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.