Reformation OPC (AZ) - Sunday, April 11, 2021
Introduction
We are tremendously blessed at ROPC to have an abundance of children and a number of growing families. We pray continually for our children, those still in the womb and those heading off to college and careers. The way we talk about and pray about our families and children is very intentional. We want to cultivate a God-centered vision of the household. We want you to look at, love, and lead your kids as children of the covenant and not as the world would teach you to do.
If you are married and have children or plan to do so, you need to spend a lot of time in Psalms 101, 127, and 128. These are not the only prayers relevant to your role, but they are some of the most important. Psalm 101 has been called the Householder’s Psalm and is an inspired mission statement for a Christian family which the husband-father is to establish and exemplify as God’s appointed leader of his household. Psalm 128 is a song of joyful perspective on the blessings and cheerfulness that will fill a house where God is feared. And Psalm 127 is a song which teaches us humility, a godly perspective, and gives us a guiding pattern for raising our children.
This psalm is broadly applicable because the concept of house can be taken in different ways. Augustine’s exposition of it focused entirely on the Church as the house of God. This is an appropriate and valuable use, even if he did neglect the more obvious and primary application. Calvin applied the psalm both to the family and the State, and he emphasized the political insights we ought to learn from it. Matthew Henry interpreted it as a family-psalm but acknowledged the broader application. There is some question whether we ought to read the Hebrew in the heading as a psalm written by Solomon or dedicated to him. Henry takes the latter view, believing Psalm 127 was written for Solomon by his father and observes: “He having a house to build, a city to keep, and seed to raise up to his father, David directs him to look up to God, and to depend upon his providence, without which all his wisdom, care, and industry, would not serve.”
I want to look at Psalm 127 under five headings in this lesson as a model for the house that God builds and blesses. First, the Priority of the House; second, the Plan of the House; third, the Perspective of the House; fourth, the Pattern of the House; and fifth, the Purpose of the House. We could apply these same five points to the Church or to the State, but I want to focus on families. If you do not have a family or your own children are grown and gone, that does not mean this psalm no longer applies to you. Think of how these points teach us to think Christianly about our families and how we can better encourage one another in ordering our homes this way. Think about how these truths do relate to the visible Church, the civil State, and your life. As Henry exhorts us all:
“In singing this psalm we must have our eye up unto God for success in all our undertakings and a blessing upon all our comforts and enjoyments, because every creature is that to us which he makes it to be and no more.” --Matthew Henry
The Priority of the House: Humility
During the first ten years or so of my marriage, I deliberately sought opportunities to ask godly older men for advice on being a good husband and father. I talked to quite a few men whose families were intact, characterized by love, and whose children were walking by faith and serving the Lord. I asked for the same advice from two fathers whose families were a mess: broken by sin, estranged to various degrees, and whose children were living in unbelief, immorality, and rebellion. I found a consistent pattern in these surveys. Those whose families turned out well immediately deflected any credit for their success. One father told me, “We made a lot of mistakes.” They attributed the wellbeing of their family and children to the grace of God. They gave good advice and shared practical wisdom for marriage and parenting, but they made it clear from the beginning of the conversation that to whatever extent their family turned out well, it was God’s blessing. On the other hand, the two fathers whose families had not turned out well denied any responsibility for or understanding of what happened. One even said to me, “We did everything right.” I began to suspect the real difference was not in parenting techniques or rules of the house but in the attitude of the parents. Humility seemed to make a big difference.
What is the first priority in a godly home? Humility before the Lord. We are to fear God and keep his commandments (Ecc. 12:13-14). This is man’s “all,” our “whole duty.” Before you decide what you will or will not allow your children to do, before you decide how you will educate your kids, before you decide your parameters for punishments, you must humble yourself before God. This is not your family; it belongs to the Lord. These are not your children; they belong to God. If you do not fear God, then you should not expect your children to love and respect you. If you will not obey God, you cannot expect them to obey you.
The Lord must build the house, and your first task is to communicate to your family that your lives and relationships are ordered by and intended to glorify God. Your wife must see that you are submitting to God in order to be comfortable submitting to you. Your children must see a model of reverence and obedience in your attitude toward God in order to know how they ought to respond to your authority. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. The husband-father is a man under authority, and he is incompetent and unqualified to lead until he knows and acts like it.
Popular culture teaches wives and children to think of husbands and fathers as fools. Mocking men is funny. Mocking women is wicked and abusive. A real man, according to our society’s standards, is a man who is constantly putting himself down, degrading his own sex. But this is not humility; it is pathetic. A husband-father (or wife-mother) who knows he is God’s man will not need to apologize for who he is. He fears God; therefore, he doesn’t fear men. He knows his identity and role; he doesn’t need to apologize for God’s work and assignment in his life.
What would your wife say about your humility if she was honest? What do your children think about you? Is humility an outstanding trait? An humble man is not a weak man; he is strong. He knows who he is, why he is here, and what he is supposed to be busy doing. An humble man is not distracted by what the world says he ought to be or do. He fears God, and he relies on God to build and bless his house. He does not trust in his own resources or wisdom. He is continually in prayer and the Word seeking the blessing and direction which comes from God alone. When he speaks to his spouse and children, he speaks as a man under authority and not as one who views himself as an independent authority. His message to his house is: “This is the will of God. Let us rise up and do it,” not, “This is what I want to do, and since I am in charge, everyone fall in line.” You cannot expect your children to serve God if they don’t see you doing so. You cannot expect your children to confess faults, repent, pray, be unselfish, be kind, and be humble unless they see these traits in you first and consistently. Your job is to point your spouse and your children to Jesus, and that begins by saying, “This is God’s house, and we will worship and obey him together.”
The Plan of the House: Diligence Governed by Grace
Once we have established the proper foundation and made humility before God the first priority, we are ready to plan and execute the family project. The Book of Proverbs teaches much wisdom that can help us. Get up early (20:13; 26:14). Work hard (12:11, 24). Love your wife (5:15-20; 18:22). Spend less than you make (21:17, 20; 22:7). Plan for the future (24:27; 27:18). Invest in your kids (1:8-9; 13:22). Be generous with what you have (3:27-28; 11:24-26). But here is the sober truth: None of your wise plans or hard work will accomplish anything without God’s blessing. Your success depends entirely upon him. It doesn’t matter how early you get up, how late you go to bed, how careful you are with your budget, or how many revenue streams you create. You will only succeed as a housebuilder insofar as God blesses your labor.
The Lord is not against diligence and labor. He is very much in favor of it. He commands it. There is no excuse for a husband-father sleeping late on a regular basis. Your time to rise should not depend on your first appointment of the day. Your first appointment is with the Lord. You have work to do before your workday officially begins. You need to labor in prayer for your spouse and children before you punch a clock for your employer. Your first job is to love, provide, protect, and lead them. How are you going to do that if you are lazy, ignorant, and weak? The Bible commands disciples (in general), parents (in particular), and husband-fathers (above all) to be disciplined and diligent, but Psalm 127 reminds us none of it will accomplish anything apart from God’s blessing. You may be a productivity guru, but you are building a house with wood, hay, and straw unless the Lord strengthens, guides, and blesses it.
There are many things I do not understand about God’s creation. Platypuses, for example. But one of the most baffling features of creation is man’s need to sleep for one-third of his life. I have devoted a considerable part of my adult life to defying this arrangement. Not everyone needs 8-hours of sleep in every 24--some people may even need more! But there is no doubt that a lack of sleep is detrimental. Our brains and bodies need us to be unconscious for a significant period of time on a daily basis. You may postpone sleep for a while, but it will catch up with you. If you are not willing to go to sleep, eventually your body will go there for you.
Sleep is God’s gift, even if we only accept it reluctantly. It is a typological kindness. We sleep as a reminder that we are not gods. We are not in control. We like to pretend we are. We imagine the world cannot go on without us. But eventually we have to go to bed, and as we sleep, somehow, remarkably, the world manages to limp along without us. You should wake up early and work hard all day for your family. You should be tired when you go to bed at night, and if you aren’t, you need to work harder. But you lie down as a reminder that you depend entirely on the Lord’s blessing. It won’t be your diligence that builds your house; it is God’s watchcare of you.
The Perspective of the House: Children are a Blessing from God
It is shameful how fashionable it is to joke and complain about the curse of having kids. If you think children are a curse, don’t have them. Please. People who don’t want to cherish and lay down their lives for their kids should not breed. Children are a blessing from the Lord, a heritage, his provision. If you have children, you have them by the blessing of God. Sometimes children are conceived out of wedlock. That child is not a mistake. The behavior of his biological parents was not a mistake either, it was sin, and they ought to repent of it, seek God’s forgiveness, and commit themselves to a life of obedience from that point onward. But the child was not conceived by accident. They may not have planned it, but God did. Sometimes God withholds children from those who desire to have them, sometimes he gives children to those who do not want them and are unprepared to receive them, but no child is ever conceived or born that God did not already know and appoint for that very hour.
If you have children, you should thank God continually for them. They may cause you grief. They definitely will be inconvenient and expensive. They will be the cause of your greatest joys and sorrows in this life. But they are heritage from the Lord. Many of us enjoy teasing our kids, and I am not denying there is a place for it. But our children, brethren, friends, co-workers, and neighbors need to know that we love and cherish our kids. There are enough parents in the world who resent them. How many times have you seen parents in public who appear to despise their children? You can understand if the child grows to hate and resent his parents. I wouldn’t want to be their kid either. Our children should never doubt that we appreciate them, but this will not be best communicated by saying, “I love you” (though we ought to do that too). It is best communicated by how we interact with them, how we speak about them to others, and how we consistently communicate our awareness that they are God’s gift, a sacred joy and responsibility.
You have been entrusted with a stewardship. Those children do not belong to you. You are not permitted to do with them as you please. You must do with them as God pleases, as he directs you to do. You are responsible for their welfare, and if you interpret primarily in terms of getting them employable so they can leave home, you are doing it wrong. Your primary task is spiritual formation. You are to “bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). You are to teach them, counsel them, encourage them, and enable them to follow Christ more faithfully and fruitfully than you have. Their spiritual growth and welfare must be your highest priority. As one of those dads I surveyed said to me about fifteen years ago: “You have to think about it all the time.” We must learn to think kingdomly and Christianly about our kids and everything they do.
One day your children will stand before the Lord, and they will be required to give account for their lives. You won’t be able to step in and make excuses for them. You see that all the time. A child is behaving like an incarnated demon, and the parent explains he didn’t get his nap. Some of these children are learning that obedience optional if you are tired. You won’t get to make excuses on Judgment Day for the monster you have made. We know that God is sovereign, and the faith and spiritual life of your children is ultimately in God’s control, not yours. But before you make some kind of Calvinistic excuse for negligent parenting--which none of our Calvinist forebears would approve--remember that most of us will be the single greatest human influence on the spiritual trajectory of our children, for good or ill. It is a sobering responsibility. But some parents are communicating that what is most important is a good education, academic excellence, athletic performance, or some other worldly measure of success. You allow them to miss church for all kinds of lame reasons but will move heaven and earth to see to it they make it to the ballgame and are prepared for their exams. Brothers, what are we preparing our children for? Is it a prosperity in this world followed by eternity in Hell or everlasting glory and joy in the presence of Christ?
The Pattern of the House: Arrows Sent Downrange
I take the simile in v.4 as the guiding analogy for Christian parenting. Your children are not decorations in your home. They are not trophies. They are not heirlooms. They are weapons meant to be deployed in war. Children are not swords which are meant to be retained. You don’t throw a sword; you draw, cut and thrust with it, and return it to the scabbard. Children are not boomerangs which are meant to come back. You throw a boomerang, over and over, sending it out to do a job and then returning it to your side. Children are arrows. They are missiles to be sent downrange. If you view them as decorations, trophies, keepsakes, or as the wrong kind of weapons, you are not raising your children in a biblical way. What do you do with an arrow? You draw, aim, and release.
You draw your children by giving them the energy and resources to go out into the world. This includes love, support, encouragement, and whatever is necessary in order to leave your hand and become independent. You aim children by giving them direction, teaching them the Word of God, helping them find their vocation, giving them godly counsel for marriage, imparting wisdom for life. You release children by letting them go. This begins early by encouraging your children to think about their future. Whatever they may be planning to do, they better plan to do it somewhere else! Leaving is God’s plan. That does not have to mean a great distance. To leave and cleave is a covenantal, relational, and emotional re-ordering of one’s life, even if a child remains on the family property and takes over the family business. But he will no longer be defined by his relationship as a son. He is a son of Adam, follower of Christ, representative of the Maker, and lord of the earth.
Many parents handicap their kids, emotionally and vocationally crippling them, with the best of intentions. They are trying to be helpful and supportive, but the child will not learn to stand on his own until he has to do so. You must begin training that independence at an early age. Babies are proud little creatures. Don’t encourage pride, but encourage personal responsibility. They want to do it themselves; let them, because one day they will have to. Remind them that God has called them to fill the earth and subdue it, and in order to do that, they will need to move out. Your house is already full. They need to build a new house and train the next generation of believers.
The Purpose of the House: Godly Engagement at the Gates
Finally, notice the purpose of the house: it is godly engagement at the city gates. The psalm assumes that our children will speak with their enemies in the gate. You could also translate the word for speak here as contend (JPS 1999). As we build our house, we must remember there are enemies at the gates that have to be confronted. We will have to contend with those who oppose God, his Word, and his work in this world. We don’t want our children to experience war and conflict, but we know they will. You cannot insulate them from it, no matter how hard you try, and if you try, you will only leave them unprepared. They are going to face adversity. There will be hard times. They will be hated and persecuted for Christ. And your job is to prepare them.
One of the purposes of marriage, not the only one but a major one, is the production of godly offspring (Mal. 2:15). God wants godly seed. Not just children, but godly children. The kingdom is supposed to grow by covenantal reproduction. First, a nation is evangelized, then the new converts are all taught to disciple their children. Unfortunately, in many communities (and local churches) the parents are converted, and then the work has to begin from scratch with their kids. This ought not to be the case. You may have a dramatic story of conversion, but we want your children’s testimony to be beautifully boring. We want kids from Christian households to be unable, in most cases, to put a finger on when God made them alive. We love to hear them say, “I have always believed in God and loved Christ.”
Why is it so important to raise our children as Christians? Because they need to know who they are before they step outside the front door of the house. There are enemies at the gates who will try to confuse, indoctrinate, and convert your children. The world wants to make your child a pagan. Your children need to know they are already consecrated to God. I can’t be a girl because God made me a man, and I can’t be a pagan because God made me a Christian. My identity as a Christian is no more voluntary and self-determined than my identity as a male. I am who I am because God made me. I am his, and the world has nothing to say about it.
There are enemies at the gates, but that is no reason to retreat into our homes and lock the doors. Those enemies have to be confronted there, in the city gate, at the entrance to the City of God. They are not supposed to be allowed to prowl around the streets. They are not permitted to preach lies and spread delusion. They are to be confronted, corrected, and conquered. That’s the work that lies before our children. That’s the kind of engagement we have to get them ready for. Our children are going to war; they are entering a contest with the enemy. They don’t need you to kiss their forehead and tell them dragons aren’t real. Don’t lie to them. Dragons are real, and they are bigger and scarier than your kids realize. That’s how you know they aren’t in the closet or under the bed. Dragons are much too large and violent to fit in either of those places. But Jesus has overcome the dragon. He crushed its head, and it is bleeding to death now. All of his demons are scared and frantic because they know they’ve lost. You don’t have to be afraid of them, because Jesus has won, and he is with us whenever we face them. Your children don’t need sweet bedtime stories without any danger in them. They need a shield and a sword.
Conclusion
These are five features of the house that God builds. The priority is humility; we live under his authority to worship and serve him. The plan is subject to his blessing, and our diligence is for naught unless he grants it. The perspective is gratitude and joy; children are a blessing, and family is a stewardship. The pattern is artillery; our children are to be drawn, aimed, and released. And the purpose is godly engagement with wickedness in the world; our children will contend with the enemy at the gate, but because they belong to Jesus, they will certainly overcome. Amen.
