In the past I’ve mused about the most important ministry parents have: their children.
Chatting with my wife after a sermon today at church stimulated my thinking on this further. In Christian circles, we all know of missionaries and full-time ministry workers who have taken their ministry so seriously that it has negatively impacted family life. We’ve heard of children shunted off to another city to boarding school while their parents carry out missionary work. In history, we read of men who were so passionate about serving God that their wives and children suffered in a variety of ways.
I’d never thought of things in this light before, but today it brought to mind the passage in I Timothy 5 where Paul is helping Timothy think through provision for the needy such as widows in the church. Here he writes, “But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.“
Now in this context, we are talking about physical provision, and that provision, focussed on widows. Yet it provoked this thought in me. If it is such a gross sin to fail to provide physically for our relatives, is it perhaps also a profound sin to fail to care for them spiritually? If we parents become so focussed on serving God in our careers, could we not still be in danger if we neglect the greater priority of loving and discipling our children?
Jesus castigated the Pharisees once for their failure to honour their parents. They had come up with a tradition whereby they could gift money to God. This meant that whatever help they owed to their parents could (according to them) legitimately be refused. We read of this in Matthew 15. So here a spiritual reason was given for neglecting their physical duty of provision to their parents. They reasoned it was morally legitimate to give their money to God in such a way that rendered them incapable of helping their parents. Jesus saw through this and condemned them for setting aside the law of God (Honour your father and mother) for the sake of their traditions. Indeed he said they were only honouring him with their lips, and not their hearts.
Are we in danger of doing the same kind of thing? Parents are called to a radical programme of discipling their children.
In Deuteronomy 6 we see this radical programme in outline.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Deuteronomy 6:6-9
And in the New Testament, the apostle Paul in Ephesians holds fathers particularly responsible for the discipline and instruction in the Lord of their children. To withhold this is to provoke a child to anger.
So my question is this. Is it possible that we might set aside the law of God requiring us to nurture and disciple our children and replace (and justify this replacement) with that pseudo-spiritual tradition of men: “ministry”? What might that say about the state of our hearts? Let us search our own hearts and make sure we retain the priorities God has for us.
Does this mean we should have no other ministry obligations apart from family? Of course not! However, our priorities should be rightly ordered. It’s all too easy for something as unnoticed and pedestrian as family to be usurped by a ministry that might seem more important, seem to have greater impact, be more public and provide more excitement and fulfilment.