Let's open in a word of prayer and then begin because I think in a sentence, we might be able to catch people up who are coming in, but we can at least have the more than one sentence version for those that are here already. The Lord be with you. Let us pray. Father, thank you for the gift of this day. I pray that you will bless our thinking and praying together about what it means to raise children and grandchildren and what it means to change ourselves and seek your grace to change ourselves even as we are seeking your grace for our children to grow and change as well.

We pray all this through Christ our Lord. Amen. The the illustrations are weird. I will give you that. They capture what we need to capture, but there's a there are handouts there.

There you go. There you go. But my daughter saw them and said, why did you go with the Ken doll approach? And I didn't I didn't make these, but the illustrations are gonna be helpful for us. I promise.

We have in thinking and praying about parenting through a few different lenses. Last week, father Jordan walked us through creating a culture of grace in our home, which is not to say creating a culture of everybody gets away with whatever they want or a culture of no punishment, but rather a recognition that it truly does take the Holy Spirit working in the heart of a human person for them to change and for them to grow. And that the a a word we have for that is grace and that our our children, ourselves can't just pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and force change that there is an there is a significant element of supernatural invention intervention involved in our change. So the title was creating a culture of grace. We had some excellent discussion from those who are wrestling with what does that look like in the actual implementation.

There was a great the recording last week I think might be worth it even if you had to miss, even just for some side conversations that happened about at some point the withholding of punishment by a parent can speak volumes, but how do you build a culture where that actually does something? So if kids get away with it, know if it's nothing but grace, grace, grace, that doesn't seem to work. If it's nothing but punish, punish, punish, doesn't seem to work. So that's just that is a boy, an eternal question of parenting, but I'd I'd really appreciate it last week. But I think the the tagline perhaps from last week is that God changes human hearts.

Humans don't change human hearts and that a word we have for that process is grace. So it does take a culture of grace in a home to recognize perhaps how it is that God is changing the heart of a child or changing the heart of a grown up. This week is continuing on that theme, but if grace is the power of God to actually change a human heart, this week is looking at some of the mechanics involved. Now there's we're we're in an interesting era where you and I are kind of expected to know a lot about some pretty complex things. Like if I if I walked around and just didn't know what Gaza is, what Israel is, who Hamas is, and what's what what is going on with the exchange of of bodies right now, You could you could accuse me of not paying enough attention to our world because we have this just understanding that we should all understand at least on a basic level the countries of the world and some of the geopolitical conflicts that are arising, And so we can't really plead ignorance in the world of politics or we get strange looks.

Automobiles used to be a good example. I don't know if they are anymore because it's harder for me at least to explain how these electric cars work. I know there's a battery. But but there were there was a point in which if you didn't have a basic understanding of what is happening inside a combustion engine, if you thought all the pumps at the gas station with different colors were all equal, you it would it would not go well for you. You needed to have this basic understanding of what the oil warning sign means and this sort of thing.

But all all that to say, computers, I mean, we we we basically understand a lot of what's going on in our computers, and and you'll get mocked by your friends if you don't know these things. When it comes to a basic understanding of what makes a human being distinct from other animals and what it means for a human to be a moral being, which is a category of being. It used to be the case that we just had a fairly unified standard understanding or answer to those two questions? And we may not know all the nitty gritty, but everyone in this room could have said, oh, what makes a human being a moral being is x y and z. And the reason we would hold a human responsible for damaging an entire home, but we don't hold a tree morally culpable for falling and damaging in a higher an entire home is x y and z.

But there has been CS Lewis who will be our guide for the first ten minutes or so. He would call it the nineteen twenties on through his time wherever you put that. There's been a roughly one hundred year period where through no fault of our own perhaps, humans stopped thinking and teaching other humans about what it means to be a human. I think we perhaps got more fascinated by other things. We felt as though so this conversation of what is a human being that goes back a few thousand years BC that every generation had stopped in kind of the nineteen twenties.

And we stopped asking the question, what does it mean to be a moral being? How does a moral being work? We started learning a lot more about our physicals. Like we know a lot more about the skeleton right now than we did in the 1920 like so we so in a sense, we've just shifted the focus from the invisible, what is it to be a moral being, to zooming in on what is it to be a physical being, which has been very good. It is a very good thing that we understand the physical body more now.

The first ten minutes of this is a drawing back with CS Lewis as our guide to the cursory level understanding that what Lewis would argue a young grade school student would have from basically 2,000 BC until 1920 in the West. So it's just it's kind of like what is this basic what makes up a human being? We're going to try to to do that very briefly on the front so that we can understand what virtues are. So if grace is the power of change, if a human heart changes for the better through this power of grace from God, you can think of virtues as the mechanics of how that change actually happens within, and so that that will make a whole lot more sense as we go and will even have some parenting implications. But that's where I wanna start us with if you've never read a short book by Lewis called The Abolition of Man, it's non fiction.

It's not one of his Narnia or Space or Ransom trilogies. It's non fiction, and it was a series of lectures that he gave about and we we won't go into all of this, but there was a book teaching basic grammar to first grade students that got really popular in England in the late nineteen twenties and Lewis saw something in how we taught phonics as it were to first graders in England that set off some alarms in his head, and the result was a three part lecture called the abolition of man, and he said based on the examples used in a first grader's grammar textbook, humanity is heading in a rough direction. And then he can you read it, and then you realize what comes next is World War two, and I mean, he he is more this is part of why people are enamored with Lewis is that from a grammar school textbook, he saw, uh-oh, we're cutting out one thing and it's about to to really crumble. And so here is that one thing, the second chapter of that book, the second lecture is a lecture titled men without chests. And in a very brief nutshell, here is what he's saying and and then we'll see what virtues have to do with that.

So you have two illustrations. They are weird if you are late to us. I already acknowledge that they are weird. So you can chuckle once about them and then we do need to move on. So you can chuckle as many times as you want.

I chuckle every time I look. The left illustration is what Lewis would describe as how the classical through medieval and even early modern world thought about what made a human person. On the right is what Lewis would argue the modern and late modern and postmodern world thinks about a human being. Now one of those just on the surface is more attractive than others, so it's not going to surprise you that Lewis believes the left side to be a truer fuller understanding of the human person. And Lewis believes that if you don't understand, especially what we will find in the chest of a human person, then you will create an anemic society.

You will create a society of human persons who lack the heart needed to live the human life most fully. So that's why the pictures look kind of like Captain America and me junior year of high school. Thank you. So Lewis would say that the classical medieval early modern world saw human beings as essentially tripartite or there's three three things that make a human being a human being. There's our head which is our intellect, it is our mind, it's our will as well.

Your head is where decisions are made for the most part. So the will and the intellect is there. We're gonna skip down to the stomach, Right? When you meet that special someone you get butterflies where? In your stomach.

When you when there's this you just really have this sense that you need to make a certain decision, you call that a gut feeling. So this is modern language that harkens back to this understanding of a human. You think and decide and reason with your mind, and your gut or your belly or your stomach is the aesthetic center of your body. It is where your likes, your dislikes, your tastes, and your desires live. So you'll have this gut desire urge for something.

When Saint Paul, he uses this language a few times in the New Testament when he talks about I don't remember if it's the Colossians or the Corinthians or some other church, but their God is their belly, and he is not saying they they are a gluttonous people. When he says their God is their belly, he means they are driven just by what whatever they desire in the moment. So they have done so. So a human being in the classical medieval late modern world, we are a mind, a collection of desires, likes, dislikes, and perhaps most importantly, we are also a heart or a chest. And the heart is where both the emotions reside.

Right? My heart breaks, so the emotions reside there, but it is also the primary moral muscle of the human being. So we will talk all about more muscles in just a moment, but it is in other words a filter that allows your mind to rule your belly. So the heart plays this pivotal role to allow your intellect and your will to have dominion over your primal desires. It is the heart, don't think so much the physical organ of the heart but the invisible but very real organ of the moral muscle heart that helps your mind rightly rule and rightly order your belly.

So your belly might say, I hate broccoli. Your mind might say broccoli is very good for you. It would be a strength of moral muscle that would allow what you know to be true to rule over this distaste for broccoli and put the fork in the broccoli and eat the broccoli. So that's that's the full picture of the of the human person. What Lewis sees in an illustration in a first grade English grammar textbook from the late nineteen twenties is that humans in at least Europe are beginning to stop talking about the heart in this historic way.

The heart as this strength to allow a wise mind to rule a base passion. He said we start talking about the heart in what seem like innocent ways but in a way that undercuts the purpose of the heart as a moral muscle. And so he says the modern human thinks about the chest in one of two wrong ways. So this is what the purpose of the heart is, It was this great muscle that needed to be developed so that you and I are not two year olds in 40 year old bodies, right, to where we can have some strength or control over our base appetites and function in society. That was what the heart was.

Lewis said that by the late 1920s there are two errors that are being made about what the heart is. The error number one is to say that it's not even a real thing. There is no moral muscle within us. Emotions themselves are not real things. This would be an extreme version of what Lewis would call materialism or scientism.

So science telling us what we can know and observe and repeat about the world that can be seen by our senses, Lewis and others are great with. That's that's science. The quest to understand the world that can be perceived by our senses. What Lewis calls scientism is is a trend that did grow in the nineteen twenties and beyond that took that to a to an ultimatum, to where we are at the point now, and this is one where I think Lewis is fairly spot on in predicting a hundred years down the road. Many of us believe now without realizing it that science is the sole arbiter of truth or of facts.

We say things like, well it's in the science. And so we have taken a process that is a wonderful process of observing the natural world with our senses and repeating to see what can be repeated and proposals. We have taken that and said because science deals with the visible world, science can only deal with things that can be measured. Now they have some really cool tools for measuring things that you and I can't see with the naked eye, but since science gives us just the visible world and it feels so predictable, then I bet the physical visible world is all that is or all that matters. And so between 1920 and today, you have among the first times in human history that you have otherwise sharp people suggesting things like there's no such thing as human to human attraction.

It's just synapse. There's not romance or that's not love. It's just synapses fired in my brain, transferred chemicals when I first met my wife at UT Dallas, and then fortunately those same synapses fired in her brain, it took her longer. It was a slower part on her brain. Tori, you would start to just you explain away human experiences like love and heartbreak or why we are sad when we when there's a death or why we celebrate when we celebrate.

And so what Lewis would say is that there was on one end of the spectrum, there was a desire to explain away emotions and to explain away desires in a way that just said they're not real. You you are just a product of evolution. You only don't want that broccoli because of x, or z. Firing. You don't have to worry about overcoming that.

And and his point was basically half the problem is there are those who are saying there's no place at all for the emotions. The other half, he would say, is the opposite error, and we might see this a little bit more. So materialism would say only the material world exists. If you experience something that cannot be measured in a lab, then that is not a real experience. So that's the side one side that Lewis is worried about.

The other side, instead of diminishing our emotive life, it elevated it and kind of gave it this divine status, which is the emotions cannot be trained or controlled. I put in parentheses Disney and The Bachelor. Right? And and and that is not to say that there is nothing redeeming in I don't know. I don't know that there's much redeeming in The Bachelor.

I I do think there's an an there's far more redeeming in Disney. Right? So so it's not to say there's nothing redeeming there, but the think of the number of this is all secondhand knowledge. I would never watch this this sort of garbage. Right?

But think of the number of times like the reason giving for I didn't get the rose is I just fell out of love. This whole notion of love instead of being an actual virtue, which it was until early nineteen twenties. It was actually the strength to choose the good of another person over your own good. That's what everyone meant. The word charity is the word love.

There's no English is the one that made up that distinction. And so instead of love being a muscle that has to develop over time and should be strengthened, love is now this thing that just happens to you. It just I fell in love and now I fell out of love, and it's a reverting back to ancient Greece. So before Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates, not in that order, sorry, I put them out of order, before Greek philosophy took off and started critiquing this god system, what the Greeks had was Cupid who did go around and just shooting little love darts at people and then they fawned and fell in love, and part of what Greek philosophy did for humanity is say that's not that's not it. Right?

So in many ways, the the more modern we are getting, we're just reverting to very old misunderstandings. So Lewis sees and we look at these examples and we think they might be silly, and I don't even always see how he sees them, but he is able to predict much of of what comes from there. But basically his argument would be over the past one hundred years, we have ignored the pivotal role that the heart plays in what makes a human being a moral being either because we have said since we can't see the the virtue of justice, it must not be real, so let's not even talk about it. Or we have taken virtues and over emotivized them and just made them this this feeling that washes over you. Like, and and I'm getting a sense of justice right now as if it's just this feeling that washes over you when that was not the case.

So that's the very basic. We don't have long, but we don't need long because I just want to give you some of this to give you a chance to think and let's talk a little bit about it. All that to say, I think there is wisdom in following Lewis and others lead in saying one of the things that we can do for ourselves as human beings who are trying to grow and develop as human beings ourselves and are tasked with raising and helping to raise younger human beings, one of the things we can do is recover a basic understanding of what makes a human a moral being and and how mechanically even that works. And once you see this, I do think you will find it helps. It doesn't solve parenting because I've seen this for many many years and it does not solve parenting, but it does give a proper framework.

You know if your kids cheeks are warm and the stuff coming out of the nose is coming out of the nose, like you know some basic things to see and that there's something underlying that, and you who've had multiple ear infections and little ones I'm sure you can probably diagnose an ear pretty quickly now. Understanding the virtues themselves as these moral muscles that every human being needs in order to let their mind rule their gut, you'll start to see better diagnoses. Child A is not being a scoundrel or is not being impossibly difficult. Child A unfortunately has a very weak temperance muscle. Our thoughts you'll begin to have, and how do we get a stronger temperance muscle might be thoughts that you have.

So let's just jump straight to that. The four cardinal virtues is where we will live today. I've given you more, but this is an old and tested way of thinking about what it is that makes up a human person, specifically the missing part in much of our modern discourse, which is our heart, our moral muscle. There are four cardinal virtues. You've probably memorized these at some point in your life.

Great. If you've been to to great churches throughout Italy or or England or France, these are these are painted everywhere. The four cardinal virtues, virtue is just a word for strength. So the word has always meant this moral muscle. Right?

It is a virtue as a strength to do something. Cardinal comes from the Latin word for hinge, and so the four cardinal virtues are the four virtues, base virtues on which every other virtue depends. So these are an excellent basic place to start, and the the Christian tradition has has always maintained that part of what it means to be made in God's image and likeness, a part of what it means to be a human being is that we are a moral being, we are given choice, and those choices have real world consequences, and so that's a moral being, but as such God has implanted within every moral being as much as we have a physical mind and a physical heart, we also have these basic moral muscles that God gives to every human being along with the ability for those muscles to grow and develop or to shrink and lead to atrophy. So think of temperance, fortitude, prudence, and justice as the four basic moral muscles that every human is born with. Some other time we can talk about things like the theological virtues or the practical virtues, there's tons, the athletic virtues, the artistic virtues, these are special skills that can be acquired separately, but the four are if you are a human being, you are equipped with this internal heart, and it it was with these four muscles that you can live the way you were called to live.

So let's just go through them one at a time. With every muscle, there's some exercises that help strengthen it. I do want to pause. This is worth us taking a few minutes to do. We did a version of this quickly on the family retreat as well, but when we say moral muscle, I truly want you to think of what you know to be true about a bicep and translate everything you know about a bicep to temperance and to fortitude and to prudence.

So just shout at me now, what are things we know to be true about muscles? What's good for them, what's bad for them, like a bicep. They need nutrition, so they need protein or none of this could be there, so they must be fed. Exercise, and what is exercise doing to the muscle? Breaking it down and building it back up.

If there's one thing you take away from today, if there's one thing I wish I could remind myself of every day, it would be if temperance is a moral muscle, and if moral muscles work the same way that physical muscles work, then what it takes to grow in temperance is failing, breaking down, injuring the moral muscle in a way that it grows back stronger the next time. Which is to say if I want Rowan age nine to be better at telling his own gut no at whatever he has in mind, the way he grows in that is by misusing the no muscle and us helping to create an environment in which he recognizes that so that then and then we can do some other exercises to strengthen it so that the next time he's in that situation, his no muscle doesn't get stronger when I tell him 10 times in a row that that was a bad decision, but that's what I do still. So we're working on it. So muscles grow. What happens when you go to outer space and come back for a little while?

Or is zero gravity environment? Are the first astronauts at atrophy? So the first astronauts came back. Not only do our moral muscles grow by actually being broken down and being re strengthened so that they are more capable the next time. But if they are not used, even for a short season, they don't stay, they actually shrink.

If you don't use your legs, they don't maintain their current levels of strength. They actually atrophy. So a season, you've done this before, I know you have with temperance. You've gone on vacation with children where the answer is yes a lot more than it is in real world, and then you come back and you're you're trying to get back into this crazy land where you don't have dessert with every single meal including breakfast, and they lose their minds because their no muscle had atrophied because I just told them yes every time they needed it. So these are small and big.

So that's what I want you to think about these moral muscles. The more you know about physical muscles, and you guys know way more than I do, you can still apply those here. So temperance is the moral no muscle. It is this strength for your mind to say no when the gut is wanting it to say yes. So it's a moral no muscle.

There are times that call for you to not act even though you really want to, and the muscle, the name for that decision muscle temperance. So it's the moral no muscle, and the way you strengthen that muscle is through fasting. Fasting from food or fasting from anything because what is fasting at the end of the day as it relates to the muscles? It's no. So fasting is an exercise.

The Christian tradition has long not eaten meat on Fridays either all year long or during Lent, and the misunderstanding of that is that meat is bad on Fridays during Lent, and that's not the point at all. The point is choosing something that is otherwise good to go without, to say no to. So when you give up something for Lent or if you give up something for Advent, which some people do, you're you're not necessary. Now if you're giving up a vice, then yes, that's a bad thing. If you're giving up heroin, that's good.

Keep giving up heroin. But the point is still, you can give up a good thing for a short purpose, and one thing that is happening is that by saying no to meat, which itself is a morally neutral decision perhaps, by saying no to that on a weekly basis, your no muscle is getting stronger. And so the next time you need to say no perhaps when the stakes are higher, you are stronger for it. So fasting does not always have to be religious in nature or within the church calendar, but think of perhaps introducing no's just as a way to strengthen a child's you like, you don't have to have a reason. It's just today we are not doing x.

And the 14 times that you will think I want to do x and you have to tell yourself no is that is an exercise for for the when it will matter. Fortitude is the equal but opposite. It's your moral yes muscle, so courage is another word for this. So there are clearly times when the right answer is to act and you need to act even if you're scared of physical consequences of other consequences and that is fortitude. So it's your moral yes muscle.

You might be thinking of different children that you know, some have strong no muscles, some have strong yes muscles. You can strengthen the yes muscle with what are sometimes called manual acts of piety. So it's the same spectrum as fasting but it's not going without something so that you get a stronger no muscle. It's introducing something often an exercise usually physical in order to strengthen your moral yes muscle. So there's this group called Exodus ninety that does something called Saint Michael's Lent every year, which is it's been an old practice that they're revitalizing some, but it's a group you can sign up for.

It's a Roman Catholic kind of men's ministry, and there are other versions of this out there, but they will say, okay, for the next ninety days, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, take a freezing cold shower and don't eat meat on Wednesdays and Fridays. And in doing this, it seems preposterous at first, but what they are doing is they're introducing manual acts of piety. It is as fast as saying no to something, this is saying yes to something that you don't desire that comes with some level of discomfort simply so that you will have to practice saying yes in the face of discomfort. So every time you're in the bathroom about to shower and you wish that it was steamy but it's very, very cold and you step in regardless, you are actually strengthening the courage muscle. And so I think that's a healthy way to think of if you read Christian history and what saints have done, you will see them fast from some things, and then you will see them adopt certain practices, most of them physical bodily, so that even your muscle memory is working and strengthening as you do these things.

So those are the big two, the easier to see. Prudence is the ability. We've got the no down, right? So if you have a real strong temperance muscle, you can say no when you need to. If you've got a real strong fortitude muscle, you can say yes when you need to.

Prudence is the strength to know whether this situation needs a yes or a no. Does this situation, does wisdom need me to act or to refrain? So in the face of a temptation, it is wisdom that tells you no is the answer you need. And then you'll see how dependent these are on one another. You can know that the answer should be no, but if you have a weak no muscle, you might not be able to execute that.

But the ideal, almost, we've got three of the four, the ideal is that you know, you have the strength to know this requires me to act and I have the courage to act even in the face of danger or fear. And then finally, don't need to explain this to you if you have ever met a child or a fellow human, sometimes people know the right thing to do, and they're capable of doing the right thing, and they just don't want to. With kids it's nice because they just do this and say I don't want to, so it's not like adults we pretend otherwise. So justice is this final piece of the puzzle, justice is the desire or the strength to desire that the right thing be done. Because you can know the right thing to do, have the best yes and the best no muscle ever, but if you lack a desire for justice or the desire for rightness to be the outcome of this situation, then none of those matter.

And so these four really work together. What I want you to do as we close, and I'm sorry I was just talking the whole time, it was not the initial desire. I did not have a strong restraining muscle to allow my mind to say, see we can do this all day. I think it's helpful to both to digest this and to begin thinking about how this could impact our parenting to picture yourself going to an annual checkup for your moral muscles. So if a wise moral doctor was going to do an honest assessment of how strong right now in this season of life is your temperance muscle, How strong is your fortitude, prudence, and justice muscle?

Write down, think about, pray about which of these right now are maybe your strong suits. Like I'm in a season right now where I do actually have fortitude, And then which are coming to mind as you're noting deficiencies? You've maybe spent all year on your upper body and you've got kind of just twig legs left, and you're noticing as you look in this moral mirror, I may need to introduce some exercises for for this particular muscle. So that I think is step one. We it it you know, be your own critic, and then step two throughout this week is you can choose a child, favorite or least favorite.

Right? You can do it to all of them, just kidding. Those don't exist. So but just try to do this for your children too. I I found at first I was worried it would make me more critical of them.

It actually gave me a little bit more patience for them just naming because I can't blame a child that grew up in my house for having an undeveloped prudence muscle. So what can I do? What are some things I can do? Seeing behavior this week, maybe this is the bottom bottom line, through the lens of how is this showcasing some strong moral muscles and some weak moral muscles. And then we'll come back next week and begin to maybe look at more practical implications of if you're noticing these two are off or out of alignment, those often go together.

Let's here's how do you chiropractor them back together. Good. Thank you. We'll we'll we'll finish kind of wrap this up in a sense next week. Thank you all.