Father’s Day 2019

Hello, and welcome to the Salt Church Podcast. Thank you for tuning in to this week's message. Join us as we explore God's Word providing practical teaching for day-to-day living. The message you are about to hear was recorded live at our Sunday morning worship experience. If you would like to learn more about Salt Church, please visit us at saltchurch.

org. We hope that you are encouraged by today's message. information just so we can double check that it'd be great today. And if you are a kid and you're in here, I know Pastor Lan said we're staying in here today, the elementary kids are. And not just because I'm up here, we had a couple things this morning, but it's going to work out good because we were going to do something a little different with you here today also.

So if you are a kid and you're in here, I want you to come up front here and grab one of these sheets. This has some of the stuff we were going to talk about today, and we're going to mention this a little later in the service, but you can look and work on that a little bit. And I know there's some pens in the back of the seat, so if you want to write or fill anything in on there, come on up here. Just grab one of these. Here, Violet, you want to help hand those out to everybody?

Thank you. All right. So, and what I want to start with is really to say happy Father's Day, happy Dad's Day, and also go blues. So, we're from St. Louis originally, and I realized I didn't have a blue shirt this morning after all the stuff with the Stanley Cup this week, so I had to wear a Cardinal shirt and at least represent St.

Louis somehow this morning. But besides happy Father's Day, I also want to say happy Grad Day, all the recent high school and college graduates, and also the pre-K graduates, the fifth grade graduates, middle school graduates, all the different graduations. And I think it's sort of interesting how all these graduations happen right between Mother's Day and Father's Day. And I think there's sort of a reason for that, because we put a lot into each of those stages of the kids' lives. And I want to, you know, welcome our elementary kids in here today and thank the awesome parents and teens and others that serve back in Salt Kids each week.

And it's important to have some other people around each of our kids' lives as they get older that are building those good values into them. And that's at church, you know, baseball coach, wherever that comes from, we appreciate that as parents. And I appreciate everybody here at Salt that really builds into the kids here regularly. But I also appreciate each of you guys as parents for being here. Dads and moms, you bring your kid into church, and that lets us help you as you build into them with a foundation of God's Word.

And notice I said that we help with that, because it's not really the church's responsibility to train up a child. God makes it really clear that he assigns that responsibility to you as a parent. Right. And it's not the church's responsibility to care for a child, nurture a child, protect or provide for a child, or any of the million and one things a child needs. And we try to do a lot of that, but we've only got them here for an hour or so the weeks that they're here.

And so that's just a little handful of the thousands of hours of their year and all the time that goes into them. So we try to do that, but a huge one of those needs is also for a child to know God. But that responsibility, too, falls on you as a mom or a dad. Now, the church does have an important role. The main role is to build you up as you grow in faith and as you learn to serve others.

Now, it's true of a mom or a dad, but what I just said is also true of your kids as well. Well, so when they come here, Salt Kids is not child care. We sort of avoid using that word for a reason because this isn't just like, oh, we did some child care back there so church can happen in here. They are the church back there, too. They have their own service.

They do their own things. And I know we got sort of in here with us today, but it's important that they grow in their faith and they start discovering who they are and how they can begin serving in the world, too. And they grow in that faith journey. But it is a lifelong journey. And so as a parent, we want you to know that we are honored to be able to partner with you in all those years of that journey through Salt Kids and Salt Youth and as they launch into adulthood.

And we know it's a big, big thing. It's a big thing becoming a dad. It's a big thing becoming a parent. And it's something you can try to prepare for, but when those nine months start, it is on you fast. And no matter how much you try to prepare, the first time you hold that bundle of joy so full of potential, so little, I remember the moment really clearly that Angie told me that we were expecting.

And I remember that moment and really just that. The impact of the moment itself was so huge. I remember where we lived, and I know I was in grad school, and Angie was finishing her undergrad, and I remember we just had so little, but all of that sort of blurred out and faded in that moment. So I don't remember the exact day or day of the week. I don't remember what we ate that day.

I don't remember what the weather was or even what the room looked like. But I remember the moment really vividly. I remember the look on Angie's face right before she told me. And it was a look I had never seen before. It was a look I was only going to see one more time about four years later.

And I remember this fleeting look for just a moment as she told me and then sort of seemed to hold her breath, looking to see how I was going to react. And I remember that that mutual feeling of excitement as as I sort of gasped and said, really? And that excitement was the same thing. I know we both sort of shared over and over again with friends and family and pretty much any stranger we could tell that, you know, we were expecting and that was we were excited about it. And so we didn't really know Katie yet and we didn't know she was even a she yet.

But we waited on all that till the day she was born. And that's a story for another day. But like I said before, those nine months flew by and there we were in a hospital in St. Peter's, Missouri with this beautiful little girl in our arms, Kathleen Marie. And about four years, almost exactly four years later, a beautiful little boy in those same arms, Alec Daniel.

And I apologize to my kids right now because that's telling that story is the only time I use your middle names other than when you used to be in trouble. So Kathleen Marie and Alec Daniel. And so some of you guys, I get a reaction every couple of weeks. It's like, oh, I just connected the dots and figured out that Alec playing up here, that you're his dad and whatever. It's like, yeah.

So Alec is my son. So way to go, Alec. He did an awesome job this morning, too. Yeah. And but I never had a day since about 28 years ago that I haven't felt absolutely blessed to be a dad.

And it's not that all of them are easy. In fact, it seems going through that almost none of them are really easy. And some are far, far from that. But they're worth it. Absolutely worth it.

And so I want to go back. Like, if you're a new father, you have grown children or just, you know, that's on the horizon for you. We know on days like Father's Day, we tend to evaluate ourselves and our fatherhood and see, you know, maybe some things I could have done better. And it's for a moment. I want to give you, as we start out here, three sort of encouragements just leading up into Father's Day here.

Number one is you're doing a good job. And I know I'm sort of laying out as a blanket statement, but I've met very few fathers in my life and all my life that were not giving their best. And the job is hard, and it's certainly not for the weak. And God knows that, and I know your children know, too, that you are trying. Okay?

And the good news is there are no perfect fathers, you know, other than our Father in Heaven. On Earth, there are no perfect fathers. God uses broken men to be fathers because it's the only kind of men that exist. And there is a grace from the Lord for you. The second encouragement is that you are choosing the right thing.

And so as men, we're called on our hearts for a lot of things to put our attention into, work and hobbies and a lot of other things. But we've got to make sure we're not giving over completely to those things and keep them in their proper place. So we win at the right thing, and that's being a dad. And that can also, part of that is being a husband, too. Now, you might be able to make more money or have a lower handicap in golf or catch the right wave or anything else you want to do if you spend less time and energy with your child.

But I'm going to encourage you to fight the noble fight. Choose to win at the right thing because God notices that, your kids notice that, and one day the fruit of your choices is going to show. And the third encouragement is this, that you just need to stay at it. Someone once said, if you want to grow... If you want to grow deep, grow trees.

If you want to grow impact, grow people. Now, you're in this for the long haul, so sometimes it might seem like you're not having the impact that you want to have. When you're growing something deep and something with impact, you don't see the fruit of that right away. And I want to encourage you today, as sure as God will make the sunrise tomorrow, you can be sure that your role as a father matters. And I've been thinking, there's a few of us that started like, I think, back in December, going through the, on the Bible app, there's a Bible, it's like a chronological Bible, so we're going through the whole Bible in a year.

And if you're in that, you know, keep going along, it doesn't matter if you, there's days we miss and we all try to sort of catch up and whatever. If you want to start out on that, it's not too late. Jump in on that and just plug in, you know, every day you can, open that Bible up and read it. Because it doesn't really matter where you start, it just matters that you're reading in there regularly. And what I've been thinking about as I've been going through it is the big arc of the Bible.

And I was thinking about this message a couple weeks ago and realized, sort of in a rough sense, there's a parallel to our lives. So, you know, Angie works for the city of Norfolk. With kids birth to three, they have developmental delays. She did something very similar as a developmental therapist back in Indiana. And she loves that age group of sort of birth to three.

She had a real passion about that. And if you look at a broad overview of life development, that's one stage. There's really 12 stages. And so, I think there might have been a timeline up here a second ago showing sort of the overview of the whole Bible. So, we're going to take that as quickly as we can.

But I'm hoping we get through the first half of that before we all have to leave here and go to the beach. No, I'm kidding. We're not going to spend time on this, breaking down this chart at all. I just want you to sort of see the big picture of the Bible. But we're going to jump into looking at the stages of life development, see sort of roughly how those parallel, when God put the whole Bible together, how that parallels our lives in a way.

And I don't think that's really a coincidence either. So, the first stage when they break down the stages of life is pre-birth. And that's potential. It's all about potential. The child who's not yet been born could become anything.

And in the beginning, there was just God. And He created everything. It was all potential. The second stage of life is birth. And that's where hope is really the predominant thing.

When a child's born, it instills in its parents and caregivers a sense of optimism, a sense that that new life can bring something new and something special into the world. And we see Adam and Eve and all that God expected with His final creation in Genesis, humanity. And then the third stage is infancy. And it really sort of covers zero to three. So, sort of that whole toddler starting to get around that whole section of life.

And sort of the theme for that section is vitality. An infant is vibrant and seemingly unlimited source of energy. And especially as they get into toddler and they start moving around, we realize how much energy they have. It doesn't matter if they just have one little animal cracker. They can just go for hours.

And we see God do the same thing. Because what do they start to do? They start to get into trouble too, right? And that happens. And we correct them.

And God did the same thing. And not just when sin first entered the world. Over and over again. And humanity's version of sort of the terrible twos was... I'm thinking sort of like Noah in the flood.

And it's like, okay, let's clean up the whole place and start over again. You know, that was what happened. The fourth stage is early childhood. That's sort of the ages three to six. And what characterizes that is playfulness.

Young children play. They sort of create the whole world anew. And that sort of reflects God's creation again already there. What they take and combine things, fashion events, that have never before been seen in the history of the world. They seek to understand right from wrong.

And in the Bible, that's sort of like the time of judges. Then we move into middle childhood, sort of the ages of six to eight. You know, early elementary ages. And that's where imagination really starts to take over. In middle childhood, the sense of inner self starts to develop for the first time.

They internalize some things that they see in images from the outside world into them. And they also start to realize those things that God put inside of them and start looking inside a little bit and start seeing some of that stuff and how God built them. And that imagination starts to lead them beyond princesses and knights and into sort of a bigger world around them. And that's where we sort of see Abraham and others that start exploring the world around them and seeing all the trials and tribulations and different things. And later in the Bible, we see, you know, kings.

They sort of go with the princesses and knights and everything as well. Then we get into late childhood. So ages nine to 11. And that's an age of ingenuity. Older children acquire sort of this range of social and technical skills.

And they haven't mastered all of it yet, but they got enough to really start looking at those skills and come up with these marvelous strategies and inventive solutions for things. I saw a kid helping this morning. And he was helping in there with little kids. And Jonathan's in there helping to do some duplos. And he knows the other kid likes sort of ideas.

He's younger, but Max likes storms and tornadoes and things. So he built this big storm chaser thing, and it turns into the storm eater because it's going to be big enough to eat the storms up and everything. A very inventive solution. And you can sort of see those two different phases working together there on that. So we see times of great ingenuity like in the Tower of Babel and the time of the prophets.

Then we get into the age of adolescence. This is ages 12 to 20. And that's where passion starts to take over. So the biological event of puberty sort of unleashes that powerful set of changes in an adolescent body and in their mind. And some people want to just sort of forget that whole stage after you're through it.

But it does unleash things not just in the sexual but in emotional and thinking about their career path and spiritual passions and all those things. Passion starts to just infuse all those different things they think about and that they do. And we also see rebellion here which is reflected in the Bible because God's people turn to him every time they need something. It's like, Dad, I need $20. And then immediately shun him.

It's like, Dad, you're embarrassing me around my friends. Right? And God's people do that over and over again through the Bible. It's like, I need something and then, okay, I don't need you anymore. And then I need something and I don't need you anymore.

And we see that same pattern. And what we know though is that most people who accept what Christ did on the cross, they do that before age 18. And I know most of us in here are over 18. It doesn't mean we're beyond hope because you're here. That's good.

But that's also a reason why we invest really strongly in what happens with our kids and with our youth because we know that those are really critical. Even when they fall away from it for a bit, we know they're going to come back and find that. And so we see that similar passion developed in the Bible as the disciples follow Christ and they witness the passion of Christ and his death and burial and resurrection. That whole piece is the passion. It fits right with that stage.

So number eight, the eighth stage is young adulthood. This is the age of enterprise. And it takes that to start taking on these responsibilities. If I'm in a home and a mate and establishing a family, a circle of friends, getting a good job, all those different things are happening. And we saw the disciples are growing in their circle through the book of Acts.

Then we go into midlife from 35 to 50. That's sort of considered the age of contemplation. You've had some years of adulthood and you follow society's scripts for long enough. And you're like, you start to reflect on that and that midlife stuff hits. And you start to look at what are my worldly responsibilities?

What are some deeper meaning in life? And how do I forge ahead with sort of a new understanding? And that element of contemplation is an important resource we sort of deepen and enrich our lives and others around us with. And that reminds me a lot of the journeys of Paul and these churches sort of establishing and thinking, what's a new way to think about God? Because that wasn't the old way.

This is a new way now. The tenth stage is mature adulthood. And they list it as age 50 to 80, you know, somewhere up into retirement age, maybe a little bit beyond that. And that's considered the age of benevolence. Mature adulthood, you've raised families, established yourself in work, become contributors to society.

You're maybe volunteering more, you're mentoring, philanthropy, all those kind of things tend to happen stronger in that age range. We see the apostles going out and giving of themselves to share all that they learned from Christ and passing that on for generations to come. And we know that their sacrifices, as well as others who were faithful to that through the ages since the Bible, are the reason we see people getting baptized at Salt tonight. And all that happening to us is because of that. And all that happening to us is because of that.

I was faithful and that benevolence just carried on through the ages. Then we hit late adulthood, so age 75, 80 and on. That's the age of wisdom, so it's gonna take a while for most of us to get there. But the elders represent a source of wisdom that exists in each of us, helping to avoid the mistakes of the past while reaping the benefit of life's lessons. In the Bible we see this in Proverbs, and we also see this sort of in Paul's later writings.

And then the last stage is death and dying. And so those in our lives who are dying or they have died, they teach us about the value of living. And that, you know, dying can happen at any stage. You know, I think about Rob just a short while back and, you know, he didn't get to live all these stages out. I think my own dad was sort of in that later stage and he died just a few years ago.

And I miss him so much every day, especially on Father's Day. But his memory, and I know for all of us, the memory of some of those that we've lost, remind us not to take our life for granted, to live each moment to its fullest, and remember that our small lives are a part of a greater whole. And so just like that last stage, we know that Christ will return and we will face judgment. And so if we break the whole Bible down, and some of the kids are sort of figuring out sort of the scope of this, but put some numbers on it. There's 66 books in the Bible, but I looked it up because I didn't count this myself.

There are 807,361 words in the Bible. Probably varies a little bit off that number depending on which version you're reading, but somewhere over 800,000 words. 31,173 verses, and it breaks down to 1,189 chapters in the Bible. So, and when we're sort of doing that Bible segment, we're sort of reading, you know, three, four, five chapters every day, and that's sort of a nice little chunk to sort of digest some of those chapters. Because if you just read a verse, it might be a nice little inspiration, but it doesn't give you a lot of meat.

When you read a chapter, you start to see a bigger picture. And I know with the kids that are in here, the story they were going to be doing today was about King Nebuchadnezzar and this statue that he had to dream of. So they've got sort of this whole chapter in Daniel chapter 2 that they're going to take a look at in some of those handouts, but we'll talk about that in a minute. What I was thinking about was if that whole arc of the Bible reflects in our lives, how do we sort of break down our lives? Because it's not chapter and verse.

It's more, you know, the years are our birthdays, but that's sort of a big point. It's months, weeks, days, hours. It's, you know, any way we can break all that down. I'm not going to put all the numbers on it, but I found something interesting that was looking at some of those different stages. How do we look at our father, our own dad?

And so as we go through these stages, about four years old, you look up at your dad and you think, my daddy can do anything. By eight years old, we start feeling like, well, dad doesn't know everything. He still knows a lot. He can do just about anything, but he doesn't know everything. Twelve years old, we think, well, oh, well, you know, my daddy doesn't understand at all.

They start to feel like that. Fourteen years old, you know, dad, he's sort old-fashioned. He doesn't, you know, get those things anymore. By 21, as a dad, they see he's completely out of date. You know, they don't expect any more than that.

By 25, they start to sort of get through a different little hump, and it's like, well, he does have a good idea every now and then. Okay, so that's okay. By 30, I need to find out what dad thinks about this. By 35 years old, we're thinking, well, for the little patients, let's get dad's input first. And then by 50 years old, if it's like me, it's sort of like, well, I wonder what my dad would have done in these shoes.

By 60 years old, we're thinking, I wish I could talk it over with my dad one more time. And so the central image of God in the whole Bible is of God as a father. In Islam, there's 99 different descriptions of Allah in the Quran, but he's never once in that whole thing, in any interpretation, any way to look at it, described as a father. So it's a very different view of who God is. Now, in the Bible, we see good fathers, the bad fathers all the way through it.

You don't have to read hardly any chapters in the Bible. You're going to run across a good dad or a bad dad, or maybe a little bit of both. And so there's a lot of examples to learn from, and I encourage you, just, you know, reading your Bible every day, you're going to see some of those. But I want to give us a taste, a perspective on sort of God's view of all this, on the time we have. So he blesses us to be parents for our children, and that's really until they launch into adulthood.

Not that we stop being parents, but we want to look just from birth to 18 years old, okay? Around the time they graduate from high school. They're no longer a child. So from birth to graduation, we have 18 years, but sort of like the Bible. That's like reading a whole book in the Bible.

That can be a really big chunk. So we want to break it down a little more now. If we look at 6,500 days until they turn 18, it's a lot of days. It's 157,000 and change hours, about nine and a half million minutes, half a billion seconds. And yeah, every minute counts with your child.

But it's sort of hard to tick off nine and a half million minutes going through with your child and keep track of that without losing the time you actually have with your child. So the meaningful part of that we're going to sort of pick out of here today is to look at a week. Because just sort of like if we looked at one letter or one word in the Bible, that would not really mean a whole lot. I mean, you might have a word on a plaque on your wall and say faith or something like that. But it's got to have some context around it.

You read a whole verse, like I encourage the kids to do all the time, you want to read a couple of verses around that. You don't want to take just one verse. So in the Bible, there were a little over 1,100 chapters. So if we break it down from birth to 18, it's a pretty similar number. We have 936 weeks from our child from the first week they come home.

So they're graduating. 936. And each one of those is different. Each one of those is important. So I'm going to pull out a little prop here for a second.

Do a lot with the kids, so we always have to have some props or something going on. And it's got to be fun too, right? So what I have here, kids, what are these things called? Anybody know what these are? Normally they're little ones.

I got big ones. Marbles. They look like marbles. These are Orbeez. But they're really big ones.

So I have 930, they call them water marbles or water beads, sort of like the ones you fill up plant bases with. These are just real big colorful ones here. And I think I've even got, let's see if you can see them a little better. I got some lights on them. There we go.

There, now you can see them. All right. So they start out real small. These stuff start out like a little bit smaller than a marble. We've been sort of growing them for a few days and keep adding water and they keep growing.

So we're trying to figure out how much space this is going to take up. But this, when we started, we're dividing this up last night and they don't start growing as big as they're going to get. We're looking at them going, wow, you know, it's, it's, it is a lot like what I'm trying to talk about. They had 936. It's like, that's it.

That's all, that's all the marbles. That's all you have from birth to graduation. So that's what we want to sort of divide down here. So you start with 936 and you blink a couple of times. You haven't slept a bunch in that first week and that's gone, right?

That week's in the past, right? And then you start going on down there and I'm going to take just a little handful. I'm not going to try to count these out, but you start going along there. And before you know it, I had a runaway one there. That's fine.

They fall too far. They do break. It's not a big deal. Thank you. And that first year flies by and it's gone, right?

So before you know it, they're a year old. There's 884 marbles left. Now that's still a lot of potential. There's a lot of time ahead. There's a lot to build into the life of that child.

So it's a lot ahead to help them grow up. But as the years keep going by, you've got 832 and 780 and then 728. And by five years old, they're heading off to kindergarten. There's 676 marbles left. 676 weeks.

And that's the time you have left with them. The others are gone. Okay, I'm not going to keep trying to pour them over there, it's a lot of marbles. But, even though 676 is a lot of weeks ahead, by that point you're starting to realize, it's like, holy cow, I started out with 932 and now I've lost almost a third of those, it feels like. You know, it's like, wow, there's some time that's passed here and they're growing up.

And you send them off to school and that's that feeling you feel because that time has passed, it's gone. So, still a lot of heads. It's seven, eight, nine hit. By nine, half of the marbles are gone. Half of those weeks are passed.

And so, you might feel like you, I know sometimes in those years you feel like you've lost your marbles, but the weeks, the weeks are in the past, but they're not really lost. They've been invested in that child, for better or worse. Everything that's happened in those half of 936 weeks is invested in that child. 468 weeks. So, all those build up.

By age 11, you have three, you're starting to hit those pre-teen years, you have 364 marbles left. Now you're feeling like, sort of like in that life development thing, like that middle age thing, you're feeling like that for your kids. Like, oh my gosh, they're growing up. It's like, I'm like blinking and they're going to be in like high school and then, you know, that starts to come on you. Because you realize there's not that many weeks left.

I mean, you're under and we're already well below just one of these bins. One's already gone and a good bit of that one's already emptied out too. So, it doesn't just get to seem a lot less, but we realize, not just do we have fewer weeks, but as our kids get older, we realize, how do I have influence now? Can I even change something in one of these weeks? When they were little, I mean, you could teach them all kinds of things and you could have an adventure and explore things and you could see huge change in a week.

And when they get older, it's like, man, I don't know if we went backwards the last few weeks or what happened. Because it gets harder and harder to have influence in your child's life when those weeks start dwindling down. They're growing up. So, around age 14, by the time they head into high school, around that age, you got somewhere in the vicinity of 200 marbles left. And then, let me get to, I sort of separated some of them here.

Okay. This is one year. This is 52 marbles. So, by the time they're 17, those are all gone. This is all we've got.

And so, they start going through that last year of high school and we start counting through those marbles. And we're really aware, it's like, they're talking about college, they're moving out or going to school, whatever's happening. It's like, we start realizing how few of these we have left. And remember, these are harder. I mean, they're making big decisions now that they're driving, whatever they're doing.

And we have little time and just little chance for influence unless we've really invested well in that. We may have little or no influence in some of these weeks. And they just start emptying down to where a lot of people were at this last week. They were going to graduation parties and commencement things and proms and all the tuxes and dresses and everything else. And realizing, yeah, that's the last week.

They're graduating and they might be around for the summer or something like that. But they're either 18, they're hitting 18, they're about to move out, and that last week's gone. It goes quick. I mean, I just went through it in a few minutes, but by the time you hit that point with your kid, it feels about like that. It's like, man, that was just a few minutes ago.

They were like two and then they were five and I breathe and, you know, they're gone. So, we don't stop being parents just because those weeks are in the past. But we do move to a different point. And that's where I want to sort of build into you a little bit here in the last part of how do we have some influence here? So, I want to, if we can roll a little video real quick, Kylie.

Just something to get us thinking about that before we... Dad, do you love Mom? I do. How much? Gobs and gobs.

Dad? Mm-hmm? Do you love my brother? Connor? I do.

How much? Gobs and gobs. Dad? Mm-hmm? Do you love God?

Yeah. How much? Gobs and gobs. Do you love me? Hmm.

I do. How much? Um... I already know. Gobs and gobs.

Yeah. Dad? Mm-hmm. How much is it got? Well, let me put it like this.

Your favorite color is yellow. And when you eat those Nota Butter cookies, you always scrape the peanut butter out of the middle and you secretly feed it to the dog because you think the dog deserves a treat too. At night time, I know before you go to bed, you always pull your Barbies all together because you don't want them to be lonely. And sometimes when you get a little nervous, you bat your eyes like this. They get really, really, really fast.

But when you're happy and when you're excited, you always twirl your hair right beside your ear. And you love your mama's red earrings. And you always seem to eat your green beans one at a time. You see, my love, I notice you. And I love being your daddy.

And I will always be here for you. Even on your best days, even on your worst days, your daddy loves you and will always be here for you. And that, my dear, that's what a gob is. I gob you too, daddy. I know if you're here in all those weeks and marbles didn't make you cry, I knew that would.

It makes me cry. So, when all that potential you see in that little girl in our kids, when that potential, those 18 years are done, more or less, it's up to them. You know, we're still part of their lives, but less and less. All those weeks still count. All the ones God gave us.

For some listen today, if you lost a child or one way or another, you might have even fewer of those precious weeks. And what are those weeks like to us, to our kids? Beyond just gobs and gobs. Charles Francis Adams was the son of President John Quincy Adams. He was a diplomat to Great Britain.

His dad had also been. His grandfather had been. And so he had this diary, and he sort of learned that from his dad and passed it on down. And there was a day that he wrote in his diary, went fishing with my son today, a day wasted. That's all he wrote that day.

His son had learned to write in a diary, too, at an early age. The same day, if you look in his son's diary, his son, his name Brooks, wrote the following entry. Went fishing with my father, the most wonderful day of my life. And there's some big weeks. You know, I was going to ask Alec to come up here and share, like, what his favorite week was.

But you guys can ask him that after the service. I don't know what his favorite week was with me. It might be different than what I think the best week was. I don't think I wrote down anything about a day being wasted or a week being wasted, because I didn't feel that. But the weeks are different for us and our kids.

So, in Salt Kids, they were sort of doing this series on robots. And I want to share just a little bit. This is the verse that they had for today, because I know it hits me and probably a lot of dads right between the eyes. This is Ephesians 4.29.

It's not a verse about dads, necessarily, so it's for all of us, but as a dad, I want you to hear this. Ephesians 4.29 says, Don't use foul or abusive language. Let everything you say be good and helpful, so that your words will be an encouragement to those who hear them. And so, the story of Nebuchadnezzar, and this big statue, and this dream he has, and all this stuff with Daniel, what it really boils down to is Daniel relied on God to give him the right words to help encourage this king.

And that's what we're trying to help the kids learn. They've been learning something different about sort of how God uses them in this robot series. So, when we're done today, I've got some extra big Orbeez, so make sure your kids all get one of the big ones to take home. And I've got some sheets that will be over there that are what the take-home sheets are for the kids. And I printed out some extra ones this week, so if you want to sort of see, even if you don't have kids in that elementary group or kids right now, and you want to take one of those and just sort of see, it's like, what does it mean for a parent to take something home and do something with a kid during the week and not just leave that at church and ignore it the rest of the week?

What does that mean? That's why we send that sheet home. But I'm also going to send every parent home today. There's going to be a little thing over there that's going to look like you're probably at the doctor's office. There's these little centrifuge vials that I found.

They're colorful. And there's little Orbeez in here. Now, these aren't hydrated yet, so they're just little tiny dots. And they don't grow quite as big as those. They grow up maybe a little bigger than a marble.

So, put them in water for a couple of days. They won't fit in this anymore. There's at least 52 in here, probably a few extra, because we didn't count them by hand. They're too tiny. I don't mean to interrupt, but I wanted to...

Oh, you do have a story. I wanted to come up. Okay. He said I wasn't going to come up. I didn't see you, so go ahead.

No, I mean, there's a lot of different... I just wanted to share what my best week was with you. What was your best week? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of different weeks.

There's a lot of good weeks, a lot of bad weeks. I don't know. Was it like a surprise, like when I told you this morning I was going to ask you this question? Yeah, well, that was one of them. No, that was one of them, for sure.

No, I think, I don't know, my favorite week, probably, just because it encompassed so much, was, I think it was your 25th anniversary, and then Katie's something birthday, like, my first. 21st birthday. We were at dinner, and it was their anniversary, and my sister's birthday, and he gave all of us a present, including me, and I'm like, it's not my birthday, why are you giving me a present? And we opened it up, and there was like this waterproof case in here, and it had a picture of Puerto Rico in the middle of it. And so he had to surprise us, he literally had this entire trip planned behind all of our backs, that he said, yeah, we're leaving tomorrow morning at 5am.

And so we had that whole next week, or I don't know how long it was, but just, it was just this really special thing that he did, and that he cared so much about us that he put that all together. And I know there was trials and tribulations on that trip, and so he definitely showed his fatherhood through all that. And you were glad you took Spanish? Very glad I took Spanish, even when they spoke too fast. I think my sister and I had a really bad fight while we were there, and he was there to help tame that.

That's a good story, we'll tell you. That's a great story. No, I just wanted to share that and say thanks, Dad. Am I craggy? So I want to sort of wind down here.

There's a chart, I don't know if we have it up there, about parental influence. And I'm not, like the other chart, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I just wanted to sort of see a big picture here that sort of fits with what we were talking about earlier. Yeah. So we see what's sort of, there's two different lines sort of moving through there. The one that starts out really high when kids are little is called positional influence.

It's basically, I'm bigger and older than you, listen to what I tell you. Okay? That's positional influence. Okay? We see that in other places in life too, but as they get bigger, we lose some of that.

And if by the time they're, you know, going into middle school and high school, if all we have with them is positional influence, we're going to have no influence. That's why those weeks get harder. And it means that the other line, that relational influence, you know, that relationship takes time to grow. So that's not a big influence at all when they're little. You know, they're in a kid's world.

It's, it's very egocentric. It's, it's very like that. They, it takes a few years before they start to realize others and how others might think and be thinking independently. So for them to form that relationship and be influenced in a relationship, they're influenced by us, but it's not as much relationally. But that's what we need to be investing in in those early years so that we have the opportunity to still sit down and talk with them and listen to them in those later years.

And so that's sort of that, that big trend. But over all those phases, there's six things that I want to wrap up with that really matter the most. And there's sort of a habit that goes with each of these. And so with each of these, because they're, they're habits, they involve time. And so the first one we're going to look at is time.

And so it takes time over time to make a history that's worth repeating because time matters. And what that means is, yeah, you can spend some time with your kid, but if you're not doing that consistently and there's that time invested repeatedly over time, then it's not building that, that history, that, that relationship with them. And so think about those 936 marbles we were talking about. I've been putting a link on Facebook the other day that we, they sell these bags online of 936 little tiny peewee marbles. So if you want the whole, you know, smaller than this, you know, something you can fit in a jar on the kitchen counter that has 936 marbles and start counting those out, you can do that.

But that's the other reason, you know, you can do it with anything. You can do it with a calendar, an app, whatever. But, you know, I want you to think about just for this next year, just the 52 weeks you have this year, not all 936, because some of those are probably already gone for your kid. But you got that next year that's ahead. And so start counting those up because that time matters.

And what matters is we want to visualize time. So that's the habit that goes along with us is to visualize time. In Psalms it says to teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Like I said, it doesn't have to be marbles. But the important thing is that you're counting those things down.

And when you see how much time you have left, you tend to do more with the time that you have right now. And you want to trust God over that time and figure out what God's design is in all that. And a little extra challenge on that first one there. In some of that time this week, pray about the week that your child accepts Christ. Somewhere that's going to happen.

Like I said, it usually happens in childhood or in the young teens. It tends to happen by age 12 for a lot of people. It tends to happen before 18 for most people. And so there's going to be a week there where they start to ask some harder questions. And it may not even sound like they're asking about that.

So there might be a day that they accept Christ, but there's going to be a week where they really wrestle with that. And if they're really accepting Christ, they're going to wrestle with it a little bit. And whether it's us over in Salt Kids or it's a little older and it's Eli and Sharon or whatever, we want to be with them when they start asking those questions. Because you want to help get those answers and help them figure that out and make that big decision. But there's going to be a week to pray about.

And you just don't know when it's going to be. But pray about that this week. The second habit is love. And again, it's over time. So love over time is one of the things that matters most because love matters.

And so the habit that goes with that is to prove it. Because kids are going to test you. And you don't believe that, then you haven't probably been around a lot of kids that you're going to figure out when you know them, when you love them. They figure that out and they know when you love them. They know you should understand that.

Thank you. Thank you. So instead of a sub, instead of, instead of trying to just make up for that. That. Prove that you love them.

Don't just let it be a subconscious reaction. Actually prove it to them. So if you want kids and teenagers to have a healthy sense of self-worth, if you want them to believe in a creator who loves them unconditionally, if you want to discover the value of using their lives to love and show love to others, then you have to get in the business of actually proving that you love them no matter what. So we start earning, as parents, it's probably time that we start earning the right to be believed. Because again, that positional influence starts to wane.

So you can't just tell them, believe me, because it's true. They're going to question it. And so you have to earn that right over time. And that comes with love to be really believed in these more difficult things. Start using the time to get serious about proving our love to our kids and show them what matters most in our lives.

And it's pretty simple. When we show up and we make rules, we prove to them we care. When we break the rules and we show up, or when they break the rules and we show up anyway, we prove to them we still care. We prove to them they have worth and we're committed to them. Even when it's difficult and inconvenient and messy, we keep showing up and we prove that to them.

So kids need parents who will be present in their lives consistently. So I want you to just think a little bit this week about who invested that love on a regular basis in your life, at whatever age it was. There might have been several people that come to mind in that. But think about how they did that. How did they prove to you?

How did you know? Without it just being subconscious, what can you really hang on to that you know? I know that person loved me because they were going to be there for me no matter what. The third thing is words. So words, over time, can impact the direction of someone's life.

Because words matter. And you saw what that dad did in the video. You know, gobs worked for her, but the dad knew that it wasn't just saying gobs. When she wanted to know what's a gob, he had a whole array of words that hit right where she was at, at that phase of her life. And she knew when she heard all that, he loved her.

But it was because of the words that he used that he had noticed those things. And he had a vocabulary about the things that mattered to her, whether it was mom's red earrings or whatever it was. He knew the vocabulary that was important there. And we tend to underestimate the importance of words. We get tons of words thrown at us more today than ever in history.

So especially the weight of our words when it comes to kids and teenagers that we care about. Our world is shaped by the words we use to express what we see. So research has shown us if we want to think a thought, if we want to paint a picture, if we want to work a math problem, any of those things, we need words. And so without words, as simple as two of our communication, we are limited. If words are us to think and see and interpret things, they have to be a big deal to God.

And when he left us the Bible, he left us words. And they might paint a picture in our mind, but he didn't leave pictures behind. You know, could he have had someone invent the camera in 30 BC so that there would have been a video camera around when Christ was walking around? Yeah, he could have done that, but he didn't. Because he knew what was important was the words.

That's what really digs in deep. The first words that we know that in the universe were God's words. He said, let there be light. He spoke words, and that began the whole creation thing we talked about earlier. So sharing the power of words, we give that gift of communication.

So the habit that goes with this is to expand our vocabulary. And that doesn't mean learning quarter words and using big long things and practicing, you know, big hard spelling words and spelling bee kind of things with your kids. What we mean by expanding your vocabulary is know what's meaningful. You know, what do these things mean in a text? What's the language of emojis right now?

What things matter to your kid? What are they into? And do you know the words that go with Minecraft or with lacrosse? Whatever they're doing, what are the words that go with it? I can't play any guitar, but I went to some workshops when Alec was growing up.

We were living up near Sweetwater, and I learned some of the lingo and some of the words. So when he was talking about guitar stuff and it was his passion, I knew some of the words. That was expanding my vocabulary. I still didn't learn to play guitar. I still can't play it a bit, but I know some of the vocabulary there.

So you want to make it personal to your kids. The next habit is stories. Stories over time move us to imagine a world beyond ourself. And so stories really do matter. They shape somebody's perspective.

They're another one of God's brilliant ideas to help connect us to what really matters. So God created time itself as a platform to prove to us that he loved us unconditionally. But he also created stories so that collectively, over time, they could give us a deeper perspective about his universal principles. When Christ came, he didn't give, you know, professorial lectures. He said, let me tell you a story.

Here's a parable. I'm going to tell you about this man and his son. I'm going to, you know, and the son came back home and he hugged him. That was just a story. But it communicated something huge.

So stories really do matter to God and they should matter to us as parents as well. So stories over time matter. And that doesn't mean telling the same old story. I know we're going to have those stories that seem to fit every situation. And your kids, by the time kids are my age, they're rolling out.

It's like, oh, dad, you told us that story like a thousand times. Yeah. That's a good story. Keep telling it, but don't tell just that story. There's got to be more stories around there.

So stories over time moves to imagine that world beyond ourselves. So the challenge here is to think about some of the stories that redefine the ways we see ourselves and others. What are some new ways you can engage with your kids and stories that will move them beyond themselves? So maybe that's discovering arts and think going like books and movies or going to the theater, going to an art museum, go to a play, sing a song together, even if you can't sing. They were joking about me singing.

I'm not going to sing a song without. That's not going to be good for anybody. But visit a history museum, collect trinkets along a trip. But, you know, live out those stories and make them part of your family. The next thing is tribes.

Tribes over time show us how we belong because tribes matter. And we all try to fit in somewhere as a parent. We have a critical role in helping connect our kids and connecting to two primary tribes. There's going to be a lot of tribes they're a part of in their life. But church and family, those are the biggest roles we have to build tribes in their kids.

And we know tribes are important to God. We see the tribes of Israel. And how did he collect these groups around? And how did they react to other tribes? And what was important?

What defined them? We see, you know, Judah. We see these different kingdoms and things evolve out of these tribes. Because tribes matter. He used over tribes.

God used tribes over time to reveal himself to us and continue to spread his message of love. They mattered for a long time. The kids need to be known so they can feel welcome, so they can feel forgiven, so they feel like they belong. And so the habit here is to go in circles. You want to help kids get into circles and experience community.

And it might be in just small circles. You know, if they just come out to something once in a while and connect with a few people, that's fine. That might fit them. But it's still a tribe. They might be involved in a hundred different things.

Help them focus on some things that really are the tribes that matter to them. That help define them. And then the last one is fun. Fun over time makes a friendship go deeper. Because fun matters.

And that's a big one for me. Because not just because I'm working with the kids and working with families, but Angie and I have been working on this new thing in Virginia Beach, launching a thing called Family Fun Experience. And I can tell you more about that later. And fun's sort of in the middle of that. But for now, why is fun even on this list?

Because it seems a little bit out with all the others. But simply, one of the most effective ways to stay connected to your kids is to have fun with them. And I wasn't necessarily expecting, I didn't know what story would come out. But what happened with Alec? He was surprised.

And there was this fun element of, oh, Dad surprised us with a gift. And it was this thing. And this whole trip was a surprise. And it was fun. And that, the reason it mattered to him was because that connected us.

That, that trip. And... to others, but that one stood out and connected us in a different way. So, is it time to stop taking ourselves so seriously and start getting serious about having fun with our kids? And your kids will know you love them, but do they feel you love them?

Before they can feel love, they might need a little evidence that you actually like them. They might need to feel confident about that, and the best way to do that is to start having some fun with them. It's fun over time, reconnects things that are disconnected. Playing with kids breaks down some of those walls. It can repair damage in a relationship.

And something that comes between you relationally, sometimes it's fun that is that bridge that rebuilds that relationship. So, as parents, we can take that cue from our kids and start acting like fun does matter. So, let me share a story here as a final challenge on that point. The kid sees his dad returning from work and is heading toward the couch. The little young boy, he has a real timid voice.

He's got sort of idolizing eyes looking up at his dad. He says, Daddy, how much do you make an hour? And his father sort of glares back and says, Look, son, not even your mother knows that. Don't bother me now. I'm tired.

But, Daddy, just tell me, how much do you make an hour? The boy kept insisting. And so, the father finally gave up and said, $20 an hour. Okay, Daddy, can you loan me $10? Dad blows up.

So, that was the reason you asked me how much I earned. Go to bed. Don't bother me anymore tonight. It's already dark. And Dad started mulling about what he said and feeling a bit guilty.

And I don't know if somebody was looking to buy something. I don't know what it is. And curiously, he gets the better of him along with the guilt. And he sort of goes up to his kid's son's room and knocks on the door and says, You asleep, son? No, Daddy.

Why? Replied the boy. Partially asleep. But, no, no. What are you asking, Dad?

Dad says, Here's the money you asked for earlier. It didn't really matter. He just was going to give him the $10. Thanks, Daddy. Rejoiced the son.

He put his hand under his pillow and removed some other money from under there. And he goes, Now I have enough. Now I have $20, the boy said. And his father was sort of gazing confused and trying to figure out what does he mean? You know, what's the $20 all about?

And his son added, Daddy, can I buy you for an hour? And so we talked about time and love and words and stories and tribes and fun. What you do for kids over time matters. And the absence of those things in somebody's life can affect them powerfully. negative consequences.

Our culture is full of people who have been and missed a struggle because they were rejected or abused or isolated or neglected or abandoned. And we might feel some parts of that in one way or another from our parents or from other things in the world that have made us feel that way. But our Father in Heaven doesn't act that way. He's always there. He's not going to abuse us.

He's not going to abandon us. He's always going to love us. But we do get those scars from our experiences in the world. And so that's why what you do every week, all those weeks, to give your kid a better sense of worth and belonging, connection and direction and perspective, that time over time makes history. But if you're not just doing the time over time, you're also doing the love and the stories and the tribes and the fun, and all that stuff over time, that makes a history that's worth repeating.

And so, remember, none of those things mean much without time. If you have love without time, we would call that infatuation. If you have words without time, just some nouns and verbs. If you have tribes without time, it's just some familiar faces. Don't let that be here today.

It's not just familiar faces. Let this be your tribe. Fun without time is just a game. Stories without time are just incidents. And time without time might not make a lot of sense.

When I talk to a kid who spends a lot of time around their parents but never really feels they spend any time with that parent, it makes a lot of sense to have time without time. And that can be really transformational. So the final point I wanted to leave you with is whatever matters will matter even more over time. So love is just love until you put it over time, and then it gives the kid worth. Words might just help you win the game of Scrabble, but it might just be a tweet to somebody who's following you.

But when you put them over time, they become a collection of messages that move somebody in a better direction. A story can just be an experience that happened, but you put Spielberg behind it and it gets an Oscar, and all of a sudden you've got something that captures imagination. So when we collect stories over time, that can shape perspectives. Tribes can be just people linked together with some common interests. Clubs, you signed up and attended.

But when you put them over time, they become family. They become community. And that's where a child experiences a sense of belonging. Fun, just a good time. You know, fleeting smiles, laughs, until you put it over time.

Fun over time creates a powerful connection. It takes a friendship with your child even deeper. Friendship with your teenager even deeper builds that relationship. I know a lot of people say, you know, you can't be friends with your kids. Balderdash, old word.

We'll do some vocabulary here. Balderdash. That was a word that came to my mind earlier. We have multiple roles with many people in our lives. You know, with Angie, I'm a husband, but she's also my best friend.

But there's multiple roles there. There's no reason it can't be the same way with your kid. Those things shift over time. But let that friendship grow with your friend. And still be a parent.

You can do both things. Okay? There's going to be a time where you really can't parent them anymore. And you want that friendship there. They're going to grow up.

You can't stop that. What you're doing every week matters more in someone's life when you do it week after week, month after month, year after year. You combine love, words, stories, fun, tribes together every time. They gain momentum. They become that history.

And they build a legacy. So, like I said, whatever matters will matter even more over time. It might not sound that profound, but, you know, when they're done being seven, they're done. They're not going to be seven again. That's history.

Make it matter. Make it matter. Because you are playing for keeps. People, all of your boat like us, we are going to be Steuer. You are listening to the Bigalwood Institute.

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