Episode 185: Are we Modeling Good Fruit or Folly?

YouTube link to longer video version here.  If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.

 

 

This is a really sensitive and controversial subject today that I can’t talk to kids directly about so I am coming to you with instead—the question of whether we are discipling our kids into the Scriptural promises of the good spiritual fruit which comes along with trusting God and yielding to the Spirit, or whether we are succumbing to culture and teaching them the opposite. And it’s difficult because oftentimes church culture is incredibly worldly and especially when we have convinced ourselves that our church, our denomination, and/or our faith traditions are somehow immune. Am I just talking to myself here or are you getting uncomfortable too or are you just thinking about someone else’s faith walk? Personally, I am thinking about mine right now! As I should be! My kids didn’t always have the best example when it comes to faithfully doing what it takes to follow a very counter-cultural Messiah—as counter-cultural then as He is today. Actually, let’s be honest, my kids never had the best example except when I was reading directly from the red-letter words, in context. Speaking of which, I recently heard about this thing—a red letter only Bible where I guess it only has the words of Yeshua/Jesus? I went through a few pages of the Gospels, just for fun, and looked at some of what He was saying out of context and it wasn’t good. Having never actually read such a thing, and I am not interested in spending money or time to do so because we need all of the Gospels and not just edited versions, I may have it all wrong but still—it struck me as kinda funny but in an unfunny way. So, if one of you have read a red letter only Bible, please send me an email to enlighten me.

 

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. However, everything changed about a month ago when the Lord told me in no uncertain terms that my days of teaching adults are over, so now this portion of my ministry is devoted to teaching adults how to teach kids by making sure that we are supporting their growth and faith in the Messiah instead of hijacking it. Which is super easy to do, by the way—hijacking it. I’ve done it, and you’ve done it. Let’s stop doing it and teach kids how to take Yeshua/Jesus seriously as the greater Moses, greater Temple, and greater Prophet whom Matthew tells us He is. So, from now on, this is a satellite ministry of Context for Kids, which has become my primary ministry. Lots for adults to learn still, but geared more toward discipleship and less toward context studies—but still very much contextual. I still have a ton of teachings for grownups at theancientbridge.com and on my YouTube channel, and I think that most of the listeners to Context for Kids are probably grownups anyway so you can catch me there as well if you enjoy crawling through Genesis at a snail’s pace. I also have curriculum books and all that jazz available on Amazon. All Scripture this week is from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible, unless I say otherwise.

So, yeah, in mid-November the Lord broadsided me and told me to focus completely on teaching kids and equipping caregivers with no more focus on adults. I have known it was coming since 2015 but teaching adults was something I had to learn first because teaching what I teach to kids is much more difficult and the tightrope I have to walk is far more perilous. I would rather teach something wrong to a grownup than to a kid, you know? And I have to stay away from politics and sex, and anything that is going to cause division between children and their parents or undermine that relationship. I have to be doubly careful about the integrity of what I am teaching. And we all teach wrong things—that’s inevitable—but the way we teach things is even more important. Teaching adults, people can get away with a lot of nonsense and some appallingly bad behavior—even though we shouldn’t—but with kids we are laying the foundation for what behavior they will think is acceptable from the pulpit and what isn’t. That’s a scary responsibility. Really, kids became my priority over three years ago when I started the radio show for kids but now, they are the only show in town as far as I am concerned. I still teach and pay attention to you guys when I need to support what I am teaching the kids in ways that I can’t do personally—like teaching Sodom and Gomorrah when we get to Genesis 19 after the series I am teaching now on “Being like Jesus.” Honestly, kids need to have Yeshua (I always call Him Jesus when teaching kids so that everyone is clear who I am referring to—I am not interested in being confusing) as their foundational baseline because dang, those patriarchs and kings did some messed up stuff that the Bible doesn’t make any excuses for and neither should we. When we start with perfection, we can avoid a lot of the problems that come when parents and teachers believe that they have to call the bad stuff good. We have only one perfect example, just one. Not Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Moses, or anyone else. When we normalize the teachings of Yeshua, our own lives change and our kids see it. Okay? Okay.

Oh, and just FYI—I do not teach kids the way I teach you guys. I am not as direct, or confrontational with them or blunt like I have to be on topics like this—I break things down and we explore things slowly from the Bible and from the history of the ancient Near Eastern and first century worlds. I believe we can be confrontational when absolutely necessary while still being kind and gentle but firm and self-controlled. We’ll see how it goes this time. However, not with kids. I don’t find it productive or effective or edifying for them. And they deserve to be able to learn to think critically so that they have the ability to make up their own minds without manipulation or too much interference from a non-parent. So, that’s where my mind is about teaching adults vs teaching kids. Just FYI. That goes for my radio shows and my books.

 

Lots of sermons out there are directed at how we and our kids are worldly, right? And that’s not a bad thing. We should want our kids’ heroes to be people like Mister Rogers and the great saints of the past. People like Gladys Aylward and Cameron Townsend, but they often don’t even know who they are—everything is Taylor Swift and Beyonce and sports stars and actors and influencers and all that. Music and movies and sports are fine, don’t get me wrong as I really enjoy music and movies—but they aren’t our examples of how we should behave. They are cultural and not counter-cultural. And that’s just obvious—not telling you anything you don’t know. The church largely focuses on preaching against all that but is that the biggest problem facing the Body of Messiah? I really don’t think so. Yeshua didn’t really talk about that stuff, at all. And He could have spent time talking about stuff that would make what we deal with now look tame. When was the last time your kid saw someone nailed to a cross along the roadway? Or death matches in the arena? What He did talk about was the character of the believer and especially in the Sermon on the Mount. And before Matthew wrote his account, including the Sermon on the Mount, there were oral traditions of the teachings of the Messiah, passed around among the congregations and Paul must have known them well because his letters are very much obsessed with and focused on promoting the character instructions of Yeshua. In fact, get rid of Paul and you get rid of the hardest teachings in the entire Bible on what it means to love neighbor and enemy in real life. Yeshua spoke in sweeping generalities to a Jewish audience, but Paul confronts the day to day nonsense that believers were getting into with infighting and just generally being jerks.

Get rid of the Sermon on the Mount and Paul, and Judaism and Christianity both get a whole lot easier to live out—and since Constantine brought the military into the faith—that’s exactly what started to happen. Did you know that the early church took the Sermon on the Mount and the commands to be peacemakers and meek and loving toward enemies very seriously? This while they were being thrown to the lions in the arena! If anyone ever had a reason to not take Yeshua’s hardest commands seriously, it was definitely them. But their witness brought down normative paganism in the Roman Empire. It’s crazy and upside-down but no one can argue with the success. Paul spent a lot of time giving individualized instructions to the different congregations he founded throughout the Roman Empire based upon what was and was not respectable within the different cultures. Obviously, Rome, Ephesus, Jerusalem, Corinth, and Antioch are all going to have very different local laws, ideals, and traditions even though they were all under the umbrella of the Roman Empire. In some places, women weren’t even allowed to be educated. In others, the majority of the population was enslaved or retired military and their families. Imperial Cult was celebrated zealously in one city but was more of an afterthought in others. So, they had to be taught to be counter-cultural within the culture. It was a tricky situation—to be respectable in all the right ways but to be very different where the culture was oppressive and antichrist.

 

The difference, and this is where we can most help our kids, was in the character they were commanded to have on display at all times. Their character was not to have a shred of worldliness, and character, of course, is about our mental and moral qualities. It’s not only about how we think but about how what we think (or claim to think) manifests in what we are actually doing. Men of the Roman Empire were expected to be adulterers while women could be executed for it. But when it came to ground zero and Yeshua was speaking to His fellow Jews, He told the men quite plainly that they couldn’t exalt themselves over the gentile men whose perceived masculinity was enhanced by being sexually aggressive—when they were looking at women lustfully or divorcing their wives over frivolities in order to marry some other woman. He was saying that it is all the same thing as what the Roman men were legally doing in broad daylight. Yeshua was saying, frankly, that lust isn’t inevitable and that when we view one another truly as human beings, brothers and sisters of the same Father in Heaven, that we will not degrade each other with lustful and dehumanizing thoughts. In fact, it should be difficult (if not impossible) when we see others as siblings. In the ancient Greco-Roman world, by the way, that was the jist of the philosophical virtue of self-control—controlling oneself sexually. Obviously, despite many philosophers valuing that virtue, others didn’t and the general public—not so much.

Meekness and humility were also very counter-cultural and still very much are. First century honor/shame culture prized and rewarded aggression in males—whether that be verbal, physical, or sexual aggression and Judaism wasn’t that much different from the rest of the world in that. Men engaged in aggressive verbal wars to see who would come out on top and who would sink to the bottom. This was normal life, but Yeshua made certain to stress the absolute worldliness of gaining honor in such a way, and that the way of the Kingdom of Heaven rewards the meek, the merciful, and the peacemakers and that it is the peacemakers and not the bullies who are the sons of God. Again, the audience would have been flipping out because Yeshua was telling them that the female virtues were also supposed to be the male virtues. Yeshua was telling them not to practice Greco-Roman and ancient Near Eastern modes of masculinity. He told them that the Kingdom of Heaven was so completely different than what they believed they needed to be, that their entire lives needed to be turned upside down. And this should have been very obvious after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple when God didn’t reward the Zealot rebellion—which was worldly in every way you can imagine; if you haven’t read what the first century Jewish historian Josephus had to say about how the Zealots made the Romans look like saints, you should.

 

As I said before, the early church practically used the Sermon on the Mount as the handbook for acceptable behavior until, all of a sudden, they were no longer a persecuted minority and had an army at their beck and call. That’s what happens to everyone, right? It’s the way of this world and its kingdoms, which is why it is very hard for the church to be countercultural in all but the most glaringly obvious ways. Sure, we do a good job of teaching our kids not to twerk or to do drugs but those are just symptomatic of larger issues—we aren’t teaching them to be Kingdom people because it isn’t safe or culturally masculine. But that’s why we have always been taught to take up our crosses and follow Him—because His way isn’t safe in the here and now. His way requires courage and transformation away from what brings honor in the world. The way of the Kingdom isn’t power and hierarchies and wealth and worldly honor but oftentimes the exact opposite. I want to look at Galatians 5. I mean, look, I could teach on this for years and not exhaust it but I really don’t want to do that here. You guys can connect the dots. What I want is to set the stage for teaching kids what the Bible tells us about actually being like Jesus—what it really means to be disciples and what Galatians 5 tells us we will become as we let go of the world and take hold of the Spirit. People rarely read more than just verses 22-23 because what comes before is just painful to our worldly desires for artificial set-apartness and self-righteousness and safety. I don’t like it any more than you do so let’s just get it over with, starting in verse 16:

I say, then, walk by the Spirit and you will certainly not carry out the desire of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is against the Spirit, and the Spirit desires what is against the flesh; these are opposed to each other, so that you don’t do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, moral impurity, promiscuity, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and anything similar. I am warning you about these things—as I warned you before—that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The law is not against such things. Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. (Gal 5:16-26, CSB)

 

So, what’s “obvious” here in the works of the flesh? Are they really obvious? I see a lot of that stuff masquerading as ministry on social media and from the pulpit. Our carnal minds are actually drawn to the people who are doing a lot of these things and because of that, we make excuses for the others too. But if you belong to political party A and would roast alive a person from political party B who did such and such, but you excuse it in your candidate and from the pulpit then we have to ask exactly how un-obvious these terrible things have become. Let’s look at the works of the flesh that are actually now celebrated from the pulpit and in our political, public, and private lives that we turn a blind eye to when we are enjoying it.

Idolatry—politics is probably our worst example here in America and something I never discuss with kids. I have watched people excuse behavior that actors in Hollywood would get cancelled over—if the politician is good for their issues. And it’s frankly worse in the church than outside it. And whatever we excuse, our kids are listening and watching and internalizing. If we can exalt a politician who is not only committing the works of the flesh but bragging about it, we will never be able to wrestle our own children out of endorsing and copying the same behavior that they see us admiring. What’s our political legacy? Who is it okay to destroy as long as the economy is good and our issues are being promoted? Do we have credibility with our kids when we turn a blind eye in the name of politics and promote commandment-breakers and bullies as bastions of masculinity to be emulated? And worse, the cult of personality within our churches and exacerbated by social media where the worst behaving people in ministry draw the biggest crowds and get to write books telling men and women how to be men and women—for the purpose of attracting the world into the faith by being more like the worldliness of another era, not less. And when these people fall into adultery or financial crimes or whatever, we defend them because the “message” feeds our flesh. Is that okay? Does that line up with anything Yeshua ever taught?

Hatred—that’s like the drug of choice in the church. We are specifically commanded not to hate in the Sermon on the Mount. And it is specifically modeled for us that we are to bless and forgive. But nowadays, if you are grieving and concerned for Palestinian children (which any feeling human being is when they take time to think about it calmly), you are accused of hating the Jews. How can love for Jews manifest as hatred for children, when 50% of the population of Gaza was born after the last free election in 2006? It can’t. We can and should and must love both, okay? When does love for the innocent on one side mean hatred for another side unless that is the general state of our hearts? Did loving and forgiving those who killed Yeshua mean that He endorsed their governments? We treat hatred as though it is a right and a virtue when one of the fruits of the Spirit is specifically a promise that as we yield to and mature in the Spirit that our love will grow and overpower and defeat our casual hatred. Hatred compromises us, it is one of the underlying themes of the Gospels. Sometimes I wonder if, when Yeshua commanded His followers to love their enemies, if someone accused Him of hating the Jews. That’s a flesh response. That’s what we do these days. It’s natural but not representative of a cruciform life or mature fruit. It’s worldly to hate and to preach and support hate.

Strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy—some of the most popular preachers out there have all of these on open display under the auspices of being zealous and speaking the truth in love. People who thrive on being angry and promoting anger even over the smallest things, who cannot tolerate any form of disagreement, who label everyone who is not in lockstep as other, dangerous, heretic, enemy, stupid, etc. Leaders who do not make disciples of Yeshua but of themselves—openly ambitious instead of humble and meekly serving. Cutting down anyone who seems threatening, creating factions and envious of the influence of others over the people around them. Teachers who would rather make up an answer to a question than to send the questioner to another teacher. Gosh, I have received some terrible made-up answers from people who simply didn’t know how to admit that they haven’t studied such and such. The creation of these hierarchies where we lord authority over one another the way Yeshua warned the pagan gentiles did (which was actually a challenge lobbed directly at the politically powerful Sadducean priesthood). No wonder such things go hand in hand with sexual and financial abuse in the congregations.

How about violence? Oh, we bristle with fear when we read the Sermon on the Mount and immediately say, “But what if?” instead of saying, “Lord, I am listening. My flesh is crawling and I don’t like it but I am listening.” How do we teach our children to take Messiah seriously when the first thing we say after each verse of the Sermon on the Mount is, “Yeah, but, He can’t mean that because that’s dangerous and hard and scary.” That’s the Beast Kingdom in us, in all of us, and we teach it to our kids because it has been drilled into us. That Jesus couldn’t possibly mean for us to actually be in danger—like the church usually has been throughout history whenever it isn’t backed by political power and an army. That’s anti-Christ because when we say things to countermand Yeshua, or use the Constitution to negate Him, or “common sense” to sweep away His commands—we are doing exactly what the persecuted church never has done because they never could.

Some of the last recorded words of Yeshua by Matthew are that we are to go into the world, teaching people to do everything He commanded. There are five teaching blocks in that Gospel and the first and foundational one is the Sermon on the Mount. That’s the manifesto of the Kingdom of Heaven in the New Creation age. That’s the narrow path. That’s the meat we move on to after we learn to digest the milk of the basic commandments. That’s the upside-down way we are called to live and be different and when we do, we prosper spiritually. But it requires a lot of trust. It’s hard and everything in us screams against it. It’s never been any different for any generation—none of us like it. We want to be safely enmeshed in some sort of artificial 1950’s John Wayne type masculinity where we can trust in big, strong, white dudes to protect us while trying to avoid being forcibly kissed and even spanked instead of trusting in God despite His requiring us to live in a meeker way that exposes us like a huge raw wound floating in a cesspool of infection.

Now, I don’t teach the kids anything like that. I just teach them about Jesus and what love, joy, peace, patience, etc. looks like and I allow Him and parents to do the rest. They are still children and don’t need to unlearn all the stuff we need to unlearn. I don’t want them to turn against the adults in their lives or to feel unsafe in their homes. They aren’t the ones choosing what to listen to from the pulpit or from politicians or whatever. They still see some things very clearly and while we have come to force ourselves to see as good and normal, they are still very pliable and teachable. That’s why we are supposed to be more like them and why the Kingdom belongs to them and not to us. But they are walking away from the faith and from our politics—because neither are modeling Messianic character for them. And I can say that regardless of denomination or political party. Our walks have to be in line with the teachings of the Messiah and not something we have to make excuses for being the opposite of. Remember, Yeshua could have called down ten thousand legions of angels but all He ever did was to flip over some tables and chairs once, and to herd critters off the Temple Mount. That’s self-control. And then He died for all those people involved. We can’t ever forget that. That’s radical, and not worldly.

So, over the last few on Context for Kids, we covered self-control and what Jesus did compared to what He could have done and last week, it’s mercy/gentleness in the parable of the ungrateful servant. Yesterday I recorded a program on faithfulness—which is more complicated than it sounds. I won’t, of course, be talking to them about rogue preachers or politicians. Jesus is enough. He really is. They can spot the counterfeit as long as we don’t try to pass it off as the real thing. Frankly, the reason we see so many church abuse situations is because we have learned from our parents to accept abuse and bad behavior from “anointed” people and we have been passing it down to the generations that follow us.