26SEP26 Workshop Article by Gary Cox, edited by Ruth Shell
Article 1: The 'True Liberty of a Child's Sovereign Will'
God created Man with a 'sovereign will'. 'Sovereign Will,’ implies that every individual has the ‘final say' in any action taken by them. There are many factors that influence our choices, but in the end they are ours to decide.
The 'True Liberty of a Child's Sovereign Will' is when they believe and trust in the Lord, no longer in the bondage of one who is leaning on their own understanding.
“But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster. …Wherefore you are no more a slave, but a son; …a child of the free.” (Gal 3:25; 4:7, 31)
“Trust in the LORD with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He shall direct your paths. Do not be wise in your own eyes; Fear the LORD and depart from evil. It will be health to your flesh, and strength to your bones.” (Prov 3:5-8)
That kind of faith and trust begin by learning to ‘Honor Your Father and Your Mother.'
“Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother,” which is the first commandment with promise: “that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth.” (Eph 6:1-3)
Learning to trust in the Lord is the most important step towards freedom from your Adamic human nature. Only by faith can you have a genuinely full and successful life. Faith is the most important part of learning how to not lean on your own understanding.
In this year’s Workshop series, we’re going to study six stages of developing 'True Liberty of the Sovereign Will’. Stage one is the nursing infant, stage two, the weaned child. Followed by adolescence, conversion, faithful servants, and models of faith.
To begin, let’s consider the concept of a nursing infant. Even nursing infants have a way of communicating their will to their mother and everybody around, as you know if you have ever heard a screaming baby!
In this process of developing the identity of who you are, you have one great enemy, the Devil, who wants you to go to hell forever with him. He's a thief and liar, and he does everything he can to deceive you. He wants you to make choices with your sovereign will that will keep you from knowing God and God’s love in your life.
It is a huge spiritual battle.
You have not learned to exercise your sovereign will properly until you've learned to place it under the care of your Heavenly Father whose sovereign will rules over all.
One of the biggest things that a nursing infant has to learn is that they're not the center of the universe, though they imagine they are when they have a need.
Wholehearted surrender to God is the first choice, is the best choice, you can ever make.
We have parents given to us by God, and the scripture teaches children both in Ephesians and Colossians, "obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long on the earth."
Homeschooling is the greatest opportunity for young children to be under the care of their parents and to learn to trust their parents. Learn to rest.
I taught junior high or middle school over a 10-year period. During that time I was able to observe many of the stages I mentioned above, including stage three, adolescence. Adolescence is that age where a child's outlook begins to be affected by a greater capacity for them to observe what other people are doing and thinking. It is normal for them to be curious and want to experiment with all these new options and choices.
When I began teaching young adolescents, they were moving into this place of vetting information and their favorite comments were “who said?”, “how do you know?”, “you have any proof for that?”. Challenging information. Learning to identify trusted resources. That is what your parent is! Your parent is the first and most trusted resource in your life. Parents are not perfect, but they are God's perfect choice for your first instructor and guide. You learn to trust your parents' judgment from the time that you're a nursing infant.
The second stage is this 'weaned child' that's at rest on his mother's lap, able to wait, able to trust.
In that process of learning to control and develop your sovereign will, you have to learn two things: someone else knows more than you, and other people who know more than you may desire to hurt you or get you to conform to their understanding. You will face pressure to conform to other people's interests and ideas.
The process of learning to trust God begins with learning to trust your parents.
Here's the problem with trusting an imperfect parent; Satan always wants us to focus on the negative, the shortcoming, the difficulty. When you get those negative filters in place, you have a tendency to doubt. “Does my parent really have my best interest in mind?” When your heart gets really interested in all the new and unusual things that are going on around you and your parent continually says 'no', you can develop an attitude that says "My parents don't want me to do anything. My parents don't want me to be happy."
Your sovereign will that you have from birth came from Adam, and in that sense, it has a flaw. The flaw is, you will always do what you think is best for you.
In Genesis 1, God said, "Let's make man in our image." In the image of God, He made us. We have been given some of the capacity of God. In that sense, we're different from any other of the creation of God. We're moral beings with the Sovereign Will.
When God made Adam and Eve, He gave them a guideline. He said, "You are to subdue the earth. You are to rule over the earth." They were to be Sovereign over it.
Sovereignty is the thought that says, "I'm going to make the decision over these things." How many of you have a garden? You are sovereign over your garden. Those attributes of your sovereignty come from the way God made us. We're designed to rule, to oversee, to exert control over the earth.
Chapter two explores the creation of man in more detail. It describes Adam as he's naming all the animals. (His sovereign will in action.) It gives the account of God creating Eve from the rib of Adam. Adam said, "This is woman, for she came out of man, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh." At that point, the institution of marriage occurred. Adam said, "For this cause will a man leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh." Here we have introduced the concept of the 'sovereignty of emancipation', as we would put it legally.
Emancipation is when a child is legally no longer considered a child but fully considered an adult and as an adult they are completely responsible for all their actions. They have the authority to make choices in their life. They're fully sovereign.
In Genesis 1, we see how God made us to rule, and in Genesis 2, how He creates this structure.
God intended you to reach a place in your life where you are responsible for yourself. You are no longer under your parents' direct care but directly responsible before God and you have the authority and the right and the ability to make sovereign will decisions. That's the structure that God ordered.
At that point, your life should be something that you place under God's care so that He chooses your path for you. How do you let God choose your path? Well, the word ‘obedience’ enters in here. If I'm going to trust God, I'm going to obey God.
What happens in Genesis 3? The temptation of Adam and Eve in the garden by the serpent. "He was more subtle than any of the beasts of the field." He comes slithering along and tempts Eve by asking a question with an exaggerated claim. Satan asks, "Did God really say that you can't eat from any tree in the garden? Are you serious? You poor hungry thing.”
Your sovereign will is going to face similar challenges. The question is, how are you going to process it? Eve processed it by trying to make God's commandment look more respectable. "Oh, no! God's not like that. He didn't say you can't eat from any tree in the garden. He just said this one tree." She's trying to narrow it down. And then it appears from what the text says God told Adam that she adds a little bit to it. She said, "No, it's just one tree. The tree in the middle garden. We're not to eat it or even touch it." It is not written that that was part of the original command. Eve's sovereign will got engaged in an argument with the Liar.
The New Testament scripture teaches us that “Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.” The presence of the Holy Spirit is needed directly in your life before you can resist the Devi
"Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right." Your parents love you. As Christian parents, they simply want one thing; for you to know God and to have a relationship with Him where you follow Him. We as parents know there's a day coming when you're emancipated, and whether you know the Lord or not, you leave home. That responsibility for life falls on you.
The spiritual battle is childhood. This rich time of homeschooling. It's the most precious time for you to learn how to trust the Lord. Thank God, it begins with you learning how to trust your parents. What's imperative is not that you understand everything but that you trust God above everyone else.
That little proverb I keep quoting from Ephesians and Colossians, "Children, obey your parents in the Lord." That little phrase 'in the Lord' is powerful because if a parent's parenting you right, this is what they do; "Son, daughter, I have been appointed by God to care for you and to bring you up and to guide you. And I'm going to have to give an account to God for how I did this. You're not my child. You're God's child. And God has a special plan for your life that we don't know. He's going to guide us down the path. So, I want you to know, dear child, I am going to try continually to honor God and how I raise you, to do what He would want me to do, to guide you in the right way." As a Christian parent, we have that model of authenticity. “You're not mine. You're God's. I'm charged with raising you and I'm going to give an account to God because I'm a steward of that opportunity.” When you have that relationship, you open up the occasion for spiritual discourse.
One of the most difficult but loving tasks that parents perform for their children is teaching the child to say 'no' to themselves.
It was said of Robert E. Lee that he was a godly man and a noble example of Christianity. After the Civil War, he was walking through Richmond and a young mother came up to him with zeal and said, "Robert Lee, Sir, please give us a blessing." And he turns to the young mother and sees the young child and says, “If you want to give your child a blessing, teach them to deny themselves.” Teach them to deny themselves.
Because self-denial is the first step towards being a disciple of Jesus. Remember what Jesus said, “If you want to be my disciple, you must deny yourself.” The natural man is designed to preserve life in the flesh here in this world, and it can be brilliant in doing so. Jesus even warned about that brilliance. "What would it profit a man if he was so brilliant that he gained the whole world, but lost his soul? What can you give in exchange for your soul?" Young person, your soul, your relationship and potential eternity with God, is more valuable than anything.
God wants you to learn how to trust Him. Trusting always comes with obedience.
What would it have looked like in the garden if Eve had trusted God? What would have happened if Eve had simply said, "Wait a minute. Everything I’ve known and experienced of God is His love and care and I don't understand everything about why God does something, but I'm going to trust Him and obey Him and not eat of that tree because God is good.”?
The process of learning to trust God is a process of not making a decision with our sovereign will that we think we understand and is okay.
Matthew 16:24 is the basic call of discipleship. "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." You have no greater asset, young people, than your parents who will teach you to deny yourself. Their goal is to preserve you so that you can walk by faith trusting in the Lord and receive the unfolding plan that God has for your life.
Learning self-denial begins at home. A child needs to learn to be told 'no' and to accept that, to be quiet about it. It's not that 'no' is just done arbitrarily. It's that the parent happens to know the bigger picture and they must give guidance to the child. Children who are never told 'no' have the greatest amount of insecurity and they cause the greatest amount of trouble in society because they're looking for boundaries.
I was in college as a sophomore, and at this point in my life I didn't really know God or have a relationship with Him at all. I was interested in helping people have a 'good life'. I was studying psychology and psychiatry, and I took this introductory class called 'family life’. They had done studies about the happiness of children. The study said 'the most secure children in the world are the ones whose parents have firm guidelines that say 'no' in the context of a loving environment’.
Now there were three types of people. One who had both balance of love and discipline, then one who had only strong discipline and one who had only lavish love. I was expecting that the second best parent would be the one that said 'yes' all the time because at least their child knows they love them. I was astonished that no, the second best were the parents that said 'no' all the time and the child felt unloved.
We have to learn to say 'no' to ourselves because if your life is guided by saying 'yes', the 'yes man', the Devil, is going to come along and tempt you into saying ‘yes’ to something that will destroy you.
Your sovereign will has to be trained.
"A wise man will hear and increase in learning. A man of understanding shall attain to wise counsel. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction."
We have to discipline our lives. We have to have the 'no' taught to us in a way that we can recognize, 'Okay, I have a sovereign will, but I'm not trustworthy. My natural inclination is going to be to always say 'yes' to me and that's going to lead me down a path of difficulty and confusion.'
I want to close on an encouragement. You are going to use your sovereign will because that's how God made you. The most imperative part of learning to use your sovereign will is recognizing you're not enough. You don't have what it takes to make all the decisions. Therefore, you trust the Lord and gather that wisdom and understanding that you need and acknowledge Him and do not lean on your own understanding. That's the safety net.
True liberty begins with me first learning how to say 'no' to myself. Then I can grow with a larger capacity to think beyond myself and recognize the potential that I have as God's child to be His servant in the world that we live in.