In the sermon 'Raising Young Adults,' Scott Brown emphasizes the critical importance of raising children within biblical frameworks, especially as they transition into young adulthood. He warns of the dangers of neglecting biblical discipline, which can result in a generation that is disrespectful and self-assured in its own ways. Brown stresses the need for parents to transition their approach as children grow, moving from micromanagement to allowing more autonomy while still guiding them in biblical principles. The sermon underscores love as the foundation of all family interactions, drawing from 1 Corinthians 13 to highlight its significance. Brown also discusses the importance of having a big, purposeful plan for family life, which includes clear cultural identity and active participation in church and community. The sermon warns parents against following their children, emphasizing the need for strong leadership and adherence to biblical values to prevent the family from straying into worldliness.

Let's pray. Oh Lord, we pray that you would give us sound wisdom and understanding for for the raising of a new generation, that you would help us to be a blessing to those who are coming behind us, preparing them to take over for us, And oh Lord that you would preserve this generation that's coming up now. I pray you keep them from the worldliness of the world which would take them away into unprofitability in all manner of trouble. That you would give us a holy generation. Amen.

I'd like you to turn to Proverbs chapter 30. The text here in Proverbs 30 beginning verse 11 speaks of what can happen when you have not disciplined your children when they're young. And it's a tragic scene where you have children who have not been cared for according to the discipline of the Lord, either because the parents were ignorant, they didn't know it happens, or they neglected it or they rejected it because they were wise in their own eyes. There are different reasons that people reject biblical patterns for the raising of children, but when they're neglected or rejected for any reason, then there's trouble. And Proverbs 30 speaks of it, and he speaks of it with these words, there is a generation.

He's talking about a generation coming up. There's a generation that curses its father and does not bless its mother. So Solomon begins with this problem of rejecting honor of father and mother. And then in verse 12, he speaks about how self-confident this generation is. He says, there is a generation that is pure in its own eyes, yet is not washed from its filthiness." It's a generation who is satisfied with their own ways and their own sins and proud about it, which takes us to the next verse.

There's a generation, oh how lofty are their eyes, and their eyelids are lifted up. This is a proud generation. It's a generation that wasn't disciplined, wasn't dealt with, and as a result, their pride is seen in how lofty are their eyes. When you see this, particularly in older children, it's startling, and their eyelids are lifted up. They're wiser than you are.

Every young person growing up is tempted to think that they're wiser than their parents. They go through this phase. Hopefully it doesn't last very long. Sometimes it lasts the rest of their life and they never grow up. But having the eyes lofty is such a tragic thing.

And then in verse 14, he speaks of what it does in that person's heart and makes them hateful. There's a generation whose teeth are like swords and whose fangs are like knives to devour the poor off the earth and the needy from among men. The leech has two daughters, give and give. There are three things that are never satisfied for, never say enough. The grave, the barren womb, the earth that is not satisfied with water and fire never says enough.

And then finally Solomon ends this discussion of children in verse 17. The eye that mocks his father and scorns obedience to his mother, the ravens of the valley will pick it out and the young eagles will eat it. So he ends with this picture of the person who does not honor his father and mother and that dishonor turns to mocking and that mocking turns to direct disobedience, not caring for the will of the parents. But The tragedy is stated at the very end, the ravens of the valley will pick out their eye and the young eagles will eat it. This is really a description of what the apostle Paul said and what Moses said, that if you obey and honor, it will go well with you, but if not, it won't.

So that's the danger of the older years. All of these things, they come and the dues are paid when a young person is no longer young. They become young adults. So it's a really critical time. And if they take this turn, then the ravens and the eagles are there to devour them.

And I bring that up just hopefully as some kind of biblical shock value to help us understand what happens when children don't honor their father and mother. It's devastating to the child. And you know, we began this time where I said you know here's several reasons why you don't want to go to sleep at the wheel when raising your children because the consequences are just terrifyingly enormous. Okay so I want to just walk through, talk through a number of categories of living that I want to recommend we at least consider, particularly with you who have older children. And the first point I want to make is characterized by the word transitioning.

Transitioning. You have to remember that your children aren't nine anymore. It's a temptation of parents to treat their children like they were still little. And they're not little anymore. They don't think like little ones.

They've in some ways set aside childish thinking and they're different now. And in a time like that, parents have to recognize that times have changed. When they were nine, you micromanaged them. But when they're older, micromanaging is really, really rough on them. Somehow, the earlier years of child training should create a situation where you don't have to micromanage them.

If you feel like you have to micromanage, then it's quite possible that something had gone awry, you know, earlier on. Parents often, I think, make terrible errors in micromanagement in not allowing them to make decisions, not allowing them to create a schedule. Now, I'll just have to qualify that. If your children create unprofitable, unworthy schedules, then you should correct them for it. But it's possible for parents just to be relentlessly controlling in those older years, and when they need more freedom.

And sometimes what happens is that they have a hard time being independent and self-governing because their parents were too micromanaging when they started to get older. So the first thing is transitioning. I think that anybody who has children who are getting older has to ask, am I transitioning properly? Am I thinking rightly? My children are a different stage of life right now.

And I'm not here to give you rules about it. I think you have to be before the Lord and ask how you should properly help that child deploy their energies without micromanaging them, letting them make decisions. I mean, in our family, when our kids got into their teen years, we gave them all kinds of freedom, all kinds of freedom in decorating their rooms or doing things in our house, buying things. We hardly restricted our children on any financial matters. We also didn't have a sense that we should restrict them.

We weren't disturbed about what they were doing with their money. But I think what parents should do in the younger years is try to be sure that they're training people who can govern themselves. The second thing is related to the first, and that is there may be need to correct mistakes of the past. Sometimes you don't realize it until it's a little late, but realizing it even when it's late is a good thing. And you may have to admit, you may have to repent, you may have to correct some errors that you'd made in earlier life when they were younger.

And often the best thing a parent can do with their children who are getting older is to come clean, is to sit down with them and say, here are some specific errors that we made. Here were the sins that were connected with those errors and we realize it had a negative effect on you. It's good for parents to do that and I would just encourage you to consider if any of that's necessary. You know children are not different than anybody else. They appreciate honesty.

They respond to authenticity and they don't want something fake from you. And it's possible for parents just to keep on rolling and kind of be fake in the eyes of their children. Their children know that there are some errors made. So the second thing is, you know, throwing out the question, are there errors that you made that you need to come clean with? You should do that with your children.

Don't just keep rolling. The third word is love. The first word is transitioning, the second word is correcting, the third word is love. You know, I've been preaching through 1 Corinthians 13 here at our church and delivering four messages on that passage. And in the very first three verses of 1 Corinthians 13, The Apostle Paul makes it really clear that without love, you ain't nothing.

Nothing. You are nothing when you don't do it in love. And the foundation for every profitable thing in life is love. And when your children get older you're going to want them to see a world of love. What Paul says is that without love, whatever you do is nothing and it's worth nothing.

All of your parenting is that way too. It's not worth anything without love. Now, of course, love has to be defined properly. We have a lot of wrong definitions of love. It has to be defined by Scripture.

But what God has done is he's designed that parents would create a world of love. The whole kingdom of God is defined by this one word, love. And of course, the whole law is summed up in one word, love. Paul says the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart, but everything is designed for that. You know, in the Trinity, you have this fountain of love that comes from the Father.

The Father loves the Son. The Son delights to do the will of the Father. The Holy Spirit glorifies the Father and the Son. It's a world of love. It's a world of delight and authority and submission.

That's the world of love that God has designed for the family to be demonstrating. And there's nothing worse than a child to grow up and end up as a teenager in a family where there's really not love defined biblically. So protecting love and tenderness, the very marks of love that you see in a lot of places in Scripture, Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 13. There are a number of places where love is defined very, very clearly. If you go to 1 Corinthians 11, what you read is, God is the head of Christ, Christ is the head of man, and man is the head of woman.

Now that can sound very clinical in a lot of ways, but the reality of it is that There is a cascading fountain of love that comes from God the Father. That's what that's all about. It's about love being passed on through this family. The Trinity is the paradigm of all of love, where the Father loves the Son. And the whole structure of the family is designed to be this fountainhead of love that comes from God the Father, and that fountain of love is poured out onto that family.

So everything in a family should somehow be connected with love. A loveless family is the most dangerous thing you can have. Now a loveless family is also a joyless family. If you look at your family and you think you're having problems with your teenagers, the first thing you should ask is, what about love and joy in my family? My experience with families that are falling apart, generally there's a lack of joy in that family.

And the reason there's a lack of joy is because there's a lack of love and there's a lack of love because there's a lack of a vision of God and His fatherly love. It all goes back to the same thing. And so I think it's just very important that we ask this question about love. God has designed everything to be a demonstration of his love. So how's it going on that?

And then that really flows from a whole other category of theology and it really is a family's view of God. And I wanted to speak about your family's sense of the majesty of God because that will control almost, it will control the whole emotional atmosphere of your family. If your family has a right view of God and the majesty of God, there's nothing that can knock it over. There's no disturbance, there's no trial that can knock it over if they have a real sense of the majesty of God. And one of the greatest hedges against trouble in a family is the right view of God.

Because families experience troubles of different kinds. And if they have a small God, then they're always going to have big problems. I was talking to somebody yesterday, I can't remember who it was, But they were telling me a story of someone who had asked a Christian leader this question about prayer. This person asked, I bring my big problems to God, but is it okay if I bring my small problems to God? That was the question.

And this person replied and said, honey, all of your problems are small problems to God, all of them. Well, he understood the majesty of God and his absolute sovereignty over all things. And when you have, you know, young people growing up in your family they're tempted to despair like no other time in their life if you have children that reach the teenage years and you don't have a solid beautiful majestic vision of God what will sustain them nothing will sustain them And so it's so critical that in your family you understand God, His greatness, his perfection, his absolute sovereignty, that nothing can stay his hand, that he does according to his will in every home, in every government, and in the vast array of nature, he does his will, and nothing can stay His hand. And I bring this up to say this, don't let your children find themselves in their teenage years without a mighty God at their right hand. You know, when young men would come for my daughters, that was the first question in my mind.

What's their view of God? I want to know if they have a big God or a little God. Because if they have a little God, they're going to have big problems for the rest of their life. So the majesty of God, have you properly declared the glory of God in your family so that when they grow up and they start having these fears about the future and all the things that will never happen to them and all the terrors they have about growing up and not being married or no one loving them or not being able to make a living or not being able to be somebody that they at least have something eternal in the heavens to hold on to. The majesty of God.

The next word culture. I'm giving you several words, transitioning, correcting, love, majesty, now culture. You must build a strong family culture. And be very clear about who you are in this world as a family. You need to know who you are.

The Noahs need to know who the Noahs are and what the Noahs do in this world. You know, the Hillmans need to know who the Hillmans are. The Browns need to know who the Browns are. And what does it mean to be a Brown? What does it mean to be a Dome?

You know, the Browns do this, but they don't do that. The Browns are clear on what the culture of their family is like, because they realize that they have been given a responsibility to build a certain culture in this world. A culture totally apart from this world, in the same way that a church is a culture apart from the world. So is a family is designed to be a center of holiness and beauty of love and and industry and creativity and and the creation of beauty in the world. That's the purpose of a family, it's the purpose of a church.

And all of these things are designed to be reflective of the kingdom of heaven, but all these things are culture matters. What kind of culture are you building? You know, the Browns, the Browns don't wear their hats to the side. They don't do that. The Brown girls have to learn how to cook for 500 people.

That's just what the Browns do. The Browns have been given a certain life. They have a responsibility to live in a certain way. There are just certain things that the Browns don't do, and there are certain things that the Browns do do. And every family needs to recognize what callings they have in this world to define them and fulfill them and to keep them.

Every family is different. And every family doesn't have the same calling as the Browns or the Domes or the Noahs or the Hillmans. But every family has a particular calling based on the gifts that God has invested in that family, the resources, the relationships, all the various skills that exist in that family. All of those things should be part of defining that family culture. And one of the greatest things in the world is to be able to create that culture.

When Deborah and I got married, we were aware of this. We got to go create something totally new, something different than my mom and dad, something different than her mom and dad. We got to go create a world together, and It's such a joy to be able to do that. But you want to be very clear about what world you're building. Building that family culture is the thing that creates the affections of that family.

The problem with life as it is today is that there's so many opportunities that every time you say yes to something, it's no to something else. Like if you're going to say yes to one thing, you're always saying no to something else. And of course, the reverse is true as well. If you say no to something, you better be saying something yes to something else. And that's often a great problem in family life.

They just say no, no, no, no, but they don't provide reciprocal yes, yes, yes, yeses. And so the culture of the family is just based on one big no. And that's a tragedy in the making for any family. It really matters what the vision of that father and mother are. It's about creating a culture in a family.

Whether you have a spouse or not, I know some here don't have spouses, but you still have that same responsibility to create a culture, to create a world. And God has given that to you. And It can be particularly helpful, especially as your children get older, to help you along the way. But every household is designed to have a certain kind of culture. And it's so critical that while you're building the culture of your family, that you're building a culture that creates profitable affections.

I'm going to repeat those words, profitable affections. Because the world is full of opportunities to cultivate unprofitable affections. And this is one of the most pivotal matters in a family. What affections are you cultivating in your family? Because here's the reality, whatever you cultivate will grow.

It's just the way it works. The next word is big. Big. There should be a big plan. There should be a consuming plan for life.

And that plan has various elements to it in a family. And one of the most heartbreaking things that young people can experience as a family with not much of a plan. Where you have the heads of the households, they're just riding along through life, and they don't have much of a plan. Hey, guess what? Young people need a plan.

They want to do stuff. They really do. I mean they want to do stuff that matters. They really do. It's one of the great things about young people.

I see it all the time you know it's It's like in the lives of some young people, you know, there's this point where this switch turns on and they want to do something great for God. Have you ever seen that happen? It's part of the design of God. When they get to that place and you ain't got nothing for them to do, they're going to go find something. They're going to go find it somewhere else.

And it might not be exactly what it ought to be. One of the hardest things for young people is to be in a family without a plan. A plan for taking dominion, a plan for doing things that really matter. An active life that has some kind of meaning. That life in a family is defined by a number of things the work that it does family should be working family should be a picture of God the Father and his son Jesus Christ My father is working and I'm also working.

We're always working. We're always doing something good. So there should be a life of work that brings benefit to that home, on the one hand, but also to the church of Jesus Christ. The church should be one of the greatest constellations in the life of a family. The work in the church, the involvement in the church should really be one of the most critical high priority matters in a family.

A family that's in a real church, you know, there's always something to do, okay, something meaningful to do. There's someone to serve, there's someone to help, there are meals to make, There are things to do, there are things to fix and repair and mow and all kinds of stuff when you're in church. They're broken hearted people to deal with, their moms having babies that are at their wits end. In our churches, I mean, there are moms that have Four little babies in hand and they need help. So, big, a big plan where productive and beautiful things are on the radar screen.

So that when young people grow up, they don't grow up in their home and say, nothing's happening here. Create a big life. Create a bigger life than anything out there. One of the big problems with all young people is peer dependency, where they become dependent on their peers. But that's usually a symptom, by the way.

It's a symptom of small. Because when you have big, most of the time don't have peer dependency. Where your young people are just looking at other young people for their pattern, which is a disaster. It's a disaster. I'm going to say it again, I've said it probably 400 times in my life.

The idea of 13-year-olds mentoring 13-year-olds is insanity. Same with 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, it's all insanity. And so peer dependency is not really a great trajectory. What you want is you want your young people with mature people who can take them to the next level. That's really what you want.

Their peers aren't going to do them any good, really. So my view in raising of our children is that peers were secondary, not primary. Because peer dependency is a real, real danger. And so big, big. One more sort of line item under big is particularly with boys, you know, parents should really help their children figure out their career path and help them work through their employment thing, to get them rolling hard and fast as early as they can, getting them involved in meaningful work.

I always love to bump into young men who work hard. And those are the kind of young men that can really be great providers and also they can train another generation to be like the father and the son who are working. Big. The next is biblical. And I'm thinking about thinking biblically here.

When your children start growing up, they start asking questions. And they say things like, well, you know, show me in the Bible where it says, the words rock and roll don't exist, they're not in the Bible. How can I know that, how come you're saying I can't listen, I shouldn't be listening to this music? Why? Well, they have to learn how to think biblically about things.

And usually the problem is not thinking biblically, it's thinking honestly about biblical. That's usually the problem. But you have to teach your children how to think through the things that are going on in this culture through the lens of Scripture and you know answering questions about music and entertainment. It's not enough just to say well you know it's wrong It's just not enough to say that. There have to be biblical explanations for those kinds of things.

If they don't know how to draw principles from specific commands, then they just give up and you lose them there. They're not thinking right. Now one of the problems with growing up is that you don't think right. You know, you don't, like when you're 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, a lot of times, by the way, you're just not thinking right. You'll know that someday.

You'll figure it out. You'll see it. You'll get older and you'll say, wow, boy, was I an idiot. How did I think such stupid thoughts? Your parents are thinking that now.

But no, no, you think you're so wise. I'll never forget a young man that I had working with me, used to work with my interns, and one time he got them together and he said, you have no idea how much a fool you are. That's what he said. And they didn't. They didn't have any idea how foolish they were.

But they'll figure it out. That's the nice thing about life, is that you actually, over time, God helps you to figure that out. So think, thinking biblically is really critical. Of all of these things, I think the shepherding of the affections is the most important thing because the things that you cultivate are the things that they'll be attracted to and you just have to be very very careful about what you do in your family life. Earlier I quoted Richard Baxter who said, if these things aren't carried on in the family, then you undo all of it.

And what families need to be very careful with is to construct their family life around biblical truth. And often what happens in families is that they hear the preaching and the parents embrace it, but then they undo it. They completely undo it with the movies they watch and the songs they listen to and the things they engage them in. They just completely reverse it within just hours sometimes of the preaching and of the instruction of the shepherds of the church. It's a great tragedy, But that has to do with affections.

And that's why John said, do not love the world or the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world is passing away and the lust of it but he who does the will of God abides forever." And then he goes on and just continues to deal with that. Well, the three great idols of the day that will mangle the affections of your children are music, film, and sport.

Those are the three gigantic idols of the day. We don't bow down to Baal anymore. We go into stadiums and we listen to things. That's what idolatry is today. So you have to be very, very careful And the next word is follow.

Disaster awaits parents who throw up their hands and start following their children. It happens all the time. Children get older and bolder, and they want to do things their parents know they shouldn't do. But because the parents are so afraid of them, they're so afraid of losing them, that they won't direct the ship in a profitable direction. And so what happens often is that children get in front of parents and parents start following their children.

I've seen it happen many times. And don't think that you are somehow, you know, insulated from that temptation. Be really careful. God has put heads over children so that a father and a mother are heads. They are the directors.

They are the leaders. And if that is overthrown, you'll lose it all. But often it happens when parents just become so fearful of losing their children, they lose all their values. And I would just encourage you to watch out for that.