TLP S00-E9: It Only Takes a Generation to Die | will your children share your faith?

We cannot force our children to bear the fruit of repentance. We need to create an atmosphere in this spiritual greenhouse conducive to spiritual life and spiritual fruit.

The Ministry’s Purpose and the Coming Discussion on Counseling

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

Well, happy November to all of you out there. I love November. I love November because Thanksgiving is a big deal in my family. I love it to death. In fact, my family's been celebrating Thanksgiving since, well, the very first recorded American Thanksgiving.

And I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute. But I am very excited. We're getting closer to the episode where Dr. Heath Lambert is going to be on discussing what counseling is. And he has a lot to say on that, considering that he is the executive director of the Association for Certified Biblical Counselors.

So he'll be talking about what counseling is and how it functions within the role of the parent. Specifically, how counseling works with the parent-child relationship. And it's a unique dynamic. I think a lot of people don't believe that they are competent to counsel.

They're not prepared to counsel. They don't know how to counsel. And they think that parenting is something different than counseling. And we're going to get Heath Lambert's take on that. And I'm really looking forward to what he brings to the table for us in helping us to become intentional premeditated parents.

Thanksgiving, Family Heritage, and the Loss of Faith Across Generations

Now, anyway, back to what I said earlier about my family having celebrated Thanksgiving since the very inception here in America. My name is Aaron Michael Brewster. And I am a descendant of the Mayflower Brewsters.

Elder William Brewster and his wife, Mary, came over on the Mayflower. And you can read all about their lives in all of the histories that have been written about the Mayflower Pilgrims. My wife as well, actually, is a descendant of William and Mary.

She goes back through one of the girls' lines. And so when we got married and we had compared our family trees and found out that we were distant, distant cousins, we thought it was actually pretty cool that these two branches of the Brewster family were coming back together.

And so in honor of that, we named our first child Micah William Brewster because that was kind of cool. It was neat that we had that shared heritage. I know any time I meet somebody whose ancestors go back to the Mayflower, all of a sudden I feel kind of a connection with them because I think about the fact that our ancestors both were probably some of the closest of friends.

They endured hardships and difficulties that likely we living today will never truly understand. And I always feel kind of a connection to them knowing that our ancestors were so close as they were. So Thanksgiving is a huge deal in my family.

We'd like to give it all the honor that it's due. We don't like to jump right over Thanksgiving and go straight to Christmas. And I know many of you love Thanksgiving as well, especially because of your faith in God and your acknowledgement of his provision in your life.

We have so much to be thankful for. And I'll be talking a little bit more about Thanksgiving and its implications later on. But today, I just want to make some applications specifically from my own family tree.

Today's episode is called It Only Takes a Generation to Die. And that's as true in my family tree as it is in many of them out there. It's as true for me as it was for the Old Testament Hebrews, where they would have this revival in their country.

And then it seemed like a generation later, everyone was back into the same sins of their fathers. Specifically in regard to my family, from the record we have of their lives, it's safe to say that William and Mary Brewster were very serious about their relationship with God.

And yet, as I research my genealogy, my spirit sinks to know that it appears I am, for all intents and purposes, a bona fide second-generation Christian. My ancestors immigrated to this country and suffered fatal hardships because they loved God, but it didn't take long before my family tree was indistinguishable from the self-worshiping trees around it.

In fact, it became so bad that by the time my parents sprouted, they were some of the first in their families to be born again. How does something like that happen? How do you have parents just dedicated, ready to put everything on the line to sacrifice their lives for God, and a few generations later, it seems that nobody in the family even cares about God?

We've all heard about the trickle-down effect. Unfortunately, when it comes to spirituality, sometimes it just seems that it's a doesn't trickle-down effect. How does God's life-altering truth not filter down to the children?

Why can't it be passed on like a family heirloom? How is it we share the same physical DNA, but we lack the same spiritual genes? And of course, the answers to these questions are found in God's Word.

Spiritual Inheritance, Ken Ham, and the Need for a Greenhouse Environment

Each generation has the responsibility to choose or reject God. It doesn't matter how passionate mom and dad are. Their zeal won't just rub off. Ken Ham has dealt with this subject many times. His book, co-authored by C. Britt Beamer, Already Gone, is a fantastic study in this concept.

I've linked one of his articles in the description. You can check that out. It's called Gone in Only One Generation, The Battle for Kids' Minds, and I'd strongly encourage you to read it. The ideas shared in his book are so important to us as parents that I'm actually gonna be mentioning these concepts over the next few episodes.

In fact, I'd love to get Ken Ham on the show so that he has the opportunity to share his perspective on this phenomenon and directly apply it to our parenting. But for now, I'm gonna share with you some important biblical truths that will help our next generation, our kids, and hopefully the ones after them, to live in the truths that we do.

This first idea, I call it the spiritual greenhouse. Before we can have any effect in our kids' lives, we need to understand a couple things. First of all, we cannot force our children to bear the fruit of repentance.

There's not a Christian parent on the planet who hasn't wished at some point they could pull out a toolbox and tinker around inside their children's hearts. But there's nothing we can do to directly change the minds of our kids.

God's the only one with that power. We can pass down our eye color and hair color and our other physical attributes, but we can't do that with our spirits. So what are we to do? The second idea is this.

We need to create an atmosphere in this spiritual greenhouse conducive to spiritual life and spiritual fruit. Dr. Jim Berg compared the role of a parent to a hired gardener who tends a greenhouse. This picture is instructive because A, the plants do not belong to the gardener, and B, the gardener is not responsible to make the plants bear fruit.

He's responsible to produce an environment conducive to fruit bearing. So let's take this picture and build it up a little bit by considering a tomato plant. Many people run to Home Depot, buy a tomato plant, put it in the ground, surround it with a cage.

The plant subsequently grows into a three foot tall bush, produces some tomatoes, and is discarded at the end of the year. But did you know that your tomato plant should look like a seven foot string of red pearls?

My shortest tomato plants are generally seven feet tall. My tallest ones are closer to 10 feet and they each produce more tomatoes than my family could possibly eat.

Well, how?

It's good to know that tomatoes are vines. They're not bushes. They perform best when cut down to one main stem. But because they're a vine, they need to be tied to a stake in order to keep them off the ground.

Tomatoes don't multitask well either. All the nutrients and energy that tomatoes consume go primarily to the creation of new leaves. Any leftovers are then routed to the fruit production. So a productive tomato plant needs to have all but a few of its leaves and suckers, which are the branches that grow up at the apex of the branch.

They need to have all those cut off. This process channels all of the plant's energy into creating delicious fruit. So, okay, now we know a little bit more than we wanted to about raising tomatoes. Let's go ahead and apply this to our parent gardener metaphor.

Stewardship, Spiritual Nourishment, and Loving Discipline

First of all, the gardener is a steward of the owner's plants. Parents are stewards of the children God gives us, nothing more. We don't own them. They're really not ours. Understanding this will affect our attitude toward our children more than anything.

When we say things like, how could you do this to me after everything I've done for you? Well, we don't talk that way if we're a gardener who embraces his stewardship. Secondly, the gardener is actively involved in creating a perfect environment for the plant to grow.

They monitor the light, the nutrients, the water, the soil, and the temperature. As parents, we need to shine the light of the word on our kids from waking to sleeping. Kids need more sunlight, S-O-N light, than plants need sunlight.

We need to do it all day long. As parents, we need to feed our kids the bread of life at every possible moment. As parents, we need to introduce our children to the living water as early as we can. As parents, we need to work to break up the hardened soil of spiritual ignorance.

We need to dig out the rocks of spiritual superficiality. We need to pluck up the spiritual distractions that may choke out God's truth. And as parents, we need to monitor the spiritual temperature of the home.

Isn't it interesting that the most ungodly part of Sunday is generally at home as everyone's rushing to get ready for church? The first step that we need to take if we're going to be the steward of our children is to realize that the only way that our children can truly grow spiritually is to have an environment that's conducive to spiritual growth.

So there needs to be constant truth in love being poured into our children. And every time that we take a break, it's like hiding the sun behind a cloud that the tomato plant can't do its photosynthesis.

Every time we stop watering it, that tomato plant is going to stop producing the fruit. It's going to start to shrivel up and to die. And we need to do this for our children as well. The third concept is once the plant is established, the gardener continues the previous tasks, but then adds the important jobs of pruning and staking.

See, parents need to apply appropriate boundaries so their children can flourish spiritually. Parents need to prune behaviors and relationships from time to time to ensure Christ-honoring growth. And the way we do this is very important too because here's the fourth idea.

Gardeners never get mad at the plants for not producing. They may become upset at themselves for failing to see the signs of disease or insects. I know I did that in this past year. I wasn't as faithful with my tomato plants as I should.

And I had all of these green tomatoes, nowhere near ripe, just falling off of the vine. And I found out too late that it was due to all of these slugs I had in the garden. And I was upset with myself.

I wasn't upset at the tomato plants. They may be angry that the plants died or failed to produce because they themselves didn't do the job the way the owner instructed. But no intelligent gardener ever gets mad at the plant.

See, we so often get mad when our plans are thwarted. We go to our children, instead of staking the plant up in love or pruning the plant because that's what it needs, we lash out and we tie it down to a stake too roughly.

We cut off things that we don't need to be cutting off because we're just responding out of anger. And that's not how we're to respond. That's not going to help us. It's not going to help our children.

It's not going to help our relationship. And we have to be honest with ourselves enough to admit that very rarely is our anger without sin. James 4, 1 through 3 tells us, what is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you?

Where does it come from? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members? You lust and you do not have, so you commit murder. You're envious and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.

You do not have because you do not ask. When you do ask and you don't receive, it's because you ask with wrong motives so that you may spend it on your pleasures. When I, as the gardener, go into the garden angry at the plants, angry at my job, I'm never going to treat the plants the way I should.

A plant that's just being annoying isn't growing the way I want it to grow. I'll be tempted just to pull it up by the roots. How ludicrous it would be to be angry at the plant. Now, I know children aren't plants.

Children have a will. They decide, they choose to call God a liar. They choose to sin. They choose to ignore the truths that you have shared with them. I understand that. And there is a certain level of righteous indignation that is valid and accurate.

We can be angry and not sin. Yet the problem is, like James tells us, our quarrels and our conflicts and our wars and our fights grow out of the fact that we ourselves aren't getting what we want. And that's where we need to be careful.

We need to be careful that when we deal with our plants, when we deal with our children, that we're doing it for the right reasons. It's not for what we're going to get out of it. It's for how our children can better glorify God.

And if we don't want to lose the next generation, we have to apply these truths every moment of every day. Still, even so, the sad reality is that we have no guarantee that the plant will ever bear fruit.

God, the perfect father, had many children. Let's just consider the children of Israel, shall we? He had those children rebel against his perfect love and example. But wait, you say, what about that promise in Proverbs?

And Proverbs 22 .6 does tell us that if we train a child the right way, he won't stray from the training when he's older. Well, let's tackle that for a minute, just so that there's no misunderstanding.

Some people view that Proverb is a promise. If this were a hard and fast promise, then God's a liar, since the children of Israel rejected him and Judas rejected Christ. It cannot biblically be a promise the way most people view it.

So some people view it as a proverb. There are others who say that it's merely a pithy statement expressing some commonplace truth. But if it's not always true, and if it's just a nice thought, really, what good is it?

I believe we need to see it as a provision. Providing we give our children truth, and providing they accept that truth, they won't depart from it. See, this verse is another in the long line from which we build the doctrine of preservation or perseverance, whichever one you choose.

True training does not occur if the student hasn't learned the material. Now, this statement seems kind of one-sided. Hey, parents, train up your child. But it's really a two-sided thing. The parents need to train in truth, and the children need to embrace that truth by accepting God and his plan for their lives.

Only then will the children persevere in that truth. And this is easy to understand in the concept of playing the piano. If you have someone tell you that they have been classically trained in piano, you expect that they know how to play.

You don't expect that they had a teacher who was amazing at the piano and told this student everything they needed to know to be a classical pianist, and yet the student never practiced, the student never got better.

For that person to say that they have been trained would be untrue. We only would accept the fact that they had been trained in that skill if they had really had the ability to show it and to prove it and to play the piano well.

God didn't say, teach your children truth, and they won't depart from it. He didn't say, model for them truth, and they won't depart from it. He said, train them. And that training requires that they actually participate, and they actually practice, and they actually grow.

And to that degree, I would say it is a promise. Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he's old, he will not depart from it. I believe that is a promise, but I think most people misunderstand that word, train.

So again, unfortunately, we have to acknowledge that the child's part in all of this, it's not something that we can easily quantify. All we can continue to do as parents is to create a greenhouse environment that will encourage spiritual growth as we train every single day of our children's lives as often as we can.

This needs to happen all of the time. This needs to happen when we're watching a movie, or eating around the table, or we're working on homework, or we're taking a family outing. My mom was always fantastically good at this.

I remember one of the first times I watched Bambi, and we got to that spot where the hunters who were vilified throughout the entire movie finally killed Bambi's mom. Eventually, they were responsible for starting the forest fire.

And my mom stopped the movie and kindly and lovingly shared with me the concept that the writers of this movie wanted to make us think that hunting animals was bad. You know, we're killing these animals, and it's not right, and we're burning down forests.

And she shared with me that that's what the world thought, and what the creators of that movie thought. But we needed to think accurately and biblically about that, and that has never left me. My mom taking those few minutes to explain that before the movie was over was so wonderful for me.

And I've been able to pass that on to my children, and it's helped me as I grew older to understand the difference between—to think critically, really, when it comes to our entertainment. And that's what we need to do for our kids.

That was my mom, then and there, creating for me an atmosphere where spiritual growth was possible. So, let's be honest here. Your children, my children, will run from God if they are not introduced to the truth of his word.

No man seeks after God. They will struggle if the distractions and cares of the life are allowed to crowd out the spiritual realities they've learned. They're going to fall away if they've embraced quote-unquote Christianity solely to avoid being punished.

Now, of course, please don't think I'm putting the fate of your children's spiritual life in your hands. Inevitably, your children will be held personally accountable for their choices. And as a friend of mine mentioned, the grace of God does far more in reaching our children than we do.

But we mustn't allow these observations to deceive us into parental apathy. In order to be a premeditated parent, to be an intentional disciple-making parent, we must acknowledge that even though we don't give life or cause fruit to grow, we cannot relinquish our responsibilities.

We've been tasked with a monumental undertaking of tending the greenhouse of the king. And we need to ask ourselves, are we ready? If you would like some help with this, if you say, ah, you know, I'm not ready.

I look at my life. I look at the fact that God has called me to be a steward of this greenhouse within which my children are supposed to be growing spiritually, and I am failing at this. I need help. Please feel free to reach out to us at counselor at evermindministries .com.

That's evermind, E-V-E-R-M-I-N-D, ministries .com. You can also go to evermindministries .com, our website, and check out the articles there. And of course, follow us on social media. You can check us out on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter.

I have a personal Twitter there at ambruster. I'd love for you to follow me. And I hope that this week is a week where you look at your parenting differently, where you see the stewardship responsibility you have to your kids, and you start thinking about how you can create a better spiritual atmosphere in your house for God.

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.