If you could choose a profession all over again, would you still choose the one you are in now? I want to see whether you can appreciate what is the most important function that a person could perform in a lifetime. Is it to create a satellite worth billions of dollars that discovers another moon around Neptune? I am afraid I don't quite understand what the value of such knowledge is. But I do wonder whether there is something more important when we speak of science — which simply means knowledge — and that is the knowledge of how to form a human character into the kind of character that can produce a new world, a new society.
Why do we have wars in this world? Why do people fight with one another? Why do husband and wife live in tension from day to day? And in the meantime, we are spending billions of dollars to discover gas rings around a planet somewhere in space. The logic of all this escapes me. Only when a human being is changed can we have a world in which we stop killing one another. Can you understand what's going on in Beirut? Once the financial capital of the Middle East, that prosperous and beautiful city has been reduced to a heap of garbage — pounded to rubble in the name of what, exactly? Is there a calling higher in this world than the transformation of a person?
But when should the transformation of a person begin? It should start from the moment of birth — and hence the importance of our subject today: parenting. Let me try to see if we can understand the mind of God. When God created mankind, what did he have in mind? In Genesis 1:26–28 we read: "Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness," and then, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth." Fill the earth with what? With human beings who fight each other? No — notice the connection between these two verses. God created man in his image, his glory, and then said: now multiply and fill the earth. Fill the earth with his beauty, his glory. The task of parenting is to pass on the image and glory of God from generation to generation.
And that is why the camp theme — "Show me your glory" — connects directly with parenting. I saw on television the scene of three students kneeling on the steps of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, holding up a petition in their hands. Nobody even acknowledged their existence. These are the people whom God created in his glory and image. Where do we see that image today? God said fill the earth with it, and we pass on instead killing, tension, and political oppression.
I must make a sad confession. My grandfather was one of the earliest pastors from the province of Fujian. He gave up a promising career — one of the few educated men in China at the end of the last century — to become a pastor and live in poverty. He established a church in the city of Quanzhou and another Hokkien-speaking church in Shanghai. But nobody taught him anything about parenting. And his children did not grow up to know the Lord. My uncles, even my own father, did not know the Lord. My father was such a gifted man — he completed his master's degree at Harvard within one year having never studied English before, and when he submitted his PhD thesis he was awarded two doctorates simultaneously, a PhD and a DLit, on a single certificate. He had the world at his feet. And yet every time I pass through Hawaii, where my father is buried, my heart weeps within me — that he gained the whole world and seemed to have lost his soul. How is my grandfather going to answer before God as a pastor? I say this as a confession, not a criticism.
What is the use if you can win all your friends and neighbours to the Lord but cannot win your children? If you cannot do the one, you cannot do the other. The Bible is very clear: anyone who aspires to be a pastor but cannot bring his children up in the Lord is not accepted into the ministry. It is one of the requirements Paul gave to Timothy and Titus. Because anyone who does not know how to bring up his children also does not know how to bring up a person spiritually in the Lord. The two are inseparable.
Parenting is discipleship. If you are parents, consider yourselves to have a great opportunity to learn how to make disciples. Your children are your disciples. But what is discipleship, really? It is not going to a seminary and acquiring a diploma. It is not technique. Let me come quickly to three stages, and then we will have our question time.
The first stage I read from Galatians chapter 4, verse 19, where Paul is writing to the Galatian Christians: "My little children, with whom I am again in labour until Christ is formed in you." That is discipleship. Discipleship is not preaching — preaching is only one very small aspect of it. Today you can spend three or four years in a seminary studying theology and know nothing whatever about discipleship.
First, there must be commitment. Without commitment there is no discipleship. Even the devil believes that Jesus came, that he died, that you can be forgiven — that is no commitment. There must be a seed — as 1 Peter 1:23 says, we are born again not of perishable seed but of imperishable seed, through the living and abiding word of God. That word comes through you and through me after our commitment to God.
And after the seed is given and the child is born, what happens next? Paul says: "I travail." He is in labour. He is suffering. There is a period of pregnancy, of suffering, of walking alongside the person. We want instant results. We want the word of God to be like instant coffee — just drop it in and you have a disciple. But Paul did not know about instant discipleship. He prayed with people, counselled them, helped them through their struggle with sin, wept with them — maybe for one month, maybe for six months, maybe for nine months — until finally the chains were broken and the person was freed from the power of sin. Have you ever suffered for anybody in this way? If not, you do not yet know what discipleship is.
You can convert people without discipleship. Even communists make converts by talking about Marxism-Leninism until people agree. But you must be a true Christian to make a disciple, because it has to do with life, not just doctrine. I can talk you into a doctrine, but you only become a Christian when you receive God's life into your soul. For that, the one discipling must suffer. Have you made a disciple? Or have you only made converts?
The Lord Jesus himself, who could attract thousands of people and preach better than anyone, spent most of his time with twelve apostles — bottle-feeding, literally nurturing twelve people who half the time did not even understand what he was talking about. That is discipleship. Today we want to talk to thousands on television and radio and make many so-called converts. But that is not parenting. We have forgotten what discipleship means.
# Workshop on Parenting (1) — Part B: Three Stages of Discipleship: Labour, Nursing, and the Rod
Now we come to the second stage. Once the child is born — whether physically or spiritually — what happens? 1 Thessalonians 2:7: "But we proved to be gentle among you, as a nursing mother tenderly cares for her own children." What a beautiful picture. Paul says to the Thessalonians: I was to you like a nursing mother. I cared for you gently and patiently. When you cried and complained, I listened. I gave you my time. I stayed up nights to care for you.
Those of us who are parents know what this means. When my daughter was a baby, I had to wake every four hours in the night to warm the milk and feed her — and this for a week when my wife had to go to Paris because her mother had been hit by a car and broken her leg. Father, mother, nurse all rolled into one, and I was worn out by the end of it. But that is the picture Paul gives to the Thessalonians: I cared for you as a nursing mother, spending endless time, building you up, nursing you through your needs.
On the spiritual level, it is exactly the same. After you have brought a person to the Lord through months of travail and prayer and counselling, are you willing then to spend the time to care for them, to instruct them in the word, to deal patiently with their needs? This is so time-consuming and exhausting. And yet without it there is no true discipleship. You can build a church of two thousand people and not one of them is a true disciple — and you know what will happen. There is no life in it, and it will become an empty monument. I would rather have a church of ten or twenty true disciples. That church will keep on growing until the Lord comes.
The third stage is found in 1 Corinthians 4:15: "For if you were to have countless tutors in Christ, yet you would not have many fathers. For in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel." In Galatians he was the mother in labour; now in 1 Corinthians he is the father. And notice the change in tone. He is talking to older Christians, and Paul can be severe if he has to be. Verse 21: "What do you desire? Shall I come to you with a rod, or with love and a spirit of gentleness?" That is the choice he gives the Corinthians — and it is the choice you give to older disciples who can understand right and wrong.
Now I want to speak plainly to the parents here. Do you have a stick at home? Get one as soon as possible, because otherwise you are not going to fulfil your job. I have a walking stick — light, hard, and very painful — that I bought in Switzerland and keep very handy. There are parents who do not bring up their children in the fear of the Lord because they have never learned to teach their children to make this choice.
Read Hebrews chapter 12, verses 5–8: "My son, do not regard lightly the disciplining of the Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by him. For those whom the Lord loves he disciplines, and he scourges every son whom he receives. It is for discipline that you endure. God deals with you as with sons. If you are without discipline, then you are illegitimate children and not sons." If God does not hesitate to use the rod on you and on me because he treats us as sons, then if you truly treat your children as your children, use your rod.
But there is a great problem: many parents do not know how to use the rod properly. First, never discipline your child in a fit of temper. You must never lose your temper. There are parents who become so angry that they whack their children left and right and slap them. You must never do that — it is a disgrace and a dishonour to the Lord. When you discipline, you must patiently and quietly explain to the child that they have done wrong, that they were cautioned not to do this, and that because they have deliberately done what they were told not to do, you are sorry but you must carry out the necessary discipline. And you must measure the discipline according to the need — not too much, not too little, and never in a fit of temper.
The one time I had to use the cane on my daughter was when she did something I had repeatedly told her not to do. I called her upstairs. I was very quiet, though very angry. I said: "You know I have told you repeatedly that you must not do this for your own good. And now you have done it. I have no choice but to exercise the necessary discipline." I explained exactly what was going to happen. And because of the seriousness of what she had done, I told her she would receive not one, not two, but seven strokes of the cane. I carried them out. She could hardly stand afterwards, and the marks remained for several days. I told her afterward: "It hurts me as much as it hurts you. I hope you will never force me to do this again." And I am glad to say she never did.
That is the scriptural teaching. I checked through Proverbs and was amazed how many references there are to disciplining a child — a long list that you should study carefully. And the book of Sirach echoes Proverbs again and again on discipline, including this dreadful warning: if you fail to discipline your child, there will come a day when your child will curse you for it.
The same principles apply on the spiritual level. Those in full-time training in our teams are also under discipline themselves. At any given time perhaps 20 or 30 percent of teammates have been under discipline at one time or another — sometimes for as long as three years of suspension. Every teammate accepts discipline willingly, some even requesting it. I myself exercise discipline on myself, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9 — sometimes through fasting for up to three weeks, sometimes through the rigour of reading difficult Greek texts, which can be very exhausting. We must maintain the highest standard of excellence.
Let me close with one illustration. I recently saw a documentary about a boot camp programme for young criminals in Florida — offenders between the ages of 19 and 24, sentenced for drug trafficking, assault, or worse. The programme gives them three to four months of tough military-style discipline, the kind of training they never received in childhood when they should have. The results are remarkable. Of the average young criminal released from regular prison, 50 percent return to jail within one or two years. Of those who went through the boot camp programme, only 11 percent reoffended. That is the power of discipline and training to reform a life — and how much more so the discipline of the gospel to transform it.
Our time is gone. I hope you can see the importance of what we have discussed — the three stages: labour, nursing, and the rod. Whether in physical parenting or spiritual discipleship, the principles are exactly the same. Let us have our question time now.