Shepherding a Child's Heart

Three Foundations for Life
What are parenting goals in this period of life? What can you hope
to accomplish? What foundation blocks can you lay that are more
solid than your personal ideas? What goals are simple enough to
remember, yet comprehensive enough to provide broadly applicable
direction?
Proverbs 1:7–19 furnishes you with such direction. There are three
foundations of life in this passage: The fear of the Lord (verse 7),

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adherence to parental instruction (verses 8–9), and disassociation
from the wicked (verses 10–19).
My assumption at this point is that parenting has been undertaken
according to the model this book sets out. During this period, you
desire to see the daily instruction throughout your child’s life brought
together and internalized by him.
The Fear of the Lord
The first foundation of life is walking in the fear of the Lord.
Proverbs 1:7 reads, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of
knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.” Your teen-age
child is on the threshold of life independent from you. He is already
making choices that have major impact on his life. He is making
values decisions each day.
Recall Figure 3. That chart reflected the individual’s Godward
orientation. It is a split chart because everybody has a Godward
orientation. Everyone worships either God or idols. Everyone lives in
some sort of fear either of God or idols.
Your teenager must be motivated by a sense of awe and reverence
for God. You want the choices he makes to reflect a growing
comprehension of what it means to be a God worshiper. Since the
question is not if, but what your child will worship, you must freely
confront him with the irrationality of worshiping any lesser god.
Living in fear of God means living in the realization of
accountability to him. It is living in light of the fact that he is God
and we are creatures. He sees all; everything is open before him.
Living in godly fear means living in full light of God as a holy God
who calls his people to holiness.
Make it a point to read through the major and minor prophets with
your children during their teen years. Your children are part of a
contemporary evangelical culture that suffers from a low view of
God. Reading the prophets confronts you with a holy God who is

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awesome and prepared to hold his people to account. I have talked to
my teens about the need for a bumper sticker to counterbalance the
popular “Smile, God Loves You.” This one would say “Tremble, God
is a Consuming Fire.” Sober your children with the realization that a
major theme of more than one third of the Bible (the minor and major
prophets) is judgment.
Like any area of theological truth, the key to growth is not the
cognitive identification of truth. It is understanding the pertinence of
that truth in daily life. You and your children must understand the
fear of the Lord in a manner that reorganizes your lives.
You must make the fear of God functional in regular living. For
example, teenagers struggle with the fear of man. They worry about
what their friends will think of them. They make decisions based on
fearing the disapprobation of their peers. Peer pressure is simply
living in the fear of man rather than in the fear of God.
What you must do is shepherd your teenagers toward living out of
the fear of God rather than the fear of man. You must help them see
the relevance of knowing the God who is a consuming fire.
You have to talk with them, helping them to see the ways they are
experiencing the fear of man. Then, you must help them understand
the bondage that is produced by living for the approval of others. Help
them see the futility and idolatry of organizing life around the desire
to have approbation. Help them see the true freedom found in a holy
indifference to the opinion of others.
Often, the most powerful way these things are taught is by sharing
one’s own experience. My children were all teenagers when I started
doctoral studies at Westminster Theological Seminary. I was
pastoring a church and attending classes one day a week. My classes
were on Thursday. Each Wednesday night, I would burn the midnight
oil. One Wednesday night at about 2 a.m., I was scribbling madly on a
legal pad. My wife was strapped to the typewriter, making order of
my scratchings. Suddenly, I began to reflect on what I was doing.

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Here I was, depriving us of sleep. My patient wife was working
through the night. In the morning, she would be facing a classroom
full of youngsters as a school teacher. She would be exhausted. I
would be a hazard on the road as I drove to Philadelphia.
I had to ask myself, “Why am I doing this?” Was I persuaded that
God wanted me to deny sleep to my wife and myself? Was I
convinced that God’s truth and righteousness demanded that I work
through the night? No! I was not being driven by the fear of God; I
was driven by the fear of man. I wanted the professors to regard me as
an efficient, capable pastor. I feared their disapproval. I craved their
approval. In my pride and my fear of man, I made choices based on
being a man-pleaser, not a God-pleaser. I prayed that night. I
confessed my sins to my wife and God. I repented of living in the fear
of man.
Sharing this experience with my teen-aged children provided
many fruitful times of conversation. They could identify with the
choices I had been making. They could see where they had done the
same things. They could also see how liberating it was to fear God
rather than man.
I am appalled at the skepticism people express about helping
teenagers see the importance of the fear of God. It is too often
assumed that young people cannot be driven by godly motives.
I am not sure what creates greater skepticism. Is it that teens can
know the fear of God, or that parents can teach it? I offer this
encouragement: If God wants your children to know the fear of God,
then surely those people he has charged with their instruction
(parents) can teach it.
The teen who understands the fear of God will be delivered from
danger. He will possess wisdom. He will grow in the knowledge of
God.