The Home as a Little Church

So, as we get started, there's something that you have to understand about me.

I love Martin Luther.

So, one of the reasons, you know, Happy All Saints Day, so forth, I really love the Reformation.

And Martin Luther, the father of the Reformation, is a guy that I really like.

I've been to Wittenberg, I've toured his home, I've seen where he nailed the 95 feces, I've uh laid across his ossuary.

I didn't really do that, but um uh no soul sucking here.

But uh we did do all I went to be able to see that for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.

So I really like his writing style, I love his posture and attitude.

And another thing I really like is perusing half-price books to be able to find good little cheap deals on books to add to my library.

Well, one day I was walking through half-price books and I saw this small catechism book.

So this is important because part of understanding how to disciple family, one method for discipling your family, is through catechism.

This is something that the church has used uh for a very long time, and catechism is basically a system of questions and answers that are about the Bible or about God or about how we should live as Christians.

And they're very easy ways to understand faith and the faith that we call our own.

So this book is small catechism, and then on the spine it said Luther.

So I picked it out, pulled it out, looking at it, and I was like, oh man, this is Luther's small catechism.

This was a cool little find for me.

The thing, though, that struck me is when I pulled the book out and started looking at it, at the heading of the page, when I was opening up to see what this was about, it said this statement As the head of the family should teach them in a simple way to his household.

That was a profound statement for me.

Because when I looked at this first, I looked at it from a lens of a pastor.

This catechism book.

Now, I thought, man, I could use this in discipleship classes, I could use this in Sunday school, I could use this in all various different ways to be able to disciple people in the Christian faith.

But then when I read that heading at the top of the page, it struck me.

This book wasn't written for clergy, this wasn't written for uh professional Christians, uh, this was for the training and teaching of houses led by the head of the family.

You see, the responsibility was assumed upon the head of the home to teach to their own household.

You see, I've grown up in a church where family worship really was not practiced or preached.

Uh, we kind of come from the model, and I think this is a pretty normative reality where you come to church to learn about God.

You that's why we have Sunday school classes.

And midweek uh back in the day, we had Sunday morning, Sunday night, Thursday night, uh all church services, plus we had different classes and so forth.

We came to the church to learn about God.

You see, it's always been expected that you would just come here if you wanted to learn about faith.

And we would have the professional Christians teach you the faith that you say that we confess.

You see, like many of our personal and public lives, having a separation in the realm of faith, so the home has a separation of the faith of the parents and that of the rest of the family.

It's as if we believe the lie that our faith is something so private to such a degree that it remains even private from our own family, at least in function, if we're honest.

We've grown up in generations of homes where faith happened at the church and then life happened everywhere else.

And this has created a generation who do not know how to disciple their families or worse yet, have no conviction that it's their responsibility to do so.

We have compartmentalized our lives and we have outsourced our responsibilities.

We have to contend to capture, recapture the necessity of family discipleship.

We must instruct and equip to lead the charge, specifically men.

You see, biblically, men are the head of the house.

We have to strengthen them, encourage them, create conviction within them, and then equip them to be able to disciple their families.

Men are the functioning pastors of the home.

Now we realize that circumstances have created situations where there is no man to lead, or the man present won't lead.

In those cases, we pray for strong, spirit-filled women to lead in their absence.

We look at examples of this biblically.

We see Timothy's mother and grandmother, Eunice and Lois, who were uh brought forth before the entire congregation as a model of who discipled Timothy in the faith that was handed to him.

So we see this as a biblical truth in reality, something to support and uphold, because we understand this that the total labor of family discipleship is spread throughout the household, but the responsibility is not.

Men, it is not your wife's responsibility to disciple your children.

Should she help in the work?

Should she be a partner in gospel proclamation in your home?

Absolutely, but it is not her responsibility, it is yours.

As we will 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.

So when we look at the verb, four through nine, actually we look at the whole verse itself.

What this verse says in Deuteronomy 6, 4 through 9 is that to love God and teach others to do also is our greatest achievement.

To love God and to teach others to do also is our greatest achievement.

Here's what we're setting up in Deuteronomy.

Moses is giving these commands that he received from the Lord to the Israelites.

They're getting ready to actually head on over into the land of Canaan under the leadership of Joshua, because Moses is not permitted to go, and to take the land that was promised to them by the Lord.

And so before they prepare themselves to go and inhabit this land, God wants to establish a foundation.

How does he establish the foundation?

He establishes it through his commands.

This is how when you occupy this land, I expect you to live.

When you go and be a part of these people, this is how I expect you to live and worship me.

These commands that were established for Israel, so that they would understand how to occupy the land faithfully and in worship to God.

Let's look at Deuteronomy 6, 1 through 3, that kind of precedes this scripture we're looking at.

Now, this is the commandment, the statutes and the rules that the Lord your God commanded me, Moses, to teach you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over to possess it, that you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your son's son, by keeping all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you, all the days of your life, and that your days may be long.

Hear, therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them, that I may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly, as the Lord the God of your fathers has promised you, in a land flowing with milk and honey.

So you want you want longevity in life, you want prosperity in life, you want to be able to see the fullness of this land of which I'm giving to you, then here's what you have to do: you have to obey my commands.

I'm gonna tell you how to live to be able to have that happen.

Now, in this section of these commands, we discover the greatest commandment to love the Lord your God with all of your being.

This is the greatest commandment.

It's known throughout the scriptures, it's told by Jesus that this is the greatest commandment, and it is the summation of half of the law.

If we look at this story where Jesus was questioned, well, what is the greatest commandment?

He says, Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.

The fulfillment of these two commandments is the fulfillment of the entire law of Moses.

Just these two can be distilled down so simply for us.

Now, to love the Lord is a command we all embrace.

If you're a Christian, you're never going to really push back on the reality that you're commanded to love God with all of your being.

We all realize it's something for us to strive toward.

But what about the integral command that precedes it?

That one's often dismissed or overlooked.

He doesn't simply just say, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength, but he commands us to teach it diligently to our children.

God does not command us to simply strive for a personal affection for him, but to instruct others in our homes to be consumed with love for him also.

The responsibility to teach, to disciple, falls not on the priests, the clergy, the elders, the trained, the qualified, but it falls primarily on the home.

We are to bear the responsibility with all joy to instruct our families to love God.

You're a family known for loving something, whether you like it or not.

When people talk about your family, talk about you, you're known for loving something, right?

What is that?

Some of us are known for loving sports or the outdoors, Disney or Star Wars or Legos, whatever it is.

Oh man, that family loves blank.

Why is this the case?

Because we've labored in and instructed toward that love being cultivated in our home.

Whatever it is, we have put forth conscious effort for that love to be cultivated in the lives of our family.

What if we put the emphasis on cultivating a love for God in the hearts of our family?

We possibly don't do this because we fail ourselves to complete the first portion of this great command.

If we ourselves allow lesser loves to rob occupancy in our being, we will not shepherd our families to love God with all of theirs.

It's as simple as that.

Do you know why your children love what you love?

Because you love it so much.

You love it so much that you are training them, teaching them, and instructing them to love it too.

Why are we not putting that same emphasis on loving God?

Why are we not putting a greater emphasis on loving God?

It is possibly because we as parents fail to even fulfill the first part of the command.

If we're not consumed with a love for God that actually impacts and affects our entire being, what do you think that's going to translate to inside of our own home?

When we look at just verse 4 and 5, we see this: that our response to who God is is to love him with our entire being.

Our response to who God is is to love him with our entire being.

He says this Hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

So he's revealing himself.

What's the proper response to who he is?

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength.

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

This is not a complete or total revelation of who God is, but it is a foundational one.

Right?

This isn't the fullness of revelation of who God is, but it is a foundational one, foundation to his people, so that they can fulfill this very next part.

What?

To love him with all of his heart, with all of their heart, soul, and strength.

What he's doing here, when he's saying, Hero Israel, the Lord your God is one, is he setting himself apart.

He's simply declaring to Israel, there is no other.

I am the only God.

And it's not just the only God in existence, but I am the one that will love you with a covenant, unbreakable love.

There will be no other God who can ever satisfy you the way that I will.

There is no one who will love you the way that I will.

There is no other God.

Here, O Israel, the Lord your God is one.

There is no other.

No other God who is in covenant relationship with his people like Yahweh.

So in response to that revelation, we're commanded to love him with our entire being.

The wholeness and oneness of God is expected to be met with a response of the wholeness of his image-bearers.

You see, it may seem form for us to understand love in the context of a command.

For us, love should be more organic, right?

Something more fluid or something that comes more natural, free choice of placing our affections on someone or something.

However, God sees it as the only true response to who he is.

Now, this context of loving God within commands isn't foreign to God by any stretch of the imagination.

It's not foreign to his teaching.

If we look at what Jesus says in John 14, 15, he says that if you love me, what will be the proper response?

You'll keep my commandments.

And to actually love God is a commandment from him.

So it's not foreign to his expectation and teaching for his people, but it's also not foreign to his nature.

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

This is a relentless, unstopping, unfailing love that God has for us.

Approximately 250 times the term steadfast love is used in the scriptures.

In fact, in our call to worship, it closed out in the book of Isaiah, the steadfast love of the Lord.

This is used approximately 250 times throughout Scripture.

And what they're trying to communicate in this is that it means a love that never changes, never fails, is always promised, and always true.

The Bible doesn't talk about our great love for God.

The Bible constantly and continuously talks about God's steadfast love for us.

You see, God's not commanding his people to love him in ways that he himself would not love them.

In fact, God demonstrates time and time again that only his love fulfills its side of the bargain.

It is only God who loves us the way that he desires for us to love him.

Verse 6 through 7, we see that who God is and what he has commanded for us is our responsibility to hand down.

Who God is and what he has commanded of us is our responsibility to hand down.

The love of God has revealed that he will love us with the love he has called us to love him in response with.

And this is to be handed down to our children.

This is the heart of shepherding.

To point our family's affections toward the only one who will never fail them.

You see, we have this propensity as parents to try and cause our children to love us so much.

Me and my wife will play this game with Liam, our youngest son, our only son, but youngest child, and we'll say, Whose boy are you?

Right?

Basically, what we're saying is, who do you love more?

Do you love your mother more or do you love your father more?

And when he disappoints you by saying the other parent's name, right?

Mom or dad, usually it's mommy, pretty consistently.

Uh you you're you're like, but but wait a bit.

Uh don't you love me?

Don't you don't don't you love me?

And you're really saying, don't you love me more than mom?

Isn't that what you're supposed to do?

Uh we we do this all the time, right?

We vie for our children's affections to be placed on us.

But what's the problem?

We're going to fail them.

We are pathetic saviors, horrible gods, wicked idols that can't ever satisfy our children fully.

But God can.

God can, God does.

And this is the heart of shepherding.

Not pointing our family's affections toward ourselves, but focusing their affections to point toward the one who will never fail them.

This is an active, present, participatory effort.

We are the pastors in our homes.

We are the ones who have to bear the primary responsibility in discipling our families.

Think about it this way: your children are your children.

God has not put this joy-filled obligation on any other person than you.

Men, your wife is your wife.

There is no one else who is ever going to be able to take that place.

You have to see the joy-filled responsibility.

To not take primary responsibility and discipling your family to love God is in part to forsake the call to love him yourself.

Let me say that again.

To not take primary responsibility in discipling your family to love God is in part to forsake the call to love him for yourself.

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

When we look at the origin of the greatest command right here in Deuteronomy 6, these are inseparable realities.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength and teach these things diligently to your children.

That's an inseparable continuation of the very first great command of which he gives us.

If we cannot disciple our own families in loving him, then there is probably some dysfunction in our own love for him.

An absence to disciple your family and loving God is only speaking to the absence of love for God in yourself.

Listen to me, there's no higher goal, ambition, or pursuit than to foster a relentless love for God.

And we have to bear in joy the responsibility to see that that lives out in our families.

Verses 8 through 9, we see that to love God with our entire being should never be absent from our sight.

He says, to write it on your doorposts, to write it on the gates, it shall be like a front lip between your eyes.

We have to stop compartmentalizing our faith away from the rest of our life.

And I understand that the culture that we live in, some of us are terrified to do so.

If I bring up my faith at work, it could cost me my job.

If I bring up my faith in front of these friends, they might not ever hang out with me again.

If I bring up this, this, whatever, it's worth every single loss imaginable to stand for the gospel of Jesus and to teach others to love him in the ways that you do.

Our faith should drive and inform every single aspect of our lives.

There's not one part of our existence that the gospel of Jesus does not radically invade and fundamentally change.

When we look at our values at Sacred Mission Church, our very first value is Jesus first and foremost, because the gospel changes are the making Jesus the focus in every aspect of our lives.

Jesus first and foremost.

Because when Christ raised from the dead, it changed everything.

It changed your marriage, it changed your family, it changed your home, it changed your bank account, it changed your occupation, it changed the things that you enjoy, your hobbies, you name it.

There's not one thing in the existence of our uh uh life that has not been radically changed and impacted by the fact that the Tomb is empty.

And yet we want to live life as if that were true.

Like we can compartmentalize the two separate from one another.

That's a false, powerless, empty gospel.

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

As a household, we should seek to instruct loving God in our rising.

What's the first thing that happens when you wake up?

Is it just chaos because you're all sleeping in too long?

Because it's cold outside and you're warm under your blanket and you're just pushing for that next five minutes so that you can get just enough time to pack the lunches and get out the door and make it to wherever you have to, 30 seconds before you need to arrive?

Because that's what I do.

But what about just getting out of bed early with joy that you get to sit around the breakfast table and instruct your children and family in how to love God better today?

To make prayer a priority before you walk out the door?

What about around the table?

How many of us have tableless homes where we're not sitting down and eating dinner without electronics on, without TV on, without whatever going on, without electronics at the table, phones or tablets or whatever else, and we're just sitting there in relationship with one another, trying to cultivate a love for God in the hearts of our family members.

What about in our experiences?

How many gospel moments do we miss when we just allow experiences to go by us?

Things that happen in one another's lives, things that happen in the life of your children.

We're gonna unpack this more throughout this series.

So I'm kind of hitting high-level stuff, but I'm tempted to dive into some practical ways that we can do this.

But our children's experiences, our family's experiences should be shaped and informed by the gospel.

What my kids talk about hard things at life, uh hard parts of their day.

I've got to fight as a father to bring it back to the gospel.

And it's usually like some little girl made me cry in the playground.

Guess what, baby?

Jesus will never make you cry.

He's a friend better than that girl will ever be.

And he loves you.

And I love you.

Right?

These experiences to bring them to the gospel.

And what about our lying down?

Are we taking the time to put our family to bed with prayer, with reminder of who God is and how much he loves them?

The instruction to love God with our entire being should ever be before us, not absent from sight.

Now consider for yourself.

Consider what messages are constantly in view in your home.

Because whether you're conscious of it or not, you are portraying and communicating messages to your family.

They might not be active, they might not be intentional, but you have something ever before you.

Maybe these are some of the messages that we're sending to our children.

I'm not as important as my parents' social media feed.

I'll have to love sports to be able to have time with my dad.

My parents' work is why I'm in front of a screen all the time.

I'm the center of my mother's universe and her only reason for living.

Now, what messages do you want constantly in view in your home?

No one will ever love you like God does.

There's no greater ambition in life than to love God.

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

Dad and mom love God so much that it makes me want to love him too.

Those are the messages that we want in our home.

But if we're honest, if we take assessment of our own daily lives, we're communicating another message.

There's something constantly before us in our homes.

The question is, are we intentional about what the message is, or do we just allow reactionary circumstances to create a horrible message that doesn't work toward the end goal of fostering love for God in our families?

What we have to do is this.

We have to understand that our homes, our homes are to be a little church where we disciple one another to love God.

Our homes are to be a little church where we disciple one another to love God.

This fundamentally is our highest call.

This is our primary responsibility.

If there is no greater command in all of Scripture than to love God with all your heart, soul, and strength, then there is no greater responsibility than what exactly precedes it.

Then teach it diligently to your children.

You can't separate those two realities.

You can't try and pull them apart and make them stand on their own in separate places.

They are eternally, cosmically, and transcendently connected to one another.

Our lives should be centered around this endeavor, and all other aspects of life should work to support it.

Our job should work to support it.

The what we do extracurricular should work to support it.

Our education, the way that we understand our living in our homes and the rhythms of our family, all should work to support that endeavor.

Jonathan Edwards said that every Christian family ought to be, as it were, a little church.

Every Christian family.

Jonathan Edwards, the father of the great awakening.

He saw the importance of having your home function as a little church.

For far too long, we have seen and understood the local church as the primary place of worship and discipleship.

However, the command to teach our children to love the Lord precedes any sense of a formal temple or tabernacle.

When God commanded this of his people, it was known solely in the context of family, not in the context of a local assembly.

In the time of Moses and the patriarchs of our faith, to gather for worship was to fundamentally gather with your family.

That was fundamental to their understanding of faith.

When God said to worship him, it was to worship together with family.

It wasn't in this context of a local assembly or some type of congregation.

There was no separation of the two, worship and family.

And yet the faith, commands, instruction, and deep love for God was handed down from generation to generation.

Now, this is not to say that the home is a substitute or replacement for the local church.

It is not.

The home works in tandem with the church to see the Christian come to the maturity that Jesus has called them to.

Yet as I was submitted the primary work in toiling to see the love of God developed in us is in the home.

And we as men must understand our identities as pastors and shepherd the flock that God has given to us, our families, to love and obey Him.

You see, some of us, we believe that the church is primarily responsible for discipling our families.

We believe the church is primarily responsible for discipling our families.

We see the church as the center for worship and godly instruction.

We have resided in a culture that so compartmentalizes life that we placed our faith into a siloed compartment itself.

Much in the same way we do education.

We look to other spaces and other people to carry the work for us.

We don't see this area of life as something we're to lead or even simply have as part of our home.

Most of us would rather just leave it up to the professionals to do it for us.

But I would think that this fundamentally rests in the reality that we actually have a wrong perception about church in the first place.

Not just simply about where we do education of spirituality or where we worship God, but we actually have a wrong perception about the church even for ourselves.

We often see it much more as a training ground than a playing field.

We see the church as a training ground instead of a playing field.

Church should be the place where all of our work in loving and obeying God is seen, experienced, and celebrated.

Think about what the Bible calls us to as the church.

When we gather as a people, we are here to sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to one another.

We're here to build up one another in the faith of Christ.

We are here to work, speak words of affirmation and encouragement, to pray for one another, to declare healing over one another, to prophesy, to speak in tongues, to see the gifts of God celebrated within the congregation.

And you know how we view the church?

Not as a playing field, but as the training ground.

We come here where we try to learn, where we try to soak in and consume instead of a place where it's like I've put the work in from Monday through Saturday.

I was in the Word, I was praying, I was getting filled with the Spirit, I was exercising my gifts, I was worshiping with my family.

I'm ready to come to church to see others encouraged in the faith that I've built up in my time being with God, being with him amongst my family, so that they might strengthen their faith also.

That's what the church is supposed to be like.

To do what God has called us to do when we gather, we have to put work in before we show up for game day.

We have to change the way that we think and perceive spirituality and quit outsourcing our responsibility as men to other people.

Your child may have other pastors in their life, but they'll only have one father.

They may have other Sunday school teachers, but they only have one father.

They may have other worship leaders, but they will only have one father.

Take up the responsibility to shepherd your family with all gladness and lead them to love Jesus.

Some of us though, we believe our primary responsibility is success in this life for our families.

We believe our primary responsibility is success in this life for our families.

We fail to bring an eternal perspective into our families' vision.

We focus on the immediate and present that we often miss sight of the eternal.

If we really assessed our lives and where we're putting our time and our resources, we would see this to be true.

How much time do we spend at work?

How much time do we spend on education?

How much time do we spend on sports and performance arts?

How much on anything that isn't anything about loving God deeper today than we did yesterday?

Take an assessment.

Overwhelmingly, we put time and resources into the success of this life.

And we fail miserably to bring an eternal vision into the scope of our family, to love God.

Our homes so sadly reflect the culture.

According to Washington Post, less than 30% of college graduates actually use their degree.

Less than 30%.

Think about that.

We work so hard, spend so much time and money to earn it, and then find out it wasn't worth it.

Think about your kids.

How many of you are putting your kids in like training sessions of failed semi-pro athletes that we shipped over to America to teach a six-year-old how to kick a ball better?

And we're spending money and time to be able to do that.

What, so little Johnny can make it in a full ride to college?

Little Johnny probably ain't gonna make it.

Let's just be honest, here now, that's probably not gonna happen.

How much time and emphasis are we putting on education?

How much debt are we acquiring to put our children into education where only less than less than 30% actually use it?

I'm not saying college is a waste.

I'm saying if you don't have vision for where college is gonna take you, you don't have understanding for exactly what kind of education you need to get to the places that you have vision for, college is a waste.

We're raising a generation of children who are being told day by day to put all of your time and resources into something that won't matter.

Instead, we should be championing them, leading them to invest in God and in his kingdom.

Let's say your child grows up to be all that you could have ever dreamed or hoped for them, right?

If you're a parent, you've thought about this.

What you would love for your child to grow up to be, right?

All this ambition of, oh, he's so smart.

Oh, he walked when he was uh four weeks old.

It was amazing.

You should have seen it.

He was reading at three, it was um it was wonderful.

You should just see how smart he is, right?

This is what he's gonna grow up to be.

Let's say your child grows up to be all of that.

Two things.

When you thought about right now what your greatest ambition for your child was or is, is loving God first and foremost anywhere in that equation.

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

There's only one primary way to measure success in this life.

It is by knowing that your family will worship Jesus in the life to come.

That's it.

We have to be more concerned with the state of our children's souls than we are the state of their social or occupational success.

Whether person we are, one that sees the church as the primary place for discipleship, or we see that our primary responsibility is in the success of this life of our children, both often step back and ask, what's wrong with the world?

What is wrong with this generation?

What's wrong with society?

What's wrong with what's happening around us, right?

That's the question that we're all kind of asking right now, especially what, we're two days away from one of the biggest elections that our country will have ever faced?

And we look at every news report, what's going on with the world?

What's wrong?

And rarely in response to that question are we allowing the finger of accusation to point back at ourselves.

You see, we want things to change.

We want to see revival in America.

The primary problem is we are expecting someone else to do it for us rather than getting our own hands dirty in the work, much like the state of our own homes.

This is a lengthy quote from Charles Spurgeon.

He was a pastor in London in the 1800s, but I think it was relevant for us even today.

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?

You want to know what's wrong with our culture?

Family worship was forsaken and abandoned for generations upon generations.

That's what's wrong with our culture.

We expected someone else to do the work for us.

But the beauty of the gospel is that Jesus took primary responsibility to make a way for us to love God and teach others to do so also.

Jesus took primary responsibility to make a way for us to love God and teach others to do also.

The gospel itself is both a manifestation and a way maker to fulfill this great command that we have been looking at today.

God in his infinite grace and mercy determined to show us what steadfast love looked like in the person of his son Jesus.

Not simply reducing Jesus to an example of God's love and the way that he treated others, but to show that God himself would go to any extent imaginable to lavish his love on us, even if it was at the expense of his own son's life.

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

You want to see what it looks like to love someone with your whole being?

Then set your gaze to the crushed being of Jesus the Son.

He loves us with all of his heart.

Even to the point of it being pierced by the end of a spear.

There's nothing else God could do to show you that he loves you than to give his only son to obtain you.

So first and foremost, Jesus made a way for us to even love God.

Without the finished work of Christ, we would not desire to love him.

We would not have the ability to fulfill this commandment.

But Jesus made that way for us.

Without the work of the cross, we never even desire to fulfill it.

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

And when we are made alive by faith in his finished work, we finally desire to love God as he commanded us to.

And now we have to grow in the conviction to teach others to do so also.

So what do we got?

Three things of how we do this.

I'm gonna try and hurry this up.

One gathering means I get to preach longer, right?

I try not to do that.

Number one, what we have to do is we have to take responsibility.

Men, you need to take responsibility.

Be a man, stand up, understand your identity as a pastor in your home.

It is not gonna fall on someone else, it has to fall on you.

God gave you stronger shoulders and a stronger back to be able to bear a greater load than your wife.

Now stand up and take responsibility.

This fundamentally is the first step.

You have to see this as your responsibility.

You have to develop a strong conviction for it.

If we don't have conviction for family worship and discipling our families and loving God, then we're not gonna ever do this.

Because when we try to do this without conviction, we will get deflated so quickly.

It's like many of us who really don't want to be healthy.

We just want to fit into a better swimsuit in summertime.

So we start this diet at the beginning of winter and then we fail miserably.

We fizzle out and fade within just a matter of a few weeks.

Why?

Because we really don't have a conviction of being healthy.

If we have conviction that drives us, then what follows it will be so much easier and joy-filled.

To be successful in discipling your family, you need three things.

Number one, we just talked about this, you need conviction.

Conviction is a God initiated, biblically informed passion that fuels you.

A God initiated, biblically informed passion that fuels you.

You need conviction for family worship and family discipleship.

But not only do you need conviction.

You need culture.

Culture is shared beliefs and values that drive the behavior of a group.

Your home has a culture to it.

Your home has a culture that says whether TV is more important than conversation with your loved ones.

Your home has a culture within it where the way that you excel in academics or sports is more important than other things.

You have a culture in your home that when someone's hurting, you don't go and care for them or love for them in the way that they're supposed to.

I'm saying maybe these are cultures in your home.

I'm saying we have cultures, whether we intentionally develop them or we don't.

When we're mad at each other, we don't talk to one another.

That's a culture issue.

What we have to do is we have to be intentional about shaping a culture within our home.

These are shared beliefs and values that drive the behavior of a group.

If you have a culture for loving God's word and reading it daily, do you have a culture for prayer as a primary response to the effects of life?

Do you have a culture where you talk about the gospel constantly in your home?

Do you have a culture where when things of this world invade your home or these kind of modern events that we are experiencing today?

Do you shape that conversation around the hope of a savior or the hump of a candidate?

How does the culture in your home function?

So you need conviction, you need culture, you need constructs.

Number three, these are established rhythms to develop discipleship.

You need a plan.

What do you do?

Do you read the Bible in the morning with your children and your wife?

Do you pray before you leave the home?

Do you share your life at dinner time?

Do you have an evening or two of the week where you're doing a more formal family worship?

What does that look like?

You need to construct what kind of rhythms to develop discipleship in your home.

But take responsibility.

Number two, make your home a little church.

Make your home a little church.

This is where the culture and constructs start to take shape and form the people in your home.

Culture where gospel conversation becomes second nature.

A culture where prayer is our first response to life circumstances.

A culture where God's word is treasured.

A culture where we ask what Jesus says about things.

The constructs of prayer, family worship, devotion, teaching.

We have to work to make our homes a little church.

And that culture and construct is going to be the key players in being able to establish your homes in such a way.

We can't just have conviction alone.

We can't just say we're going to take responsibility.

When you take responsibility to do something, the best thing you can do is make a plan on how you're going to actually do it.

And then thirdly, we need to send out our children like arrows.

Send out children like arrows.

Look, I get asked quite a bit, aren't you?

I remember, I remember this, my um grandmother, God rest her soul, when we told her we were pregnant with Liam, her response was, Oh, baby, why would you bring another child into this world?

And I remember that, like thinking in the moment, I have to risk I have to respond to this somehow.

How do I do this well?

And I had to try and say, Well, our hope is in Jesus, our hope isn't in this world.

And I've had other people ask me that same question.

What do you think about bringing children into such a world that we find ourselves in?

Let me tell you something.

A full being, love for God, is a bulwark against any plot of darkness.

You know why I'm confident in bringing kids into this world?

Because I'm committed, convicted, building a culture and having the constructs to develop a love for God in their hearts that the darkness of this world doesn't even have a chance of coming against.

But let me tell you something.

If you don't take responsibility of that over your children, if you think that you're gonna outsource it to me or your mission group leader or the kids who have them for one hour and 20 minutes a week upstairs, if you are gonna outsource your responsibility to someone else, you should be terrified of putting your sending your children out into this culture.

If society, social media, their teachers, the public school system, their coaches and sports directors, whoever else is gonna take primary responsibility in shaping their worldview, and shaping their faith and convictions, and the way that they combat against this culture, or more importantly, they give in to this culture, you should be terrified to send your children out.

I'm not.

And it's not because I'm naive, it's not because I'm ignorant.

I understand the dangers of this culture, but I understand that I am leading them and taking responsibility to cultivate a love for one who destroys the culture underneath the crushing of his heel.

Remember, Christ sits on the throne and the earth is his footstool.

All enemies are defeated under him.

Church, you don't have to be scared of the culture.

Jesus said, I have the keys of the kingdom.

And the gates of hell can't even stand against them.

We're cowering behind our own false comforts and protections, worried about the world that we reside in today.

It's sad, it's pitiable.

We have to understand who we are in Christ, who He is as Lord of all creation.

Church, let us be men who love our Lord well, by loving our families well, and let us love our families well by caring for their souls, and let us care for their souls by leading our wives and children in worship.

Let's pray.