How to apply the goal.

1. How to apply the goal. Last time: What is the goal of parenting? This time: How is that goal applied?

2. Review: What is the Goal of Parenting? • Reality Check: • What do you want for your children? (What are your goals as parents?) • How do you define success? (How do you know you have gotten what you wanted?) • How would your child complete this sentence: “What Mom and Dad want for me is…”

3. The Goal of Parenting • The goal of parenting is to teach children to worship. The goal of parenting is no different than our greatest goal. Except we are teaching children to do it. • Our greatest goal: worship. • Deuteronomy 6:4-5, The SHEMA (Shema means “hear” in Hebrew): “4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. • Deuteronomy 6:7a “Impress them on your children.”

4. The Goal of Parenting “Are your children learning from your words and your example and especially from your expectations for them, that you care for nothing except this: that their lives be joyfully spent serving the Lord Christ? Do they know that you don't give a fig for how much money they make or where they live if only they might do all they can and be all they ought to be for the sake of their Redeemer and yours?” - Rob Rayburn.

5. Why is this the Goal? • God’s utter uniqueness. No other God exists. • God’s amazing rescue. He alone saves. • Deut 6 in context of Deut 4:32-40: • 32 Ask now about the former days, long before your time, from the day God created man on the earth; ask from one end of the heavens to the other. Has anything so great as this ever happened, or has anything like it ever been heard of? 33 Has any other people heard the voice of God speaking out of fire, as you have, and lived? 34 Has any god ever tried to take for himself one nation out of another nation, by testings, by miraculous signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, or by great and awesome deeds, like all the things the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes?

6. 35 You were shown these things so that you might know that the LORD is God; besides him there is no other. 36 From heaven he made you hear his voice to discipline you. On earth he showed you his great fire, and you heard his words from out of the fire. 37 Because he loved your forefathers and chose their descendants after them, he brought you out of Egypt by his Presence and his great strength, 38 to drive out before you nations greater and stronger than you and to bring you into their land to give it to you for your inheritance, as it is today. • 39 Acknowledge and take to heart this day that the LORD is God in heaven above and on the earth below.There is no other. 40 Keep his decrees and commands, which I am giving you today, so that it may go well with you and your children after you and that you may live long in the land the LORD your God gives you for all time. • The only fitting response: Worship.

7. What is worship? • Worship: Giving God the honor, glory, and submission that He is due. In other words, fearing and serving and loving the Lord. • Example: Theme of fearing the LORD in Deuteronomy: Deut 4:10; 5:29; 6:2, 13, 24; 8:6; 10:12, 20; 13:4; 14:23; 28:58; 31:12, 13, cf. Prov 1:7. • We were made to worship. • Worship is done in all of life. • Thus, our lives are to be lives of worship service. • We do gather with others for services of worship, but this is in the context of a life of worship.

8. Questions?

9. How to teach your children to be worshippers The “How?” Outlined in Deut 6:6-9 • Teaching how to worship requires a worshipper. (Deut 6:6) • Teaching how to worship happens relationally. (Deut 6:7a) • Teaching how to worship is comprehensive. (Deut 6:7b) • Teaching how to worship shapes character. (Deut 6:8) • Teaching how to worship affects calling. (Deut 6:9) Disclaimer: I am a student of Scripture, and I am a work in progress. I’m still learning how to live this way before my children.

10. Teaching How to Worship Requires a Worshipper • True worship flows from the heart. Vs. 6. Cf. Vs 4 & 5:29 • True worship only flows from a changed heart. • Deut 30:6-8: 6 The LORD your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live. 7 The LORD your God will put all these curses on your enemies who hate and persecute you. 8 You will again obey the LORD and follow all his commands I am giving you today. • Context: Exile and Repentance.

11. Teaching How to Worship Requires a Worshipper Application: • Are you amazed at God’s grace? • Who, or what, has your heart? Prov. 23:26 “My son, give me your heart, and let your eyes keep to my ways.” Before we can say that to our children, we must hear God say it to us. • What do you think about in the car? When you are stressed? When you have free time? When you see something beautiful? When something difficult happens? Does your heart cry out to God? • Does worship characterize your life? • Phil 3:8 What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ. • God told Abraham - “I am your shield, your very great reward. " (Gen 15:1)

12. Teaching How to Worship Requires a Worshipper Application, con’t: • Its not enough just to take the children to church. • Do your children observe you worship throughout life? • More is “caught” than “taught.” • “Do as I say and not as I do” is destructive. • Teaching your children to worship thus begins, continues, and ends with repentance and prayer. • Repentance for our wandering hearts. • Prayer for more grace.

13. Questions? Comments?

14. Teaching How to Worship Happens Relationally • Deut 6:7a: Impress them on your children. • This is a relationship. • Enter into relationship with your child. • Application: talk with, not at or to, your child. In other words, have a dialogue, not a monologue.

15. Talk With Me (From Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade): HENRY opens his Diary and begins to thumb through it. INDY Do you remember the last time we had a quiet drink? I had a milk shake. HENRY Hmmm... What did we talk about? INDY We didn't talk. We never talked. HENRY And do I detect a rebuke? INDY A regret. It was just the two of us, Dad. It was a lonely way to grow up. For you, too. If you had been an ordinary, average father like the other guys' dads, you'd have understood that. HENRY Actually, I was a wonderful father. INDY When? HENRY looks up from his Diary. HENRY Did I ever tell you to eat up? Go to bed? Wash your ears? Do your homework? No. I respected your privacy and I taught you self- reliance. INDY What you taught me was that I was less important to you than people who had been dead for five hundred years in another country. And I learned it so well that we've hardly spoken for twenty years. HENRY You left just when you were becoming interesting. INDY Dad, how can you --? HENRY (interrupting) Very well. I'm here now. He closes the Diary and leans back in his seat. HENRY What do you want to talk about? Hmmm? INDY stutters uncomfortably as HENRY stares at him, waiting for a response. INDY (laughs) Well... I can't think of anything. HENRY Then what are you complaining about? (laughs)

16. Talk With Me • “Talk To Me” Song by Judy Rodgers • One dad said: “We talk… just last night, he told me he wanted a bicycle and I told him to eat his beans.” -quoted in “Shepherding a Child’s Heart.” • “When children are little we often fail to engage them in significant conversation…Eventually they learn the ropes. They realize that we are not interested in what goes on in them. They learn that a “good talk” for us is a “good listen” for them. When they become teens, the tables turn. Parents wish they could engage their teens, but the teens have long since stopped trying.” - Tripp

17. Teaching How to Worship Happens Relationally • Focus on understanding your child. • Learn to listen to your child. • Think before you speak. • Apologize when you sin against your child. • Talk about everything with your child (weather, sports, politics, ideas, dreams, hopes, history, music). • Laugh, play, work together.

18. Questions? Comments?

19. Teaching How to Worship is Comprehensive • Teach worship everywhere: “Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road,” (Deut 6:7) • Teach worship all the time: “when you lie down and when you get up.” (Deut 6:7) • This pair of instructions encompasses all of life: from the time we wake up to the time our head hits the pillow, whether we’re at home or we’re out, we are to teach our children.

20. Teaching How to Worship is Comprehensive • Rob Rayburn: “Verse 7 says it plainly. The word of God is never to be far from the lips and very often to be popping into the conversation that fathers and mothers have with their kids. Whether it is having a catch in the yard or working at some chore in the house or beside the bed at night, another line, another stitch, another nail. Remember, son, what our heavenly Father says about that. Or, that is why, my girl, the Lord told us never to do that or say that or think that. Or, the solution to that dilemma, my children, is here in the Word of God, where the Lord tells us to trust in him.” In sum, its always the right time and place to instruct our children in the ways of the Lord.

21. Teaching How to Worship is Comprehensive App: Teaching worship everywhere • Where do you have a sacred/secular divide in your thinking? • Every place: Where are the opportunities in your life to talk to your child about the Lord and his ways? Drive to/from school? Place of sports/recreation in life? • What do your desires, dreams, and aspirations for your child’s life say to your child?

22. Teaching How to Worship is Comprehensive App: Teaching worship all the time • Know your weaknesses. (I.e. my [main] weakness in ping pong)- Are there specific times that you know that you struggle to worship yourself? Pray about these times. • Teach your child to worship all day long. Illustration of a student who though you prayed only in the morning and evening. • When your child does well in school, do you pray as well as buy that ice cream cone? • When your child doesn’t make the cut on the drama team do you pray with your child as you offer comfort? • When you are admiring the beauty of nature, or the beauty of something man-made, do you stop and thank God for the gift of creation and the gift of creativity? • Do you have specific times that you teach your child? While the reference to the morning and evening is symbolic of the whole day, it is good to daily worship God as a family.

23. Questions? Comments?

24. Teaching How to Worship Shapes Character • Deut 6:8 “Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.” • Jewish phylacteries and mezuzot are boxes bound on the arm and forehead or attached to doorposts containing the Shema and other Scriptures. • Worship shapes what your hands do and what your eyes see. • Teach your children to have such a love for the law of the Lord that what they engage with their hands and what they see with their eyes is pleasing to him.

25. Teaching How to Worship Shapes Character • Illustration: Joseph and Potipher’s Wife Genesis 39:6-10: So he left in Joseph's care everything he had; with Joseph in charge, he did not concern himself with anything except the food he ate. Now Joseph was well-built and handsome, 7 and after a while his master's wife took notice of Joseph and said, "Come to bed with me!" 8 But he refused. "With me in charge," he told her, "my master does not concern himself with anything in the house; everything he owns he has entrusted to my care. 9 No one is greater in this house than I am. My master has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife. How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?" 10 And though she spoke to Joseph day after day, he refused to go to bed with her or even be with her. • Notice what Joseph’s eye sees (God) and what his hand refuses to do (sin against God).

26. Teaching How to Worship Shapes Character • How? It shapes the heart. • The story of redemption changes our heart. This then affects our hand and our eye. • Application: How do you do this? • Remember what was already said about communication. Have a rich, full relationship with your child. • Discipline. Discipline is an expression of love.

27. Teaching How to Worship Shapes Character Prov 23:13-19 13 Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you punish him with the rod, he will not die. 14 Punish him with the rod and save his soul from death. 15 My son, if your heart is wise, then my heart will be glad; 16 my inmost being will rejoice when your lips speak what is right. 17 Do not let your heart envy sinners, but always be zealous for the fear of the LORD. 18 There is surely a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off. 19 Listen, my son, and be wise, and keep your heart on the right path. Twin Themes of rich communication/instruction and discipline, set side by side.

28. Teaching How to Worship Shapes Character Application: • Talk with, not to, your children • Discipline done consistently to draw them to God.

29. Questions? Comments?

30. Teaching How to Worship affects Calling Deut 6:9: “Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” • “House” and “Gates” reminds us of our calling in life, the call to work and home, family and productivity. • A worship-filled life has a direct impact on how we view our work and our home. - Thus, teaching how to worship affects calling.

31. Teaching How to Worship affects Calling Application: • What view of life are you instilling in your children? • What are you teaching your child about the place of work and rest/recreation in life? • Are they learning to see that any work done, if it is honest and done wholeheartedly, no matter how menial, is glorifying to God? • Do you want to see your child be godly as their skills develop, or do you want them to “succeed?”

32. Questions? Comments?

33. Conclusion • The Goal of Parenting: teaching children to worship. • How to live out that goal? • The “How?” Outlined in Deut 6:6-9: • Teaching how to worship requires a worshipper. (Deut 6:6) • Teaching how to worship happens relationally. (Deut 6:7a) • Teaching how to worship is comprehensive. (Deut 6:7b) • Teaching how to worship shapes character. (Deut 6:8) • Teaching how to worship affects calling. (Deut 6:9)

34. Conclusion 3 John 4 “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.”