Well students, we have come to the end of our Theology 4 class. We have looked this year at hermeneutics, postmodernism in particular. We've looked at the doctrine of salvation. We're going to touch on some of that today in the baptism issue with regard to children. And this spring our topic has been parenting. And it's a joy to be able to prepare you for something I hope that each of you is able to experience someday if God has chosen for marriage to be the gift that he wants to bless you with. It's been a delight and a privilege to be the dad of six children myself. and now to have several grandchildren. And I will say that it is true while children are a blessing, yes, they are also a burden, but I'm able in Christ to cast my burdens on the Lord. And so he has strengthened my wife and I for every challenge. And we are grateful for that. And I would say that most of the blessings that we experience down here on earth have come with challenges. And so while like the Proverbs say, a barn or a manger with no oxen is very clean, there's much strength with oxen. And so you can have a nice clean life if you just kind of bottle yourself up and keep to yourself. It may look like everything's going to be smooth and without complications. But you're going to miss out so much blessing. And so I encourage parents to seek the Lord on this matter. We're not in the Old Testament. We are in the New Testament era. So family is not as high up as it was before Christ came. His family and the mission of the church is very important now. In light of all that, and especially in comparison to the way the secular world puts down having children, oh, you can't raise them right unless you give them all this and that, why don't you give them siblings? It's like all those experiences and pay for those experiences, can that ever replace the value of having more siblings? And so we live for Christ and his church and God's family first, but the blessing of earthly family, our own children, is so strong, so big. I'm so glad that we've been able to have this time then to look at parenting together. We started this course back in Ephesians and Colossians saying there's only two verses that explicitly address parenting in the entire New Testament. But we saw then that the Old Testament is presupposed. And so the data in the Old Testament is very rich. Proverbs speaks much about parenting. Deuteronomy expressly commanded the Israelites that God should be their soul God and that he should be their one love. And that having that impressed upon their spirit, they should then instill that into their children through integrity. And we saw that it should pervade the home life. so that if there's true integrity in the parent's heart, you can't get enough Bible in the home, spoken and decorated. We've come now then to the place where having looked at what parenting involves and what discipline involves, both positive and negative development, the child, let's say, is starting to near the end of his journey in our home and is coming to that place of entering the adult world. What does parenting adult children look like? Specifically, what should we believe and expect regarding these children and how should we then behave toward them? Because our doing should be based on what is true or else it isn't right. And so let's consider together what are the things that we should believe about children when they leave our home someday. And I know this is a long ways away for you in high school, but in a sense, your parents are dealing with this. And so maybe it'll help you to empathize with them a bit, but it definitely will prepare you as I want you to look at the whole journey ahead in parenting. What should we believe? Well, one verse that's often quoted is Proverbs 22 verse 6, train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old, he will not depart from it. I've seen this posted in a church as like a plaque and I've heard it said, on many occasions by parents, especially when they have a child that has gone astray. And they take hope in this as a promise that I've brought him up. I've trained him in the way he should go. And now that he's old, he'll come back to it. It's interesting. It doesn't say come back. It says that he would never leave it when he's old. And so, is this a promise or is it not? A couple things to take note. Number one is, Proverbs are not promises. They're generalizations. All things considered equal, this is what you would expect. When you have cause A, you'll get effect B. And so, wisdom has observed this and learned this in the fear of the Lord and in the context of his written and spoken revelation. So a promise is not, a proverb is not a promise. The other thing is though, the translation of this, if you have a margin note, you might notice it's ambiguous in the Hebrew. It literally says, train up a child according to his way. And when he's old, he will not depart from it. According to his way could be ascertaining what kind of a child this is. And like we saw in our freshman year, what his vocation is. what her specific interests are, her makeup. And so we want to train this child to be what God intended this child to be. And when they're old, they won't depart from it. More likely, it's if you train up a child in accordance with the way he wants or the way he is wired, that's what you're going to get. A few verses later it says foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child. A rod is required to remove it far from him. And so if I train up a child according to his foolish way, he will stay in his foolish way. All things considered equal barring a miracle of God. The point is that parenting normally has lasting effects. This is something obviously psychology has noted, though perhaps not applied well, but how you were raised has lingering and lasting effects the rest of your life. And thank the Lord there is grace to overcome those. We're not chained to our past. resurrection, regeneration, the power of God, sanctification, learning new ways, and yet we manage with a set of things we didn't choose our parents gave us. I'll just pause right here. I am thankful you have taken this class because the effects that you will have on your children someday will last in the same way you are now beginning to realize the effects of the parenting that has been given to you. So may you be wise and may you be gracious to your parents as you realize, as I hope you have, some have expressed this, the challenge that parenting brings. Well, the second verse is Psalm 112 verse 2, and this is more of an example. There could be many that we could bring in here, especially from the Psalms or the wisdom literature. General blessings attributed to the children of the righteous. Of the man who fears God, Psalm 112 says, his seed will be mighty on earth. The generation of the upright will be blessed. The next verse talks about wealth being in his home. That should caution us. from not seeing this as a guarantee for each and every person, but as with all wisdom in the context of other things in life, and again, as a generality. This is a wisdom psalm. It's an acrostic. It goes A, B, C, D in the Hebrew lettering system as you go through the lines of the poem. And so it falls under the general cautions of wisdom literature that you can't press it as absolutes. That's what Job's friends did to Job. The wisdom literature would say that a righteous man is blessed and is rich, and yet you have lost all your riches, Job. You must not have been righteous, which is a logical equivalent to what they believed. It's the contrapositive. And yet Job knew, and God knew, and we as the reader know, Job has been righteous. And so, that generalization is not absolute. And the Bible prepares us for Jesus Christ, who will come. And though he's not penniless, he has no home. He is homeless. And he also dies like a criminal, and dies without riches. They even take his clothes. He dies naked. And so should we look at Jesus with that kind of wisdom mentality and say, he must not have been a righteous man. No, no. We will be like the centurion if our eyes had been open like his eyes were open and say, surely this man is a righteous man, the son of God. And so those are not absolutes in the wisdom literature, but again, are like Proverbs or generalities. Even going further, Some of the places in the Psalms speak of a condition that the children of the righteous also must believe or be faithful to the covenant and obey. Psalm 103 says that God's loving kindness is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him. It extends generationally. And you go, wow, there's a promise to my children. Yes. but it says to those who keep his covenant and remember his precepts to do them. It's not guaranteed. The law envisions a case where obedient parents have disciplined their child and yet have a stubborn and rebellious son. This is in Deuteronomy 21. Note that please. The law itself envisioned a case where parents have been obedient in training a child and they themselves have handed the child over to the civil authorities to be put to death because he is a rebellious son who will not respond to discipline. Now before I talk about just the seriousness maybe of obedience there, let's just note We should not guilt trip other parents nor be guilt tripped ourselves. We should confess sins that we know of where we have failed as parents and you will fail students as parents someday just as your parents have failed and their parents have failed. But don't go guilt tripping them or you as if there's a certain formula that you can keep, that if you kept this formula perfectly, it would guarantee obedient children. That is not promised to us in the Bible. That's part of why I'm going through this carefully. There's no guaranteed truth that you need to obey. There's no guaranteed method that you need to follow. And anybody who tells you that if you do it God's way, parenting God's way, you will get God's blessings automatically. You need to look at them then with the caution of Job looking at his friends. It sounds like wisdom literature made absolute. So, yes, are the offspring or the seed of those who fear God mighty? Yes, they have influence. Do they prosper? Oh, often they do. They are blessed, as Psalm 112 says. But does that guarantee they are righteous or believing or citizens of heaven? Jonathan Edwards has been often cited as having an interesting lineage. I read an article once that went through several generations, I think 100 years from when Jonathan Edwards lived in the early 1700s in American history to like up into the 100, 200 of his descendants. And it was like lawyers and doctors and all sorts of educated, influential leader people. It's really remarkable. But I know right from history, American history, that among his grandchildren, there is Timothy Dwight, the great theological professor at Yale who led a revival at Yale University, but also at the same time, another grandson of his was Aaron Burr. the vice president under Thomas Jefferson who was a scoundrel, the man who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel and ended up getting involved in some shady, shady business regarding property and such. Same godly man, Jonathan Edwards, not perfect, but a man that feared God according to Psalms 112, with much influence through his offspring. But no guarantee was given as the historical counterexample would show that even in the second generation from Edwards, among his grandsons, you have a Dwight and a Burr. Now, Edwards would have believed in some form of covenant theology, and some people then would point to the Reformed tradition and say, well, still, we have a promise in the covenant itself. I will be God to you and to your seed. And we must believe that promise. And we, in obedience to that covenant, give the sign and the seal of the covenant to our children in infant baptism. And I have respect for the Reformed community, and I hold several of their beliefs. I don't hold to this one in particular. I am Baptistic in my beliefs, as we talked about in the winter term. I have respect for them, but only so far as it remains an evangelical belief. In other words, that these individuals, these Christian parents, still still see it as necessary that the child must come to personal faith at some point, and until that is evident, they're cautious about speaking of the child as a Christian. I know that if it is a true promise, it would be right for them to speak in terms of the future, as Jesus spoke of Jairus' daughter being sleeping, not dead. to attribute to Abraham being the father of many nations when he has no promised son yet, is to believe a promise and to speak in future terms as if they were present, because the promise is so sure. But I doubt that there is such a promise, and so I recoil when I hear, as I did once at a Presbyterian church, when a child of maybe 7 or 8 was set before the congregation and called a Christian on the basis of her baptism. I'm very cautious about that. Household baptisms might be mentioned and cited in the Book of Acts, but I also see household faith mentioned, like in the Philippian jailer's house. 1 Corinthians chapter 7 speaks about God being, you know, that the children of a believer are holy, but it also says that the unbelieving spouse is sanctified or made holy by the believing spouse. We wouldn't baptize the unbelieving spouse, would we? And Matthew 19 says to let the children come to me. I'll apply that in a way Baptists have applied that in a bit. I know several of those verses and I was a hair breath away myself from becoming Presbyterian at one time, having attended a PCA church and studying the theology of that tradition. But I wasn't able to go there. for a couple reasons. One is, with regard to the Abrahamic covenant, where that promise is given, I will be God to you and to your seed after you, the Apostle Paul is astute in Romans 9 to note that God said in Isaac, your seed shall be named or called, which means not every biological descendant of Abraham is seed of Abraham. That's a remarkable insight taken right from the text. The Reformed tradition has been very strong on election and often Romans 9 has been the key passage. on saying every child of the flesh is a child of the promise. If Abraham himself couldn't do that, what gives then a Christian parent the right to then liberally and without distinction apply this kind of thought to every biological child they might have? Romans 11 though says that the promise is still applicable to the biological family of Abraham. In other words, the larger family of ethnic Jews still is under an umbrella of promise, an umbrella, excuse me, a blessing, like Romans 9 begins with, to them belongs all these things. And so, the promises, or the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. And so, though they are enemies because of the gospel, yet they are loved because of Abraham. and a day is coming in which all Israel will be saved. I view that is that all in a certain generation in the future are elect and when Christ comes, shall believe and respond to him much as Saul did on the road to Damascus. Now that's speculative. I'm going to set that aside. The point is, I believe the dispensationalists have also a point that there is still a promise for ethnic Israel. That said, I, as a Gentile believer, have no specific promise given to me and to my children. As one called from among the Gentiles, I am grafted into the nation of Israel, into the promises given to Abraham and the patriarchs. But it's not natural to me. I'm a wild olive branch grafted into the cultivated olive tree, Paul's analogy. This isn't my program. But in Christ, I reckon seed of Abraham, according to Galatians 3 29. And so I personally, individually am grafted in, but there's no promise to me about my children. I can't then co-opt Abraham's promise. and then apply it to me when Abraham's didn't apply to every biological child and I'm even one step removed because I'm not even ethnic Jew. With regard to the sign of circumcision, which from the time of the Reformation on has been said to be replaced by baptism, I would say that circumcision as a sign has been nullified and done away with because what it signified has come. The sign of circumcision is given to where the seed is. And so Christ is the seed of Abraham. And because the seed of Abraham, the child of Abraham has come, circumcision is no longer than a sign. And so it is nullified. If you go to the Old Testament anyways, students, circumcision is fulfilled not looking down the road. It's a sign that's, I mean, it's fulfilled when the covenant is fulfilled, the promise son of Abraham comes. But as far as what it signified, it signified a change of heart. We have the prophets telling us this, even Deuteronomy 30 tells us this, and Paul picks this up in Romans chapter 2, and where he says that it is someone who is circumcised of heart that is a true Jew. And so, while the Old Testament side spoke of heart circumcision, baptism as a New Testament sign speaks of personal discipleship. It begins when people come to John and are baptized in the Jordan, confessing their sins. And they then announce that they are becoming disciples and looking for the kingdom. Then when the king has come, they're baptized in his name. And he then commissions his disciples to go out and baptize in his name and the name of the Holy Trinity as a sign of discipleship. Now, that said, I would also add that the Old Testament reckoned seed according to kind. Just like plants bear seed according to their kind, the very first chapter in Genesis, so this metaphor of seed used throughout Genesis, from seed of the woman, it's not every See, it's not every child of Eve. No, it's opposite the seed of the serpent. So also seed of Abraham has to have the likeness of Abraham, which is faith. And that's what the Apostle Paul highlights in Romans chapter four. True Jews are marked by faith. And so again, I come back to I'm okay with the baptizing of infants, at least I'll tolerate it, if the emphasis is still given on faith and personal regeneration. It's through being united in Christ that His death becomes our death and His death the removal of all His flesh. I believe is what Paul was speaking of in Colossians 2 when it speaks of circumcision, the removal of flesh being fulfilled in union with Christ when his crucifixion becomes my crucifixion. Long and the short of it is, there is no guarantee here either that my child will believe, even with all the supports of covenant theology behind me. I think those in the evangelical tradition of the Reformed branch of Protestantism recognize the need, as Edwards talked about, the need of being born again, and the need for personal faith. Now, this may all seem discouraging, and in one sense, I don't want to discourage you. I've often thought about it with regard to those who believe in healing. I respect them. They believe in a big God, and I believe that God heals, and I believe that we should anoint those who are sick. We'll learn about that. Well, we learned about it in public policy class. So I have respect for people that have big faith. In fact, at one time I said, I want to teach at a charismatic school so I can be around charismatics and get to know them. And I found them to be a people that would expect God to do big things. The challenge is, is that I want to hold onto that idea of a big God. while at the same time allowing His authority to dictate to me what I should expect. While God can do everything, it doesn't mean He will do everything. He will tell me what He will do, and my faith then is obliged to believe what He has said He will do. Otherwise, I'm setting myself and you up for disappointment. And those disappointments can be a crisis of faith that sometimes people don't recover from. When they discover that their faith was misplaced, they then imply that the God in whom they place their faith isn't real. And that would be a false inference because they didn't base their faith on exactly what God's word said. So I don't want you to even to risk such a disillusionment, but I do want you to believe in a big God. So let me offer to you some of his ways that you can pattern your faith after. Teach me your ways, oh God, that I may walk in your truth. Unite my heart to fear your name. What are your ways? Well, number one, God does love people for the sake of others that he loves. A great example of this is when Lot is in Sodom, foolishly in the gate of Sodom, now living in Sodom. And the Bible says that while God had mercy on Lot, the conclusion of the episode is God remembered Abraham. It was out of respect for Abraham, who is his friend. Shall I hold from Abraham what I'm going to do, God says. And so he's the friend of God and through that relationship with God, God heard Abraham and God remembered Abraham and rescued Lot. Draw near to God as when you become parents. Don't stay far from Him. Be His friend. Commune often with Him so that you sense God answers my prayers. God wants to answer my prayers. and that he will love your children for the mere sake that he loves you and have regard for their well-being out of regard for you. Certainly that's the way that the wicked Jews right now who hate Christ and his gospel are loved for the sake of their fathers. And so though we don't have a guarantee of a covenant like Abraham does in that case, we still have this example. And so, As Lot was not under the covenant, but was loved because Abraham was a friend of God and Lot was a relative of Abraham, so may our children be regarded as special in God's sight for our sake. And ultimately, praise the Lord, we are loved because God loves His Son supremely and perfectly. Well, a second pattern I think is really encouraging is God loves freely. While we don't have guarantees, we do have grace, freely given favor. You can't earn it, ah, but you can't dis-earn it. God gives it whenever and however he wants to. It is solely his decision to give it. Therefore, in that freedom, we find hope to give it in any situation. Have I, you know, blown it completely as a parent? Maybe I became a believer and my children are already raised. Ah, but there's grace. I can still believe in his heart who wants to give. Maybe I sinned so much and had bad parenting. Can he overcome my mistakes? Yes. Why? Because God is free in his grace. He gives it whenever and however he wants to. God spared the entire nation of Israel at the base of Mount Sinai with the golden calf because Moses attached his good name to that people, offered himself up, And God freely, on the basis of His name, I will be what I will be, loved them and was gracious to them. So be that intercessor, stand in the gap of your children, and don't let your previous sin or your failure keep you back from expecting and looking for grace to be given to your children. God does desire the salvation of all kinds of men. 1 Timothy 2 is explicit on that. That would include not just kings, but certainly the children of believing parents. God wants to save them. Believe that. Trust in His heart. Believe in His love for you. Believe in His freely given favor, in His grace. I say this with emphasis because I remember reading the heartbreak of a dad once in a book that had a son that rebelled against the Lord and went away from him and he confessed that all his marbles were in one basket. Method. He had relied upon homeschooling and a certain way of training his children, thinking that that would guarantee their success. And in now deep sorrow, he realized his faith had been misplaced. Even if you do everything right, God saves our children. God will save your children because he wants to. because he is gracious. We are saved by grace, not by the obedience of parents. And so even if you do everything right, there's no self-righteousness in it. All the glory goes to God because he freely chose. But the thing is, no parent does it right. So not only should I think I did it right, I expect, salvation to be to my children, but also I shouldn't think I didn't do it right. I can't expect that. No, my hope is in the loving kindness of the Lord. And I wait expectantly for his loving kindness. Are you content with that? Do you think you can be content with that someday? I trust that you've experienced it personally to know that this is the true foundation for salvation and there is no other one laid. If you've experienced that personally, it doesn't take much imagination to extend it to your children and to then not trust in your own ways or be discouraged by your own faults. So what should we do then on the basis of these things I've said we could believe? Well, here's what I think you should do. I think you should bring your children to Jesus regularly, that he would freely, emphasis on grace, freely bless them. I'm reminded by Dietrich Bonhoeffer saying that we should speak to Christ about others more than we speak to others about Christ. All that we said about raising our children and teaching them in the Lord and which should pervade our homes. Still, if Bonhoeffer is right, we should speak to God in prayer more often than we speak to our children about God. So bring them to Jesus often. Bring them in prayer often. Pitch your hope completely on the grace of Jesus Christ. And as a sign of that, Instead of infant baptism, why don't you practice child dedication? Bring your child to the church and have the child dedicated to Jesus Christ there. Even more, seek the blessing of Jesus Christ there publicly for your child. Now I say that because two reasons. Number one, Matthew 19 is a section on the family. You have marriage talked about with the question on divorce, and then the very next scene has parents bringing children to Jesus that he might lay his hands upon them. I see this as instructional about how families should be in the kingdom. Singleness is gonna be valued according to the marriage practice, and children should be brought to Jesus. more than say the temple where circumcision was. They should be brought to Christ. And where is Christ? Well, certainly at the right hand of God. But the chapter beforehand says, where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in their midst. And so, Let's bring our children to Jesus. And where is Jesus? Where two or three have gathered together? He's in the church. His presence is especially there in a special way. And so we bring our children then to the church to have Jesus bless them. And so I think this is a better New Testament precedent. It's not obliged. You know, it's not commanded. We're not under duty. We have to do it. but there's a precedent given to us and so here's a way that we can corporately as a church dedicate our children to the Lord and it's a sign of how we then as parents shall be dispositioned or have our attitude towards our children for the rest of their lives. So, two implications of this are, number one, By dedicating my child to God, I signify that God is more important than my child. The child exists to bring glory to God. God doesn't exist to bless my child. I'm dedicating the child to God. I must then love God more than I love this child, and that, students, believe me, will be tested. It is so hard at times to love God more than mother and father and son and daughter, as well as our own lives. That's when our faith is put to the ultimate test. If my child refuses to obey God and rebels and disobeys and strays, I must not bend my own obedience and faith to cater to such rebellion. The law said I will be tested in such a way, Deuteronomy 13, even with miracles. And the Bible says there, even if my son should come with a miracle and say, let's go after another God, I should not follow that son. In fact, in that civil society, I should bring that child to the authorities and the child should be put to death. In New Testament times, that's called church discipline. When we hand somebody over to Satan, 1 Corinthians 5, for the destruction of their flesh, that their spirit might be saved in the day of Christ. It's serious. But even if it's my own child, I should not refuse church discipline in such an extreme case of apostasy. Even in disobedience, I shouldn't interfere with what the teacher is going to do to this child, or the policeman, or the courts. civil society. I shouldn't step in between their choice and the consequences of their choice. Just as Deuteronomy 21 hands people over a disobedient rebellious son over to the authorities, so I should not hold back that as well. David almost blew it when he wept over Absalom and his whole army almost left him in the day of victory when the rebellion was put down. But David's deep, deep, deep sense of his own sin and his family and then the consequences of the sword never leaving and now Absalom is dead. It seems like his sentimentality made him lose his perspective on the kingdom We must not lose that perspective, though we must always love our children and continue to pray that God would be merciful and would grant forgiveness, even if it's after I'm gone and they are old. Manasseh, the most wicked king in Judah, repented in his old age in prison. It is possible. because all things are possible for God. His grace is not dependent on our merit and not hindered by our demerit. See how that's a hope. So second, by dedicating my child to God, I am also relinquishing my rights upon this child's life. This is very important right at the get-go. Child's an infant. Right away, I realize the child belongs to God. I'm going to tell the world, I am merely a steward. They have always belonged to God. He can take the child whenever he wants. I can't keep the child alive. And so the dedication just acknowledges what is a plain fact, the child belongs to God. But in acquiescing to that, I assume then a responsibility of stewardship to manage his property. that bears his image to manage that property well. And so the goal of parenting, as we said earlier, is to train them in the fear of the Lord, not in the fear of dad. And so the goal is to be independent of me, but not independent of Christ or of his church. The method to get to that point normally would be a path of more and more freedom where you kind of step back and allow the child to face God more and more directly in the consequences of the choices that they make. If though there's rebellion and the child is still in your house, there may be a season where you have to rein in the freedom and throw more constraints on the child Song of Songs 8 verse 9 describes a situation of a young virgin. If she's a door, meaning she allows young men into her life way easily, too easily, then her brothers say, we're going to barricade her. If she's a wall, then we'll build a citadel on her. In other words, if she protects her own moral purity, then we then can trust it. and find it a secure basis for further decisions. But if she can't be trusted with those decisions, we're going to pull back and protect her. That can only be done for a season. And it may be necessary. I remember reading the story of Cassie Bernal, the martyr at the Columbine shooting who said, I do believe in God. She was killed by goth students with shotguns that she used to hang out with in that dark culture of occultic practice and such. But her parents took drastic measures when she was a sophomore and pulled away her phone and cut off all those friendships. And she responded in faith through the ministry of her church and her youth pastor. Praise the Lord for that. And then when she died, she died in faith, expressing faith in God. So that may be necessary, but it's only allowed for a limited time because eventually the child must leave. And I think this is the ultimate proof that God wants our children to make their own decisions ultimately. They make no decisions basically when they're little, but ultimately they need to make all their own decisions. What's the proof of that? The second chapter of the Bible, when God set up family, he said that a man, for this reason, based on God's plan initially in the garden, for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and cling to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. A man shall leave his father and mother is the plan given from the beginning. We always base our family ethics on the beginning. It puzzles me why homeschooling and the movement of homeschooling in particular values so greatly. This large family huddled around the patriarch like all, I want all my children on the property setting up their own show, their own families here. Now that may happen, and maybe that's God's will for a specific family, but it's not the generality. Just because we live in a society that breaks us up into little individuals and we lack familiness and we suffer so much from loneliness, we shouldn't jump to the opposite extreme and create this large commune of relatives. I don't want to be facetious here, but it's interesting. False religions, Roman Catholicism, and the Muslims have often promoted large families in order to keep them in check. God's plan has been so different. The same mandate that said to multiply, which the homeschoolers often hold on, and I homeschooled, that same mandate also says to fill the earth. which we find out after the flood when it's repeated, was disobeyed at the Tower of Babel when they didn't want to leave Shinar. And so we would be disobeying the dominion mandate if, in obeying it to multiply, we then don't encourage our children to spread out. They should spread out. Somebody should say to me, well, Jacob didn't do that. He had all 12 sons with him. Jacob's family was so dysfunctional. Wow, what a mess. God tolerated Jacob and all the patriarchs' sins, like Jacob marrying two sisters in polygamy. But that wasn't the pattern he set out in the garden. Marrying two sisters ended up being outlawed in Leviticus eventually anyways. The plan is in the beginning, not as we see it laid out by patriarchs and kings. in the Old Testament. God wants us to spread out. And if God wanted us to spread out before Christ came, the Great Commission just accented it. And we have the record in Acts that when the Christians were all huddled together in Jerusalem, God used persecution to start spreading them out because they needed to go out. So I'm just encouraging you. God's plan has always been that children would leave. Now, whether they leave to the other side of the county, to the other side of the country, or to the other side of the world, they must leave. Are you content with that? Will you be content with that? This is important because eventually they're God's property. They need to make their own choices before God. and to live their lives for the value and the glory of his kingdom." If you put these two dedications together, God is more important than me, God's family is more important than me, God's mission is more important than my family, then you realize the Great Commission is more important than my sense of wholeness in my family. It hurts. It's hard to see children become missionaries and go away. It tests our faith when they go to regions that are dangerous. And yet, this is the Great Commission. Isn't it a blessing to be able to offer to Christ? Didn't we dedicate them? To offer to Christ our children and say, Jesus, use them for your mission. And so we dedicate them and we send them out. And we're happy. that they can be used for Christ. It's interesting. Now, letting them make their own decision, more and more, some may choose, some may sense God's calling. It's interesting, this mission of God's family spreading around the world is the ultimate fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant, that he's the father of many nations, and that in him and in his seed, which is now Christ and his church, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. If we're really covenantal, we will be enthused about sending our children to the farthest ends of the earth that the great commission would be fulfilled and God's promise to Abraham of bringing blessing in this cursed world shall happen. So, thank you for listening to this entire 10-week series on parenting. May you be blessed someday and may your children fill the earth if God wills for you to be married. Thank you. Amen.