We live in a perilous age. What Christian parents haven’t worried about the world they are sending their children into?

Depravity is widely praised and promoted. Moral order has been turned on its head. Many good customs and institutions, once taken for granted in our society, have crumbled into dust. We have to fight many times harder than our parents and grandparents to defend even the most basic of moral truths. Our increasingly secular society, however, should lead us not to despair, but to greater vigilance in how we raise our children.

Ephesians 6:4 gives us a command to shape all our attempts to form our children into those who love the Lord and desire to serve him all their days. Although I normally use the ESV, I think the King James Version is better here: “Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” Consider how this brief charge shapes Christian parenting in an unchristian world.

Every Father’s Calling

First, note that the command is given to fathers. In Ephesians 6:4, Paul deliberately shifts from using the word parents (in Ephesians 6:1), or speaking of fathers and mothers together (in Ephesians 6:2). Fathers are the divinely appointed leaders of the household (1 Corinthians 11:3; Ephesians 5:23; 1 Thessalonians 2:11–12; Hebrews 12:7–11) — which is not to downplay the vital role of mothers in the household, but simply to note that fathers are given the chief responsibility for the nurture and admonition of their children. And so, Paul calls fathers to rise to the challenge for the sake of their children’s spiritual well-being, even as mothers play their own indispensable role, both as a complement to the father, and as a support.

“Fathers are given the chief responsibility for the nurture and admonition of their children.”

Second, remember the first half of the verse. Fathers are commanded to bring their children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord rather than provoking them to wrath (sinful anger). There is a way of disciplining our children, in other words, that will actually lead to more rebellion and alienation. Such discipline is hard and unloving, driven by sinful anger and resentment: anger because our commands are not heeded; resentment because of the resulting unpleasantness; all of it driven by love for self rather than love for our children.

In contrast, godly discipline is driven by love for our children (Hebrews 12:7–11), by the recognition that the pathway of uncorrected error and rebellion is the pathway to death and hell (Proverbs 5:1–6). The world may tell us that we will alienate and embitter our children if we firmly and consistently discipline them, but we live by faith in God’s promise that “folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him” (Proverbs 22:15; see also Proverbs 3:11–12; 13:24; 19:18; 23:13). Paul, therefore, calls us to raise our children in the “nurture and admonition” of the Lord.

Nurture and Admonition

Nurture is a word sometimes used positively, sometimes negatively in the New Testament. It has the positive sense of instruction and training in Paul’s words about the purpose of preaching in 2 Timothy 3:16, and the negative sense of chastisement or corrective discipline in Hebrews 12:5–11.

Admonition, on the other hand, has the sense of warning in both of its instances in the New Testament: in 1 Corinthians 10:11, the Old Testament’s “instruction” functions as a warning to the Corinthian church not to follow the example of Israel’s wilderness rebellion; in Titus 3:10, Paul commands the church’s leaders to “have nothing more to do” with the man “who stirs up division” after “warning him” twice. These uses make it more likely that nurture in Ephesians 6:4 should be taken positively: it is the positive counterpart to the admonitory warning.

To nurture, then, is to teach and show our children positively what the Lord requires of them: repentance, faith, and a humble life of obedient service. To admonish is to warn them of the spiritual peril that will necessarily result if they turn away from the Lord in unbelief and disobedience. In his book Parenting by God’s Promises, Joel Beeke captures both the overlapping and distinct qualities of these two words:

“Nurture” (paideia) is the general training of all parts of the child: instructing his mind, shaping his character, bending his will, awakening his conscience, enriching his soul, and building his body. “Admonition” (nouthesia) has to do with conduct: encouraging children to do what is right, rewarding good conduct, confronting them when they do what is wrong, and punishing their misconduct in an appropriate way. (80)

Our Twofold Responsibility

Both sides of the equation are indispensable. Our children must be taught to embrace Christ by faith, to love what is good and true, and they must also be shown the positive and negative consequences of unbelief and disobedience (see the similar positive-negative dynamic in Paul’s comment on preaching in 2 Timothy 3:16).

The twofold call is much like the old adage about the training of inspectors of counterfeit dollar bills: they spend as much time studying real bills as they do counterfeit ones so that they will be able to tell the difference. In much the same way, our children cannot pursue faithfulness merely by being told what they have done wrong. They must also positively be shown the pathway of faith and obedience.

Nurturing our children also includes showing how pleased we are when they do well, and praising and encouraging them in their obedience, as our heavenly Father does with us: “The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing” (Zephaniah 3:17; see also Matthew 25:23; 1 Corinthians 7:32; 2 Corinthians 5:9; Colossians 3:20; 1 Thessalonians 2:4; 4:1; 1 John 3:22).

Ephesians 6:4 in Practice

What might obeying Ephesians 6:4 look like in practice? We can begin by reading the Scriptures with our children and encouraging them to do the same.

“Nurturing and admonishing our children for their eternal spiritual well-being is hard, slow work.”

We can also teach them what the Scriptures mean. Many parents will feel daunted by this calling, but there are many helps to be found. Chief among these are the great catechisms of historic Protestantism. Why reinvent the wheel when we have such wonderful teaching aids already at our fingertips? Family worship is also vital, which need not be complex or overlong. In addition, calling our children to faithfulness requires modeling faithfulness ourselves. What greater hindrance to a love for Christ could there be than for our children to hear it from our lips, but not see it in our lives?

Perhaps an example will be useful. Consider a command to an 8-year-old son to take out the trash, which he ignores. Nurture requires that we explain to him what he should have done, but also how he should have done it: the obedience God requires is immediate, complete, and without complaint. We explain to him that a truly obedient heart responds with respectful acknowledgment (“yes, sir,” or “yes, daddy,” for example), begins to obey immediately, and obeys without complaining.

Along the way, we exercise care not to “provoke our children” to anger (Colossians 3:21) with undue harshness and condemnation, or with unreasonable expectations that do not fit our children’s capacities, even as we train them toward complete obedience. To that end, as the New Testament commentator Andrew Lincoln puts it, we also treat all of our children with fairness, we do not seek to humiliate them, and we do not arbitrarily command them to do something just to show that we have power over them (Ephesians, 406). At the same time, however, we insist upon obedience, just as the Lord does with us.

Hard, Slow, Wonderful Work

All parents fall short of what God requires of us, and there is abundant grace in Christ for the forgiveness of our failures. And yet, grace does not teach us to lessen what God requires of us in any way, even though this is our natural tendency, a way of trying to cope with our parenting failures. God’s grace is sufficient to forgive us, and then strengthen us to strive after obedience to what he requires, not to find our hope by lowering the standard and congratulating ourselves in how we have met it.

Nurturing and admonishing our children for their eternal spiritual well-being is hard, slow work. As a vital aspect of our own holiness, it is an endurance race set before us (Hebrews 12:1). Our children’s spiritual growth will not occur overnight, but don’t be discouraged: we look for spiritual fruit, the fruit God promises, to develop over time as we patiently and prayerfully nurture and admonish our children to take hold of Christ and to follow him wherever he leads (John 10:27).

Few saw as much as Peter did.

One of the first disciples, and chief among them, he heard Jesus’s public teaching, and his private explanations. He saw Jesus heal, raise the dead, and feed thousands with a few loaves and fish. He walked Galilee with Jesus, on land and sea.

Along with James and John, Peter witnessed the transfiguration, and accompanied Jesus deep into Gethsemane to pray on the night before he died. Then, watching from a distance on Good Friday, Peter saw what Jesus did, and did not do. Jesus’s enemies mocked him, slandered him, insulted him, maligned him, reviled him — as verbal thrusts of contempt conspired with nails and spear.

How Jesus handled it left an indelible stamp on Peter. And it came to mark his letter to insulted, maligned Christians, tempted to respond in kind to their revilers. In short, “When [Jesus] was reviled, he did not revile in return” (1 Peter 2:23).

Mindful of God

The holy composure that Jesus showed when mistreated, and while dying in agony, was not only truly divine, but like Christ himself, fully human.

“Not reviling in return” didn’t just happen. This is not how humanity naturally responds when verbally attacked. No, for years Jesus prepared for it. He trained his soul for these trials. Through rhythms of communion with his Father and compassion for immature sheep, through seasons of prayer and ceaselessly rehearsing what “is written” in Scripture, through shaping his own pliable human soul with habits of Godward praise and glad obedience, Jesus had long readied himself for the gauntlet of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.

Christ was not caught off guard when they first flogged him with words. Jesus knew that mocking would come, and warned his men of it ahead of time. He would be “mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon” (Luke 18:32). “See, we are going up to Jerusalem. And the Son of Man will be . . . mocked and flogged and crucified” (Matthew 20:18–19; also Mark 10:34). Not only flogging and crucifixion, but also mocking would be a genuine trial, requiring his readiness.

How did he prepare for the onslaught? In the words of his watching disciple, Jesus entrusted himself “to him who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:23). He lived “mindful of God” (1 Peter 2:19), not just fellow man. He readied himself for the assault of spoken and acted evil by becoming the kind of man who would not respond in kind.

Mocked and Maligned

Preparation was one thing. Many are willing to talk theory. But when mocking words begin to fly, they often sting and disorient far more than anticipated. After his arrest,

the men who were holding Jesus in custody were mocking him as they beat him. They also blindfolded him and kept asking him, “Prophesy! Who is it that struck you?” And they said many other things against him, blaspheming him. (Luke 22:63–65)

They shuffled him off to the puppet king Herod, who “with his soldiers treated him with contempt and mocked him” (Luke 23:11). Then back to Pilate, and Mark reports in more detail what shape the mocking took: they clothed him in purple, put a crown of thorns on him, and saluted him in jest, “Hail, King of the Jews!” They struck his head with a reed, spit on him, and knelt down in sneering homage (Mark 15:17–19; also Matthew 27:28–31). Once they had nailed him to the cross, the soldiers came by for another round; they “mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine” (Luke 23:36).

Now that he seemed safely affixed to the cross, his own countrymen unleashed the barrage they had waiting. Passersby “derided him, wagging their heads” (Matthew 27:39). Even as he writhed in agony, and public humiliation, they taunted him: “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself!” “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross” (Matthew 27:40).

Even the dignitaries of Israel could not hold their tongues but descended into the same cowardly insults: “He saved others; he cannot save himself.” “He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him” (Matthew 27:42). “He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him” (Matthew 27:43). Never one to exaggerate, Luke simply reports that “the rulers scoffed at him” (Luke 23:35).

Even the two criminals crucified to his left and right “reviled him in the same way” (Matthew 27:44; Mark 15:32).

Reviled, Keep Trusting

How, then, did Jesus respond?

Clearly, he was capable of putting it all right back in their face with some perfectly crafted reply. No one had a way with words like Jesus. When he chose to speak, even foes confessed that “no one ever spoke like this man!” (John 7:46). None could silence the proud with one simple word like Jesus. Yet hear it from eyewitness testimony: “When he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:23).

Jesus had cultivated a life of trust in his Father. He was ever “mindful of God.” Then, even when the thrusts of reviling and mocking came, he did not let the hurt pierce his heart, and he did not respond to evil with evil. Instead, he continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. Mindful of his Father, he could trust that justice would come in due time, and at least in this moment, it was not his own to enact. The wicked words of man would not unseat his own obedience to God. If we only had such wherewithal today.

This, of course, was not raw willpower, without joy. When pummeled by spoken contempt, Jesus would not fail to practice what he had preached: “Rejoice and be glad . . . when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you” (Matthew 5:11–12). He was a man of sorrows, but not joyless. In the whole horrible enterprise, says Hebrews 12:2, Jesus endured the cross “for the joy that was set before him.”

Joy does not mean fun. There was nothing fun about the odium and shame of the cross, nor its nails, nor its blasphemies. Nor was it without the deep joy that could sustain him.

Gethsemane and Golgotha were not yet the time, but they prepared the way. The day would come to “leap for joy” (Luke 6:23). Which leads to Peter’s emphasis on what Jesus did not do.

Do Not Respond in Kind

Jesus did not descend into the very sin that had been sinned against him. He did not give in to evil by repeating it. “He did not revile in return” (1 Peter 2:23).

On such authority, Peter says to his embattled readers, “Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling” (1 Peter 3:9). No matter what terrible evil has been uttered against you, keep your tongue from speaking evil (1 Peter 3:10). Have you been slandered? “Put away . . . all slander” (1 Peter 2:1). The kingdom-disqualifying sins of others, including reviling (1 Corinthians 5:11; 6:9–10), are no excuse to give ourselves to sin. Would you too go to hell because the hell-bound scoff at you?

On the one hand, Peter should not have been surprised to see Jesus’s response to reviling. This very concept of not responding in kind had been one of the hallmarks of Christ’s teaching. Turn the other cheek. Go another mile. Give him your cloak as well. Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Still, Peter marveled to see the Christian ethic in its first and greatest act. It’s one thing to hear of a miracle; another to see it for yourself. And he would see still more.

Bless Your Revilers

Remarkably, Jesus didn’t stop at holding his tongue, magnificent as that was. He spoke blessing, rather than curse. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Human, he could find the impulse to respond in kind. But holy, he acted the miracle of not reviling in return, and then went even further. The joy that led him not to respond in kind held his peace and filled his mouth with words of blessing for his foes.

So Peter writes, “Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless” (1 Peter 3:9). Who would dare venture such an ethic without the teaching and example of Christ? Christians are constrained not to silence, but to righteousness. Peter would have us be ready, in fact, to speak with grace and truth: “Always [be] prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.” And however well-meaning or slanderous their talk, do so “with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15).

Paul also got the message, and gave it: “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. . . . Repay no one evil for evil” (Romans 12:14, 17).

Blessed and Vindicated

In the end, Jesus not only blessed but he was blessed.

God did not leave him in utter humiliation, but exalted him. He did not abandon him to the tomb, but raised him. God counted to three, and fully vindicated Jesus with resurrection life, then counted to forty, and raised him up to heaven, and then seated him on heaven’s very throne. And in his threefold rising, Jesus looked in triumph over his enemies and saw them put to shame.

So too, “you will be blessed,” writes Peter (1 Peter 3:14). In fact, you already have a down payment: “If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you” (1 Peter 4:14). True, insults will not first strike us as blessings. But then, like Jesus, we go to work on them by the Spirit, mindful of God. With the calculus of heaven, which is never flippant, but ever earnest, we learn to live what Jesus taught and realized:

Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven. (Matthew 5:11–12; also Luke 6:22)

When mocked, maligned, reviled, we follow in Jesus’s steps (1 Peter 2:21). In him, we do not sin in response to sin. And one day soon, if not already in this life, the folly of our revilers will be exposed. “When you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame” (1 Peter 3:16).

When Reviled, We Bless

Make no mistake, we do not take reviling lightly. We do not celebrate opposition to Jesus, in and of itself. And true reviling is unavoidably painful. We don’t seek it, try to provoke it, or enjoy it. Not eager for it, yet we are willing for Jesus’s sake to endure it — when it comes.

In times when talk is cheap and unbelievers are prone to take aim, we look to our Lord, admire his magnanimity, and, when attacked, we seek to walk in his steps.

As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 4:12, “When reviled, we bless.”

For five years, I cared for my friend Violet as her memories faded away. Dementia took hold, and the feisty Finnish woman who took pride in her nursing career, her spotless lawn, and her adoring German shepherd eventually forgot the people and home she loved. In her final months, she no longer recognized Bible verses that had buoyed her through so many storms.

But she still had “Amazing Grace.”

During Violet’s last year, I visited her every Tuesday with my Bible in hand. She neither recognized me nor recalled any words I read to her. But whenever I sang “Amazing Grace,” she joined in, warbling just as she had for so many years in the choir. In a season when the fog of dementia had otherwise clouded her vision of God’s grace, she reclaimed his promises through song: “I once was lost but now am found; was blind but now I see.”

Chorus of Commands

Throughout the Bible, praise, adoration, and thanksgiving move God’s people to sing. After God guides the Israelites safely across the Red Sea, Moses leads them in song (Exodus 15:1). When God protects David from Saul, David praises him with singing (2 Samuel 22:49–50).

This pattern repeats throughout the whole biblical story. When God blesses Hannah with a son, she sings in thanksgiving (1 Samuel 2:1–10). After Gabriel visits Mary to foretell Jesus’s birth, she rejoices with the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55). Jesus himself sings a hymn (likely from Psalm 118) at the Last Supper (Matthew 26:30), and John foresees all the nations singing praises to the risen Lord in the new heavens and new earth (Revelation 5:9–12).

Paul encourages the church to “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Colossians 3:16). James writes, “Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise” (James 5:13). The Lord himself calls us to sing as we praise him. Consider Psalm 96:1–3:

Oh sing to the Lord a new song;     sing to the Lord, all the earth!Sing to the Lord, bless his name;     tell of his salvation from day to day.Declare his glory among the nations,     his marvelous works among all the peoples!

Psalm 147 likewise begins, “Praise the Lord! For it is good to sing praises to our God; for it is pleasant, and a song of praise is fitting” (Psalm 147:1). And Psalm 100 joins the theme: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth! Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into his presence with singing!” (Psalm 100:1–2).

From beginning to end, singing and worship go hand in hand.

Reason to Sing

Why would God so fervently command us to unite our words with melody when we worship him? On the one hand, as God creates us in his image, we’re to rejoice in song just as he does. In Zephaniah 3:17, we read,

The Lord your God is in your midst,     A mighty one who will save;He will rejoice over you with gladness;     He will quiet you by his love;He will exult over you with loud singing.

Furthermore, when we lift our voices in song to the Lord, we direct our emotions heavenward, stirring up thankfulness in our hearts as befits the Almighty (Colossians 3:16). As Jonathan Edwards writes, “The duty of singing praises to God, seems to be appointed wholly to excite and express religious affections” (Religious Affections, 115).

“When we read a verse, it can flit away; when we sing it, we harbor God’s word in our heart.”

And yet, there’s another reason to worship with singing — a reason beautifully evident during my visits with Violet. In Deuteronomy 31:19–21, God commands Moses to teach the people a song recounting his deeds so that they and their offspring might remember. “When many evils and troubles have come upon them,” God says, “this song shall confront them as a witness (for it will live unforgotten in the mouths of their offspring)” (Deuteronomy 31:21).

When we sing God’s praises, we glorify him, obey him, and direct our hearts toward him. But also, remarkably, we remember words our inconstant, sin-stricken brains would otherwise so quickly forget.

Musical Memory

The history of God’s people is a story of forgetfulness and remembrance. In the wilderness, the Israelites forgot the wondrous deeds God had accomplished in Egypt and worshiped the work of their own hands (Exodus 32:1–10). In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses pleaded with the people to remember what God had done for them (Deuteronomy 4:9; 8:2, 11–20). Joshua built a memorial of twelve stones from the Jordan River so the following generations might know how God provided (Joshua 4:1–7). Finally, in the upper room, Jesus commanded his disciples to take the wine and the bread in remembrance of him, as we also must do (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:23–29).

To follow Christ is to remember and proclaim what he has done (Acts 4:20). And the gift of song, in addition to stirring our hearts, aids our minds in remembering. When we read a verse, it can flit away; when we sing it, we harbor God’s word in our heart (Psalm 119:11).

The link between song and remembrance arises from how God designed our brains. While the act of forgetting may seem simple, we actually have several types of memory, all organized within separate areas of the nervous system. Declarative memory involves recall of events, concepts, words, meanings, and facts, and it originates in the temporal lobes and hippocampus. Studies show, however, that music involves complicated networks in the brain beyond this system.

Singing triggers our procedural memory — a complex network involving the cerebellum, motor cortex, and deeper brain structures. Procedural memory allows us to perform actions without explicitly focusing on them. Consider how rarely you think about how to ride a bike or drive a car after your first awkward days of learning. Such procedural memories are so robustly imprinted in our brains, that we can take up an action like playing the piano or knitting even if we’ve not done so in ages.

Musical processing also connects to emotional memory, centered in a region of the brain called the amygdala. The emotional memory system helps us to recall events with strong feelings attached to them. The link between music and emotional memory explains why certain songs transport us to a specific moment in time and evoke feelings we may not have recalled for years.

Thanks to the connection between music and these two memory systems, we can hardly erase catchy jingles from our heads, no matter how much they annoy us. Hearing a familiar song on the radio can instantly carry us to that first handhold with a spouse or to our birthday party in kindergarten. Most stunning of all, the link between these systems reveals why the command to “Sing to the Lord!” not only glorifies God but also blesses us abundantly. When we sing, we remember.

Melody When Memory Fails

The human brain’s stunning ability to recall music is a gift of mercy in Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s preferentially affects the temporal lobes and hippocampus, the regions of the brain responsible for declarative memory. As a result, memory for language, names, and events erodes away. Memory for recent events fades first, as these are less rigorously stored. Over time, however, even remote events can slip away.

“God has designed the very architecture of our brains to hide his word even when our memories fail.”

Memory for music, however, often remains intact in Alzheimer’s because it involves the procedural and emotional memory systems. The response to music is preserved even in advanced dementia, when patients can no longer reason, plan, or even speak. “I remember the first time I saw someone with Alzheimer’s remembering the Lord through music,” writes clinical psychologist Benjamin Mast in his book Second Forgetting: Remembering the Power of the Gospel During Alzheimer’s Disease. During his visit to a memory-care center, where “the full range of dementia was represented,” he writes,

When it came time for music, and especially the old hymns, things visibly changed. One woman who only wanted to leave finally sat down for a while to listen. A man who was always angry and agitated now had a contented look and tapped his foot to the music. Another man who was quite confused closed his tear-filled eyes and slowly raised his hands while quietly mouthing each word. God uses music to reach the seemingly unreachable. And he gives us this gift as a gracious resource to help us in drawing people back to him, to reengage their faith. (139)

By God’s grace, believers who can no longer remember the names of loved ones can still readily sing God’s praises. God has designed the very architecture of our brains to hide his word even when our memories fail. And he commands us to sing so that we might recall his life-giving word even when we’re prone to forget.

Sing to the Lord, my brothers and sisters. Make a joyful noise. And as you sing, even as other memories fade, remember his amazing grace — the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s love for you in Christ.