Ephesians 6:4: Parenting in the Grip of Grace

 Okay, my friends, if you would grab a Bible and open with me to Ephesians chapter six. Ephesians chapter six. If you're a note taker, you feel free, take a seat for a moment. You're free to use the notes that are in your bulletin, if that would be helpful to you this week. Um. We got to celebrate Pastor Mark and I and other pastors in our region of watching.

Um, our beloved Nathan Duke take his oral ordination exams before the hills and Plains Presbytery. And Nathan is not here. He's enjoying a well-deserved time away with his family, um, the first time he's ever gone on vacation without the weight of school or an ordination exam upon him. And one of the, uh, the other ministers, uh, said.

That was one of the best ordination exams I've ever seen in Nathan Duke. So when Nathan gets back, be sure to, uh, tell him congratulations, and I know we'll wanna, uh, thank him for his studying and preparation for those exams. Pastor Mark is also away. We, we've always wanted to invest into other men and.

The pipeline of leadership of church planters. And so there's a young man named Jake Allen, who at our church plant in Grove that Mark led for many years. Jake was a mechanic and came to Jesus and grew up through the, um, discipleship of Pastor Mark and later went to seminary and he also is being installed as a pastor and Rogers, Arkansas this morning.

Isn't that great? So Mark is there to be part of his installation service and to celebrate the life of what God is doing in Jake Allen's life. So. All good things, and we come this morning to, um, what will probably be the shortest passage I've ever read and ever preached on Ephesians chapter six, verse four.

And so if you're willing and able, would you stand with me for the reading of God's word? Ephesians chapter six, verse four, fathers, do not provoke your children to anger. But bringing them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Grass withers flowers fade, but God's word stands forever. This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God. You may be seated. Please, father, would you now take this verse and would you shape our hearts by it? Would you teach us how we are your children disciplined and cared for by you? Our good father? I pray especially for fathers in the room, you would help us to take seriously our responsibility to disciple and nurture the children that you have given to our care.

I pray for every man in this church who's taken vows of membership, that he too is a parent, even if he doesn't have biological parents of his own, to also care for Shepherd. Encourage the covenant children in this church as though they were his own. So help us to be a church where we together point our children to the beauty of the gospel and we first recognize our own need for grace, and we parent out of that profound sense of need as your children.

We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Tom Pinkerton was a young dad in his mid thirties. He loved Jesus. He was faithful to his church. He worked hard to provide for his family, but lately home does not feel like the refuge he hoped it would be.

His wife Kara as exhausted, and she spends her days juggling toddler met Downs and. Schedules, even her homeschool schedule and the quiet ache of wondering if she's failing just seems to reverberate in her heart. Every parenting blog she reads gives her different advice, and every social media post feels like a reminder that someone else's family has it all figured out better than she does.

When Tom comes home after a long day, he can see the tension in Kara's face. So what does he do? Like all good fathers and husbands, he immediately tries to fix it. He rearranges the house, puts the pillows on the couch. He starts to come hard down on the on the kids. He starts to. Talk about better routines and firmer boundaries, and he's doing all that he knows in his wheelhouse to do.

But my friends, Tom is not making things better. He is managing. He's not shepherding. He's trying to stabilize the home by controlling all the moving parts. And so the air gets thick in the Pinkerton home, it gets thick with disappointment because over time, Kara begins to feel more and more unseen. Tom feels unappreciated.

The kids feel the temperature rise in the house, and on most evenings, everybody just retreats Tom into silence. Kara into her worry and the children into a book or into a screen. Good intentions everywhere in the Pinkerton home.

But grace seems to have been misplaced somewhere between the work and the homework and the bedtime routines.

If Tom and Kara Pinkerton were in your community group, or they came to see you for dinner, or they came to sit down with you and they said to you, we're trying our best, but we're just tired. We love our kids, but at the end of the day, we mostly feel frustrated and defeated. What would you say?

Would you tell them to try harder or organize better or enforce stricter routines? It is into that context that Paul's word in Ephesians four speaks. It was written for families like that, not only an ancient, an ancient Ephesus where they talked in the shadow of the temple of Artemis, but also right here in 2025.

Ephesians six, four is not for ideal families. It's for the real ones, because behind every door and Ephesus, just like behind every door in this church, there were wey parents and there were frustrated children who are trying to live out their faith in very close quarters. Friends, the word of God speaks into the most practical and intimate of our settings, especially this one because if you're like me, when I was writing this sermon, I just started crying as I wrote about the Pinkertons because it's the Altman.

And it's so many of you and grandparents, you're not beyond it because you watch your children lead their children a generation removed and you wonder what is wrong with that generation. They didn't do it like we did. I'm pretty sure you needed grace too.

Paul gives the vision here of Gracefield leadership. He redefines headship. He's done that in the earlier verses, not as an authority to control, but it is as a calling given by God to the husbands, the fathers of the house, to nourish their family in the admonition of the Lord. It is not a right to command.

It is a privilege and a responsibility to disciple. And so as you come to Ephesians six, four, you find this beautiful picture that Paul says The gospel must reach even into the tone of our parenting, even in the grace that saved us, must also reshape us and how we shepherd our children. So as you walk through this verse today, I just want to encourage all of you dads.

If you're a biological dad, this certainly hits home because you've been living this out. But if you're a legal guardian or a parent, also, this is for you. If you're a covenant father, if you've taken vows as a member of this church, oh, you may not have children of your own, but because you're a member of this church, you do because you have vowed to care for every child in this church.

And so these principles apply also to you. Paul shows us what redeemed parenting looks like when grace enters in through the front door. Freed by grace of our perfect Father, Christian fathers lead by nourishing and discipling their children in the same love that has rescued them. So before you run to techniques, notice that Paul doesn't go to a technique.

Paul looks somewhere deeper. He looks at the posture of the human heart because what droves most of our frustrations as fathers and as mothers is in a lack of effort, is the presence of fear. And parents lead out of anxiety rather than assurance out of a kind of guilt rather than grace. And that's the exactly the kind of exhaustion that's that Paul aims to heal.

So Paul shows us the father's. Posture, pattern and practice. I know I couldn't resist. Or three Ps. And again, the point is that freed by the grace of our perfect Father, Christian fathers lead by nourishing and discipling their children in the same love that has rescued them. First, what does he show us?

He shows us the father's posture. Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger. Paul begins these words to parents with a surprising address. He is going through the house table. He is addressing husbands and wives and children and fathers, and he gets to fathers and he says, oh, fathers, he's about to get to slaves and masters next.

In the next couple of weeks, he says, and you fathers. The Covenant household, the fathers held the authority of the house, and that was not some kind of cultural patriarchy. It was a humble responsibility to lead as the moral compass of that family, as the example to be the lead and chief repenter, to be the first one in the family to say, I need the grace of the gospel.

To wear that responsibility as it was given to you with full integrity and embrace every bit of it because you are called to lead out of grace, not out of guilt. Paul restores the original vocation of fathers to reflect our Heavenly Father's care in the home, and so notice what he does here in the pagan world of Ephesus, fathers ruled their homes by law and by fiat.

That is by demand. And yet the gospel reorient, orientates, that kind of authority. For Paul, he says, your leadership is not your own. Oh, fathers, it should mirror mine. Do not exasperate your children. Do not provoke them to anger. In Greek may, uh, may Perro, GTE is the Greek language. The word do not provoke.

To provoke means to stir up to anger. Para means to handle discipline. That kind of breeds a resentment instead of repentance, it's pushes a child away from you rather than draw him close. As we've seen all these verbs in this part of Ephesians are all present imperatives, which means that it's present action with ongoing continual practice.

And so he's saying, continue to not provoke your children. Do not keep exasperating them. Paul knows that fathers can misuse authority, and so this command prohibits a kind of posture or a tendency with which many of us fathers tend to lead in the discipline of our children. What does it look like in our own homes?

While provoking oftentimes happens when discipline of our children is detached from a relationship when our correction flows out of an anxiety, not out of an affection. And our father's voice carries law, but does not carry the good news that the child cannot lose his or her father's love. And when fathers lead by fear instead of faith, they provoke even if you don't intend to because your children see it.

They see you better than you can see yourself. And fear driven control communicates anxiety. And not security. And so, oh dear, brothers and sisters, faith Grace, gospel centered, gospel driven leadership creates safety and correction in your home without condemnation or ridicule. One of my, um, when my kids were young, one of my, um.

There's so many stories of how I've been a bad parent. I had to figure out which one I was gonna pick, but there was one moment I remember where a pastor friend of mine, we were talking about our kids and I was telling him about my kids and this or that, and he, he, I just kind of felt like, I don't get this right, everything's gonna fall apart.

And, and he, he replied, tell me how you en you are enjoying your children, just delighting in them. This is something the Lord reminds me of all the time. She delights in our children, and as the potter familia, I sometimes go in there and say, straighten up, take your hat off. Obey dad. And she just sometimes looks back and just smiles.

And she's an example of what this pastor told me. He said, listen, Christ is at work even where you fail, Blake. He's shaping their hearts in ways that you cannot see. It's not that you're gonna fail as a parent, it's that when you fail, do you go back to the same grace that you preach to others? So often, and friends.

I want us as a church to be able to be a place where parents can admit that they fail, but the admission of that failure means that actually we lean into these texts even harder, and we use the gospel even more clearly as we try to shepherd our families with beauty and with grace. The first thing he says is the father's posture.

You are called to lead faithfully. You're not called a guaranteed outcome in the church. Your children are holy. They are sanctified by being part of the covenant family of God, but you cannot guarantee their sanctity, if you will. You cannot be the one that controls all of their behavior, or you may outwardly be able to shape and control them.

But when they're 18 with tension, like a bottle ready to pop, they just wanna run. I've seen it time and time and time again. And so as parents, we are called to shape with grace and to help restrain their hearts, to point them to Jesus, to teach them about their need for grace, because we are the ones who need it even more.

And we're teaching them gradually and gradually. To be able to walk, not as little pharisees who do everything right, but as shepherded sons and daughters who walk toward a redeemer who loves them even when they fail, may per do not provoke. Paul's first command removes the illusion that parents can produce a righteousness in their own children.

The grace that saves us is the same grace that shapes our home. And when a father with a posture that tries to connect. Rather than simply correct, he doesn't just try to manage or control, but he connects. The home becomes an outpost of grace where the atmosphere of heaven and earth begin to touch. And that child knows it, his friends know it.

They begin to wanna hang out in your kitchen. Your house becomes magnetic. They want to be there. And if your children were to describe your leadership in your home, this is not rhetorical, it's for you, what would they say? Would they recall your rules or your nearness? Would they remember a correction or connection?

Which takes us to 0.2, the father's pattern. The father's pattern is to nourish and not neglect. Notice the contrast here. After the negative command, Paul immediately gives them the positive. He says, but bring them up. Notice that shift. There's a but there, there's a transition, a contrast. Paul corrects the fathers not by restraint.

He doesn't just say, stop it. He gives a new affection. He says, bring them up. Raise them up at Tray day. Nourish them, support them. It's the same word that Paul uses back in Ephesians 5 29 when he says, no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it just as Christ does the church. That's the pattern.

Christ's care is protective, it's patient and it's personal. Fathers ought to have a posture toward grace that have a pattern. Nourishing not neglecting. Are you still with me? This is the pattern that Paul alludes to all throughout the Old Testament. His words echo what the Old Testament has preached from the very beginning, Abraham, when God gave Abraham a land in a nation, he gave him a family mission, namely, to keep the way of the Lord, to pass on the faith in Genesis 1819, I've chosen him so that he will command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord.

To the old paths, or Moses received the same charge from the Lord in Deuteronomy four nine. Only take care of Moses and keep your soul diligent, lest you forget. And Moses said to the people of Israel and make these laws. Known to your children and to your children's children. And then in the famous Shama that you heard Luke and Hope read earlier in Deuteronomy six four, you shall teach them diligently to your children.

You shall talk of them when you sit in your home and when you walk by the way. And when you lie down. And when you rise the ordinary places that we are to continue to shepherd and teach our children. And then again in Deuteronomy 1119, he says almost the exact same thing verbatim as it to say that a child's formation is shaped by a thousand ordinary moments that develop into a worldview that leads to a lifestyle of faithfulness.

The Psalmist picks up the theme in Psalm 78 when he says, we will not hide them from our children, but we will tell the coming generation of the glorious deeds of the Lord. Why is it that we think it's so important to keep children in worship together with us? It's because we're telling them of the coming glory of the Lord.

It's intentional. Proverbs sharpens our focus with practical wisdom. Discipline your son for There is hope. I love this line. Do not set your heart on putting him to death, because literally in the ancient world, a father could put a son to death. If he disobeyed Proverbs 22, 6, train up a child on the way he should go.

You know the verse. And when he's old, he will not depart from it. Proverbs 29. Discipline your son and he will give you rest. He will give delight to your heart. In the early church, they saw this calling the same way. John Christo, the golden mouth preacher, preached on this passage and he told the fathers in his church that you must lead a little church in your home.

You are to shepherd their behavior. Yes, their behavior, but their souls teach scripture prayer. Teach the holiness of God as faithfully as you taught them how to walk and how to speak. Cryto said, would you leave your child untrained in worldly skills? How then will you leave them untrained in virtues?

Good question for Cryto. Neglecting the heart was spiritual starvation and faith is families. Fed as we tell the stories of what the Lord has done in our lives or around the dinner table. Worship is fostered as it's trained in the living room. Reminders of the gospel are whispered on those weary nights.

This is the kind of pattern that Paul is channeling. Please. Dude, there's a French philosopher named Ku Alu and he welcomed us into the world of technique. The modern West just needs technique, new skills to learn. That is not what Paul does here. Paul says There are postures and there are patterns. It is not in techniques, and it is a disposition of the heart, and it is the pattern of continuing to build them up in a thousand ways.

Over time. That's why some of us, when we ask really amazing parents, how did you do it? They don't really have an answer because it became so broad. They talked about the gospel so much, it just infiltrated their home. They couldn't put it in a list of 10 things they did. It was a disposition of their heart.

And you know it when you see it, but it's hard to articulate it. Don't provoke your children to anger, but bring them up, Paul commands. The point Paul tries to make is it's about formation, not reaction. It's about cultivation. You remember how, um, when Paul encouraged young Timothy, where Timothy was a young church planter, and he said that, Timothy, from your childhood, you had known the sacred scripture second Timothy through 15 because your mother and your grandmother had brought you up.

In the word, that's covenant pattern. That's covenant continuity. Faith nourished from one generation to the next. So like the negative, do not provoke the verb at TRE today. To build up or to nourish is also a present imperative, which means it keeps on going. You continue to build up in a thousand ways.

Nourishment is not a one time event. It is a daily pattern. That's the father's pattern to us, isn't it? He nourishes us by the table, by the encouragement of the means of grace, by his discipline of you, he doesn't neglect you. He moves toward you. Freed by the grace of our perfect Father Christian Father's lead by nourishing so far.

There's a posture, there's a pattern, and lastly, there's a practice. The father's practice. He goes on to write the very end of verse four in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, there's the curriculum. He moves from the heart of fatherhood. Don't provoke to the hands of fatherhood, nourish them to the mind of fatherhood, to form a godly atmosphere of disciplines and instruction that belongs to the Lord.

The word Padilla. Some of you who. Um, grew up in a classical homeschool movement. Certainly know this word, Padilla. It means to train or to form. It means a structured kind of correction. It's the root word of the word disciple. True discipleship shapes the formation of desires. It builds characters, it builds character, it builds love, and padea trains the will through consistent loves and.

This instruction, it literally means to put truth into the mind. It's an admonition that is mixed with a kind of encouragement warning together with wisdom that grace will amplify the truth when it's practiced in an atmosphere that stays centered on the truth of God's word. When it's practiced with a kind of posture and a pattern and a practice, the truth gets amplified by the grace and the light of the Lord's work in it through the parent toward the child.

And so Paul summarizes both of these words by the phrase of the Lord. The instruction and the discipline was to be of course, of him and of the Lord. Parenting means that you parent out of the same love that rescued you. And so fathers, men, fathers, and brothers in this room, you are the chief disciples and your family.

Honest question, are you?

It means a father reads scripture with their children. He apologizes when he is wrong. He reminds them by his own repentance that even dad needs. In so doing, he teaches them the gospel more eloquently than a thousand lectures ever could. And that's why Paul uses his hearing discipline and instruction to, they need consistent boundaries and they need spiritual formation.

Pad guides, the world of consistency and.

Shapes the mind through story and scripture and prayer entities are of the Lord rooted in grace, and they're connected by this abiding relationship and this connection that a father has with his children. And father is your discipline that should others maintain a redemptive aim. You bear the responsibility of husbands for how to this, how discipline is carried out.

It's time, it's timing, spirit of it.

You ensure that correction is both clothed and graces and it never denigrates into punishment. And when fathers begin to imitate this pattern and they begin to put it into practice, there's a sense of levity and joy in that house that becomes palpable. The amount of life there actually increases, not decreases because the father's not so uptight.

He knows he's gonna fail. He takes himself a little less seriously because he takes the gospel deadly seriously. He enjoys his children. He delights in them growing up and them making a mess. He delights in them. Maybe doing something socially that just seems so awkward. It may be embarrassing him, but does he react in a way that protects his reputation or shepherds and nurtures the child for his sake, the child's sake, her sake.

The husband who knows that apart from him, knows that none of these things in Ephesians six four, he can do on his own. And if I were to just pray right now and say, okay, let's pray, pastor Paddle in practice, get to it now, let's go. That would not be good news for you because you will not measure up to it.

And you would feel yourself and you just felt yourself feel the weight of the conviction as I've talked. But you know, the only way that we can parent is if we recognize that we have a heavenly Father who loves us in such a way that we can never not be infinitely loved by him. We're going to fail. And he knows that and he picks us up and he reminds us as his child.

Do it again. Go for it again. Try it with grace this time. Seizing your speech with salt. Shape them. I know it's late. I know you're tired. Shape their hearts for their sake, not for your own reputation. Go for it. Our hope is not in our perfection as fathers, but it is in our adoption by our Heavenly Father.

But we have a father in heaven who has called us to be his, and he never provokes us to wrath. He disciplines us. He restores us by his mercy. Do you know why that's possible? Because he put his wrath on only one of his sons, the Lord Jesus Christ for you, so that your Heavenly Father now has expended all of his wrath upon Christ so that you don't have to parent now out of fear that he's gonna come down on you.

You can feel, you can parent out of a sense of tremendous joy, that you have the affection of your Heavenly Father and that he loves you. And this helps even heal some of your relationships with your own fathers that have just tormented you for so long. You have a heavenly Father who sings over you, as we often say, and are been addictions.

The Lord your God is in your midst. He is a mighty one who will save. He rejoices over you even when you fail as a parent. And he says, lead by repentance. Come again. Oh. Nurture their hearts. Yes. And do it in a thousand ways. You are after correction, not control. You are after connection. You're not after trying to frame things so water tight that you neglect in your desire to nourish.

Grace multiplies the truth of God's glory and it empowers good leadership. When we understand that we are beloved sons, oh brothers, we become more than good fathers. We become good sons of our father. We become good Christians and believers who walk in repentance and faith. Those are the ones who begin to get the gospel.

They understand themselves more and more and more.

At the end of the day, every Christian home lives by the same miracle. Our home is held together by a grace that is greater than us. Amen. And Jesus enters our broken households. He bore failures and he rose to make us confident that we, to our children of our Father, who doesn't provoke us because he displayed his full wrath upon Christ the Son.

And he gives us the Holy Spirit to be able to nurture our children with a kind of posture, a pattern, and a practice that oozes with the grace that we've seen from Ephesians chapter one all the way through Ephesians chapter three. And so, dads, you don't lead for your Heavenly Father's, love for you, lead from it.

Love those children. One day when the work and the noise and the bedtime chaos, which is a kind of symphony and beauty, not to be denied, just rest in it. Those sleepless nights, they are for a season and they are part of the Lord's work to hone in you a heart that is bigger, to receive his grace, because those cries and those late nights are just his way of helping you recognize your utter need.

For grace and one day we will sit in glory at a new table, the family meal of the redeemed, and we will see by the son the Lord Jesus Christ's power and by his spirit, that we will be there with a father who has the right posture, who has the right pattern, who has the right practice of love toward us, and I'm pretty confident.

You look to your right and to your left, and you may just see Tom and Kara Pinkerton also there with you, and what a wonderful date will be in glory to celebrate and we can look back together on our parenting that we did together, O Trinity. You cannot do it alone that we did together. Every verb in this part of Ephesians is plural, you all, because we need each other to demonstrate this.

Posture, this pattern and this practice freed by the grace of our perfect Father, we are able to lead by nourishing and discipling our children in the same way that has rescued us. Hallelujah. Let's pray together.

Father, would you help us to recognize that we are children nourished by grace? Thank you, father, that you have never provoked us to wrath. Thank you to in your mystery. Redemption. You only laid down your wrath toward one that was your son. The Lord Jesus Christ. Help us not to offend your holiness by neglecting our responsibility to shepherd our children, and yet help us to do so in a way that is so grace filled that our children see the beauty of your Heavenly Father affection and care for them in our responsibility to lead and guide our homes.

When I pray for the fathers in this room, who long to be fathers but haven't been able to. You would help every covenant child in this church remind them that, oh, but they are fathers. Not in the biological sense, but in the realest sense there is of a covenant household of a church. So strengthen us to raise our children together, our community groups, to talk about our weaknesses and needs as parents for grandparents to come alongside the next generation, to shepherd them and care for them with the same grace that their heavenly father shows toward them.

And so help there to be a cascading waterfall of grace from generation to generation in this church that walks in holiness and beauty and truth in light of our desperate need for the grace of the gospel. And we pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.

Sermon transcript is computer generated.