- Hey, everybody, thank
you so much for joining us. If this is your first
time, we certainly hope it's not your last time. And this is a great
time to join us because we are at the front
end of a brand new series. For the next several weeks,
I wanna talk to parents, grandparents, future
parents, aunts, uncles, anybody who feels the weight,
and the responsibility of equipping an infant,
a child, a teenager, a middle schooler, or a
high schooler for life. Today, and for the
next few weeks, I wanna talk about parenting. Now, when Sandra and I talk
to parents about parenting, she always says something that
gets everybody's attention. And for those of you
who are in this season, where you're raising middle
school or high school students, you totally get this. Here's what she always says,
she says the days are long, the days are long, but the
years, the years are short. And this is oh, so true. On the front end, you feel
like you have plenty of time, and then you blink,
and they're 10. And then they're graduating
from middle school, and then they're gone. And you will think "oh,
no, are they really ready, that I tell them everything
they needed to know, that I prepared them for life?" And the answer to that question
is always," no, you didn't." You probably forgot
a few essential, some really important things,
which is understandable because you were busy. You were busy parenting. Now, like most first
time fathers and mothers, I will never ever
forget the terror. And that's the right
word, the terror I felt when the nurse at the hospital, you'll remember
this, some of you, closed our car door,
as she sent Sandra and me home with a
baby by ourselves. What we're they thinking? I knew what I was
thinking, I was thinking, "surely one of you is
coming home with us." I mean, what if
we do this wrong? And that's, I think
that's the first time that it dawned on me that
just because I have a parent, just because I have a parent
doesn't mean I know anything about being one. And maybe more to the point. Just because I was a kid once
doesn't mean I know anything about raising one. And so you'll remember
this, some of you, so you're sitting in the
car, the doors are closed, you don't know
what you're doing. It's just terror. I think it's just terror. I mean, there's excitement,
but there's terror, and the nurse, she
just stood there. And she waved goodbye with
that knowing look on her face. But we figured it out. But we didn't figure
it out on our own. Sandra and I were sponges,
like many of you are, we were sponges for
good parenting advice. Whether it came from books,
or videos, or friends or even experts. And honestly, we had
an advantage that most people don't have. At the time I was serving
as the student pastor at our church, which meant I
had the opportunity to oversee our middle school and
high school students, which meant we had
lots of interactions with parents of middle
schoolers, and high schoolers. That we had interaction
with the parents, we saw great examples
and we saw, what we saw, what we consider some
really bad examples. But when we saw parents who
had a healthy relationship with their teenagers, we were
not shy about inviting them to lunch. We wanted to know
their game plan. We would say we want your map,
we wanna know how you did it. How did you get them from the
car seat to the driver's seat with the relationship intact? And the relationship was
was so important to us, because again, we'd
seen so many parents undermine their relationship
with their kids. And nobody does that on purpose. Nobody has a plan to
undermine their relationship with their teenage
or their adult kids, but we saw it over
and over and over. And when we saw parents
who got it right, or who did it right, we wanted to know
how they did it. And every time we would ask
these parents for advice, they would just kind of
look at each other and shrug and they would say things
like, "we don't know, we just we just loved our kids." But we knew better. They had a map. They had an approach. They had some habits, but
it was so intuitive to them. They oftentimes they
couldn't verbalize it. But Sandra and I were students. And we were serious
about figuring this out. And to some extent,
we were afraid, right? Because we wanna get it,
we wanted to get it right. And here's what we noticed, here are a few things
that we noticed upfront. The parents who seem to
have been able to maintain a strong relationship, even
through the middle school and high school years, one
of the things that was true of almost all of them is
that they had fewer rules. They had far fewer rules
than the parents whose kids were always in trouble
for breaking their rules. One of the things
that we noticed when
we did middle school and high school ministry
together was how many kids were always on restriction. They were always on restriction. They were being
restricted from things. They they were
grounded all the time. And in our experience,
these kids never really got any better. They were always
the troublemakers and they were always in trouble. But when we talked to parents
who had been able to maintain strong relationships
with their kids, even through the middle
school and high school years, we discovered that none of them,
that virtually none of them ever even used
restriction or grounding, as a tool to
discipline their kids. We will come back to that later. The other thing that we noticed about these
extraordinary parents who seemed to have
gotten it right, is, and this may sound strange,
they were not afraid of their children. They were not afraid
of their children. Now, if you don't have children, this may seem strange to you. But I'm telling you, it is easy
for parents to become afraid of their children. And when you fear your
children, your children are just by nature, the fact
that you're afraid of them, or you fear them or you
fear their response to you, they are in charge
of the relationship. They're in charge, in some
cases of the of the marriage. But these unique parents, they
did not fear the rejection of their children. And that's oftentimes
what parents fear, they fear the rejection
of their kids. They weren't afraid to
discipline their children. But again, they didn't
discipline their children in the traditional
ways that parents often discipline their children. Again, we'll come back
to that later here. Here's the other thing,
then I don't know exactly how to say this, so
give me a minute. These extraordinary
parents discovered, I think is the best word, they actually spent
time discovering, or they discovered, and
then they facilitated their kids interest,
their kids strengths and their kids talents,
rather than, and this is key, rather than forcing, or
insisting that their children embrace what was
most interesting to or what came naturally
to the parents. In other words, instead
of the, the athletic dad, insisting that his
son be an athlete or his daughter be an athlete,
instead they stood back, and they were students
have their kids. And they figured
out the direction, the natural flow
of their children. And then they invested
in the natural flow rather than trying to
force them into something. And again, we've all seen
parents do the opposite of that. And again, we've all
seen where that leads. In fact, maybe that's
your story growing up. Your mom had a special
interest, and she wanted you as her daughter to embrace
what was interesting to her, but you weren't
interested in it. And again, what happened, there
was a relational friction. Somehow, these wise parents,
they avoided all of that. Another thing that we noticed
about these parents is that, they resisted the temptation
to involve their kids in everything. Not only were they not
afraid of their children, they didn't fear their
children missing out. In other words,
here's how I say this. They prioritize, they
prioritized relationship over experience. They prioritized their
relationship with their kids and their kids relationships
with each other, over experience. They prioritized the experiences
that they can experience together over the experiences
that sent everybody in 100 different directions. And then there was
one other thing. And it's what I want us to
spend the rest of our time discussing today. As we got to know these
families, through the years, through multiple years, we
noticed that all of them had what we would consider
healthy marriages. Not perfect, because there
is no perfect marriage, but healthy. In fact, we walked away from
those multiple conversations convinced that perhaps the
best parenting tool of all, perhaps the best gift we
could give our children was a healthy marriage. And for some of you, that's when you
put down your pin. And that's when you
stop taking notes. I understand that because
if a healthy marriage is part of the
parenting equation, if it's an important part
of the parenting equation, that's bad news for you,
discouraging news for you, because it's out
of reach for you. In fact, it's so discouraging, and I've been doing
this for so long. It's so discouraging that
honestly, I was tempted to skip this part of the series. As you can imagine, it would
be easier to just leave marriage out of a
conversation about parenting. And you know this for years,
there's been a push to do just that, to divorce
parenting from marriage. And honestly, the
parenting conversation is certainly easier,
it's more comfortable, it's more politically
correct, if we just set aside the notion of the
nuclear family, a phrase that we don't
use that much anymore. The nuclear family is
simply a father and a mother and children all living
together under one roof. It's easier to isolate
parenting to a standalone topic. But to do that, and here's
what we're going to talk about for the next few minutes. To isolate parenting
from marriage is actually to steal something
valuable from the current and the next generation. To isolate parenting
from marriage is to steal something
valuable from your children, and your grandchildren. To do so is to remove, well,
it's not only to remove the bullseye, it's like
removing the entire target. And hopefully that
will become clear in the next few minutes. Now, that brings us to
this uncomfortable tension that you're already
beginning to feel. This uncomfortable tension
between what's real, and what's ideal. What's real, and what's ideal. It's an uncomfortable tension,
because for many of us ideal, when we talk about
family and marriage, ideal is seemingly out of reach. And it would be more
comfortable again, to just put it out of sight. But part of my responsibility
from time to time is to step into the
emotional, uncomfortable, perhaps dangerous
role of a prophet. To plant my feet and my heart
and honestly, my compassion in the middle of what's real,
while pointing to an ideal. And to ignore reality, and
again, it's easy to do this when we talk about
something like marriage, but to ignore reality, leaves
us or leaves me speaking or teaching in such
a way that doesn't take into consideration the
families and the family dynamics that actual people are
actually navigating. It leaves the impression if we
don't deal with what's real, it leaves the impression
that the message of Jesus and this is so important, to
not delve into what's real, what's actual, is to
leave the impression that the message of Jesus has no
real bearing on real life. To ignore current reality,
your current reality leaves us with a static kind
of stained glass religion removed from reality. Church and sermons become
nothing more than reminders of somebody else's reality, standards that we
will never attain to, a world that no longer
exist if it ever existed in the first place. So for a discussion on
parenting to be relevant, we have to take into
account what's real, which again, should be
really easy for Christians. And this may come as a shock. In fact, this may be offensive, but of all the people in
the world when it comes to embracing what's really
going on with families and marriages. This should be second
nature to us as Christians, because there are
virtually no, as in non, there are virtually no
good examples of family in the entire bible. When it comes to
illustrations of real world family dysfunction, the bible is actually
your go to source. I mean, just think about it. Think about the first
family, you remember them, they were pretty
much a disaster. Think about it, sin
entered the world, if you're a Christian
this is what we believe, that sin, all sin
entered the world through the first married couple
before they even had kids. And then they immediately
started blaming each other. And their kids, well, we don't
know much about their kids. But what we do know is
this that one of their sons murdered his brother. And we're off to the
races, the human races. Just about every Old Testament
story involving family is bad. In fact, just about
every Old Testament story that deals with family is
horrible, by modern standards. So the point being
this, the church, we should be really good
at taking into account the realities of family life. Taking into consideration
what's actually going on. Taking into consideration
what's actually going on in any conversation
about parenting, because our book, our
text, the bible is full, it's full of bad examples. But at the same time,
and this is what makes this conversation
so fascinating, and
actually so helpful. At the same time, the
authors of the New Testament, the authors of the New
Testament paint a picture of what could be
and what should be. What could be and should
be as it relates to family. They actually point
us toward the ideal, while they embrace,
clearly embrace reality. They also point
us to this ideal, and we shouldn't be
surprised because they knew and God knew what
we intuitively know. And that's simply this,
that if we remove ideal from the equation, if we remove ideal from
the family equation, simply because it's out
of reach for some of us, out of reach for some of
us in this generation, that simply ensures that
it will remain out of reach for many, and the
next generation. Part of our responsibility
as parents and grandparents, come on, is to give our
kids and our grandkids something to aim for,
something to live for, most importantly, something
to decide towards. Now, when it came to
living and teaching and the messy middle between
what's real and what's ideal, Jesus was the master. He navigated during his entire
ministry that this tension between real and ideal and
he clung to this tension, he didn't abandon it. But then of course he
did, because the gospel, the gospel doesn't begin
with, once upon a time in a perfectly ordered
world where everyone always did the right thing. The gospel, Christianity
begins like this, that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scripture. The gospel assumes sin, the
gospel assumes that we're going to get it wrong. The Gospel assumes real
while it points to ideal that Christ showed up in a
perfectly disordered world where ideal seemed out of
reach honestly, for everyone. The gospel begins with this, "For God so loved the
world," but which world? Not the garden of Eden
world, our world, your world, my world, our broken imperfect,
less than ideal world. The tension between real and
ideal was embedded within just about every single
one of Jesus parables. He would say things
like this, he would say, "the kingdom of God is like." And his disciples would say, "yeah, but this isn't
the kingdom of God." To which he would
then smile and say, "come to me, all who are
weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest, you will find rest
for your souls." And then he would pivot. And once again, he would
point to the ideal. He would say things like
this, "you have heard it said, you have heard it said that
you shall not commit adultery." To which his audience
would always say, "yes, we have heard that said." And Jesus would say, "but
I tell you, but I tell you, anyone who even looks
at a woman lustfully. has already committed adultery
with her in his heart." To which they would say, "we
had not heard that part." And Jesus, honestly, that makes
us feel bad about ourselves. So don't say things
like that anymore. That's just, it's unrealistic. But he kept saying
things like that. He consistently pointed beyond
the lowest common denominator to the ideal. He gave people, he gave
people in his audience, he gives us something
to aspire to. And then when he would bump
into people who fell short, unlike the religious
leaders of his day, he did not condemn them. In fact, Jesus condemned
the condemners. And then he would die
for the condemned. Instead of lowering
the standard, he
turned up the grace. He redefined adultery and
made every man an adulterer, and then he paid
for their adultery. When religious leaders
attempted to trap him with his own words, during a
discussion regarding divorce, Jesus, this is amazing, Jesus
raised the marriage standard, so high, so high that
he slammed the door on a man's
opportunity or freedom to wiggle out of his
responsibility to his family. In fact, Jesus raised
the bar so high, he pointed so intuitively,
and so pointedly to the ideal that when he finished talking
about marriage and divorce, when he finished the discussion,
and they walked away, his apostles, the 12 that
followed him everywhere, they looked at each other. And here's how they responded. They said, "wow, if
this is the situation, between a husband and a wife, it's just better not to marry." In other words, "Jesus, you
made it sound so permanent." "But Jesus, that's
so unrealistic." "Things happen, people change." To which Jesus would have said,
"I know, it's why I'm here." So Jesus, let me
get this straight, so you're against divorce, "of
course, I'm against divorce," "Divorce hurts people,
divorce breaks people, divorce leads broken lives,
divorce leads wounds, of course, I'm against divorce." Well, then Jesus,
what are you gonna do about divorced people? "I'm going to give
my life for them." And this is the tension. This is the beauty
of the gospel. This is why if you've
walked away from faith, perhaps you should reconsider. Jesus never, Jesus never
dumbed down the truth. But he never turned
down the grace. And here's the
fascinating thing, John,
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, John, who knew Jesus well, who spent three and a
half years with Jesus, heard everything he taught,
saw all the miracles. John said, it was so remarkable. It was so remarkable. And then john writes one
of my favorite things that anyone said about Jesus. He said, "looking back
over my time with Jesus, having watched him
deal with real people who were dealing with
real life situations, situations for which there
were no easy answers, no quick fixes." John said, it was remarkable
day in and day out, Jesus would point these
people who were living with real difficulties to the ideal. He consistently pointed
them to the ideal while helping them navigate
what they were facing, living through, living with. Again, as an old man looking
back on his time with Jesus, he summarizes his time with
Jesus with these familiar and powerful words. Here's what he writes. He said the Word
speaking of God. He said, God came to live with
us, "the Word became flesh, and he camped out with us." He dwelt among us. He didn't send us more rules
and regulations from afar, he became one of us. He navigated our
reality with us. He showed up in human
form, he moved in with us. And he says, "and we have
seen, we have seen his glory." To which the Old
Testament scholars and the first century
Jewish scholars would say, "no, no, you haven't
seen the glory, no one can see God's
glory and live." And John's like, "look,
I'm just a normal guy, and I'm just telling
you what we saw." "We saw the glory of
the one and only Son who came from the Father." And then this next phrase,
this next phrase that I think summarizes
in so many ways, what kind of Christian, what
kind of person I wanna be. In fact, if you lost your
faith, if you lost your faith, Perhaps it's because
nobody ever explained this part about Jesus. He said, "the glory of
the one and only Son who came from the Father full
of, full of grace, and truth." Jesus was not the balance
of grace and truth. He was a full dose of grace,
he was a full dose of truth. Jesus was all grace and he
was all truth all the time. Again, he didn't
dumbed down the truth to make us feel better
about ourselves, but he never turned
down the grace. And again, that's the
kind of Christian, that's the kind of Christian,
that's the kind of person that I wanna be. And maybe part of that is
because I grew up on the truth, version, grace, not so much. But here's the problem,
truth without grace, and I know from
personal experience, that truth without grace creates
pretenders and hypocrites. But grace without truth creates
kind of a permissive version of faith that ultimately
hurts everybody in the end. But grace and truth, grace
and truth is personified and illustrated by
Jesus, it's powerful. John wraps up the
passage with this, again, so much that could
be unpacked here. He says this "for the law,"
talking about the Jewish law, "for the law was given through
Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." This is so powerful. It was Jesus who first
introduced this tension between grace and truth
and then lived in it rather than leaning
one way or the other. And here's the thing,
as dynamic as this is, and as inviting as this is, this is a difficult
thing to live out. And yet, it's what we have
been called to live out as Christians. And it's what we've been
called to model corporately. I mean, come on, the church, the church is the
body of Christ, and as his body this
is our responsibility. This is our role in culture. This is how we serve as
conscience and comfort in our communities
and in our nation. I mean, you know what
the conscience does, conscience from time to
time makes us feel bad about ourselves. But a properly informed
conscience is also what keeps us from losing our way, keeps
us from losing our bearings. Our conscience tells
us when we veered into dangerous territory. It reminds us that we're about
to undermine our own future and the future of
those who depend on us. So back to parenting,
and marriage, let's get maybe
uncomfortably specific. Here's the ideal, ideal
is parents raising
children together under one roof. Communities don't raise
children, parents,
raise children. Communities are simply the
context for raising children. And in communities, whether
they're rural, urban or suburban, communities
whether the nuclear family is the exception
rather than the rule, you know what happens. The government is forced to
step in and help raise children. Local schools are
forced to feed children, agencies are created
to protect children. We all know that. And we all want
better than that. We want better than
that for each other. And we want better than that
for the next generation. Communities don't raise
kids, but they certainly set expectations for
kids for good or for bad. It's why some of you have
gone to great lengths and honestly great expense
to ensure that your children are being raised in a community
that affirms your values. And this is so important. And you are to be
celebrated for this. You've gone to great lengths
to make sure that your kids are being raised in communities
that affirm your values, even when your particular
situation falls short of what you value. And you are to be
so commended that. In fact, we have designed our
churches to partner with you in that process. We want better for your kids because you want
better for your kids. You don't wanna be told
that everything is fine so that you'll feel
better about yourself because you're smart,
and you love your kids, and you know better. So every once in a while,
every once in a while. we all need to be
reminded of what should be and what could be. Maybe not what can be for us,
but what could and should be for our children,
that's good parenting. Every once in a while
we all need to be coaxed back into the tension between
what's real and what's ideal. So when it comes to
parenting, marriage matters. And any attempt, any attempt
to downplay the importance of marriage, to downplay
its role, is just misguided. Not because of the
dynamic it creates within a particular family, but because it robs children
of an opportunity to aspire for and to decide toward the ideal. Now, I think, again,
one of the reasons that I have so much
energy around this, is something that happened
to me about 10 years ago. 10 years ago, I had a
conversation that brought this entire dynamic into
very, very sharp focus. This dynamic between
real and ideal in marriage and parenting. Sandra and I met a
gentleman named Rick. Actually, I met him first. Rick is about my age. His family situation growing
up was extremely unhealthy, chaotic, and at times,
he would say, dangerous. By the age of 13,
Rick had had enough and he was planning
to run away from home. He told his uncle,
who was disabled, he told his uncle what
he was planning to do. And his uncle urged him,
said, "wait, wait, wait, let's talk about this." And his uncle explained to
him that the state of Georgia, would help him. Provide him with a place
to live, predictable meals, a consistent roof over his head. So his uncle, he said
cashed his welfare check to pay for a cab and he and
Rick who was 13 years old, taxied over to the
Defects Office. His uncle dropped him off. Rick did not wait to be
taken out of his home, he opted out himself
and he was placed in a temporary foster home. Later, he moved to
a children's home. And he was eventually
placed with a family in Gwinnett County, which
is a county just north of the city of Atlanta. Where he says his life
was changed forever. Now, Rick and I
had a long lunch. And he told me his
entire story in detail. But toward the end of the
story, he said something that honestly it altered the
trajectory of our family's life. He said this, he said, "Andy,
until I went to live with the Price family," the
family in Gwinnett County, he said "until I went to
live with that family, I had never seen a family
sit around a table for dinner without arguing and screaming." He said, "I'd never seen
a man come home from work with a paycheck." He said, "I'd never seen a
father provide for his family." And he said, "seeing
that, just seeing that, was life changing for me." And then he said this,
and I wrote it down because it had such
an impact on me. And I quote, he
said this, he said, "I just needed to see
it to aim for it." I just needed to see
it to aim for it. "Once I saw it and experienced
it, I knew what I wanted, at 13 years old." "I knew what I wanted, until
then, I didn't even know such a thing even existed." When I called Rick to
get permission to share this part of his story, he
got emotional all over again, just working through
some of these detail, explaining some
of these details. And he said this, he
said, "Andy," he said, "the thing is this, once you
see it, you can't unsee it." "Once you see it,
you can't forget it." So after that initial
lunch, 10 years ago, I went home and I told
Sandra Rick's entire story. And we agreed we could do that. We could give some kids a
different picture of family, not a perfect family,
not a perfect picture. But a picture that they
may otherwise never see, never experienced. In a few weeks or a few months
with us in our household, perhaps we could provide
a child with a picture, a potential that they
didn't even know existed. And if we can do
for even one child what the Price family
did for Rick, wow. Now, as you know, from time to
time, I encourage you to ask and answer this terrifying
question what breaks your heart. And as it turns out, kids
growing up without a picture of what could and should be
as it relates to marriage and family that broke our hearts. So we became foster parents. As you know, there are 10s
of thousands of children who will not aim for ideal
because they don't even know it exists. And they've never seen it,
they've never experienced it, they don't even know
what's out there. So and here's really the
point of this opening session of the series, to do
or to support anything, to do or to sport anything
that removes ideal from the equation, the
conversation, the culture, to downplay the importance of
parents raising kids together, simply because it seems
too ideal, too American, too Western, too traditional, to remove that from the
equation because it's too ideal is stealing. It's stealing the future
of our future generation. It's a mistake that we will
pay for for generations. And make no mistake,
women and children, women and children will
pay the highest price. They always do. So yeah. It was tempting, it was
tempting to just jump right into some parenting tips that
would have been easier, safer, certainly less potential
to be misunderstood. But that would have
been irresponsible, because parenting is
first and foremost. Parenting is first and foremost
about preparing our children for their future. Which requires us to
cast a compelling vision for their future. What could and should be
for them, regardless of where our lives have taken us. A vision for them academically,
financially, spiritually, but maybe most
importantly, relationally. Our shortcomings as parents,
and we all have a right, our shortcomings, if we
leverage them wisely, can serve as a catalyst, a
catalyst for our children to climb to heights that
perhaps are out of reach for us. And if they do, that's a
win, it's a win for them, and it's a win for us. It's a win for our community. So while we navigate
what's real, let's not give up on ideal. And let's instill a dream
in the hearts and minds of this next generation
that positions them to, live better lives and perhaps
make the world a better place. And let's resist, let's
resist the voices in culture that have the potential to
steal the dream of family, from our kids. There will always be a
tension between what's real, and what's ideal, and
we dare not resolve it. To resolve it is
to lose something. So when it comes to family,
let's resolve not to resolve that tension. Let's live in it. Let's parent in it. Let's follow Jesus through it. After all, he came and he
made his dwelling among us, and he was full of
grace and truth. Think about it, talk
about it, argue about it. And we will pick up the
discussion right there next time in part two of Parenting
in the 21st Century.
