SERMON TITLE: Train Up A Child
TEXT: Proverbs 22:6
SPEAKER: Adam Borsay
DATE: 5-15-22
Watch the sermon here.
Take notes here.
I am so excited to be with you this morning at both our County Road 9 and North Main campuses. My name is Adam Borsay and I am the Director of Youth Ministries at Gateway and have the privilege of continuing our mini series, “Verses in Context”. The last two weeks we have heard from Cody O, our temp, who shared some popularly misused portions of scripture. True story, two Sundays ago Cody was preaching on Philippians 4:12- I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me….and walking through how we misapply the powerful Christ centered context that the Apostle Paul was sharing. Well, I could not be in attendance that day. I was suffering through my first kidney stone. I thought, I am 40 now, I should really let my body fall apart for real and add some fun suffering to the experience of being so old. Well, I didn’t want to miss out on my young charges sermon so I was live streaming it on my phone while they carted me around the ER for tests. So as I moaned in pain everyone got to hear Cody telling me to be content no matter my circumstances because Christ is with me!
This morning we will be looking at a verse that can be one of the hardest verses to navigate as a parent in today’s world. Proverbs 22:6
6 Train up a child in the way he should go,
And when he is old he will not depart from it. (ESV)
This is probably a passage that many a parent has either put a lot of hope into, or a passage that has caused no small amount of heart ache either. Both reactions are the result of not grasping what God IS communicating in this section. As a community of believers, our approach to Scripture is so immensely valuable in how we can be impacted by it. We must all strive after a high degree of Biblical literacy. And so often the thing we need the most is nothing more than taking the time to understand the context that a particular verse, passage, chapter, etc. are found in. To go back to Cody O speaking on Philippians, when you dive back into the whole passage, it is quite clear that Paul was not indicating you will indeed kick the winning field goal at the game!
DA Carson attributes to his own father this quote, “A text without its context is a pretext to a proof text”.
When we dive into Proverbs, it is so important to understand what it is and what it is not. Otherwise, we set ourselves up for a number of problems in how we read it.
Proverbs can be misused in a few ways, let me highlight three primary ways:
While this is a passage about parenting, a big idea that will hopefully be helpful for anyone when reading proverbs is that,
Principles are not principally a promise, but they ARE true in principle.
Hold up, you might be thinking. How can something be true in principle but not a promise?? Let me help illustrate this valuable approach to reading Proverbs well with my own life experience.
In college, I had a roommate named Harold. Harold is actually the youth and college minister at the church of Scott Miller’s brother’s church today. Which was a fun discovery we made when I met Scott here at Gateway a number of years ago.
Well, Harold is the unhealthiest person I know. I honestly do not know in the 4 years that I lived with him if I ever saw him eat a vegetable. But he ate a lot of nachos; drank a ton of Mountain Dew. On Sunday afternoons, he would make himself a giant pot of baked beans, dip Tostitos chips in it like dip and kill half a case of Dew while watching NASCAR.
Harold is also very thin and, don’t tell him I said this, a handsome fellow. I, on the other hand. Well, am not thin. Now don’t get me wrong. I am not the paragon of health and exercise. I am not now and wasn’t in college. But I can say with 100% confidence, I paid much closer attention to my diet and trying to stay active than Harold did. It drove me nuts. He would gorge on junk food and get thinner. I would be in the same room as his plate of nachos, and through osmosis in the air, calories would waft through the room and lodge themselves in my midsection.
How many of you have had this experience? You feel like you are really trying to make good healthy choices and you aren’t noticing a difference and you have that one friend who hasn’t seen a stick of butter they haven’t eaten and they could probably stand to gain a few more pounds.
Do these anecdotal stories change the underlying truth that we should eat healthy foods and exercise?? Of course not. While we might all have varying degrees of how we respond to certain healthy habits, the truth is that every single person is better off when they eat healthy and exercise. Just because the principle didn’t seem to work out exactly between Harold and myself does not mean that it stopped being true.
So back to the text
6 Train up a child in the way he should go,
And when he is old he will not depart from it. (NKJV)
Using my three examples of how Proverbs can be misused. Let’s look at how those apply to this verse:
Just like Harold and I, the PRINCIPLE is true, but we can’t oversell it and we must apply it with wisdom.
The principle value in a principle is rooted in it’s accurate application
What is the context of Proverbs that shapes how we approach this particular verse within the book? Think of Proverbs as a gathering of wise Godly advice and sayings that should be utilized as shorthand tools to approach life with wisdom. A modern example of a wise saying that would fall into a similar category would be something like, “The early bird catches the worm”. Does it mean that birds that wake up late starve? Of course not. It is a wise saying that speaks to the immense value of being efficient and responsible with your time. There is a reason people love to tell stories about Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan and how they were the first ones in the gym and the last ones out. Would they have been fantastic athletes even if they weren’t first? Probably. But they reached the pinnacles of basketball because of their work ethic. If you think of your capabilities as having two components - your ultimate potential, and your actual results, we all fall somewhere on a line between failure and success. And how close we get to our ultimate potential is found in how we apply wisdom to our approach to the tasks at hand.
In the same way, God uses Proverbs to lay out a foundation of things that are very true that have immense value in applying them well.
So how do we apply this passage as parents, as adults in a community that prioritizes the next generation?
The main application is simply “teaching or raising up a child in the way they should go”. And this is rooted in a such a simple application that we might miss it.
This principle that God tells us means nothing if we as the adults are not actively applying it to our interactions with kids. Whether you are a parent or just a part of our community. Here is what God instructs his people to do in the book of Deuteronomy:
4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. (NIV)
Some within the Jewish community will literally have little boxes with mini scrolls of the Torah attached to themselves as they very literally apply this instruction. But to modernize this idea, we went and got Carsten’s tattoo artist and he will be out in the lobby to put your favorite Bible verses on your foreheads before you leave today. Not only will kids think you are really cool now but they will constantly be able to read the Bible when they are with you!
Alright, so I’ll be honest. Josh hates good ideas and shot this one down. So we won’t be doing that. But the application is not that you need to go through the motions of having a Bible verse literally written down on your body, but that you are actively engaging the Word of God in your day to day life at such a high level that the first thing people, and YOUR KIDS, know about you is that God’s word is the center of your life.
Arizona Christian University recently did a nationwide study on where the disconnect seems to be with kids growing up in the church and then walking away from God in their adult lives. You ready for this? This is shocking and troubling. 67% percent of teens polled claimed a Christian household/parents. But of those 67% only 2% of those parents actively lived out a Christian worldview!!
This doesn’t mean they go to church on Sunday and rob a bank on Monday. But that in the vast majority of the lives of “Church Kids,” the profession of faith they see from adults on Sunday mornings is not congruent with the behavior of their families the rest of the week.
Let me give a simple example. Would you be completely embarrassed to be overheard cursing at church on Sunday morning, but creatively use colorful language Saturday at the game? Now I am not here to preach a sermon on our language, but I want you to think about this disconnect for watching eyes of the kids here at church. They know that you know you shouldn’t drop a few choice 4 letter words talking with the pastor in the lobby after service. But the minute the pastor isn’t around, they hear you let it rip. What do you think the message they are subtly taking in is? Yah. That Christian faith is kinda like performance. Perform at the right time, and then loosen the belt and really be you when the show is over.
Think about the myriad of ways this plays out in our lives? How about the angry dad who is all smiles and handshakes at church with his small group friends and doesn’t have a nice word to say at home. Or how about the family that says Church is a priority and seem to always have some reason to not be there.
When the words you say are not congruent with the life you live, you ARE training your child up in a direction that will be highly likely to be kept as they enter into adulthood.
Should you be actively instructing your children in God’s Word?? Yes. But how are you LIVING??
Now I don’t like to brag too much about my parents. I don’t like their heads to get too big. But let’s be honest. They raised me. So clearly they did a fantastic job. Of many of the wonderful things I have grown to appreciate in my childhood is that my parents never had “church life” and “regular life” lifestyles. When we were on vacation, it didn’t matter, we were going to find a church to attend. And pre-internet, it could be pretty hit and miss on the quality of church experience you would find. Never got a fun snake handling church, but some real doozies. But their example taught me without even direct words that our Christian commitments were the most important thing about our lives. Something so simple as that shaped me in ways that, to this day, I am seeing play out in my own views on who I am as a follower of Christ!
And if you are not a parent or no longer have kids in the home, what does that mean for you? The exact same thing!! The kids in this church see you. They see you on Sundays and they, to varying degrees, are aware of your life outside of these walls. Are you just one more adult who acts like a Christian on Sunday but lives in a different way after the final song has been sung?? I want you to think about this. There are kids in this church who sadly do not have a consistent picture of Christ-centered living in their lives at home. Every community you will ever be a part of will be full of kids who are dealing with the disconnect between what is said and what is done. And sometimes, they have parents, or a parent, who is negative towards God overall. You might very well be the adult in their life that shows them through how you live that there is more to Christianity than a performance. That it is a complete life-shaping reality that leads you every single day.
Now the actual teaching of God’s truth, in word and deed, are obviously the big principles that are laid out in this verse. But like most of Scripture, there is depth to what is happening. The way this verse is written and understood in the Hebrew is a key catalyst for how one can be as successful as possible in training up children in the way they should go.
The structure of the Hebrew can be read as in the way HE should go. Meaning, a specific direction for THAT specific child. Rabbinical sources interpret it as a reminder that as a parent to train a child effectively you must take into account who THEY are.
Let me explain it this way.
You love football. Your dad was a coach, you were a star player, and have been counting down the days until your own son was old enough to play. And lo and behold. his mother’s genetics have horribly influenced him to love music. This leaves you with two choices. Force your son to play football because gosh, darn it, that’s what men in this family do, or you can come alongside your son’s gifts and passions and learn to be his biggest cheerleader.
The double meaning in this passage is that as a parent you are responsible for KNOWING your child and working within the reality of who God has made them to be. Now of course this doesn’t mean that if your child tries what I tried, you don’t have to go along with it…When I was about five my mom told me I needed to clean my room and I told her “Mommy, I can’t do that. I am not a worker, I’m a player.” Obviously, and if you know my mom, she did not say, “Well, hunny, let me celebrate who you are, and I will clean up for you.” So there is obviously some wisdom and discernment that we need to utilize, hand in hand with God’s Word and ultimate truth.
Are you fostering the gifts that God gave them, not trying to shoehorn them into a model that you had hoped for?
And this actually is a huge part of how you instruct them in the ways of God. While there are some non-negotiable standards in life, (for instance, maybe your kids aren’t great at academics, you don’t let them drop out of school), but you do work hard to find creative ways to help them succeed.
Knowing your child, responding to who they are is going to pay dividends in your spiritual instruction. Take the football analogy. If you force your son to play football because “that’s just what they do,” do you think they feel loved, cared for, heard? How do you think creating that sort of relationship will impact how they respond to your spiritual instructions? When you take the time to know them, really know them, they will listen to you in a much different way.
As an adult in our community, think of the teachers that most impacted you in your life. The ones who you felt really cared for YOU. When you felt heard and cared it made you care about doing well in their class. One of my favorite teachers in high school was Mr. Harper, the math teacher. He was a hoot. And he was tough. A big surprise for most of you is that I was not the best student. I was a bit….let’s say…chatty. But Mr. Harper got me. And I couldn’t wait to be in his class. I had started off not getting a lot of my homework done on time, and this had lead to less than stellar grades on the tests. Finally, with his encouragement, I got on top of my work, and got an A on the next test. He wrote on the top of the test, “The lad studies, the lad gets an A, a connection between the two perhaps.” My dad made a copy of that note and I had it hanging on my wall for the rest of high school. Mr. Harper’s relationship with me, feeling like he liked ME, gave me motivation to do better!
Here is where I want to land us today. Whether you are a parent of a young child or not, God's wisdom in this passage is vital for who we are as a community. Just showing up to church is not God’s idea of “training up a child”. While each individual makes their own choices, it doesn’t remove our responsibility to pursue the Godly principles he has laid out and apply them with wisdom.
And within this, there is great hope. Guess what? You are not a perfect parent. You can’t be. God has given you wisdom to follow, and you will fall short time and time again. And if your hope for your kids, or your hope for yourself, is in you executing Godly principles without any mistakes, then you have a hope that will die on the vine.
The most important thing you do for you kids, for the kids in this community, is to run to Jesus everyday. In Christ alone do we have the hope of God’s law being perfectly fulfilled. In Christ alone do we have hope that, when our own sin and failures rear their ugly head, we know that even those failures that we often let hang like millstones on our necks have been cast off when the stone was rolled away.
See, as a parent, the greatest example in guiding your children in the way they should go is to see you walking to the foot of the cross and finding your hope in a Father who would not spare his own son to make a way for his children to come to him.
Because of the cross, it is never too late to find hope for the kids you have raise, or the kids you will raise, be made anew.
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