Let's turn to Proverbs 23. Proverbs 23, verses 12 through 26. Proverbs 23, 12 through 26. Apply thy heart to wisdom and thine ears to the words of knowledge. Withhold not correction from the child, for if thou beatest him with a rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with a rod and shall deliver his soul from hell. My son, if thy heart be wise, my heart shall rejoice, even mine. Yea, my reign shall rejoice when thy lips speak right things. Let not thy heart envy sinners, but be thou in the fear of the Lord all the day long. For surely there is an end. and thy expectation shall not be cut off. Hear thou my son and be wise and guide thy heart in the way. Be not among winebibbers, among riotous eaters of flesh, for the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty, and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags. Hearken unto thy father that beget thee. Despise not thy mother when she is old. Buy the truth and sell it not. Also wisdom and instruction and understanding. The father of the righteous shall greatly rejoice and he that begetteth a wise child shall have joy of him. Thy father and thy mother shall be glad. and she that bear thee shall rejoice. My son, give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways. Let's pray. Gracious God, help us to build heart-establishing convictions in our children, and use this talk to assist us in that great challenge. Lord, we need thy help. We make so many mistakes as parents. We're unfit. We're unable. But thou art a covenant-keeping God in Jesus Christ, and thou hast promised that thou wilt help the poor and needy when they cry to thee. Please help us poor, needy mothers and fathers in child-rearing to build Spirit-worked, Spirit-established, God-glorified, Word-based, Christ-honoring convictions in our children. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Well, for about 20 years we take care of our children, and then the time comes that we have to let them go. We have to push them out of the nest, as it were, and they have to fly on their own. If we run our households with fear, slavish fear, when our children break out onto their own, they will do their own thing, which usually won't be a good thing. So our goal is not just to force them to obey us when they're at our home so that when we are out of sight, they go their own way, but our goal in childbearing is to shepherd their hearts. And I'm sure you all agree with this. You want them to build convictions from within so that when you turn around and go away, you don't have to worry about what they're doing back at home. That's a great blessing. I know of some parents, happily not too many, who even with older teenagers, they don't dare leave the home without them. Because they don't know what they're gonna do. They think they're gonna run over to the internet and get into pornography and all kinds of things. But building heart convictions is your goal. Now it doesn't mean you're going to ever be totally successful all the way across the board as you desire. because your children are sinners too. But you want to build into your children a conscience that hates sin, loves Christ, pursues the King's highway of holiness, and wants to do what is right in the sight of God. And that's what Proverbs 23 is all about. It says, begins this way, the part I read anyway, apply thine heart, thine heart unto instruction, and thine ears to the words of knowledge. The passage I read to you, the word heart, which is the real essence of who the person is, is used seven times. This is your goal, you build convictions in the heart. Your goal is not to make little Pharisees clean on the outside, but rotten on the inside. You don't just want children who obey you outwardly, but don't do so with their minds and their hearts and their consciences. I was telling the story last night to somebody. of a little child who refused to sit down while his dad's driving down the highway. And the dad suddenly realized it, got very upset, very angry, and said, if you don't sit down right now, I'm going to pull off the side of the road, and I'm going to spank you if you don't put on your seat belt. Child sat down, put on her seat belt, and about two minutes later, as the dad is comfortably driving down the road, thinking the problem was resolved, said to him, Daddy? He said, what? I'm sitting down, but in my heart, I'm still standing up. See, the problem was not resolved. The child sat down out of fear. Well, sometimes, that's the best you can do in a quick situation, but the main, for the main, you've got to be shepherding the heart, the heart, the heart, the heart, teaching the heart. That's what's important. All right, in Proverbs 23, 12 through 26, there are five or six principles here that will guide us, and I want to cover those with you one by one briefly. First of all, the first principle we see is that we must discipline with mercy. We must discipline with mercy. Look at verses 13 and 14. We're told that we're not to withhold correction from the child, even to the point of sometimes spanking the child. Now, the rod of chastening, of course, must never be used to leave abiding marks on the body, to injure the body, and certainly not to give the child what his sins deserve, because we all deserve hell, your children included. but only to curb the child's natural tendency to choose evil and to reject good. That's what you want to do. So administering corporal discipline is one of the most unpleasant aspects of ruling a household in a godly manner. You don't want to do it, however, in such a way that you stir up wrath. The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God. So you don't do it in wrath to stir up wrath. The rod of wrath is not the rod of correction. Parental discipline must conform itself to the example of our Father in heaven. Whom the Lord loves, he corrects, even as a father, the son in whom he delights. So the motive for discipline is not anger, but love. The manner is not judicial, but paternal. And the aim is not punishment so much as it is correction. So the best way not to go wrong in disciplining your children is to consciously remember every time you discipline, just think this in your thought, I am standing in God's stead, God's place. These children, technically speaking, are not my own. They're just loaned to me from God for a little while in this world, and I'm to do what God wants, what God would do if he were me. And you'll say, then if you're really, really angry, and you're just about ready to spank too hard, you'll check yourself and say, wait a minute. If I discipline in anger, I'm sinning. Then it's better to say to your child, you know, you've done this wrong, and I need to think about how I will discipline you, and I'll come back to you, until you calm down, because you want to discipline in a way that God would have you to do, not according to your feeling or your desire at the moment. So, there are three things you need to remember when you discipline your children, according to the Bible. The first is love. First is love. You're disciplining them because you love them. My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, neither be weary of his correction. For whom the Lord loveth, He correcteth, even as a father the son in whom he delighteth." Proverbs 3. So, your correction should not display the image of Satan, which aims to destroy, but the image of God, which aims to heal. So when Satan afflicts us, his aim is to embitter us against God and to bring about our destruction. When God chastens us, His aim is to make us partakers of His holiness and righteousness. Hebrews 12. That's what we should do. You're not trying to stir up anger in your children against you. You're trying to show your children you need this discipline because you need to walk in God's ways out of love. Second thing you need to remember I'm talking to children now about, say, between the age of 1 1⁄2 to 7 or 8. I mean, after that, when they're 9, 10 and up, you can't really spank, can you? Because now you use instruction. Instruction more than the rod. But instruction already can begin for a 1 1⁄2-year-old. So that's the second characteristic. Love, number one. Instruction, number two. Christ says, as many as I love, I rebuke and chasten. Be zealous therefore and repent. He that has an ear to hear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches. So Jesus is saying, when I rebuke someone, when I chasten someone, I'm instructing them. You need to repent, you need to be zealous, you need to turn back to me, you need to hate sin, you need to love Christ, and so on. So when your child does something wrong, the goal isn't to lash out and just spank anywhere on the body. I like to say God has given one part of the human anatomy, we call it the rear end, that is fitting to receive a spanking. Should not slap across the face, slap the hands, slap anything. But you take a child apart into a separate room. You don't discipline in front of the child's siblings to shame the child. That's not the point. You take the child in the separate room. If the child's one and a half or older, you can explain to that child the moral infraction that has been committed, why it's wrong, and ask the child to repent and to ask for forgiveness. And then you might say, well, I'm just going to spank you one time now. Or if it's very severe moral infraction, I'm going to spank you twice or very, very severe. I'm going to spank you three times. You lay the child across your lap. You do what you said you'd do. You're in total control. And sometimes you just tell the child, you don't have to say it too often, but I'm going to spank you according to what God would have me to do. This isn't easy for me to do. I don't want to spank you, but you need this because you need to stop this sin. And then when you spank the child, you scoop the child up in your arms, you embrace the child, and you pray with the child that God will help him to stop doing this sin. And then you walk out of the room, case closed, hand in hand, and never, never bring it up again. Discipline has been administered, it's done. As Spurgeon said, when you bury a dead dog, you don't leave its tail sticking up above the ground. It's forgotten. That's true in marriage, too, by the way. And sometimes women, in love to you, not my wife, of course, past, present, future, all comes into purview in a woman's mind more than a man. A man lives more in present tense most of the time. Check it out. And it's easy for a spouse, a woman especially, but also a man sometimes, to bring up something that's already been forgiven 20 years ago. What in the world are you doing bringing that dead tail up out of the ground again? You see, but also with a child. That doesn't mean you totally forget that it happened, but you don't bring it up again. It's been forgiven. When you administer discipline and you pray, You've given forgiveness. You've asked for God's forgiveness. The matter is resolved. And you walk out of the room saying it is resolved to the child. Now, this kind of discipline works better with one child than another. And I must admit that. Sometimes you need to kind of flex this a little bit and find something that works that's similar to this pattern. For two of our children this pattern worked quite well, for one it did not work very well at all. So we had to find another method. We found that just allowing this child to or commanding this child to sit in this child's room alone for a while was a more severe punishment and brought the child to the right place much better than a spanking did. So we used that method. You see, you need to remember each child is different. And one reason why the Lord makes all your children so stunningly different from each other is so that you need his help for the rearing of each child. And you can never say, oh well, I treated all my kids the same and they all turned out well. Now we had two families in our church that both had 10 children. One was the most God-fearing family I think I've ever seen in my life. It was amazing. The other family was just totally chaotic. The father of the 10 chaotic children went to the father of the 10 very obedient children and said, what am I doing wrong? I raised them all alike. And the father of the 10 obedient children said, well, dear brother, he put his arm around me, he said, maybe that's what you're doing wrong. You raised them all alike. You forget that each one has his own unique personality. That's important to understand. So you do it with instruction, but you keep in mind that you're looking for the most effective way to achieve your goal of shepherding the heart. So love, instruction, and then thirdly, compassion. Compassion. When you discipline your children, you remember, like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him, for he knows our frame, he remembers we are dust. Psalm 103. Best way to remember compassion is to remember who you are and what you were when you were a kid. And then you will not discipline too heavily, because you will remember, I'm really, in my heart, no different. No different. Now, if you remember these three words, love, instruction, and compassion, your corporal discipline will probably be rightly balanced. Principle number two. Rejoice openly in wise choices. Rejoice openly in wise choices. Move on now with me to verses 15 and 16. My son, if thy heart be wise, my heart shall rejoice, even mine, yea, my reign shall rejoice when thy lips speak right things. So what this wise man is saying is, on the one hand, I discipline my children for moral infractions. And of course, it doesn't always have to come to spanking, even a young child. Sometimes instruction is enough. It doesn't need to move into spanking because repentance is there. When repentance is there, you've reached your goal. But at the same time, you need to do the flip side. You need to rejoice openly with your son and daughter when they do right things. Too often, well-meaning Christian parents get in the mode of something like this. When my child does right things, I don't say anything, because I don't want to give him a big head or her a big head and stir up pride. But when they do wrong things, I'm on their case. Well, what does that tell a child? It tells a child I can never measure up to dad and mom's expectations. When I do right things, I get no positive feedback. When I do wrong things, I get negative. So I'm always wrong. That's not how you want to raise a child. The Bible says we should reward our children when they do right things. And we should tell them, you rejoice my heart when you make wise choices. That's what the wise man says. So just follow him. Now, it is possible, of course. to stir up pride in the heart of your children that is sinful when you compliment them from every little teeny tiny thing. And there are parents that do that. I'm sure you've seen them. They praise their kids for everything. I mean, just all praise. And kids walk away feeling like they're the best kids in all the world. Well, that's not healthy either. But there's a balance here, you see. There's both correction and there's delight. And Jesus did the same thing, didn't he? He said, well done, thou good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord. And we're prone to say, but Lord, I do nothing right by nature, or even after received grace, there's always sin mixed in with it. What are you doing saying to me, well done, thou good? No, the Lord says, I see my grace in you, and I see what you've done, I see that you've done it, I will love, well done. Isn't that what you long to hear on the day of judgment? Not that that brings you into heaven. Christ's blood alone does. But what a beautiful thing it is when the Lord looks at us and says, well done, my child, and smiles with a fatherly smile of delight and joy. You know, God speaks of rejoicing over his children with singing. Singing. Can you believe that, that God would sing over you because he rejoices so much in you? A child of God is to live in joyful obedience with a sense of his father's smile. In the same way, parents should always be ready to smile upon their children, to give a word of praise, an appropriate reward when they do well. My mother was very, very good at that. My dad, not so much, though. He was, well, he didn't notice too often when we did right things, somehow. But my mother noticed everything. And she also was always ready with a smile. You know, when I was a boy, my parents used to have these religious gatherings about once a month in the home. And in the Dutch, we called them gezelschappen, which doesn't make any sense to you. But it's a special word which means spiritual fellowship. God's people would get together, sit in a circle, and talk about God's ways in their lives, in their hearts, maybe ask a question about some text, and have spiritual fellowship. Those are really special occasions. And when I got convicted of sin, I wanted to sit in on those, and my parents finally let me. I was the only kid in the room. I felt a little out of place. They're all older people and saved people, and I was in awe of what they were talking about. And my mother sensed that. She'd be sitting on the other side of the room, and maybe 10 times in an evening, as I'd be looking around the room, I'd catch her eye, and every time, she'd smile at me, like saying, it's okay, son. I'm glad you're here. That was just so sweet. I still remember it 50 years later. It's okay, son. I'm glad you're here. You see, positive affirmation is built into us. We need that. We need that from our spouses. We need it from our children, and we need to give it to our children. If you're going to build strong convictions in them, they need to feel strong love. She'd need both, strong discipline, strong love. You know, my wife and I have often talked about my, I have an older brother who has 13 children and 55 grandchildren, and I don't know, 20 great-grandchildren. There's always three or four pregnant in his family at a time, and he's only 70 years old, and it's just an amazing family. But my sister-in-law just runs that family that household, now of course they're empty nesters, but in years gone by, in such an amazing way, my wife and I were often talking together, what makes this family have less troubles with 13 kids than many families have with one child? And finally we decided that she has this incredible sense of love for her kids. Even some of the older children, just come and sit on her lap and she'd stroke their back and their hair and hug them. But boy, don't mess with her. I mean, if you did something wrong, she would discipline you. So she had strong discipline and strong love. And that was a powerful combination. Powerful combination. But that's what the wise man says here. You use the rod, but you also use compliments. Number three, you instill truth. You instill truth. Jump down to verses 22 and 23. Hearken unto thy father that begat thee, and despise not thy mother when she is old. Buy the truth, and sell her not. Also wisdom, and instruction, and understanding. Solomon here is borrowing imagery from the marketplace. Parents are selling wares to their children. And he urges the parents to market precious commodities to their children. Words of truth, wisdom, instruction, understanding. And he's urging the children to buy up all that they can and to hold on to it for dear life. What he's really saying here is be a teaching prophet. in your own home. Teach as God's authorized steward. Teach through family worship, as we saw already. Teach by example, we saw that already. Teach by sharing your life. We saw something of that already in family worship. But also teach for holistic ministry. Teach your children not only spiritual things, but proper manners. Teach them for a holistic form of effective life in this world. And teach it all with passion. Buy the truth, you tell your kids. Truth is more precious than gold. Sell or not, stand with truth. Now, my dad was very good at that. He would often preface, when he's gonna tell me something very important, he had a saying, he had lots of sayings, by the way, and Dutch people tend to have that, but my dad had a double dosage, and he would sit me down somewhere, and he'd say this to me. Now, what I'm about to tell you, I wish I could write it with an iron pen on your heart. Then I knew it was gonna be important. He did, he wrote it like with an iron pen upon his heart. And then he'd say something to me that was very, very meaningful. And I still remember many of these instructions that were just wrapped in a wrapping paper of truth. You know, one time when I was nine years old, he sat me down and he said, now, I wish I could write this with an iron pen on your heart. He said, do you know what the biggest difference is between a believer and an unbeliever? And of course, I always said no to all his questions, because I could never get it right. So I said no. He said, and I think he wanted me to say no, so he could impart wisdom. So he said, well, a believer always has a place to go. An unbeliever has nowhere to go when he's in trouble. And then he got out his wallet, he took some money out of his wallet, he laid it on the bed next to me, and he said, you see this money? an open throne of grace to go to is worth more than all the money in the world. And you can go there 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Don't you ever forget this lesson, son. Wow. The gift of prayer. You know, later on, I haven't gone through many surgeries in my life, but I was driving myself to the hospital for a knee surgery one time, and I was just thinking on the way, where does an unbeliever go when they have surgery and have to go under anesthesia? And then my mind went back to that nine-year-old session with my dad. I thought, what a blessing to have a God-fearing parent to teach you those lessons. Isn't it true? When you have communion with God in prayer, it's priceless. It's worth more than everything in this world. Buy the truth. Present the truth to your children. And if you weep as you tell them, that's okay. It's good for your children to see you feeling things so deeply once in a while, it brings tears to your eyes. by the truth, sell it not. Principle number four, you need to direct children to fear and hope in the Lord. Go back up to verses 17 and 18. Let not thine heart envy sinners, but be thou in the fear of the Lord all the day long, for surely there's an end and thy expectation shall not be cut off. Fear of God and hope in God are two aspects of saving faith. So on the one hand, we must communicate to our children the majestic and moral holiness of God so that they will fear him with a childlike reverence and turn away from evil. On the other hand, we must teach them the faithfulness and loving kindness of God so they will hope in his word and persevere in doing what is right in his sight. And what this means is we need to encourage a sense in which the childlike fear of God abounds in their heart. Now the Holy Spirit alone can work that in truth, but we strive to leave that impression, don't we, if we're faithful parents? Now what does that mean, the childlike fear of God? Well, I often say the best definition I ever read of the fear of God, I think, is the one given by a 19th century author by the name of John Brown. And he said, the childlike fear of God is to value the smile of God greater than the smiles of all men, and to value the frown of God greater than all the frowns of men. When a child fears the Lord, the child wants to obey God, to receive His smile, but also wants to avoid His frown. And you see, when you teach your child that, you're teaching your child the need for confession of sin, because when you don't confess your sin, you get the frown of God. But it also teaches the child consecration to God. Like we sing in our Psalter book, Lord, give me a single eye, thy name to glorify. Consecration, total consecration to God. Take my hands, take my heart, take my life, Lord, let it be totally consecrated to thee. That's what you want to teach your children. That's the way to live, and you want them to see that in your life, that you are sold out to Jesus Christ, and your life is 100% in his camp. And you want his smile upon your life. You want to fear him. You want to hate sin and love him and walk in the king's highway of holiness all your life. And you see, once you have that, once you see in your children this heart to confess sin and to receive forgiveness from God and to consecrate themselves to the Lord, well, that perhaps is the best conviction of all. to build into the hearts of your children. Let me illustrate that with one example. We have an annual conference every year. By the way, you're more than welcome. If you want a trip to a beautiful state of Michigan, you want to actually enjoy four seasons of the year instead of just one. Sorry, I had to get that in there. You could come the last weekend of August, and we have a wonderful conference each year. But anyway, at one of these conferences, a dad came up to me one day and he said my son has something to say to you and this boy was about 10 years old and you know in all the book stalls around the conference we have little dishes of candy and this boy apparently had snuck around during break times and grabbed a couple pieces from this dish and a couple pieces from that dish and his parents saw bulging pockets that evening and he had 63 pieces of candy in his pocket. And so they told him, you need to go directly to Dr. Beeky tomorrow and you need to confess your sin and return all this candy. The boy said, I can't do that, I can't do that. Dad said, you will do that, you will do that. The boy went to bed trembling with fear that he had to confess to me about stealing all this candy. He was very shamed and embarrassed. Next morning he got up, he was very cheerful. His dad said, well, you're very cheerful this morning. Yes, the boy said, I think Dr. Bickey will forgive me. His dad said, well, what makes you think that? Well, he said, I went to bed last night and he said, I poured out my heart to the Lord And I asked him to forgive me, and he did that. He forgave me. And if the Lord will forgive me, I think Dr. Beeky will forgive me, too. So the boy came to me and just said he was really sorry. And would I forgive him? I hugged him and said, yes, I'd forgive him. He returned most of the candy. Some of it had already gone down. So about 10 minutes later, the session was about to start, I was sitting in the front row, and this little boy comes up beside me. And he sits beside me, he starts chattering away. And he tells me that he feels called to the ministry, he wants to give his whole life to the Lord. And someday, he said, my dream is I'll come to Puritan Reformed Seminary, and you can train me in the ministry. I go, wow, this is quite a switch, you know. Ten minutes ago, we were doing confession of sin, and there's stolen candy, and ten minutes later, we're talking about ministry for life. But you see, in the mind of this child, what was happening was he was really fearing the Lord, wasn't he? He was confessing his sin. Then he wants to consecrate his life to the Lord. It's actually a beautiful, beautiful thing that was going on inside of his soul. And when we teach our children to put their hope in the Lord, we're really teaching them that if they come wholeheartedly, sincerely with all their sins, God will forgive them. And then the fruit of it is, when you really fear the Lord, you want to consecrate yourself wholly to God. And what a beautiful thing that is. It's the only way to live and the only way to die. Principle number five, warn against destructive lifestyles. Warn against destructive lifestyles. Verse 20 and 21, be not among winebibbers, among riotous eaters of flesh, for the drunkard and the gaunt shall come to poverty, and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags. You know, what's going on here is that a self-indulgent lifestyle can take many forms. And you want to teach your children to use their time wisely, not to indulge in themselves, like the 63 pieces of candy is a good example there too, but not to indulge themselves in electronic communications and fritter away their whole life playing games on the computer, not to immerse themselves in the entertainment world, not to immerse themselves in alcohol or substance abuse. You need to instruct your children that life is valuable and you need to warn them against destructive lifestyles. And that means setting up some rules for things even that are pleasurable, but also means avoiding the sexually immoral lifestyle in the computer world, but also in the real world. Notice verses 27 and 28, beyond where I read. A prostitute is a deep ditch. A strange woman is a narrow pit. She lies in waiters for a prey, increases the transgressions among men. So we teach our children to avoid sexually immoral things, Also, substance abuse lifestyle versus 29 all the way to 34 or 35. I'll just give you a one-sentence summary of this. I've got it written out here. for time's sake. Verse 29. determine our social lives, verse 30, enslave our senses, verse 31, bring pain and death, verse 32, corrupt our minds and speech, 33, cause us to lose control of our bodies and our thoughts, 34, numb our healthy sense of pain so we do not know when we are in grave danger, 35, and make us willing slaves, verse 35. So, in family worship especially, there are times you just need to warn children of the grave danger of living selfishly, according to our natural heart, and getting in bad habits. And show them the beauty of what the Puritans called getting into holy habits, where your life is structured around holy things, instead of being a slave of unholy things. And then finally, number six. Set a trustworthy example. Set a trustworthy example. Look at verse 26. My son, give me thy heart. And then this is amazing. Let thine eyes observe my ways. He's saying, trust me to guide you. That's also back in verse 22, by the way. So the father is actually asking his son to watch how his father lives and to follow him in the same path of obedience. Now, Paul says something similar in the New Testament. I like to say that to our children. Follow me insofar as I follow Christ. We're all sinners and there's areas where we shouldn't be followed. But we want to be, we badly want to be as a father and mother, such an example that we can say to our children, follow me. So we must model for them a life of deep convictions ourselves. So what that means is, We don't sit in front of a TV and watch a ball game every night, and then our kids hear us say, oh, I really shouldn't be doing this, but what are you teaching your kids? You're teaching them to further away their lives in their own entertainment world. If our children see us get more excited about who wins the March Madness than about Jesus Christ, What are we teaching our children? There are so many ways we can teach our children by bad examples that Jesus Christ and God and the things of God are not the most important things in life. But there are also many other ways, if we're walking up brightly with God, that we teach our children that everything must be dedicated to the Lord. So let's say your daughter is old enough now, you determine, and trustworthy enough, you're going to give her a cell phone. I'm just taking an example now. So what do you do? You just give her a cell phone and say nothing? No, you give her a cell phone and you say, my dear daughter, there's a lot of sin you can use a cell phone in, but your dad and your mom have been trying to teach you biblical moral principles about how to use everything in life. We will not be able to control what you do with this cell phone all the time because we're not around you all the time. But we want to warn you, you can use this to damage your own soul for life and to sin. So, honey, you go to your bedroom now and you get down on your knees, and please lay that cell phone in front of you, and you ask the Lord that you will never use this cell phone to indulge in sin, but you'll only use it for good purposes. Will you do that, sweetheart? You see, that's building convictions in your children. So that if that child starts to use that cell phone to go into areas where she shouldn't, she's gonna think back on that conversation. conscience is going to speak. Now she can override that conscience and she still may go into sin. And every time she overrides the conscience, again and again and again, it gets easier and easier to sin. But you have warned her in love. But then you couple it with other teachings. My dad used to always say to us, the worst way to live is to step over your conscience. Because the more you step over your conscience, the more you bring yourself into a way of selfish, sinful lifestyle. So, when you couple that with convictions like that, you see, hopefully, hopefully, God helping her, she won't use that cell phone for evil purposes. But then you've got to be an example. How you use your phone, you see. And she will hear you on phone calls, how you do it. And she will see you never, you never go on internet and go to the wrong places. So, you model for her. You be a trustworthy example of the way you spend your time, the conversation you indulge in, the things you do, the way you treat your wife, And your children will learn from your example even more than they learn from your words. So let me close. And what I want to do here in closing is I want to say to you there are four stages in which we build convictions in our children. This is a generalized statement, but roughly four stages. The first stage is regulation. This is when our children are very young. Life is black and white to them. And so they need rules, they need regulations. And you need to tell them what they're going to be. And the rules must be enforced. If you say, this will happen if you do A, you need to make that happen when she does A or he does A. You don't say, I'm going to spank you if you do this, and then they do this and you don't spank. And you say again, I'll spank you if you do it again, they do it again, you don't spank. That is the way to train up a disobedient child. So, regulation. The second stage in life is participation. As children get older, nine to maybe 12, preteen children, You want children to participate. Now you don't just get black and white rules, but maybe you ask your child to help you decide what's right or what's wrong. So your child is 11 years old and comes to you and says, dad, my friend wants me to come over next door, wants me to watch a movie with him. Is it OK? Well, what do you say? Does she want to watch? Yes, she wants to watch the movie. Well, you need to ask yourself, why do you want to watch this movie? And is it a good movie? And what do you think? Well, my dad would often say to us, when we were in this stage, go to your bedroom, get down on your knees and ask God to be glorified in what you're about to do. And if God can't be glorified by you watching this movie, it's probably not a good movie. But you see, the child begins to be pulled into the participatory process. You and the child making the decision together. Because the child is maturing. And you're training the child's heart. The third stage is integration. Integration. This is the time when our children are older, they're teenagers now, they're increasingly able to make their own decisions, which will help them later when they move out and begin to live independently. But at this point, they're still evaluating what they've learned and experienced, still determining their own views. As long as they live in your home, you have the right to expect them to live by the rules of your household. But now, they're making more and more choices on their own, integrating them into their lives, into their heart convictions that you've been building since they've been little children. And then the final stage, of course, is what I'm calling supplication. The children are out of the home. Now you don't rule directly in any form in their lives. You don't even give unsolicited advice unless you see them openly sin, and I think you need to. But now you turn to supplication. Now you pray for them. Now your child rearing It's for all practical purposes, in concrete ways, done. But your prayer goes out, and they remain your children. Now you talk more to your God about your children than you talk to your children about your God. And when they get married, of course, you don't lose a child, you gain another child. And so you double your petitions for your married children, because you include your spouses. So, in all these stages, we go through life as parents called to be conviction planters in what we say and do, always pointing our children to the name of Jesus, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. And as we plant these convictions in them, we don't underestimate our influence. We have a tremendous influence over our children. But we also don't overestimate our influence because only Jesus can do for them what really needs to be done for them. And we recognize that we cannot control our children completely, we cannot save our children, and we're not responsible directly for what they choose to do as adults. However, we aim to sow good seed in the soil of their hearts year after year after year after year, And we pray for God's grace that that seed will bear fruit 30, 60, and 100 fold. And may God grant this fruition in your family, in the families that your children raise, and in every generation that follows you until our Lord returns for the sake of His own Son, His own covenant, and His own glory. Let's pray. Gracious God, we thank Thee for this short address. We pray that we may be conviction builders in the lives of our own children. Please be near to us and help us to be like the wise man in the book of Proverbs. And may our children indeed buy the truth and sell it not. We thank Thee for this time together. with these dear friends in the last three sessions and we do pray for thy benediction upon the services tomorrow as well. Be near to us and bless us we pray in Jesus name. Amen. I actually need to tell you that there's a couple other books I didn't mention I should have. Friends and Lovers, Cultivating Companionship and Intimacy in Marriage. I forgot we had this book here. This is a elongation of that little part of the talk I gave last night about physical intimacy and close friendship in marriage. Just a $5, $10 book, you have it for $5. And then these are like $6 books you can have for $3, bringing the gospel to covenant children. which looks at how to talk to your children about spiritual things in family worship and elsewhere, and The Family at Church, how to teach your children to get the most out of a church worship service and prayer meetings. $3 each. And don't forget to pick up your big package, $100 package of the Puritan thing that will be coming out, Puritan documentary in June. There's still some of these left. Believe it or not, you're good book buyers, but you haven't purchased all of these Reformed preaching volumes. You need them. You've got to read them. You've got to understand what preaching is about. Buy them for your friends and others. Thank you so much, and God bless you very much. Thank you. If someone has a question that has arisen because of this last, as a result of this last lecture, then Pastor McDonald is back here. You can hand it to him, and if he gets one or two, he can bring them up for us. Meet me at the book table and I'll try to answer them. Sure. If you think that it would be a benefit for everyone, then please do it. Some of these questions relate to your lecture. Some of these questions relate to interest in you and your living for the Lord. And this one says, I think I could answer this. I think I know the answer. Out of all the Puritans, who is your personal favorite when it comes to godly living and marriage, you can't say all of them. My favorite Puritans have switched all throughout my life. Generically, probably the most years, Thomas Goodwin was my favorite Puritan. And we've reprinted the complete works of Goodwin because of my love for him. Right now, I'm really into Anthony Burgess. I want to do a number of his works. Samuel Rutherford, Scottish Puritan, we might say. We're going to do his complete works of 12 volumes, so gonna really get into him. Of course, we're finishing up William Perkins, that's great. So, that's not all of them, that's just a few. In terms of marriage and family, hands down, would be William Gouge. That's why we edited that major volume into three modern contemporary volumes, because that's, if you were a Puritan pastor, in the 17th century, and you officiated the wedding of a couple in your church, nine chances out of ten, you'd give them William Gouge's domestic duties as a wedding gift. That was just standard in those days. You have answered this in your lecture. However, I'll ask it anyway because there may be some specific that you would want to reflect upon. How do we properly reflect Christ? I mean, the way the question is very pointedly Christocentric. How do we properly reflect Christ in disciplining our children? Yeah. Yeah, I think I have. I think I have answered that. Just remember that really, every time you discipline your children, you think of God and of Christ, and of course, you have seen me, I've seen the Father, so the triune God, and say, how would Jesus handle this disciplined situation if he were here today? And that's how you should discipline your children. And you can get lots of hints from that, from the way he preaches, the Sermon on the Mount, and the way he handled his disciples. I mean, he could be very blunt, couldn't he? Get behind me, Satan, he said to Peter. Wow. Because Peter was saying he didn't have to suffer. That was not only a heresy, but that struck at his very heart of his mission. At the other hand, he could really compliment Peter. Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. Flesh and blood is not revealed to you, but my Father which is in heaven. That was a real affirmation. And upon this rock, upon the confession you just made, Peter, I'm gonna build my church. And you know, these two events happened in the same chapter. So one moment he's, Affirming Peter's confession, the next moment he's rebuking Peter's mistake. But he does it all in love. So you do with your children. What is the best way to handle a child slash teenager who is resistant to family worship and corporate worship? Yeah. My easy answer to that, which I don't mean to be facetious here, but my easy answer to that, and I'll give you a more complex one, the easy answer is in family worship, you just tell your child you need spiritual food and you need physical food. If your child says, well, I'm not going to sing, I don't feel like singing, say, well, you're under our roof, my dear son. And we are called by God to give you both spiritual food and physical food. So if you're not going to participate in receiving spiritual food, then we won't give you physical food either. And I'm serious about the connection between the two. Because if you're going to have one in this household, you're going to have the other. So you need to participate. And we want you to do it willingly. We don't want to see a sour look on your face. You need to be bold here. This is part of your training, this is part of your upbringing. Now, if the child is extremely rebellious and you have been doing family worship and you try to spring it on him and you haven't confessed your sin, then it gets more complex. I think then you need to go to him and say, I'm so sorry, I haven't been doing family worship and I've been an unfaithful father to you and I just really beg of you to give me your help please cooperate with me. And we're going to try to just do three or four or five minutes of family worship. Do it very short. If a child doesn't want to go to church with you, you really need to say, you need to follow. We try not to have many rules, son. or daughter, but you need to follow the rules that we do have. And one of the rules that we have, since church is really good for your soul, whether you see it or not now, it's beside the point at this moment, but church is really good for you, and God commands us, you can use the Joshua text, is for me and my house, we will serve the Lord, worship the Lord, we're commanded to bring you to the house of God. And as long as you're under our roof, you will come to the house of God with us. Not maybe, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. And we want you to know that your father and I, or your mother and I, will be praying for you as you come to church with us, that the Lord will open your eyes to see the beauty of worshiping God. You know, my son, everything that happens to you is God's gift to you. Everything that's ever good that's happened to you, the fact that you can blink, the fact that you can move, the fact that you can have a brain to think, it's all the gift of God. The least thing we can do is to go up once or twice a week, twice on the Lord's Day, to the house of God to worship the Lord for three hours out of 168. So you will come, you will come. Thank you for your cooperation, my son. But if we could just go to that one down the street that has all these great things happening and pop music and all the rest, I'd like to go. Yes, I understand that, son. And sometimes, if we have a famous preacher coming to town, I wouldn't mind hearing that preacher myself. But we belong to a church family. And when you belong to a church family, the family gets together every Lord's Day. And so in God's providence, he's put you in this family. And we believe, as your mom and your dad, that this church, the pastor preaches the Bible. As long as he doesn't commit spiritual adultery with the truth. We're committed to stay in the church family where we are. What happens in so many families, my son, you'll see this later on in life too, is they go from one church to another because this one has a social program, that one has that, no one has that, and they become church hoppers. And the problem with that is pretty soon they have no commitment, no roots. We want to build roots in this church family with you. So when you get older, you don't leave this church lightly. Maybe you have to move to another city, but by following our example, if you go to another city for work someday, we want you then to build deeply into a church and be of service to that church, build deep roots in that church, and not just go from church to church to church. That's not the way to live. There's nothing wrong with this church. Yes, maybe some things are better than the other church, but as long as this church preaches the truth, we're going to stick right here. Yeah, but Dad, there's so much Bible, and then the sermons are long, and they're just hard to, you know? Well, just be glad you didn't live in the 17th century and the Puritans preached. That little preacher preaches long sermons. Yes, you know, but I want to say something to you, son. This little preacher loves you. He loves your soul. And when he preaches, do you realize he's poured probably 20 hours of work, maybe 25. 25. 25. Into the sermon that you're hearing. And he intends it for your welfare. If you listen carefully, there's a lot of substance in what he puts into that sermon. So you should see it as a gift of God that you have a preacher who labors so faithfully and wants to bring you the truth. So just, you know, the way you should go to a sermon when you're not interested is you should ask the Lord before you go, is there just two or three things I can get out of this sermon that could do my soul good? And when you listen for that, I think you'll find more than two or three things. Maybe you should start taking notes, and you would remember more, and the time would go quicker, and you'd profit from it. In fact, why don't you do that, and when you come home, we'll compare our notes and we'll talk about the sermon, all right? Sounds good to me. Maybe the problem is I'm not thinking much about my soul. Maybe I need to think more about my soul. Yeah. Yeah, I'm really grateful to hear you say that, son. That's really true. That's really true. That's true of all of us. That's true of your parents as well. In fact, If you think about how much time we spent on last summer's vacation planning it, sometimes we spend more time planning a one-week vacation in a year than we do thinking about our never-dying soul for eternity. So you're right, my son. Yeah, yeah. Do you think, Dr. Beeke, if I can be me for a minute, our children, by and large, will grow up loving the things that we love and that we teach them to love? Yeah, I say that with a caveat, a little bit of a side, because of course God's covenant mercies are sovereign and there can be children that go the wrong way and just absolutely repudiate everything. Okay, because, I mean, my wife and I are really blessed this way. God has not seen fit in his sovereign providence to try us in this way. and our children are walking in the truth. But I need to be very sensitive to the fact that other parents may have done a much better job raising their kids than we did, but may have one or two children that are just off the rails completely. But I think by and large is a good way of putting it. Yeah, yeah, by and large. Okay, here's another question. What are your personal habits for reading and internalizing the writings of the Puritans and others? Yeah, I'm not sure I, what? I just thought you might want to see it. Okay. Thank you. I try to keep one Puritan book going all the time in my life, but I'm not a very good model to follow here because I'm a publisher now and I'm the final editor of 40 books a year. Most of my reading is required reading, but I help pick out the books that we're going to publish. So they're usually very edified books, and I love editing. So a lot of my reading surrounds that. But I would say, read the great classics. They're just so, so valuable. And start with something simple, like John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, if you haven't read that. I mean, that's just amazing, amazing Puritan book. Or read Bunyan on the Fear of God. It's an incredible book. So, read The Great Classics, and work your way up to John Owen and Thomas Goodwin. John Owen's 400-page book on communion with God, in his distinct persons, communion with the Father, communion with the Son, communion with the Holy Spirit, is a masterpiece. So don't waste your time going to the local shallow Christian bookstore and buying books. Buy all your books from Reformation Heritage Books and get substance and read them. That's our goal. We're picking out the best books in the world for you. You know, that type of thing. And then read them. And I think, I think the best way to read is to read a book from cover to cover. And there's so many good books today and you're tempted to read here and there. If you're teaching a class, yes, you'll need to read here, and you need to read there, because subject matter for your teaching, that's different. Then you use your study, your books, like a library, and that's okay. You don't read all your library books from cover to cover. But always have at least one book going that you're reading from cover to cover that is really substantive for your soul. I think that's a better way. And you'll get deep into that book, deep into the mind of the author, deep into the scriptures, and you'll learn more in the long run. If I could say it this way, I'd get off the internet, except for times you actually have to go on there and get actual books in your hand. You can take ownership. You can write in them. You can meditate more. Computer reading of books, I know, Kindle, all that stuff. It's not the same, in my opinion. And I know I might just be revealing I'm an old man, but I think Take an ownership of a book, underline, making comments, thinking about it, meditating. Read slowly. Look up the texts that are quoted. It's far better to read two pages and read them well than to read 25 pages and hardly know what you read. And if it's a great book, it's worth reading many times in your life. Yeah, that's true. How do you balance the responsibility of disciplining your children between husband and wife? What are the roles? For time's sake, I cut out the last point of the marriage one last night, which was, actually I had one more point that I wanted to say, so I can say it now. Parenting is a together thing. This is one area I think we, if I can humbly say that, I think we did succeed in our parenting. We failed in many areas, and were weak in other areas. But my wife and I made a commitment that when our children were very young, anything that was the least bit debatable, we wouldn't make the decision alone. So one time I remember Kelvin coming to me and saying, go to, He wanted to know if he could do something. I said, go to your mother and get her opinion. I went to her, and she said, go to your father and get his opinion. And then one time he got so frustrated, he said, you two guys always think alike. And I said, well, that's because we want to talk things over. We want to make decisions together. So if a child came to either one of us, our normal way was to say, Your father and your mother will talk about this, and we'll get back to you tomorrow morning." And they got used to waiting overnight, and we'd talk at night, and we went to bed, and we'd make a decision, and we'd bring it to them together. So our kids never had this problem, Mom's easier than Dad, and so I'm going to go to Mom, or vice versa. In many families, that's divisive. So I think we used the right approach there. I think think together and you talk things over together and come to mutual decisions. That also helps bind you together as husband and wife and gives you the conviction that your partner is supporting you in that decision. Someone wants to know how you find time to write. Yeah, I'll find time to write. I'm an obsessive compulsive writer. I feel closest to God when I write. So, and I've got, I couldn't do it without my wife. She's just really, really good to me that way. And so often I write in the evenings and I write in the summer when I'm not teaching full time. But if I go two weeks without writing something, it sounds strange, but I start feeling distant from God. So I'm called not just to be a minister. When God called me at 15 years of age to be a minister, I had already been dabbling in a lot of secular writing before that. So I felt called when I was converted to be a writer as well. And that's been a passion for me all my life long. I've gotten more out of books than any other means of grace. That's why I push books so much on people. I think books can help you grow as a Christian. So I feel very strong about these things. And to me, every minute of life is precious. And so my parents were very hard workers. They never wasted a minute. I never saw them wasting any time. And I think that's in all of my brothers and sisters. We try not to waste any time. So if I'm not reading. I'm not with my wife, I'm not with my kids, I'm writing, or I'm studying, or I'm doing something for the kingdom. To me, that's why I'm here on earth. So, I realize I'm a little bit over the top, or quite a bit over the top on this, and some people need more recreation time. I know pastors who need to read a secular book now and then to balance it out. To me, to read a secular book, I would fall asleep, I'd hate it, it'd be a burden. I just love reading about God and Christ, and I love writing about these things. It's another one of those things, what you feel really, really strongly about, you'll make time for. And so, yeah, I just somehow make time for it. Are the books at the end of the conference less expensive than they have been already? I don't like to take any books home with me. Don't tell anybody else, but if you want to take them for 60% discount after this last... Are we doing books tomorrow or not doing books? No, we'll do it today only. Today only, okay. You can have anything out there now for 60% off because I don't want to send postage both ways. Okay, so good question. And so make sure they're all gone by the time we leave here. Dr. Meeke, we are so appreciative that you have spent your time helping us to become more Christ-like in our homes and we praise God for you. We're thankful. Thank you. Thank you for your friendship and thank you for the love I felt from all of you. Thank you very much. Now, tomorrow we worship. Members of this church know this. If you are a member of a Bible-believing church, we expect you to be there, unless you're from out of town and wish to worship with us. But if you are not a member of a Bible-believing, Christ-preaching church, then you are invited to be with us at about a quarter of 11 tomorrow, and again in the evening at 5 o'clock. as Dr. Beeke will be preaching the word of God to us. He's preaching a sermon in the morning that I've heard him preach. I asked him to preach that sermon here and it's from Revelation 19 on the marriage supper of the Lamb. So we encourage your prayers and your attendance at the worship services here or elsewhere if you are a member of a church. I'd like to ask Elder Jim Valini to take this microphone. and close our time in prayer. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we love you for all that you do for us. We love you for what you do for us in this church, in providing men like our pastors and Dr. Beeky. We love you for your word. We love you for your commandments. And mostly we love you for what Jesus Christ came to earth to do for us. And Father, as we live out our lives in gratitude for that, we thank You for our families, we thank You for our spouses, we thank You for our children, and we pray, even by the means that You've provided for us, in this conference by your Holy Spirit that we would bring honor and glory to the Lord Jesus Christ by the way we live in our homes. Help us to go forth and live as you would have us to live. We pray these things in Christ's name, amen.