I want to be, you know, a voice to say, you know, wrap your whole life around a local church, particularly the preaching and the fellowship of a local church, wrap your whole life around it. That's what we did. I'm so glad we did. The great thing about being in a church is you have all these messed up weird people in a church. You need them in your life.

You need people who think differently than you do. You need them actually. It's how love grows. So, proposition number one, you know, go for it with the local church, prioritize it above everything else in your life, whatever else you can fit in, fit it in. That's my council, that's my generic council, I'll probably go to my grave saying things like that.

Now you, if you're going to bring your children to church, you need to teach them how to listen in church. You need to teach them how to engage normal church life, how to sit there in church. Now, we're advocating that churches should be age-integrated, and the preaching should be heard from the littlest to the oldest. You know, we made a movie about it called Divided. I wrote a book about it called A Weed in the Church, how a culture of age segregation is harming the church and messing up the next generation.

I wrote something that is designed to be fairly distinctive and clear in the form, I really wrote it in a confessional format, a declaration of the complementary roles of church and family life. You know, what are we talking about when we say that a church should be age-integrated or family-integrated or whatever you want to call it, it really is a function of being a biblically ordered church. So you can read about things like that or listen to it, but bring your children to hear the preaching. Bring your littlest children to hear the preaching. The Apostle Paul said in Romans 10 17, faith comes by hearing and hearing the word of Christ.

I hope your children spend hundreds of hours in church and while they are among the people of God, do everything you can to help them hear the word of God through the preaching because faith comes by hearing and you should be standing there assisting them. Jesus said take heed how you hear in Luke chapter 8 verse 18. You should help your children take heed how they hear when they're sitting with you in the Church of Jesus Christ. Well guess what their children They need help. Children need help to do everything.

And they need help to hear sermons. So, this is your job as a parent. Admonition. Don't be passive in teaching your children to hear the word of God in church. Don't just let your children wander on, saunter on in and mindlessly engage and have their minds going all over the place.

You need to help them focus. So that's my appeal. Have a strategy for what you will do before the preaching, during the preaching, and after the preaching, every time they hear preaching. Got that? Before, during, and after.

Well God gave preaching to the church. It's foolishness. It is foolish. What a dumb communication, you know, format. You know, we could do so many more interesting communication formats here, right?

I mean, but guess what? You get these dull men standing up here using words, that's the way God designed it. That's how God designed for you to grow. And it's actually, it's mind expanding, you know, on the one hand, you know, sermons are for mind expanding discipleship. And they are soul satisfying as well.

You know, for unbelieving children, they are mind expanding and they prepare them for faith. They're a necessary part of their child development. Don't deprive your children of sermons preached by real preachers. They need them. It's part of their, the expansion of their vocabulary.

It's part of introducing complex concepts. It stimulates their intellectual activity. They need the intellectual stimulation of preaching. The concentration that it requires, the grasps of words, the theological concepts, the scenarios that are life oriented. They need to see the word of God woven in all these kinds of things.

It's good for them, it matures them, it grows them up. This is why don't take your kids to kiddie church. No kiddie sermons. Children need real sermons from real preachers. That's what they need.

If you have kiddie sermons, and what I mean by kiddie sermons are things that are so dumbed down that nobody really learns anything, that they're just directed for the babies. Preach to souls. Now, when you're preaching, you're preaching to all ages. In the church that I pastor, I mean, there are newborn babies And they're hearing the sound of my voice. Some of, most, almost all of them heard the sound of my voice when they were in their mother's wombs sitting in church.

And then they come out into the world and there's that voice again. And maybe they'll hear that voice for a long time. They hear the voices, by the way. They respond in the womb. So don't think they don't respond outside the womb.

We talk to our babies in the womb when they're in the womb and we sing to our babies in the womb and we should do the same thing when they get out of the womb, okay? So parents need to capture the opportunity with vigor, improve their vocabulary, expand their grasp on the world the way that God created and the regular preaching of the Word of God is a very powerful tool to transform them. It's critical that we gather all the generations together and we dispense with these things that really are unbiblical. You know all you need to do is to look in the times of Moses, the times of Joshua, the times of Ezra, the times of Nehemiah, the times of Jesus, and the Apostle Paul, where people gathered together as whole families, all the generations together, hearing the word of God, together. If you want to Get the download on that, go get my book, A Weed in the Church, it's all there.

And I'll deal with every possible objection to the proposition, every one of them, OK, because I've been doing this a long time. I dealt with every one of them in this book, OK. OK. So what do you do? Here's some tips.

I'm gonna give you several tips. First, examine your own heart. Is it a joy to you? Like do you love the preaching? Do you love the voice of God in the church?

Do you love to hear the reading of the word of God? Are you on the edge of your seat for God? That's really, really important. Your joyful delight in the word of God is the first matter for having your children sit and listen to sermons. It's infectious.

You want to infect your children with how good it is to be under the teaching of the word of God. You want your children to be singing what David's saying. I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord. Teach your children to be glad. Give them every reason to be glad to come hear the preaching.

Here's the reality. In the worst sermon preached that has a Bible verse hooked to it, there's something you can get out of it. There's at least one thing you can get out of it. And it's your job to make sure they get that one good thing. Now you might say, oh I didn't agree with this, I didn't agree with that.

Don't focus on that. Focus on what was good. And teach them to glory in it. So examine your own heart. Is it a joy to you?

You know, Nehemiah said, we will not neglect the house of God. We will not neglect it. Number two, familiarize your family with the sermon text before the preaching. Now you may not be able to do this but try. Familiarize your children with the sermon text before they come and hear it.

All you have to do is ask the pastor what he's preaching on next week. Now maybe he doesn't know. Maybe he doesn't know until Friday. You know, God forbid! But that does happen.

Sometimes. It shouldn't happen very often in my view. A man needs to be soaking in the Word of God to deliver it, so that's why I said that. He needs to be pondering for his own heart and you need time to do that. I need time to do that.

Now, familiarize yourself with and your family with a sermon before it is preached. You know, if you're a pastor here, find ways to do that with your congregation. Tip the families off on what you're preaching on. Well, here's what we do in our church. We, I meet with the men of our church every Monday morning at 6 a.m.

And we have one man do a 15-minute exposition of that text that I'm preaching on the next Sunday. So it's Monday, I'm preaching on Sunday. And our goal is to walk through that text and these fathers they bring their boys, some of them are fairly young. We want those fathers and those young men to go back and review it with their families during the week. We want the husbands to teach their wives and the fathers to teach their children that text so that when they come into church they're already dialed in with the language.

They've already heard the story. And they've probably been inculcated in some of the hermeneutical problems and some of the questions and the issues that are in that text. So that when they hear me preach on it, I want them to already know it. And they're going to get it from me from the heart. So familiarize your family with the sermon text before the pastor preaches it and it's very important that you prepare your children if preparation is often the most helpful thing in acquisition of wisdom.

So prepare them beforehand. Number three, prepare your family to hear. Now, I worded that very carefully. Prepare them to hear a sermon. Now, you can Google how to listen to a sermon and you're going to find some pretty neat short articles come up.

Many of them are written by English Puritans by the way. And let me paraphrase George Whitfield's instructions for hearing sermons. This is a paraphrase. Come with a sincere desire to know your duty, pray before, pray during, and pray after the sermon. Listen to the sermon as if you are listening to a king as the Lord of Lords himself.

Why? Because ministers are sent from God. They are ambassadors who speak the words of God. Do not think poorly of the minister when you think of his weakness. Prepare your family to hear.

Number four, cast a vision for the importance of the moment. This is a moment, OK, in life. Here's what God has always done. He's always gathered his people together in groups. He's always created these moments and they are moments where he speaks.

When the church gathers it's a holy sacred moment. It's not a throwaway. It's critical that you impress on your children the importance of the moment. God has always gathered his people for these moments. Now it always bothers me a little bit when people come sauntering on into the church and they've got their big mug of coffee and they're just kind of casually cruising in.

Now, I don't think it's sinful to bring your coffee into the church, okay, just so you know that, but I don't want people just sauntering in. I want them prepared for a moment to hear from God, to sing, to pray, to be before God. That's what you're doing when you come before the Lord and in his gatherings. You know if you sense that your children are like those who in Nehemiah 9 29 they shrugged their shoulders, then help your children not shrug their shoulders when they come into the church. Children will naturally shrug their shoulders.

You need to help them not shrug their shoulders by giving them a sense of the importance of the moment. It's a moment appointed by Almighty God and He's always done it and He's going to keep doing it until you get to heaven and then that's what heaven is going to be like. Some moment praising God for all eternity beyond all expectations of happiness. Next, pray for the preacher before the church service. Give thanks for the preacher.

Give thanks for the preparation he's engaged in. Hey, preaching is hard labor. It's often torturous labor. You're fighting with the devil. You're fighting with your own stupidity.

You're fighting with your own unspirituality. You're fighting with your lack of understanding of history and doctrine, you're fighting all the time to try to bring out what's true and good. You're trying to understand eternal truths and it's hard labor, It really is hard labor. Pray for that man. Honest preachers labor with their whole heart and it tears them up, tears them up inside.

And when they walk into that pulpit, they may just look like normal to you, but they've been torn up by God. That's what happens. Next, help your family during the sermon. Get yourself ready to help them Receive with meekness the implanted word. Help them get ready to receive it with meekness in the frame of mind, you know, during that sermon.

You know Solomon says a child left to himself is a shame to his mother. Don't let your child just be left to himself in the sermons. Well, don't let your child be left to themselves Don't mismanage the time that you have this is a moment don't mismanage it and so Help them to be attentive now Because hearing the word of God is a matter of life and death. You know in helping them during you know help them deal with distractions. David Clarkson says that the wanderings, the rovings of the mind, the rovings of the will, the rovings of the affections, the senses, you know, caused by the cares of this world and everything going around distracts you from the preaching.

These are these natural distractions. Everybody is distracted by these things. And Clarkson says it's hard to hit the moving object of a distracted soul, right. In other words, the preacher is preaching, he's trying to hit souls. He's trying to appeal the souls and but that soul is distracted, it's hard to hit a distracted soul.

Hearing the word of God is a matter of life and death. You know, we also I think should relax in the different cognitive abilities of our children. You'll need to be attentive to the capacities of each child. Some children can only come away with one single word, one single concept. That's fine.

You know, people often complain, Well, in these family integrated churches, the children aren't getting everything out of the sermon. Well, guess what? Nobody gets everything out of the sermon. Everybody gets a little bit. And the more they mature, they get a little bit more and a little bit more.

So relax in their cognitive capabilities. You know, many years, when we first started our, the first family-graded church in Wake Forest, North Carolina, 19 years ago, there was a family that had a bunch of kids. And Deborah held the baby for two years just so that it would be a little easier. And so she held this baby and for two years. Well, a few years ago I bumped into this girl on her, on the driveway of her house.

And I said, hey, hey, what's the first thing that comes to mind when you think back at the times your Aunt Deborah, because she calls her Aunt Deborah, when your Aunt Deborah used to hold her, hold you? Without stopping, she said, oh, the thing that I remember the most is whenever the preacher said something she loved, whenever there was a prayer or a song that she loved, she would always say, amen. And then she said, and I do the same thing. Okay. This was a baby in arms.

Don't you miss what children can get out of being in the meetings of the church. But you have to help them, you know, relax in their knowledge and their capabilities and things like that. But there's a slow pile up of truth, that's how God created us. You know, unfortunately it's a slow pile up, it takes a long time, doesn't it? You know what, when I had young children I would do different things to help them listen.

I'm not going to go into all that but you do that whatever it is help your children to listen during the sermon. There are lots of different things you can do. You don't have to be a rocket creative to figure this out. You know, but if you want to talk about it, I'll talk about it more. I don't want to take time in this sermon.

You know, then discuss the sermon with your family after the sermon. The devil is always ready with his fiery darts to extinguish every good thing and do all you can to hinder him. There are many enemies that oppose and impede what was heard in a sermon. My advice is after the sermon that day sometime find a time to say, hey, what glorious thing happened today in that sermon? What was awesome?

Or maybe there are questions. But start with what's awesome. Don't start with what I disagreed with. You might get to that. But start with what's awesome.

You know, the Bible says that a wife, if she has a question, should ask her husband at home after the sermon. You know, wives should be asking their husbands questions. It engages husbands and wives in theological discussions. That's what God wants. God wants to raise the theological grasp of a husband and a wife.

And he does that through a wife who's asking questions. And any of you guys have wives that ask questions that are harder for you to get to answer really hard? Yikes! They're very intimidating, you know. If they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home, for it is shameful for a woman to speak in the church.

First Corinthians 14, 34 and 35. Paul wants husbands and wives to talk about the preaching. Talk about the preaching. Yeah, it's a really good, it's a good thing. You know, it's possible that one of the reasons we have so many men in the church that don't really understand their Bibles is they don't have wives that ask them good questions.

You know, some wives are smarter than their husbands. It might not be a stretch to think, to say that most wives are smarter than their husbands. Parents rise up, make the most out of the preaching. It doesn't start in the pew, it starts at home with you. Resist the devil so that your child is the one who hears the word of God and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and produces some a hundred fold, some 60, and some 30.

So, rate the attendance of your child and snap into action and figure out what you're going to do about it, okay. Now let's talk about teaching them to sing in church. Children need to be taught how to sing. Now, you know, Paul said to the Colossian Church, He taught the Colossian church how to sing. He was a singing instructor.

He said, let the word of Christ dwell richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. You need to teach your children to sing because the Bible teaches us how to sing. It's really important that you help your children participate in the singing. Don't let your children walk into church and mumble or sit there like stones. Quiet.

Teach them to sing. Help them to sing. Don't let them be quiet because the church is a singing family. And the church sings doctrine, the church, if you read what the Bible says about singing, I mean singing is really very diverse, it's very rich. You know I'm just going to summarize the doctrine of singing in the Bible.

We sing to teach one another God's truth. Like there's this wrong idea that when you sing you're singing to an audience of one you're in this own personal inner sanctum well the Bible doesn't let you do that the Bible says that you are teaching one another when you sing you are teaching God's truth you are you're not just singing to God you are singing to one another when you sing. We sing to admonish one another, that's in Colossians 3, 16. He uses the word neuthateo which means to admonish, warn, instruct. It's biblical counseling.

We're counseling one another when we sing. It's not just to an audience of one. It's to a big audience, maybe even including the heavenly hosts, you know. We do sing to God personally. That's very clear.

In Romans chapter 15, 9, it's clear that we sing to the unconverted among us. Paul says, I confess you among the Gentiles and sing into your name. There's always Gentiles, there's always unbelievers. Don't mumble the songs when unbelievers are in the church. Let it rip.

Show them how glorious God is. Sing out. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Jesus is so good to me. No, no, no, no, no.

Let it rip. God is so mighty. We also sing to our own souls. David said bless the Lord, oh my soul, that all that is within me bless his holy name. David is singing to his own soul.

So, teach your children to sing. Teach your children they have a responsibility to sing. Teach your children to sing in the voice the song is written in. Some of the songs are directly to God. Some of the songs are teaching one another and encouraging one another.

So help your children sing in the voice of the song. Now we've sung songs here that actually have been sung in different voices. Some have been directly to God. Some have been admonitions. You know, like when you sing a mighty fortress is our God, it's like we're all together saying, This is our God, all of us together.

It's our, this is our God. And there are other songs that are actually direct admonitions to one another. We're command, you know, you command your brothers and sisters out of their sorrows a lot of times in songs. So sing, sing, teach your children to sing. Now let's talk about speech.

Let's talk about dealing with words in your home. It's very important that we help our children to govern our tongues and to help your family to be uncompromising in the government of their speech that takes place in their home, in your home. Don't be surprised when you hear all manner of unkind and harsh and self-serving and proud and hurtful and lying and slanderous presumptuous speech in your home. God put you there to catch it and to teach your children not to talk that way. So, you know, in this whole matter of speech we often get desensitized to what our children are actually saying.

Now, this happened in our family many times. Our kids were young. There are times we realized we just left, let our children drift into dishonorable speech. Now, Here are a few things. Words are a reflection of the heart.

The mouth speaks what's in the heart. Now, you're, you know, you're not a clairvoyant, but you do know what words your children are using. And when they use words, it's directed to what's in their heart and you need to understand that. It's very, for a good tree does not bear bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit, for every tree is known by its fruit, for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. That's the way it is.

The heart always translates into words. Pay very close attention to the words and root out sinful communication. Don't fall into the trap that the only thing you need to deal with is their hearts. That's only part of the problem. You need to deal with their words and with their hearts.

The Bible says that the words of your mouth take you in a direction. They're like a rudder. And your words actually take you in a direction and they're driven by an unseen force. They're either driven by and set on fire by hell or they're driven by the Holy Spirit. That's it.

There are only two places that your children's words come from. You know, I'm in the process of writing a book. Right now I'm not done with it. It's called Rudder, the Unseen Power of the Tongue. It will come out probably in a couple of months.

There are also some books on the table that I've just put together. One is, I was very taken by Richard Baxter and his rules for governing the tongue. I just finished this two weeks ago. And I also produced and reprinted Jeremiah Burroughs on how to conquer a murmuring tongue. How to conquer a murmuring tongue.

Help your children conquer a murmuring tongue. Problem is they might have got the inclination from you, that's the problem. But teach your children to govern their tongues and teach them what the Bible says about the government of the tongue because what they say really is representative of what's happening in their heart. Speaking harshly. The Bible gives you various sins of the tongue.

I'm just going to click them off. Ask this question. Is this happening in your home? Speaking harshly. Second, speaking rashly.

Do you see a man hasty in his words? There's more hope for him than a fool. Lying, this includes all misrepresentations and twistings of the truth and half truths, all of them connected to Exodus 2016 you shall not bear false witness grumbling and complaining this includes all expressions of unthankfulness the apostle Paul said do all things without complaining and disputing idle words this includes unnecessary and unprofitable and incessant chattering. Speaking wrathfully, this includes all angry and hurtful speech. Impure speech, this includes all impure and coarse speech, Ephesians 5, 3 through 4.

Flattery, this includes all insincere, self-serving, manipulative speech. Tattling and gossip, this includes caring true or false, slanderous stories that should not be shared. But God calls us to a life giving tongue and with a life giving tongue you impart grace to the hearers Ephesians 4 29. You cover over the transgressions of others in your speech Proverbs 10 12. You speak words of wisdom, Psalm 37 30.

You speak for the health of the other person, Proverbs 12 18. You talk of the praises of the Lord, Psalm 35 28. You speak the truth in love, Proverbs 12, 19. You speak words of encouragement to the weary, Isaiah 50, verse 4. You speak with kindness, Proverbs 31, 26.

You speak to your neighbor, not about him, Matthew 18, 15. You stop evil in its tracks, Proverbs 26, 22, and you speak the word of God. Now, just a quick word about the way that husbands and wives speak to one another. There are obvious ways that husbands and wives speak wrongly to one another. My, in my experience with marriages, learning how to talk differently is one of the most important things.

People grow up and they don't learn how to talk. They don't learn how to have a conversation. They don't know how to disagree about something or communicate except with dishonorable and happy kind of speech. We all need to learn how to talk again. I'm still trying to learn how to talk right, okay.

And one of the most common problems in a family is when they get around the table and they speak evil of people. They think that because they're in their family they can say whatever they want. And husbands and wives fall into bed and they think they can say whatever they want to one another about somebody else. And they think that there's like this slander free zone where they can say whatever they want. And it's very harmful to a family to not have their tongues governed by the word of God.

Yes, your tongue should be governed by the commands of God even in the privacy of your own home. You know, Moses pointed out a devastating thing that happened among the children of Israel. He said, and you complained in your tents. You complained in your tents. You slandered your mother's son.

Okay. You know, God meted out severe judgment for the complaining of the children of Israel. It was severe. Don't think that any of us will escape that. So, learning how to speak is really, is really, really important.

Well, I think that I've probably run my time here. I'll stop now, but I've got another shot this afternoon on these matters. I want to continue to talk about practical matters of family life here in the last session, you're going to hear some very helpful messages coming up.