Created to Worship
by Tedd and Margy Tripp
Human beings are worshipers. It follows then, that children are worshipers. We can almost hear someone say, “Not my children, Tedd and Margy, they fall asleep in church every week.”
But nonetheless, your children are worshipers. They have been created in the image of God. The world in which they live is designed to display the glory of God, and children—indeed, all human beings—are uniquely designed for worship. Like explorers driven to find distant shores, your sons and daughters go off every day in search of excitement, seeking an answer to the question, “Who or what is worth worshiping?”
The fact that human beings are hard-wired for worship is a unique aspect of our creation. It is the reason we love to hear a symphony or watch a juggler or marvel at an athletic feat. We love to be dazzled. It is the reason we watch sports on TV. Do you know that Antarctic penguins hold no diving competitions? They perform marvelous feats without color commentary or slow-motion replays. A brown bear grabs a salmon from the Columbia River, by any account an amazing feat of timing and coordination, and yet none of his fellow bears line the shore to applaud. Human beings do this sort of thing because human beings are uniquely designed for worship. Your kids love to be entranced by something amazing because they are instinctively worshippers.
Now, what happens when children who are designed for worship fail to worship the God in whose image they have been made? These children do not cease to be worshippers; they simply worship and serve something else. The apostle Paul speaks to this in Romans 1:25: “[ They] exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever” (NKJV).
This is what your children do; it is what all humanity does. If your children do not worship and serve God, they substitute something for God, worshipping and serving something in the creation instead. They manufacture an idol—a substitute for God.
These idols your children find are not small statues of wood or gold; they are much more subtle. Leaving a Chinese restaurant recently with two young granddaughters, I felt a tug on my coat. “Grandpa,” one asked, pointing to a large statue of Buddha in the corner, “who’s that fat man?” The question provided a wonderful opportunity to speak to the girls about idols.
The human heart creates so many idols:
Pride and performance. Some children will lay all at the altar of performance. They are driven. The joys of performance and the praises that attend excellence stimulate and impel them.
Power and influence. Other children exhibit a lust to control the people in their world. These are the organizers and arrangers. If the game is playing school, they will always be the teachers.
Pleasure and sensuality. You may have a thrill-seeker in your family. This is the child who constantly seeks the rush of exciting, heart-throbbing, and adrenalin-pumping experiences. He finds the joys of ordinary living boring.
Possessions. Some kids crave stuff. They pore through the catalogs that enter your home. They collect stuff; they polish stuff. When they leave the house, they want assurance that no one will touch their stuff while they are gone.
We could add to the list. People are endlessly creative when it comes to finding substitutes for God. Other idols include the fear of man, the desire for approval, the longing for friendship, or simply the consuming desire to be someone or have something that elicits the response “Cool!”
All of this brings me to my point: The most important job you have as a parent is to show the glory of God to your children, who are compulsively worshippers. Your kids are hard-wired for worship, but in their fallen state, they instinctively worship and serve created things rather than God. Psalm 145 talks about this when it says,
I will extol You, my God, O King; And I will bless your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless you, And I will praise Your name forever and ever. Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; And His greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall praise Your works to another, And shall declare Your mighty acts. (Psalm 145:1-4, NKJV)
Your job is to be one generation commending the glory and excellence of God to the next generation. (See also Psalm 78:1-7.)
Help your children see that we find our greatest joys in the nearness of God rather than in fulfilling our appetites. “There are many who say, ‘Who will show us any good?’ LORD, lift up the light of Your countenance upon us. You have put gladness in my heart, More than in the season that their grain and wine increased” (Psalm 4:6-7, NKJV).
Show your thrill seekers that the lasting joys and pleasures that people crave are found in knowing God. “You will show me the path of life; In Your presence is fullness of joy; At your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11, NKJV).
Illustrate for them that the greatest deliverance from adversity is not removal from difficulty (Psalm 27:1-3), but enjoying the beauty of the Lord. “One thing I have desired of the LORD, That will I seek: That I may dwell in the house of the LORD All the days of my life, To behold the beauty of the LORD, And to inquire in His temple” (Psalm 27:4, NKJV).
Other Psalms to which you may turn to underscore the joys and delights of being entranced by God are Psalm 36:5-9, 63:1-5, 73:25-26, 81:10-16, and 96:1-6.
Why is this so important?
1. Your kids do not merely exist amidst the facts and circumstances of their lives. They interpret everything that happens around them, and their interpretation determines how they respond. The key to correctly interpreting life is the being and glories of the God for whom they are made. If they are worshiping and serving idols, they will never accurately interpret the circumstances of life.
2. Since you love your kids and desire their happiness, you will always be tempted to feed their idols. Many parents do just that. They fill their children’s lives with stuff and take delight in their children’s delight in possessions. Yet they cling to the hope that someday their children will see that life is not found in possessions, but in knowing God. Resist the temptation to polish your children’s idols.
3. The Christian life begins with glory. “For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6, NKJV). The Christian life continues and grows as we behold God’s glory. “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18, NKJV).
Perhaps the best thing you can do for your children is to go before God, behold His glory, and then move toward them with the encouragement that they have been created for a great and glorious God who longs to bring them abundant life.
Tedd Tripp is the senior pastor of Grace Fellowship Church, Hazleton, Pennsylvania. He and Margy have been married since 1968, and they have three adult children and six grandchildren. Tedd holds a B.A. in History from Geneva College, M.Div. from Philadelphia Theological Seminary, and D.Min. with an emphasis in Pastoral Counseling from Westminster Theological Seminary. He is the author of the popular childrearing book Shepherding a Child’s Heart (Shepherd Press, 1995).
9 comments:
Sunday, September 14, 2008
A Post I Wish I Didn’t Have to Write: Tripp, Intimacy, Spanking, Submission and Little Girls
(If you are a troll who has been sexually harmed by spanking, I beg you not to troll on this blog.)
Watching parents and their babies and children at Mars Hill today, I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Mark Driscoll encouraged parents to register for the Ted Tripp conference, lauding him as an excellent parenting speaker. I am afraid of what will happen to those babies and children if Mars Hill parents take Tripp’s advice.
I have blogged a lot about babies, but it is now time to find out what our excellent parenting expert teaches about spanking children, and I’m going to focus on little girls, one of the most vulnerable groups for sexual predation.
Let’s say that a father is spanking his little girl. Here is the process that Tripp recommends:
1. The father takes the little girl to a private place.
2. He strips the little girl of her pants or pulls up her dress. He pulls down her underpants exposing her bare buttocks (and most likely genitals)
3. He lays her across his lap. We will talk about why he recommends this in a moment.
4. He slaps her naked buttocks painfully with his hand.
5. He spanks her until the little girl is “sweet” and “submissive”. Perhaps he will ask her if she is going to be “sweet” now, or if she needs to be slapped on her naked buttocks again.
6. The two hug and proclaim their love for one another.
No one can deny that this is what Tripp teaches. It is stated in his book, Shepherding a Child’s Heart.
Tripp recommends baring the child in order to increase the pain of the spanking. But the
Stop the Rod website asserts that Tripp teaches: “God demands that parents spank bare bottoms, even infants, and that this brings ‘intimacy’.”
Tripp recommends putting the little girl in a position of physical closeness on the father’s lap in order to “put the spanking in context of your physical relationship” (page 151, Shepherding a Child’s Heart). This disturbing statement would be at home on an adult sexual bondage website and we all know it.
Out of the hundreds of men who are being given this advice at Mars Hill Church, do you think there are some for which this combination of purposeful exposure, closeness, slapping and seeking submissiveness of little girls will be a problem?
Is it possible that practicing of Ted Tripp’s spanking techniques will trigger something in a certain percentage of fathers who have latent inclinations that they do not even know about?
Many people who are “not really opposed” to corporal punishment imagine spanking to be a perfunctory swat on the backside of a child who just ran in the street or lit the house on fire.
But Ted Tripp’s spanking method is a ritualized process, which emphasizes bare buttocks, physically positioning the little girl to be in contact with the father’s body and the goal of the little girl’s loving submission to the father at the end of the process.
Mars Hill will be exposing these teachings to hundreds of fathers of little girls next week. Are you as worried as I am?
Anon, Are you a regular visitor to this website or do you just spam (it's pretty clear by googling that what you have posted is elsewhere) webpages to attack Tedd Trip?
It seems you have a grudge against the man. May I remind you:
1 John 2:9 "Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness."
1 John 3:15 "Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him."
1 John 4:20 "If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen."
But regarding smacking:
Prov 13:4 "Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him"
Either God is wrong or you are wrong. And God's Word says your actions show that you and sites like 'Stop the Rod', hate children. That is what that text says.
You are clearly in rebellion to your Creator who you will one day stand before in judgement, and you think you can mock and put yourself as judge over Him and His Word.
2 Tim 3:16-17 "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work."
Prov 22:15 "Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him."
Prov 23:13-14 "Do not withhold discipline from a child;
if you strike him with a rod, he will not die.
14 If you strike him with the rod,
you will save his soul from Hell."
Prov 29:15 "The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother."
To understand what these verses mean and they are NOT in anyway child abuse. (In fact God says it's child abuse to withhold the rod when needed), I highly recommend you listen to this firm but gentle sermon by Voddie Baucham Child Training
Also in you shaking your fist in disgust at God's Word, you show every sign that you are lost and do not truly know Jesus Christ.
Please, I can only ask of you to take the time to go through these:
'Searchers' or those 'Unsure' If you are Concerned About Your Soul, Please Stop Here
I have no interest in belittling you or winning an argument for the sake of winning an argument. Eternity is a long time to be wrong and there is nothing more important than laying down your rebellion to God and His Word and being found at peace with God in Christ Jesus.
"Also in you shaking your fist in disgust at God's Word..."
I am not the original anonymous poster, but I AM the person who wrote the quoted post. It is from my website:
http://tripptomars.blogspot.com/
Allow me to guarantee you that the bible does not promote seedy spanking rituals or the spanking of infants. It is a shameful travesty to even suggest such a thing.
In me, you are encountering a person who has witnessed the serious emotional and sexual harm this advice can do to people. I'm not going to indulge anyone's fantasies of righteous parenting at the expense of children.
In response to entirely valid arguments, you whip out a series of verses intended to intimidate "anonymous" from making his or her point.
My answer to that is that you need to worry about the spiritual implications for yourself of promoting, defending or practicing acts that harm other people, particularly children.
Nicola
Nicola, nor does Tedd Tripp "promote seedy spanking rituals".
Please take those warnings of Scripture seriously, and take the time to go through the "'Searchers' or those 'Unsure' If you are Concerned About Your Soul, Please Stop Here" link I posted above.
"Nicola, nor does Tedd Tripp "promote seedy spanking rituals".
I'm sure that some people don't consider taking a little girl to a private location, stripping her panties holding her close for "intimacy: and slapping her naked buttocks with the hand and then asking her if she'll be "sweet" to be seedy.
Those people need to spend some time on the internet, researching the damage this can do to a child. I am not accepting any more excuses from educated literate adults that they cannot figure out what is wrong with spanking children.
"Please take those warnings of Scripture seriously"
Do you take the warnings of scripture seriously? Are you concerned about striking an erogenous zone on your child, stimulating blood flow and nerve endings leading to the nearby genitals and causing a sexual linkage in that child to spanking that he or she will live with for life?
I have no patience for Christians anymore. Take the log out of your own eye before you complain about the splinter in mine. Think about what you're advocating as you hide behind an erroneously used barricade of scripture.
All the law is contained in this one thing: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. Your child is your neighbor. You cannot love your neighbor by giving them a fetish or ruling them by fear and pain. Those are acts of hatred for your neighbor and if you are doing such acts or promoting them, then you are in sin according to the bible.
You owe an apology to every child and adult who lives with the emotional and sexual damage of spanking because you sit around advocating for it in spite of overwhelming evidence that it is harmful.
Nicola
Hi Nicola (and others),
Wow, this got contentious. It's obvious everyone has strong opinions about this, and rightly so. The proper bringing up of our children should be one of our highest priorities.
I don't think anyone wants to bring up children wrongly, nor does anyone want to abuse or create a fetish in the child, or unlock a latent hidden perversion in a parent.
The original poster made the case that a dad spanking a daughter is wrong because it might (and I quote) "trigger something in a certain percentage of fathers who have latent inclinations that they do not even know about."
So let's consider that...
If we follow that line of thinking, let's look at other parental responsibilities.
Does this mean that fathers ought not give their daughters baths, because, after all, wouldn't seeing a naked little girl in the water trigger latent desires in a percentage of men?
I mean, it doesn't take much time perusing adult websites to find pornographic movies that involve naked women in a bathtub.
Might giving your daughter a bath trigger latent desires in a certain percentage of men?
And what about diaper changing? Imagine all the desires that could be triggered by wiping the genitals of your baby daughter! And if she has a rash and you have to wipe diaper cream on her genitals?
And what of cuddling? Perhaps daddy's ought not cuddle with their daughters, for fear that they might somehow get aroused.
But why stop with the men? Maybe women shouldn't nurse their infant sons, because they might trigger arousal in the women for having their breasts stimulated. Think of all the little boys who might be forced into incestuous relationships with their mommies because of breastfeeding!
See where this is going? It's absurd!
It comes down to this... God says we must spank our kids. And in order for spanking to work, it has to hurt for a moment. When a toddler has a diaper on, the spanking isn't going to hurt. So the diaper must come off. That's all. It's very simple, and nothing sexual. For kids in underwear, it can come down a bit. Again, nothing sexual. No more so than changing a diaper or giving a bath.
If some men (or women) have sinful perverted desires triggered, then those must be dealt with by repentance and self control and maybe even incarceration. But we don't throw out God's principles because someone might be a pervert. That same pervert would likely be aroused more by putting diaper cream on his daughter's private spot than over a quick spanking. Are we to forbid diaper changing? No. We deal with the pervert appropriately and protect the child at all costs.
Spanking is biblical and moral. Sexually abusing a child (or anyone) is unbiblical and immoral.
This all comes down to obeying what God says and trusting Him with the results.
You say: "It comes down to this... God says we must spank our kids. And in order for spanking to work, it has to hurt for a moment. When a toddler has a diaper on, the spanking isn't going to hurt. So the diaper must come off."
My friend, I am not one of the biblically illiterate here.
Nowhere in the bible does it suggest that the rod is to be applied to the body of small infants and toddlers and preschoolers. That is your intrepretation, which is in defiance of all common sense.
"That's all. It's very simple, and nothing sexual. For kids in underwear, it can come down a bit. Again, nothing sexual. "
Mark, you do not own your children. You are not entitled to play russian roulette with their sexuality. You have clearly not troubled yourself to look into the growing community of people raised by Christian parents who are struggling to cope with the permanent damage done to them.
What do you have to say to the following man, whose sexuality is altered with no hope of recovery, and who is trying to figure out what to do with his life?
Let me guess...you'll tell him to PRAY his way back to sexual and emotional health, as you go on advocating spanking!
http://nospank.net/mc.htm
"However, one thing I feel that is missing and may be benifical to myself and others like me, is a section with resources or articles to help those with spanking fetishes. Your website offers plenty of material showing the causes behind spanking fetishes, but as a Christian, I wish I could find some resources that would help me deal with this distortion in my sexuality. Unfortunately, I have had difficulty finding such resources on my own, but I have noticed that many people have written letters on your website describing their own sexual fetishes, and I was wondering if any of those individuals had any suggestions about how they dealt with the issue? As a Christian, I hope that I could have wonderful sex with my future wife, and that the passion and sexual arousal would come about just from me finding beauty in my wife, and loving her. But I worry that if I ever do marry I will probably have to fantasize about being spanked in order to reach an orgasam. "
By the way, therapists who help people with spanking fetishes are in agreement that this fetish, established in the mists of childhood, is so deeply entrenched that people should plan to live with it. They teach "coping strategies" not cures.
Here's is what I don't understand from all of you spank happy fundies. I have a Bible degree so I am no speaking from complete inexperience, but while the Bible uses the word rod with regards to discipline, it DOES NOT say to hit your kids with one.
Every other time that word is used in the Bible it with reference to a shepherd protecting his sheep. There is no instance of a shepherd striking a sheep with his rod, so why do we justify it to hit our kids?
Hi Tahila,
Just because you were not sexually or emotionally harmed does not mean that spanking is harmless. This is like saying that parents should not have their children wear seatbelts because you didn't and you survived childhood.
Spanking is a common sexual fetish. The Internet is teeming with people who cannot enjoy ordinary sex lives, because they require some element of spanking fantasy to be sexually stimulated.
What is the matter with people in general, and Christians in particular? Why do you feel entitled to take a chance with your child's sexual future?
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