Session 1 parenting through crisis-1
Well, I think we are streaming, but I'm not sure. I've had a lot of problems trying to get this stream up and running, guys, but welcome. Good morning. How you doing? Bentley was here a moment ago.
He wanted to greet you guys, but he got bored waiting for the live stream to start and he left. Hey, Bentley, come on back, buddy. Anyway, it's good to be with you this morning. I had a crazy morning, guys. I mean, I had such an incredible time with the Lord.
All the things that I thought I wanted to share with you guys have been kind of twisted and turned around. In fact, I'm now thinking that I'm going to split this up into two sessions. The first session will be this morning, of course, but then Monday morning at 10 o'clock, I'm going to schedule another livestream, another Facebook Live at that time. And I'm thinking about doing Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10 and bringing some devotional and some ideas, because obviously we're sequestered and stuck at home, but we're finding in our ministry, on Target Ministries, that we're having an outreach way beyond anything we could possibly imagine. In fact, we've been posting a lot of videos like this, and there was one a couple of weeks ago that has already had over 8,000 views.
And we're so grateful for that. And we're so blessed to think that maybe many of these might be blessing you. And our prayer is that that certainly would be the case. So look for Monday at 10 o'clock. We'll do another one of these.
And then let me encourage you to maybe have a notepad in front of you, because there's a lot of important things I want to share with you guys that I think are some things that we need to hear, especially going through these crazy times that we find ourselves in. And also in the comment section, please, on this page, and even after this video is over, you'll have an opportunity to comment. I read all of the comments, and if you would comment there or if you have any questions or ideas or thoughts you'd like to share, please use that area to write those. I would love to see them. But guys, this is a crazy time.
I mean, I've been sequestered now, as many of you know. It's a high risk for me to go out with Cindy's condition that she has since her hospitalization 10 years ago. Her lungs are very compromised, and so I can't risk going out. So my world and I'm sure your world as well is very different. And I mean, I'm learning things.
We actually have a kitchen sink. My wife showed it to me the other day. She brought me over there. It's the sink. We have underneath it, there's what we call a dishwasher where you put the dishes in there and they come out.
And then all laundry. I take my dirty clothes and I throw them in this basket on the floor. And then a few days later, they show up on the bed all neatly folded. But do you want do you know that there's actually a process in between those two things? And I never knew anything about it.
So I mean, I'm learning all kinds of stuff that I never knew before. Fifty five years I've been married to this woman. I'm getting to know her. I mean, it's amazing. But friends, the idea is on a more serious note, life is not the same.
It's just not the same. Let me turn right now to actually a more serious note and share with you something I read this morning in my devotional time. I think this was from streams in the desert. And I know that many of you, you're scared. You're wondering, where is God?
What is going on right now? But the whole essence of the message today and the one I'm going to continue with on Monday is to try to give you hope, to try to encourage you and help all of us understand the truth. All of us understand that we have nothing to be afraid of. Our hearts should be filled with joy and thankfulness because we serve a God who has our back. But I read this this morning and I thought it would be interesting to read it to you.
This is a verse in Luke 8, 24 and 25. You're all familiar with the story. It says, And they came to him and awoke him saying, Master, Master, we are perishing. Remember this is in the boat. Jesus is asleep.
OK. And there's a there's a wind and the waves are boisterous. And then he arose out of his sleep and rebuked the wind and the raging of the water. And they ceased. And there was a calm.
And he said to them, Where is your faith? Wow. I'm not so sure Jesus isn't saying that to a lot of us right now in the middle of our storm. I remember one time someone was sharing a story about a woman who was having a difficult day. And they said, Well, what are you going to do about it?
What are you going to do about it? And she said, Well, I will wake him up. And he said, What do you mean, going to wake him up? What does that mean? And she says, Well, don't you know your Bible?
Don't you remember when Jesus was in the boat and he was in the middle of the storm? They had to go over there and they had to wake him up. And she says, That's what I'm going to do. And you know what? Some of us need to wake him up.
Some of us need to go to him and say, Jesus, I'm in a storm here. Can you help me? But listen to what it says. This is important. Truth is a person, not a concept.
Jesus said he was the truth. John 14, six. That means that you can never know the truth of your circumstances unless you have first heard from Jesus. The disciples thought they were perishing in the storm. They were fishermen who knew the sea and knew what their condition was.
And so do we, by the way. They had allowed their circumstances to convince them that the truth was their eminent death. But they were wrong. Listen, truth was asleep in the back of the boat. Since some of the disciples were fishermen, they trusted in their own expertise and wisdom rather than recognize that only Jesus knew the truth of their situation.
At times, our human knowledge in certain areas of life can bind blind us to our desperate need to hear a word from truth. When Jesus spoke, the disciples saw the real truth of their situation. There was absolute calm. The disciples had seen Jesus perform other miracles, but they had not yet witnessed his power over nature in such a dimension. Often we are like the disciples.
God may have recently demonstrated his power to us in a mighty way. We may have experienced many spiritual victories in the past. Yet, when a new and frightening situation comes upon us, we too panic and say, Lord, save me. I'm perishing. God will remind us of his provision saying, I can handle this situation too, my friend, and you will know more of me because of it.
Have you become fearful instead of faithful? If you have, prepare for the rebuke, for it will come. The rebuke, of course, is when Jesus says, where is your faith? Sometimes I think in the midst of situations like this, Jesus is very tenderly asking you and I that question. Where is your faith?
When we're tempted to be down and we're tempted to be discouraged and be anxious, Jesus is saying, where is your faith? I have your back. Right now I'm not asleep. I'm awake. I am in this situation.
I think that's an important thing for us to understand, particularly today. The other thing I read this morning was from Matthew 10, 27. And this is where I want to transition into what I really want to talk to you about. That verse says, what I tell you in the dark, listen, speak in the daylight. What is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs.
What I tell you in the dark. Friends, we're in a dark time right now, but Jesus is speaking to us. Listen to what this says. Our Lord is constantly taking us into the dark in order to tell us something. I've often said that God never wastes a good old trial in our life, work not to teach us something.
Many of you have heard me speak about that when I talk about the situation with Cindy years ago and what God taught me in the midst of that intense struggle. But I had to go looking for it. And that's what I'm trying to communicate with this session this morning. Our Lord is constantly taking us into the dark in order to tell us something. It may be the darkness of a home where bereavement has drawn the blinds, the darkness of a lonely and desolate life, and where some illness has cut us off from the light and the activity of life or the darkness of some crushing sorrow and disappointment.
And that's where many of us are today, friends. It is there. There he tells us his secrets, great and wonderful, eternal and infinite. He causes our eyes blinded by the glare of things on earth to behold the heavenly constellations. And our ears suddenly detect even the whisper of his voice, which has been so often ground out by the turmoil of earth, loud cries.
That's where we were a few weeks ago, guys, right in the turmoil, all the loud cries, hard to hear Jesus in those kind of situations. Yet these revelations always come with a corresponding responsibility. Now get this, friends. What I tell you, speak in the daylight, proclaim from the roots. We are not to linger in the darkness or stay in the closet.
Soon we'll be summoned to take our position in the turmoil and the storms of life. And when that moment comes, we are to speak and proclaim what we have learned. God is preparing us, guys, for something that's coming. And shame on us if we miss this. So where are we?
Well, listen, it's Saturday, guys. It's the Saturday before Easter. It's that day nobody tends to talk about very much when we celebrate Easter and we remember what Christ did for us. It is the day between death and life. And in many ways, guys, that's where we find ourselves today.
The old stuff is died. It's gone. It probably will never be the same. And we're in that limbo period right now where we're kind of marinating in this thing. But we are going to come out the other side.
It seems like a long time, I'm sure it seemed like a long time to the disciples when Jesus was in that grave and they didn't know what the future held. That was a long day that Saturday. And this season we're in right now is a long season, guys. But there is life on the other side. But while we're in the midst of it, I believe God is calling us to really use this time to learn what he's trying to tell us.
The question for us becomes how are we going to rise? What are we going to look like when we come out the other end of this thing? What are we going to discover? What are we going to learn? Well, I don't know about you, but I believe many of us, because I've talked to many of you, are learning a lot.
We're learning about the things in life that meant much more to us than they should have meant. We're learning what the real values in life really are. The values that have to do with people, not things, not the amount of money we have, not our jobs, not all those distractions that the world puts on us. We're learning to reevaluate. We're learning to appreciate the bare necessities that we need for life.
We've accumulated so much stuff and so many different things, and we're now learning that, hey, we don't necessarily need those things. Man, we can kind of get by with a little bit less. But the most important things that I think we need to learn are, number one, am I close enough to my Lord to feel his comfort in the midst of this? And is the Lord showing me the things that are the highest priorities in my life? And dear ones, please hear me.
I've titled this thing, this is supposed to have to do with parenting. And I pray that many of you who are watching picked up on that title and you are parents of school-aged children are watching. But this has to do with everybody. But especially I want to focus on those of you who have parents of school-aged children, because that's where I think God has really been teaching us through this time to look at that and reevaluate how we've been dealing with our children. Now, I want to throw kind of a shot across the bow right now, and I'm going to kind of leave you with that until we come back on Monday.
And I'll finish again with it on Monday, but I want to say something that's very, very controversial. This occurred to me the other day when I was talking to a woman who was now being forced to homeschool her children. It's a woman who probably would have never thought about homeschooling before. In fact, the whole concept of homeschooling scared her, but she made an interesting comment to me. She said, you know, this is not as bad as I thought it was.
I am really bonding with my kids. This has been an amazing time. And what I thought I couldn't do, I'm finding, is not that difficult. I'm not so sure I'm going to send them back to school next year. And I can't tell you how much my heart leapt with joy when she said that, because here's what I want to suggest to us.
If I really share what I'm really feeling right now, my heart, I wish some way that it were possible for every church in America to start a school where our kids could get solid Christian education. I think that's the only answer to turning a culture that's gone mad around. I wish that every single person listening to the sound of my voice right now that has their children in the public school system would take them out. And I mean that sincerely. Take them out.
Put them either in a private school. And I'm trying to encourage more and more churches to help families to do that if they can't homeschool, because the stakes are high, guys. The public education system in this country, while not set out to do this, is deliberately, and I mean this deliberately destroying everything that you're putting into your kids. All you have to do is look at the curriculum. All you have to do is look at the social engineering that's going on in our schools, particularly in our schools of higher education.
We have a stream of young people moving from high school to college who after the first year are going from solid Christians to atheists, because that is what they're trying to do. And here's what's interesting to me, guys. We are, I actually posted this, you know, about a year ago on Facebook and I got a lot of comments from it. But here's what's happening. We are spending years putting stuff into our kids about values and faith and who God is.
And then we turn around and we send them to colleges, listen, that are deliberately designed to undo everything that you put into them. But get this, on top of that, you're paying for it at the same time. Help me. Help me understand all of that. Well, I'll tell you why it's happening, because we're not thinking about it, because we have so many distractions and so many other things going on.
I've got to get to work. I've got to get I've got to make money. I've got to buy that bigger house. I got to have that second car. We're thinking about that kind of stuff.
Instead of thinking about the preciousness of our of our children, beginning at very young ages, all the way through college. Someone once said that it's easier to to build a child than it is to repair an adult. And I believe that's true. Today, we've got a lot of broken adults as the result of a broken system that we have let happen on our watch, dear ones. And I'm here to tell you today that I'm encouraging every single one of you to pray, seek God and ask God to help you understand in the midst of this struggle that we're in right now.
Lord, what are you trying to teach me in this area of how I'm to deal with my children? And I would I would I would pray about that. And I would sincerely research what it might take for you to be able to protect your children from what the world is putting upon them. I told somebody the other day, the world is spinning so far out of control. You want some schizophrenia.
Here's how you can experience schizophrenia. I want to challenge you if you want to understand how the world looks today, watch one hour of Fox News and then switch the channel and watch watch one hour of MSNBC. And if you don't end up with schizophrenia, then you're weird. I have never seen it's almost like we live in two different universes. It's an alternate world.
The clash is never been so heated as it is today. There's never been, however, a more clear message of good and evil, light and darkness. And if you're a follower of Christ, you will see that if you're looking for it. That's the world we live in. And that other world, the dark side, is doing everything they can to get more and more people over there.
And they're targeting your kids. They've been doing it for generations. You and I, if we're to be responsible parents and grandparents and people need to do whatever we need to do to protect those precious souls, those precious little lives and grow them up. The Bible says to train up a child in the way he should go. I'm going to unpack that verse on Monday because there's a lot of misconception about that.
What that verse means. I'm going to unpack that and I'm going to go into it a whole different list of great ideas having to do with parenting. What I'm going to teach you on Monday comes right out of our On Target Ministries curriculum that we've been developing for 30 years. And it specifically focuses on parenting. And I think you're really going to enjoy that.
That's where I really want you to come prepared to take some notes. So with that said, I don't want to take any more time today. We've already gone longer than I wanted to, but I want to gear up for Monday and I'm really excited about some of the things I want to share with you then. And so I will look for you then. And oh, by the way, Bentley's back.
Bentley, come here. Bentley. Well, Bentley's asleep. I'm so sorry. I'll Bentley will greet you on Monday.
How is that? But until then, let me pray. Lord, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for this precious group of people.
I thank you for what you're doing. Lord Jesus in our lives. I thank you for this time that we're going through. Help us navigate this time, Lord, in a way to where we discover the things that you are uniquely trying to show us and to teach us so that when we go from the death of the past to a new resurrected life as we come out the other end, we will have your marching orders. It will not be business as usual.
We're going to make a difference in our world, Lord, but it's going to start with what you're revealing in us. And we're looking forward with great anticipation and excitement about what you're going to do in this area. Lord, we love you. We honor you. We praise you in Jesus name and all God's kids said, Amen.
Amen, guys. See you on Monday.