Christian Children (Ephesians 6:1)

Welcome to God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon R.P. Church in Morning Sun, Iowa. Check us out online at www.sharonrpc.org. We pray that this message will be a blessing to you and that the Lord will use it to transform your faith and your life. Well, we are going to continue our series in the book of Ephesians, Ephesians chapter 5, or sorry, Ephesians chapter 6. Ephesians chapter 6, and as Jim said earlier, men, you had your share yesterday. Wives, you had your share the week before. Children, it's your turn. And so we're going to do something a little bit different because the scripture is speaking directly to children.

And so if there are children, you are welcome to come forward at this time. That's serious, come on, come on. You can come with your parents or your grandparents, but come on forward. Yep, come on up, come on up, come on up. Come on, you guys got it. Go ahead, sit down. Come on up. Good job, Koda. You're not going to let go of me, are you? Got to stay up here, Grandma. OK. Just a minute. OK, so Mommy's got talked to two weeks ago. Daddy's got talked to last week. Daddy's going to talk to again next week. They get it twice. But today, he's talking to children.

So I'm gonna read to you guys Ephesians chapter six, the first three verses. You guys ready? Children, obey your parents and 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 you may live long on the earth.

Did you hear that? Who's he talking to? God. God's talking to who? Children! Isn't that neat? God doesn't forget about children. Yeah, that's neat. That's really neat, right? God doesn't forget about children, but he loves children. Did you know that there are stories about Jesus with children? Yeah. Yeah. You didn't know that?

Yeah, there are stories about God, about Jesus with children. Like one of the songs. Yeah, there's songs about Jesus loving all the little children, isn't there? But there's also a story about when Jesus is sitting there and people are trying to bring their children, like you guys, to Jesus. And you want to know what people tried to do? No. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Actually, yes. Yeah, you want to know? Yeah.

They were like, no, no, no, no, no. Church is for big people. You can't let your kids come to Jesus. And guess what Jesus said? do not hinder these little ones from coming to me, for such is the kingdom of God." Right? The kingdom of God belongs to children. And then he says that we adults, like parents and grandparents out there, you know what Jesus tells them?

They all need to have faith, like you all. Faith, ooh, that's a great question. Faith is a saving grace. It means we trust and cling to Jesus Christ alone for salvation. Whoa. Yeah, pretty cool, huh? Yeah. I still, I don't, I didn't understand that, but I just wanted to say whoa. Oh, okay. He didn't understand it, but he still wanted to say whoa. I still don't know why all the kids are God's, I don't know.

Well, that's because God makes promises, not just to mommies and daddies, but to their children. Right after Jesus goes back up into heaven, Peter, one of his 12 special people called apostles, he says a sermon. And after he preaches the whole sermon, you want to know what he says to the families? He says, this promise is for you and for your children. The good news of Jesus Christ isn't just for adults, but it's also for little children.

The promise has always been for not just adults, but for adults and children. And when Paul would have written this letter, this was like 2000 years ago. That's older than me. It was a long time ago. When he wrote this, he would have known there would be children in the church. And so he wanted to talk to the children. He wanted them to know something.

And so he said, he said, children, obey your parents and the Lord, ooh, that's kind of hard, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, is it easy to obey your children? Do you obey your parents? Nope. Nope. Are your parents, sometimes do your parents like tell you to do stuff you don't want to do? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, pretty much, that's what they do, right? It's hard to obey your parents, isn't it? You don't think it is? Well, you must have a lot more Holy Spirit than I do. Sometimes it's hard, right? It's hard to obey your parents and the Lord.

The idea of obeying comes from a word that means open up your ears, listen, listen closely to what your parents say. And when your parents tell you to do something, you get to do it. But there's an interesting thing he says here. Listen to what he said. He said, obey your parents in the Lord. Right, obey your parents in the Lord.

I know what a Lord is. You know what a Lord is? I don't know what a Lord is. You don't know what a Lord is? A Lord is a master, but here it's talking about Jesus. Yeah, I didn't know. Yeah, I actually didn't know what a Lord was. Oh, good, good. You didn't know that?

But you know it now that this is talking about Jesus. So when you love Jesus, guess what? If Jesus loves you, and if you love Jesus, if you are in Jesus and Jesus is in your heart, guess what you get to do now? What? You get to love your parents and obey them.

I already did that. Oh, good. Keep doing it. I don't like when they do that. Yeah, it's kind of hard. One thing I'm missing. What's that? Listen to my parents. Yeah, you still gotta listen to your parents, right? The very hard thing that I cannot do is... Well, when we were at Grandma's, Tota had hiccups and Tota drinks like this. Oh, that's pretty hard, huh? Yeah. Yeah.

So you know what he says to do in Ephesians chapter 6? He goes all the way back to what God said on a flaming mountain when Moses gave the Ten Commandments. I didn't know that there was a flaming mountain. Yeah, there was a mountain and it had smoke and it had thunder and there was lightning and the people were really almost like a volcano.

Yeah. Yeah, it was this big, you know, the people were so afraid. The people were so afraid that that was the last time. They said, they said, don't let God talk to us directly or we'll die. And so Moses talked to God for them. There's actually two gods. Well, there's only one true living God. Yeah. Yeah, but there's three persons. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Right? And so this God gave ten commandments. And the fifth one? He said five important rules to make sure your life is good. The fifth one?

Honor. Well, honor your father and your mother. Where's the chair right there? Nope, there weren't chairs right there. But honor your father and your mother. I know why there's chairs right there. I might know. Oh, you know about those chairs? That's so that way I can be lazy and sit down. Sometimes I need to be lazy. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes my mom, sometimes my dad does these lazy things.

What do you think honor your parents means? What do you think that word honor means? I think it means like obey them, love them. So you think obey and love? Sophie, Aaliyah, do one of you know what honor means? No. Nathan, what do you think honor would mean? Obeying. Obeying.

Maybe like thinking good of them. Like, it would be like, oh, my parents are worth more than anything else, right? It's just below God. I was trying to say that. Yeah, well, good. You know what we used to do to show honor when I was in the military? No. When somebody more important than us would walk by, you know what we would do? We'd stand at attention and we'd salute them, right? Or whenever we walked past the flag, we would salute the flag. We would show honor to it. Like that, you guys all wanna stand and salute? You ready? Let's try to salute, ready? Go ahead, try to salute. It's okay, so we wanna honor our parents. We wanna show them that respect, that it might go well with us.

There's a promise. God says, this is the first commandment with a promise. Do you guys know what a promise is? Yeah, I know. I know what a promise is. I wonder. Is it a promise if your parents say, if you eat all your dinner, you'll get ice cream after dinner? Is that a good promise? Or cookies, right? And if you eat all your dinner, are you gonna ask your mom and dad for, will you ask them after you eat all your food? Oh yeah, you will. Oh yeah, you're gonna ask for the candy or cookies afterwards, right? Well, God says there is a good promise after. If you obey your mommy and daddy, there's a good promise. Do you remember what he said the good promise was? No. No, okay, here we go. That it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth.

Can I tell you guys three quick stories? Yeah. All about the same little boy. Okay, there was a little boy. His mommy and daddy said, Son, we don't want you to leave the house this morning because we have work to do. So we'd like for you to stay at the house.

And guess what the boy did? The boy didn't obey. The boy went and he went and he played and he was climbing a tree and he fell down the tree and he smashed his knee on a brick. And he had to go to the hospital because there was blood and they had to sew up his knee because he didn't obey his mommy and daddy. Yeah, you want to know what happened to that same boy later? Yeah, it was scary. That boy, one time he got in trouble.

He didn't do what his mommy and daddy said and they said, you can't leave this house because you did something bad. And so his mommy went off to work and guess what he did? He went outside and he played basketball with his friends. And guess what happened when he was playing basketball with his friends?

He fell down and he got more stitches in his knees. One of my uncles got a stitch. Yeah, they hurt, don't they? Yeah. And you want to know what happened the next year to that boy? His mommy and daddy said, come home right after school, and guess what he did? What? He went and he played with his friends. Again, and he's going to get hurt. You know what happened? I know what happened. What do you think happened? He got more stitches. You want to know what happened? He ran across the street not looking and got hit by a car. Was that true? That was me. Oh, what? You knew that the whole time? When you said the basketball, I knew. Do our parents give us rules to keep us safe? Do they tell us things because they want us to have a good life? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, now you know.

Your parents give you rules and they want you to have a good life. They want it to go well with you. And so the Bible is telling us here, God is telling us, if you obey your parents, it'll go well with you. You'll have a good life. All right, so we love Jesus, and because we love Jesus, we obey our parents, and because we obey our parents and we love Jesus, generally, God will bless us, and he'll care for us.

Hey, you guys did awesome. Can I get some high fives? Good job, good job, good job. Do I get high fives over here? No, that's okay. All right, thanks so much, guys. You can go back. Children, obey your parents and the Lord for this is right. For this is the first commandment with a promise that it might go well with you and that you might have a long life upon the earth.

Jesus cares for the children. Jesus loves the children. Jesus even said if someone caused one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better for them to have a millstone tied around their neck and to be thrown into the lake. than to have one of them stumble. Jesus loves children. Jesus cares for children.

This is one of the beautiful things, I think, when Paul addresses us in Ephesians chapter six and he calls out children, there's an assumption here. In the ancient world, when the letter of the New Testament was written, it was written assuming the people he was talking to would be in the church. And so this is one of the beautiful blessings we have in a covenant church where we don't try to keep the children off at children's church or something like that, but no, the whole family is expected that we're going to be together and that the children are even going to hear week in and week out the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus cares for children.

Jesus loves children. It's amazing when the Philippian jailer is told the gospel and what happens afterwards. It's not just the Philippian jailer who gets baptized, but it's the Philippian jailer and his whole family get baptized. He gets baptized, his wife gets baptized, people in his family get baptized. It's this beautiful reality that God loves children. He doesn't overlook them, that they're part of this covenant family.

And so we're going to get in next week, especially with fathers about sometimes it's, we can make it difficult for our children to obey. And children, there is a limit to obedience. Your parents can't tell you to sin. Your parents can't tell you to do things that God tells you not to do. But the reality is that this world tries to tell us that children They aren't disobedient, they just got something going on in their lives. Well no, folly is tied up in the heart of a child is what the book of Proverbs say. Any of you elementary or middle school or high school teachers know full well that children know disobedience well.

But again and again in the scriptures we find that disobedience is the mark of the human condition. Disobedience marked our first parents, Adam and Eve. Disobedience marked the sons of men that were destroyed in the flood. Disobedience marked Lot's wife. Disobedience marked the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Disobedience we find again and again and again.

But if we are in the Lord, what we find is God has loved us and out of our love for the Lord, what do we do? We obey. We don't obey God, we don't obey our Heavenly Father just because we're worried about the consequences, but we obey God because we love God. This is the same thing we desire in our children and our grandchildren.

What's better? This is for you parents out there. What is better? Would you rather your children obey you because they love you and honor you or because they're worried about getting spanked? Now some kids need to worry about getting spanked, and so they'll obey. But the hope is that they'll learn, and that they'll love you, and they'll trust you, and then out of that trust and love, they'll have a heart of obedience.

This is what God desires of little children. This is what God desires of us as well, that we would obey him because we are in the Lord. Not obey him so that we might be in the Lord, but because we're in the Lord. We listen and we obey, even though it's hard. but it's good. And this is a beautiful reality as well in the fifth commandment that Paul quotes here in Ephesians chapter six, verses two and three, honor your father and mother.

And he points out that this is the first commandment with a promise, that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth. This is a general rule. Generally speaking, obedient children have better outcomes in life. It's a general rule that children who learn to honor and respect within the family structure have far less problems when they go to school, have far less problems when they go into the workplace, have far less problems when they have their own families. God has has set the family in a place where there is a structure, there is a hierarchy, and this is the way things are supposed to be ordered.

And our world looks at that and they think, that's so backwards, that's so oppressive, right? We need to let children be more free range. We need to let our children, you know, have their own voices and things like this. And I'm not saying, the scripture isn't saying here to suppress your children. Actually, we're gonna get to that next week with the following verse. But what this is saying is that when this structure is broken, those blessings are also lost. There's an internet meme going all around Facebook right now that we would have a lot less rioting in the streets if there was a lot more spanking in the homes. And it's true.

It's true, we are a culture that parents are afraid to discipline their children. Parents are afraid to enforce obedience upon their children. Parents are afraid that, oh no, hold on, if I'm too strict with my children, and let me point out here, again, next week we're going to get to the difference between discipline and provoking your children. Discipline and abuse is next week.

But there's a reality structure that God's made, that honor and obedience are due to people. And it's not just the children. Romans chapter 13 says we are to honor and obey the civil magistrate. The political authorities who are above us, when they make a law, as long as it's not a sinful law, we're supposed to obey it the same way. People might fight against us.

Our culture doesn't like to think that anybody else has honor or authority over them. The entire postmodern philosophy that we live in is built on we're all equal and no one should have authority over you. That's not the way that God ordered things. That's not the way the world works in reality.

And in our postmodern setting, what we're finding out is those people who said, oh, you know, there's no absolute authorities and things like that, sure seem authoritarian when it's their agenda for things. There's authority and there's structure. And it starts in the family.

And so parents, you get to, grandparents, you get to encourage your children and your grandchildren in obeying their parents and pointing them to the Savior, Jesus Christ, and showing them even Jesus obeyed Mary and Joseph. Can you imagine that for a second? The perfect Jesus obeys his imperfect parents. The perfect Jesus, who was tempted in every way, just like these little children will be tempted, yet without sin, obeyed his parents. We see Jesus again and again. Sometimes people will look at Jesus' words when he says to marry woman.

At that time, to call your mother woman was like saying in the South, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. Ma'am. There's a reason in cultural societies, people are taught, you know, it's this weird thing in our day and age where kids call their parents by their first name. Like, whoa, hold on, what?

You're not your parents' friends. You want to have a loving relationship with your parents, and when they're older, it develops into friendship, but when your children are children, they need you to be their parents. They need you to be their grandparents. They need you to be that person they can look up to and honor and respect and yes, indeed, even obey.

God has built this structure into society and there's great blessings when we keep this structure. There's great blessings. It will go well for us even here on the earth because the family is a training unit for what it's going to be like in heaven. There's an authority structure in the universe. This is where we started when we got into the family unit. God has made the universe, God structured the family the way that it's supposed to be.

And when we get to heaven, there's still going to be an authority structure. There is a king and his name is Jesus Christ and he has authority over his kingdom. And so if we have a problem with obedience today, we're not going to like heaven. We're not going to like the new heaven and the new earth. But there's a godly obedience. There's a godly structure that the Lord trains us up and the home, the Christian home is meant to be that place where we can encourage and teach our children what obedience looks like, what honoring looks like, what respect looks like.

So that way when they go out into the world, it will go well with them. Your home is a greenhouse for holiness. You're growing little sprouts that someday you're gonna transplant out into the world. And the question is, Will they be mature and healthy to weather outside your home?

Closing Prayer

The children, hey kids, Jesus loves children. If you love Jesus Christ, you can love your parents and honor and respect them. Parents, the world's gonna fight against us. But you can encourage your children, you can rear them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord. And even though the world might tell you that's oppressive, even though the world might try to tell you this is not current child development, we know that if we follow the Lord's plan, it will go well with our children. So trust in the Lord. Raise them in the fear of the Lord. Encourage your children in obedience. Let's see our culture changed by starting within our own houses. Let's pray.

Father, we thank you so much for the blessing it is that you have given us a structure for the family. We thank you for Jesus Christ and the love that he has given us and for the model he shows us of obedience, that he always perfectly obeys his Father in heaven. Lord, we thank you so much for our children, for our grandchildren, great-grandchildren. We thank you for mothers and fathers, for grandparents.

Father, we pray that we would be obedient. We pray that we would show honor where honor is due, and respect where respect is due, and that your glory might shine forth from it. And as a benefit, it would go well with us, both here in this present age, as well as that which is to come. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.

Thanks for listening to this week's message from God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon R.P. Church in rural southeast Iowa. We pray that the message would be used by God to transform your faith in your life this week. If you'd like to get more information about us, feel free to go to the website, SharonRPC.org. We'd love to invite you to worship with us. Our worship time is 10 a.m. every Sunday at 25204 160th Avenue, Morning Sun, Iowa, 52640. May God richly bless you this week.