SERMON: Wisdom and the Hands That Form (Part 2)

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day Sermon. And we pray that as we declare the Word of God, that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and you would catch a greater vision of who Christ is.

May you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word and may the Lord be with you. Now, over the last several weeks, we've been walking through what we have called the anatomy of wisdom. And we've looked at the human body one part at a time in all of the various ways that Proverbs speaks about it.

And we've asked ourselves, what does it look like when the Spirit of God takes hold of a particular part of the body and He orders it with wisdom? And as you remember, we've watched how He opens the eyes and causes us to love true things.

He's remade our hearts and caused us to love what is good. He's unstopped our ears and directed our feet and tamed our tongue. He rules over the belly. And last week we finally came to the hands because when the head learns to believe a thing and the heart learns to love a thing, and when the head and those hearts are joined together, the hands will surely follow.

Wise Hands Prepare and Establish

The hands are how we reach out and touch what God has already put into our head and to our heart. Last week, we said that wisdom informs our hands and we saw two basic general categories on how God does that.

The first thing that we saw is that wise hands prepare things that before they build, they prepare. And because we do that, we now have to do ordinary acts of faithfulness to prepare for what God has given us.

And we saw that 10 ,000 ordinary acts of faithfulness repeated over generations is what faithfulness looks like to God. So wise hands prepare. The second thing we saw is wise hands establish. They build things.

They build homes and families and faith and community and kingdom, legacies and generations. They fill rooms with the praises of God, with 10 ,000 ordinary acts of faithfulness where convictions become customs and customs become culture and Christian culture multiplies to the ends of the earth.

Wise hands build and they establish. But we also saw the inverse. We saw Solomon giving example of the sluggard's field where he stopped laboring, stopped teaching, stopped bringing chaos into disorder, stopped spreading dominion.

And we saw how thorns and thistles took over everything. We learned that when a man does nothing, nothing is not what happens. Something happens, chaos happens, thorns creep in, disorder breeds. And we examine how we apply that to our life today.

Whatever area of life that we are personally refusing to take dominion of, whether it's marriage, whether it's family, whether it's work, whether it's whatever else, there's areas of our life where we have refused to take dominion or we have been passive in.

And as we've been passive in, thorns, thistles, chaos and disorder have come in. So instead of us, this is what we saw last week, instead of us complaining about the chaos in our life, the chaos in our life is a good example that points us to where we must faithfully labor, where we must labor for Jesus and where we must through Christ bring those things under dominion.

Wise Hands Work Together Through Generations

Now, as we transition to our second look on the hands, and I have to apologize. I said we're going to do two weeks on the hands. We're doing three. And we're ending next week with this series. So I want us to remember as we do number two on this to keep in mind what we spoke about last week.

If you remember, I shared an illustration of a rock wall going through the middle of a forest in New England. It was once a wall that marked off someone's property, someone's field, someone's borders around their property.

And it's clear evidence that someone at some point took time to dig up the land and every single rock that they found, they put it on a wall in order to mark out this is my property. They cleared it, they piled it, they stored it.

They kept piling up these rocks until they made impressive looking walls. But over time, those fields were neglected. Some of them had men who quit tending them. Some of them after a couple hundred years, the only thing you will find is a rock wall in the middle of a fully grown forest.

No one set out with the intention of building a rock wall in the middle of a forest, but with inactivity and neglect, a fully plowed field that once supplied a home with food, once was a source of income for a family, became overgrown and ran through with every mature sapling.

And the reason is because when we do nothing, something happens, chaos comes. The world's at war against us in a post-fall world. When we do nothing, chaos comes. We must exert effort, energy, godly, righteous effort in order to bring dominion.

And because of that, we also saw that the work of building a wall is probably not the work of a single person. It actually has to be a joint effort by a community of people. And in old New England days, that was truly the case.

It wasn't a single father outside stacking stones and digging up rocks. You imagine how long that would have taken to clear the rocky soil of New England. One dad would have maybe gotten a wall finished in his lifetime and then there would have been no food.

So clearly it was a work of him and his sons. Neighbors came over and they helped with the border walls. Communities got together and they built things together and the whole town kept record of it so that when the wall was finally established, it was put down into the record books, which tells me that walls like that are not the work of a single household, but the work of an entire community and in fact, the work of an entire generation.

And that has profound implications for us today because in the book of Proverbs, wise hands are not Lone Ranger hands. Wise hands are filled with God's wisdom and they don't cease working, but they do work together.

They join in the work together and the best way that we see that happening is in the family because as we labor with our hands for the glory of God, as we use our hands to build something, the most important thing that God's ever gonna call us to build is the people that he's entrusted to us, that community, that community, that little people is where we spend our greatest effort, our most faithful labor.

Hands that are set apart for the things of God are not meant to give everything they've got to a boss. They're not meant to give everything they've got to a hobby. They're not meant to give everything they've got to a time with the boys or whatever else.

What I'm learning and what the scriptures teach is that our hands were made to equip the hands of our next generation and to fill them with the good things of God, to give them maybe what we were never given, to form them so that they will take the truths of God and give it to our grandchildren's grandchildren.

That is what I want us to talk about this morning is how do our hands form the hands of our children? So if you will, I'm gonna read a few passages. I'm only gonna talk about one thing today, that. There's not multiple points, that's the point.

So that's why there's only, that's why there's another sermon because this one was a whole one. So if you will, I'm gonna read some passages from the book of Proverbs. I'm gonna pray and then we're gonna answer this question.

Proverbs 29 and 23: Forming the Next Generation

How do we form the next generation? Proverbs says this, the rod and rebuke give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother. Proverbs 29, 15. Proverbs 23, 15 through 16. My son, if your heart is wise, my heart will rejoice.

Indeed, I myself, yes, my innermost being will rejoice when your lips speak right things. Let's pray. God, we thank you that all throughout the scripture you teach us what to do with our hands as hands is a great metaphor for our actions.

After our thoughts have been ordered to the things of God, after our affections and our heart have been ordered around the beauty and glory of God, what are our hands do? What does our behavior do? What are our actions supposed to do?

And Lord, I thank you that today we can look at such a great work as the formation of generations. Lord, would you help us to see these truths today? Would you write these truths on our heart? It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.

The question that we asked last week is the question I want us to ask this week. What has God put into my hands? As you evaluate your life, what has God put into my hands? So if it comes to children, has God put children into your hands?

And if he has not put children into your hands, well then, will he eventually put children into your hands? And if not, how can you come alongside of other people who have children in their hands? What has God put into your hands?

That's a question that I want us to look at and answer this morning. And what we're going to see is that wise hands form. Of all the things that God places into a man's hands, there's nothing more impressionable and nothing more consequential or more demanding than a child.

A field may feed one generation, a house may shelter two, but a child carries what he's received from us to generation after generation after generation. The wisdom established around your table may still be shaping households, cultures, and nations in the future, which is an incredible thought.

Long after your hands have returned to the dust, the legacy of your hands will remain. This is why wise hands must do more than simply provide for children or simply nurture children or simply scoop them up when they're crying.

Wise hands must do something more than that. They must shape households, churches, nations. Wise hands must protect them and feed them, clothe them and keep them alive. And wise hands must, in all of that, form them so that they will patiently labor in their life and so that they will live in truth and goodness and the beauty of God's wisdom and gospel.

And so that they will learn to love wisdom as the Lord himself has called us to love it as well. Proverbs 29, 15 says,. The rod and the rebuke give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother.

Left to himself, like we talked about last week. We already know what happens when you leave something to itself, chaos comes in. You leave a field to itself, the thorns come in. You leave an appetite to itself, the belly comes in.

You leave a bill to itself, the collections agencies come in. You leave dishes to themselves, your wife comes in. Whatever you leave unattended in our sin-stained world will inevitably drift back into disorder.

And it's only through continuing, ongoing, laborious work that the delay or that the decay is reversed and something meaningful is produced. Well, Solomon says that's also true of a child. A child left to himself does not drift into holiness.

A child left to himself does not drift into obedience or respect or humility or wisdom. A child left to himself follows the rest of creation in drifting towards disorder. And it's only through patient, ongoing work of formation that a child is shaped into someone who will follow God all the days of their life.

Notice what Proverbs 22, 15 says,. Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction will drive it far from him. Solomon is telling us something about the innate nature of a child and of all people, really.

Foolishness is something that's bound up inside of them. They don't have to go out to find foolishness, it's in them. Nobody ever has to teach a child to whine. No one gives a class or a masterclass on, hey, how do you manipulate?

How do you use your eyelashes to make your dad do what you want or how do you charm your mother with your sweetness, young lad? Nobody has to instruct a teenager on how to be consumed with themselves.

Sorry, teens. The thorns are already in the soil from the moment that the seed gets fertilized. And if your hands never reach into that little life, if your hands never pull the weeds out, tend the weeds, yank out the cursed thorns, then you can assume with absolute clarity that they will grow unabated like kudzu in North Carolina.

I've said that analogy before, it grows over a foot a day. It takes a lot of work to keep it at bay. And in that, how do we actually do that? Well, the goal is not merely obedience. Obedience, absolutely, but the goal is not merely obedience.

Forming Wisdom Rather Than Mere Outward Obedience

I wanna make sure that we're absolutely clear on the goal of how do we use our hands to form the next generation because we're not just raising up compliant, people-pleasing children so that we can have more peace and quiet.

We're not raising up children who will refuse to talk with their mouth open, who will look you in the eye when they're speaking to you. We're not just raising up mannerly children. Solomon says that the rod and the rebuke give wisdom, which means that one of the great goals of child formation is so much bigger than behavior modification.

Our goal is bigger than that. We're not asking, how can I get this child to be quiet? Maybe you've asked that. That's not the right question. We're asking, how do I form this little unformed human into a wise man?

How do I forge this little girl into a woman who is after the heart of God? And those are important questions that we need to be wrestling with immediately because childhood is a very fleeting season.

It is a short window of opportunity that we get to form who our children will become and then it is gone. And it's terrifying because how many wasted minutes are we going to look back on and regret? How many conversations that could have been had that never happened?

How many moments for discipline, but we were too tired? How many times did we choose our comfort over their character? And one day, because of that, we'll look back on it with sorrow. Our days are fleeting.

The sands in the hourglass fade quickly and before we know it, it is gone. And there are two basic errors that we could have when it comes to this. First, we could waste our time. By not pouring into our children, by not investing in them, by not discipling them, by not taking hold of every single opportunity that we've been given.

And second, we could waste our time by pouring into our children the wrong way, by investing into them wrongly, by disciplining them according to some picture that Jesus and his word has not given us.

The first parent wastes time wrongly neglecting their children. The second parent wastes time wrongly indulging their children. And we have to remember that we've been given a single season with our children, a single season to shape them according to the things of God.

And our aim should be not who they are right now, but who they will become in him, which means we have to have a future-oriented vision for who our children are when they're adults, and then a plan to get them there.

Wise and godly adulthood is where we are sending our children or not. And this whole anatomy of wisdom series has been really pushing into this, and it's provided us as parents a basic roadmap on how to raise our children, or how we're supposed to spend our time using our hands to form them.

Think about it, we get the privilege of setting apart their eyes for purity, protecting them so that they can see and behold what is true, good, and beautiful, and not what is lustful, wicked, and perverse.

We get the privilege of setting apart their ears so that they love hearing wise counsel, and they love hearing the praise of God, and they grow up actually hearing songs and hymns and spiritual songs sang in their living room instead of the cursings of men.

We get the opportunity, we get the privilege of setting apart their little hearts so that they long to feel what is good, so that they learn to hate what is evil, so they learn to love God and obey His commandments instead of chasing after many idols.

We get the opportunity to help set their feet on the narrow path instead of having them sit in the seat of scoffers. We get the privilege of setting apart their tongue so that it's bridled and righteously tamed so that it praises the Father, and it's not a loose cannon with an unlimited supply of bullets.

We get the opportunity of setting apart their appetites so that they're ruled by wisdom and not driven by the flesh. And we get the opportunity and privilege of setting apart their hands so that they work and so that they build and so that they prepare and so that they establish and so that they form things in their world according to the vision that God has given them so that they build His kingdom instead of our castle.

That is the future man. That is the future woman that we are forming, that we are forging, and nothing short of that is acceptable biblically. That's our vision. And oftentimes, at least when it comes to the training of the hands, we will accomplish this by some kind of apprenticeship.

Yeah, we teach them with words, but it's often our actions. It's often us coming alongside of them and putting things actually into their hands. We often think as parents that the best thing that we can do is give a diatribe that fills their ears full of knowledge.

Okay, that's great, we need to do that. But it's often what we put into their hands that actually teaches them. And we do this from the moment that they're born. We demonstrate to them so that they will mimic us, don't we?

We smile at a baby, why? Because we want them to be happy people. We want them to be cheerful people. We don't growl at them, at least I hope you don't. What kind of a sicko would growl at a baby? We teach them with very deliberate facial expressions, mama, dada, why do we do that?

Because we want them to see the movements on our mouth and imitate it on theirs. We want them to imitate us. We put a spoon in their hand. This is a particularly difficult time in a parent's life. We show them how to eat and food ends up everywhere, but we stick with it.

And by the end, they end up getting it. Then we put crayons in their hand and we teach them art. And they use canvases that were not sanctioned. I told my wife two days ago that if my house stands for a thousand years, someone, some archeologist will come in and think there were cavemen paintings on my daughter's wall.

That's what they look like. They look like hieroglyphics and cavemen paintings because she used an improper, unsanctioned canvas. But that's part of the learning and the maturation process. We put a broom in their hand and they inevitably miss the dust bunnies.

We put a Bible in their hand and they don't fully understand how to comprehend it yet. We put a hammer in their hand, God help us. We put a steering wheel in their hand, God help you. And then responsibilities and then a career.

And eventually, the last act that we do is we hand them to someone who will put a ring on their hand. And then our time of filling their hands is over. You see what's happening? From the very moment that a child is born, we're putting things into their hands.

We're discipling their hands. And as a child matures, we don't stop putting things into their hands. We increase the weight, we increase the preciousness, we increase the costliness, we increase the depth of responsibility.

We're continuing to bend them, but not break them. Stretch them. Because maturity doesn't stay stagnant, it develops. And unless bigger, heavier, more significant things are put under their care, they're not maturing.

A newborn can carry nothing and is responsible for nothing. But if that person matures into a righteous grandfather one day, they have an entire family in their hands. They have work, money, marriage, children, ministry, hardship, grief, responsibilities.

They have things in their hand that a child could never conceive because over years, God's been adding more and more and more to their hands. And it's our job as parents to prepare our children on how to lead our grandchildren by putting the right things into their hands.

Our goal is to wisely increase the weight, to increase the responsibility, to end up bending them further than they're comfortable so that they will go places that are bigger and better than what they would ever imagine, that are stronger and greater.

We often, as parents, like to prioritize our children's comfort, and that is actually like cyanide to our children's maturation process. We must make our children uncomfortable. We must put things in their hands that they can't carry so that they learn how to.

So that one day, they're given the tremendous responsibility of doing it for another child, for our children, for their grandchildren. And this is one of the key principles of formation that we're talking about, how do we use our hands to form the next generation of hands?

Because we have to make the move from doing things with our hands to putting things in their hands. And how much easier is it for us to just do it? When we're in the kitchen doing something, how much easier is it for us to say, just go watch TV?

I need to just do this. I need to get it out of the way. How much easier is it that than having them come alongside of us and work with us? But if you do that long enough, you end up with a child in the basement playing video games and his mother still folds his underoos.

Nobody wants that. You have to actually give them things and put things into their hands so that they will grow and so that they will mature. Responsibility moves, moves out of my hands and into theirs, out of your hands and into theirs.

It must be transferred. And that must happen in a litany of areas. We have to teach them to clean up what they dirtied. We have to get them to finish what they started. Not rescue them out of it. Not come along and scoop it up behind them.

We have to actually have them work when they would rather play. That play's not bad, but life is not just play. We have to get them to tell the truth when it'd be way easier to give a lie. To serve without applause when it would be better to gain attention for them.

To rule over their own appetites when they don't want to. To confess their sin when it's hard. To forgive the one who sinned against them when it gnaws at them. To open God's Word for themselves. To lead themselves to the Savior who loves them.

And to not wait on me to open it for them. Yeah, I need to be opening the scriptures with my children, but I also need to teach my children how to open it as well. Because when they get out of my home, if all they've ever had was daddy leading them, how are they gonna lead themselves?

That's formation. The goal is not a 17, 18-year-old child who grunts like an ox every time we need them to do something. The goal is a child who grows up into an adult who has a joyful, happy desire for the things of God that manifests itself in self-rule, eager work, holy and worshipful ends.

The Rod and Rebuke as Instruments of Loving Formation

And Solomon gives us two instruments in order to do that work. Two tools that we can employ in that work two tools that are gonna transfer responsibility from our hands into their hands. And that is the rod and rebuke.

Or to say that another way, instruction and consequence. One of the tools that God has given us teaches the child what folly is and how what they're doing could become foolish if they continue down that course.

That's teaching, that's instruction. The other tool teaches the child that foolishness hurts, that sin has consequences. And if the instruction is not heeded, a different tool will be applied that is needed to spare the child even greater grief in the future by disciplining them today.

Many parents struggle with this because I don't want my child to go through pain. I don't want my child to go through discomfort. You can give them small, measured, calculated, godly applied discomfort today, or you can allow them to go through a world of discomfort later when chaos has come in.

Which are you sparing them from? As we said before, Proverbs 13, 24 is not the verse where an unhinged buffoon can simply grab his belt or a switch when he's lost his temper and wear out a child. That's not the loving hand of a father who's applying wisdom faithfully and biblically.

A man who loves his children and who's training them for glory. That's not what that is. That's a fool. Proverbs 13, 24 says, he who spares his rod hates his son, but he who loves him disciplines improperly.

Discipline is an act of love for the child, not an act of irritation towards the child. Discipline is an act of love for his people, not an anger to silence them. It's measured, it's prompt, it's calm.

It aims at the child's good, not the parent's relief. The angry hand does not form the child. It only teaches them that when big people are angry, they hurt them. But wise hands wound like a surgeon does in an operating room, always carefully, always patiently, always deliberately, and always aimed at their healing.

Our goal as parents is to form our children, not into people who just simply do what I say, although your words ought to have veracity. The goal is for our children to fear the Lord. Our goal is to help them understand why the truth is better than error, why diligence is better than laziness, why purity is better than lust, why humility is better than pride, why governing yourself is better than being a slave to your own appetites.

We're not merely restraining foolishness, we're forming wisdom. And Solomon shows us what the future harvest of that kind of child is. If you're teaching your child with rebuke and with the rod, with godly, loving correction, if you're teaching him that, this is the goal.

My son, if your heart is wise, my heart will rejoice. Indeed, I myself, yes, my innermost being will rejoice when your lips speak right things. Notice what kind of child it is that fills his father's heart with delight.

It's not a child with accolades. It's not a child with multiple different letter degrees in front of his name. It's not a child with success at work or success in his whatever. It's a child that doesn't just make you look good in front of your friends, it's a child who's wise.

That's what becomes the delight of a Christian parent's heart, a child that is wise and who speaks the things of God. That's what makes a Christian mother and a Christian father beam if our orders or if our loves are rightly ordered.

And that is the harvest, that's the goal, that's the end. That is what we're laboring towards is that our children would speak the things of God, delight in the things of God, love the things of God so that when we are old, we would have delight in our heart over the good things that God has done.

The Limits of Parenting and the Sovereignty of God

This brings up a challenge. Because if you're laboring for any other goal in the formation of your children, you are investing your time in things that moth and rust will destroy. You are chasing after the wind.

Anything that we are aiming at that is less than this is futility. And it's so easy to do because we can spend our time giving them the things that they want. We can spend our time giving them sports because sports are good.

Nobody's saying sports are bad. We can spend our time and our energy giving them education, experiences like piano. That's a good thing, it's beautiful. Or art classes or camps or travel or friendships or community or comfort, entertainment, career preparation, financial advantages, every opportunity that we never had.

And that's often what we do. We look back at our childhood and all the things that we didn't have, we want to fill our children's life full of those things because we want them to have it better than we do.

But if we fill our children full of those things but have no wisdom, have no approach to their formation and the things of God, we've failed them. If the overarching thing that we give them, if the thing that they think back about us and say, my dad gave me this, my mom gave me this, if it's travel baseball, if it's violin lessons, we failed them.

We have formed them, but not according to scripture's vision. And we ought to repent if that's what we've done because we will regret squandering the time that we had with them. It might not be today, but we will.

Because the light in the heart of a parent comes when their child is formed to wisdom, not when they're a symphony orchestra player or a first baseman for name your team. There will come a day when all of the extracurriculars fade, when the piano's gathering dust, when the mitt is dry rotted, and we have left them with something.

And the question is what? Will what we've left them with cause us to beam like Proverbs 23, one through six, or will it cause us to weep? And it's pressing because we don't wanna be the generation. We do not want to be the link in our family's chain where everything broke.

We don't wanna be the domino on which the rest of them fell. We don't wanna be the one who resulted in the downfall of our clan and of our family and of our people. We don't wanna look outside of this in eternity and say, I was the point where my family walked away from God.

The time is too short and the mission is too great for us to spend our time on anything less. And we must take up the charge. We must take it up according to Scripture. We must take it up in accordance with wisdom because there's not much time left.

Our lives are fleeting. They are but dust. They are a breath of vapor. They are here today, gone tomorrow. I woke up and I have a 16 year old and I'll wake up tomorrow and I'll be in my 60s, 70s and 80s.

And then what I've given them with my hands will then turn to dust. And the only thing that's left is what I've put into theirs. What have I put into theirs? What have you put into theirs? Now, this also leads to another challenge because I wanna be clear.

There are men and women who did these things, not perfectly because none of us do things perfectly, but they did these things. They opened up the Scriptures with their children. They prayed with their children.

They sang with their children. They gave them Jesus. And maybe you're even sitting here with a hole in your heart saying, I did that work. Maybe not perfectly, but I did it. I disciplined them. I instructed them.

I pointed them to the gospel and they walked away. And perhaps you're hearing all of this and you're feeling heaviness. Maybe you're feeling the sting of condemnation. Maybe you're feeling regret. Perhaps words ring in your head like failure.

Accusations from the enemy, like it's too late. Maybe accusations that remind you, you could have done more. Maybe it was that one time where you lost your temper. That one time is what caused it all to fall apart.

Maybe you've penned everything on a single moment. That's what broke your child. If that's where you are, if that's how you feel, I want to speak to you. Because Proverbs is not a promissory note that if you will simply do A, B, and C, then God is obligated to give you D.

Proverbs describes the shape of wisdom, not that every single circumstance must accord with it every single time. Proverbs is general truths that are true. And they're true the vast majority of the time, but there are parents whose children have walked away.

Solomon himself who wrote this book, he had a son named Rehoboam. Day one of Rehoboam's kingship, he lost 10 tribes out of the 12 and he did not walk in the ways of his father. Rehoboam split the kingdom in two.

The father, God, who raised his firstborn son, Israel. Remember he says, out of Egypt I called my firstborn son. Well, that firstborn son rebelled against a perfect father every single chance they got.

You'll remember the parable of the prodigal son. The father in that parable undoubtedly is God. And yet he has two children that walk away. One walks away through wild living, one walks away through legalism, but they both at some point in the parable were lost.

So I wanna speak very clearly about this. Faithful formation of your children is your responsibility. No one else can do it. It's not something you can shirk and it's not something you can outsource to an academy or to a church or to anyone else.

It's yours and yours alone. And yet salvation belongs to God alone. Overwhelmingly if you put into your children's hands what God has told you, then you will reap children who happily walk with the Lord because that's the ordinary means of grace that God has promised.

And if you do not do those things, you should ordinarily expect that your children will walk away from God. That doesn't mean that it always happens. At the end of the day, there are parents who did not do these things and their children walk with God.

And at the end of the day, there's parents who did nothing and their children became great, faithful, obedient saints. The regeneration of our children's heart is entirely up to the Father God. If we failed them and He determined to elect them, there's absolutely nothing that our behavior could have ever done to stop Him.

We are the creatures. We are entirely dependent upon the Lord for everything. We follow His commands, we obey what He says, and we have every reason to hope that faith in Jesus will progress to the next generation.

But if something happens, if a child walks away, if you understand that God is still God and that God is still good, then you have not failed. Ultimately, God is still good. If a child walks away, God is still good.

If a child renounces his faith, God is still good. God's goodness does not depend on our circumstances. It says that He works out the good for those who are called according to His purpose in all things.