Speaking the Truth in Love

TRANSCRIPT

read Ephesians 4:13-15

Well, I do get a lot of phone calls from parents who are saying, "so what are you going to do different, with this struggling teenager of mine, different than what I'm already doing?" Well, maybe not much. I don't know, but what I do know is there, there is a transition taking place between childhood and adulthood and that teenagers, right dead center in the middle of it. And he's right into all this change. And the scriptures are very have, have painted a very robust picture of the transition between childhood and adulthood in a spiritual realm. And we can take a look at that because he uses it as a picture for the spiritual realm. We can also understand that that it's a picture and it works because we know that a child doesn't think like an adult, there's a change, the transition taking place. And sometimes it's kind of nebulous where that actually switches. In fact, I will say even today I have some childish ways of thinking at times. And that's probably where all of us are. We're still growing in our mature adulthood as Christians, for sure but understand that teens are people. Sometimes we kind of forget that because we get kind of in the messy struggle between this or in this transition time between child and adult, and it is messy. And it gets like sometimes very difficult as we deal with our own mess as we're growing. And then we're trying to help our kids through their misses. But understand that teens are people little scary at times, but they're still people and people need to grow. You need to grow. I need to grow.

As we look at teens needing to grow, we see that it's a process in chapter four of Ephesians verse 13. It says until we all attain, there's a process of growth that's going on. We also note further in there that it's a time of instability talks about children, uh, that they would no longer be children tossed to and fro by waves carried about by every wind that blows along, ah, by the craftiness and the deceitful schemes that people come up with. And I have to do is just spend two minutes on the internet and you can see the deceitful schemes. Sometimes they're not so easy to see. So teens are people that need to grow. We know they're in a process. We know they're unstable and we know that they believe things that aren't true. And that's where the Bible comes in. And he speaks here, um, rather than being this, this child that's blown around, we need to speak truth in love and grow up in every way to be Christ-like.

So what we need is we need truth spoken into our lives, and we need that truth spoken in a loving way. And a lot of times, honestly, we speak truth. A lot of times we'll speak truth, but sometimes that truth is more motivated by what we're going to get out of it. I want my team to make me more comfortable, or I want my kid to just not be a hassle. We want compliance. We want things to be easy for us. We're tired of griping, retired of, of pushing and shoving to get our kids, to do what we want them to do. Well, really this, this is, this is different than that. This is speaking truth wrapped in love. I want my kid to get this because of what it does for him now, because of what it does for me, because of what it does for him. And I need to take that love and understand that that means listening. I've really got to listen to understand the heart and really if I can draw my kid into an explanation of his own heart, if I can get him talking about that, it's time to sit back and listen, because I want to hear where this kid's heart is. And I want to help him go through the struggle and grow.

​And that's where I think we specialize. If you could say, in really working to take that truth and wrap it in love for your kid.