The Text: Ephesians 6:1-4
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honour your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), “that it may be well with you and that you may live long on the earth.” Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
Introduction: The Maker’s Instructions
It would be unthinkable, Pawson begins, that God would place people in the world without giving any guidance as to how to live. Almost every piece of complicated equipment in a home comes with a maker’s handbook — a car, a fridge — and children, he says, are the most complex piece of mechanism anyone will ever encounter. God did not simply create fathers, mothers, and children and leave them to work out family life by trial and error; he gave a book of maker’s instructions, and that is what this passage sets out.
Pawson recalls the previous week’s study: God’s pattern for human relationships is neither democracy nor dictatorship, but a combination of leadership and loyalty. Neither group is to speak of their rights — only of their responsibilities. That pattern, first seen in marriage (the smallest human group, two becoming one), now enlarges to the family. A family cannot be run as a democracy, where every member has an equal vote, nor as a dictatorship, where children are treated as robots. Again, the Bible speaks not of the rights of children or parents, but the responsibilities of both.
Built within this framework, Pawson argues, is the one thing many children today lack: security. The majority of juvenile crime, he suggests, traces back to insecurity in the home — children who do not feel safe within a clear, ordered framework. He recalls a striking remark from a little girl: “My mummy doesn’t love me — she never spanks me.” That child, he says, was voicing a profound insight: without any framework of right and wrong, she felt insecure, and would misbehave deliberately simply to discover whether there were any boundaries at all.
Pawson disclaims any pretension to being a child psychologist, quoting the wry line about a man who started life with six theories on raising children and ended it with six children and no theories. But he intends, nonetheless, to preach the Word of God on the subject — beginning with the children’s side of the family framework, then turning to the parents”.
To the Children: Obedience and Reverence
Paul addresses children directly — meaning they were considered old enough to be listening to the whole letter to the Ephesians read aloud, even if, like the adults present, they did not understand all of it on first hearing. Two things are asked of them: one concerning action, one concerning attitude — obedience and reverence.
Obedience
Obedience, Pawson observes, is a word quietly disappearing from everyday English, replaced by the modern preoccupation with self-expression — as though a child’s highest good were simply to express itself. God’s word does not speak of self-expression; it speaks of obedience, using a word that means literal obedience, to the letter.
Pawson turns to what he calls the shortest and simplest parable Jesus ever told: a father asks two sons to work in the vineyard. One says “I will not,” but later changes his mind and goes. The other says “I go, sir,” but does not go. Which did the will of his father? The lesson, Pawson says, admits of only one interpretation: obedience is doing what was asked, not merely saying the right words.
At what age should a child’s obedience end? Society’s answer keeps sliding downward — once 21, now 18, and drifting lower still. A Jewish boy, by contrast, was considered accountable for keeping the law from the age of twelve. Yet the most remarkable thing about Jesus’ own life, Pawson notes, is that even past that age of accountability, at twelve years old, he returned to Nazareth and was subject to Mary and Joseph — a striking example, unpopular though the teaching may be, for every teenager today.
Why should a child obey? Paul gives only one reason: because it is right — not because it pays, not because it can be explained to the child’s satisfaction, but simply because it is right. That, too, Pawson notes, is a phrase dropping out of common use, as young people increasingly demand justification before they will comply.
Obedience comes in different qualities. Pawson tells a story of a young man’s optimistic reply-paid telegram proposing marriage, and the Scottish girl’s answer designed to use up every paid-for word: “willingly, gladly, eagerly, voluntarily, lovingly” — some thirty words, in delightful contrast to a plain “yes.” Of the two sons in Jesus’ parable, one obeyed, but reluctantly; that was still better than the son who promised and did nothing. But best of all is the child who says “I will” and does it — because to obedience, that child has added reverence.
Reverence
This is why the commandment continues with honouring father and mother: God’s will for children is not bare compliance, but willing, honourable obedience. One can obey resentfully, simply because a parent is bigger and cannot be argued with — or one can obey gladly, because the parent is honoured as wiser, more experienced, someone who has been around more corners of life and would not ask something that was not good.
Pawson laments the erosion of this respect in casual modern speech — “pop”, “the old man” — small epithets that nibble away at genuine honour. Honour means, quite simply, to look up to someone, not down on them.
God considered this commandment significant enough to attach to it the only promise found among the Ten Commandments: that, other things being equal, health and wealth will be improved by honouring one’s parents. Since the same promise is repeated in the New Testament, Pawson takes it literally for Christians as well as Jews — not a guarantee of becoming a millionaire, but a genuine, lived difference between growing up honouring one’s parents and growing up rebellious and self-centred. He includes emotional and mental health under this promise as well, noting from long observation that it is very often in homes lacking this pattern that emotional ill health develops later in life.
To the Fathers: The Other Side of the Bargain
It is easy enough, Pawson says, to preach obedience and reverence to children — but verse 4 turns the responsibility around. If parents expect this kind of loyalty, they must give the kind of leadership God has commanded. How can children honour parents who are not themselves honourable? As the older, more mature, and more responsible party in the relationship, it falls to parents to make honour possible.
Verse 4 is addressed specifically to fathers, and Pawson gives two reasons why. First, following directly from the previous week’s study, the father is head of the house and ultimately responsible for the standards of discipline and behaviour within it; something is amiss when a mother alone must settle every question of right and wrong. Second, Pawson observes candidly that he has never met a mother without some natural instinct to protect, guide, and nurture a child — but he has met many fathers lacking that same instinct. Men, he admits frankly, do not always find family involvement as natural as women do, which is why in the typical British household it is so often the mother who raises the children while the father remains at a distance. That, Pawson insists, is not God’s design; a matriarchal pattern is not the Creator’s intention, even though fathers are, in practice, far more likely than mothers to fail in this particular responsibility.
What Not to Do: Do Not Provoke
The word translated “provoke” literally means to prick or goad. Pawson illustrates this with the ancient ox-goad — a long stick tipped with a spike, still used in parts of the Middle East to keep tired oxen ploughing by repeated pricking. This is the very word used of Saul on the Damascus road: “it is hard for you to kick against the goads.” Fathers, Pawson says plainly, will get nowhere constantly prodding their children from behind. Paul adds in Colossians that this produces discouragement — and discouraging, rather than encouraging, one’s children may be among the gravest failures a father can commit.
Two common forms of provoking are over-strictness and constant, carping criticism. Pawson tells of a schoolboy who, asked his name, replied “Johnny Don’t” — because that was what his father always called him. Constant prohibition without warmth builds up resentment that, sooner or later, blows the safety valve: a father is eventually confronted with a child’s open defiance and wonders how it ever came to this, when in truth the provoking had been building for years.
What to Do: Discipline and Instruction
Paul offers two words in place of provocation: discipline and instruction — both, somewhat surprisingly, negative words in the sense that both are concerned with dealing with wrongdoing, rather than simply teaching what is right.
Discipline
Discipline in Scripture means, quite simply, punishment. Pawson recalls a child psychologist asked whether there was a place for corporal punishment, who answered: yes, if you have a definite end in view. Scripture certainly makes room for it — “spare the rod and spoil the child” originates with God, not with Victorian moralists. Pawson reads several verses from Hebrews 12: do not regard the Lord’s discipline lightly, for the Lord disciplines those he loves, and a son left without discipline is, in effect, illegitimate rather than truly a son. Earthly fathers disciplined us as seemed best to them, but God disciplines us for our good, that we might share his holiness.
The crucial distinction, Pawson stresses, lies in that phrase “as seemed best to them”: a human father sometimes disciplines to work off his own irritation, but God never does — his discipline is always for the child’s good. He recalls the same little girl mentioned earlier, and the old adage “this hurts me more than it hurts you” — a line he once found laughable, but which he has come to recognise as simply true when discipline flows from real love. He commends a book, The Christian Family by Larry Christensen, written by a father who learned this pattern both through Scripture and through hard experience, and coins the phrase “woodshed therapy” for this kind of loving, painful correction.
Instruction
Discipline must always be accompanied by instruction — an explanation of why it was given. Punishment without explanation, Pawson insists, is inadequate, and simply leaves a child in a state of pain and resentment. A father should always ask, “do you know why I did that?”
Pawson takes dishonesty as an example: no parent ever has to teach a child to lie — only to tell the truth. All biblical teaching assumes a child’s nature is, at root, in need of correction, directly contrary to the modern assumption that human nature is basically good. Christians, he says, believe in God and in Jesus — but not in unaided human nature, because the closer one is drawn to Christ, the more clearly one sees one’s own heart, echoing David’s confession, “in sin my mother conceived me.” Every parent passes on to their children the same fallen nature they themselves received — one of the most unsettling realities of parenthood is watching one’s own faults resurface in one’s children. This is precisely why it matters so much that children come to be born again of the Spirit, and why discipline and instruction belong permanently together.
An Old-Fashioned Teaching?
Pawson anticipates the objection that all this sounds hopelessly Victorian. It is not — it goes back far further than that, all the way to the Bible, and to God himself, who planned it from the beginning. He pleads with parents to recognise what society is only slowly rediscovering: young people desperately need guidelines and the security of clear boundaries. Without fences, a child cannot even know when they have trespassed; to raise a child without any punishment or prohibition is, in reality, to deprive that child, not to indulge them.
Who is sufficient for this? Pawson names honestly one reason parents shrink from the task: knowing their own hearts, they recognise that anger, frustration, and selfishness can corrupt discipline — a child is sometimes punished not for their own good but because the parent is simply annoyed. Alternatively, aware of their own past failings, parents may excuse the same behaviour in their children because they cannot bear to condemn what they once did themselves.
Who Is Sufficient? Christ at the Centre
Pawson’s closing word is that God did not merely hand down a plan for family life — he gave a person to help carry it out. Children are told to obey their parents in the Lord; fathers are told to discipline their children with the discipline and instruction of the Lord. When Christ is genuinely at the centre of family life, these practices cease to feel old-fashioned or harsh; freed from being self-centred, they become his, and lose the edge of unpleasantness.
In practice, Pawson suggests, a parent should only discipline a child in a way that Jesus himself would. He rejects any soft, sentimental picture of Christ as someone who would never correct a child, simply setting them on his knee with sweets — the New Testament’s Jesus, after all, once took up a whip because it was right to do so. Before disciplining a child, then, a parent might genuinely ask: Lord Jesus, this child has done wrong; I am tempted to let it pass because I did the same as a child myself. What would you have me do? — inviting Christ not only to guide the discipline but to be present within it, so that the child comes, in time, to share in his holiness.
Closing Prayer
Father, we pray that you will help us not to knock our children down, but to bring them up. We pray that you will convict us straight away in our conscience when we are taking a wrong course. And grant, O Lord, that we may not deprive our children of the guidelines that will direct their feet into the paths of righteousness. Help us to teach a child how to walk in your way, so that when he is old, he will not depart from it. And we ask this through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
© David Pawson Ministry CIO
Listen to the original teaching at davidpawson.org
© David Pawson Ministry — Transcript prepared for Koinonia.nu | koinonia.nu