Well, I'd like to ramp up to what I want to get to here this morning by saying that there are a number of very encouraging winds of renewal blowing through the church right now. I'll just give you a couple of examples. First of all, there's a resurgence of biblical preaching a foot in our land. I'll just give you an example. When I moved to my community 20 years ago, you would have to look really hard, you'd have to drive a long way to find a church where the leaders were committed to the practice of expository preaching.
Not so now. Twenty years later, there must be twenty or thirty churches where the Word is preached in power. And I was talking with a friend of mine the other day and we were sitting over lunch and we were looking at each other and I thought, what is God doing? Why is He establishing these places where the Word of God is honored? Now that's happening all over the country.
There's also a resurgence of the awareness of the doctrine of the sufficiency of scripture, but I am seeing a resurgence of understanding and a desire to be faithful to the plain things of the scripture. What we're talking about here in this conference in Uniting Church and Family, to speak about the complementary relationship between church and home is one of those winds of Reformation that's blowing through the church today. It's not the only Reformation that's needed, it's not the only Reformation that's in motion, but we believe it absolutely is critical for the Reformation of the church. And it was interesting to me to hear that Don Hart's wife this morning received a very tender email toward him encouraging him in his work here today. The same thing happened to me.
I was talking to my wife on the phone and she said, she said, Scott, please, please know that we need this. And she was just encouraging me, you know, being so far away from home and not whining about it, but just saying, yes, this is a blessing, please, you know, this, give it all you have was kind of, kind of the message for me. So what I would like to do right here at the beginning of the conference is just sort of lay some groundwork regarding the elements of God's design for discipleship and how it expresses itself in family-integrated discipleship. And what I want to begin with and what we want to speak about through this entire conference is this critical element, and that's this, that God is a God of design and He doesn't throw anything away in any of His designs and He has said much about it, particularly regarding the complementary relationship of church and home. Well, everything declares the glory of God.
The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day pours forth speech. Night unto night reveals knowledge. God is using the heavens to declare His glory. He uses everything to declare His glory.
And it is also true of the church and the home. And I might add, every single aspect of home life is designed to declare the glory of God. God has designed both church and home to declare the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so, we have to understand that when we talk about the family, we're not. We really aren't just talking about the family.
We're talking about the expression of the glory of God in this earth from one generation to the next. We are not doing this so we can have nice families. We don't have nice families. We have sinful families. We fall short.
We have logs in our eyes. Every one of us. There are hundreds of logs in this room and there's a giant one right here up in this platform. We are people with logs in our eyes, full of sin, we fall short in every way. But this we have in the midst of our weakness.
This amazing proposition from God that He would use every human being who calls on His name, and even those who don't call on His name, to declare His glory. And so think about this way. Think about the fact that every relationship in family life is designed to declare the glory of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. For instance, God's design for husbands is to declare the glory of the Gospel. Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church.
A man's relationship with his wife is designed to declare the glory of Jesus Christ's love for His church. You cannot separate the communication of the gospel from the family. This is why I believe Satan desires to destroy the family, because every element of family life in the divine design is to communicate the beauty of everything regarding the gospel. How about God's design for wives? Well, God's design for wives is also to give a picture of the gospel.
Wives submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. It's the same thing as a husband. And that is that in a wife's trustful submission, she declares the glory of the gospel. And that is that God desires His church to be a trustful and submissive church following the head of the church. And every time a wife follows her husband, even in his imperfect leadership, She is declaring the beauty and the perfections of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.
God's design for children is to be a picture of the Gospel as well. Children obey your parents in the Lord. Well, what's that all about? It's the same thing that wives do. It's the same thing that husbands do.
Children when they obey their fathers and their mothers are declaring to the world that there is an Almighty God to obey, and He must be obeyed. Whenever a child disobeys a parent, we need to understand something. That child is not just disobeying the parent. That child is in direct disobedience to Almighty God. When there is disobedience in a home, it is cosmic rebellion against Almighty God.
You can't play patty cake with sin and rebellion and the rolling of the eyes and the dishonor to a father or mother because that child's life was designed to declare the glory of the gospel that there is a God to obey. And if the child cannot obey his father and his mother, There will be travail in that category later in life and it will not go well with them. God's design for families as a whole is for the same purpose, is to declare the glory of the gospel from one generation to the next. God has designed the family to be fruitful and to multiply so that the promise of Abraham, the great evangelistic promise of God's design will be fulfilled. That in you all the families of the earth might be blessed through godly seed, which would multiply as many as the stars are in the sky, as many as the sand on the seashore.
The purpose of the family is singular. There is only one overwhelming purpose of your family in mind and that is to declare the glory of the gospel from one generation to the next. He has brought husband and wife together to work together for and pray for, the pudding on the earth, mouths who will declare the glory of God. Thousands of them. Why the family?
Why marriage? Because God desires worshippers before His throne, from every tongue and tribe and nation for every generation and throughout eternity so the design of the family is all about the gospel and So it's no wonder that this divine pattern is so maligned and so ignored in so many places in our day. Now there is a pattern, there is design that God has delivered and It's our lot in life to say, and it is the goal of this conference to say, I have no other pattern but that which I learned from my Father in heaven. And I'll say that again, because I trust that this will be the heart of all we do here together. I have no other pattern but that which my Heavenly Father has delivered to me.
I love no other pattern than that which my Heavenly Father has delivered to me. I follow no other path than that which my Heavenly Father has delivered to me. This is so critical. I believe that in the balance of the revival of the church in America hangs the hearts of the families. I believe the health of the church is dependent upon it.
I believe the communication of the gospel hinges upon it. And that is why God designed the family the way He did. And that's why Richard Baxter said it like this as he spoke of the absolute critical nature of godly family life. He said, you're not likely to see any general reformation until you procure a family reformation. Some little religion there may be here and there, but while it is confined to single persons and is not promoted in families, It will not prosper nor promise much future increase." Well I believe that that's absolutely true.
So this morning I'd like to identify elements of God's design for the family and for the church and how they are meant to work together. I would like to lay some foundations and give some historical perspective and some biblical basis and then I want to give you 14 elements of God's design for the family. And so let's begin with the basis of this. The biblical basis is the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture. And the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture affirms the idea that Scripture is enough for any area of life, and that for all of life and godliness there really isn't anything else needed.
Because all scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work." And there is a way that we should conduct our family life. There is a way that is clearly communicated in Scripture that we should conduct our church life. And that's why the Apostle Paul said to Timothy, he said, I write to you that you may know how to conduct yourself in the house of God. There is a way that we should conduct ourselves and there are ways that we shouldn't conduct ourselves. And our proposition to ourselves and to the modern church is this, do we like our own way better?
Do we like the things that we've gotten used to over the years better than God was? We're shouting it from the housetops, yes, that's happened. That's happened to us in the church. And so when you play before the modern Christian, what God says about order in the church and in the home, particularly in the church, He says, He says, yes I understand that that's true, but can't we have both? Can't we have a little bit of our way and mix it with God's ways?
And the answer is absolutely not. That's syncretism. Syncretism is taking some of the world and some of the faith and mixing it together and having something that you like. But the syncretistic heart attitude of the American church is destroying it because it still wants to say, can't we still have both? And the answer again is absolutely not.
We cannot have both. We ought not to have both. And so the biblical basis for this is that everything must be grounded in Scripture and that we must take from Holy Scripture. There's a word in the New Testament and used in the Old Testament Septuagint. It's the word tupos, impression.
And it has to do with forming, it has to do with a pattern. And the term is used in a number of contexts, but 1 Timothy 1.13 says, hold fast to the pattern of sound words that you have heard from me, in faith and love, which are in Christ Jesus. Hold fast to the pattern. He said, brethren, join in following my example as you have us for a pattern. The apostle Paul and all of Holy Scripture gives us patterns.
He gives us a tupos, a type. The term actually comes from the practice of minting a coin. You start with a blank and you come down on the coin with the die and it makes an impression. It reforms that metal. Of course the dye has to be distinct and clear and it has to be harder than the medium, it has to be harder than the blank.
If the blank is harder than the die, then the impression won't be made. Or if it's brittle like glass, it'll just go everywhere. But this principle of pattern is what we advocate here. There is a pattern. Do you love the pattern?
Do you want to restore it in every area of your life? Of course, there are hundreds of areas of our lives that are out of the pattern. And this is what the discipleship process is about. Will the church ever get it perfectly? No.
Will you ever get it perfectly? No. But still the call is to hold fast to the pattern, to continue on year by year in sanctification, to seek the Lord that we would be impressed and formed by this pattern that God has given. And one of the problems that we face in the modern church today is that we don't love those patterns like we ought to love them. We like other things better.
We actually prefer them better. And so we have to recalibrate our affections toward these patterns of God. Now, This is just another way of saying that Christ has authority over His church. And He has that authority through the communication of the Word of God. Now, the doctrine of the deficiency of Scripture.
Why is this so important for us today? And I would just like to sum it up by this statement. It's important because we have something going on today, and I'm going to call it Creative Christianity. And my generation, the Baby Boomers, tends to value creativity over biblical substance. And so we created a number of movements in the church that have rolled through, some of them have come to maturity, and we're finding after 50 years of creative Christianity that we have a church today that is highly documented to be indistinguishable from the world.
And the pattern has been lost. The pattern isn't loved and in many ways it's not even known. And this practice of creative Christianity where we in the church think that we can just sort of make up the church and contextualize it wherever we go throughout our lives is a wrong idea. And we're here to proclaim that that is an idea that is destroying the church today. And many of our church Christian leaders today believe it's okay to create the church in the image of the culture, to do surveys and then create a church that appeals to people's affections for whatever.
And so we've become very good in American Christianity to create a brand of Christianity that's very successful and draws large crowds. And creative Christianity says, let's find the best way to engage the culture. It says, find a need and meet it. The only problem with that is it starts in the wrong place. It starts with man, and that's its fatal flaw.
It starts in the affections of the heart of man and it tends to appeal to it. But the question should be, what hath Scripture said? What does the Bible say about this? From Genesis to Revelation, what is the heartbeat of God toward this subject that we're dealing with? And that's the question that we must be asking, because there is a way that God desires for people to conduct themselves in His church.
It's not up for grabs. It's not up for our creative energies of the next creative leader that shows up in the church to reform it and recraft it into the image of some interesting paradigm that he made up out of his own head and happens to actually work. We have a statement in our confession at National Center for Family Integrated Churches confession for uniting church and family. We quote 1st Peter 1 and 1st Timothy 3 that everything for life and godliness should be formed as a result of responding to Scripture. And then we say that we should not treat his word as inadequate for church and family by supplementing his completed revelation with humanistic psychology, corporate business models, and modern marketing techniques.
And that, I trust, will be the message that we'll all really have a chance to think about in detail over this weekend. And what we're saying is that the activities and worship of the church should be shaped by the commands and the patterns of the Word of God and not the fruit of the inventions or the patterns of contemporary culture. That we ought to worship God in the way that He has commanded us to worship Him. And we should not be creating new methods, no matter how effective they might be. Effective in quotation marks, obviously.
So we believe that the explicit instructions given to the church should be regarded as authoritative guidelines for church life in all generations. Now, for our purposes here, Regarding this whole subject of church and home, education of children and how that integrates with church life, here's what we believe. The biblical testimony indicates that the education of children is primarily accomplished through fathers and qualified teachers in the church in an age-integrated setting in the meeting of the church. That's what we believe Scripture teaches. And when we get in discussions with people, they don't argue with us with Scripture.
They use other data points to argue the point, but it's important for us to keep our eyes on Holy Scripture. Now, one last thing before we before we jump into some of the meat of this. It's clear from Scripture that God would have us form ourselves after a pattern. And Paul said, if anyone is inclined to be contentious, We have no other practices, nor have the churches of God. There are particular practices that should rule and reign in the church for every generation, in every culture.
We should not waffle, we should not try to get out from under, but we should be like that malleable blank that is impressed by the pattern of Holy Scripture. Now I think it's so critical to get historical perspective on all of this. You know, comparing historical patterns to modern patterns is an exercise that the believers should engage in. Now, we need to understand a couple things. When Luther and Calvin preached, there were no nurseries in the churches.
When Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather preached, when George Whitefield preached, in the great open theaters, the children were there. And so I want to talk about some of my favorite Family Integrated Church pastors. Let's start with Richard Baxter. These pastors week after week preached, conducted their ministry in a Family Integrated setting. We're not proposing anything new here.
This is not a new model of the Church. It is the explicit and implicit model of church life from the beginning. So Richard Baxter, think of what a joy it must have been to be in Baxter's congregations. He says, all our teaching must be as plain and simple as possible. If you speak them as plainly as words can express them, as the easiest rules and grammar most plainly taught, will be understood by a child that is but learning his alphabet." He said that because he was preaching to children.
You know, it's interesting, in our church, we have a church of about 160 people, Hope Apple's Church in Wake Forest, North Carolina. We have over 100 children in that church and only about 10 of them are over age 15. So here's the deal. I'm preaching to eight year olds. That's what we do.
That's our expertise. We preach to eight year olds. What a blessing it is, honestly. And what a challenge it is as well. Well, so did Richard Baxter.
We're walking in his footsteps. Think of John Bunyan. How amazing it must have been to be in Bunyan's church and hearing him explain the gospel to whole families as he was there in England and anticipating the growth that happened as a result of that gathered body there. He said, you should also labor to draw them out to God's public worship if perhaps God may convert their souls. Of course, he was speaking of children.
Bring them in, bring the children to me. That was his message, that was his practice. We could speak of Matthew Henry, who said, little children should learn betimes to worship God. Their parents should instruct them in this worship and bring them to it. Put them upon engaging in it as well as they can and God will graciously accept them and teach them to do better.
Matthew Henry was a diamond and a tremendous example for all of us in the issue of church and home life. He engaged himself, as did his father Philip, in beautiful ministry in the home, which produced much of his work as a pastor and we will talk more about that later. You can think of Jonathan Edwards who said, I have seen happy effects of dealing plainly and thoroughly with children in the concerns of their souls. And when the fires of the Great Awakening were burning white hot and his church was just full to the brim, they would find places for everyone to meet and often He could fit a lot of children on the staircase of his church because he wanted them there. They were not out in the nurseries, they were not having kiddie sermons and having kiddie times because that wasn't something that they did And it's not something that we should be doing today either.
So what we're advocating here is nothing new. It's a practice of historic Christianity. It was practiced in the early church. It was practiced in centuries following. Some of the greatest heroes of the faith practiced it.
You know, I don't understand often why we receive so much heat on this issue. This is something that the great divines practice and that you see in the New Testament and you see it in the Old Testament. You don't see anything different in the New or the Old Testament either, but we're here in part to recover a biblical practice that we think needs to be recovered. Okay, so this design of God for the church and the home is explicit. And what I'd like to do is just try to frame the subject by giving us 14 elements of God's design for church and home.
Let me say, let no one pretend that this is the whole picture for church life. This has to do with God's design for church and home. There are many other aspects of the communication of the gospel, of discipleship, and all kinds of other things that we could talk about. So I don't want anybody to think that I believe this is all there is to church life. This is an element of church life that we're dealing with here that we're very passionate about.
So what is family integrated church life? And the first thing I'd like to say is family integrated church life is biblical orthodoxy and biblical ecclesiology, you know, implemented. The family is not the center of the Church. Jesus Christ is the head of the Church. The Word of God is the source of wisdom for the Church.
The work of the Spirit is the sanctifying element of the Church. So when we gather our churches together, we're not gathering our churches for the family. We are gathering our churches together for God Almighty, that all might worship at his feet, that everyone from the littlest child to the oldest would bow down before Almighty God and repent of their sins and to turn to Him in every way to evangelize, to be fearless members of the body of Christ. So the family integration is really just a piece to a puzzle. It's not the whole puzzle.
The reason that people become so obsessed about it is that because the family has been so obliterated in the modern church, if you do anything with families, it seems like you're turning it into an idol. When really, in actuality, the needle's only moved just a little bit. But because the culture is so degrading toward the family, because the devil hates the family so much and has worked so much of his philosophy into the church, that if there's any movement toward it, people come up in arms. Let's just be clear. Family integration is not the center of the church at all.
If you came to our church, you would find we preach the Word of God. We pray. We take communion. We baptize, we sing as we worship. People ask me, what are you doing in these churches?
And I say, well, honestly, it's not that much different than anything I've done my whole life except the children are there. A friend of mine explained it to me this way. He said, I think it's kind of like the transmission in a car. It's a piece of it. It's a part of the car.
It's not the whole car. It's a critical part of the car. It needs to be running quite well, thank you, but it's not the whole car. So a family integrated church is an orthodox church faithful to biblical theology and faithful to biblical practices. And it's not out doing its own thing with the family.
It isn't governed by the practices that are outlined in Holy Scripture. The second thing is that families worship together. Now, there's no indication from Scripture that children were ever removed from the meetings designed for preaching and Scripture reading and prayer and worship. In contrast, though, in our culture, it's comprehensive and systematic. Everywhere, the family is fragmented.
I was telling a story to one of the brothers here yesterday about my own experience as an elder in a church and how one time I went to an elders meeting and I made a graph and I wrote all the programs down that we were doing on the top of the graph and down the side I wrote down is it for equipping, is it for evangelism, and does it fragment the family? This was many years ago. And so, I was just taking notes, you know, putting X's in the boxes, because this graph had all these boxes. Well, every single thing we did fragmented the family in that church. And I said, brothers, you know, there are two things I want you to know.
I'm not going to support one more activity or program in this church that fragments the family. I'm not doing it anymore. And you see this chart? We need to take a couple of these X's off. We don't have to make every single thing family-integrated in this church, but we need to get rid of some of those.
And the contrast is important to note, that in the modern church, comprehensively, families are fragmented. In Scripture, they're not fragmented. What's the problem? The problem is with us. We're not mirroring, we're not patterning after, we're not walking into church after the commands of God.
We've set aside the commands of God for the sake of our tradition. We love our tradition more than we love what God says clearly. Jeremy Walker stated this case as succinctly as anyone. The constant presumption of Scripture is that children were present in the worship of the people of God. In Nehemiah's time, men and women and all those who could hear with understanding gathered to hear Ezra describe read the Law.
Moses certainly anticipated the literal children of Israel to be present when the Law was read in Deuteronomy 31. Paul's letters, intended to be read to the churches, assume the intelligent presence of children. And children were present when the Lord Jesus taught. Now, I know that's obvious to all of us, but what we're saying is that in family-integrated churches, the principle of families worshiping together in the context of the local church defines one element of a family integrated church life. So let's bring the children back into the meetings of the church and let's engage in instruction, in relationships, in teaching, in whatever we can do to encourage our brothers to return to this practice.
Number three, singles are incorporated into the full spectrum of church life. People often ask, what do you do with singles? Well The same thing you do with any brother or sister in Christ. You don't send them off into their own group. I had a fascinating lunch with a singles pastor of a large church last week And he came to me and he said, he said, I become disheartened with the results of my ministry.
And he said, here's what I've learned. When you put singles together, their maturity is stifled. And then he said, what I've learned after doing this for all these years is that when you put them together, they get more selfish, they get more self-absorbed, and they get unhappier the more they're together. So his question to me was, what do I do? And he says, what do you do?
He's asking me. We say, we don't do anything. We just treat everyone as a brother and sister. We put the old and the young together. We put the single, we put the solitary in families, we put the families with the solitary, we mix it up, and we spread out the wisdom, and the minds are challenged in both directions, from the old to the young, when we do that." He was amazed.
He knew that was the right answer, absolutely. I believe that there are probably many, many singles pastors all across this nation who are scratching their heads and thinking, what is wrong with this picture? I was a singles pastor once. I understand what happens. He's exactly right, but he's not just right about singles.
It happens to all of us. If you put a six-year-old with six-year-olds, that six-year-old will also not mature. If you put an 85-year-old, only with 85-year-olds, they just get more crotchety and mean and sick and obsessed about it. That's what happens to them. But if you put little children around them and also young people, you know, like in their 50s or something like that.
They love it. You know, they flourish. Life gets beautiful. And so, families worship together and singles are incorporated into the normal life of the church. They're not set off in some kind of a strange group that is off to themselves.
They are part of the body of Christ. You know, the principle of the unity of the body should be, it really should be enough for us to argue for this. Well, we have a lot more than that. But the body is to be unified. There's a fascinating book that was written by Mark Dever, who's a Baptist pastor in Washington DC, pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church.
He wrote a book called The Deliberate Church. He says in his book, as he's discussing the regulative principle and its application in the church that he believes that we should reconsider the whole idea of multiple services because it breaks up the unity of the body. He says the principle of unity fights against it, it argues against it. He also won't have soloists in his church because he believes that you just don't see soloists in in Scripture. But what do you see?
You see the whole church lifting up their voices to God together, not one person lifting up their voice to God and everybody. No, you don't see that. So we should think clearly about the patterns of Scripture. The principle of unity should be enough to make us family integrated, but it's not. So we have a lot of other data points in Scripture that lead us that way.
And it's the same with singles. The principle of the unity of the body of Christ should lead us to incorporate singles into the life of the church. Number four, fathers are equipped to be spiritual leaders in their homes. We need to acknowledge that the child-raising commands in scripture have been given almost exclusively to fathers. It wasn't until just recent times that the books about child-raising were written to women.
Before, at the turn of the 17th century, in the 1800s, And up to about 1850, the child raising books were directed to fathers, not anymore. Because a massive meltdown has occurred, a meltdown of masculinity has occurred in our culture, and androgyny and feminism has come, and every other distraction and materialism and self-fulfillment and pleasure and entertainment have just gripped men in our culture today. And it's destroying their legacy. It's making them men of nothing. It's making them men of flipping and entertainment.
And they don't produce very much. And they don't have any responsibility in their own minds for the next generation. And it's PMS, it's passive mail syndrome, has gripped the American man, and it's cutting off the church. It's destroying the next generation. On the contrary, though, God has called them to teach their children when they sit in their house, when they walk by the way, when they lie down, and when they rise up.
That is what a father should be doing with his time. And it's an all-consuming engagement that should steal him away from the other silly engagements that are out there. It should take him off his computer. It should take him off away from that television set and get him instructing his children in that manner that scripture supplies for us. We have a man in our church who says the fathers say they love God and if they're not teaching their children they may be fooling themselves.
He believes that if a father's not teaching his children it may be a sign that he's not converted. Of course Richard Baxter believed that too. If you were not catechizing your children when Richard Baxter showed up at your house, he would put you under church discipline. I don't know of any church that's done that in modern times, But maybe we ought to restore the practice. It might actually cause a little reformation in that church if it happened.
But Baxter believed it was so serious when a father didn't teach his children that he would bring him under formal judicial church discipline. I just think that's amazing. My how, my how we have drifted over the centuries. And at the same time, the church has usurped the role of the Father in teaching his children and taken it over and spread it out among people who have never been given that responsibility or that jurisdiction. It's a dangerous thing to move outside of the jurisdictions that God has established.
We're going to talk about that in detail later on here. You know, you look at the energy where the bulk of the human resource goes in our modern churches to direct all these programs, and very, very little energy is directed toward equipping of fathers for the work of the ministry that God has given them. And so men do not pray with their families, men do not teach their families, we are in serious trouble as a church as a result. But a family-integrated church engages the fathers, it returns his jurisdiction back to him. We will not do a father's work in our church.
He will do it or it won't get done. Most men, real Christian men, are terrified by that. And It's the terror that passes all understanding. They realize that you're not going to do it for them anymore, and if they don't do it, their children are going to be godless in their thinking. And so they power up.
They crank up the energy. They do it. Here's what I believe. Until you take it, until you pull the rug out, they won't do it. And so when people say to me, why can't we have both?
I say I've never seen both work ever and Number two, I don't believe you can have one until you take away the other No, that's just what I believe. It's my experience. You know, I I've been observing church life for a long time. I've never seen a church Where they had a Sunday school usurping the role of fathers Where you had fathers decide on their children never Have you ever seen one? I don't think...
No one has ever produced one. An example of that. Number five. Biblical roles and jurisdictions are in order. This is a critical issue for the church today.
The modern church member is not thinking clearly about the role of the church and the role of the home and the role of the government. And because of that, there's this tremendous, we just have a mess of church life as a result of it. And Many of the modern ministries that we have in the church are violations of biblical jurisdictions. And so we have to understand that issue. And as I said before, we will be pursuing that in some detail.
Number six, adolescence is regarded as a myth. You know, a hundred years ago, the concept of adolescence barely, barely existed. And it's a modern invention of industrialization and principles that began to flourish in the 1880s up into 1900. Before then, children walked beside their parents, they assumed adult responsibilities early, and now youth is extended for years and years and years, and we've created the terminology to explain this problem that we have going on in our culture. In Scripture, though, there really are only two ages.
There's the old and the young. That's all you see in Scripture, the old and the young. And The modern invention of age segregation has a very clear beginning in pagan philosophers. You can go back to the Greeks, you can go to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French Enlightenment thinker who believed that children should be removed from their parents. You could go to John Dewey and other educational philosophers who created the idea of age segregation.
The idea of age segregation is from the pit of hell. It doesn't belong in the church. We're not saying that your Sunday school is from the pit of hell. We're not saying that Sunday school teachers have terrible hellish motives. We're not saying that.
We're just saying that the philosophy, the structure is a structure from God hating people who desire to destroy the Gospel. And We just need to understand that and we should eliminate the practice among us. Not only is it clearly unbiblical, but it just doesn't work right. But this whole concept of adolescence has destroyed so much of the glory of God in the world. You know, we have to realize that David, before he killed the giant, was an accomplished musician.
He demonstrated responsibility and boldness and maturity, taking care of his father's flocks. And God has established responsibility and accomplishment for the young. And it's wrong for us to put them in shambles and keep them in this regimented pace that just does nothing more than hold them back. Children are far more capable than we allow. You know, there is a way that you ought to conduct yourself in the household of God.
And one of those ways has to do with the way that we treat adolescence and the years of childhood. The seventh element of family integrated church life, the seventh element of God's design for the church is that biblical youth ministry is implemented. Yes, the principle of youth ministry is found in the Bible. We know what modern youth ministry is, but biblical youth ministry is something totally different. And The propositions of modern youth ministry did not come from holy scripture.
And so we need to expose that, and we need to be clear that this age-segregating, parent-removing model of ministry is totally bankrupt. It's completely contrary to Scripture. And the fruit of the ministry is obvious. And the idea that six-year-olds should learn from six-year-olds and 14-year-olds should learn from 14-year-olds is absolute madness. And we should stand up and just say that until enough people really understand it.
And by the way, more and more people are understanding it. And it will take our boldness, it will take our faithfulness to continue to complain what is biblical youth ministry. And of course biblical youth ministry is conducted in households through the Ministry of Fathers and Mothers and through the preaching of the word in the local church. That's the biblical youth ministry. We shouldn't get distracted with the modern inventions.
Number eight, wives functioning according to their biblical, complementarian roles as helpers to their husbands and nurturers of the next generation. God has established distinct roles for male and female, and this is part of His design. This is why the wiping out of gender categories is so hellish. It's because when you take away manhood and womanhood, you've really destroyed the communication of the Gospel. Because a wife has a particular role in communicating the gospel to the world.
She submits to her husband as to the Lord. If you take away her womanhood, if you take away her distinction, You've destroyed the communication of the Gospel. The gender wars are some of the most important wars going on today. We should fight them with all of our hearts. The same thing with maleness.
God has invested in males particular responsibilities and roles. The husband is the head of the wife, the man is the head of the woman, and Christ is the head of the man. When you inject androgyny, when you make everyone submissive to everyone, you destroy the structure of the communication of the gospel. We need to understand that. This is a fierce battle that we must continue to wage on every front for femininity, for masculinity, to define it as Scripture defines it, to help our children understand the beauty of femininity and masculinity and the complementary ways that they function together.
Here's my daughter Claudia a few years ago in motherhood training. Here's what I believe about my daughters. Civilization hangs in the balance of what they do with their lives. The Bible has so much to say about femininity and the impact of a woman in this world. God is so high on women that He would ask men to lay down their lives like Christ did for the church, that He would have a presence in their lives of nourishing them, of cherishing them, of washing them with the water of the Word.
Why does God value women so much? His heart is as tender as can be. I believe one reason is that civilization hangs in the balance. Now my daughter Claudia, when this picture was taken, was telling me that she wanted to have 16 children just like Sarah Edwards and the wife of the Great Awakening creature, Jonathan Edwards. So we were sitting down one day with our calculator and if her children do this for five generations, there will be a million children.
At eight generations, four billion children. At ten generations, one trillion children. So go, Claudia, let's go! You know, now, Who knows how many children God will give this young lady? God will open and close her womb as He desires.
And she cannot control it and should not control it. But in view of this atmosphere of feminism that just pervades all the terrestrial space that we're walking in the midst of. We're just constantly breathing feminist air in this world. And in the midst of that culture, we should shout it from the house tops what a woman should be. Glorify it, picture it, encourage it, and bless it in every way that we can.
Civilization in many ways hangs on the balance of what a woman does with her life and with her time. And no wonder the devil wants a woman to throw her life away in a corporation that's going to end up wrapped up and thrown down the ash heaps someday. It's not the call of God for women. The call of God for women is to prepare a generation that would be succeeded by another generation, that there would be millions and millions of mouthpieces on the earth to declare the glory of God, to sing the praises of God, to declare His strength and His mighty acts which He has done, that one generation would praise another, that the children yet to be born would rise up and praise God in that next generation. That's one purpose of womanhood.
God has designed womanhood for the gospel. That's the singular design of everything in this world, including manhood and womanhood. And so it's so critical for us that our wives are functioning according to their roles and not disfiguring the roles that God has put before them. And then biblical requirements for church leaders are applied. And we, in a family-integrated church life, we're promoting the biblical doctrine of leadership in the church.
Of course, it's male leadership. If a man desires the office of elder, it's a good thing. And there are many qualifications for leaders of the church. And then, that family integration is a principle that guides the programs for equipping and evangelism. That we would encourage families to walk together in the midst of church life, and that the whole family would be there to experience the great things that God is doing.
There's a beautiful picture of this in Acts 21, entire, where the whole family comes out to pray for the Apostle Paul. And there they are together weeping together, the little ones and the fathers and mothers all together, caring for the ministry of the gospel, for the Apostle Paul. Church life should be family integrated and there should not be segregation and that we should be together because there is a way that we should conduct ourselves in the household of God. And then the household and hospitality are the centerpiece of community ministry And that the ministry is not primarily programmatic, but it's relational. How different is that from the modern church?
The modern church is much like herding cattle, much more like that than it is making disciples and having people know one another and love one another from the heart and bear one another's burdens. And then The fatherless are brought into the mainstream of church life and family life. You know, what do you do with youth without families? Well, the New Testament pattern makes that very clear. And He sets the solitary in families.
We need men like Job, who is a father of the fatherless and a defender of widows. Job is a tremendous study. Look at Job 29. Look at Job 31. You'll see patterns for this that help us to understand how we deal with those who do not have fathers.
And then multi-generational faithfulness is promoted. And that means that we're thinking beyond our own generation and that we are training up a new generation. There is a way that we should conduct ourselves in the household of God. It's not for us to make it up. Now I want to tell you that I am so full of hope for the things that are going on in this country regarding a returning to biblical order in the church and the home.
We've been doing it for a while and we're seeing fruit, brothers and sisters. I am so encouraged at the fruit that I'm seeing. I just don't know how to express it with enough passion, but let me just give you an illustration. Just from my own family. My daughter was married a little over a year ago, And I had the opportunity to walk her down the aisle, which was just one of the most wonderful experiences of my whole life as I was giving her away to be married to a young man.
A couple of months before the wedding, she brought me her vows. She said, Papa, what do you think about these vows? And I read them and I just, I was overwhelmed with emotion. Because her vows, her vows were a reflection of what was in scripture regarding marriage. She and her husband-to-be had gone through scripture and extracted the words from scripture that define marriage.
They wanted the words to define their marriage. And so, there they were. They had this wedding and these vows were given, which came directly, directly out of Scripture. It was just one of the happiest days of our families lives. You know, these vows to me were signs of hope for the next generation.
Because what we have in the next generation rising is a group of young people who really, they understand the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture. They want their family life, they want every part of life to be governed by Scripture. So there, my new son-in-law and my daughter were going to Scripture first, to Scripture alone to go make their wedding. And now, they've been married for a year and about three months. They have a little baby, little baby boy, and they're continuing on just desiring to look here first and to look here only to build their lives.
And that's why I am grimming with hope today. I want to stand before you and praise God. I want to lift my voice up to the mighty loving kindness of God because He is good. Every word that He has spoken is good. Everything that He has put here is a blessing and there is a rising generation that understands all of these things and I am just so I am so grateful for this.
I want to close with something that Alexander McLaren wrote because he speaks about the patterns of Scripture. Alexander McLaren was a pastor of the 19th century And he spoke very powerfully of this principle that we've been speaking of. Again, there is a pattern. There is design for the church and the home. And it is for us to love the design.
Here's MacLennan. When I stand at the judgment seat of Christ, and He shows me His plan for me, the plan of my life as it might have been, had He had His way, and I see, I see how I blocked him here, and I checked him there, and I would not yield my will. Shall I see grief in my Savior's eyes? Grief, though He loves me still? He'd have me rich, and I stand here poor, Stripped of all but his grace.
While my master runs like a hunted thing, Down the paths I can't retrace, Then my desolate heart will well nigh break with tears that I cannot shed. I'll cover my face with my empty hands and bow my uncrowned head. No, Lord of the years, they're gone. I yield them to Thy hand. Take me, make me, mold me to the pattern Thou hast planned." And then he pulls back and says this, the judgment seat is met for us professing Christians, real and imperfect Christians.
And it tells us that there are degrees in that future blessedness, proportioned to present faithfulness. And I trust that God will fill us with an understanding that the wrath of God is against all ungodliness and unrighteousness again. Even we believers, there will be judgment. It has been deflected to the Son, but there will be judgment for our lack of love in patterns and our caring in that it matters what we do in church and home and in last love with patterns and delight in the design. That's perfect.
Oh Lord, ah, how blind we are to the fact that we are in the world of the past, and And we must love the patterns and to love them as they are. Let's pray. Oh Lord, how blind we are, how needy we are for your wisdom and your grace. I pray that you would raise up a mighty generation and that you would include us in it. To love the patterns.
Okay, we have just a couple of minutes for questions. We'll give you a few moments for that, and then we'll take a break, and Kevin Swanson will be back. Any questions? I know a number of men who are who are doing that. It's a decades-long work.
They understand that And they know that if they're not careful, they'll lose their job rather quickly. So I have not personally seen an established church transform. But we haven't had very many years either. I have heard that there are some examples typically though that's not the Typically though that's not the case. I do believe that God can do anything and that a shepherd who's resolute and full of love could transform his church.
But I think that his numerical picture would also transform. Because those people joined that church for a reason. They like it. People go to churches because they like it and then when you change it they don't like it because that's what they signed up for. I don't know, are you guys aware of transformed churches?
Transformed churches. I had a man from I think Texas last year tell me that he saw church transformed but I'm not I'm not personally aware of it. You know, there is a transformation going on by degrees in a lot of churches in America on these subjects. There are small steps of progress that men are trying to accomplish. There's no question about it.
It's It's really amazing what is happening and how Attitudes are changing So I'm really encouraged by that. I was actually, I was invited this year to speak at a conference of family ministers. These are guys who are in super churches and they lead from the middle. And they invited me to come talk about family integration. At A lot of the points that I gave here I gave there.
And what I found out is there are a lot of people who agree with us on this issue. There really are. But Life can get hard if they actually apply it. I don't know if that helps. I pray that Rob will do that.
But church planting is much easier, obviously. Everybody is added, understands it, has covenanted with these practices, and so it's much easier to do that yes so the the movement called family integrated church movement surely has accusations against it what are the common accusations that are received and wherein is the truth from them and we have to be cautious about it because it seems that it's easy for everybody to misunderstand what God wants. Yeah, maybe one of the big accusations is you're making the family the center of the church. God forbid we would do that. You know, there are a number of...
A lot of the accusations come from not carefully reading or listening to what we say. So I think that makes it even more difficult. Let's see, what would be some of the, I mean there are a number of accusations that are made. You are promoting an abusive, male, hyper-patriarchal view of life. So, I just want to know how come our wives are smiling so much?
That's what I want to know. We're not promoting a hyper-patriarchal, domineering, subjugating view of headship at all. We're promoting the headship of the Lord Jesus Christ. He defines what headship is that we we take it in the neck on What people are if you use you call something hyper patriarchal then you can you know Then you don't then you don't have to deal with the facts. You can just put a label on it and you can walk away from somebody.
But if you interview our wives, they don't want anybody messing with their deal. I think the question is the accusation that we are being asked to elevate practices over biblical principles and theology. I'm thinking that the notion of integrating and defining the practices of a church in these ways which for example the 14 that you've outlined was absent the first one which I think deals with it is that okay the church is about the gospel of Jesus Christ which is centered in the truth and the Word of God and yet all of the focus within this so-called movement is about practices, how we practice what the families do what the churches do isn't there maybe I'm wrong maybe that's not a common thing I have heard that and I'm curious how you advise those who seek to embrace this to have a proper balance so that that doesn't become true. Well, biblical preaching keeps the church focused on the words of Scripture and of course, you know, I would say that the fierce dedication of biblical preaching is what the fear is what keeps any church on target but you know there are practices outlined in scripture that we must follow.
So the practices aren't the message, the practices promote the message. Like for instance, Let's take the qualifications for elders. This is a practice of church leadership selection that must be cared for. What's the purpose of that? The purpose is the glory of God.
What's the purpose of the Father teaching his children? It's the glory of God everything is for that so I don't I don't I think maybe you know when you're when you're trying to retrain when you're trying to equip the Saints you have to talk about practices because practices do bear fruit. I'm feeling like I'm not getting to your question very well. Do you guys have anything on that? In my experience that criticism seems to ignore the fact that God really does speak to practice and how we do things.
And His jurisdictional directions to us, He talks not about what should be done, which often the critics of our movement talk only about what God said ought to be done and then they ignore the fact that God not only said what should be done, but how it should be done. And not only did He say what should be done and how it should be done, but He said who should do many of these things. And I think that's precisely the reason that we see bad fruit in well-intentioned churches. They look at what God says should be done and they ignore how God says it should be done and they ignore who God says is to be doing what parts of His will that He has revealed. And God's program is like that.
He didn't say here's my will, accomplish it any way you see best. This willy-nilly, you know, any approach is fine. No, God said, worship me in a certain and precise way. Accomplish things certain and precise ways. A family is to be ordered a certain and precise way.
A church is to function a certain and a precise way. And when we have good intentions about accomplishing God's will, but then we substitute our methods for His, we have bad fruit. And so we have whole denominations talking about losing 9 out of 10 of their children. And their intentions are good. They want to accomplish God's will but they've decided that they know a better way.
They'll do it their way. And so then they accuse us of elevating the practices, which I think is just a false accusation. They don't listen to what we've said and how we say it and they don't examine that these practices come from scripture. And God is a God not just of the end result, but of the method that gets us there. Okay, we're going to have to just save your questions.
We can load them up here. But we need to take a seven minute break. Seven minute break and we'll be right back with Kevin Smolson.