Gospel Powered Parenting (1)

Assumptions

"People have presuppositions [assumptions], and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize." (Francis Schaeffer)

5 assumptions parents need to make:

1. Parenting is not easy...

"You will experience stress and obstacles. They will happen so that when your child comes to saving faith, your boasting will be in Christ, not your own best efforts."

2. God is sovereign, but He uses means...

"God is sovereign over your child's salvation: "No one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him" (Matt 11:27). But..." Parents are the "means" that God wants to use to reach our children. Therefore..."We are utterly dependent and responsible at the same time."

3. A Good Offense is better than defense

"Either we can focus on preparing our children to enter the world and conquer it, or we can concentrate on protecting our children from the world...effective parents equip their children to overcome the world-not by changing and controlling their environment (things external to their children), but by going after their children's hearts...the best way to overcome the world is not with morality or self-discipline. Christians overcome the world by seeing the beauty and excellence of Christ. They overcome the world by seeing something more attractive than the world: Christ, "in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Col 2:3).

"...parents with a defensive mind-set usually fail to understand the power of the gospel. They have little confidence in the power of new birth. They don't understand the role of the heart in conversion and sanctification. Instead, they emphasize the child's external environment. They put their confidence in rules, restrictions, and protections."

4. Understand New birth

"...it is foolish for parents to presume upon new birth. New birth is a radical change of heart that ushers in new desires, new loves, and a new life direction. "No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God's seed abides in him, and he cannot keep on sinning because he has been born of God" (1 John 3:9)...New birth means that one has enthroned Christ in the center of one's life. You become a Christian when your life, thinking, and behavior begin to revolve around Jesus Christ. Until that happens, professions and decisions mean little...Be wise. Don't presume your child's new birth until you see solid evidence. The first sign is growing hunger for God. Other signs are hunger for holiness, growing obedience to parents, and desire for secret prayer and Bible reading."

5. Child-Centered Families

"...effective parents are not child centered. They are God centered."

"...there is a fine line between healthy parental love and child worship. We know the latter has happened when we begin compromising God's will for the sake of our children or their activities...Compromise always points to idolatry."

"Hierarchy is a nasty word in our anti-authoritarian culture. Yet heaven, a world of intense joy, love, and peace, is profoundly hierarchical...To the degree that heaven permeates our homes, they also will be hierarchical...In a God-centered family, everyone serves God by submitting to the authority over them. The husband focuses on pleasing God, not his wife. The wife focuses on pleasing God by submitting to her husband's authority rather than pleasing her children. The children please God by honoring and obeying their parents."

Gospel Powered Parenting

Introduction

"...the gospel is sufficient to answer all our parenting questions."

"...the most effective parents have a clear grasp of the cross and its implications for daily life...

They include the fear of God, a marriage that preaches the gospel to its children, deeply ingrained humility, gratitude, joy, firmness coupled with affection, and consistent teaching modeled by parents daily." (William P. Farley)

This Time of Year

...we rejoice.

"For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given:

and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called

Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace."

(Isaiah 9:6)

The Reason for God (Chapter 14)

The Dance of God and The Divine Dance

Keller begins the chapter with the doctrine of the Trinity- "God is one being who exists eternally in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit". He does so to remind us that "God is, in essence, relational" and as so, each glorifies the other. Keller explains, "the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit glorify one another by mutually self-giving love. When we delight and serve someone else, we enter into a dynamic orbit around him or her, we center on the interests and desires of the other. That creates a dance, particularly if there are three persons, each of whom moves around the other two...none demands that the others revolve around Him...each person of the Trinity loves, adores, defers to, and rejoices in the others. That creates a dynamic, pulsating dance of joy and love."

The Dance of Love

Keller continues, "if God is triune...then God really has love as His essence. If He was just one person He couldn't have been loving for all eternity...for love is something person(s) do". Keller makes this point to show that "this world was not created by a God who is only an individual...or an impersonal force...neither is it the product of power struggles between deities nor of random, violent, accidental natural forces...it's a world made by a God who is a community of persons who have loved each other for all eternity."

The Dance of Creation

Here, Keller addresses those who would say, "On nearly every page of the Bible God calls us to glorify, praise, and serve Him. How can you say he doesn't seek His own glory?" Keller answers, "Yes He does ask us to obey him unconditionally, to glorify, praise, and center our lives around Him"...but He does so because "He wants our joy!" Keller continues, "If we will center our lives on Him, serving Him not out of self-interest, but just for the sake of who He is, for the sake of His beauty and glory, we will enter the dance and share in the joy and love He lives in."

Losing the Dance

Keller says, "the story of the Bible begins with the dance of creation, but in Genesis 3 we read of the Fall" and losing the dance when Adam and Eve disobeyed and tried to get God to orbit around them. When this relationship with God unraveled, all other relationships disintegrated as well. Specifically, Keller tells us it is self-centeredness and self-absorption that leads to social disintegration. Keller says we lose the dance of joyful, mutually self-giving relationships when everyone is stationary and trying to get everything else to orbit around them. However, Keller says, "God did not leave us there. The Son of God was born into the world to begin a new humanity, a new community of people who could lose their self-centeredness, begin a God-centered life, and, as a result, slowly but surely have all other relationships put right as well." Keller puts the story together and tells us, "As the first Adam was tested in the Garden of Eden, the last Adam (Jesus) was tested in the Garden of Gethsemane. The first Adam knew that he would live if he obeyed God about the tree. But he didn't. The last Adam was also tested by a "tree", the Cross. Jesus knew that He would be crushed if He obeyed His Father. And He still did." Keller explains that when Jesus died on the cross for our sins, "He was circling and serving us...He began to do with us what He had been doing with the Father and the Spirit from all eternity...loving us without benefit to Himself."

Returning to the Dance

Keller says, when Jesus died on the cross, He invited us to join in "the dance"- "to put our lives on a whole new foundation- to make Him the new center of our lives and stop trying to be our own Savior and Lord."

The Future of the Dance

Here, Keller looks to Romans 8:21 and says "the whole world will be healed as it is drawn into the fullness of God's glory...the human race will finally be reunited. The human race will finally live together in peace and interdependence."

The Christian Life

Keller ends with, "The purpose of Jesus's coming is to put the whole world right, to renew and restore the creation, not to escape it" and no other religion offers this hope. Keller then asks the question "What does it mean to live a Christian life?" and answers, "God made us to ever increasingly share in His own joy and delight in the same way He has joy and delight within Himself"...but..."We glorify and enjoy Him only as we worship Him, serve the human community, and care for the created environment."

The Reason for God (Chapter 13)

The Reality of the Resurrection

In this chapter, Keller looks at the reasons and evidence, the arguments and counterarguments for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He says that the burden of proof is not only on believers to give evidence that it happened but also on unbelievers to come up with a "historically feasible alternate explanation for the birth of the church".

The Empty Tomb and the Witnesses

Here, Keller addresses the claim that the resurrection narratives in the gospels must have been developed long after the events themselves and that the empty tomb and eyewitnesses were fabrications. Keller disputes this by saying that the first accounts were actually recorded in the letters of Paul, which every historian agrees were written just 15-20 years after the death of Jesus. Keller looks at 1 Corinthians 15:3-6 and notes how Paul not only speaks of the empty tomb and resurrection on the "third day" (to show he's talking of a historical event vs. a symbol/metaphor) but also points out how Paul lists the eyewitnesses (500 of them and most of whom were still alive at the time of his writing so it could be corroborated). Keller also mentions how Paul's writing was to a church and therefore a public document for anyone to challenge as well as the fact that the accounts of the resurrection were too problematic to be fabrications (i.e women as eyewitnesses).

Resurrection and Immortality

Keller, here, addresses those who may say, "Surely the followers desperately wanted to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. If anyone had stolen the body in order to make it look like he had been raised, many sincere people could have thought they'd seen him, and maybe a few others went along with saying so for a good cause." According to Keller, that wouldn't happen. To all the dominant worldviews at the time, an individual bodily resurrection was impossible...and undesirable. In Greco-Roman thinking, no soul, having gotten free from its body, would ever want it back. The body was considered weak, corrupt, and defiling. Even the Jews, as Keller states, would have thought the resurrection of Jesus was unthinkable. Unlike Greco-Roman thinking, Jews believed the body was good and death a tragedy but still the idea of an individual bodily resurrection, in the middle of history, while the rest of the world continued on burdened in sickness, decay, and death, was inconceivable.

The Explosion of a New Worldview

Keller tells us, "After the death of Jesus the entire Christian community suddenly adopted a set of beliefs (a resurrection centered view of reality) that were brand-new and until that point... unthinkable." Keller says this massive shift in thinking could only have occurred if it actually happened. Keller also mentions that the only way a group of first-century Jews could have come to worship a human being as divine (which was considered blasphemous) was if it actually happened. Keller reminds us that hundreds of Jews began worshipping Jesus literally overnight. Keller continues by saying, "Virtually all the apostles and early Christian leaders died for their faith, and it is hard to believe that this kind of powerful self-sacrifice would be done to support a hoax." In light of this, Keller says it's not enough for the skeptic to simply say, "It just couldn't have happened". They must also answer these historical questions:

1. Why did Christianity emerge so rapidly, with such power?

2. What led a group of Jews to worship a human being as divine when they knew it was blasphemous to do so...and to change their worldview virtually overnight?

3. How do you account for hundreds of eyewitnesses to the resurrection who lived for decades and publicly maintained their testimony...even to the point of death?

The Challenge of the Resurrection

Keller says, "Nothing in history can be proven the way we can prove something in a laboratory. However, the resurrection of Jesus is a historical fact much more fully attested to than most other events of ancient history we take for granted." It has the most evidence for it but still, Keller says there are those who are unwilling to believe simply because they don't believe in miracles.

The Reason for God (Chapter 12)

The (True) Story of the Cross

In this chapter, Keller addresses the main question- Why did Jesus have to die? Couldn't God just forgive us?

The First Reason: Real Forgiveness is Costly Suffering

Keller, here, points out that for any debt incurred, someone must bear the cost. Either the wrongdoer is forced to absorb the debt or the one who has been wronged "forgives" and absorbs the debt. Keller says, choosing to forgive and absorb another's debt is painful but is the better way. It results in peace, a resurrection...because it's rooted in love.

The Forgiveness of God

Keller says, "if the evil is serious, no one "just" forgives...Everyone who forgives great evil goes through a death into resurrection, and experiences nails, blood, sweat, and tears...On the Cross we see God doing visibly and cosmically what every human being must do to forgive someone, though on an infinitely greater scale." Keller says, "Why did Jesus have to die in order to forgive us? There was a debt to be paid-God himself paid it. There was a penalty to be born- God himself bore it. Forgiveness is always a form of costly suffering."

Keller also reminds us here that "God did not, then, inflict pain on someone else, but rather on the Cross absorbed the pain, violence, and evil of the world into Himself...He became human and offered His own lifeblood in order to honor moral justice and merciful love so that someday he can destroy all evil without destroying us."

The Second Reason: Real Love is a Personal Exchange

For those who ask, "Why can't we just concentrate on teaching about how God is a God of love (without the Cross)?", Keller answers, "if you take away the Cross you don't have a God of love." Keller says, "In the real world of relationships it is impossible to love people with a problem or a need without in some sense sharing or even changing places with them...All life-changing love toward people with serious needs is a substitutional sacrifice. If you become personally involved with them, in some way, their weaknesses flow toward you as your strengths flow toward them." Keller quotes John Stott from The Cross of Christ, "The essence of sin is we human beings substituting ourselves for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for us. We...put ourselves where only God deserves to be; God...puts himself where we deserve to be."

The Great Reversal

Keller says, "...here is the Great Reversal. God, in the place of ultimate power, reverses places with the marginalized, the poor, and the oppressed...On the Cross Christ wins through losing, triumphs through defeat, achieves power through weakness and service, comes to wealth via giving all away. Jesus Christ turns the values of the world upside down...and creates an alternate kingdom. In this peaceable kingdom there is a reversal of the values of the world with regard to power, recognition, status, and wealth. Christ creates a whole new order of life." Again, Keller answers the question- Why did Jesus have to die?...for us...to take justice seriously and still love us.

The Reason for God (Chapter 11)

Religion and the Gospel
Keller begins this chapter with the question, "Why must the solution (to sin) be Jesus and Christianity? Why not other religions?" He answers by pointing out a very profound and fundamental difference...only Christianity and the gospel teach "salvation through grace" (Jesus as the way of salvation). All others teach "salvation through moral effort".

Two Forms of Self-Centeredness
Keller tells us there are two forms of self-centeredness or two ways to be your own Savior and Lord:
1. By being very bad and breaking all the rules and
2. By being very good and keeping all the rules and becoming self-righteous

Keller focuses on #2 and says, "by trusting in your own goodness rather than in Jesus for your standing with God", you are avoiding Jesus as Savior and rejecting the gospel. He further explains, "both religion (in which you build your identity on your moral achievements) and irreligion (in which you build your identity on some other secular pursuit or relationship) are ultimately, spiritually identical courses. Both are sin."

The Damage of Pharisaism
Keller says "Pharisaic religion (#2 above) damages the inner soul. "Pharisees" build their sense of worth on their moral and spiritual performance and Keller says this results in feelings of anxiety, insecurity, anger, and despair. These feelings arise because "Pharisees" know deep down that they can never achieve or maintain such a high standard of moral and spiritual living. Keller says "Pharisaic religion" will also lead to social strife because as "highly righteous and judgmental people, "Pharisees" will despise and attack any who don't share their doctrinal beliefs and/or religious practices. They will marginalize, oppress, and exclude others to make themselves feel better and more superior.

The Difference of Grace
Keller says "Religion operates on the principle "I obey-therefore I am accepted by God." But the operating principle of the gospel is "I am accepted by God through what Christ has done-therefore I obey." Keller continues, "the primary difference is that of motivation. In religion, we try to obey the divine standards out of fear...In the gospel, the motivation is one of gratitude for the blessing we have already received because of Christ." "The Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time...That means that (Christians) cannot despise those who do not believe as they do, or feel superior (or inadequate) in any way...because the Christian's identity is not based on the need to be perceived as a good person, but on God's valuing of them in Christ."

The Threat of Grace
The "threat of grace" is that if we are sinners saved by sheer grace-then there is nothing God cannot ask of us. However, for Christians who experience God's radical grace, there is also a radical change in mind and heart and therefore, anything God asks of us will be a delight and pleasure.