TLP 156: Concrete Family Talk | avoiding misunderstanding; encouraging true understanding

Hear me out friends. We need to jettison our modern, culturally informed ideas concerning the definitions of words. We need to communicate God's intentions for the ideas He created.

Welcome to Truth. Love. Parent. Where we use God's Word to become intentional, premeditated parents. Here's your host, AM Brewster.

Thank you for joining me today as we search God's Word to learn how to be ambassador parents. If you're new to the show or you've never listened to the two-part episode called The Fifth Way to Parent, the only parenting style that glorifies God, I hope you will.

There truly is only one parenting style that pleases the Lord, and we need to know what it is. Not only that, but those two episodes also talk about the four other parenting styles that displease Him.

Know thyself may be an uncomfortable proposition, I know, but it's necessary if we're serious about following Christ. In my flesh, I tend to be a dictator parent instead of an ambassador, and when I do that, I'm actively working against the best interest of my home.

And this ties into today's discussion as well, because it doesn't matter what kind of parent we are, most of the interactions we have with our kids is verbal. Sure, we provide for them and play with them sometimes and cook for them and drive them to school, but most of the influence we have comes through our words.

So if my words are selfish, inaccurate, unloving, or unclear, I'm chipping away at the foundation of our relationship and the home. Now, before we continue, I'd like to ask those of you who've been with us for a while to please rate and review the show.

Perhaps you started listening because you read reviews from parents just like you who were blessed by this show. Perhaps your reviews can do the same for another. All right, what does it mean to have concrete family talk?

There are plenty of dictionaries you can use to understand words, but I like Merriam-Webster, and one of the reasons I like them is the extras they provide. When I looked up concrete, they included a did-you-know section that read like this, quote, we can trace concrete back to the Latin verb, and I'm not even going to try to pronounce Latin, I'm sorry, and it means to grow together.

Appropriately, when it first entered English, concrete could mean connected by growth. Logicians and grammarians also applied concrete to words that expressed equality, viewed as being united with the thing it describes.

That in turn led to the sense of concrete, which is now contrasted with abstract. Concrete words express actual things, while abstract words express qualities apart from the actual things. And it was not until the 19th century that the noun concrete and its related adjective began to be used for the building material composed of cementing material and sand, gravel, or similar materials, unquote.

I thought that was kind of cool. So, we're going to tweak that idea ever so slightly and use this definition. Concrete family talk uses words that are united with God's intentions for those words. Concrete family talk grows in connection with God's truth.

It's been said that prose is words in their best order, and poetry is the best words in their best order. And if that's the case, then I encourage us to parent in poetry and teach our children to do the same.

Of course, I'm not advocating a house full of Dr. Seusses or Longfellows, and I realize that this concept may seem strange, so we're going to use the rest of our time to define concrete family talk and to give illustrations.

What are the best words in the best order? Well, for today's study, we're going to consider the 14th psalm. Number one, concrete family talk is acceptable to God. Verse 14, the very last verse of the psalm says, let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

Is it acceptable to God to lie? Is it acceptable to God to tear people down? Is it acceptable to God to swear? Imagine how your family talk could be revolutionized by simply learning what it means to be acceptable to God and then living that way.

The words we use in our concrete family talk must grow in connection to God's expectations. Number two, concrete family talk exalts God. The first six verses illustrate creation's speech. The heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

Day to day pours out speech and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor are there words whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.

The entire creation is obsessed with proclaiming God's awesomeness. There isn't a native tongue who hasn't heard its declamation. Now, isn't it interesting that humans seem to be the only part of creation that don't constantly declare his power and glory?

Reflect on that for a moment or two. How often is God exalted in your home? How many conversations turn to his grandeur, love, mercy, and holiness? When you correct your children, do you exalt God? When your kids admonish each other, is God the preeminent motivation for behavior?

Is his word read and proclaimed? The words we use in our concrete family talk must grow in connection to God's purposes. One of the reasons he gave a speech was to tell others about him. And number three, and finally, concrete family talk is exact.

Now, this is the last point and we're going to park on it though for a bit because it's a huge point. I could have taken all of these sub points and made them main points, but I want this to be practical for you.

I want you to be able to walk away from this concept with three main ideas and be able to start using the principles today instead of feeling like there's this massive list of requirements. Concrete family talk is acceptable to God.

Concrete family talk exalts God. And concrete family talk is exact. Now, some of you may have felt overwhelmed if I added any more to that list, and let's be honest, we should. You know, God tells us that we need to be holy as he is holy.

That's the core of the ambassador parent, maintaining high biblical expectations for ourselves and high biblical expectations for others. So what does it mean for our family talk to be exact? Well, it means quite a bit.

Merriam-Webster defines exact as exhibiting or marked by strict, particular, and complete accordance with fact or standard. The second definition is marked by thorough consideration or minute measurement of small factual details.

So how does God define exact? Well, let's read Psalm 14, 7 -11. The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.

The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever. The rules of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold, sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.

Moreover, by them is your servant warned. In keeping them there is great reward. The first section was about creation, and this section is about the law of God, which, as we all know, has been graciously communicated to us in the Word of God.

Do you remember our episode about the book War of Words? Some of us had never really thought about the fact that spoken and written communication is precious and divine because God ordained it to be this channel through which we know Him and each other.

Therefore, what better form of communication is there in which to root our family talk than God's Word? So in order to have concrete family talk, it needs to be exact, which means we need to model it after these eight principles.

A. Concrete family talk is perfect. It revives the soul. The Hebrew word translated perfect refers to being whole or complete. It's healthy and unstained. The word translated reviving speaks to bringing something back, presumably to bring something back from where it was to a place of wholeness.

Consider the implications. Do your words give spiritual health? Are they complete in that they communicate the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Hear me out, friends. We need to jettison our modern, culturally informed ideas concerning the definitions of words.

We need to communicate God's intentions for the ideas He created. Let me give you one example. God created two sexes. There are men and women. Biblically speaking, there is no such thing as gender, as at least defined by millennials.

The English word gender came to us via the Anglo-French genre, which came from the Latin, which referred to birth, race, kind, and sex. For years and years, if you looked gender up in a dictionary, you would find a definition like this.

A subclass within a grammatical class, such as a noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb of a language that is partly arbitrary, but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics, such as the shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex, and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms.

The second definition would be membership of a word or grammatical form in such a subclass. And the third definition is an inflectional form showing membership in such a subclass. That's the definition of gender.

Gender has almost always been a term that referred to the grammatical class of words, not people. However, let's do some time travel back to the early 20th century. Because the word sex started to take on more of an erotic connotation, people felt uncomfortable and started using the word gender instead.

They just didn't want to say sex. So for decades, people have been using the word gender instead of sex. But the first appearances of this substitution were found in early feminist writing and was often used to refer to social attributes as much as it was biological attributes.

Since the word never actually referred to sexual organs, but instead referred to a cognitive association to grammatical concepts that have no human biological organs, it made all the sense in the world to detach from the word gender, everything having to do with biological sex, and instead keep to the true definition of gender that had to do with an arbitrary understanding of masculinity or femininity of words.

Now, if you go to dictionary .com, it provides this extremely long footnote to the new definition for gender. Please, I'm not going to read all of it, but I'm going to read a large chunk of it, so stick with me.

Quote, although it is possible to define gender as sex, indicating that the term can be used when differentiating male creatures from female ones biologically, the concept of gender, a word primarily applied to human beings, has additional connotations, more rich and more amorphous, having to do with general behavior, social interactions, and most importantly, one's fundamental sense of self.

Until recently, most people assumed that acknowledging one's gender or sex was easy. You just check the appropriate box on a standard form, choosing either male or female according to the gender you have been assigned at birth based on visible anatomical evidence.

But some people's internal sense of who they are does not correspond with their assigned gender. And in fact, we now recognize that a complex spectrum between male and female exists not only mentally, psychologically, and behaviorally, but also anatomically.

Gender identity is complicated. Some people, perhaps most, do not question their assigned gender, but others perceive themselves as belonging to the opposite sex. Still others, some of whom identify themselves as genderqueer, see themselves as neither male nor female, or perhaps as both, or as rotating between genders, or even as not belonging to any gender categorization at all.

This array of life experiences has resulted in a veritable explosion of new or newly adapted vocabulary. Particularly striking and useful is the word cis, or prefix cis, as in cis male, or cis female, and cis gender, designating those whose sense of self matches their assigned gender.

Using cis in a way to refer to these individuals without implying that cis people are the norm, and all others a deviation from quote-unquote normal. It is notable that choices of gender beyond male and female are even appearing on social media sites.

Clearly, gender is no longer a simple binary concept, if it ever was. And that's been included in our new dictionary. You see, because we stopped using words the way they were intended, and decided to use words the way they weren't intended, we have found ourselves in a place where Christian young people actually believe that gender is something different than sex.

And perhaps it now is because we've made it different. But the postmodern view of gender is not biblical. In a TLP snippet number five, I made the observation that transgenderism is child abuse. Let me now go so far as to say that allowing our children to believe that a person's gender is somehow potentially different than their biological sex, or honestly, that a person has a gender in the first place at all, is child endangerment.

Anytime we allow our children to believe something God says is not true, we are endangering them. Our family talk must be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help us God. Okay, so that was a really big point.

The rest of them will be much shorter. Moving on, and with more brevity, letter B, concrete family talk is sure. It makes wise the simple. The word sure refers to being trustworthy. It's trustworthy to do what?

Well, many things, but specifically the passage says that it takes the simple and makes them wise. Simple people are ignorant, silly, or foolish. Wisdom is living as God commands. Our conversations need to give our children information they can trust.

This speaks not only to having the habit of speaking words that will make them wise, but it also teaches us that we need to be trustworthy when we promise things. If we say we're going to do it, we must do it, or we're not being concrete.

We're not being exact. See, concrete family talk is right. It rejoices the heart. Our words need to be just, upright, righteous. God created this world to need Him. He created us to thrive when everything is right.

When we ignore His truth and seek our own way, we spiral into unrighteousness, which leads to pain and destruction because sin hurts. We must not allow ourselves to adopt ideologies and philosophies that run contrary to God's truth.

We talked about this in episode 61, are there failure philosophies in your home? That would be a fantastic supplement to today's study. Your home life will not work if you subscribe to mottos and mantras that contradict scripture, you know, like follow your heart.

Letter D, concrete family talk is pure. It enlightens the eyes. As you can imagine, pure refers to being clean and free from impurities. I believe the imagery of the eyes grows from the idea that the eyes are windows to the soul, just like we revive our homes by throwing open the drapes and allowing the sunlight to flood through the house.

God's purity allows the whole person to be refreshed, revived, and enlightened. Are our words stained by sin? How many things do we speak that are blemished by selfishness, greed, anxiety, pride, sinful anger, or depression?

When we speak in those ways, I believe we darken the spirits of those to whom we're speaking. Letter E, concrete family talk is clean. It endures forever. The Hebrew word translated clean is very similar to the word pure.

In fact, in some passages, it too is translated pure. However, I believe the chief difference is not in the words, but in what they accomplish. Pure words give light to the soul, and clean words last forever.

Like a bar of gold that's free from its matrix and purified from its dross, concrete family talk will last for all eternity. Sinful talk often dies on the ears of the listener, and if it's lucky enough to be recorded in a book or podcast, it will likely outlive its author.

But it will come to an end when God throws sin and hell into the lake of fire. Only talk that has grown in connection to the Lord will be an everlasting legacy. Letter F, concrete family talk is true.

It's altogether righteous. True family talk is faithful. It doesn't change. It's reliable. This idea is similar to our words being sure and trustworthy. And why are they faithful? Because they're completely righteous.

G, concrete family talk is valuable. It's more precious than gold and sweeter than honey. In episode 145, we talked about how to have a valuable family. These concepts are very closely related. Your family talk won't be valuable if it doesn't conform to God's standard of value.

In that episode, we discussed Philippians 4 .8 as being a good start in understanding how God defines valuable. And letter H, concrete family talk is secure. There is great reward in heeding its warning.

Your family can rest safe and secure when your words conform to God's high biblical expectations. We know this because our words come from our minds, you know, our spirits, our hearts. And there is no end to the promises of spiritual safety when people run to the refuge that is God in His holiness.

So by way of review, and please know that I will have all of this in our episode notes. You can click on the link below to access them. Number one, concrete family talk is acceptable to God. Two, it exalts God.

And three, it's exact. And when we say exact, we mean that our talk is perfect, sure, right, pure, clean, true, valuable, and secure. And listen to the way David ends this psalm. Who can discern God's errors?

The obvious answer being nobody. And he continues, declare me innocent from hidden faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless and innocent of great transgression.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Wouldn't it be amazing if our children grew up to be innocent, free of insolence, and blameless?

If that's how you want your children to turn out, I encourage you to give some more thought to the way your family communicates. Lastly, let me point you toward episode 38, called The Communication House.

If today felt a little overwhelming and you feel like you need a simpler stepping stone, that approach, that episode will not only give you what you need, but will also provide you an image that you can hang in your house to help your whole family start speaking in a Christ-honoring way.

Please don't forget to share today's episode with your friends. Next time, we're going to talk about mothering for Jesus. Of course, as you've probably come to realize, I rarely ever speak to just one of the parents, so dads, don't skip that one because you think it won't be relevant to you.

And if the Lord is laying it on your heart that you should consider partnering with Truth Love Parent, I would encourage you to click on the link below marked 5 ways to support TLP or go to truthloveparent .com and learn something about our mission, passion, our goals, and our roles.

We know that parenting is a huge, life-dominating calling, and communication is the second most difficult part of parenting. We want to help you every step of the way. So, I'll see you next time.

Truth Love Parents 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.