INTRODUCTION:

What we have now in our culture is self-focused parenting. The driving force for parenting seems to be: it's about me and my comfort, and there's really nothing bigger than that, a bigger purpose. We don't seem to have it in our culture.

Good parenting does not, by the way, meet the goal of comfort, right? Good parenting is hard. So what do we get? We get low expectations in parenting. We get kind of an entertainment culture. We get media pacification in parenting. We get things like coddling, where parents attempt to give the children whatever they want, and what this does is make kids obsessed with self-seeking comforts, just like their parents.

Give kids lots of freedoms and freedom to be and to do whatever they want to do. And what happens is kids then become enslaved to their own desires and enslaved to themselves. We live in a largely self-obsessed, rebellious generation. And that goes through all generations, not just the young generation. And I think parenting has something to do with this.

God speaks to this as well, and that's what we're going to allow God to speak about this morning.

We've been looking at these household codes about how God calls relationships to happen within the family and all the family relationships. The gospel has transforming power and that power fundamentally changes who we are. So, in the power of Christ, we walk worthily, we can walk carefully, we walk wisely and in days that are evil, and that's in language from Chapter 5 that we were in a few weeks ago.

The entire family is affected by this transforming power—the power of the gospel. What we're going to see today is that children flourish when parents actively train them in the ways of the Lord. We have a weighty message this morning. It's spoken directly to both children and parents.

It's a message that's fundamentally about how it's appropriate to submit to God. So the good thing is that God does not leave us kind of flailing in the wind when it comes to the most practically important relationships. The relationship of wife and husband, the relationship of father and mother to children. These are relationships that most of us in our lives are just filled with and God has given us what we need to know how to live. And he's revealed what is good and right and true and he's revealed what is ultimately satisfying to us. And we can trust him in that.

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