Thesis 40- We must be swift to repent to and in front of our children.
It is a difficult thing in our age for parents to swim against the cultural stream and actually lead in their homes. Our world has bought into the egalitarian lie that all of us have been given an equal amount of authority. Children and adults are at best seen as equals. Often its worst, with children portrayed as the fonts of wisdom, and parents portrayed as dottering fools. But God, the maker of the world, has determined that parents are to rule in their homes, that children are to obey their parents. That challenge is made all the more difficult by this glaring problem, parents are not just leaders in their homes, but are sinners in their homes.
Because there is so much cultural pushback against parents leading in their homes, sometimes parents face a peculiar temptation. If, we seem to fear, we admit our failures, admit our weaknesses, admit our sins, this will undermine our authority in the home. Better to pull rank, we sometimes think. Because we are listening to the devil on our shoulder, rather than the angel.
When we sin against or in front of our children, our calling is not to try to cover our own sins, but to run to the only One who can cover our sin. Our calling is to repent and believe the gospel. That our sins were committed against or in front of our children changes nothing. Well, almost nothing. It is the glory of the gospel that our sins can be forgiven. All of them. This is the good news. But it is likewise a grand blessing to be able to model before our children what repentance looks like. When we repent to our children we are not only affirming what they already know, that we are sinners, but we are showing them how we all must deal with this reality. We are acting in light of God’s grace, and being a means of grace in the lives of our children. We are teaching them that sin isn’t the exclusive province of children. We are teaching them that we recognize that they too bear God’s image, and so can be sinned against. We are showing them how a Christian household operates. We do sin against each other, but we are quick to forgive each other as well.
When we repent to our children we ought to do so in much the same way we repent to our Father. That is, we ought to leave our excuses behind. We ought to confess that we committed the sin because we’re sinners. “I’m sorry I shouted at you when you spilled your milk, but it just drives me crazy how you’re not careful with your milk” isn’t repentance, but blame shifting in a pious disguise. Do not be afraid. Your children may indeed look down on you. But they should, when you are down on your knees confessing before your Father. It is a cliché because it is true, that kneeling before the Lord in prayer is the very height of the position of power. Repentance has changed the world. Surely it can change our homes.
Don’t forget that today, at 7:00 eastern we continue our live study, working together through my father’s classic work, The Holiness of God. We will cover this week (after postponing last week due to a funeral) chapter 5. All are welcome to join us online. We’ll be on Facebook Live, at RC-Lisa Sproul. If, however, you are in the area, you are welcome to join us in our home. We serve a meal to our guests at 6:00. Do please let us know if you’d like to be here in person for the study or both the meal and the study. We hope to see you here.
While I’m perfectly willing to affirm that various and sundry state agencies have well exceeded the bounds of their authority in the wake of COVID, it has been for some time my contention that Christians would do well to spend less time accusing the heathen and more time pleading with our Father for forgiveness. Every bit of government overreach is wrong, wicked, presumptuous, provocative, idolatrous and iniquitous. What they meant for evil, however, God has meant for good. It is certainly possible to object to the one while giving thanks for the other. It is, however, more probable that when we are grumbling against God’s ministers of justice we are also grumbling against God. When the Babylonians invade you unsheathe your sword. But you also get on your knees in prayer, repenting.
If the closing/dividing/masking/cyber-izing of our churches is a judgment from God, what is it He is judging? Chances are, given the long history we have recorded for us in His Word, that our problems are the same problems our fathers had before us. We, and by we I don’t mean we Americans but we Christians, are inveterate syncretists. We blend together the worship of the living God with the worship of the gods of our neighbors. We reshape Yahweh into the image of Baal.
God-to-me is the name of the god of the broader culture. He, or she, is loving, tender, kind, encouraging and wants us to be happy. His law can safely be reduced down to two great commandments- Do what thou wilt and You gotta be nice. Which is why it shouldn’t surprise us that the God who is preached, at the bleating demand of the sheep, from our pulpits is much the same. Either we speak not of sin at all, or, if we’re bold and heroic we do speak about sin, the sins the church down the street is guilty of.
So what do we repent of? Worldliness. Seeking to serve the living God and the god of personal peace and affluence. Spiritual pride. Our inability to blush. Our refusal to feel His hand of judgment on us, no matter how obvious He makes it. Indifference to the plight of the most marginalized demographic in the world, the unborn. A prideful unwillingness to identify with our brothers and sisters when their shame is made public. An arrogance that presumes to know the state of the souls of others who profess the name of Christ, if they aren’t as politically astute as we are, or as boldly defiant as we are, aren’t as alert to Gramsci’s game plan as we are.
We repent of our lack of faith. First, we fail to believe that He is at work in the here and the now, looking at pandemics and power grabs as mere human plots rather than our God working out His plan. Second, for failing to thank Him for these hardships, because we fail to recognize that when He brings hardship to His people He does so out of love, to drive us deeper into His arms. Our Father loves us. He holds the heart of the king in his hand, and of the governor, and of the mayor. He holds the outcome of the election in His hand. How can we doubt the one who took the one true tragedy, the one great horror of an innocent man coming under judgment, and revealed it not just to be good news, but to have been His plan all along? Forgive us O Lord, our lack of faith. Hear our cry, and deliver us from us.
It is a sure sign of the fall that we so egregiously miss what we lost. Jesus calls us to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness precisely because our priorities are all out of line. Even that for which we long, that we’ve got to get back to the garden, we long for in the wrong way. Eden, to be sure, was Edenic. It was a garden paradise. There were no weeds crowding their way in there. No bugs buzzed in ears, nor stung arms and legs. Adam and Eve had no need to fear that prowling lions would consume humble lambs, nor that cyclones would tear up their garden by the roots. Eden was a place of joyful, fulfilling work. Adam would never feel the pressure of too many deadlines. His laptop would never go on the fritz. Neither had he any reason to fear an industrial accident. And then Adam and Eve had each other. This was a love relationship that would stagger us in its glory, that would blow us away in its intensity, that would in turn calm us in its beauty.
And all of the above did not amount to a hill of beans compared to the real blessing. All of the above are but shadows of a far greater glory, icing on a far richer cake. The glory of the garden was this- they walked with God. What we lost was not just beholding, but entering into the very glory of God. That is to say, it would have been enough just to have been allowed the privilege of watching Him walk by. That would have shrunk every other blessing down to size. But He did not merely walk by. He walked with. Adam and Eve drew near to Him. To get just a glimpse of what this must have been like, recall to mind how C.S. Lewis portrayed the joyful Aslan playfully wrestling with the Pevensie children. This, not luscious fruit and tropical breezes, is what we lost.
This loss, in turn, is what we are seeking so desperately to forget. We are haunted by Eden. Which may help us to understand the peculiar way in which our modern culture practices its folly. We are told by Paul in Romans 1 that all men know that God exists, but we suppress that truth in unrighteousness. Supposing ourselves to be wise we become fools and exchange the glory of the Creator for mere creatures. Our idolatry isn’t merely embracing the wrong religion. It is rejecting what we know that we might bow down to what we have made.
In Paul’s day it seemed that on every street corner there was a temple to this goddess, and a statue to that god. Modern Americans are different. Or are we? We do not self-consciously bow down to gods of our own making. But if one were to step back enough, to set aside the normalcy of our idolatry, we might find it in the strangest places. I suspect that archeologists in future millennia, when they dig up our civilization will suggest that we worshipped a nearly ubiquitous god named “Starbucks.” They would, of course, be missing the point. Starbucks is not our god, but a mere aid to our worship. We carry around cups of our drug of choice that will keep us awake and alert enough to attend to our gods- that we can distract our minds, and our hearts with our smart phones, streaming services, our podcasts, our constant and perpetual influx of meaningless data. We are all aflutter taking in media of one sort or another so that we will not hear the deafening echo of our emptiness, so that we won’t feel the gnawing lack where we once walked with God.
The strangest thing of all, however, is not the frantic forgetfulness of those yet on the outside. No, the truly strange thing is that Jesus has for us restored paradise. We walk with God but will not listen because our earphones are piping us the latest new band. We will not see His glory because our eyes are captured by whatever is making the rounds today on Youtube. We will not even hold His palm scarred hand because we’re busy checking our retweets. That is, we who walk in paradise, are too busy dancing with the devil to notice.
The kingdom is here, and the kingdom is now. We need not, in one sense, seek it. For it has sought and found us. To seek what has already been found we do not work harder. Instead we stop. We listen, We see. We smell. We enter into the glory of His presence. Instead we rejoice and give thanks that we are already seated with Him in the heavenly places. There is no cell service up there. Be still, and know that He is God.
In that stillness you will hear first the heavenly choirs of angels, as they cry out, “Holy, holy holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory.” Then you will hear the Master’s voice. Even now, even here on this side of the veil you will hear Him say, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Enter into your reward.” And you will rejoice that He is that exceedingly great reward. He walks with you now in the cool of the evening. For lo, He is with us always.
Sometimes the same thing needs to be said, over and over. I try, hard as it is, to not repeat myself across the various media I use. If I tweet something I likely won’t talk about the same issue on my podcast. If I write a blog piece along a certain line, I likely won’t record an Ask RC on the same theme. And so I fail again.
I have a long history of being doctrinaire. I have over the decades built a reputation as something of an ideological pugilist. Those thousand hills holding our heavenly Father’s cattle could each hold an ideology I’m willing to die for. Not a one of them, however, is worthy to be compared with this one- Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of which I am chief.
Which is why I have to, once again, take a stand against those I am typically more inclined to stand with. As I noted in a piece earlier this week, I have never voted for a Democrat. I can’t imagine a scenario in which I would ever do so. In like manner, on racial issues I’m more than willing to take on the judgment and condemnation of the woke for the stand I take- I believe the better day is that day when a man is judged by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin. Radical hard right conviction, that one, I know.
When, however, my friends on these secondary issues start spouting off about how those on the other side of these secondary issues are beyond the reach of God’s grace, well, let’s just say I don’t much care for it. “No Christian could ever…” “To embrace theistic evolution is the same as being an atheist…” “Believing in government handouts is Marxist and all Marxists are not Christians.” Seriously? When did the young, rude and Reformed suddenly embrace Wesleyan perfectionism? Do all believers receive a second work of grace when they invite Von Mises, or Thomas Sowell or Alex Jones into their hearts?
Voting Democrat, embracing theistic evolution, asking the state to rob Peter to pay Paul, or any intersection thereof is sinful, rebellion, foolishness, unbiblical, nonsensical, and just plain dumb. Yet all three together are not worthy to be compared with the folly that says, “Those who do or believe these things have not been covered by the blood of Christ.” To say such is sinful, rebellion, foolishness, unbiblical on steroids.
It is a good thing to be sound on the issues, to apply the Word of God to the controversies of our day, and to do so rightly. It is a good thing to, in our prophetic office, call sin sin. It is a good thing to contend for the faith. It is, however, a better thing to remember that the faith proclaims this- Jesus died for our sins, those in our past, those that yet hold on to us, and those we will commit in the future. He died for our behavioral sins, our ideological sins, our sins of concupiscence, and, thankfully, all the sins that flow out of our foolish pride. Friends, let us fight the battles before us with vigor. Let us not, however, surrender the war in doing so.
