What is the significance of family life? How is family life diminished in the modern world? What is the true impact of a family on the world? Join Scott Brown, Jason Dohm, and Jared Longshore as we explain the power of a family – your family – in the world.

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of scripture. And I have Jason Dome with me again, so glad for that. And Jared Longshore. Hey Jared.

Hey, how you doing? So great to see you, man. So good to have you back. Yeah, good to have you back again. Now Jared is a pastor at Grace Baptist Church in Cape Coral, Florida.

He's vice president of Founders Ministries and all wrapped up in the Institute of Public Theology. I highly recommend all. But thank you so much, Jared, for joining us. We're going to talk about the family as a force in the world. So I want to just sort of open up our discussion talking about the pivotal role of the family as a force in the world, but I want to start with a statement that we made years ago called a declaration of the complementary roles of church and family.

And We wrote this because we had a sense that church and family life had been unnecessarily and actually unbiblically disconnected. They're two separate institutions. Both of them have overlapping roles to preach the gospel and to prepare the next generation. That has an awful lot to do with the family being a force in the world. I'm just going to read a couple of statements just to sort of Seed our thinking and then we'll run We write in in this declaration the complementary spheres and the biblical roles of the church and family as set forth in scripture Are crucial for fulfilling the Great Commission Because of this the world the flesh and the devil wage a fierce and unrelenting warfare against the Church of Jesus Christ and the biblical order of the family.

Consequently, Christians must rise up to defend the biblical order of the church and the family without compromise. And then one of the articles, Article 16, we have written this in kind of a doctrinal statement declarative format. Article 16, the mission of the church and the family is generational. And I read this because this has a lot to do with the force, the helpful, powerful force of the family in the world. We affirm that God commands churches, families, and individuals to teach the gospel and make disciples in every generation.

Quote, that thou mightest fear the Lord thy God to keep all thy statutes and commandments, which I command thee, thou thy son and thy son's son. And of course, several scripture references. And then we say that we deny that the church and the family should be left out of the whole discussion of preaching the gospel to the next generation and that ignoring such a thing is a disaster. So that's what we say in the declaration, and I think that really begins the matter of the importance of the family as a force for the power of the gospel in the world, really the most important power in the world. So let's just talk about this.

What are some of the issues that we ought to consider when we think about the family as a force? Yeah, I think we need to think well about the family as a force in the world, and rather than merely thinking about the force of the world upon the family. Now, I would be the first to say we need to beware of worldly ideologies. We need to be aware of the way that the enemy attacks our families and all of the bad ideas that can come our way. And yet I think sometimes even in conservative Christian circles, that truth is understood.

But any sense of the family exercising Dominion in the world and seeing the spread of God's image the recovery of that image through the blood of Christ and of course his life death and resurrection and in his Sanctifying power in us and this flourishing of the image of God on earth I think that is that is detached. So you have to go back to the cultural mandate and say, well, what did God tell us to do in the beginning? He told us to be fruitful, to multiply, to fill the earth and to subdue it and to have dominion. And you simply can't fulfill that mandate without the family. If you're not going to be fruitful, if you don't have husband, wife, if you don't have children that need to be nurtured and raised and taught God's ways.

And so when we begin to think this way, it's like, we don't only have to play defense, we certainly have to play defense, but we also need to learn how to play offense and to train up children so that they know God's Word, So they know the bad ideas that exist all around them in the world, but they're able to go out and to tear down those strongholds By taking hold of God's Word believing it and obeying it I like what you say about you know taking you know in advance. I just did a conference last weekend called Build, Dwell, Plant, and it's based on Jeremiah 29. Jeremiah writes a letter to the captives in Babylon, and you know, they're in pain, but he tells them, build houses, dwell in them, plant gardens, get married, have babies, pray for the peace of the city. In other words, go for it. Don't hunker down, get going, buy tractors, buy power tools, build, go take ground.

That's kind of what Jeremiah is telling him to do. But you kind of reminded me of that with what you said. So I think there's a temptation to be resisted, and that's this, to think of what Paul says about healthy marriage in Ephesians chapter 5 and what he says about healthy child training in Ephesians chapter 6 and sort of view it as a counterpoint to the Great Commission, as if it's either or, as if we focus inward and take care of home life, or we focus outward and take care of taking the gospel to the nations. It's actually, my observation after a couple of decades of just watching, is that a healthy marriage and family is actually the perfect platform for the Great Commission. And it's a false choice that we should never sort of back ourselves into the corner in picking one or the other.

Yes, great commission work can compromise the family. If you think about missionaries sending their kids off to boarding school, that's exactly the wrong direction because actually teaching the things that Christ commanded, most people in the world are living in the context of a home life that has marriage, has children, and if you're going to disciple the nations, you better have your marriage and your children and be living before the people that you're evangelizing. But anyway, let's banish the false choice right now. Amen. I think Christians would be helped, particularly in their parenting, their family life, by thinking deeply about creation and thinking deeply about even the language of world in scripture.

Like, to whom does the world belong? I think many people would be tempted to say, well, it belongs to the devil, because you do have verses that speak of the prince of the power of the air the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience and yet we can de-emphasize clear biblical text in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth the the heavens belong to God the earth belongs to God The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. And certainly with Christ and his coming, we see this great change, this great impact that happens when he is born of the Virgin, when God himself is made flesh, takes upon himself flesh, takes upon himself humanity. And then he lives, dies, and rises from the dead. And when he does, he says, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

If you're injecting that those truths about creation and about the earth and about the world into your children, well they're going to go out of the door and know that this is God's world. God rules here and his ways are good and we can see his wisdom. When his wisdom is applied, good things are going to happen. I was just doing this with my children recently. We were reading through Proverbs and Proverbs says, offer your first fruits to the Lord, and then your vats will be, or then your barns will be filled with plenty and your vats will be bursting with wine.

And if you don't do that, well, then you're going to get the opposite. I was saying, well, the worldly person says that that is not true, right? I mean, if I get my crop, I can take my corn down to the market and I can sell it and I can get money and then I can fill my barns and I can have plenty of wine by selling it at the market. But if you take it to the temple, if you take it to the church and you give it, well, they don't give you any money back, you know, they'll give you something. So you're not going to be able to get that those full barns and all of that wine.

It's just, you're being crazy. But the Christian knows, no, no, no, You see, you've forgotten the key thing. It's God's world. He sends the rain. He's the one who makes the crops grow.

I am rendering back to the creator. And he has promised certain blessings and it all comes from him. Like you don't, if you upset him, you're gonna have big problems. So Christians can begin to train their children to live in the actual world, bringing biblical truth to bear by the way they actually go about their lives. So I think we need that recovery of creation doctrine, And we need a recovery of the sense of Christ authority, both in heaven and on earth.

That's so wonderful. I mean, think of just the value of knowing who you are and knowing what to do in the world and know why you do it and who there is to please. What a blessing it is to know that in a world where people are really confused about every single one of those things. Jared, just to sort of build on what you were saying, something like a decade ago I was at a homeschool conference and the speaker put up an image of side-by-side pictures of a monastery and a fortress. And he made the point that they look roughly the same, it's high walls, but the monastery was typified by trying to keep out things.

And really, to the point you were making earlier, it's just defense. It's defensive only. But a fortress exists to propagate strength, and then the strength goes out. And the speaker was making the point that Christian families aren't monasteries, aren't only concerned with what we keep out of the home, but we're actually fortresses. We're places where we propagate strength in order to be used for Christ in the world.

You know, sociologists know about this matter of strength. You know, for years I read articles and books, probably 20 years ago I read a book called Fatherless America by David Blankenhorn. It's really a remarkable book. But it's a book about fatherhood. Sociologists call it the fatherhood effect.

Like when you set aside God's ways for the family, everything falls apart. If you just have a father sitting in the home, even if he's sitting watching television, it drives down the incarceration rate. It drives down psychological problems. It drives down poverty. It drives down drug abuse.

It drives down dropping out of school and everything else. And for what David Blankenhorn says is if you put a father in the home, you eliminate poverty, you eliminate teenage pregnancy, and in our terms, you probably eliminate abortion because you have a father who's there who's taking care of his daughter. So, I mean, just the raw sociological effects of rejecting the power that God has invested in the family is a disaster. So just a question to throw out, and you can race to be first if you want. So dads ought to be doing things to sort of rally the troops at home and to create a great commission outpost where God is planted.

And what are some of those things that dad can do to prepare his family to engage the world like that? Well, you know, you have the fundamentals of that. You need to be engaging in family worship, and probably most of the listeners here would be thinking, yeah, I'm going to check that box off. We're going to make sure that we're gathered around the table and we're considering God's Word and working through catechism and working through prayer and modeling all of that. Church is essential.

We're going to assemble the family. We're going to go to worship the Lord together on the Lord's day. But I would encourage them to continue to press that, especially when you're thinking about kind of taking truth to a lost and dying world, for them to help children in a variety of ways think of their life as being in step with Christ's kingdom and the advance of that kingdom, so teaching these truths first and foremost, just helping them to get a grip on to whom do the nations belong. Well, they belong to Jesus Christ. And what is Jesus Christ doing right now?

Well, he has sat down at the right hand of the father and his enemies are being made his footstool. And how is that happening? Well, his kingdom is coming, and his will is being accomplished on earth as it is in heaven. That's why we pray that Lord's Prayer. And we want to look for that, and we want to mark it as we see it.

And then as a wise father, wise mother to children, help them to apply those proverbs and see those proverbs in the world. I think working with them and helping them to think about work, like the work that they're doing, whether that be in the home or the yard work around the house or getting a job with another member of the church when they get to the right age. And especially with the boys, helping the boys to have that outward orientation. You think about when sin comes upon us. I mean, if we were sitting around a table in a nice air conditioned building, we all had a hot cup of coffee.

And we're probably not prone to be, to, you know, bite at each other and be snappy or no to whatever it might be. But if we have a job to do, if we're out like trying to mow the yard and we run over, you know, stump, and then we break the blade, and we're out there trying to change it in this South Florida, you know, 99 degree heat and humidity. And then like three kids come up at the same time and ask you a question. Well now, now you're in the middle of, of dealing with the fallenness of the world, the curse that has come upon us. And now you have to exercise self-control.

Now you have to remember patience and kindness and let the teaching of kindness be on your tongue. So your children are gonna have to do that same thing. And so helping them to do that, helping the boys get outside and do that kind of work. Ladies are doing the same thing. They're like that Proverbs 31 woman.

Try to create those times. Talk as husband and wife about, we're going to do work together, and then we'll have these moments of examination where we can apply the Word of God at that very point and encourage people to continue to do that kind of good work. I mean, Jason, I'll add to that, to your question. I want fathers and mothers to prepare their children to be exemplary church members. The family needs to understand that the family is a temporary institution, but the church is not temporary.

The church is eternal. And I, I'm thinking about what Richard Baxter said about how pivotal a family is for the church. I'll just read some of his statements. A holy, well-governed family is the preparation to a holy and well-governed church. He said, the life of religion and the welfare and glory, both of the church and the state, depend much on family government and duty.

If we suffer the neglect of this we shall undo all." And you know as we're all very interested in reforming our congregations Baxter says says this about that, What are we like to do ourselves to the reforming of a congregation if all the work be cast on us alone, and masters of families neglect that necessary duty of their own by which they are bound to help us. If any good be begun by the ministry in any soul, a careless, prayerless, worldly family is likely to stifle it or very much to hinder it." So I want to see parents prepare their children to be exemplary church members to strengthen the Church of Jesus Christ and be intentional about that. So I'll throw a couple on the pile as well. The dinner table and war zones. The dinner table is a strategic weapon for Christians in our duty to take the good news of Jesus to the world.

If we don't have believers at our dinner tables periodically, that's just an area that we ought to troubleshoot. Why not? Don't we know anyone? Do we not want them in our homes? There's something magnetic and compelling about healthy Christian families that unbelievers are not used to coming into contact with, and a lot of their arguments evaporate when they can just see love and health and care happening at a normal dinner table, the things that we take for granted.

The second point would be the necessity of fathers to take their children into war zones. Well, what's a war zone? The abortion clinic curb is a war zone. It's one place that the Dome family goes. My kids have learned some new words.

They've seen some new hand gestures and things like, well, hey, guess what? Our world is filled with those words and hand gestures. And unbelievers actually have, they're on the different side of a kingdom divide. And that might not be apparent day to day under our roots, but it's apparent out on the curb of the abortion clinic. And the sooner our children get the idea of what this is all about, the better off we are.

Amen. I would add education to that, to train the children to understand everything that there is to know in the world in light of Christ and his supremacy. That's a challenge because we can quickly sense how insufficient we are for that task. Any topic comes up and we might have an opinion on it, but if you ask why enough times, sometimes we realize, I don't know, I heard it somewhere, but I don't know how grounded my own thinking is now in Scripture about a particular issue. So we try to do that around the table.

I think that's a wonderful thing for fathers, mothers to sit around that table and to take advantage of that time at dinner to talk about things that are going on in the world. Again, it's about Christian impact upon the world. And so you could say, you know, let's talk about the Federal Reserve, you know, something recently just I was talking about interested in let's talk about inflation, you know, and, and where does it come from? And should it should it exist? And why did you get these kids oftentimes you can kind of get a little debate going about, you know, what should the government's role be in this and, you know, you can talk about the vaccination stuff.

You can actually show them how to have Christian conversations, grounding their argumentation in the Bible and have fun with it. So bringing up those things really is a call for the parents to be interested in God's revelation even through creation, His general revelation, His special revelation, so that you're able to bring God's Word to bear on those issues. In doing so, you're just training those children day after day, meal after meal around that table to think biblically about their engagement with the world. You know, we have a great example of that in Jonathan Edwards. You know, there's that famous story that after a couple of generations, somebody was counting up, you know, who came out of that family, and you had college presidents and, you know, leaders of industries and, you know, all kinds of remarkable people.

It was astounding. They went out of the Edwards family in platoons and they tended to glorify God. I was thinking about Moses, Moses' parents. By faith, they hid the child because they weren't afraid. But this is really the power of faith in a family.

You had the greatest man in the Old Testament, but his parents had towering faith. And this is the one who stopped the genocide of the most powerful ruler in the world at that time. And it was coming out of a family. So it's a blessing to have faith in a home, and that's the power of it. God sends His people out.

So we just have a couple minutes left. I'm gonna give each of you just one final shot. What do you wanna say, and then I've got something? Don't you go first, Jason. Yeah, it just makes me want to double down on having my family healthy and strong so that we can be outward facing together.

In the instances where we have been outward-facing together, sort of shoulder-to-shoulder at the family level, it's been such a joy and a pleasure. So I want more of that. Amen. I'm delighted by what appears to me to be a recovery of the cultural mandate among Christians. You know, there are many who are talking about having more children than we used to, and that's wonderful to see that.

And then to tie to that abundance of children, the sense that they are arrows in the hands of a mighty warrior to be sent out into the world. And again, that's going to come with its dangers. It's not that you just kind of throw them over to secular ideologies and secular teachers. It's not that. But They don't have to be afraid of the world.

You should fear God. You should not fear the world. You are to go into the world that God made with all of its fallenness and brokenness, with the sin indeed that crouches at the door. You are to go out there and to proclaim Christ and to represent the image of your very creator I'm rejoicing at that and praying that God would bless the Christian Church with more and more of that in these days Amen. Yeah.

Hey, and I'm here to say, you know, give it all you got to really prepare your children to be exemplary members of the church and in this world. The time is a lot shorter than you think. In our family, we had about 17 years raising little kids and about 9 years raising older children. The time goes really fast. So the time will pass, give it all you got.

So that's it for me. So thank you, brothers, for joining us. Pleasure. Thanks for having me. Great to talk about all this stuff.

Thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to the Church and Family Life podcast. We have thousands of resources on our website announcements of conferences coming up. Hope you can join us Go to church and family life.com See you