Scott sits down with pastor Justin Miller to announce Old School, a new parenting podcast from Church & Family Life launching October 19. Grounded in Jeremiah 6:16 — “ask for the old paths, where the good way is, and walk in it” — Old School will show the bankruptcy of modern parenting psychology and call parents back to the sufficiency of Scripture for raising children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. Tune in to this new podcast as Justin applies the timeless wisdom of God’s Word to the very real challenges of parenting today. How do you raise difficult children, God’s way? 

Thanks for checking out the podcast. Just a quick reminder, not to use this as a replacement for the good pastoral leadership and teaching in your local church, but really just an encouragement for quiet faithfulness through the sufficiency of Scripture. Of Scripture. Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. We're going to announce a new podcast called Old School.

It's a parenting podcast, and Justin Miller is going to be the host on the podcast. So Justin, great to have you, man. It's wonderful to be here, brother, as always. I'm really excited about this podcast you're going to launch for Church and Family Life. And I love the name Old School.

Yeah, going back to the old past, the old trustworthy past to see how God has told us to raise our children in fear and amish to the Lord. Yeah, we're grounding it on Jeremiah 6, 16, which says, Thus says the Lord, stand in the ways and see, and ask for the old paths where the good way is and walk in it and you will find rest for your souls. So I pray that'll be the legacy of this podcast that you do, Justin. Justin, now why don't you tell everybody a little bit about yourself? What do you do?

Yeah, so I'm one of the preaching pastors of First Baptist Church in Puxico. I've been here for 15 years almost, and just really grateful to serve this flock. It's a 1689 Confession Reform Baptist Church and a very warm, loving church. It's just been a delight to grow in the Lord with them. I'm married to my wife, Jodan.

We have four children, one married, and we're expecting our first grandchild here very, very soon. So I'm going to be a grandfather in October. So the Lord has been immensely kind to us. I have three children still in the home, 14, 12, and 11. And we just are enjoying the season of homeschooling and teaching.

We had a co-op meeting yesterday. We started a co-op here at the church and coming alongside homeschool families and offering things like Greek and literature. And so it's just been a wonderful season here in the church, brother. So I bumped into you having written a book on gentle parenting. And so we struck up a friendship and it's been really great.

And so I really loved the things that you had written about parenting. And so we thought, let's start a parenting podcast with Justin Miller. And I think it's a timely kind of thing because, I mean, until about 1950, parenting really didn't change that much. People pretty much did what their grandpa and their grandma did, and you had this common sensibility of how to raise children. But then in the 1950s and the 1960s, the tidal waves began to hit and the progressives really absorbed the space of parenting.

And you had all kinds of newfangled parenting movements. Dr. Spock was mentoring a whole generation of baby boomer mothers with his article in the Ladies Home Journal, really carrying forward the apostate psychologists and psychiatrists like Sigmund Freud. And you had the self-esteem movement and all kinds of books now come out on parenting. Parenting wasn't even really much of a category of book writing, book publishing, except the Puritans.

The Puritans wrote a lot about it, but most of the parenting books that came out really didn't have anything to do with scripture. So this podcast, we want to really ground in the Word of God, the sufficiency of Scripture for parenting. Yeah, I remember when I was wrestling with the whole general parenting philosophy that I was asked to write about and critique, the thing that I kept going back to was, as Christians, what a heritage we have. We have the scriptures, which are very clear on how to parent, how to discipline and instruct our children. But also, we have the Puritans and the Reformers, and even the fathers wrote a lot about parenting.

I think of Christautum in his book on parenting. And so we want to go back to those old pasts, the sufficiency of Scripture, understood through history, all those things. And God's ways are always good because He's our Creator. He knows what's best for us. And so I'm excited to tackle this with Church and Family Life.

Yeah. So what's your plan? How does this roll out? We're going to meet with Dr. Beeke for our first interview and just talk about the different stages of parenting from infancy to more of the younger child days to the teenage years and those sort of things.

And the various challenges that you will face with that and how we from Scripture are to wisely parent at every phase of that progression. We're going to look at the difficult child with Trent Moody. I can't wait for that one because I think every parent at some point has one, maybe two children. They're a little more stubborn, a little more hardheaded, And we want to parent them well. We want to get their affections.

And he had a great session at the conference there in Wake Forest, North Carolina that I got to listen to. It was wonderful. And so we're going to talk about that. We're hoping to talk about various titles and topics with various guests, things from family worship, what do you do with spanking, how to spank, is spanking biblical, those sort of things, and just go at all the topics we possibly can with parenting, and really confront several of the ideologies that are being put forth today that are not helpful and that are possibly leading our families astray into unhelpful things. Yeah, and you're gonna interview some of the men that we really appreciate, that we've known, you know, for a long time and would like to get them to weigh in.

Talk to us about the approach, what's sort of the general approach of the podcast? Yeah, we really want to look at what is parenting from the Scriptures perspective. We believe in the sufficiency of Scripture. So what does the Bible set forth for how we as Christian parents are to parent? And so there's an assumption being made that We are speaking to those who see that they are sinners and they have repented by God's grace to turn from sin.

They repented and they believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, His life, death, resurrection, for their restoration before God, their forgiveness of their sins. So we're talking to Christians, those who belong to Christ, purchased and redeemed. It's hopefully an encouragement to them concerning what parenting is to be biblically, what it's always been biblically. We're not trying to put new ideas forth. We want the old past.

That's why we called it old school. We want to look at what the Bible says concerning how we will raise our children. And we're not going to be intimidated by the whole PhDs or all the different qualifications that many psychologists or psychiatrists have. We have a creator who's good, who's sovereign, who knows us, who created us, and he's given us his good word. But we also want to learn from those in history, Ephesians 4, 11 through 14, who have been gifts to the church, who have written about these things.

And we have some of those men in our modern times and we want to bring them on the podcast and ask them questions and really understand how parenting at various phases works, what it looks like, taking the truth and applying it, which is wisdom. Amen. You know, I have a whole stack of parenting books that I've purchased over the last 20 years and very, very few of them actually begin with scripture. They begin with some principle, some illustration, you know, raising children is like raising tomatoes or something like that. And you know, so how, how did that happen?

How did that happen? That the modern books about parenting don't begin with the Word of God. They begin with some social issue. You know, brother, I think, and I'm young in this, and so I've been a Christian for almost 20 years, but the background I came out of was the Southern Baptist Convention, and they fought the battles before my time for inerrancy. But I think we gave away the battle for sufficiency of Scripture.

I think many of us as Christians will say we believe the Bible is God's word, but we don't really practice the reality of sufficiency of Scripture. But we must believe the Bible is sufficient because it is the inerrant, infallible, authoritative word of God, and it's a good gift of God. The laws are delight, as the Psalmist says. I want to hide this word in my heart so I may not sin against God. And wisdom is what we're seeking to employ as parents, and it's found in the Scripture, and we believe the Bible is sufficient.

So I think we've moved away from the sufficiency of Scripture. I think even in our efforts in retrievalism, we can move away from the sufficiency of scripture. But we want to ground everything in the Bible because it's the basis of our faith, the plumb line. The very best books on parenting really are expositions of biblical texts. There are very, very few modern books that are like that.

So I'm really, really excited about this podcast and that you're taking it on, particularly having done research with some of the modern aberrations, some of the modern, I'm just going to call them heresies about raising kids like the gentle parenting movement. So this will be super duper helpful. What else do you want to tell us about this podcast? I'm really excited to address areas where modern psychology uses the same terms we do, like communication or even gentleness, and just define these things biblically. And I hope that will be a help to parents.

But I would just encourage our listeners, I would be so humbled if you'd tune in. We want to encourage you in parenting. What a great and glorious calling this is. You're an ambassador of God to your children. They are gifts of God to you.

This is a great work of ministry that pastors are called to equip the saints for. And so we wanna be a blessing to you. We wanna encourage you to raise your children and fear diminish the Lord and do everything we can to be a, hopefully, a encouragement, a shot of encouragement for you. Good deal. Well, okay, so click in on the podcast, go to the Church and Family Life website and find podcasts and you'll find Old School, a parenting podcast with Justin Miller.

I can't wait to hear these podcasts, Justin. Thank you so much for doing it. Thank you, Pastor Scott. Okay, mark your calendar, October 19th. Justin is gonna be interviewing the kickoff session with Dr.

Joel Beeke. It'll be fantastic. 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