Mother’s Day – Eph 6.4
For mother’s day, we decided to make the day an emphasis on the Christian Home. I recently preached on the subject of child training at the recent NW Regional FBF conference, so thought to combine that message with two others on the same subject for an all day emphasis.
The first message concentrated on the first half of Eph 6.4, ‘do not provoke your children to wrath’. We looked at what wrath is and then considered ways in which children are provoked to wrath, including abuse of hand or tongue, inappropriate overbearing leadership, and abdication or absence of leadership. The biblical alternative to this is found in the second half of the verse, which is the subject of our afternoon message. The decision we need to make in light of the possibility of provoking our children to wrath involves forgiveness and attitude adjustment if we are ‘children of wrath’, i.e., if we have been provoked by parents in one of the ways mentioned, repentance if we are currently provoking children to wrath and a replacement of our ways with the Lord’s ways, to be discussed in more detail in the afternoon message.
Read the notes while you listen.
I just became a first time father nine weeks ago today, so I appreciate all the advice that you have in these mp3’s especially on leadership and such. Thanks for the resource.
Hi Nicholas, thanks for the comment. And welcome to fatherhood! It is a great blessing.
The goal we had was for our children to love Jesus Christ. We insisted on teaching and modeling godly behaviour. I left out of the second message a section on evangelizing children. It is in my earlier message from the FBF conference. The section comes at the end of the message. It is a bit brief and really deserves a whole message by itself, perhaps from a different passage. In that message I talk about “delayed infant baptism”, something that I think we practice too much in independent Baptist churches. We need to use a great deal of wisdom as we lead children to faith in Christ. We established a few guidelines for ourselves that we think was helpful. To sum up quickly, we tried to make sure the kids had a real heart response and heart desire to respond to the gospel and then later to ask for baptism. We tried not to give assurance based on having ‘prayed a prayer’. Praying a prayer doesn’t save, only faith in Christ saves.
May the Lord bless you as you raise this little one. And, Lord willing, may he give you many more to raise as well! Children are truly the heritage of the Lord.
Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3