Often the big conflict between mom and dad
and a teenager is that the heart
of the teenager has been claimed
by the acceptance of friends.
Now, acceptance of friends is the god they serve
and they'll do anything to get the acceptance of friends.
These friends, they'll be out of their lives
in four years but the wreckage will remain.
If you don't understand the connection
between character and idolatry,
you can't help your kids.
Because you just get mad at them and walk away,
instead of helping them to understand what's going on.
Listen, those three lovely little children
don't know they're idolaters.
They don't know that pleasure
is keeping them from loving their mom.
They don't know, they don't know, they don't know.
That's your job.
Your job is to open up the mysteries,
the spiritual mysteries of the universe to your children
so they will understand who they are
and why they do the things they do.
And I've come to understand that I have no
independent ability to fight off idols in my life.
Things attract me.
Before long, they've addicted me.
And I need help.
And the Bible says that Jesus came
so that those who live would no longer live for what?
Themselves.
Jesus came to break the back of my self-oriented idolatry.
That little three-year-old fights you,
and will stand like this
in front of a person three times their size
because she's under the full rulership
of the idol of control.
She doesn't know it.
She doesn't know that all of her pushing
against her parents is control, control, control.
It doesn't help her to get mad at her.
Getting mad at her will never break the bondage
to that thing.
She needs to understand why she pushes against you
the way that she does.
She has no understanding of her heart.
No understanding that her heart
lives under rulership of something.
No understanding.
But every moment of a fight between siblings
where a single toy
or a single electronic thing becomes more valuable to me
than a loving relationship with a sibling.
They don't know that that's going on.
That's shocking, damaging materialism.
They don't know it.
But you do now.
And your job is to make those connections,
and every time you make those connections,
hear what I'm about to say.
You give the Spirit of God
to begin to work this pain inside of them.
And what is that pain called?
Do you know?
Conviction.
And that conviction begins to work in that child
a sense of need for help.
And then you have opportunity
to give the Gospel to a child
who actually has come to know that they need it.
God cares about character.
And character gives you an opportunity
to talk with your children
about the single most important function
of every human being:
Worship