Learning to Take Responsibility (Pt 2)

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

All right, let’s talk about self-discipline, the third trait that comes under taking responsibility. Biblical self-disciplines primary goal is to increase in godliness. 1 Timothy 4.7 tells us to discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness. So self-control we just talked about, the ability to restrain oneself from unwise actions. Self-discipline is the opposite side of the coin deals with the ability to push yourself to take wise actions. When it comes to our children in self-discipline, Newton’s first law of motion certainly applies. An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by some force, and that force is usually the parents.

Parents need to train their children to be self-disciplined. This process starts by imposing discipline upon them in the areas of time, money, talents, relationships, etc. And so again, I have a list for you here of some things you can do to try to develop self-discipline in your children Taking our time here. We got till seven, right?

Once the habits of self-discipline are instilled in your children It will be more likely that they will carry them on into their adult life But you’re gonna have to kind of prime the pump and work with them Consistent private devotional life Gayle since she was at home with the children She would instill this in their life in an early age Time out time to go take your Bibles go read your Bibles We’d have the family devotions of course where we talk about things But they all learned at an early age the importance and the discipline of taking that time in the Bible They may not have always had the right heart attitude But we were still requiring them to spend that time and Gail was good about quizzing them to ask them what they were learning in those times Learning to be a lifelong learner what I mean by this is telling them that that, guess what, if you think you’re going to go to school for 12 years and then it’s done, you’re crazy. You’re going to be a lifelong learner. And some of the ways we

instilled this in them is by using what’s called delight-directed study. And so an example of this would be, there was one day they had been out down the hill, they caught a little shroomal, little mouse-looking creature, and they wanted to keep it as a pet. And they had it in a shoe box and they’re all excited, and dad, can we keep And I said, well, tell you what, your mom’s going to take you to the library, and you’re going to go do a research paper for me on shroomles. What are shroomles like? What do they eat? How do you take care of a shrooml? Well, the kids were so excited about the shrooml that they didn’t know that they weren’t supposed to like going to the library, learning how to use the card catalog system at that time, and look up shroomles and do a book report on shroomles.

They loved it because they had a delight-directed study. And so they came back with their two-page report on shroom holes. And we said, sure, you can keep it as a pet. And it died two days later. But they had learned. Chris, between second and third grade, I think it was, he was still, you know, C-spot, C-spot run. That was his reading level. And he loved horses. So we went and got him the Black Beauty series of books, you know, big 200-page novels. Well, he loved horses, so he devoured those books. We believe that was the beginning of him developing a phenomenal gift for language. His reading just went from C-SPOT to 300-page books by the time he was third or fourth grade because he got into the delight-directed stuff.

You can use techniques like that to help develop those skills in them, but then they just learned and they loved to learn. today as an example, he’s had to back off. He skims all the news feeds and articles that come into his different reader devices. He was, I forget it, he was like seven or eight hundred articles a day he was skimming. I think he stays down to like only 300 because he didn’t have enough time. Now how many of us skim 300 articles a day? But that’s just kind of the, he’s got that curiosity that was fostered at an early age that’s taken hold and he’s become that lifelong learner. I was asking Jeremy the other day, I said, Jeremy, how have you learned all this technical stuff you know? He’s kind of a Bill Gates, he kind of just knows all this technical stuff. How’d you learn? Oh, I just read, I said down and read the Google white paper. Well, how long is that? Well, it’s about a thousand pages. And yet, here they are, done with college, but their curiosity is just taking hold, and so they’re teaching themselves stuff.

Proper diet and exercise obviously is again an important thing to be teaching them. You could get in to discuss some picky eaters here. You just have to really work on that at an early age. We had one Jesse did not like it was green. Jesse did not like it. I did all kinds of tricks. I tried to get him to learn. I blindfolded him insisting he couldn’t taste some of it. I put a pea in the middle of a mashed potato ball with him blindfolded. told it, but he figured out it was in there and spit it out. But we kept chipping away at it. And today, Jesse is probably the biggest health nut in the family, eating all the good stuff.

But bit by bit, we just would make it sort of unacceptable. And you’d have to use some reason there. There may be some food items that they actually don’t like and can’t tolerate. Chris was at a friend’s house once, and he knew the principle about eating, what’s put before you. And he happened to not like corn, you know, corn off the cob. It just really didn’t make him feel good. And he was, it was served to him and he told the hostess, he said, oh, can I please not have any corn? I have it. It makes me have a reaction. And she’s like, well, what reaction? And he says, well, it makes me throw up. So she said, okay, you can skip the corn.

But, but generally speaking, they need to learn to like and eat what’s put in front of them or at least eat what’s put in front of them to try it out. That just is just a discipline that you have to work with them. Don’t train them to be picky eaters as some wife or or if it’s the other way around someday their spouse is going to come back and curse you if You know they’re a picky eater, so Learning to manage and understand money You know is there earning a little bits of money doing chores you start teaching them how to save How to tithe all of those principles? explain how money works, how, you know, compounding interest works.

I took Esther out to Starbucks when she was starting college, and I said, let’s talk about interest and how that works. And I explained, you know, how, you know, we actually counted, you know, look at this, you know, two, four, eight, 16, 32, 64, 128, and how fast, you know, numbers grow exponentially. And if you put your money in here, I actually explained this to Jesse. He called one day and he said, Dad, I’m thinking of buying it. I got $8,000. $5,000 I’m thinking about an $8,000 car. What do you think at time? He’s like 21 or something So okay, just well you could buy an $8,000 car It’s going to be worth about $4,000 in a couple years, and you know it’s going to eventually have no value You could probably find a $3,000 car that will get you around from A to B It won’t be a hot rod, but it’ll serve the purpose the other $5,000 you can put in a 10% mutual fund somewhere and just forget about it till you’re 65 and And you guys understand the rule of 72 when you’re doing investing.

Rule of 72 says you take the number 72 and you take your interest rate and divide it into 72. And that tells you how many years it’ll take for things to multiply. So I know I’m going really fast. You take 72 and you take 10 percent interest. 10 into 72 is 7.2. You follow that? 7.2 years, your money will double. Jesse’s 21. I’m talking 65 down the road, 40 plus years. Jesse’s going to see that money double seven times. You start with five, go five, 10, 20, 40, 80, 120, 240. And I think it came out like $600 something thousand dollars. If all he would do is today at the age of 21, drive a $3,000 car and put the other $5,000 in the bank.

But see, we don’t teach our kids that stuff. And so they go out and buy the $8,000 car or the $20,000 car and get in debt. So those kinds of things that we have to be teaching them, the discipline now, deny yourself a little bit now, And the reward will be much greater later on. Wise sleep habits.

Part of this is, again, you can bring natural consequences to barrenness. Numerous times, the kids would say, hey, can I stay out till 2 o’clock in the morning? And I’d say, well, didn’t you tell so-and-so that you were going to be there to help them at 6 in the morning? Oh, yeah, don’t worry. Don’t worry. I’ll be there. I’ll be fine. You sure? Six minus two is four, four hours of sleep. Unadab, okay. Well, sure enough, you know, six o’clock rolls around in the morning and they’re all groggy and still in bed and I’m in there saying, get your carcasses out of bed, you’re supposed to be somewhere. And they’re griping and complaining.

I said, you’re the one that told me you can manage it. Obviously you can’t, so I guess next time I’ll have to say no when you tell me you wanna stay out till two in the morning. So those kinds of conversations. All right, good work ethic. Again, by having them do it, you can have them go do part-time jobs. When they’re smaller, when they’re young, learning to do chores well around the house, beginning to develop that good work ethic. Don’t do the minimum. Do it with excellence. Begin instilling that at a very early age in your life. And then cultivate friendships that uplift and eliminate those that pull down. All part of self-discipline.

the ability to look at your relationships and say, these are good for me, I’ll cultivate those, these are not good, I’ll eliminate those relationships. I have to make those decisions. Basic life skills, cooking, cleaning, simple repairs, shopping, auto, that should say auto. It, again, it is astounding how many young people are turned loose into their first departments and have no basic skills for living. I kid you not, we had a young man of probably the age of 16 in our home visiting our son, and it was lunchtime, and my wife said, there’s the refrigerator, make yourselves some sandwiches. And she came back ten minutes later, and that young man had the refrigerator door open, and he was staring into it and not moving and not blinking.

And she said, can I help you? And he said, I don’t know how to make a sandwich. how to make a sandwich. My mom always makes the sandwich. And that’s a true story. And that’s like, come on, hello. And again, on and on it goes with people that are just not prepared to do life. I made the comment during the break to somebody that it’s been my observation that often, not always, but often, young men choose to go into the military, not because of a sense of God duty an honor and I’m going to go serve my country, there may be an element of that, but many times the primary motivation is I’m 18, I have no idea what to do with my life, I’ll go join the military.

Now yay for the military, they get some people, but I find that kind of tragic, that if a young man is primary reason for joining the military is because he doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up. That’s kind of sad. So we want to help them along the way. related to that is other basic life skills. I think that’s one you just saw there, right? You know, in some of these you can develop trying to figure out what their interests are along the way, the gifts and talents. One son I knew was very interested in computer-related things, and so I had a friend that was working in the gaming industry. I know I just bashed Xboxes a while ago, but this friend was working in the gaming industry, so they were working with high-tech stuff.

I asked him, I asked my friend, I said, can my son come shadow you for a day and see what you guys are doing? He said, sure. He brought him down, he introduced him to their team, so he was meeting the PhD guys doing the complicated mathematics. He met the artist doing all the artwork and the mock-ups. He met the people sitting down at the computers and programming the game. And then they actually sat him down and showed him how to do some basic work on the system. And they actually had him design a corridor for one of the games, one of the shooter games, where you go through the corridor looking for the bad guy.

And so Jeremy got to actually design this thing. That sparked more and more interest in him. So lots of ways like that, you can begin to help your kids figure out what their gifts and talents might be, where their interests lie. In doing that process, it’s a fine art between learning when to push your child to do something and when to back off. I mentioned that earlier today. Just because a child says, I don’t like it, doesn’t mean that you might not want to still encourage them to give it a try. An example of that was we wanted our kids to be exposed to music and to develop some music skills. So up until the eighth grade in our home, it was required that you will take piano lessons, even if you didn’t like it.

And I said once you’re in that ninth grade if you want to burn your piano you can burn it I just did till your eighth grade you’re gonna learn piano I mean how many people do you know how many some of you here right now if I said do you add you saved yourself today?

I wish I had stuck with my piano lessons so that I could still play today And I wish I hadn’t quit and a lot of adults say that And so we have to sometimes push our kids because we know that there’ll be that adult some days saying I wish I had stuck with it. But again, at some point you decide no, they really don’t have an interest in this thing and so okay then you don’t push it anymore. Sports, it might be fear, it might be a lot of other bad reasons for not trying a sport. So again, you might gently push them to try some of these things. You might want to use some reward incentives to get them to try things. But then once you start to see what their gifts and talents are, then you can start to direct them from there and again, not keep pushing them in in a direction that they actually don’t enjoy.

So don’t just take their first, I don’t like it, as an answer. Do a little pushing, a little probing, a little steering. And then as you figure out what they’re good at, continue to steer them. You want to teach them that they have an obligation before God to figure out what their giftedness is and to actually use it for the glory of God. Everybody’s got a giftedness from God. And so they have to figure out what it is and use it.

So let’s talk about now the last S in our four S’s, the last trait and taking responsibility, selflessness. Jesus himself established this principle for us by way of example in Matthew 2028. He declared the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve. And then Paul reiterates it in Galatians 5 13 for you were called to freedom brethren only do not turn your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh but through love serve one another. Unlike in the world’s economy the path to greatness in God’s kingdom is through selflessness. Mark 935 quotes Jesus as saying, if anyone wants to be first, he shall be last of all and servant of all.

The call to a life of selflessness is quite simple. The fulfillment of that call is another matter. Human beings simply aren’t predisposed to serving others. Typically, our service only comes through bondage or some external incentives, such as a paycheck, to freely and willingly deny ourselves so that we might serve others goes against man’s basic nature. This has been certainly true of our children, especially in the younger years where selfishness is more their inclination. The goal then is to train our children to freely and gladly take on this calling and live a life of service to others and their fellow man.

Now since that trait is not going to come to them naturally, you’re going to have to do a little extra work. There’s some of the other scripture references I gave you a moment ago. You’re going to have to do a little work to help develop this selflessness in them. First off, show them God’s command in the scripture and show them Jesus’ examples. We’ll take them to the Word again. Again, everything goes back to the Word. We’re trying to model what Jesus was like. Show them by your example. This is more cot than talk. So don’t just be pushing them to be selfless and serving if you, in fact, are not characterized by that.

Have them do acts of service for others. Look around for opportunities. They can go over to the neighbor’s yard and volunteer to break up the leaves or if it’s snowed, if they’re old enough, go over and shovel the elder neighbor’s walkway without expecting any payment in return. It’s obviously you can use your imagination. There’s a thousand ways you can teach them to serve others as well as just in the home. Hey, guys, I see mom’s really been having a rough day. What do you think we could do to show her how much we’d love her and that we could do to serve her? Ask them that question.

Say I know we could do the dishes or we could be real quiet so she can take a nap or you know Whatever their ideas may be and you want to encourage those kinds of thinking Have them participate in outreach programs Whether it be with some kind of church program going off an admissions trip going out I know kids could go you go with your kids out to the on Saturdays where Josh Walton and the team are feeding the homeless and help, you know make breakfast burritos Going down to the soup kitchens all of these things are ways that you can get them involved in thinking outside of their own little world. And then praise and reward voluntary acts of service when you do see them doing the right thing and their kids will periodically spontaneously do something really special, a real act of self-assess, make sure you really praise that. You know you want to reward that and recognize that but then watch out that they make sure that they ultimately understand that they’re doing it to serve God and to please God, not man. Some kids will jump on the bandwagon to do

all this good stuff because they like the reward, they like the praise. You want children who will just do it because it’s the right thing to do and because they want to hear God say, well done, thou good and faithful servant, regardless of anybody else ever recognizes or says thank you to them. These lists are not exhaustive. There’s certainly more things you could put down here. You know, I’ve told several people at break time that nothing I’m saying today is like wow that’s profound and never heard that before but it’s amazing how much we forget this stuff and don’t do it So I’m really calling to remembrance things you already know to do But if you’re faithful and again, it’s helpful to think about these four S’s undertaking responsibility if you’re asking yourself How’s my child doing on submission to authority how they doing on self-control how they doing on self-discipline?

How they doing on showing selflessness if you’re thinking about that all the time as you’re thinking about your kids It will drive you to then take action. Okay, what do I need to do to help develop or promote that particular trait in my child’s life?