What I want to talk about now is blessing your children with good patterns in your marriage. Our marriages that we're living out in front of the children that God has given us and put in our homes is establishing a baseline for our children. So we should be considering what kind of baseline we're establishing. I'd like to begin by reading Psalm 12, verses one and two. Psalm 12, praise the Lord.

Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who delights greatly in his commandments. His descendants will be mighty on the earth. The generation of the upright will be blessed. And of course this applies more broadly than marriage, but of course it applies to marriage. Husbands and wives who fear the Lord and who delight in the commands of the Lord have children who are blessed by the Lord.

Or Psalm 112 isn't true, but it is true. And so I want to talk about your children's inheritance. What will your children inherit? It goes way beyond money. You might not have money to give them, but they still have an inheritance.

And you're handing it over to them long before you die. You're actually handing it over to them daily in a sense as you live together as husbands and wives together before them. Consider Deuteronomy chapter 6. We are to teach our children diligently to speak of the things of the Lord when we sit in our house, when we walk by the way, when we lie down, when we rise up. So it's not just an academic exercise.

Teaching the ways of the Lord isn't just a classroom activity, but it's walk-along, talk-along discipleship. Not just talk-along discipleship, but walk-along, talk-along discipleship, where we're modeling the things that we're teaching, and we're laying down patterns of life that our children are undoubtedly to a greater or lesser extent going to walk in and it's probably a greater extent rather than a lesser extent. The truth is this, the path of least resistance for us, for our children, for their children, and so forth, is doing what you saw. If you witness something for 20 years, the path of least resistance is to just do that thing which you witnessed over and over and over and over and over again. And the truth is you'll likely see a lot of your own marriage when your children get married and establish their own marriages, you'll be seeing things that look very familiar to you because there were the things that you had as established patterns in your own life.

So here's the question. If your children do what they are seeing, is that a blessing or a curse? If your children do, If they just walk in your footsteps, would that be a blessing to them? Or are they in big trouble if they walk in your footsteps? Now, Janet and I know all this is true by experience.

We have found over the years that a lot of the things that we do, or a lot like the things that we saw done, walked out in front of both of us. We actually grew up in very similar homes in many ways. And to the extent that we've walked in the footprints of our parents. Overwhelmingly, that's been a blessing. So one of the things I want to do is just to testify, this is possible.

We know it's possible to lay down good patterns and have children walk in the good patterns of their parents and have that be a tremendous blessing because Janet and I feel like we're sort of living that life and it's a sweet life in many ways especially when we know and have watched other people who come into marriage with all sorts of baggage because their parents walked out patterns in their lives that were unhealthy and it was the path of least resistance for them and to change those patterns in their own marriage has been just such a struggle and a heartache in many ways and we feel like hey we've been free from that so so largely. I would just give you two examples of that. One the general gentle gracious treatment that both Janet and I witnessed as our moms and dads related to each other in our homes over a period of multiple decades. It was overwhelmingly characterized by gentle, gracious treatment. I'm going to tell you the story of the worst fight I ever witnessed in my house.

So my mom and dad played bridge. Nobody plays bridge anymore, but a couple generations back, everybody played bridge. It's a card game. I was of the age that I went to bed, you know, was sent to bed long before the card game would be over. So when I woke up in the morning and we would always have breakfast together, there was serious tension at the breakfast table.

So I didn't know what had happened, but all I knew is that my dad was mad at my mom and my mom was mad at my dad, and they really couldn't hardly say words to each other. And that was so out of character for our home. And I went to elementary school convinced that there were major problems in the marriage and just with the thought, like, will the marriage survive this? Well, the truth is, by dinnertime, all of that had been resolved. I wasn't privy to any of that.

I don't know how they resolved it. I don't know what was said. They had been playing cards the night before and one of my parents, I don't know, played dumb, and the other parent commented on it, and it wasn't appreciated, and tension lingered to breakfast. Okay, so, but to a little boy who'd grown up with such patterns of gracious, gentle treatment. I thought there were serious problems because I didn't have a real framework for serious problems.

Just let me tell you what a blessing that is for a little boy to think that there are serious problems when there's just tension over cards at the breakfast table because I didn't have a frame of reference from shouting at each other and things turning physical and things like that. That never would have occurred to me that something more serious would need to have happened, to have transpired to be an indication of serious problems. The second category, giving. Giving. So when Janet and I got married, I don't think we ever had a conversation about giving.

Why was that? Well our parents had always, both sets, her parents and my parents had both given generously and first out of their paycheck. In other words, when they got paid, they gave right away generously to the churches that we went to separate churches, but they gave generously and right away to the churches. So they gave first and they gave generously. And so tithing to us was not something that we wrestled over at all.

It was sort of handed to us. You ask marriage counselors what a couple's fight over. One of the things couples fight over is money. Well, we've never fought over especially that part of money because we just got it given on a silver platter to us and it's never really been something that we've had tension in our home about giving because honestly we watched it happen. I watched it happen for 20 years in my home.

She watched it happen for 20 years in her home. And so there was nothing, really nothing to discuss. When we got married, we just sort of fell into those patterns. And it wasn't a curse, baggage that we had to figure out how to go upstream to get away from to establish new patterns. We could just walk in their footsteps and it was a blessing to us.

I'm sure there are many more examples. Friends, I'll just end by saying this. This is a tremendous gift that can be given to your children. It's quite possible that your experiences don't match mine. And actually, if you did what you saw, that there are significant ways in which it would be a curse, and you cannot afford to do what you saw.

And so you're feeling like, oh, I'm one of those who has to swim upstream, and it's discouraging. Well, let me tell you this. You might not have received it from your parents, like Janet and I received it from our parents, but you can give it to your children. You can give it to your children. You can break the bad patterns that you saw, establish good healthy patterns, and then send your children into their marriage with the momentum of good patterns.

And they can actually, in those ways, take the path of least resistance, walk in your footsteps, find it to be a blessing, and then use their energy not to counteract things that they need to overcome, but they can spend it on pushing forth the boundaries of the kingdom of God in your home. Here's some good news. We always remember the most recent events most distinctly. Why is that good news? Well, because you might not have perfect patterns in front of your children.

You might have some patterns that, as I'm talking about this, you think in your mind, Ooh, if my children walked in my footsteps in this category, it would sort of be a curse and not a blessing. Well, the story's not over. They're going to remember most distinctly the things that were most recent, and so this is just an encouragement to all of us to identify those things that are not right in the patterns in our home and overturn them now so that our children don't have to swim upstream to try to overturn them later. God, I thank you for your word and I pray that we would walk in your word. We know that Psalm 112 is true and that those who fear you and delight in your commandment, their descendants are blessed.

We desire to see our children walk in our footsteps in ways in which we feared you and delighted in your commandments and have that be a blessing in their lives. Make it so God, please in Jesus' name, amen.