Dena and Andrew Sherman bring their children publicly before God and before the church, you know, they’re going to ask they’re going to ask God and they’re going to ask us to commit to um just assisting them and supporting them as they raise their children in the fear of the Lord as godly children. There’s nothing there’s nothing magical about this service or this ceremony or this event, but we do believe that the supernatural spirit of God is here in this room with us. And uh we seek for that spirit to move in the lives of these three children to make them his own, to draw them into his family, to convict them of sin, convince them that they’re not their own. They don’t belong to themselves, that they’ve been created by God. Uh Jesus Christ is their is their redeemer and their savior. And they’re going to face, we know these three children are going to face many cultural pressures to live lives that don’t leave any room for transcendent power or transcendent truth. But we’re asking God to impact them early with the knowledge of him. Now, prior to that portion of the service, first a little bit of scripture as we would suspect because God has placed us in our families and God uh says that the church is a family. That’s the metaphor he uses for the church. God’s word has a lot to say actually about family life. And we have encouragements and we have admonitions. And this little short passage we’re going to look at this morning has something crucial to say to both parents and children. And of course, we’re not all parents, but unless we somehow self-generated, it’s pretty good bet that we’re all someone’s children. So, this passage is going to say something to each one of us. Ephesians chapter 6 says, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with a promise that it may go well with you that may you that you may enjoy long life on the earth. Fathers, don’t exasperate your children. Instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. So, let’s first look just at that word to parents and specifically fathers. Do not exasperate your children. Instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. And I don’t know if moms are exempt from that particular word, but it may be addressed to fathers specifically because we’re really good at exasperating our children. And that word exasperate just means you provoke them to anger. And if we as parents, if we know if we keep depositing or stirring up anger in our children, we’re going to set them up for a miserable lifetime of great difficulty. If we wire them up to be exasperated, frustrated people, it’s going to spill over into every relationship they’re going to face in life. And this is all really straightforward. It’s not difficult for us to think of all the ways that parents, particularly fathers, can exasperate children. Can happen if we overcontrol them. We have harsh standards that they can’t live up to. Always finding fault. And we communicate that they’re just not quite making it or living up to our expectations. and we condemn their choices. We humiliate them. We don’t mind seeing them sad or depressed because that’s life. And the sooner they learn it, the better. Or we can exasperate them another way just by keeping them overly dependent on us, overly connected. We never release them to learn from and make their own mistakes. If we discipline them excessively, load them up with legalistic rules and demands, or if we’re just unpredictable and inconsistent in the way we relate to them, and they never know which version of their dad or their parent that they’re going to get from one day to the next. We ignore them. We neglect them. We don’t engage in their lives. Teasing is taken too far. We don’t have any sensitivity to their individual needs and personalities. Don’t realize that they need some custom parenting. or if we just confuse and distress our child by not loving our spouse, their other parent. So, as as parents, there is many many ways we can exasperate our children, provoke them to anger. It just comes as a result of frustration. We emotionally overwhelm them. They’re too young to know how to deal with it or how to respond to it. So, it comes out in anger. And maybe maybe we’ve done that maliciously, but most likely we’ve done it unintentionally. Maybe we projected our own unresolved stuff and our own unresolved issues on them. At the time, because they’re kids, they don’t know that. They just internalize the confusion, the frustration. Maybe they assume everything’s their fault and it leaks out of them in anger. So God’s command not to exasperate, calls parents to take a look at their kids, monitor the anger, and then examine themselves to see if they’re the source of some of that anger. And if you’re a parent, at least if you’re an honest parent, you can probably think of many ways that you’ve slipped up. I would hate to have my 50 worst parenting moments broadcast before anyone. The times when I exasperated my own kids, and you can probably all recall times in which your parents exasperated you and uh and stirred up anger in you. Thankfully, uh time provides opportunities for a bit of distance and some forgiveness and some forgetfulness. And the other really powerful tool in our passage for counteracting our parental failures is this tool of positive discipline. Bringing our children up or positive instruction rather bringing our children up in the training and instruction of the Lord. That word training means holding children accountable. That involves some discipline and some punishment. Second word, instruction involves placing something before someone’s mind, giving them something to think about or providing counsel. And if that’s neglected, if training and instruction are neglected, if children are just left to their own devices, if parents don’t expend any energy in instructing and guiding and offering wisdom, it can cause great harm. The 1950s, a French sociologist, Emil Durkheim was studying suicide, particularly teen suicide. And he identified a major component that leads to teen suicide. Something he called anomi which means lawlessness. It’s a poorly regulated home. There’s constant change. There’s no moral clarity. In that kind of environment, he says teen suicide will develop because there’s no strong value systems. There’s no clear norms or rules or or which to guide their lives. In the absence of those rules and those values, it confuses people. It isolates them, leads to despair and leads to the taking of their own lives. So parents need to provide both training and instruction. Done properly and consistently, it will fulfill the goal of verse four to raise them up or bring them up in the Lord. And then once they’ve been raised uh once parents have exercised sufficient authority to teach the child what’s right and wrong and what’s valuable to do in life and what’s not valuable to do in life. Teach them that there’s a kingdom of heaven and uh all the kingdoms of earth must be subservient to it. Eventually the goal is just to release those children like releasing an arrow from a bow and instructing them in the manner that they can they can go out they can live their own lives and others can have a hand in it. It’s not just parents that are involved. That’s why the church is involved in what we’re doing today because we can be involved in supporting and encouraging that instruction and that wisdom. The year 1527, Martin Luther and his wife had the second of their six children, a little baby girl they named Elizabeth. And Luther wrote to a woman that he saw as a really good prospective godmother for this new little baby Elizabeth. He wrote this, “Dear lady, God has produced from me and my wife a little heathen. We hope you’ll be willing to become her spiritual mother and help make her a Christian.” I don’t I don’t know if it takes an entire village to raise a child, but I do know that a loving church family, it’s tremendous resource for parents who are seeking to raise and release children effectively. Let’s look now at the other side of that passage, the one that impacts each one of us here as children. I even if your parents are gone and you don’t have any opportunity to relate with them any longer, here is God’s primary enduring word as to how children should think about their relationship with their parents. It says, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with a promise that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.” So the first call for children is to obey parents. and that refers to children who are in the process of being raised. The second call is to honor parents and that has a a timelessness to it, which means it’s a command that’s addressed probably to all of us. Honoring parents is not the same as obeying them. Although all of us have to start out by just blindly obeying our parents, but that obedience is meant to transition over time from into honoring. Proverbs 22:15 says that folly or foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child. Something we all know that every child born in this world is just a hot little mess and they don’t know anything and they they’re not grounded in reality. You can trick a kid into believing anything. They have no idea about wall sockets or traffic or hot stoves or swimming pools or dead birds and things they shouldn’t put in their mouth. There’s no discernment at all in their lives. Folly or foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child. They don’t understand how relationships work. That’s why if one of our kids grabs a toy away from another child, we tell them to give it back and apologize and listen to their teachers and respect their other adults. We don’t let our children get away with lying or hitting or screaming or not cleaning up their messes because they’ll never have a successful relationship or friendship in their lives if they’re left that unregulated. So parents, we really have our work cut out for us to dislodge that natural foolishness of our children. That’s why parents have to be very authoritarian at the early stages of a church’s life bec. Children have to be compelled to obey for their own good. But the purpose of parenting isn’t just to keep them under subservient obedience. It’s to develop people of wisdom who no longer have to sit under our authority and no longer have to think about obeying us. To develop them as critical thinkers to offer them a worldview of what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s worth living for, what’s worth dying for. A worldview that assists them in going with the grain of God’s universe. So authority and discipline, they’re just early temporary means that a parent uses with the goal of producing a wise child. So what parents really are instructed to do in the Bible, their their primary task is to inculcate wisdom. We have some verses in the Proverbs. My son, hear the instruction of your father. Forsake not your mother’s teaching. You’re a graceful garland to your head and pendants for your neck. Wise children make their fathers proud of them. Foolish ones bring their mother’s grief. My son, if your heart is wise, then my heart will be glad. My inmost being will rejoice when your lips speak what is right. So foolishness in a child totally expected. Foolishness in a man or a woman is to be lamented. So as parents, we want our children to transition from that place of just raw obedience into something far more wise and mature. And our children, they may at some point reject some of our teaching. They might question our worldview. They might experiment in ways that we know aren’t helping them. But we’ve done our job as parents. If we can draw back the bow and release the arrow and send them out as basically wise people in the world. They’re in touch with reality. They understand how the world works. Hopefully, they’re able to live humble and character-driven and people focused and serviceoriented lives. and uh and even if they haven’t trusted in Christ yet as their savior, they’re haunted by his presence and the reality of Christ that they’ve seen in their homes. At that point, although our children’s need to obey us and uh submit to our authority has expired, all children for all time are called to honor their parents. Children, obey your parents in the Lord. This is right. Honor your father and mother. This is the fifth commandment. That it may go well with you may enjoy long life on the earth. First part then is addressed to children who are in the process of being raised. They have to obey. At some point in their teenage years or maybe a little later, the child is they’re through being raised and they’re through being compelled to obey. But now that timelessness of honoring kicks in. And honoring parents really, if you think about it, honoring a parent doesn’t really require um the child to obey them any longer. Doesn’t require that we admire our parents. doesn’t admire that we tr doesn’t require that we trust our parents or that we even feel affection toward them. Honoring is objectively above all those things. And that’s really important for us because some parents are really lousy parents and it would be very damaging to a child if they felt they had to continue obeying their parents or even feeling affection for parents. They’ve done research, you know, and they found that almost half of all parents are actually below average. Some of you had had parents that are profoundly below average. And they they might have been abusive and they might have been consumed with anger, might have been controlled by addictions or just plain evil. Maybe they couldn’t have cared less to have you around or offer any love or support. They were unstable and dysfunctional and mean and untrustworthy. But even a parent like that, if not obeyed, they can still be honored. And that word translated honor in the fifth commandment and in Ephesians 6 is the Hebrew word caved, which literally means to be heavy or to have weight. So to honor someone is just to regard them as a weighty, substantial person. If you ever held a little small nugget of gold, the first thing you notice might not be its color or its shine if it’s in its natural state, but it just seems to weigh more than uh something that size should weigh. Honored relationships are like that. We see in a person a weight or a substance, a significance that um goes beyond other relationships in our lives. So, honoring parents, assigning them weight, it’s it’s a moral choice. It’s not necessarily an emotional choice or something we feel. We’re acknowledging that God has placed us in our family. God has set those people over us to raise us and we honor the work of God through them. So, four quick ways in which we can continue to honor parents. And one way is simply just just to grow up and and apply ourselves to becoming the the people of character they want us to be. If their job is to inculcate wisdom in our lives, then receiving instruction and mirror mirroring that character back to them is the way to go. Proverbs 23:24 and 25 says, “The father of a righteous man has great joy. He who has a wise son delights in him. May your father and mother be glad. May she who gave you birth rejoice.” So through our own character and reputation and integrity and uprightness, we become this precious crown to some old gray-haired parent and we honor them by the way we live. Second way that we might be called to honor parents, not for everyone, but we might be called is to is to provide for their needs. And one thing that Jesus noted in Matthew 15 was that the religious leaders of the day uh that exempted themselves from looking after their elderly parents and Jesus condemned them for that and he told them to pay attention to this fifth commandment. Jesus himself at the end of his life his earthly father Joseph apparently had died hangs bleeding on the cross on behalf of our sin for you and I. He’s experiencing the loneliness, the cosmic rejection. is calling out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And in the midst of all that cosmic drama, as he paid the penalty for our sins, even then, in his last agonized moment, as the eldest son in his family, Jesus realized that he wouldn’t be around to care for his mother in her old age. So, what did he do in John 19? He honored his mother. He gave her over to another son, his friend John. So, he transferred to John the responsibility of looking after his mother. And it says, “From that time on, this disciple took her into his home.” That’s honoring a parent. Jesus is the perfect model for us. He shows that we don’t ever get over this command. Children aren’t to get over their parents, but are to love and revere and uh and look after them if they need looking after. Any Christian who neglects his or her needy parents isn’t paying attention to this command. There’s no honoring happening. They’re not to be treated as an inconvenience. It’s not just financial support. I think it’s emotional support or relational support or prayer support. Seeing them through to the end of their days. Another way to honor parents, I think, is to be realistic about their place in our lives. Don’t demand from our parents things that only God can give us. As a parent, well aware that I’m far from perfect and many situations, conversations with my kids, I’d take back if I could. Not only are parents going to be the first people we’re called to love, they’re also going to be the first people we’re called to forgive. No parent has ever loved or taught their child perfectly. No parent has ever been very consistent in the delivery of values and life lessons. And uh we shouldn’t expect that from our parents, but we can still honor them. No parent can give us the unconditional love of God that we that we think we need when we’re young. Our parents act as kind of a proxy for God in our lives. And uh and if they say we’re wonderful, we feel great. They say we’re failing or we’re ugly or we’re bad, it’s devastating. We can’t really honor our parents unless we crawl out from under the need for their approval. We can’t allow them to have that godlike place in our lives any longer. Otherwise, we will always be so desperate for their approval. We’ll be broken and bitter if it doesn’t come. And we won’t develop a relationship of realistic wisdom with them. Unless we’re realistic what our parents can and can’t give us, we won’t have the distance to honor them properly. Some some particularly bad parents, they have to be honored from a safe distance because getting close to them again is to risk damage to ourselves. And that safe distance might just be uh a birthday card sent in the mail or even just a whispered prayer for a parent who it’s not safe to be around. And one final way I think that we can observe the fifth commandment and honor our parents. This is a great little life hack. It isn’t hard to do, but it present produces really good results. And that’s to let you let them know that something of them still lives on in us. That they’ve transferred something into our lives. That’s important. Respect the need of a parent to see something of themselves in you. There’s an interesting little verse in Isaiah 49. It’s a time uh that talks about the future blessing and restoration of the city of Jerusalem of God’s people. And it said they’ll be so proud of their citizens at that time that the city will wear its sons like ornaments. And as parents, you know, it’s not necessarily right, but we all feel somehow that if our children look good in the world, it reflects well on us. And if our children are wicked and act like fools in the world, that reflects very poorly on us. So the way our children tell the world, the way they live in the world says something about what we are like. And our hearts and our reputation get tied up with our kids. And I know how wonderful it is if one of my children says something uh positive uh something in their life that they’ve gotten from Charlene or myself. If they say uh oh, I like jazz or I like music because you liked it first or uh or I care about the environment or I care about vulnerable people because I saw that example as I was growing up or I I love God because I’ve seen your consistent example. We really want to honor our parents. just assure them that there’s something of them that uh that lives on in us. Just watch their reaction. It’ll be quite powerful and it can be very specific. One of our daughters uh celebrating uh my wife’s uh birthday one day put out a Facebook post and she wrote, “My three siblings and I all have our mom to thank for a big chunk of our creativity and talent. Through the years, there’s there’s been a constant push to be creative. not even an intentional push. But if you’re around a highly, highly creative person for 30 years, you can’t help but start being creative yourself. Creating was so normalized in our house that it was thankfully never a skill I had to learn and it shaped all of us profoundly. That’s immensely honoring for my wife to read something like that. Very powerful thing we can do for our parents is just let them know that something good from us has transferred over to them and will carry on after we’re gone. So, I think there’s something in this Ephesians 6 passage for each of us to take away today, to ponder, to not exasperate children, to ponder what it means to stir up anger in children, what it means to raise them up in the instruction of the Lord, and then what it means to to assure them that something of them, something good from them lives on in us. We’re going to do something a little more specific now. I’m going to ask the Sherman family to come on down, head down the stairs, and join us up front. As they’re doing that, let me read from Psalm 103. But from everlasting to everlasting, the Lord’s love is with those who fear him, his righteousness with their children’s children, with those who keep his covenant and remember to obey his precepts. Come on. Come on forward. This is Andrew and Christina and Michael and Alexander and McKenzie. I like the hat. You have to wear the hat. Have to wear the hat. So, the purpose of what we’re doing today, it’s it’s found not in the dedication of the children, but really the dedication of the parents to their children. So, it’s a time in which Andrew and Christina pledge themselves uh before God to raise Michael and Alexander and McKenzie up in the training and instruction of the Lord. Fathers, don’t exasperate your children. Bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. So we see in scripture a few similarities with uh Hannah dedicating Samuel in 1st Samuel chapter 1 and even with Joseph and Mary presenting Jesus uh to the temple as a very young baby in Luke chapter 2. So it’s not the child that’s making a commitment at this time. It’s the parents making a commitment to raise their children with prayer in Christian love teaching and training their children in the knowledge and ways of the Lord. Let’s read a little responsive reading from Mark chapter 10. One day, some people brought children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them. But the disciples scolded the people. Let’s read this together. But when Jesus saw what was happening, he was very displeased with his disciples. He said to them, “Let the children come to me. Don’t stop them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I assure you, anyone who doesn’t have their kind of faith will never get into the kingdom of God. Then he took the children into his arms and placed his hands on their head and blessed them. So let’s pray together. God of our fathers and of our children, we praise you and we thank you and we honor you for your love which has made us and supports us, for the gift of life embodied in these children. We thank you, God of our fathers and our children. With joy we praise you. Amen. So, I’ve asked Andrew and Christina if they would do a little bit of thinking and a little bit of research and perhaps come up with a with a little with a verse of scripture that would uh speak to what they want from each of their children. And I’d just like you to share that now. Yeah, you can. Yes, you can. Hi everyone. Thank you for coming. Alex says, “Thank you, too.” Um, so we uh we talked we talked about this and we selected three three different verses, one for one for each child. Um, yeah, there we go. Do you want do you want to introduce your family first? Sure. Yeah, we can we can do that. Uh this is my wife, Christina, and this is our oldest son, Michael, who just turned four. This is Christine. She’s Christina’s old friend. And she’s holding McKenzie, who is almost a year old. She’s 11 months. And this is Uncle Tyler. And he is holding Alexander. Uh for Michael we we chose Samuel 1:27-28. Um I prayed for this child and the Lord has granted me what I asked of him. So now I give him to the Lord for his whole life will be given over to the Lord. This was significant for Christina in that um well she’s very protective mom. She knows that she can be a better mom than anybody else can can be to her parent to her kids and she wants to uh always wants to protect them and guide them and the only other person that she feels that she can trust is the Lord. So that’s why that was significant to her. For me, this particular verse was significant because um Michael is uh well, Michael’s namesake was very important to my heart and I am I was very honored to be able to name my son after him. Uh for Alex, we selected uh Luke 2:40. Uh and the child grew and became strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him. And we selected that because we just hope that he can uh grow up. And well, you can tell he’s already strong of spirit. And we just uh we hope that um everybody here and and the Lord and that the whole his whole life just uh blesses him and and has grace upon him. And for little McKenzie, we selected Deuteronomy 14:2. Uh out out of all the peoples on the face of the earth, the Lord has chosen you to be his treasured possession. You are precious to God just like a child is precious to their parents. God sees you as his treasure, his beloved and his darling. And I don’t know, I feel like that one’s kind of self-evident because she is just precious to us. Um and she is our treasure. She is beloved and she’s quite a little darling. And we know that if we feel that way, then God feels that way as well. All right. Thank you. Well done. Eh, so Andrew and Christina, I’m just going to ask you uh a couple of questions here and just ask you to respond. Do you two recognize today recognize that your three children are a gift from God? And do you give heartfelt thanks for God’s blessing? And do you pledge as parents that with God’s fatherly help, you will bring up your children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, making every reasonable effort with prayer, patience, and love to build the word of God, the character of Christ, and the joy of the Lord into their lives. And do you now dedicate Michael, Alexander, and McKenzie to the Lord who gave them to you, surrendering all worldly claims upon their lives in the hope that they will belong wholly to God. In the name of the Lord Jesus, we present these three children to God, to his protection, and to his saving and sanctifying grace. And now, I’m just going to ask the congregation to stand. I’m going to ask you one question as well. We’re in this as a church family. So I ask you, beloved in the Lord, do you earnestly promise to support this family in faithful prayer, Christian teaching, and by wholesome example? All right, I am going to ask uh Ian on behalf of our church eldership to come forward and Heather who uh leads up our children’s ministry to come and pray for this family and for these children. Good morning. Lovely to see you again. Um I just uh like to say a little prayer on behalf of our our children in our children’s ministry and just you know welcoming you into our family here. So heavenly father we feel so blessed to have this beautiful family in front of us today. We thank you for bringing them to Knox and and that they um join us as part of the Knox family. May we continue to embrace them and love them and welcome them here. And may we continue to encourage them to encourage them as parents and encourage them as a family to know you and love you and be committed to you. And may we just so enjoy watching them grow and learn in you as they take you on as their true father. Lord, we just thank you for this blessing and this time together. We are so grateful that their own families, both of Christine and Andrew, were able to be here today, Lord. And we just thank you for this coming together. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen. Andrew and Christina, you are like that uh scripture. You’re like the parents that were standing in the background saying, “We want to bring our children to Jesus to get blessed.” That’s what you’re doing here today. And not only get blessed, but to be just come under the covering here of of believers, fellow believers in helping raise them. Which by the way, Andrew, when you’re talking about Christina being a very protective and loving parent, sort of the only person that can trust. Uh there’s an amazing thing that happens as someone who has four children now and nine grandchildren. There’s something that happens when you It’s quite amazing. You see your children grow up and all of a sudden there’s somebody else loves them almost as much as you do or the grandparent and it’s just not the grandparents. It’s uh some complete stranger sort of falls in love with your child because they just a lot of that is because you are an intact loving godly Christian family and that just overflows from here to eternity and it’s it’s quite an amazing thing you’ll discover as uh other people quality people all of a sudden see the quality in your children they see God in your child and they just they just fall in love with them. It’s quite it’s quite a for me it was quite a revelation as my kids became teenagers and started getting older. Um but I would like to just pray and it says Jesus uh laid hands on the children. I only have two hands and you have multiple children so this is a bit of a challenge. So I’m going to ask Doug maybe Doug and Heather. Heather maybe you could lay hands on on on little McKenzie and um and Doug can lay Alexander and I’ll do Michael and we’re just going to just pray a blessing. Yeah. Right on, Michael. Yeah. You know what? There’s there’s Okay. Still working, Michael. Amazing. Um, Father in heaven, we just ask your blessing right now on these children and we just um for for for the family for as a as a intact, beautiful uh loving Christian family. We just uh ask your your presence and your Holy Spirit on them. And we just ask that um these children would as as they get older commit their hearts to you and that your um your Holy Spirit would just grab a hold of their hearts as they as they grow and become uh older children and then young adults and adults and even parents themselves down the road. We just ask that all now in Jesus’ name. Amen. Oh, and uh we have a little momento here for you. We have a little certificate for each child and a little uh a little gift and a beginner Bible for Michael as the eldest child. He’s now got his first Bible. Well, it’s children’s Bible. So, anyway, thank you very much. Thank you. You can go in the family. You can go. Yeah. Yeah. [Music] Nicholan and Sean, would you come and uh and just lead us in closing worship?