The Next Level
I ONCE PREACHED ON THE "Do not provoke your children to wrath" passage from Ephesians 6:4. I approached it from the perspective of a thirty-two-year-old dad of three preschoolers—that's what I was—struggling to find the line between discipline and punishment. I was convinced I had thoroughly exegeted the text before I began preparing my sermon.
I recently revisited the same text while preaching a series from the book of Ephesians. I pulled my study notes from my files and was startled to see how much of my life experiences as a thirty-two-year-old not only influenced my sermon content and illustrations but my exegetical research as well. I found I could not dip into my old notes and simply review discoveries I had made in a previous exploration. I was now fifty, the father of three adult daughters. I found one commentary particularly helpful this time as I studied the passage, the same commentary I looked at all those years ago but from which I chose to use almost no material. Not only was I bringing my immediate experiences to bear on the text but the passage raised different questions for me, issues I never would have considered twenty years ago.
For example, what does this text say to a sixty-year-old gentleman who is dealing with guilt now because he was so afraid of "provoking his children to wrath" when they were young that he never confronted them appropriately? This gentleman so much wanted to be kind that he allowed his children to make wrong choices, and now he lives with the consequences. He has also resorted to correcting his adult children in such a way that they are angry with him.
In short, if I had not dug new footings for my sermons on Ephesians—and instead built my sermons on what notes I had created many ...
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