You probably got one of these, the declarations for the complementary roles of church and family. If you don't have one of those, there's one here. This is really kind of a technical description of how the church and the family relate together. It speaks of the centrality of the local church and its roles and the pivotal and fundamental role of the family. It's stated in kind of a confessional fashion but we have tried to state this with some level of precision so you'll find it there.

You know I want to use a term here in the next few minutes. It's an old term called domestic piety. It's a term that the Puritans used to use and they're talking about godliness in the home. Those of us who have a heart to restore domestic piety, to restore godliness in the home, to bring families to biblical order, you know, are in many ways, we're rebuilding the old waste places. We know that.

We've been doing that for a long time. In Isaiah 58 verse 12, this whole scene of the work of God's people coming together. They fast, they pray, they come together on the Lord's Day, and it's a day for delight, and they're actually proclaiming justice because they're bringing the people of God to recalibrate for what is true justice and righteousness. And he says, those from among you shall build the old waste places. You shall raise up the foundations of many generations.

You shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in. It's really an important work, and it's a work that we need to do now more than ever. And I know most of you have been doing this work for a long, long time. My brothers over here particularly have been laboring in this field, recognizing the collapse of biblical family life, really the disappearance of fatherhood, the disappearance of womanhood as a result of the feminist ideologies that have swept over the world. And, you know, God at the same time has called for very particular practices for family life.

And we must recover them. And they won't be recovered unless church leaders first recover them in their own homes and then begin to explain to the congregation how they might recover them. We're all in recovery. That's the problem, isn't it? And the Bible makes it very clear that fathers are directed to maintain an ardent focus of the communication of the gospel and the works of God in their homes.

And that's so critical. And, you know, bringing families to worship God in their homes and then families bringing their families to worship God among the family of God are the two primary ways that God has designed to disciple his people. The church and the family, they're complementary institutions, they're the fundamental foundational institutions, they are the particular institutions that God has ordained for the communication of the gospel and for the raising up of the next generation. These institutions are so important and you know for us who are giving our lives to the local churches, this is our work is to restore the broken down walls that we find in families. You think about the evangelistic impact of actually obeying the commands of God for fathers.

You know, a father daily, when he sits in his house, when he walks by the way, when he lies down, when he rises up, is communicating the great deeds of God. And he's filling up his home with the mighty sovereign hand of God and his design to save sinners, that he's rescuing a bride. And the fathers had the opportunity to do that every day of their lives. And they're actually commanded to do it every day of their lives. There's nothing more powerful than that in a person's life.

And that's what God has ordered for fathers to do, really, to every day in their families, to cry out and say, today if you hear his voice, you know, don't harden your hearts against the Lord. And so you have this picture of fatherhood and family life in the Bible where, you know, our father's delighting himself in the Lord and he's pouring it out on his children. This is so critical. Think about what the impact might be on children when their fathers do that every day. And they teach their children from Genesis to Revelation how good God is, how wonderful He is, how powerful, how true, how pure, just how sweet God is.

And that's really what God has commanded parents to do. And then, you know, elders or pastors are commanded to do the very same thing in their churches. So this little family that's been worshiping God now comes into a big family. Wow it's a big family. Everybody gets a lot of aunts and uncles and new grandmothers and grandfathers in the local church.

It's such a wonderful thing. So you have fathers doing their parts and you have pastors doing their parts by bringing these families into the fellowship where there's a diversity of gifts. You have the rich, the poor, the wise, the foolish, and your family needs that actually. Your family needs all the imperfect people in the church, all the weird people in the church. They need that for their socialization, if that's what you want to call it but God has so designed the church and the family to be an intensive powerful life-changing mechanism for children you know I was so thankful to hear such desire to pass on the greatness of God to the next generation.

That's really what's on my mind more than anything right now, passing the baton to the next generation. You know, these two institutions, when they work in harmony, they really fulfill that great messianic promise in Psalm 22 where The Psalm shows how God brings glory and salvation from one generation to the next. And here's what it, here's what, here's how it reads. A posterity shall serve him. It will be recounted of the Lord to the next generation.

They will come and declare his righteousness to a people who will be born that he has done this. This is the power of the gospel in a family. Where the gospel is preached, it's embraced and then the gospel is preached to those who would be born. It's such a remarkable, powerful thing that God has done. And so these institutions, the Church and the family, are designed to administer what theologians call the ordinary means of grace.

And this is very important that we understand what this is. The ordinary means of grace are composed of the things that God has commanded for the discipleship and care, the evangelization of His children. And my view is that the ordinary means of grace can be defined both broadly and narrowly. Very broadly, the ordinary means of grace are the things that God does to reveal himself to you. More narrowly it's related to the means of grace in the church to bring a sinner to salvation.

But on the one hand everything that God does in your life to bring him to bring you closer to himself is a means of grace and what happens in a family is one of those means of grace and I think you know probably most of us believe there's a particular tighter definition for the ordinary means of grace in a church but God has actually given commands and principles to help us understand how we impart ordinary means of grace in a family and they should be ordinary in our families. The problem is they have been so devastated through the pragmatism and the worldliness and you know and the entertainment bent of the church that they're lost now. And how do you get them back? We're all in the process of trying to get them back. And anybody that comes to your church is somewhere on this trail of recovering biblical order in their family.

So I'd like to walk through just some of the critical segments of scripture where you see this appear. Let's talk about domestic piety in the Pentateuch. You find in the Pentateuch that the worship of God actually began in families. The first pictures that we find about worship is family worship where Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel are worshiping God. And you see the same thing with Noah and his family, you see the same thing with Job and his family, you see the same thing with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, they worship God in families.

You know if you look at Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, you notice that they're setting up altars. Well, their families were around those altars. The worship of God began in families, and it ought really to continue in families as well. When you think about the way that the worship of God corporately was organized in the wilderness, you have the tabernacle, God commanded the establishment of the tabernacle. But a very strange thing happens.

God commands Moses to arrange the people around the tabernacle in a very particular way. There are certain families on the north, certain families on the south, certain families in the east and the west, and what are they to do? They are to serve the tabernacle. The families really have their eyes, have their focus on the tabernacle, the worship of God. And I think that's a type of the church where God brings his people together in local churches where you have families who are serving local churches.

You know you get to that great central text in Deuteronomy chapter 6 verses 1 through 9 where you find Moses commands the families of Israel that they would talk of the great deeds of God when they sit in their house, when they walk by the way, when they lie down and when they rise up. Brothers, this must be recovered in our families. And it's, you know, all of us have experienced, you know, drift in our own lives, in our own churches, but we've got to bring our families back. You just might think, you know, have the families in our church drifted from this pattern of when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise out. You know, Richard Baxter, it's reported that if you weren't catechizing your children, you'd be disciplined in that church because you weren't doing your biblical duty.

Now we've never done that in our church, but you know we really ought to be thinking that this is so pivotal. It's so pivotal for the life of our churches and you know this matter of teaching them diligently is really critical. We've outsourced education to the state, and we've outsourced it in some ways to churches, you know, unrighteously. The church is an educational organization for sure. But we've, in our society the way that it's developed, you know, education and spiritual life has been outsourced from the family.

It's gone. Economy is gone from the family. Everything that you see in the family, in the Word of God, has pretty much been pushed out of the family. And it really does need to be recovered. It's for our generation to recover.

And guess what? It's being recovered. It's being recovered all over the place. You know, there are about 500 churches that embrace these things in our network. There's so many more than that, though, that embrace these things.

But I praise God for those churches. Guess what? They're having a lot of babies, and at least they have, in the DNA of their thinking of their church that parents should lead their families in the word of God. They at least believe that. They at least have embraced it.

And many of them have taken down various programs that distract from that, from that particular family responsibility, in order to give families time to actually be families, how about that, so that they can worship God together, that there's a church schedule that actually allows it. Well, there are hundreds and hundreds of churches that have done that and I praise God for that. And they, you know, they're very unusual churches. And they are churches that are having babies. They are churches where expository preaching is taking place.

They're churches where fathers really believe it's their responsibility to teach their children. That is so important, we must recover that. And you find that all through the Pentateuch in Deuteronomy chapter 11, you find the same thing. You know, when you get to Genesis 18, you get a picture of the purpose of Abraham's life, and God reveals why he called Abraham. I'll read it to you, it's stunning.

For I have known him in order that he may command his children and his household after him that they may keep the way of the Lord to do righteousness and justice that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has spoken to him." So God's call to Abraham of course is to fulfill the Great Commission that all the families of the earth would be blessed that there would be disciples you know more than the stars in the sky and the sand in the seashore. And how is that? How does that work out? Well, he does it by commanding his children and he's commanding them to do righteousness and justice. Grab onto that word justice for a minute.

The new religion about today is justice. It's all injustice. It's reproductive justice. It's environmental justice. It's reparations.

It's economic justice. But it's all injustice. It's so important that we have fathers today who teach their children justice, and there's only one way to teach what is just, and it's from the word of God. And your children need to understand what justice looks like from Genesis to Revelation. If they don't, they will not know how to discern the works of the devil, and they'll be overcome by them.

We need a truly just society according to the word of God. God's word is justice. There's a new word, social justice, and it's not justice at all. But God appointed Abraham to teach justice to his children. And the word of God gives the whole spectrum of it.

And, you know, You go to Exodus chapter 12 and you have Moses commanding fathers to answer questions from their children on the Passover. The Passover was a family ordinance. It was a question and answer and a declaration of the power of God to deliver. You know the Exodus is the primary symbol of the power of the Gospel in the Old Testament where God delivers his people from an abusive Pharaoh and saves them and takes them into a promised land. And, you know, Moses commands the children of Israel to rehearse this over and over again.

You know, in Exodus chapter 13, fathers are commanded to explain the sacrifices and the law of the first born. These are family ordinances. You have many places in the Old Testament where you've got family religion running. In Numbers chapter 30 you get a picture of what headship in the home looks like. There's much to say about that.

In Joshua 24 you have this father who says, as for me and my house we will serve the Lord. And this is, he's a courageous father for sure. He broke rank from all those who didn't want to follow the Lord. The first thing he does in that statement is he declared his headship over his household as for me and my house. He believed that his house was his responsibility and second he protected their unity and he said we will serve the Lord.

We will. We will be a unity. You know it's so hard to be a family in today's society. Everything wants to fragment the family. How do you have a unified family?

You have to have a father who says, we, we will serve the Lord, we will stay together. And thirdly, he devotes himself and his whole household to worship, We will serve the Lord. The word that he uses serve there is the word that really is used for the worship of God. It has to do with the particular ordinances of the worship of God. We will worship God.

That's what Joshua did and tragically that was lost as Scott so carefully pointed out by the time you get to the book of Judges. You get to the oldest book of the Bible, probably the oldest book of the Bible, Job. In Job chapter 1 you have a father, you know, praying for his children. He's visiting their houses and he's interceding for them. He's making sacrifices for them.

They're grown. They're, you know, they're already on their own. And right up until the last day of their life, he's visiting them and crying out to God for them and then they're killed. It's amazing. He cared for them until the very last day of their lives And then God gave Joe the new family.

It's amazing. It's such a remarkable story. But you have a father who is a real father. And he took care of his family. You know, when you get to the Psalms, you see domestic piety played out in many, many places.

Psalm 78, Psalm 127, Psalm 128, Psalm 145. You have particular places in the Psalms where it's very clear what families ought to be like and They ought to be places where the greatness of God is declared. And you see pictures of happy family life. Why? The fear of God.

That's why. Your family can't be happy if they don't fear God. But anyway, you see this in the Psalms. And, you know, Psalm 78 is probably the central, you know, Psalm in the entire, you know, corpus of the Psalms that really describes biblical family life. And there you have a picture who is declaring the deeds of God to the next generation.

And he's really, this father Asaph is standing as an example and he's saying here's what I'm doing. I'm declaring the great deeds of God. You get to the book of Proverbs. Here's what I'm trying to say. This is all over the Bible, okay?

You get to the book of Proverbs. What is Proverbs? It's a letter from a father to fathers to train their children. That's what that is. An entire book of the Bible is dedicated to child raising.

And using proverbs in the training of your children is really critical. And proverbs teaches so much about the gospel. It's not just about how to have a great life. The central matter in Proverbs is the fear of the Lord. That is salvation, by the way.

That is loving God with your heart. And Proverbs gives very specific instruction to fathers. You get to the book of Ecclesiastes and you find this admonition, enjoy your life with the wife whom God gave you in this hard life that he gave you. And what's he saying? He's saying, look, you can't control everything that's happening in the world, but you can enjoy what God gave you.

That's a summary of the book of Ecclesiastes. Bad things happen to everybody. What are you going to do about it? You can't do anything about it. Worship God.

Enjoy what God put in your hand. And you know, you get to the prophets, you know, in Jeremiah 10, you have the judgment of God against families that don't pray. How about that? Do we have praying families in our churches? You know, as pastors, we need to check with our families.

Are they praying families? Jeremiah says, pour out your fury on the Gentiles who do not know you and on the families who do not call on your name. It's a disaster when families don't pray. And the judgment of God actually falls on a family that doesn't pray. That's what he's saying.

And you get to the book of Malachi, the prophet prophesies of the coming of the Messiah and he ends his prophecy in really a remarkable way. He ends his prophecy prophesying that something will happen when the Messiah comes. And it has to do with families. Isn't that interesting? Now, there are many powers of the Gospel.

We know that. But for some reason, Malachi only identifies one of them. And when the gospel of Jesus Christ really comes, he will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their parents. And then he says, lest I strike the earth with a curse. So the Gospel comes and children honor their fathers and mothers and their fathers and their mothers love them and they bring them up in the training the admonition of the Lord.

You know that's that's the Old Testament alone. There's there There are so many guideposts for what I'm going to call domestic piety in the Old Testament. You know when you get to the New Testament, you know I think you get to probably the central text on family life is in the book of Ephesians, Ephesians 5 and 6, where you get these pictures of domestic life, of family life. And the apostle begins with wives and husbands and how they relate to each other. And then he turns to children and then he turns back to fathers and says in chapter 6, fathers, you know, don't exasperate your children.

Don't make them angry. And then he turns to the domestic economic life of the family, which is at that time was with servants and that type of thing. But this is the family code in the book of Ephesians. But what you find there really is a picture of the Gospel in a family. Ephesians 5 really starts out in verse 5 in verse 18, be filled with the Spirit.

The secret to family life is the filling of the Holy Spirit. Well that's what Moses said. He said you shall love the Lord with all your heart. He said these things shall be in your heart. That's what Moses said and you know the Apostle Paul is saying a very similar thing to the families in the New Testament era.

So there's much that we can speak about. You know people say there's really not much about family life in the New Testament. I don't know, well I disagree. I mean you know Lois and Eunice are teaching a young boy named Timothy in this book and they're teaching him the Word of God. That's what they're doing.

You know, the first miracle in the God, the first miracle of Jesus happens at a wedding. You know, the last scene in the Bible is a wedding. You know, there's much about family life. You know, You have a husband and wife, Priscilla and Aquila, who are serving the Lord together as a family. They even have a church in their house, and they risk their necks for the Apostle Paul.

This is like a really courageous husband and wife, and they're kind of a theological husband and wife. They're instructing Apollos to get it right. You know, there's a lot about family in the New Testament. You know, in Mark 9 you have a father crying out for his demonized son. You know, in Mark 5 You have a father grieving over his dead daughter.

In John 8 you have a woman caught in adultery. In John 4 you have a woman who had five husbands. I mean family life is all over the New Testament. You know one of my favorite stories in the book of Acts is in Acts 20 where you have this young man, you know, he's in the upper room, the Apostle Paul's preaching probably too long, he falls asleep and falls down and dies and God brings it back to life. We have low windows in the church here.

Yes, that's very important. In Acts 10 and in Acts 16, you've got the household of Cornelius and the Philippian jailer. You've got children being converted in households at the preaching of the gospel. And you know, this is interesting, you know, of the 12 apostles, six of them, they came from six families. There were a lot of relatives among the early disciples.

In 1 Timothy 2, 4 you have the older women teaching the younger women. In Mark 10 you have little children, they want to hear Jesus. In Matthew 21 you have children shouting, Hosanna, when Jesus walks into the city. In Acts 12 verse 13 you have children in prayer meetings. You know you have young men growing in favor and stature with God and man in Luke 2 52.

You know the very fascinating story is about Paul's nephew. We don't know how old he was but the word that's used actually he was a youngster. In Acts chapter 23 verses 16 and 17 he overhears a plot to kill Paul because these 40 assassins have entered into an oath to kill him and he hears about it in a crowd this little boy walking through a crowd whoa he heard the rumor and warned the Apostle Paul. We don't know what ever happened to those assassins. Where did they go?

Well, they said they weren't going to eat until they killed them. But, you know, I think maybe they might have passed on their proposition. You know, the Apostle's preaching is a gospel that is for children's children in Acts chapter 2. You have in Ephesians three prayers that invoke God's blessing on the coming generations. You have families that are torn asunder, divided by the gospel in Matthew chapter 10.

You know, you have two sisters grieving over their beloved brother in John 11. Well, I could go on. I have a really long list here of family life in the New Testament. But just to say, God speaks to matters of family life, not just in the Old Testament. It's a misnomer to think that God doesn't speak much about family life in the New Testament.

It's not true. And the Apostle Paul is the chief instructor on all these matters in Philippians and Colossians and all these other places. So There is this matter of domestic piety. It's critical that we recover in our times. And I pray for more and more churches that will recover.

It's so important, especially now. The times that we live in are so dangerous. And all the propositions of manhood and womanhood, all the propositions of family life are being destroyed before our eyes. My view is this. It's for God's people to create societies called churches, local churches, where the gospel is preserved, where family life is preserved, where the preaching of the gospel goes on every day in a family.

And you have a family that's a biblically ordered family and you have a biblically ordered church. To me, that's the most important work in the world, and I know that's what you're doing. And I pray God really prospers you in that work. You know, we live in a world right now where people don't think that there's anything in eternity. But the people who believe that there's something ahead they have children the people that don't don't have children we have children because we believe that God desires godly seed you know at this conference that we're gonna have here's what you're gonna hear me say I want to encourage especially young families to just to recognize how thrilling and how important it is to have a real Christian family.

I want to encourage the young families to go for it. I want them to go have a lot of babies, and I want them to preach the word of God to their children. I want them to wrap them around everything in the kingdom of God and settle them in local churches so that you have these two societies. Here's the reality. Most of the time, not all the time, but most of the time when you have a real Christian family where the true gospel is preached and there was love there, Most of the time those kids go to heaven.

I know not all the time but most of the time they do. And God did say very clearly, why marriage? Because I desire a godly seed. And so we have the joy of working with our, you know, we're working our fingers to the bone to see that happen. And so we'll talk a lot about this at the conference, but I just really appreciate what you guys are doing and I pray that God, God prospers your work.