Gloria Dei Lutheran Church | Urbandale, Iowa

Parent's Priorities: Transfer Dependence of Children from Parents to God

Pastor Meyer’s Sermon

Sunday, October 12, 2008

A few months ago, my family and I went to Arcadia, Iowa, to visit a pastor friend of mine and his family. And, while we were there, the kids wanted us to go and look inside of the church. They have an older church building there. So we took the kids over to the sanctuary and let them look around for a little bit. While we were in there, Ben, my 5-year-old son, came up to me and said, “Daddy, can I go up into the pulpit?” And I thought to myself, “Ah, he wants to be like his daddy. Yeah.” “Yeah, you can go on up into the pulpit. You can take a good look around.” And while he climbed into the pulpit and while he was moving these books and papers around, I was elbowing my friend, saying, “Look, look. Doesn’t it fit him well? He wants to be like his daddy.” Well, he got up into the pulpit and he took the microphone and he adjusted it and he got himself ready to preach and he gathered himself up and he said, “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Yes, that’s my boy.

If you are a parent or if you know someone who is a parent or have had a parent, I’m sure you have a whole library full of awesome stories about what kids do. And today, we start a new sermon series entitled “Parents Priority” and we’re going to see that God has given us certain priorities in scripture that can help guide us as we handle this joyful, challenging and yet humbling role God has given us in raising our kids.

And each of these priorities apply to whether your children are younger or whether the children are older. Now if you’re single or if you’re married and you don’t have children, I would encourage you to think about some of the aspects that you hear this morning and how you might be able to apply them into your own life as you journey along with God.

And so we start with our first priority and I need to tell you this is the foundational priority. It’s foundational to everything we do as parents and our first priority is that we transfer our children’s dependence away from us as parents over to God so they’re depending solely on God. Now I need to say this again because it’s so foundational to everything we do as parenting. Our priorities as moms and as a dad is to teach our kids to gradually transfer dependence.

Now our children, when they are little, they depend on us for everything, don’t they? If they need a glass of water, they depend on you to get it for them. When they hurt, they come seek you out. When they find that cool, little bug in the back yard, they come find you. When they are afraid of thunder at night, whose bed do they get into? Yours. And as they get older, they’re dependence starts to change. I’ve seen that in my own family as now we’ve gotten to a point where our children can go to the bathroom on their own. And so we see, as they transfer their dependence, which helps them to transfer where they no longer depend on us but instead we teach them to depend on God because God is really the only one who will ever completely fulfill and be faithful and love them in every single way.

Now where did this come from? Well, it comes from our first reading for this morning from Deuteronomy 6 and I need to set it up for you a little bit. You see, the whole book of Deuteronomy is Moses talking to the Israelites to get them ready to get into the Promise Land. But this is a new group of Israelites. We see that in Deuteronomy, which is Book No. 5 in the Old Testament, Moses is speaking to a new generation which was not there, they were not born yet, when God brought Israel through Moses out of Egypt in the Exodus. They were not there at the foot of Mt. Sinai when God gave His promises and His covenant. And so these new Israelites, they are preparing themselves to go into the Promise Land. And it is here that Moses recites for them the Ten Commandments, the covenant, the Big 10 that God has challenged His people to live by while in the Promise Land.

Now He is speaking about these commandments and Moses gives the most important teaching about parenting in all of scripture. And we find it in Deuteronomy 6 right in Verse 1. Moses says this, “These are the commands, the decrees and laws the Lord your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land you are crossing the Jordan to possess so that you, your children and their children after them may fear the Lord your God as long as you live.” In other words, teach your children to fear the Lord. Fearing the Lord means to trust, to acknowledge, to honor, to respect God. And as you teach them to live according to His commands, not only will you yourself be changed but generations upon generations will be different, too. We as parents need to lead our children not to depend on us or themselves or anything they see around them but instead, on the one who has created everything. And God is telling us, as parents, He has put within each of us a power to change generations and generations to come.

Now the question is how do we go about doing that? Well, God encourages us to keep in mind two important principles as we strive to help our children transfer dependence and the first one starts, not with our kids, no, the first one starts with each and every one of us. You see, we are to love our God. And we see that, we pick it up again in Deuteronomy 6:4 where it says, “Here, O, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” We are to love our God. That means before we can even begin teaching our children, we need to first practice what we seek to teach.

St. Francis of Assisi said it so well when he said, “It’s no use walking anywhere to preach unless your walking is your preaching.” For as we love the Lord our God with all of our hearts, we find we spend time with God regularly in His words through devotion. We do it because we know the most important thing in this life is to have a relationship with God. When difficult decisions come up or when someone is sick in our family, the first thing we do is to pray to God for guidance or for healing. Or we find ourselves getting involved in church because it’s important to us and so we seek to become participators and not just participants and we become active in the church and we’ve immersed ourselves into finding deep, growing relationships with others in the church community because we can truly say that we’re plugged into this community and to this family of God because we know it helps us as a person. It helps us to grow as a Christian.

But wouldn’t you agree that if we’re honest with ourselves, if we really take a look at our lives, we find that we love God with just a little bit of our hearts. In this world we live in, there are so many things that can distract us from loving God with all of our hearts. When I look at my own life and when I compare my life to God’s Ten Commandments, I’m reminded constantly of my failures. God tells us to love Him with our heart and with our soul and with our strength and God also points out that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves but if we’re honest with ourselves, we can see that we have failed to love God, that we have failed to love our neighbors perfectly. And that means we don’t deserve God’s care. It means that we don’t deserve His kindness but rather what we deserve is His anger and His punishment because of our sins.

But there’s also something else we know. We know that Jesus has told us something very important. And we remember these words, Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law. I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” We remember that Jesus came to this earth to fulfill the law completely, perfectly for us. It’s something we cannot do on our own and He chooses to go to the cross for us, to die a death that was meant solely for us so we can be forgiven of our sins and He rose again three days later so He could come to us to comfort us when we make those mistakes in life and when we seek that forgiveness. And so when we spend time depending on God ourselves, coming to Him to seek forgiveness for the mistakes we’ve made, praising Him for what He has done for us, it is then that we begin to teach our kids. And it becomes not just what we say. It becomes not just what we hope or what we think but it becomes actions that help describe who we really are and how important having a relationship with God really is.

I thought it was interesting, I came across a study about kids who grow up and become active Christ followers as adults and I found out that if Mom and Dad both went to church, then about 72% of children grow up to be Christ followers as adults. And if only Mom goes to church, it drops down to 15%. What I thought was interesting was the role the father plays because if the father only goes to church, 55% of kids will go to church as adults. Dads, do not ever underestimate the value you play in getting your kids to know Jesus. You see, as parents, the first thing we can do for our kids is to love God with all of our hearts, for the children begin to learn not by what is taught but rather they learn by what is caught through what we do.

Now God has encouraged us to keep in mind two important principles and the first one is that, as parents, we are to love our God. The second one is that we, as parents, are to lead our families. And we pick it up again in Deuteronomy 6 right after we see loving the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. We pick it up again with Verse 6. “These commandments I give you today are to be upon your heart to impress them on your children, to talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road and when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gate.” We are to lead our families. And we don’t lead by what we express to them. No, we lead by what we impress upon them. Did you hear it? God tells us, “Impress these commandments. Impress upon your children.” And the Hebrew word there for impress is a carpentry word. It means to carve. It means to sand into. It means to ingrain into the family and to the children and we are to lead our children spiritually.

Edward, Duke of Windsor, said this about America, I thought it was interesting, “The thing that impresses me most about America is the way that parents obey their children.” I want you to think about that for a second. “The thing that impresses me most is the way that parents obey their children.” We are to lead. We’re called to lead. We’re called to impress upon our children spiritually. So spiritual talk becomes not just something we do on the weekends or on the way to or from church but it also becomes a part of every day of the week of everything that is going on and that means that you take a hard look at your family life. It means if there is a soccer tournament on Sunday morning, we will attend church as a family on Saturday night because it’s important to be in worship. It means if there is a question that comes up about morality or a certain kind of behavior, we are quick to go to scripture to see what God has to say about it. It means that we’re willing to send the children to Grace Place or to Castaway or to Faith Alive even though our kids are wanting to go home because we know it’s important for them to build relationships not only with each other but with Jesus. Think about it. We, as parents, are called to set the tone. We are in charge and we are as concerned about the children’s immediate happiness as we are about their holiness, as we are about their full pursuit of God in every single way. Because, my friends, one of the most dangerous things we can do as parents is to be child-centered parents instead of Christ-centered parents. If our lives revolve around our children, our children will only get to know a little bit about God. They find themselves knowing just a little bit about Him and not learning how to know God personally and intimately in a life-changing way.

And so what we do as parents is to impress upon them, to ingrain into their hearts who they are in Jesus. We impress upon our children the way they should go. Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train a child in the way he should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” First it starts with us and then we intentionally lead our families.

And so we impress upon them how to conduct themselves by what we say and do, as we take our kids to T-ball practice. We ingrain into them how to take care of their anger by how we handle our anger. We impress into our children how to manage God’s money by how we manage God’s money. We carve into the hearts of our teenagers that they are loved by God even though they may feel like they are unlovable. We teach our children when they have made mistakes in life, they can come and seek forgiveness because they’ve seen us come and seek forgiveness. And we can impress upon them to carefully select their friends and to watch the words they say because that’s what we do.

It takes work and it’s not easy. But as we do, we’ll begin to see that we are ingraining into our children the truth of God’s power, that what we’re ingraining into our children is goodness, the power of prayer, the truth of His word, the working of His spirit. And we will empower and lead our children to be able to transfer their dependence from us over to God. And we can lead them to the one who gave His life up for them and when they know who they are in Jesus, it makes all of the difference.

About four weeks ago, my grandfather died. And I want to thank you for all of the cards and words of encouragement that you’ve given me. But when we found out that he had died, there was a flurry of activity for the family to get ready so we could drive down to Perryville, Missouri, for the funeral and we arrived in Perryville very late and we stayed in a hotel room that night. The next morning as we got up and got ready to go over to my grandmother’s house, that’s when it hit me. It hit me that my grandpa had died. And so while I was sitting there on the bed in the hotel room with tears coming down my face, Michaela, my oldest, she came over and said, “What’s wrong, Daddy?” And the only words I could say were, “I miss Grandpa.” And she said, “Don’t worry. Grandpa’s in heaven and you’ll see him again.” And it was at that moment, when listening to her words, I thought to myself, “She’s got it. She’s got it. She’s on the right track.” And my prayer is that you’ll be able to use those same words when you think about your children, too. Amen.