A God-like Parent-Child Relationship

Introduction and Ministry Updates

0:02 How Not to Foul Up the Training of Your Children. This is cassette number six in a series given by Pastor Albert N. Martin in the Adult Sunday School class of the Trinity Baptist Church on February 10, 1991. While others are being seated, let me mention what I think is common knowledge to the vast majority of you, and that is that Pastor Barker has been gone this week in a pastoral visit to Puerto Rico where we have official oversight in conjunction with Noble Vader and his labors there in the area of San Juan.

0:39 And then he was also making a trip down to Santiago or over to Santiago to apprise the brethren there where Pastor Arocha labors as an elder in that assembly that we have accepted their overture to assume some level of more, more formal oversight and guidance and counsel along with Pastor Pinheiro. He has been the main point of contact and has agreed to continue to be so. And since English is, in the case of some of the brethren there, a very weak second medium of communication, we're confident that in having Pastor Pinheiro as our point man that the communication will be much more accurately conveyed to us from them and back through him to them. And when I got home from lecturing in a counseling session on Friday, I had about a three-minute telephone call on my answering service from Pastor Barker, and with his permission, I called him last night, I felt this would be the best way to encourage you as well as to send out a prayer request relative to today and the remaining two days, so I just took off my answering machine onto my little dictating machine, Pastor Barker's greetings. He's just said that he's just returned back from the Dominican Republic, and these are his words.

2:13 I pushed the record, I'm sorry. I thought that would be an encouragement to you to have that fresh report.

6:27 In fact, speaking to him last night, the enthusiasm with respect to the work in Santiago has only increased, and he said he doesn't know if he's ever seen a place where there were so many evidences of vital, vibrant, experimental, doctrinal Christianity. And I said, well, if you're seeing contrasts rather than comparisons with things in our own life, come back prepared at some appropriate occasion to speak to us on things I saw in Santiago that I don't see at Trinity. If God will use the brethren we're helping to help us, then may God keep us from any kind of pride that would be unwilling for our spiritual sons and daughters in many ways to show us the way they see us. Thank you.

7:12 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

7:12 of God more perfectly and let's pray that God will bless our brother's labors in the remaining two days and pray that God will bless him as he preaches tonight there in Pastor Vader's midst and among his people and as he indicated he does appreciate the consciousness of your fellowship in prayer with him at this time so let us pray for God's blessing upon us and upon the Lord's servant there our father we do magnify and praise your holy name for what our ears have heard from your servant as he has labored in fellowship and ministry with our brethren in Santiago and there in Puerto Rico we rejoice in every indication that you are the God who is working salvation in the midst of the earth and we do earnestly pray that the remainder of his visit will be heard. blessed of the Spirit. His preaching tonight will be owned of you, that you be with Pastor Vader as he becomes his other mouth to translate his sermon. May it come with power and clarity and unction of the Holy Spirit. And we would plead with you, our Father, that if our brethren

8:32 there have things to teach us, that we may have an open heart and a willing spirit to be rebuked and to be warned and to be encouraged and admonished, that we would welcome any and every influence that will prod us into your ways more perfectly and more zealously. Be with us now as we turn to the Scriptures, as we again address ourselves to these crucial issues of family life. May the Holy Spirit himself be our teacher through the Scriptures. We ask in Jesus.

Reiterating Foundational Presuppositions and Addressing Cultural Opposition

9:09 In Jesus' name, amen. Now, for those who may be visiting with us, whom we do welcome in Christ's name, I should tell you that you are coming in to the sixth study in a series of studies on the broad and vital subject of a biblical approach to child abuse or how not to foul up the training of your children. One of my brethren suggested by stating it positively, that you should follow the course of Jesus Christ, and perhaps it even puts the thing into more accurate focus, how not to foul up the training of your children. And I have reiterated in each review – and I am going to do so this morning and show you why it is so relevant in just a moment – the two fundamental presuppositions on which this entire study rests. And the first is that the fundamental duties of Christian parents are outlined in the scripture of the Gospel, and those duties are different from the duties of the Bible. In other words, now that we have the basicSONA and the fundamental duties of Christian parents, we should not outlined in Colossians 3.21 and Ephesians 6.4.

10:18 And the second is that these duties require the righteous use of spanking and authoritative verbal instruction and correction of our children. Now you wonder, why do I keep emphasizing that? Well, for a number of reasons, not the least of which, there is an increasing movement abroad that stands in direct opposition to this teaching of the word of God and the world will continue to seek to press the church into its mold and Romans 12.2 tells us we must not allow it to do so.

11:01 And I get a newspaper or two newspapers, usually on a Monday, and try to read them. And this past Monday, February the 4th, in the book section, there was a review of a recent book entitled Spare the Child by a Philip Grevin. And the subtitle is The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse. Now let me just read a couple of paragraphs.

11:32 This is the New York Times, and here is a book that will influence child psychologists, sociologists, educators, et cetera, et cetera. It is easy enough to accept the case against the physical abuse of children made by Philip Grevin in his impassioned new book, Spare the Child, the Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse, which the author says is a sequel to his book, quote, The Protestant Temperament, Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America. What is more complex to embrace is the author's conclusion that parents should never, ever lay their hands on their children punitively, not even as a last resort. After all, as the author himself concedes, liberal thinkers such as John Locke to Benjamin Spock have recommended that once in a very great while it is acceptable to resort to corporal punishment, to the punishment of children. And America as a society has always deeply believed in the folk wisdom that to spare the rod is to spoil the child. Now he's going to tell us where that folk wisdom comes from.

12:56 He's going to show us the pit out of which that horrible evil comes. Yet it is precisely the character of American society that Mr. Grevin, a professor of history at Rutgers University, in our own backyard, uses to lend weight to his case against the physical punishment of children. After all, he argues, America is an unusually angry, violent, crime-ridden society.

13:26 The roots of that anger, he writes, lie in the country's Judeo-Christian heritage. It is so pervasive that, and here's a quote from his book, the values and viewpoints, by centuries of tradition and practice, imprints even areas that we believe to be most remote from religious convictions and traditions. He is out for the juggler there. He said, the folk wisdom, spare the rod and spoil the child, is rooted in the theology of the Bible, Judeo-Christian heritage.

14:10 This is a frontal attack, upon the word of God. And it's not being made by some joker who can't put two and two together, who can't write sentences. He's one whose academic qualifications and standing makes him respected in academia. And this kind of stuff, mark my word, in different languages, dressed up in euphemisms, in five years will be one of the dominant notes, in the so-called Christian books on child-rearing.

14:48 As Dr. Schaefer said, tell me what the world is saying today, and I'll tell you what the majority of the church will be saying five years from now. And proof of that is the so-called feminist movement. They were screeching and hollering and burning their bras in the middle and late 60s, and by the 70s, you had so-called evangelical feminist societies writing their books, holding their conferences, and being given, a platform at large gatherings of evangelicals.

15:18 So, dear people, when I keep emphasizing this thing, I'm not doing it for filler. I'm not doing it because I'm getting old and senile and repeating myself. This must become a visceral, spiritual conviction that in all of our discussion of the rearing of our children, and in particular, seeking to avoid the ways to abuse them and not to foul up in their...

15:45 In their training, it is a given with us, a non-negotiable, that the righteous use of the rod of correction and the proper implementation of authoritative verbal instruction and correction are duties required by the living God. Those are our two fundamental presuppositions. Well, then, with those suppositions underneath us, we've been working with this definition of child abuse, a sustained pattern of exasperating or provoking a child to anger, directly taken from Colossians 3 and Ephesians 6-4, the sustained neglect or misuse of those means ordained of God for the child's nurture, that's Ephesians 6-4b, or, an aggravated act of inflicting permanent damage to a child's body or spirit. And the first area in which we are seeking to discover where we might inadvertently, or even after having liked willfully, be guilty of abusing our children is what I have called in the climate of the home,

Defining Child Abuse and the Importance of Home Climate

17:12 the overall spiritual, emotional, and physical climate of the home. And because we have three basic groupings of relationship within the home, we have the parents,

17:29 and then we have the children, this climate can be manifested in the husband-wife relationship, in the parent-child relationship, and the sibling-to-sibling relationship. And so we began with considering the husband-and-wife relationship, and we've established, I trust from the word of God, that that which should characterize the relationship between a husband and wife, if they are to be able to nurture their children in a healthy atmosphere, not impregnated with the radon and asbestos of negative influences, is that they themselves must have a warm, they must have a close, accepting, goodwill, relationship one to another. Next to your prayers, the greatest legacy you can give to your children is an ongoingly, dynamically, healthy husband-wife relationship. And though we may fail in many of the particulars and look back as we sit in our rocking chairs in the rest home, if we can do so still holding hands and have the glow of an ongoing biblical love, it will sweep away many of our particular failures, if we gave to our kids the legacy

18:53 of a happy, wholesome, warm, intimate, dynamically growing husband-wife relationship. Now if you don't believe that, just ask some people who've had it, and ask some people who haven't had it, who are over 40. Because the chickens don't fully come home to roost until you come into your most mature years, and then they do. So we dealt with that relationship, and now for a couple of weeks we've been dealing with the relationship of the parents to the children.

God as the Pattern for Parenting: Warmth, Closeness, Acceptance, Goodwill

19:26 And we've seen that whatever natural affection may be there, when you hold that cuddly little ball of soft flesh that coos and goo-goos, it isn't long into their development before you realize, if you're going to make it, and keep a relationship with those children that is marked by those words of warmth, closeness, harmony, and goodwill, it ain't going to happen naturally. It isn't long before, whether it's incessant crying for no apparent reason, or a problem with a colicky child that keeps you from having a decent night's sleep for three or four months, and a host of other things, it isn't long before you realize if you're going to establish a relationship with your children and maintain a relationship marked by those four things, warmth, closeness, and substitute the word acceptance. Again, one of the brethren helped me there, that word I was fishing for really, harmony, is acceptance and goodwill. And in seeking to establish a theological framework to open up this, I established, or we sought to establish from the word of God, these two fundamental biblical principles that God himself as our Heavenly Father is our general pattern for godliness,

20:54 and God in his fatherly role is our specific pattern for parenting. And having established that from specific portions of the word of God, we then went through over the course of the last half of two weeks ago and all last week, looking at scripture after scripture which demonstrate that in God the Father's relationship to us as his children, his dispositions and actions are characterized by warmth, by closeness, by acceptance, and by goodwill. And now we are to reflect and mirror God's fatherly disposition to us in the disposition that we cultivate and sustain to our children. And when we think of what we are as God's children with all of our perversity and remaining sin and stubbornness and blindness, it will not do to say that, well, God doesn't understand. That's why he treats, oh, he sure does understand. He sees us in all of our vulnerability as preachers.

22:09 He knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust. He sees us in all of our perversity of remaining sin, our blindness, our dullness, and yet in spite of all of that, his heart is toward us in warmth, closeness, acceptance, and goodwill. Even when he chastises us, it is out of goodwill whom the Lord loves, not whom he gets so irritated with that he loses his temper, he smacks, but whom the Lord loves.

22:40 He chastens and rebukes every son whom he receives. God revealed in Christ says, as many as I love, I rebuke, and I chasten. That one text alone is enough to make us go out and have a burning ceremony for this educated fool. An educated fool who dares to contravene the word of God.

23:08 That's all he is. An educated fool, not a master to be listened to. As many as I love, I rebuke, and I chasten. Now that's what we've established.

Guidelines for a God-like Climate: Embracing the Standard

23:21 And time ran out in terms of applying this. And as I prayerfully considered where to go this morning, I felt the best thing to do, because a number of you have indicated that this material has smacked you right between the eyes. For some of you, it's opened up wounds, and God has gone in and scraped out the pus sacs for others. It has made wounds, and you've gone to Christ for healing and cleansing.

23:47 Some of you have told me you've even had some sessions with your families, you've confessed your sins to your children, and you're making a fresh start, and we bless God for that. And so what I want us to do this morning is to sit for the remainder of our time on this subject, guidelines for a God-like climate in your relationship to your children that pertain particularly to God. The guidelines that we're going to deal with fall into three categories. Those that pertain to our relationship to God as parents.

24:25 Some guidelines that pertain to our relationship to our children. We'll take those up, God willing, two weeks from now. I'll be gone with the singles next weekend, and Pastor Nichols will be picking up some of the loose ends from the fifth commandment in the class next week. And then, those that pertain to ourselves.

24:46 And so I want to be intensely practical at this point and amplify more than any other part of our study this aspect because it is so crucial. We didn't spend a lot of time how do we create and nurture this relationship because I only brought it in as it has bearing upon the matter of our children. This is not meant to be an exhaustive or balanced treatment of family relationships. It's how not to blow it with your kids.

25:17 And so we introduce the husband-wife relationship to show how crucial it is in relationship to the children, but the focus is really here. Now, if we are to cultivate, to attain, and then maintain and increase the relationship with our children marked by warmth, by closeness, acceptance, and goodwill, as opposed to coldness, distance, non-acceptance, and ill-will, we need to know what it's necessary to do in relationship to Bob as parents, in relationship to our children, and in relationship to ourselves. And here's what I'm permitting I want us to consider four things. And I hope we'll have time for discussion. I don't promise, but I hope. Number one, if you would have this kind of relationship with your children, here's the first guideline.

26:18 You must embrace the standard for such a climate as right, reasonable, and attainable. You must embrace the standard for such a climate as right, reasonable, and attainable. In Romans 12 and verse 2, the Apostle says that in a context of a heart suffused with gratitude for the mercy of God in Christ, our desire is to present ourselves living sacrifices unto God, and then determined in that posture that the world will not squeeze us into its mold, but that we shall be transformed by the renewing of our minds. This is the great end in view. In order that you may prove, that is, that you may prove in your experience to the test and validate in your own life history what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Here, the will of God is called the good, the acceptable, or the well-pleasing, and the perfect.

27:42 And Paul says to these believers that they are to prove, that is, experimentally and personally in their own world of men and things and responsibilities, yes, in their own relationship to their children, that they may prove the will of God, the good, the acceptable, and the perfect. Fortified, and further, while explicitly referring to the Decalogue, it is equally clear that all aspects of God's revealed will fit the description of Romans 7, 12. The law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good. Now this standard we have seen where God's spiritual parenting of His spiritual children is to be the paradigm, is to be the pattern, the model of our earthly parenting of our natural children, that is a revelation of the will of God. And though it is not specifically articulated in terms of the Decalogue, which is the specific reference in Romans 7, all of God's will that is revealed in God's word, of that it can be said

29:08 it is holy, righteous, and good. And so I say to you as parents that the first and the most essential guideline on the threshold, if we are to attain and maintain this kind of relationship to our children, is to embrace this standard as a climate that is right, reasonable, and attainable. If you reject the standard as unreasonable and unattainable, you have a controversy with God. And he who has a controversy with God will not know the enablement of the grace of God.

29:49 This is not a noble ideal. I did not say we must seek to attain a climate that is perfectly and without interruption marked by warped closeness, acceptance, and good will. That would be perfectionism. And there's no perfectionism, individual or domestic.

30:10 But I talked about an overall pervasive climate where these things are the dominant, albeit not perfect, characteristics. Now as you've heard this, if you sat there saying, oh, well, that's the lovely, noble ideal, but if he knew the situation in my home, he'd know there's no...

30:30 My friend, God knows it. And this is not Albert M. Standard. This is God's standard.

30:36 Now have you embraced it from the heart as attainable, as good, as right, as holy? Have you? You see, if you don't, then your conscience won't condemn you when there are elements in your home contrary to this. You'll say, oh, well, we're human.

30:54 I get sick and tired of people, instead of saying, we're sinners, saying, oh, well, we're human. My friend, humanity has to do with creatureliness. Sin has to do with the moral standards of God. And God takes pity upon our frame and remembers we are human.

31:12 But he deals with our sin righteously. And you and I must deal with it. And I really wonder, if I sat at my desk and I said, Lord, I wonder how many really, in their heart of hearts, have embraced this standard as reasonable and as attainable. If you don't, you have a controversy with God.

31:36 And number two, you won't be willing to pay the price to see it attained in your home. Because I didn't say it's easily attainable. But it is attainable. And only when you hitch your wagon to this stuff by God's word will you ever be able to begin to attain and maintain such a climate in your home.

Guidelines for a God-like Climate: Acknowledging Inability

32:02 Second guideline that has to do with your relationship to God is this. Acknowledge your inability to attain and maintain such a climate in your own strength. Acknowledge your inability to attain and maintain such a climate in your own strength. In calling us to such a standard, God is not making demands upon our native resources.

32:34 Rather, He's making demands upon His grace in us and toward us. And that's not just trying to be a clever turn phrase. That's the whole heart of the issue. In making these demands upon us, in setting such a standard before us, God's not making demands upon our native resources.

32:55 He's making demands upon His own grace available to us in Christ. And here are two pivotal texts. John chapter 15. John chapter 15 and then we'll go back to Romans 7.

33:10 Words familiar, I'm sure, to most of you if not all of you. Where the Lord likens our relationship to Him and in the context it was especially significant. He's telling the disciples He's going to go away. But in going away He's going to send another comforter, the Holy Spirit.

33:32 And the Spirit's coming will not replace Christ. The Spirit's coming will make Christ nearer than He had ever been before. In the person of the Spirit Christ Himself says, I will come to you. I will dwell in you.

33:49 And here He uses the imagery of the intimate connection between the main stalk or the main limb, whatever term is used, of a vine and then all of the branches that are organically united to it as my five fingers are organically united to the one and same palm of my hand. So He says that every child of God is like a branch in the vine. There is living, organic relationship. And in opening up that extended imagery, what we might call an extended metaphor, our Lord says in verse 5, I am the vine, you are the branches.

34:32 He that abides in me and I in you and I in him, the same beareth much fruit for apart from me, severed from me, ye can do nothing. And there is our trouble. We have unofficially but very rarely many of us in our own minds rewritten that verse. Apart from me, ye cannot do the unusual and difficult thing you are called upon to do.

35:02 For example, if some of you are utterly unaccustomed to public speaking, we are suddenly called upon by one of your elders to get up this morning and we said, look, we heard there is a whole bunch of unconverted people coming in this morning, most of them out of such and such a background and we went to one of the men. That's his field. And we say, we think it would be good if you gave a five minute testimony of how the grace of God meets you in that field. On the spur of the moment, you had to get together thoughts to say for five minutes in front of five, six hundred people, oh boy, you would believe this verse then.

35:34 My, you would inwardly pray up a storm, wouldn't you? And say, Lord, I don't want to be disobedient to my elders' request and I see there is a good opportunity, but Lord, I can't do that. Lord, help! You would do some pretty fast, furious, ejaculatory prayer, wouldn't you?

35:51 Huh? You say, well, Paul, I believe that verse. Without me, you can do nothing. See, when the difficult things come, but how many times when you have gotten up for an ordinary day where as far as you knew it was going to be the ordinary coffee, the ordinary strokes to get your whiskers off, the ordinary things to do first, the ordinary ritual putting your right shoe on first, to your left, and most of you don't even know which one you do first.

36:15 That's how you do it. You do it so unconsciously. If you were under oath right now, and you were asked, which shoe do you put on first? You couldn't answer.

36:23 And you get the rest of your clothing on and you go to fix the breakfast and braid the girl's hair and all the rest. Ordinary day! Do we feel that same utter sense of the impact of Jesus' words? Without me, you can do nothing.

36:37 You cannot do enough of yourself this day, Mom and Dad. Keep a climate marked by warmth, by closeness, acceptance and goodwill apart from drawing upon me, my life, my strength. Why? Why?

36:57 Why can I, without him, do nothing? Well, Romans 7, again, gives us our answer in a nutshell. Romans, chapter 7, verse 18. For I, I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.

37:20 Are the commodities of warmth and closeness and acceptance and goodwill, are they good things? Yes. Well, they don't dwell in you natively. For to will is present with me.

37:35 To will those things, yes, that is present. But to do that which is good is not. I have no native stock of grace that automatically parcels itself out. Without me, you can do nothing.

37:54 And so, if you and I are to attain and maintain such a climate, then the second guideline I give to you, my fellow parents, is acknowledge your utter inability to attain and maintain such a climate in your own strength. Be honest with God. He knows us anyway. Say, oh Lord, if I've got to face another day with a colicky kid, I'm going to go crazy.

38:24 I'm going to sit on the living room floor and pull my hair out. I'm going to bang my head against the wall. You say, well, somebody else feels that way yet. And you're too embarrassed even before you think you're ready to pull your hair out and bang your head against the wall, God sees you thinking it.

38:59 So you tell God that. You who are mothers of little ones, you who are mothers of teenagers, when you're mother and father of little ones, you're saying it's certainly going to get easier than this when you enter into the problems of preteens and teens. So we're always thinking. Well, the circumstances, you see, that is the rub.

39:30 No, no, the rub is this. Without me you can do nothing. You can't keep that climate, whether it's the unique and peculiar pressures of little ones, half little ones, or the preteens and young adults across the whole spectrum. We can do nothing that is spiritually good, that is according to the divine standard, that is well pleasing to God apart from the virtue of our union with the Lord Jesus Christ.

40:09 And you need to tell God, Lord, the climate that I want this day, where the radon and the coldness and rejection and ill will will have no place in this home. Oh God, I have no strength of my own to guard against it. Left to myself the windows will be thrown open and it will be sucked in as with a massive vacuum cleaner, because that's the stuff that's in our hearts in remaining sin. In the hearts of our children it may not only be remaining sin, but also the devil in our house.

Guidelines for a God-like Climate: Earnestly Seeking Grace in Prayer

40:51 And to have a climate like that when they are natively like their father who is a murderer, who's full of hate, who's full of ill will, it takes the grace of God. And we need to acknowledge our inability to attain and maintain such a climate in our own strength. Guideline number three, for parents who are in need of grace, we must earnestly seek in prayer the needed grace stored up in Christ and conveyed to us by the indwelling spirit. Now I've chosen the words carefully. Earnestly seek in prayer the needed grace stored up in Christ and conveyed to us by the indwelling spirit. And we need to acknowledge our inability to attain and maintain the grace of God. Guideline number three, for parents who are in need of grace, we must earnestly seek in prayer the needed grace stored up in Christ and conveyed to us the needed grace

42:20 stored up in Christ and conveyed to us the needed grace stored up in Christ and conveyed to us the needed grace stored up in Christ and conveyed to us the needed grace stored up in Christ and conveyed to us the needed grace stored up in Christ and conveyed to us the needed grace stored up in Christ and conveyed where he wondered, is it right for me to have so much? He said, I've learned how to abound and to have plenty. And he said, I've learned how to be effaced. When I'm on one meal of bread and water a day and only one sweater on my back and one pair of sandals for my feet, and if you ask me how and where I get the strength to go from here to here, it's not in me natively. Not that I was so scrambled up in my mother's womb that I can live like a king one day and a pauper the next. I've just got a flexible temperament. Paul doesn't put the attention on his temperament.

43:28 He says, I can do all things in him that strengthens me. In him that strengthens me. So then, in the home, with all the broad spectrum of emotional demands and physical pressures, what is the answer? The answer is to be able to do all things required of you to keep a climate of warmth, closeness, acceptance, and goodwill.

43:54 You can do all things in him who strengthens you. Not in yourself. Not in your native temperament. Not in your own stock of natural self-discipline.

44:06 No. But through him who strengthens. It's interesting, isn't it, that the one command in all of the scriptures to be filled with the Spirit is given on the threshold of family directives. Ephesians 5 and verse 18.

44:24 Be not drunk with wine, wherein is riot, but be being filled with the Spirit.

44:35 And then there are five participles indicating the channels that a Spirit-filled life will cut or the avenues down which a Spirit-filled man will run and walk, speaking one to another in songs and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord, giving thanks for all, all things in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to God and the Father, subjecting yourselves one to another in the fear of Christ. A Spirit-filled man, Paul says, will be marked by a certain inward disposition. It will be an inward disposition of fundamental joy in the Lord expressed in the singing or speaking one to another or to ourselves in songs, hymns, spiritual songs, singing, speaking, giving thanks. And then when it breaks out into horizontal relationships, he says, subjecting yourselves one to another in the fear of Christ. And then in verse 22, down to the end of verse 4 of chapter 6, he's dealing with the domestic life. The first explicit focus of relationships that comes after the command to be filled with the Spirit are domestic relationships.

45:58 What is God telling? He's telling us we can't do what is set forth in these portions unless we are full of the Spirit. I can do all things through Christ. Be filled with the Spirit, nurturing your children, not provoking them to anger.

46:19 And while the Spirit is given to us in the complex of conversion, first of all, sovereignly coming to us to renew us beneath the level of our own consciousness, and at the level of consciousness, our first knowledge that he's come sovereignly to us is that in our grief or sin, we see hope in a crucified Savior and we repent and believe. We lay hold of Christ in a believing penitence and we seek the living God in a penitent faith. And then God is pleased to give to faith the gift of the Spirit as the Spirit of adoption, enabling us then to call this, God, our Father. And if we are without the Spirit, we are none of His, Romans chapter 8. But it's interesting, isn't it? In Romans 8, He's called the Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit, all one in the same Spirit. Why?

47:19 Because it is in the person of the Holy Spirit that the virtue and strength of Christ needed, the virtues of Christ and the strength of Christ needed are actually conveyed, to us in the deep recesses of our own redeemed humanity. And though the Spirit is given, it does not mean that He cannot continue to be given in ever-increasing copious measures. That's why Paul can talk in Philippians 1.19, your prayer and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

47:56 If you, being evil, Luke 11.13, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him? Well, if we're His children, we already have the Spirit, yes, but we're to pray that we may be filled with the Spirit, that He may be given in ever-increasing copious measures. And could it be that the great inadequacies that many of us are experiencing in relationship to our children, over them could be written one basic text, James 4, verse 4.

48:39 You have not, because. That's it. You have not, not because you haven't read six books of Dobson.

48:54 Sorry, it's not 4.4, it's 4.2. Sorry.

48:58 James 4.2, last part.

49:01 Doesn't say you have not the grace and the patience and the wisdom needed to keep a climate of warmth and closeness to overcome. Your own native sense of being awkward and expressing love to your kids verbally and physically because you didn't get it yourself. And so you need to read six books on how to overcome your psychological hang-ups. No, no.

49:26 You have not because you ask not.

49:30 Does God know how your psyche is put together? And the holes and the twisted parts from your own up? Does God know all that? Then go to Him and tell Him all about it and say, God, by the Holy Spirit, correct that abnormality.

49:44 Had sin never entered, every single kid in Adam's household and all who came out of those kids would have been absolutely at ease to say, I love you, to express love in appropriate physical ways and deeds and words. It's sin that has brought all these hang-ups. And Jesus Christ came to save us from our sins, dear people. The sins of our psychological quirks that keep us from doing the clear work.

Critique of Psychologized Christianity and the Power of Grace

50:13 The clear will of God. Our emotional hang-ups. Our emotional scars. And frankly, I am increasingly disturbed with the way the Christian church is being psychologized to death at the denigration of the ability of God's grace.

50:31 What was a first century... where there were gross abnormalities as far as patterns are concerned.

50:43 Where you were an older sibling and you saw... a kid born in your house who was stuck out on a mat outside the door.

50:51 And only if your father went out and gave him the right of citizenship was he taken in and honed as your brother. He could have been left to die. What in the world kind of impact would that make on a four or five year old kid? That's the situation in the Roman Empire.

51:09 You could have seen him picked up by a compassionate Christian and adopted. We talk about psychological warping.

51:19 Yet these documents come into such a context. Dear people. And it's time we stop...

51:26 Stop under the guise. Well, if I just could get the fight...

51:30 No! Have not! Because you asked. Go to God with your twisted psyche and say, Lord Jesus, save me from the kinks and the bends and the twists and the holes in my psyche.

51:50 So that I can learn to love and accept as you accept. And express good will and be vulnerable. Go to the Lord. Now, I'm not saying there is never a place for the psychologist or the psychiatrist.

52:07 Someone will go out of here and say, Boy, he really gave a blast at the psychos. Friends, please. No, I'm not saying that. But what I am saying is if we believe as an ordinary rule that the ordinary means of grace are adequate, then let's start acting like we believe that.

52:26 And say, Lord, that standard's not unreasonable. It's good. It's acceptable. It's perfect.

52:31 But, oh God, I don't have the stuff in me. I believe all fullness is in Christ and that I can do all things in him who strengthens me. And I believe that strength is actually conveyed to me if I may use crass physical spatial language within the confines of the limits of my shoulders and fingers and my feet and head and everything that's within me of mind and soul and spirit and emotions. It's in there that the Holy Ghost actually works with divine energy.

53:10 The Puritans were frustrated. At least one of them, Owen, trying to express that, ended up using the word, a physical energy is put forth upon the soul. What were they trying to state? This is not just notional.

53:27 This is dynamic and powerful and real. He said, where that colicky kid got you ready to bang your head through the wall, you can actually have a quiet, calm spirit because Christ's grace is doing something in here. And where there's that kid, when God scrambled him up in your wife's womb, he was made so different from you, you can't get inside his head. You can't understand him.

53:58 He could not, you say, I wonder if they mixed him up in the nursery at the hospital. And you just get so frustrated trying to understand your own kid. And it's more frustrating because the very ways in which he's different from you are things that irritate you. You say, there's no way I can be close and intimate and warm and loving with something so different from me.

54:20 God can make the fascination of trying to figure him out a holy exploration in which you'll delight. A holy challenge to which your godly manhood and womanhood will rise. And then God can give you a love that does not have to do with the natural love of affinity. Jesus said even the Gentiles, they love one another.

54:44 Why? Because they're cut out of the same cloth. The Gentiles greet one another. Why?

54:49 Because they got a common commitment, common standards. What do ye more than others? And you can be as close emotionally to that kid whose is unlike you as night from day as you can be to the one who's your mirror image. Now, you can be close to the one who's your mirror image by natural affinity.

55:11 But there's only one way you're going to be close to the one who's unlike you and that's by spiritually wrought grace. Maybe that's God why God scrambled that kid up that way. Because he wanted you to know the grace of God. He wanted to put you again in the wall until you said, Lord, I can't do it.

55:31 And God says, well, I finally got the message through. I've been telling you that all along. Without me, you can do nothing. But you didn't believe it until I gave you that kid made that way with that particular psyche.

55:42 And now I've got you. And if it dawned on you that just may be the very reason. And may I suggest to some of you by just flipping up to this relationship, that may be just the reason why in prayer and in careful counsel, you didn't marry hastily, irresponsibly. You say, man, but if I knew she was this, I never would.

56:07 Wait a minute now. If you can't believe God guided you and you had a heart that was full of integrity, you sought counsel. No, God veiled an awful lot of what she was and what he was because he was engineering that person into your life to get your back against the wall until you throw your hands up and say, Lord, if I'm ever going to love that woman, you've got to do something for me. Because I've come to see things in the intimacy of marriage that I never knew, which if I knew, I never married her.

56:37 And she's saying the same thing about you. So you can do one of two things. You can have a standoff and say, well, we're incompatible, but we know you're in it for good. And so we'll just bite the bullet and live.

56:49 And that's what some Christians do. Or you can say, bless God, you didn't give me what I thought I needed. You gave me what you knew I needed. And now, Lord, if I'm really going to love that woman with a warm, intimate, close goodwill, accept God, you're going to have to do something in me you ain't never done before.

57:12 And that's just why He gave her to you. Now stop fighting her. And stop fighting Him. You say, well, I could really love Him if only...

57:22 No, no, no, no, no, no. If He were only that way, you'd love Him with a natural love. And you'd never know the grace of God. And God's determined to display His grace.

57:34 Isn't that what we read in Ephesians 3? He's determined under principalities and powers in heavenly places to show off His manifold grace. And some hymns of heaven and hell floats around in that world and says to some righteous spirit, or I don't know if they have access to God anymore since the death of Christ. That's debated by the theologians.

57:58 But let's just suppose one of them says, huh, look at that couple down there. They never get along well. And in the early years of their marriage, they don't. But now after 10 years, I mean, they're just like two coo birds.

58:10 It's getting better all the time. And when accusations are made, this is all a bunch of nonsense. God points to principalities and powers, says, if that's so, you explain that couple to me. Explain that couple to me.

58:22 Look at me. So many areas that could be points of tension and difference and ill will and look at them. Like two little coo birds getting more cooey all the time. That's my grace.

Guidelines for a God-like Climate: Not Grieving the Spirit

58:35 What am I driving at? Are you getting a hold of it? We're to be this kind of husband and wife. That was a digression.

58:47 But primarily these kinds of parents. We must not only accept the standards, accept the standard as right and reasonable and good. We must acknowledge our inability to attain it. We must earnestly seek in prayer the grace of the Holy Spirit.

59:05 And I see that it's already 1034. Well, we must determine not to grieve the Spirit by toleration of ungodlike attitudes in our hearts toward our kids. Don't tolerate ungodlike attitudes in your heart to your kids. Ephesians 4, 28 to 32.

59:25 You will grieve the Spirit if you tolerate bitterness and wrath and clamor and indulge in evil speaking. Don't tolerate it. It's not enough to pray that God would fill you with the Spirit and impart the grace and strength of Christ. Then you must not tolerate anything that would grieve Him in causing your own spirit to be suffused with those graces that will help you to have a climate with your children that is God-like.

59:52 A climate marked by warmth, by closeness, by acceptance and goodwill. Dear people, are you grieving the Spirit? You've got bitterness, some of you, against your kids. And your bitterness is they aren't the way you wished they were put together.

60:11 And down underneath, you've never accepted that God had a right to scramble them up in the womb the way He did. You better go home today and settle that with God. Psalm 139 said, God was the scrambler in the womb. He was there engineering the gene pool.

60:27 He was there doing it. You better tell God you're sorry for questioning His wisdom. That He gave you just the kids He gave you because He knew in that relationship His grace would shine. Accept it.

60:43 Cry to Him. And if you're grieving the Spirit by tolerating anything contrary to Him, repent of it. Stop it. Go to the cross.

60:51 Go to the blood of Christ. Plead for cleansing. And then say, Lord, by Your grace, our home is going to be one marked by warmth, closeness, acceptance, and goodwill. Not that I might show how great a parent I am, but that I might tell people what a great Savior I am.

Conclusion and Prayer

61:12 Our Father, how we thank You for Your Word. We thank You that it is the sufficient rule of faith and practice. We thank You that in it we have a lamp to our feet and a light to our pathway. And oh God, help every parent in this place today to whom one or more of these points was an arrow feathered by Your hand and shot into his or her heart.

61:47 We pray that they may not pull it out until the wound is deep enough to drive them out of themselves to the Lord Jesus. We pray none will leave wallowing in self-pity, but that we will leave disciplined by the grace of true penitence and a fresh visit to the cross O Lord, help us, help us by Your grace that we with the Apostle may be able to say I can do all things in Him who strengthens me. Seal then Your Word to our hearts. We ask in Jesus' name.

62:22 Amen. You have been listening to How Not to Foul Up the Training of Your Children by Pastor Albert N. Martin. These cassettes are distributed by the Trinity Book Service.

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