"And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord." Ephesians 6:4 (NKJV).

God cares how parents treat their children. He especially calls fathers to a high standard of love and care for their children. The Apostle Paul gives the above command to fathers to not provoke but to equip both through word and deed. It is very easy - and sadly very common - for fathers to err either toward laxity or severity, and frustrate and provoke their children, and to forgo godly equipping. Fatherhood is a high calling and God has given his word to help guide men in this great and noble work.

Take a look at Ephesians chapter 6. We're going to go back to that. We looked briefly at it last night, but you've seen this morning that we've covered off a number of topics equipped for holiness, equipped by the Word of God, and then we just spoke about equipped for meditation. And now my task is to look at Ephesians 6, 4 and focus on the question of, are you exasperating or are you equipping? It's a message that's gonna be geared to fathers, taking the charge that we heard from the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 6 and applying that.

And I just want to review, if you have your Bible, you can open up to Ephesians 6. We'll look at verses 1 to 4, and then we'll go into verse 4 in specifics. But it says here in Ephesians chapter 6, verses 1, it says, children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise, that it may be well with you and that you may live long on the earth. And you fathers do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and the admonition of the Lord." And So what I want to do today or this few minutes that I have here is not so much focus on the role of parents towards their children, but specifically in regards to the role of the father towards his sons.

And what's interesting here is this, is when you look at verse one, what do you notice? There's a charge to the children to obey their father and their mother. But then when you come to verse four, what does it say? And you fathers and mothers. No, it doesn't say that.

It doesn't say fathers and mothers, but it says, and you fathers. It deals singly with fathers and identifies the father's duty, right? There's no focus on the mothers here, not because mothers are unimportant. We absolutely know how important our wives are and how crucial the mothers are to our children, but it's not because they're unimportant that Paul omits them, but it's because of responsibility. He's identifying the responsibility and where it lies most especially.

When it comes to our children, we own the initiative. We own the actual raising of them. Our wives are help meets, they're hugely involved in the day to day, perhaps even more than us in some ways, right? In terms of hours spent, but when it comes to actual ownership, that lands on us. And so Paul gives this charge to the Ephesians, specifically to the fathers in the Ephesian church, to pay special attention to this.

And this just totally obliterates the idea, right, of putting food on the table and so on and just teaching your children a trade. This does away with that entirely. That's important, right? Without doing that, we're worse than an infidel. But Paul doesn't stop there.

He goes further in his charge and he lands responsibility for the raising of the children squarely on Dad's lap, especially in terms of the development of his son, the dad's son, in terms of his soul and who he's going to be going forward in the future. And what Paul does here, he says this, he says, you fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath. There's two paths he's going to look at. One, he brings us to a fork in the road, and he says, here's one path that you can go down. You can be a father that provokes your children to wrath on the one side, or on the other side, you can bring them up in the training and the admonition of the Lord.

And so this idea of provoking to wrath means to rouse, to anger, to create within your son a resentment and a feeling of disgust when he thinks either about you or about the things of God. And so we wanna talk about these different things. There's really two components to the second path, is training and admonition of the Lord. And I want to talk about the first one. The first one here, when we talk about training, it says this, in Ephesians chapter five, it says, "'For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church.

He was speaking to the husbands in regards to how they ought to treat their wives. And the same word that he uses to train is the same word that he used in Ephesians chapter five that was translated into nourish. And what this has to do with is what we do for our children. The next section has to do with what we say, the admonition, But the first part of this, this training, has to do with what we actually do for our sons. And it's the idea of this cultivation of their hearts, of their souls, of their minds, who they are as an actual person.

And then the admonition is dealing again with what we say, right? And this is not the ordinary simply teaching where you go into a classroom setting. The word there is not the word that you see in other parts of the scripture when it deals with teaching. That word stems from the Greek, which is where we get the word didactic. But this word that he's dealing with right here is a much more, a word that carries a lot more meaning than just simply didactic teaching.

Let's sit down and we'll go through these points. But there's a pleading behind these words. There's a heart, even a warning behind these words. And Paul uses the same word in the Colossians chapter one, verse 28, he says, speaking of Christ, him we preach. Warning, that's that same word.

Warning or the same word for admonition. Every man and teaching every man in all wisdom that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus. And so you see these two elements. One is focusing on what we do as fathers. The other one is what we say as fathers.

And not only what we say, but the method in which we say it. Oftentimes when you see a man like the Apostle Paul in the book of Acts pleading, what is he doing? He's not just preaching to people to simply get their blood off of his shoulder. But what does he say about the Jews? He says, I myself would rather be cast away and all Israel be saved.

That's really the spirit of what this entails. So it's not this kind of grinding on your son. It's not this constant just attempt to crush him with the word of God. But there's just, it's all stemming out of this heart of love, I need you to see this. I wish you could see this.

And what will that do? It will filter also into our prayer for our son, the way that we instruct and so on. So this is so critical that Paul is warning us about this. And he, you know, this idea of warning, you know, the Greek lexicon taking this word says, it's really to counsel about avoidance or the cessation of an improper course of conduct. Stop going the way that you're going.

But it's with a heart of pleading. And Paul doesn't leave it there. He doesn't just say, you fathers do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in training and admonition. But he caps everything off and he seals everything with these three words, in the Lord. See that, that tempers everything.

And what Paul is not interested in and what we ought not to be interested in are just developing well-mannered, moral, upstanding sons that obey us, right? That Christianity hasn't even started yet. If you've read the Pilgrim's Progress, you'll meet a man by the name of Mr. Legality from the city or from the town of morality. And he could agree with all of those things I just said, obey and be well and proper, conduct yourself in this way and that way.

And those are important, don't get me wrong. We've seen that. We heard last night how we don't wait for our children to be born again before we teach them that they must obey. So don't get me wrong, but that's not what we aim at. And that's not what the apostle here is aiming at.

But he wants this instruction to be tempered and carried through in the Lord. And it covers absolutely everything that we say, the way that we say it and then the way that we live and we conduct ourselves. So I have a question for us, right? If we examine ourselves as fathers, what Is our chief ambition for our sons that they become doctors or they become successful in a career, is that the chief thing that we we aim for? It's something worth pondering.

Not to say again that it's unimportant that our children be successful in certain things, right? It's gonna filter over. But what is the chief thing that we're aiming for at the end of the day? Hopefully, it's that they come to a knowledge of Jesus Christ. And that's what this verse is really dealing with here.

Understanding this, that no one is more influential in the lives of your sons than you are, Dad. And that I am as a father myself. And my brother earlier, he mentioned John G. Payton. And I just wanted to read a little bit about John G.

Payton and his reflection of his father. John G. Payton was one of eleven children. He grew up in a tiny little cottage in the middle of nowhere, Scotland. And they had this, what does his dad do for a living?

He made stockings. Someone asks you, what does your dad do? He makes socks. I mean, it's not the thing that you would think of as the cream of the crop career. Later on, his dad would become a peddler of books, traveling and knocking on doors and asking people if they would like to buy books.

But beyond what he did for a living, listen to what his son said about him about 50 years later in reflection on his dad and the way that he lived, the prayers that he prayed, the way he led his family, the passion that he had for the Lord Jesus Christ. This is what, this is what John G. Paton says 50-plus years later. He says, though everything else in religion whereby some unthinkable catastrophe to be swept out of memory were blotted from my understanding, my soul would wander back to those early scenes and shut itself up once again in that sanctuary closet. That's where his dad would go to pray three times a day.

And hearing still the echoes of those cries to God would hurl back all doubt with the victorious appeal, he walked with God, why may not I? Wouldn't that be the most wonderful testimony at the end of the day for your sons to look at you and say, my dad walked with God. If nothing else, you sold socks for a living, it doesn't matter, my dad, he walked with God. It doesn't matter if you're the CEO of the largest company, did you walk with God at the end of the day. May that be our hope for ourselves, but may we also hope to demonstrate that effectually to our children.

And so I wanna talk a little bit about exasperation and kind of taking a little bit of a different slant. I wanna take a page out of a book that doesn't really exist, but we can imagine it does and it's a book entitled, How to Drive Your Sons into the Arms of the Devil, a roadmap for hell for the next generation. And this is a chapter from the book that doesn't exist, but you can imagine it does, that's geared for Christian fathers. So it's not for all fathers. There's many, many, many millions of ways to destroy your children.

But this one's particularly geared to Christian fathers. And don't go on Amazon, try to find it, I've made this up. But I wanna just talk about a few things, 10 points on how you can lead your sons to destruction. The first one is, or to exasperation. The first way, one of the most effective ways to do this is let religion lie upon the brain.

And what I mean by that is communicate a mechanical religion devoid of true devotion and passion. As we heard, I think three times today in all three of the different talks, check the box type of Christianity, where you go through the motions. If you want to destroy your sons, have this kind of religion that just lies upon the brain. A set of doctrines to be acknowledged and subscribed to, even a confession of faith, but it doesn't really have any heartbeat and lifeblood behind it. That's one of the ways that we can do that.

You can also give the impression that religion is all misery. When dad calls for family devotions, let it be a time of absolute dread where dad's gonna monologue for 20, 30, maybe even 50 minutes in a way that just totally disintegrates everyone's heart and affections toward the Lord. When they think of dad's religion, instead of what John G. Payton communicates, let them see a plodding dreariness of duty. That's another way that we can lead our children and exasperate them in the faith.

Another way we can do this is depend on the means of grace, not the Lord himself. And I wanna be careful here because God gives us the means of grace. We've just heard of various means of grace this morning. But if a man relies on a formula as a means of seeing his son come to know the Lord, it will end in exasperation and frustration rather than relying wholly on the Lord Jesus Christ himself. And it's so interesting that oftentimes we can we can depend on on things or formulas.

We look for ways to kind of shape or fix our sons or fix our families. But really and truly, we must look to the Lord himself. Another one that's probably one of the most effective ones is, sing like an angel, but live like the demons. It works wonders, you know. This is one of the things you can do.

You can be one way at home, but when you're in public, you're another thing altogether. What a great way to exasperate your sons and let them know that religion has really no means. And it was interesting, a few years ago we were as a church preaching at the abortion clinic and a group of atheists came and basically for three months would try to obstruct what we were doing every single time that we were out there, holding banners, screaming, doing all sorts of different things. But it was interesting, a few times talking to these different atheists and they might've been 25 at one point, 10 at another point, And almost without exception, I can't remember one of them that did not grow up in a Christian home. And what was the singular comment each of them made?

It was the hypocrisy of their parents' religion, specifically their father. It works wonders. Here's another one. Don't let them under any circumstances see or hear you confessing sin. Humility is weakness.

What you want to do is create the impression that Even when sin is like that 800 pound gorilla sitting in your living room as you're hosting family devotions and everyone's kind of looking nervously at the sin that everyone knows you've done, just continue as though everything's normal. Just keep marching, just keep taking care of externals. After all, you're too big to confess your sins, to ask God to forgive you, or to ask their mother to forgive you, or to even to ask them to forgive you. This is one of the great ways that we can do that. But if by some means you're brought to the point where you have to ask for forgiveness, do it with just a vague apology and move on as quickly as possible.

It's a great way to exasperate your sons and destroy religion in their hearts. The sixth way that you can do it is don't have a plan or a vision, just as a father, take life as it comes. And this is a great way to do that. We talked earlier, just put food on the table, take your family to church, conduct family worship even, and consider yourself a great father. But just don't develop a plan or a vision for your son and his life specifically.

Let him figure it out as he gets older, kind of into his teens and even into his early 20s, and all will be well. That is according to the devil. Don't develop a plan for your son or a vision for him, for your life, or even for your family. Another way we can do that, we heard earlier, the first one this morning is make light of holiness. The best fallback position, I've actually heard men say this, is I turned out okay.

That's what oftentimes we can say, or if we don't say it with our mouths, we can kind of have this casual relationship in regards to holiness and sin. And what we do is we end up moving our children to the well-watered plains of Sodom under those auspices thinking that, hey, if I turned out okay, surely they're gonna be fine. It's a great way to exasperate your sons. Another way we can do this is don't discipline consistently. And when you do, make sure that you've worked up a good lather of anger first.

This is a great way to exasperate your sons. Another way we can do this is don't discipline consistently. And when you do, make sure that you've worked up a good ladder of anger first. This is a great way to exasperate your children. By the way, both of them often go hand in hand when we don't consistently discipline what happens is there's a build-up happening within my heart.

Have you ever had that? I've had that myself. And then it can just explode in anger but we've defeated and we've actually sinned against God and against the Son who might have sinned as well. Here's one that might be interesting for us. Get them a phone.

Now I pause there just because the first thing that rises up in our hearts, like legalism, right? Legalism. But I say get them a phone this is a good way and I mean I want to put it in context but get them a phone without first having walked with your sons and assessed their maturity level individually So we do some front work first, get them a phone without doing that, and then once they've got the phone, kind of leave them to themselves, right? The tried-and-true method that we can look to, the kind of handbook that we can flip to in the appendix would be Eli's parenting strategy, which is, no my sons, it is not a good report that I hear, this kind of gentle kind of lightness when it comes to sin, if you find them dabbling. Or I love the word, when you talk to men sometimes, I'm struggling with pornography or whatever else it might be.

Well, here's a way that you can actually exasperate your sons by putting in their hands the very means of access without any of the controls on the front end or any of the long-term controls throughout the course of their walk and this openness that you have with them. Close communication and monitoring is too intrusive says the Devil's Handbook. And then the last one, and there's probably others, but set up other idols on the family altar. I heard Al Martin yesterday, he was quoting from an article, he says, "'The family that cheers together stays together.'" It used to be the family that prays together, stays together. But now with excessive sports and Hollywood and occupation, leisure, get their hearts just totally involved with things like trucks and vehicles and other things that really don't matter.

It's a perfect way and have other competing sources of life and light in their hearts. It's a great way to lead them on the path that leads to destruction. And so, I wanna end. Those are the, a few of the ways that we can do that, but I wanna end more so on a, on a positive note and in terms of how we can equip and how to lead our sons toward the path of life itself. And I just wanna run through a few of them.

I think the first one is to make much of Jesus Christ, of person. And I say that because I think a lot of times, people when we think of religion or even Christ or what we do on a Sunday, it's almost like, I don't know if you ever got that impression, it's like a system, you know, Christianity works. But make much of Christ the person, that he's the chief treasure to be obtained at all costs. And he's the one not to be relinquished for life itself. Make much of Christ and let them see that in you.

Warn from evil, we've seen that today, warn from evil. There's an interesting proverb that talks about the idea of a son quoting and saying how I hated instruction as he looks back and sees the trail of tears that sin has brought him to and it says this, I was on the verge of total ruin in the midst of the assembly and congregation. Can that happen? It can happen. In the midst of the assembly and congregation, going to church weekly, but on the verge of total ruin because of what's going on inside the heart.

Make much of Christ and as a dad, warn them from evil. That's number two. One of the other ways that's really just practical, what we're doing here after every talk is extend the sermon. When you go home on Sunday, don't just get into other things, but extend the sermon, talk about it, apply it, discuss it, figure out how can we as a family join together and make full proof of what we just heard today. Let your sons see your view of God and His word that it's living.

Also teaches word that goes without saying, but I guess we should say it daily and as consistently as you can, but with a worshipful and joyful heart, not something that's just a drudgery. Okay, let's get together. It's time to do family worship, but let it actually be with worship. And then one of the most important things to counter the sing like an angel and live like a demon is live consistently, seek to live consistently. Be a man that doesn't have to look over his shoulder to worry about what's coming after him because of things that he's done in his past.

What a way to live. I've heard, it's not a proverb in the Bible, but it says that the best or the most comfortable pillow is a clean conscience. It's a good practice that you can go to bed at night with a clean conscience because you're trying to live consistently. Notice I didn't say sinlessly, right? That means that when you do sin that you can ask for forgiveness.

And then point your sons in a direction while they're young. I think again just another very practical way in terms of career or even a means of providing. Can you point them in a direction while they're young? And if they don't end up going that direction that's fine, but you've kind of pointed them along the way while they were young. Whether that's a career in a professional or trade or whatever that is, but make sure there's something there.

And then be engaged with the world. This is so important that they see that this is not all theory, but this is we're in hand to hand combat with a world that opposes God, opposes his Christ. And that means evangelism, serving maybe in the nursing home or in missions or whatever it is. Another way that you can, instead of exasperating your sons, lead them and train them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord is to love your wife. Love your wife.

And we all struggle to love our wives. I know I do as Christ loved the church, but it's a great way to train your sons. And then the last one, love. Fill your home with an atmosphere of love. They're not gonna remember October the 27th, 2016, But when they leave your home, there'll be an impression.

It was a home, you know, what was it like living in the Keith home or in the Carrington home or in the Zuniga home? And the impression hopefully will be, you know, I can't remember everything, but I got the sense there was love there. That's a way that you can train your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. So I just want you to consider your impact for good on your sons because it's immeasurable. And I'll end here with John G.

Paton continuing about his father. He says this, "'How much My father's prayers at this time impressed me. I can never explain, nor could any stranger understand. When on his knees and all of us kneeling around him in family worship, he poured out his whole soul with tears for the conversion of the heathen world to the service of Jesus and for every personal and domestic need. We felt as if in the presence of the living Savior and learn to know and love Him as our divine friend.

Let's pray. Father we we come before you Lord with the words who is sufficient for these things. We find ourselves so failing in many ways as fathers, but Lord, we commit ourselves to you and ask you to help us. Lord, you've given us such a grand task with these sons, these souls that will live in one of two places for all of eternity. And we pray, we plead with you Lord, for your working in us and through us.

Lord, we ask you to help us to not exasperate our sons, but to truly train them in your nurture and admonition. Oh Lord, may you help us. We desperately plead and call out to you, Lord, for your help. In Christ's name, amen.