Ephesians 6:1-2
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother” – which is the first commandment with a promise – “that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.”
Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
I grew up in a wonderful, loving Christian home with a Mom and Dad who loved each other very much; and with a father who was a pastor. Unlike some PKs (“preacher’s kids”) I have known over the years I never learned to hate the church; and I think the main reason is that my father was always the same person at home as he was at church. That, along with my mother’s faithfulness in prayer, is why I beleive my brother and I eventually were able to hear God’s call into pastoral ministry.
It was easy for me to love and respect my father. He was, in almost every way I can imagine, a model of what a Christian father should be. But, along with all the tremendous blessings of having him as my Dad, there were also some rather big shoes to fill!
While he never pressured me to follow in his footsteps, and never once suggested I become a pastor, I think I wondered sometimes if I could ever measure up to him as a man. I mean it’s one thing to see your father as a role model but it’s quite another to know that other people see him as a “man of God!”
At some point in my early 20’s, as I was searching for the direction God wanted for my life, I felt the need to write my Dad a letter (remember those?). I’m not really sure why I felt this need but I wanted to tell him that I hadn’t always been the person that maybe he thought I had been. I wanted him to know that, while I loved Christ and wanted to serve him with my life, I wasn’t perfect; I had made mistakes along the way.
A week or two later I received a letter from my Dad in the mail. He wrote that he knew I wasn’t perfect and that he didn’t expect me to be. He also said that he felt that he had not allowed me to see his own failures and apologized for the burden he may have unintentionally created for me.
I still have that letter somewhere.
I think that’s what Paul is getting at when he writes:
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother” – which is the first commandment with a promise – “that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.”
Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
Just as children are not perfect (remember the chocolate milk story?), so also parents are not perfect. And in our imperfection we sometimes, in Paul’s words, “exasperate” our children. The Greek word translated “exasperate” means to “provoke to anger” or, in more contemporary language, “to push someone’s buttons.”
I think one of the ways we “exasperate” our children is when we demand that they be perfect while not holding ourselves to the same standard.
I have seen and heard parents actually use profanity while telling their children not to use foul language! I have been guilty of teaching my children to come to a complete stop at stop signs when driving while I allow myself to execute “rolling stops” more often than not.
We exasperate our children when we tell them, in effect, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
We also exasperate our children when we make our love for them conditional.
Years ago I met a man who was a successful nuclear engineer and well into his 40’s. He had a measured I.Q. of over 170 and could read 1000 pages of technical manuals every day. Yet he told me that he had never known the approval of his own father. No matter how much he achieved, the bar to receive his father’s approval, love and blessing was always set just a little higher than he could reach.
So why is it so important that parents do not exasperate their children? Because of the very next thing Paul says:
Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
What does he mean by “bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord”? I think Paul is telling parents to be sure that their children know and experience the gospel of Jesus Christ. Furthermore, I think he is saying that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to teach the meaning of the gospel while simultaneously exasperating our children.
It is sometimes said that the Christian faith is “caught” as much as it is “taught”; one can say the same thing about the gospel.
May our children not only hear the gospel from us, but may they the gospel in us.
Pastor Brian Coffey
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