Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The Good News for Father's Day

This is the column I've written for the Cook County News-Herald for Father's Day 2009. As I researched this column I came across four excellent sermons from John Piper that proved very helpful. If you have not already done so, let me encourage you to check out www.desiringgod.org. Specifically, read or listen to the sermon, "Raising Children Who Hope in the Triumph of God," from which I gleaned several key ideas for this column.

Cook County News-Herald THE GOOD NEWS for 6/20/09

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Ephesians 6:4

There are two verses in the New Testament expressly directed to fathers in regard to their role in parenting. Ephesians 6:4 is one. Colossians 3:21 is the other. Let me make three observations about Ephesians 6:4 for dads this Father’s Day.

First, dads, these words are directed to you. You have a specific role in raising your children beyond simply being half responsible for their existence. God addresses fathers with instructions about their parenting role because he expects fathers to be actively engaged in parenting. Fathers get to provide a family, provide for the family, and provide within the family.

Psalm 127:3-5 says, “Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them!” Children are a blessing and it is a blessed privilege to have them. And dad, it is a blessed responsibility to raise them, so God points out for you in Ephesians 6:4 one strategy you could use and one strategy you should use.

The two strategies are separated by the little word “but,” indicating that one strategy is superior to the other and is to be chosen over the other. We should do what we should do and not do what we could do. Fathers could “provoke your children to anger,” but they should “bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”

When God instructs fathers to not provoke their children to anger, he does not mean that a father should never cross a child’s will. Elsewhere God reminds us how earthly fathers reflect God’s own love for us when they discipline and correct us: “We have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live. For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness” (Hebrews 12:9-10). Neither does God intend for father to never deny a child’s desires. What God means is, dad, don’t cross your child’s will or deny their desires without making that action intentionally part of a greater vision of God’s love and plan for your child and his purposes in the world.

That’s where the “should strategy” comes in. Fathers should nurture and nourish their children in such a way that their children will recognize and come to understand the true nature of God and his love for them, as well as God’s plan for the world and their place in it. "Anger comes from a feeling that a parent’s instruction is petty, trivial, self-serving—that it is not part of something truly great, something really important." And there is nothing greater or more important than knowing, loving, and serving God.

How can a father do what he should and not just what he could do? First, dad has to have a relationship with God that is more important to him than anything else. No kid is going to believe a dad who says the child should love God while dad’s primary love is money, or work, or fishing, or women, or something else. Children grow to love what their father loves, and if their father does not love God it is less likely that children will continue to learn and love God while they are in the home and even less likely once they leave home.

Let your life be God-saturated, dad, and your children will be God saturated as well. Pray for your kids and pray with your kids. Read the Bible yourself and read the Bible to your children. Be a living example of faith to your kids. Be happy, disciplined, humble. Worship together with your children. Be holy, and let God’s love fill your heart, your life, your outlook, and your parenting, and your kids very likely will follow suit. And even if they don’t you will have represented well your heavenly Father to them.

That’s the good news.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Memorial Service

We've been on vacation and I've got several ideas I want to process with you over the next few weeks, but for the moment I want to post a memorial service meditation I offered recently. I'm putting it up because it's basic. Sometimes I feel an urgent need to analyze and reach out to every individual in some uniquely meaningful way, when in fact, it is not any skill of rhetoric that changes peoples' lives, it is the gospel that is the power of God unto salvation (according to Paul in Romans 1).

The gospel is what people need. It's what I need every day to maintain faith, purity, wholeness, right thinking, right living, right being. Here's the gospel to you and to me as it came at the memorial service of a person I didn't really know to an audience I didn't really know:

Funeral services and memorial services like this share one thing in common regardless of where or when they are held: no one really wants to be here.

We gather for memorial services and for remembrances, but we would rather be gathered somewhere else with our loved one healthy and whole and living life along with us. We would much rather avoid death altogether, but the reality is, we cannot.

The reality of life is that each of us will be touched, wounded, by the death of others that we love, and one day, inevitably, others will be touched by our death. Most days we can get along quite well not thinking about such things. But some days, like today, death stands toe to toe with us looks us square in the eye and says to us, “Deal with me.”

The Bible says, “It is given unto every man once to die, and after that the judgment.” While we often use memorial services like this to remind us of the best things about the person we have loved, in the background, behind the remembering and the songs, behind the preaching and the prayers this question lurks: “What does all this mean for me?”

God created us for two things: to love him and to be loved by him. All too often, however, we live out our lives in love with ourselves rarely giving God more than a second thought. That failure on our part to enjoy a loving relationship with the God who created us is called sin, and sin is the reason judgment follows death in the Bible verse I just mentioned.

But here is good news. God loves us. God loves me and God loves you, and He has given us every reason to have great hope in the face of death and judgment. The Bible tells us that God so loved the world he gave his only Son, Jesus Christ, for us so that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. The Bible informs us that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” And God’s word reminds us that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

These are words about preparing for death and having an answer when death stares us in the face. When we put our faith in Jesus, God forgives our sins and reestablishes that relationship of love we were created for. By doing that, God takes away any fear of death and judgment that may have plagued us in the past and replaces it with joy for today and hope for the future.

God’s answer to death’s challenge is Jesus who died on the cross for our sins and was raised from the dead opening the door to eternal life for all who believe in him.

How do we take advantage of this great gift from God, who reminds us in the darkest hours of our grief of his great love for us? Here again God points the way in his word. The Bible gives these simple instructions, “Repent and turn to God, so that your sins my be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord.”

As you spend time this afternoon remembering your loved one, telling the stories that will bring her face to mind, that will ignite your love for her all over again, please remember that God loves you with all his heart and has made a way for you to face your own death without fear and with great hope. Put your faith in Jesus.