Cultural Confusion

Introduction

Well, good morning, everybody. I’m going to ask you to take your Bible, turn to the book of Ezekiel. Ezekiel chapter 8 is where we’re going to begin. Ezekiel chapter 8. Just appreciate all of you being here this morning and appreciate this opportunity we have to open God’s word together and study what he’s preserved there for us. You might think it’s a little bit interesting since we’re doing a series on parenting to start in Ezekiel, but I promise you it will connect. So just give me a second to loop these two things together, and we’ll go somewhere meaningful, hopefully. In Ezekiel chapter 8, Ezekiel receives a striking vision from God. And it teaches us something important. It causes us to question where our loyalties truly lie. Ezekiel 8, beginning at verse 7, the Bible says this.

Then he brought me to the entrance of the court, and when I looked, behold, a hole in the wall. He said to me, Son of man, now dig through the wall. So I dug through the wall and behold, an entrance. And he said to me, Go in and see the wicked abominations that they are committing here. So I entered and looked, and behold, every form of creeping things and beast and detestable things, with all the idols of the house of Israel, were carved on the wall all around. Standing in front of them were seventy elders of the house of Israel, with Jaazaniah, the son of Shaphan, standing among them, each man with his censor in his hand, and the fragrance of the cloud of the incense rising.

Then he said to me, Son of man, do you see what the elders of the house of Israel are committing in the dark? Each man in the room of his carved images. For they say, The Lord does not see us. The Lord has forsaken the land. And so here, Ezekiel sees a really interesting vision. He sees a hole in a wall, and he’s told by the by the angel or by God to dig through that hole. When he does, he finds an entrance which leads to a room where he finds 70 elders of his people standing there behind closed doors, engaged in gross idolatry. And notice especially what is said in verse 12 that he wants the prophet to see what the elders of Israel are committing in the dark.

In other words, he’s saying, look, these elders, these important people, they worship me openly, but once the doors are closed, once they get behind the wall, you can see who they really trust and who they really serve. They worship Jehovah openly, but behind closed doors, they really do put their trust in idols. And that’s the idea that God wants his prophet to see. That deep down behind closed doors, that’s where their loyalty truly lies. And so that scene, it raises a question for us to consider, which is who do you really trust and who do you really put your faith in? I know you’re here this morning, and you’re worshiping God openly and loudly when you sing to him, and you’re praying to him, you’re bowing your head, closing your eyes, doing all this stuff.

You worship God openly, but at home, behind closed doors, behind the walls of your house, where have you really put your faith? More specifically, since we’re doing a series on parenting, who do you trust when it comes to how you parent and how you raise your kids? And the truth is that when it comes to parenting, when it comes to raising kids, our world is full of idols. Our world is full of organizations and people and things that want to convince us to put our trust in them. Don’t listen to what the Bible says about this. Listen to what I say about this instead. Put your trust in me. Don’t put your trust in God when it comes to how you’re going to bring your kids up.

Isn’t that true? We’re surrounded by all kinds of different philosophies about parenting and raising kids. We are surrounded every single day by other parents who are following popular parenting trends when we go to the park or the grocery store, we interact with the people that our kids go to school with. They all have their own ideas about how they should raise kids that they’ve gotten from who knows where. And then we get on social media and we absorb the social media fodder that’s out there about parenting if your algorithm is so inclined to give that to you, right? We follow the TikTok moms and the insta dads who have their ideas and their hot takes about how kids ought to be raised and how we ought to do that.

And then you add to that all of the intellectuals and the academics and all of the organizations like the American Medical Association or the American Psychological Association. I should have just said the acronym so I wouldn’t have to say the words. Or the American Academy of Pediatrics. I slowed down on that one. And they’ve all got their ideas about how we ought to raise kids too. And maybe depending on your family, you throw a counselor, a therapist, a psychiatrist into that mix. They’ve got their ideas. But none of those, none of those hold a candle to our favorite parenting resource these days, which is Chat GPT. Haven’t we all done that? Which sometimes, let’s be honest, we get on AI, whether it’s Grok or Claude or ChatGPT, and we treat it like we honestly we treat it like it’s God.

I’m going to insert my question, and whatever it pops out, it must be right because AI gave it to me. Even when it comes to my kids and how I raise them. In all of these idols, they demand our devotion. Listen to me. I know what’s right. I know how to parent. I know how to raise good, happy, healthy kids. And all of that is in contrast to what we read in the Bible. One of my favorite verses is found in Psalm 12 and verse 6. It talks about the word of the Lord. The word of the Lord, the words of the Lord are pure words. As silver tried in a furnace seven times. And I love that idea. The idea that the words God has preserved for us are perfect.

They are perfect. Like what you would do with metal back in the day, if you wanted to cleanse out all the impurities, if you wanted to make it as perfect as possible, you’d send it through the furnace to make sure all of the impurities were burned away and only the best was left. And it says, God’s word is like that what he’s preserved for us is perfect. It’s like silver that’s been through the furnace seven times. That’s how carefully God has removed any kind of falsehood or any kind of impurity from his word.

I will tell you how to parent and how to raise kids. And we have to ask ourselves the question Who do we trust? Now I want to be careful that I don’t give you the indication that all of those resources are bad. There’s a lot of good stuff out there that you might get. In fact, I believe it was last week when Brent preached the end of his sermon, he referenced a video that he saw on social media about what it looks like to be a really good loving father. There’s a lot of good stuff out there when it comes to raising kids. But who are you going to trust when those ideas clash? When the word of God clashes with the popular sentiment in our culture.

Because that happens a lot, and it happens about really important stuff. Let me give you a few examples of that. Sometimes the Bible and culture clash when it comes to the battleground of validation. This is one of the primary things that our culture encourages. That when it comes to parents raising kids, emotions should always be validated. And that word validated is important. It means something specific. It does not mean to notice or feel or to recognize emotions. Those are all great things. But validate goes further than that. It means to accept them and affirm them and to justify them. And in many cases, that’s what our culture encouraged us to do. If your kid feels something, they are justified in feeling that way. And as a parent, you need to validate that emotion.

You need to affirm that. Not just you’re mad, but you are right to feel mad. Not just you’re sad, but you are right to feel sad. Not just you feel like you’ve been mistreated, you have been mistreated. If that’s the way you feel, then that’s the truth. That’s what we’re told to do. Validate, affirm every emotion. And not just that, but go deeper than that. Ruminate on your emotions, dwell on them, think about them, explore them. Or maybe our favorite word, unpack those emotions, right? That’s what our culture encouraged us to do, which is different than the message the Bible gives us. The Bible tells us in Jeremiah 17 and verse 9 that the heart is deceitful, is more deceitful than all else, and is desperately sick.

Who can understand it? One of the things the Bible teaches us is that emotions aren’t always true, that emotions can manipulate us and mislead us, and that they shouldn’t be validated and affirmed at every turn. They rather should be evaluated extremely carefully. And we have examples of that, don’t we? Isn’t that what God does to Cain? When Cain is angry that his sacrifice was rejected and Abel’s was accepted. What does God say? Why are you angry? He’s going to validate that emotion. He questions it. That’s exactly what God does to Jonah, too. Remember when Jonah is upset at the very end of the book, when God makes that plant grow up and cover over Jonah and then the plant dies? He asks him, Do you have a good right to be angry, not only about the plant, but by extension about God saving the city of Nineveh?

He challenges those emotions. He doesn’t validate them. What are we going to listen to when it comes to the battleground of emotions? When it comes to the battleground of validation, the word of God or the popular trends in our culture. And that’s also true in the battleground of self expression. Our culture tells us to let kids be kids. To let them explore who they are and discover their own personal identity. Isn’t that what Disney tells us? We lived in Tampa for years. We went to Disney like 20 times a year at least. And we always heard that message in every store with every, you know, fireworks show at the end of the night. Disney’s telling our kids, follow your heart. Be you. Express yourself. And these days, the cardinal sin for parents to commit is to get in the way of that, right?

Don’t limit the self-expression of your kids. We see that in really extreme forms with the transgender craze that swept through the country a few years ago, where parents are told to let their kids just deny blatant reality and pretend like they’re something that they’re not. But we see that in less extreme ways too. Where parents are encouraged to let their kids just do what they want, participate in what they want without interference, where parents are told to let their kids to dress however they want, do whatever they want, read whatever they want, listen to whatever they want, play whatever they want, however much they want, sleep in however much they want. And my job as a parent is not to, is not to limit any of that, but just to get out of the way and watch the beauty of their own personal self-expression play out in their lives.

Don’t get in the way of their self-expression. And I gotta tell you, that’s a little different than what we see in the Bible. The Bible teaches us that as parents, we’re not supposed to get out of the way and let our kids express themselves. We are supposed to train and raise and bring up our children. Isn’t that what Ephesians 6 and verse 4 says? Bring up your children into the discipline and instruction of the Lord. There’s also Proverbs 22 and verse 6, you knew I was probably going to go here. Proverbs 22 and verse 6, which says, train up a child in the way he should go, even when he’s old, he will not depart from it. And I think there’s an interesting implication embedded in that text, right?

The implication is that as a parent, you know better than they know which way they should go. Which is the exact opposite of what we’re told in our culture, right? The word of God says, look, you need to train your kids and raise them and show them the way that they’re supposed to go. Now, of course, we need to be careful not to impose our dreams upon our children or try to live vicariously through them. In Ephesians 6 and verse 4 says we should make sure we don’t provoke our children to wrath. We need to make sure we don’t do all of those things. But at the end of the day, my job as a parent is not to get out of the way and let them express themselves however they want.

My job as a parent is to take a wise, discerning look at who they really are and direct them in the way they ought to go. Culture says get out of the way, but God says show them the way. Who are we going to listen to? And this is also true. We also see this clash when it comes to parental authority. That culture, depending on who you’re listening to, seems to indicate or communicate that wielding parental authority is wrong, unhelpful, and misguided. You see this idea come out in many different ways. Some people will say that the idea that you should punish your children in any way, that’s that’s wrong and misguided. There’s an author named Alfie Cohn who wrote a book, the subtitle of which says, We should move from rewards and punishment toward love and reason.

That’s the idea. He’ll go on to say that parenting is not about parents guiding their children or wielding authority over their children. Parenting is about a collaboration between parent and child, right? It’s not that the parents are in charge. We’re just working together to figure out how you ought to be and who you ought to be. And of course, the American Academy of Pediatrics would go on to say and positively affirm openly that all corporal punishment is wrong. This is what our culture encourages that punishing children is wrong and misguided. And our culture also seems to indicate that self-esteem is the key to everything. That our job as parents is to make sure that our children feel great about themselves. Our job is to boost their self-esteem and make them feel as good as they possibly can about themselves.

And you know what? I agree with that. I think that’s noble. I think excuse the things they do that are inexcusable, or to justify the bad choices that they’re making at school or with their friends, or maybe just to set really low expectations so that they never have to worry about falling short of what we expect from them. Sometimes in our efforts to boost their self-esteem, we use our authority to shield them from all negative emotions. That’s what our culture tells us to do. And of course, that’s a vastly different message than what we get from the Bible, isn’t it? In Proverbs 3 and verse 11, train my son.

Sorry, I should have deleted the train. That’s not actually there. Start with my son. My son, do not reject the discipline of the Lord or loathe his reproof. For whom the Lord loves, he reproves, even as a father corrects the son in whom he delights. What God tells us is that when we delight in our children, we will use our authority to correct them and discipline them to help them become the kind of people that they’re supposed to be. And so the question we have to ask ourselves is who are we going to listen to? Behind closed doors, when we actually make policy in our homes. Who wins out? The word of God or the popular mentality of parenting and raising kids in our day. And we need to be honest with ourselves, that’s a much harder decision to make than we like to admit, isn’t it?

Because these ideas are pushed, it seemingly from every corner of society. There are experts and academics who are telling us that we’ll destroy our kids, we’ll scar them for life, we’ll ruin their futures if we don’t raise them the way they’re telling us to raise them. And we’ve also, when we’re in the grocery store and we hit a speed bump and stuff starts to go sideways, we feel the judgmental stares of everybody around us who expect us to raise our kids the way everybody’s seeing we’re supposed to raise them on social media, or the way everybody thinks we’re supposed to raise them based on what the academics say. And we’re worried if I listen to what God says in this kind of situation, what are they going to think about me?

1. These Idols Lack the Integrity They Claim

It’s tough. And sometimes with the weight of all of these different things, we want to bow to those idols and listen to what culture says about how we ought to raise kids. What I want to do this morning, for the few minutes we have left, is I want to destroy your faith. Not in God, but I want to give you three things. Three things, three truths that will help you put your trust in God’s word rather than these idols when it comes to parenting. And the first one is this. Why should you put your trust in God’s word when it comes to raising kids and not in the popular trends of parenting these days? The first reason is this, because these idols lack the integrity that they claim to have.

They lack the integrity that they claim to have. And that’s true in a number of different ways. And I think we ought to appreciate that sometimes when we think about all these parenting trends, we can be very captivated and compelled by what they put out there. You look on social media, you listen to a TikTok mom or an Instad, and you watch their video that’s a minute and 30 seconds long, and there’s really nice music behind it, and it’s really well shot, and he’s got a very earnest face when he’s telling you how you ought to raise your kids. And it can, it can be very moving and persuasive, and it can cause us to think, man, he must be right about what he’s saying.

And when we look at the academics and the stuff that they publish in newspapers or online articles or the research studies that they do, it can make us feel foolish and honestly stupid for choosing to raise our kids other than what he says. He’s got all the degrees, he’s got the doctrine, he’s got all the research studies on his side. I must be a fool if I think I’m gonna raise my kids this way, opposite of what he says. He’s got the weight of all academia behind him, right?

But we need to remember that these idols do not possess the integrity they claim to possess. First of all, we need to remember what these people are after. What’s their goal in all of this? The TikTok mom and the insta dad, what are they after when they post their stuff online? Are they trying to raise your kid or help you raise your kid to be the best disciple of Jesus? No, probably not. They’re looking for likes and followers and recognition, which honestly, in many ways, is what the academics are looking for too. They’re looking for recognition and praise and prominence within their community. They are not looking to make your kids the best disciples of Jesus they can possibly be. And in addition to all of that, you need to recognize that a lot of these places like academia, where they claim to have all of this respect for truth and honest scientific inquiry, there’s not a lot to back up that claim.

That when it comes to academia and intellectuals, they do not have the integrity that we think they do. There’s several examples that we could point to, but I want you to appreciate just a couple of recent things. Recently, if you haven’t paid attention, there are lots of plagiarizing scandals and dishonesty that has wrought the academic world. Just a few examples of that. Claudine Gay was the president of Harvard University, and she actually had to step down in 2024 recently after she took that office because she was caught plagiarizing a number of different things. She was completely dishonest. Francesca Gino was also a professor at Harvard. She lost her tenure. She was fired from her job because she was caught manipulating data in some of her scientific research.

Ranger P. Davis, Diaz, sorry, I probably pronounced that wrong. She was caught committing data fabrication and data falsification. This is a few prominent examples that have happened in just a few last two or three years of people who are in high positions in academia, who are very well respected, who are caught showing no integrity whatsoever. And we need to add to that the revelation that a lot of the process that they go through in order to publish the scientific studies and research, that’s that’s more deeply flawed than we think it is, too. Have you guys heard of the Sokal Squared Hoax? This is something that happened in 2017 and 2018. And it was meant to undermine people’s faith in the peer review process. Now, peer review is a process that scientists engage in because what they’re what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to ensure the integrity of their studies.

So what they’ll do is they’ll create a study and they’ll go through the process of all of that, and once they’re done with it, they’ll submit it to their peers in the field to review everything that they’ve done and check all of their work to make sure that what they’ve done is right and that it’s good, that it has integrity, and that it’s worthy of publication. Well, in 2017 and 2018, three people, Peter Boghausan, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose, decided they were going to test the integrity of that system. And so they published 20 completely fabricated research studies. They did no research, they didn’t do any of the stuff they said they did, they just wrote it and pretended like it was true. And they did it on some of the most outrageous stuff that you possibly could.

Look up the Socal Squared Hoax, and you’ll see the kind of research studies that they just made up out of thin air. And when they submitted it for peer review, seven of those papers got published in respected scientific journals. Seven more of those studies were still under review when they came out and admitted that they had made all of it up. And you might wonder why would somebody publish seven studies that have absolutely no backing that were completely fabricated out of thin air? Well, because they wrote them in a way that would reinforce popular political positions. And so people put a check mark on that and said, I approve of this because it confirmed what they wanted to believe. And all of that is to say, oh, and by the way, I meant to say this, the reason it’s called the Sokol Squared hoax is because this isn’t the first time people have done this.

The first guy who did this was named Alan Sokel, and he did it to make the same point that you can’t really trust the peer review process to be perfectly honest all the time. Now, that is not to say that every college president is a fraud or every peer reviewed paper is worthless. But it is to say that we should not treat those things as if they are on an even plane with the word of God. We should not treat scientific findings or data or conclusions as divine. God’s word has been tried in a furnace seven times. But the scientific things that people find in research, that process is susceptible to lying and cheating and scheming and falsification and political pressure. These idols do not possess the integrity that they claim to possess.

This is one of the chief arguments that God makes against idolatry in the Bible. He says you shouldn’t serve idols because ultimately they’re fake. They don’t deliver on their promises. They’re not really going to protect you. And it’s also the argument that God uses against turning toward other nations for help rather than God. And this is something Israel was fond of doing. They would often, instead of turning to God in times of distress, they would turn to Egypt in times of distress. And God likes to point out that look, when you turn to Egypt instead of me, you’re going to find Egypt isn’t going to help you at all. In fact, they’re going to hurt you. He talks about that in Ezekiel 29. Ezekiel 29, verse 6 through 7.

Then all the inhabitants of Egypt will know that I am the Lord, because they have been only a staff made of reed to the hand of Israel. When they took hold of you with a hand, you broke and tore all their hands. And when they leaned on you broke and made all their loins quake. And so the picture he’s painting there is really interesting when he says, Israel, when they were in distress, they turned to you, Egypt, and you ended up, instead of supporting them and giving them what they needed, you broke and you cut their hands and you caused them to fall down. They trusted in you and you let them down. That’s what happens when we trust in idols. The same is true when it comes to these other parenting idols that we might turn to.

2. These Idols Do Not Lead to Good Outcomes

We are encouraged in this culture to reject our authority as parents to validate every feeling and to allow our kids unrestricted self expression with the promise that when we do that, we will raise happy, healthy, well adjusted kids who love us. But the truth is that’s just not what happens when you do that. You listen to these idols, you raise your kids that way. You’re not gonna get happy, healthy, well adjusted kids who love you. That’s not what happens. Now, if you’re even willing to trust the research, this is what the research says. Specifically about validating feelings and exploring our emotions and ruminating on our emotions. Specifically, what happens when you dwell on your feelings is it increases emotional distress, it increases anxiety, and it happens to be the hallmark of depression.

Did you know that? That if you want to make a person depressed, the best way to do that is to tell them, I want you to keep thinking about your negative feelings all the time. Keep exploring your negative emotions. Keep unpacking those bad feelings. That is the perfect way to make somebody depressed. Validating feelings and encouraging that emotional exploration all the time, it does not lead to good outcomes in kids. My mentor in preaching, D. Bowman always liked to say, without any scientific studies to back it up, if you want to feel good about yourself, go out and do something for someone. Turns out he’s got a lot more truth in that statement that he just came up with than all of these experts and research are telling us about validating emotions.

And likewise, these idols tell us that look, if you want good, healthy, happy kids, you need to reject your parental authority. Don’t rule over your kids, don’t wield that authority over them. Don’t correct them and discipline them. But what the research actually says is maintaining healthy authority as a parent is the best way to raise your kids. That when you have healthy authority in your house, it leads to fewer behavioral problems, better social skills, better academics, healthier emotional states, better child development, and better parent-child relationships. And that is validated by research. If you want the sites, I can give them to you if you’re even interested in sites after this lesson.

Turns out the best way to raise your kids is to exercise your authority in a loving way as a parent. If you abandon your role as an authority in your house, your kids will behave worse, have fewer friends, they will be less smart, they will be more emotionally dysregulated, they will develop worse, and they will like you less.

Proverbs 29 and verse 17, correct your son, and he will give you comfort.

Proverbs 1, verses 8 through 9. Hear my son, your father’s instruction, do not forsake your mother’s teaching. Indeed, they are a graceful wreath to your head and ornaments about your neck.

They do not lead to good outcomes.

3. These Idols Do Not Share Our Goals

That these idols also do not share our goals.

That the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, Academia, social media influencers, they do not want the same thing for your kids that you want for your kids. Social media influencers, they want money and likes and followers. Academics want respect and recognition and prominence. Politicians and organizations want power. And maybe under the best circumstances, you could say that some person you follow on Instagram, they really do want what’s best for your kids and want to teach them how to become a good citizen of this country. But even that is not the same goal that we have for our kids. We want our kids to become disciples of Jesus. That’s our goal. And that’s why when we turn to raising them and we think about raising them, we don’t turn to people in this culture.

We don’t turn to organizations or research articles or social media influencers. We turn to the Word of God because that’s why this was written. The words of the Lord are pure words as silver tried in a furnace seven times. And these pure words were given not to make your kin your children a lot of money for God, not to give prominence to the writers of the Bible, not to make them even good citizens of a country. It was written to make them good disciples of Jesus so they can go to heaven when they die. Let us put our faith in God and not in the idols of this world.

Conclusion

That’s true when it comes to parenting and raising kids. It also happens to be true when it comes to salvation. The people of this world do not tell us how to be saved. God’s word tells us what we must do to be saved. The Bible says that if we believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, if we’re willing to repent of our sins and confess our faith in Him before men, then we can be baptized in water to have our sins washed away. We can rise to walk in newness of life. We can become true disciples of Jesus. That is the only way to be saved, the only way to become a child of God. And that’s based not on culture, but on the true words of God.

If we can help you do that, we invite you to come to the front while we stand and while we sit.