraging, a smaller volume that condenses it all into probably a more accessible form, would be called God's Kingdom Through God's Covenant. It's a much slimmer volume, still by Stephen Wellam and Peter Gentry, and it's also a very good read.

It's encouraging to see the unfolding of the glories of Christ from the beginning of the end to the end of scriptures, and how it impacts and what it really means for our everyday life. Chris? So I.

Recently read a book by C .R. Wiley called In the House of Tom Bombadil, and that book was awesome. It was really good just on itself, but it was also a small, a smaller read, and it was just kind of light-hearted and fun, but it had some deeper principles in it that I found very helpful, particularly when talking about kind of that the home and the house and that sphere.

So I'd recommend that, In the House of Tom Bombadil by C .R. Wiley. Did you like the conversational style that he wrote with? Yes, I did. And he brought up questions that he didn't answer. Yeah, just let me throw that out there.

You think about that. And just walk away.

David, what about you? I have an Audible subscription, so I think there's other ways that you can get it. The way I got this book, Cultivating Biblical Godliness for Men, is actually a combination of five books, but Joel Beakey is the lead author on it, and I got it with a single credit.