Moms, hear me, don't worry about the couch, don't worry about the carpet. If your carpet gets stained, those are glorious redemptive stains. Praise Jesus for the stains. If your couch gets broken, you can buy a new couch, but you cannot replace the soul of your teenager. I think there are times, in our desire to have a beautiful surrounding to live in, we actually treat physical furniture as being more important than our own children. I can tell you for sure if you make your home a hospitable place, it will get damaged. Have the right sense of values. You can patch the hole in the sheet rock and you can praise God that when that little skirmish took place, you were there and you were able to enter in, and you were able to impart wisdom at that moment. And you're patching that and you're sort of smiling because you remember the good thing that happened as the result of that whole different way of living. One of the best investments Luella and I made – we had boys who were very avid and skilled skateboarders – was to build a half-pipe in our backyard. It was ugly. Our entire yard was wood. You could barely get around the sides of this thing. Our neighbors were terrified and so we told them boys would never skate before 10:00 in the morning, and they would never skate after 8:00 at night. But that brought that world to our door and because it was dangerous, the boys couldn't skate until their parents had seen the ramp and signed an insurance release form. So we met all the families. It was wonderful. We spent as much time out there with the guys and there were so many times when I could enter into relational things that were going on. On a Saturday, we'd go out and we'd buy 15 pounds of hamburger and we'd just make hamburgers all morning. And at noon, we'd just bring out trays of hamburgers and give these to these boys. They loved being at our place. And the amount of things that we preserved our boys from and the amount of things that we were able to be involved in because we're willing to lose our yard for something more important, just cannot be estimated. I have this experience. It's a beautiful experience. It happens to me once in a while. I live right down in Center City, Philadelphia and I walk a lot down there. And I'll be walking down the street and now a grown man will call my name. I'll hear, Mr. Tripp, Mr. Tripp." The last time it happened, it was a guy in a suit and a briefcase. And he came over to me, he dropped his briefcase, he threw his arms around me. He says, "My name is Hector. I skated on your ramp. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for what you did for us." I'm weeping. Such a little easy decision. When they left the home, we tore down the ramp, put in a beautiful English cobblestone patio and praised God for His existence. But we love that ramp and our kids still talk about that. They still love to look at the pictures and when they do, they just tell stories. Make yourself part of this thing. Make your place a hospitable, wonderful place to be. Fourth thing, teens are particularly susceptible to sexual temptation. We all know that sometime between 10 and 20-whatever, there's massive social and physical development. You put an eight-year-old boy and an eight- year-old girl on t-shirt and jeans, they look pretty much alike. You put a 17-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl in t-shirt and jeans, they don't look at all alike. And that development is not an evil thing, it's part of God's design, but it's a dangerous thing in a fallen world. An eight- year-old boy will be convinced that girls have to cooties. They don't know what they are, but they don't want them. A 17-year-old boy magically becomes a cootie consumer. He doesn't know what they are, but he's strangely attracted to them. Now I want you to hear what I'm going to say, all this is happening for us in a world that's gone sexually insane. Brothers and sisters, there's no more sanity out there. It's nuts. It's craziness. You can barely listen to a CD, you can barely watch a DVD, read a magazine, go to a mall without somehow having your morals assaulted. We are so obsessed with sexuality that we are taking knives to the chest of our daughters and putting plasticine substances inside of them so they have a stronger sexual self.
Transcript: Session 10
GETTING TO THE HEART OF PARENTING
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