Truth That Changes Lives

JP Jones: See to it that no one takes you captive through empty philosophy according to the tradition of men rather than according to Christ. Jesus Christ should be at the center of our thinking.

Guest (Male): Thank you for joining us on Truth That Changes Lives. Pastor JP Jones is the senior pastor of Crossline Community Church in Laguna Hills, California, and a professor in biblical studies at Biola University. Today on Truth That Changes Lives, Pastor JP will be giving us a message from a series entitled All About Jesus. Let's listen in as JP gives us part one of Parenting in Christ.

JP Jones: If you have your Bibles, would you open to Colossians chapter three? We're just going to look at two verses, Colossians 3:20 and 21, as we continue our study in this book, which is all about Jesus. The book of Colossians is a book that tells us that every question that we have is answered in Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father but through Jesus. We have seen in this book that we're not to be taken captive by anything other than Jesus Christ, and we're to understand that Christ is all and that he's in all.

In Colossians chapter three, the apostle Paul has been developing this new life that we have in Christ, and he's applying the new life to the most intimate relationships, in particular, the family. Colossians 3:20 and 21 says this: "Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not be embittered towards your children or they will become discouraged."

This passage, these two one-line commands, they are merely extensions of the new life content of Colossians chapter three. Paul's been describing the fact that we're united with Christ. We died with Christ, we've been raised up with Christ, we're seated with Christ. Our life is Christ, and when Christ is revealed, we're going to be revealed with him.

Because that's our new spiritual life as followers of Jesus, he says, "Lay aside the old life." He talks about the fact in Colossians chapter three, there's certain things we're to actually put to death, they're so destructive towards us. There's certain things we're to lay aside, there's certain things we're to stop doing.

But on the positive side, we're to put on the virtues of Christ and the fruit of the Holy Spirit, and we're to allow love to rule in our hearts. We're to let the word of Christ richly dwell within us, and he summarizes this kind of new life teaching in Colossians 3:17 by saying, "Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him."

Now he says, as a new person in Christ who's living new life, live it out in the family. Last week, we talked about in marriage the fact that husbands ought to love their wives and wives are to submit to their husbands. It's an extension of the new life teaching in Jesus. Now he's looking at children and parents.

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, and fathers, don't exasperate your children that they lose heart, that they become discouraged. Two simple commands that talk about the family. I want to focus on the second one, the one addressed to fathers. Really, it's to parents, fathers and mothers as co-regents of the home, leading their children in the way of the Lord, helping children become healthy, mature, godly, Christ-centered adults.

The title of this message is Positive Biblical Parenting. Here's the first observation: we are to model new life in Christ to our children. Model it, live it out. That's what Paul's talking about in Colossians chapter three. That's the context of this command. You can't just take a Bible verse and pull it out of its context; you have to see what it means in the context.

In the context, it is you have this new life in Jesus, you are to be living this new life in Jesus, and you're to be living it in the family. As parents, you're to be living it before your children. The most positive aspect of our influence for Christ is our personal example. The most positive tool that we have to change and impact the behavior of another person is our personal modeling, our personal example.

If you want to be a godly parent, be a godly person. If you want to be a Christian parent, be a Christian. Do you want to raise kids who love Jesus? You be a person that loves Jesus. It's just logical. It makes sense in the context of the passage. Our modeling, our example, is the greatest tool that we have to impact the next generation.

This is written specifically to parents, but this is a guide for those of you who may aspire to be parents someday. It's also a guide to any of us who would want to be spiritual parents. The apostle John in Second John said, "I have no greater joy than this than to see my children walking in the truth." John isn't talking about his physical children; he's talking about his spiritual children.

All of us have the opportunity to leave a legacy, to impact the next generation for Christ. I got married when I was 29, and we had our first child when I was 32. I had already been in ministry for 10 years. I had been serving with Campus Crusade for Christ in student ministries. When we found out that we were pregnant, my greatest sense of excitement was, I've been living and breathing this ministry of discipleship with college kids; I get to have live-in disciples.

That's what parenting is: it's discipling our children. Some of us get to do that as physical parents, and all of us can do that as spiritual parents. Modeling is the greatest tool that we have to impact other people for Jesus Christ. Parents, it's the greatest tool you have to impact your kids for Christ.

Educational psychologist Tom Lickona, in an essay on the power of modeling in developing character in children, writes these words: "For starters, we can share this with parents, that the most important findings of cultures all over the world affirm three life goals as sources for authentic happiness."

They've looked at cultures all over the world and they've discovered that there are three goals that all cultures share in terms of what it really means to become happy. Number one: maturity of character, becoming the best person you can be. Number two: loving relationships in marriage, family, friendship, and for religious believers, their relationship with God. Number three: making a positive difference in the lives of others.

Developing good character is at the heart of all three of these pursuits. What can we do as parents to help our children develop the strengths of character that will set them on the path to productive, ethical, and a fulfilling life? In hundreds of interviews with parents, young adults, and others, I've discovered people who are experiencing this type of authentic happiness.

I've asked them, "What did your parents try to do to teach you good values and good character?" People speak of many things, including their parents' love, their high expectations, their firm discipline, their wisdom about life. But far and away, the most common answer I receive to the question, "What did your parents do to teach you about good character?" they set an example for me.

If we're to be parents who impact the next generation for Christ, either physically or spiritually, if we're to have kids who grow up to be healthy, positive, confident, mature, loving, Christ-centered adults, the greatest tool we have to bring that about is our personal example to them. As parents, we need to be intentional about our example.

Moms and dads, ask yourselves: what is the example of love between us that we're passing on to our kids? How do we handle conflict in our family and how do we reconcile? Do our children see us apologize, own our own mistakes, and repent? What are the core values that we have as a family? How do we model those and talk about those and champion those?

How do we speak about others in our home? How do we treat those outside of our family? What are the moral values that we champion, that we fight for, that we stand against? What will our children take with them when they leave home? These are all things as parents we ought to think about, talk about, pray about, and seek to implement because our modeling, our example, has the greatest influence.

We need to be intentional about our modeling and our example. Several years ago—my daughters now are this summer they will be 16 and 19. So at this time, they were probably 11 and 8. I had taken them over to the Kaleidoscope right off Crown Valley and the Five freeway. There was an ice cream place at the time where now it's a frozen yogurt place.

I had taken them there on a little date. We walk into the place. A lot of kids, I noticed right off the bat as we pulled into the Kaleidoscope and walked out. A lot of older teenagers, like 17, 18, 19 years old. As we walked into the ice cream place, there was a group of teenage guys, maybe about four or five of them, and they were just full potty mouth.

They were dropping f-bombs loud. You could see everyone was uncomfortable with it: the people working at the store, other kids around. I walked in and had my two little girls with me. I walked up to the group of guys and I said, "Hey, excuse me, guys. Got my little girls with me. Would you mind just watching the language? In fact, if you want to talk like that, I have no problem with it. I've heard it before. But you can maybe just take it outside because I have my little girls here."

Well, the alpha male of the group decided he wasn't going to listen to me. He kind of stepped out of this group of about four guys, puffed out his chest, got right in front of me and really about two inches away from my face and says, "What are you going to do about it?" Now, if I had done what I wanted to do about it at the time, I wouldn't be here preaching this sermon.

But that was the first thing that flashed through my mind very vividly. As I thought about it, I looked down and here were these two little girls with saucer-like eyes looking at Dad because they heard this whole exchange and saw this. They were looking at me asking, "What are you going to do, Dad?" Before me, literally in this split second of time, in my mind, it was like these girls will forever remember what I do right now.

I took option A off the table, and I went to option B. I reached into my pocket, and I pulled out a cell phone. The guy's looking at me, I have eye contact just like this, and I never lost the eye contact with him. I took a step back and I said, "I'll tell you what I'm going to do." I opened my cell phone and I intended to punch in 911.

But I was so jacked on the emotion, I don't even know what numbers I pushed. I pushed some numbers and I didn't hear "emergency police," whatever. I just was hearing "beeeeep" on the phone. I faked a conversation with the police looking at this guy. I'm looking him eyeball to eyeball, I'm realizing I didn't get the police, so I'm going to fake it.

I look at him, I said, "Yes, is this the police department? Yeah, this is JP Jones. I'm here at the Kaleidoscope off Crown Valley. I'm with my girls and there's a group of young guys here that are intimidating me and other people at the store and I'm wondering if you could come over here and take care of this situation. Yeah, I'll stay on the cell phone and tell you when you get here."

I just kept looking at the guy, and I did it just like that. He kind of stepped back and his buddies kind of stepped back and, "Oh, you're going to call the police, huh?" They said a few more things and then they walked off. When they walked off, all these other kids that were watching this whole thing and the employees in the ice cream place, they all erupted in applause.

My girls are just looking at me and going, "Oh my gosh, Dad." My heart's just pumping out of my chest. I closed the cell phone, we ordered the ice cream, we got in the car, and we talked about it the whole way back. Had I played that out differently, it would have been a whole different story for our family.

But I realized I'm modeling with my girls what you do in a situation like that. Our example is communicating all the time. Little eyes—sometimes they're full-grown eyes—but they're watching us. They're watching us as parents. Our modeling, our example, is the greatest influence we can have on our kids for Christ.

If you want to raise godly kids, become a godly person. If you want to raise kids who are filled with Christ's love, you be a person filled with Christ's love. If you want to raise children who make decisions that honor Jesus Christ, you make decisions that honor Jesus Christ. It's our influence, our example, that has the greatest impact.

Here's a second observation from the text: don't win the battle only to lose the war. The address to fathers is this: "Do not embitter your children or they will become discouraged." The word "embitter" is the Greek word *erethizo*. It means to stir up, to excite to quarreling, to provoke to strife. In other words, don't use your parenting authority just to create conflict within your kids that they can't resolve.

Because you're bigger than they are, older than they are, more authoritative than they are, you get them to do what you want them to do in the moment. But all this conflict is stirred up inside of them and all it produces is discouragement. You may win the battle, but you lose the war. As someone who worked in youth ministry for a lot of years and who continues to work with college kids, let me tell you.

I've met a lot of young adults who want to have nothing to do with Christ because they were raised in the church, because they were raised by Christian parents. Parents who professed Christ, but their parenting style was anything but Christ-like. We can embitter our children by exerting our authority and power and getting them to do what we want them to do, but in the end, we lose the war.

We have children who want to rebel, who are discouraged, who have no sense of themselves, no sense of God's love, no sense of truth, no "no" muscle. If we never allowed our kids to experience and assert "no," what makes us think when they get out in that cold, cruel world, they're going to be able to say "no" to temptation?

We have to be strategic in the way we parent. We have to think about the way we parent. We need to think about the big picture. We're trying to raise adults who love God and love people. It starts from day one. How do we age-appropriately build into their lives so that they become at the end adults who love God and love people?

Don't just win the battle and in the end lose the war. There's a scene from a movie I really enjoy, a movie called *The Great Santini*. It's based on a novel by Pat Conroy, starred Robert Duvall about a Marine fighter pilot who comes back from Korea as a decorated hero. He comes back to the family situation that he's been apart from for several years.

He steps into that family situation and tries to parent everybody the way he's been running his combat squad. While he was gone, his teenage son grew up, was a young man and was quite the athlete. In fact, he was a basketball star. There's a scene in the movie where Robert Duvall's playing basketball with his son and it starts off and they're just kind of shooting baskets.

Then they start playing a game. Rather than champion that his son has become a young man, and rather than champion that his son is a good athlete, he's getting beat by his son and he can't take it. His ego can't take it. He starts ridiculing him on the basketball court. He starts getting into his mind. He starts saying sarcastic comments and dehumanizing comments.

He starts throwing elbows and physically intimidating his son until he actually wins the basketball game and loses his son, who just leaves in defeat and frustration and discouragement. We have an awesome role as parents to build into our kids, but we have to be so careful that we don't exasperate them and embitter them and leave them discouraged.

If we do do that—which we will, by the way, at times as moms and dads—we need to come back and we need to practice one of the most powerful forms of modeling that's ever been invented: confession, repentance, and asking for forgiveness. Some of the most precious times that parents can have with their kids is as a parent, you come back and say, "I am so sorry. I was too harsh. Would you forgive me?"

"I am so sorry. I didn't believe the best in you and I jumped to a conclusion and I was wrong. Would you forgive me?" Or even, "Dad was right in disciplining you. I didn't do a very good job at it, though. Would you forgive me?" and then talking about it. Or maybe it's not that, maybe it's just the situation was tense and created all kinds of cognitive dissonance within the heart of your child.

You just come and you debrief and allow them to vent, let them talk about it. Maybe it's just, "That was a tough situation we just had. How do you feel right now? What's going on inside of you? It's okay because we got a family. It's okay to feel whatever you feel in our family. What we do with those feelings, we have to talk about and work on, but feeling it, that's okay. How are you feeling right now?"

Just that debriefing allows some of that whatever exasperation not to become discouragement, but instead to become encouragement so that we accomplish the end result, which is raising healthy, positive, confident, mature, godly young men and women. Here's a third observation, not immediately from this text, but from the larger context of Scripture: use God's Word as your supreme authority in parenting.

Deuteronomy chapter six says this: "These are the commands, decrees, the laws the Lord your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess so that you, your children, and their children after them may fear the Lord." This is for grandparents, great-grandparents. We get to influence not our own kids, but our grandkids, our great-grandkids.

"Hear, O Israel, be careful to obey that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in the land. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. These are the commandments that I give you today. They're to be upon your hearts and impress them on your children."

"Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up." We're to hide God's Word in our heart. God's Word is to influence everything about our lives. God's Word is to be out of our mouths; it's to be what we live, what we speak, and it's to be all the time.

Not just a Sunday experience, but 24/7. Everything in life is a teachable moment and an opportunity for us to impart God's Word to our kids. God's Word needs to be the authority and the tool that we most pull upon to use in raising healthy, positive, godly kids. This past week, my daughter Kylie just finished her freshman year at Biola.

She came home after finishing her finals and we went out to dinner together with our family. I asked her, "Hey, what did you learn this past year?" thinking back in my mind since I spent about 35 grand to make it happen, what'd you learn? She shared that she had a great year and she enjoyed it. She goes, "I took a course, Biola's a Christian college, and she had taken this course on spiritual formation."

She said, "I took this course and one of the things that the professor had us do is memorize Scripture. So I memorized a passage of Scripture. Happened to be Colossians 3:1-17." She shared there at dinner, just from memory, because she had internalized Colossians 3:1-17. My wife and I heard her share that and we thought, "That's great. Good job," and the evening went on.

I got up the next morning and this was my first thought: do you realize when you asked your daughter what she learned from college, she shared a passage of Scripture that she memorized and you didn't make a big deal about that? You didn't even really celebrate it. That Scripture has a lot more power than anything she would have learned in biology or history or speech communication.

That Scripture changes her life, blesses her soul, and she valued it enough that that's what she thought of when you asked her what she learned. When I was able to see her throughout the day, I said, "I want to apologize. I did not champion enough the fact that you memorized Scripture and that that was what you learned. That is awesome."

"I can't tell you how proud of you I am that you took the time to memorize that passage and that you have that now, because that can change your life more than anything that you'll ever learn in your four years of school. Learning God's Word is the greatest thing that you can learn to be successful in life."

Guest (Male): What a great message for all of us today. Pastor JP provides us with great insight. That is why we'd like to make it available to you on CD. Just get in touch and mention today's date. We'll send it your way for just $5. Or if you'd like to support this ministry, you can write us at Truth That Changes Lives, 23331 Moulton Parkway, Laguna Hills, California 92653, or give us a call at 949-916-0250.

For your gift of $25 or more, we will send you a signed copy of JP's new book, *Facing Goliath*. Please join us every Sunday at 9:00 or 11:00 AM at Crossline Church in Laguna Hills. The address is 23331 Moulton Parkway, Laguna Hills, California 92653. Or check us out on the web at crosslinechurch.com.

We want to help you in your relationship with Christ. Please get in touch with us at Truth That Changes Lives, 23331 Moulton Parkway, Laguna Hills, California 92653, or call us at 949-916-0250. On the internet, you will find us at crosslinechurch.com. We hope to see you at one of our services every Sunday at our new campus in Laguna Hills. For more information and directions, please go to crosslinechurch.com. Please join us next time on Truth That Changes Lives.