Chapter 6 and verse 4. The Apostle Paul says, addressing the fathers, he says, Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction So many things in life seem to come down to the issue of balance. Too much work is not good. But then again, so is too much rest. Too much eating is not good, but then again, too little eating is not good. I've thought of several things like this. We can have a word. Our bodies operate this way, homeostasis, constantly trying to achieve balance. Music operates off this principle. You need unity, but you need diversity. Food is this way. If you have a food item that you love, maybe you could eat it once, maybe you could eat it the second day, maybe three days in a row. But eventually, no matter how much you love it, you're going to want to mix things up and bring something else in. Studies are like that. Some of you maybe can't study math for two seconds. You despise it that much. Some of you, maybe it's your subject. But I mean, you somehow have to go for a walk. Sometimes math can just grind your brain to mush. And you need to mix it up with watching a movie or something. You literally have a part of speech that functions for this purpose, the pronoun. There's nothing... That necessitates a pronoun. It's just to mix things up a little bit, to just repeatedly say the person's antecedent over and over and over. It just becomes painful to hear, monotonous. And so you're trying to mix it up. Too many pronouns, you can't figure out who the antecedent is. And too many antecedents, you're cramming for some pronouns to just mix this monotony up. Ecclesiastes chapter 7 affirms this principle to some degree. If you turn there with me, Ecclesiastes 7.15, Solomon says, I've seen everything during my lifetime of futility. There is a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man who prolongs his life in his wickedness. And concludes, do not be excessively righteous, and do not be overly wise. Why should you ruin yourself? Do not be excessively wicked. Do not be a fool, for why should you die before your time? It is good that you grasp one thing and also not let go of the other. For the one who fears God, as we were just saying, the one who fears God comes forth with both of them. Well, as we come to Ephesians 6-4, we see that the same thing holds true for parenting. Because essentially, the very first lesson that Paul urges upon parents here, which you might say is the only lesson, but it's at least the broadest, in my view, the initial large lesson, is to not over-parent. but also to not under-parent. That's essentially a summary of what Paul says. Do not over-parent, but also, right after he says that, make sure you don't under-parent either. So what we're looking at here in context is after addressing the wives and the special thing they can do to change the world through the gospel, and the husbands and the special thing that they can do, and the children and the special thing that they can do, he now turns his attention to us for further which is fathers specifically, but more generally, all parents. And the particular thing they can do, amazing to me, to change the world is to be balanced, to strike the balance between over parenting and under parenting. So let's take those as the two points for today's message and look at this with Paul. First of all, Paul tells the fathers, don't over parent. This is where he says, fathers, do not provoke your children to anger. The word provoke in English means to call forth. Provocative and to pray, to call forth. And you can see in the sentence that what you are calling forth is anger. And where it is being called forth from is within the child. So like you have that old classic science experiment of pouring vinegar in the volcano and the bacon soda and the lava comes out and all that, that there's anger that is capable of being called forth from the heart of the child. And the father has a particular ability to bring it out. How so? Well, we get some more help from the Greek term here, which is very pictorial. It means to stoke the anger from the side. It means it's par for parallel, the side, then orge for wrath or anger. And it's a verb, so it means to create wrath from the side. And I know exactly what this means. Every time I see this word, I think of this story when I was a kid. And me and my cousin were upstairs, and they had a cat. We never had cats growing up. We only had dogs. But they had a cat. And we just tortured this poor cat doing things to it. And we had it under the bed. And the poor cat was against the wall under the bed. And we were poking at it and doing things. And eventually, that cat swagged to my face and nearly took out my eyeball. And everybody would say, well, that's what you get for just provoking and prodding and just irritating this animal. And that's this word, para orgae, to come alongside and prod. And just maybe have the picture of some bully, classic bully in the playground just hitting someone, slapping them, until they finally fight back. We know what this word, provoking, means. And again, apparently fathers have a particular, peculiar ability to somehow irritate the children, frustrate, aggravate, exasperate the children until they eventually overcome and unable to maintain a good attitude and lash out as a result. Again, how is this done before we answer some answers? We get more help, not just from the English word and the Greek word, but from a parallel word in Colossians. In Colossians chapter 3 and verse 21, Paul quotes this very same idea in a parallel letter written around the same time as he wrote to the Colossians. But here, it's a little bit different terminology, so we kind of get a better grasp of it. He says, fathers, do not exasperate your children so that they will not lose heart. Now, I found this word particularly interesting, because although when I began to look at it and break it down, it's obviously two parts, egg and then prefix, and then you have aspirate. And I was looking everywhere. Is this related to why they named it aspirin, aspirin? Looking for this. And we don't use this word. You never heard it. You hear aspirer, but that's different. Aspirate. Aspirated. Aspirating. It's not in use anymore. And according to the Oxford English Dictionary, about the last one that I saw where they had a citation of being used to us prior to the Civil War. in 1858. So you have exasperate used a little bit in our language. After that, the OED has no reference to aspirate without the prefix. And that made me think, yeah, perhaps we don't really know the meaning of this word. And if we don't know the meaning of the word, perhaps we don't know the particularity of what the Bible is exhorting us to. I asked Charlie this morning, I was like, what comes to your mind when you think, just off the cuff, you just woke up, you're fixing your coffee, exasperate, go, what's it mean? And she was like, to stress someone out. And I'm like, that's good. Not that that's the meaning, but it kind of shows that that's still too vague. That's still too general. Because it doesn't bring out the specific type of stress. So let me share with you, so that we can all have it in our mouth, the Bible has observed this too. This word, aspirate. It means to make hard, harsh, or rough. It means to make rough or harsh physically, and then it becomes a metaphor for doing so psychologically. So think of someone in Guantanamo Bay being locked in a cell, and their hands are tied, their feet are tied, and they just blare loud music. That would be painful to the ears, right? Rough, harsh on the senses. And you could say they are aspirating him. that they're bringing harshness upon you, and being rough with war. If you replaced your children's bedsheets with sandpaper, That would be aspirating. That's rough. That's harsh. You get the idea of like, OK, well, are they technically called by God to still maintain a good attitude? Yes. But I mean, I don't know how you would do if somebody made you sleep on sandpaper, right? And so there is this thing in 1 Corinthians 13, even though the provoked person is responsible, is still loving not to provoke. Love does not pervert. You maybe could think of someone, irritants, allergies, things that inflame physically. Well, apparently there are similar things that do so psychologically. There's ways to just irritate a child and frustrate a child and sort of smother a child in this kind of environment such that they cannot handle it to the point that they lose their capacity to maintain a good attitude anymore. And that's where a good segue into the preface, actually. It seems to mean either maybe the thoroughly or the intensity meaning, thoroughly or completely to push someone over the edge, or maybe to the point that it comes out, or the anger comes out. The word loose heart means that. The Greek word for all the different loose hearts verses that you probably know of is ekleuro. And it's a wonderful word picture. Ek again for out. And to leuro means to loosen out. It's almost like a the picture of hope leaving the heart. You have this float in the pool, you know, and sometimes you're swimming in the summertime, you gotta re-air this thing back up, it's just getting soggy, it can't hold the weight. Well, a heart, a human heart is like that, and you know what this is like if you've been carrying lots of weight. And sometimes, you know, you spill the milk and that sends you over the edge. It's that idea of losing heart because there was already so much hate on the heart to start with. And a child can lose heart. And then the other word that's translated lose heart has the egg, but cacao for evil or bad or like maleficent. And so then evil comes out. And that's what happens. You're losing heart, you're trying hard, you're frustrated with life, and someone just keeps bearing down on you, and eventually you get resentful and bitter toward this individual because you feel like they're just beating you into the grave. And then sometimes you lash out. Here, where it says in Colossians, so that they don't lose heart, it's got the alpha-negative prefix to themos for spirit, so that they have no spirit. And we use that a lot, like, you know, he has a good spirit. And how are your spirits? Are your spirits up, keeping in good spirits? So a kid can be squished to the point that they lose spirit, and they become more like Israel. living under fate, just grieved. There's a proverb, right, that when there's a good king, the people rejoice, but the oppressive king, the people grieve and long for relief. And the idea is just feeling like you're locked into a hopeless situation because the adult has more power than this little child. And if the adult starts bearing down on this little child, they need to feel like they're under a Hitler. They're under a tyrant instead of a parent. And they have nowhere to go. There's no redress of grievances. You're the Supreme Court. You're all three branches of government. There's no changing of the guards. And so what can happen is this whole idea is they become an angry, bitter person who doesn't even care anymore. who just becomes hardened and unresponsive, and even people can seem to be weird. You think, well, you're not even responding to normal stimuli. You're just off. You're just turned off. That's that stone cold look of there's no point in communicating. There's hopelessness. And so now you have an individual possessed with what they call father hunger, and an orphan spirit constantly longing for a father, aggravated at the one he has, and what's going on. So how does a parent do this? There's an old sermon that we have, I think, called 21 Ways to Provoke Your Children to Wrath or Anger. So there's lots of ways, and we can't enumerate them all here. Let me just mention some before we go on to the next point that I think are helpful. Mention at least and you know that many of you could add more from your own experiences And so I hope you will maybe in conversations after you may think it's on my mess, but we can overparent By Not disciplining ourselves while we're disciplining the children The child sees that we don't discipline ourselves, but we want them to be disciplined. In other words, we correct a child who's angry, but with anger. We correct a child who's being rude by being rude to them. We use an early rag to clean up the mess, in other words. And that doesn't work. So a father, before he gets his little buddy's attitude right, he has to have his attitude right. And a mother who needs to have a word with her daughter has to have the word with herself first, and be calm, and thoughtful, and in control of herself. Remember, these all flow from being filled with the Spirit. So the assumption is you're under control. But that exasperates a child. When we don't submit to God or obeying authority in our life, but we're demanding that the child submit to our authority. It's hard. It's hard for anyone to submit to a hypocrite. It's just hard. And they see that. Remember the man in Matthew 8, he said, I also am a man under authority. And then I have people under me. That's the way authority works. Oftentimes, you have a wife not submitting to the husband, and she can't figure out why the kids don't submit to her. Authority works as kind of a cascade. And no one respects someone barking authority who doesn't submit to it themselves. We can overparent them when we don't treat children like distinct images of God, like distinct, genuine persons in their own right. C.S. Lewis, every time he spoke to a child, in a way, he spoke to them like an adult. And that's part of the reason that children love Lewis. He spoke to them like they had their own mind, their own heart, their own feelings, their own struggles, their own questions about life. Simply telling a child to shut up and submit is abusive. And it's wrong. And it's a denial of their dignity as being a person and being made in the Lord's image. Often, the reason we do that, parents, is do that because they just don't want to take the time to have an interruption in their day. They're busy. They have this and that and the other going on. It takes time. And the other kid has a question. They're like Pinocchio, right? Well, why? Well, look, well, why? And you just, you're like, I don't have time for that. And I'm not saying that there's not times for that. But you have to be careful. Because when you do that, the assumption is there's something more important going on. That's why we can't deal with this right now. And if the important thing going on is you watch an LSU game, and you put on a whole conversation with a child, that speaks volumes. Eventually, they see that I'm just not that important to them. And my heart, and the state of my heart is not that significant to mom. So that's a way we can do it. We can oppress children. This needs to be said. I remember Mr. Ford and Ms. Ronder, where they graciously took me with them to the first G3 conference, and I was so impacted by Paul Troops' message. And he travels. The Lord has given him grace to have a significant ministry to parents and families. And he just said, you know, in one outburst there, he's so worn out from from hearing and seeing parents that are in their children's faces and breathing in their faces and shouting at them, this kind of frustration. You see people screaming at their children, hitting their children in the face, jerking them around. in the grocery store, you know, hollering at them in public in dominion ways. There's just no way to treat a human. You're going to eventually have a Patrick Henry on your hand that says, give me liberty of this tyranny that I am under. And no amount of, oh now you know I love you. Like no, John says let us love in deed and in truth and not just word only. There's no amount of words, no amount of birthday gifts, no amount of go fix it by buying a four wheeler or something. It cannot be fixed in some momentary little cover up thing. We can over parent and exasperate kids by being only concerned with external behavior rather than their heart. That gives them the idea that you just care about how I made you look bad in public. You don't really care about my heart. This is a big one. Some of us will say that we've had bad fathers. Some of us will say that our fathers got certain things right, certain things wrong. But you do understand as a Christian, we have a heavenly father who is the archetypical father it says in here in this book chapter 3 from whom every father in heaven on earth derives its name and we can look to him as an image for what a good father should be And I want to remind you that before Jesus, His Son, goes into the wilderness and onto His ministry, which is going to end in the cross, it begins with God the Father bathing Him in His Spirit of love and saying, you, to everyone there, this is my beloved Son in whom I'm well pleased. There are people in this room that if they had the spirit to talk about it would say that they grew up and not one time did their earthly father ever make eye contact and look them in the eye And say I want you to know that I love you no matter what you do No matter how it goes Like yes, we're going to play sports, and we're going to do this and we're going to take science seriously and all of that but It's not hanging on that It's not hanging on your performance in any of those things I can't tell you, and some of you know deep in your own psychology, how many kids on the baseball field and football field are running and trying as hard as they can, not for the people in the stands, for one person in the stands, to make their father proud of them somehow, yearn for that attention, and being driven by all that they're doing for that. So we can exasperate them by putting a high bar in the home. Or about making them feel like they have to do everything you did in life in order to live a good life. Living vicariously through your kids. Talking about your glory days. So they have to go all down your path in order to take the right path in life. And so they feel like they have to be literally a clone of you in order for you to love them. It's a known thing in our house, sadly, that Annabelle differs with me on the Frozen films. And I don't know what went wrong with her taste, but some suffered. But it is what it is. I can't reverse it. And, but you know something, like, that's okay. Like, she's not Jeffrey. She's not me. It would be weird if she had the exact same thoughts that I do, and not her name. And so, you know, on the things that matter, the big issues of life, like Christ, and the Gospel, and Frozen 3 when it comes out, just things that matter, yeah, you want them to be like you, but they need freedom to be their own person. And so everything doesn't have to be, you know, oh, well you must not love me and hate me, you don't agree with me, you know, something like that. John Carter had a particular woman he counseled in that committed suicide And in one of the counseling sessions she confessed to him that she just never felt like she was good enough for her father when she was growing up You can have favorites. Like Jacob, you know, look at that man. Joseph was his favorite. And now we're in. You don't want to love what you get. If you're into fishing, say, put it this way, because we're in the South, where manhood is, like I always say, sitting on a tailgate, drinking a beer with your rifle, sighting it in, popping your Copenhagen can, and you're about to go fishing. And you got your work boots on. That's manhood. Where it is, it's just not. Some of that might translate, some of it not. Manhood is the Lord Jesus Christ. He's the standard. for what it means to be a man. And so you might have a kid more like Esau, a hairy figure, small like the field of the earth, and always outside. And you might have a Jacob. You know, and he's into art and beauty and the order of things or whatever. And I have felt like this for a decade now. And literally, I've seen it happen to people who've been here. That the sexual movement going on today, there are so many young people who don't know how to categorize what they're feeling because they don't have a father. to say, hey, son, you like to paint. That does not mean X, Y, and Z. So yeah, it could be man-linked to paint. So we have to be careful of our stereotypes and get the manhood stereotype from Jesus and Paul, not from Doug Banaste. So paying organic attention to them day by day. You know, not having fear for where they are. If you don't have fear for someone, you come in and you just drop a huge rebuke, you know, and they were already down that day. You're just missing it because you're not attentive, you're not involved, you're not aware of their heart from day to day and what it can handle. Jesus says, you know, he won't break a blues reed and quench a smoldering wick. And so to be mindful of, you know, I feel like they can't handle a hard work today, I'm gonna wait on that. Or I feel like, no, they can handle this hard, they need this hard work today. That kind of give and take, From day to day, it can only happen if you're involved in their life. Too many rules. Arbitrary rules. Not willing to explain, as I said earlier. Not treating them like they have a brain. That provokes children. I remind you again, I always quote this. God the Father didn't just tell Adam and Eve, don't eat from the tree. He gave them a reason. The Lord says, come and let us reason. If God gives reasons for why we should obey him, who are we as parents to just say, just shut up and do what I told you to do and don't ask. That's all arrogant and abusive and has no part of a Christian man's parenting. And just simply says to the child that they are an idiot, and they can't understand life. And that's what it confirms. Instead of passing on the wisdom that you have for whatever advice you're currently given, so that they say, oh, I can do this, too. I can think the right way, too. Fathers overparent one way when there's not a gradual lessening of rules over the course of the child's life. Nana Bear was three, and we started spanking her with a little pencil on the hand when she was like one and a half or something. But then it got to the little ruler thing. And there was this, Charlie's mom They still laugh at this thing because Annabelle would be over there and get a spanking. And she went through this phase when she would cry and get a spank. She would say, I must obey. And she would just cry. She would say, I must obey. Because I think child told you, you must obey. I must obey. She would just cry. And so Ted always says it. It's like his name for her now, I must obey. But, you know, when they're that old, it's like, you must obey. You're just so tight. This is the time to get up. I mean, you gotta brush your teeth, and you gotta go to bed. But, you shouldn't be doing that with your 17-year-old. You know? When they're young, they don't know. I mean, is the kid ever going to self-control and autocorrect and say, oh, that's too much TV for today? No. You're going to have to, oh, I've had enough ice cream. I need to eat cauliflower. No. They're never going to do that. But hopefully, as they get older, they have their own auto-correct, and they know when they need to go to bed, and you're not having to tell your 17-year-old to brush his teeth. So it's like there should be neural form at the beginning, and it should gradually grow into freedom as time goes on. Almost like you have this tree where we'll tie it down or maybe even put like a cylinder. We're trying to direct this thing But once it kind of gets going you cut and cut and cut and this thing is now free doing its own thing Couple of more we can overparent when our yeses outnumber our noes God gave Adam and Eve a million yeses and only one no in the garden, and that's how you communicate that you love a child and that you're good. They experience that you're willing to say yes. And so that's something to pay attention to. Am I getting to where everything's It becomes claustrophobic. About the subject of ownership, I remember years ago, I don't remember if Trevor gave it to me or tipped me off to it or whatever. But it's a really nice book. It's super little. If anyone has a business, I highly recommend it. It's called Business to the Glory of God by Wayne Gould. And he just goes through different little things that are super helpful. But he was talking about ownership. And just in passing, he made a comment about kids. that God is sovereign and we're made in His image. So one of the attributes that we image is sovereignty. There's such thing as personal sovereignty. And there's kind of like a rabies here where you start encroaching, encroaching, encroaching, and it's no longer an issue of, oh, I'm the authority over you. You're stifling their image of God in a person. And you can't eliminate the image of God. So it's going to come out, like I said, in a little miniature Patrick Henry in your home. Give me liberty. And so there should be a gradual increase in ownership, even. These are their things in their room. There's a sense in which this is their room. The way they dress some some parents are just know you're going to wear this and it isn't really that big a deal if they like you know Boots and you want them to wear oxfords. It's like a left kid wearing boots. They don't have enough problems in the world And just that, like, y'all know there are some parents that, like, the kid is 13, and the mom's still trying to put the bird in the hair and all this. And it's like, I just want to pick out my own things. And it can become claustrophobic, humiliating them in public, talking about their failures, in front of grandparents, others. You see it creeps in. They're just kids. You see that? That little oppression, that little inequality of not treating them as a real image of God. And you kind of tear them down emotionally by judging them. The road says the first the status case seems right until other comes and examines him Sometimes you just already have a negative attitude toward the kid And you just misjudged him and that just can become so exasperating Finding how about this one finding? your security and identity and children in such a way that you never want them to grow up, and your house becomes like the tangled story, or the mom that has the daughter in the castle, and you just never want her to leave. Maybe something has happened to you, and you feel like this is all you have, right? Your kid is all that you have. And it can cause you to hold on to them, and the whole thing becomes evil in there. Sometimes parents get frustrated with themselves at not being able to control the kid and they end up spanking him harder and swinging the belt harder. I'm just being honest with you. You know these things are true. And you just, you're losing control because you're really just frustrated at your own failure. And we just have to admit and confess that's a very wicked thing to do. For me to be frustrated with myself and to hit another person as a result. So letting them go, I mean, the Bible calls them arrows. Arrows are meant to be thrown. They're not meant to be in the quiver forever. They know that they're meant to mature and grow towards a goal of maturity in which they go out and live their own life. And if we don't have that goal in mind, they feel like we'll just hold one thing forever and become opponents in a relationship that's ruined. So it's really sad, but it happens. Parenting is a sacrifice. For this reason you give your whole heart and your whole soul and you give a great chunk of your life away In your body and your time and your cells of your body literally just give yourself your being To this person and you build this thing up to just be John the Baptist and just watch it go on like alright Right and be happy And it really is a temptation if you don't have your motive and heart right. You won't be like John the Baptist. You won't be able to rejoice when they leave. How about this last one? Always wanting to make sure they stay safe. And nothing bad ever happens to them. I feel like I'm pro the new education movement. Y'all know that, like classical Christian education. But I feel like sometimes we're trying to have a master array of curriculum so that my kid goes out in the world and nothing reactive has to ever happen. I've fully prepared them. and proactively for every single wicked thing. They're like, yep, I learned that in seventh grade. But every time something happens, and that's just not possible, we're not on a mission. If the world is full of landmines and puddles, I don't know what's going on. I do my best to say I know this one and watch out for that one. But we just teach the general principles. So I'm trying to let you know, you're going to watch your children fall on their face. And you're going, oh, you made a mistake. You can't prevent it. It's called being human and living in the real world and not being omniscient. And so it's a very unhelpful attitude to say, my goal is to prepare them such that they never fall. But rather, the goal is to bring them to maturity so that when they fall, not if, but when they fall, they know the way back from the prodigal pigsty to the father's house. That's the goal. And maturity principles that they have in their mind so they know how to apply and face situations that you and I can't even dream of. So you have to have in your mind, they're going to face situations after I'm dead and gone that I never foresaw. But I have instilled the principles and the truths that they need to apply to it no matter how you do it. Well, as you can fall off of a horse either side, or drive off the road into either ditch, you can also swing back the other way, can't you? But the opposite here, or over-parenting, is the dad who's just sitting there eating potato chips, watching the game, saying yes to everything. that the parent who's having parties at their house, drinking parties at their house, the father who is allowing his daughter to wear revealing things and dance. Yes, I'm preaching right now. My conscience must be clear. And dance with post-pubescent bullies that neither party has any intention of marriage in any foreseeable future. And act like we don't know what's happening. It is happening. And that is negligence on the part of the father. Paul moves now to say, don't over parent, but don't under parent. There's something here for you to protect. There's something here for you to guard. I mean, and Finn, like Abraham, had this precious sacrifice and he drove the vultures away. I mean, a girl, a daughter, should grow up knowing she's valued because her father treats her as something to protect. He's, no, he can't go with that. Why should I? No, and you should speak to your girls, or the wife should speak to the girls. Literally, you should have this conversation. These are the body parts. These are the things. Because guess what? You don't teach them, they will be taught. They will be taught. So let's look at the second thing that Paul mentions. Let's take it to heart together. He says, don't under parent. This is where he says, but bring them up. Look at this so that you see it's not just me. But bring them up. It means to turn out, to turn out, or to turn up. And the idea is there's something that's like an acorn to an oak tree. Something is growing and forming. And it means a gardener. The garden needs a gardener. It's essentially the difference of a garden just by nature growing everywhere. Like the proverb says, a child left to himself brings grief to the parents. But if you discipline them diligently, so there's activity. There's a gardener. You're out there trimming, moving, redoing things, and fencing. And there's this constant attention to this thing. That's the idea. That's the command you father bring them up guide them toward the goal Be it's active. It's an action verb So you have to take initiative and act and guide the thing don't just let the thing go you guide it to where it's going so in terms of The flow, here you can see that Paul's thinking this is one of the ways of not provoking them. If I told you, hey, don't make an F, but study hard for the test. It's like, well, studying hard for the test is how you don't make an F. And if Paul says, don't provoke your children to laugh, but bring them up, it's partially saying that this gives a child hope. This makes a child feel loved. And we all know the proverbial ballpark game, and the little kid that looks up and does not go in the stands, and what that does to a child's heart. So the idea is being active, and everyone, nearly as everyone a parent says this, in some weird, ironic way, kids, they don't want to be ruled over, but they crave boundaries. No child really just wants to be out on the street. That living cars are just driving by you're not even a thought nobody even cares about you No one's paying attention to you guiding you In terms of nature versus nurture This would be saying give yourself to the nurture of the child. Don't just let nature Take its course you guide This thing you be there. You're walking. How it happens is you're walking aside and somebody says something even if it's someone in the church You're a father. You have authority. And you're there. And it's a thought. It's a bad thought. You address it. You push that thought out. That's nurturing. You see that man, the kid's struggling with issue X, and the plant needs to tilt this way. Well, you're going to turn that toward the light in the room, and put the light there, and cause the plant to go that way. You're just constantly guiding and nurturing this thing, not just letting it grow on its own, and not letting Society, mold it. Because again, it's never whether, but which someone is going to inculturate them. So the application here is just simply, don't do the opposite thing. Here at the end. Don't do the opposite thing. Don't say, oh man, I'm so worried about over. No, just pull back, and I'm passive, and I say yes to everything, and I'm not involved. I'm not checking on them. I'm not, hey, calling, or going, or visiting, and how's it going? What's been going on? How you doing? And just aware of their heart. Just constantly kind of put your finger on it. Aware of where it is. So fathers, protect your daughters. Teach your sons how to talk to females. Sons learn to value females that way, too. In the same way that a daughter learns to value a son learns to value a woman that way. So in conclusion. Watch we watch at our house every Friday in this tradition. We watch some kind of Disney movie I was thinking of finding Nemo this week and it started to come to my mind And because I realized I had these two things in Paul on my mind Don't over parent, don't under parent, and how to strike that balance And I was like wow you could really You could really take that story and put it over here as a helpful analogy, just to get a picture in our minds. You remember this fish, Marlin, and his wife, and they had to move like 400 fishes there, and a barracuda kills all but one of them. And so that makes him real. So they're locked in a contradiction is wanting him to be safe, and he's going to just take a risk. And so that's what's going on. And then finally, it happens, and he's captured by this diver, and he's taken in the boat, and the worst nightmare happens, and Marlon loses him. But right before then, he was there with his friends, and they were doing a little ideary to get out into the ocean. And he just floods in there, freaking out. And Nemo actually wasn't even going to do it. But he starts accusing you and you and he's just freaking out and he's humiliating him in front of his friends And you remember that was that thing that it happens in parenting that I just crushes You know, he's just sitting there and he's sitting there Frustrated he's been torn down in front of his friends and he just says I hate you Till his day So along the way, Marlon realizes that he's been over-parenting his son. But then there's this beautiful scene where Nemo's in this Guinness office fish tank aquarium, and he's by now lost all hope. And, you know, that anybody that would find him and it's all over with is going to be the pet of this little crazy girl. And this pelican, the creatures in the ocean start hearing the story, and this pelican hears the story, realizes Nemo's there, and he flies up to the window, and he's like, And he starts throwing, I mean, and he faced a shark. And he's like, oh, that can't be my dad. No, it was. And there were three of them. And he went down into the dark. And he took on the jellyfish, right? And all of this. And you see Nemo, his face is just lighting up. And he's like, my dad did that for me? And it's the very opposite of losing heart. He took heart. I have a father who, despite I know he hates sharks and he hates all these things, he must love me and care about me. And before I turned around, he was already putting a little rock in the thing to do things and succeed and get out. I was just so impressed that he's real pleased and it motivated him to obedience instantly. And then at the end, Dory is caught in the net, and Nemo can fit through there and get in there and terrorize the fish to slow him down and save her. And while he's there rotating, he doesn't want to let him go. And then he has to let him go. He's learned that's what he needed to learn. He needed to let Nemo go. And he lets him go, and he succeeds. And he's laying there all worn out. And as soon as he comes to, and he sees his dad, he says, I don't hate you. It's such a beautiful story. But the reason it's beautiful is that's an animation. There are real people behind that. There's real people. There's real children and fathers behind that story. Some of them in this room. So in that story, you see Nemo's response to both, how being over-parented just provoked him to anger. But how Marlon didn't commit the opposite there, just being passive. The intention of his father to fill him did the exact opposite to his heart. And that's what Paul essentially calls Christian fathers to do. The way we change the world is not over parenting. Realizing one day we're going to let them go. That's the goal. But not under parenting either, until that day. Come here, son. You're mine. You're going this way with me. And I am going to walk with you all the way there. And I'm going to hold this arrow until it is time for me to let it go. How to do that is next time. For now, we have the Lord's Supper. And I guess the only segue we have into that, from belief and fellowship, is you can't think of this this way. You think of God the Father. And I know He doesn't over-punish. He's not the parent constantly disciplining you, constantly guilting you every time you make a mistake. But on the other hand, we can see in these elements his attentiveness to our needs and taking care of what we needed in our great fall in the sand and went through far more than what Marlon did and gave his one and only son for us. And so may we take the Lord's Supper today. May we take to heart this wonderful, special verse that Paul has for us here. And may the Lord give us a wonderful fellowship time after. Let's pray. Amen. You come and take the Lord's Supper. Father, we thank you for today.