Introduction
I want to put a simple picture in your mind. A skeleton. There’s a reason why a skeleton in our imagination causes a shudder. It is used to horrify us with the prospect of death and demise and decay. Or perhaps it makes us think of science class and the skeleton is to us merely an interesting case study. Hold on to that image of a skeleton, and we’ll circle back to it later.
Our custom is to use this first Sunday after Christmas as an opportunity to give a sermon on the State of the Church. Sometimes this will deal with issues which confront the broader evangelical church, other times it will focus more particularly on our local body. This year I am going to attend more closely to the needs of this church; this new church that is still in diapers, metaphorically.
The Text
Some men’s sins are open beforehand, going before to judgment; and some men they follow after. Likewise also the good works of some are manifest beforehand; and they that are otherwise cannot be hid.
1Timothy 5:24-25
Summary of the Text
The immediate context of these two verses is Paul giving instruction to Timothy regarding elders. The matters discussed are the compensation of such elders that labor in word and doctrine (5:17-18), rebuking erring elders (5:19-20), evaluating potential elders and avoiding favoritism in that selection process (5:21-22). In all of this, Paul tells Timothy to ease the stress of pastoral ministry with the occasional glass of wine (5:23).
Paul then offers a unique articulation of what Scripture teaches us elsewhere. You reap what you sow. Occasionally, the lapse of time between the sowing of seeds and the reaping of fruit can tarry. Some seeds sprout up right away and reveal what the fruit is. With other fruits it can take years and even decades for the sort of fruit to be revealed.
In other words, Paul is consoling Timothy that there are some men whose sins are so clear that they are like a chained slave to their sins long before the Final Judgement (which is what I believe Paul is referring to when he mentions the judgement). But the sin of some men can lay quite hidden, seemingly dormant. In time, those sin will be revealed. Sin is like a beach ball, it cannot stay submerged indefinitely.
In a like manner, there are some men whose good works are as plain as the elephant’s trunk. The feedback loop is almost immediate. It is plain as day that the good works are worthy of praise, encouragement, and commendation. But, there are also “hidden” good works which, though not done to be seen by man, cannot be hidden forever. These sort of good works are like trying to hide the flavor of an orange. You should not be discouraged if certain good works don’t result in immediate praise and favor before men, for this would be to turn the good work into a work of vanity and pride. Instead, put your shoulder to the plow in both sorts of good works, the ones that are evident, and the ones that are less evident, trusting that promotion comes not from the east or west, but from the Lord (Cf. Ps. 75:6).
Applying this to Parenting
This passage teaches us the potency of sin and good works within leaders. This holds true across organizations and institutions. I’d like to apply this principle to parenting in particular. If you hadn’t noticed, there are a goodly number of pint-sized saints in our midst. 52% of our congregation is under 18. To make my point even finer, 48% of our congregation is under 12. In about 15 years the hidden sins or our hidden good works of parents are made manifest in the sort of children they have raised.
Parenting is a unique example of this principle of the various lag-times of certain vices and virtues. Now, let’s cut close to the bone. You need to let the Spirit do an inventory on your own heart. Have you been cherishing sin in your own heart? Have you been daydreaming about the neighbor’s wife or husband? If we could do a spiritual X-ray, would it be said of you, as a parent, that you are content? Discontentment with your spouse, career, finances, or other life circumstances is a good way of turning your home from a greenhouse for virtue, into a meth lab. On this front you must be ruthless to root this up from your heart, along with the sinful actions that often go hand in hand with that discontentment.
Sins with Lag time
Let’s liken the Christian family to a farmland. Who you marry is like picking the sort of field in which your crops will grow. The early years of parenting are when you plow and sow the fields. From ~5yo-13yo you are watering, and then in the teen years you are making ready for the harvest, largely by making sure the raccoons and other critters don’t ravage the crops.
There are some families that you can tell from a mile away that their sins, as Paul said, are doing a parade out in front of everyone (Cf. Pro 24:30-31). But for many Christians, who sincerely desire to have a healthy Christian home, they can easily be lulled into various sinful ruts, where the lag-time between sowing and reaping covers over the sinful sloth and negligence. Too many parents are shocked when the teens years come along and they find that instead of a wheat harvest they have a thistle patch.
I’d like to highlight four such parental sins that will almost invariably produce a poisonous harvest.
- Permissiveness – You may have heard this framed with very clever branding as Gentle Parenting. Who could be against gentleness, isn’t that a fruit of the Spirit?! One of the principle ways Satan deceives people is by hijacking virtues and using them to conceal vice. Love is love has been used to brand sexual perversion as a righteous cause. Justice has been used to advocate for theft of billions of dollars from tax-payers to be given to the slothful. Likewise, Gentle has been used to conceal a parenting style that is permissive, and thus ultimately cruel. Now, your discipline of your children should always be done in the spirit of gentleness and meekness (Gal. 6:1). It really is a peculiar cruelty of our age that parents have been coaxed into treating their discipline of their sons and daughters like the wokest of HR departments. You can see this show up in the language of such permissive parenting. It is in the third person plural and always instructions are disguised in the ethereal form of vague questions. “Let’s not hit your sister.” “Which voice do we use in our place of communal dwelling?” “Did we let our feelings get too big?” “What shape do we want the sandwich cut in today?”
You should strive to make your words and actions direct to the individual child. Use the second person. Save the question asking for the catechism. You really want to teach your children how to deny themselves, for that is the way of being a disciple of Christ (Mt. 16:24). It is not love to spare your child clear verbal and physical discipline (Pro. 13:24) in order to fit in with the zeitgeist of progressive fear of hierarchy. You are bigger than them (at least when they are young), and hopefully wiser than them, and so use your strength and wisdom to guide them in the way your children must go. - Anger – Parenting is like polishing silver until your reflection is clearly visible. As our children age, we are often disappointed, not necessarily in them, but in how they reveal our own faults, insecurities, and sins. This is when parents can give way to ungodly parental anger. Such anger will rot out the floorboards of your child’s character. To be a perpetual gloomy cumulonimbus clouds above their heads, is a certain way to embitter them. In fact we’re told that such parenting will provoke our children to wrath (Eph. 6:4). Meaning, by being given to wrath we are teaching our children to give way to the heat of their feelings, which is a good way to ensure that you will spend a lot of money on Bail bonds. Solomon instructs us about this: “A man of great wrath shall suffer punishment: for if thou deliver him, yet thou must do it again (Pro. 19:19).”
You should take the discipline and instruction of your children seriously, but don’t conflate sobriety with the hot-headed wrath that commonly defines much parenting. You shouldn’t be upset with your kids if you’ve failed to take the time to give them the clear boundaries and standards of the home. Too often parents lose their temper because of a child’s immaturity and confusing that immaturity with high-handed rebellion. As they grow older they really can begin to rebel in profoundly sad ways. But in their young days your task is to see their foolishness as foolishness and take the steps to discipline that foolishness, so that the foolishness doesn’t become the operating system of their character. - Irritation – You might not be given to outbursts of wrath, but a sub-species of anger is what we commonly refer to as irritation. Many parents have a low-grade fever of annoyance towards their children. If you don’t like being with your kids you shouldn’t expect other people to like being with your kids! Do your children know that you delight in them? You need to regularly take their faces in your hands, look them in the eyes and tell them: “I love you, and always will.” “I am so glad you are my son.” “I am so proud of the young woman you are becoming.” To help you with this, here is a helpful rhyme, irrigation not irritation. Water them with a countenance of joy. Water them with a voice that is in harmony with God’s grace, not discordant with it. Water them with words and actions of affection.
- Inattentiveness – We live in an age afflicted with distractions. We have more time for leisure and entertainment than any age before us. But your newsfeed, your hobbies, your career, your “me time”, is not more important than the souls God has tasked you to disciple. This holds true even into their teens and adulthood. An attentive parent is a parent intent on raising wise sons and virtuous daughters. Consider what we learn from Solomon’s Proverbs, “Hear, ye children, the instruction of a father, and attend to know understanding (Pro 4:1).” A parents demanding their child listen to them without being attentive to their children, is like a music teacher who wears earplugs during their student’s lesson. They won’t have any valuable input because they have not been listening.
So, put the phone down. Examine your schedule and honestly evaluate if you have invested in time and money and affection in the cultivation of wisdom and godliness in your children. A practical application of this is to ask whether you have singled out each of your children in the last three months. This can be done even when your children are grown. Who wouldn’t love an unexpected note of encouragement, gift, coffee date, or outing with their parent?
Another application of this is the consideration as to how many children you should have. You are to be stewards of your fertility. While we should err on the side of taking dominion through fruitful multiplication (especially in this age that hates children in general), this does not mean trying to set an Guinness World Record for the most Irish twins born to one woman. A woman’s body needs time to recover from pregnancy, and giving the body ample time for that recovery is an application of the seventh year sabbatical found in Leviticus 25 (Cf. the related Mosaic Laws). God made women’s fertility cyclical. There really is a time for sowing, for reaping, and for letting the field lie fallow. You want to raise wise children that are well-fed, well-taught, and well-loved, and this requires a great deal of time and resource to do so well. If you heed one verse about having a full quiver, but you ignore all the other verses, you might soon harvest a bumper crop of foolish and resentful children. So then, consider your own situation and apply all the principles of God’s Word in that context.
Good Works with Lag Time
If you survey the farmland of your family and you look with horror that instead of fruitful vineyards you are instead becoming the premier expert on poison ivy, what should you do? You need to go before the Lord, put the whole pile of your sins before Him, and take responsibility. That is what repentance is. “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Repentance is acknowledging our guilt and shame before the Lord. Secondly, you need to go before your spouse and kids and make that repentance known as well. There is no time to waste when it comes to this good work, and this sort of down to the foundations repentance, is the only way of lasting reform within the life of your family. Such repentance cannot be in word only, but must be in deed.
Indeed, certain good works have a longer lag-time. Jesus taught us that faithful, secret prayer (a hidden good work) will eventually be publicly rewarded by your heavenly Father (Mt. 6:5-6). Your aim is not, in the first instance, to show up to church with everyone sitting prim and proper, like a Norman Rockwell painting. Although that is a good-work that is quite evident. But you do not want to have a prim and proper row with hearts far from love to God, faith in Christ, joy in the Holy Ghost and the communion we have with the saints of God. This is to say, do not relent in your parenting until you have turned your heart steadfastly toward your children that they would turn their hearts not just to you as their parents, but ultimately to their heavenly Father.
As Hebrews 12:11 instructs us in this regard, “Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby (Heb 12:11).” Chastening our children is not pleasant in the moment. But this is how a harvest of peaceful righteousness is cultivated. Family strife in adulthood is downstream from deformed chastening in youth. There are parents who adopt the gentle parenting style, and end up with greedy goblins for children. There are furrowed-brow parents who make Pol Pot look like Mother Theresa, and then are shocked when they harvest sour-grapes. Biblical chastening is marked by a few attributes: it is uncomfortable (Heb. 12:6) quick (Pro. 19:18), consistent (Pro. 13:24), and covenantal (Deu. 8:5, Hos. 1:10, Mal. 2:15).
By Faith
Biblical discipline of our children is to be undertaken by faith. The seeds of Bible instruction, catechism, psalm-singing, family prayer, and faithful worship with the saints on the Lord’s Day must be watered by the rain of faith and warmed by the sunshine of sincere love for God and for your children. We do this, trusting God to fulfill His covenant promises of generational mercies, so that in due times our sons are mighty men of valor, our daughters are handmaids of virtue, and our children’s children will gladly live under the everlasting reign of the Prince of peace (Cf. Ez. 37:24-28).
Remember that skeleton I asked you to think about in the beginning? God once asked Ezekiel in a vision to look at a pile of skeletons and asked the prophet if they could live. By the blowing of God’s Spirit those skeletons took on flesh and became an army. But look at the lesson that God teaches Ezekiel. What looks dead can live. That is the Gospel. All God needs to begin a new creation is a dead body. So bring all your sins, no matter what their lag-time, to your God, and trust Him to make the dead bones live.
Charge & Benediction
Remember that the imagery God gives to us in His Word regarding our children is overwhelmingly that of plants. You may have some weeding to do, but remember that while there are some sins with a long lag-time, there are also good works that have a lag-time. Thus, persistently uproot the weeds of win, and patiently await the harvest of righteousness. In other words, don’t give up.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
2 Corinthians 13:14
Leave a Reply