The National Center for Family Integrated Churches welcomes Jason Dome with the message, Church Life That Prepares for Marriage. Revelation 2 and 3 are the letters to the churches. There are many stern rebukes in Revelations 2 and 3. One of the more encouraging letters is actually the letter to the church at Ephesus. They have many things to be commended for.
But the letter concludes this way in Revelation 2 verses 4 and 5 where Jesus, the bridegroom, walking among the lampstands says this to the church at Ephesus, nevertheless I have this against you that you have left your first love. Remember therefore from where you have fallen, repent and do the first works, or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent." This is used as a rebuke, and you've all heard sermons on it and how we ought to stir ourselves up to return to our first love, but really I want to use this passage today to paint a picture of where I think we all desire to be headed with our children. There's a young woman at the altar and she's a young woman who's learned the lesson that was just read out of Revelations 2. In other words, she's had this first love and the married people in the room can know very intimately what it's like to have the first love. It's all consuming.
And this is the stuff that the Great Commandment is made out of. That we would love the Lord with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength. And The first love is like that. And when you are born again, when you're transferred out of one kingdom into another kingdom, you remember what that's like to have the first love. How consuming it is, how you think about it all the time, how happy it makes you that you've been set free from your sins.
Well, this young woman at the altar, she's tasted of that. She has had the first love. But she's found out what Christians always find out through time, that there's a drift that happens in the heart. And we do need to stir ourselves up to the first love again, and we find ourselves needing again and again and again to be reminded to return to our first love. And that happens through exactly what Revelation 2 says.
It happens through repentance. And so not only has she tasted of a first love, a consuming passion for the Lord Jesus Christ, but she's also learned that it doesn't stop there, that the life of a Christian is a life of repentance and she's learned the lesson and she's learned the signs of the drift in the heart that would cause us to say our hearts are growing cold, we must repent, we must turn back and reclaim our first love and this woman looks like a bride look she's beautiful she looks like a million bucks But there are many witnesses in the congregation who though she looks like a million and bucks, they see her differently because they know her and actually she's adorned with good works, which is proper for women professing godliness. This is 1 Timothy 2 verses 9 through 10. And when they look at her, even though she's in this radiant wedding dress and she's gorgeous, they see the hidden person of the heart with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit as 1st Peter 3, 3 and 4 says. She's not alone at the altar.
There's a man at the altar. He's the one who's invited her there and he was really hoping she would come and be at the altar. And again God has been working in his life too. He has also tasted of the first love. His heart has also burned with Jesus Christ and he's been discipled and he also knows what it means to be a Christian.
That it's a life of ongoing repentance. And he also has learned the signs of drift and a heart growing cold and knows when he sees those signs in his life that he has to turn back to his first love. And there are two people who are both making progress in the great commandment. They don't consider themselves to have apprehended, But they're pressing forward. They're pressing forward to love the Lord their God with all their heart, with all their soul, and with all their strength.
And their being at the altar is a representation of two people being joined together who are firmly established in the gospel. And they understand that they're embarking on a great drama. And he's going to play the role of Jesus Christ. So he's been studying the role. He's been studying Jesus Christ.
And he knows when they're joined together in this marriage, that's going to be his role. And she's been studying her role too. She knows that the church ought to be so trustful, so submissive, so gentle and encouraging. And so they've both been studying their roles. And here's this young couple at the altar, and they're ready to take their place in the local church.
Not just to form a new home, but also to take their place in the church. And they know what that means. And they understand what the implications are of a marriage in the Great Commission. And that the Great Commission and the gospel and marriage are tangled up in a way that you can never pull them apart from each other. So they know when they get married that that means something relative to the gospel.
That the gospel is the image that they're to put on display. And they know that marriage is tangled up in the Great Commission, that actually men and women are joined together for the advancement of the Kingdom of God in the world, and that the local church is a key part of that. So they're ready to take their place in the local church. They're not just in love with each other and just want to spend the rest of their life together, but they know that that has an implication for the kingdom of God. And that a man and a woman ought to be joined together to pull on the same rope in the same direction to advance the Kingdom of God because they have a first love because they want to serve and honor Jesus Christ.
It's a beautiful picture. It really is. And we can agree that that's the target. So the rest of our time will be spent talking about how that we can live together in the local church in a way that brings us to this moment. Because this moment doesn't happen by chance.
This bride doesn't arrive in that condition. She doesn't come to the altar in that condition just by chance. Neither does the groom. But it is the result. It's an outpouring.
It's a fruit of intentional living together in the local church that would bring this young man and this woman to the altar there in that state so that they're not learning the things about marriage that so many of us have learned in the second or third decades of our marriages. But they're at the altar with those things that we wish that we knew then. There are three parties to consider. Obviously, it starts with the young people who are considering marriage themselves. They're very central to what we'll be talking about.
It also includes their parents. Parents are vital to all this, and it includes the local church. And I have thoughts to share in each of these three different categories. But the acknowledgment is they all have to work together in the same direction to deliver this result, this picture of this young man and this young woman coming to the altar in this condition. I'm not here to recommend a radical makeover of church life, which is a good thing because I don't think we could accomplish that today anyway.
But the reason that I'm not recommending a radical makeover of church life is I don't think it's necessary. I think we can get those two to the altar in that condition without a radical makeover because I think that the means of grace that God has given us, if we're intentional about how we use the means of grace that are already in place, will be effective. So I don't think we need a separate program that ought to be adopted. I think every local church has these means of grace. And we need to just consider intentionally, proactively, how we put those means of grace into use so that there would be two mature believers who are there at the altar ready to enter life together.
There are three elements that I want to talk about. The first element is teaching. The second element is relationships and the third element is patterns. All this related to the local church. Teaching in the local church, relationships in the local church, patterns in the local church with respect to teaching.
The flagship tax for teaching in the local church has to be 2 Timothy 3 and 4. In 2 Timothy 3 we know that all Scripture has been given by inspiration of God. It is God-breathed. It is direct revelation from God himself to his people. And the purposes of this is so that we would be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
And then the result of that is an exhortation from Paul to Timothy to preach the word in season and out of season. And Paul says that this is the antidote for false teaching. So there's either a man or there's a rotation of men who are pouring out the best of their time and labors in this category already. They're spending an amazing amount of time in making themselves ready to preach the Word of God accurately in the local church. This is already happening.
We don't need to add this to the local church. So the exhortation here is to squeeze the last drop out of the investments that are already being made. And I want to observe this, that most of us are far too casual and far too easily satisfied with the preaching of the Word of God in the local church. Probably a man is given 15 to 20 hours to consider how to accurately handle this, the text before him, to the local church. And few, if any, do any advance work to make themselves ready or any work after the sermon to make sure that it sinks in.
And much is lost. When Jesus was asked a teacher, which is the great commandment, he says the great commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and the second is like it to love your neighbor and yourself. And then he says something astonishing. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. In other words, they're the framework for everything else, really, that is taught in the Bible.
And Paul affirms this. Love is the fulfillment of the law. The law is about love. And so we think about marriage and we think about loving properly. Any text in the Bible in that way can be tagged to marriage, where we say, Love isn't something that is nebulous.
It's not a concept that's hard to get your arms around. Actually, the whole Bible teaches us how we ought to love. It's either teaching us how we ought to love God, or it's teaching us how we ought to love our neighbor. So when we look at the beautiful text of 1 Corinthians 13 and what love looks like, the Bible's teaching us how to do those things. The law of God is teaching us how to love our neighbor and how to love our God.
And so in a sense, when we go to church and we hear a sermon on the Bible, we're hearing a marriage text. We're hearing a love text because on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. And when we think about the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and on. This is not pixie dust distributed on the church. This is not a sprinkling.
They're actually, it's fruit. It starts at a root and there's an outgrowth that's beautiful. And it isn't always this, but most of the time it is this. It is The Word of God preached or read and understood and meditated upon and activated by the Spirit of God. That's why it's the fruit of the Spirit.
But it's all things consistent with the Word of God. And so when we think the fruit of the Spirit is something mystical, no. No, God has given means for the fruit of the Spirit to be produced and often it's the Word of God activated by the Spirit. And so when we're seeing a picture of this young woman and this young man at the altar delivered there so beautifully, so ready for marriage. We should see a young man and a young woman who have been trained not over a week or a month or a year or a decade, but over a couple of decades probably.
And they've been coming with an intensity to hear the word of God preached and not the normal casualness about the Word of God preached. And not so easily satisfied, but really desiring to acquire what is being so earnestly imparted to them week by week. So all these other Bible texts, they really have nothing to do with the great truths about marriage. But here's the point. The main objective is not to produce two people who are experts on marriage and then marry them.
Now we do want the young woman and the young man to understand marriage and how it fits into God's design. Of course we want them to understand what the Bible says about marriage, But if our option is to produce two experts on marriage who know everything there is to know about marriage and then we join them together, or option B is to produce two mature Christians who actually are bearing the fruit of the Spirit, then we'll take option B every time. Of course they're not mutually exclusive and they should never be pitted against each other. Hopefully we're desiring both, right? But The main objective is to have disciples of Jesus Christ in our home who are growing and who really have tasted of the first love and who are really learning over time what it means and how important it is to know how to repent and turn back and stir up the heart again to a white hot passion for Jesus Christ.
These are the people we need at the altar, not the experts on marriage. So for young people, young people who are considering marriage, is it possible that you've been lazy about acquiring the things that your pastors are trying to impart to you on Sunday. In not properly preparing yourself, in not being diligent when you receive it, in not reviewing it and praying over it afterwards. Of course it's possible. You need no one else hovering over you to acquire more than you're acquiring now.
You need no one else. You can do it all by your lonesome, and you'll be blessed, and you'll be the chief beneficiary. Yes, there are things that your parents can do. Yes, there are things that your pastor can do, but they're not required for you to raise the level of benefit that you get from the sermons that are preached to you every week and maybe maybe twice a week depending on how your church is structured. Parents, can we do more to make our children ready to receive what the pastor or elder will say on Sunday morning.
Can we do more to make them linger on it longer to make sure they acquire it? Yes, and we ought to. Here's another thing in the category of teaching. We need to learn to connect the dots. In other words, the gospel is preached every Sunday in every sermon.
Some form of the gospel is preached. The gospel is about marriage. It's nice when the preacher would connect the dots for you and take you exactly from point A to point B, but again that's not completely necessary. You can connect the dots. The gospel is about Jesus Christ redeeming a people, the redemptive history, the depravity of man, the justice and mercy of God, and these things all have application to marriage.
And so when we hear a sermon that has a bearing on the gospel that teaches some facet of the gospel we can connect those dots because The man is to be Christ in the great drama of the gospel on a home. The woman is to be the church in the drama of the gospel in the home. And when we hear a sermon, we should be asking, how does the truth of the gospel that's just been taught to me, how does that relate to marriage? If Christ is doing this for the church, how does that mean I ought to be making myself ready to be a husband? If the church ought to obey and honor Christ in this way?
What's the application for me as a wife when I get married? And so that when the young man and the young woman are at the altar They know what it means when Christians marry. They know what it's intended to look like when Christians marry because they've been making applications all along. They've been thinking on the gospel. They've been stewing in the gospel.
They've been soaking in the gospel. And they've been seeing all the applications in life that the gospel had, and they've been asking themselves, how does this apply on the day when I get married? Whenever God would be pleased to do that, how does this apply? And they know that they're making themselves ready to be a picture, a picture to the world of a bridegroom and a bride. And so they've been studying their roles.
Every sermon, they're studying their role. And they know that when they're joined together, that they're joined together for the glory of God. Again, not in some nebulous way, but that they've been joined together as a ministry unit, as a new home and household that will be charged with advancing the kingdom of God. Marriage is wonderful for romance. It's wonderful for companionship.
It's wonderful in a hundred different categories, but it's not primarily for those things. It's so that the rule and reign of Jesus Christ, his fame would spread. And we want to be delivering sons and daughters who understand that early, so when they're at the altar, they're already thinking about how they might advance the kingdom of God together, how they might serve and honor the Lord together in their home. And it ought to be a very significant event when there's a new household in our churches. It ought to mean that a neighborhood that has been without a gospel witness has a gospel witness.
It ought to mean that there's more hospitality, more ministry, more kindness, more of all the blessings that the gospel brings in a place where it just wasn't last week, but they're married and now they're married and they're ready to be a blessing and a picture of the gospel. And so it's meaningful when we have marriages. It signals an advancing of the kingdom of God. We talked about teaching and the life of the church. What about relationships in the life of the church?
Relationships in the life of the church. Let's start with marriages and let's start with the marriages of the parents. We're a little off track here because we're going outside strictly the definition of the local church but it's so important that we should mention it here. The marriages of the parents represented when there's a wedding. This is a tale, a tale of two marriages.
The first marriage has two faces, a church face and a home face. And at church, everything's lovely. It's all smiles, but at home, There's lots of turmoil, lots of dissension. It really doesn't look like Christ and the church at all. And this isn't lost on the five-year-olds.
This is well understood by the five-year-olds. And so it's a marriage with a lot of hypocrisy in it. And it makes the children wonder whether they want to be married. And it makes the children wonder what can really be accomplished for the kingdom of God in marriage. There's another marriage where there's only one face and it's not a perfect face either at church or at home but it's a consistent face and it's filled with love and honoring Jesus Christ and a real genuine desire and attempt to mirror Jesus Christ in his church at home at the breakfast table on yard work day during moves.
Yeah, a lot of groaning on that one. That's the hardest when it's trying. It's hard to hold the gospel together during a move. My wife and I, neither one of us came out of perfect homes, but we came out of this, We came out of homes where the marriages only had one face. And we've reaped the benefits of that.
And we've said a thousand times, as we've observed, people who brought in the other kind of marriage, having witnessed the other kind of marriage into their own marriages and how hard it is, how much those other people have had to struggle and fight uphill and we've resolved together. We want to deliver young men and young women to the altar who have at least seen an authentic attempt to replicate the gospel in the home so that they won't enter their own marriages with all the baggage and take years to just sort out those things. Because we've seen that when you're launched into a marriage and if you do the things that you saw done, you'll be well. It will be well with you. That you're not having to swim upstream every minute just to not have tension in the home.
This is the blessing that our parents gave to us. We could do what we had seen done, and it would be well. And This is what we need to give to our children, because it will save our children years. It might save our children decades of lost time, of vanity. And it will launch them so that they can be a force for the kingdom of God, so that their love of Jesus Christ won't be find so many headwinds slowing them down.
Remember teaching is more than just what you say. You're communicating at the breakfast table. You're communicating in a hundred different ways and sometimes the nonverbal teaching is the teaching that gets remembered and gets replicated in the next generation. Jeff Pollard said this one time and I'll never forget it he said this men are you conducting yourself in your marriage in a way that makes your wife sorry she's a woman in The way that you relate to your wife doesn't make her sorry that she's feminine. What a reproach to the gospel.
Can you do this in your home and think you'll deliver a child to the altar who won't have such headwinds that they'll struggle with? Next, the marriages of pastors. In both 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, it's a qualification for church leadership that you be the husband of one wife, literally a one-woman man, faithful, monogamous. You have an exemplary marriage and that you manage your household well. And the point of this text is that church life is like family life.
So if you want to know who will make a good church leader, you go find people who are good family leaders. Because the job is going to be a job of people flourishing under your leadership. Made happier and holier by the way that you set the pace and by the things that you do and say. And so we must insist on this as we qualify our church leaders. This should be very near the top of the list.
Are the people under this man flourishing? Because If they're not flourishing, when we put them over the church, we'll find the same thing, only with a lot more people. What about the marriages of the rest of the members. We desire to see that this be so broad-based, that our marriages be so healthy across the length and breadth of the church, that our children only know one pattern. And so it's so much easier for them to go and just establish the pattern.
And that'd be a good thing. And so pastors ought to pay much attention to the marriages in the church because there's so much at stake. How about the extended family relationships? In other words, brothers and sisters in Christ. A lot of this has a lot to do with the young men and the young women that we deliver to the altars to be married.
In 1 Timothy 5, Paul addresses this with Timothy, and he says this in 1 Timothy 5, 1 and 2. Do not rebuke an older man, but exhort him as a father. Younger men as brothers. Older women as mothers. Younger women as sisters with all purity.
This is just one of the many New Testament texts that permeate the New Testament that just talk about the richness of family life that the blood of Jesus Christ actually creates a massive extended family for us. It gives us father after father after father and mother after mother after mother and brothers and sisters more than we can count. And what a blessing this is. The church is family. And so when Scott was speaking last night I thought he just hit the nail on the head he's saying how do we get our young people to relate together so that they're not on one hand withdrawn and isolated and on the other hand where they're flirtatious and they've rotated to, How do we find this middle ground where they can relate to each other?
And for me, this verse in 1 Timothy 5 has been a wonderful rule of thumb that I could compare my conduct against. And know whether I'm being too withdrawn and too isolated, or whether I'm being too flirtatious in these relationships across genders. Am I treating her like a sister? Would I speak this way with my sister? Would I relate this way with my sister in a healthy brother and sister relationship.
They're not all healthy. We should be engaging other brothers and sisters in the lives of our children early. We should be engaging other brothers and sisters in the lives of our children early. And we should be that for the other children in the church. Do we have a pattern in a local church where we're looking to exhort other people's children?
If not, why not? Are they not extended family? Does the blood of Christ not make this so? How many other children should you be a father in the faith do, a mother in the faith do? And this is for at least two different reasons.
The first is for discipleship. That they would have a multitude of fathers in the faith, a multitude of mothers in the faith who are exhorting them to godliness, who are observing things externally and commenting on them either saying I noticed this about you and it's exemplary. Go excel more still. Anyway, whatever Paul said. Excel still more, that's what it is.
Or, hey, I noticed this about you. Are you sure you should do that? Are you sure you should be relating with the other children in the church? Hey, when people do that to my children, it doesn't make me tense. I'm really happy about it.
Not only should we welcome this from others towards our children, but we should be free with it ourselves. Now, we're not talking about any kind of Hillary Clinton, it takes a village nonsense. This is not what we're talking about where you hand over your responsibility to somebody else. We're talking about family, brothers and sisters in Christ, taking an interest in each other's children and wanting to exhort them to love and good deeds, wanting to see them do well, see them make progress in the faith, that their progress would be evident to all. So the first reason is discipleship.
The second reason is it increases the connection between families so that when it comes time to marry, when they come into this window, that there's lots of different connections and it doesn't have to be so unnatural. This is the one of the things that I'm observing about our churches today is that it just seems like when we get into the courtship window that it's very unnatural. Why is that? I think one of the reasons is that we don't have the connections that have been formed over years, so there are lots of connections. So then, when there is an interest, all of a sudden it's an event.
Why is it an event? Why do we not have these connections one to another so that there's lots of interaction and it's not so strange? So that it starts the rumor mill when there's interaction. This is not right. And this is not predatory, looking for spouses.
This is not mercenary. You don't do it for the reason that you might find spouses. You do it because we're family and we ought to be developing those types of connections. And this is just a wonderful fruit of that. It's a wonderful outgrowth of relating together in the right way in the local church.
Lastly under this heading, engage your shepherds in the lives of your children early. Engage them. Make demands on them. They'll thank you for it. You say, no, my pastors are too busy.
I don't want to bother them. Your pastor knows he should be doing it. Your pastor wants to do it. But your pastor is getting tangled up in all these other things. And if a parent would come to him and say, my son is really struggling in this right now.
My daughter could really use an encouraging word on this topic right now. Would you take a few minutes to just exhort them in this category? They'd probably hug your neck on the spot because they've probably been feeling guilty that they haven't been doing enough of that. They've found themselves tangled up in all the life of the church, and now here is something specific that they can go do that is just good shepherding and they long to be good shepherds. Engage them.
Engage them. Now, it would be ideal if they would just do this proactively. But why can't you just ask them to exhort your children, to begin to engage with your children they would thank you ask me how I know we thank you thank you for asking that's my wife she's the plant on the first row she's I've got her teed up to do a couple more things before the end. There are a number of families that have done that in the last couple of months with me have come and said, we need this for this child. Are you willing?
No pastor worth his salt will ever say no to that. None. Ever. It's so encouraging to have See parents proactively doing that. You'll bless the socks off your pastor if you do that.
That tells him you're shepherding. You're not expecting him to shepherd your family, but you're proactively doing it. And at a point where you need his engagement, he knows you'll ask for it. And it'll be a blessing to him. Thirdly, so we talked about the teaching in the local church.
We talked about the relationships in the local church. And now we're speaking of the patterns in the life of the local church, patterns. We need to be cultivating in our homes a white hot love for the local church. Why? Because Jesus Christ has a white hot love for the local church.
Not sentimentality, not warm thoughts about the local church, but actual investment in the local church. And this will take the form of some sort of service. And this is how younger people get to know each other. Here's another observation about family integrated churches. We've stripped out all the programs that have no basis in Scripture.
Praise the Lord that we've done that, but something has been lost there as well. Have you noticed that? The programs are the way we used to connect with each other, And if you strip that out and there's nothing in its place. So I'm not advocating putting back in the program so we can connect. I'm just saying serving together is the way we do this.
Let's find ways to serve together in the local church so that these connections can be developed and strengthened and matured. We have a couple of, we have a couple of mature families in our church that I just can't keep up with them. I just can't keep up with them. They come and they just want a little bit of support and they're ready to run with it and they know how they want to serve in the church. They're not waiting around on me to ask.
They're seeing needs and they come to me and say have you seen this need, here's how I think we should go about it, you know, can can the church help fund it? And they've come to this through decades in the local church. What if we sent out new marrieds who already knew how to do that? Do we have to take 20 years to learn how to do this in a local church? To see needs and proactively not wait around for somebody to ask us but proactively engage it and do it ourselves?
We need to be cultivating a life in the local church where, one, our local churches are so engaged in the Great Commission, in advancing the kingdom of God that nobody has to explain to anybody in church what the value of this would be. Because it's obvious. Because we're gospel saturated and we have all of us pulling together, chomping at the bit to advance the Great Commission. And that'll create a thousand ways to serve, a thousand needs that people can proactively engage. But we need to deliver young men and young women to the altar who already loved the church because they saw their mom love the church and they saw their dad love the church, not in a sentimental way but in a lay down your life kind of way.
Are we living a life in front of the five-year-olds that teaches them that Jesus Christ values the church and that the church ought to honor Jesus Christ? Lastly, we ought to have patterns in the life of the local church that builds in protections for young people, protections. Now a lot of these are already in place. The pendulum has really swung. We kiss dating goodbye.
And how? In Philippians 5, 3, Paul says, But fornication and all uncleanness or covetousness, Let it not even be named among you as is fitting for the Saints. In other words, there's a life that's fitting for the Saints. And that life has not even a sniff of immorality, not even a hint of it. It's not even named among us because we're saints.
And so we ought to have patterns and protections built in that keep us away from these things. Here's a couple of categories. Modesty. Modesty. Modesty is not the pastor's category.
A pastor has a duty, of course, if immodesty is coming into the church to address it, but it begins at the personal level and at the family level, and we need to be careful that we're not unloving to the young men or the young women in the church by not putting the proper protections in place in the category of modesty. Jim Elliott, the missionary martyr comments in his journal that as he meditated on Jesus saying that lust was spiritual adultery and he says if that's true it must be that immodesty is spiritual seduction. If lust is spiritual adultery then immodesty is spiritual seduction. It's hard to get around that implication And it's unloving of us to let that run in the church without addressing it. How about this?
I've just called this category E-interactions. E-mail, E-whatever. E-interactions. Facebook, email, instant messaging, texting. Very easy for those things to start out innocent and migrate.
And if you don't know what's happening in that category, and as I've thought about this, I thought I need to go do some auditing in my own home. But it's we should know. We should know. Because this is how it progresses. It starts out innocent enough, and it goes from there.
And we have to know what's happening in that category. And as parents, we have to maintain the right to know what's happening in that category. And so these are things that are the responsibility of us all, not just the pastor's responsibility, not just the parents' responsibility, but all of our responsibility where we might actually have to go to brothers and say, have you considered this? Have you considered this? So that if there are relationships between young men and women in the church that are starting to cross over into another sphere, and it's not the time for pairing up that this is getting addressed quickly and action is being taken to make sure that these things are properly handled before they take on a life of their own in the local church.
Let it get up ahead of steam at your own peril. Have a charge for each of the three categories. First to young people who are considering marriage or will soon be considering marriage. If you settle for a normal, worldly, romantic vision of marriage, just the normal vision of marriage that 99.9% of Americans have, then by definition you forfeit this other vision of this young woman coming to the altar this way, this young man coming to the altar this way because it doesn't drop out of the sky. It requires of the sky.
It requires intentionality. It requires that you start now to make yourself ready. We don't want to send well-behaved people to the altar. We don't want to send homeschooled people to the altar. We want to send disciples of Jesus Christ who have had the first love with him and have felt it consuming them and have felt themselves not being able to think of anything else but the mercies of Jesus Christ and have been through some cycles of starting to go cold and learning what was required to repent and turn away from the world and turn back to Jesus Christ, who have been discipled by Him through the means that we're talking about, on their father's knee when they're really young, in their father's home, by their mothers, through the ministry of the local church, through brothers and sisters in Christ who exhorted them.
But the foundation of all that discipleship is knowing Jesus Christ. All of those other things without a young person that knows Jesus Christ doesn't deliver that person to the altar. So you might be in the most wonderful church that has the most effective means of grace, but if you've never had to first love yourself, you won't be that person at the altar. Young people, don't think that it is your parents responsibility to deliver you to the altar that way. Yes, they have a duty, but you're the one who will walk to the altar.
Begin to take ownership for loving Jesus Christ in your own heart, for pursuing Jesus Christ. Parents, ditto, no. Parents, go for the heart. Go for the heart. All these other things are important.
Addressing behavior is important. Of course, Of course we have to do that. We have to watch the things that are going on in our home like a hawk to do our duty before God but go for the heart. Heaven forbid that we should do all this and have missed pleading with our own children for their souls. Heaven forbid we should do all these things that touch on it and that are around it but never have pleaded with our children for their souls.
And finally pastors, the means of grace in the local church that God has given us, the things that you just find in Acts 2, those things will work. Those things will work if we trust them. We really give ourselves those means of grace, but it takes faithful shepherds who will preach and shepherd their hearts out, who will come Sunday morning ready to preach a gospel that is worthy of the gospel of the Bible and who will lay down their life for the people that God has entrusted to them. May it be that we'll deliver such daughters to the altar to marry young men. May it be that we'll deliver such sons to the altar, that will marry young women like this.
And they won't spend the first 15 years of their marriage figuring it out but they'll be ready to hit the ground running and expand the kingdom of God to be a ministry center in their first apartment wherever it is that they live first for the glory of God. Let's pray. Oh God, God you know our lack. God we are needy, we're a needy people, but we know that all that we lack can be supplied by your word and by your spirit. And so God, we come with hearts wanting to turn away from our own thoughts, our own patterns, and wanting to now be conformed into your thoughts and your patterns and to be helped in all these things.
And the hundred things that I didn't say that needed to have been said are in your word, God. And so we commit ourselves to it. We desire to come to it every day and to be under the authority of it and to desire to read and apply the thing that we read today. We know that you'll give us enough light to walk by so that your name will be glorified. Oh God, give us hearts that burn within us for you.
God cause us, cause us to consider our first love and to return to it with all haste. Oh God that our children might see us walking before their eyes consumed with love for Jesus Christ. That all the things that the law and the prophets hang on would be before our eyes, the love of God and the love of our neighbor. And that our five year olds would see it and desire it because your ways are pleasant ways and all your paths are peace Lord we thank you pray for your help in Jesus name for more messages articles and videos on the subject of conforming the church and and the National Center for Family Integrated Churches, where you