Facing Prometheus — Week 19 (Sacred Lives in a Secular World) | “More Important than You Think” | Pastor Jason Parrish
Editor’s note: In some of this week’s services, Pastor Jason wasn’t able to get to all of his points. This recap reflects the full message as prepared, so you’ll find every point here.
The series has spent the last several weeks inside the household codes of Ephesians 5 — marriage, mutual submission, love and respect. This week the passage turns from husbands and wives to children and parents. But Pastor Jason argues that Ephesians 6:1–4 is more important than it first appears. Read only for practical parenting tips, it stays small. Read rightly, it opens onto one of the largest questions the church faces: how one generation hands its faith and its identity to the next.
In Week 19 of Facing Prometheus: A Letter to the Ephesians and the Future Church Dilemma, Pastor Jason Parrish looks at what it means to raise up and disciple the next generation, and the role healthy families and churches play in that God-ordained purpose. Drawing on Judges, Deuteronomy, and the Psalms, he frames the church as four things the next generation cannot do without.
The Text — Ephesians 6:1–4
“Children, obey your parents in the Lord, because this is right. Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with a promise, so that it may go well with you and that you may have a long life in the land. Fathers, don’t stir up anger in your children, but bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.”
— Ephesians 6:1–4 (CSB)
The problem with a text like this is that it tends to get studied only for its practical implications, so it never gets opened up to the bigger ideas underneath, especially as they pertain to the Christian home. Lynn Cohick captures one of those ideas: by addressing children directly and publicly, Paul welcomes them as genuine participants in the church. The church becomes their “home” and “family.” That reality is often missed, and it’s one reason youth and young adults drift. They come to believe they are not part of the family, or that they have no place.
A caution and a call
Judges 2:6–13 (excerpt) — The people worshiped the Lord throughout Joshua’s lifetime and during the lifetimes of the elders who outlived him… That whole generation was also gathered to their ancestors. After them another generation rose up who did not know the Lord or the works he had done for Israel. The Israelites did what was evil in the Lord’s sight… they abandoned the Lord, the God of their ancestors.
The caution: a generation that forgets who God is turns to idols. Ours may not be Baal, but the exchange of worship still happens across generations. Because one generation abdicated its responsibility to tell the next what God had done, the next generation drifted. The call: each generation declares to the one after it the goodness, might, and power of God.
Deuteronomy 6:4–9 — Listen, Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. These words that I am giving you today are to be in your heart. Repeat them to your children. Talk about them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up…
Psalm 145:3–5 — The Lord is great and is highly praised; his greatness is unsearchable. One generation will declare your works to the next and will proclaim your mighty acts. I will speak of your splendor and glorious majesty and your wondrous works.
Scripture shows a pattern in how generations work, often in threes — the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Lineage matters. And when it is forgotten, as it was with Israel, a generation slips away. Two of the most prominent reasons this happens are a lack of spiritual and identity formation, and a lack of intentional development of the next generation. The Bible names what follows when the telling stops:
Judges 21:25 — Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
The authors of The Preacher’s Commentary warn against assuming faith simply carries over on its own. “We cannot learn Christ by osmosis,” they write; there has to be personal faith. Faith must be passed on and experienced — word, power, and purpose — from one generation to the next. That makes it incumbent on everyone thirty and up to make a strategic, deliberate effort to pour into the next generation, in both the church and the home.
The stakes show up in the research. In a recent study from the Walton Family Foundation, Religion Unplugged, Lifeway Research, and Ballard Brief, the findings were sobering:
- 42% of Gen Z has been diagnosed with a mental health condition
- 71% watch porn weekly, with average first exposure at age 12
- 8% read the Bible daily
- 30% identify as LGBTQ+
- 73% are considered the loneliest generation
These are only the high-level numbers. The more granular you get, the clearer it becomes that our young people live in a world unlike any other, very different from how most of us grew up.
★★ It is the church’s responsibility, more than ever, to create a sanctuary of hope and security for our kids, teens, and young adults.
1. The church is a place of identity architecture
Acts 20:25–30 (excerpt) — Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has appointed you as overseers, to shepherd the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood. I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. Men will rise up even from your own number and distort the truth to lure the disciples into following them.
Paul is talking about guarding. Identity architecture isn’t only about identity; it’s about care and stewardship. To be the guardian of something or someone is to be placed in a position of stewardship, responsible to see it cared for well. The church is to be a spiritual guardian of the next generation, and one of the greatest areas of guardianship is identity.
The need is real. A study from the National Institutes of Health found that roughly 49%, just short of half of participants, felt conflicted about the areas of life that define their identity. NIH describes identity broadly as the sense of self — the roles, traits, goals, values, beliefs, and experiences that together create a person’s unique place in the world. A separate study from Harvard’s Department of Psychology argues that across the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, the radical pace of social, technological, and institutional change has cost people significant stability in their overall sense of personal identity.
Who am I? has been wrestled with throughout human history, but not to the radical degree we wrestle with it now. Older generations were not facing the same questions young people face today. If the church is going to reach and disciple the next generation, it has to know and believe that God and his word offer the answers they are looking for.
★★ The church plays a significant role in the identity-based formation of the next generation. It holds, in God’s word, substantive answers to the most pressing questions about the nature and reality of self — questions our young people are asking every single day.
★★★ The church is to help build unshakable foundations in ever-shifting times.
2. The church is a place to breathe in the oxygen of orthodoxy
2 Timothy 1:13–14 — Hold on to the pattern of sound teaching that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. Guard the good deposit through the Holy Spirit who lives in us.
The church does two things to make this happen:
- Preserve — to care for something by working to maintain its original condition.
- Transmit — to convey through sound, action, word, deed, and behavior.
Kevin Vanhoozer describes orthodoxy as the fruit of centuries of Christian thinking about the implications of the good news that God sent and raised his Son for our salvation, making all things new — and says disciples “need the guidance orthodoxy provides” to walk the way of Jesus Christ. Trevin Wax, in The Thrill of Orthodoxy, defines it as the foundational truths, consistent with Scripture, on which Christians across the ages have agreed — the historic Christian consensus on the essentials of true faith and practice, what has been believed “everywhere, always, and by all.”
★★ The church must be a place where the next generation can take refuge, because it has held its consistency, integrity, and character. It does not waver in the face of adversity or capitulate to shifting culture and ideological narratives. It has a word from God that charts the course even when the water gets choppy.
3. The church is a place to display the art of sacred design
James 1:22–25 — But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves… the one who looks intently into the perfect law of freedom and perseveres in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer who works — this person will be blessed in what he does.
★★★ Obedience is the proof of understood value. When you know the value of something, you use it according to its design, not for something it was never made for. When we obey God, it isn’t religion, works, or legalism — it’s recognition of who God has made us to be.
In the creation narrative, once everything was made and operating according to design, God rested and called it good. Pastor Jason named his greatest fear for this generation: that they will not know who God designed them to be, and so will allow themselves to be used and defined in ways that are not congruent with God’s design.
Parents carry the first responsibility to model obedience and teach their children; the church models obedience and supports the family in doing so. As Francis Schaeffer wrote in Art and the Bible, no work of art is more important than the Christian’s own life. Every believer is called to be an artist in this sense, whatever their gifts — to make their life “a thing of truth and also a thing of beauty” in the midst of a lost and despairing world.
4. The church is a place to receive the distribution of courage
Psalm 78:6–7 — so that a future generation — children yet to be born — might know. They were to rise and tell their children so that they might put their confidence in God and not forget God’s works, but keep his commands.
★★ Encouragement produces confidence. The next generation is collapsing under the pressure of the world for many reasons, but a major one is a lack of confidence — and that lack exists in part because we seem to have lost the ability to encourage one another. The church cannot be among those who have lost it. To encourage means, literally, to add courage. And the greatest courage anyone will ever have comes when they meet the life-altering reality of the grace, forgiveness, and truth found in Jesus.
To give courage, we have to be people of courage:
2 Timothy 1:6–7 — Therefore, I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is in you… For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but one of power, love, and sound judgment.
Closing
Identity architecture, the oxygen of orthodoxy, the art of sacred design, and the distribution of courage — four things the church is meant to be for the people coming up behind us. Behind all four is a single, ancient assignment: one generation telling the next who God is and what he has done. The drift in Judges began the moment that telling stopped. The hope is that it doesn’t stop with us.
★★ The church must be a place of courage in order to encourage the next generation to live courageously.
Referenced in this message:
Lynn H. Cohick, The Letter to the Ephesians (NICNT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020).
David Jackman and Lloyd J. Ogilvie, Judges, Ruth (The Preacher’s Commentary, vol. 7; Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1991).
Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Authority after Babel (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2016).
Trevin Wax, The Thrill of Orthodoxy (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2022).
Francis A. Schaeffer, Art and the Bible (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1973).
Statistics compiled from the Walton Family Foundation, Religion Unplugged, Lifeway Research, and Ballard Brief; identity figures from the National Institutes of Health and Harvard’s Department of Psychology.
Scripture quotations are from the Christian Standard Bible (CSB).
