Growing Great Kids!
Gods Blueprint • Sermon • Submitted
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5 seasons in the life of a tomato.
1) Starting, seedling
2) Transplanting season
3) Staking season
4) Cultivating season
5) Harvest season
Ephesians chapter 6:1-4.
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6:1 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, because this is right. 2 Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with a promise, 3 so that it may go well with you and that you may have a long life in the land. 4 Fathers, don’t stir up anger in your children, but bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. Eph 6:1–4.
Growing great kids is awesome, and no-one can do it like you!
you may say...
I needed this sermon twenty years ago… Influence in the life of your chidren around you, grandkids, great-grandkids.
Some of you work with some young couples who are just starting out parenting. There will be days when he or she is going to come in and be frustrated. I want you to listen this morning. I want you to store the truths of this sermon.
Just as there are 5 seasons in growing tomatoes, there are five seasons to parenting.
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1. Starting- How are you with your wife? If it’s not good between you and her and it’s affecting you, how do you think it’s not going to affect the children?
This is why we need to have a good relationship with our spouse before we ever have children.
Get everything ready, be busy.
If you are not married find an appropriate Christian spouse… you won’t change them!
This is also the season where the child is growing in the womb of its mother. adopting. foster parent.
Prepare if a child is on the way. Because let me tell you what's going to happen, the child will disrupt family.
2. The second season of parenting is the transplanting season.
The child gets transplanted from that protective womb of the mother, into a garden that will influence that child for the rest of its life, and that’s your family, Your family is the soil.
Have you ever thought about your soil that you provide for your children?
Have you ever done a soil sample?
When is the last time you really looked at the family environment that you're providing for your kids? The relationship you have with your spouse is going to be the soil.
If there is an older sibling, or siblings? The relationship that you have with your spouse and the relationship you have with those children, and the relationship those children have with each other, is going to be the soil for that baby of the family.
I pray you want your kids to have the best garden they can have, amen.
In the transplanting stage, which is normally birth to two, you better make sure you understand it is a 100% investment. You're not going to get by with 50/50.
For roughly two years, you're going to be doing everything for your kid that your kid can't do for themselves, which is everything; about two years.
The moment they can do it for themselves, you're going to quit doing it for them.
At first, your child is going to know they have needs. To let you know they have a need that’s not being met, they're going to go into a state of what's called unhappiness.
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Around 1 year old they begin to throw in, not just needs, but some wants.
They’ve already learned to use the card of unhappiness.
They want to live in a state of happiness, so they expect you to do whatever they want, and we do because they can't do it for themselves.
Every young parent needs to ask themselves this question; How long do you want to keep doing for your kid what they first can't do for themselves, but now could do?
It’s kind of cute the first six or seven months. You know, changing diapers, bottles, burping, holding them, picking up, wiping slobber, cleaning up the mess.
Do you want to be doing that when they're eighteen? forty? sixty? I know of parents that still are, and still do because they made the goal of parenting to make my child happy.
That’s not the goal of parenting. The goal of parenting is not to make your child happy; the goal of parenting is to make your child holy, set apart, different. If you'll parent from the perspective of holiness and start when they're little, it’ll change the way you parent.
I hope you understand this. If you don’t get this as a parent, you are going to try to make your kid happy the rest of their life, and they’ll play that unhappy card on you the rest of their life.
So here's what I would suggest to parents, I would emphasize identity.
Now please hear me; if we parent from the perspective of happiness, one day something is going to bring them happiness that’s not going to be holy, and then we are going to be on a road we wish they had never been down. But if we will pursue holiness, it will eventually bring about the blessing and the benefit of true happiness. But you can't get it the other way.
3. After I start and transplant my little tomato in my garden, staking season.
Now, a stake on the farm is this a six foot steel T-post.
I'm going to take the post driver and put it over the stake, drive it down right into the roots of my tomato plant.
I then tie the plant to the stake, if that plant could talk, that plant would be kicking, screaming, yelling from the top of its lungs because I'm now regulating the way it’s going to grow.
Now here's what I know that I don’t think my tomato plant knows.
Most of the tomatoes are indeterminate, they will grow too tall and get too big for its britches.
It can't hold itself up because as it grows up it starts growing out, it doesn’t stay balanced, it will fall over, and when it falls over it doesn’t pick itself back up. It just keeps growing and it grows along the ground.
The next thing you know there is no airflow. The next thing you know there's dirt on the vines; there's dirt on the tomato.
The next thing you know there's disease, little rotten spots.
The next thing you know my little tomatoes are rotting on the ground while they're trying to ripen.
One of the saddest sights is seeing somebody gardening tomatoes without stakes in their plant. I want to go to their door and say, “What are you doing; don’t you know how to grow tomatoes?”
That’s what somebody needs to say to some parents, “What are you doing?”
From about three to twelve, you better be putting some stakes in the life of your children.
Here is a secret, I don’t just use a stake in the garden. I've got wire cages that I slip down over that tomato plant and I force it to grow up.
Do you know what my tomatoes will try to do? Get outside of that cage. That’s ok for a day or so, but then I put them right back on the inside.
Listen to me; you let it get around May, warm, miracle grow, good rain, and if I don’t check my tomatoes for three days in a row, they will grow six or eight inches. Do you know what that tomato plant will be doing? It will be taking its head and sticking it out the side of that wire cage.
If I wait too many days, I can't get it back in without breaking the plant.
Parent, please hear me; you don’t want to break your child, but you’ve got to keep them inside the boundaries.
Let me tell you when you know staking season starts. It’s usually around two to three.
For the first time parents realize they lied to you at the hospital when they told you that you just had a little angel born. You now realize you’ve got a little devil on your hands, amen!
Headstrong, oh yes. See, it starts out really cute. We’re doing everything for them they can't do for themselves, and then one day you get ready to do something and they say, “I can do it.”
They don’t do it right; they do it wrong.
Shoes on wrong feet. Why do they always want to put their right foot in the left shoe?
They do it all wrong, so see, you’ve got to understand that your child does not have the nature you have, if you're a Christian.
Your child, like you, was born in sin, separated from God; therefore, they have a nature to sin.
So when your child starts to want to do things their way, yeah, they want to do it their way, not your way, not God’s way. This is when you drive the stake. This is when you put the cage around them.
Here's what you need to teach your child; that these boundaries are beneficial, that if they want to be free and be who they want to be and make right choices, just make choices inside the boundary and you are going to cheer for them.
But when they step outside the boundary, there's got to be a consequence, and you teach them there's a consequence for stepping outside the boundary.
As adults, if you make wrong choices, there will be consequences, right? Have you ever noticed how speeding tickets lowers our standard of living? You have to pay a $200 speeding ticket; that hurts.
You make a bad decision; that hurts. You do something silly as a husband; that hurts the husband/wife relationship. Right?
So here's what happens when you make a wrong choice, as an adult you don’t usually get by with it; it lowers your standard of living some way.
So when we’re parenting, here's what we've got to understand; when our children step outside the boundary, they’ve got to be penalized, and the penalty must lower they standard of living so that they understand that if you don’t grow the way you're supposed to grow and you grow wrong, it’s going to lower your standard of living.
Now, when you penalize them, here's what's going to happen; they are going to play the unhappy card.
If you're a parent who believes you're supposed to make your kid happy, because when you make your kid happy the stress goes away, and they quit doing whatever they are doing because you’ve made them happy again, you're going to be in big, big trouble because it’s going to get more, and more, and more expensive, and more, and more time consuming to keep them happy when they become teenagers.
WOW!
The Scripture says, “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”
Dads, You’re the head coach. The buck stops with you.
You're the spiritual leader of the home, and here's what the Bible is telling us dads; do not provoke negative reactions in your children by the way you parent them. Don’t be an irritant to them.
Train them in the way of the Lord, instruct them, inform them, invest with them, illustrate to them, and inspire them as children.
I want to say something to the men; it is not your wife’s responsibility to rear the children. It’s yours.
That doesn’t mean that she doesn’t help. She's the biggest helper you’ve got. She's the biggest support you’ve got, but it’s still on you.
Men, you are going to have to set some boundaries so that your kids grow the way they should grow.
What should determine the boundaries is the way of the Lord.
Men, you’ve got to be spiritual.
Men, you’ve got to be pursuing your relationship with God.
Men, just as God sets boundaries in your life to keep you running in the right direction, you’ve got to set boundaries in the life of your children to keep them running in the right direction.
See mom and dad, we’re not just coaches; you are referees.
Parents, make your rules in private and make sure no means no.
No doesn’t mean maybe, we’ll think about it, you can do it in two weeks, or you can continue doing what you're doing for thirty more minutes. No has got to mean no.
The reason we've got an authority problem in our schools, the reason we've got an authority problem in our society is because we've got an authority problem in our homes. Teach respect, rules, and that no means no.
4. Cultivating. From 9-18, you’ve got to cultivate.
If I don’t weed my garden, crabgrass will take my tomatoes. I’ll still get some tomatoes, but it won't be what my tomatoes could be, so I have to weed.
Parents, weed your garden. That’s your child. Listen to me, everybody look,
Check Music
I can't believe what some parents are letting kids hear.
and see what they see!
It’s detrimental to kids.
There's an agenda by the world, the world uses music, TV, social media, video games, magazines, and the world uses friends.
You need to get your hoe out and keep the weeds out of your kid’s life, especially when they're about nine or ten to teenage years. They don’t know how detrimental that is to them, because “everybody is doing it.”
Then, suckers. A sucker looks so good on a tomato plant because it makes that tomato plant look full, but if you don’t keep the suckers off your tomato plant, you'll not have as good of tomatoes. Parents listen to me, in the day and age of which you're raising kids there are a lot of good things you're going to have to teach your kids to say no to.
You can't do everything and be on every team, and go to every academic meet, be in every cheer competition, and go to every school activity. You can't do it if you want your kid to grow up and be who they want to be, who they need to be, who God wants them to be. You’ve got to help them make decisions.
The goal is never to make children happy; the goal was to make them holy.
5. The last stage; harvest. You're still dad and mom, but that’s not the relationship now. The relationship now is that this is a fellow peer.
This is another adult, you get to enjoy your kids for the rest of their life on an adult level.
grandkids.
If you do it right, they bring you on the coaching staff .
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Growing Great Kids is always worth it!