If you will, turn with me to Ephesians chapter 6. Ephesians chapter 6. Pick up the reading in verse 4. You're familiar with this text, but we'll open our study with this word. where Paul commands, and you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord. Let us pray. Our Father and our God, we thank you that we were able to come through this midweek service to sing praises to your name, to spend time with your people, to pray, to commune with you. Father, we pray that you would bless this time together as we seek to understand your will and your purpose for us as parents towards these children, these young souls that you've given us custodianship over. Father, we come to you. May they also understand their responsibility one day as they become parents as well. Oh, may they see that it is not a burden to obey you by obeying their parents, but it is a blessing. Father, may you help us to understand, may we be a people that takes your word, not to only discipline the behaviors, but may we discipline the hearts, discipline the souls of these young ones. So Father, may you grant all the husbands, all the wives, the mothers and fathers represented here, may you grant us the grace that we may take your word and learn to apply it in such ways that our children would just rejoice to live in homes that are vibrant, those homes that are gospel-centered, those homes that seek to see the kingdom of God expanded and see the kingdom principles lived out before them. May their hearts jump and leap for joy. May they just be a group of young people that adore you because of what they see happening in these parents. So Father, we need your grace. There's not a parent here that does not understand the task before us. and the impossibility of it, but for the grace of God. We ask all this in Christ's name. Amen. So several of you have asked me over the last several months, and really it's probably a lot longer than that, to start looking at this issue of child training. How do we shepherd our children, the souls of our children? And I certainly can appreciate the request because as Marie and I have five souls that God has given us to raise and to train and to bring up, I can sympathize with the request. And so I can sympathize because these are not things that really the church spent really any time when I was growing up. I don't ever remember hearing them bringing this and talking about what we're going to be dealing with over the next several weeks. And it's not just when I grew up, but when I became converted, when I was in other churches, and I would even say some churches that you'd say, hey, that's a pretty good church to go to. They just didn't deal with this issue of shepherding the souls of our children. And so now, just like everything else we do here in this church, our challenge, I don't think that is... When we think about the issue of parenting and shepherding the souls of children, I don't think that the task is completely incomprehensible or necessarily undoable. I think the problem we have is that we're not familiar with the blueprint of how to raise these children according to God's precepts. And the problem I think we have is that we've adopted techniques, we've adopted approaches, either consciously or unconsciously, that are contrary to God's blueprint. And since the bulk of our study is going to be around the use of the Scriptures, let me just ask you some questions to get you to think about this study properly. Number one, how well do you know the Scriptures? I mean, I know that's not the first time I've ever asked this question, but really, how well do you know it? Do you find the task of being a parent frustrating at times? I would say the level of frustration that you have at times is probably proportional to your ignorance of the Scripture. So I bet there's a direct correlation between the two. Number two, how often do you refer to the scriptures in the course of a normal conversation with your children? So when you're there, when you're walking in the way, I mean, you guys, you've been to all the conferences, you've heard Deuteronomy 6 preached plenty of times, but do you apply it? Do you look for all the opportunities to take God's Word when you're sitting down, when you're standing up, when you're walking, when you're in the field, right? The whole idea is there's not really an inappropriate time for us to be discussing the things of God with our children. Number three, how adept are you at teaching and relating the scriptures to your children in everyday life? And you know, it's not just the issue of, in my mind, just teaching the precepts, but it's living the precepts out. It's one thing to say, hey Aaron, love your enemies. It's quite something different for his father to actually apply it. How would he ever expect, or how would I ever expect him to love his enemies if I don't even treat the ones I love in a biblical way? You begin to see the correlation of what's going on with your own homes and how you carry yourself out. It's hard to apply these kingdom principles. Not so hard to teach them at times, but how do you apply them? How effectively, next, number four, how effectively do you use the scriptures to reprove? And when I talk about reprove, I'm talking about convict your children of their sins. And I think one of the things we're going to realize as we go through this study is that we're far too often, far too prone to deal with the external behavior of our children and leaving the heart that drives to those external behaviors out of the disciplining process. Next, do you reprove in such a way that causes your children to revere God's Word or to drive them away from it? Now think about that one. Do you reprove in such a way that causes your children to revere God's Word or to disdain it? So what is your way of reproof? What would be some ways in your mind that would drive your children away? What would be some ways of reproof that would drive your children away from the Word of God, or drive your children away from God? Well, I'll tell you what it is in my house. When I react out of emotion, when I allow my children to provoke me and then I react and I respond, or if I let something that happens at work or something that didn't go my way and I respond in that kind of way, that's not reproving in a biblical way and it will drive them from God, not towards God. So if you won't admit it, I will. You need to learn, and I think what happens is that we let the stress of what's going on around us, we have to leave that outside the home. And we need to bring and take God's Word and learn to bring to our children on a consistent basis. Because if that's how I model in front of my children on a continual, habitual basis, then that's how they're going to live in front of their spouses and in front of their children. Because that's what's been modeled out for them. Next, how consistently do you use the Bible when you correct them? Do you use it at all? Are you inconsistent with it? I mean, I think all these questions are important, and I hope it's starting to prick you a little bit into thinking through all this. How do you use the Bible to train your children in righteousness to help them do better in the future? Another way of asking that question, I think, is how do you pass along godly wisdom to them? So these are some questions. that I want you to think about because it's not possible, I don't think, to bring your children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord according to Ephesians 6-4 without the continuous, habitual use of God's Word. Go to Proverbs 29. Proverbs 29, verse 15. The rod and rebuke give wisdom, but the child left to himself brings shame to his mother." Now, we're going to deal with a lot of these passages in more detail. I'm just trying to give you some foundational things to think about and try to set the stage for where we're headed with this study. We all need to understand that it's our job as parents to both know and use the Scriptures as God intended. And notice it is the rod, but also a rebuke. Now, where do we learn in the Scriptures how do we rebuke? What are the Scriptures given for? All Scripture is profitable. All Scripture is God-breathed. It's profitable for what? For rebuking. So it starts there. When Proverbs talks about this, it's not talking about rebuking based on human wisdom or human standards. Rather, what it's talking about is rebuking according to God's Word. You see, our desire as we embark on the study is to see how God intends for us to raise and instruct our children. And by His grace, we're going to learn how to take the principles from the Scriptures and apply them in such a way that first honors God. Let me ask the question this way. What is your chief end? What's the purpose of man? To glorify God and enjoy Him. Okay, so let me ask you this way. What if you took all these principles in God's Word, but it still didn't give the results you wanted, would you still use them? If you're here to glorify God, you would. What's the problem is, is we tend to get impatient, and we deviate from God's will. And we bring in outside methods that are guaranteed not to work. Let me ask you this way. Was Noah glorified when only eight people showed up on that boat? Not Noah glorified, but was God glorified when only eight people showed up on the boat? Absolutely. Why? The Bible says he was a preacher of righteousness. There's nothing wrong with his message. He was a faithful servant of God. And so I want you to understand that is first and foremost, your first motivator is for the glory of God. Secondly, you want to point your children to God's grace. And this is where I want you to be careful as you think through this. And we're going to deal with this in more detail next week, Lord willing. But I want you to think about this. You need to be thinking in discipline of pointing your children towards God's grace. If you're only disciplining the external behaviors of your children and leaving the heart out of it, then the best you've done is you've created a little Pharisee who's on the outside, the cup is clean, but inside they're filthy. There's an old Chinese proverb that says, one generation plants the trees and another generation gets the shade. And the problem with our generation is that we live in the shade of a lot of trees that were planted by our ancestors and those who came before us. But in spiritual terms, we derive shade from our parents and our grandparents' ethical standards. We derive shade from their perception of what is right and wrong, their sense of moral duty, and above all, their spirit of commitment or lack of it. You see, the ideas of the generation before us determined the kind of culture we inherited from them. And so now we're left with the consequences of views that I believe have deviated from God's standards. And so there's no doubt that our society, and I don't have to prove this to you, you already know this, There's no doubt that our society's in a sense of spiritual and moral decline. The family's being destroyed. It's even being redefined in our day. And there's very little, if any, true respect, and I'm not talking about respect in a biblical sense, of parents by their children. And so the question for us is, are we going to continue to sit under the shade of trees that have brought about all this destruction, or are we going to start recultivating so that the generations after us can sit under the blessings of God? Now, when you have to recultivate, what does that mean? You've got to plow up a lot of ground, you've got to tear a lot of things down, and it's a lot of hard work. Well, guess what? We're the generation, if we desire to see a change, we're going to have to do a lot of work if we desire to see our children sit in the shade of God's blessing. So everything we're going to talk about, none of it's going to necessarily be easy, but you're not without hope, and you're not without strength. So finally, the current methods and means being practiced within our homes, you have to understand they're flat out, they're not working. And we should not expect them if we abandon God's means. Now let me just make sure we're clear on this. I ain't talking about the watered-down liberal churches. I'm talking about churches that we look to that are in, quote, our circles. What are we seeing? Children rebelling hard. Why? Because the rod's not being used? No. It's because ill-equipped parents do not know how to take the reproof of Proverbs 29 and apply it biblically. They don't know how to shepherd the heart of their children. And so once again, if you only bring the rod, you can conform the external behaviors, but if you leave the heart unchecked, it will only harden and harden and harden, and when they come out from under your authority, they're going to rebel hard. We've already got the testimony of this. So I think it'd be in our benefit to sit down and really spend time looking at what God's Word deals with because this is not a study that says, forsake the rod. I'm not teaching that. But it's the rod and reproof. It's the rod and correction. Because we want to shepherd these souls and drive them and point them towards Christ. We want to bury them. We want to submerge them in the Word of God. And we'll talk about why in just a moment. Any questions on this so far? because the next thing I want to talk to you about is authority. Now, before we get into the details of shepherding the souls of our children, we need to understand something of authority. You see, we understand our culture doesn't like authority. And it's just not that we don't like to be under authority. We don't even like to be authorities ourselves. And that's a challenge. It's clearly played out within the home because we don't have a good understanding of authority. And a lot of that comes from the abuses we see. Certainly, there's a lot of abuses of authority we see out there. But our culture has lost its way with respect to parenting. And I like the words of one where he says, we're a rudderless ship without a compass. We lack both a sense of direction and a capacity to direct ourselves. Now, you may try to blame the abuses of authority for why we refuse to step up and parent, but most of our problem is that, really, we're just too self-absorbed. And in a self-absorbed culture, child rearing is a clear liability. It's an invasion on what you want to do. And like I said, it's not just happening outside of our circles. It's actually happening inside our circles. I mean, just think about how many times I've exhorted you to know God's Word until you're familiar with it. You need to clear all things off of your plate until you can. And some of you have asked me, well, how much time should I be spending in the Word of God to do this? Well, it depends, doesn't it? How much time do you expect your children to spend in algebra to get the concepts in algebra? How much time do you expect your children to spend in a grammar class, to understand grammar? But yet, if you admit you're ignorant of God's Word, are you not willing to spend that much time and more with something that has more eternal value than algebra? Keep in mind, part of becoming familiar with the Word of God doesn't have to be separate from your family, because I've heard some say, well, if I go spend time in seminary, first of all, nobody asks you to spend time in seminary. Nobody's asking you to tear yourself away from your family. What we are saying is that you need to become in God's Word in such a way that it doesn't have to be separate from your family. It can be part of and with your family as they can grow as you grow. So you need to grow in the knowledge of the Scriptures with them. So, first of all, we need to understand something about authority before we can begin our study. And so, the next thing I want you to understand is, first of all, when we talk about authority, let's first start off with the authority and the sufficiency of the Scriptures. Our Confession makes the following statement about the Word of God. In chapter 1, paragraph 6, our Confession says, "...the whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down or necessarily contained in the Holy Scriptures, unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelation of the Spirit or the traditions of men." Now, God calls all of His creatures to live under authority. He is our authority, and He is vested in authority in the people within the institutions He's established. And when we think about institutions, I'm talking about the tomb, the church, the state, and even your businesses. Okay? Now, most Christians don't understand that the Bible is just not only a blueprint for the church, but it's actually the blueprint for a strong civil government. It's a blueprint for building a strong culture or society. It's a blueprint for building your business. But especially it's a blueprint for building a strong home. And so very few look to the scriptures for building their homes. In fact, most Christians are in churches that actually encourage the father and mother to neglect their responsibilities before God. And if you know people like that, I think it's our responsibility to point them out. This is not just some kind of theological doctrinal difference. The Word of God is very clear and commands fathers that they have commands given to them. Most churches undermine the clear responsibilities given to the father and mother. So first, I believe the church has to repent and start holding the fathers and mothers accountable and stop tempting them to sin by carrying out the responsibility of the father and mother. Go to 2 Peter 1. You see, the Scriptures provide all you need for life and godliness. In 2 Peter 1, we see this in verse 3. as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue." Now, where do we have the knowledge of God? Well, it's within the Scriptures. The special revelation of God. And within this verse, Peter reminds us that God, through His Word, through this knowledge, that all things that pertain to life and godliness are found there. And so the Scriptures provide all you need to bring up your children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. And we looked at Ephesians 6, 4, and we're going to exposit that text in more detail later on in our study. But notice the command in Ephesians 6, to bring up our children in the discipline, admonition, and the admonition of the Lord. And so this tells me that the Scriptures are sufficient for the task of training up our children. I want you to understand something. For 2,000 years, over 19 centuries, The Church depended upon the Scriptures as their source of child training. It's not in the recent past here that we've had all this clinical psychology come into the Church and muddy things up. But for over 19 centuries, the Church was always able to use the Scriptures to fulfill the command given to us in Ephesians 6. God has given His Church all the resources they need to raise children. So here's the question. What's the problem? Is the problem with God's Word? Or is the problem with us that as fallen creatures we refuse to utilize what God has provided? And I think that's the problem. Go to 2 Timothy 3. When we talk about the authority and the sufficiency of the Word of God, this is a classic text, but I just want to point a couple things out to you about it. When I go to 2 Timothy 3.16, it says, "...all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, is profitable..." Now notice, "...for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness." It's a great passage of Scripture that teaches us the benefit of the Scriptures. And the question for each of you is, well, do you believe that? Do you believe that it's sufficient? Do you believe that it's profitable for all these things? I mean, do you really believe that God has given you, within the pages of your Bible, all the resources adequate for dealing with every contingency you face, both in life and especially when it comes to parenting? But that's what the text tells us. Now listen, when I say that, I'm not saying that the Bible's going to help your child with fractions, multiplying and dividing. That's not what I'm talking about. But what I am saying is that God's Word is sufficient when it comes to changing people into the image of Christ. Isn't this what we read in the Psalms? The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul. And so when we look at 2 Timothy, we first see that the Scriptures are profitable. This means they're useful, they're beneficial. And within this text, we see four uses of the Scriptures. They are profitable for, number one, doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness. And since the Scriptures have been given for these distinct purposes, then you need to become proficient in all of these uses of the Bible. And the process of biblical child training involves the use of all four of these distinctives. And I want you to understand this because you need to be careful in what I'm saying. I'm not expecting this to happen overnight. Because biblical parenting is not only responsibility, but it's a skill that has to be developed. Now as you develop this skill, I want you to keep in mind that in order to produce spiritual maturity in your child, you need to learn to be patient with them as well and allow time and the work of the Spirit to take place within their lives. And just as it takes time for you to develop these skills as a parent, remember that it takes time for your child to develop these skills as well. And also it takes time to drop whatever you're doing. I mean, you think about all the different scenarios that go on within your house. and the number of occasions of disobedience that takes place. But you need to learn to stop what you're doing and pick the Bible up, or at least take the concepts of the Bible to teach, convict, correct, and instruct your children. Now this may be time you prefer to do something else. But remember, I want you to keep in mind, there is no such thing as instant maturity. One writer said it this way, there is no pill you can give them, no school you can send them to, no waffle dust that you can sprinkle over them that will quickly transform their rebellious little hearts to obedient ones and bring them to maturity. Maturity takes time. So this process of the child becoming spiritually mature is called sanctification. Now remember, we're taking the Word of God, and we're bringing the Word of God to bear in their lives, such that the Spirit of God may bring them from death into life. But when they come from death into life, then the process of sanctification, how long does that take? It's a lifetime. Just like it's a lifetime with you, and it's a lifetime with me. So learn to be patient with them. I think it's important for each of us to get that. The Holy Spirit is the agent who sanctifies. But notice, He does it through the Word. Your child cannot change in ways that are pleasing to God apart from the Word and apart from the Spirit. Turn back over to Ephesians 6 real quick. I want to remind you of this because I don't know that you're willfully neglectful of this, but maybe unintentionally you are, but I just want to encourage you, remind you from these texts of scriptures. In Ephesians 6, look at verse 13, Therefore take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day. And having done all to stand, stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet in preparation of the gospel of peace. Above all, taking the shield of faith with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one, and take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, that's what I wanted you to see, which is the word of God, and praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, being watchful to this end with all perseverance and supplication for all the saints." The Holy Spirit must have His most effective weapon. And the weapon that He brings to war is His Spirit, the sword of the Spirit. And so, if He is to change your child's heart, then we must bring the sword of the Spirit to bear. Go to Hebrews 4. These might be some passages of Scripture you memorized. In Hebrews 4.12 we read this, You see, it's the Word of God that has the ability to open up an individual, to pierce even the hardest of hearts. And my point here is that if you don't bring the Word of God to bear in the lives of your children, then you've already lost the battle. because you're ill-equipped for the fight that you're in. Do you understand how absurd it would be for a soldier of ancient days, before they had guns and things, right, to show up in a battle without a weapon, without a sword? Well, when you don't bring the Word of God to your children, you show up to the battle without any weapons. The easiest way for you to cooperate with the Spirit of God is to get the Word of God into the heart of your child. this to the words of one He says, I've met a number of Christians who believe they can grow in grace apart from regular and continuous time in the Word. And when he talks about continuous time, he's talking about Bible reading, study, memorization, meditation, and active listening to the biblical preaching and teaching. He says, at the risk of overstating my argument, let me say it this way. It doesn't much matter how much time you spend in prayer or fasting, in fellowship with other Christians, in ministering, or in witnessing to others. If you're not spending time in God's Word, or to be more accurate, if God's Word does not richly dwell in you, You are, for all intents and purposes, handcuffing the Holy Spirit." Now he qualifies that by saying, it's not that he's unable to work if you don't cooperate. It's that he has not promised to work apart from the Bible. If you desire to see your child saved, if you desire to see your child sanctified, it's not going to happen separate from the Word of God. Therefore, you need to invest time to bring the Word of God to bear into their lives and train them in the Scriptures. Remember, the Spirit's fruit does not grow overnight, but rather it develops gradually as it's nourished with the Word of God. Your responsibility is to impress deeply upon the hearts of your children the Holy Scriptures which are able to make them wise about salvation through Jesus Christ. And so later on in our study, I'm going to spend some time giving you ideas of how to teach your children from the Word of God. But for now, as we go through the study, we're just assuming that God's Word is sufficient and that it's authoritative. Let me leave you with this thought. Samuel Worchester in 1811 said this, Children should be taught early the important truths of God's Word. They should early be taught that there is a God and that he is a being of infinite power and wisdom, knowledge and goodness, justice, mercy and truth, one God in three persons. Are you teaching your children this about God? that He is to be loved with all the heart and obeyed in all things with the most dutiful respect, that His law is holy, just, and good, that all mankind are by nature sinners and are exposed to everlasting destruction, that God has freely given His own Son to die for sinners and to bring in everlasting righteousness for their justification, that everyone ought immediately to repent and embrace the Savior, that all the unconverted reject the mercy of God and will continue to reject it to their eternal ruin, and that all who are thus renewed and made alive to God will be pardoned and sanctified and finally received to honor glory and immortality." He says, "...these and other gospel truths connected with these should be taught to our children with diligence and faithfulness. They are truths which concern their eternal salvation, nor are we to say that children cannot understand them, For it has been found by pleasing experience that if proper means are used, children will very early get so much knowledge of divine truth as to be the greatest benefit to them in all their future lives." Now as I say this, how many of you men struggle with this idea of the wisdom of God, teaching the knowledge and the goodness, the justice, the mercy, the truth? How many of you struggle with the whole idea that Jesus Christ came to die for sinners to bring everlasting righteousness for their justification? that everyone ought to immediately repent and embrace the Savior. I mean, we use some pretty big fancy words. Didn't he use some big words back in 1811? How many of you men struggle with this? If you struggle with these words, it's because someone didn't teach you when you were young. Back then, that's how they taught their children. Teach your children these truths. Impart the Word of God in their hearts. There's no reason that our children should be like us, ignorant of God's Word when we come into manhood. Okay? Any questions on the authority? God's Word is authoritative and it is sufficient. That's code for you. You don't really have to go anywhere else. You just need to learn how to use the sword of the Spirit. All your self-help books, all your parenting made easy books, I just got to tell you, there's no power in them. The power comes in the Word of God. Bringing the Word of God will convert the soul. The law of God is perfect and it restores the soul. Not your favorite Puritan writers. Not your favorite Reformed Baptist writers. It is the Word of God. Become mighty in it. Teach them to become mighty with the sword of the Spirit. Next. Not only... Remember, as creatures, we are all called to live under authority. And because God's Word is authoritative, the next thing I want you to understand is that parents are called to be authorities. And so we understand that we're all under authority of the Word of God, and so we now need to understand that God has called us to be authorities within the home. As parents, we are to exercise authority as God's agents. This means we may not direct our children for our own agenda or for our own convenience, but rather we must direct our children on God's behalf for their own good. And we talk about our children being under our authority. The purpose is not for us to hold them down under our power, but rather we are to empower our children so that they might be self-controlled individuals who live freely under the authority of God. What happens if you hold them down under your own power? In other words, just discipline the external behaviors. When they leave your home, what will happen? They tend to rebel. And they rebel hard. Remember, Christ is our example in this manner. When you think about Christ, I want you to think about the creator of the universe who possesses all authority. But what did he do? He came as a servant. Remember, he said, I did not come to be served, but to serve and give my life a ransom for many. He is our great example. Now that he is exalted, now that he is resurrected and exalted and ascended to the right hand of God, we are now to serve him. But remember, When we think of Christ as Master, remember, as His sheep, He is a kind and He is a kind, gentle Sovereign. He is a kind, gentle Master. Remember what He tells us? His yoke is easy. And so this means we're to submit to him, but he's a kind master. And so as his people, we're to submit to his authority, and we do so, or when we do so, we're empowered to live freely in the freedom of the gospel. Now as a parent, you must, it's not optional, you must exercise authority. You must require obedience from your children because they're called by God to honor you, to obey you. You must exercise authority, not as a cruel taskmaster, but as one who truly loves them. And I like the words of one. Parents who are benevolent despots do not usually find their children racing to leave home. Children rarely run from a home where their needs are met. Who would want to walk out on a relationship in which he feels loved and respected? What child would run from someone who understands him and understands God and understand God's ways and understands the world and how it works and is committed to helping them walk in godly wisdom? Who would want to leave that house? Let me ask this. Is your home an exciting place to live? And what I mean by exciting, I'm not talking about with the latest gadgets. What I'm talking about is your home an exciting place where the gospel is proclaimed and where kingdom living is the norm. Where you see your home as a means to expand God's kingdom. That kind of home is anything but boring. That's an exciting place to be. So how is your home structured? Mundane? Monotony? Once again, there are things they have to do over and over again. We're not talking about that that's not part of it. But is there anything about your home that is gospel-centered, gospel-focused, kingdom-oriented, and about the business of claiming dominion for Christ? Do you see the vision? It's completely different. When it comes to authority, I think the best way, if authority best describes the parent's relationship to the child, then the best description of the activity of the parent has to be that of a shepherd. As a shepherd, you are responsible to protect the child, to provide for the child, to guide and instruct them as you lead them through this life and you prepare them for the future. The shepherding process guides the child not just in the what's, but the why. And it gives them the why with the intent of growing the child in godly wisdom. And so there's a different kind of relationship than just dictating what the child can do and dictating what the child can think, because this ultimately leads to full-blown rebellion when they get out from under your authority. Shepherding requires you to invest in your child's life, and the idea here is that your child is gaining godly wisdom through the parent or through the shepherd-child relationship. Go to Proverbs 13. Proverbs 13, look at verse 20. He who walks with wise men will be wise, but the companion of fools will be destroyed. And so what we need to understand is that our children are going to gain wisdom. The question is from where? And what kind of wisdom? Are they going to gain it from wise parents who train them, grow them, with godly wisdom from the scriptures? Are you going to allow something else to train them and give them wisdom? If you're not proactively imparting godly wisdom into your children, then something else is going to take its place. So as a wise parent, your goal should be not just simply to discuss godly precepts with your children, but we need to learn to live these precepts out in front of them and show them how to apply godly wisdom. In the words of Tripp, parenting is shepherding the hearts of your children in ways of God's wisdom. And what he's getting at is that it's just not enough to direct the external behaviors of your children, but we want to guide the attitudes of the heart. Once again, we're not just there to show them the what of their sin and the what of their failure, but the why. And our children need to understand why they sin and how God works within them in such a way that they don't have to remain slaves to sin. We need to point them to the Savior who has the power and authority to break the reigning power of sin within their lives. Is that currently your mechanism? Is that currently your way of disciplining your children? You're going to have to be honest with yourself. Are you currently disciplining the behaviors? Or are you disciplining the behaviors and the soul and the heart? What we need to understand is that each time we give them unbiblical counsel with respect to dealing with sin, we are driving them away from God, not towards Him. So if you're ignorant of the Word of God, how can you be giving them godly wisdom? Let me give you an example. Let's see how you'd respond to this. Someone was to bully your child. or you've heard of someone bullying someone else's child, or maybe when you were growing up, this is probably a better example for those of us who came up through public school, right? Whenever there was a bully, what kind of parental advice were you given about how to deal with a bully? What's the typical response? Huh? You either hit him, or you do what else? Ignore him. Run away. You either hit him, or you run away, right? That's the typical advice that's given. Is there any other advice y'all might have? I'm talking about typical unbiblical advice. So you can kind of see the categories that are given about bullies, right? Here's the problem. You see, it doesn't take supernatural grace to stand up for your rights. Does it? However, let me get you to think about this. To do good to those who oppress you, to pray for those who mistreat you, to help the child to understand these kingdom principles, this will force them to look at Christ as an example how to live. to live a life that's contrary to the standards and to the dictates of this world. It will force a child to see the sinfulness of his own character and drives him to the transforming power of the gospel. What's missing in this kind of parental advice is that you're not saying, well, I'll tell you what, why don't we start praying for this young man? Why don't we see how we could be a blessing to this young man? That would be kingdom principles. Worldly principle is, you better get him before he gets you. Right? See, what this actually does is when you bring to him that Christ calls you to love your enemies, it forces your child to first see the sinfulness in his own character and drives him to the transforming power of the gospel rather than to be the executor of justice to the bully. And I want you to keep in mind, to love your enemies is a command. And when we put the commands of God in front of our children, we do so with the intent, hopefully, to drive them to Christ. You see, to tell your kid to just slug the other kid really doesn't require any grace at all. Anybody can do that. However, to love the enemy and to look for ways to be a blessing does require, and it drives the child back to the grace of God. Some of you are already sitting right there and thinking in your own heads, that's ridiculous. I'm taking him out. I'm taking the bully out. But when you say that, please recognize it takes no grace to do that whatsoever. The grace of God is required to live the life that God commands us to live. So let me just end with this final exhortation. God has called you to be in authority. You are in authority over your children. You're responsible for teaching godly wisdom, not ungodly wisdom, not worldly wisdom. And this is going to stretch every one of you in here, including myself, as we go through this. Every time I read through these things, I realize how far short I follow some of these things. There's another reason why we got to bear one another up in prayer. The question for each of us this evening are whether we intend to look at God's blueprint for how to structure our home and to raise our children, or are we going to be content to look to some other standard? But listen, this is where we're going to start. We'll start here with the foundation. Next week what we're going to do is we're going to start looking at what the Bible has to say with respect to your child as a fallen creature. Once you understand the fallen nature of man, including your child, and some of you don't like to look at your children as fallen creatures, right? You're quick to defend their character when you know the Bible says their heart is wicked. But your child is a fallen creature, so we need to start looking at biblical discipline that only focuses on the outward behavior but a discipline that actually brings the transforming power of the Holy Spirit to bear within their own lives. That's where we're headed with this. Any questions so far? I'm going to deal with things, particular sins. We're going to go through some of these foundations and start looking at what the Bible says about how to deal with the heart. I'm going to particularly deal on two sins. One is anger, and I'm going to deal with the sin of pride. If there's anything else, and I'm not looking for you to tell, just tell me on the side, if there's any other particular sins that you're struggling with about how to bring God's Word to bear, let me know, and we'll do a study on it. But to me, pride and anger, Those are two of the most difficult ones. Remember when I went through our little exercise on the board here, when we come to the full-blown sin, there's a thousand steps that have been violated to get to the point where the outward behavior has been committed, right? And so what we want to do is deal with it back here. That's what I talk about when we talk about godly wisdom, right? Or dealing with the heart of the child. Alright, let me stop here.