TLP 92: Christian Parenting 101

So what God's about to say next should cause us to put everything else on hold. He's taken all this time to remind us who he is and now he says, listen to me and do what

I say. Welcome to Truth. Love. Parent. Where we use

God's Word to become intentional premeditated parents. Here's your host

A .M. Brewster. Welcome friends. I am glad to have you here with me today as we get back to the Christian parenting basics.

I've already been challenged by this study and I look forward to being challenged again as I share it with you.

But before we do that, I'd like to share a five -star iTunes review we received from Freddie. He said, my wife and I have been listening to Truth.

Love. Parent. for over six months now. The quality of the biblical insight into parenting coupled with the thorough notes have been invaluable to us as we are raising our three and one -year -old girls.

Thank you so much for the wisdom that is so much needed in this world today. As we cruise into our second year of ministry,

I can't express the joy comments like this bring my heart. The Lord's wisdom is super abounding and free to any who seek it.

So thank you all for joining me today as we pursue more of God's wisdom. All right.

Now on to the things we wished we knew before we had kids. I guess to be fair, some of us did know it.

We at least have heard this information before and no doubt many of us have heard it since we've had kids.

So, Lord willing, I pray we enter today's discussion with renewed hearts and a desire to truly learn what we may have previously struggled to heed or to be consistent in.

Today's show is going to follow the same format from episode 90, how to be a truth love parent. That episode was very popular and I believe it has to do with the way we really just dug into Ephesians 4.

So today, please join me in a passage that we've cited a number of times on this show and but really have since not really mined for its parenting treasures.

We're gonna look at Deuteronomy 6, 1 through 9. I know some of you already know what it says and others of you will immediately recognize it.

Others of you may have even preached sermons out of this text. But I encourage you to pray as David did as we look at this passage today.

Open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of your law. Here's an overview. Verses 1 through 6 are the prerequisites we need for the class called

Christian Parenting 101, which then runs from verses 7 through 9. So, let's start in verse 1.

Moses is writing this to the children of Israel and he says quote, Now this is the commandment, the statues and the rules that the

Lord your God commanded me to teach you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over to possess it.

Unquote. Now before we continue, let me speak to the fact that the vast majority of my listeners are what we or in what their scriptures refer to as Gentiles.

Most of us are not Jewish, but that does not mean that this passage of scripture doesn't apply to us. Yes, there are specific

Jewish promises in these verses that refer to them claiming the promised land, but there are principles and commands and promises that extend to all of God's children as well, and they apply to all of us.

So, as we look at this first verse, we notice a couple of prerequisites. After our study on peaceful parenting in Philippians 4, we should be very familiar with the concept of a promise prerequisite.

God says that he instructed Moses to teach the people his commands, statutes, and rules because God intended his followers to keep them.

We have to do our part because of who he is. This, my friends, is the bedrock of all we're going to study today, all that we've ever studied, and all that we hope to study in the future.

If God is not able to claim ultimate and supreme authority, if he's not able to expect us to follow the commands he issues, then he's not a

God worth worshiping. And if he is a God worth worshiping, then what are we doing not obeying him?

The fact that God is who he is, a God worthy to be feared by us and our children and our children's children, makes what he has to say more important than the stock market, the presidency, the

PTA, black, white, blue, pink lives matter, our bank statements, our children's grades, our promotions, our friends, and our feelings.

Nothing in this universe is more important. So, what he's about to say next should cause us to put everything else on hold.

He's established his authority. Up to this point in Exodus, we've learned that he's created the world, sustained the world, judged the world, made promises and kept promises, performed miracles, and mightily removed his children from bondage in Egypt.

And then God says, listen to me and do what I say. And so he tells us, starting in verse two, what his awesomeness requires in our lives.

That you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your son's son, by keeping all his statutes and his commandments, which

I command you all the days of your life, and that your days may be long. Hear, therefore,

O Israel, and be careful to do them, that it may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly as the Lord, the

God of your fathers, has promised you in a land flowing with milk and honey. 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. I believe here we see three prerequisites and four blessings.

The first command slash prerequisite is fear the Lord. Now, I don't believe the English word fear really does this word justice, but I don't necessarily think there's a better one either.

This Hebrew word encompasses both the dread and the reverence, and I believe both of those responses can happen simultaneously.

We should genuinely fear the consequences of sinning against God. The consequences for the unbeliever is eternal death.

In Matthew 10, 28, Jesus says, And do not fear those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul.

Rather, fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. And obviously he's referring to himself.

The consequences for the believer are varied depending on the situation, but we should all fear wounding our Lord and Savior who gave us, who gave all the opportunity to have an eternal relationship with him.

But we're not simply just to dread sinning against God. We're also to revere him and be in awe of his majesty.

We're to value him above all else. That's what reverence and respect are. We should be in awe that he would save us from eternal punishment.

Our relationship with him should be the most important thing to us. But as a parent, it's not enough that we fear

God. Moses says that our sons and our son's sons should fear him as well. Now, you may be thinking,

I can't control that. Well, here's the thing. I believe Moses stopped at son's sons and didn't go to son's son's sons because that generally is as far as most people can influence their descendants.

Even back in Moses's day, being around to influence your great -grandchildren wasn't the norm. I believe the

Lord's instructing us to have a strong reverence for God that our children and their children can't help but be influenced by.

That's the first prerequisite. The second is this. Carefully keep all his statutes all the days of your life.

I took this from three parts within the passage. In one verse, we're told to keep his statutes and commandments all the days of our lives.

Grammatically, the phrase all the days applies to the statutes as well as the commandments. Once again, like in our peaceful parenting series, we encounter a divine generality.

When God says all, he means all. That doesn't merely mean until the end of our lives, but it means every moment in between.

There's no exception. We don't get any passes or cuts. God demands our fealty. I then took the word carefully from verse three.

Hear, O Israel, and be careful to do them. The word careful has the idea of a military guard.

We are to vigilantly and fervently work to keep his statutes. Now, I want to talk about what a statute is, but I think it's important to point out that the same

Hebrew word translated keeping in verse two is translated careful in verse three.

Twice in this passage, God uses the same word to describe the effort we are to put into obeying him, and I don't think the word keep really is powerful enough to really carry the weight of the idea that he's communicating here in Hebrew.

The last word we need to understand is the word statutes, as I mentioned before. Many people see statutes and commandments to be synonyms for each other, but even if that were linguistically accurate, even among synonyms, there are shades and variations among the words.

If God wanted to repeat himself, he would have used the same Hebrew word twice, keep my commandments and my commandments, but that's not what he did.

The word statutes here refers to traditions and customs. They often may have started as a result of a command, but they're not often viewed culturally the same way as a rule or regulation would be, because sometimes it's just, well, this is the way we do things.

Now, the third prerequisite is related to the last. As I said, carefully keep all his commandments all the days of your life.

Here, the only difference I want to point out is the word commandments, which means God's laws, precepts, and ordinances. Again, there's no need to make a big deal of the differences in these words, but I believe that noting what we have keeps us away from the temptation to kind of keep the ten commandments while excusing the cultural traditions and habits that we have that don't align with the principles and examples provided in scripture.

There was a big problem with the Pharisees who strained at a gnat in their tithing, but neglected to love their elderly parents.

I'd love to talk about this more. Maybe we'll dedicate a future episode to the fact that sometimes we like to keep the commandments without keeping the statutes, but that doesn't work.

And again, we need to see that he reminds us throughout these verses that he is the personal Yahweh and our supreme

God. We humans are so forgetful. That's partly why this study is so challenging to me. It's not that I didn't know it or read it before.

It's just really I forget it. I forgot it. I forget it while I'm making breakfast, that God is who he is. I forget why

I'm watching movies or teaching my children the martial arts. I forget that he's the all -loving, all -powerful, all -wise

God of the universe while I parent. And it's at those times of spiritual amnesia that I fail, and I believe the same is true for you.

God knows too well how many reminders we need, and we all need this reminder today. Now, I'm going to skip over the love the

Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, because really that's part of the whole concept of what it means to fear the

Lord. If you're truly fearing the Lord, you're going to do that. But really, we have so much to cover today, and we're already running out of time.

I do want to save that for later. So I want to move past the three prerequisite commands and really get to the four blessings.

They're this. One, your days may be long. Two, it may go well with you. Three, you may multiply greatly.

And four, you may be prospered. Now, I'm not going to go through each one of them again because of time, but I also think the meaning is very clear.

However, I do want to point out another temptation we can have. There's this movement all over the world, one that's very prevalent in African countries actually, often referred to as the prosperity gospel.

Joel Osteen would be an example of this in the U .S. This movement is heretical. It's unbiblical. Some of the most physically unprosperous people in the entire

Bible were Paul and Jesus. Okay, I think you understand where I'm going.

I'm really just going to call out Joel and everyone else of his deceptive ilk. What they preach is a lie. The only people prospering in the prosperity gospel in Africa are the church leaders who take advantage of the blind allegiance of their followers.

This passage is not promising that everyone who fears the Lord and keeps his statutes and commandments will be healthy and wealthy with no problems.

First, some of the specifics of these promises are unique to the children of Israel, such as the land flowing with milk and honey.

Second, there's nothing in these promises that requires the blessing to be physical. And third, the rest of scripture must be taken into account.

Jesus said that we would be hated and persecuted and reviled. But the prosperity Jesus names in Matthew 5 is not a new car or vacation home.

It's joy and contentment in the face of persecution. Again, there's so much I could say about that, but I do need to move on.

Okay, so Christian Parenting 101 requires the foundation laid in verses 1 through 6. In order to be successful in our parenting, we need to major in the fear of the

Lord and have our proficiencies and statute and commandment keeping. Only then really can we hope to receive the blessings of such a life.

Only then can we also hope to parent well. So God's laid the foundation and now we get into the part of this passage that's so familiar to many of us.

You shall teach them diligently to your children and 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 frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

I honestly, um, I only really have one point to make from all this. You need to personally, diligently, constantly, vividly, passionately, repeatedly, and intentionally educate your children in the fear of the

Lord, His statutes, and His commandments. As we saw in episode 79, we must take the full responsibility of our children's spiritual education on to us.

That doesn't mean that others can't help, but we are ultimately responsible. Our teaching must also be diligent in that it's earnest and energetic and perseveres no matter what happens.

The spiritual education of our kids must also be constant, seen in the specific breakdown, the sitting and the walking and the lying and the rising.

We need to be vivid and passionate. The idea of binding God's word onto our hands and between our eyes and and putting it on the posts of our house is a picture of the steps we're willing to take to make certain our kids see how important it is.

As we all know and as we saw earlier, we must be prepared to also repeat ourselves. We need repetition and our kids need it too.

Listen, if you hate repeating yourself, you really just shouldn't have become a parent. And of course, we will fail to do any of this if we're not being intentional about it.

I challenge you to sign up for our Truth Love Parenting course called 25 Days to Becoming a Premeditated Parent.

There, you'll be able to really hopefully mature in your parental intentionality. Also, again, note the content of our education.

We need to train our children the same things God requires of us. The fear of the Lord, his statutes, and his commandments.

That includes loving him with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength. By the way, you cannot teach something you don't know.

You need to fear God before you can teach your children to fear God. You need to have a personal culture of conforming to God's statutes before you'll be able to reform your family's culture.

And you need to follow God's commands if you plan to require your children to follow them as well. Of course, listen, none of us will do this perfectly.

And I know there's a lot of parents out there who are like, Oh, I really shouldn't even require this of my kids unless I can get my life together.

But if you wait until you're a perfect parent, two things will happen. Number one, you'll never reach it. And neither will I. And two, you'll fail your kids in the process.

And we don't want that. So Christian Parenting 101 is simply educating our children to fear

God and live in his truth. Now, if you wonder what this looks like, you're like, man, I'd love some application here.

How am I going to do this with my kids? I want you to listen as I read Moses's example in verses 20 through 25 of the same passage.

Quote, So a child asks his father, why do they do what they do?

And he wants to understand that family philosophy. And then dad takes the opportunity to explain everything he knew about God, about how he was working with their people, about what he did.

He shared who God is, what God did, what he promised, what he commanded. And even more important, he shared the spiritual motivations behind it.

It was a fantastic little summary right there. A great example Moses gives us about how to do this

Parenting 101 that we've just looked at. Now, I'm very excited about Natasha Crane's new book,

Talking With Your Kids About God, because the title may as well have just been called Christian Parenting 101.

Of course, I think her title's a lot better, but it's exactly what we're talking about today. She and I are working to schedule that show as close to the book's release date as possible.

But I really, I encourage you to get your hands on the book as soon as possible because this is what we're talking about. Her book talks about how we can, when we're lying down and rising up and walking and sitting, how we can be pointing our children back to God, talking with our kids about God.

I'm also looking forward to our next episode. I'll have a special guest on the show who's going to help us practice what we talked about today.

The show is called Tackling Tattling, and I can't wait for Jessica Mayer and I to share with you how we apply

God's truth to that very dangerous behavior in our children. And the episode after that, we'll also piggyback this one.

It's called Train Your Child to Stay With God, and it'll conclude our third season before we move into our next series called

The Meerest Christianity, which will unveil the deepest question of our families. Why do we and our children do what we do?

And how do we fix the bad things we do? I really hope you'll join us for everything I've mentioned and more as we cruise into our second year of ministry.

Also, don't forget your episode notes on truthloveparent .com. And speaking of our website, please be sure to join the

TLP family and enroll in your first TLP parenting course while you're there. Now, why do we offer all these resources?

Really, because Christian Parenting 101 is relatively simple to understand, but it's not always easy to do.

And we want to help you every step of the way. 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.