TLP 96: Why Do Your Children Do What They Do? | The Merest Christianity, Part 2

Have you ever wondered what got into your kid's head that made them do what they did? Well, today we're going to start figuring it out.

Welcome to Truth. Love. Parents. Where we use God's word to become intentional, premeditated parents.

Here's your host, AM Brewster. Welcome back to our study into the merest Christianity. What it is, how it affects our families, and what we can do about it.

If you didn't hear part one, you really should listen to episode 96 before continuing. Now, Lord willing, today on our journey to discovering the merest

Christianity, we're going to find out why we and our children do what we do. And before you're tempted to say,

I know why my kids sin, they're dirty, rotten sinners. Let's remember that our first goal is to apply these truths to ourselves, but more on that in a minute.

I just wanted to say that the conference I attended this last week in Jacksonville, Florida was amazing. You can always trust the

Association of Certified Biblical Counselors to start with God and His word and then apply it out to nearly every facet of the human experience and to do it in a way that honors the

Lord. But I don't really want to talk about the conference so much as to tell you about this wonderful premeditated parent from Texas that I met while I was there.

Sonia and her mother tracked me down and genuinely just encouraged me with their words. Sonia and her husband listen regularly to TLP and they share it with everyone they can.

I would definitely call the two of them true super fans, and I'm so happy she introduced herself.

And I want all of you to know that if we're ever in the same area, I would love to meet you. I'd love to hear your story, meet your kids, and just take some time to glorify

God together. And that goes for emails, too. I love hearing about the emails that you send to Team TLP or one of our counselors.

And I try to reply to as many of them as I can. God is just too good to not celebrate. And I love celebrating

Him, especially with the TLP family. Okay, so let's jump right into our study. Last time, we were reminded that real, genuine change can happen in our families.

But as I said, we always need to start with us. So as we learn and grow in these areas, we'll be that much more equipped to teach it to our children.

So this time, we need to figure out why we do what we do and say what we say. There's so much biblical data to answer this question, so I just want to reduce our study to it.

It's this beautiful metaphor found all throughout the Scriptures. It's the picture of a tree and its fruit.

Now, fruit is repeatedly used to represent those things that we say and do. It's also used to picture our accomplishments, character, souls we've won to Christ, and it occasionally represents our children, as in Psalm 127 .3

and Luke 1 .42. But let me share just a sampling of the more familiar Scriptures that deal with fruit.

Psalm 1 .3 says, I think about the parable of the soils in Matthew 13 .8

that we studied in our four children series. At the end, Christ explains how the soft -hearted child produces fruit, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty.

Matthew 3 .8 and 10 says, And then verse 10 says,

Good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Matthew 7 .16,

Matthew 12 .33, John 15 .8

says, Second Corinthians 9 .10

says, Of course,

Galatians 5 .22 talks about the fruit of the Spirit. Hebrews 12 .11, Hebrews 13 .15,

And James 3 .17, And there are many more passages that detail where fruit comes from, the difference between good and bad fruit, how to purge the bad fruit, and so on.

And though we'll consider some of these questions later on, for now, let's just focus in on one evidence of love, two kinds of people, and end our time by answering the question, why do we and our family members do what we do?

Number one, let's consider one very important evidence of love. In John 14 .15,

Jesus himself says, James discusses in great detail the necessity of living out what we say we believe.

And though it's true that people can fake righteousness for a while, true love for God will always evidence itself in the way we and our kids live.

I love using John 14 .15 with my whole family. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. Keeping God's commands in what we say and do is directly tied to our love for God.

This isn't surprising, since Jesus also told us that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God. Therefore, we know that love is at least part of the equation for why we do what we do.

But moving on, number two, let's use Psalm 1 in Matthew 7 to understand that there are only two types of people in the world.

First, let me go ahead and read the passages. Psalm 1 says, Matthew 7 .17

-20 says, These two passages separate the entire human race into those who have a good relationship with God and those who don't.

Psalm 1 refers to an individual who has a good relationship with God as a righteous person, and they're described as a healthy, productive tree.

Matthew 7 also refers to them as a healthy tree and tells us they bear good fruit. On the other side, we have those who do not have a relationship with God or are not a good one.

Psalm 1 calls them ungodly and compares them to dead chaff, and Matthew 7 calls them a diseased tree that bears bad fruit.

Most of you should know what chaff is. I like to compare it to that papery husk you find on a peanut after taking it out of its shell.

It's completely worthless to us from every aspect. It doesn't taste good. It doesn't feel good in our mouths like that outer shell of our popcorn that kind of gets stuck in our teeth.

It also doesn't provide any health benefits. It's just completely worthless to us. That's why in Bible times they would throw their grain in the air during a strong wind and the weighty grain would fall back to the earth and the papery, worthless chaff would be blown away.

That's how God, through the pen of David, describes those who do not have a relationship or a good relationship with God. Okay, so we've seen that our fruit is related to our love for God and that the strength of our relationship with him also has a lot to do with our fruit.

And I think we all agree that makes sense, but I do believe there's more. Let's go ahead and fill out this tree metaphor a bit more.

We all know that trees nourish themselves in a few ways. They utilize photosynthesis and they also soak up nutrients and water through their roots.

For right now, I don't want to overcomplicate the metaphor, so we're going to just kind of ignore the photosynthesis part and focus in on the roots.

Without a good root system, the tree can't even really grow leaves in the first place, let alone fruit. So anyway, the fruit grows, but how does it grow?

Well, again, to be simplistic, it grows in part because of the nutrients that come through the roots up the trunk and into the branches.

So the fruit doesn't just magically appear. We know that. There's a cause. So we want to figure out what feeds the fruit in our lives.

Where does it come from? Again, please understand that there's no Bible passage that says you do what you do and say what you say because you fill in the blank.

But not only can we see from multiple passages a spiritual and logical flow, but there's at least one passage in particular that gets really specific.

So please consider the following questions, though, before we move on as we try to work through this for ourselves.

Why do you eat chocolate ice cream? Why do you like roller coasters? Why do you cheat?

Why do you love your kids? Why do you speak unkindly to your spouse? Why do you play the sports you do?

Why did you sign up for that class? Why do you even eat food? Why do you watch movies?

Why do you take things that don't belong to you? Choose any one of those and think about it. Good or bad, doesn't matter.

Why do you like or dislike roller coasters? Why do you eat ice cream? Have you figured it out? I know this format is really hard to interact with, so let's discuss one of the best passages that I believe illustrates this concept beautifully, and we're gonna look at Genesis chapter 3.

Okay, so Eve has just been tempted by Satan to eat the forbidden fruit, and in verse 6, it says, So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.

So let's move backward through the passage. What was Eve's fruit? Well, not the fruit she ate, but her actions.

Well, she took the fruit, she ate it, and she gave some to her husband. Well, why did she do that? Well, the verse gives us three reasons.

First, she saw that the tree was good for food. Second, it was a delight to the eyes, and third, it could make her wise.

Now, some of you may be thinking, she did it because of what she could get out of it, or maybe you think she did it because of how it would make her feel, and I think those play into it, but I believe the most seminal answer is this.

She did it because she wanted to. Look at what it says. When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took the fruit because she desired it.

It was pretty, it looked yummy, and it would make her wise, and she wanted it. Now, my dad says all the time, everything you do, you do because you want to.

That goes for you, your spouse, your kids, the neighbors, the president, me, and everybody else.

In fact, this is so true, I can categorically say that you've never done anything you didn't want to do.

I know, and all of a sudden, everyone driving their cars nearly drove off the road, and if you were cutting vegetables, you may have just lost a finger.

What are you talking about, Aaron? Are you crazy? I do things I don't want to do all the time. In fact, I'm doing something

I don't want to do right now. Well, hold on a minute, take a breath, engage your mind, and follow through with this illustration.

Let's say I did something really terrible. I put a gun to your head, and I said, kick your dog, or you're going to die.

So what do we do? Obviously, we weigh it out in our minds. I believe most of us would kick our dogs.

We understand that what we have to sacrifice to stay alive isn't worth as much as what we gain by staying alive, and plus, you know, we're not killing the dogs, we're just kicking the dogs.

It's going to hurt the dog, but hopefully they'll heal, and you know, we have all these justifications. Now I get, I know this is a ridiculous illustration, but bear with me.

All of us could say, I didn't want to kick my dog, but I had to. But unfortunately, that wouldn't be true.

You didn't have to kick your dog. You kicked your dog because you wanted to kick your dog more than you wanted to die.

In situations like that, it's a question of degrees. You may be driving to that job you despise because you want to work more than you want to be homeless.

None of us really like disciplining our children, but we really do want to discipline them because we know what will happen if we don't.

You do what you do because you want to. You say what you say because you want to.

And this is so important to acknowledge because it strips us of the ability to say things like, I'm a good person who just makes mistakes.

Or he's a good kid, he's just in a phase. Or he has a good heart. My friends, none of that is true.

We overeat because we want to. We lie because we want to. We worry because we want to.

We yell at our kids because we want to. We even flirt with people who aren't our spouse because we want to.

And we also turn down our spouse's advances because we want to. We get aggravated when our home doesn't run the way we want it to because we want to.

We can't say the devil made me do it. We made ourselves do it because we are not good people.

Seriously, no one who actually desires to be unkind can be called a good person. No one who desires to do something wicked can be considered good.

We're sinners. Sin is not a disease. It's not an accident. It's not something that controls us against our will.

Sin is a willful act against God that is deserving of death. Listen, there was only one good person who ever lived and his name is

Jesus. And that one good person came to this earth to bear the penalty of our sin. Any goodness we have, we have through Him because even our best attempts are selfish and vile.

Now, I know it's not too hard to agree that our children do what they do and say what they say because they want what they want.

But we have to start with us if we hope to be able to help our children see this. And our children need to see this.

But so do we. Consider again Matthew 7, 17 through 20. Every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.

A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit.

Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.

If there is a bad fruit in my life, it's because there's something wrong with my tree. When you have bad fruit in your life, it's because you're a bad tree at that moment.

My tree is bad because it wants to bear bad fruit and the same is true for you and your kids. The very first sin occurred because Eve wanted to do it and every sin that has come after it was born from the same thing, our desires.

Now, if you're still unconvinced, because this is really hard truth to swallow, this is gross, this is nasty, this makes us feel bad about ourselves,

I need you to consider James 4. What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you?

Think about quarreling and fighting, okay, that's what we say, it's what we do, right? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?

You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.

You do not have because you do not ask, you ask and you do not receive because you ask wrongly to spend it on your passions.

According to James, we desire, covet, and have passions that bear the fruit in our lives.

So is that it? Have we found the root of why we and our kids do what we do? That's a good question.

For now, we can say this though, we do what we do and say what we say because we want what we want every single time.

But it is true and it's fair to ask the next question, well, why do we want what we want? Why do we desire what we desire?

And we need to ask this in order to see if there's another more basic reason that we do what we do. But for right now, we're just going to stop here by making full circle.

Jesus said that we don't obey because we don't love Him and that is true, but why don't we love

Him? Well, because we don't want to. We'd rather love ourselves and the same goes for all our other family members.

Now if this is difficult and you'd like to review these passages and ideas, please check out our episode notes at truthloveparent .com.

They are always free for you to look at and they're linked in the description. And also join us next time as we consider why your kids feel what they feel.

We still have to answer the why do we want what we want question. We're not trying to avoid that, but first we need to figure out where our emotions play into this whole doing, saying, desiring spectrum.

On another note, have you reviewed us yet? We'd be so thankful if you give us a review on iTunes. You can find the instructions on how to do that at truthloveparent .com

on our reviews tab. Listen, I know it's uncomfortable being faced with the reality that I do bad parent behavior because I want to, but we need to be honest with ourselves and with the scripture.

But remember that truth sets us free. I believe when this study is over, your understanding of your relationship with God can deepen further than you know.

And then you can take that understanding and wisely help your children learn it too. And I'm excited about that. So I'll see you next time.

Truth. Love. Parent. Is part of the Evermind Ministries family and is dedicated to helping you become an intentional premeditated parent.

Join us next time as we search God's word for the truth your family needs today.