Should we say something? Yes, we should. Should we stand up? Yes, we should. But don't stand up over the wrong issues, and when you do talk with people about this, because it's going to be a big talking issue, you need to know what to say. You need to know where you stand. Unfortunately many people in the church who actually do not - they're not good parents. They have no understanding of God's purpose for them as parents, no understanding of God's design for the raising of children, and how that should be done. They operate primarily out of, well this is how I was raised, didn't me too much harm, it should be okay for my kids. Listen, when you become a Christian, your reference point is God and His word and eternity; not the old way you used to do stuff. In other words, when we come to Christ, we're introduced to a kingdom, a king and His purposes and plans and principles, and ways of going about things.
Now of course we bring cultural baggage, so if you're a white person, Pakeha or whatever, you'll bring in a certain kind of approach to this. If you're from a Maori or a tribal culture of any kind, you'll bring in another kind of approach; but these are not what is relevant. What is really relevant is we find what God says, His principles, then we learn how to apply them, and in doing so you will always stand against the culture, and you'll always do things that culture will disapprove of. You have to decide in your heart, whether you're called to represent Christ, and be an ambassador for the kingdom, or you're just going to copy the crowd, and go with the crowd. In the Maori people, the level of abuse of children is horrific, and I am appalled at the lack of Maori voices speaking up about it. It's a huge issue, but it's a covered issue, because prevailing thought is: well, we have our way of dealing with it. This is not acceptable. We need to see what God says about it, and understand that children become demonised when they're abused either by physical or sexual abuse, or emotional abuse or anger. They're hurt. We leave a bad legacy for the next generation, and we've got to be nation-builders, legacy-imparters.
So we've got to think a little differently about the children we're raising up, what we're doing with them, and what God calls us to do, so if you don't understand what God called you to do, you will just follow your own opinions, or the prevailing voice of the 'experts', and what you'll find is, the experts aren't experts. The only one I know who's an expert is the Holy Spirit, and He's written words down here, which tell us how to do life, and if we don't follow Him and follow the word of God, we'll listen to a whole of so called 'experts'. Now I believe we need to learn, but what you've got to understand is many of them actually do not come from a Biblical way of thinking. They come from a different base of thinking; philosophy's a base of thinking, and they produce different results to what God wants. So what you'll find is there's a lot of things you can read about that are actually really helpful, but often they miss the key point, and so what I want to do is I'll just show you a few things from scripture. I want to help you see what is a key base difference, between the way a believer would approach the issue of child raising, and a person who's a non-believer. This is foundational. It's actually at the core of how you see the whole deal, and parents today have been totally disempowered. See one of the problems with this law, it will lift up children, and put them almost on a par with adults, and that will make it very difficult for parents to actually do the job God called them to do. So this law will in effect, although it comes supposedly with good intentions, have some terrible consequences - but I don't want to worry about that so much, because laws come and laws go, governments rise and governments fall. It's more that we, in the middle of it, actually think according to God's way. That make sense?