Audio Transcript

Well, some Christians are dramatically saved out of a life of scandalous sin and have an amazing testimony of deliverance to share. Many other Christians, particularly those saved at a young age, don’t really have a dramatic conversion story. And that leads to a challenge for at least one young Christian, a young woman named Rachael. She writes in, “Hello Pastor John, and thank you for taking my question! I’ve been a Christian all my life, as long as I can recall. I’m not perfect. I have a ton of issues and God is still working in me. But I’ve never indulged in alcohol, never done any drugs, never engaged in premarital sex. I guard my heart to the best of my ability and pray often when I’m struggling with temptations. I’ll be the first to tell you that I need God’s grace just as much as, if not more so than, anybody else.

“But sometimes, I get a case of FOMO, the fear of missing out. Sometimes I feel like the older brother in the prodigal-son parable. Like when I see people at church who turned away from sinful hedonism and became Christians, I’m happy for them and rejoice with them. But at the same time I feel like, ‘Wow, no one cares that I’ve always said no to drugs and sex and wickedness my whole life, but boy they all care when all the people doing that stuff turn away from it.’ And I know that’s not what I should be thinking. I shouldn’t be bitter or resentful. But sometimes those feelings manifest. I’m not proud of these thoughts and I often pray to God that these feelings would flee so I can just bask in his presence, but it’s hard. Any advice you have would help. Thank you!”

I appreciate Rachael’s honesty, and I appreciate her self-recrimination at the temptation to feel resentment that her lifelong faithfulness to Christ feels unacknowledged and less valued than recent converts from lives of flagrant sin. And one of the reasons that I appreciate this is that it shows me that Rachael is not in the category of the Pharisee in Luke 18:9–14:

Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.” But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other.

Now, Rachael is aware of that danger, and she’s not proud when that temptation rises. That’s a good sign.

Sons and Slaves

She mentions the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son. Now that is a dangerous comparison because she doesn’t want to be in the category of the older brother. The older brother was very angry that the father was so lavish in his celebration of the return of the younger son who had wasted the father’s inheritance.

But the problem with the older brother, more deeply, was that he related to his father like a slave instead of a son. He reminded his father “how hard I’ve served you all these years.” You could just hear, “. . . like a slave,” but the father shook his head as if in bafflement and said, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours” (Luke 15:31).

“The problem with the older brother, more deeply, was that he related to his father like a slave instead of a son.”

In other words, the problem with the older brother is not merely that he doesn’t love his younger brother the way he should, but that he doesn’t see or feel the glory of what he has in his relationship to his father, and the inheritance from the father. So, Rachael does not want to be like this older brother.

Who Are the Ninety-Nine?

Now, let’s go one step further with this parable, because it gets insightful for her situation. The parable of the prodigal son is the third of three parables that illustrate joy when a lost sinner is rescued by Jesus for the kingdom of heaven. In the first parable, there’s the man who leaves ninety-nine sheep behind, and he goes out, and he finds one lost sheep. And it says, “There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7).

And then there’s the woman in the next parable who has ten coins. She loses one, and she desperately sweeps all of her house, finds the coin, gathers her friends, and rejoices. And Jesus says, “Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents” (Luke 15:10).

Now that might sound like the situation Rachael is frustrated about. The church throws a party for one amazing convert out of a life of flagrant sinning — why? Well, doesn’t Jesus say in Luke 15 that one sinner who repents is more to be celebrated than ninety-nine faithful Rachaels? No, that is not what it says. These three parables are not about a church with ninety-nine godly, faithful, lifelong Christians who know they need grace, and who live by the mercy of God. That’s not what these parables are about.

These parables are about a dinner party where Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners, surrounded by Pharisees who are ticked off that Jesus is offering his forgiving fellowship to sinners. The elder brother represents the Pharisees, not the faithful, humble, believing church member. And when Jesus refers to ninety-nine persons who need no repentance, he’s speaking ironically, because there is no such thing as a person who needs no repentance, especially the Pharisees.

Where We See Our Sin

But here’s what I would say, both to Rachael and to Rachael’s church leaders. It is a serious mistake to give the impression that Christians come to understand the depth of depravity from which we’ve been saved, and the glories of grace by which we’ve been saved, by focusing on the remembered experience of conversion and the sins that went before.

That’s a profound mistake to think that we can know the depth of our depravity by recalling our pre-conversion sins, or that we can know the glories of grace by recalling that night when we were set free from drug addiction and sexual bondage. That is utterly naive for pastors to think that way or people to think that way.

“Nobody can know the depths of their depravity and the glories of God’s grace by focusing on remembered experience.”

Nobody, nobody can know the depths of their depravity and the glories of God’s grace by focusing on remembered experience. I don’t care how horrible the lifestyle was or how dramatic the conversion was, all such estimations of depravity and grace will be superficial without the biblical revelation of what depravity really is in relation to God, and what grace really is in the heart of God. That reality can only be learned from what God has said in his word, not from any analysis of our sinful lives or our conversions. Listen to Paul:

You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the [age] of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience — among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. (Ephesians 2:1–3)

They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. . . . But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved. (Ephesians 4:18; 2:4–5)

If we don’t penetrate into this kind of God-given description of our condition before and after grace, we will never know the depth of our depravity or the glory of God’s grace.

Glory of Grace

Which means for Rachael and her church, by all means, let there be celebrations of every conversion of every hardened sinner. Amen. And let there be celebrations of every 8-year-old child who genuinely repents and embraces Jesus as Savior and Lord and Treasure. And let every Christian marvel every day that he or she has peace with God, and that we swim in an ocean of grace, and that we owe nothing to ourselves and everything to God.

And let the elders teach the people, so that year by year the people tremble more and more at the horrors of what they were saved from at 8 or 18 or 58. And so, year by year, they leap with greater joy at the increasingly amazing grasp of grace by which they live.

People who ought to know keep saying that this year we will finally put the pandemic behind us. I’ve given up predicting myself, but I hope they’re right. If they are, I wonder how we’ll remember these last couple years.

For those who suffered the death of someone close to them, the defining experience of the pandemic may be loss. For many of us, I imagine the primary experience will be disorientation. We saw our plans upended. We felt time suspended. We saw what had been pillars in life crumble one after another — from time with aging family, to the joy of in-person worship, to a simple smile on the unmasked face of a friend.

Far beyond the physical impacts of the disease itself, the pandemic experience has exposed the fragility of so much of what we take for granted in life. How will we cope with the disorientation of the last couple years? Where will we look for stability and renewal coming out of them?

Nothing New Under the Sun

The Bible’s wisdom literature is given to help us answer questions like these. Wisdom provides proper orientation to the world. It’s a learned instinct for living in the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. And of the Bible’s wisdom books, perhaps ironically, it is Ecclesiastes that offers the perspective we badly need in responding to what we’ve been through.

“Wisdom is an instinct for living in the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.”

I say ironically because Ecclesiastes itself can be a disorienting book. It offers the perspective of a man called “the Preacher,” who essentially had everything he wanted in life. No one told him no. But in the end, he found it all to be nothing but vanity. A mere vapor. Meaningless. Empty.

It is striking to me how closely the list of his pursuits in life resembles the main options we have for reorienting ourselves after a difficult couple of years. We’ll be tempted to look for stability or hope in the same vanities that collapsed under his weight long ago.

Take pleasure, for example. In the earliest days of the pandemic, traffic to major porn sites skyrocketed. So did Netflix subscriptions. And now, after two years in which so many plans were disrupted, pleasure-seekers are booking luxury vacations at record pace. As one Forbes writer put it, what we learned from the pandemic is that “the future is unpredictable,” that “life is short,” and that “dreams should not be put off.” “If all goes well,” he continues, “2022 is going to be a big year for dream trips.”

The Big Quit

Some have chased dreams; others are looking to work for a fresh start. In September of 2021 more than four million people voluntarily left their jobs for other opportunities. That number broke a record set the previous month, when millions more made the same choice. It’s a trend so significant that pundits are calling this “The Great Resignation” or “The Big Quit.” Given how much of the disruption of these past years directly affected our work, it shouldn’t surprise us that so many would look to move on with a change of scenery.

Then there’s money and what it can buy. Retail therapy was a go-to treatment for months before any vaccine hit the market. With stimulus money going around, people purchased new fire pits and television upgrades, and started home improvement projects to take the edge off what had gone wrong. So many months later, retail therapy still sells. As one recent AT&T commercial put it, “I think we can all agree that after the past year-ish, we all deserve something new.” Why not reward your survival with the latest iPhone?

Still others have looked to mastery of some new skill to redeem the strange time and restore a sense of control. In April of 2020, I heard one economist talk about the loss of control as the primary stressor he was feeling since his job is to predict what’s likely to happen. His advice to others feeling that pain was to find something you can control, however small and insignificant it might be. Some learned to bake bread. Others took up a foreign language. I smoked my first couple briskets. What did you do with your pandemic? We want growth opportunities, to move from victory unto victory. If COVID was a curveball, we want to hit it out of the park.

All Was Striving After Wind

The Preacher warns us, however, that life doesn’t work this way. Ecclesiastes opens with a poem on the relentless, repetitive weariness of life under the sun. “What does a man gain,” he asks, “by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” (Ecclesiastes 1:3).

We want gain. We’d like to see life as one long process of acquisition. Where we have setbacks, we want to bounce back better than ever. We want steady upward progress. But just as the sun rises and sets (Ecclesiastes 1:5), just as the wind blows round and round (verse 6), so it is with all of life: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun” (verse 9).

In chapter 2, the Preacher explains how he reached this conclusion, with a catalog of where he turned for some sort of gain in this life. It’s a list that sounds eerily familiar. He looked first to pleasure (Ecclesiastes 2:1). He tried comedy (verse 2), fine wine (verse 3), entertainment, and sex (verse 8). He looked to his work, and to mastery over his slice of the world: “I made great works. I built houses and planted vineyards for myself. I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees” (Ecclesiastes 2:4–5). He built up more money and more possessions than any before him in Jerusalem (Ecclesiastes 2:7–8).

Pleasure, work, wealth, control — everything we might look to under the sun — he’s already had in abundance. We need to hear the lesson he learned the hard way: “Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 2:11).

What We Can See Now

If you’re feeling disoriented by a difficult two years, you won’t find your footing in the same old vanities that let the Preacher down so long ago. But we do have an opportunity now for a greater clarity about the world than perhaps we could have had back when things seemed normal.

“Nothing is certain about life under the sun except the death that comes at the end of it.”

Nothing is certain about life under the sun except the death that comes at the end of it. The things we take for granted have always been fragile. Our control over what matters to us has always been severely limited. And the grip of death on what we love has always been stronger than ours. COVID didn’t cause these problems. Whatever comes next won’t solve them. That’s the perspective Ecclesiastes offers to us.

When the Preacher writes of “life under the sun,” what he has in mind is life from a strictly human perspective. As if what we see is all there is. Death really is the end. There’s no satisfaction for our deepest hunger pains. In other words, “life under the sun” is life on your own, left to your own ideas for what’s best, your own resources for pulling off your vision, and your own handful of years to make the most of it.

Ecclesiastes is a devastating critique of human self-sufficiency. We won’t find a cure for what ails us under the sun. Our only hope rests on a radical intervention from beyond.

Light from Beyond the Sun

The message of Ecclesiastes is that if God is silent, the whole world is a vapor. The message of the rest of the Scriptures is that God has spoken to us. Even better than that: the Word has become flesh and lived among us (John 1:14).

Peter Kreeft has described Ecclesiastes as “a perfect silhouette of Jesus, the stark outline of the darkness that the face of Jesus fills” (Three Philosophies of Life, 51). Under the sun, on our own, all is vanity and death has the final word. Ecclesiastes exists to make “the darkness intolerable” (Derek Kidner, The Wisdom of Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, 103). And to prepare us for the only certain hope: “In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:4–5).

Whatever else we may take with us from a disorienting couple of years, into another year under the sun, let’s at least embrace the message of the Preacher. We won’t find the stability we crave short of the help and hope and satisfaction that only comes beyond the sun. If we haven’t learned that lesson, we’ll be just as unprepared for the next time the world turns upside down. And there will be a next time. “What has been is what will be. . . and there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

My wife, Julie, and I have been parents now for 43 years. During that time, God has graciously given us 6 children and 22 grandchildren, with more on the way (grandchildren, not children!). That’s a lot of parenting experience, even if many of our experiences only showed how confused we were at the time.

When people ask us for counsel on raising kids, as our children often have, it can be difficult to respond briefly. Parenting is complex, and there are few simple answers.

Of course, the most important words are those God himself has given us, such as these from the apostle Paul, in Ephesians 6:4: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” And similarly in Colossians 3:21: “Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.”

It’s significant that Paul issues a common warning in these two verses: “Do not provoke your children.” Don’t tempt them. Don’t overly burden them. Don’t frustrate them. But how do we keep from doing that? In our early years of parenting, I remember how often I thought the answer to any parenting problem was more rules. Unfortunately, that became a primary way I provoked my children. And it became especially obvious when I lost track of what rules I had actually made.

A wiser way to avoid provoking our children is to consider what kind of father God is to us. In these years far removed from the daily pressures of raising little ones, Julie and I have identified at least three ways God calls us to reflect his fatherly heart in the way we raise our children.

Attention

In this age of nonstop, ever-present, competing spectacles, giving children our attention can be more challenging than we think.

The voices of distraction are loud and persistent. Dirty dishes. Dirty house. Dirty laundry. Dirty children. Grocery shopping. Time with friends. Deadlines. Text messages. Unfinished books, magazines, and articles. Internet browsing. The nonstop allure of social media, phone games, and podcasts. It’s easy to stop paying attention to the little ones right in front of our eyes. We have an uncanny ability to tune out a whining child or ignore little fingers pulling on our shirt when we have something “more important” to do.

But God isn’t like that. “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you” (Psalm 32:8). As our Lord teaches us, his eye is on us. In fact, he is always watching us: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear him, on those who hope in his steadfast love” (Psalm 33:18).

We are never out of God’s sight. We always have his attention. Likewise, our children need to know they have our attention. That means patient listening. Focusing. Stooping down to eye level. Spending time. It often requires saying no to other activities. Turning off or turning down the TV or music. Closing your computer. Putting down your phone.

Of course, children should be taught not to interrupt adults and to respect the conversations of others. But too often, we seek to parent our kids without really knowing them or understanding them. We can view them more as interruptions, nuisances, or obstacles to what we want to accomplish.

But raising our children for God’s glory is what we want to accomplish. And to do that, we need to give them our attention.

Affection

Our young children need to know not only that we notice them, but that we love them. They were made to respond to and benefit from our affection.

J.C. Ryle reminds us in The Duties of Parents,

Love should be the silver thread that runs through all your conduct. Kindness, gentleness, long-suffering, patience, forbearance, sympathy, a willingness to enter into childish troubles, a readiness to take part in childish joys — these are the cords by which a child may be led most easily — these are the clues you must follow if you would find the way to his heart. (11)

Consider God’s affection for his people — the kind of affection we’re to reflect to our children:

It was I who taught Ephraim to walk; I took them up by their arms, but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of kindness, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaws, and I bent down to them and fed them. (Hosea 11:3–4)

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. (Psalm 103:8)

Affection begins in the heart, but it leads to physical contact: holding, touching, hugging, kissing, cuddling — and typically for boys, wrestling.

We can easily withhold affection when we want to “teach our kid a lesson.” They’ve been disrespectful. They’ve blatantly disobeyed. They’re being selfish and arguing — again. Our responses are short, even cold. There’s nothing warm or inviting about the way we’re addressing or interacting with them.

“It’s God’s kindness, not his harshness, that leads us to repentance. The same will be true with our children.”

But no matter how irritated, frustrated, bothered, inconvenienced, or bad we’re feeling, we don’t want to withhold the kind of lavish affection God has poured out on us through his Son. Showing such affection doesn’t mean we don’t speak clearly, firmly, or even sternly at times. There are directions we want our children to understand, sins we want them to avoid, and dangers we want them to flee.

But far too often, self-centered anger motivates us rather than wisdom and compassion. Paul reminds us in Romans 2:4 that it’s God’s kindness, not his harshness, that leads us to repentance. The same will be true with our children. God doesn’t withdraw his affection from his children when they disobey. Neither should we.

Authority

The Bible isn’t vague about children needing to obey their parents.

My son, keep your father’s commandment, and forsake not your mother’s teaching. (Proverbs 6:20)

Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. (Colossians 3:20)

“Authority combined with attention and affection is crucial for our children, especially in their early years.”

But a parent’s authority is never to be confused with demanding, bullying, manipulating, shaming, deriding, abusing, venting, belittling, crushing, domineering, or distancing. It’s never to be harsh or cruel or rooted in selfishness or vengeance. That kind of authority drives our children away from God, not toward him. But authority combined with attention and affection is crucial for our children, especially in their early years.

We exercise authority over our children not simply because we’re the adults, but because we want to point them to God’s authority. His rule over us is perfect and absolute; ours isn’t. So, as we exercise authority, we can look for ways to communicate the beauty, necessity, and delight of God’s commands to our kids. For example:

Talk regularly about what God wants us to do and why he wants us to obey him with joy.
Reference God’s word at planned times and spontaneously throughout the day.
Distinguish between God’s rules and our own preferences.
Point out the consequences of disobeying God’s commands.
Bring appropriate discipline when commands have been clearly heard, understood, and then disobeyed or disregarded.
Consistently bring discipline with a calm, hopeful, and faith-filled spirit.

Where Godly Authority Leads

Because authority is so often ignored or abused, it’s also helpful to remember why exercising authority in our children’s lives is so important.

First, authority teaches our children how God wants us to live. “All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his testimonies” (Psalm 25:10). Teaching our children not to lie, steal, hurt, or be disrespectful isn’t merely our preference — it’s God’s command. Likewise, being kind, truthful, generous, merciful, and faithful doesn’t just make them good citizens — it reflects their Father in heaven (Ephesians 5:1).

Second, authority shows our children their inability to keep God’s commands perfectly. As Paul Tripp has said, “Parenting is not a behavior-control mission; it is a heart-rescue mission.” Our job isn’t to keep our kids from sinning (an impossible task), but to teach them what to do with their sin in light of the Savior. There is a difference between doing good and being good, between the way we act and the way we are. God’s authority, over time, is meant to reveal our children’s waywardness, rebellion, deception, and inability to save themselves.

Finally, authority is meant to point our children to the Savior who perfectly obeyed his Father so he could take God’s punishment for our disobedience. Parental discipline is necessary to keep our kids from harming themselves and others, but it can’t change their hearts. They need to know that hope comes not from their spotless record but from the spotless record of Jesus. Regardless of how good our children look on the outside, they are never beyond the need for a Savior. And regardless of how bad our children act on the outside, they are never beyond the power of a Savior.

As in all things parenting related, we’ll never carry out these plans, or any others, as well as we hope. But we can take great comfort knowing we have a heavenly Father whose eye is always on us, whose heart is always for us, and who is always working in us what is pleasing to him (Psalm 121:7–8; Psalm 103:17; Philippians 2:13) — even, and especially, as we parent our young children.