Youth Ministry, Children, and Just Good 'Ole Preachin'

Thanks to Amy's Humble Musings for recommending a great sermon by Voddie Baucham called "Closing The Generation Gap". You can stream it here, or to download, RIGHT CLICK here and select "Save Target As" to save it to your pc hard drive (it's about an 8MB file).

IT IS WORTH YOUR 37 MINUTES to listen to this!

Amy brought out some interesting comments that might compel you listen:

Citing the current American birthrate of 1.9 children per family, he tells a group of Southern Baptists pastors: The French birthrate of 1.5 children per family, for example, is not only below the replacement rate, it is overshadowed by Muslim immigrants, who average six children per family. “Which means in two generations France will be a Muslim nation by sheer numbers alone,” Baucham said. “Why? Because they want prosperity more than they want children. And it’s the same for us.”
Further on, he states that the unwritten rule among Southern Baptists and others is two children per family: “We despise children in the Southern Baptist Convention. You don’t believe me? Find a woman who has six or seven children and follow her into a Southern Baptist church and watch the way we mock her. Watch the way people who don’t even know her come up to her and say, ‘Haven’t you guys figured out how that happens yet?’”

A few of my own thoughts:

• Voddie gives a quick, but thorough exegesis of Ephesians 5 & 6 - explaining that the 3 contexts of submission (Eph 5:21-6:9) are displays of those who are "filled with the Spirit" (Eph 5:18).
• Voddie's "paraphrase" of the first four commandments: 1. I'm God you don't get another One. 2. Don't even make nothin' that looks like Me. 3. Don't even mess with my Name. 4. Don't even mess with my day.
• When speaking of the unbiblical pattern of most youth ministries, Voddie asks, "If our people don't tithe, we don't develop a "Tithing Ministry" and tithe for them, so why, when parents don't do their jobs teaching their children, do we develop "Youth Ministries" to do it for them?"
• The poorest nations in the world see children as a blessing. The richest nation in the world only talks about children only in terms of how many we can afford.
• God says 2 things required to be His people: 1. Gladly receive these blessings that I give you called children. 2. You disciple them in your homes so that they don't look like the culture around them.
• Only two skills required of a pastor (several character qualities, but only two skills): 1. Be able to teach, and 2. Must manage his household well. (Titus 1) According to this, the church is full of dis-qualified pastors.
• Interestingly, in the same paragraph is the qualification of not being a drunkard - it doesn't say "don't drink", only, "don't be a drunkard". Why do we elevate the standard of "not being drunk with wine" and yet lower the standard of "managing his household well"?

Ready to listen now?!