The story of the Priest Eli and his sons (1 Samuel 2-4) is a difficult but important cautionary story for fathers. This is a man who knew God, served him, and failed to properly disciple his sons. In the end he lost them, and himself, to the judgment of God. Fathers, let us look to this man and his sons as an example, an example of what to not do, and let us learn from his failure so that - as much as it depends on us - we may bring up our children in the fear of the Lord.

Then the Lord said to Samuel, Behold, I will do something in Israel at which both ears of everyone who hears it will tingle. In that day I will perform against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house from beginning to end. For I have told him that I will judge his house forever for the iniquity which he knows because his sons made themselves vile and he did not restrain them. Therefore I have sworn to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli's house shall not be atoned for by sacrifice or offering forever. Now according to chapter three verse 13, he could have restrained them And even when they were older, he could have at least done what Deuteronomy 21 says.

And if he could not himself restrain them, remove them from office, and turn them over to the civil magistrate for some of the crimes that they have done. And I do want to spend just a couple of minutes to show you how bad things had turned out in this family. And this is mostly going to be from chapter two. Now we'll be reading a lot of it, but I'm just going to give you some highlights first of all. In verse 12, it says that his sons were corrupt.

And the literal rendering of corrupt is that they were sons of Belial. Now, that word Belial is used in the scripture as a synonym for Satan and sons of Belial as a reference to unbelievers, especially those whose lives were messed up. Second Corinthians 6, 15, What accord has Christ with Belial? What part has a believer with an unbeliever? And then the parallelism there, it indicates sons of Belial would be unbelievers.

And so it makes perfect sense that in verse 12, it also says that they did not know God. Now that's an odd thing to say about priests who are ministering to God all day long, but there is a big difference between knowing about God and knowing God, and it's clear that Eli had not successfully ministered the gospel of grace to the hearts of these children very effectively. In verses 13 through 15, we see that the children were self-indulgent. Now that doesn't just start happening when they were adults. The word custom in those verses indicates this had been going on for a long, long time.

And it indicates that self-indulgence starts at a very early age. They're patterns that develop very young. In fact, just as a side note, when parents tell me that they don't think that they have the ability to homeschool, I'm quick to tell them that they've been homeschooling for several years. In fact, you've been homeschooling from the time your kids are babies and toddlers. You've been training them.

The question is, have you been improving yourself and educating yourself and effective homeschooling, but they have been training their kids in something or another. For example, when they're babies and toddlers, if They pick their kids up at every little cry, at every little insistence of the child. They're teaching that child that the whole universe revolves around them. And they're teaching that self-indulgence is the norm. So right from the earliest times, we can be teaching principles of self-control and patience and trust and many other virtues.

We need to teach them as well, loving on them and that they can, they know that we care for them because we're seeking to model the whole Christian life. But these verses also show theft, abuse of office, lawlessness, bullying. Now take a look at chapter 2 verses 13 through 14. It says, and the priest's custom with the people was that when any man offered a sacrifice, the priest's servant would come with a three pronged flesh hook in his hand while the meat was boiling. Then he would thrust it into the pan or kettle or cauldron or pot and the priest would take for himself all that the flesh hook brought up.

So they did in Shiloh to all the Israelites who came there. Now this was robbing people of what was rightfully theirs. The priests were not supposed to get the people's portion. The Bible said that they got the breast and the right thigh and the rest was to be offered up to the Lord or to be eaten by the people. If you look at verse 15, it says, also before they burned the fat, the priests servant would come and say to the man who sacrificed, give meat for roasting to the priest for he will not take boiled meat from you, but raw.'" Now this was wrong on three counts.

So first, they weren't supposed to eat the fat at all. Exodus three, Exodus seven, I mean, Leviticus three and seven and Exodus 29 are all very clear. 100% of the fat was to go to the Lord. Now they weren't supposed to take anything that was to be offered up to the Lord. And thirdly, they weren't supposed to eat their portion or take their portion until after the sacrifice had been made, otherwise it spoiled the symbolism.

And so they were not looking to the word of God for how they ruled the church. Verse 16, and if the man said to him, they should really burn the fat first, then you may take as much as your heart desires, he would then answer him, no. But you must give it now, and if not, I will take it by force. No accountability of these people financially or socially. They did their own thing, and if you didn't like it, basically they told you that you could lump it.

Take a look at verse 17. Therefore the sin of the young men was very great before the Lord, for men abhorred the offering of the Lord. If you take a look down at verse 22. Now Eli was very old and he heard everything his sons did to all Israel and how they lay with the women who assembled at the door of the tabernacle of meeting. And so there was fornication and I won't need to go through and read all of the different scriptures, but verse 25 says that they were so stiff necked in their sin and in their rebellion that God wanted to kill them.

To put it mildly, they were a mess. They were an absolute mess. And so I think I've demonstrated from the scripture that God does indeed put the blame on Hophni and Phineas. They could not excuse their behavior by saying, oh, it's my parents fault. If they had only raised me right, I would have turned out okay.

Now they made their own moral decisions and they did not listen to the rebuke of Eli which they could have done. But this afternoon I'm not going to be preaching about Hophni and Phinehas so much as I am about some of the failures in Eli's life. And you might think, how is it that a priest's children could have turned out so badly? You know, when we're looking from the outside in, it's astonishing. We tend to be blind to our own sins, But we look at that with how in the world could anybody do something like that.

Now it's not as if Eli liked the behavior of his children. He wanted them to be different, but he had no stomach for discipline. Oh yeah, he blew up. He chewed out his children. Just like parents today will scream at their children sometimes.

But like King David, he did not restrain his sons. And I bring David up because a lot of times David gets kind of a free pass and people are really hard on Eli, but there really is no difference between Eli and David on these points. For example, in 1 Kings chapter one, it says of David's son Adonijah, his father had not rebuked him at any time. And the literal Hebrew is that his father had not brought pain to him at any time. Oh, he got angry at his children from time to time, but David did not restrain them.

In 2 Samuel 13, Amnon raped his sister Tamar and the text says that David got very angry but he did not restrain Amnon. Amnon continued to be a menace, so did Absalom. And so it's not as if Eli is alone with this problem. The historical books are full of examples of men who loved God, and they were willing to lay down their lives on the battlefield, but they did not restrain their children. They could take on giants in the battlefield, but they could not take on their own kids.

And these are listed in Hebrews 11 as heroes of the faith. And my point is, don't think that you are exempt from the problems that we're going to be looking at this afternoon. These are listed as people who did indeed love the Lord, but they had huge holes in their parenting. People like Gideon and Abdon of Hillel and Samuel and several good kings. And let me just give you a couple of hints that Eli was indeed a man of faith just like they were.

The speech that we're going to read in chapter two where he really chews out his sons shows that he did believe the word of God. And we'll look at that in a bit. We also see that he was willing to submit to God's discipline. He had a degree of humility. For When God brought a similar rebuke to Eli in the next chapter, chapter three, Eli says it is from the Lord.

Let him do what seems good to him. So he had a degree of humility. And I believe that even in the naming of his son, Phinehas, it shows a hint that he had dreams for his son. He probably wanted his son to have the faith and the courage and the godliness that the hero of Numbers chapter 25 had. But he had gaping holes in his theology of parenting, and as a result he had gaping holes in his practice of parenting.

And I guess I should advance these slides for you, but I think you've got a handout as well. So we're gonna take a look at these seven gaping holes. First, like many modern parents that I know, Eli was very quick to be critical of other people's sins, but he was somewhat blind to his own children's faults. And you will never have what it takes to restrain your children if you are like Eli in this regard. Just as scripture calls upon us to be harder on ourselves than we are on others, Matthew chapter five, I believe by analogy, it indicates that we ought to be harder on our own family than we are on other people's families.

We ought to take the log out of our own family's eyes so that we will see more clearly to take the plank out of other families eyes. In chapter 1 and verse 12 I want to show you how Eli tended to be blind to his own children's sins, but he was very cognizant and critical of the sins of others. Chapter one, verse 12, Hannah's pouring out her heart and anguished to the Lord in prayer. And let's take a look at verses 12 through 14. And it happened as she continued praying before the Lord that Eli watched her mouth.

And the Hebrew word for watched is shamar. And the dictionary defines it this way, to diligently guard or to exercise great care over. In other words, Eli was watching her like a hawk. He was critical of her behavior. He was analyzing her behavior, and I believe if he had the same watch care over his own family, he would have been much more quick to restrain his children's sins.

Verse 13, now Hannah spoke in her heart. Only her lips moved but her voice was not heard, therefore Eli thought she was drunk. And then he goes on to rebuke her for her drunkenness. He doesn't ask, he assumes and he takes action based upon those assumptions. And so here is Eli, quick to see sin, quick to rebuke sin, and quick to restrain sin in other people, but he is utterly blind to sins in his own family.

Take a look at chapter two and verses 22 through 23. Now Eli was very old and he heard everything his sons did to all Israel and how they lay with the women who assembled at the door of the tabernacle of meeting. So he said to them, Why do you do such things? For I hear of your evil doings from all the people. I want you to notice that Eli didn't notice these sins for himself.

In verse 22, God says he had to hear about these sins from other people and he admits that he's been a non-observant as well in verse 23. For I hear of your evil dealings from all the people. And I find that phrase from all the people interesting on two counts because I think it reveals first of all that he was somewhat resistant to criticism from other people concerning his family. He was resistant to the earlier reports. It's not until there is a consistent pattern of people coming to him, until all the people come to him, that there is a momentum that he finally does something about it.

The second thing that this phrase shows is how long it took him to be convinced, okay? If the people have been reporting, All the people have been reporting this behavior. It implies that there is a process of time. And so the question is how many years had this been going on? It's clear that for a long time he has been oblivious to their sins.

And I think Every one of you know people in the same boat who are oblivious to the serious sins being manifested in their own children's lives. They go to somebody's house for dinner and their kids are tearing up the joint and they don't even notice it. And you bring it to their attention and they look at you like you're being judgmental or something. And if you're one of those fathers who doesn't tend to notice, let me suggest that you make it a goal to watch your children's behavior, the Hebrew word shamar, that you duly investigate. Now we men tend to be so goal oriented that whatever particular goals we do not happen to have in front of us at this particular juncture of time just tends to slide past us.

It's not true of all men, but I think it tends to be true of a majority of men, and so it's critical that we have uppermost in our mind a daily goal to be observant of the behavior of our children, to exercise great care over them, the Hebrew word, a shamar. For example, when you're at church, there's this tendency to get involved in conversation and not notice that your children are maybe running wild in the auditorium and making a nuisance of themselves. And so that ability to step back from a conversation, scan the room, make sure you know what your children are doing, and if they're not doing what they should be doing, saying, excuse me, I'll be right back, you go and you deal with your children. Make it a practice to reinforce this habit, this habitual watching, this shamar of your children at home. Put the newspaper down and observe what your children are doing, how they're interacting with each other, and look at it in light of the word of God.

Anyway, this tendency toward blindness to our own sins and blindness to the sins of our families absolutely has to be licked if we are to restrain the foolishness that is in the hearts of our children in a godly way. And if you are defensive as soon as people complain about your children, I can tell you right now, you are in deep trouble. You're headed toward Eli because this is the first Eli-ism you've got in your life. Now there could be another reason why he was ignorant of his children's sins. He may simply have not been around them very much.

Maybe he was a workaholic who preferred the safety of work to the messiness of family life. And we don't know for sure all of the reasons why he was ignorant, but fathers must make it a habit to study their children, to understand their behavior. Because sometimes even ministry can rob us of insight into our children. Let me give you an example. When I was a seminary student in California, I knew a woman who was very, very involved in the pro-life movement.

Everybody knew about her. And she was so involved in the pro-life movement that she was really neglecting her children. And one day her daughter came up to her and desperately wanted to talk to her mom. And the mom was late to a meeting and she put her off and said, let me deal with that later please. I'm busy.

I need to get out the door. Well, she'd completely forgot about it and several days later, she discovered that her daughter had gotten pregnant, was scared, had come to her mom to ask for advice, but because her mom had pushed her off and because the dad was almost totally absent from that home's life, she had ended up getting an abortion. Now here is the irony. She was very observant and very diligent about restraining abortion out there in society, but was so involved in that, she was not restraining abortion within her own family. And it's exactly the same syndrome that we have been describing in Eli.

Now of course I've seen this much more frequently with fathers and it is something that we fathers definitely need to take to heart that we are not so busy in work and ministry that we are ignorant of the struggles that our children are going through. In fact, here's something that I would encourage you to do. Write down the struggles of your family and start making very concrete plans on what you're going to do to help them overcome these struggles. I dare say that if I were to ask each one of you fathers what are the key struggles of every one of your children and what have you been doing to help them to overcome those struggles, My guess is that a good chunk of you would not be able to come up with much of anything and you ought to be able to do that. We need to be observant of our children.

Okay, a second major hole in Eli's parenting was that he tried to reason with his children rather than restraining his children. And this is a huge problem in the modern, the modern Christian church, even in the home school movement. Take a look at verse 23. Verse 23, he's complaining, why do you do such things? He's obviously disappointed with his sons.

He's disapproving of them. He wants to convince them that what they are doing is not right, but asking a fool why he is engaged in folly is about like asking a circle why it is round. Proverbs 14 verse 24 says, the foolishness of fools is folly. You don't need to ask. You just recognize it and you deal with it.

And to reason with your children is not going to work. Instead scripture says we must do two things. First of all, we must apply the word of God to our children's lives and pray that God would quicken that word to their hearts. It is powerful tool. Sharper than any two-edged sword.

And then secondly, we need to restrain their sin. Those are the two things we need to be involved in. God does not hold Eli accountable for their unregenerate heart. But he does hold him accountable because he has failed to adequately bring the means of grace into the lives of his children and he has failed to restrain the behavior of his children. And the rod of discipline has that as a goal.

Proverbs 22 verse 15 promises, foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction will drive it far from him. Whether regenerate or unregenerate, the rod of correction will drive it far from him. Now only God can change the heart, but fathers can do much to bring the means of grace into their lives and they can do much to drive that foolishness far from the hearts of our children. And we already saw that David had this fault as well in 1 Kings chapter one. He never brought pain into his children's lives.

He protected them from pain. Now if the same can be said of you, it will be a miracle if your children do not turn out as badly as Eli and Hophni, Eli's children, Phineas and Hophni did. And for that matter, Samuel's. We'll look at that in a bit. So what do we do?

How do we avoid this Eli-ism? Well one of the practical exercises that I encourage fathers to implement if they have been lax in their discipline is to exercise and implement boot camp. It's obedience training, so to speak, and this boot camp is as much for developing habits in the parents as it is for developing habits in the children. So you explain to your kids that God wants them to be good soldiers of the cross. And every soldier has to go to boot camp in order to learn disciplined behavior and disciplined attitudes.

And you can say something to the effect of this. Children the behavior and the attitudes in this family have really been slipping, and I have failed to be a good leader in allowing that. Now I've repented to God, and I've asked his forgiveness, and I am repenting before you, and I wanna ask your forgiveness for failing to demand first-time obedience from you children. And we're gonna fix that this morning. What we're going to do today and tomorrow and the next day and every day until we get perfect responses from you is we're going to be implementing boot camp training.

I'm going to give arbitrary commands to you, and I'm going to give exercises and some duties that I want to be overseeing and watching you do, and I'll tell you, for example, to go get a book and bring it to me, And if you do not do so immediately, cheerfully, and quickly, there's going to be a whack with the discipline implement on your behind and we're going to practice it again. And we're going to do it again and again until every command is followed perfectly. So let's pray that God would make this boot camp a success. And so you pray with the children, and you explain your expectations to these children, and you would administer discipline for every in fact fraction in this boot camp without exception. No warning, no saying, now son, I told you that you need to obey right away.

That's second time obedience. You do not want to be reinforcing second time obedience in boot camp. You're training for unquestioning, immediate, cheerful, first time obedience. And during that first boot camp, there might be a lot of tears, in fact, so much so that you might have to break part way through for some tea time and cookies. And once they have quieted down, going back and saying, okay, we're going to resume our boot camp again.

And you might have to do that break because you're wanting to reinforce cheerful obedience and not simply crying obedience. But by the second boot camp, every child knows the routine. They usually hop right to it. In fact, it almost becomes a game. Almost, and many of the families that we have implemented this with, they don't many a times even have to use the rod after the second or third boot camp because as soon as there's boot camp coming in they adjust their attitudes.

They say, okay, yep, we've messed up. We know exactly what we need to do on this. But they learn the disciplines of doing things that they don't want to do without complaint and with good expressions on their faces. And yes, you should discipline your children for obedience that is done with a scowl on the face. You say, you know, that scowl, son, reveals a bad heart, and that is something that we are praying against and something that we are working against.

And let me say that the advantages of having boot camp are many. It breaks the habit of reasoning with kids and arguing with them. In other words, it's training the parents to expect first time obedience. There are no warnings. There is a command that's given with follow-up, either discipline with slight adjustments or praise.

But either way, there is a reinforcement of a child. In fact, you take that child right back to the exact place and the exact circumstances where they disobeyed and you say, let's try this again. And if need be, it's repeated over and over and over again. You don't raise your voice. In fact, I strongly, strongly suggest that you not raise your voice to the children.

You're not a sergeant, you are a father. It's one of the big differences between boot camp and in the army and boot camp and the family is that you are training them as a father who loves them and cares for them, not as a sergeant. So just calmly enforce the discipline. The second advantage is that when one child is being disciplined, the other children learn it doesn't pay to disobey. So they can learn by watching.

The third advantage is you can cram training that might otherwise take months and even years into two or three one-hour sessions and speed up the change. And the subsequent boot camps might be more rare and might even take only 10 or 15 minutes. But it's much less painful over the long haul for both parents and children. Fourth advantage is that it instills a habit, and that's what you want, a habit through quickly repeated practice routines. It's hard to develop a habit if your responses to bad behaviors are separated by weeks and months at a time.

And then the fifth benefit is it's very intentional and a parent is less likely to discipline out of anger or out of frustration. Now even though initially there may only be outward restraint of their behavior. As you persevere in scripture saturated and prayer saturated obedience training, you will find very speedy and remarkable changes happening in your children. I think this is in part what Hebrews is talking about when it deals with the discipline of parents, but it talks about practice. Through practice, through practice, we grow in godliness.

It works. And I don't believe it's gonna work quite so well if it's only the mom who is doing this. It's fathers who must set the role, be role models on this and set the tone for their families. Okay, the third gaping hole in Eli's parenting is shown in verses 23 through 25. He blows up the kids and he vents his frustration at them, but his sons ignore him.

Why? Well, they know from experience that dad has more bark than bite. And they're adults now, they've probably been through this ritual quite a number of times in their lives. They're probably thinking, you know what, Dad couldn't bear to see us kicked out of office. He's probably not gonna do anything about this.

Let's just ignore him like we could ignore him all the other times. So when Eli says, no, my sons, it didn't have any impact on him, on them. They've heard this no maybe a thousand times and they've usually been able to get around it. No did not mean no to Eli, at least not in terms of follow through. And in case you think there was absolutely nothing that he could do with adult sons, you're absolutely wrong.

In the next point, we're gonna read from Deuteronomy chapter 21 and I'll explain that. But right here, I just wanna emphasize that any time you dads demonstrate more bark than bite, you've already started the process of losing your children. Blowing up at your kids is a sure sign you've already lost the battle. It's a sure sign that you are weak and they are strong. It's a sure sign that you are neither in control of yourself nor in control of them.

You simply cannot restrain the evil that is in the hearts of your children if the only time they take you seriously is when you get mad, when you start yelling at them. In fact, eventually they're gonna realize they can even ignore your yelling because you're usually not going to follow through even when that happens, as Eli experienced with his older children. Okay, the fourth gaping hole in Eli's theology of parenting was that his children had become more important to him than God did. Now, if you were to tell Eli that this was the case, I'm sure he would have denied it. I'm sure he would have said, no way, God is way more important to me than my kids are.

I love God, but his actions showed otherwise. The text says that he honored them and their desires more than he honored God and God's desires. And I want you to take a look at verse 29. God says to Eli, why do you kick at my sacrifice and my offering which I have commanded in my dwelling place and honor your sons more than me to make yourselves fat with the best of all the offerings of Israel, my people. Now you might think that he did not have much choice.

These are grown up sons. There's not a lot that he could do with them, but that's actually not the case. He had the power to eject them from office, take them out of office. He had the authority to take his children to the civil magistrates for their crimes and what they were engaged in was indeed a Crime and to have them receive some kind of corporal punishment and I want to read from Deuteronomy 21 where you can see just one example of this. In fact, this is one of the most controversial passages.

Today you'll see many evangelicals are just shocked that this is even in the Bible. But Deuteronomy 21 verses 18 through 21. If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and who when they have chastened him will not heed them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city, to the gate of his city. They shall say to the elders of his city, this son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey our voice.

He is a glutton and a drunkard. Then all the men of his city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall put away the evil from among you and all Israel shall hear and fear. Now it would have been extremely hard, granted, for Eli to do this because first of all, it would have been an admission of the utter failure of his parenting. It would have been hard for him because parents love their children.

They do not want to see their children die. But in Matthew 15 and in Mark 7, Jesus upholds this law and even a more restrictive law, more severe law that when you cannot break the habit in your children of cursing, repeatedly cursing their father and their mother, you take them to the civil magistrate. Anyway, in Matthew 15, Mark 7, Jesus says that because the Pharisees refused to implement this law with their children, that they were honoring man more than they honored God. Jesus is accusing the Pharisees of his day of being basically just like Eli in their parenting. Now hopefully none of us would ever be in the situation where we would have to testify against our children in a civil court.

But what I'm doing here, arguing from the greater, which hopefully none of you will ever experience, arguing from the greater to the lesser, if Jesus says that we must honor God more than our children on even a Deuteronomy 21 kind of a scenario, how much more so on the far lesser situations that arise years and years before that even comes up, okay? It does not honor God when our children are disrespectful to other adults and we don't do anything about it. We let them get away with it. It is because fathers want their children to like them and to respect them that they refuse to restrain them. But we must be far more concerned about what God likes than what our children like.

And if we don't close that gaping hole in our parenting, it will become exceedingly hard to enforce a no by restraining our children. Now related to this is point E. Eli was overly driven by a desire to protect his children from harm. And even when Eli rebukes his sons in chapter two, he does it to warn them that they better quit that or they might receive God's judgment. Rather than viewing God's disciplines and his own disciplines as a good thing, as a tool for training in holiness, he sees it as something to be avoided at all costs.

And you are making the same mistake when you tell your children, you better quit doing that or you're going to get a spanking. What are you saying when you say that? In effect, you are saying that Avoiding a spanking is more important than first time obedience. It's exactly what you were saying. If your goal is to keep your children from getting spankings you have already missed the heart of the matter.

My own father faced such pain in his early growing up years that he tried to shield us children from all discomfort and all pain, and it's not a healthy thing. Children too need to be taught how to be good soldiers of the cross. They too need to be taught how to pick up their cross daily and follow Christ no matter how uncomfortable that cross might be. They too need to be taught how to deny themselves for Christ's sake. But here's the question, does your parenting reflect that fundamental call of Christ to your children to pick up their cross and follow Christ daily.

If you're an indulgent father who is trying to protect your kids from discipline and discomfort, you have a hidden motivation that will destroy consistency in restraining their evil. The next point, though for the most part, Eli was godly, he did model some evil to his children. Now they picked up his small compromises and they amplified them. And by the way, because Eli was Samuel's adoptive father, which by the way is not a good thing to sentimentalize, That's a horrible situation where Samuel was taken away from his parents and given, there's nothing in the scripture says this is normative or should have been followed but because Eli was in effect the parent for Samuel, Samuel imitated many of Eli's defects and if you look sometime at 1 Samuel chapter eight, you will see that Samuel became the same permissive parent and his kids turned out just as much of a disaster, in fact, such a disaster that the citizens insisted that they be impeached from office, be kicked out of office, and they should have been kicked out from office. Not Samuel so much, but the sons definitely were very evil, and it was a result of the permissiveness that he learned.

It all started with Eli. Now in verse 35, Eli was said to be not totally faithful in his priestly duties. There's just a little bit of compromise there. In verse 29, we see that Eli modeled taking more than his fair share of the sacrifices. He modeled indulgence.

He modeled that if it tastes good, I'm gonna eat it, even if God has said that 100% of the fat is supposed to be burned up to him. Verse 16 rebukes the sons for eating the fat that should have been given to God. But where did they learn it? It wasn't just them. In verse 29, God rebukes Eli saying, to make yourselves fat.

And I want you to notice that he includes Eli. To make yourselves fat with the best of all the offerings of Israel, my people. They were all fat. Now the picture in your outline doesn't reflect it, but in chapter four, verse 18, it says that Eli was exceedingly fat, and God says it wasn't a hormone thing, it was a making yourselves fat thing. And so Eli had a hard time in restraining indulgence in his children.

Why? Because he was indulgent. They were just amplifying upon what he had modeled for them. He had a hard time restraining their theft when he himself had been taking things that God said he should not have been taking. He had a hard time restraining their compromises because he was compromised in small areas as well.

And I've seen Christian parents rationalizing their children's petting and other sexual fornication when they're dating and they say, well, you know, we did that when we were children as well, we didn't turn out so bad. These things, these character issues have got to be dealt with in parents if we're going to be successful in dealing with them in our children. Our children will almost always amplify upon our compromises if we have not repented of them and if we have not trained them to do differently. So that's the sixth gaping hole. And the last thing that I want to highlight was that Eli failed to be God-centered in his parenting.

As part of God's judgment on Eli, God says in verse 35, Then I will raise up for myself a faithful priest who shall do according to what is in my heart and in my mind. I will build him a sure house and he shall walk before my anointed forever. Now there are two phrases that speak about God-centered living here. The last phrase, he shall walk before my anointed forever is not primarily looking at David, though that's involved. I think it's a messianic reference, David being a type of Christ.

And So in effect, this is equivalent to saying he would walk quorum Deo. He would walk before the face of God. This was the goal of Calvin in his life, to constantly walk in all of his actions as if God was looking on, knowing that God indeed was. The other phrase, who shall do according to what is in my heart and in my mind, also shows a God-centered focus. Now, Eli in some ways did want to please God, and he wanted to serve him, but Because his mind was focused on earthly things, rather than being God centered, he had a hard time being driven by God's desires.

And the more difficult the task, such as discipline, which admittedly is a difficult thing to do, the less likely he was to be driven in a God-centered way. And the only remedy for this is given in Colossians 3 verses 1 through 5 where Paul says, if then you were raised with Christ, Seek those things which are above where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God Set your mind on things above not on things on the earth Now that is extremely hard But it is absolutely essential to have a God-centered focus in our parenting. It's only as we abide in the vine that we're going to bear fruit to his glory. So he says, set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth, for you died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

Therefore put to death your members which are on the earth, fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness which is idolatry. Because of these things the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience in which you yourselves once walked when you lived in them. Now Satan will do everything in his power to keep you distracted from a Christ-centered and a God-centered focus. As he knows that if you are not abiding in the vine, if you're not abiding in Christ, if you're not walking in the power of the Holy Spirit, your parenting will be powerless and everything else that you do will be powerless. He'll try to distract you emotionally by making you so emotionally exhausted at your job that you come home and you just wanna plop down into a sofa and flip through the channels on the TV.

You just don't feel like discipling your children. You don't feel like working in their lives. He will try to distract you spiritually by making you too busy to pray with your wife and your children, too tired to read scripture, to read solid books. He'll try to distract you physically by making you so busy that you're an absentee dad just like Eli was. Or it might be through a tiredness, or he may distract you through becoming overly committed to things outside your home so that you're neglecting the things your primary calling to your home.

But I would urge you to fight every distraction from Christ centered living and to put off these seven Eliisms that are keeping you from restraining the foolishness that is in the heart of your children. And as you start dealing with these seven points, it's my prayer that God would richly, richly bless your fathering. Amen.