Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today, Jason and I are going to talk about first-time obedience, a really critical matter for parents to secure early on. I hope you enjoy the discussion. Jason, for years we've been giving child raising tune-ups, you know, at our church, you know, just to sort of give a little refresh. Parents need actually reminders for raising their children.

It's really easy to, to, to get off course and, and, and get it back. I think that happened to both of us a few times in our child raising for sure. And we've got a whole new wave of young parents in our churches. Now it's really exhilarating. Actually, we're feeling the effects of being family integrated in our services like we haven't in the last few years.

You know, this, this does go through in waves. A bunch of people have their first children and their second children I have young young families in the house that will die down for a while then you get the next wave. Where'd all them babies come from? I mean that's the deal. It is super fun but we're we want to talk about discipline and particularly first time obedience.

It's a really so important thing. Here's a story. Happened right around here a few years ago. There was a logging truck barreling down the road near a school. And across the street was a little girl, and her mother was on the other side of the road.

Mother sees the logging truck coming. Obviously, this truck is not gonna be able to stop. She is screaming at her daughter, stop, stop, stop, and the daughter refuses to stop and goes out into the middle of the road and is mowed down by a massive logging truck. And of course there was an outcry against the driver of the logging truck but I don't recall anybody mentioning the parent who did not secure honor and obedience from her daughter. Her daughter lost her life because she was disobedient.

So I know that's an extreme example, but I think it's an important example. Yeah. Let's start in Exodus 20 verse 12. Exodus 20 gives us the Ten Commandments. Exodus 20 is the fifth commandment and it says, honor your father and your mother that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you." So there's only only ten commandments in this summary of the moral law and one of them is about your disposition towards your parents.

It's to be a disposition of honor. So I think an important question right out of the gate is does this come naturally to children and the answer to that is a resounding no. Actually they have many impulses and pulls in exactly the opposite direction in the direction of dishonor And so that lays at the feet of parents a duty and obligation to secure honor To teach your children to insist upon honor and to teach your children what it means to honor and that they must honor. It assumes that the older should teach the younger. It assumes that a child needs to really understand that when they're growing up, there is somebody smarter in the room.

Yeah. So parents, if you're receiving dishonor and disobedience in your home, we should always think about our role in that, not to shift the blame from the sin of a child to dishonor and disobey. But we do have a duty to secure honor and obedience from our children and it should make us think, the gaps here, are there things that I haven't done that I should be doing? Is there a lack of consistency that is resulting in this dishonor and disobedience that I'm experiencing? Let's throw let's throw around some manifestations.

Let's just go back and forth. Manifestations of dishonor. Let's start with rolling of the eyes. Yeah that's dishonor. So a question is how blatant does it have to be?

Do they have to be storming out? Do they have to be striking out? I've seen parents or children hit their parents. I mean, obviously there are more dramatic instances of this, but it can be as subtle as an eye roll as a tone of voice. And I think parents have to be ready to, to, to discipline in the right way, even for the small instances of this, unless you want big instances of this.

You got selective listening. You have walking away. There are lots of manifestations of dishonor. I mean, some of the most obvious ones would be talking back, rebuking a parent. You've got a problem when a parent is being rebuked by the child.

And what's the point? Parents have a duty to secure honor and obedience. That's what the fifth commandment speaks about, is that there's this category that has to be captured. And the reason it has to be captured is because from the womb, it's out of control. And so you're trying to sequester a sin pattern.

So I think there's a predisposition when we start talking about this, to think about little kids. And it starts there, and you better do good work there, because it only gets harder to secure honor and obedience as children grow But it's not just for little children. It's for bigger children. It's for teenagers, adolescents. It's for children in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s.

When parents are dead, the duty to honor doesn't go away. In other words, you can actually dishonor your parents after they're dead, and that's not right either. So just sort of open up a line of discussion that says the duty to honor our parents or for our children to honor us never goes away, but it doesn't look different over time. You definitely don't treat your teenagers like you treat your three year old and you definitely don't teach your 20 year old, 30 year old, 40 year old children, like you would treat your teenagers. Your relationship with them grows and expands, but any time you're experiencing dishonor, that needs to be confronted and contradicted because it's actually no service to our children to allow for dishonor.

It's bad for them. It's obviously unpleasant for us, but there's so much more at stake than it just being unpleasant for parents. It's actually really bad for children, and that's confirmed by the Fifth Commandment. That it may be well with you right Jace I believe it's JC Abbott who writes about how pivotal is to secure the honor early and I believe he says if if you don't if you don't secure it in the first 18 months, it's gonna be a nightmare after that, and he tells a long and convoluted story of a child whose parents did not secure it early and the the trouble the war it was to secure it it can be secured but waiting is a very very bad idea yeah yeah oh 100 percent so you can you can tell very early on that children have these natural inclinations to sort of be a god unto themselves and to demand that their will be honored, not the will of the household, which is actually a more mature desire, more mature desires, a more mature will. And so parents you got to get on top of that right away by contradicting and confronting those evidences of dishonor and disobedience.

So here's a couple of things about the the parent side of this. The first is a question, What if you only get in the category of honor and obedience? What if you only get from your children what you model? What do I mean by that? Well, how do you treat their grandparents, your parents, you there, They're watching you relate with your own parents.

Well, what if you only get from them what they see you model, the level of respect and honor that you afford to your own parents? You have church leaders. You have civic leaders or the civil magistrate or government leaders, what if you only get back from your children the disposition that they see displayed towards your church leaders or towards government officials? That makes me cringe a little bit just thinking about some of my own disposition particularly towards civil leaders our government officials but it's a good question to ask because that may be exactly what you get what you've modeled mm-hmm right yeah it's really important to honor your father and mother because your children might do the same way with you as well. I think that's really important.

To expect differently is probably naive. Yeah, we know that for those who honor and obey, it will go well with them. That's a promise. That's really, really significant. In one way, it's the most important thing for a child to understand when they're growing up that it is not going to go well with them if they do not learn how to honor their father and mother.

And we could talk about all kinds of difficult fathers and mothers, how hard it is to honor them, how they do many dishonorable things. And I think it's kind of simple to in terms of how to deal with that and that is learn how to honor whatever you can right you know even with a disobedient or a wayward parent learning how to honor what you can is, I believe, how it goes well with you. So here's a great example from Scripture, Noah. They come off the ark, Noah plants a vineyard, Noah makes wine, Noah gets drunk off the wine that he's made. One child snickers, laughs at, makes fun of.

The other two sons come into the tent backwards, so they're not seeing their father in his drunken nakedness. And they back into the tent with a blanket, and they cover him up and leave. That leads to cursing in the event of the child that snickered, made fun and blessing to the other two sons. They had a father who had acted dishonorably, was hard to honor, but they did find a way to honor him in that. I think that's a great example to keep in mind.

Let's flip it to the child to Eli's sons. Eli's sons were very dishonorable sons, but the scripture says that the problem was that he did not restrain them. So it was the father, the father was culpable and and trouble fell upon that family. So when you look at the account it's really interesting. He does contradict them.

He says, I hear the reports and know my sons, you shouldn't be doing that, okay, but he doesn't go further and this brings me to a text that I wanted to bring up which is Proverbs 29 15. Listen to Proverbs 29 15. The rod and rebuke give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother. So we'll start at the end and kind of work away the front of that verse. A child left to himself brings shame.

So children can't just be left to themselves. This parental model where you just leave children to flower, no, no, that's not what happens in a garden that is left to itself. You get nothing but weeds in a garden like that, and the weeds eventually take over the valuable plants in the garden. So you don't leave a garden to itself. If you want flowers and good fruit, you weed in water and prune.

You do all the things that a gardener does. You don't leave a garden to itself or you end up with a patch of weeds. Then you have what brings wisdom, which is the rod and rebuke. So if you're a parent and you're a one-trick pony and the trick is the rod and only the rod, you can't expect that the output of that will be wisdom. It's the rod and rebuke, so it's actually physical discipline and verbal instruction.

But you've also seen homes where there's nothing but talk, there's lots of verbal instruction, but there's nothing actually ever physical to back it up. I think especially in the early years, there's so much wisdom in having the right mix and balance of physical discipline, the rod, and rebuke verbal instruction. One without the other is not going to yield wisdom in the disciple that you're making. Yeah, I think what happened with Eli is he wouldn't stand in the way. He made a comment, But he wouldn't stand in the way and put a stop to it and that's where parents often fail They're not they're not willing to put a stop to it He should have said over my dead body to the to the wicked actions of his And these are actually adult sons at the time.

They're acting as priests. And so these are not little boys. He should have said, over my dead body, and he should have insisted that that behavior stopped. I know a very young man in a youth prison today, who did not receive discipline, the discipline of the Lord growing up. And I remember I was with him one time, and he was so, he wanted to show me about what he could, his tricks and antics he could do.

It was remarkable, but he brought his dog to me and he wanted to show me the tricks his dog could do. And so he asked the dog to sit. The dog refused to sit. And then he said to the dog one two three and the dog would not sit well he learned that he learned that from his his parents. He learned that you that you didn't have to obey and now he had a dog that wouldn't obey and now he's in a youth prison for his crimes And I I credit it to his not being restrained as a child.

It's such a tragic story So so I've heard you talk about counting to three many times. So so give the spiel. What's the spiel on counting? Well second time obedience is disobedience, So obedience on number two is disobedience. Obedience on number three is triple disobedience.

Yeah, the phrase that we kind of crystallized that in our house. Slow obedience is disobedience. Slow obedience is reluctant obedience, which is actually dishonor. So there is the actual carrying out of what's being said, but there's also the disposition behind it. Slow obedience shows that the disposition behind it is a dishonoring disposition.

The truth is, anyone who can obey at the number of three, right? One, two, two and a half, two and three quarters, two and five eighths. And this is how the counting game goes, right? If you can obey on three, you can actually obey on one. And what we want to say to parents is you you can only expect to get what you're prepared to insist on yeah parents can have it if they insist on it.

And so we have to be consistent as parents and we have to have sometimes a spine of steel that says it has to be it has to be my way. Now we need to be insisting on good things. But when you're insisting on good things, you can say with a straight face and a clear conscience, it has to be my way and insist on it. Yeah. You know, all of this, I think, dovetails down to the promise that it will go well with you.

God's ways are pleasant ways. And I think we're just here to encourage parents to regard first-time obedience. It's really really important and Secure it early if you have if you haven't secured it You know take on the challenge. It's gonna get a lot harder You know if a child is three four five six seven eight nine ten, but you you as a parent before Almighty God are obligated to Give it your best shot and and to bring your children to a place where they recognize the goodness of honor and obedience. So can I read the Paul Jaylee quote?

Sure. Do you know which one I'm gonna read? I'm gonna read. I think. Okay, so I wasn't actually at this conference, I think it was 2013, and it was the History of America, History of America conference, and you actually related this back, you were there, you related it back to the church, and I wrote it down and have never forgotten it because I thought this is the right way to think about these things.

Paul Jaylee at that conference said, the Pilgrim Church was a whole holy Commonwealth so we're talking about the the Puritan Church and in Puritan New England the Pilgrim Church was a holy Commonwealth they trained their children by voice obedience in a soft voice on the first command. Parents were put in stocks if a child disobeyed in public. So if that were true today, how many stocks did you have to put outside target? Jason, it's time to do another child raising conference. Let's do it.

Let's put it on the calendar. You'd have so many parents and stocks if that were the standard, but there, so there, but there are three parts to the standard, voice obedience. So, you don't have to horse collar your children, you don't have to drag them, right? You don't have to whack at them. You can just direct them with your voice.

Secondly, with a soft voice, You don't have to harangue them. You don't have to use biting sarcasm with them. You don't have to scream at them or yell at them. And third, on the first command, they didn't believe in counting to three. They believed in giving instructions or directions to your children and having them cheerfully followed.

Cheerfully following is actual obedience. Slow obedience is disobedience. Reluctant obedience. Eye-rolling obedience is disobedience, but cheerful obedience on the first command is really with in a soft voice. You don't have to yell at it.

That's a good target for parents. I early on we don't hit that target very much. I know that but it's good to sort of keep it out there as here's where we're headed and to like express that as the expectation to your children. Hey, we've seen a lot of blessing in parents, you know, who've worked, who've worked effectively about this. And so, hey, let's go do it again.

Yeah, let's go do it again. Another one. Okay. All right. We have new parents.

We have a lot of new parents. Sweet. Well, hey, thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast and we hope you'll join us next time. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com