Biblical Parenting Principles that Changed My Life! | Ed Moore

Alright, welcome back to the Room for Nuance podcast. I'm Sean.

And my name is Ed Moore.

Voice for radio. Will you open us in prayer, brother?

Yes, thank you. Father in heaven, thank you for this opportunity that I have to be in Decatur, Alabama, and Lord, to share some things that you have taught me about being a father. I'm thankful for this opportunity.

I pray now that you would give me wisdom as I speak. I pray that you would give me grace. Please be with Sean as he asks the questions. And Lord, most of all, I would ask, please, that you would be with those that are listening if they need help, Lord.

Lord, we do need your help in raising our children. And so, Lord, if there's anything that could be helpful today, I pray, Lord, that it would be heard and applied. In Jesus' name, amen.

Amen. Thank you, brother. Alright, so pretty par for the course. We usually...

Actually, sorry. I completely forgot. I have to sign like two things real quick. Just for like... I'm sorry. I know I should have remembered it before.

It's okay. Take it from the top.

What am I signing? I'm happy to sign, but...

It's like a... because this is part of the... like not part of the church, but it's kind of connected. So you have to do an NDA and a general release liability. Meaning you're allowed to use it. Yeah.

So like, if you just sign on this one, right here for that, and then sign here for the second one. There's actually three. And then sign right here for this last one. Well, what's that last one?

He's now your dad. Wait, is that... Are those the adoption papers? Yeah. Nice. Nice.

Wait a minute. Adoption.

And you just became my father legally. So we are good to go. All right. Now we can get the episode going. All right. So now that you're my dad, I feel like we can really have a good conversation. Who's your daddy?

Luke, good job. You played the part perfectly. I'm also surprised, Ed, that you didn't even flinch at signing an NDA. You were just like, whatever, dude. No, nobody ever signs anything. I thought you would at least flinch at the NDA agreement.

That's so funny.

That was good. And that was well played.

Oh, he did it, right? Did you have any idea? That's why I snatched my notes from you, because I have it in my notes to do that.

I didn't. I just thought, how am I going to recreate that prayer? That was my biggest concern. Yeah.

Okay. So brother, in five minutes or less, not leaving out the best parts, can you tell us your testimony, how you came to know the Lord?

Yeah, happy to do that. I was raised in a small town in Western Pennsylvania, a little town called Dubois, in a Christian and Missionary Alliance church. My parents were both saved on the same night in 1946.

I'm not born until 1961, so by the time I come along, they are well established in the faith. Church was everything to us, Sunday school, Sunday morning, young people's on Sunday night, Sunday evening service, Wednesday night, no exceptions.

So I grow up with the Word of God. I grow up with the gospel. I am a very bad child. I'm a very disobedient child. And when I am 16 years old, I get saved. I did not learn any new information when I got saved.

I had always known the gospel. What happened was I had a dead heart, and then it was brought to life. I did not love Christ, and then I did. And when I came to know Christ, it was a really radical transformation.

What happened though? What led you...

There were no circumstances that led to it. It wasn't like I walked an aisle or I prayed a prayer. No life crisis? There was no life crisis. From infancy, I've known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make me wise unto salvation.

Before I was saved, I had memorized the book of James. I knew a lot of the Bible. I knew the Bible stories. All I can say was I used to be blind,.

And then I could see. But at 16, you just wake up one morning and you're like, you know, this is real.

I never doubted that it was real. I can just remember one night sitting in my parents' living room by myself, everyone had gone to bed, and I began to think about the death of Christ. And I began to think for the first time that that was for me, and I began to weep uncontrollably, and I fell deeply in love with Jesus Christ, and there was a radical transformation in my attitude.

Because I was raised in a fundamentalist home, there weren't too many of the traditional teenage sins that I needed to repent of, but there was a radical transformation in my heart in that I just became really interested in the Bible, and really interested in church, and sought to serve every opportunity that was presented.

I wanted to be at the church around the people of God all of the time. And previously, I was always there, and it's not that I didn't want to be there previously. That was just what you do. It was a part of your life.

It was like going to football practice, or going to school, going to church. But when God saved me, I just wanted to be around the people of God. And I would say about a month after I was saved, I can remember very distinctly, I was sitting in a Sunday evening service, and our pastor stood up and was leading the hymns.

And in between two hymns, he said, this hymn reminds me of Isaiah 6, where the Lord says, who shall we send and who will go for us? And then I said, here am I, Lord, send me. And it was like there was a laser beam coming from him to my heart, where I was figuratively jumping up and down in my seat saying, here am I, send me.

I want to preach the gospel. I want to serve the Lord. I will do whatever you ask me, Lord. I was eager and willing to serve the Lord. I had a very open heart to do whatever God wanted me to do from the very beginning.

But like I said, there wasn't a crisis. There wasn't some new information I received. I was just brought to life. And it is the word. I mean, James 1 18, of his own will, he brought us forth by the word of truth.

Having been born again, not of corruptible seed, but through incorruptible seed, through the word of God, which lives and abides forever. I had been receiving the word all along, and one day it just brought me to life.

Wow. Well, praise God. You have, I think, like many Christians, another level of your testimony where there's a deepening of the reality of grace in the gospel. And we're going to talk about that a little bit later in the interview, because part of it has to do with some of the changes that you made as a father.

Correct. So let's start with this. I've heard you give your parenting talk twice now. I think it's absolutely fantastic. You haven't written a book or anything, although that may change. But both times I've heard you give it, first of all, it's all anybody can ever talk about.

After they hear it. I didn't just sign a book deal, did I?

No, you wish. But you always start the talk with this quote from Mark Twain, whose original name was? Samuel Clemens. Look at that. When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around.

But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years. You say that this is not just a humorous quote, but a profound truth. In what way? Why do you always start your talk off with that?

Because wise parents do not play to the audience of their immature children. They do what is right because it is right, and they are convinced that in time their children will come to see that. But whether they see it or not, they are not playing to the audience of their kids.

They're doing what is right because they know it to be right. Which in a sense is just in parenting,.

What we do in all of the Christian life, right? We live as under the Lord, whether people get it or don't get it, it's kind of beside the point.

Right, but it's particularly applicable in parenting because there is going to be that pressure. Maybe it's from a 14-year-old, maybe it's from a 12-year-old, but there's going to be that pressure to do things differently than you know them to be done so as to please your children.

There's that fight that goes on. Similar to pastoring in some ways, you feel that pressure sometimes. I think I feel it more as a parent because I'm not living with the people that I'm pastoring, and there's not that constant battle to try to win the heart of the person on a day-to-day basis.

So, but yes, in principle, it's the same. Oh, you pastor differently than I do. Yeah. No, I'm just kidding. Go ahead. Yeah, you're living with the people, and you start to question yourself saying, okay, I graduated from high school in 1979, and now it's 2009, and my son is a senior in high school, and he's telling me that I am out of touch and that I don't know what I'm doing.

Maybe he's right. Maybe I am out of touch, but I think a wise parent says, no, it really doesn't matter what the year is. Truth is truth, and we're going to stick with this. Whether you like it now or not, I believe that you will come to see it.

But with that Mark Twain quote, there is the understanding, or it is assumed that parents know what to do. So are they going to stick with what's right? Well, they have to know what's right before they can stick with what's right.

Thus, the talk, here are some things that are right,.

And stick with that. And you're pretty good at the beginning of the talk to say, obviously, scripture is our foundation for truth in all areas of our lives, especially as parents. But a lot of the way we arrive at truth is through failure.

We try, we mess up, we think we know what's right, and then maybe the Lord shifts our perspective a little bit. So a little bit later in the interview, we're going to talk about some of the ways that you as a dad realized that you missed it.

Have you had moments like that where you thought, this is the truth. And then you went through an experience of failure and you realized, actually, no, I wasn't reading scripture properly?

Yes, absolutely. In fact, I don't know when we're going to get to that, but for years, I've been giving this talk. And by the way, in the talk, there is nothing about money management, there's nothing about manners.

It's not exhaustive. It's just some things that we incorporated into our family. And I had a little bit of a crisis in my own mind and conscience about three or four years ago. And my wife and I sat down and started to analyze a lot of the things that I had done wrong as a parent.

And she basically said to me, it's fine for you to give this parenting talk, but you really need to also include some of the mistakes and the sins and errors that you made. Don't make it sound like you did everything right, but give a realistic picture so that others can be helped by the mistakes that I've made.

And I think you do that really well, brother. So your talk is basically eight tips, which will probably be the eight chapters of the book, Shall It Come to Fruition? You make four qualifications. You say, first of all, these are not exhaustive.

We covered that. Kind of like in the nine marks, Mark always says, these are not necessarily the only marks of a healthy church. These are just nine marks that I want to highlight. You also say that these tips are born more failure than success.

This is an important one. You say that the list is not formulaic, right? It's not a, if you do this, then your children will turn out a certain way. Why do you feel like you have to say that?

I think because of many books that I read on parenting or a lot of books just with general topics on biblical counseling, you're sort of left with the impression that if you follow the steps, then you will get the guaranteed results.

And look, I've seen parents who did just about everything wrong. They were really bad parents and their kids turned out to be terrific and godly and responsible. And I've known people that were much better parents than I am or I was, and their children turned out to be ungodly and weird.

So this is in the hands of God. This doesn't come with a money back guarantee. These are some principles, all things being equal, that if you apply, you will most likely see good results, or at least we did, but there's no guarantee whatsoever.

So we believe in divine election and we believe that salvation is of the Lord and it's in the Lord's hands. Because if you think about it, you see your children grow and develop in certain areas. But just like as I was brought to life as a dead sinner, I'm sure that my parents would have wanted to have done that for me.

And in many churches where they emphasize the sinner's prayer at a young age, I think it's more the parents and the Sunday school teachers wanting to bring this about in the child's life early on. But we really want to do it.

If I could have done it, I would have done it. But when you see someone who was born again, one of your own children, you just have to sit back and say, I didn't have anything.

To do with that. That was a work of God. And if you think that you had everything to do with it, you have some different issues to work through. Right. You have a pen. Right. Raise a child in the way that he should go and he will not depart from it.

That is not a promise in Scripture that is guaranteed. If you're a good parent, your kids are going to get saved. It's a proverb, which is a maxim. It's a thing that's generally true, but in a fallen.

World is not infallibly certain. Yes. In fact, I even misused that verse in... When I do give the talk, it's sort of a springboard text. I've heard some people say what it actually means is if you raise a child in the way he should go, meaning if you let a child go the way that he wants to go, when he's old, you're not going to be able to bring him back to the way that is right.

I don't know. I mean, there are some smart guys that said that who know a lot more about Hebrew and Hebrew idioms than I do. I just take it like at face value that if you raise up a child in the right way, when they are old, at some point they will return to it.

But yes, I think everything in the book of Proverbs... Not that the book of Proverbs isn't true. It's all true, but that literature... It's not intended to be.

It's not intended to be. Yeah, right. You said idiom. Is that Latin for idiot? For plural? I don't know. Like a gaggle of idiots? Okay. And then your final qualification is this, my family is not your family.

Your family is unique. Don't try to be another family. So here you're trying to say, although truth is truth, you can plug it in anywhere. It's kind of like the regulative principle, right? There's elements and then there's forms.

You can take this truth I'm giving you, but it's going to look different in your family than it's going to.

Look in mine. Yeah. I think some of the biggest mistakes I made is I tried to match apples for apples with families that I admired. I mean, I watched what they were doing, and so I tried to imitate it way down to the letter, and that was a cruel thing to do to my children.

And it's not that imitating is bad. Paul says, imitate me, right? We have to find people to imitate to learn how to do things, but you have to figure out how it works in your context.

Yeah, you don't paint by number. No, your family is your family. That's right. So like I say in my talk, you are not the Moore family. You are not the Manson family. You are your family.

You do take acid, but listen to the Beatles. Anyways... Helter Skelter. Helter Skelter, baby. Pull that mic just a smidge-a-rooney, but yeah. Oh, it's... Yeah, get it right up in there. All right, there we go.

All right. Watching you do this is like watching you with your phone earlier. I feel like I'm trying to help my grandpa make a Skype call. Grandpa, turn the camera on. All right, so you have eight tips.

You have eight tips. Lookit, just do this. Go like this. Bring it over closer. No, yeah. There it is. Okay. Is he fine on audio? Okay, it's just driving me crazy. All right. And we're leaving all this in the episode, by the way.

All right, and your tips are not like... We're live. We are live, folks. Your tips are not pithy. They all follow the same pattern, except for the eighth one, which doesn't have the double thing here, but we'll get to that.

You say, use, and then you have like a modifier, expressive words. This reminds me of my church covenant. It says, the way that we watch over one another. What does it say? No. Anyways, it doesn't just say watch over one another.

It's like lovingly care for one another. You don't just say, use words. You say, use expressive words. With obnoxious frequency. Ah, he knows it. With obnoxious frequency in order to communicate love.

So you say, the expressive word that we need to use is, I love you. The obnoxious frequency is, we have to say it all the time.

Right. And the first word of all of the points is, use. James 1 .22, be doers of the word. So the talk is designed such that if you just listen to the points and you don't listen to a description of the points, you would be able to go home and do what it says because the point itself is long enough and descriptive enough that you would be able to do it.

So now you're asking about love specifically?

Well, let me ask you this. Let's just get out ahead of a potential objection. So a man listening to this will say, let's say after we run through all this, he's convicted, he's convinced, he needs to say I love you and he needs to say it more.

But he says, I'm just not expressive. It's really hard for me to say I love you. What would you say to a dad like that?

I would be sympathetic to that because it might be hard for that man to say I love you if that was never told that he was loved by his father. But I think it's more than just what the Moore family does and how we talk to one another.

I think it goes back to God and we are to be like our Heavenly Father. And what was he like with his son when his son was on earth? This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased at the baptism and at the transfiguration.

So he says it and he says it more than once. He's in a pattern of saying it.

Yes. And then even reading the high priestly prayer, reading about the love between the Father and the Son. So I don't think it's a valid excuse for someone to say that I'm not expressive.

I've had to work through this even just with guys in our church, trying to get the men of our church to say I love you. And if you think that there's somehow some way that it's less masculine, you got to work through that.

You look at the way that Paul talks to the Christians that he's writing to in his letters. He's saying, I want to be there with you and take care of you like a mother taking care of an infant. There's nothing about saying I love you that is unmasculine.

We got to be able to say it to one another and especially to our children.

Absolutely. Yes. So for example, my dad did not have a dad. My dad is born in 1926. His dad leaves him when he is six months old. I don't know if you know anything about the culture of America back in the 1920s.

There's no war going on. So literally my dad is the only little boy in his community who doesn't have a dad because people did not get divorced back in those days in small towns in Western Pennsylvania.

He is raised by his mother and some other ladies in the house there. He never has a dad around. And you would think, well, he has no idea how to be a dad. He was a great dad. One of the things that made him a great dad is that many times a day, he would tell all of his children how much he loved them.

Every night when I would go to sleep, he would walk into the bedroom. He would kiss me on the forehead. He'd say, God bless this boy from the top of his head to the sole of his feet. And then he would get down and he would give me a kiss and I could still feel like he hadn't shaved yet that day, his whiskers.

And it was like, yeah, this guy loves me. Or I would be playing on the floor and he would just for no reason, stop the playing, call me over. I would stand in front of him. I don't know, I'm six, seven years old.

I'm standing in front of him and he'd say, no, you listen to me, look at me. I love you. And I want you to know that. And I'm very glad that you're my son. And now go back and play. Well, when you grow up in a home like that, what you assume is that this is happening with every other kid.

You assume that that's just what is normal. Anything that happens in your home, you think that it's normal. And then you start to meet people. I can't tell you the number of people that I've met who said their father lived and died and he never said, I love you.

And they would say, now I know that he did love me because he showed me that he loved me. He provided for me. He was always there for me, but he never said that he loved me. And I would say, well, does it make any difference?

And they'd say, oh yeah, it made a tremendous difference. I would love for him to have told me that. And so that's why I say, do it with obnoxious frequency. My dad died in 1992 at the age of 66. He died of a massive heart attack.

He had a glorious death. He was in his bed and died so quickly. He didn't even lift the covers. He just had a massive heart attack and he died. I miss him to this day, but there was no sense in which we needed to have the talk or we needed to say something that had never been said because he said it to me every day of my life.

So he went to be with the Lord and I'll see him again one day, but there was nothing that needed to be said. So if there are any dads that are listening right now that are struggling with this, first of all, I would ask you to ask yourself, does it mean anything to you or did it mean anything to you whether or not your father told you that he loved you?

And why would you want there to be any doubt in your child's mind? Say it, say it frequently. If it's something that you're not accustomed to saying, I would preface the first time I say it by saying something like, um, I've recently come under the conviction that I need to tell you that I love you and I need to.

Do it a lot. You're saying this is what the dad should say. I think this is just say to the kid,.

Yes, I have always loved you, uh, but I just haven't said it, but I'm saying it right now. So I want you to know that I love you and I want you to know that I'm going to be telling you that I love you.

I think it would make a big difference in families.

Yeah. You use the word obnoxious in relation to the frequency. Is it because sometimes children.

Think you're overdoing it? Well, I think that kids are going to be insecure until they are.

Secure. And you know, like sometimes I'm loving on my daughters so much. I'm like 10 ,000 little kisses. I say, all right, I'm going to kiss you and I'm going to count to a hundred, you know, and you stopped me if you've had enough and you know, they're like dad.

So I wonder if part of it is because you over, you do it so much when they're young that they don't really appreciate it. Sometimes they might even be annoyed by it, but then later they look back on it and they go,.

Man. Oh, it was the greatest thing in the world when I was six and seven and eight, you know, to have my father tell me that he loved me. He didn't mind. I mean, he said it all the time in front of everyone, but when you're 13, 14, 15 in public and you know, you're in the parking lot and you're walking away with your friends and your dad yells out, love you Eddie.

It's like,.

Let me see you at home. I appreciate you giving us a theological foundation for this as well. I thought that was a really good part of your talk. Hey, did you ever get a chance to ask your dad about how he learned to do that with you in light of his lack of having that?

Or, I mean, I think, obviously I'm listening to your talk through the lens of my own experience, especially without a father and now being a father and nobody ever taught me to do that. I wonder if part of it is because I was so broken by not having a father that when I became a father, I was like, listen, I am never going to let you think for even a second that you are not deeply loved and known.

But did you guys ever get a chance to just talk about that?

We never did. I just always assumed that he was doing it because he himself did not experience it. He would tell really sad stories about his father. His father moved to another town. His father would come back to our little town and would not even stop by to say hello to my dad.

And my dad would hear, hey, your dad was in town the other day. And it crushed him. I just think that he longed to be loved so much that he wasn't going to do it to anyone else. Another example. So my dad at one point moved to Florida.

They tried to make it in Florida for a while. They lived in St. Pete and my dad worked in Tampa and they didn't have a car. And so my dad would hitchhike 18 miles one way every day and fade in, fade out.

Several years later, I'm born. My dad would not, could not pass a hitchhiker on the road. He would pick up every hitchhiker because he knew what it was like to stand out there with his thumb out. In the same way, I think my dad knew what it was like not to be loved and he just wasn't going to do that to.

His kids. Wow. Okay. Tip two. Use creative actions with enthusiastic spontaneity to create memories. I think this is one of the tips that I have tried my best to incorporate into my family's lives. And we have, well, we'll talk about that in a second.

You say that this parenting tip is not that spiritual, but then you go on to quote Ecclesiastes 10 .4. Is it not Ecclesiastes 3? I think it's Ecclesiastes 10 .4.

Okay. A time to laugh, a time to dance. I think so. So here's what's going to happen, Sean. You're going to get old and you're going to forget.

What is in Ecclesiastes 10. Okay. It is Ecclesiastes 3. Okay. Yeah. So literally me looking at the manuscript and then writing down the note, I messed up the scripture reference.

I think Ecclesiastes 10 is something about like how many wives Solomon had or something. I don't know, but yeah. So let's look at it this way. If heaven is our home, like this really is not our home, but heaven is our home and heaven is a place of joy and delight.

And boy, am I being sacrilegious to say that heaven would be fun? Not in a trite way, but it would be... It's a delightful place. Then why would we not want to model what our heavenly home would be like with our children in the here and now?

And so I just think, make the house as fun as it possibly can be without sinning or being irresponsible.

Yeah. But you talk about... Okay. Yeah. Enthusiastic spontaneity. Fun is shorthand for.

That. Okay. So right. Have fun. That's what... Okay. So great example. Last year, my son was living in New York City for five months. He was there with his family, his four children. He came there to take a ministry job working at a church in New York City.

So they're on 75th Street and 2nd Avenue. They're in a little apartment. And my son's daughter, Mabel, who is five or six years old at the time, Mabel is an insomniac. She doesn't go to bed at night. She won't go to sleep.

And so he puts her to bed. She comes down. Mabel go back to sleep. Puts her to bed. Mabel comes back down. Mabel go to sleep. She walks down a third time at midnight and Charlie looks at her and says, Mabel, you've got two choices.

You either go back to bed or you come with me right now and we're gonna go get pizza. And so she puts on her... She's got her pajamas on. She puts her coat on over top of her pajamas, puts her slippers on.

They take the elevator down and they walk around the corner and get a slice of pizza. And that's the kind of thing that I'm talking about. She's not going to forget that. That can't be everything that you do always in your life.

But if you never do anything like that, if there never is any spontaneity or fun, why would the kids want to be at the house?

Why would they want to go to heaven if it's gonna be so boring?

Right. So we always tried to do things that didn't cost a lot of money because we didn't have a lot of money, but you could have a lot of fun without a lot of money.

Right. Yeah. So let me run through some of the examples that I know from personal experience with you on spontaneity and just stories I've heard. Let's run through them. Going Christmas, Carolyn?

Yep. Usually about this time of year, no advance notice. It gets dark early. We eat. Come on, guys, put your coats on. We're going to the widows and older people in the church and we're going to walk around and the six of us are going to sing Christmas carols and that'll be a joy for them.

It'll be a joy for us. So the whole thing would take, what, an hour and 15 minutes? It doesn't cost you anything. Doesn't cost you anything. It teaches them to sing. Yeah. Sing a couple of Christmas carols and move on to the next house.

You say that you would have, you would put the kids down, get them all in bed, warm, comfortable, and then in like 30 minutes, bus through the door, ice cream trip, everybody in the van now go, right?

Something like that?

Something like that. If I could talk my wife into it, or if she like was in another part of the house where I could get away with it, she wouldn't stop me. Yeah. What's your wife's name? Anna.

For the viewers? Yeah. She is a big part of this. We're talking a lot about you, but I know that you would want to say that you couldn't do all this stuff unless Anna was on board with this. And she is, she's like a superhero.

Yes. Actually, she ought to be sitting here and not me.

I tried to book her, but her agent made it happen.

Yeah. So I would come up with the ideas, but she would be the one who would have to cook or to clean up or to get the kids ready for school the next day. So I was the fun dad and she was the responsible one.

But yes, she would play along.

Pizza parties. So my first time really hanging out with you was at the Ocean City Bible Conference, which everyone should go to, right? Yes, that's right. And it's at a beach in New Jersey, but give it a try anyways.

The beach in New Jersey, dude. Nobody thinks I want to go to the beach. Let's go to New Jersey. Okay. So anyways, we go to, at like midnight, we go to a pizza shop in Atlantic City that looks like Yeah, cheesesteaks, pizza.

It looks like it needs like a good deep cleaning. And so I'm thinking, oh, this is fun. You know, we're a little kind of on vacation, a late night out, let's go get cheesesteaks in Atlantic City. But then out of nowhere, boom, you bust out the boom box and there's a hundred people.

And the owner of this cheesesteak shop is like, what's happening? You start blaring this music and it all turns into a dance party. That's something I feel like I've only seen in movies. I didn't know that people.

Actually did stuff like that in real life. Well, first of all, the owner of that place is making a lot of money. So we should be allowed to do whatever we want. Secondly, it's not a classy joint, but

Playing a lot of Bon Jovi. Yeah, but why not have a dance party in a cheesesteak place in Atlantic City?

Oh, it's great, man. So my daughter, Patience, was there with me and she was a little too shy to get out there on the dance floor, but you should have seen her face light up when people started doing it.

I mean, it was an experience that I'm sure she will never forget. And then when I was there as a speaker last time, Bella got to come. No, we had to switch venues.