Family Discipleship

Hey, we're in the last sermon in our series called United.

And here's what we've strived to do: we've strived to understand how the family is God's good design for the flourishing of all creation.

And then we work to see how healthy marriages create the foundation for healthy families and our role and relationship as parents raising children.

And now we're going to close this out with the importance of family discipleship in the home.

And so if you have a Bible or an app, open up to Deuteronomy chapter 6.

Deuteronomy 6 · chapter mention

We're going to be working through this text verse by verse.

How many of you know what a catechism is?

If you didn't raise your hand, you know.

No, I'm just joking.

It's not like a shame culture we have here, right?

But a catechism, it's a summary of Christian doctrine in this kind of question and answer format.

And it's designed for teaching and memorization.

The word comes from the Greek catechine, meaning to teach orally.

As I was looking through some different catechisms throughout church history that I have in my library upstairs in my office, I saw this introductory statement in Luther's small catechism written in 1529.

It simply said this as the head of the family should teach them in a simple way to his household.

Now, this really stood out to me.

Most of the books on my shelf are for training professionals, clergy, ministers, Sunday school teachers, right?

But this was for the head of the family.

The head of the family to use in his home.

The responsibility was assumed and placed upon the father to teach their whole household about God.

For the father to take the primary responsibility for family worship within his home.

Now, I've grown up personally in a church culture where family worship has been completely absent in both preaching and practice.

What's been assumed and expected is that you would simply come to the church to learn about God, placing the primary responsibility on the teachers and leaders of the church to teach and instruct about faith.

I want to draw our attention to something.

Now, I'm gonna say something, but don't hear what I'm not saying.

I'm not trying to make us all homeschoolers after I say this.

Not the goal, right?

We're making your own clothes and butter.

That's not what we're what we're doing is this.

I want to draw our attention to this.

There was this split, this parallel line that happened.

As families begun to put the primary responsibility of education for their children on others, simultaneously, parents abdicated the responsibility of their discipleship on others also.

If you look at a classroom situation, right, you go to parent-teacher conference, there's this kind of ethos that's there.

If your kid's doing bad, you blame the teacher.

Give me an answer for why my kid's doing bad.

We've abdicated this responsibility, we've forsaken it and given it to another.

And we see this exact same reality with inside the home when it comes to discipling our children.

Here's a pattern I think we can witness within our culture.

Parents have become functional Uber drivers and DoorDash agents.

And they've abdicated the responsibility of education, discipleship, even relationship on other people or other things.

And it's time for us to reclaim it and take it back.

You see, this hasn't historically been the case.

This is a fairly new reality.

Because historically, throughout scripture and throughout the history of the church, the primary responsibility for discipleship has been anchored in the home.

You see, faith has chiefly been understood as something handed down from generation to generation through a beautiful means of grace known to us as family worship.

Now, while I'm not here advocating for a certain education style, I think that it is interesting that families who homeschool have a greater rate of family worship and discipleship than families who don't.

Maybe it's because those families take their responsibility in their child's life more seriously.

Just want to submit that for a moment.

I don't homeschool, just so you're aware.

Though we are experiencing the devastating outcome of previous generations abandoning and neglecting this virtuous duty, what we have to do as a church is contend to recapture the necessity of family discipleship.

We must, as a church, instruct and equip men to joyfully bear the responsibility of leading their wife and children in family worship, seeing their homes as a little church and functioning in their role as shepherd pastors to their little flock.

Because they are the biblical head of the family.

Now I want to state this in a way that is full of grace and tenderness.

There is some of us where circumstances have created situations where there is no man to lead, or the man present in your home will not lead.

So by God's grace, we need strong, spirit-filled women to lead in their absence.

Women who share in the honor of Timothy's mother Eunice and grandmother Lois.

Women whose sincere faith was passed down to young Timothy through their faithful discipleship of him.

I want us to know that the total labor of family discipleship, it is spread across the household.

Father and mother taking up this responsibility to disciple their children.

But the primary responsibility to ensure that it is functioning within the home, it rests on the father, the head of the family.

As we'll see in this passage, there is no option for men to forsake the responsibility to disciple their families if they are committed to serving God and obeying his commands.

It's not an option.

So let's dive into the text together, okay?

Deuteronomy 6.

Here's kind of setting up where this context of the verse is.

As Moses prepared to send the Israelites into the promised land of Canaan, underneath Joshua's leadership, he began instructing them in the commands that God had given to Moses for his covenant people.

And so standing on the edge of this new land, Moses explained that these laws weren't just temporary rules.

No, they were meant to guide the Israelites, their children, and their grandchildren for generations to come.

If they listened carefully and followed God's ways throughout their lives, they would experience his blessing.

Long life, prosperity, growth as a nation, and the abundant land flowing with milk and honey that God had promised even to their ancestors.

And within these commands, we discover what would become known to us as the greatest commandment.

Deuteronomy 6 5.

You see, to love the Lord with your whole self is known as the greatest commandment.

And even by itself, Jesus affirms that this one command summarizes over half of the 613 Old Testament commands we find in the law.

To love the Lord with your entire being is a command that we all strive to embrace and work toward.

We all realize that's something for us to labor in.

But what about this indispensable command that proceeds it?

Deuteronomy 6, 7.

You shall teach them diligently to your children.

Here's what I want us to grasp up front.

God's call for us to love Him is inseparable from His call to teach our children and family to do the same.

You cannot have one without the other.

God does not command us to simply strive for some personal deep affection for him that is isolated to our own primary existence.

No, it's to instruct others in our homes to be fully consumed with love for him also.

You see, the responsibility to teach, instruct, disciple, it doesn't fall on the priests there with inside of Israel, the elders, the heads of tribes, nor does it fall on the pastors, the Sunday school teachers, or the kids' volunteers.

No, it falls on the home.

We are to be the ones who bear this primary responsibility with all joy to teach and instruct our families to love God.

But I want us to look at this passage more holistically so we can see it in the big picture of what God's calling his people to.

In this passage, God actually reveals himself to Israel for who he is.

It starts off in Deuteronomy 6, 4 through 5.

Hear, O Israel, here's the Lord's revelation of himself.

The Lord our God, the Lord is one.

Then verse 5, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.

Now, this is not a complete and total revelation of who God is, but it is an essential, foundational one.

You see, he's setting himself apart from all other gods.

He alone is Yahweh.

He alone is God.

There is no other.

There is no other God who is in covenant relationship with his people.

So this revelation of himself, this disclosure of his person communicates his holiness to us.

He is set apart from all others.

He is holy, other in his self, his kingship and lordship over all creation, his undivided unity.

And then immediately after God discloses himself to Israel comes the command to love him.

This call to love God is a response, and I would submit the only true and faithful response to the revelation of who he is.

We are to love him with our entire being.

The wholeness and oneness of God is expected to be met with a response of the whole self of his covenant people.

And so our only faithful response to who God is is that we are called to love him with our entire being.

Now it may seem foreign for some of us to understand love in the context of a command, right?

In our Western culture, we think love is somehow organic or natural, that it somehow is derived from this free will choice of placing our affections on someone or something.

Yet God sees it as the only response to who he is.

The notion of loving God as a command, or in the context of commands, isn't foreign to God nor his teaching.

Jesus Christ God made flesh, the Son, he declares in John 14, 15, if you love me, you will keep my commands.

We have to also see that this concept isn't foreign to God's nature either.

God is revealing himself here as the one who will have covenant love for his people.

This is a relentless, unstoppable, never failing love for us.

Approximately 250 times in the Old Testament, God reveals that he has steadfast love for his people.

It's to refer to God's love that is unwavering, faithful, and enduring regardless of any circumstance.

It's not an emotion that comes and goes in waves depending on how he's feeling that day.

But it's a committed, reliable devotion to the good of his people.

So here's what we need to see.

God is not commanding us to love him in ways that he would not love us as his people.

God is not commanding us to love him in ways that he himself would not love us as his people.

In fact, God demonstrates, God alone demonstrates that time and time again, that it's only his love that fulfills its side of the promises and commitments made.

It is only God who loves us the way that He calls for us to love Him.

The instruction for God's people continues in verse 6, 6 through 7.

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.

You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise.

So the love God has shown us, and the love that God calls us to show Him in return must be handed down and taught to our children.

This is the aim and heart of shepherding your home.

It's to point our family's affections toward the one who will never fail to love them.

Amen.

This is an active love, this is a present love, this is participatory effort of pastoring our homes because we bear the responsibility for discipling our families.

And neglecting this calling, as I said earlier, is itself a failure to fully love God in the way that He calls us to.

To love God and to disciple your family, to love Him also are inseparable realities.

There's no higher goal, there's no greater ambition, there's no worldly pursuit than to foster a relentless love for God within yourself and in the hearts of your family.

And this passage informs us that the work of discipleship is one that's carried out in the very regular rhythms of everyday life, right?

He says, as you shall talk with them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise.

Last week we talked about how our very lives are these living liturgies that have these rhythms and habits that create spiritual formation with us, right?

It's not a question are are you being formed?

The question is who or what are you being formed into?

Because the rhythms and habits that you have, the liturgy that you live, is shaping you.

And so here we see that in our everyday going of life, we're to be intentional about the liturgy that we are living.

You see, this perspective is even carried out through church history and the instructions and catechisms that have been developed for fathers that they might be equipped to effectively pastor their family.

And I think that what this text shows us is our daily lives can be structured in these four movements of liturgy.

And here's what this is about: this isn't about adding more things to your calendar.

This is about redeeming the things you're already doing.

It's kind of like the command to go and make that we see in Matthew 28 of the Great Commission.

It's not a call necessarily for us to go to foreign countries and be missionaries.

The real language there is as you are going, as you are living your life, as you're going to work, as you're going to school, as you're going to the grocery store, as you're going to the park, make disciples.

The same way here, as we are going in our everyday life, seek gospel intentionality.

And so let's look at these movements one at a time.

Arising.

I think if you're here this morning, you woke up.

Right?

Yep, good.

I'm glad you did, and I'm glad you're here with us.

Uh we eat breakfast, right?

Most of us, some of us.

Um here.

This is something me and my family have been doing for years.

We wake up 15 to 30 minutes earlier than we need to.

We have to be downstairs at the table by 6:50 a.m.

And I'm reading them scripture.

After I've like begrudgingly made them some kind of avocado egg toast thing that like I function as a barista in my home, it's uh humiliating at times.

But uh serve them breakfast, right?

I sit down and I either have a resource like a catechism, or I have the scripture, the Bible open, reading to them as they are eating breakfast, asking questions, and then we pray together before we walk out the door.

It took us to wake up a little bit early and be intentional about getting to the table and sitting there.

Right now we're going through a resource called real life theology conversations.

It's 52 catechism questions that give you a whole week to work through together.

It takes like five, ten minutes to go through with my family.

It's wonderful.

Right now we're learning what truth we can know about God.

We learned on Monday we can know about his existence, Tuesday, his character, Wednesday, his word, Thursday, his actions, and Friday, his power.

And so my family's being equipped about who God is and how we ought to love him in response to that.

And we pray and we send each other out the door.

The second liturgy movement we see is when you sit in your house.

I will say this over and over and over again, but I think the anchor of a healthy home is a dinner table.

Families who eat together, who share meals together.

It's it baffles me how many of my children's friends don't eat dinner together with their families.

And it's a perfect space to shepherd their hearts.

Hey, tell me about what went great today.

How did you see God's hand bless you today?

Let's just be filled with gratitude and thanksgiving or let's be aware of his presence in our life.

What was something that was really difficult and hard that you needed the Spirit to really strengthen you and help you today?

How does the gospel speak to how your friend treated you today?

Or how you treated your friend?

It's a beautiful opportunity to redeem that and have this gospel intentionality, right?

What about when you walk by the way?

Here's one thing I need you to see about discipleship.

It's not always or even primarily so formal, where like you're sitting down and you're opening a book and um just gospel conversations in moments of everyday life.

Like when we're just hanging out together.

How do we gospel something that's going on?

How are we intentional about trying to pull out of our families' hearts the things that they're wrestling with or the things that are happening?

I've been loving going to the skate park with my eight-year-old son because on the drives there we just get to talk about him and his heart, and we're trying to use that time.

Like I could turn on whatever and listen and just not talk to my kid, but I get to just hit mute and say, Hey bud, what's going on?

Right?

We just get to use these everyday opportunities to gospel them and disciple them.

And then what about our lying down?

You all go to sleep, right?

Like, bedtime doesn't have to be uh a war.

Like, like, I swear to the living God, I will lose my salvation.

If you get out of that bed one more time, like have you ever been in that moment?

Like, one of our lives is over tonight.

Uh but what about just an opportunity to like shepherd their heart?

If you if you took five minutes of intentionality to read a psalm and pray with them, if you shepherded them in that moment to meditate and rest in Christ finished work as they go to sleep.

What I want us to see is that this.

This doesn't have to be super difficult.

It's not about adding more to your already seemingly full plates.

It's about redeeming the opportunities that you already are walking in every single day of your life.

It's a great and simple way to begin family worship.

Redeeming the moments that you already function in with gospel intentionality.

But man, I even want to call you to something greater.

I think it's important for us as men to identify at least one night that we can protect and we guard with everything in us to have a more extended, intentional time of worship.

We've had to adjust in seasons based on different circumstances, but right now in this season, that's Monday night.

So you're not meeting with me on Monday night.

Our kids aren't going and doing stuff on Monday night.

We protect Monday night with ruthlessness.

And we're getting out of guitar, we're singing some hymns, we're reading the scripture, we're praying for one another.

It's such a critical thing for us.

Now you may, maybe you can't play guitar, right?

But you can turn on YouTube.

Or at least I know every single one of your kids can turn on YouTube.

And we can find songs, right?

And sing.

We can read the scriptures, we can pray for one another, teaching your kids to pray for mom and dad, teaching them that mom and dad need prayer.

I think that that's something that we as men have to guard.

Because as we're going to discover later, time is probably the most precious commodity that you have right now.

You see, as we finish out this passage here, what we're going to see is that the love of God, to love him with our entire being, it should be something that is never absent from our sight.

Deuteronomy 6, 8 through 9, you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.

You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

In this command, God informs us that the high call to love God with our whole being is to be ever before us.

And so this is what we have to do.

We have to contend against distraction that draws our hearts to lesser loves.

And this world is full of distraction moment by moment by moment.

Here's what the world is trying to do: the world is trying to turn you into a product that they can sell to distractions.

That's why social media exists.

You get that right?

You're the product being sold.

And so if they can distract you to these lesser loves, they can keep you toward this dependency on themselves.

What we have to do is we have to keep the love of God, our love for Him, ever before us.

We're to contend against these distractions, to keep our heart and mind focused on our greatest ambition.

Our first core value here at SMC is Jesus first and foremost, making Jesus the focus in every aspect of our lives.

This is derived from Jonathan Edwards' religious affections, where he was trying to articulate what does a true and genuine move of God look like?

And this was his first thing.

Is Jesus the focus?

This value aims to have the person and work of Jesus permeate every aspect of our lives, keeping him ever present before us.

Because we want the gospel message to be the message that we meditate on.

If you think about all the messages that flash in front of you in a given day, is the gospel the primary one that is meditated on in our hearts, in our minds, one that calls our attention to God's steadfast love for us and fosters our wholehearted love for Him in return.

Think about the messages in your home.

What message do you desire to have constantly in view in your home?

Here's some examples that we desire in the Ramasome.

No one will ever love you like God does.

Mommy won't, daddy won't, we will fail to love you.

God will always love you better.

Perfectly.

There is no greater ambition in life than to love God.

No matter how successful you are in this life without loving God, first it is all for nothing.

Dad and mom love God so much that it makes them want to love Him too.

Those are the messages we want in our home.

Remember, our lives are a living liturgy that's using these rhythms and habits to form us into something or someone.

And so, church, may it be the image of Christ.

And so we have to reshape the way we think.

And we have to think in a way of our homes as a little church where we disciple one another to love God.

You see, brothers, we've been living in an upside-down understanding of God's design for spiritual formation.

For generations, we viewed the local church as the primary place of worship and discipleship.

And what have we done?

We've quietly abdicated our role as the chief shepherds of our homes.

Listen, jealousy is a communicable attribute that we share with God.

We serve a jealous God.

And oftentimes within church culture, we confuse jealousy with envy.

Envy is desiring to have something that is not yours.

God is not an envious God.

He does not sin.

God is a righteous God whose jealousy demands that he desires what is rightfully his.

We don't have enough jealousy over our wives' hearts.

We don't have enough jealousy over our children's time and presence.

We don't have enough jealousy for the things that are ours.

And men, it should disgust us to hand our wife and children over to another man to lead them in spiritual formation.

But consider this.

When God first commanded his people to teach their children to love the Lord, there was no formal temple established, no organized church structure.

His instruction came in the context of family.

In the time of Moses and the patriarchs, family and faith were inseparable.

To gather for worship meant to gather with family.

There was no division between the two.

And through this seamless integration, faith, commandments, instruction, a deep love for God flowed naturally from generation to generation.

Now, this doesn't diminish the local church because it remains a vital part of Christian maturity.

It's the home and the church working in this beautiful tandem together, each fulfilling its God-given role.

But we have to reclaim this truth.

The primary work of cultivating love for God happens in living rooms, not in sanctuaries.

You see, we have to understand our identity as pastors, shepherds of the flock that God has entrusted us to our with our family.

I would submit to you that our greatest ambition in life is this: to know God, to love Him in response to who He is, and to shepherd our families to do the same.

That and that alone is our greatest ambition in life.

You see, this isn't just one responsibility among many.

This is our highest call.

This is our primary mission.

Every other aspect of our lives should orbit around this central purpose, supporting and strengthening our ability to lead our families into deeper love and obedience to Christ.

So the question isn't whether we're qualified.

Because you're probably not.

I wasn't, right?

Like, I didn't have a dad to teach me this.

I don't have a father to model this.

I didn't get brought up in this.

But I want to create a church community where we help and strengthen and support one another to do this faithfully.

It's not about if you're qualified, you're not qualified.

It's will you faithfully step into the role that God has given to you.

Martin Luther, at the who started the Reformation in 1517, he said this about the home.

The home is the first church, the first school, the first government.

Parents are the first pastors, the first teachers, the first magistrates.

This is the central importance of our homes.

But many of us, we we believe the church is primarily responsible for dissiping our families, like we've been talking about.

And I get it.

We find ourselves wrestling against this cultural tide right now that seeks to fragment the very essence of our faith because our modern world has trained us to compartmentalize life into these neat separate boxes, right?

And tragically, we've allowed our faith to become just another compartment that's disconnected from our everyday life, especially our family life.

And we've adopted the same mindset that we unfortunately often use with education.

We delegate the work to others and assume someone else will handle what matters most.

And so this cultural current has shaped how we view the church itself.

And the truth that we have to reclaim is this: your child will encounter many spiritual influences.

But men, your child will only have one father.

They may sit under gifted pastors who can preach with the best of them.

They may learn the scriptures and memorization from these dedicated Sunday school teachers.

They may worship the Lord while singing with inspiring worship leaders, but none of these can replace the role of father.

None.

The role that God has given to you.

You see, the culture whispers that spiritual formation, it's too complex.

I've already got too much on my plate.

I'm not equipped or educated enough.

I gotta leave this in the hands of someone else.

But God's design is clear.

Fathers are called to be the primary shepherds of their home.

So this is our moment, men, to reject the cultural lie of spiritual outsourcing and to enjoy, take up the responsibility of leading your family to love Jesus.

Some of us here, though, we believe that worldly success is primarily responsible for our family's prosperity.

We think if we can just get our kids everything, that their life will be so good and they'll be so happy.

Brothers, we've been measuring success with the wrong ruler.

We've convinced ourselves that our primary responsibility is securing temporal success for our families.

If we can just have better jobs, better schools, better neighborhoods, better houses, better opportunities, better club sports programs, right?

If we can just be in this pursuit of immediate and present gratification and worldly success, but what we've done is we've lost sight of the eternal.

We failed to bring any sense of an eternal perspective into our family's vision.

We're just working for what's next.

Let's be honest about where our time and resources actually go.

How many hours do you invest in work?

How many hours do you invest in their education and sports and performance arts and hobbies and clubs?

Now contrast that with how much time you dedicate to loving God deeper today than you did yesterday.

You see, the math doesn't lie, it reveals our true priorities.

And sadly, our homes often mirror the culture around us rather than the kingdom we say we belong to.

Let me help put this in perspective.

From the formidable ages of 5 to 18, your child will have lived over 113 hours, 113,000 hours of life.

In that time, a child's gonna spend 56% of their life just sleeping or going to school.

So from 5 to 18, 56% of their life is going to be sleeping in at school.

Now, this is the sad reality.

The average child will spend 26% of that life in front of a screen.

56% sleeping or at school.

On top of that, an additional 26% just in front of a screen.

You want to talk about where we have time to redeem?

Like, this is why I'm working back to.

Not only have we abdicated education and spiritual formation, we've abdicated relationship to a YouTube influencer or Netflix or Switch.

What are you willing to do to redeem that time?

What are you willing to do to reclaim it?

If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.

It's better to go into the kingdom of heaven blind.

If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off.

It's better to go into the kingdom of heaven maimed.

If screens are stealing the souls of your children, it's better to put a bullet through your television or chuck that switch into a lake or run over that iPad with their back wheel than to allow them to keep pursuing lesser loves that will steal them of all affection for God.

It is better.

How relentless are we willing to be?

To love our family.

And this is what it tells us.

It tells us that we don't rest well.

Like if rest comes from a screen, we don't even understand healthy rest.

It tells us that we're preoccupied with all these distractions, where your kid is getting this message that somehow your social media feed is more important than their time and presence.

It tells us that we're outsourcing every single aspect of our lives, and we've just reduced our own responsibility down to an Uber driver to get them to their next practice or game or social event or some door that here's food, here's a hot meal on the table.

I got some hole in a window in the side of a building.

Here you go.

Like this isn't condemnation against you.

I this is I know this reality.

But men, are we willing to go to war for the hearts of our children?

You see, we're raising a generation of children who are being trained day by day to pour their lives into things that will not matter in eternity.

When you die, when they die, they will be known by simply six feet of dirt that covers them.

I want my children at the throne of God.

I want my wife before the Lamb, worshiping Him for eternity.

You see, we so often work ourselves to exhaustion, we spend fortunes chasing dreams, only discover at the end of the day it just wasn't worth it.

You know that only 30% of graduates actually use their degree?

How much time, money, energy for what?

Here's a sobering question.

Imagine your children grow up to achieve everything that you've ever dreamed and hoped for them.

And if they accomplished it all, but they didn't love and serve God, would any of it even be worth it?

You see, there's only one primary way to measure success in this life, men.

And it is working to exhaustion to know that your family will worship Jesus in the life to come.

Our primary way to measure success in this life is that your family will be worshiping Jesus in the life to come.

You see, we must be more concerned with the state of our children's souls than the state of their social achievements.

But our hope this morning is in Christ.

You see, Jesus took primary responsibility for making us sons of God so that we could take primary responsibility for raising our children to love their Heavenly Father.

You see, in a culture that demands we exhaust our way to spiritual success, we must remember this foundational truth.

Jesus took primary responsibility to make a way for us to love God and to lead others to do the same.

The gospel is this beautiful collaboration of both the perfect example and power for everything that we've been discussing in this sermon.

It's in his infinite grace and mercy that God determined to show us what steadfast love looks like in the person of his son Jesus.

You see, this wasn't just a demonstration.

God himself went to unimaginable lengths to lavish his love on us, even at the expense of his own son's life.

If we want to see what it looks like to love someone with our entire being, then set your gaze on the crushed body of Jesus.

If we want to see what it looks like to love someone with our entire heart, then look to Christ whose heart was pierced by the tip of a spear to love you.

You see, Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection prove once and for all that God's love for us is always true and never fails.

There's nothing more God could have done to show us his love than giving his only son to obtain us.

But here's what often we miss: the gospel is not just an example to follow, it's actually the power that makes following possible.

You see, without the work of the cross, you and I, we would never even desire to love God or to serve him.

We would never even desire to lead our families in spiritual formation.

It's Jesus' death that makes a way for spiritual life to come to us.

And so when we're made alive by faith in his finished work, we finally possess both the desire and the power to love God as he commands.

So this is why we can take up this mantle of spiritual leadership in our homes.

Not because we're naturally equipped, but because Christ has equipped us through his work and by his spirit.

And so, men, the same gospel that saves us is the gospel that empowers us to shepherd our families.

And so it's time for this.

It's time that we just take responsibility.

It's time that we take responsibility.

Let us be men who love God faithfully.

Who love God by loving our families faithfully, that we might disciple them to love Him also.

And you're not going to be great at this at first.

Like if this is your first time jumping, you're going to be horrible.

It's going to be a mess.

Kids are sinners, right?

They will not make it easy for you.

But here's one thing I like this quote by G.K.

Chesterton.

He says this if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

Like, mess up on this a lot.

Over and over and over again.

Because it's worth doing.

And by God's grace, by his spirit, you'll get better.

By this community of other men who are striving to love our families in the same way, it'll get better.

I've been doing this for uh, well, my oldest is 16, so 16 years.

And uh at breakfast times, I still don't think that they hear me.

And I ask them like really basic questions, like who died on the cross?

And they're like, huh?

Uh, you know, it's okay, Lord.

But we got to care for these kids' souls.

We got to care for our wives.

We have to lead them in worship to foster a deep love for God as a right and good response to who He is.

I'll close with this.

I would say that each one of us here in this room, we we desire revival in this city.

We want to see people come to Saving Faith.

We want to see the glory of God expand and fill this place.

We want that.

But I want to submit to you for maybe the first time you're ever hearing this: revival starts in the living room.

Here's this quote from Charles Spurgeon, the Prince of Preachers from London in the late 1800s.

We deeply want a revival of domestic religion.

The Christian family was the bulwark of godliness in the days of the Puritans.

But in these evil times, hundreds of families of so-called Christians have no family worship and no wholesome instruction or discipline.

How can we hope to see the kingdom of our Lord advance when his own disciples do not teach his gospel to their own sons and daughters?

Church, let's let revival start in living rooms, among dinner tables, at the sides of our beds, and watch what the Lord will do through it.

Let's pray.