Okay, we're gonna pray together and then we will get started. And let's turn to the Lord. Lord our God, we're thankful for a new day. We're thankful for the first day to gather for worship in a new year. We thank you that you have watched over us and cared for us and brought us to this place. Lord, we are comforted by your care and provision and We think of the passing of time and we think of that great last final harbor and rest of the believer to be with you in glory forever. And the highest form of that, a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. We pray that you would make us mindful as you give us these markers to think on heaven. and on you and on eternity and to recommit ourselves to you in everything we do. We pray, especially for our families, we pray that their life within would be marked by godliness, and peace, and where we have strayed and erred and failed, we pray for your forgiving mercy and help, and we pray for grace that even this morning as we discuss these things, we might turn back to you. And we pray in Jesus' name, amen. Okay, I'm going to open it up for any questions that you may have had, and if not, I am going to Move on to my prepared questions. Any questions that you had in the last weeks on parenting? Anything, anything. Or anything on the Christian family. Mr. Horn. So the question here is about the classic, which has happened before in my house, the classic answer shopping. Children are good at shopping for answers. So you ask one parent, you don't like that. Maybe you ask a slightly different version of the question to the other parent. It depends. I guess Loralee and I have just grown into Habits, I want to go back to the scriptures The fifth commandment says honor your father and your mother There's not that many children in here because they're in their Sunday school classes. It's kind of too bad because I was going to address them but So if that is the children's duty, it's also the parents duty to preserve that honor of parents together and In our home If either of us would figure out that you were trying to do that, the answer's just gonna be no. It's like you just lost your, you just guaranteed your answer, no. There's a hierarchy of important things. Sometimes I say, I'm gonna have to talk to your mother about that first. There's a lot of times when someone says, hey, can I go to this person's house? It's okay with me, but go ask your mother first. And if she says no, Don't use my, because you know what a child has the capacity to do, use my answer, my yes as an argument why they shouldn't say no. No, that's not gonna work either. I do think this points to a deeper matter that I keep emphasizing in this class, which is that the heart of a home is a marriage, a marriage covenant. And it's love and unity and union are critical to happiness, peace, and good order of the home. And so parents that are fighting over the direction of their children are not helping their children at all. And I said earlier, there's probably some wisdom. Well, there is wisdom in praying together, thinking together, probably doing that just the two of you. on your own when it comes to differences you might have, that you might present a clearer, unified front, as it were, when you're answering your children's questions. But I think it's very important. your marriage is very important to cultivate and promote. And there's something here that's going, there's an attempt to divide and there should be unity. So I think there's two things to remember, not only children's strategies, but how important it is for a loving, marriage that reflects Christ and his church to be at the heart of a home and children understand that that's not to be taken advantage of. So a couple principles there. Let me answer some questions, not an uncommon one. The first one here, and you can ask along the way. I'll take a pause after each one. So the first one is the question of Parents being united in their child rearing. I think it's very, very important that parents get on the same page and pray and think and talk together when you shepherd your children. You don't want to hurt their souls and make it harder than it already is to wrestle against the world, the flesh, and the devil. by being contradictory to one another. Sometimes that can't happen and sometimes it doesn't happen. That's a more difficult situation. Right now I'm addressing a home where the Lord willing, the marriage is in good condition. Here's another one. Is corporal discipline, for example, any form of spanking a child, not the beginning of abuse or abusive Hmm, it's an interesting question to ask. Actually worth asking. In our present age, and even, I would say, in our own denomination, and in what I would call evangelical reformed and Presbyterian churches, or more broadly, even conservative evangelicalism in America, this is becoming a more and more common viewpoint, that any form of corporal discipline is abusive. And I dealt with it somewhat. I think I dealt with this question somewhat when I taught on correction. I tried to. But I think it's worth answering the question outright. Because if we are, if I did advocate, and I did, for a careful, biblical use of corporal punishment and child rearing, we would want to make sure that we would avoid being, avoid abusing correction, or being abusive to a child, more narrowly. I wanna review a few things to answer this question. I think it's worth answering, and it's gonna put me at odds with the cultural winds, which I am on a lot of things today, and I'm not that worried about it. Even, especially our present age. A review of broader social principles in a fallen world, sin is offensive to God, it invites His holy judgment, and it causes pain to others. I think this is something that we often do not remember, but sin hurts other people. And it hurts other people often very greatly. A little child who is perhaps being unduly rebellious is probably not really hurting other people at that point. If they do not learn in some way to curb their passions, they could very easily hurt other people. And secondly, probably the times I would most often report resort to corporal discipline with a child would be, I think I said in earlier classes, when they would hurt somebody else would be a pretty clear example. But let me just repeat some things that I said in the past weeks. I'm gonna repeat this. Sin is offensive to God, invites his judgment, and causes pain for others. To curb sins is merciful. All societies curb and correct offenses. You need to remember that without this, we only have anarchy. The kind of anarchy where the person with the most strength rules. So what I would call The spirit of the age says that to correct sin in any way that might include pain or discomfort would be unjust to the one receiving the correction. But that person never thinks ahead about what happens when sins are not corrected. Anarchy and cruelty. All society, second, we looked at this a few weeks ago, but it's worth repeating, curbs sin with corporal punishment. of one degree or another. And I mentioned the worst, the highest example, which is the death penalty in South Carolina. And we still have a federal death penalty. We do that for murder. Why? because that hurts others. And for that to continue unchecked in a society damages, it's an offense to the glory of God, to striking at his image, his image bearer, as we read in Genesis 9. And to remain unchecked and unpunished in a society, God has clearly instituted this penalty in his word. because of the destructive nature of that continuing. It's the destruction of all human communion and life. But we do more than that. We incarcerate, we imprison, we have fines, you can have your wages garnished. If you are living in here on a visa, for example, you can actually be deported out of the country if you commit a crime. There's all sorts of ways where you can have a kind of punishment that is physical. I gave the example some weeks ago of Singapore. Some people wondered why I did that. I wasn't advocating for this to be the policy here in Canada. I was just giving an example, the fact that there exists a Canada. I just said Canada, America. I was just in Canada. In America, I don't think, I wasn't bringing it up for that reason. What I was bringing it up for is it's sort of an anachronism in our present day. What they're doing in Singapore probably was most of the world 100 years ago. There's a little phrase you're going to hear me use, the arrogance of the modern. We always believe that modern is better. but all human history would say differently. I'm trying to illustrate something more generally, a clear and universal social principle, which is rooted in the fact that people are sinful, and that sin, again, is offensive to God and injurious to others, and that to curb sin and rebellion in a society is the only way for there to be a society. Let me say one more thing. Just societies are also careful not to use, and to think of the Eighth Amendment of our own Constitution, cruel and unusual punishment. That correction is within bounds. The magistrate cannot do whatever he wants to correct wrongdoing. That power must be held in check. And I want to remind you from the scriptures, because this is important. The other side of the question is as important as the broad principle of correcting evils. "'Hear me now, my children. "'Do not depart from the words of my mouth. "'Remove your way far from her, the adulteress. "'Do not go near to the door of her house, "'lest you give your honor to others "'and your years to the cruel one.'" The idea of cruelty and sin and cruelty being connected there, interestingly, adultery is a kind of cruelty. But the idea of cruelty is forbidden in the scriptures and spoken against. Here, the merciful man does good for his own soul, but he who is cruel troubles his own flesh. In Proverbs 12 and verse 10, we read that a righteous man regards the life of his animal, but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. That a righteous man would look at all creatures and want to treat them with gentleness and respect, even an animal, but a wicked man has unbridled cruelty, and that this is wrong. And then Proverbs 24, seven, the idea of simply being vicious, again, is clearly taught to be evil. Wrath is cruel and anger a torrent, but who is able to stand before jealousy? Now that's contrasting wrath, anger, and jealousy, but it is saying that wrath is cruel, and that's an indictment of cruelty and of unbridled anger. And Christianity has historically recognized two things here, that the governed can sin and often need serious correction, and that a governor could sin in correction, and that both sides must be moderated by the word of God. Number two, recall that scripture clearly teaches that God himself often brings pain to correct our sins, 1 Corinthians 11. There were problems at the Lord's table in Corinth. And Paul just says, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and so many of you are sick and some of you have died. I want you to just take the weight of that statement. God, in his chastisement of a church, brought illness and death. When Israel sinned in the wilderness, God brought plagues. When Israel was in rebellion at the end of her entry in the land the first time, God brought Babylon to destroy Jerusalem, burn the city, kill many, and carry the rest captive. Ananias and Sapphira, when they lied to the Holy Spirit, the Lord struck them dead. The reason I give these examples is because in the mind of God, sin is not a light thing. And we tend to think that sin is a light thing. Now how about not those kinds of judgments? How about what we call chastening? How does the Lord chasten or discipline his own children? In Hebrews 12, we read the word chastening, and it means chastisement for improving behavior. It's not judgment in the sense of God's judgment of Israel in the exile, but it's discipline. Well, the exile for those who were believers was discipline to return back to the Lord, but it's not final judgment. It is the reminder that the way of the transgressor is hard, as we saw before. And Hebrews 12 and verse 11 says that this discipline of the Lord can be painful. Proverbs 13, going back to the book of Proverbs again, He who spares his son, his rod, hates his son, but he who loves him disciplines him promptly. And then in Proverbs 23 and verse 14, the verse that people really stumble over, do not withhold correction from a child, For if you beat him with a rod, he will not die. You shall beat him with a rod and deliver his soul from hell. By the way, this is not beating the sin out of someone or cruel correction that is commended in the scriptures. There are some people who read that verse and they want to throw it out. The Holy Spirit inspired it. We always are up against a crossroads, and the crossroads are, has God indeed said or not? Well, he said something very serious here. He's teaching that the way of the transgressor is hard, and that discipline leads to repentance. So back to the question, with those principles being repeated, the question about spanking itself. Obviously, after I just said this, in principle, no, unless we believe ourselves to be wiser than God and his word. It's that simple. In principle, no. In application, when we think about the warnings against cruelty and the limits on our ability to correct, yes could easily be if used in an ungodly way. And a lot of things that I have read on corporal punishment of children do bother me. Let me just say a few things that I think I said before, but an angry parent I think ought not to be using corporal discipline. You should get control of your anger. Undue force is wrong. Causing injury is wrong. Disciplining for unclear reasons is wrong. For these reasons, I think it is a tool that would wisely be used sparingly and carefully, and I said more about that last week. But let me remind you that the same people in our day who often would say that any form of spanking, for example, could be abusive, don't realize that you could hurt and abuse your children in a thousand other ways. Many of them would say, for example, divorce should be easy. Divorce hurts children. Now, it doesn't mean there's not a time and a place for biblical divorce, but it hurts. It hurts a lot. For example, if I said, clean up your room before you eat dinner, and my child was three years old and couldn't clean up the room. Well, God forbid I don't give them dinner. That was my mistake, not theirs. You understand? Any form of discipline can be used cruelly. Any form. That was my mistake, not the three-year-old's mistake. There's many ways that correction can be abusive. If you swear at your child, belittle your child, ask your child for more than they can do, if you neglect their basic needs, if you fail to provide for them, The arrogance of the modern, here it is in my notes, targets only one form of correction as evil or wrong. And it does that after 2,000 years of its use in the Christian church and thousands of years before that in the Old Testament. And what I'm trying to illustrate is that this is a selective and unbiblical criticism. We need to be careful. Let me add one more thing. A failure to correct is also a form of abuse and a misuse of authority. A failure to correct is a form of abuse. Let me give you an example. One of your children harms another. How about sexual abuse left undealt with? A failure to correct, as I said earlier, produces a society, a church, or a family of narcissists and abusers, a nightmare. And a failure to correct is rooted in a wrong view of human nature, which is that we are not capable of very serious sins against other people and against the Lord. The critics of correction do not have the upper hand on kindness, but rather they have a naive view of the human condition that will result in more sin. I don't know if any of you have heard of the man Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He wrote a famous book called The Gulag Archipelago, and sometimes I would think that some of the people in the modern age might do well to read a book like that, which he describes the Soviet concentration camps in Siberia, to describe to you what the sinful human condition is capable of towards other people. and that will help you understand the seriousness of correction. You could say the same about the Nazi camps of the Second World War or the current concentration camps in North Korea. Christian nations understanding the depravity of the human heart and of our children conceived and born in sin have advocated tempered correction that has the result of a call to repentance, the preservation of life and safety in a culture, and anyone who says otherwise is naive and foolish, and they will reap the whirlwind when they are finished with their philosophy. One more reminder on this question. All forms of correction on their own apart from gospel proclamation are inherently legalistic and damaging. Correction is used by the Lord for his children when we wander from him. And he's doing it to bring us back. He uses more severe corrections often for more severe sins. And when he doesn't, he's letting you go. And that is sobering. This correction is designed always to turn us back to God's mercy in Christ. It is for repentance. It's a call to repentance. But repentance, of course, can never be divorced from faith in Jesus Christ. And so if I were to conclude this answer here, God forbid that we use this tool, corporal discipline, for the wrong reasons or in the wrong manner, in an abusive manner. but is manifestly and clearly a biblical tool. Countercultural for sure. but to be used with careful attention, first to yourself in restraint and prayer, and for a child, and that it is to be used for the correction of harmful and sinful conduct. You would have to twist the scriptures and its fundamental theology of correction to say that it could never be used or that it is in and of itself. So, questions there. As you can tell, I'm trying to be very careful here. I don't like, child abuse of any form is evil. The wrong use of authority, you could define abuse very, very carefully. The sinful use of authority and correction is wrong. The failure to correct is also wrong throughout. So I heard an argument literally yesterday that's kind of novel to me, was the idea that the rod didn't represent corporal punishment so much as comforting or correction. You think about, like, Psalm 23 was the application there. And I think the idea that we're going for is using that and saying, historically, this wouldn't have been the case. And as far as I can tell, historically, it's always rod is correction, you have corporal punishment. Am I over-reading that or is that the case? You know, I've heard that argument too. It is amazing how quickly the contemporary age can reinterpret the scriptures for their own ends. Let me give you an example. Psalm 110 has an example of the rod in use. Um... The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand till I make your enemies your footstool. The Lord shall send the rod of your strength out of Zion. Rule in the midst of your enemies. If you look at verse five, the Lord is at your right hand. He shall execute kings in the day of his wrath. He shall judge among the nations. He shall fill the places with dead bodies. He shall execute the heads of many countries. He shall drink of the brook by the wayside. Therefore, he shall lift up his head. The rod there is used as a word for the scepter of the king who rules in power. It's being used there to correct the nations. In Psalm 2, Christ who has given the nations as his inheritance the ends of the earth for his possession, he will break them with a rod of iron, dash them to pieces like a potter's vessel. The rod definitely does stand for, in the Old Testament, the power of the king, especially the scepter of rule, and it includes the correction of the nations. It's very interesting. If we go to Hebrews 12, the writer of the Hebrews helps you understand God's discipline. Whom he loves, he corrects. It's a sign of God's favor and kindness when he says, this road leads to destruction. Step off of it and go back here. That's a sign of God's favor. And if you, for example, committed a serious crime in this country and you were put in jail for it, let's say you had assaulted somebody. That's a mercy of God that you remove from that situation, placed in jail, where you can get a Bible, and God's mercy is still today, and you could pray over, you would be prevented from doing it again, and you could pray over that sin, and Lord willing, turn to Christ. And this is to be viewed as, in this life, these corrections are mercy. So that view I am, clearly not a fan of, but I have heard it, and I might have heard it the same place you heard it this week, but that's a separate story. Yes, a podcast, correct. Ken. I was remembering what you said last week, and it really struck me as something I've been thinking about a lot. It seems that many, many times when discipline is too harsh, or even other disruptions other than just the parent-child relationship of the spouse, sister, or friends even, I find that one of the problems is personal indignation rather than a recognition of sin primarily being a tendency against God. And I find that even in cases where there's a situation that If I'm relying on my personal indignation, it will cause that to go away, where it will cause heat to emerge in a situation that is not useful and is disruptive rather than a blessing. There's times I think where there's a sense of urgency about discipline. And I would say that all correction and discipline should be used by a calm corrector. Careful and calm. Not personal indignation. It's not a category. James says, the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God. Remember that. The wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God. It's prayerful, careful correction. Okay, I'm gonna move to another question. This one's bigger, and it might take the rest of our time. How does a Christian parent deal with the coarsening and increasing rebellious nature of our culture? especially when a child pushes a parent, as it were, hard to the wall in defiance. This question was sketched out a little more, and I think I have this right. In earlier days, a wildly rebellious child would be pushed up against, at a certain point, would find themselves pushing up against the whole of society. You know, if you live in a small town and openly more and more rebellious, at last everyone would be like, he's out of control. Social norms help bound rebellion, and at some point you would lose all social support. Today, rebellion is the norm. It is the social norm and taught and encouraged. Authority is almost by definition evil. So any exercise of authority, which is why people, We had a conference on marriage here and our speaker talked very plainly about wives submit to your husbands and husbands love your wives. I was talking to some folks who were there and they didn't like it that much. Plain language of Ephesians five was too much. in its plain application. This is the day that we live in. Any idea of any sort of submission of my will to anyone else's, I will not do it. This defiance is open. It's often thought to be the high moral ground. Rebellion against authority, against controlling structures, against all forms of power, any exercise of any power is tantamount to abuse. It's not exactly that. I think behind this is the persistent cultural Marxism of our day, which masquerades as deliverance through revolution, throwing off power structures that are holding in bondage all those under them. The irony of this philosophy is that it has led to more bloodshed since the invention of Marxist socialist thought than almost any other system of human philosophy invented in history. And go back and read Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag Archipelago or study the history of Mao's China or Stalin's Russia. The idea that authority is bad, where do you think it comes from? Anybody? The serpent, okay? Now, can authority be misused? Yes, but that authority itself is bad. It is, has God indeed said, and then Psalm 2, the conspiracy of humanity, let us burst their bonds, cast their cords from us. The rebellious nature of humanity is behind this philosophy. Ironically, this philosophy has led to more bloodshed, abuse, and harm than the, and listen to me carefully, because I know that this is being recorded and someone's, I'm gonna have all kinds of nicely, thankfully I'm not on social media, so it's hard to have, it keeps the online crowd, it's harder to throw invective back, but this is an important line for anyone who's listening. Ironically, this system of thought has led to more bloodshed, abuse, and harm than the real or so-called evils it attempts to address. And we have to acknowledge that part. There are people who are worried about authority because it has been used badly. They're not all wrong. There is real abuse. And there are people who overreact and say there's no abuse of authority, these people are just crazy. Well, some of them have actually experienced profound wrongdoing. And they're grasping for a solution to the problem. However, a wrong solution to the problem will only increase the problem. This is true in workplaces today, families, nations, churches, the idea that authority on its own is just bad. A whole new vocabulary has come up with it. I actually read a Time Magazine article two weeks ago trying to understand all the new vocabulary, because there's so many new words that have to do with abusive authority. Gaslighting, safe spaces, triggering microaggressions, and my story. It's a classic one. which is now to take a higher place usually than the word of God and is usually listened to without listening to the other side of the story. These things will destroy all human communion and fellowship and the church. There's just nothing around it. It's a huge problem. Again, especially since my story is rarely followed by carefully listening to the other side of the story as Proverbs instructs us to do before judgments are made. Because the one with power is always wrong. And I could put the one, capital one, capital O, Christ, the target of this philosophy. And it is creeping into the church and into our society. And I will tell you something about this, going back to Marxism, it always leads to murder and more pain, not less. It's the only road this goes down. But with it comes this impenetrable wall of language that leaves no modes of communication left except capitulation. Just capitulate you're wrong. And we're in a very hard cultural moment. Now, you take that cultural moment and then you take a parent who's trying to say to a child, don't go that way. You know how close the temptation is to reach out and just take the philosophy of the world and just be defiant. And the result is that defiance, now I think it'd be right to say, more quickly and easily reaches what we call the limits of correction. Because there are limits of correction. We don't have unlimited ability to correct. We can only correct within biblical bounds. In a restrained, thoughtful, prayerful, careful manner. And we don't have unlimited power. We have power that's bounded by God, and we have duties as parents, for example. I'll give you an illustration of what happens if we don't remember limits. I have a brother, a younger brother, and we used to disagree, sometimes as boys, that turned into a heated argument. And when two little boys have a heated argument, what happens? Anyone know? A couple of fists fly, a little rough and tumble, and mom comes in and sorted it out. Are there usually any serious lasting injuries? Fast forward to 18. If you were using the same modes of conflict resolution, could you have serious injuries? Yeah, what happened? Your capacity, your strength went up. If you're still using the same mode of conflict resolution, you could murder somebody. You have to recognize. The maturity means to restrain the use of power that we have, lest we injure others. And it's the same with all authorities. Our constitution, referring to it twice, just as a political example, recognizes this. You can't use the military to police the nation. Though it does seem at times that line's getting kind of fuzzy, but I mean, the federal government has F-15s. Your house is not a match for an F-15. The Constitution says that would be an abuse of the federal government's power to use that to stop you from, or to encourage you maybe to mow your lawn, for example. The Constitution anticipates the temptation of the wrong use of power and forbids it. And this is a biblical and Christian impulse. Again, James, the wrath of God does not produce the righteousness of God. And David says to the Lord something that I always try to remember, your gentleness has made me great. What about the parent back to the parent now with the rebellious teenager in the social age where defiance is a virtue? You could have a teenager or young adult in your house. They have escalated to the point of appearing to win. This can happen. And you can run out of what I would call righteous and legal corrections. Like you don't have any tools left. And if there were more teenagers here, there's only a few, but let me address our teenagers. Though your parents are sinful, it's not a reason for you to rebel against them. When you're growing up, there's a certain point where you can see your parents' sins with a kind of crystal clear clarity. joined with an incapacity often yet to see your own with the same clarity your parents can see them. Sort of a one-way vision. You need to be careful about that. It's common to every age. And the second thing is they're not permitted by God to use their authority in any way they wish. They're responsible to God for your care. But you are also responsible to God for your humility and obedience. In a godly, loving home, God is using your parents to teach you the limits and the nature of a holy life. As you grow older, there's a great temptation to see their faults, to disregard your own, to refuse to forgive and justify your rebellion. But remember, Christ gave you parents, and you will answer to him on how you respond to them. Back to the question. Question asks this question, there are worldly options at this point where you're up against the wall. What do I do next? You could explode, you could curse, you could check out, you could give up. What should a parent do? This is a big question, a hard question. I thought about some things that I think about as a parent of children of various ages. I would say, first parents, you are living in an age where, yes, the social norms that used to exist are gone. And the new social norm is that defiance is virtue. Revolution is righteousness. Authority is by nature bad. That's the spirit of the age. This, I would say, is a massive encroaching storm, a storm that requires all of you to be careful first, to communicate the love of Christ to your children early and often. You might think, You might wonder why I start here. This is not a magic pill nor a statement that a parent with a particularly defiant child has not been loved adequately. I'm not saying that. Our children are conceived and born in sin and very tempted to doubt gracious love. The love of parents and the love of God and Christ. It's a temptation to doubt both those things. But a hug, a kind word, a prayer with the child, a birthday gift, a special outing, the regular reading of the word, the taking them to worship, If your life is not filled with an affectionate and intentional love of your children, that you seek to communicate together with the fact that you're not Christ, you're imperfect, and you need their forgiveness and mercy, you will have difficulty, especially in our age. What Satan is aiming at in this great cultural temptation is that God is not good. And so your highest antidote is gospel presentation and reminders and to tell them about Christ and his goodness. Behind the social revolution or rebellion is the world saying something about God, louding often and in unison that he's not good and kind. And mark my words, even though this movement is saying that they're against, often in the terms of against abuse or the abuse of authority, at a deeper level, there's attack on all authority and that authority is bad. The historic structures of Christ's church are not good in kind. Now, I wrote an article on this topic in February, February 5th, 2024. It's on Reformation 21, and it has an intentionally, in our day, provocative title, though it wouldn't have been provocative for 2,000 years of church history. It's called In Defense of Patriarchy. I would encourage you to go and read it. This idea is in it. The world is saying God is not good. Our Father is not good. His ways are not good. His correction is not good. His created order, male and female, parents and children, is not good. Male leadership in the church is not good. That's what the movement is saying. And that we know better now. And it's offering to the next generation freedom. Psalm 2 freedom. Let us burst their bonds and cast their cords from us. In aiming at and targeting our children. Anyone see that San Francisco choir a couple years ago singing about this? leftist revolution, we are coming for your children, we'll convert your children, happens bit by bit, quietly and subtly, you will barely notice it. It's an intentional play for the next generation. It's in public schools and private schools and universities, HR departments, social media, movies, TV shows, political leaders, full court press. The aim is to undermine the loveliness and power of Christ while exalting the judgment and reason of man over God. Satan is the ringmaster of this unhappy circus. We need to be preaching the love of God in Christ, and that Christ is both our king and our priest, and all three, and our prophet. And that as his rule is gracious, his mercy is unbounded, his word is good. Go back and go back to work on your marriage. Always work on your marriage. It's supposed to be a model of love. This is a massive spiritual war that is to be fought first with the everlasting gospel, Revelation 14, six and seven. Okay, I think I'm running out of time on two questions, but let me keep going. Second, prayer. Even if we weren't in our cultural moment, there's nothing new about the rebellious child. Deuteronomy 21 has something about the rebellious son that indicates how the Lord considers it. If a man is a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or voice of his mother, who, when they have chastened him, will not heed them, his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city and to the gate of his city. And they shall say to the elders of his city, this son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey our voice. He is a glutton and a drunkard. Then all the men of his city shall stone him to death with stone, so you shall put away the evil from among you, and all Israel shall hear and fear. That is very strong language. Does not fit the spirit of the age, does it? I am not a theonomist, I am not an advocate of returning to the old covenant judicial penalties. But there's a principle here, is that the rebellious drunken, which means adult, son who won't honor his parents. God considered that to be an abomination in Israel, very clearly. This requires prayer. much prayer. There's a great spiritual warfare that's happening in our age, and at that moment a spiritual warfare that's happening in our homes. It's not unusual. Spiritual warfare happens in the New Covenant. Our primary Weapon is prayer. We pray to God. And Jesus, when his disciples were having trouble casting out a particular evil spirit, they said, why could we not cast it out? He said to them, this kind comes out by nothing but prayer and fasting. These are our weapons in the present age. Deep spiritual warfare needs much prayer. A deep dependence on the Holy Spirit. Regeneration is the only defense against rebellion. And where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is life and liberty. So, gospel-centered home, prayer, I'm hearing children. I'm in trouble, I think. Oh, why can't I get two more minutes? Three. Use forms of correction and calls to repentance that fit the situation. For an older child, your tools are limited. The older your children get, the less you can correct them. That should be obvious from nature. But don't underestimate the power of your words. Writing a letter. Don't underestimate confessing your own faults. Model repentance. Don't underestimate the power of the word of God given quietly and regularly. Don't be afraid to call sin what it is. In firm and gracious terms, not yelling, but use the most direct and plain language. For example, homosexuality is a form of deeply sinful rebellion against God, against his word and nature. Repent. We need to just talk in clear categories about what sin is. Never be ashamed of God's word. Keep following Christ. Remind your children to follow Christ and join that with prayer. If you're a parent in this situation, you can often be attacked by Satan yourself. Meditate on the gospel for your own comfort. Satan often tries to take parents to dark places to doubt God's goodness. And the gospel is also for you, dad and mom. Don't try the defensive route. I don't really like at all when parents say, well, we did all that we could. What in the world? I mean, if you've been parenting at all, how many of you think you've done everything well? No, but there's the gospel for that. All of us, without distinction. We go back to Christ and we ask him for mercy and he gives that mercy in Christ. Ask your friends to pray. Ask others who might have a better relationship at the time to draw alongside a son or daughter. He used the elders of the church and even the discipline of the church. It's always a sadness when perhaps there's a deeply rebellious 21-year-old and let's say that 21-year-old could use the correction of elders and a parent says, oh, please don't do that. I would pray that God would, in his mercy, do that if I had a 21-year-old who was rebelling against the Lord and I had not other Corrective options, I'd say please speak into his or her life with your word, with the word, pray over this. Maybe I'm wrong, tell me. Maybe my child's wrong, tell my child. Teach your children this importance early of biblical submission to church authority, which seems to be unpopular today. Again, are we biblical or wise in our own eyes? The church has power to Bind on earth and that will be bound in heaven, Jesus says. It's a great power. Take it to the church, take sins to the church, and pray for the use of church discipline if needed. God is pleased to use his church in the ministry of reconciliation. And then finally, Let me go back to the bigger cultural war. We're going to have to develop thicker skin. It's inevitable that we're going to be targeted as repressive, oppressive, backwards, and dangerous if we use any authority, even gracious, godly authority. The iron of this is that this will often be while accusers are rebelling against the clear testimony of God's word against his law and gospel. The same Holy Spirit who inspired all the texts I've talked to you about correction also inspired the text on the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, et cetera. The same Spirit is interested in a holy, happy society of the best and highest sort, a place of rest, and yes, I like to use this word, safety, biblically. That's what Christ came to do. Again, the arrogance of the modern is that we know better than Christ. He does not contradict himself. We need to be careful lest we grieve the Spirit of God. I would say that the topic we're talking about here, our present cultural moment of defiance, might be the most complicated and dangerous challenge the church is facing today. We can get it wrong in two ways. and there's a sort of propaganda war of epic proportions underway against Christ's church. But Christ's church is the ark of salvation in a bleak world, where parents, by God's grace, and I understand sin means it's an imperfect world, but stay together, where children are taught the gospel and seek to obey their parents, where alms are given to the poor, meals are brought to the sick, prayer is offered for the needy and sorrowing, and God is worshiped and glorified. Contrast this with a world where babies are aborted, children are mutilated, divorce is free, drug use destroys our cities, pride marches fill our streets, and corruption and perversion and abuse of authority are at the highest halls of power. The church ought to be a contrast to all these things. And it is Christ's church. And even though we are weak, and often not what we ought to be. We ought to be careful to remember that this is his bride, number one, and number two, that he's supernaturally at work amongst his people for salvation and blessing. We need to trust him for that. It's not that the church can't answer for the wrong use of authority, but it is wrong to think that Christ's church, his bride, is de facto a Christian. wrong, the spirit of defiance and distrust will destroy the church if we're not careful. High duty for us and a pushback against the rebellious age. So that's a long answer where I went into other things, but I want to recognize that we are at a hard place and we're up against a big challenge. We need to pray much for the church. Okay, I went right to the end, Anyone have any questions? I wouldn't mind entertaining at least one or two. Anyone think that what I just said is... Anyone noticing the problem? Anybody else? Has anyone seen this? Getting practical on this correction aspect for older kids who are denying the faith, basically, especially back on the financial side. Do you mind applying it very quickly? Should you support them financially whatsoever? Should you disinherit them? What are some of the ways that you would continuously press that generate equity side of taking it to the society or to the elders in the city and stoning them? What would you do financially? I think there was a, I had a disclaimer somewhere in my notes. I am averse to, let me just say this, parents have authority in their home. And the disclaimer is this, I don't know the answer to your question. I think we get into dangerous places where we think we can guess the application without knowing the circumstance, or even your child, or the history of the story. We would stray. I do not have all the answers. That's what I'm getting at. I don't want to have them all. You need to be Bereans, take the scriptures, pray over them broadly, and not just think that somebody here can just tell you what to do and fix it. I think that leads to cultish societies and is not dependent on the Holy Spirit. I think that's one of the big problems that we're facing on the other side, the overreaction to the spirit of the age, is that we could just build a just society on our own. And we can't. The Holy Spirit makes just societies. Word in the Spirit. So that's my first disclaimer. The second is, if I had a son who said, I'm rebelling against the Lord, I'm not going to help him do that. He's 25 and he's rebelling against the Lord, I'm not going to help him do that. but I can't make a rule that you shouldn't buy him a birthday present. In other words, we could get into bad territory by legislating what God doesn't legislate. Very often, God, making the rain fall on the just and the unjust, in a forbearance, he brings people to repentance. And a wise parent might say, here's time for forbearance and mercy. And other times you might say, no, I can't help you anymore. Let's say a drug addict. No, I can't give you a penny. I can't. I know where it's going. If the parent had to do that, it would be very, very painful. But sometimes it has to happen. So I hope we get the tenor of that answer. We have to be very, very careful not in our zeal to become legalists on the other side. Big mistakes can be made on either side. So, Darrell, uh-oh, big trouble. A quick comment just related to this, because it seems that both grantees have actually done misapplications in relation to the world. The biggest mistake I've noticed with people myself included, talking with folks who disagree on these points, is deciding that you're going to use their vocab rather than what the scriptures have actually declared. And it's like, this is a guy who has a bit of a problem. No, he's a drunkard. This is the term you use. This is the sin that's labeled as. Use God's word for it, both in the diagnosis and the prognosis. Correct. Use of the word. A little hint is when you see a culture try to redefine all terms and create a new vocabulary, you know that you're up against one of the biggest power plays you could imagine. If all of a sudden we need an entirely new set of words to describe something that's existed for 2,000 years, there's something fishy going on. That's almost as big a seizure of power and authority that you could make. We'll define the terms. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we are grateful to you for your Word. We pray for grace to live by it. We think of the troubles of our present age. We are thankful for your Word and Spirit which lead and guide your church. We pray, give us grace to search the Scriptures, to live by them. We pray for your Holy Spirit to be at work in us and our children after us. We pray for grace that our homes would reflect the plain patterns. that you've given for them in the word. And Lord, where we have sinned, especially as parents, we confess our sins and we pray for grace to be more like Christ in everything we do. In his name we pray, amen.