Thank you most holy God for sending your Son into this sinful world to redeem us so that we may be adopted into your family and receive the gift of the Spirit. We delight to now call you “Father”. What an amazing privilege it is to be your sons and daughters! We praise and thank you in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

If you’re a preacher or training to be a preacher I encourage you to give the post a read.

Piper answers the question in the title of his post with three points.

1. For children, external, unspiritual conformity to God’s commanded patterns of behavior is better than external, unspiritual non-conformity to those patterns of behavior.
2. Requiring obedience from children in conformity with God’s will confronts them with the meaning of sin in relation to God, the nature of their own depravity, and their need for inner transformation by the power of grace through the gospel of Christ.
3. The marks of devotion, civility, and manners (“please,” “thank you,” and good eye contact) are habits that, God willing, are filled later with grace and become more helpful ways of blessing others and expressing a humble heart.

I think many parents with young children struggle with this issue. Piper offers wise counsel so make sure to read the entire post.

• D.A. Carson – Ministry, Motives, and Mentors (mp3)
• David Helm – The Personal Work of Gospel Witness (mp3)
• Mark Dever – The Four Ps of Evangelical Ministry (mp3)
• Phillip Jensen – Biblical Theology of Ministry 1: The Aim and Method of Ministry (audio unavailable)
• Phillip Jensen – Biblical Theology of Ministry 2: All God’s People as Prophets and Disciple-Makers (mp3)
• Phillip Jensen – What is Training? People not Programs (mp3)
• Marty Sweeney – Obstacles to Training (mp3)
• David Helm – The Pastor’s Work of Gospel Training (mp3)
• Tony Payne – Training and Gospel Resources (mp3)
• Phillip Jensen – How a Training Mentality Leads to Gospel Workers (mp3)

Make sure to watch the video below of Mark Dever recommending The Trellis and the Vine.

(If you’re reading this in an RSS reader you may need to click through to the blog to see the video clip)

You can read Horton’s review here.

Western evangelicalism tends to run through cycles of fads. At the moment, books are pouring off the presses telling us how to plan for success, how “vision” consists in clearly articulated “ministry goals”, how the knowledge of detailed profiles of our communities constitutes the key to successful outreach. I am not for a moment suggesting that there is nothing to be learned from such studies. But after a while one may perhaps be excused for marveling how many churches were planted by Paul and Whitefield and Wesley and Stanway and Judson without enjoying these advantages. Of course all of us need to understand the people to whom we minister, and all of us can benefit from small doses of such literature. But massive doses sooner or later dilute the gospel. Ever so subtly, we start to think that success more critically depends on thoughtful sociological analysis than on the gospel; Barna becomes more important than the Bible. We depend on plans, programs, vision statements — but somewhere along the way we have succumbed to the temptation to displace the foolishness of the cross with the wisdom of strategic planning. Again, I insist, my position is not a thinly veiled plea for obscurantism, for seat-of-the-pants ministry that plans nothing. Rather, I fear that the cross, without ever being disowned, is constantly in danger of being dismissed from the central place it must enjoy, by relatively peripheral insights that take on far too much weight. Whenever the periphery is in danger of displacing the center, we are not far removed from idolatry (25-26).

Real change happens when biblical truth and personal honesty intersect in repentance, faith, and obedience (David Powlison, “Getting to the Heart of Conflict: Anger, Part 3″. The Journal of Biblical Counseling, 16:1, p. 32).