husband's going to talk about his wife because this radical thing we find is hard to believe.
My mom was a member of a depression-era family of ten brothers and sisters, what our culture would call a classic dysfunctional family. When this family reached adulthood, these children didn't like one another very much, but they were committed to family reunions. They were creepy gatherings. They would rent a hall and they would gather like warring nation states, and sit at separate tables and glare at one another. It was like a bad UN. Or maybe like the real UN. The centerpiece of the day would be this banquet table because everybody would bring their best dish and then after the meal, there would be enough alcohol come out to float Georgia. And this thing would get wild. My mom and dad taught us how to work the tables and say hello to our aunts and uncles. And before this thing got too crazy, we would be at our retreat. Well, one Saturday, my mom got involved in an evangelistic encounter with one of her siblings and didn't realize that another one of her brothers, who was downstairs in the same room where my brother Mark and I were, had gotten very drunk and he was saying sexually perverse things about women in the room. My mom discovered that. She ran downstairs. She grabbed my brother, Mark, and I, and she yanked us to the car. I remember very well because I don't think our feet touched the steps. And before she drove away, she turned to us and she said, "I want to say something about what just happened and I don't want you ever to forget it." I obviously never have. She said these eloquent words. "There's nothing that comes out of the mouth of a drunk that wasn't there in the first place." You see, the alcohol didn't create that sexual perversion. That man was actually thinking those thoughts in his sobriety. What the alcohol did was loosen the lips and when the lips got loose, guess what? Out came the heart. Now if this is true – and it is – you must not be content with regulating, managing and controlling behavior because if all you do is regulate and control behavior, once that child exits your home and that system of control is no longer there, they have nothing. Every September, thousands of supposedly Christian young people go off to residential university and forsake the faith. I would propose to you they're not forsaking the faith. They never had it in the first place. You see, if the heart is the control system, if the heart really is the causal core of my personhood, then what I'm actually parenting is not behavior. I'm parenting the heart. Where change needs to take place is not first in behavior. Change needs to take place first in the heart. That's my job. That's my job. Now Jesus uses a wonderful example here. It's the example of a tree, a fruit tree. Think about this example. It's really brilliant. What's the best way to recognize an apple tree? Apples, right? But think about this. When you see apples on that tree, you instinctively know that that tree is "apple-stic" all the way down to its roots, right? If it didn't have "apple-ism" in its roots, it wouldn't grow apple as fruit. And in Christ's illustration, the fruit is behavior and its consequences, and the roots are what's going on in the heart. You know that you will never plant Georgia peach pits and get apples. If you plant peach pits and get apples, run fast, run far, something has happened to the universe and it's not good. Now that's a very helpful illustration, but let's work with it. Let's push it a little bit. Pretend with me that I have an apple tree in my backyard. And every year it grows twisted, pulpy, dry, brown, hard, inedible apples. And that happens year after year. It's very frustrating. Never get an edible apple. This tree grows organic hockey pucks. And Luella finally says to me, my dear wife, "Paul, it doesn't make any sense for us to have this apple tree. We can never eat the apples. Can't you do something about our apple tree?" And I think and I ponder. I love this woman. I want to please her.
And I say to her one Friday evening, "I got a great idea. Saturday, I'm going to fix our tree." Well, she's a little bit
Transcript: Session 3
GETTING TO THE HEART OF PARENTING
46
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs