Mentoring and Parenting
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Message M6: Mentoring and Parenting November 30, 2008
Text: Eph. 6:4
Big Idea: Mentoring and parenting involve sharing love, but also disciplining the young in the Lord.
Actor Bruce Willis of the Die Hard series lived life as a hard partier.
He said, I drank a lot…I took drugs…it wasn't until I had a kid that I realized it was my job and my wife's job to teach our children the difference between right and wrong.
Every man knows there is a line between good and bad and that, unless you're a sociopath, you know where that line is. That means honesty, kindness, trying to help people, not hating, and teaching that to my children. My life's a work in progress—that's how I view it.
My wife Sakiko, long before she envisioned becoming a mother, had a habit of saying if you want to grow up, you need to have a child. She was NOT necessarily thinking of a biological child, but someone you are responsible to care for.
We have been in this series on marriage and singleness in the Spirit, and today, in this final message in the series, we are going to look at what it means to be a mentor or a parent.
Whether we are single or married, we may be called now or in the future to a mentoring or parenting role or both.
Paul in Ephesians 6, after speaking about marriage in chapter 5, talks about parenting, and the same principles he offers to parents can be used by those who will mentor others.
(Let me also say here as some of you turn to the passage, that if issues have been stirred for you in this series on marriage, singleness and sexuality, I would encourage you to talk to trusted Christian friend, or counselor or pastor.)
In Ephesians 6:4 Paul says:
4 Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
As Paul writes these words he would have been aware that many people in his Greco-Roman world did not want to get married, or have children, because of the responsibility and money involved in marriage and raising kids.
In fact, this situation was so bad that toward the end of the 1st century BC the Roman emperor Augustus passed laws encouraging people to marry and have children through financial incentives.
In our own society, of course, there are many people who prefer not to marry or have children. The New York Times not long ago reported that in North America for the first time single adults outnumber married adults.
Like in Paul’s world, many people today are choosing not to marry or have kids because of the responsibilities and costs of being married and having children.
Or more positively as Kirsten Rumary pointed out a few weeks ago in her story, some people welcome the single life because of the freedom it offers…
Some are single, of course, because they haven’t met the person who is right for them.
So, as we come to this text on parenting, whether we are married or single, and God affirms both, I want us to see how this applies to us as either parents or mentors.
Parenting or mentoring can be a transforming experience.
A few weeks ago I talked about how, if you are single, it is possible to be self-centered without even knowing it. What marriage and/or a really close relationship can do is act as a kind of magnifying glass on our selfishness (prop). I talked about how, as a single person, you can work as long as you want late into the night and no one is going to mind. As a single person, if you tend to be messy, you can leave your apartment a total dump… leave your stuff everywhere…and it may well be that particularly if you live alone no one challenges you on that. If you are single, you can watch the movies you want to watch, eat the kind of food you want to eat, your life can revolve around you.
But when you get married, or build a close relationship with someone, that can put up a magnifying glass on our selfishness, as you are going to have to think about how our schedule affects our spouse, how our messiness affects them. When you think about choices around movies or food, we are going to have to think about the preference of another person. Marriage can help pull a person out of his or her self-centeredness and self-absorption, which can kill a person’s spiritual life.
Having kids, or having a person in your life that you are mentoring, can pull us out of our natural tendency toward being self-centered or self-absorbed.
Ron Rolheiser has said, “Perhaps there is nothing in this world as powerful to break selfishness as the simple act of looking at our own children. In our love for them we are given a privileged avenue to feel as God feels—to burst in unselfishness, in joy, in delight, and in the desire to let another’s life be more real and important than our own.”
(Rolheiser by the way is single a Catholic priest with no kids of his own).
Having kids or people whom we mentor can powerfully free us from our self-centeredness and self-absorption as we focus on the life of another.
Whether we have children or not, perhaps God is calling us to mentor someone.
Part of the reason why I had the gift of being mentored by an older Presbyterian minister was because his 21-year-old son Sandy died of a rare heart disease, and out of that loss he wanted to invest his life in younger men and women who, like his son Sandy, desired to serve the Lord. Instead of turning inward after losing his son, Leighton turned outward and God used loss to enable him to mentor scores of young leaders from around the world.
For many years I was single and thought that perhaps it was God’s call for me to be single for life. I thought as a single person I have more space to mentor other people.
Then I got married and for a number of years we did not have kids of our own. Early in our marriage, because of a pregnancy complication we experienced, Sakiko and I were led to believe that we might not have any children of our own. At first that was hard, but after a season of grieving the loss of that child, Sakiko and I accepted it. We were happily married. We thought that God in his providence, by not giving us kids of our own, was calling us to focus more of our energy on the spiritual children that we were being called to care for. It felt like a gift. Part of the reason that I have committed myself to mentoring young leaders in different parts of the world has come from the fact that I have received the gift of mentoring, but also because as a person without children, until recently, I had the space to do it.
As you look at your life, do you sense that God may want to you mentor someone?
If so, you might ask yourself these questions.
Am I living the kind of life that I would want to invite others to live?
That, of course, is a big part of mentoring.
Knowing that how we live will impact another life will can inspire us to live an exemplary life.
When I was playing on the basketball team in high school, I was motivated to be in shape, because my conditioning or lack of conditioning would either help or hurt people.
When you are a mentor, you will be motivated to grow in character, because your character or lack of it, your light or darkness, will either help or hurt those you are mentoring.
Am I living the kind of life that I would want to invite others to live?
The best path to become worth following is to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
In Eph 5:18, to be filled with the Holy Spirit of Christ and his teaching on parenting assumes this.
Second, if you may be called to mentor others, will you make yourself available to one or more people who are younger than you in some way?
In some ways mentoring is similar to dating, you find a person’s name, initiate getting together perhaps for coffee, perhaps to run, you feel out the situation, see if the there is some connection, a mutual desire to continue the relationship…
Now after this long preamble, let’s look more closely at the Ephesians 6:4 text and see how it applies to mentoring and then to parenting.
Paul begins by saying, “Fathers, do not exasperate your children, but instead bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” The Greco-Roman world was a harsh world. A father had pretty much the absolute right to punish his child in any way he saw fit. In the Roman world a father had the right to kill a new-born child by allowing it to die through exposure to the cold. A Roman father had the right to sell off his children as slave. A father could even issue the death penalty on his child.
So, when Paul says, “Fathers (and the Greek word, as respected pastor and Bible scholar Dr. John Stott points out, can also refer to mothers) do not exasperate your children,” this is a radically counter-cultural statement. Paul says do not be excessively harsh with them, do not bring them up in a way that would provoke and exasperate them. But instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. In Greek, the word which is translated “bring up” actually means “to nourish” or “to feed.” It is the same word that Paul uses in 5 verse 29, as he speaks to all husbands to take care of their wives as they do their own bodies by nourishing them, feeding them.
So part of what it means to mentor or parent someone is to love a person, to care for them, to nourish and feed them.
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Parker Palmer in his book, A Hidden Wholeness, said that many people have an absence of a positive, healthy, robust sense of themselves. What both parents and mentors are called to do is to love and nourish people in such a way that it enables them to grow and become confident in the best sense of the word, and to emerge as their true selves.
Some years ago I was spending time with a young kid who lived out in Fraser Valley. One afternoon when I was at his house, I saw that he had a football and I asked him if he enjoyed it. He said, “I really don’t know how to play football.” So I said, “Well, I played football in high school. I was a quarterback and I’ll show you how to play football.” I showed Ryan how to play football and how to hold it, how to stand, and how to extend your arms. Little simple things. How to bring it behind your ear and kind of how to throw and rotate your wrist, counter clockwise. We spent part of the afternoon just learning to throw the football. His mom told me a few weeks later that the following week he was so excited about throwing the football and he would say, “Mom, this is how you throw a ball.” He took the ball with him wherever he and his mom went, including the grocery store.
That’s a very small thing, but part of what mentors do is love and nourish people and help them find their strength.
Part of what it means to be a mentor is to bring discipline. Paul says, “Do not exasperate your children, instead, bring them in the training and the instruction of the Lord.” I remember being with a person I was mentoring, and he was making some bad choices sexually, partly because of a drinking habit. I asked him to just go off alcohol for at least a year. As the year was coming to an end, he was invited to a party where he knew there would be alcohol. He didn’t want to appear like a stick in the mud. He asked me if it would be okay to drink a little. I said, “No, I want you to maintain the commitment for a year.” He agreed to do so, and later he felt good about the fact that he was able to maintain the commitment for a year. He felt that it had been an avenue of growth for him.
Part of what it means to parent or mentor is to bring a certain discipline and challenge to people. And then Paul says, “…bring them up in the instruction of the Lord.” The most important thing we can do as parents or mentors is to encourage people into a deeper relationship with Christ.
Ideally, in a mentoring relationship, we can lead a person in the way of Christ.
When I was a young, inexperienced new pastor here 12 years ago, intimidated by some of the challenges before us as church, I asked my mentor Leighton Ford for some counsel.
He said, “Remember that God is an artist. He will not lead you copy someone else. Seek God for a unique vision here.
A good word that led me to seek Christ.
This past week I was mentoring by phone a young Christian leader who lives in Mexico City. He’s wrestling through a decision. Through a series of questions I asked him, I tried to encourage him to consider how God was inviting into to decide on way or another. Part of mentoring involves leading people into the way of Christ.
At this time I am going to invite my colleague Catherine to come forward as she shares about some of the unique challenges and lessons she has learned as a parent of three. Catherine is our children’s pastor.
Catherine Fenn:
Conclusion:
There are only two things that really last forever—God and people. So, to invest your life in people is a great investment. It will change you and shape them.
Pray about: becoming a certain person (love, discipline, Lord)
And becoming available…
Benediction:
Christmas Concert invitation—a good opportunity to invite friends.
Message M6: Mentoring and Parenting November 30, 2008
Text: Eph. 6:4
Big Idea: Mentoring and parenting involve sharing love, but also disciplining the young in the Lord.
Actor Bruce Willis of the Die Hard series lived life as a hard partier.
He said, I drank a lot…I took drugs…it wasn't until I had a kid that I realized it was my job and my wife's job to teach our children the difference between right and wrong.
Every man knows there is a line between good and bad and that, unless you're a sociopath, you know where that line is. That means honesty, kindness, trying to help people, not hating, and teaching that to my children. My life's a work in progress—that's how I view it.
My wife Sakiko, long before she envisioned becoming a mother, had a habit of saying if you want to grow up, you need to have a child. She was NOT necessarily thinking of a biological child, but someone you are responsible to care for.
We have been in this series on marriage and singleness in the Spirit, and today, in this final message in the series, we are going to look at what it means to be a mentor or a parent.
Whether we are single or married, we may be called now or in the future to a mentoring or parenting role or both.
Paul in Ephesians 6, after speaking about marriage in chapter 5, talks about parenting, and the same principles he offers to parents can be used by those who will mentor others.
(Let me also say here as some of you turn to the passage, that if issues have been stirred for you in this series on marriage, singleness and sexuality, I would encourage you to talk to trusted Christian friend, or counselor or pastor.)
In Ephesians 6:4 Paul says:
4 Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
As Paul writes these words he would have been aware that many people in his Greco-Roman world did not want to get married, or have children, because of the responsibility and money involved in marriage and raising kids.
In fact, this situation was so bad that toward the end of the 1st century BC the Roman emperor Augustus passed laws encouraging people to marry and have children through financial incentives.
In our own society, of course, there are many people who prefer not to marry or have children. The New York Times not long ago reported that in North America for the first time single adults outnumber married adults.
Like in Paul’s world, many people today are choosing not to marry or have kids because of the responsibilities and costs of being married and having children.
Or more positively as Kirsten Rumary pointed out a few weeks ago in her story, some people welcome the single life because of the freedom it offers…
Some are single, of course, because they haven’t met the person who is right for them.
So, as we come to this text on parenting, whether we are married or single, and God affirms both, I want us to see how this applies to us as either parents or mentors.
Parenting or mentoring can be a transforming experience.
A few weeks ago I talked about how, if you are single, it is possible to be self-centered without even knowing it. What marriage and/or a really close relationship can do is act as a kind of magnifying glass on our selfishness (prop). I talked about how, as a single person, you can work as long as you want late into the night and no one is going to mind. As a single person, if you tend to be messy, you can leave your apartment a total dump… leave your stuff everywhere…and it may well be that particularly if you live alone no one challenges you on that. If you are single, you can watch the movies you want to watch, eat the kind of food you want to eat, your life can revolve around you.
But when you get married, or build a close relationship with someone, that can put up a magnifying glass on our selfishness, as you are going to have to think about how our schedule affects our spouse, how our messiness affects them. When you think about choices around movies or food, we are going to have to think about the preference of another person. Marriage can help pull a person out of his or her self-centeredness and self-absorption, which can kill a person’s spiritual life.
Having kids, or having a person in your life that you are mentoring, can pull us out of our natural tendency toward being self-centered or self-absorbed.
Ron Rolheiser has said, “Perhaps there is nothing in this world as powerful to break selfishness as the simple act of looking at our own children. In our love for them we are given a privileged avenue to feel as God feels—to burst in unselfishness, in joy, in delight, and in the desire to let another’s life be more real and important than our own.”
(Rolheiser by the way is single a Catholic priest with no kids of his own).
Having kids or people whom we mentor can powerfully free us from our self-centeredness and self-absorption as we focus on the life of another.
Whether we have children or not, perhaps God is calling us to mentor someone.
Part of the reason why I had the gift of being mentored by an older Presbyterian minister was because his 21-year-old son Sandy died of a rare heart disease, and out of that loss he wanted to invest his life in younger men and women who, like his son Sandy, desired to serve the Lord. Instead of turning inward after losing his son, Leighton turned outward and God used loss to enable him to mentor scores of young leaders from around the world.
For many years I was single and thought that perhaps it was God’s call for me to be single for life. I thought as a single person I have more space to mentor other people.
Then I got married and for a number of years we did not have kids of our own. Early in our marriage, because of a pregnancy complication we experienced, Sakiko and I were led to believe that we might not have any children of our own. At first that was hard, but after a season of grieving the loss of that child, Sakiko and I accepted it. We were happily married. We thought that God in his providence, by not giving us kids of our own, was calling us to focus more of our energy on the spiritual children that we were being called to care for. It felt like a gift. Part of the reason that I have committed myself to mentoring young leaders in different parts of the world has come from the fact that I have received the gift of mentoring, but also because as a person without children, until recently, I had the space to do it.
As you look at your life, do you sense that God may want to you mentor someone?
If so, you might ask yourself these questions.
Am I living the kind of life that I would want to invite others to live?
That, of course, is a big part of mentoring.
Knowing that how we live will impact another life will can inspire us to live an exemplary life.
When I was playing on the basketball team in high school, I was motivated to be in shape, because my conditioning or lack of conditioning would either help or hurt people.
When you are a mentor, you will be motivated to grow in character, because your character or lack of it, your light or darkness, will either help or hurt those you are mentoring.
Am I living the kind of life that I would want to invite others to live?
The best path to become worth following is to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
In Eph 5:18, to be filled with the Holy Spirit of Christ and his teaching on parenting assumes this.
Second, if you may be called to mentor others, will you make yourself available to one or more people who are younger than you in some way?
In some ways mentoring is similar to dating, you find a person’s name, initiate getting together perhaps for coffee, perhaps to run, you feel out the situation, see if the there is some connection, a mutual desire to continue the relationship…
Now after this long preamble, let’s look more closely at the Ephesians 6:4 text and see how it applies to mentoring and then to parenting.
Paul begins by saying, “Fathers, do not exasperate your children, but instead bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” The Greco-Roman world was a harsh world. A father had pretty much the absolute right to punish his child in any way he saw fit. In the Roman world a father had the right to kill a new-born child by allowing it to die through exposure to the cold. A Roman father had the right to sell off his children as slave. A father could even issue the death penalty on his child.
So, when Paul says, “Fathers (and the Greek word, as respected pastor and Bible scholar Dr. John Stott points out, can also refer to mothers) do not exasperate your children,” this is a radically counter-cultural statement. Paul says do not be excessively harsh with them, do not bring them up in a way that would provoke and exasperate them. But instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. In Greek, the word which is translated “bring up” actually means “to nourish” or “to feed.” It is the same word that Paul uses in 5 verse 29, as he speaks to all husbands to take care of their wives as they do their own bodies by nourishing them, feeding them.
So part of what it means to mentor or parent someone is to love a person, to care for them, to nourish and feed them.
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Parker Palmer in his book, A Hidden Wholeness, said that many people have an absence of a positive, healthy, robust sense of themselves. What both parents and mentors are called to do is to love and nourish people in such a way that it enables them to grow and become confident in the best sense of the word, and to emerge as their true selves.
Some years ago I was spending time with a young kid who lived out in Fraser Valley. One afternoon when I was at his house, I saw that he had a football and I asked him if he enjoyed it. He said, “I really don’t know how to play football.” So I said, “Well, I played football in high school. I was a quarterback and I’ll show you how to play football.” I showed Ryan how to play football and how to hold it, how to stand, and how to extend your arms. Little simple things. How to bring it behind your ear and kind of how to throw and rotate your wrist, counter clockwise. We spent part of the afternoon just learning to throw the football. His mom told me a few weeks later that the following week he was so excited about throwing the football and he would say, “Mom, this is how you throw a ball.” He took the ball with him wherever he and his mom went, including the grocery store.
That’s a very small thing, but part of what mentors do is love and nourish people and help them find their strength.
Part of what it means to be a mentor is to bring discipline. Paul says, “Do not exasperate your children, instead, bring them in the training and the instruction of the Lord.” I remember being with a person I was mentoring, and he was making some bad choices sexually, partly because of a drinking habit. I asked him to just go off alcohol for at least a year. As the year was coming to an end, he was invited to a party where he knew there would be alcohol. He didn’t want to appear like a stick in the mud. He asked me if it would be okay to drink a little. I said, “No, I want you to maintain the commitment for a year.” He agreed to do so, and later he felt good about the fact that he was able to maintain the commitment for a year. He felt that it had been an avenue of growth for him.
Part of what it means to parent or mentor is to bring a certain discipline and challenge to people. And then Paul says, “…bring them up in the instruction of the Lord.” The most important thing we can do as parents or mentors is to encourage people into a deeper relationship with Christ.
Ideally, in a mentoring relationship, we can lead a person in the way of Christ.
When I was a young, inexperienced new pastor here 12 years ago, intimidated by some of the challenges before us as church, I asked my mentor Leighton Ford for some counsel.
He said, “Remember that God is an artist. He will not lead you copy someone else. Seek God for a unique vision here.
A good word that led me to seek Christ.
This past week I was mentoring by phone a young Christian leader who lives in Mexico City. He’s wrestling through a decision. Through a series of questions I asked him, I tried to encourage him to consider how God was inviting into to decide on way or another. Part of mentoring involves leading people into the way of Christ.
At this time I am going to invite my colleague Catherine to come forward as she shares about some of the unique challenges and lessons she has learned as a parent of three. Catherine is our children’s pastor.
Catherine Fenn:
Conclusion:
There are only two things that really last forever—God and people. So, to invest your life in people is a great investment. It will change you and shape them.
Pray about: becoming a certain person (love, discipline, Lord)
And becoming available…
Benediction:
Christmas Concert invitation—a good opportunity to invite friends.
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