Parents Who Do | Peaceful Parenting, Part 7

TLP 76: Parents Who Do | Peaceful Parenting, Part 7

7/28/2017

Hearers don’t have peace. If you want to be a peaceful parent, you need to be a doer. Join AMBrewster as discusses the final parental Peace Prerequisite.

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Next Episode: The Second Promise | Peaceful Parenting, Part 8

Spare the Rod | Punishment Versus Correction
Parents Who Think | Peaceful Parenting, Part 6
Parents Who Do | Peaceful Parenting, Part 7
The Second Promise | Peaceful Parenting, Part 8

Episode Notes

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Transcript

Introduction

Thank you again for joining us. Today we discuss the fifth and final Peace Prerequisite and get a full picture of the type of parent we need to be if we want to experience incomprehensible peace.It’s possible, but it will take some work. But don’t worry, God doesn’t leave us to accomplish what’s only possible through Him. No, He gives us everything we need for life and godliness.

But more on that in a minute.

We have an acronym we use a lot at Truth.Love.Parent. It’s LSR and it stands for “Listen, Learn, Subscribe, Share, Rate, and Review.” Subscribing, Rating, and Reviewing you only need to do one, but Listening, Learning, and Sharing can be done all the time. If you haven’t done all six of these steps, will you consider embracing LSR for us? We’d greatly appreciate it!

Once again, I cannot being to express the blessing this study has been to my soul. Just like you, there is so much in my personal parenting and my professional parenting that dangles huge temptations to anxiety and anger, but God’s truth has bastioned me and Christ Himself has taken charge of the garrison keeping a daily watch over my heart and mind. So, thank you for this opportunity to study God’s gracious, ever sufficient truth with you.

Topic

I foresee that — including today — we have only two more parts of our study left. Today we’ll look at the last Peace Prerequisite and next time we’ll see the final Peace Promise.

If you are new to our study, I strongly encourage you to start with episode 69. The experience will be immeasurably valuable.

But even if you’ve been with us since the beginning, it’s important to have a quick review:

1. Our Responsibility to God

At the beginning of our study we were reminded the absolute necessity of finding our joy in God. Psalm 33:1 says, “Shout for joy in the Lord, O you righteous!”
Our joy can’t be founded in things like our families, jobs, 401-k, or houses. We can’t allow our happiness to reside in obedient children, pleasant spouse, or decluttered garage.
As Christians who have been saved from eternal damnation and temporal impotence, how could we not rejoice in our God. And again, I say rejoice.

2. Our Responsibility to Others

When God, His Word, and His will are the only things that bring us true happiness, we will strive to live His Word and Will.
Everyone around us will be beneficiaries of our gentle spirit.
And because we have the Holy Spirit in us and the future expectation of the return of Christ, we have all the power and motivation we need to love everyone — no matter how unlovely.

3. Our Responsibility to Ourselves

But there will be times when we broken people living in this broken world are tempted to fear and anxiety.
In every single situation we must run to our highest joy — the very throne room of God and poor out our prayers and supplications. He’s the one who matters. He’s the one powerful and wise and loving enough to know what to do.
And I take it to Him with thanksgiving. I can do this because I’ve bathed myself in His Word, I know His promises, and I joy in Who He is and the relationship we have.

4. Our Responsibility to Reality

God’s reality is the only reality. Everything else is a delusion.
Therefore, I need to align my thoughts with God’s reality.
I will only dwell on that which is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellence, and praise worthy. Because those are the only realities.
Why bother functioning off a delusion.

And today we look at the fifth and final parental Peace Prerequisite from Philippians 4.

But first I have clarify something. Do you really want peace in your parenting? I know it’s easy to say you do, but if you’re not willing to intentionally and premeditatedly take steps to be the parents God wants you to be then you have to get real with yourself and admit that you don’t really want God’s peace.

What do I mean by that? It works like this.

Sometimes what we want is the destination without the journey. You want a fit body, but you don’t want to embrace the diet necessary to attain it. You want a higher standard of living, but you don’t want the non-existent weekends and overtime necessary to make the extra money. You say you want peace in your home, but you’re not willing to really rejoice in God, be gentle with your kids, shun anxiety by thankful prayer, and think in a sanctified way.

If that’s the case, the best thing you can do for yourself is admit that you’re not really interested in God’s unfathomable peace, but that instead you really want everything to go your way and for everyone in your family to be okay with that.

And you know as well as I do that that’s never going to happen.

But if you really do want God’s peace, and you’re really interested in fulfilling your responsibility to God, others, yourself, and reality, then you’re ready for the fifth and final Peace Prerequisite.

5. We have a responsibility to Truth.

Paul puts the finishing touches on his dissertation on peace with an umbrella-like admonition to do all that Paul has revealed about our responsibilities toward God. Once again, he layers the verbs in order to leave nothing out.

Have you learned from me? Do it.

Have you received it from me? Do it.

Have you heard it from me? Do it.

The surface implications are two-fold:

If we want peace, we mustn’t only obey the 4 Peace Prerequisites we’ve study to date, we must also attend to the whole of biblical teaching.
If we have peace, people will be able to learn from us. Paul clearly experienced the peace he’s writing about, and it’s because he glorified God with his life that he received the Peace Promises from God. But it’s also because he glorified God with his life that other people (including us) could learn how to have peace. If you are living correctly and experiencing peace, your life will be a veritable textbook to students of peace.

So, we see that peace is the natural and inevitable by-product of a life that . . .

rejoices in God,
loves all men because it loves God,
rejects anxiety because it runs to God in times of trouble,
thinks about only those things that God loves,
and strives in God’s power to glorify God in all things.

Peace Promise II

“And the God of peace will be with you.”

This promise has a slightly different flavor than the first. The first promise said that our hearts and minds would be protected in Christ. This one promises that the God who creates the peace and in is the eternal source of the peace will be with us!

The simple beauty is staggering.

“I will be with you.”

Eleven times in the Old Testament God speaks these words to His children, and every times we see a prerequisites/promise pair.

So Why The Prerequisites?

It’s been said and sung that love should be unconditional. I agree with that. God loves us even though we haven’t done a single thing to deserve it. But what is love? Love is doing what is in the best interest of the thing loved.

Everyone agrees that sending people to heaven is loving, yet send someone to hell and you’re a hateful monster.

We barely have time to even glimpse at this doctrine, but we must understand why God a loving God puts prerequisites on things as important as salvation and peace.

Please remember that the sole end of all things is God. He’s the only One that matters. Our salvation and sanctification are all about Him. Therefore, when an individual rejects God, His preeminence, and His glory, God cannot simply lavish His blessing on them for two reasons.

God cannot support what rejects His truth. If God allowed unregenerate souls into heaven, His perfect, holy glory would no longer be the preeminent goal of the universe. At that moment, men’s happiness would become to greatest mission of God, which would mean men’s happiness would become a god. There can be nothing greater that God and His truth, so it stands that no one who rejects God will be able to enjoy Him for all eternity.
God loves us too much to lie to us. Living our own way always ends in destruction., but if God lets us deny Him and yet still sees fit to usher us into heaven, His Word becomes a lie.

Isn’t that Earning Grace?

When we work out our faith in God, we are not earning salvation. We are simply being what we have become in Christ.

Receiving God’s gift of incomprehensible peace only when we submit to His way of living isn’t earning peace. Oil and water do not mix, but once two drops of water have joined, you will never separate them. As long as we keep living like oil, we’ll never be able to appreciate the benefits of being water. God’s perfect peace is waiting like an ocean of water for our tiny drop to disappear into its depths, but until we start living like a drop of water, we will never experience it.

We will only experience divine peace when we start living like the divinely regenerated people we are. Do you want to have the peace of Christ? Live like a Christian. Do you want God’s soul rest to wash over you? Live the way God lives.

Conclusion

And to help you understand and review it, we have free episode notes for you linked in the description of today’s show.

On our next episode we finish our study in Peaceful Parenting by looking at the second Peace Promise in Philippians 4. I hope you’ll join us as we put on the finishing touches, stand back and enjoy the immense vista that is God’s promise of peace, and then roll up our sleeves and take our first steps to being an intoxicatingly peaceful parent.

See you next time.