Okay Mr. and Ms. Fancy Pants..

I love ya, and I gotta tell you something.

You need to listen and honor your parents instruction.  Your parents don’t do everything right and this tempts you to not trust in their words in other areas, I know.  But can I ask you something?  Will you be different than the typical run-of-the-mill teenager who thinks his parents don’t get it and he does?  This is old.  Most teenagers do this only to find out when they become parents of teenagers themselves that they see their teens treating them like they are unenlightened.  

Come on.  It is a common lie that circulates around every young person that you need to disobey because they don’t really understand what I’m going through.  Don’t fall for such easy traps.

“But my parents have issues!”  Listen, we all have issues.  Your God and Savior is the Lord Jesus Christ and no man.  You will see with more wisdom later, but for now, take their word to heart and obey, cheerfully.  The more you do this, the faster wisdom will come to you.

Be different.  You will realize later and in the present (if you listen and obey) that your parents are right about FAR MORE than you realize.  It is so easy to throw off something that an authority figure says because you see a deficiency in a certain area.

Be different.

Be a wise young man and woman.

“Even a child is known by his deeds, Whether what he does is pure and right.”  Prov. 20:11

What does a Christian and classical education have to do with it?  Of course for a mom and dad to be wonderful parents they don’t have to teach in the Christian classical tradition but it helps to fill out the questions and the identity of the teenagers view of the world.  As we’ve talked about already, young people are always interpreting life around them.  They will get answers one way or another.  It may come from a home that provides articulate and well-read views towards history and its meaning for life today (i.e. a classical ed.) or it may come from the cheesy and lame pop-culture teachers that flood your teenagers head every day.  Did you catch that?  Young people today are absolutely flooded with the gurus of pop-culture.  We have to have the stuff to counter all the flashy computer technology in the movies.  

The three sacraments in our culture: movies, music, and TV are persuasive in seducing young people to stupidity.  We can’t just throw Bible verses at them nor can we always be quoting from our own limited life experience.  And it’s not always helpful to always be citing 17th Century authors to them.  

No.  We need to swim with them through pop-culture dissecting it scrupulously.  We must study to show ourselves approved to God and to our children.  The effect should look something like lining up all the stupid heads of pop-culture and rhetorically and in love, cut off all their heads by the penetrating analysis of their foolishness with the well-developed tools of cultural engagement.  What are these tools and weapons?

At the least, the Bible oozing out of your pores and careful study of what we know to be biblical about the distinctives in our denomination and in a Christian and classical education.  What else but a great classical ed. can provide for a teenager the difference between a good story and a ridiculous one?  What else can lay the foundation for the wisdom to know the difference between Eminem and Bach?  And if you don’t know who Eminem is, then you should familiarize yourself by listening to some of his music on itunes. (!)

It just doesn’t do to tell a kiddo, “Oh, that’s bad, very evil stuff.”  You have to show why.  And we’re all challenged along the way.

“I am convinced that we miss these dynamic moments (to instruct) because we don’t know what to talk about.  Our Christianity often becomes fuzzier the closer it gets to real-life, everyday experience.  So we clumsily throw out-of-context Bible passages at our children in the hope that they will somehow motivate them to do what is right.”

Let me say that we have much to be grateful for at this point.  We find ourselves in a church community and denomination that is both skilled and passionate about practical Christian living.  We have a cultural inheritance in our own denomination that is oriented to live the Christian life with grace and beauty.  Can I remind everyone that there is an absolute gold mine of resources on many things under the sun over at Canon Press and the community at Moscow, ID?  Take a trip with your family, go to a conference or just take an afternoon on a weekday that you have off to peruse through the audio materials at Canon.  They have so much good stuff there on the family, theological topics, history resources and many, many other things.

Our very theology around here informs us to take dominion and to bring in the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.  We’ll never run out of things to talk about and explore with our children if we winsomely lead them to sort out obeying Jesus accurately in *anything* that they may find themselves doing.  In the areas I will list below lies some of the substance behind the culture that we are raising our children in.  Study along with me in the distinctives we have in our theological tradition:

1)  Covenant theology –One of the most central guiding metaphors for studying Scripture is the foundation of God being a gracious God who establishes and maintains relationship through promises.  This is crucial.  This was the backbone for all Jewish exegesis.  It is about identity.  It is about “the covenant” always including believers and their children.  It is about history.  The covenant is the only key that properly untangles the confusing discussions about the law and the gospel in the New Test.  So, wherever we may find ourselves in Scripture we don’t interpret it as though we are without a unifying system to interpret –and that is the covenant, well understood and developed of course.  Each passage of the Bible does not stand alone, it is not a person with a one-track mind.  The Bible is literature.  The Bible is history.  The Bible is symbols and types.  In other words, the Bible is Jewish, highly symbolic and highly poetic.  All this and more is wrapped up in the term “covenant theology.”  It is the discipline of doing theology the way the apostles did, through telling God’s story of redemption.  Covenantal theology is part and parcel of what it means to do faithful theology in any area because the concept of covenant is so interlaced in the Bible.  Therefore, for something to be scriptural or biblical, it must have this covenantal flavor and smell about it.  This is foundational stuff, that’s why I have it #1. 

2)  Calvinistic soteriology–We have a beautiful heritage in this.  It is great peace and ballast to know that God is sovereign over all things.  Covenantal, (that is, grounded in Scripture and not rationalistic/scholastic Calvinism which is hyper-calvinism)  and biblically balanced “Calvinism” gives wonderful teaching on eternal security and the doctrine of God’s providence through evil.  We have covered this thoroughly at Christ Church.

3)  Paedocommunion–We stand unique in the reformed world at this point.  The belief that baptized children are not only welcome to the Table but ought to come to the Table is rare in our baptistic culture.  We best know what we’re talking about when asked.

4) covenantal theonomy–The only real law out there to govern all things is the law of God–understood in this the New Covenant and carefully applied through a mature understanding of the state and the church.  We are a long way from this as a society.  But we need to study these things carefully so that we can teach our children and grandchildren how to really understand a biblical form of government and economics.  It is in this arena that Christians are so weak in impacting this country and in this our time of history.  This was not always the case.

5) Postmillennialism–Christ is the King of the earth now.  He will return after the world is enveloped and drenched with the gospel.  Much of the prophetic material in the New Test. concerns the ending of the old world–before destruction of apostate Jewish nation.

6) Presuppositional apologetics—the starting ground for all metaphysics, epistemology and philosophical debate is the revelation of God in His Word.  God’s Word is the foundation for all apologetic endeavors.

So why are these expounded distinctives of most of the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches listed?  See Parenting Teens Part VII.

“What does it mean to say that children think?  It means that children will seek to make sense out of life.  They will try to organize, interpret, and explain the things that go on around them and inside of them.  Children are incessant interpreters, and they respond to life not on the basis of facts, but on the basis of the sense they have made out of those facts.”

Parents, we are the interpreters!  We must grow in skill in taking every thought captive under Christ and learning and growing ourselves so that we may teach our children how to view the breadth of God’s world with wisdom.

“Start with your heart,” he says.

The idol of comfort. “Secretly in our hearts, many of us want life to be a resort. At a resort, you live with a sense of entitlement. We reason that we have the right to quiet, harmony, peace, and respect, and we respond in anger when we do not get it.”

The idol of respect.
The fastest way to lose respect is to be a hypocrite.

The idol of appreciation.
Lead them to be thankful for all things by being thankful yourself. You man, you father, be known to be the foremost servant in your home.

The idol of success.
“We tend to approach parenting with a sense of ownership, that these are our children and their obedience is our right. We begin to look at our children as our trophies rather than God’s creatures.” When this done, the Lord has ways of pulling out the fingerprint dust to point out the impression of our sin on them and on our own heads.

The idol of control.
“I regularly work with parents who want to turn back the clock. They think that the only hope is to go back to the former days of total control. They try to treat their teenager like a little child. They end up more like jailers than parents, and they forget to minister the Gospel that is the only hope in those crucial moments of struggle.”

Forgiveness and integrity on the part of the parent, is the way out and the way through. “Tony, this is the way your mom and I are going now. I have sinned here, here, and here. Please forgive me. My intention is to live for the glory of Jesus now far more conscientiously. Please follow me and imitate me as I imitate the Lord.”

“My goal is not to clone my tastes, my opinions, and my habits in my children. I am not looking for my image in them; I long to see Christ’s.”

This has to be ours as well.

When the children are young we do have opportunity though to teach them to love the things that we love, if we can only show it to them in irresistible beauty.

“If our hearts are ruled by comfort, respect, appreciation, success, and control, we will unwittingly hunger for our teens to meet our expectations instead of ministering to their spiritual needs.”

Your child’s sin is first and foremost a sin against God, not you.

Fathers, please be wary of getting much involved in anything more than faithfulness to Church and your work. I look back to all the times that I needed to talk with my Dad at all the wrong times. I remember going down to that basement and seeing my dad there surrounded by computer problems, bills, projects (all in between his 3 to 4 day trips-he is an airline pilot) but more often than not, he would drop everything and listen to my horrible attempt at communicating my petty and confusing “issues.”

But, if it were not for those sacrifices he made, I would have been forced to look elsewhere..Like my own confused head or the culture out there –just ready and waiting to stuff my brain with lies and poison.

Tripp has a great little story on pp.20,21 about how he came home one night stinkin’ tired and purposefully anticipating a few hours completely alone to drink his diet coke, and grab that remote. But, the moment he walked in, he knew that his plans to veg out and relax went up in smoke, for his son was in a bind and was frustrated over some petty squabble with his brother.

It was a petty issue, but the time was right for dad to be used to grab the mind, the heart of his boy. He says, “Here was one of those unexpected moments of opportunity, one of those mundane moments ordained by a loving and sovereign God where the heart of my teenager was being exposed…This was God’s moment.. A petty argument with his brother opened the door to discussing things that were far from petty… Ethan saw himself.”

Go and do likewise. This is parenting young people. “Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke, and encourage-with *great patience* and careful instruction (II Tim 4:2).

My plan is to offer some thoughts and critique chapter-by-chapter of a book called, “Age of Opportunity: A Biblical Guide to Parenting Teens” by Paul David Tripp. You can buy the book and read it along with me offering your thoughts about the book or you can just read what I have to say about the book. I think this will be a valuable read for me and a profitable one for you, I hope, at least through my gleanings from it. if you don’t have teens, follow along anyway, as the time to prepare for that is now. As Tripp says, “They (the teen years) are the golden age of parenting, when you begin to reap all the seeds you have sown in their lives..” Indeed, we should sow and seed towards the goal right now. We should do this while the kids are young. Keep filling their little heads with truth, goodness, and beauty.

The title of the first chapter is, “Age of opportunity or season for survival?” He unpacks how crucial it is for parents to lead their children beautifully and persuasively in teaching them their identity. Here is a great little section:

“There are significant temptations of the heart that greet teenagers, calling them to believe that they cannot live without some aspect of the creation. These voices call them to believe that identity, meaning, and purpose can be found in the creature rather than the Creator.”

Teenagers need to understand that they can be content with who God is and what He has done for them. They could (as we) use a good dose of the power and grandness of God and His story. Teens can be quite self-centered. They need to be lead to think of others, in the details. They need to be servants. Listen to what Tripp has to say about the struggle of parents in this time:

“These years are hard for us because they expose the wrong thoughts and desires of our own hearts. These years are hard for us because they rip back the curtain and expose us….So, too, the teen years expose our self-righteousness, our impatience, our unforgiving spirit, our lack of servant love, the weakness of our faith, and our craving for comfort and ease.”

When the kids are little, one can get away with masking things as a parent. But, when the teen years come the real nature of the *parents* spiritual maturity is forcefully brought into review.

Parenting teens is hard because it pushes the parent to deal with himself.

But take heart. This is a good thing if one receives it from the Lord as pruning, and take the plunge.

But I have noticed something about frustration.. When we know that another is going through a rough time with something and we find ourselves around them we do secretly hope that they will do the noble thing. And what is the noble thing? It is to keep quiet about our annoyance and let peace reign over our troubled hearts. This actually engenders respect and sympathy from others when we entrust ourselves to a faithful Creator with a quiet heart. We inwardly cringe and feel ashamed when another vents his anger and we are tempted to disrespect his problem. But when we are going through it, it seems so natural to vent, and so we do often.

But the next time you are frustrated, just keep a cool head, pray and do not lose heart. We shouldn’t keep quiet when we are angry just so people will notice us, but it is wisdom to keep silent and a shame to do otherwise. Others notice and respect the discipline when someone does not vent when they have reason, so let us not take the way of shame…