The following message, relationships, what does a healthy church look like, was given by Kevin Swanson at the Regional Uniting Church and Family Conference in Wake Forest, North Carolina in 2008. Well, good morning. It's a delight to be here with you today. Yes, I am a little theatrical. I can remember my father is not theatrical at all.

In fact, my father was really actually boring. I can remember my dad giving us family worship time out on that island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for 18 years out of my life. Forty minutes a day. My dad was monotone. In fact, one time he lost a position as an elder in a church because he was too boring.

And he never really knew what to do with me. He always looked at me a little askew, wondering where I came from. But I love my father. I love my father. We're all different personality types.

And my father was a very consistent man that raised us in the fear and nurture of the Lord. And I would not be here today had it not been for my father. The faith, the courage, the decision to homeschool us in 1969, the desire to reform the church of Jesus Christ. My dad had a passion to see Reformation come about and it has to happen with the Church of Christ. Now I think for the first 35 years out of my life and the time my father spent with me, we were more focused on reforming the family than we were reforming the church.

Because you see, the family is the foundation block of the church itself. So if you're not reforming the family, you're not going to be reforming the church. That I think is one distinction between the Reformation of the 1500s and the Reformation we are looking at today. The problem with us today is that our families are in shambles, largely because of the institutional forces in education and economics that have stripped the family down in Western culture and disintegrated the family. But the church is what we're here to talk about today.

So let me piggyback on Scott Brown's illustration of the church. And really, it's Christ's illustration of the church being the bride and I want you to picture one more time the bride at the end of the aisle and Kelly at the end of the aisle and Peter standing up here waiting for his bride with all of that expectation in his eyes, the excitement, the joy, and yet at this moment a thug, a ruffian from the neighborhood, comes in and starts beating on the bride with a baseball bat, rips off her veil, pulls out her clothes, stumps on all of her clothes, and effectively violates the bride in front of everybody. How do you think Peter would feel about that at that moment? That would be the end of the Aruffian, I would say. Within two seconds, that man does not exist.

Actually, Jesus says in 1 Corinthians 3, if anybody, if anybody, destroys my church, I will come and I will destroy him. Brother Scott, Jesus loves His bride so much. And you know, the bride's looking a little shabby right now. And I hope there's passion in the hearts of the men here. The fathers, the elders, the pastors have gathered here, I hope there is a passion in your heart that reflects the passion of Jesus Christ.

You go salvage that bride. Amen, somebody? Amen, we're gonna salvage the bride. Absolutely, the bride is in trouble. And I will do everything in my ability with my energies and the abilities and the knowledge and the experience and the wisdom that God has given me to rebuild the bride of Jesus Christ in the 21st century.

The state of the church is in desperate desperate desperate conditions you understand especially in the West you have the church coming apart in Europe hardly exists anymore. Here in America, we are right now in the the most significant apostasy in the history of the world as far as I can tell. Israel apostatized, yes, but you're looking at 300 million people in this nation. Back in 1970, 70% of Americans claimed to be Christians. Now it's only 51%.

And you see a, what, 70, 80, 90% generational apostasy happening right now in churches in America. And we're talking about average ordinary everyday evangelical churches, more than that, Reformed churches, fundamentalist churches, churches we thought were good churches. I can remember 28 years ago my dad comes back stateside and here he has six children. He's been homeschooling on that island out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And he said, man, I've got to find me the best church I can find on the West Coast.

And we're going to settle down there for a couple of years. And he found a church in Santa Maria, California. It was on a reforming trend. It was called a reformed Baptist church. There was typically any decent church that recognized the centrality of God and epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics was hard, hard, hard to find in the 1970s.

I mean, you drove for 200 miles on the west coast, Oregon, California, where we lived, to try to find a decent church that really understood the absolute centrality and sovereignty of God over all reality. Hard to find in the 1970s. My dad found one of these churches. We joined it in 1981. And you know what's interesting, the last year or so, I have run into a lot of the members of that church and guys you need to ask yourself what your church is going to look like in 28 years because it really is important you understand the bride of Christ is important and your participation that that church is important as well well I ran into a lot of these folks that had been members of this church back 28 years ago.

And man alive, you would not believe the kind of problems they were having with their children, divorces among their children, full fledged apostasy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I've got all these stories I can tell you about things that happened 28 years later. You see, a lot of times we look at our church, we say it's pretty decent. I think we're in pretty good shape. We've got 247 people attending this church.

Or we think we have fairly decent doctrine. And practically, we've got some great programs here. But guys, you do not know what that church is going to look like 28 years from now. And here's the problem. The problem is that there is a principle, I think, nicely synopsized in that little statement, it's hard to soar like eagles when the people you hang out with are turkeys.

Have you ever heard that expression before? There's a little truth to that. That's because of the corporeality of human beings. We are connected to others. And it is impossible not to be connected to others.

And the quality of the faith in your generations, what happens to your children and your grandchildren will have a great deal to do with the quality of preaching, the quality of church life you experience right now. So I always tell families, if you're gonna choose a church, choose carefully. Choose carefully because you could so, so easily wind up in a church that could do your family damage over the generations. But before you say, now wait a minute, it's the church that makes the difference. Remember the church is made up of individuals and families like yourselves.

You're the turkeys, right? And it is hard to soar like Eagles when you're turkeys. So you will have a contribution to the body itself. The quality of the church depends on you. And the quality of you depends on the church.

See, there's a symbiosis going on here. So therefore, it's important for us to choose the right church. Now, we are in the process, as I said, of religious, generational, and moral, and cultural apostasy. By the way, you know the number one song in the nation or during the summertime of this year, the number one song of the nation was a song in which a woman singer is encouraging 13 and 14-year-old girls to engage in lesbian activity. That's where the culture is today.

And the song is produced by a star who is a grown-up daughter of a pastor in Santa Barbara, California, and she says she got tired of singing Amazing Grace. The point I'm making is that the apostasy of our nation, the apostasy of our culture and our morality is really the apostasy of the church and the apostasy of generations. See it's a double-edged sword. If you teach your children God's Word, if your children are in some way connected with the Church of Christ and they rebel against it, guys, they're going to wind up tearing down our cultural institutions and destroying our nation. And that's what's happening.

So the blame for the disintegration of liberty, of righteousness, of morality, of the culture in this country is due to the apostasy that is happening in the Church of Jesus Christ right now. Well, brothers and sisters, it's a passion of mine to see that the Church of Christ be reformed. Now we began with the family as my father did many many years ago and now I think we have an interest in developing a healthy church. So what is a healthy church? You say it's family integrated and that's a neat buzzword that we use today, but you know you could have a family-integrated homosexual church.

You realize that? You see the problem is that all of us are trying to seek out a formulation. Because we know that what the church looks like today and the kind of reformational agenda that we bring about in our families and churches today will have an impact on generations 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now. So it is critical that you formulate the right reformational agenda, which begins with developing the right fundamental foundational truth and then sufficiently incarnate the foundational truth. Again, you can't just reconstruct the worldview foundation.

You've got to get down into the foundational elements. It's not just the fact that we disintegrated the family. You've got to ask yourself, why did we disintegrate the family? What did we do to disintegrate the family? I'd suggest to you we abandoned the principles of God's word, as Scott Brown has said, it's the sufficiency of scripture, and there will be a conference next year that really digs into the foundation of what went wrong in 20th century America.

And that is we abandon God's word. We abandon God as the source of our truth. We were not directed by God. We were far more directed by Karl Marx, by John Maynard Keynes, by John Paul Sartre and their existentialism, and their economic systems, and their psychological systems, and their sociological systems than we were by the laws of God. Somehow we thought that Marx and Sartre and Rousseau and all these thinkers were smarter than God.

And then there were people who said the Bible is just not relevant and not sufficient for our ethical constructs and the way that we live our lives. That's the foundational problem. But now I could say that, and then everybody here would agree. Yeah, I believe God's the source of law. I'm with you there.

But if you do not incarnate that worldview perspective sufficiently into the way that you do life, into the way that you do church and family and economics and all these things, then brothers and sisters you still lost the game. That's what makes this thing tricky. Well, let's look at this agenda. And I'd suggest to you, and this is the way I put on my radio program every day, I think we need to bring back God-centered truth and relationships to a lost and lonely world. That is the fundamental problem.

And I outline the antithesis, which means what are we doing? What's the enemy here? What has happened to us? How has the devil corrupted us that we might bring the law of God, the Word of God, the will of God back to the way that we think and live? What have we done?

So we have to uncover that first. I'd suggest We are lost and lonely. We have abandoned the idea of absolute truth and ethic. And we have abandoned the notion of relationships. And it began with John Jacques Rousseau.

That's why we're going to talk about relationships in this presentation. That's fundamental. It's fundamental. And we're going to incarnate it too because if you just talk about relationships you go out there say it's about relationships stand up in front of every mega church in America it's about relationship it's about relationship everybody says hey man right hey man it's about relationship everybody you know who out there saying no I think we ought to live in a cold and lonely world and be in un-relational all day long. Who says that?

I don't know anybody who would say that. No, you've got to incarnate it properly according to the structures we find in God's word. But it is about relationships. And it all began with Jean-Jacques Rousseau back in 1765, who Paul Johnson in his book Intellectuals calls the most important intellectual force in framing the modern world and the postmodern world, the institutions that you now see today. It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who wrote the book, Emile, the book that told the modern world how to educate K-12 kids.

Now before he wrote that book, you know, so many of you know, you've heard me talk about this before, 20 years before he wrote that book, his living girlfriend had a child. He had five children, illegitimate. And on their birthdays, he had deposited those kids in the steps of an orphanage and said, let the professionals raise them at a time where a third of those kids deposited on the steps of orphanages died in their first year of life. This man abandoned five of his own children in the steps of an orphanage. And then he went and he told us how to educate children.

And Will Durant in his book on Emile or on Rousseau and Revolution, a big old thick book on what was happening during the French Revolution, which ultimately determined the direction for modern societies. This guy Will Durant says Emile was the book that described K12 education where you would remove the child from their parents as early as possible, put them under an unmarried tutor, had no connection to any family whatsoever, and then give them an education funded by the state. That was the revolutionary concept brought forth by John Jacques Rousseau. Now understand that the orphanages of John Jacques Rousseau are everywhere. You've got billions of people going to these orphanages.

And John Jacos says the best book ever written on education is Plato's Republic, where Plato says the purpose of men and women are to come together for temporary liaisons, have a child that comes off the conveyor belt, And the state takes care of them, and he says, this is Plato, guys. This is Plato. This is the city of man. This is classical education. He says, no child shall know his parent, and no parent shall know his child.

What is that relationship? Undermine the very fundamental sociological relationship that man knows of developed by God himself. Destroy the family, which is exactly what Karl Marx said in the 1860s. In the Communist Manifesto, the first thing he says is abolish home education. Yes, homeschooling is mentioned in the most important document of the modern age, the Communist Manifesto.

Abolish home education, abolish the family relationships, and abolish the family business. That's Karl Marx's agenda. And that, my friends, is what has happened. Last year, for the first time in American history, the nuclear family, mom and dad, has now fallen to the 50% level as the percentage of American households. They have been Amazingly successful.

This is the world you live in. And my guess is most of the adults in this congregation were educated in these institutions. You've been educated in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's, and Plato's, and Marx's institutions. You grew up in it. Does a fish know he's wet?

That's what Doug Phillips says all the time. Do you know you're wet? Do you know where you come from? We come from these institutions, And they are inherently antithetical to the covenantal relationships that God laid out. And I'm telling you here, guys, I think God is smarter, better, wiser, bigger than Rousseau.

So it all began with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the undoing of relationships for the modern world. But it really began earlier than that. It began with Cain. Remember Cain? Anybody?

Genesis chapter 4? In Genesis chapter 3, man destroyed his relationship with God, right? Destroyed it. He cut the vertical. And in Genesis 4, promptly, Cain kills his brother, destroys relationship with his brother.

And then what does he do? He becomes a vagabond in the earth and builds a city. Okay, now this is what men do. The largest city 200 years ago in America was Philadelphia, 40, 000 people. Today there are thousands, tens of thousands of cities bigger than that.

I'm just pointing this out. I'm not saying cities are inherently sinful, but Cain loves cities Because the way that men build their cities, they build them such that they can retain an anonymity, such that they don't need to be in covenantal accountable relationships with each other. And guys, this is the life people are drawn to, mass migrations into the city, still happening. Still happening. People building the mega churches.

It was the fastest growing church movement of the last 20 years. Small churches were dying by the hundreds, by the thousands. Scott, I'm sure you know the statistics on these. I don't know them, but I know that the mega churches sucked up as many people as they could. Why?

Well, let's give them the benefit of the doubt. They were trying to salvage some little remnant of Christianity in the 21st century. They knew it was dying. And there were men with great intentions and were trying to hang on to something of the church because they knew it was dying and they saw what happened in Europe and they wanted to retain something of the church but they forgot that man was lost and lonely. The Man is lonely.

And I spoke to a man attending a mega church in Chicago, Illinois several years ago. The man said, the reason I attend this church is because they don't know me and I don't know them and I don't really want to know about their problems. Occasionally somebody in the city of man will be honest with you. It's relationships, guys. It's accountable, relational living.

And we have lost these concepts in so, so, so many different ways. Man is lonely. You are lonely. You are lonely. Did you know you are lonely?

You are. I didn't know I was lonely. And on Saturdays in the early 90s, my children were very young. I'd spend so much of my time alone. I'd go to the hardware store alone.

Sometimes they'd even go to the movie theater alone. Go to the mall by myself. And I'd wander. And I'd go on business trips by myself all the way through the 90s. And as I was laying in bed last night at Scott Brown's house, I thought to myself, I'm so happy that Emily's with me.

My beautiful Emily. She's here. Raise your hand. You're so beautiful, sweetheart. That's my daughter.

She traveled with me this time. It was so nice to have Emily with me. What makes it so striking for me, I don't know about any of you, but I've changed. I've changed so much. I travel with my children, I travel with my family, I travel with my wife.

One time I traveled with an elder, and I love Dave Buhner, but it's not like Emily. We are lonely and we don't even know it. And I'm on the flight yesterday out of Chicago into North Carolina and I see all these soccer girls coming in to play a tournament and there they are lost in their iPods or the MePod or the All About MePod and you know that our cultural expressions allow us to escape into our own world with our own relationships with these make-believe stars, the Hannah Montanas, whatever, who could care less about you but you have some kind of an anonymous relationship with these musicians and with this music in your own cultural experience. It's existentialism. It starts brave man in the wilderness of existentialism making his own choices, developing his own reality, and as Sartre said, hell is other people.

Hell is other people. Listen to the philosophers that have made your world, that put Hollywood and Nashville and the television, the iPod together. Listen to them. Can't you hear them? Hell is other people Because it's all about me.

I saw that bumper sticker just what two weeks ago. For the first time I thought now we finally get some honesty out of these people. It's all about me it said. Guys this is a very lonely lonely time where you've got things like the age of unaccountability. Oh man, you know, you say what's the age of unaccountability?

You've heard about the age of accountability, don't you? You guys hear about that from time to time? Your Baptist churches, sometimes your Presbyterian churches. Age of accountability! Well, I call this the age of unaccountability.

You see, I was raised in a covenantal home, lots of really warm relationships. And my dad hardly ever let us watch the television sets, so we had to sit together like Almanzo Wilder's family every single evening on those tatami floors out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean interacting with each other. And my dad was one of these guys who wanted to cut the electricity costs all the time. And we would not let us turn the lights on in any other room. He says, you come in here to the living room, we have one light where I huddle around this thing, OK?

And we had to be in relationship for 18 years out of my life. Well, I grew up that way. Now fast forward, my dad brings me to California, I'm in junior college for a while, still at home. My folks take off, go back to the mission field, and left me by myself. Now, from the time I was about 18, 19 years of age till 26 years of age, I am living the age of unaccountability.

Why? Because I have been accountable. People knew what I was doing. People cared about what I was doing. People loved me.

People would have given their lives for me until I was 18, 19 years of age and then I get into college and I'm flopping around from one flop house to a dorm room to another situation to another situation and I unfortunately did not have a church that understood relationships and accountability and shepherding although it was a reformed Baptist Church the best we could find that there were these ideas were so foreign so foreign back in the 1970s and then 26 years of age I get married and I'm in a countable covenantal relationship with this woman because she's there and I'm there all the time. She knows what I'm doing. Now here's the deal. Why do they have to live the life of unaccountability for seven or eight years in the city of Maine? Somebody answer that question for me.

Why do we have to do that? Who said we had to do that? Why do they have to be outside of accountable structures? Furthermore, this word independence, where did that come from? I was on a flight out of Salt Lake City a couple of months ago.

I had just spoken to a homeschool conference down there and came back and I was sitting next to this Mormon lawyer and we were talking about homeschooling. I talked about the importance of character and education and so forth, kind of building the case for homeschooling for this guy, you know. And as we were talking about character, the guy came back and says, character, preeminent education. I agree with that. Yeah, that's absolutely right.

We need to make sure we get character into the education of a child. That's why I'm training my daughter to be independent. And I went, And that would be a character trait I would not be using in the pi-day of my child because, you see, I can't find that in the word of God anymore. I do find that the man is not independent of the woman and the woman is not independent of the man, 1 Corinthians. Paul made it very, very clear.

You don't live the independent life. And Paul himself is with Silas and with Barnas. By the way, this is the number one thing that's gotten me on trouble on the web. They blog against me all the time right now. So if you want to know any bad stuff about me, just put Kevin Swanson into the Google search engine.

It's all over the place. But I'll just give you the heads up. I'm getting it to you right now. I hate independence. I hate the life of the vagabond that is unaccountable to anybody who loves them and will give their lives to for them.

We don't belong in those structures. Paul would travel with Silas. Paul would travel with the Barnabas. And we don't live the lives of independence. We live the lives of dependence.

Let me tell you what they really mean. Let me tell you what every, and we heard this from relatives, we hear it from Christian friends, we hear it all the time. Why aren't your daughters learning to be independent? What they mean is independent of the family. In the church they really mean they are to be dependent upon the state because the largest demographic that always votes pro-socialist as socialist as possible they did it in this last election again, are single women.

75% of single women will go for the most socialist candidate they could possibly go for why because they get their dependence and their security on the state this is Marx's agenda the dissolution of the family the independent lifestyle the singleness picture of the family in the church is precisely what they want and there is nothing any conservative will ever be able to do it to reverse that trend until our Christian friends and our Christian churches stop using the word independence for their children and their churches. We don't live independently of covenantal structures. Doesn't happen. Doesn't happen. Doesn't happen.

Moreover, The emergent church is trying as best as it can to recover relationships and other churches are trying to do this. But the problem is, and I've read this on the net, They are creating Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z, Gen L, M, and O P churches. Why? Because the hearts of the fathers are severed from the sons and the sons from the fathers. And the cultural forms change not every 20 years now, every 10 years, right?

Relationships are taking the churches apart. Our churches are so transient, it makes it so difficult to recover relationships. I've been part of our church now for eight years. We have tried to put together a relational family integrated church in Denver, Colorado, and guys I'm telling you it's a challenge and a half. You say, are you there?

No, not for about 100 years. I hope some of you are wet ready to roll up your sleeves and work at this for generations, Because we got into this trouble over 200 years. We ain't getting out of it in the next five. So right now, there is very little gray hair in our congregation. And we have seen the older families want to leave as their children graduate from high school.

Why? Because that's what you do. You see, they say, I thought your church was a 35 to 45-year-old with 3.6 children. And you're all home schooled. I thought you were a very narrow, narrow little demographic, which, by the way, is probably characterizing a lot of your churches if you're part of a family integrated church.

You haven't even scratched the surface on what it's going to take to integrate the generations. Because many older people do not want to be part of this generational church. Some do, but many do not. And many of us have no idea what it takes to be in a church. Churches are so transient.

I think about 60% of our church in 1999 when we got together for the first time, I'd say about 60% of them are gone. Why? Because modern societies are transient, especially if you're in the cities. But I've also heard that a lot of the small towns, the farming towns, are losing their kids right and left. Why?

Because the cities are drawing them. Because the life of the vagabond is one of transience. Now you say what about the missionaries? Missionaries for a thousand years, no for 1, 500 years in the church, would go to a place and stay there for a thousand years. I know I'm shocking some paradigms here.

That's what missionaries used to do. They didn't go to one place and stay there for six years. On to the next for two. On to the next for five. On to the next for seven.

They didn't do that. They put roots down. The Bible describes our ethics, guys. And you're going to find right away that the Bible describes what is good and what is evil about life. Now the modern world doesn't understand this but the Bible says if you got average of 1.4 kids in your congregation and 90% of you are on mortgage debt and you are hopping from town to town you are one of the most cursed lots that's ever lived.

Now let me distinguish briefly between what is good and what is evil and what is right and what is wrong. I'm not saying you're in sin I'm just saying you're cursed. The problem is modern man says, I got one point two kids. I'm in debt up to my eyeballs. I move every 2.5 years.

I'm doing great. And by the way, one of the curses in Deuteronomy 27-28 is all these are gonna happen. You're gonna be in debt, you're not gonna have any kids, you're gonna be vagabonds in the earth and you're not gonna know it right so here's the deal we're cursed because we're transient We got to learn how to put down roots and that's hard to do. It's hard to establish long-term relationships, especially when there's a lot of conflict going on in the church and There's bad goodbyes right and left. We've seen a lot of those in the West.

I don't know where it is in your churches, but man, we've seen some bad goodbyes. And a bad goodbye, I preached a sermon on it one time. Got to make sure that you preach sermons on how to say hello and how to say goodbye, Because people don't know how to say goodbye. People just up and leave. They got a little bug under the saddle, a little burr under the saddle.

They got a little bitterness that's built up in their own hearts. And before you know it, they're up and gone. And they're not willing to suffer for a very long time. So these are the sorts of things that happen in a society that has very shallow relationships. Moreover, shallow relationships also produce a shallow truth.

I get people coming to me from time to time and say, you know, back when I was attending a mega church, everything was pretty good in one sense. Nobody really argued about anything. You know, I mean, it was a message about Jesus and granted they didn't get into any doctrine because the relationships are so shallow in these congregations there was no way that a pastor could stand up and talk to some of the deeper issues the relationship of sovereignty and responsibility the relationships of families and churches and families and baptism and so forth and so on. We couldn't deal with any of these things. We couldn't talk about them.

And so what happened in the large churches is that it became, the doctrinal perspective became the least common denominator in terms of its depth. And so we had this perpetual immaturity in the church. Then I fast forward into a family integrated church. We're sitting around seven families would develop the relationship. Before you know it, somebody is talking about Calvinism.

Why is that? Because relationships afford you the opportunity to go deep in truth. You see, It's relationships that matter and you'll never have maturity in your congregation in the area of truth unless you have maturity in your congregation in the area of relationships. Can you believe it? Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith matter.

I gave a sermon to my congregation a couple months ago, and I told them, you know what, folks? This is a nuclear reactor here at our church. We have some of those opinionated people on the face of the earth, at least in Denver, Colorado, that have all congregated into one little church on this hill. And it just scares the living daylights out of me. Because we don't all agree.

I said we're a nuclear reactor. Keep the rods submerged in love, joy, peace, long suffering. Are you with me here? Because you yanked those rods, what's gonna happen? Kaboom, kaboom.

All right, well what do we do to restore relationships? Let me start theologically. I've established the problem. Now I want to bring about the solution to the problem, and the first thing we need to do my friends is to establish a clear worldview, a clear metaphysic. You say, what is that?

People have to know that God is real and that God is personal. It's gotta happen. They gotta know that God is so close you can talk to him. They have to know that God is a Father worth fearing and loving. And guys, here's the problem.

God is not real to us. It's not real enough. Why do I say that? Because God only shows up on Sunday for most people. God isn't there.

He's not real enough. Seven days out of the week in Deuteronomy 6 7 he says, I want you to teach your children my word as you walk, by the way, as you lie down, Monday through Sunday, over and over and over again. It's gotta be everywhere. It's gotta be on your posts of your gates. It's gotta be a front lip between their eyes.

They need to confront the living God all the time. But ever since Aquinas, our educational systems have not permitted God into the natural, physical, material aspects of life. And it has been devastating. Now I speak to many homeschool conferences around America and let me give you my agenda. There's a couple leaders here so let me share my agenda.

My agenda in these conferences is to come away hopefully with a congregation knowing that God is real and that God is to be feared. If I can get that much into the hearts and minds of 100, 000 people in America, I'm willing to die. And here's the problem is that we have not been integrating the fear of God into every single aspect of our children's pi-deo education and our children hear science from public schools and private schools and Christian schools from home schools, where you describe the beauty of the universe, the expanse of it, the usefulness of it, the beauty of it, the magnitude of it, And you get into that chemistry class, and you bring it out. But nobody, no teacher is standing up and saying, class, I got to teach you science. And I haven't taught it until we've stood up and worshiped the God who made all of this.

Quick story. A couple of weeks ago, my wife is coming home at night. And she's driving the excursion with the kids. And it's dark. And she sees something on the side of the road.

She slams on the brakes, she says, whoa, roadkill! And she runs out and she gets this big raccoon that's dead on the side of the road and shoves it in the back of the excursion. She drives on home, she puts you in the fridge, of course I come and get something out of the fridge, I want some dead raccoon going to the fridge, you know, she says it's curriculum, curriculum, we're gonna dissect it tomorrow. So, free curriculum, That's even better, isn't it? Homeschool moms?

So, so I remember she got all the homeschool families around, I mean, you know, she called all her buds from around the area, and they're all there, and they had their rubber gloves on, their masks on, and they ended up out there in front of the garage and I come out and I look at this animal I said whoa whoa whoa stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop before you cut into this thing let's worship the God who made it And we stood there and we raised our hands and we worship the God who made this beautiful animal. Guys I'm telling you there are college classes, universities here in the state of North Carolina where their professors haven't done that for a hundred years and that is why you live in the world that is coming apart that's why Your people aren't worshiping God on Sundays because they've been taught that God's no big deal in the chemistry class. And my brother yesterday showed me Robert Boyle, his sermons that he preached in his chemistry class and he's the father of it. When men stopped worshiping God in the universities and the seminaries, let's throw that one in too, they perverted religion in America.

They perverted it. And I'm telling you, there are seminary classes where guys aren't getting on their knees and worshiping God in awe and fear before they dare to touch the holy doctrines of those words. There isn't enough fear of God in these people. That's why you've got so much pride in the American church. And among so much of modern academics, I think there's a fundamental, most practical issue that's wrong with the way we are raised and the way we think.

I just think that's it. Guys, God has got to be real. I mean real. So that when you get into worship, there are people crying and crying out and shaking. Not because they're told to be charismatic, but because they're sincere and they have come face to face with the living God.

And they really do fear him and they have been to the cross where they have seen the wrath of God poured out on the Son of God, pulling his face back from his only begotten son where the relationship formed in eternity and they fear the God who did that and they love him with fear. And Now you have people quaking. Now you have people crying, and they have a reason to cry. Guys, I just don't think they know that God is there, and they've got to relate to him. How do you relate to God?

By crying. By crying out. By rejoicing with emotion. We try to bring corporate emotion into our congregation. Over eight years I've worked on it, worked on it, worked on it at Sincere.

Everybody emoting together. I didn't think it was possible in America until two years ago my son and I were invited out to the playoff game for the Rockies where they made it into the World Series for the first time in their history. 70, 000 people out there and when some guy hits a double, I was amazed. 70, 000 people leaped up in rejoicing and screamed at the top of their lungs. Americans can emote together, and we've got a God who is a little more impressive than some guy hitting the ball with a stick.

Huh? You know the problem is people just can't see it, and they're not connected. And evidently some of us leaders apparently aren't sincerely quaking before the living God and coming face-to-face relationally in fear. Coming face to face relationally in fear that's relational in love that's relational before God himself is God real and what's our relationship with him? Secondly, you got to have a healthy theology concerning human relationships.

And I talk about the family in the church being blobs and just about every single image that our brother Scott Brown shared with you during his first message was a blobbiness. It was a tree. It was the branches tied into a vine. It was a building. Is this building one or is this building 30, 000 pieces of brick?

It is one because everything stuck together. You don't distinguish these things. The church is a building. The church is a tree. The church is a vine.

It is a connectiveness to us in the local body and in the family. And people come and say, well, how in the world can Jesus come and take a branch out of the church, rip it out of the church, and still the guy not loses salvation, et cetera, et cetera. And we get into these debates. Well, I'm here to tell you that there are different relationships with Jesus Christ. And I know most of you have heard that you've got to have an individual relationship with Jesus Christ.

I agree with that. If any man is in Christ, he's a new creature. All things are passed away. Behold, all things have become new. That's an individual case.

Romans chapter 16, the household of Narcissus, which is in Christ. The household of Kevin Swanson, which is in Christ. The household of Bill Brown, which is in Christ. Households can be in Christ. 1 Thessalonians chapter 1 and verse 1, the church at Thessalonica which is in God and in Jesus Christ.

A local church, your local church is in Christ. My local church in Castle Rock, Colorado is in Christ. There is a blobbiness about us And I know there's debate on whether you can baptize an entire blob family and bring them into the church together. Some of us say you can. Some of us say you can't.

But understand that there's some debate on the issue. At least please let us resolve today theologically that the family has a blobbiness, a bodiness, a corporeality about it as does the church. And we have been so individualized by Karl Marx, by the thinkers of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others through the 1700s and 1800s that you have gotten the impression that all that matters is me and Jesus. No, they both matter. Your individual relationship matters.

Your family's relationship with Christ matters. Your church relationship with Christ matters because there is a bodiness about you and there is an individuality about you. This should come as no surprise to you whatsoever if you're Trinitarian. God has lived in relationship as a one and as a many for eternity And he created us as individuals and as blobs connected to others, a oneness about us and a multiplicity about us. This is very simple Trinitarian theology that ought to start being implemented in the way we think, the way we treat our families, and the way you treat our churches.

Okay, this ought to present a relational charity as well. And you know, our church has abandoned state aid for our widows and orphans. The last, oh I'm gonna say six years, we spent at least a hundred thousand dollars on widows and orphans in our church. Our goal is to bring about 25% of our income for widows and orphans, keeping them alive, getting them on their feet, bringing them back into covenant community. And this is one of the most challenging things that we're doing.

But understand that whatever the United Way is doing, whatever the average American charity is doing is very non-relational and anonymous, and it is corrupting. It is corrupting. It would be better that they not give the money to the poor through the federal government than they give it because it is tainted money it is stolen money and it is unaccountable money you say how in the world are we going to be able to do this by faith? By faith. We're establishing our own charitable structures.

We have widows coming to our church that says, I refuse to take any money from the government. Can you help me? And we have to deal with them in relationship. They got to trust us. We got to trust them.

They got to respect us. They got to start listening to our counsel. It's our money they're using. We wrote a check of $4, 000 for some widow as she was working through a trial last month. And then we gave her another $1, 500 for rent and for groceries because she's going through one of the toughest times of her life.

You think we're just going to leave her alone to flop around or we're going to make sure that she is going to make it because we are with her in the body. We've abandoned state funding. We're going into relational charity. Let me give you one more. Relational mentorships.

I talked a little bit about the principle of unaccountability. Well, what in the world are we going to do with our young people? Well, the first thing we do is we try to restructure the way that kids are discipled, sons and daughters are discipled in the homes. But folks, I think we've got a deeper issue with our young men. I do.

And that's from 10 years of experience as a leader in the home school movement. Newsweek magazine came out with an article a couple of months ago where they said 70% of young men have not grown up by 30 years of age. And men 25 to 35 years of age, the only demographic making less money than they did in the 1970s, they're making less money than women. Men are not growing up, and Newsweek magazine is concerned about it. Isn't that something?

Yet the vast majority of Americans could care less. The vast majority of Christians could care less. I find incipient immaturity among most males in the homeschooling movement in America. I see it everywhere. And I see dads doing what they can.

And they can't do, many of them can't do what I did, but by the way, when I was, my son was 11 years of age, God fired some warning shots across the bow, and I knew that unless I took my son under my wing full time, I would lose my son. I was so convicted at that moment that I knew whatever happens, I have got to bring my son into my life, and I'm going to have to disciple that boy. And it has been a full-time job. My son travels with me. He's gone everywhere with me.

I don't homeschool him. I car school for the most part. I office school. I do conference room school, whatever. But we just school everywhere we possibly can.

It's been a real mess all these years. I've never given him a real structured education. But I think he's picked up a few things for me. But we got to do something with our boys. A lot of men can't do what I did, and their boys are gonna be in trouble.

That's the bottom line. 37% of little boys are born without fathers. What are you gonna do about them? 37% of little boys born without fathers. What are you gonna do about the boys whose mothers and fathers were divorced?

The dad takes off, which is what, 12% of the cases? 25%? I don't know. What do you do about all these boys? And these are the families in your congregations.

These are the families that come and worship with us. These are the families you guys are supposed to be shepherding. What are we gonna do? Guys, we got to disciple these boys. Amen?

You don't take a boy 16 to 26 years of age and just toss them into the world and let them float from one flop house to the next and off to some university where he just gets a completely humanistic form of education and no discipleship or shepherding whatsoever. Just don't do that. I'm gonna put together a shepherd center. I'm gonna do some discipleship. Now I've discipled a young man in our church whose father did a lot of work himself, and his father came to me and said, would you take this boy three days out of every week?

And I've done that for the last three and a half years. Three and a half years with Chad Roach. And I've learned something about mentorship and discipleship. You know what Jesus did? Jesus went to James and John, or took James and John away from Zebedee.

He says, I'm gonna take these boys for three years. I'm gonna disciple them. And it says in the Word of God, Mark, Jesus took 12 men to be with him. And my friends, that worked very well until the 1100s, when somebody said, I got a better idea, let's send them to a Christian college. This too radical for anybody here?

We're getting pretty radical now, aren't we? Or somebody else said, I've got a better idea. Let's put a seminary together and call it Harvard. And then we'll corrupt it in 60 years. No, make that 50.

No, make that 40. I don't know how long it lasted. In increased May, they were trying to hang onto a little sense of sanity, but it was history by the 1700s. No, it was the wrong model. It was the wrong model.

We have got to bring mentorships and discipleship and shepherding back into the Church of Christ, and we've got to get rid of universities that are inherently non-relational, non-focused on character, non-life integrated. We have got to bring relational discipleship back into the preparing of a young man to be a man of God by the time he's 24, 25, 26 years of age. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take more than one. I'm going to take three, four, five, maybe six, and we're going to disciple these boys 16 to 26 years of age every day, two hours of worship every day, 6, 30, 7, 30 in the morning, 7, 30, 8, 30 at night, every day, every day, three years, we'll disciple these boys. They'll learn how to worship and they'll learn more about the word of God than your average seminary student will, they'll learn everything I know about God's word over two, three, four years, and by the time they're 20, 21, 22 years of age, these are men of God, ready to be shepherds of their home they know the Word of God inside and out they're resident theologians their wives have a question they come home and ask their husbands because they've been through seminary and see I want just the opposite of what we see here in the modern day.

I want men who are mighty in the Word. I want men who can shepherd their homes. Our churches call out, they cry out for responsible, mature elders in the Church of Christ. And we're only gonna do it by discipleship. You know, and let me throw out one more thing.

I think there are other organizations that have done some level of discipleship. And that is the campus ministries. The campus ministries. Because you know guys, there are very, very precious few opportunities for discipleship in most situations in the modern age. Homeschooling is one because your kids are there and you're there for 18 years And they're in your face and they're in your house and they're your mess for 18 years.

The campus ministries have a similar opportunity because these people come to this campus for four years. Relationships are established. Discipleship happens. And a lot of guys, I asked the question one time, how many of you guys learned about Christ and were discipled for the first couple of years of your life in a campus ministry? You would not believe the number of people that started their walk of faith in campus ministries.

So let's give some credit to the guys who have done the work, but here's the question I have for you. What church is doing that? What pastor is doing that? I thought pastors were supposed to disciple people. I thought elders were supposed to disciple people.

Evidently it's not happening very much. I asked somebody one time, what would you rather do if you had a choice of two things to do for the kingdom of God. Only two things. You had to pick one or the other, not both. Number one, would you want to speak to 10, 000 people for three hours or three people for 10, 000 hours?

Which would you rather do? Well let me ask you this, which better reflects the Great Commission? What is the Great Commission? Anybody remember what we're supposed to do? Go out and make disciples, exactly.

Teaching them to understand whatever I've told you. No, teaching them to observe whatsoever I've commanded you. Which by the way, takes a long time. We've been trying to disciple some little ones in our house. We started with obey your father and mother, we're still working on that.

That's only one command. There's actually a few more there. Discipleship takes an awfully long time. And yet the way we do things in our transient age is to run out there and get 10, 000 people saved, 4, 000 run forward and in the end, 40 years later you look back and say, I wonder, I wonder from all of the revival services, from all of the Youth for Christ efforts, for all of the DVBSs we've been doing, for all of these programs, I wonder how much gold, silver, and precious stones we have today after the fire burned. And you know, I'm telling you, I'm a grandson of a grandfather in the 40s and 50s and 60s that was doing all that stuff and he wrote his biography at the end of his life and he said most of the programs that I was involved in really didn't amount to all that much and you know what he did?

He synopsized the three guys he discipled in his life. Did you want to know the gold, silver, and precious stones in my life? My grandfather had a passion for the kingdom of God. He was involved in every big old program that Billy Graham could put together, etc, etc, etc, but when it all came down to it, he said, let's start separating out the woodhand stubble and the gold, silver, and precious stones. When it all comes down to it, the gold, silver, and precious stones were the guys that he had discipled.

Three or four guys he spent a little bit of time with. I think we got to bring relationships back into evangelism guys and let's just call it discipleship. That's what evangelism was in the New Testament. It's discipleship. Stop distinguishing it.

Somebody out there is always distinguishing evangelism. We've got to go and evangelize people and then we'll go disciple. No! Please stop distinguishing evangelism and discipleship. They're the same thing.

The same problem occurs with the raising of children. People say you can't teach your children to obey God's word until you teach them faith in Christ. You ever hear that? Or know one place where they say, no you teach them obedience first and then faith in Christ. Come on, they're distinct but not separate, you nuts!

And that's what Calvin and all the reformers used to always say, they're distinct but not separate! Come on, stop separating them! They separate them and call one evangelist and the other disciples. Get rid of that thinking. You teach them faith, you teach them repentance, You teach them the works meet for repentance.

Come on, teach them the whole shooting match. And call it discipleship. And teach it every day for about 5, 10, 18 years, and we'll see what happens. Come back and we'll talk. Right?

This is what it is. It's discipleship. And guys, this hit and run stuff has got to go. We were sitting in Indiana, Indianapolis with Vision Forum having dinner one night after the Indiana conference. And boy we have a great time with the Vision Forum guys going back and forth.

And I kid you not, some guy streaks through this restaurant, throws a track on the table, it slides across the table, it hits me in the chest, and I look up and the guy is outside the door. I can't even see his face. Now that's non-relational, right? That's non-relational. And I'll tell you guys, I've talked to a lot of these track guys out there.

I've interviewed them on my radio program where they are hit and run evangelists. They do their little thing on an airplane. They tell everybody else you've got to do your little thing on the airplane, they hand out tracks and so forth, they leave them in toilets, or on the toilet, not in the toilet. They do everything they possibly can with this hit and run evangelism. And I have asked them, a number of guys, a number of times, talk to me about somebody that you have worked with who's walking with the Lord today.

And then I get this long pause, this embarrassing pause. Oh, you mean engaging in relationships with people? Oh, you mean hanging around for a long time and working with somebody? Oh, I don't do that. That's not what I do.

Now, I'm not saying you can't stand up and talk to 10, 000 people for three hours, but guys, if you don't associate it very, very, very, very closely with discipleship every single day of your ministry life you don't know what Jesus was doing it's discipleship we're all about and remember it was more about the 12 than it was about the 5, 000 who left them in John 6, right? Because Jesus turned to them and said, okay, are you gonna desert me now? I think the reason we do these big conferences is just to go out there with a net and try to bring in the 12 or the three or the one that we can get ahold of and disciple. All right, I think that's what we're doing. So let's evangelize, let's engage in household evangelism.

We have a guy in our neighborhood, man, we've been discipling or trying to disciple over the last five or six years. We're making some pretty good progress. Just had him over. We had a snowstorm on Sunday night. Couldn't get out the church and hospitalized.

We call it hospitalized. That's the verb form of hospitality. We couldn't hospitalize anybody else in the church. So we called a neighbor over and he sloshed over in one foot snow, came over to our house and, you know, this guy doesn't know the Lord, but he's starting to know the Lord. He's starting to sing the songs with us.

You said, well, at what point do we get him down on his knees and have him say the three spiritual laws and pray the prayer and come forward in the church and raise his hands. I don't know. I don't know. I've always asked this, at what point does a plant get regenerated? Is everything about that?

By the way, if I were to do systematic theology in our seminary classes, I'm putting a plant in the middle of the table and say, systematize that, big boy. Give me an outline for this plant. When does a plant get regenerated? See, these are doctoral issues that have puzzled people for a long time. I think at some point somebody needs to look up and say, I don't know.

That would be really refreshing. If somebody at some point said, you know, I don't really understand this very much, that would be huge. Huge! That would be a breakthrough theologically in the Church of Christ. But you know, the parable of sowers says you plant the seed, and the seed grows and grows, and sometimes it kind of fizzles out and sputters.

But the good seed will yield fruit. So the answer is a guy gets regenerated and converted somewhere between the planting of the seed and the yielding of fruit. Right? Well, what is that? Well, when he writes the date into his Bible.

You see, again, we're getting into mystery here. Stop worrying about when somebody gets converted or regenerated. You don't need like, okay, regenerated. January 15, 1975, sanctified 26.4% by this date. You know, whatever, forget all that guys!

We don't need the timeline, okay? It's a plant for Pete's sake! Just work with it. God says go out there and plant seeds and water, water, water, water, water, water, and see what happens over the next 15-20 years. And you look up and after a while you got all this fruit everywhere.

You go, where'd all this fruit come from? God is good. God is good. You go out there and you be a good farmer and you work for 15-20 years. You trust in God all the while, He's going to give you a lot of fruit.

You're going to be really blessed by that. Okay, we've talked about relational mentorships, relational evangelism. How about relational pastoring? A practical theology professor at a Reform Seminary, I was going to say which one it was, but I'm not going to give it away. A Reform seminary a couple of years ago was talking to all of his biblical counseling students.

And he says, you know what? These people that you're going to minister to in these churches, they're not your friends. They will despise you. They will walk away. They will not be grateful for the things that you have done.

They will abandon you in the day of your need. They will teach you badly. They are not your friends. If you want a friend, get a dog. Jesus had 12 friends.

They were his friends. They were his friends. And on the worst day of his life, they abandoned him. So he went and died for them. Elders, pastors here, guys listen.

Go do the same thing. Go do the same thing. You say, you know, kick me in the teeth. They'll reject me. They'll say nasty things about me.

They'll take me apart. Yeah. They'll take my family apart. Yeah. Then you go die for them.

And then you come back to them and you make peace. The first three things Jesus says to his disciples when he meets them is what? Peace be unto you. And the second thing he said was peace be unto you. And then Thomas showed up and he said, peace brother, peace, peace.

It's okay. It's okay. It's okay. You're my friend. You're still my friend.

This is what we do. This is conflict resolution, brothers. This is what we engage in. We engage in relational hospitality in life. Guys, listen, you're gonna do a family-integrated relational church.

You're not gonna do programs. You gotta do hospitality. If you don't do hospitality in your church, go to a programmed system. Period. Go back to it.

Don't just say I'm not going to do programs, but we're not going to engage in hospitality because it kind of messes up my house. All these people come over and they track their mud into the house. We had 450 people over to our house in the month of September. We have cranked it up big time, 100 times what we've done five years ago. And we love it.

We love it. I mean we're in relationships up to our nose, up to our head. We're bringing people into our house. People are living in our house all the time and people are staying in our home overnight it's just one big covenantal relational mess and it's great and I encourage our elders to do the same thing and you know I'll tell you what the vision is growing slowly but it's growing and the relationships grow in the the hospitality. It's amazing to me what has happened with the men in the church.

We started out as a Presbyterian Church a long time ago. I'm not sure we're that anymore. I don't know what we are. We're not your typical Presbyterian Church. We had this guy who went to the Navy on a ship for two or three months, a brother of the church that was the hospitality king.

We were all so close to him. We all cried when he left. We were crying. It was just a sad, sad farewell and the guy was on a ship for two days. He's a big guy, he's a hunter, he's a man's man.

He comes back to the church a couple of months ago to visit us and he comes in and he just hugs us and he grabs this one elder and he gives them a big kiss, a holy kiss. This is a Presbyterian church. There's a Lutheran guy that he kissed. And I don't know, it's just different. I don't know, you guys do Baptists kiss each other?

There's a lot of kissing going on in your churches? Why not? You guys, you ever felt a guy's shaggy beard up against your cheek as he kisses you? Why not? I'll tell you why.

You say it's the culture. Yeah, it's the culture. Why is it the culture? Because you've got 300 years, no make that 500, no make that 800 years of humanist indoctrination in non-relational living. You know we see this holy kiss stuff in the Bible and think that's kind of gross, that's kind of weird.

No, it's not weird at all. It's natural. See we've changed over the years. We're very odd. Why?

Because we've learned to love each other and appreciate each other. These are the relationships that we engage in. Moreover, tri-relational confession. You know, I think it's so funny, no, not funny, so sad, that the Catholic Church went to anonymous confessions. You know what I'm talking about?

The Catholic Church, they allow for some confession, but there's this anonymity between you and the priest. Well, the Bible doesn't say confess your sins to the priest. It says confess your sins one to another. And one of the first things, the most healthy things that occurred within our session, within our own eldership, was guys getting down their knees and just weeping and bringing out their sins to their brothers and asking them to throw their hands over them and just lift up their requests to the Lord. And guys, that level of transparency and vulnerability among some Presbyterian elders has transformed the church.

You gotta have it. You gotta have it. You gotta look a brother straight in the eye and say, this is the issue, brother. You really got to pray for me. You know, I know you love me, and I was so amazed one time.

I was, I brought my son into the session meeting, and I want to tell you what we were confessing. I was confessing some of my sins, and then because I was struggling with some issues with my son, because I'm discipling him quite a bit, and my son confessed in an elder that I didn't think could ever knew how to cry. Tears coming down his cheeks and the man was crying for me and for my son. I've never seen it like that in my life. There like that in my life.

These men love me and they would give their lives for me. This is the Church of Christ And I think we've been without it for too long. Amen, somebody? We only have a few minutes left, But let me end on this because I want to bring out the fact that our ministries have to be consumed with relationships and relational teaching. You know, a huge problem in our country is the problem of homosexual marriage.

And California just barely won that battle again with Proposition 8, this last election. And right now, it's a 51-49 split. You all know that? Now, people under 35 years of age, it's like 70-30. And people with a master's degree at 65-35, which means that the new generation is really excited about homosexual marriage.

And when the old Foggies die off, then the younger generations will bring this in full force. But there's another issue that is just as important, or more important in my estimation. And that is that James Dobson puts together his book, Bringing Up Boys, and has a whole chapter on homosexuality. Someone interesting doesn't bring a lot of biblical stuff into it, But there's one study he brings out from a Dr. Nicolosi who says he has worked with homosexuals for all of his life, talked to and counseled hundreds of homosexuals, and he says he's never met a single homosexual who had a loving, respectful relationship with his own father.

So see, the number one nurture contributor, not nature, men make their share choices according to their nature and yes they're depraved and they're responsible for their own choices. We're not negating that, All right? But in terms of nurture, the number one nurture issue in the paideia of a child, in the formation of his homosexuality, is the absence of a loving, respectful relationship with his father. Now guys, if 6% of little boys were born without fathers in 1960, I'm just taking one industry, one industry, only one, I'm not talking about divorce or anything else. I'm talking about the number of little boys born without a father in the 1960s, 6%.

Last year, it was 37%. Now, the homosexual activists today are the sons of the fathers who abandoned them in the 1960s and it only makes up 6% of the population, not even. Our problem is going to be seven times worse 20 years from now. Seven times worse. And all of the yard signs in the world, all of the prop 8s in the world, all of the efforts on the part of focus on the family and all the pro-family legislative organizations, all of that is not going to squat when you've got the hearts of fathers turning from the sons.

And you've got dads out there who never mind the divorce, never mind the fornication, never mind any of that, but there are dads out there on a Saturday morning and they've got a choice. These things are made up of hundreds of choices, guys, millions of choices around the nation. You've got a dad on a Saturday morning, he's got a choice. He could disciple that little eight-year-old boy, that little ten-year-old boy who's crying out for his dad's attention, crying out for a relationship with dad, but that man's gonna go play golf instead because he doesn't have a relationship with that boy. And I'm talking to churches across America today that are preaching against homosexuality.

All that homosexual thing is so awful. Oh, we need to get laws against it. Let's bring in theonomy or let's do this or let's do that. And maybe what they really ought to be preaching is, dads, you gotta start turning your hearts back to those boys. Dads, you gotta spend some time with those boys.

Dads, you gotta get rid of daycare. Dads, you gotta get rid of this this family disintegrating ministry work out there, and this family disintegrating economic structures, and family disintegrating education systems. We've got to get rid of these things. Why? Because the hearts of fathers are needed for the discipleship of tens of millions of little boys across this country.

That's the message. But you know what? That message is harder than standing up and saying, the Old Testament says homosexuals ought to be put to death. Oh, I can preach that message all day long and I could probably wind up with a congregation where there are no homosexuals going, Amen, Amen, Amen, brother. But the minute I stand up and say, dads, I'm talking to you bros.

There's a heart of a son right here that I see is in closet rebellion to you. You got to get his heart. You might have to quit your job to get his heart. I don't know. Maybe you're gonna have to stop working 60-hour weeks.

Maybe you better go back to 30-hour weeks. Maybe you ought to go ask your boss whether your son can come to work with you. Maybe you better just quit your job tomorrow. Go sell your house. Give to the poor and come and follow Jesus.

Maybe you ought to sell your house for $250, 000, go find a trailer for 30 grand and live on 210 grand for the next 10 years out of your life and raise that son if that son means anything to you or if that Kingdom of your Christ means anything to you. You know I'll tell you the sad fact of the matter is according to George Bonner only three out of ten born-again parents in America consider the salvation of their children an important parental emphasis. Does that break your heart? Only three in ten. Twice as many parents, born-again parents, think a good education is better than a meaningful relationship with Jesus Christ.

Why is that? Because they're telling their kids, get out of my house! Go let somebody else educate you! And I don't even want to focus on this relationship with Jesus Christ. I don't want to focus on this discipleship.

Guys, what's wrong with us? I think we're not loving God very much because Deuteronomy 6 4 to 7 says, love me. God says love me. I want your love. Love me with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

There's a vision that has propelled our state organization, has propelled us in our church, propelled me in talking to all these people around America. This is the one vision that propels me and that is I want more Colorado people loving God. I want more Colorado moms and dads loving God. I want more Colorado Christians loving God. I want more Colorado churchgoers loving God.

What do you mean, Swanson? I think they already love God. No, I want them to love God! I want them to love God so much that they will love their kids and love their kids enough to disciple their kids as they walk by the way they rise up as they lie down. You see, if you really love God, moms and dads, you're gonna disciple your children to the God that you love.

That's the vision. That's what we're about. That's what we're doing. That's what empowers us, impels us, constrains us. Brothers, we have got to bring these relationships back if the church is going to survive, if families are going to wind up discipling their children.

The problem with the church is the family. The problem with the church is the family. In 1 Thessalonians 2 and verse 11, Paul says, I shepherded you. I discipled you as a father does his children. I exhorted you.

I charged you. I comforted you as a father does his child. Well how would a pastor know how to do that? Unless he knew a father who actually did that. You follow me here?

The pattern for pastors and shepherds is in the home. And when you have pastors that do not know how to shepherd, how to rule their own households, they don't belong in the eldership of the Church of Christ. They just don't belong there. It begins at home. And we've got a dysfunctional church because we have a dysfunctional family in this country.

Well, here's the broad issue as we wrap it up. Here's the broad issue. The broad issue is in the church today we have a failure in truth and love. Both. Faith and works.

I haven't talked much about the laws of God. I've talked about relationships which tie directly into the laws of God and the constructing of the father-son relationships and the elder-sheep relationship. And the problem with the church is that they're fighting over tertiary issues, insignificant, superficial things. They're straining at gnats and swallowing camels. They got Baptists out there and Presbyterians that for a hundred and fifty years have fought over how much water to use in a baptism while all of their kids are going to hell in the public schools.

Sounds to me like we missed the camel. Presbyterians, anybody here? Baptists, anybody here? I think we all miss the camel. And I think right now it's time to stop fighting over the tertiary things.

It's time to stop straining at the gnats and swallowing the camels. Let's start focusing on the camels. I think it's the reason why is because the church has sought to be relevant and proved itself obsolete. The church doesn't want to go for the root problem, doesn't want to face the real antithesis. You know, it wants to deal with a little homosexual problem in Washington, D.C.

You know, So the pastor does a sermon on homosexual marriage and why you should vote for Amendment 8 in California, but he's not going to stand up and grow to the root and say, root and branch we've got a problem with our social systems. We've got some major repenting to do in the way we do our economics, in the way we do our education, the way we disciple our boys. We've got some big problems, much bigger than Amendment 8 that's supposed to salvage marriage. It's a lot like Saul, American religion today is like Saul, who goes out and takes out all the ugly things. He gets rid of all the ugly sheep and he saves all the good things.

Then King Agag, And King Agag was the real root of this evil tribe, but he was such a delicate man, he was such a cool guy, he had a great intellect or what have you, and saw one to salvage King Agag. And Samuel says, no, you saved out the beautiful things and you whacked away the homosexual marriage and ugly things but you didn't go to the root and Samuel came and hacked that King Agag to pieces. That's what you do. You take it out, root and branch. You go to the foundational issues.

You bring out the important issues and you embrace the truth of Christ. Christians, here's the bottom line, the real bottom line. You have got to be willing to die for Jesus Christ. Over what? Over truth and over your brothers.

The problem with modern Christianity is we keep moving the line and moving the line over which we are willing to die. At some point you've got to draw that line and say, I'm willing to die over that truth. At some point you got to say I'm willing to die for my brother. I'm willing to lay down my life for the love of a brother. And I think the problem is there's not enough passion in people.

There's not enough, they're not willing to lay down their lives for something. They're not willing to put everything on the line for some truth. They're not willing to put everything on the line for some brother. We got to be like that martyr, that Iranian brother who laid down his life because he stood for the truth. The video Cry for Iran brings out this beautiful story, but he laid down his life because he was teaching the truth and loving his brother.

And that's what we have to be prepared to do. So what's wrong with the church? We don't really care about the truth very much. We're not willing to lay down our lives for the truth, let alone, you know, break our comfort, change our lifestyle for the truth. We're not willing to do it for the truth and we're not willing to do it for our brothers because if we were willing to lay down our lives for our brothers, we wouldn't be splitting churches over gnats and tertiary issues.

We wouldn't see the broken relationships that we've seen. We just don't have enough passion for our brothers, and we don't have enough passion for the truth. So all my encouragement here this morning is find something to lay down your life for and go do it tomorrow. Start laying down your life for something. Amen?

Let's pray. Heavenly Father of God, we pray that you would give us your spirit this day, God, to acknowledge and discern the issues that we need to commit to this day. God, convict our hearts. Help us as we come to rebuild the family and the church by restoring relationships, by renewing a sense of the truth and the power of your truth and the application of it to our relevant situation. God we pray we would be willing to lay down our lives for the truth here in America, not just in Iran but here in America.

Help us to be willing to lay down our lives for our own brothers right here. Oh God, strengthen our relationships, our relationship with you, our relationships in our families, and our relationships in our churches. God, we pray for the beautiful, beautiful thing of brothers dwelling together in unity. Oh God, brothers that are powerful, fierce warriors in your kingdom who come together with bonds of love that cannot be broken. God this is our vision for our churches.

Bring it to us, O God this day, in Jesus' name we pray, Amen.