Thesis 38- We must model for and teach our children to be hard-working and diligent.
A recent poll asked parents what one thing they believed was the most important to provide for their children. Those outside the church gave as their top answer, a good education. Those inside the church gave as their answer, a good education. We have been taught to believe that a good education is what will cure whatever ails us. It will persuade us not to smoke. It will persuade us not to do drugs. It will teach us how to eat properly. And it will, in the end, be the very key to our future prosperity. Get a good education, and get a good, high paying job. Get a good high paying job, and you will have a good life.
The Bible offers no such calculus. It does not suggest that getting a good education is the key to prosperity, far less that it is the key to having a good life. Our problem, according to the Bible, isn’t that we don’t know the truth, but that we will not submit to it (see Romans 1). Our problem is rebellion, not ignorance.
The Bible does call us to diligent labor, from God’s command in the garden to the call to do our work “as unto the Lord.” In turn it suggests that one of the great blessings in this world is to eat of the fruit of our labors in peace. It explains that we will prosper as we consume less than we produce, and we will fall into hardship as we consume more than we produce. The Bible, in turn, commands that we look to it for all of our answers (II Timothy 3:16).
For the good of our own families, and for the good of the families of our children then, we must model for them what it means to be diligent in our labors. They will learn to do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay as we demonstrate the same to them, not from lectures from us. We must also expect the same from them. We live in a culture driven toward recreation. We work for the weekend, rather than resting that we might work. We can overcome this cultural drift as we delay gratification, as we work now and play later. We can push back against this folly as we rejoice in a job well done. When we collapse into bed at the end of the day exhausted we tend to think something must be wrong. Being tired at the end of the day is a sign of blessing, not curse.
Our children learn by watching us. Our work in teaching them then is never through. As we labor diligently, God will bless us. He will bless us first in our own homes. But He will in turn teach our children to do the same, and when the time comes, bless their own homes as well. Hard work and sound saving is the path to prosperity. It always has been, and always will be. Shortcuts lead only to disaster.
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 weather) chapter 4. 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.
Probably not what you think. My father was a wise and gracious man. He was a man of integrity and honor. He was also a man of insight. He noticed, when listening to unbelievers speak of Jesus, how well they all liked him. A closer look, however, revealed why. Unbelievers like Jesus because they don’t know Him. Instead they invest in Him their own favorite qualities and characteristics. Marxists love Jesus because they think He is a Marxist. Republicans love Jesus because they think He is a Republican. Everyone loves to dress Jesus up as a cheerleader for the home team.
Jesus, however, isn’t alone in getting this kind of treatment. Of late I have seen various social media pundits responding to intersectionality, critical race theory, churches violating social distancing rules, and riots in the streets not by suggesting that God’s Word says this about the situation or that applying Paul’s principle in Colossians would mean that about some event, but asking, WWRCD, what would RC do? And, much to the surprise of someone other than me, it turns out my father is the writer’s sock puppet.
My father was no man’s puppet, sock or otherwise. And he was full of surprises. Take for instance his dislike for government overreach. My father used to talk openly about the virtues of secession in our day. He was a limited government guy from the bottom of his loafers to the top of his perm. Which is exactly why I thought I would have his support when I turned 16. I told him that Uncle Sam expected me to register for the draft. I reminded him that that same uncle had sent soldiers into harm’s way more than half a dozen times into unlawful wars. I didn’t want to register because I didn’t want them enacting a draft, drafting me and sending me off to another Viet Nam.
“Son,” he said to me, “I want you to go to the post office and register for the draft. I understand, appreciate and agree with your fears. The good news, however, is that Uncle Sam isn’t commanding you to break God’s law by fighting an unjust war. He’s commanding you to give him your address. If a day comes when we need to defy your uncle, we’ll do it. But today is not that day.”
I didn’t like what I had to do, but I confess, he impressed me. A lot. He showed me the biblical pathway whereby I compromised nothing, endangered nothing, disobeyed neither my uncle nor my heavenly Father. It wasn’t what I expected. It was much better. He took my jingoistic passions and applied careful, biblical reasoning.
Of course, he might have been wrong. That is not the point. Either way I am asking that you stop. You are borrowing credibility you did not earn, like the purveyors of pseudepigrapha in the early church. You are claiming support you don’t really know that you have. You act as though you are honoring his memory when you dishonor it. You are confusing yourself with him, and worse, confusing him with Jesus. If you want to know what my father thought, I have good news. His thoughts are recorded in over 100 books and on thousands of hours of recordings. If you want to know what he would have thought, you’re out of luck. If you want to tell the world what he would have thought, you’re out of line. He’d tell you to knock it off.
Lord Acton was absolutely right, that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. He may have been more right, however, if he had adapted a bit of biblical wisdom in articulating the dangers of power. What if he had said instead, “The love of power is the root of all kinds of evil.” Just as greed is not the exclusive province of the rich, so the hunger for power extends well beyond the powerful, and with it goes all manner of evil. Those without power often seek power by sidling up to the powerful. If you have no power, the next best thing may be to get close to those who do.
We see this principle worked out in spades in the English Reformation. The Reformation came to England not because of a popular uprising of the people. It was not rooted in the heartfelt convictions of the clergy. The Reformation came to England because a king wanted a new wife, one who would bear him a son. The king thought he was pulling the strings of the clergy to get what he wanted, while the clergy believed they were pulling the strings of the king to get what they wanted. O what a tangled web they weaved when the English Reformation was first conceived. At any given moment, the shape of the Reformation was determined not by the Word of God, but by who had the king’s ear. The inauspicious beginning laid the groundwork for what would ensue, centuries of confusion, death and strife.
Trying to untangle the knots created by shifting alliances, convicted consciences and the providence of those born to inherit thrones may make for an interesting historical survey. What may be better, however, would be for us to consider our own failures and weaknesses as we set about the business of Reformation in our own lives. Whose ears do we seek access to, and to whom are we listening? Rather than trying to divine whether the Church of England skewed too Romish or whether its problems grew out of its Erastianism may just be a distraction from examining our own lives.
Reformation, rightly understood, is nothing more than dominion. Adam and Eve, in being called to rule over the creation were called to re-form the world. After the fall the call to dominion abides, and so does the call to re-form. Now we are not merely turning jungle into garden, but are at the same time turning sin into righteousness. Our re-formation is, by the power of the Holy Spirit, remaking the sinful dust of our fallen father Adam into the glorious gold of our elder brother, Jesus, the second Adam. The Reformation not only is not over, but it will not end until all things are brought into subjection. Those “all things” certainly includes the rulers of England, both ecclesiastical and civil. They certainly include all who rule here in these United States. They include our churches, our culture, our labors. But they begin with our families, ourselves, our hearts.
In the economy of God, we do not re-form by seeking power. We do not re-form by seeking the ear of those in power. The only way to re-form is to die. The dead have no lust for power. They have no ears to be tickled. They have no lips with which to seduce others. Indeed this is where our power is found. By being powerless we are beyond the seducing power of power. By being dead we strike fear in the hearts of the powerful, for their power has no sway over us.
In the economy of God, the great things that we do for the kingdom we do in peace and quietness. When we speak to our children of the things of God, we are bringing Reformation. When we visit the widow on our block, we are bringing Reformation. When we sit down in a moment of quiet and meditate on the powerful Word of God, we are bringing Reformation. When we wash the dishes after sharing a feast with our fellow saints, we are bringing Reformation. We bring Reformation to the world in the very ordinary tenor of our lives.
We have no need to sit next to kings, for we are seated beside the King. Indeed we are kings and queens with Him, seated in the heavenly places. We do not need to seize the engines of ecclesiastical authority, for we are already a royal priesthood. We need not seek positions of power and influence, that we might whisper in the ears of the powerful. Instead we must make known our desires to the Almighty, Him whom we are instructed to call, “Our Father, who art in heaven…” We need not tear out the great weeds of unbelief that infest the church at large. We need only tear out the great weeds of unbelief that infest our tiny little hearts, that we might instead bear much of the fruit of the Spirit.
We must re-form our understanding of Reformation. The world is changed through service, not power. It is changed by service to “the least of these” rather than the powerful. Perhaps to better understand this we ought to tell ourselves, the next time we find ourselves changing a dirty diaper, “Be of good cheer. For in this deed we shall light a fire across the globe such as shall never be put out.” Perhaps that is what it means to play the man.
There aren’t many moments that I remember discerning pain in my father’s voice. Listening to him recount the sad saga of Francis Gary Powers was one of them. In 1960 Powers piloted a U-2 spy plane across Soviet airspace. With a ceiling at 70,000 feet the plane was believed to be out of reach of Soviet air defenses. Despite this his plane was shot down, mostly intact and he reached ground safely, only to be taken prisoner. The sorrow in my father’s voice, however, wasn’t over what happened. The sorrow came when he explained that President Eisenhower told the American people that a weather plane had accidentally flown off course and crashed with no survivors. Not long after, Khrushchev produced Powers and the spy plane for all to see. It was, to my father, the first time our government had been caught in an undeniable lie. It broke his innocence.
Lying is bad, heartbreaking, conducive to crushing the faith of the trusting. There is shame and embarrassment as well. What is worse, however, is when lies are told with such a brazen and callous spirit in which everyone knows it’s a lie. The rotting cynicism of a government that doesn’t expect to be believed, only obeyed brings to mind the words George Orwell penned in 1984– If you want a vision of the future imagine a boot stamping on a human face- forever.
That time is here, unmasked with the shameless hypocrisy of various state and local governments who have told us we must not, because of the health risks, congregate, unless we are remembering the death of a civil rights icon. We must not gather in large numbers, unless we are protesting the death of George Floyd. There has been no attempt to nuance or spin this reality, no verbal two-step or rhetorical misdirection. It’s all been out there, in the open. “Yes, we said it is not safe for you to gather. But if the motive for the gathering is this favored political expression or that, then it is safe.” Absolutely shameless.
There is one thing sadder still. That we just accept this. Please don’t misunderstand. The issue isn’t COVID or quarantines. The issue isn’t the memorial services or the protests. The issue isn’t debates on how deadly the illness or how useful social distancing is. The issue is that the government has now reached a place where they don’t even pretend to have a rational defense of what they say, and that we move along as if we have not just crossed a Rubicon. They painted this on the side of the barn- “All group meetings are equal” and then, when it suited them, added, “but some are more equal than others.” And we just keep chewing our cud.
I don’t have a solution. I can’t begin to imagine how to even get back to that better place and time where they bothered to wrap a veil of plausibility around their lies. I don’t know how to teach us to once again blush in the face of such shame. All I can do is cling to this glorious truth, that the real government, the one with all the power, is well beyond the reach of surface to air missiles, and that He has never and will never lie. Maranatha Lord Jesus.
