God's Pattern for Children, Part 2

Children are deficient in four areas. Mentally, we want to stimulate them to know the truth of God. Physically, we want to nourish them so that they can grow up. Socially, we want to teach them humility and the love of others. Spiritually, we want to confront their sin and bring them to the place of repentance and faith in Jesus Christ.

If you've ever taken a philosophy class, you've probably heard the theory popularized by John Locke called tabula rasa. The basic idea is that a child's mind and soul is a blank slate at birth, so he's not morally good or bad, just neutral. And that's a popular notion these days, but is it a biblical one? Bottom line, what does the Bible say about our moral condition even before we're born? It would be hard to overstate just how important that question is, and the answer is going to affect every aspect of your parenting, from the way you discipline to what you teach your kids about God and salvation. So stay right here on Grace To You, as John MacArthur helps you examine your child's nature through a biblical lens. It's part of his current study, The Fulfilled Family.

Here's John with today's lesson. Open your Bible, if you will, to Ephesians chapter 6, Ephesians chapter 6. The family, as we have been saying all through this series, is the critical center of society. The family is the seed bed of economic skills, social skills, morality, ethics, values, attitudes toward work, faith in God, you name it.

When things go well in the family, life is worth living. When they don't go well in the family, life falls apart. And clearly in our time and in our country, life is falling apart. Children are largely the devastated ones in this disintegration. Without proper love, without proper discipline, we are raising or better not raising a generation of troubled, angry, bitter children. They have been abandoned by their career-driven fathers and their working mothers. Parents have become self-centered, energy with their own enterprises. They want only that the children not get in the way. Children are left to themselves largely, left often in the chaos of divorce, sometimes born illegitimately. All of these things tragically affect them. Criminality is on the increase because of this unloved, angry, undisciplined generation.

Young people who are self-centered, selfish, hostile, driven by unchecked lust, which escalates as this generation of rebellious children grow up. Against this trend stands the Word of God, so clear about how to raise a responsible, faithful child. And it really is not that difficult. In fact, we can understand clearly the plan.

It's only a question of whether we will be faithful to implement it. I can sum up all you need to know about raising your children, all you need to know about parenting in just a couple of sentences. One, teach them the truth about God and His law all the time.

That's the first sentence. Teach them the truth about God and His law all the time. Now that one sentence sums up all kinds of things out of Scripture, but that's the sum of it. Teach them the truth about God and His law all the time. Second sentence, demand that they obey that law and punish them physically when they don't. Demand that they obey that law and punish them physically when they don't. Those two sentences sum up what the Bible teaches about raising children. Teach them the truth about God and His law all the time.

Demand that they obey that law and punish them physically when they don't. We remember what it says in Proverbs, foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of reproof will drive it from him. But the rod of reproof will not drive it from him if he does not understand why he is being reproved.

And he will understand that if he understands the law which he has violated. As we saw last time, children battle the curse inside them. They battle the world system outside them.

And nowadays, of course, they battle these last days' dissolutions which come upon them. They must then not be left to themselves, but they must be assisted to develop as God-fearing people. And Ephesians chapter 6 gives us the simple pattern. In fact, it speaks first of all to the children. And it says, Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with a promise, that it may be well with you and that you may live long on the earth. And then to the parents and fathers, and that certainly encompasses the parental responsibility of both father and mother, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. In other words, instruct them about the Lord and discipline them to obey that instruction, just that clear.

There is the pattern. Your goal is children who are obedient and who honor their mother and father. They are the ones to whom blessing is promised. Now we're still talking about the responsibility of children, and it is this, to obey your parents and to honor them. Really, that's the sphere of all of their responsibility. They are under their parents, and they are called to submission and respect. But children must be taught to do this. They must be disciplined to do this. They must be made to obey. They must be made to respect. Now, when you have an improper or absent area in their lives in regard to teaching this, when there's a big missing element in their lives, and it is this, you can give them things, you can give them toys, you can give them a happy environment, a comfortable home, but if this area of their life is missing, they will not learn self-control.

And if they do not learn self-control, they're on a fast track to being reprobate and headed for damnation. You see, children are deficient in four areas, and you can find those areas simply by reminding yourself of Luke 2.52, where it says about our Lord Jesus, and Jesus kept increasing in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man. Jesus, as a little child, grew, and He grew in four areas. Wisdom and stature, that means He grew mentally and physically.

In favor with God and man, that means He grew spiritually and socially. Those are the four categories in which children are deficient. They are mentally deficient. What that means is they have limited knowledge and limited wisdom. They are physically deficient.

They have limited strength. They are socially deficient. They are selfish and proud.

You know, they want what they want when they want it, and they show off a lot. And they are spiritually deficient in that they are sinful and do not know God personally. Parents then have to create an environment and a context which demands that they develop in these areas. Mentally, we want to stimulate them to know the truth of God. Physically, we want to nourish them so that they can grow up. Socially, we want to teach them humility and the love of others and to be servants.

Spiritually, we want to confront their sin and bring them to the place of repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. That's what parenting is. It is teaching them about God and His law all the time and enforcing their obedience to that law by disciplining them when they disobey.

Now frankly, this pattern yields marvelous results, wonderful results, and you don't have to be an educated Ph.D. to figure this out. You only have to be a Ph.D. to figure out how to control children who aren't trained this way. And that's what we have today. We have a whole world of psychologists and sociologists and psychiatrists trying to figure out how to get control of a generation of children who are out of control because they have not been raised according to the principles of Scripture. We have a whole generation of disobedient children in our nation who are proud, self-centered, and indulgent toward their own drives and lusts. Parents who have been programmed not to spank them because that's been reclassified as child abuse, parents who really don't know what moral system to teach them, parents who are too busy to bother largely, are now trying to deal with these children who are angry because they're not given the love and affection and attention that they need, who are uncontrolled because they have not been taught self-control. Parents are now trying to deal with these children in the most frightening ways. I picked up Newsweek magazine, and the main article was an article on Ritalin, which is a medication being given to children today. And I want to give you some of what this article says because I want to show you what lengths parents go to to try to get control of their children when they will not do it God's way. Here's how the article begins. It is another medication morning at Winnebago Elementary School in the middle class Chicago suburb of Bloomingdale.

Three pings sound precisely over the intercom at 1145 A.M. Principal Mark Wagoner opens a locked file cabinet and withdraws a giant Tupperware container filled with plastic prescription vials. Nearly a dozen students scramble to the office for their Ritalin, a drug that calms the agitated by stimulating the brain. These children, all ages, mostly boys, have been diagnosed with ADHD, which is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, a complex of neurological impairment that takes the breaks off brains and derails concentration.

A decade ago, Wagoner, the principal, remembers only two Winnebago students lined up for Ritalin. He's uncertain how many more take their medicine at home or on their own. There are no x-rays, no blood tests, no CT scans to determine who needs this medicine.

And diagnosing Attention Deficit remains as much art as science. There are no definitive long-term studies to reassure parents that this stimulant isn't causing some hidden havoc to their child. It takes time for parents and teachers to sit down and talk to kids, says Dr. Sharon Collins, a pediatrician in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where reportedly eight percent of the children are on Ritalin. It takes less time to get a child a pill.

I think she sees the reality of it. It takes a lot of time to train a child, a lot less time to give them a pill. But turning your disobedient child, your child that lacks self-control, maybe your angry child because that child is not cared for properly, turning that child into a drug addict, is that a solution? Some students take their time-released pills before school. Others take their doses at off hours. One boy's jogging watch is timed to beep for Ritalin at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Like many administrators, Wagner's not sure what to make of it. Are doctors just catching this disabling affliction more often?

In other words, why now and not a few years back? Has our culture gone so high-bod haywire that we've lost patience with the demanding quirks of training our children? ADHD has become, and this is interesting, America's number one childhood psychiatric disorder. Experts believe that more than two million children have the disorder.

According to an estimate by the National Institute of Mental Health, about one student in every classroom is believed to experience it. Since 1990, Dr. Daniel Safer of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine calculates the number of kids taking Ritalin has grown two and a half times. Among today's 38 million children at the ages of five to 14, he reports 1.3 million take it regularly. Sales of the drug last year topped 350 million dollars. This is beyond question an American phenomenon. The rate of Ritalin use in the United States is at least five times higher than in the rest of the world. It is so common in some upscale precincts that a mini black market has emerged in a handful of playgrounds and campuses and vitamin R, as it is called, sells for three to fifteen dollars per pill. Some kids are now using it to crush and snort for a cheap and relatively modest buzz.

The article concludes by saying to researchers it's a classic pay now or pay more later situation. Studies indicate, listen to this, that those with untreated ADHD are more likely to become alcoholics, smokers, and drug abusers than the general population. Sure, undisciplined people with no self-control are more likely to behave like that. More than one-third drop out of school, of course. And about one-tenth of ADHD adults attempt suicide. What you have is a dysfunctional, antisocial, unloved, angry, upset, undisciplined, lacking self-control child who becomes that kind of an adult.

Formula for disaster. Now in case you want to look at the diagnostic list, I'll give you a checklist. Professionals base their diagnosis of ADHD on the following guidelines. And they give a whole bunch of them. There might be 20 of them. And they say if any six of these applies to you, you've got it. You can pick your six.

First, pays little attention to details, makes careless mistakes, has a short attention span, doesn't listen when spoken to, doesn't follow instructions, fails to finish tasks, has difficulty getting organized, avoids tasks that require sustained support, loses things, is easily distracted, forgets things during the day, fidgets, squirms in seat, leaves seat when remaining seated is expected, runs about, climbs excessively, has difficult playing quietly, acts as if driven by a motor, talks a lot, and blurts out answers before the question is complete. You know who they're describing? All of our children. Don't kid me. That's all of my children. That's all of my grandchildren. That's me.

I don't have a disease. Every kid is like that if he's not taught self-control. Every report card I got, the first few years, and I'm telling you the deep secrets, folks.

Every report card I got as a little kid in my early years of school said the same thing. Johnny doesn't pay attention. Johnny talks too much. Johnny won't stay in his seat. Johnny fiddles and makes noises with his pencil. Johnny lacks self-control.

Johnny doesn't do his best. And every time I took home a note like that, I got spanked. I had a lot going on in my head, and I couldn't concentrate on just one thing because I was busy with a whole lot of things. God made me a certain way. He wired me to be able to deal with a lot of stuff, and that's my life now. I'm glad my parents didn't turn me into a drug addict. I didn't have a disease or a disorder.

That was just me. My parents had a tremendous challenge teaching me self-control because I had so much mental energy and so much physical energy. I still have a lot of energy, even now, and you can only imagine what I was like before I was 12.

I was a rocket going in every direction. My parents worked very hard to harness me. I'm so glad they took the effort to do that so that God could use the abilities that He gave me. They loved me, and they spanked me.

They taught me God's truth all the time by instruction and example. And when I didn't abide by it, they disciplined me, and I learned self-control. It's a sad, sad situation in our society. All these psychologists and psychiatrists running around trying to solve a problem that can only be solved in a home where the Word of God reigns supreme.

There's no other way. And we are called, parents, to teach our children to obey us. And not just because we have this own independent agenda, but because we represent to them the truth of God. And our morals, and our ethics, and our values, and our truths are God's.

And we're passing them on. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Obey your parents in the Lord. What does that mean?

For the Lord's sake. Because your parents are teaching you the things that are precious to the Lord. Children, you should obey your parents willingly. You should obey your parents unconditionally.

You should obey your parents gladly and joyfully, because they are teaching you the truth of God. And all these efforts that go on in our culture, all these efforts that go on to liberate children from parental authority and liberate children from physical punishment are disastrous and violate God's law. A few years ago, I read, quote, a disgruntled school teacher handed in her resignation with the following comment. In our public schools today, the teachers are afraid of the principals. The principals are afraid of the superintendents. The superintendents are afraid of the board members. The board members are afraid of the parents. The parents are afraid of the children. And the children are afraid of nobody. One foreigner to our country said, the thing that impressed him most about America was the way parents obeyed their children. How tragic. Children, obey your parents in the Lord.

And why? What does it say? This is right. This is right. Who says?

Where's the psychological evidence? God says it's right. And you're going to know it's right by looking around at the disaster of this culture when children don't do it. God said do it. God said it's right.

And he wrote the book on right. So if you're a mom or a dad and maybe struggling to bring up your children in a way that pleases the Lord, you're going to want to hear what John has to say. But in the meantime, John, you have a practical help for parents that you want to mention. Yeah, and it's a book titled What the Bible Says About Parenting. You know, radio is fine. It's wonderful. Preaching is great.

But it passes by, and you can't recover it. So you're dependent on your memory for what you heard. And that's why we support so much of our ministry, our audio ministry, with books. You can even download the entire panoply of sermons in print.

You can have them printed out on your printer. Because we know that when truth is on a page, you can linger over it, you can study it, you can compare it. So we want to put things in your hand that are going to be beyond just trying to remember what I might have said in a sermon. And that's why in this series on the family, we're adding the resource of the book, What the Bible Says About Parenting. I know there's a lot of books on that. There have been endless material.

Some of it, most of it, may be psychologically oriented, pragmatically driven. But from us, it's biblical. What the Bible says about parenting, and you will learn what every child's greatest need is, how to present the gospel to your children, how to avoid the danger of self-esteem, and the priority of the marriage relationship between the husband and the wife, and how that affects the ministry to the children. Being a godly parent is, it's not only possible, it's within the reach of anyone willing to understand and apply the Word of God on the subject.

There really are no excuses for God's people. You just need to know what the Word of God says, trust in the Spirit of God, and be faithful to carry it out. The book is titled, What the Bible Says About Parenting, a strengthening investment in your role as a parent. You can order a copy from Grace To You. Price is affordable, and shipping is free inside the U.S. And you are sure to benefit from this book wherever you are in the parenting process.

Again, the title, What the Bible Says About Parenting. Place your order when you contact us today. Our toll-free number is 800-55-GRACE and our website, gty.org.

Read What the Bible Says About Parenting with your spouse or with your entire family. It's also available in Spanish. Again, call 800-55-GRACE to order, or you can log on to gty.org. That's our website, gty.org. And while you're there, make sure to download our free app for your smartphone or your tablet. It's simply titled, The Study Bible. It's a free app that gives you the English Standard, King James, and New American Standard texts of Scripture, as well as instant access to thousands of free online resources, all of them designed to help you understand and apply the passage of Scripture you're studying. You can also add the notes from the MacArthur Study Bible for a nominal price. To download the free app, again it's called The Study Bible, visit our website, gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace to You staff. I'm Phil Johnson with a question for you. What can you do to help your children come to Christ? John gives you the answer tomorrow when he continues his study, The Fulfilled Family, with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time. On Grace to You!