Raising joyful children in an angry world, a podcast dedicated to faithful parents navigating their families through a stormy culture.
If we were to ask, what is the most significant thing our kids need to know and learn, I believe our God, our Bible, and every teacher in our faith would answer in one word, love. This is Raising Joyful Children in an Angry World. I'm your host, Paul Osborne. Jesus taught there are only two commandments.
Paul:Love God and love your neighbor in Paul's famous letter to the Corinthians chapter 13 verse 13 He says we have faith hope and love but the greatest is love JC Ryle said we needed to teach our children love because of faith of knowledge and Without love is useless. Jonathan Edwards said that love is the sum of all virtue. And Thomas Aquinas said that all human actions should be conformed to the standard of love. Our faith clearly tells us that the greatest thing we need to teach our kids is love, and it is the hardest thing to teach. So much of Christian teaching is baked in proverbs or guidelines for living. And the worst of it sometimes emphasizes rule keeping over love. And then of course our faithless society makes matters worse. It tries to go the opposite direction and teach about the vice of hatred. Society speaks about hatred more and more. Interesting, there are 16 major Holocaust museums in America and more of them around the world. And yet, last year, we saw a rapid rise in anti Semitism. Our society posts signs. It speaks about hatred over and over. It's in NFL end zones and on their helmets. Yet, it seems to have little impact. The absence of knowing God means not grasping love. And it's really why the world is angry. And until we learn to love, we're vulnerable to envy, and that leads to outbursts of anger and all sorts of hatred. We tend to get stuck in the Aristotle definition. He said that love was just the great quid pro quo. We give love to what gives us something in return. And when we stop getting something, Our love sours. At best, we become indifferent. And at worst, that old envy and hatred problem boils up. Our kids will not learn love as an independent study. Hopefully, they'll gain some understanding of love from us as parents. But we certainly can't count on schools and our culture to help. First, I think it's important that we cannot know true biblical love without knowing God, who is love. Two of the greatest preachers and teachers of our faith, I think, bring some wisdom and clarity. Martin Luther. Luther said it this way. The love of God does not FIND but creates that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it. Explain this a little bit. We tend to love what is pleasing to us. That's the human definition that Aristotle gave. We're passive when it comes to love. We're only active when it comes to receiving. We come at love in what we receive, the feelings we get. And the best we can really hope for is a reasonable exchange between parties. This kind of love, unfortunately, has a high failure rate. God, rather than seeking his own good, God lets his love flow forth and he creates good. God delights in loving the sinner, the unlovable, creating love in us, and that's what transforms us from a taker to a giver. How can we love properly without first learning to love God? who creates love. This is what Luther is pointing out. Luther agrees. Look, the world on a human level of love is based on an exchange, but godly love is above us. It comes from God. It's the real standard of love because it teaches us that God loves us not out of compulsion, not because we're lovable, Not because he gets something from it, but because God is love and he simply loves us because he's love. Now, none of us lives up to this standard. We can't even grasp it without the gospel. But without the love of God in our heart, we're not going to be able to love in a biblical framework. The person who does not understand God or love, for example, would believe that the soulmate is something that they find. The person who knows God understands their soulmate is given to them by the God who created. the soulmate. God creates love. We simply are on a human level trying to find it. This past week, Carol Stone, uh, have featured an article in the London Times. She said, I'm 81 and I have 55, 000 people in my contact list. It should be easy to find a man, love is classic. What would make her feel good? What would remove her loneliness? It's an exchange of companionship. It's human love at a human level. We have to learn to love on a higher level. That is to say, to add biblical love on top of our human recipe for love. St. Augustine brings a little more perspective. He said, you know, to live this godly life, to live this joyful life. We have to be able of being capable to evaluate things to love. That is to say, in the right order. So we don't love what we should not love. Or fail to love what we ought to love. And we have to have a greater love for what should be loved the greatest. And the least love for those things that should be loved least. And once we understand love. And that God is love, then we're only capable to start to understand what Augustine is describing. We learn to prioritize our love by understanding God's priorities of love. And this, I believe, helps us emphasize The positive in Christianity rather than simply emphasizing the negative. Don't love this, love that. We have to start with what does God love and what does God not love. And this of course is going to include correction because we have to care enough and love enough to confront. But we have to also teach the positive side of love. So how do we do this? Well, I think we have to start with our Bible stories, and we must emphasize God's love in those stories and explanations of the Biblical story. So the story of David and Goliath, for example, has to include how much God loved David. And David loved God, that he gave David the victory. Secondly, I believe we have to kind of practice what it means to love. If love involves giving our time and our talents to those who cannot pay us back or reciprocate, then we have to include that in the raising of our joyful children. It's the time to visit a nursing home, the blanket drive, the food bank. These are part of the ways that we learn to love. And then the family unit is where this really gets put to the test. Sibling rivalry should be replaced with sibling supportiveness. Learning to be happy for our brothers and sisters successes. And this is a lesson. We have to learn over and over and over, but on the positive side, we can teach it by celebrating the successes of the family members in our home. Let me say again, it's a long process, but this is part of the way we learn to love. The way God wants us to love. And lastly, our view of God. Our understanding of the way God works. That God is sovereign. In other words, God does not live up to our standards of fairness. We don't all start off in life equally. We don't all get the same talents. God doesn't care about that. He cares about what we do with the talents that we get and how we react to the talents he gives to others. We went into very long detail about this in the podcast on talents. I bring this up, however, today because I believe the culture is in many ways teaching children to hate, to be envious and angry and unloving. The current philosophy behind diversity Equity and inclusion is filled with oxymorons and circular logic. It is a contradiction. The teaching fuels guilt and envy. It does not stop hatred. It creates it and is largely behind, I believe, the spirit of condemnation that has infected so much of American culture. See, the world tries to say, yes, we need diversity of talent, but at the same time, Everyone should be given the same resources so that all are included. But it's doublespeak. It's contradictory. It's why, frankly, I found the book. Just because, written by McConaughey, it's foolish. It's a destructive set of beliefs. The idea that we are different, but must be made the same, cannot be done. And when people realize it, it causes anger and strife. And we fool ourselves in pretending it can work. All of nature and the universe testifies that the world is diverse and therefore cannot start with the same resources because the resources are part of the diversity. We can't make the land of tropical fruit equal to the plains of grain or salt water to fresh. Trying to do so just ends up destroying the world and we lose the benefits of the diversity of resources that the universe and the God who created it gives us. If the sea had the same amount of water as rivers. We'd go into a drought, and if the rivers had the same volume of water as the ocean, we would be in a flood. The same holds true in human talent. Teaching children to love is hard. It goes against our human conception of love, and it goes against our foolish societal definitions of what is fair. There are two things that we need to know. God and his word that instructs us and informs us on how to practice love in our home. And secondly, we must understand that our children cannot drink the advice of this world on love and escape its anger. We have to teach them to feed on the word of God, the sacraments that the Lord has given us. And recognize that Christianity has an exclusive claim to teaching love because only Christianity says that our God gave his only son for us because he loved us. Let me close with this, Psalm 100, for the Lord is good, His steadfast love endures forever, and His faithfulness is to all generations. You want to pass down a joyful family and your children pass down a joyful family to their Kids, it all comes down to understanding the steadfast love of God that it lasts forever and the gift is to you and your children and your children's children.
The ultimate battle for the heart and soul is a fight for identity. Our king invites our kids to know who they are, what to believe, and where they belong. Until next time, let's remember the words for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.