August 16, 2018 Show with Nancy Snyder on “The Gospel for Moving Targets: Helping Active Children Grow in Grace” (Part 2)

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors, Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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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 Arns. Good afternoon. Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City,.

Florida and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arns and your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 16th day of August 2018.

I'm so delighted to have as a returning guest today Nancy Snyder. Many of you heard Nancy not long ago when she conducted part one of our interview on the gospel for moving targets, helping active children grow in grace.

Well today we are going to be entering into part two of this subject since it is a massive subject and her book is fairly lengthy on that issue. Nancy is the former K -12 student support services coordinator at Logos Academy in York, Pennsylvania and she has experience as a homeschooling parent of four and she is an interpreter of conferences and translator at seminary courses for deaf pastors.

In fact some of you recently heard the interview we had just on Monday the 13th this past Monday with Kevin Hamilton. He is a deaf pastor and our interpreter that day was Chuck Snyder, Nancy's husband.

And today as I said we are going to be discussing part two of the gospel for moving targets, helping active children grow in grace and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Nancy Snyder.

Thank you so much Chris. And I'm so delighted to also to have one of our rare in-studio visits from a man who is like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. He is my webmaster for Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and without Eric Nielsen this show certainly could not exist and he does a lot more for this program than people even realize and it's so great Eric Nielsen to have you in studio as my co-host today on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

Thanks Chris glad to be here. And before we go back to Nancy please tell our listeners something about the Evangelical Free Congregation in Illinois where.

You serve on the Elder Board. Okay my church is Community Evangelical Free Church of Champaign Urbana. We're located right there close to the University of Illinois. We meet in Judah Christian School and in fact we've met there for we were realizing 30 years now.

We look a lot like a church plant but that's intentional because we want to try and spend as much of our money as we can on foreign missions and God has been gracious to us in allowing us to send a number of people from our congregation over the years.

And if anyone was at.

The first G3 conference that Iron Sharpens Iron Radio had an exhibitors booth present. Both Eric and Sandy his wife were there doing the vast majority of the work at the exhibitors booth. I think Sandy was doing more than all of us.

She was running around and handing out flyers and drawing people to the booth. But the last two you went solo right? Yes this last year I had to go.

Solo because Sandy is an instructor and so she was preparing for her semester. But yeah that was.

That's right we've only had two already. This is the third one that's right. And you will be God willing there at the third one and we don't know yet whether Sandy will be. Yeah that's well.

We'll just have to see what the Lord has in store as far as Sandy coming. Great. Well send her my.

Regards. I will. And I want to give our listeners also our email address if they have questions about parenting and specifically on Nancy's book The Gospel for Moving Targets Helping Active Children Grow in Grace.

Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Chrisarnsen at gmail .com. And once again I just want to read a couple of the endorsements for this book for those of you listening to this program for the first time.

Dr. Sinclair Ferguson who's one of my favorite preachers of all says Nancy Snyder knows what the word rambunctious means. She has seen it in action in nurturing her own children. If you are a parent chances are you have also seen it and wondered how to handle it.

If so The Gospel for Moving Targets is just what you need. In fact this is a book for all families. It is full of mature biblical wisdom and a real understanding of how Christian character is formed. Anyone who buys The Gospel for Moving Targets to help them love their children will find its teaching transforming them first of all.

And that of course is exactly how God means family life to be. And then also Jerry Bridges the late Jerry Bridges who I had the privilege to interview a couple of times before he went home to glory. Many of you recognize his name from his book The Pursuit of Holiness and my favorite book by him is Trusting God Even When Life Hurts.

Jerry Bridges said about this book the Bible is meant to be applied to one's daily life but how to communicate this to small children is a challenge. Nancy Snyder has given us a creative way to do this involving the children in the learning process.

This book should prove useful to parents grandparents and anyone else working with small children. All of your children are adults now correct Nancy? That's right. Now do I know that not all of them do any of them have children of their own?

Are you now a grandparent yet? Two are their own, yep. And so I am sure that not only are you putting this book to use even though you wrote it yourself, I'm sure that they.

Are now using it for their own children. That's right. So we have four sons, three daughters-in-law and three grandsons. So you can see that we had to import the girls but we're getting there.

And I'm going to start this program the the second part of this subject that we've already began in a separate interview and by the way anybody who wants to hear the first interview that we did with Nancy on the Gospel for Moving Targets later on you can go to ironsharpensironradio .com and go to the archive it says past shows podcast and you can type in s-n-y-d-e-r and that will come up.

But we may do some overlapping obviously but since your book is titled The Gospel for Moving Targets and the subtitle is Helping Active Children, energy is obviously a central theme in the book that involves nearly everything else you've in the book.

And this is an area that is very prominent in the minds of parents because even though I'm not a parent I'm with parents and their children and grandchildren quite often and I see the frustration on their faces and I hear it in their voices and especially when we're in a public place, when we're in church and they're misbehaving, when we are at a restaurant and they are just refusing to obey and they're running around.

So I want to start off with energy solutions. What solutions do you have other than and I don't know if you're completely opposed to this but it seems in a day and age where everything requires a pill where psychologists or even physicians are telling parents we'll just give this pill or that pill and people are drugging their children just to basically slow them down and and quiet them down.

But what are your solutions to an abundance or an overabundance of energy in kids? Oh that's a great question,.

Thanks. I'm comprised of these children and the children learn. First of all we've got gifts and my lunchbox I shouldn't have. You know kids can really get that idea. It has to be used with very advanced skills, times when you're allowed to be high energy and you come in and we don't even think of it as a skill.

We think for example that he and his family would have used energy to know, trust God, either use their energy wisely but that's another really advanced skill when children begin to get that their problems don't.

Now one of the things that I have seen working.

When I look in the pews next to me or nearby me or even in the pew that I'm sitting in when I see parents or grandparents calming down their little children I've seen something that works but I don't know necessarily that all Christians would agree that this is appropriate during a worship service.

What seems to work is a coloring book or some kind of a restaurant. I have seen like many of the restaurants these days like Chili's and places like that they have kiosks with little computer games on them.

Now that seems to just keep them frozen and focused on that and they don't speak. You don't hear them. But in churches I said coloring books. Now do you think that a child I mean I'm talking about very very young children.

Do you think that a child. It is appropriate to distract a child from what is happening at a worship service in order to quiet them down even if they're too young to even.

Comprehend really what's going on? So it depends to me somewhat. I would have and maybe it's my age but I would have an aversion to letting a child color a picture on an iPad during a worship service but I wouldn't have a problem having them color in a coloring book with physical pages.

So maybe that's a prejudice of age however it's just so easy for kids to tune out when they've got a screen in front of them and I think that my children and many of the children I know could actually attend quite well.

My kids would have said they could attend better when most of them when they had something in their hands that they could do like a coloring book where they could you know take their crayons and color on the pages and in fact you know my oldest son a physician and probably at least theoretically knows better took so much more energy to do one thing at a time than to do two things at a time and he would play clarinet while he was reading physics.

I mean I'm not just talking about when he was little this went on for quite some time. So I'm not opposed to some families even have a special little carrying case or special little box and they might call some families actually call them things in them that they only get out during worship.

I think it's also really great to sit beside your children and draw pictures of what is being said in the sermon and that sort of yeah that makes sense yeah they can draw them to what's going on. Scripture doesn't, Billy does.

And as long as you don't draw horns on the pastor I think.

That would be it. That's right. And of course it seems very obvious to me that parents are letting their children use the pew bibles and hymnals as coloring books because you very often find that when you're sitting at the pew.

Now Eric Nielsen you have six children. Are they all.

Either teens or adults. By now? Yes they are. I have five daughters and one son and my youngest is now.

15. Wow now have you noticed a difference between the girls and the boy in regard to energy and how.

It is unleashed? Yes the boy tended to jump off of things and run into things and do more physical sorts of activities like that. And for the most part the girls have always been a lot more laid back and it's been easier for them to sort of sit, listen, that sort of thing.

All of my children are fairly mellow anyway. Yeah the ones that I've met were. I admit I don't have the higher energy.

Children that a lot of other folks do. Now does your experience Nancy not only in your own home. Wait a minute. All of your children are boys? They are. Yeah that's right. So you can't compare other than in your school setting.

In your education setting. Have you found what Eric has said to be a fairly normative thing or is every family different when it comes to the over abundance of energy with children between girls and boys the comparison?

I think it is often true. I've certainly met some very very high energy girls but you know that bent towards the physical, that bent towards jumping off the dresser. If nobody teaches you that actually we don't practice Olympic dives off the dresser and you know then that is pretty.

Typical of boys. And well one of the things that is a it's actually a division in the body of Christ and perhaps even more so amongst those of us who are Reformed than in other areas. There seems to be a divide over whether it is appropriate to have a nursery and children's school as a separate entity from the corporate gathered body of adults in the worship service.

Do you have a set opinion on that or do you think that that is just a liberty that churches can.

Disagree on? Right. I do think it's an area of freedom and I do think that it's mercy for churches to offer it for parents. I mean let's just say there's a mom who has real high energy children and her times in the Word are always interrupted and she does pray with her kids but those are really sort of scattered times, they're not deep pools in which to dive into the Word of God and prayer.

And now she's jumping in puddles with her children and it may be that the corporate worship is her only time where she can really focus. And so I do think it's a ministry of mercy for a church to provide it but I don't think that anybody should be frowned upon for not making use of it and that we need to give each other freedom and grace.

The Christian family has in one sense the same calling. Yes and do you think that there is anything that.

A child is being deprived from if he is in a nursery setting or a church school setting until you know he is at a typical age where he can actually pay attention to what is being spoken of by the pastor?

I don't know what the age that would typically be maybe maybe six or seven. I don't know but do you think that that. It seems that there are some of us in the Reformed faith and perhaps other places that think that by osmosis or something the children who are not at all able to absorb what the pastor is saying are somehow being nurtured and nourished by just being present there.

What are your thoughts on that?

Right well my bigger concern is that some in some corporate bodies this continues through the teenage years that they never whole body there's always age segregation and I think we are definitely short-changing those children and young people in serious ways.

We tend to think and this isn't hard and fast but I guess well growing up my children didn't have this option so we were in a small deaf church not only that but they were having church in their second language and I remember one of my children having just tears pouring down his face because he was working so hard visually just to pay attention he wasn't crying his eyes were just watering and I remember my youngest son this is when the deaf church moved to meet in the deaf club.

The center of the deaf cultural unbelieving world and I thought oh isn't it precious he's taking notes on this sermon which is not easy to do when it's in American Sign Language because every time you look down at your paper you miss what's going on and when we got home and I asked to see like I said the church met in the deaf club and he was writing down everything on the wall including how much beer costs at the deaf club Friday night and things like that.

So obviously there were things he was picking up by osmosis that weren't what I was intending but I remember going to the church of one of my some of my students were in this church and church and they were to read scripture and I just wanted to support them and go to their church and I was working my heart but as I walked the church small congregation just passed them from person to person for the whole two hours.

What they picked up by osmosis was love they were in a covenant community that poured out love on these moving targets and somehow kept them going for two hours. So I think there are a lot of unseen benefits that God pours out as we do struggle to make corporate worship.

Accessible to our children. We have a listener that prefers to remain anonymous who wants to know do you think that it is appropriate to use these child leashes that have been used with children in public to prevent them from becoming missing and getting hurt?

You know I remember hearing a discussion like that on tv a discussion about that I should say where there are people who are just furious saying that just because it looks like a dog leash that you should never do that.

Well let's let's be honest a crib looks like a cage. I mean if the person is really just trying to prevent their child or children from being kidnapped from wandering away and being lost or getting into mischief somewhere and falling or whatever is that an okay thing?

Have you seen that yourself? Have you used that yourself?

You know what I'm talking about. Right I have seen it and I do have the same inward cringe but I just have to come back to the fact that all of these things that aren't specifically addressed are areas of freedom where we use physical principles and you know when I think I'm a special my background special ed okay and so I have worked with children who wear helmets all the time because they have a seizure disorder and they might not have a seizure every day but when they do they they don't want a chance of them falling on the concrete and cracking open their heads.

That's a gift. A helmet is a gift. Most of us don't want our kids walking down the city streets with helmets on but for those who need them it could be a gift. As active as my children were and I will say that three of our four sons were pretty off the charts when it came to activity level.

In fact one of them who was adopted out of a traumatic background and did have a child psychologist as one member of his team and the first time the the psychologist met with him during out of his office.

I was about 20 minutes at Medicaid like him. This is not what you I have never at Medicaid like him. He's like a pinball in a slot machine. I've never seen anything like this. So despite all that and despite having very close developmental stages two of them like that okay so the third brother was older by that time somewhat older.

I still preferred having a hand but I'm not going to condemn people who have found that you know it's a it's a way to keep their children safe and a way to keep their parental frustration levels and patience level glorifying to God.

But no I never did it and I do have that same inward cringe but I fight against it. I don't think I don't think that inward cringe that I have is is first Corinthians.

13 mom. Right well we have to go to our first break right now and by the way Anonymous if you want to give us your your full name and address off the air obviously we will make sure that you get a free copy of The Gospel for Moving Targets Helping Active Children Grow in Grace.

It will be shipped out to you by our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service cvbbs .com and this is compliments of our friends at Shepherd Press. So just send us your full mailing address and we'll get that out to you as soon as possible.

We're going to our first station break right now if anybody else would like to join us 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 of the USA and please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

Don't go away we'll be right back with Nancy Snyder.

And The Gospel for Moving Targets. Hi Phil Johnson here I'm executive director of John MacArthur's media ministry Grace to You and I'm also an occasional guest on Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio. So I'm delighted that from January 17th through the 19th my friend Chris Arnzen and I will be heading down to Atlanta for the G3 conference where I'll be joining James White, Steve Lawson, Vody Baucom, Mark Dever, Conrad Mbewe, Todd Friel, Josh Bice and a host of other speakers to address the topic of biblical understanding of missions.

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We are now back to our discussion, part two of our discussion on the Gospel for Moving Targets, Helping Active Children Grow in Grace by Nancy Snyder, who is our guest today. In studio with me is our webmaster here at Iron Sherpa's Iron Radio, Eric Nielsen, who happens to be an elder of an evangelical free church in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.

If you have questions of your own, our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. You have a section in your book, Nancy, that feelings are gifts from God, and I'm sure that you would agree that much of the world of Christian psychology, and some might call it Christian pop psychology, ran too far with the of focusing on our feelings, and I think that Christian psychologists, even very famous ones, and world-renowned ones who are prolific writers and so on, and very powerful presences in the media, have taught a version of self-esteem and the importance of self-esteem that has become a very damaging thing, I think, in the body of Christ.

Tell us about your thoughts on the self-esteem movement, and also on specifically what you are writing about in regard to feelings.

Yeah, even if it's, you know, frankly, my background growing up was addicted to shame, but words from Christ is like shame. Talk about indulged. If we couldn't have the relationship emotions, we don't, which is called dealing with their feelings on a child's level, notice and repent of what they're treasuring that isn't God.

So the child, for example, who blows up because there's only one gold crayon, and he has to wait for his brother or his classmate to finish using it before he gets a turn with the gold crayon, can search behind that and see what he's treasuring, and children can get really savvy at this.

So one of our sons really struggled with anger, and every night when he was a little preschooler, I would, when I would go in to pray for him at bedtime, ask him what he was angry about, and, you know, before he could even necessarily name the number, he would be like, what's that number after 14 that's not called 15?

And he could tick off the 15 things he was angry about, and I prayed about every single one of them, and if I forgot one, he would add, you forgot to pray that I'm mad that the dog growled at me, and I'd be like, you mean when you pulled on his, you know, his fur?

But, and then after a year of this, one night he said, I'm really only angry about one thing, and remember he's still a preschooler, okay, and I said, what's that? And he said, I'm mad that everyone in the world won't do what I want them to do all the time.

And I thought, I'm with you buddy, that's my struggle too, but he got to the heart of it, and kids can do that when we, we adults help them in a biblical way to trace behind their emotions. I remember there's a fantastic book called, written by Lou, The Heart of Anger, and it helped, I remember the day we overheard them say to each other, they're about to blow up at each other, and they said, let's not get mad, we don't, okay, so again, you know, we hadn't gotten to the heart yet, but we had cleared the debris, and that's what I'm trying to do in section one of this book, is clear the debris on the runway to the heart.

Section two, which is the gospel with Christ and the book of Romans, and emotions. Great, you actually reminded me that I've got to get Lou Priolo on my show,.

Because I don't think that I have ever had Lou as a guest. I remember, I remember years ago, when I worked part-time for Calvary Press Publishing, they were the ones that first.

Brought that book into print, The Heart of Anger. Yeah, you've got to fix that, get him on your show.

Yeah, I certainly will try. I remember I did, before I had my own show, I had arranged an interview with him on Andy Anderson Live on a radio station that I worked for for 15 years, but it's a good reminder.

Johnny wants to know, I know that there are differences of opinion between those who believe in covenant theology. Some view children as a mission field, some view them as covenant children that do not need to be evangelized.

What is your guest's opinion?

...is still wrestling with that one perspective. However, even if you're coming from a strong perspective that children are members of the covenant community, that they have, through infant baptism, been initiated into the covenant community, when you look at Scripture, it is hard to see that, just take the book of Genesis, for example, and you look at everybody's children, so many of those early, you know, the patriarchs, had some of their children who did not keep covenant with God.

Okay, so I think that even if you view your children as members of the covenant, that a reading of Scripture leads you to at least say to your children, um, you have been baptized into the covenant community, and you are called to keep covenant with Christ.

Okay, so even if you baptize your children as infants, what you might need to say to them is, you are in this covenant as long as you keep covenant with God. Through Scripture, we do see that there are curses that come down on covenant breakers, and you're blessed if you keep covenant.

So, I would say that my husband and I, in the midst of, as I mentioned in the last program, we interpret both for people who are paedo-baptists and people who are believers in baptism, and we, when we interpret for these people, we become them.

We sign the sign for baptism differently, and so I think we took a ground of encouraging our children that they were called into covenant with God, and they were called to be covenant keepers. I wish I had emphasized that even more.

I should add right here that for Chuck and me, parenting is definitely an out-of-weakness-comes-God-strength journey, and any wisdom we've gained is solely because God promises to give wisdom to those who lack it.

So, we married, actually, against the advice of the person who did our premarital counseling, who said, I don't think you should, he did personality tests, and he was in our college, the college fellowship director, and he said, I think you need to rethink this thing, and what we had in common was that our childhoods were significantly impacted, so in very different ways, by addiction in our families, and we loved Jesus, and we didn't have a clue how to build a Christian marriage or a Christian family, but, you know, God keeps covenant with the clueless, and God has promised to give wisdom to those who lack it, and it's actually a little just staggering to me to be in this position, but the gospel for moving targets has grown out of weakness and is all to the glory.

Amen, and I know that it's not even as simple as a division between paedo-baptists and credo-baptists, or baptists, on this issue, because even folks like Dr. Joel Beakey, who is a paedo-baptist, who I love, who's a dear friend, who I've had on this show many times, he takes a view, even though he is a paedo-baptist, he treats children as a mission field, unlike many Presbyterians do, so it is an interesting issue of division.

The one thing that I'd like to also add is that, as my friend Peter Jeffrey, who's now in eternity with Christ, he titled a book, one of the many books that he wrote, Christians Need the Gospel Too. So, I mean, when a pastor is preaching to a congregation, he's not to get up there and say, now, this is only for the lost people in the room.

Well, that's exactly right. Yes. I mentioned in your last show, without giving names, and then I noticed, I was instructed just by listening to you, Chris, I noticed how gracious you are at giving honor to people who have made an impact, and I mentioned my first pastor's wife and daughter, and those are Rosemary Miller, who is a missionary with Surge, formerly World Harvest Mission, which she started with her late husband, Jack Miller, and she's the author of From Fear to Freedom and Nothing is Impossible with God, and also a book on parenting, which she wrote with Deborah Harrell and Jack Krumpenauer, and I hope I'm saying their names right, called The Gospel-Centered Parent.

Jack Miller, who needs to understand the gospel and the importance of, you know, counseling, preaching the gospel, a very gifted teacher at Philadelphia as well, and on the gospel to them.

Praise God. And going back to the area of feelings, even though, as we've already said, there is a false and dangerous idea that promotes self-esteem that is really an attempt to build up pride in people, when that is actually a sin.

Absolutely.

Uh, do you think that we who are Reformed have, some of us, have had a tendency to overlook human self-worth? I think there's a difference between pride and self-esteem and recognizing self-worth, recognizing gifts and talents.

In fact, I think it's sinful to ignore gifts and talents that God has given us. And also, to recognize, even though we were unworthy of Christ's love and Christ's sacrifice, that He viewed us as worth very much, so much, that He died on the cross and received the wrath of His Father to redeem us.

So, I mean, isn't that something that we are to instill in the minds of children, that they are very valuable? Even Jesus Himself speaks of us being more valuable than sparrows. So, there is something about teaching worth, not only to children, but to adults, self-worth.

Right, right. So, if it's under the rubric of people who are called to talk to our children about their sin... Amen. And by the way, I forgot to mention to Johnny in New York City,.