Families, Church & Discipleship (i) Ephesians 6:1-4

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”                      

 (Matt.28:18-20)

Love the Lord your God and keep his requirements, his decrees, his laws and his commands always.

(Deut.11:1)

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be … disobedient to their parents … having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.

(…taken from II Tim.3:1-5)

Obedience has always been integral to Christian discipleship.  To be redeemed is to be called into God’s vision of our life together.  It is the goal of grace (Titus 2:11-12), and the inevitable result of genuine faith (Rom.1:5).  It is the aim of the Spirit’s ministry through the Scriptures (II Tim.3:15-16), and indeed through much of what He does in our services of worship Lord’s Day by Lord’s Day.  And it is always worth remembering that it is by our obedience to the Lord’s commands that we will be judged, and not by our spiritual experience or ministry (see e.g. Matt.7:21-27; Rev.20:12-13 etc.).  We face a constant and insidious temptation to conceive of our spirituality without reference to the decisions we make in the details of how we live.  Yet it is obedience to the commands of the Lord that makes real our faith; and without such expression in daily character and life, our faith remains only a religious theory…  or more bluntly, ‘dead’ (Jas.2:17).  Obedience articulates our beliefs, gives voice to our change of identity in Christ.

And what does all, or any of this have to do with the question of discipling children and young people, or the life of families?  Because if we have been privileged to be born into a covenant family, then we are able to learn the mechanics of obedience in the context of our relationship with our parents.  Taking us back to the enduring reality fifth commandment, Paul dispenses with any questions about ‘historical context’ or ‘cultural relevance’ by simply restating it, centuries later and in a very different world (Ps.119:89).  And in ‘our’ world in which rebelling against parents is seen as normal, perhaps even a rite of passage; and in which parents so often feel they have no authority; in this world, we need to reclaim this simple strategy to teach our children obedience.   

This is not some naïve nostalgia for the family life of a bygone age.  It is recalling us to God’s good and gracious design for family life.  Parents are supposed to grow wise with age, learned in the things of God, spiritually compelling examples of Christlikeness.  They have a lifetime of experience in learning what it means to walk with the Lord to bestow.  And their children are to honour them, and in so doing learn from them.  They will be raised in the training and instruction of the Lord (Eph.6:4).  They will be taught what it means to walk with Christ.  This is the fundamental responsibility of parenting (we’ll see this next week in Dt.6, esp.vv.7-9 & Dt.11:19 etc.).  Nothing exempts children from so honouring their parents, not even that which is ostensibly for religious purposes (Mk.7:9-13).  Only if your parents seek to lead you into actual sin are you freed from this all-encompassing obligation (Matt.10:37; Acts 5:29).  Only Christ Himself takes precedence (which given this commandment, is quite a statement, Matt.10:35-37; Lk.9:59-60; 14:26); and Christ Himself was bound by it (Lk.2:51; Jn.19:26-27).

The very vocabulary used points us to this extraordinary arrangement: ‘honour’ (which Paul understands as including obedience!).  It is language that is used to describe the relationship we have with God (Ex.12:42; Ps.22:23, etc.).  We see a similar overlap in other language used to describe the role responsibilities of parents to their children (e.g. Prov.6:20, Ps.119:105).  As children learn to honour their parents, so they learn the necessary dynamics of relating appropriately to the Lord (Mal.1:6).  Parents are to seek therefore reflect as fully as possible the characteristics of the Lord, and to structure their relationship with, and discipline of, their children as closely as possible to that of the Lord’s relationship with us.  Children are then able to transfer what they learn from their relationship with their parents, to their relationship with God.  They understand the Lord, because they have learned to understand their relationship with their father and mother.  Parents make great visual aids!

Questions

What are you hoping that this series will cover?  …and what are you hoping it will avoid?

In the light of the introductory thoughts above, what would you say to a parent who felt they couldn’t discipline their child(ren) because they had done the same kind of things (or worse) when they were that age?

How can MIE better reflect the idea that parents are the primary ‘pastor’ in the lives of their children?  What would youth and children’s ministry look like if it was modelled on this?  Would we have youth and children’s ministry?

Read Eph.6:1-4

How does our culture teach children to think of their relationship with their parents?  …and how does it teach parents to think of their relationship with their child(ren)?

What does it mean to honour our parents?  How do the dynamics of such honouring change as we (& they) grow older?  What about if our parents aren’t Christians?

What does it mean to say ‘so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth’?  Why does Paul change the promise as he quotes it?  How does this promise act as a motivation to honour and obey parents? 

Paul writes this in a letter addressed to the whole Church.  How can the whole Church support children as they seek to obey their parents, and parents as they bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord?  And how can families better engage with the life of the whole Church?

Do you think Paul is addressing v.4 specifically to ‘Fathers’, or is it shorthand for ‘Fathers and Mothers’?  What does exasperate mean?  What are we being warned against?  …and what does it mean to bring our children up in the training and instruction of the Lord?

Memory Passage:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.  But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.”  Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds..

James 2:14-18

Going Deeper:

We live at the end of half a century (and for some that covers our entire Christian life) of unprecedented investment in youth and children’s ministry in the British Church.  Never has so much time, energy, thought and money been poured into servicing a specific demographic in the life of the Church.  And at the end of it, the stats are terrifying.  Less than 100,000 children / y/.p. (0-16) attend Church.  Looking specifically at Anglican Churches, less than 1,000 Churches have more than 25 children or y.p. in attendance; and almost 50% of 0-16 year olds are found in 6.4% of the Churches.  Within living memory, hundreds of Church, likely thousands, have seen their youth / children’s work decline to zero.  Behind those statistics are terrifying trends… but more importantly, there are people.  There are young people not walking with Christ, and broken hearted parents and grandparents having to navigate that devastation of their (grand-)children not sharing their faith.

Whether a segregated approach to Church life ever worked is a moot point.  It is self-evident that it isn’t working today.  To continue to invest in a model of Church and youth and children’s ministry that has led to such catastrophic results is beyond madness.  To put our hope for our children in such structures would be to invite only further tragedy.  But the questions we must face in these few weeks are deeper than pragmatics, and statistical trends.  The fundamental question we must learn to ask when addressing any aspect of our discipleship is simply this:  What does the Bible teach?   That and that alone must guide our discussion as a Church.