The Forgotten Weapon in a Fallen World

I'd like to switch it up a bit today. Today, I'd like for you to stand as we read God's Word. We'll stand, I will read, I will pray, and then you'll be seated.

So I asked this morning that for the reading of Scripture that if you're able to please stand as we read the authoritative Word of God. So it'll be in Joshua chapter 24. We'll start in verse 14.

Hear the living and active Word of God speak. Now, therefore, fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and truth, and put away the gods which your father served beyond the river and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. If it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve, whether the gods which your father served which were beyond the river or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living.

But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. The people answered and said, far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods. He who has ears to hear, let him hear what God has said.

Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for this day as we come before your Word. We are so thankful for the authority of your Word and the assurance that we can have in the truthfulness of it.

We pray that your Word would be clearly preached today and that your name would be glorified. We ask this all in your name. Amen.

Please be seated. What a great day. People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.

I read that quote last year and it greatly impacted the way that I do things. I love what I do. I love who I deal with, and I love who I do it for.

My name is AJ Sparks. I am the youth pastor or the director of youth ministries. This is my fourth year doing it.

I also do a couple other things. My main job is I'm a speech and debate teacher at Arrowhead Christian Academy in Redlands, which is great. I also teach Bible there for friends.

And I also teach health. That was an add-on this year. That was not very fun, but I taught it.

And then I'm also a coach. I coach cross country and I coach swim, which has been a lot of fun. So those are both seasons and during the summer.

And then I'm also getting my master's online to hopefully teach college or teach college classes for communication studies. So I love what I do. But again, mainly the reason why I'm here, I am the youth pastor, the director of youth ministries here.

And while today won't be a youth update, we'll have that in August on Wednesday night. I'd be foolish to not talk about those amazing people in that room for just a little bit. I love them dearly.

We have 36 souls in that room. Myself and my wife, Maddie, we serve alongside three couples and David Lawler. David Lawler is in college right now.

He's great. We serve alongside Pablo and Mia Thompson and Anna and Franco Boats. And then we also serve alongside Ana and Ignacio Vargas, who have been there since I was in youth group, which is great.

And then we have other esteemed people that come every now and then to either do the elders will come and they'll teach every now and then. But I love it. And then we have the kids in that roster.

We have 27 souls in that roster. And I love them dearly. Every Sunday and Wednesday, we have the opportunity to be able to preach them.

And it's wonderful. And so on Sundays, we've been going over John. John's a great book.

I know you guys are going over here. Hopefully none of the sermons are copied from whatever we did in there. But John's a great book.

We love it. And we just went over John 5. And in John 5, you get to see how Jesus Christ was interruptible. And it's beautiful.

Interruption is not a bad thing. You're on a mission towards something and there's a brief pause. That's what the word interruption means.

A brief pause from what you're doing. Christ was very interruptible with no matter who he was working with. Whenever he was preaching, working on his mission, people came to him and he was interruptible.

And so we talk with the students about interruption and how well they're able to be interrupted in their own lives for the sake of Christ, for the sake of the kingdom of God, as well as the Sabbath and what it means to truly rest. On Wednesday nights, we've been doing something a little bit different. We're going over biblical leadership.

I like to call them worldview Wednesdays. We basically just go over things that challenge the worldview of the students in there. And so we've been going over biblical leadership.

We looked at 1 Corinthians 11.1. Paul says, imitate me as I imitate Christ. And so we looked at essential aspects of biblical Christian leadership and what that means. We first looked at leadership in commencement.

Then we looked at leadership in conversion, leadership in creed, in chaos, in charity, in celebration, in crisis, in controversy, in character, in confidence, in companionship, in charging, in confession, in contending, in carrying out our mission, and in Christ. It was a wonderful series and that we're having some guest speakers during the summer and then on Wednesdays, we'll start up the Book of James. We also have events that we like to do in youth ministry.

We try to aim for three big events each semester. And the goal is to get these kids to be excited for youth ministry, hopefully, and to be excited to hopefully invite kids to come. That's one of the main reasons.

A second reason is for us to get to know the kids more, of course, and just have fun with them, for them to enjoy. And the third reason, which is probably the most important, is a discipleship aspect. We want to make sure that the students can see the leaders doing regular things.

How do I respond when I get beamed in the face with a dodgeball at Sky Zone? Well, they can come and find out. So we love our events. But again, that's not what we'll be discussing today.

So let's discuss some semantics. When I teach, I want to try to maximize the impact of God's Word. As Charles Spurgeon said, the Word of God is like a lion.

You don't have to defend the lion. All you have to do is let the lion loose and the lion will defend itself. So when I try to preach Christ, my goal is to put him on display as clearly as possible.

That is all I try to do. So as I develop my lectures, I try to develop them based on strict principles of validity, soundness, and logic of the truth of God's Word. And so there was a man by the name of Petrus van Maastricht who wrote a book called The Best Method of Preaching.

And it's a great book. And in this book, he outlines, if you want to make a sermon or a lecture or a lesson God-honoring, what do you have to do? He says, first you have to read God's Word. And then you have to exegete God's Word.

And you have to pull a doctrine from God's Word. And then you have to apply God's Word. And at the end, he has what is called the stirring of the affection, which is basically the charge to the congregation in some sense.

So that's my framework. But my ultimate model is Jesus Christ, of course. The best speech, the best sermon ever given is Matthew 5 through 7, the Sermon on the Mount.

That is a master class in how to give a sermon. There was no, okay, at your tables you have a little notepad. It was Jesus Christ.

And he taught. And people listened. I talk to my speech students all the time.

You don't need props to be interesting. You don't need cool statistics to be interesting. Your content needs to be good.

And if your content is good, people will listen. And they'll be engaged and they'll be changed. So again, this is my framework.

But my ultimate model is Christ. And Christ used a plethora of two things. First was metaphors.

And second was questions. People love metaphors. And as a communication major, my job is to make sure that people properly understand what I'm trying to say.

And so metaphors are great. We're comparing something in some sense, which is why when I tell my speech students, the reason why we say the word like so much in our conversations is because we're trying to compare something. That's all we're trying to do is make our message relatable to the audience that we're giving it to.

But those words like and um and ah, they decrease our clarity. But Christ used a lot of metaphors. And pastors try to use metaphors all the time.

Food metaphors are very common because everyone loves food, right? The common one is sports. People love sports. The pastor will say winning someone to salvation is like throwing a touchdown.

And everyone's like, yeah, I get that. I love that. And the other half of the congregation is like, I don't even play basketball.

And if you didn't get that joke, that one was probably for you. But so some metaphors are great because again, they communicate for audience on a way that they can understand. Christ obviously used a lot of farming metaphors because they were prevalent in that time.

But the second thing that Christ uses questions. Oh, if we could ask questions like Jesus Christ asked questions, just examining his conversations with people and the questions that he asked, Zach Zender, an author, found that Christ asked 305 questions in the Gospels. It's astounding.

Questions are so important because they get us to think. And so I have this chart here. Back in the early 2000s, there was two men that got together.

There was a theologian and a mathematician. They got together and they made this chart. And they found basically what it is.

It's every single line is when the Bible references itself in some sense. And they found that the Bible references itself 63,799 times. It is the most complex book in all of history.

1500 years, over 40 authors, 66 books, two testaments, all saying the same thing about the same person, Jesus Christ. And so when Christ asked questions, it was all just leaning back to what has been and looking forward to what will be. And so asking questions are so incredibly important.

And our job as Christians is to ask good questions. We're to learn how to ask questions properly. The Gospels, again, are riddled with these specifically questions that Christ has drew people in to what he was doing.

And so today I would like to ask you all a question I think the modern church would do well in answering effectively. The opportunity to speak before you today has excited me. I was told I think about two and a half weeks ago and I was like, great, I've already had something on mine for a while that I'd love to share with the church.

And there's a plethora of things I could talk about. I could talk about the pervasiveness of the LGBTQ community and the ideology it has on campuses. I could talk to you about how homeschooling in light of the modern education system is a proper thing or the importance of worship and prayer in the personal and corporate life, the sovereignty of God, the doctrine of election and predestination, the imago dei, the image of God.

I could talk to you about penal substitutionary atonement. I could talk to you about spiritual disciplines. I could talk to you about the cost of discipleship, biblical forgiveness, post-Christian world, living in a post-Christian world along with the lives of post-modernism.

I could talk about spiritual warfare, biblical manhood and womanhood, their Sermon on the Mount. Again, it's not even including exegetical topics like the Sermon on the Mount, Romans 5, 8, looking at sin, grace, struggle, and assurance or Acts and their early mission of the church and why Acts is the most joyful book in all of scripture because all we see is people coming to Christ. But I found it necessary to talk about something else today.

Today I wanted to talk to you all about the family. And as the title of the message state suggests, the family is the forgotten weapon in a fallen world. If you receive an outline in the back, great, I'll go along that briefly.

Hopefully I'll talk slowly enough for you all to understand it. I don't want to affirm you in any way because affirmation without discipline just breeds delusion. My job is to really get to the heart of the matter of what family needs to be and why everyone is involved in this.

So as in all important lectures or topics begin with an investigation, let's do that. What is the family? If you had to define family on your own, how would you define family? Are you a part of the family or are you not a part of the family? Do you enjoy your family? What kind of family are you a part of? What are you doing to create a family around you? Is everyone involved in a family? Is it necessary to start or create or be involved in a family? So a couple of questions for you. What is the current state of your family? When was the last time that you checked the spiritual condition of your family? Husbands, are you leaving your homes as Christ led the church with sacrificial love? Wives, are you submitting to and respecting your husbands as unto the Lord? Children, are you honoring your father and mother because the Bible commands it or just when it's convenient for you to get something? How does your marriage display the gospel to your children and to a watching world? What intentional rhythms of discipleship exist in your home right now? What legacy of faith or lack of it are you actively leaving for the people around you and your family? How do you reflect God's heart in the way you speak to or about your family? Are you contributing to the unity of the home or the division of your home? Who is in your family? That you are currently failing to forgive or to reach out to? Are there sins in your family that have been normalized for the sake of comfort? If your family were the only Bible that your neighbors ever saw or were able to read, what would they learn about Christ? And what is one habit, tradition, or pattern in your family that needs to die at the cross? I think these are all good questions to ask about your family.

So let's get into it. The first blank is the definition of the family. The family, what is it? God's first institution for discipleship, which is designed to reflect His covenant love, transmit the truth, and picture Christ's relationship to the church.

I'll say that again. God's first institution for discipleship, which is designed to reflect His covenant love, transmit the truth, and picture Christ's relationship to the church. As I talk to my youth students, I like to give them long definitions for things, and we unpack them.

My favorite one we ever did was about three years ago. I gave him a definition for love, and love has God as the primary object. It is expressed in obedience towards Him, and it is sacrificial, continual, and impartial.

So I like to have three parts to every definition, which I have here. So again, the first institution for discipleship, and then again, designed to reflect His covenant love, transmit the truth, and picture Christ's relationship to the church. While the biological family serves as the primary context for these responsibilities, every believer, every believer, whether married or single, is called to uphold, support, and live out the biblical vision of family within the household of faith, the church.

Whether you're single, married, widowed, divorced, or still a child in your parents' roof, the topic of family is not just relevant, it is essential. God designed the family as the primary institution, again, for forming character, for transmitting the truth, and displaying the gospel to a world that desperately needs it. But more than that, every believer belongs to a greater family, which of course is the household of faith.

In Christ, we are brothers and sisters, spiritual fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, not by blood but by the spirits. So a biblical understanding of the family teaches us how to love sacrificially, teaches us how to serve faithfully, lead humbly, submit joyfully, forgive continually, and these aren't just family values, these are kingdom values and things that we all have to take into consideration. So even if you're not currently raising children or sharing a home with a spouse, you are called to strengthen and support the families around you and to disciple the next generation.

I have countless teachers at where I work at who are not married, and they see the responsibility as leading the next generation as spiritual fathers or spiritual mothers to these kids. And so this sermon, this passage, this lecture is not just for people with rings on their fingers or people with children, it is for the whole body of Christ. Because when families are strong, the church is strong, and when the church lives as God's family, the world sees a clearer picture of Christ.

So this is necessary. Now some of you, when you hear the phrase family, I don't really like that. We don't like that for a couple of reasons.

Number one, our culture hates family. Now maybe that dropped off on you. I have no idea.

Since 2007, the number of births per 1,000 people in the U.S. has dropped nearly 50 percent in the United States. It's a tragedy. China, back in 1979, had a one-child policy, and they kept it all up to 2015.

And it was so bad that they had to make it now, okay, now you can have two children because the condition, the economic state in China was not thriving. So they changed it to two. And then just six years later, in 2021, they changed it to, okay, now you can have more.

And to go with that, an article in the New York Times came out where they found there were more adults in diapers than there were children in diapers in China. And they live with the consequences of what they did. Our culture hates family.

Secondly, we are single, or we've been hurt by family in some sense. So we think, if I don't have a husband or a wife, or if I've been hurt by my family, I'm not really a fan of this topic. A third one, then, would be when you talk about family, people think it's a certain phase of life, right? You have one son, one daughter, a dog, white picket fence, nice house, all those sort of things.

But that's not necessarily true. You will always be a part of a family. You've always been a part of a family.

For those of us who have come to salvation, this extends to all of eternity, which is a beautiful thing. Because when God talks to us about this notion of Him and His redeemed people, He speaks to us using the metaphor of family, the bride, the church, and the bridegroom, Christ. When He communicates to us, God, the Father, and God, the Son, this is family language.

So in looking at what I could speak on today, I wanted you all to walk away knowing more about Christ than you do about me. I think any good sermon, the congregation always walk away knowing more about Christ than they do about whoever's speaking about Christ. And again, this issue of family is of the utmost importance because it applies to all of us.

So again, I want to kind of keep with the regular flow of what I said about we read the passage. We're not going to exegete it as much. We'll look at different passages, but we'll pull a doctrine right now, then we'll look at some application, and we'll have a stirring of the affections.

So let's go to our doctrine for today. Our doctrine for today is that the family is a divine institution, a divine institution. It's typically whenever I give a doctrine to my students, there has to be scripture that backs it up.

So please turn to Ephesians chapter five, verse 22. This is, of course, a classic verse on marriage, but again, to further drive from the point that family is a divine institution. It's going to get better and better and more convicting and more convicting because I haven't even gotten to the main point yet.

The main point is going to be awesome, and it's something that's been right under your nose forever, and we just don't even know about. So Ephesians five, verse 22, we'll start there. This is, wives, be subject to your own husbands, ask to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife.

Christ also is the head of the church, he himself being the savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be subject to their husbands and everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for her, so that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church and all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she would be holy and blameless.

So husbands also ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church. Go to Genesis chapter two.

This is the very beginning. Of course, in Genesis chapter two, we see in verse 22 through 24, again, we get the picture of what marriage is supposed to be, an institution by God. And more importantly, again, as our doctrine stated, it is the family being the divine institution by God.

Genesis two, verse 22 says, the Lord God fashioned into a woman, the rib, which he had taken from the man and brought her to the man. Verse 23, the man said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called a woman because she was taken out of man.

For this reason, the man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become one flesh. And then go to first Timothy chapter three. I know we're bouncing around a bit.

The verses are also on your outline in some sense, a couple of the main passages we're going over, but first Timothy chapter three, we get a couple of good things. And we get to see the relationship with family to the church. Because again, working at a school, my job is not to parent the students that I teach.

I can't discipline them. You know, I can't spank them. I can't ground them.

I can give them attention, but that only relates to what I have in that school. I can't do anything else outside of that. And so my job as a teacher is to partner with parents.

And the job of the church, again, a youth group, right, is to partner with parents because there are certain things that have been given to the church and certain things that have been given to the family. And there has to be a distinction. So in first Timothy chapter three, we'll read verse four.

It says, he must be one who manages, speaking of overseers and deacons, manages his own household well, keeping his children under control with all dignity. But if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the church of God? So right there, we get to see the relationship. Now we get to see the family.

If you can't manage your family well, that will relate to how you view the church. Go just a page over if it applies to you in first Timothy chapter three, verse 14 through 16. It says, I am writing these things to you, hoping to come to you before long.

But in case I am delayed, I write that you will know how one ought to conduct himself in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and support, or the pillar and buttress of the truth. By common confession, great is the mystery of godliness. He who was revealed in the flesh was vindicated in the spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in the glory.

That is an amazing passage of scripture. And that is a great summation of Christ's life in the gospel. But in this, I almost called the sermon the family, the pillar and buttress of the truth, and how the family was to model the church.

But after a conversation with a friend of mine, we came to the realization that this is not, the family is not the pillar and buttress of the truth. That is the church. And again, there are certain things given to the church and certain things given to the family, and they have to know their roles.

Again, the church is the pillar and buttress of the truth. It is an institution that has been entrusted with the receiving, guarding, and proclaiming of the mysteries of faith through men and women who are graced and gifted to faithfully teach these truths. But still, the family plays a vital role in supporting the church because the church is made up of families.

Fathers and mothers are called to teach their children these same truths on a daily basis as part of their duty to raise children in the faith. The family exists by a natural design. So that's why the issue with the LGBTQ community is not that it's necessarily just sinful, although it is, it's against a natural cause of order that God created, because the family is natural.

The church is a supernatural institution that God has given to us. It has been established by Christ for the purpose of God's glory, the making of disciples, and the propagation of the truth. This reality of family also teaches us what it means to be a church.

Votie Baucham said that we don't know what it means to be family, and we don't know what it means to be church. There is a reason we are wrong on both. If you can't get one, you will not get the other.

It is hard to find somebody, a strong, saved, God-fearing Christian who gets it from a biblical perspective what it means to be involved in the local assembly through service and love, but doesn't get the family thing. Vice versa, it's hard to find someone who knows how to lead their family and understands their role in the family, but doesn't really get the church thing. They are dependent upon one another.

A church is only as strong as the weakest family in it. We must understand that we are tied together, and without the strength of one another, we cannot get to places unknown to us as we currently exist. So in looking at this, I want to drive home a singular point today.

Now we're going to get to the main thing that I think is going to really revolutionize the way your family is. And the main point of today is going to be family worship. The key point to drive home today is family worship.

If the family is an institution that has been given by God divinely to fight off evil in this world, I believe the best possible way to continue to grow your family is to partake in what is called family worship. This idea was popularized by a man named Joel Beek in recent years, but it's been popular much before then. But again, it's something that I think is necessary to bring to your attentions today.

And I'll discuss more about this in a bit in family worship. I'm going to emphasize four main points. We're going to look at the reading of God's Word, the instruction of God's Word, prayer after God's Word, and then singing of God's Word.

That's it. So if you came today expecting something cool from a guest speaker or something different or profound, it's the simple truth. Everyone has goals.

Winners have goals. Losers have goals. If you have the goal of creating a strong family, it's not just about setting a goal that you think will hopefully one day achieve itself.

It's about the daily discipline that separates yourself from every other family to actually do these things. And hopefully today will give you the encouragement to do so. Family worship would be a time of devotion that you spend with your family every single day where the father leads his family in the worship of God.

Of course, when the father is absent, that would then be the mother. This is a lost spiritual art and discipline. This is a full-time job for parents.

I always tell people all the time, I have all these jobs, but my primary ministry is my wife. Always has been and always will be. She comes before everything else.

She has to. In 1677, there was a church covenant put forth by a Puritan congregation in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and it included the following statement. They said, we, quote, want to commit to reform our families, engaging ourselves to the conscientious care to step before us and to maintain the worship of God in them and to walk in our houses with perfect hearts in a faithful discharge of all domestic duties, edification, instructing, and charging our children and households to keep the ways of the Lord.

Family worship has saved millions of children throughout the years because of the necessity and dependence upon God's word and families seeing their necessary command to raise children. Puritans used to do things called soul visits back in the 1600s. And if some families were not practicing family worship, some pastors and elders in the church saw it as an abdication of their role.

And what they would do is that some churches would even withhold communion from their fathers because they did not lead their families properly. And if you can't lead yourself properly, you definitely won't be leading your family properly. So if they saw the family not being led properly, something has to be going on in your own life.

And if something's going on in your own life, communion will have to be withheld from you this morning. So what does family worship consist of? Basically reading, instructing, praying, and singing. If you do it, twice would be great in the morning and at night.

For some families, their schedule only allots for 10 minutes in the morning, maybe 20 minutes in the afternoon. My goal is to give you all the tools and motivation for you guys to be able to do this, whether you are by yourself, living by yourself with the family, just a wife, you're a widow, you have grandchildren, whatever it is, this is something that applies to everyone. But consistency in this is key.

So four things. The first one, again, is daily reading of the word of God. Daily reading of the word of God.

2 Timothy chapter 3, verse 14 through 17 says this, You, however, continue in the things you have learned and become convinced of, knowing from whom you have learned them, and that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which were able to give you wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God, profitable for teaching, and reproved for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. We love those last two verses because we use them to memorize about the authority of God's word.

But the verse before that, Paul's instructing here in 2 Timothy chapter 3, you know these things from your youth. That implies that he was taught these things from his youth, that the word of God was read to him. You can read a psalm a day.

So I want to give you a couple of things within each point. Have a reading plan. Again, one of them, you can read a psalm a day with your children, a proverb a day, whatever it might be.

J.C. Riles said, Fill their minds with scripture. Let the word dwell in them richly. Give them the Bible, the whole Bible, even while they're young.

It is so important to read God's word and to have a plan as you read it. You can do the Bible in a year, you know. I've only read through the Bible like twice in my whole life.

I know I'm young, but I never sat down from beginning to end and had a devotion plan to read through the entirety of God's word. I've asked some prominent pastors, what do you do for devotions and how do you differentiate between preparing a sermon and doing devotions? And some of them have told me plainly, I just do a couple of proverb verses a day. And that is enough for me to then go out and live that faithfully.

I mean, if you did read this morning, whenever you read, like how much of it do you actually remember? Probably not a lot. And so as you go out to the world, I have no idea what I just did whatsoever. It's like what James says, you go and you look in the mirror and then you walk and you instantly forget what you look like.

And so it's not, you don't need, the issue is not more scripture or more motivation. The issue comes down to discipline and application of God's word. Secondly, involve your family, involve your family.

So again, in the daily reading of God's word, have a reading plan, involve the family. Everyone should read as soon as they're able to, everyone should. And you should struggle with it.

I have a student in my class. His name is Lucas Quiros. He just graduated.

He's a senior and he has special needs. He has autism. And so the special ed teacher came to me and said, we'd like to have Lucas be in your Bible nine class.

Is that okay? Absolutely. And by God's grace, I have a lot of students that really wanted to help Lucas and work with Lucas. And we sat there and had Lucas read scripture because Lucas is a human being created in God's image.

And his job, along with everyone else's job in that classroom, is to read God's word. I don't care how long it takes. Lucas is going to read God's word, even if it takes, which it always took me, whispering it into his ear so he could say it, because he cannot read.

It is so important to involve your family. And then the third thing, be very simple in your explanation. This doesn't need to be complex.

You don't need to be a theologian to do this. Be simple in your explanation. So again, the first one, daily reading of God's word.

Secondly, daily instruction of God's word. Again, daily instruction of God's word. Deuteronomy chapter six, verses six through seven says this, these words which I am commanding you today shall be in your hearts.

You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk with them when you sit in your houses, when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up. So these things should be instructed to your kids, to your children, to those around you. Again, if you don't have kids, this can be with a discipleship group.

You guys can do this with weekly. So again, a couple of tips. Encourage dialogue around God's word.

There are multitudes of commentaries. And again, the issue is that, well, they're expensive. Yeah, commentaries are expensive.

I get it. John MacArthur, Matthew Henry, they can have expensive commentaries. John Gill has a free commentary on every single verse in the Bible online.

Everyone has internet access. And so you can access that online for free. And so you can have these at your hands.

Secondly, be pure in your doctrine. So not only do you have to encourage dialogue around God's word, you'd have to be pure in doctrine. As Titus two seven says, in all things showing myself a pattern of good works in doctrine showing uncorrupted sincerity.

So we're to be pure in our doctrine. As we live these things out, people always catch more than they hear. Always.

I've taught, I just got done with my school year, taught 206 students. And the things they came up and talked to me are the things that I did, not even the things that I taught. So people will catch things more than they will hear things.

And then the third tip for that, require attention through affection. Be passionate about God's word. All right, let's do God's word again.

Let's do family worship one more time. If you're coming to that or coming to family worship with that attitude, but then on Saturday or Sunday, Hey, we got a football game. Let's do this.

The kids are going to see where the parents' priorities are. Third points is daily prayer before the throne of God. Colossians four two says to devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alerts in it with an attitude of praying without ceasing.

Doesn't just apply to the individual that applies to the family. You can use the ax formula, right? Adoration, confession, Thanksgiving, supplication, but communication is always a two way street. And so if you go to God's word, reading God's word, and God illuminates truth of his word to you through his word, you must go back to him in prayer.

When you're reading God's word, Jeremiah 10 25 says, pour out your wrath on the nations that do not know you and on the families that do not call your name. If you're not praying with your family, this first applies to you. Puritan Thomas Brooks said that the home without daily prayer is like a house without a roof exposed to all the storms of heaven.

It's a tragedy to not pray. So again, a couple of tips in prayer, be brief, no lead, no, no need whatsoever to drag this out for 10, 20 minutes. Be brief in your prayer with your kids.

Secondly, be varied. Switch it up. Hey, you're going to pray for this today.

I'm going to pray for this. Then you'll pray for this tomorrow. We'll switch it up.

You pray for this. You pray for this. I pray for this.

Third, have a list. You need a list when you pray. I have a list with me every morning when I pray.

If people that I pray for in this church, at my work, at my school, you have to have a list that you can go through and then you add to it. I'm a big user of pens. I think you should commit to your mistakes.

But in my prayer journal, I use a pencil because the needs are always changing. And I always want to make sure that I'm able to pray for people as I should be. Give assignments.

Again, this week, I want you to pray for this person. This week, I want you to pray for this person. And when you come back, hey, how did you do praying for so-and-so this week? And then follow up would be the last tip.

Follow up with them throughout the week. How's your prayer life coming? How has your prayer been for this individual? And these are awkward, hard conversations. I'm, of course, being a communication major, all for face-to-face communication.

But you have phones. There is no excuse to not communicate with people. There's no excuse to not hold people accountable.

It's discipline. That's it. Then the last thing, daily singing to the praises of God.

Daily singing the praises of God. Psalm 118 verse 15 is a beautiful verse. It says, The sound of joyful shouting and salvation is in the tents of the righteous.

What a right hand of the Lord does valiantly. Singing is done in the synagogues, but it's also done in the tents. So the synagogues was the places of worship, but the households were in the tents.

And there was daily singing, daily joyful shouting from the tents that was heard from the families. Singing stays with you throughout the day. It's memorable.

You should own a good hymn book or listen to Christian music with your kids throughout the day. It's incredibly memorable. So again, tip number one, you should own a hymn book.

Buy one online. We budget for other things, budget for a hymn book. Secondly, sing songs that are doctrinally pure.

We have a list here in the back. You guys can sign up to hear the songs that we sing every week. An email gets sent out once a week.

These are the songs we're singing on Sunday. And then you can start to sing them with your kids in the car. We do for VBS and those songs are annoying.

These ones are fine. We come up here, we get to sing God's word. You get the songs every single week, and then you can sing those songs.

Third, sing Psalms, P-S-A-L-M-S, Psalms. John Calvin said that Psalms are anatomy of all parts of the soul. Another author said that they are the richest goldmine of deep living experiential scriptural piety available to us today.

And then fourth, sing heartily and with feeling. Sing with passion. Biggest thing that keeps people from singing, my voice isn't very good.

I can't do it. We had daily sunrise worship at our school, and I sang with other guys. Their teachers had to be there, so I walked up there and there's other teachers there.

I just don't sound very good. I said, it's okay, man. I don't sound good either.

So we both belted it out together, you know, and that encouraged the other students to sing louder and then find their own voice to sing. If the father and mother don't sing, the children are not going to sing. You got to sing passionately.

So these are essential to family growth. Again, these are kingdom values. Why are they so important? Colonel Richard Husband was the pilot in the early 2000s of a spaceship, a space shuttle, specifically Space Shuttle Columbia, which was destroyed upon re-entry in 2003.

Some of you may remember it. I was only two years old, so I don't remember it. He died in February that year, 2003.

We lost seven astronauts that day. It was a day of mourning. While he was a pilot, while he was on the space shuttle, what you probably didn't know about him was that he was a devoted Christian man, and that before he left, he handed his son and daughters 36 taped videos for the 18 days that he'd be gone.

One to watch in the morning and one to watch at night. Imagine what those videos mean to that family now. So a couple of objections, because there always are objections.

I can't do this. Number one reason is time. Busy schedules.

Family's not always together all the time. Everyone has 24 hours, people. Everyone has 24 hours.

Time is not found. Time is made, and you make time for the things that are essential in your life. It is not an issue of time.

It's an issue of priority. We will do this before we go out tonight. We will do this before we leave school.

Secondly, people say relationships. I'm single. I'm widowed.

My family's not saved. I don't have a family of my own. Again, this relates to all believers.

This pattern of family worship should be your pattern of daily devotion, in reading, instructing, praying, and singing. You were all called to strengthen and support the families around you, to disciple the next generation. Third one then would be knowledge.

People say, I don't have enough knowledge. I can't do this. I don't have the knowledge to be this properly, or I'm not a teacher.

Again, there are guides to help you, which I'm going to come to in a second, but the issue isn't knowledge. It's cowardness in that sense. Fourthly, people say, I don't know where to start.

My family's in shambles. I can't do this. My kids won't want to do this.

My wife doesn't want to do this. My husband doesn't want to do this. No one wants to do this to my family.

Your household is not a democracy, and it's not a dictatorship either. Your household should be a theocracy, a house that is ruled by God, an audience of one. So many people are paralyzed by the fear of failure, of doing this with their family.

If you don't fail, you're not even trying. If you want to achieve this style of family worship, you have to do something you've never done. If you want to achieve something you've never had, you have to do something that you've never done.

So two great guides that I have for you today, if you want to learn more about them or come back for the service, you're more than welcome to. This is a great book called Raising Spiritual Champions. It's been mentioned here before.

It's a great book. This goes over children in some sense, how to raise children properly. This is good for anyone to know.

If you're helping out VBS, these are good things to know. Second one is the book by Joel Peek. It's called The Family Worship Bible Guide.

It's about $30 on Amazon, and it has commentary on every chapter in the Bible. So all you do is that you just read the chapter, and then you read what he says. Sometimes there's one question at the end, two questions, three questions.

You can sing the songs that we have here in church, and then pray with your family. The resources are there. The discipline is what we need, and the discipline is hopefully brought by the stirring of the affection and the motivation.

So there's a couple of last-minute applications I think are important for your family. Number one, you have to have sacred time for family worship, a time in your day where nothing interrupts this portion of my day. My wife and I, we like to do something on Saturdays where between 12 and 5 we cannot be interrupted.

We are together. We read God's Word. We read it separately.

We read it together. Then we read a book that we have, and then we pray together. And there's time where that is sacred time.

If something urgent comes up, then we do it in the morning. But there has to be sacred time. Again, it's not found.

It has to be made. Secondly, you have to establish a family mission. My wife and I did this back before we got married, and we wanted to come to the cross to get my family name.

Jessica Lovaas in our church graciously gave us a nice framed portrait of it. But we wanted the Sparks household to consist of six things. And when our children are raised, they know these six things.

We have to be submissive to the Lord. We have to be practitioners of truth. We have to be all things to all people.

We have to radiate with the joy of Christ. We have to be keepers of God's beauty. We have to safeguard the family.

Those six things are what I want people to know about our family, that our kids have values as they grow up. Even if you don't have a family, have a personal mission statement for yourself. Jim Rohn once said that you are the average sum of the five people you spend the most time with.

Those five people, if you're not in a family, you're not married, are your family. The five people you spend the most time with are your family, especially if they are Christians, because that is a spiritual unity and a spiritual bond. Viktor Frankl said that when a man can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.

Don't be distracted with pleasure. Find deep meaning that is rooted in God's word. Have a family mission.

This is what we do, and this is how we act. Third thing, make family a hallmark of your life, a benchmark of your life. Be obsessed with the idea of family.

The benefits, of course, if in your marriage, marital smoothness, growing in love, sharpening one another, and then if you're single, benefits in this. Or a widow, growing in maturity, increasing in brotherly love, and increasing in accountability for those around you. And lastly, the fourth point, fourth application, teach your family to fear the Lord.

Teach your family to fear the Lord. George Barna has a great book where he outlines seven things that kids need to know. He says they need to know that there's one supreme being revealed in the Bible.

All human beings are sinful by nature. The consequences of our sin can be forgiven and eliminated through Jesus Christ. The fourth one, the entire Bible is true and is the best moral guide for every person in all situations.

Fifth, the absolute truth, absolute moral truth exists, and those truths are defined by God. Six, the ultimate purpose of human life is to know, love, and serve God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And then seventh, success on earth is best understood as consistent obedience to God.

And then he walks through all the statistics of how many kids do not believe this anymore, and how it has decreased because the family doesn't value these things. You have to teach your family to fear the Lord. In closing, Psalm chapter 11, verse 1 through 3. And the Lord, I take refuge.

How then can you save my soul? Flee as a bird to your mountain. For behold, the wicked bend the bow. They make ready their arrow upon the string to shoot in darkness at the upright in heart.

So the evil world is ready. They are ready to attack the family. And then verse 3, if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do? The foundation that has been given to you clearly is the family, both in the physical, biological, and the spiritual, supernatural sense that has been given to you by God.

So many people fall in love with the idea of the biblical family, but they don't fall in love with the habits that create for the biblical family. Don't fall in with the idea of it. Fall in love with the habits that create for that family.

Use whatever it takes to get your family to where it needs to be. In an age where the family is attacked, the church is weak, where do you stand? Your job, husbands, your job, mothers, is to stand the gap for your family, to intercede for your family on their behalf. Again, using whatever it takes to bring them to where it needs to be.

And family worship is key to this. It is what creates the ripples that fuels the tidal waves to destroy false ideologies and hatred towards the biblical family. I had a student come up to me and ask me one time why I teach.

I teach speech and debate. That's the main class, but another class I teach is the Bible 9 class. And so she came up to me and said, why do you teach Bible 9 class? And how did you begin to do it? I said, well, I just applied, and they accepted me.

Oh, what are your qualifications? I don't have a teacher credential. Ever been to seminary? I said, I don't have any. You've never been to seminary? No, I haven't.

That was a surprise to hear from a freshman student. And she said, so how did you get this job? By the grace of God, I have no idea. But I know that I got this job because when I sat down in the interview, I looked at the principal then in the eyes and I said, my job is to teach the whole student to practice truth.

And that's why I do what I do, to teach the entire student to practice truth. And in speech, I tell my students again and again, you never have any idea how powerful your words are to your family and to those around you. That same student came up later and asked me, then why do you do this job? Now I know how you got it, but why do you do this job? Because I believe that truth will save the world.

The truth of Christ will save this world. It is the only thing that can save lost sinners like it did for me. It is life.

And if you think I'm wrong, then you are too protected and too naive to have any idea for how this world is even constituted and constructed. There is suffering in this world and that can be ameliorated or done away with through the words that we use in our personal and our corporate life and our family worship that we do. I think of a student, a different one that came up to me and said, Mr. Sparks, could you help me write a speech? She was my Bible 9 student.

I said, yeah, I can do that. So I asked some questions. What is the purpose? And she said, I'm speaking at my parents' divorce hearing.

I need you to help me write a speech for that. That was the hardest speech I've ever written and helped a student through. To think the pain that could have been done away with if this family did worship together, if the father grabbed his daughter and said, let's sit down, let's read God's word, let's be instructed by God's word, let's pray after God's word, and let's sing praises to God in his word.

These words that we use are not vain, useless things. They are who we are. As Luke 645 says, what comes out of us are these words.

So yes, I believe that truth will save the world and it's our job and everyone's job to support that, especially in our families. We have to speak the truth. A lot of men shout boldly, I will die for my family, and that's great, but will you change your habits for your family? Will you do family worship for your family? Will you change your unhealthy habits for your family? Start to live for your family.

Your greatest challenge is in anything else other than to believe in Jesus Christ and the gospel, to believe that Jesus Christ is God. Could it be that there is a God that died for your sins and your job is to communicate that with your family? You must teach this to your children and there is no formula. Your own discipline, your own devotion, your own good works will not save your life, will not save your marriage, will not set you free.

There's only one and it's Jesus Christ. It's the one who took your place. He's the one who stood silently on that platform as Barabbas walked down and he died for your sins.

We are that Barabbas that walks down. Barabbas never thanked Christ for doing that. We are saved by the blood of Christ.

He is the one that we live in, the one who we do it for. There's only one. It is still Jesus.

It'll always be Jesus. It'll never stop being the power of Jesus. His blood is sufficient to save you and his power is great enough to sustain you through every trial, through every storm, and through every tribulation.

So pursue the truth. Have an adventure. Stand up straight.

Articulate yourself. Love with your whole soul. Forgive as your Savior has forgiven you.

Understand your calling. Live with exuberant passion. Fear the Lord.

Keep his commandments. Do family worship for this is the whole end of man and for this we labor for the glory of our Savior Jesus Christ. Let's pray.

God, we thank you for this morning. We thank you for the opportunity we had to be able to come before you and discuss the importance and matter of family worship. You are such a good God and we are so thankful for this institution of family that you've given to us for us to understand what we need to do and how we need to live and how we need to act.

God, I thank you for the families that we have in this church. I thank you for those that are single in this church, for those that are widowed in this church, for the children of parents and families in this church, God. I pray that every individual in here would see the necessity of family.

And why this goes beyond a physical family is because we have a spiritual family. Father, that is how you communicate to us as father and son, as bride and bridegroom. God, I pray that we'd be able to picture this each and every day to a world, to be able to picture that the family is a divine institution and that the daily reading of your word, the daily instruction of your word, daily prayer before your throne, and the daily singing to the praises of your glorious name would be something that is forever on our mind.

I pray that as the day draws near of your return, Lord, that we'd be found faithful, that as every knee will bow and every tongue will confess, Lord, I pray that each and every family in here would be bowing the knee and confessing daily before the throne of grace, God. We pray that this would be a daily habit of our families, the daily habits of ordinary households, God. We pray that this would be something that would transform the family, that they would see the necessity of doing something that has been here all along, that the motivation has been given, that what lies next is a discipline to do it properly each and every day.

We pray that you'd give us grace to do that. Through God, our creator and savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, by the power of the Holy Spirit, be all glory, majesty, demeaning, and authority before all time, now, and forever. Amen.