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Parenting the Pew (Christ the Redeemer)
Christ Church on September 9, 2025
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Deuteronomy

On Loving the Standard (Biblical Child Discipline in an Age of Therapeutic Goo #9)

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INTRODUCTION

The chances are pretty good that over the years you have heard me say something like this. You task as parents is not to get your kids to conform to the standard, but rather to get them to love the standard. This may seem straightforward and simple, but there are actually layers to it. As we pursue this, we turn to the greatest commandment in the Bible, which is where we find the authority to say things like “love the standard.”

THE TEXT

“Now these are the commandments, the statutes, and the judgments, which the Lord your God commanded to teach you, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go to possess it: That thou mightest fear the Lord thy God, to keep all his statutes and his commandments, which I command thee, thou, and thy son, and thy son’s son, all the days of thy life; and that thy days may be prolonged. Hear therefore, O Israel, and observe to do it; that it may be well with thee, and that ye may increase mightily, as the Lord God of thy fathers hath promised thee, in the land that floweth with milk and honey. Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates” (Deuteronomy 6:1–9). 

SUMMARY OF THE TEXT

This passage is where we find the greatest commandment in all of Scripture. We know this on the authority of the Lord Jesus Himself (Matt. 27:36-40). Now God gave Israel all His laws and statutes, in order that they might live them out in the land (v. 1). Doing this, they would fear the Lord, keep His word, from grandfather to grandson, through lengthened days (v. 2). Hear and do, O Israel, that you might prosper (v. 3). Then we come to the great Shema, hear, O Israel. The Lord your God is one (v. 4). You shall love the Lord your God with all that you have and are (v. 5). These words must be taken into the heart (v. 6). From the heart, you are to teach them diligently to your kids—all the time (v. 7). Bind these commandments to yourself (v. 8), and post them on your house and gates (v. 9).   

LOVE CAN BE TAUGHT

The first thing to take away from this passage is the understanding that love is a thing that can indeed be taught. But it cannot be taught by people who do not understand it themselves. Those who would teach this love to others must have it first themselves. Before you teach it to your children, you must be doing it yourself. Love the Lord your God with all your heart (v. 5). The words of His commandments must reside in your heart (v. 6). From the heart, it flows to the mouth, and from the mouth to the environment of the entire home. 

Religious instruction of children must not be pro forma or perfunctory. You are not ticking boxes, but rather nurturing souls, starting with your own.

COMMANDED TO LOVE

The fact that we are commanded to love does not take away from the nature of God’s grace. In his Confessions, Augustine once said, “Give what you command, and then command whatever you will.” Our obedience to this kind of requirement is entirely dependent upon the sovereign grace of God. 

“Therefore thou shalt love the Lord thy God, and keep his charge, and his statutes, and his judgments, and his commandments, alway” (Deuteronomy 11:1). 

“In that I command thee this day to love the Lord thy God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments and his statutes and his judgments, that thou mayest live and multiply: and the Lord thy God shall bless thee in the land whither thou goest to possess it” (Deuteronomy 30:16). 

The fruit of the Spirit, the working of His grace in our lives, maps very nicely onto the commands of God. What is the greatest command? Love (Dt. 6:4-9). What is the first fruit? Love (Gal. 5:22). It is the same thing all the way through—joy (Phil. 4:4; Gal. 5:22), peace (John 14:1; Gal. 5:22), longsuffering (Eph. 4:2; Gal. 5:22), gentleness (Tit. 3:2; Gal. 5:22), goodness (1 Tim. 6:18), faith (John 8:24; Gal. 5:22), meekness (1 Pet. 3:4; Gal. 5:23), and temperance (Tit. 2:2; Gal. 5:23). God gives us commands, and His Spirit grows obedience to those commands in us. Our responsibility is not to go obey Him on our own, and then bring that obedience back to Him, expecting some kind of a reward. No, we go in His grace, and we come back in His grace.

And we model for our children what this is like. As we walk along the road, we have them by the hand. 

Children learn by imitation primarily. “Therefore be imitators of God as dear children” (Ephesians 5:1). 

GOOD AND GODLY TEACHING

What does it mean to teach? It means to love your God, and the subject you are handling, in the presence of a student, whom you also love. It means to love God and your neighbor, and then to work out the problem together. 

This always brings us back to Jesus Christ. There is nothing worse, nothing more suffocating, than to be trapped in a Christless Christianity. Of course, this is not really Christianity at all, but there appears to be an abundant supply of this counterfeit nonetheless. A Christianity without Christ has no blood in it, no salt, no sap. 

But when Christ is present . . .? How would it be possible not to love the standard? “Great peace have they which love thy law: And nothing shall offend them” (Psalm 119:165; cf. 97,113, 163).

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Compassion and Its Counterfeits

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THE TEXT

12 Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, 13 bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14 And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. (Colossians 3:12-14)

6 “If your brother, the son of your mother, or your son or your daughter or the wife you embrace or your friend who is as your own soul entices you secretly, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’ which neither you nor your fathers have known, 7 some of the gods of the peoples who are around you, whether near you or far off from you, from the one end of the earth to the other, 8 you shall not yield to him or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him, nor shall you spare him, nor shall you conceal him. 9 But you shall kill him. Your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterward the hand of all the people. (Deuteronomy 13:6-9)

INTRODUCTION

These two passages display the complexity of the biblical witness on compassion. In the first, we are to clothe ourselves in compassion (literally: bowels of mercy), which leads us to bear with each other and forgive each other as love binds us all together. Elsewhere Paul “yearns for the Philippians with the affection of Christ” (Phil. 1:8). Affection and sympathy are bonding agents (Phil. 2:1), enabling us to be single-minded and in full accord. The Lord, who is compassionate and merciful, is our ultimate model for compassion, and he has given us the fathers and mothers as images of his compassion (Isa 49:15; 1 Kings 3; Psalm 103).

In the second, we are forbidden to show pity or compassion on those who would entice us to idolatry. Similar commands are given with respect to first degree murder and lying in court (Deuteronomy 7:16, 19:13, and 19:21). In such cases, God is adamant that “your eye shall not pity them.” And again, in doing so, we are to follow God as our model, who executes his judgment without pity or compassion (Jer. 13:14; Lam. 2:17; Ezek. 5:11; 7:4, 9; 8:18).

So how should we make sense of this?

DEFINING COMPASSION AND ITS VICES

The virtue of compassion (or sympathy) is habitual inclination to share the suffering and pain of the hurting which moves us to relieve their suffering and pursue their ultimate good. As Lewis writes, “Pity is meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery.” The biblical imperative is to weep with those who weep, to clothe ourselves with “bowels of mercy,” to relieve suffering because, like Christ, we are “moved with compassion.”

Virtues go wrong through defect or excess; a defect of compassion is apathy, a callous refusal to identify with and share the pain and suffering of others. On the other hand, (untethered) empathy is an excess of compassion, when our identification and sharing of the emotions of others overwhelms our minds and sweeps us off our feet. Empathy loses sight of the ultimate good, both for ourselves and for the hurting.

And this is precisely our challenge. As Chesterton put it, “The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”

THE PASSION OF PITY

We live in a sentimental age, one that is drowning in a sea of feelings. And thus we are more susceptible to the manipulation of empathy. C.S. Lewis helps us to see ways that empathy or pity goes wrong. In The Great Divorce, Lewis describes the problems with the Passion of Pity. In the final interaction between Sarah Smith and her husband Frank, Sarah describes Frank’s besetting sin, the sin that he must turn away from if he is to be saved.

[Stop] using pity, other people’s pity, in the wrong way. We have all done it a bit on earth, you know. Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity.

You see, I know now. Even as a child you did it. Instead of saying you were sorry, you went and sulked in the attic . . . because you knew that sooner or later one of your sisters would say, “I can’t bear to think of him sitting up there alone, crying.” You used their pity to blackmail them, and they gave in in the end. And afterwards, when we were married . . . oh, it doesn’t matter, if only you will stop it. (131–132)

The passion of pity (or the sin of empathy) makes us vulnerable to emotional blackmail.

Emotional blackmail happens when a person equates his or her emotional pain with another person’s failure to love. They aren’t the same. A person may love well and the beloved still feel hurt. They may then use their felt pain to blackmail the lover into admitting guilt he or she does not have. Emotional blackmail says, “If I feel hurt by you, you are guilty.” There is no defense. The hurt person has become God. His emotion has become judge and jury. Truth does not matter. All that matters is the sovereign suffering of the aggrieved. (Piper)

Empathy, because it is myopic, can lead to great cruelty. “Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to cruelty. Most atrocities are stimulated by accounts of the enemy’s atrocities; and pity for the oppressed classes, when separated from the moral law as a whole, leads by a very natural process to the unremitting brutalities of a reign of terror” (Lewis). 

THE ANTIDOTE

So how should we live? First, we must repent of the Sulks. We must refuse to wield our afflictions (especially our minor afflictions) as tools of manipulation. It’s easy to magnify our inconveniences in order to elicit sympathy from those who love us, to make martyrs out of ourselves and send our loved ones on a guilt trip. The Sulks are not only a danger for children.

Second, we must refuse to wield the suffering of others in the same manner. Compassion is a great good, a spur to joy to help those who are suffering. But the line between spurring joy to help misery and using the misery of others to steer the merciful is not always easy to see. In their empathetic zeal, advocates can often overthrow other virtues, such as honesty and justice, in their zeal to help the hurting.

Third, we must be aware of the link between feminism and toxic empathy. By God’s design, women are the more empathetic sex. It’s why women are the glue that holds communities together. Crucially, however, what is a blessing in one place is a curse in another. The same impulse that leads a woman to move toward the hurting with comfort becomes a major liability when it comes to guarding the doctrine and worship of the church. Like in Deuteronomy, there are times–usually involving grave error or gross sin–when God forbids empathy and pity. It’s one reason why the empathetic sex is ill-suited to the ministerial office.

Fourth, refuse to concede what cannot be conceded. Don’t embrace the lie. Biblical compassion reserves the right not to blaspheme. This is especially true in an age of gay “weddings” and other celebrations of wickedness. Be willing to be labeled “heartless” as you seek the ultimate good of other people by refusing to join them in the Lie (even under pressure from other soft-hearted Christians). 

Finally, we must labor to be faithfully compassionate, weeping with those who weep, considering both their immediate feelings and their ultimate good. In compassion, we meet people in suffering and say, “This is hard. I know you feel that way. I’m with you in this, and I have hope.”

At the same time, we refuse to be totally immersed in the feelings of another. We refuse to allow other people to steer our emotional vehicles. We resist attempts to subordinate truth to the feelings and sensitivities of the most reactive and immature members of a community. We move deliberately deliberately and intentionally into the pain of others while clinging to Jesus for dear life. 

As Christians, we must have deep feeling for the hurting, the broken, and the suffering. We are, after all, called to clothe ourselves with “bowels of mercies.” But our feelings, and our sharing in the feelings of others, must be tethered to Truth, to Reality, to Christ. God help us. 

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Covenant Peanut Butter & Jelly (What is “Reformed” Anyway? Part 3) (King’s Cross)

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INTRODUCTION

One of the great recoveries of the Reformation was the notion of covenant. The doctrine of the covenant steers a biblical “middle way” between sacerdotal mysticism on the one hand and subjective mysticism on the other. God’s covenant is His objective personal relationship with human beings in history, with attendant blessings and curses. And because God deals with us in this way, we also deal with one another broadly through covenants in our families and nations. 

The Text: “The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Dt. 29:29).

SUMMARY OF THE TEXT

The Bible teaches that there are inscrutable thoughts and ways of God far past our finding out, but His covenant Word to us is not one of those things. That Word is the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and it has come down to us by particular promises to particular people in history, sealed with sovereign signs, culminating in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh for us and for our salvation. This sure Word of the Covenant is for us and for our children forever that we might walk with God under His blessing. 

COVENANT OVERVIEW

In the beginning, God made a covenant with Adam commonly called the Covenant of Creation (also Covenant of Works/Life) in which Adam, as the federal head of the human race (Rom. 5:12-19), was promised life for obedience and death for disobedience (Gen. 2:15-17). When Adam disobeyed and broke that first covenant (cf. Hos. 6:7), God in His mercy made a second covenant, called the Covenant of Grace, in which He promised that the seed of the woman would one day crush the head of the seed of the serpent (Gen. 3:15). God demonstrated that grace in the substitutionary blood and skins of beasts by which God clothed and covered the nakedness and shame of Adam and Eve (Gen. 3:21). This Covenant of Grace was renewed with Noah after the flood and signified by the rainbow (Gen. 9:9-13), with Abraham and signified by circumcision (Gen. 12, 15, 17), with Moses and signified by the law and the sacrifices (Ex. 19-24, Lev. 1-7), and later with David and signified by the kingdom and the temple (2 Sam. 7). 

These older administrations can all be referred to as the “Old Covenant/Testament,” types and shadows pointing to the coming of Christ, and now fulfilled in Christ. We call this new administration of the Covenant of Grace the “New Covenant/Testament” in His death and resurrection, and His heavenly rule and ministry for us and for the whole world, and it is signified by baptism and the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 10-11, Heb. 8-10). So we usually speak of one overarching Covenant of Grace with two administrations (Old and New Covenant). 

COVENANT PRINCIPLES

Woven into this broad storyline is a pattern of God’s dealings with people as corporate bodies, specifically as families and nations. The Bible calls marriage a “covenant” and children are the natural, organic fruit of that covenant, such that Joshua can speak on behalf of his household (Prov. 2:17, Mal. 2:14, Ps. 127-128, Josh. 24:15). Every husband is the covenant “head” of his wife just as Christ is the head of His bride, the Church (Eph. 5:23). We see this covenant structure still in force when the promises of the covenant are applied to Gentile kids in Ephesus (Eph. 6:1-2). This is also why Job can pray and offer sacrifices on behalf of his grown children (Job 1:5). Peter preaches the gospel promises for “you and your children” (Acts 2:39), and Paul tells the Philippian jailer that if he believes, he will be saved and his household (Acts 16:31). 

On the political side, Abraham made a “covenant” with Abimelech (Gen. 21:27), Isaac did the same (Gen. 26:28), and Jacob made a covenant with Laban (Gen. 31:44). Later, Jonathan and David made a covenant (1 Sam. 20:16, 23:18), as did Ben-Hadad and King Ahab (1 Kgs. 20:34). While Israel was a uniquely “holy nation” prefiguring the church (1 Pet. 2:5-9), there was also a civil aspect of the covenant renewed by faithful kings, re-committing to be faithful as a nation to God, as did Ezra and Nehemiah (2 Chron. 23:16, 34:31, Ez. 10:3, Neh. 9:38). All of this implies that while there is one, overarching Covenant of Grace administered through the Church, God has also established the covenant entities of family and nation, which are bound together by particular oaths and constitutions, according to their assignments under Christ.

APPLICATIONS

You Are Not Your Own: One of the central temptations of the Devil has always been toward self-centered individualism. Follow your own heart, find yourself, look out for number 1 are all slogans of this false gospel. If you try to find your own life like that, you will most certainly lose it. But if you lose your life in Christ, you will surely find it. And you will find it in your various covenant assignments to your family, church, and nation. You are who God says you are (Ps. 100:3). This world is what God says it is: marriage, justice, truth, goodness, and beauty.

Objectivity of the Covenant: Everyone born from Adam is born objectively under the death-curse of his covenantal disobedience. Just as God objectively marked Abraham’s descendants with a sign of His intention to save, so He does the same thing with baptism in the New Covenant. What is outwardly signified must be inwardly embraced and affirmed, but no amount of denial can erase that mark of God. This is how we may speak of faithful covenant members and unfaithful covenant members. And all of this means that we can trust His word. Let God be true and every man a liar (Rom. 3:4). You can hold God to His personal Word.

Real Blessings & Curses: Sometimes, friendly critics might accuse us of finding “covenants” everywhere and pretty soon we will be talking about covenant peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (and why not?). But the real point is that there is no neutrality anywhere. Everything is either pleasing to God or not. This is God’s world. While it is true that for all those in Christ, the curse of death has been taken away (Gal. 3:13), there are still blessings and curses in the New Covenant (1 Cor. 10-11). But this is a matter of great comfort for all who believe: “let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not” (Gal. 6:7-8).

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Chestertonian Calvinism (What is “Reformed” Anyway? #2) (King’s Cross)

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INTRODUCTION

Pastor Wilson has used this phrase “Chestertonian Calvinism” for a number of years to describe the flavor of Calvinism we are aiming for. It’s a riff on something C.S. Lewis once said about the Puritans: “On many questions, and specially in their view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party; if we may without disrespect so use the name of a great Roman Catholic, a great writer, and a great man, they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries.” 

In other words, far from the morose and harsh caricatures, the legacy of John Calvin is joy and gladness, astonishment and relief, and the early accusations were that, if anything, they were too celebratory when it came to the gifts of bed and board.  

So as we go over the basics of what has come to be called “Calvinism,” we want to do so in an obedient and humble way, which is to say: the right kind of humility before these high doctrines ought to result in a robustly earthy joy. 

The Text: “Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee, and shall pursue thee… Because thou servedst not the LORD thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things” (Dt. 28:45-47).

SUMMARY OF THE TEXT

These verses come in the midst of a fierce litany of promised curses ranging from their cities to their fields to their bodies, weather, plagues, war, insanity, pestilence, and famine (Dt. 28:15-44), concluding with horrific descriptions of sieges, disease, homelessness, and slavery (Dt. 28:48-68). And here at the center of these terrible warnings is the explanation: a joyless disobedience. The curses will be God’s sign to the world of their sin (Dt. 28:46). And the central sin would be a failure to serve God with gladness of heart, with hearts overflowing (Dt. 28:47). 

WHAT IS CALVINISM?

John Calvin lived from 1509-1564, spending most of his life and ministry in Geneva, Switzerland after being converted through the influence of Martin Luther’s preaching and teaching spreading to France. Calvin’s most famous work is his Institutes of the Christian Religion which is a lengthy commentary on the Apostles’ Creed. Calvin’s system of doctrine included Bible teaching on worship, sacraments, church government, civil government, family life, as well as salvation and prayer. But in popular parlance, people sometimes refer to the “Five Points of Calvinism,” which were actually the result of the Synod of Dort in the Netherlands from 1618-1619. Calvin certainly taught what the Synod concluded, but his teaching was much broader.

The primary concern of the Synod was to settle a controversy began by the teaching of Jacob Arminius (1560-1609), theology professor at Leiden University. After Arminius’s death, 43 of his followers presented Articles of Remonstrance to the States General of the Netherlands in 1610, seeking government protection for their teachings that 1) election is based on foreseen faith, 2) the universality of Christ’s atonement, 3) the free will and partial depravity of man, 4) the resistibility of grace, and 5) the possibility of a lapse from grace. The Canons of Dort are the confession that resulted, answering each of those five points with the Bible’s teaching on the 1) Total depravity and inability of man to choose God, 2) the Unconditional election of God’s grace, 3) the Limited or definite atonement of Christ’s work, 4) the Irresistible or efficacious grace of God, and 5) the Perseverance or preservation of the saints (hence the shorthand “TULIP” acronym). And the central thing is that at every step of salvation, God gets all the glory.  

CHESTERTONIAN JOY

G.K. Chesterton himself either misunderstood Calvin or had the misfortune to only interact with the worst sorts of Calvinists, and therefore took routine potshots at the name in his writings. But there is a strong case to be made that he was actually far more Calvinist than he realized, and at the very least Calvin and his descendants were far more “Chestertonian” than he knew.

What do we mean? First, Chesterton’s conversion was coming to an almost giddy, childlike joy in God and how He ruled His world: “A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality… they always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough… It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening ‘Do it again’ to the moon… In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician… I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.” 

Calvinism simply affirms the same point and that the Magician, the Great Story-Teller has reached down into their sorry, sinful lives and made them alive by His sheer grace. Perhaps the word that best describes what a true Calvinist ought to feel is astonishment – that begins with the sheer grace of eternal life and overflows: “In whom [Christ] also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of Him who worketh all things after the counsel of His own will…” (Eph. 1:11). “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?” (Rom. 8:28, 32)

APPLICATIONS

Bacon & Beer: Yes, God chose you from before the foundation of the world, and He chose you so that you would rejoice before Him for the abundance of all things: this includes forgiveness, adoption, and Scripture, but also bacon, beer, and the marriage bed in this life, and infinite joy in the world to come. “In Thy presence is fullness of joy; at Thy right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Ps. 16:11). True biblical Calvinism results in deep gratitude for all of God’s gifts. 

This is our Father’s world: All the nations belong to Christ. He made them. He purchased them with His blood. He governs all things for our good and His glory. We are more than safe; we are more than conquerors (Rom. 8:37). Far from turning this world into a grim, faceless, grinding machine, the sovereignty of God turns the world into the greatest adventure story, and we get to be bit parts. True biblical Calvinism delights in serving the King in every area of life.

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