Episode 562: Episode 562 - Secrets to Great Parenting

Okay, so Colossians chapter 3.

And again, we've already talked about wives and husbands.

Now he says in verse 20, "Children, be obedient to your parents in all things; for this is well-pleasing to the Lord." Now, if you read that verse and you don't have a greater context of what the Bible says about parenting and about, uh, family and, and about obedience, that kind of thing, then you as a skeptic perhaps, you might say, "Well, oh, so you're just supposed to be blindly obedient to your parents no matter what they say, no matter what they do." Uh, that is not what the Bible's saying.

The Bible nowhere, uh, calls us to have blind obedience to, uh, those in authority above us, our parents, our employers, our, uh, government.

Uh, if your employer asks you to cut corners and, uh, to fudge on the, on the numbers and to essentially lie on a report so that you can look good or so that it looks like you're making less money or more money, uh, you as a Christian have a moral obligation to stand up and say, "I'm not doing that.

I'm gonna disobey, uh, your order." And so th- that's something that you, you have to do.

Uh, if you're, if you're a citizen of a country like we are here in America and our government, uh, requires us to do something that is counter, uh, scriptural or unbiblical, then we have a moral obligation to God to say, "No, the higher authority over me, who is God, who's greater than you and the government, tells me I can't do that." Or if it prohibits you from doing something that God has called you to do, then you also have a moral obligation to disobey.

And so there is a time for Christians to disobey their government if their government is requiring them to do something that is unbiblical.

And, uh, the early Christians had this experience.

They were required by Rome to bow to the statues of Caesar.

You remember back at Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Babylon, they were required by their government to bow down to the statue of their king, and they didn't say, "Well, you know, I guess we should do it this one time and confess it," or whatever.

No, they just didn't do it.

Now, there were consequences to that.

They ended up in a fiery furnace, right? [laughs] Uh, but, uh, but God was there with them, and God actually protected them.

So, so God is not saying in this verse that children are to obey any parent for any reason about anything.

Uh, if, if your parents tell you to do something that is immoral, y- you don't obey them.

You, you disobey and you suffer the consequences, right? But the context of the passage here, if you think about what Paul's saying, he's speaking to Christian parents and presumably Christian children, and he says, "Be obedient to your parents in all things." Why? Because I am assuming Paul is saying through this that these...

This, the, the all things we're talking about here are all the things that are under the umbrella and the par- and within the parameters of the things that God wants you to do, uh, that, that He's communicating to you through your parents.

So obviously, without just saying it out loud, he's saying, "Obey your parents, uh, in all things," obviously not to do evil or to go kill somebody or whatever, but in the things they tell you to do, which are gonna be normal things.

Th- this is why, you know, where it says, um, in the Ten Commandments to children, "Obey your parents," uh, because it, it'll, uh, you'll live a long life.

It'll go well with you, and you'll live a long life.

Well, what do you mean by that? Well, because it's assuming that parents have their, their children's best interests at heart and are trying to protect their children.

If you obey your parents, you'll end up living longer.

You know why? 'Cause you won't walk out into the street, uh, because your parents will tell you not to play in the street.

You won't, uh, you won't do harmful things to yourself.