June 20, 2016 Show with Dr. Tedd Tripp on “Shepherding a Child’s Heart”

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

Now here's our host Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming.

This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 20th day of June 2016 and I'm delighted to have someone back as a guest who has not yet been on the new

Iron Sharpens Iron. He was a guest several times on my old broadcast which was emanating from Long Island, New York and I'm so thrilled to have him for the very first time on the news show here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

His name is Dr. Ted Tripp. He's an author, conference speaker and elder at Grace Fellowship Church in Hazleton, Pennsylvania and he is the author of the book that we are going to be discussing today,

Shepherding a Child's Heart and he also with his wife Margie wrote

Instructing a Child's Heart after the first was published and was such an enormous success.

I know that not only was the book an enormous success regarding its sales but churches began inviting

Ted to speak and do a full -blown weekend conference on the subject and it was fascinating to see although Dr.

Ted Tripp is a thoroughgoing Calvinist and Reformed Baptist, the churches inviting him to speak were really spanning the denominational lines and it's just a thrill to have him on the program and welcome back to Iron Sharpens Iron, Dr.

Ted Tripp. Thank you. I'm happy to be with you Chris and looking forward to being on with you now that you're in Pennsylvania.

I don't know what took you so long to get back to me but thankful for the opportunity.

And let me introduce you to my guest or should I say my co -host, Reverend Buzz Taylor.

Yeah, I feel like I'm part of the furniture now anyway. I'm no longer a guest. Good to meet you.

Yeah, it was nice to meet you. And Dr. Tripp, tell us something about the genesis of the book

Shepherding a Child's Heart. What was the reason that first was basically the catalyst that made you say

I've got to put this down in a book form. This is nowhere to be found in its completed form in other books that are in print.

I've got to get this done. What was really the genesis of this? Well you know

Chris, I had a lot of kids in the ministry that I was involved in as a pastor.

We had a period of time in our church where we had 48 months in which there was at least one baby born each month and many times multiple babies born.

So we had a lot of kids in our church, a lot of ministry to children. I was raising children. We started a

Christian school so we were interacting with parents about child rearing issues. And I did a de -ment program at Westminster in pastoral counseling and so I had to write a book -length project.

I wrote the book that became Shepherding a Child's Heart. I had no ambition at the time,

Chris, of having it published. It was a course requirement to graduate. So I wrote a book -length project applying the principles of Biblical counseling to child rearing.

We're looking to have it published. After 18 months or so I got a call from the library at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia saying, we have a waiting list.

It'll take us months to have all the people who want to read your project actually get a chance to read it.

You know, nobody ever reads these things. They just keep bouncing up and down in the library. So you really ought to think about having this published.

So we spent a couple of years reworking it from an academic book to a more popular book and set out to have it published.

Nobody was interested in it. And so we got a pile of rejection letters from all corners of the evangelical publishing world.

Eventually, with the encouragement of the elders in our church, we set up a little publishing company, did 5 ,000 copies.

We thought that our grandchildren would be giving them away. You know, hey, my grandpa wrote a book.

Would you like to have it? We still have some boxes of these left in our basement. And I had no anticipation of the response to the book.

And it literally reshaped our ministry in many ways. But it ended up, it sold over a million copies in English.

It's been translated into 37 different languages. And so it has really reshaped our work.

And the church then that I was serving, we had to wrestle as a church, what do we do with this? And the church embraced it as a ministry of our church in the body of Christ.

And so they sought to free me as much as possible to do seminars. And so the rest, as they say, is history.

But yeah, it was kind of, it wasn't anticipated. And you know, I think in some ways,

Chris, a lot of very valid ministry takes place quite organically like that, where it wasn't just, you know, we weren't setting out to let's start a ministry to parents about how to shepherd their children.

You know, but, you know, as the book caught on, I was having invitations to speak and started speaking and all the while working with the elders in our church, really under their care and oversight.

We did some videos, the videos, there was a very good response to the videos and the church.

Really the videos and audio stuff was all the church's property. And so the church started, you know, distributing those as there was request for them.

But it really wasn't something we set out to do. It was really something that, you know,

God just opened up doors and ended up, as I said, really reshaping.

Well, if you listen very carefully, you can hear the sound of the presidents of book publishers and their boards weeping uncontrollably.

Well, not to mention all the other authors that are looking for publishers. It's like, it just doesn't seem fair. You know, it's a funny thing.

I pastored a church in a little town in Pennsylvania, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, 5 ,000 people. And I have had, in the initial years after shepherding began to take off,

I had publishers from all over the country call and say, could I have lunch with you?

And people literally flew to Hazleton to have lunch to say, we would love to publish your book.

But by that time, it had found a niche in the marketplace. And so we just went ahead and continued to publish.

I really thought, to your other point, that we might be able to help other authors who had something to say, didn't have a big platform, and could never get published very readily by the major publishers.

And so we have been able to publish other authors that probably would have never been published, or would have had a difficult time being published otherwise.

So the Shepherding at Charles Hart book actually was the vehicle that the

Lord used to actually launch Shepherd Press. That's correct. That's exactly right. The first thing we did after shepherding was the young Peacemaker set.

Corlett Sandy, Ken Sandy's wife, did some excellent stuff on peacemaking principles for children.

We published that, and that really found its place. Ginger Plowman's book, Don't Make Me Count to Three, also it's really a mother's approach to heart -oriented discipline and correction.

That book has really done very well over the years. Dave Harvey's book on marriage,

When Sinners Say I Do, has also done very well. But both Dave and Ginger and Corlett Sandy are just three examples of people who are unknown as writers who have really influenced a lot of people because they were able to be published.

Great. Let me announce our email address if anybody listening has a question about parenting for Dr.

Ted Tripp. Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. I understand with a subject matter like this there may be questions that are very sensitive, personal, private, and you would prefer to remain anonymous.

I completely understand that. So you may remain anonymous if it makes you feel more comfortable and if the question calls for that.

In fact, we would insist that you remain anonymous if you're going to be identifying certain situations where we would not want to unnecessarily reveal the identity of people and so on.

So you are welcome to do that. I was born in 1962,

Ted, and my older siblings definitely got the stricter upbringing and there was a lot more corporal punishment involved in the washing out of mouths with soap and belt straps to the backside.

Then my mother discovered Dr. Spock and my upbringing was a much more pampered and spoiled one.

I can't even think of one time that my mother ever hit me in any way.

My father, I can just remember one time that he hit me. But tell us what it is in the secular realm of child psychology and all that.

What are the most prominent and popular things being taught to parents that you think depart from not only what the

Bible teaches but what practically works in raising a child to be obedient and so on?

Well, one of the big ones is the most popular method of child rearing in our culture is behaviorism, where you think of some incentive, some prize, reward, or something like that that will motivate a child or some disincentive, some threat or privation or something that will make a child decide not to do something.

So I think that incentives and disincentives, behaviorism is the most prominent view.

And of course, you understand in some ways the reason for that. I mean, we see behavior, we hear behavior, behavior requires a response.

So it's very easy for parents to think, I'm just going to go for behavioral change. And if that's your objective, behaviorism is very effective because you can, you know, you're an adult, you can figure out how to motivate your kids, you know, which kids will work for prizes, which will work for threats and punishments, which ones will work for praise, and you can motivate them and get them to jump through your hoops.

But of course, as Christian parents, we have a much richer objective than that.

We want not just to manage and control our children, we want to nurture them. And that's where the importance of the heart comes in.

So I think a huge problem, I think, is behaviorism. Another problem too,

Chris, and I'm happy to follow up that behaviorism issue with you further, but I think is that it's a very popular notion these days in contemporary culture that we don't try to influence our kids at all.

They are their own person, they have the right to make up their own minds and decide what they think, what they believe in.

It's not my job as a parent to try to influence them. It's my job just to, you know, prepare for their, you know, see that their basic needs are met, care, you know, food, clothing, shelter, some modicum of fun activities together, but I'm not really trying to influence them because it's not really fair for me to try to influence their thinking.

We do have a listener in Mastic Beach, Long Island, Tyler, who asks, do you think that Proverbs 22 .6

applies not only to parents, but also to those who have an influential and substantial role in a child's life, such as youth ministry?

And in fact, perhaps before you even answer Tyler's question, there is disagreement over what

Proverbs 22 .6 actually means. Some exegetes believe that this is a positive admonition that if you raise your child rightly, that they will most likely become godly children.

And then you have some who are teaching that if you raise them according to their personalities or their leanings, even with sinful proclivities and so on, they're going to wind up just manifesting those things to a greater extent when they get older.

But if you could explain what you think Proverbs 22 .6, which for those of our listeners who aren't familiar with it, it's train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old, he will not depart from it.

That is the, at least the New American Standard rendering of that text. And if you could exegete that for us,

Dr. Tripp. Sure. I've talked to many heartbroken parents who are confused and even a little disappointed with God.

And the conversation goes like this. We did everything we were taught to do. We were in church three times a week.

We always had family worship. We sacrificed to have our kids in Christian school or we homeschooled them.

They never gave us any trouble, even when on mission trips. But in college, everything changed. He got into bad relationships with men and women and drugs and the whole party scene.

And now he wants nothing to do with Christianity. And, you know, so the parent is disappointed with God.

What happened? Proverbs 22 .6 didn't come true for me. God failed me. Or you have other people who, you know, who look at others and they say we have friends who were worldly Christians.

They were inconsistent with their training. They allowed them to watch movies that we forbid in our home. They attended church spasmodically.

And you should see their kids. Their kids love God. They're active in church. They're the young adults we always wanted our kids to be.

So a lot of parents, I think, get very disappointed because they have read that passage as a promise that if you get everything right, and the way it's read is that if the way parenting works is that if you do all the things

God calls you to do, you will produce Christian children. So salvation is not really of grace after all.

Salvation comes to parents who work hard, fulfill all righteousness in raising their kids.

And so if my kid turns out to love God and desire God and want God, then I actually get a little bit of the glory for that because,

I mean, we know it's all of grace, but I did my part too. You know, I trained him in the way he should go. Oh, the

Lord's been so good to us. But in reality, the person is hoping that you realize that underneath my humility,

I've been pretty good too. So I think that often there's this idea that this is a promise that if I get it right, things will turn out right.

And I think that it's not what the passage means.

You know, that passage is part of a whole genre of biblical revelation that's known as wisdom literature.

And wisdom literature provides us with general principles for living in ways that are wise and honor

God. And when we approach wisdom issue, we have to think in terms of application, not theory.

Wisdom issue is an application of biblical truth, but the Proverbs are not legal promises from God that if I get it right, my kids will automatically be saved.

And I think there's a lot of, you know, a lot of Proverbs that you can look at that are in that same genre.

You know, for example, in Proverbs 15, it says, the Lord tears down the house of the proud but maintains the widow's boundary.

Well, does the proud man's house always get torn down? We would have to say no. There are proud men who live and die in their houses, and they don't get torn down.

Does the widow's boundary never get encroached on? Does God always maintain it? Are widows never taken advantage of by wicked people?

Well, we'd have to say no. There are some times when wicked people do take advantage of widows. So I think that the wisdom of the

Proverbs is designed to point to God, the one who is only wise, to Christ, in whom there are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

But the passage is not an absolute ironclad promise.

If I get it right, my children will be saved. And you know, Chris, frankly, if I had raised my three children, who are adults and who all love

God, but if I had raised my children thinking, if I get it right, I'm guaranteed they will be saved, that would have never been a comfort to me, because I don't think

I got it right enough at the time. I made so many mistakes. But in spite of my mistakes, in spite of my failures, because God is a

God who is full of grace, he had grace and mercy on my children, and my children came to know him.

So I don't think it's an ironclad promise that if we get it right, our children will turn out right.

And our listener asked, do you think this is only guidance for parents or for those, could it include those who are very instrumental in a child's life, especially like a youth minister or something?

Well, I think all those people that have places of influence in a child's life have a marvelous opportunity to show the kids under their care, whether it's their children or children under their care, as in the case of a youth minister.

They have a marvelous opportunity to teach the truth of God's Word to kids. We know

God's Word is powerful. We know God's Spirit works through the Word to save people. We know that the gospel is the power of God to salvation.

And so we're putting truth before kids that is the exact truth that they need in order to know

God and love God. And so we want to put that truth before them faithfully and trust

God that God's Spirit will work and do his

Word as he will. Let me ask you about... By the way, let me just let

Tyler know. Tyler, good news, you've won a free copy of Shepherding a Child's Heart, and I hope it comes into great use with your work as a youth minister.

But the thing is we need your full mailing address, Tyler, so get that to us so we can have a book shipped out to you

ASAP. And we want to thank the folks at Shepherd Press for providing those free books.

And we also want to thank Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service for shipping them out to our winners.

But anyway, I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, yeah, you cover the text as far as it relates to wisdom literature, but do you also see the possibility that it could be a warning as well as a promise that if we do not take into account the natural bent of a child, he will not depart from that?

Yeah, I think really the child is... Yes, I think that's correct.

I think that we take into account... So it says, train a child the way he would go according to his needs.

And the children are influenced by that training and it becomes part of their calcified.

Well, I think parents quite often have very mixed emotions when it comes to their own children. Having raised six myself, but you get that new bouncing baby and, oh, they are just so sweet and innocent.

And later on, you learn what a hellion they are. You realize, yeah, I think that we have to realize first that...

Diapers and... Vipers and diapers. Vipers and diapers. Yes, I've heard that one. Yes. But I think it's difficult for us.

We don't want to accept the fact that what the scripture says about children is true, that they are fallen, they're born depraved and they need salvation.

They need to be raised in the things of the Lord because of the fact that they're sinners and they have a natural bent.

And yes, when the Bible says folly is bound up in the heart of a child, it's not kidding. That's right.

You know, it's very interesting. I think when I teach on raising children, I've thought this many times.

If I gave a theoretical description that said, I talked about human depravity in children, many people in evangelicalism would argue with that.

They'd say, what about the age of accountability and so forth and so on, and they would want to quibble. But when

I teach it, not in that kind of abstract way, but I say, you know, in our kids, we see things like pride, envy, self -love, greediness, anger, resentment, rebellion, hatred.

I've never had a group of people that said, not my children. You see people even who have toddlers who aren't even speaking yet, and they're nodding their heads.

Yeah, I see that in my kid. So it's very interesting if you did a theoretical discussion of human depravity in children, people argue with you.

When you look at the practicality of, do I see compulsive self -love in my kid? Do I see compulsive self -centeredness?

Do I see deceitfulness? Do I see, you know, pride?

No one argues with that because we see that in our kids. And we do have another listener.

We have Seth in Randlesman, North Carolina, and Seth has a question.

Hold on, I just clicked off of it by mistake here. Seth's question is, my question is concerning family devotions.

My children's ages are five and two. We want to include devotionals with them and are leaning toward doing a

Puritan collection. Do you have any recommendations? Oh, there's so many wonderful devotional series available these days.

When our kids were little, we read Marianne Schulen's book, The Child's Bible Storybook, and it was excellent and had a lot of questions at the end of each session.

Marty Makowski, that's spelled M -A -C -K -O -W -S -K -I, Marty Makowski has done a number of devotional books for parents that are very nicely laid out with a scripture reading, some talking points, some questions to ask kids, and even some suggestions of things you want to pray about.

Those are really nice. They're designed as 10 -minute devotions for a family. I think they're very useful and doable and don't require a lot of preparation.

I'm not familiar with the Puritan series that you're talking about. We certainly use the Catechism with our kids.

We taught them the Catechism and they learned those things. And the way

I think about that, one of my sons actually gave me this thought. He said, you know, when I'm teaching my kids the

Catechism, I'm not teaching them light truth, they'll outgrow. I'm teaching them robust truth that they will grow into.

And I think that's well put. But kids, you know, memorize so easily.

The Catechism is so easy for kids to memorize. They have a sense of achievement in memorizing it.

And it is putting powerful truth in them. So I think that there are a whole range of things you can do devotionally.

What I would suggest with kids that are young like that is short periods, you know, 5 -10 minutes. But if you just read, pray, and sing together, it's of incredible value.

You know, Chris, I had the experience of growing up in a home where we always had family worship. And I know many people have been influenced by Shepherding Child's Heart and the ministry that God has given me.

People have been greatly influenced by my brother, Paul, who's done much more writing than I have and has great insight and wisdom.

We were raised in a home where we had family worship every single morning. There was never a day

I remember that didn't begin with family worship. Now, as an adult, I know we must have missed some days.

It's not possible we never missed a day. But it was so much the pattern of life I have no recollection of days that didn't start with family worship.

My dad was utterly unimaginative in doing it. We read a section in the

Bible. He made no commentary on it. We simply read it. We would take turns each reading the verse in turn until we had read through the section.

We prayed. That's all we did. We didn't sing. He didn't ask any insightful questions.

He didn't do anything really to promote our interest in what we were doing. But we did it every day.

And the fact that each day began with that acknowledgement of God and our need of God was powerful for us.

So I think even the doing of it is more important than what you actually do when you get to it.

I mean, it's important. Obviously, you want to do something worthwhile. But my point is just simply having family worship each day, acknowledging our need of God, our dependency on God each day with your kids is going to be of value to them.

And obviously, you want to look for the best materials you can find, but doing it is the essential thing.

And by the way, Seth of Randleman, North Carolina, you are going to also receive a free copy of Shepherding a

Child's Heart. And we thank you for writing in a question today.

And we're going to be going to a break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air as well with a question of your own for Dr.

Ted Tripp on parenting, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. That's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

Don't go away. We'll be right back with Dr. Ted Tripp and Shepherding a Child's Heart. Iron Sharpens Iron Radio is sponsored by Harvey Cedars, a year -round

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Solid Ground Christian Books is honored to be a weekly sponsor of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Welcome back, and we do have a listener in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Alec, who has a question for our guest,

Dr. Ted Tripp. If you just tuned us in, Dr. Ted Tripp is our guest today for the full two hours, and he is discussing his book,

Shepherding a Child's Heart, and Alec from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, says, do you have any tips on how to deal with conflict between siblings when you are not there to see the incident, and they both are pointing the fingers at one another?

Yeah, I think there's some questions that you can always ask kids, and you could do this individually, and then get them together, and try to talk.

You can ask the child, what happened, and each of them are going to tell you what transpired.

Now, obviously, you're going to get their point of view, even if they're not intending to deceive you. That's always possible, but even if they're not intending to deceive you, you're going to get their point of view.

The next thing you can ask them is, what were you feeling when this happened? And there you're starting to get to those, you know, subjective stuff, what's going on inside this kid, but both of those questions will be fairly easy for the child to answer.

Then a third question is, what did you do? What did you do in response? Why hit him, or, you know,

I kicked him, or I, whatever. So, what did you do? The third, the next question actually begins to get to motivations.

What were you trying to accomplish when you did that? What did you want to accomplish?

What did you think his response would be to what you did? Those kinds of questions can be asked.

What else could you have done? Because sometimes kids get locked in this idea, it's the only possible response

I could have had. What else could you have done in that situation? And, you know, what do you think you ought to have done if you're living in a way that reflects loving

God and loving others? What do you think you ought to have done? Now, none of those questions are accusatory, but they're all questions that help the child begin to think out this circumstance and how he responded.

And then I think you can try to talk it out. Now, you may, in the course of those questions with both kids, you may begin to get some insight yourself into what actually transpired.

And certainly is the parent's role to try to be an agent of justice and peace and adjudicate the matter.

But I think those are always questions that you can ask kids to begin to unpack what was going on.

And Alec from Lancaster has a follow -up question. He asks, and this is really,

I don't think it is exclusively for the age that he mentions, but he says, do you think it's ever appropriate to spank my 18 -year -old son in public?

Obviously, in this day and age, you could use any number for that age.

But actually reminds me of when you were speaking at a conference, a

Shepherding at Charles Hart conference in Bayside, Queens, New York. During the question -answer session,

I stood up and I said, is it okay for me to ever smack my nephew in the side of the head?

He was setting fire to my mother's drapes recently and I smacked him in the side of the head. And you said to me, how old is he?

And I said, 37. I was just kidding. But Alec from Lancaster wants to know if he should ever spank his 18 -year -old in public.

And I'll ask, any age should you spank in public? I do not think you should ever spank in public.

I can't imagine that you would be spanking an 18 -year -old. I'd like to come back to that in a moment.

But I think you never want to spank a child in public because discipline is not a spectator sport.

You want to give your child the dignity of interacting with them in private, because the purpose is not to humiliate the child.

The purpose is to shepherd the child. And just any public discipline is going to be humiliating rather than even humbling the child.

So I think that would be the case. I think, I can't imagine why

I would want to be spanking an 18 -year -old, because the idea there is that if I exercise some kind of physical discipline,

I'm going to make this kid sorry for what he did, and he'll learn not to do that again. I don't think that's the way I want to engage an 18 -year -old.

I don't even think I want to engage a 6 -year -old that way or a younger child that way, because the way

I look at physical discipline is with little children, they want to avoid a spanking.

They don't want to be spanked. Spanking humbles them. Spanking gets their attention. It gives weight to your words.

So spanking is very effective with little kids. As kids get older, they get stoic about it, and they figure out how to handle it.

If I squeeze my buns real hard, it doesn't hurt. They get older.

And there are other things we'll turn to with older kids. With older kids, I want to use the story and principle of God's Word and use consequences in ways that are not behavioristic, but in ways that underscore the importance of living according to God's will and doing what

God calls us to do. So I can't imagine spanking an 18 -year -old. I think that you have a view of spanking, if you're spanking an 18 -year -old, you have a view of spanking that sees spanking as this physical punishment that I will bring to this kid in order to get him to knuckle under and do what

I want him to do. That's not a biblical vision, in my view, of what discipline and correction and nurture is for our kids.

Well, Alec, you are also getting a free copy of Shepherding a Child's Heart.

Just never hit your 18 -year -old with it, especially in public.

Unfortunately, I have heard a number of those horror stories. A lot of times, even pastors want to prove to their congregations that they're in charge of their families, so they will discipline their children in front of the congregation and those situations.

You do not blame the children when they get to 18 for the rebellion that usually comes from that kind of behavior.

Yeah, the parent actually has fostered the rebellion,

I think, and you've planted seeds of rebellion with that kind of punishment focus to discipline and correction.

God doesn't punish us for our sins, and I think that's something we need to think about as parents.

God doesn't punish us for our sins. God chastises us. Us meaning Christians? Yes, Christians.

That's right. Thank you for that clarification. Okay. Hang up on him, quick. God does not punish us for our sins, because the punishment of our sins has been borne by Christ, and what

God does is he chastises us, and chastisement is for our good. So that's why

Hebrews 12, verse 5 says, Have you forgotten the word of encouragement that addresses you as sons?

My son, don't despise the Lord's discipline, because the Lord disciplines those whom he loves just like a father disciplines a child he delights in.

So, I mean, I think that contextualizes discipline. It says discipline is the expression of love.

It's not making you pay for what you did. It's not punitive in that sense. It's corrective.

It's designed to restore the child and to bring them, you know, back into the circle where they're honoring and obeying father and mother and where God promised that it'll go well with them and they will enjoy a long life.

So I think that discipline and correction always has that positive focus of, you know, and discipline, the word is very closely related to discipleship.

Discipline is a type of discipleship. It's God chastening us for our good and for his glory because he loves us and he knows that for us to continue in patterns of sin will be destructive to us.

That's very different than a parent having a punitive view that says, okay, you did something wrong.

You're going to pay for what you did, mister, and I'm going to take it out of your hide. I think that is a punitive view and it's not what

God does with his children. Well, obviously, we can't have a discussion about this without Proverbs 13 24 coming up and we've all heard the often repeated version that even those who aren't biblically literate or even

Christians know, spare the rod and spoil the child. I can't even speak today.

Spare the rod and spoil the child and then you have versions like the New American Standard which says, he who withholds his rod hates his son.

What exactly is being taught here in our Bibles that we believe are inerrant regarding a rod and regarding the discipline of children?

Yeah, I think the passage is a very interesting passage because there are two observations I always like to make on that passage.

One is that Hebrew poetry rhymes ideas. It doesn't rhyme words. The rhyming ideas are the rod and discipline.

So, he who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him.

So, i .e., he does not spare the rod. The other observation I have always on that passage is that it says, he who spares the rod hates his son.

And see, I think that there is a natural aversion. If you're a parent with normal filial affection for your children, there's a natural aversion you have to physical discipline.

You don't want to be the cause for your child's discomfort and pain.

But what the passage is saying is that the parent who loves his child is willing to overcome that natural aversion and is willing to bring the discipline that is appropriate.

And that discipline then is an expression of love. It's a demonstration of the love. And really, that parallels the

Hebrews 12 passage, too, because it says in Hebrews 12, after the quote I made from 12 .5,

it says, you know, anyone who's not disciplined is not a son. But when

God disciplines you, he's treating you as sons and not as illegitimate children. So, you know, discipline is always an expression of love.

And that's really what Proverbs 13 .24 is saying. Well, do you believe that it is appropriate to use any kind of an instrument like a rod?

I mean, I know many Christian parents, including homeschool parents, perhaps especially, who believe in, you know, having a stick or a paddle that you don't bring about serious bruises on the child, but they believe in using that instrument to swat the kid's rear end.

I don't have any problem with using a paddle. I think a paddle spreads the shock over a broad area. It stings.

A paddle is appropriate. Now, a lot of times people say you shouldn't spank with your hand because you love with your hand.

That doesn't make sense to me because spanking is not something I do when I stop loving. So I don't get that. But I think, and sometimes, you know, in some civil authorities even will say if you're going to spank, you should do it with your hand because then your hand is sensitive to how much force you're using.

If you use something, an object, that object isn't sensitive to how much force you're using.

And my own opinion is that you're more likely to harm a child with your hand than you are with a paddle, which spreads the shock over a broad area and stings rather than hurting the child.

But the objective certainly is not to hurt the child, but the objective is to underscore the importance of obeying mom and dad.

I always put the spanking thing, too, in the larger context of Ephesians 6, 1 through 3, that says, you know, children, obey your parents, honor your father and your mother, which is the first commandment, the promise that it might go well with you and you may enjoy long life on the earth.

Well, God has done that passage and he's drawn a circle in which children are to live. And the boundary of the circle is honor and obey father and mother.

When a child moves outside that circle, he puts himself in a place of danger because those promises, it'll go well with you, you'll enjoy long life.

It won't go well with him, he won't enjoy long life outside the circle. So the function of discipline and correction is not punitive, but it's really designed to restore the child to the circle where God says it'll go well with him and he will enjoy long life.

Even there, I think physical punishment, when people talk about disciplining the children,

I try it as much as possible. I'm sure I wasn't always perfect as myself, you know, a human, but in disciplining my children, they didn't get spanked unless it was something pretty bad, like, you know, a deliberate rebellion, not for like spilling milk or forgetting to, you know, make their bed or something like that, you know.

Exactly. I think that's an excellent point. One of the distinctions I make when I'm teaching on this in seminars is a distinction between correction and discipline.

There's an awful lot that children do that require correction in which discipline is inappropriate.

For example, let me give you an example. It might seem a little surprising at first, but if you track with me, if my three -year -old pushes his 18 -month -old sister over and takes her toy, my first approach to that is not going to be disciplined because he's not being defiant for my authority.

He's three years old, he's impulsive, he sees something he wants, he goes for it. He has the agility and speed and strength to pick it out of his sister's hands, so he goes and grabs it and takes it.

I'm going to correct him. I'm going to say, no, no, no, you can't take your sister's toy. She was playing with that. Let's give it back to her.

I'm going to use the language of the heart as I talk about it. I'm going to say, you're not being kind to your sister, you're being unkind.

You're not loving her, you're loving yourself. You're not serving your sister, you're serving you. Now, you must give the toy back to her.

So if he gets the toy back, there's no need for discipline because I wasn't dealing with rebellion against parental authority.

I'm dealing with an impulsive three -year -old who has taken the toy out of his sister's hand.

He's not thinking, oh, this is going to hurt her, she's going to make her unhappy, she's going to be sad. All he knows is

I want the toy, I see it, I'm going to get it. And so he's being impulsive, he's not being rebellious against authority.

So I think that that distinction you've made is such an excellent distinction. I want discipline only for issues of defiance, failure to honor, failure to obey.

I'm not going to discipline for everything that goes wrong. And there are an awful lot of things that are childish. I mean, children are clumsy.

They're messy, they make messes. They spill the milk at the breakfast table. Sometimes they write on the walls and we're not going to spank them for writing on the walls.

A little child, I'm going to say, no, no, no, honey, we don't write on the walls, we write on paper. Use this paper, we don't write on walls.

So we're going to correct that. And one of the reasons I think that's so important is for me as someone who is taught about spanking, and I try to teach through how to do this in ways that are appropriate, not abusive, not cruel, and so forth.

Spanking is a huge hurdle for young people to get over because it's so unpopular in our culture.

And what I observe is a lot of people, young people, they get over that hurdle and they decide, okay, it's in God's word,

I'm going to do it, I'm going to spank my kids. Then they spank for everything. So it's like the person who only has a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

So you're spanking for everything that comes down the pike. And you're spanking every time the child does something wrong.

And really, when you're raising children, children are, they have bad judgment, they're impulsive, they're, you know, they require correction all the time.

And most of the time, they don't require discipline. The only times we're going to discipline will be for defiant behavior, where they are refusing to submit to mom and dad's authority.

But all the rest of the stuff, my first pass at it is going to be correction. Now, in my illustration with a three -year -old, if I'm correcting him, say, no, you can't take your sister's toy, you must give it back to her.

He refuses to give it back, he throws it in her hands or with it or something. If he shows some defiance in that situation, we may end up needing physical discipline.

But the discipline is not going to be because of the original issue of taking the toy, it's going to be because he was defiant when

I corrected him. Yeah. We have Jay in Fountain in South Carolina.

Oh, I know Jay. Oh, you do? Yeah, he's a good man. Okay. Well, Jay says, ask

Ted about the importance of speaking to your young kids with clear biblical truth rather than using baby talk or watered -down talk.

Are our young children capable of understanding more than we think they are?

I think Jay is exactly right. I think you don't talk down to kids, you don't talk baby talk, you speak to them with regular adult words and they learn language by hearing things used appropriately in context.

I think Jay's point is very well taken. And I think also that in my illustration with a moment ago with a three -year -old, what

I'm doing in introducing the hard stuff is I'm really letting him know my concern for you is not just that you took the toy from your sister.

My concern for you is you're not loving your sister, you're loving yourself, you're not being kind, you're not serving her, you're serving you.

So I'm really, even with that three -year -old, I'm not asking him what his motivations are. He's not self -conscious motivation.

But I am giving him, I'm using the language of the heart and that biblical descriptions of those attitudes of heart to describe the behavior because I want him to know, and he will learn over time, when

I correct him like that consistently over time, he will learn that my concern for him is not just that he did something aggressive and took his sister's toy, but that he was, my concern is for what's going on inside.

So the self -love, the unkindness, the self -service that is behind, that's the sin that is under the sin of taking the toy from his sister.

His point's well taken. Now I have seen parents when they are obviously trying to be humorous and playful with their children or their grandchildren speak with gibberish or baby talk, not when they're instructing them about anything, but when they're just having fun with them and the kids seem to giggle and even seem to have some kind of awareness that this is gibberish because they'll even mimic the gibberish and stuff.

I mean, do you think there's anything wrong with that? Even if it's not when they're teaching the kid, but it's just... I don't think there's anything wrong with that kind of playful banter back and forth.

I just think that parents tend to talk down to kids rather than treating them like they understand, and the fact is they understand far more than we think.

It sounds to me like just kind of fun and games. Well, I think that most televangelists talk down to adults.

And I just have trouble thinking that peekaboo is going to be fun for a kid, you know? Right. But yeah,

I mean, Joel Osteen could learn a lesson from your book about not talking baby talk to grown adults.

But we do. I think this is a female, and I'm finally glad that we have a female listener writing in.

I was expecting more women to write in today about your book, but it's a female with an alias,

Lam Lam. It's either an alias or she has parents with a sense of humor and a stutter, one or the other.

But Lam Lam in Valley Stream, New York, asks, as Christian parents, one would want to protect the children, say, in their early teens, from bad influences and develop worldly habits, nor hobbits, like music, movies, etc.,

which are not beneficial to neither academic nor spiritual. I guess she's making a play on words with the hobbit, and she thinks that that is a dangerous thing in some way for kids.

So if Dr. Tripp could share some insight tips on how to balance the two ends with practical suggestions.

Maybe I'll read that whole thing again. As Christian parents, one would want to protect the children from bad influences and develop worldly habits, which are not beneficial to either academic or spiritual with the peers, yet also want to train them for reaching out and sharing the

Gospel with any children, even the newcomers to the church. So that's the best as I try to edit it a little bit.

But do you understand where our guest or listener, I should say, is coming from? I think so.

I think, you know, certainly we want to screen out harmful influences in the lives of our children.

There's an awful lot of stuff, for example, that is part of mainstream entertainment that none of our children should be seeing or observing because it's sinful and wicked and perverse.

I mean, perversion has become mainstream entertainment in our culture. So I think there's a lot of stuff where we do not want our kids to be seeing those things.

I think we need, and certainly the whole world of the internet and the ways everything's connected these days and wired,

I think we need to be very wise concerning that. But we also need to help our children understand how to interact with a sinful culture and how to critique what they hear and see going on around them.

And so we don't want them to be so shielded that they have no idea what's going on around them in the culture and are not equipped to interact with the culture when they get old enough to.

But we also, you know, we don't want to be feeding things that are wicked and perverse to them or feeding those appetites and desires that are within any of us because we're fallen sinful people, those appetites and desires that are wrong.

Yeah, that seems to be the model of classical Christian education where they use secular literature and Greek mythology and all kinds of things so that the children are aware of culture outside of the

Christian faith and yet at the same time they clearly teach them true biblical theology and they teach what is fact from fantasy and all that kind of thing.

Sure, exactly. And even, you know, I know in our Christian school they use classical literature and they trace the whole history of the hero concept developing in literature and of course really

Christ is the hero because he's the first, the only hero that has ever come on the scene that comes truly in the service of justice and righteousness and goodness and is not self -aggrandizing.

So I think that that approach to things, learning how to think through and evaluate and critique the culture around us is very valuable for kids.

Now I'm not sure, 100 % sure, that Lam -Lam was making an intentional dig on the

Hobbit but J .R. Tolkien is a world -renowned author who has lived in his writing beyond his life on earth and is very popular today.

A good friend of J .R. Tolkien was a good friend of C .S. Lewis, although he was a Roman Catholic and Lewis was an evangelical

Anglican. Would you recommend the Hobbit and all of the associated fantasy literature that J .R.

Tolkien has written? I think that a lot of that you can read with your kids as they get older.

I think it's something you want to read with them and interact with them about, talk with them about, but I think it's excellent literature.

It deals conceptually with large ideas, so I think that that could be very profitable stuff to do with our kids.

We're going to another break right now, if you'd like to join us on the air. Oh, by the way, Lam -Lam, you are getting a free copy of the book

Shepherding a Child's Heart as well, so give us another email with your full mailing address and we will have that shipped out to you as soon as possible.

Compliments of not only Shepherd Press, who's providing the free books, and I think we have one or two left, but also compliments, as far as the shipping goes, to our friends or of our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com,

who ship out all of our books that we give away on Iron Trepans Iron to our listeners at no charge to us, and we thank

CVBBS .com very much for their faithfulness and their generosity in working with Iron Trepans Iron, but we are going to a break right now.

Don't go away because we've got another whole hour with Dr. Ted Tripp and Shepherding a Child's Heart. We look forward to hearing from you and your questions.

If you want to join us on the air as well with your own questions, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

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Welcome back, this is Chris Arnzen, and we are now at the top of the second hour of today's program.

We have for the full two hours Dr. Ted Tripp on the air today to discuss Shepherding a

Child's Heart, his masterpiece that came out in the 90s and has sold over a million copies, and is now also available in audio form and DVD, and it's translated in many languages.

It's just a phenomenon that has become so for a very good reason. It's very biblical, it's very well written, and it has changed the lives of many parents around the world.

And if you'd like their website for Shepherd Press, the publishers of this book, go to shepherdpress .com,

that's shepherdpress .com. And as always, if they happen to be out of stock, you could always go to cvbbs .com,

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, one of the sponsors of Iron Sharpens Iron, CVBBS, which stands for Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service.

And I'm sorry, were you going to say something there, Ted? No. Oh, okay,

I thought that you were beginning to say something. We do have Christopher from Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, who asks,

I understand that Baptists and Presbyterians typically, although not always, have different approaches when evangelizing children.

The Baptists tend to view children as a mission field, and very often, although not always,

Presbyterians do not, because they have a different view of their membership in the covenant.

Since you and your brother disagree on Baptist versus Presbyterian views, do you disagree on that issue?

Speaking of Paul, obviously, who's a Presbyterian. Yeah, yeah, you know, you may not believe this, but it's something we've never have discussed.

But I think that, really, as a

Reformed Baptist, I don't really have significant practical disagreement with my

Pater Baptist friends, because one of the things that you pledge yourself to, for example, and I know that this is true with the

Reformed Presbyterian of North America denomination, and I think it's true with many

Reformed and Presbyterian denominations, one of the things you commit yourself to, even when your child is baptized, is that you will acquaint him with his lost state.

Reformed Presbyterians, or Presbyterians who are

Reformed and Evangelical, do not regard their children as Christians because they were baptized.

That's not the reason for administering the sign and seal of the covenant on the child, it's because they believe the child is a

Christian. And as a Baptist, we don't baptize our children until they make a credible profession of faith.

But I think, apart from that distinction of when you apply the water, we would both view our children the same.

A Presbyterian and a Baptist would view their kids as sinners, as in need of the Gospel, in need of the grace of God, in need of understanding who the

Lord is, and repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. So I don't think I'm really in substantial disagreement with my

Pater Baptist brethren on those issues. And one of the ways

I always viewed my kids is that my kids are in this unique place. They're in a Christian home where they're hearing the

Gospel every day of their lives. The Gospel is what's suited to their needs. They are people who are sinners and in need of grace and forgiveness and mercy and regeneration and new birth and salvation.

And so every day they're in a place where they're being confronted with their need of Christ and where the power and grace of the

Gospel is being presented to them and offered to them. Well, my Presbyterian brothers would view their kids in the same way.

So I don't think most Presbyterians make the presumption that their kids are saved because they are, according to their view, in the covenant.

I mean that their kids are saved. Well, thank you for that distinction. I will say as a Presbyterian, you are correct there.

And thank you for taking on one of our biggest battles, because that's something that people just have trouble accepting, that we do not believe baptism equals salvation.

Right. And well, there are different strains of Presbyterians though, because I can even remember working part -time for a publisher when some

Presbyterians would get angry when a book was clearly coming from the perspective that children were a mission field.

But I know that there are many Pato Baptists that agree 100%, as you said,

Dr. Tripp, on that issue with Baptists, such as Dr. Joel Beeke definitely believes that the children of Christians need to be evangelized and should be presumed lost unless they prove otherwise.

And Don Kistler is another Presbyterian who would view things that way, much in the same way as the

Puritans did. And by the way, there are Baptists.

One of the reasons why even our Southern Baptist friends and brethren, like Tom Askell and some other guys from the

Founders Movement, they will be the first to admit that there's rampant nominalism in the

Southern Baptist Convention. And you have many Baptists and credo -Baptist, believer -only baptism folk in the

Bible Belt who presume that their children are saved just because they were raised in a

Baptist home. Sure, because they go to church every Sunday. Right, right. And they have their kids baptized automatically when they reach the age of 12 or something, because it's this thing to do.

Right. Yeah, I think that there's not really substantial disagreement in the actual practice of what we do.

When I wrote the book Shepherding Charles Hart, I was very, very careful not to write a Baptist or a credo -Baptist book.

So I tried not to tip my hand in writing the book, because I wanted the book to be used by credo -Baptists as well as Baptists.

And that was really J. Adams' advice, good old Presbyterian brother. He said, you've got to write in a way that will not tip your hand in terms of baptism.

So I was very careful to do that, and I'm thankful for that, because I think that the book has been widely embraced by credo -Baptists as well as Baptists, and that we have substantial agreement.

There's really no reason for us to make child -rearing one of those areas where we work out the implications of our distinctives.

Yes, and I even know Arminian churches and Pentecostal churches that have had you speak and conduct conferences.

I've been very blessed. I've had wonderful opportunities. I have some marvelous friends in Calvary Chapel Movement and various places,

Assemblies of God churches, and I'm very grateful. Any place where I can go to speak and I'm not bridal and I can preach the

Word of God and they won't tell me what to say or what not to say, I'm going to be there. So I'm thankful for those opportunities and really have sought to cultivate those relationships and to recognize that none of us are 100 % right in our theology.

We strive to be. We want to be. We want to come to such an understanding of God's Word that there's no passage that we're embarrassed by or that doesn't fit our system.

But ultimately, we know that one day in glory, we'll be aware of things that we didn't have right.

Thankfully, being theologically 100 % right is not of the essence of faith.

Amen. Well, you know, when you wrote Shepherding a Child's Heart, I was still a fairly young Christian at the time, and we,

I'm sure both of us at that time in the 90s, never would have dreamed that in our lifetime you would have rational, sane, intelligent adults publicly saying that children should have the right to change their gender orientation and get medication and even surgery to change what gender they were born with.

Of course, we know that that can never happen literally or really, but we are seeing people that are not saying this from the padded cells of asylums or through the bars of prisons.

We are hearing this from average moms and dads, and we are hearing this from child psychologists, and we are hearing this from people from many streams of life, and it's just jaw -droppingly shocking and disgusting and frightening.

It is really shocking. I am so amazed that people will recognize human beings are born with chromosomal differences and anatomical differences that are undeniable.

Like, for example, I'm 70 years old. I have never menstruated. My wife has, but I never have.

Now, how can you deny that there are differences between us?

I mean, there are anatomical differences, and yet we will say gender is a construct, but for us to have a child decide what gender he ought to be is not a construct.

I mean, it's just hard to get your mind around that. Recently, the

American Association of Pediatricians has actually come out against all this gender -neutral stuff for children.

They're saying it is not healthy for children to be regarded as binary, but to be regarded as as able to choose their own gender, and that children have to develop a sense of themselves before they can do that.

It should never be happening with children. Now, that's not even from a Christian point of view, but just from the point of view of medical professionals and pediatrics are saying this stuff has gone so far off the rails that it really is destructive.

Well, I think that parents that are participating in their children getting medicated and even surgery,

I think that they should be in prison. This is child abuse. I mean, I don't know, what do you think about that? I think it's child abuse.

Well, it really is. It really is, and the reality is there is no such thing as a transgender person.

Right. Human beings are binary, and there's a very interesting continuum.

You have a continuum between what has traditionally been called femininity and masculinity, and that's a continuum, and every human being is somewhere on that continuum, and some women are more on the masculine side of the continuum and some men are more on the feminine side of the continuum than is normal for their gender, but to say that this person is female because of that, therefore experiencing life as a woman rather than as a man, it truly is a construct, and the fact that that has gained such ascendancy and has gained such a hearing is shocking, and also is a huge challenge,

I think, for young people. I think that parents are not spending enough time talking about these issues with their kids before their kids are confronted with it, because we're not talking about gender and the fact that God created human beings binary.

We're not talking about that, that God created male and females, is what it says in Genesis, and we're not talking about that, emphasizing that enough with our kids, and so when they go off to college, they're immediately confronted, even before college these days, immediately confronted with all this gender confusion, and I think we have to really step up in terms of helping children to have a healthy, biblical view of their sexuality.

Well, yeah, that brings me to a very obvious question, I think, that would be a segue from that.

You know, you have people who are convinced that people are born homosexual or lesbian because they know of people in their neighborhoods growing up, or whatever the case may be, that they can remember that child as young as you can walk and talk.

If it was a boy, they can remember that child being extremely girly and effeminate, and that person, sure enough, grew up to act upon their homosexual proclivities, and then you have the girls who were very manly and butch, and so on.

Now, obviously, there are people that mistake soft -spokenness in a man for being effeminate, when you can have a very godly and masculine man who's soft -spoken,

I mean, I understand that Jonathan Edwards was soft -spoken, but that doesn't mean he's effeminate, and you have women who are very athletic, and women who have talents in areas that are usually found only in men, women who are very good at carpentry and things like that.

Now, where do you draw the line when you're raising children and people start to criticize them, or even you may start to get nervous because they are acting in a way that is not typical for the gender that they are?

Yeah, I think that it's appropriate to teach a biblical masculinity and a biblical femininity to our children, and that doesn't necessarily have to cross those boundaries of aesthetic sensitivity and so forth, because you can have a boy who is typically much more aesthetically sensitive than most boys are, and this kid likes to accessorize his costumes when he gets dressed and all that kind of stuff, and there's a great deal of sensitivity to that.

That doesn't necessarily mean that he's effeminate, but I think teaching boys things like the fact that God has called men to protect and defend and care for women and children, teaching women to be modest and appropriate in the ways that they project themselves and so forth,

I think you train those things. You train children those things when they're young, and it doesn't really, it has nothing to do with gender, and I have known,

Chris, I've known men, I've known many men over the years, and some men even in the ministry, wonderful men, who were very much on the continuum of being aesthetically sensitive, more domestic than other men would typically be and so forth, and these were godly men who lived as men, who interacted with their spouse and their children as men, even though there were ways that they would typically be on the feminine end of the continuum in terms of the way they project themselves and the ways that they think and experience things, and they would have never said, oh,

I'm a woman trapped in a man's body. You know, they recognize, I'm a man, but I'm also a man that is much more aesthetically sensitive than most men, and I'm perfectly comfortable with who

I am. Well, you even have within some of the Mediterranean cultures,

Italians who may be very tough men in many respects, but they are kissing and hugging their sons, and even their male friends and their brothers, and there is never even a thought that that's somehow effeminate.

It's just a part of the very expressive and gregarious and,

I don't know what other synonym to use, but that type of a culture where it's not like the

Scots are, you know, very reserved and standoffish, and I know brothers in Christ.

In fact, I think when I first, the very first time I met Peter Jeffrey from Wales, I'm sure you must know

Peter. Yes. When the very first time I met him, I approached him with a big hug, and he seemed like he was terrified of that, but you know.

I think I would be too, Chris. You're such a big guy. But you know what

I'm saying? That there are those differences that don't make someone effeminate, and there are even, like I was saying before, would you discourage your daughter from not only pursuing the use of her athletic skills, but even carpentry and things like that, that seem to be more in the line with what boys do and men do?

No, I wouldn't. And I think that sometimes, just like I wouldn't discourage a boy who's interested in pursuing the culinary arts or whatever,

I think years ago, I had a young woman who worked with me when

I was in the building trades and running a construction company, and she worked with me. She had grown up with construction.

She always enjoyed it. Her dad had done a lot of it, and she was really sharp when it came to understanding how buildings go together.

She ended up later designing her own house and participating a lot in the building of the house, but she's a mom in every way.

So I think that we can, as Christians, we can step aside from some of those gender stereotypes and say, we don't have to buy into the gender stereotypes, but I think there is a biblically distinctive masculinity and femininity.

I think John Piper does a good job with that in that little book called What is the Difference? Well, you know, one of the areas that our fundamentalist brethren would ridicule us for ignoring, and sometimes you might think that they have a point, when the

Bible clearly condemns cross -dressing, you have a unisex style of dressing that is very popular with young people, more and more so, where you look at a kid and sometimes you don't even know what gender they belong to, and it's probably more prevalent with women wearing clothing that would be more appropriate or typically utilized or worn by a man, and nobody bats an eye anymore, especially when a woman dresses very much like a man, or a girl dresses very much like a boy.

How do you address that? Well, I think it's appropriate for women to dress in women's clothing and men to dress in men's clothing, and generally there are differences in the cut and shape and so forth of the clothing.

Certainly with my daughter, I always encouraged her to dress as a woman rather than as a boy, but I think that there is this problem of gender blending that has taken place in our culture in the last decade or so, where you have this kind of androgynous look, where you're not quite sure whether you're looking at a man or a woman, and so I think that people ought to dress in ways that are appropriate to their gender.

We have to go to our final break right now, and if you'd like to join us on the air, there is still a half hour left for you to join us with a question of your own for Dr.

Ted Tripp on shepherding a child's heart. Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

that's c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA, and you may remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter that you don't want to reveal your identity when addressing, so feel free to do that and we will honor your request.

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Don't go away, we're going to be right back after these messages. I'm James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries.

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that's lindberghbaptist .org. Welcome back, this is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in for the last 90 minutes we've had

Dr. Ted Tripp on the air with us to discuss his book, his classic book, Shepherding a

Child's Heart. Before we run out of time in a few minutes I want to discuss the new book that he's written with his wife

Margie. But before that, even though I usually don't let listeners have more than one question since I made fun of Lam Lam's anonymous name or alias

I should say, I will let her have a second question here. She says, and I'm assuming since she didn't correct me last time that she is a she,

I have children who love to read yet I don't like the idea of them reading just any kind of Christian literature, especially mystery fiction.

Making the situation worse, they always get books which are very old from decades ago from the church library and do not have that much time to read through each single book in order to discuss with them.

After speaking with them multiple times, things still haven't improved.

It is good to, is it good to threaten them of considering a different home church?

Any other method Dr. Tripp can suggest? I think what she's saying is should we threaten our children by saying we're going to go to a different church if you don't stop reading those books from the library?

Maybe you got something else from that. I'm not sure that I follow the concern.

I mean, I think reading old Christian books, even if they're mystery books and books that carry the interest of children,

I think that, I don't know the ages of her kids, but I think that, I just don't know how to comment on it,

Chris. I don't know if I totally follow the question. I know with our boys, the thing that really taught them the wonderful enjoyment of a book was reading the

Hardy Boys. Now the Hardy Boys stories are certainly not excellent literature, but when they were eight or ten years of age and they discovered that they could read a book without pictures in it and the story would be interesting to them and carry their attention and they devoured one book after another, after another.

I was so grateful and eventually their appetites grew beyond the Hardy Boys.

They started reading other things, but they had discovered through the Hardy Boys the joys of reading.

And people might even grow up to be detectives. Excuse me, I'm sorry. I'm sorry,

I spoke over you. What were you saying? That's okay, I'm done. Oh, I was saying that some of these kids might grow up to be detectives and they might -

Yeah, there you go. Forensic scientists and things that are very beneficial and needed.

Beneficial to the society. Right, right, right. And I'm sure that a lot of kids who became police officers and detectives and forensic scientists started off as kids reading mysteries and that kind of thing.

Well, let's hear about the book that you have co -authored with your wife

Margie. And tell us how it is different from Shepherding a

Child's Heart. Well, in Shepherding a Child's Heart, Margie and I wrote in response to literally hundreds of conversations we had with young people who were raising kids when we were doing seminars.

And I'd be teaching on a Friday night, Saturday, Margie would be along with me and always increase the value of the seminar if she was with me because she would end up having a lot of conversations with people.

And what we discovered is the parents don't spend enough time at what we call in the book instructing a child's heart with formative instruction in their children.

By that we mean instruction that forms or shapes the thinking of their kids. So it's really formative instruction has to do with giving our kids a biblical worldview.

Really, I think of it as a Christian culture of thought and understanding. Because if you think about what culture does, culture tells us what's valuable, tells us what's worth living for, what's worth dying for, what makes you somebody.

And we need to be providing a Christian culture of thought and understanding for our kids. And that's sort of what formative instruction is.

And of course, there's so many. Another way to think about this, Chris, is that I want to provide the truth content that makes sense out of the things

I expect of my children. So for example, I want my children to obey me. So I'm going to require them to obey, but I want to give them a biblical worldview that makes sense out of that requirement.

So that means I want to come to them, saying to them, where there's a God in heaven who's good.

In his love, he's put you in a family. He's given you mom and dad who love you, have maturity, who have wisdom, who have life experience.

And it's a blessing for you to obey mom and dad. And God promises these wonderful blessings. It'll go well with you.

You'll enjoy a long life. Those are blessings we want for you. So we insist on your obedience because we know that's what's good for you.

Well, that's that formative instruction. That's giving our children a worldview that makes sense out of our expectation.

And it's far more biblical, more consistent with Christian worldview than for me to say to my kids, look, you're going to obey me or I'm going to, you know, spank you and teach you that you have to obey.

And where the requirement to obey is just simply, it's rooted in me rather than in God.

And when I come to my kids saying, look, I'm your dad, I put a roof over your head, buy every morsel of food you put in your mouth.

As long as you live in my house, you're going to do what I say. What's missing in that presentation? God is missing.

But God's not missing in Ephesians chapter six, children, obey your parents in the Lord. This is what we do because there's a

God in heaven. So to start out with the fact there's a God who's good, he's made you and me and all things for his glory.

He's put you in a family. It is a blessing for you to obey mommy and daddy. And we insist on your obedience because we know that's what's good for you.

That's really providing a rationale for my kids that makes sense out of my expectation that they obey.

So really that's what formative is, that's illustrative of what we're doing in the book, Instructed Child's Heart.

It's providing that formative instruction that makes sense out of the expectations we have of our kids and the things we say to them in times of correction discipline.

But what we've discovered in these many conversations was that parents don't spend enough time with that formative instruction.

So they're requiring things for their kids and when the kids get out of line they make demands on them, but they're not spending enough time providing that formative instruction that makes sense out of our expectations.

And there's so many ways you can do that. I mean you think about the whole area of conflict resolution. That's stop fighting.

I want to hear another word. You know, go to your rooms. Rather than that, giving them formative instruction that teaches them peacemaking principles and how to resolve conflicts in ways that honor

God and ways that respect the dignity of their brothers and sisters.

That's that formative instruction. And so that's really what the book is about. It's really, we think of it as a how -to book for shepherding.

It's really a book that gives parents the help that they need to understand how to provide that world view for their kids that makes sense out of their expectations.

Now, I'm sure that you and most of our listeners know that nauseating song that was made famous by Whitney Houston, Greatest Love of All.

It was actually originally intended before Whitney Houston sang it. It was a theme to the original movie about Muhammad Ali, the great heavyweight fighter who just passed away recently.

But a lot of the song seems to be about children and so on. But the most troubling verse in the song goes like this, the greatest love of all is easy to achieve.

Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all. And that seems to be the philosophy of a lot of people when it comes to children, that their self -esteem is the most important area that needs to be elevated and that kind of a thing.

And then you may have some Christians who go to the opposite end of the spectrum and who wrongly approach the truth that we are all indeed sinners and there's nothing good in us that would merit our salvation or that would cause

God to love us for anything good that is in us or good that we do.

But at the same time, obviously, if we didn't have value to God, Christ would not have died for his elect.

And so therefore, what's the medium there, the truth that avoids both the errors of the self -esteem movement and also not coming home and saying, hey kids, you're all just garbage because God thinks you're garbage.

There's got to be some... Yeah, I think that's a real important question, a real important distinction you're making too, because I think that what we want our children to understand is in terms of their value, they're creatures made in the image of God.

There are no other created beings in that category other than humanity.

Human beings are made in God's image and we're made for glory. We're made for the wonder of knowing

God. We are made and given stewardship over the entire created order.

And human beings are to make this world a place where other human beings can flourish. And you know, so that there's a dignity to humanity that is there because of the fact we're made in God's image.

And even the fall doesn't utterly destroy that. I mean, certainly it's true that our dignity is defaced by the fall of humanity into sin and by our depravity, but even in spite of that, we are not junk.

We are image bearers. We're made for glory.

We're made for wonderful, marvelous things. We're made to delight in God and to see

God and to behold God and to glorify God. So human beings,

I think, so we want to teach our children, you are a creature of great dignity.

You're not an animal. You're not, you know, just something that is a creation of chance and time, but you are an image bearer.

So I think we teach them that. We teach them in Psalm 139, you know, you were knit together in your mother's womb.

God beheld your unformed substance. What an amazing thing.

God put you together with the exact combination of abilities and strengths and weaknesses and everything from your eye color to your hair color to your stature to your body type and all that was ordained by God and created by God.

So I think we teach our kids that dignity of humanity. And then we also teach them, you know, because of the fall, we are people who sinned and we were fallen people.

We not only fall into sin, we dive into sin. We choose to sin. And we are therefore liable to God's just judgment because of our sin.

But God is full of grace and full of mercy and full of love and so loved the world that he sent his son into the world.

So I think that we help them to see both the reality of the fall and our fallenness, but also the dignity of man.

But I think as far as the self -esteem question is concerned, you know, what we want to give is not high self -esteem.

We want our children to have an accurate self -esteem. You know, the scripture says, you know, no one should think more highly of himself than he ought, but rather with sober judgment.

So, you know, and I think even teaching kids to recognize their gifts and abilities, to recognize, boy, this is the way you're gifted.

You have a clarity in your thinking that is a gift from God, or you have an artistic ability that is a gift from God, or you have an athleticism that is a gift from God.

And those are wonderful gifts that God has given you, and you are stewards of that gift.

You're to develop that gift as much as you possibly can so that you are, you know, making that gift that God has given you even more and more useful.

So I think that helping kids have an accurate sense of self -esteem is the goal.

We have CJ from Lindenhurst, Long Island, who asks, don't you think that very often people confuse and blur the distinction between being proud and being unashamed, whereas children might be wrongly taught that they should be proud of being black, proud of being

Irish, proud of being Italian, and any other race or ethnic group. They should rather be taught that they are unashamed of that, and even celebrate that, but there is a difference between that and pride, is there not?

Yeah, I think that's a good point. I never thought about that distinction, but as you read that,

I think that makes a lot of sense to me, that there's a sense in which, and in some ways, the whole black pride movement, you mentioned

Muhammad Ali a little earlier, the whole black pride movement that took such root in the 60s was a reaction against ways that blacks had been denigrated and so forth under Jim Crow and all of those things that took place.

So in a reaction to that, people said, no, I'm not going to be slinking around ashamed to be black,

I'm going to be proud to be black, and it was a reaction. But I think that that idea of being unashamed is a better way to put it, because a black person should not be ashamed of being black.

They are made in God's image, and God made them black, just like God made me with a birthmark on my forehead.

And you know, my mother used to say, well, that's your mark of distinction, honey. But it's not something to be ashamed of.

My mother used to tell me I had a birthmark that had three sixes on my back of my head. So I think that that listener has made a very interesting observation.

I like that formulation. And we do have Arnie from Perry County, Pennsylvania, who says

I was raised in the Catholic Church in the 60s, went to parochial school, and there were many children who were beaten by the nuns, with the permission of the parents, the parents wanted the nuns to discipline them this way.

Should anybody other than a parent ever spank or use any kind of physical discipline with a child?

My own position on that is that all the passages that address the physical discipline of children in the

Book of Proverbs are addressed in a parent -child context. So I think it's, you know, do not withhold discipline from your son if you discipline that.

It's a parent -child relationship. So I think that it's not appropriate for schools.

As a grandparent, I have nine grandchildren. They all live nearby. I've spent a ton of time with my grandchildren.

I've never disciplined any of them physically. I've corrected them. You need to obey grandpa.

Grandpa wants you to hold his hand crossing the parking lot at McDonald's because I don't want you to get run over. And if the child is reluctant to do that or resist doing that,

I will talk to your father about this. Your father wants you to obey me. So I'm going to correct them, but I would never physically discipline them.

The only exception I would make to that, Chris, would be in the context where sometimes grandparents end up functioning in a parental role.

A lot of grandparents are raising children these days because the parents are absent. And in that case,

I think that the grandparents functioning as a parent and physical discipline would be appropriate, but that would be the exception rather.

Are you saying along with that, though, that parents shouldn't give permission to others to discipline their children?

I'm talking about babysitters or something like that. That would be my position. I would not give permission to babysitters.

I would say to the babysitter, my child behaves in ways that are inappropriate. You tell me.

Please tell me. I insist that you tell me. I want to know. I will deal with him when I get home. And I guess that you would make an exception or perhaps you would differentiate between spanking or hitting a child in discipline and allowing anyone who has the role of a caretaker for them to restrain them, even if that restraining may hurt to a degree.

I can remember even as a kid in school, I remember that a young man was behaving violently in the class and a gym teacher came in and slammed the kid to the floor because it was the only way he could control the kid.

I think restraining a child from doing harm to himself or others would be a different category, but it wouldn't really be.

There's not a disciplinary function or it's a matter of just protection, both for the sake of the child and for the sake of others.

So I think that would be a distinction I would make. But I think in general, discipline is something that belongs with the parents rather than with others.

In our Christian school, one of the things we've insisted on, if your child's going to be in the school, we have to be able to get in touch with you.

And if your child behaves in a way that means we cannot maintain him in the class, we will call you.

You have to come and take your child. Take him home, take him to a quiet room here in the school, but wherever you wish.

Deal with him in the ways that you feel is appropriate, but we cannot have this kid back in class if he's not willing to be compliant.

So we put it back on the parents. Well, I'd like you to basically wrap up the program today by leaving our listeners with the things that you most want etched in their hearts and minds regarding the subject of shepherding a child's heart today before we run out of time.

Sure. Well, I think the big story in shepherding a child's heart is, I hinted at this earlier on, is that my desire is not just to control and manage behavior, but my desire is to shepherd the heart.

And whenever I make behavior my goal, then I immediately will be prey to all the temptations to manage behavior through threats, warnings, prizes, rewards, whatever, whether it's incentives or disincentives, some form of behaviorism.

As soon as I make that my goal, then I miss the heart. And what the scripture teaches so clearly in Proverbs 4 .23

is above all else, guard your heart for the heart is the wellspring of life.

We live out of our hearts so that all the hopes, the dreams, the aspiration of the person reside within the heart and behavior flows from the heart.

So Jesus says in Mark 7, it's from within, out of the heart of men or women or children, boys, girls, we could say out of the heart of a child come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, folly.

All these evils come from inside make a child unclean. So I think that it's that stuff in the heart that is my goal as a parent.

So I want to, I want to shepherd the heart. I want to help my children understand those attitudes of heart that push and pull behavior.

And I want to help them to see that my concern for them is deeper than just the fact that they behave badly.

My concern is not just for the behavior, but for the sin that is under the sin, the attitudes of heart that show how profoundly we need

God. And see, as soon as I start talking about heart attitudes, it does something marvelous for the process. One is

I can stand in solidarity with this kid. He's struggling with selfishness. I understand how selfishness works in the human heart.

So I can say to this kid, Daddy understands selfishness. I understand the struggle with selfishness. And I don't have to try to figure out how do

I get to the gospel. There's hope for people like you and Daddy who are compulsively self -serving and found in Christ and His grace and His capacity to change us internally.

So I can immediately move from heart concerns to the gospel and to my need of grace, my need of God's forgiveness, my need of God's transformation and redemption of me, my need of God's empowerment and enablement to walk in His ways.

So I think that focusing on the heart rather than on just managing behavior just bears really good fruit with kids.

So that would be probably my biggest takeaway that I want parents to carry off with them. Are we speaking about children or gun control?

Because actually, you know, what you are saying obviously expands into many other categories.

And I was somewhat joking about gun control. But it's true that people, even

Christians, very often are looking for a political Messiah. And the only way that the world is going to be truly transformed is by the grace of God through the gospel and when hearts are transformed.

That's exactly right. And you know, I think as we observe the whole political scene, our hope for America is not political change.

It's in neither party. Our hope for America really is in the power and grace of the gospel.

And the desperate need of America is a revival of true religion.

And apart from that, we are on a trajectory which means the sun is going to set on this great nation.

Apart from a revival. And so my prayer is for that work of God's spirit that transforms people internally and has transformed cultures in the past, has transformed our culture in the

Great Awakening, and transformed cultures during various revivals that have taken place in England and other parts of the world.

And I think that's our hope. It's not political transformation, but really the power and grace of the gospel.

And that's our hope with our kids. We have time for one more question from Erin in Indianapolis, Indiana.

She says, it was helpful to hear the thoughts of Dr. Tripp, as I have had difficulty balancing rather low self -esteem because my mother emphasized that everyone else comes first, which is not altogether wrong.

Of course, I have the proclivity also of thinking too highly of myself. Do you have any comments about that?

Well, I think, I mean, it's a very natural force to do that. It's part of our fallenness. We think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think.

And that's why the scripture exhorts us not to do that. Because our temptation and our pride and self -love is to exalt ourselves over others and to want to make everyone else our servants.

So I think, you know, turning away from the pride of that, but also recognizing that the struggles that you've had with low self -esteem are really, they're really focused on people and what others think of you.

And we've got to get our focus on God's assessment and the fact that God says we're people of dignity, we're made in His image, and that He has sent

His Son to redeem us so that we can show forth His glory and be glory givers.

And that's a wonderful calling that human beings can fulfill. Yes, Reverend Buzz Taylor and I just were recently at a

Bible conference in New Jersey that was run by Dr. Vody Baucom. And he was reminding us that people aren't really being troubled by low self -esteem, they're really self -absorbed.

And when they look in the mirror and they don't see what they want to see, they say,

I don't deserve to look like this, I deserve to be much more attractive.

And it could be any other realm of life, whether it's athletic ability or any other talent that they think that they lack.

And very often people are just driven to self -pity because they're thinking about themselves more frequently than they should.

Yeah, and the social media thing has just built all that up.

I mean, you've gone to some young person's Instagram or Facebook or even older people for that matter, and what do you find?

Endless pictures of themselves. Yeah. Well, we are out of time.

I want to thank you so much, Dr. Tripp, for being once again our guest on Iron Sharpens Iron, and I really look forward to having you come back very soon.

And I know that your website again is ShepardPress .com, ShepardPress .com.

And I also want to plug CVBBS .com, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service .com,

and also our friends at Solid Ground Christian Books who sponsor this program, Solid -Ground -Books .com,

Solid -Ground -Books .com. And do you have any other contact information that you care to share,

Dr. Tripp? Yes, I have a website for my teaching ministry, ShepherdingtheHeart .org.

ShepherdingtheHeart .org. Thank you so much. I want everybody to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater