0:00:00 - 0:00:22 In job one, we read this description of Job's Children. In verse four, it says, and his sons went and feasted in their houses every one his day and sent and called for their three sisters to eat and to drink with them. And it was so when the days of their feasting were gone, about that job sent and sanctified 0:00:21 - 0:00:42 them and rose up early in the morning and offered burnt offerings according to the number of them, all for job said it may be that my sons have sinned and cursed God in their hearts. Thus did job continually skipping a couple of verses while he was yet speaking, there came also another and said, thy 0:00:42 - 0:01:00 sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house. And behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness and smote the four corners of the house and it fell upon the young men and they are dead and I only am escaped alone to tell thee. So the loss of his Children 0:01:00 - 0:01:27 was a great affliction part of the larger trial that job was facing that seemingly came out of nowhere. So here's my question for you uh job. It's obvious that job did not see this daily feasting of his Children as a good thing. He responded to it by offering sacrifices to God every single day to try 0:01:26 - 0:01:57 to atone for this wickedness in his Children. Where did they get the money? Where did job's Children get the resources to spend their time doing this? Instead of the constructive things that job spent his time on? They got it from job, they got the money from job. Now, you could contrast this with the 0:01:56 - 0:02:21 story of the prodigal son. And in that story, the, the son asks for his inheritance early and then he goes and he wastes it and then he comes back to his father to serve his father as a servant. And so he loses the opportunity to be a son and inherit what his father has. And instead he has to be a servant 0:02:21 - 0:02:41 to his father. And his father is very happy that he has come back and he gets to spend time with him and that his life is still going to be better than it would otherwise be. But he doesn't renew the inheritance. He doesn't say, oh, well, let me just cut out another chunk of money and give that to you 0:02:40 - 0:03:02 because he knows that his son would just go off and do the same thing again. So we don't have all the details from job's story. But it's, it's obvious that his Children were financed to do the bad things that they did by their father. Now, their father's righteousness is what yielded the money in the 0:03:02 - 0:03:25 first place. He was a very righteous man, but it was used for evil in his Children. So his Children were glad to take the money, but they weren't interested in his wisdom. They weren't interested in job's righteousness. These were things that they would not take from their father and in the end, it cost 0:03:25 - 0:03:50 them their lives. If job had given his kids a little bit of tough love, they may have survived. But even if they hadn't survived, they would have been better off than they were. At least they'd have the potential for listening more than they did. So I wanna share two verses from Isaiah because I think 0:03:50 - 0:04:15 that this is an apt connection. It's very frequent that when we talk about sin, we tend to narrow our imagination compared to the actual scope of potential sin. We only think about certain sins. And you know, frankly, that's not a bad thing. There's plenty to work on for people. But let me read this 0:04:15 - 0:04:37 to you and let's connect it to this idea of financing your Children in inequity, Isaiah 518, woe unto them, they draw iniquity with chords of vanity and sin as it were with a cart rope skipping 19 and going to 20 woe unto them that call evil, good and good, evil that put darkness for light. And light 0:04:37 - 0:00:00 for darkness that put bitter for sweet and sweet, for bitter. There's so much going on in the world today where we're just hearing complaint after complaint, after complaint of younger people, let's just say people under 40 that's convenient because I just turned 40. So let's just narrow it to that. 0:00:00 - 0:05:31 Right. So you hear these complaints again and again and again about these generations of people and a lot of those complaints are coming from people, parents and grandparents of these people. What an interesting thought that the Children we raise are like sins that we're tying to ourselves and hauling 0:05:30 - 0:00:00 along. The idea of pulling sin with a cart rope is a funny one because it's really hard to pull a cart and you can let go any time. Isn't that interesting? And so how is the misbehavior of recalcitrant Children like pulling sin with a cart rope? Well, you can let go any time. Now, I want to specify, 0:00:00 - 0:06:25 I put an upper bound of 40 which is soft and convenient, but we're gonna put a hard lower bound on 18 because if your kids are under 18, legally, they're your problem. Once they turn 18, they cease use, you cease to be legally obligated to care for them. Now, you're still morally obligated to do the 0:06:25 - 0:06:55 best that you can for them. But there ceases to be a legal obligation to do things like house them and feed them and clothe them because sometimes being homeless, being hungry and being cold and naked. Sometimes those are very useful consequences to teach someone some sense. So if you're not uncomfortable 0:06:55 - 0:07:20 yet, just, just hang on, I'll try harder. Often the circumstances we encounter they don't seem like they're within our control. There's an awful lot going on that's outside of our control. But sometimes those circumstances are, are obviously within our control. It's just that we refuse to do something 0:07:20 - 0:07:51 about it. We refuse to tackle what causes them. And this includes activities that take quite an active effort to sustain. It was not inexpensive or easy for job to finance his wicked Children. It wasn't easy for the father of the prodigal son to amass the wealth that he handed over to the prodigal son 0:07:50 - 0:08:25 . Now it was emotionally easier to do that than to do a better thing. But the overall amount of effort was incomparable. We asked the question of the younger generations. How can they be this bad? Do you know what the number one answer is their parents? These people, for the most part, we're not born 0:08:24 - 0:08:51 this way. Some of them were and to some extent, we all are OK. But when you do a statistical analysis, you have to control for different variables, controlling for all of that, a massive slice of the pie chart of why are younger people this bad? It's squarely upon the parents, you made them this way 0:08:51 - 0:09:16 . Now, why is that such a terrible thing to contend with for at least two reasons. One because it's, it's really a true, I mean, imagine that, uh, your, your child doesn't have the use of his or her arms and legs because you dropped them as a baby. That's something that's 100% your fault and you're gonna 0:09:16 - 0:09:36 feel terrible about it your whole life. Every time you see that kid, you're gonna think, man, this kid is jacked up and it's because of me. So that's, that's a big emotional, emotional burden to carry. But a significant chunk of why that's so terrible is that you can't change it. Not only is it your 0:09:35 - 0:10:03 fault, but you also have to deal with it for the rest of your life and they have to deal with it for the rest of their lives. Children are a AAA tremendous percentage of a person's personality is quite rigidly set by the time they're 678 years old, those first years are so astronomically important. It 0:10:03 - 0:10:34 is true. Nutritionally, it's true emotionally, it's true across a variety of, of aspects. But a kid's experience until they hit 18, that's 100% in your wheelhouse as a parent. And so whatever they come to this earth with as far as their personality, their pre existent personality, character, intelligence 0:10:34 - 0:11:13 , whatever mixed in with all the choices that they make, what the harm you can do as a parent grossly dwarfs that it's, it's huge. Comparatively speaking, So when you look at these, these folks and you say like, how can this be this bad? One of the, the, the places that things go off the rails, maybe 0:11:13 - 0:11:37 the biggest chunk of this is that they've been insulated from the consequences of their choices. And so we talked about their choices as being a factor obviously in who they are, but choices are not made in a vacuum, they're made in an environment. And if your kids are growing up in a situation where 0:11:36 - 0:12:01 they are absolutely insulated from the real world and from the consequences of their choices, that's 100% on you. You see consequences are signals. There's a phrase that I think it's popular in the Marine Corps and something like pain is fear, leaving, it's a sensation of fear leaving the body or something 0:12:01 - 0:12:24 like that. Um But pain, pain is a signal. Other people have talked about this. Ray Dalio speaks about this, that, that pain is a signal and it's meant to teach you something. It's meant to expose more of reality to you in some way. And when you create an environment where your Children are absolutely 0:12:24 - 0:12:47 completely cut off from the real world that is not going to lead to good things. A parent is supposed to be a permeable membrane to the real world. You don't raise your kid in an absolute bubble, you raise them in a permeable bubble where you intentionally moderate the interactions, they have with the 0:12:47 - 0:13:06 consequences of the real world. Modern parents don't do that. They keep him in a bubble and they will explain, see that second verse in Isaiah to remind you woe unto them that call evil, good and good evil that put darkness for light and light, for darkness, bitter for sweet and sweet, for bitter. They 0:13:06 - 0:13:35 say, well, I'm doing this to give my kid a good life. I want my child to be happy. I want my child to, to, to be spared from suffering. And that all sounds good if you're a moron because you can't be insulated from those things and turn out to be a decent person. Nor can you have joy. Joy is a pendulum 0:13:34 - 0:14:01 with suffering, the displacement of the one, the suffering side. It determines how much joy you can have. They go together, you can't separate them. And so if you want the, the complete version of being totally doped up on antidepressants where you have nothing but this in your life, you're just a zombie 0:14:01 - 0:14:25 . Then by all means deprive your kids of access to the consequences of the real world. But it's even worse than that because if you're a zombie, you are just vacuous. There's nothing there. When you insulate your kids from the negative consequences of their actions, they become monsters. This isn't because 0:14:25 - 0:14:44 they're kids. It's because they're humans. This is how human beings are. It's, it's accentuated with kids because they have less self control. But this is how it is in every situation where you just let someone do whatever they want and you take away all the negative consequences. You see this in marriages 0:14:43 - 0:15:15 where a spouse mops up all the mistakes of their, their, their counterpart, that person becomes a monster is, this always happens and it's, it's a lot more commonplace than people admit or realize you have. If you love someone, God says who he loves, he chastens. If you love someone, you need to create 0:15:15 - 0:15:39 an environment where you're actually making their lives better by helping them become better. And you do that by modulating their exposure to those consequences. Let me give you an example because we do this well with young little, little toddler baby types, we do it great with babies. Once they get 0:15:39 - 0:16:01 older, it just gets way worse. We, we somehow we lose the mechanism and, and I think it's because we're emotionally dishonest. Uh We tell ourselves ba bapt Isaiah, we're helping these kids. No, you're not. You're helping yourself. You're being emotionally lazy because it's easier for you. And you know 0:16:01 - 0:16:24 , the ancient people, they sacrificed their babies to Molik. You're sacrificing your babies to malek too. You're just doing it in a different way. Instead of putting literally putting incinerating them, you're sacrificing them by surrounding them with situations they do not deserve, do not understand 0:16:24 - 0:16:45 and aren't willing to pay for taking away all the negative consequences of their poor choices and you're doing it because it feels better right now for you. Of course, over time it, it ceases to feel better right now for you because you're, you're hauling along this cart that's getting heavier by the 0:16:45 - 0:17:08 day because you're not taking care of it. It's like the baby dragon that keeps growing because no one wants to acknowledge it. And so the later in the game it is, the more it's gonna hurt to deal with, but the more you don't deal with it, the more it's going to hurt more later. And so you're in this 0:17:08 - 0:17:32 really terrible situation. The good news is no matter how bad it is to deal with it now, it will be better than it will be later. But good luck trying to wrap your head around that when you've pulled this thing for so long that seems like it's a part of you. I if you drive around wherever you live, this 0:17:31 - 0:17:55 is what you're gonna see. You're gonna see a bunch of young people in cars that they absolutely cannot afford spending money. They absolutely don't have. Where did it all come from? Their parents, their parents are paying their bills. Young people are signing leases for, for properties they can't get 0:17:54 - 0:18:12 or cars or whatever student loans. If their parents don't cosign, maybe student loans aren't the greatest example of that. They hand those things out like candy, but young people are signing leases that they need their parents to cosign on, they're driving cars that they can only afford because their 0:18:12 - 0:00:00 parents paid for them or contributed in some way. Maybe they're paying the car insurance, health insurance, same deal, cell phone plans, cell phones, tuition, it goes on and on and on clothing. You are the reason that this generation failed. You are the reason that this generation continues to fail. 0:00:00 - 0:19:03 You made them this way and you just keep making the problem bigger every time you give them money, every time you save them from their own choices or lack thereof. Now, we've seen that many of the young people that fit this stereotype and it's not all of them. There are shining examples that are, are 0:19:03 - 0:19:29 the opposite. I'm one of them, you might dispute how much I shine. But uh I'm one of them, those who fit this stereotype in many ways, they seem to be irredeemable because like I said, it's, it's a whole lifetime. You're fighting against their minds are wired differently now. They, they, they totally 0:19:28 - 0:19:54 skipped over development phases that were meant to happen as early as 23 years old, but you're still just making it worse by continuing to insulate them from the consequences of their choices and you're going out of your way to do it. I read on a news comment the other day. This guy said, oh, we just 0:19:54 - 0:20:17 helped my kid buy his first house. We paid for the down payment because the rates are so high. It's like, look, if your kid done all the right things or many right things in their lives and you're trying to help them get ahead and you've done the cost benefit and it's actually gonna help them to do something 0:20:16 - 0:20:41 like that and you're in a position to. That's amazing. That's wonderful. What a great blessing. If they're actually going to be as grateful as they would need to be for that to be a good thing in their lives have at it. But I'd be willing to bet good money that that kid is an absolute train wreck. That 0:20:41 - 0:21:07 his or her entire life is a train wreck because of that same behavior from the parents. Ha. Have you ever stopped to wonder just how grateful someone would have to be for that kind of hand out in order for it to be a good idea. You probably haven't. And that's one of the problems with this is that deeply 0:21:06 - 0:21:28 psychologically, one of the reasons that parents are doing this is, it's like some kind of twisted, attempted atonement for their own sins. See, if you're in a situation where you're enjoying a, a standard of living that exceeds kings of the past and all you did was roll out of bed the day you graduated 0:21:27 - 0:21:51 high school and got a job at the local factory and now you're however many years old and you're just swimming in money that's unearned, basically. The difference between the ancient and modern prosperity levels is unearned. If you're in that situation, then again, you're not giving them the money because 0:21:51 - 0:22:12 you care about them, you're giving them the money to avoid the guilt that you have over having it. And you think, well, if I pay this tax to give my kids something, my kid doesn't deserve, then I get to keep what I don't deserve. That's not the way it works. Folks where much is given much is expected 0:22:11 - 0:22:41 and the fulfillment of that expectation from God is not to give away your money to your idiot kid who's just gonna burn it up and make themselves even more of an idiot. There are better ways to spend that and you should think about it. You should think about what those would entail. If you love your 0:22:41 - 0:23:04 kid you will do for them. What benefits the most, these kids don't need a handout. They need a kick in the pants. You're causing tremendous harm to them. You need to yank the rug out from under them. That's the most helpful thing you can do. Is it cruel? You might think that I'm going to say no, I'm 0:23:04 - 0:23:29 actually going to say yes, but I'll tell you why. It's cruel. It's cruel because you've set them up for it to be extra painful for them. It didn't need to be this way. It's this bad because you made it that way. Subtle corrections in the moment might seem extreme. But in the scope of life, subtle corrections 0:23:28 - 0:23:55 in the moment are the least disruptive way to do this. But when you refuse to do that for 1825 35 years and suddenly you have to flip the switch because the, the consequences are now so obvious to you that it's basically life or death. And then I can tell you stories of cases where it was literally life 0:23:55 - 0:24:22 or death. You might know some of these cases where we're to start talking about drug overdoses, suicide or whatever avoidable freak accident has occurred. This generation exists because their parents care more about themselves than they care about their kids. Period. It's time to pull the plug, kick 0:24:21 - 0:24:47 them out of your house or at least charge them rent, get them to sign a lease, stop paying their bills, boot them off of your insurance or give them a bill for their cut of it. Stop letting them use their, your car or charge them by the mile to do so if they're 18 and they're done with high school because 0:24:46 - 0:25:15 some people turn 18 in the middle of the year or whatever, they're 18 and Dunn high school show them the door or show them a rental contract. If you won't do what you need to do, at least stop complaining about the consequences of your choices. Of course, your kid is a pain to deal with in doing bad 0:25:15 - 0:25:39 things. Of course, they can't hold down a job. Of course, they can't pay the rent on the jobs they're willing to work or qualified to work. You made them that way, put down the rope and free them from the stifling box of your harmful false empathy so that they can grow into their potential. If you really 0:25:39 - 0:25:41 want to help them, you need to pull the plug.