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Battle_of_the_sexes 11:30am

fragile families

05-19-13
Senior Pastor: Steve Davis
Series: Fragile Families
Location: Spout Spring Church

Battle of the Sexes
Text
 
 
Ephesians 6:1-4 (NLT) 
1  Children, obey your parents because you belong to the Lord, for this is the right thing to do. 2  “Honor your father and mother.” This is the first commandment with a promise: 3  If you honor your father and mother, “things will go well for you, and you will have a long life on the earth.” 
4  Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger by the way you treat them. Rather, bring them up with the discipline and instruction that comes from the Lord.
 
Colossians 3:18-21 (NLT) 
20  Children, always obey your parents, for this pleases the Lord. 
21  Fathers, do not aggravate your children, or they will become discouraged.
Don't aggravate or provoke your children, which will ultimately discourage them, but instead bring them up with the discipline and instruction that comes from the Lord
 
 
Discover Your Child's Uniqueness.
Psalm 139:13-14 (NIV) 
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. 
 
<ul>
<li>Boys vs. Girls 
<ul>
<li>Vision: Colors vs Motion and Details</li>
<li>Differences are from God.</li>
<li>Aggravation</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Stress = Gap between expectations and reality</li>
<li>My Expectations for my children</li>
</ul>
 
 
Guide But Don’t Control.
Proverbs 22:6 (ESV) 
Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it. 
Prepared in advance.
Colossians 3:12-14 (NLT) 
12  Since God chose you to be the holy people he loves, you must clothe yourselves with tenderhearted mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. 13  Make allowance for each other’s faults, and forgive anyone who offends you. Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others. 14  Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds us all together in perfect harmony.
If we’re to display these attributes outside the home, how much more should we act this way inside it? 
 
Problems to solve vs Tensions to Manage
Tensions:
<ul>
<li>Provide Freedom and Boundaries 
<ul>
<li>No Boundaries = No Path</li>
<li>Slot race car</li>
<li>No Freedom = Aggravation</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
 
<ul>
<li>Provide Discipline and Love 
<ul>
<li>Paul identified himself as the father of the Corinthians and had to deal with their arrogant disobedience (1 Cor. 4:14–21). He drew a contrast between the slave guardian (paidagogos) and the father, telling them that they had “ten thousand guardians in Christ” but just one father.</li>
<li>Thousands of people trying to dictate what your child should do and become. There’s only a few willing to take the time to guide them. And parents need to be among them.</li>
<li>do not aggravate your children, or they will become discouraged</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
 
<ul>
<li>Provide Order and Space 
<ul>
<li>Get up on time, get to school, participate in life</li>
<li>Create space/margin</li>
<li>John Cleese on Creativity and the need for space.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
 
<ul>
<li>Protect from Harm and Direct Through Problems</li>
</ul>
 
 
Bring Them into God’s Story.
Ephesians 2:8-10 (NLT) 
8  God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. 9  Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it. 10  For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.
 
bring them up with the discipline and instruction that comes from the Lord 
Use of “Lord” in the Ephesian passage
Not just into faith, but into God’s purpose.
God’s Story Needs Men
The need for masculine attributes. (Vision illustration)
1 Corinthians 16:13 (ESV) 
Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.
Risk taking, aggression, confidence,
<ul>
<li>Not gonna bow to your idol</li>
<li>Paul getting up and walking back into town.</li>
</ul>
 
<ul>
<li>Blue Bags</li>
<li>Communion</li>
<li>Cross and Zone</li>
</ul>
 
 
 
Remember the Cereal.
<ul>
<li>What’s here for preChristians? (sweet flakes)</li>
<li>What’s here for new Christians? (milk)</li>
<li>What’s here for mature Christians? (granola clusters)</li>
</ul>
 
What’s the Point?
 
 
 
Journal 
 
 
Verses
 
 
Research
Message of Ephesians
What is evil here is the destructive nature of such provocations as endless criticism and harsh punishments. To encourage a person is creative; it is to stir him to do and be what otherwise would never have been achieved (see the only other occurrence of this word in the New Testament, 2 Cor. 9:2). The result of the irritable parent is to produce ‘discouraged’ children in the sense that they are fearful and timid, shy and lacking in normal self-confidence. It is no use such a father bemoaning the inability of his children to be strong and self-reliant like himself, since he has used his strength to crush and undermine them.
NAC
In the Lord, parents have a mutual responsibility to children. There is a command and a practical reason. Parents are told not to embitter their children. Paul used the term “fathers” in addressing the parents. The term may easily encompass both father and mother, as it does here, but it also served to remind them that the fathers bore a primary responsibility for the children in the home. Paul meant that they should not embitter or irritate their children. The word “embitter” (erethizō) occurs only one other time in Scripture (in 2 Cor 9:2). This speaks of an irritation or even nagging. Parents embitter children by constantly picking at them, perhaps refusing to acknowledge their efforts. The fact that children might become discouraged suggests that the parents too easily reminded the children that they were not good enough. This activity had no place in the Christian home. If correction were needed, it should have been toward the behavior of the child, not the child’s personhood, and it should have been enforced quickly. Discipline was not to be prolonged so that nagging occurred.
The reason for the command was to avoid discouragement. Constant nagging produces a situation where children are discouraged either because they cannot please those they love or because they feel they are of no worth to anybody.
In this case, Ephesians and Colossians complement each other by presenting two sides of the issue. In Ephesians, Paul exhorted the parents to raise the children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. This suggests a positive, Christian environment in which children will appreciate the Christian commitment of the parents. In time, children should believe in the Lord and mature in the Christian life and world view. In Colossians, Paul warned parents not to discourage their children. Especially in the child-rearing process, fathers were to embody Christian principles and remember the equality of all persons in Christ. In God’s sight, children and parents have equal worth, and parents were to treat their children with respect as persons.
NIVAC
This command assumes that parents will not demand anything unseemly from their children (cf. Mark 6:24–25). The command also takes for granted that the parents have the best interest of their children at heart. When their children ask for a fish, they will not give them stones (Matt. 7:7–9; Luke 11:11–13).
But the children’s duty to obey their parents is transformed into obedience “in the Lord.”17 Paul emphasizes a child’s pleasing the Lord, not just the parents. He or she owes obedience above all to the Lord. The child’s independent relationship with the Lord surpasses the relationship with parents , and Christ’s obedience to his Father in all things serves as the model.
 
Dionysius of Halicarnassus remarked:
  The law-giver of the Romans gave virtually full power to the father over his son, whether he thought proper to imprison him, to scourge him, to put him in chains, and keep him at work in the fields, or to put him to death; and this even though the son were engaged in public affairs, though he were numbered among the highest magistrates, and though he were celebrated for his zeal for the commonwealth.18
 
The attitudes toward disciplining children in the ancient world varied, just as they do today. For some, ruling with an iron hand was the norm. Quintilian, however, contended that “physical punishment inflicts shame” and “breaks the heart.”20 Others complained—as they have throughout the ages—about permissiveness which allows the younger generation too much latitude.21
Paul identified himself as the father of the Corinthians and had to deal with their arrogant disobedience (1 Cor. 4:14–21). He drew a contrast between the slave guardian (paidagogos) and the father, telling them that they had “ten thousand guardians in Christ” but just one father. The paidagogos was a trustworthy slave charged with supervising the life and morals of upper-class boys. He led the child to the schoolhouse and back home and protected him from trouble. He became a comic type caricatured for his severity as a stern taskmaster. In pictures on Greek vases he is frequently recognizable by the rod in his hand, and in Greek plays he is often portrayed as harsh and stupid. Paul picks up on this image by contrasting the proverbial pitiless discipline of the guardian with the milder discipline of the father. “What do you prefer? Shall I come to you with a whip [lit., rod], or in love and with a gentle spirit?” (1 Cor. 4:21). As a father, Paul expected obedience, but he believed that a father’s discipline should be tempered by love, compassion, kindness, and patience (see Col. 3:12).
 
The causes that provoke a child’s resentment are countless but usually involve nagging, belittling, and overly harsh punishment. Pliny wrote to a friend cautioning him about his severe rebuke of his son:
 
  I was reminded by this example of excessive severity to write to you, as one friend to another, lest you on some occasion treat your son too harshly and strictly. Remember that he is a boy, and that you were once a boy, and perform your duty as a father always remembering that you are a human being and the father of a human being.22
 
Paul has a greater concern that overly stern and heavy-handed parents might drive their children away from the faith.
 
In contrast to what we today call “the nuclear family,” the household in the ancient world consisted of the father, mother, and children, plus any foster children, slaves, unmarried relations, freedmen, or renters. Sometimes brothers with their families lived together under the same roof. We need to keep in mind “that Romans regarded with admiration the large household run on frugal lines by an inflexible paterfamilias.”45 Such a large group needed some kind of ordering lest it slip into anarchic chaos, and the universally accepted pattern was that all came under the authority of the father of the family (paterfamilias).
Paul had no intention of turning that world upside down.46 Instead, he focused on how to live within one’s cultural framework in obedience to Christ. If we read Scripture sympathetically, using a hermeneutic of trust as opposed to suspicion, we can see how Christ’s lordship subtly deconstructs the old habits of domination and exploitation. These instructions do not simply parrot the social conventions of the culture, they work creatively on them.
 
aul has no intention of defying all the norms of first-century society in which Christians lived. He adapts the accepted pattern of households in the Mediterranean world of antiquity but transforms it by appealing to the Christian’s loyalty to Christ as Lord. The “Lord” (Gk. kyrios) appears seven times in this section: It is fitting in the Lord. Do what is pleasing in the Lord. Fear the Lord. Work as you were working for the Lord, not just human masters. The Lord shows no partiality and will render judgment and reward. Serve the Lord. Know that you have a Lord in heaven. The motivation behind each of Paul’s commands is charged with the phrase “in the Lord.” Christ’s lordship imposes itself on all aspects of our lives. Stern comments that the Lord becomes a third partner: “Like a magnet over iron fillings he orients things in the right direction.”58
 
Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, which deals with adultery: “All happy families are more or less like one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.” He interprets it to mean that we can go wrong in all sorts of ways, “but there is only one way of going right.”61 Christians can only go right in their families when they are subject to Christ, when the family becomes a place where faith is lived and nurtured, and when each member submits to the lordship of Christ.
 
Here he reflects the new insights we find in the New Testament, which appreciate the child’s point of view and feelings.76 The apostle worries more about the discouraged child, the one who is so bowed down that he or she is broken. He knows the danger that the one invested with the final word “in everything” may misuse that authority in destructive ways. His concern is not that children will grow up to disgrace the father by their disobedience, but that the father will hinder the nurturing of his children through discipline at all costs.
 
Wuthnow’s research on young people to see how they learn to care for others beyond their own families and friends led to some interesting conclusions.78 Caring is not something innate but learned, and we learn it in our family life from our parents and their everyday small acts of kindness—how they treat one another, their children, and others. These small acts show children that kindness is not something exceptional but a natural part of life. Youth associate their parents’ kindness with their personhood; that is just a part of who they are. In a world that is becoming increasingly indifferent and uncivil, parents need to inculcate in their children the spirit of kindness and compassion by setting good examples, beginning with the way they discipline their children.
 
Word Studies in the NT
Provoke to anger (ἐρεθίζετε). Only here and 2 Cor. 9:2, where it is used of stirring up to good works.
 
Pulpit Commentary
It implies a use of parental authority which, by continual exactions and complaints, teaches the child to look on the father as his enemy rather than his friend.
 
 
 
Evernote
The Heart Grows Smarter
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: November 5, 2012
But as this study — the Grant Study — progressed, the power of relationships became clear. The men who grew up in homes with warm parents were much more likely to become first lieutenants and majors in World War II. The men who grew up in cold, barren homes were much more likely to finish the war as privates.
Body type was useless as a predictor of how the men would fare in life. So was birth order or political affiliation. Even social class had a limited effect. But having a warm childhood was powerful. As George Vaillant, the study director, sums it up in “Triumphs of Experience,” his most recent summary of the research, “It was the capacity for intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects of these men’s lives.”
Of the 31 men in the study incapable of establishing intimate bonds, only four are still alive. Of those who were better at forming relationships, more than a third are living.
It’s not that the men who flourished had perfect childhoods. Rather, as Vaillant puts it, “What goes right is more important than what goes wrong.” The positive effect of one loving relative, mentor or friend can overwhelm the negative effects of the bad things that happen.
In case after case, the magic formula is capacity for intimacy combined with persistence, discipline, order and dependability. The men who could be affectionate about people and organized about things had very enjoyable lives.
 
http://thinkchristian.net/why-men-and-women-see-differently
“Females are better at discriminating among colors,” according to National Geographic, “while males excel at tracking fast-moving objects and discerning detail from a distance - evolutionary adaptations possibly linked to our hunter-gatherer past.”
All this is to say that the study thinks my ability to spot berries from across a farmers’ market is evolution at work, something that made my prehistoric sisters’ berry-picking role easier.
Now, normally, this sort of talk makes me nervous. Rebellious, even. Normally whenever I’m told what I should be or do because of my gender or heritage or education or location, my immediate instinct is to prove them wrong, to bust out of whatever box I feel tightening around me.
But my reaction to this study was quite different. The idea that we see the world differently - whether because of gender or because of experience or quality of eye sight or because of opinions or knowledge or whatever - gets me pretty excited. Especially when there are hints that God created us or allowed us to evolve to see things differently. Although, I confess: I’m not really as interested in how well women see berries or men chase prey as I am in how we see issues and how we see God Himself at work in this world.
 
<a href="http://thinkchristian.net/can-kids-be-too-happy">http://thinkchristian.net/can-kids-be-too-happy</a>
Kids grow up with inflated self-esteem and are shocked in adulthood to learn that not only are they not as amazing as their parents told them, but there are indeed winners and losers. Not everyone gets the job or promotion. Not everyone gets along. And there is real heartache. Wouldn’t it be better, Gottlieb asks, if kids learned how to deal with disappointment in childhood rather than be shocked by it in adulthood?
…
But what Gottlieb is missing – and I dare say her 20-something patient is as well – is spiritual fulfillment. Not happiness, but joy. There is a significant difference. I realize my kids will face heartache and disappointment. But I don’t want them to measure the quality of their lives by a worldly happiness scale. All the money in the world, a fulfilling career and amazing friends will never be enough to satisfy them – something will always be missing. True peace and fulfillment, not happiness, is only found through a relationship with Christ. Happiness, like the satisfaction of finding that missing boot right before recess, is a fleeting emotion. Joy is a lasting state that can be found in even the darkest of places.
…
There will be bad days. And there is no Biblical promise that followers of Christ will have happier and easier lives than non-Christians. In fact, James 1:2-4 says we should “Consider it pure joy … whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.” Likewise, Paul tells his readers in Philippians 4:12 that “[he has] learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.”
 
Tim Stevens:
I think being a good dad has more to do with studying your kids and determining what would be meaningful to them. Perhaps with one it is shopping, another it is playing video games, another it is helping them with homework, and another it is coaching their sports team.
You know what I think may be the most important key to being a good dad? Intentionality. And by that, I’m not talking about good intentions. Those aren’t worth much. I’m talking about thinking through each child and being intentional about your time with them and support of them. I’m talking about having an intentional plan to invest in each kid—and revising that plan as they grow older and change.
 
USA Today
The cost, some analysts say, is not just rising concern that kids won't look back fondly on their childhoods. Analysts say there are increasing signs that a lack of independence fuels stress, anxiety and depression among young people. Many child-development specialists and others worry that it's just not as much fun to be a kid anymore.
"Kid time today? That time is filled," says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a developmental psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia.
"We've lost the sense of allowing children to be children, to have that period of time in their lives where we don't burden them with a zillion things to do," says Malcolm Goldsmith, professor emeritus of health education at Southern Illinois University.
Zelinger says she grew up with "a lot of free time to play outside and put on roller skates and play kickball. In many ways, I do feel they don't have time just to play games and play with their friends and go to the park."
<Tie in with John Cleese and creativity video.>
 
Deut 11
Remember today that your children were not the ones who saw and experienced the discipline of the lord your God: his majesty, his mighty hand, his outstretched arm; (2)
So tell them. Make God's miracle stories part of your conversation (see later verse).
 [Father, help me to start telling our kds our stories of your miraculous interventions in our lives.]

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