Fulfilling Family Roles

By David Block

INTRODUCTION

In this article, I would like to talk to you about children and parents. Now if you think that none of this will apply to you because you don't have any children or they are grown, just hang in there with me. As we move through the text you'll see that the role of children and parents is extremely important to all of us.

Read this and contemplate on it for a moment.

“Reflecting upon a basic college preparatory education of just a few hundred years ago can be a little overwhelming. Jonathan Edwards grew up to become one of America’s greatest theologians and philosophers, but his education was not uncommon for those in his circle. His father schooled him in the “basics,” and these basics enabled him to enter Yale in 1716, before he was thirteen, with a thorough knowledge of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. Just the language entrance requirements for those starting college barely resemble the present-day exit requirements for a typical liberal arts Ph.D. degree. Edwards himself was a key preacher in the Great Awakening and later became president of Princeton. He had a profound effect on those who came after him. Among his direct descendants are found three college presidents, sixty-five professors, one hundred lawyers, thirty-three judges, sixty-six physicians, three senators, three governors, and one Vice President.”1

Here we have Timothy Edwards, Jonathan's father. He knew what he had to do and he did it. Obviously, he was very successful at it for God used his son in an amazing way. Jonathan followed after his father's example and his children after him. The list of accomplishments of their descendants is even more extensive than the one that you read above and is almost unbelievable, except that it is all true and has been recorded in the pages of history.

There is a way to have a family that is different than all others. The Edwards were humans just like us. They didn't have mutant brains that allowed them some extraordinary ability to learn. No, they were common people living amongst a wicked and crooked generation just like us. So what made them a family that excelled? We will see why in our text.

BACKGROUND

During the time of Paul, Ephesus was the capital of the Roman province of Asia and the headquarters of the cult of the goddess Diana. Her temple became one of the seven wonders of the world. It was amongst this goddess worship, materialism, rampant divorce, sexual perversion, and degradation of children that these early Christians lived and worshiped. Doesn't sound much different than today, does it? Well, these are the evils that Paul had to overcome to train these new believers. It is in the midst of this society that Paul taught these Christians what it meant to be a Christian family. As we look at this passage in Ephesians, we will learn that if we want to be a true Christian family then we need to fulfill our roles in the Lord. A Christian family is characterized by its willingness to follow the commands of God for their positions in life. Yes, the members of Christ's community must strive to attain those standards which he placed before them.

Let's take a look at Ephesians 6:1-4 to see how God wants us to relate to each other in our roles as parents and children. As we move through the text there are four questions that we need to answer in relation to the family. The first question is:

I. What are children to do (Ephesians 6:1a, 2a)? In the Ephesian culture, unwanted babies were abandoned, the deformed or weak were killed, and even the healthy were regarded as a hindrance to sexual promiscuity and easy divorce; much like America today. But what did Paul command these children to do?

A. Before we answer the question of what Paul is telling the children, we must ask to what group of children is he talking to? If you go back to chapter one verse one we see that this letter is addressed to the saints in Ephesus. Included in this group of saints are converted children. It's easy to read through the book of Acts and often forget that many of those converted in the early years of the Church were children. Here Paul addresses these Christian children as to how to act as true God-fearing children.

First, Paul says, “Children obey your parents.” The word for obey actually comes from two root words meaning to “listen under”. This listening under means that when an order is issued the response that is called for is given, like a doorman answering a knock at the door. This is what a Christian child is called to do. When there parents say, “Take out the trash,” the response is not to be, “Awww...man! Do I have to?,” or, “Ok, I'll do it later when I have nothing better to do.” No, this word implies that when the order is given the reciprocal action is done.

B. This idea of obedience reminds me of my job at the hospital here in Zion. My normal job is driving the shuttle in the evenings for the patients. Many of the people coming for treatment are from out of town and stay at the local hotels. I drive them back and forth as they need. People hop on my bus and say “Country Inn”. I say, “Ok sir, I can do that.” I put the car into drive and off we go to the hotel. This is the idea that Paul is driving at; command and response.

As parents, those children that are under our roof must obey us if they are truly trying to fulfill their duty as a child of Christ. There is no gray area in what Paul is saying, “Children obey your parents.

C. In verse two, we see that children are to honor their father and mother. After a casual reading you might think that Paul is just repeating what he said in the previous verse, but there is a distinction between obedience and honoring. Where obedience refers more to the actual physical response to a request, the word honor has more to do with the motives of the heart. Honoring someone means to give a person the value that they are due, as in honoring Christ for his work on the cross. A Christian child is not only to obey but to acknowledge their parents God-given authority over them by giving them their love and respect.

D. Honor goes beyond mindless obedience. As we find in the words of Jesus, “This people honors me with their lips,but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me,teaching as doctrines the commandments of men,” Matthew 15:8-9. The people worshiped God and honored them with their lips but when it came to their true motives and intentions they were just giving God lip service and replacing his doctrines with their own.

I have seen this in my own kids. When my daughter Emma was potty training she wore pull-ups instead of diapers. Sometimes I would see her walking through the house and you could see that her pull-up was wet. I'd say, “Emma, do you need a clean pull-up?” “No, Daddy. I ok. It's dry,” because she knew that she shouldn't be going in her pull-up. I'd tell her that she needed to go change and she'd say “OK.” Awhile later she'd come by with the pull-up sagging down to her ankles. “Emma you have to change your pants. Now!” “OK!” she'd say to me without any intention of actually doing anything. She had learned to honor me with her lips but not to give the respect to me to actually follow through with what she said. So we see that the honor that parents deserve has obedience as a component along with respect and love.

So, if we want to be a true Christian family then we need to fulfill our roles in the Lord. So that is what a Christian child should do; obey and honor their parents because this is the role that God has given to Christian children. That leads us to the next obvious question:

II. Why are children to obey and honor their parents (6:1b, 2b)? There are three main reasons Paul gives to us.

A. The first is, “Children obey your parents in the Lord.” As Christians, we are now in Christ. And in so being, our loyalty must be in Christ, no matter what pain that may cause. Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me,” (Matthew 10:34-37). Children must obey their parents because God has commanded it and they are in Christ. Now of course that does not mean that they must obey absolutely because they are to obey in the Lord. Children cannot obey when a parent's command is to do something that is against the commands of the Lord. He must come first in all things. Obedience ought to be the norm and disobedience the rare exception. The family which God ordained and blessed in the Old Testament has not been abolished by the coming of Christ, if anything, its bonds of love and sacrifice have been strengthened.

The second reason is that children are to obey their parents because, “this is right.” Why is it right? What does this phrase mean? The obedience of children to parents does not come to us by special revelation. What I mean by this is that this obedience of children was not given to people solely through the biblical canon. It is what we call “natural revelation”. It is something that God has written on the hearts of all men as explained in Romans 2:15, “[the Gentiles] show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.” Child obedience can be found outside of Christianity. The ancient Greek and Roman societies believed in it. Stoic philosophers taught that obedience was part of the natural order of things. Confucius taught the same and we still see its affects in the Japanese, Korean, and Chinese cultures and customs practiced today. It is hard to find a culture in our world that does not recognize the authority of parents over children. Though they may not have had a strong argument for why they believed the way they did, nevertheless to transgress this was a terrible offense.

The third reason Paul gives us as to why our children ought to obey and honor us is so, “that it may go well with and you may live long on the land [some translations earth].” Here Paul applies an Old Testament promise to the people of Israel to the Gentiles of the church in Ephesus. He reminds them that if they do honor their parents then God has promised them posterity. There children will follow them in the church. For the Israelites the promise was that they would reside long in the land which God had given them, the Promised Land. Here Paul does not tell the Ephesian children that they will get to live in Israel along time. No, under divine inspiration, he expands the scope of this promise to the idea of a Christian heritage. If you honor and obey your parents then your children will do the same.

B. Aretta Loving, Wycliffe missionary, was washing her breakfast dishes when she saw Jimmy, the five-year-old neighbor, headed straight toward the back porch. She had just finished painting the back-porch handrails, and she was proud of her work.

“Come around to the front door, Jimmy,” she shouted. “There’s wet paint on the porch rails.”

“I’ll be careful,” Jimmy replied, not turning from his path.

“No, Jimmy! Don’t come up the steps,” Aretta shouted, knowing of Jimmy’s tendency to mess things up.

“I’ll be careful,” he said again, by now dangerously close to the steps.

“Jimmy, stop!” Aretta shouted. “I don’t want carefulness. I want obedience!” As the words burst from her mouth, she suddenly remembered Samuel’s response to King Saul: To obey is better than sacrifice.

How would Jimmy respond, Aretta wondered. To her relief, he shouted back, “All right, Loving, I’ll go around to the front door.” As he turned around the house, Aretta thought to herself, “How often am I like Saul or like Jimmy, wanting to go my own way? I rationalize, ‘I’ll be careful, Lord’ as I proceed with my own plans.”

But He doesn’t want carefulness. He wants obedience. He wants children to honor and obey their parents because all of us need to honor and obey God. The role and honor of the parents is only part of what is at stake when our children are rebellious. The honor of the Lord is tarnished among people that we know when our children live in a rebellious state.

A Christian family is characterized by it willingness to follow the commands of God for their positions in life. If a Christian kid fulfills their role then they will be doing what is right in the Lord and they will live long on this earth and that life will go well for them. So we have seen how our children ought to act but what about us fathers and mothers?

III. How are parents not to act toward their children (6:4)? In our society we always want to hear about what we need to do. We want the five step plan for happiness. But Paul starts off with telling us parents what not to do.

A. “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger.” Paul had just finished telling children that they need to obey because their parents have a God-given authority over them. Now he turns to parents to tell them that they should not abuse their authority. Parents do this in many different ways; Favoring one child over another, making unreasonable demands beyond the capacity of their child, over-indulgence, letting them do whatever they want without disciplining them, humiliating them, suppressing them, ridiculing them or using sarcasm inappropriately. All of these can provoke a child. Though parents have authority over their children, parents must remember that they too are created in God's image and therefore deserve respect. Even if the child is not a believer, we cannot drive our children to anger. We also must remember that our children are individuals and some personalities just clash. The parent does not have the authority to squash their child's personality just because it conflicts with theirs.

B. Little Johnny went for a play-date with his friend down the street. Later, in the day, he and his mother get into an argument and he unleashes a few four letter words. Greatly disturbed by this Little Johnny's mother forbids him to ever play with the boy down the street ever again saying, “It must be that little pagan boy that is corrupting my boy. My boy would never do anything like that.”

People think that violence, sex and drugs on TV, movies and music is corrupting our children. If only we could ban all that then our society would be better. The school killings, like at Columbine, had nothing to do with the killers parents, right? We need to remember that children are born evil, not good or neutral. The Bible tells us that we are born in iniquity that the unrighteous lie at birth, the heart of man is desperately wicked and that it is not what goes into a man that defiles him but what comes out of his heart. And when this evil is provoked by a father, there is no telling what will be unleashed.

The members of Christ's community must strive to attain those standards which he placed before them. If a parent is to fulfill their God-given role as a parent then they must remember not to provoke their children to wrath. So now we know what not to do but:

IV. What are parents to do for their children?

A. Ephesians 6 tells us that fathers are to, “bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” There are two main things that Paul tells Christian parents to do. The first is to bring their children up in discipline. Discipline is not the same as punishment. When a convicted murderer is executed, the judge is punishing the person for their crime. Discipline has correction as its intention; its goal is to change behavior. In the Bible we see how God disciplines his children through trials but those that are not his children he has prepared eternal separation from him. In the end when God casts people into the lake of fire he does it not do it with the intention that they will one day change.

If you turn your Bible to Proverbs we will find out a lot about this discipline. Proverbs 10:13 tells us, “On the lips of him who has understanding, wisdom is found, but a rod is for the back of him who lacks sense.” Godly discipline will result in understanding. Proverbs 22:15, “Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him.” Foolishness is already in the child and it is the responsibility of the parents to drive it out of them. Proverbs 23:13-14 says, “Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die. If you strike him with the rod, you will save his soul from Sheol.” Discipline needs to be hard sometimes, and this verse assures us that we need not worry about using strong discipline because we won't kill them, though our children might say otherwise. No, it will actually have the opposite effect. This goes back to what we discussed earlier. The promise to children that honor their father and mother is that they will live long on the earth. Here we see the parental side of that command and promise. The parents that discipline their children will see their offspring live long on the earth. Now turn to the book of Hebrews. Chapter 12 verse 11 says, “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.” The author of Hebrews says that all discipline seems painful at first but what it produces, the peaceful fruit of righteousness, far outweighs that momentary pain.

B. God has promised that discipline works if you do it You have been given the authority so exercise it. We have seen it work, we have seen it in action, like the Edwards family.

C. Not only are parents to discipline but their to bring their children up “in the instruction of the Lord.” The word instruction in the Greek is the word paideia. Paideia refers to more than just teaching a child David and Goliath and Jonah and the Whale in Sunday School. Paideia encompasses every aspect and every subject of life. Today we use the word worldview, that is, how you interpret everything that you encounter in this world. Listen to these quotes and you 'll get the idea as to what I'm driving at.

“To think God's thoughts after him, to dedicate the universe to its Maker, and to

be vicegerent of the Ruler of all things: this is man's task. Man is prophet, priest and king. It is this view of education that is involved in and demanded by creation.”

Christians are to think God's thoughts. This is what a parent is instructed to do; train your children in the thoughts of God.

“For the Christian the purpose of education is to facilitate maturation in the image of God and thus growth into true manhood and womanhood, so that the child might be able to fulfill his creation mandate in obedience to God's word. It follows from this that the kind of education we give our children must be one which is thoroughly grounded in the Christian worldview and which seeks to subject every discipline to the authority of God's word as it is revealed in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Education is thus inescapably a covenant activity; indeed it is a central aspect of man's covenant duty. Hence to deny our children such an education is to abandon our responsibilities as the covenant people of God.”

So this instruction in the Lord is not a simple task. It involves teaching children to view everything as God views it.

Jesus said that he was the Way, the Truth and the Life. If children are not taught in light of the knowledge of Christ, that instruction is worthless in God sight because it is apart from the truth, apart from Christ. Children must be taught constantly about God as it says in Deuteronomy 6 when you lie down and when you rise up and as you walk along the way. That means every waking hour children should be learning about God and his creation. The Bible tells us that in Him we live and move and have our being. Apart from God there is nothing. The Bible tells us that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. There is nothing you can teach a child that doesn't come under the power and authority of God. Nothing!

D. Parents are commanded by God to train their children, that is, parents have the sole responsibility to train their children. No one else, not the state, not the Christian school, only the parents. Now the Bible allows for parents to use schools as a tool to help them fulfill their role as teacher of their children but a school can never take the place of a parent. Since parents have this role, we need to choose our tools wisely. Do you send your children to public school or Christian school? If Christian school, then which one do you go to? Or maybe you choose to homeschool, then which curriculum do you use? The answers to all of these questions depend on how you react to the teaching in Ephesians 6 but one answer is clear: parents must teach their children to think as God thinks about everything. The paideia of God is a hard task but one that comes with being a parent. It is the role of the Father.

So, if we want to be a true Christian family then we need to fulfill our roles in the Lord. A Christian family is characterized by it willingness to follow the commands of God for their positions in life. Yes, the members of Christ's community must strive to attain those standards which he placed before them. So we have seen in this passage that:

Children are to obey and honor their parents.

Children are to do this because it is right and because of the promises of God.

Parents are not to provoke their children.

Parents are to bring up their children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

[Conclusion]

If you are a parent with kids at home, then you need to think carefully about how well your children are fulfilling their roles as Christian children. This will reflect directly on how you are doing at your duties as a parent. We need to help our kids to obey and honor us. Our actions need to be in line with Scripture. We need to instill in our children a Christian worldview so that they think biblically about every topic and subject, not just churchy stuff.

At the beginning of this article, I said that this topic of children and parents pertains to all of us. We are all a part of the body of Christ, right, and if one part is injured we are all affected. Therefore, all of us are responsible for each other; we are our brother's keeper. Yes, I am the one that ought to be teaching my children, but you have the duty to make sure that I am doing my job and doing it according to passages like Ephesians 6. If I'm not doing my part you need to come along and help me. Show me in the Scripture where I'm failing and then help me to fulfill my role.

If you are thinking that your children are all grown and out of the house so these verses don't apply to you anymore, I'm sorry but your not off the hook. You see, if you have grandchildren, nieces or nephews, or just because you attend a church, there are children that need you. There are little saints in your sanctuary right now that need you to care about them. Some of their parents may be failing miserably at teaching their children. Some of those kids when they have grown might leave home and your church thinking the same as an atheist. But, how do you know if they need help or their parents need help fulfilling their roles as Christians? You have to get involved with them. We can't be rugged individualists in the body of Christ. We must help each other. We must for the sake of our communities, our churches and most importantly the glory of God. We must see to it that all of us are following the Scripture and the commands of Christ.

So will you join with me in something today? Will you first agree to examining your own family today in light of Ephesians 6? If there are problems then you must ask yourself, “Have I trained my children according to the discipline of the Lord? Have I instilled in my children nothing from our society but all of God? Have I taught my children while acknowledging Christ in every area of life?

Are you concerned about all those kids that are in your Sunday Schools? Are you concerned about the teens that are meeting in your church? Did you know they need your help? Did you know their parents need your help? Do you care? If you thought “no” about any of these questions then today, right now is the time to change. Right now is the time to get involved.

1.Strawbridge, Gregg. Classical and Christian Education: Recapturing the Educational Approach of the Past. http://www.wordmp3.com/gs/classical.htm