The Best of 2020 | #2

Truth.Love.Parent.

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Now, I know I say that, and then many of you may cringe believing that you have spent far too much time with your family.

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If that's the case, though, please hear me out. Welcome to Truth, Love, Parents, where we use

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

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A .M. Brewster. Welcome back to our Best of 2020. On our last episode, we acknowledged the joyous blessing that God has used 2020 to remind

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His people that we must anchor our hope in Christ. Fear, sinful anger, and hopelessness have no place in the life of a believer.

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And we heard the number three most downloaded episode of 2020, Why Does My Family Argue and How Do We Stop?

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Today, we look at the second greatest things to happen in 2020, both in the world and on TLP. But before we do that,

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I hope you'll take some time to enjoy TruthLoveParent .com. We have so many gift ideas, from games to parenting resources to super comfortable apparel.

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Christmas will be here before you know it, and we have more than enough gift recommendations for your family, so be sure to check that out.

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And while you're there, you can also download today's free episode notes. But before I reveal the second most popular episode of 2020, allow me to share what

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I believe may have been the second greatest blessing of 2020 for God's people. One of the most beautiful consequences of the lockdowns was that we were reminded who our families are.

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But more importantly than that, I believe we learned that we simply do not spend enough time with our families.

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Now I know that I say that, and many of you just may cringe because you believe that you've spent far too much time with your family this year.

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But if that's the case, please hear me out. Your family was designed by God to possess the nearest and dearest relationships you will ever have.

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All throughout Scripture, the imagery of a husband and wife and parents and children and brothers and sisters are used to illustrate the closest and most intimate human relationships possible.

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Those of you who acknowledge that family is abundantly precious will agree with me that you very much enjoyed spending more time with your spouse and children.

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And I would argue that if you do not feel that way about your family quarantine, you're actually proving my point.

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If God designed your family to function better the closer you are, but your relationships are fragmented and antagonizing, that means you need to spend more time together mending your relationships and submitting them to God's will for your life.

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Families should not hate being around each other. I love the song, It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas, but the line, but mom and dad can hardly wait for school to start again is not cute or funny, it's actually really sad.

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We should desire a larger quantity and greater quality of time spent with our family. So yes,

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I believe all of God's people received a blessing in 2020 when God reminded us how much time we need to be spending with our spouses and children.

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As a side note, if you struggle wanting to spend time with your kids, the TLP counselors and I would love to help you and your family recapture

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God's vision for your relationship. So that's the worldwide blessing. As for Truth Love Parent, our second most downloaded episode may surprise you.

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Episode 336 is called Parenting Strategies You Need in Your Home and addresses a very interesting technique

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Jesus used all of the time. The second episode in this series then teaches parents how to sharpen this strategy for maximum impact.

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I hope you'll listen to episode 337 when you're done with today's episode. Now let's consider a new parenting strategy we desperately need in our homes.

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All right, let's discuss some parenting strategies you absolutely need in your home. Before I start though, we need to straighten our glasses.

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What do I mean by that? We need to realize a couple things. Number one, we're often very blind to God's realities.

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Spiritually dead people are incapable of understanding spiritual truth without help from the Holy Spirit. In fact, so are spiritually alive people.

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Also, even if we're born again, we're often blind to many glorious realities simply because our current culture, society, family traditions, personal beliefs, and unconscious convictions all so easily distract us from deeper and more important truth.

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The strategy I'm going to discuss today is an area so completely informed by our modern conventions that we often don't even stop to consider that there's a different, or dare

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I say, better way. So about what could I possibly be talking? Today's topic falls under the large umbrella of communication.

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Now the moment I say that, we should all acknowledge that our family communication is struggling at best.

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Communication issues are one of the biggest complaints in nearly every family conflict. This is why

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Team TLP and I spend so much time talking about communication. I'll link some of the past shows in the description of this episode so you can further your study.

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But we're also going to continue talking about communication on future episodes, because whether we realize it or not, communication is an incredibly gigantic issue in our homes.

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This is why we're going to do a series in March about an often misunderstood element of communication. I'm really looking forward to it for a number of reasons, but one of them is that I'm going to kick the series off with an interview from Hilary Morgan Ferrer from Mama Bear Apologetics.

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That's right, we're going to discuss the Mama Bear's newest book as well as focus our talk on an absolutely vital and extremely detrimental problem with our modern communication.

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So as you can clearly see, communication is a big deal to Truth Love Parent. Truth is the content of our communication and love is the motivation of our communication.

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But the method of our communication needs to be just as lofty. This is why we're talking about it right now.

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But today's topic is not going to be what you may expect. Frequently, communication talks revolve around what we need to stop doing.

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This isn't a bad approach, but it's definitely lacking if we only spend time talking about what we need to stop talking about.

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And then there are communication studies that focus on new strategies for communication. But I think there's less of this out there than you may think.

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It's true that when people say you should stop using angry words, they often include a list of words you should be using, and that's helpful.

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But I think these discussions need to go deeper. They need not only to address the words, they need to discuss the patterns and framework of our communication.

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But they also need to challenge the motivation. I believe the best communication studies deal with the heart.

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Jesus says that everything we say comes from our minds, so it makes all the sense in the world that we won't be able to truly fix our communication until we first fix our minds, or biblically speaking, our hearts.

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My family and I are currently reading War of Words by Paul Tripp as part of our family devotional time.

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I did an episode about this resource. You should check it out. This particular book, though, does a great job focusing on why we have communication problems in the first place and addressing the true heart of the matter.

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But what about the patterns and framework and methods and delivery of our family talk?

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You see, we can talk about renewing our mind and putting on and putting off all we want, and that's fantastic and it needs to be done.

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However, there is an extra step that's equally as valuable. Students who attend

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Bob Jones University are required to take speech classes. Why? Because even though every student in those classes already speaks

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English and has been doing so since they were very young, very few people actually know how to communicate well.

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It's more than vocabulary. It's far greater than just the words we use.

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This discussion today is very similar to our study on thinking. All humans think to one degree or another because God created us to think, but we must understand that we do not naturally think well.

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Just like everything else in our lives, our thinking starts immature and desperately needs to grow up, and since our speaking comes from our thinking, then it follows that our communication needs to be taught as our thinking needs to be taught.

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Long ago, they actually used to have classes in school that taught logic and critical thinking.

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It's excessively hard to find such classes nowadays. One reason I love the apologetics movement is, if nothing else, it teaches people how to use reason and logic again.

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Of course, it's so much better for lots of other reasons. I've often talked about wanting to offer a parental speech class.

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I really believe I'm going to put one of these together one day. Unfortunately, I don't think many people would be interested because, as I've already mentioned, we all think that we think and speak well, and when people correct us, we write it off, make excuses, condemn them for being quote -unquote too polished or grammar

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Nazi, and continue on as we always have. This is due to the fact that we are being influenced by all the wrong worldviews.

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Our society hates to be told how to talk and especially how to think. Their belief in personal freedom and their own evolutionary maturity blinds them to the fact that they have never actually been taught to string their thoughts together in truth and love toward a

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God -centered and efficient end. And yes, that is the indisputable way God created us to think and speak, and any thoughts that do not conform to that formula are the result of faulty thinking.

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So, it cannot go without speaking. Pun intended. We've established that our words flow from our hearts, which technically refers to our minds.

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This means that if our thinking is immature, our speaking is definitely going to be immature.

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Okay, Aaron, you've spent a lot of time talking about communication, but you haven't even revealed your point.

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Isn't this poor communication? No, because I'm building necessary suspense. Let me tell you why we're already over nine minutes into the show and I haven't revealed our topic yet.

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Had I started the show with my topic, I believe many listeners may have turned it off or listened politely and then excused the information.

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Before we learn what to put off and put on though, what I said earlier, we need to first renew our minds.

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So number one, how do we need to renew our minds about communication? What I've attempted to do in this long introduction is build a solid foundation for our minds.

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I needed to address the heart attitudes that make it too easy for us to dismiss important teaching about communication.

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To renew our minds, we must accept the biblical reality that number one, none of us think as well as we should.

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Two, none of us communicate as well as we should. And three, this means that we must be willing to consider a completely different way of communicating when illustrated in Scripture, even if those ways are different, seemingly awkward or hard.

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That's how we should be thinking about this. So let me ask you, are you willing to allow the biblical example we're going to study today to conform your communication?

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I hope so. So without any further ado, let's talk about what we should put off and put on.

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Number two, what do we need to put off in our parental communication? In George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984, he created a society that had reduced communication to the barest of essentials.

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However, in depleting the vocabulary of the language, the dystopian dictators also killed the ability of the masses to think.

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Though we passed the year 1984 long ago, a beautiful, wonderful year that my wife was born,

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I believe our society is definitely moving in the direction Orwell predicted. Social media and texting have made it impossible, or at least awkward, to write anything more than a short paragraph.

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Normally a word or two or an emoji will suffice. All forms of mass communication are also being affected.

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Entertainment isn't mirroring the culture so much as it exaggerates it for dramatic or comedic effect.

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Therefore, all of our poor communication is fed back to us in hyperbolic form, and then we copy it and try to appear cooler, and then the entertainment takes that new extreme and exaggerates it even more, and the cycle continues.

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Have you ever wondered why TLP episodes generally are no longer than 20 minutes? Let's be honest, who would listen if they were continually an hour or two?

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Most of us won't do anything for an hour or two unless there are a lot of explosions involved. I use these examples to show that we need to put off the idea that the way people generally communicate is the best way.

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Too often we think things have to be what they are simply because they are what they are. We regularly argue that something is the best simply because it's what we're already comfortable doing.

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We say things like, well, that's the way it is, as that somehow proves the fact that it's okay to be the way it is.

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We rarely consider that what we do may not be the best and desperately needs to change.

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We also need to put off our frenetic frenzy that deludes us into thinking that we don't have enough time to say what needs to be said the way it needs to be said.

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I'm taking my time getting to the main point because it's the best that I can do. Now, you may disagree and be desperately wishing that I would hurry up and get to my point, but that is the point.

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So before I grieve your soul anymore, let me go ahead and unveil the parenting strategies you need in your home.

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Number three, what do we need to put on in our parental communication? Have you ever considered how

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Jesus communicated? Have you ever turned to him to be a good model for your own communication?

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Being God, we can know with all confidence that every time he opened his mouth, he gave us the perfect example of how to communicate.

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Of course, when I suggest that, I often hear the following arguments. So we should all speak Hebrew and Aramaic.

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So we should all speak Greek. So we should all adopt the communication styles of an ancient culture. Now, there are so many arguments that can be made to address those faulty misconceptions, but I will once again drive us to the important observation.

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Every time Jesus spoke, he illustrated the best way to speak. Spiritually, grammatically, theologically, logically, linguistically.

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Jesus spoke all to the glory of God the Father all of the time, and we should too. But I only want to focus on one communication device today.

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Let's consider the linguistic element for which Jesus is the most famous, the parable.

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What's a parable? Well, Merriam -Webster defines parable as a usually short, fictitious story that illustrates a moral attitude or a religious principle.

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Now, our feelings may want to dismiss Jesus' use of parables as an archaic way of communicating better left in an ancient time.

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But I want you to think carefully about a statement I made earlier. I was talking about the length of the average

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TLP episode, and I mentioned that most people won't do anything for two hours unless it involves a lot of explosions, but that's not entirely accurate.

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Let's look at the value of stories in general. I'm sure you'll agree with me that if it involves a compelling story, you and your kids will read a book or watch a show for hours and hours on end.

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According to a Common Sense Media survey, on average, American 8 to 12 year olds spend 4 hours and 44 minutes on screen media each day, and teens average 7 hours and 22 minutes, not including time spent using screens for school or homework.

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That's nearly an entire work day spent staring at screens, and much of their staring is in the form of a game or show or a movie, all of which are in story form.

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We can only endure 45 minutes in class and school because we have to. A sermon over 30 minutes is unbearable.

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Spending 15 minutes reading a devotional is taxing, and talking with our family for 5 to 10 minutes a day seems like an eternity.

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And yet, we all stare at screens for hours and hours. Consider this. God didn't give us a theology textbook.

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He communicated all the divine truth we would need to live this life successfully to His honor and glory via a story.

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That means two very important things. Number one, God created us in His image, and since He is a storytelling

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God. Number two, I believe we were created to resonate with stories. Think about that.

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God wired us and our children to learn by story. Imagine how we could potentially multiply the efficacy of our parenting simply by utilizing more story modes.

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This is why it shouldn't surprise us that when it came time for the incarnate Christ to speak the deepest truths His audience needed to hear,

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He often utilized stories. Now to be fair, He didn't use them all the time, but some estimate that parables and illustrations made up about one -third of His teaching.

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The question for us today is what percent of our parenting is made up of parables? I'd argue that the answer is not enough.

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So what exactly is a parable and why don't we use them more often? Let's talk about now the nature of a parable.

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I think it's helpful to see the following words as all tied to the same idea. Parables, illustrations, analogies, metaphors, object lessons, similes, and morality tales like Aesop's Fables.

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Simply put, a parable takes an esoteric or purely conceptual idea and translates it into a practical picture that can be more easily understood.

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This works for children as well as it does for adults. When Jesus wanted to illustrate how God has given each of us a spiritual purpose and that He expects us to put in the effort to capitalize on that spiritual purpose,

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He told a story about a master who had three servants. The master gave each of his servants a large sum of money with the understanding that they steward that money while he was away on a trip.

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When the master returned, two of the servants had wisely used their resources to gain even more resources. Even though they each had different amounts of money to begin with, the master praised the servants and blessed them.

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But the third servant was lazy and fearful and foolish in his thinking. Instead of stewarding their resources, he buried them in the earth.

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The master was very wroth with this servant, stripped him of his resources, and punished him. When fleshed out with greater detail, the parable takes the mental concept and turns it into a practical reality to which most people can attach.

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In Jeremiah 13 verses 1 -11, we learn about God commanding a prophet to use a powerful object lesson.

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It should amaze us the amount of complexity God required of Jeremiah. The passage reads,

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Thus the Lord said to me, Go and buy yourself a linen waistband and put it around your waist, but do not put it in water.

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So I bought the waistband in accordance with the word of the Lord and put it around my waist. Then the word of the

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Lord came to me a second time, saying, Take the waistband that you have bought, which is around your waist, and arise, go to the

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Euphrates, and hide it there in the crevice of the rock. So I went and hid it by the Euphrates, as the

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Lord had commanded me. After many days the Lord said to me, Arise, go to the Euphrates, and take from there the waistband which

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I commanded you to hide there. When I went to the Euphrates and dug, and I took the waistband from the place where I had hidden it, and lo, the waistband was ruined.

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It was totally worthless. Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying, Thus says the Lord, Just so will

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I destroy the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem. This wicked people who refuse to listen to my words, who walk in the stubbornness of their hearts and have gone after other gods to serve them and to bow down to them, let them be just like this waistband, which is totally worthless.

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For as the waistband clings to the waist of a man, so I made the whole household of Israel and the whole household of Judah to cling to me, declares the

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Lord, that they might be for me a people, for renown, for praise, and for glory. But they did not listen."

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It wasn't good enough for Jeremiah to use the word picture. God wanted him to actually go through the process of destroying a waistband in order to cement the teaching.

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So if this tool is so valuable, why don't we use it? Well, after listening to the process

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Jeremiah went through for that object lesson, the reasons we avoid them are likely apparent. Let's discuss the difficulty of parables.

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Most of us weren't taught to do it, and we didn't have good examples of it growing up. As I mentioned earlier, too often this way of communicating seems archaic, so we avoid it in exchange for more quote -unquote contemporary and trendy talk.

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It takes more time. I guess in the illustration of the servants and the master, I could have easily said, children,

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God has given each of us a spiritual purpose. We need to work hard to discover and accomplish that purpose. Period.

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Jeremiah could have told the Jews that they had become to God like a worthless waistband, but it takes longer, sometimes much longer, to tell a compelling educational story.

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That's a third reason why perhaps we avoid it. And lastly, it's difficult to create a powerful and applicable parable when you're just not used to thinking in word pictures.

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But given the fact that 1 Corinthians 10 .31 is still in the Bible, then we have to accept that everything worth doing is worth doing the best way we can all to the glory of God.

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God has given us precious lives to bring up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We'll attend boring conferences in order to be better equipped in our jobs.

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We'll even pour over lists and lists of stats to fill out our fantasy brackets to the best of our ability. How about we put some extra time into learning how to utilize a communication tactic that Jesus used so effectively?

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Let's not allow the superficial difficulties to discourage us from pursuing this parenting strategy. Okay, Aaron, you say,

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I understand that they're important, but how do I use parables in parenting? I have no idea where to start. Well, that's a fantastic question and a legitimate need.

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That's why we're going to dedicate a whole episode to it next time. This episode is all about reasoning through the important arguments for implementing parables into our family talk.

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I hope you're willing to accept that this may be a skill that you need to develop. Next time, we're going to take a practical look at building and using parables in our parenting.

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Consider it a mini speech class that will help us add this strategy to our ever -matureing quest to parent like Christ.

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Please share this episode on your favorite social media outlets so other parents can learn the value of parabolic parenting.

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And remember, if we want our children to grow up into Christ, we must parent in truth and love.

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And that is often going to require that we work through Jesus' parables as well as utilize some of our own.

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So, to that end, join us next time as we look at how to integrate parables into your parenting. Truth.

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

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