This year for Lenten Services I am preaching through the Table of Duties.
Here is the first sermon in that series.
Parents and Children. Children and Parents. Scriptures make clear that children are given to parents as blessings. Likewise, parents are given to children as blessings. But as children and parents both know, they are some days when the blessing of either is rather hard to appreciate. Often, parents are perceived as overly harsh by their children and children are viewed as stubborn and disobedient by their parents. Sometimes those perceptions are simply that, perception. But sometimes they are quite accurate. Sometimes parents are overly harsh and sometimes children are plain disobedient.
In Ephesians 6, both parents and children are told how to live out together the new life they have each been given in baptism. Parents are told that they are to make sure that they do not provoke their children to anger. They must treat their children fairly, justly, and without unnecessary harshness. And that means that if you as a parent have never asked your children for forgiveness for going overboard and confessed the same before God, you should. Discipline is good and essential to parenting, but harshness and discipline are two different things although they are often confused.
Secondly, parents are charged with bringing up children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. That means that your child’s understanding of the faith is your responsibility. It 
is not the job primarily of the Pastor, Sunday school, or Midweek teacher. Many parents have bought into the idea that their prime responsibility is to produce star students and super athletes. But Christian parents are first and foremost are to produce godly offspring who know God’s ways. And so you are to dedicate yourself to your children’s Christian education. Everything else must come after that. Even though school work and sports schedules just appear with the expectation that they will take priority in life, you must resist. Christian instruction cannot come last. It cannot be done only when you are exhausted from everything else. You most creative ideas should be employed here. And men, I am not just talking to your wives. In fact, first and foremost I am talking to you. You are to take the lead in this. But to both parents I say this, when you fail at this our most important role as parents, you again need to confess this sin before your children and your God.
Children, you are on the other hand are to obey your parents trusting that God has given them to you to care for you in his place. You must know that God has promised blessing to those who do this. You are to honor and respect your parents. And yes that means obeying them. Obeying them not only the spirit of what they say, but to the letter as well. Obeying them not only when you think they are right but each time they speak. Unless they demand evil of you, you are to obey. That is what God says. Many young people often spend a lot of times considering what it is that God wants them to do in life. That is fine, but do not leapfrog right over the simplest answer to that question. He wants you to honor and respect your parents. So if you have not admitted to your parents the times you have disobeyed them, you should and you should do the same before God, for it is truly him that you are disobeying. And older children are not to ignore these words either. You should honor your parents by visiting them, providing for them in need and living in ways that respect them and their reputations.
If parents raised their children in the faith and refrained from lording their power over their children and children honored their parents in thought, word, and deed, I bet the blessing of parents to children and children to parents would be much easier to perceive each day.
But you might just think I am being too idealistic? Well I am stating the ideal unabashedly because it is God’s ideal. But I say all these things as a child and a parent. I am realistic in understanding that as long as the devil, the world, and our flesh are around, every relationship can be strained. But we cannot simply resign ourselves to failure in these relationships. Children cannot buy the rhetoric that parents really just don’t understand anything and therefore can be ignored. And parents should not just assume their kids will be disobedient and therefore give up the fight. No, we must seek to live as we were re-created in baptism to live. We share that life together. And when we do not, we must confess that to one another and to our God. We must end up at the cross of Jesus. That is what Lent and life is all about. Only there can torn relationships be reconciled through forgiveness. And only there can each of us again be made new to live as parents and children in the blessed ways of God.
Children are a blessing to parents and parents to children. Amen.
