An Inescapable Principle

From The Christian Reader:

An Inescapable Principle


by Brian Carpenter



We begin our meditations today on the Fifth Commandment, but before we do, it’s worth noting that we are at a transition point. The Westminster Larger Catechism reads as follows:



Q. 122. What is the sum of the six commandments which contain our duty to man?

A. The sum of the six commandments which contain our duty to man, is, to love our neighbor as ourselves, and to do to others what we would have them do to us.



The first four commandments are also called the First Table of the Law. Those four commandments teach us what it means to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. If we love God we will worship, adore, and obey Him alone. We will worship Him in the correct manner. We will take care to respect his Name and all whereby He makes Himself known. We will set His day aside for worship and rest in Him.



The next six commandments are the Second Table of the Law. These six commandments teach us what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves.



The Fifth Commandment is, on the face of it, a commandment regulating the relations between parents and children. But remember that each of the commandments is a synechdoche. It stands for more than it actually says. Fundamentally this commandment is about human relations within the God-ordained hierarchy in which we all exist whether or not we particularly believe that we do or particularly like it. I personally believe that the Lord chose the parent-child relationship as the paradigm for this commandment because it is the most naturally and obviously hierarchical, and it is most naturally and obviously good that it be so. Of course postmodern western man has managed to severely damage and disrupt even this most self-evident truth. This is because the Devil thoroughly controls the opinion-making centers of western culture and is very good at getting fallen men to profess to be wise at the same time they are being exceedingly foolish.



Every parent of a young child understands that there must be a significant amount of control exerted over the child’s affairs, and that this is in the best interests of the child. They come to us as tiny, utterly self-centered barbarians. Children need to be taught right from wrong. They need to be kept safe. They need to be taught to control their impulses. They need to be formed and shaped according to our social and cultural norms so that they can get along in the society in which we live. The Christian knows that the child must also be taught the things of the Lord. The wise Christian knows that it is the duty of the parents, and particularly the father, to train up a child in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. The Lord has ordained that this be so. He has laid this upon the parents as a sacred duty.



This, by the way, has become one of my hobby horses. Christian families have, by and large, outsourced the Christian education of their children. It has been relegated to the Sunday School teacher and the Youth Minister. This is totally inadequate. It is also simply disobedience to the clear commandment of scripture. The Lord lays the responsibility for the spiritual education of the children squarely on the parents:



“Now this is the commandment, and these are the statutes and judgments which the LORD your God has commanded to teach you, that you may observe them in the land which you are crossing over to possess, that you may fear the LORD your God, to keep all His statutes and His commandments which I command you, you and your son and your grandson, all the days of your life, and that your days may be prolonged. Therefore hear, O Israel, and be careful to observe it, that it may be well with you, and that you may multiply greatly as the LORD God of your fathers has promised you—‘a land flowing with milk and honey.’



“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.



“And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deut 6:1-9)





And:





‘And it shall be that if you earnestly obey My commandments which I command you today, to love the LORD your God and serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul, then I will giveyou the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the latter rain, that you may gather in your grain, your new wine, and your oil. And I will send grass in your fields for your livestock, that you may eat and be filled.’ Take heed to yourselves, lest your heart be deceived, and you turn aside and serve other gods and worship them, lest the LORD’s anger be aroused against you, and He shut up the heavens so that there be no rain, and the land yield no produce, and you perish quickly from the good land which the LORD is giving you.



“Therefore you shall lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land of which the LORD swore to your fathers to give them, like the days of the heavens above the earth. (Deut 11:13-21)





My concerns with outsourcing the child’s spiritual education to the church are twofold. First of all there is the effect of time spent. Your youth director and Sunday school teacher have access to your kids for two or three hours per week at best. But if your children go to public school and their best friends are worldlings, they are being influenced by those forces for 40 or 50 hours per week. Which is going to have more influence on them, naturally speaking? The world will. And since the Devil is the God of this world, let’s be frank and say that the Devil will be their primary influence.



Second of all, while I admit that there are certainly godly Sunday School teachers who take their job very seriously and see it as a calling, it is my experience that this is not the norm any longer. As a pastor I can tell you that it can be a tremendous headache to try and fill slots for Sunday School classes. People often have to be dragged to it, have to be spoonfed materials (which are often of marginal theological quality and that they hardly look at) are slightly resentful and halfhearted while they serve, and won’t continue in the harness for very long. Every pastor longs to have a group of Sunday School teachers who love God and love teaching children about God. Most pastors can’t say that.



Youth ministers are also problematic in my experience. Once again, I do not deny that there are very good youth ministers out there. But in my experience the task of youth ministry usually goes to the nitwit with the least theological grounding and the coolest hair. If he can play the guitar, so much the better. The time spent in youth group is more about games, eating, and socializing. Then they will get a fifteen minute “message” which usually comes from some very psychologized, pop-theology-centered book and is of very dubious spiritual value. Three or four times a year there should be some sort of retreat or lock-in because of the firm belief in the inherent spiritual value of fun, fatigue, and unsupervised sexual experimentation in the middle of the night. Maybe once or twice a year there should be a service project where the kids work (badly) on the yard of some widow or stand around the grounds of a Habitat home holding a loaded paintbrush or roller and horsing around with their friends. If they are really lucky, a whole parallel “worship service” will be set up for the kids, thus relieving them of the need to ever hear a sermon from the senior pastor, sing a song that’s been around for more than ten years, or get to know someone over the age of 25.



The idea that the youth minister would teach the kids the Bible is sort of weird. And if he tried to teach them the Catechism and Confessions he would probably be fired before long. If the Sesame Street theology and Pizza-For-Jesus methodology were abandoned, the unconverted and perpetually spiritually immature kids would stop coming. The parents, who are unconverted or perpetually spiritually immature themselves and thus are doing absolutely nothing spiritual in their homes would grow alarmed that their kids didn’t “like church” anymore. They would demand to know why their money was going to pay for a youth minister who their kids didn’t like. Since the Senior Pastor didn’t become a Senior Pastor to preside over a shrinking church, it wouldn’t be long before said youth minister was replaced with someone who had cooler hair, a guitar, and no firm theological knowledge or convictions. Of course, when the kids go off to college or into the military, they abandon the church altogether because they’ve never really been part of the church to begin with.



Recently, however, the church has moved to address this. Thanks to the groundwork laid by the Seeker Sensitive movement in the 1990’s and the innovations of the Emergent Church movement, they can now go to the latest emergent-type church where they can have a more grownup version of the Sesame Street theology and the Pizza-for-Jesus methodology. And they can be taught to call what they are doing “real” and “raw” and “authentic” and pretend that their newly discovered spirituality isn’t about rules (so they can still fornicate freely without feeling guilty about it) but is about “relationships” and thus is really far superior to anything practiced by the Reformers or the Puritans or the great saints of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries.



If you are concerned about your child’s eternal soul, you must give them the gospel and the things of God from a very tender age. You must teach them to pray. You must teach them the scriptures. You must catechize them. You must teach them the hymns and songs of the faith. You must have family worship. You must talk to them about their hearts and how Jesus loves a beautiful heart and how He can turn the ugly heart they were born with into a beautiful heart. You must show them that you, too, are one under authority, who must obey God. You must do so cheerfully, purposely, and openly. You must show them by example how the Christian life is lived. Which means you actually have to live it. Which means you must put aside the idolatry to your golf game, your fishing hobby, your shopping habit, or your real estate career in order to be present to your children and instruct them. You must repent of your worldliness and learn to love Jesus and serve Him with your whole heart first. For you cannot give away what you do not possess yourself. By all means, begin to do so today. Right now is not a moment too soon.



Next week, if God permits, we will explore these things further.