Live to Love (the right things)

​TRANSCRIPT

Read 1 John 2:15-17

Well, I've turned down this road. I think thousands of times - the road that leads back here to Victory Academy. As I go down this road, sometimes I think about what I'm going down at for, going down at the minister to people, to bring the hope of the gospel to desperate situations. I'm also going to my house, which has my children in it. My family struggles with the same things that other families struggle with. First John talks about the trifecta of sin: the desires of our eyes, things that we see and want that the desires of our flesh, the things that make us comfortable and feel good and the pride of life, just that I am somebody. Those things draw upon us all. Each one of us struggles with that. I would say parents struggle with those three things. As much as kids struggle with those three things. I struggle with them. As much as my children, my wife and I need Christ. We need to live redemptively. We get hung up on our kids, the desires of their eyes or the desires of their flesh or whatever, as it plays out on whatever platform they put their eyes on and put their hearts on. But the reality is our need is for Christ to redeem us, to draw us, not just to the place where we're acceptable or we are able to enter heaven, but that we would live redemptively too. We need to learn how to live life successfully here, where we're called, not just to go to heaven, we're called to glorify God right here. And as parents, that means that we need to learn to seize every opportunity and to set every stage we can to parent redemptively to bring that hope of Christ to our children, because they're struggling with that trifecta of sin.

They know that they have struggles. They may not want to talk about them. They may not want to acknowledge them. They may want to hide them, but they also know that that their sin is having a consequence. It is having repercussions, if you would, on their own lives and those sins and those desires that are competing with the desire to love God, those things are, are deep. And we need to speak truth into that. We need to be looking for how we can open the scriptures, how we can take the scriptures and make those a part of our every day so that our kids are saturated with it. They're being saturated with everything else. They're being saturated with the world, trying to satisfy them, trying to draw them into the world. We need to be very adept, very proactive, very planned to bring the truths of God to bear on today on the temptations of the day.

How we do that? We've got to take the Word of God and make it a part of our own lives. Deuteronomy is so clear about that. In chapter six, we make it ours before we attempt to make it somebody else's. Before we diligently teach it to someone, we have to know it ourselves. You can't teach something. You don't know. I've tried. It doesn't work. We teach what we know and we've got to get past the yelling and screaming and the belittling and the aggravating and the catching and the policing. And we've got to get down to where we are actually taking the Word of God and delicately, deliberately sharing it with our children. We have to really model the two great commands. We have to love God ourselves. And we have to love our neighbor as ourselves because our children are trying to figure out how to do that. So as a parent, get into the Word yourself, memorize it, learn it, become a student of the Word so that as you become a student of your own child, you have something to offer them. You have a new love. You have something better for them to set their affections on that. They might grow up through the struggle, learning to love God with all their heart and learning to love other people like they love themselves. They might fulfill the purpose that God has for them. When they look in the rear view mirror, they can say, "wow, I've lived to honor and glorify God."

​What a joy.