Can Parents Overcome Their Children’s Enemies?

1 Corinthians 15:20-28

According to what we heard from Ephesians 4:17-24, the way of the world without Christ can be associated with words such as futile, darkened, alienated, ignorant, hard-hearted, callous, sensual, greedy, corrupt, deceitful, and impure. Does that sound like anything we see out there in the world? But if we are living in Christ, we have taken off our old selves and put on new selves which are being renewed in the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. What a contrast!

According to what we heard from Ephesians 6:10-20, our enemies are not human beings, but spiritual forces of evil who lie to us about who we are, distracting us from who we really are in Christ, and keeping us in darkness. Paul advises that we equip ourselves with spiritual armor that will remind us of who we are in Christ so that we will not be deceived by the lies of the enemy and so that we can actually live in the light we have in Christ and become the children in the image of God that we were created and redeemed to be. What a worthwhile battle!

Now listen as Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 that the crucified and risen Christ has defeated and is subduing our enemies. He is reigning until he puts all enemies under his feet, at last subduing even death itself, and turning the completed kingdom over to God the Father:

20 But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21 For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. 22 For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. 23 But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. 24 Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. 25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 27 For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.” But when it says, “all things are put in subjection,” it is plain that he is excepted who put all things in subjection under him. 28 When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all. What a victory that will be!

Naturally, Christian parents want this victory for their children. They want to know if there is a way that they can be good enough parents to overcome their children’s enemies so that their children will be good Christians and perfectly fulfill their parents’ dreams for them.

The first and simplest answer to that question has just two letters: N and O. If you think that you can overcome your children’s enemies for them, you are in for deep disillusionment that I would prefer you not to experience.

Someone is sure to quote to me Proverbs 22:6 which says, “Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old he will not depart from it.” The implied point will be, “If we only succeed in training our children properly, we will defeat the enemy, and our children will live painless and perfect lives. So, preacher, tell us how to get the training right.”

Proverbs 22:6 is not a divine prophecy. It is not a divine promise. It is a proverb, a practical human observation endorsed by God as beneficial for making us wiser. It is better to do a good job training our children than not to do a good job. But following good advice is not a guarantee. Proverbs 22:6 does not cancel our children’s free will. It does not cancel their rebelliousness. It does not cancel their overconfidence that they have life all figured out. It does not cancel the lies of the enemy that are out there waiting to trip them up. There are no such guarantees, not even in the Bible, not even for God.

God placed his perfectly created children Adam and Eve in the perfect environment of the Garden of Eden. All they had to do was to trust and obey the wisdom that their heavenly Father shared with them as they walked in the garden together…and to guard the garden against the Liar. But the Liar invaded and had his way with them anyway. No amount of training could prevent Adam’s and Eve’s failure to apply their training and their failure to fulfill their assignment. So far as I know, God did not look at his children’s failure and sit down and say, “Where did I go wrong?” Rather, he set about the long, costly, and painful path of redeeming the mess. God knows the heartbreak of parents who see their children wreck their lives. Adam and Eve were free to choose against God’s training. They were free to mess up with consequences that were costly not only to them, but also to God. They were free to mess up colossally because God did not want robot children. Still doesn’t.

Because of free will, no amount of training guarantees a certain outcome. The culture of the home—for good or ill—is not destiny. Some wretched sinners come out of good homes, and some beloved saints come out of appalling ones. The odds are a lot better with good training, and that is the point of the proverb, but there are no guarantees.

If you want evidence of this, study your family tree. My Turner family tree will illustrate the point. The first Turner immigrant to America on my tree was Arthur, who came to the colonies in the mid-17^th century, a Puritan who was anything but pure. He is said to have been the ne-er-do-well son of English landed gentry who sent him to America either to give him a second chance or at least to get his embarrassing misbehavior across the big water. Whether dealing with money, sex, or power, he had a knack for getting himself into scandalous trouble, and the sordid details of his life are all too well documented in colonial American court proceedings, and all too available for perusal on the Internet today. Humbling! Not an auspicious start for a family.

But among Arthur's descendants and the families with which they intermarried have been some fine and admirable men and women. I know of at least one state university, one Methodist university, and two Baptist colleges, all four still in operation, that members of the extended Turner family tree helped found during the 19^th century. The extended Turner family tree includes slaveholders and abolitionists, warriors and pacifists, social reactionaries and social reformers, drunkards and prohibitionists, unbelievers and clergy (yes, even one woman preacher from the 19^th century, so Judy wasn’t the first such on the family tree), several family members who signed their names with an X and several distinguished scholars, some family members who were on public relief rolls and some who were judges or congressional representatives (political figures of reputable Christian character in at least two of those cases!) and many, many more farmers, shopkeepers, small-scale entrepreneurs, school teachers, and the like. Was all that variety of character and lifestyle due to good or bad parenting? Sometimes the contrasts were within one household, with the very same parenting.

Both of my Turner grandparents were good Christian people, Bible-reading, praying, regular church-goers, orthodox believers, morally upright, hard-working, good citizens, loving parents and grandparents. My father was raised in church, but as soon as he left home, he stopped attending church and did not spend much time on spiritual matters until he was about the age I am now. Was that my grandparents’ fault? They were not without their shortcomings, but it was hardly their fault that their son did not attend church or take his spiritual life seriously until they had passed out of this life. He was always a man of notable integrity, but his spiritual training kicked in at last about three years before his accidental death. As with Adam and Eve, it was a matter of free will. So it is with your children.

While you cannot yourself overcome your children’s enemies, you can help equip them so that they themselves may overcome their enemies if they choose to devote themselves to that task. You teach your children more by who you are and how you live than by what you tell them.

1. Your children need to see that you know the real and living God, the God who created and rules the universe, the God who inspired the Bible, the God whose Word became flesh in his Son Jesus Christ and dwelt among us full of grace and truth, the God whose Holy Spirit comes to us to guide, empower and transform us in our service to Jesus. They need to see that this God is the Rock on whom you stand in the storm, the Hope on whom you wait through the darkness, the Shepherd whom you trust even in the face of the loss of all else, the Source of all for which you are grateful, the Giver of your driving purpose in life, and—this is key—the Armor that protects you against the lies of the Enemy by reminding you of who you are in Christ. If you want to teach your children, let them see this living, loving God ruling daily in your life.

2. Your children need to see that you know who you are, a child of God, saved by grace, saved through faith, saved for good works. They need to know that you are not your own, but have been claimed from darkness by the light of God’s grace in Jesus Christ, and that you are now a caretaker of the mysteries of grace, bearing grace to the world. That is, you have been redeemed by Christ to serve as an instrument of Christ’s redeeming love.

3. Your children need to see your faith in action. Basically, they need to see you living out the 9 Ways: studying, praying, worshiping, serving, giving, fellowshipping, sharing faith, showing compassion, practicing spiritual honesty. They need to see you studying God’s word to find the fullness of God’s light for your life. They need to see you praying in times of joy and in times of uncertainty and in the humdrum times of the daily grind. They need to see you prioritizing the fellowship and mission that belong to the church. They need to see this on your calendar, in your checkbook, in your credit card purchases. They need to see that your faith commitments include God’s love for your spouse and your children.

4. Your children need to see the fruit of your life of faith increasing day-by-day, year-by-year. They need to see your increasing wisdom and discernment, your increasing hungering and thirsting for righteousness, your increasing compassion and graciousness, your increasing steadiness of faith, hope, and love. It is not so much how far along you are on the journey toward sainthood, as that you are moving with graciousness and gratitude in the right direction.

5. Your children need to see you as a secure, maturing parent. They need to see that you can be firm and confident in exercising your proper authority as a parent without over-reacting and over-controlling. In other words, they need to see that you can set and maintain clear boundaries appropriate for their maturity level without destroying their ability to make safe choices within those boundaries. They need to see you adjusting those boundaries closer in or farther out according to their proven ability or disability to handle the freedom and responsibility that are available to them. All this is done with the goal of preparing them for gradually expanding boundaries.

But we are living in a culture without sufficient boundaries to protect our children from great harm. We may have to create some boundaries that do not open out as rapidly as in the majority of families around us, and this will take some long conversations to help our children understand that we do not think them less mature than those who are in the group that has for many generations has been called “everybody else” as in “but everybody else is doing it.” We just think that they have a special future that deserves a bit of protection until they are ready to claim it for themselves.

As the mature parent in this conversation, you should be prepared to listen with understanding, sympathy, even empathy without automatically surrendering. You must be prepared to remain calm and caring, but steady and resolute, in the face of tears, extreme statements, dramatic actions, the sudden return of childhood tantrums that you may not have seen in them for a decade or more, as you advocate for the best that life has to offer, a life in Jesus Christ.

Conclusion: So far, this sermon has focused on who you are as the parent. That is most important. The church cannot offer many answers for parents until the parents themselves are on a serious Christian journey.

We will go farther next week into words and concepts we can teach our children. But, for now, parents, let’s resolve to get our own lives in spiritual order. That is the most effective teaching we can do.