Is your family life orderly or disorderly? Do you have a frenetic and variable schedule? Is your life characterized by the disorder of irregular sleeping habits and mealtimes? Are you able to keep a rhythm to life? Is your house messy? How important is it to have an orderly home, an orderly life, an orderly schedule? Scott and Jason work through various passages of scripture that speak to the matter of orderliness in your home life.

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture. And today we're here to talk about a really important matter of family life, and that is the matter of orderliness. So, hey, Jason, here we go. We get to talk about orderliness.

I'm looking forward to it. We're about to find out if we can be trusted without a guest. That's right. Well, the Bible says, let all things be done decently and in order. That's 1 Corinthians 14 verse 40.

And all things in the church, all things in the family, all things in your heart should be done decently and in order. And I think, you know, families ought to ask, is your family life orderly or disorderly? Do you have a frenetic and variable schedule? Is your life characterized by disorder, irregular sleeping habits, irregular meal times? Are you able to keep a rhythm of life?

Or is your life messy? Is your house messy? Is your house disorderly? And if you answer yes to those questions, Beware. That's why we're here in this podcast.

We want to encourage parents to beware of disorderliness because if you keep an irregular life, if you keep irregular hours, there is a price to pay, and I think there are significant, costly prices to pay. So, if you can't get to church on time, examine how you're managing your time on Sunday. Some people just can't get to church on time. And that's not right. They shouldn't accept that and default to that position.

And it's really... It's not the problem itself, it's a symptom of the problem, right? If you just back up, Scott, and look at a very high level, at the top level, what is God like? Well, we know from His creation, You look at the creation and you just see tremendous order, you see times and seasons. Really, everything about creation is orderly.

So, we're made in the image of God and our mission in life is Christ-likeness, is becoming more like the image of God without the Mar that comes through the fall. And just read scripture. Scripture is about, in so many ways, bringing order out of chaos. And that starts with the salvation of an individual. Think what happens in a life when someone is saved.

It really is a life of disorder and chaos. And salvation, of course, is much more than just that. But a part of that is a bringing of a life into order. And there are lots of effects of a disorderly life. People who have disorderly lives have spotty attendance at church.

Something comes up and they can't get their family together to read the Bible or to pray because something came up. And I think, you know, we're kind of here to sort of sound a warning. If you're tired, you're stressed, if you're out of control in your life, We just want to encourage you to take some steps toward orderliness. And really, is this the way you want to live? Do you really want to live this way?

And I want to encourage people to embrace the idea that it's your responsibility to give your children an orderly life, because it'll pay really good dividends. It may be true that some people have a disposition that's more naturally orderly than others, But I think everyone on planet Earth would acknowledge that all of us have the seeds of disorder and chaos in our hearts. And even a person who might be more naturally disposed towards order has the potential makings of chaos and disorder in their lives. So really, this isn't a finger wagging session. I think both of us have seen areas of disorder in our lives, and we've thought, this needs to come into order.

Mm-hmm. Right. So we... Let's see, we don't wanna point a finger... We don't wanna point a mean finger, but we're gonna point a finger because we wanna encourage families to find out what's causing the disorder.

What people who are more prone to disorder do is they just say, well, I'm just a disorderly person, so forget it. And I think we want to say, no, no, no, no, no, not so fast. Yeah. Here's just an amazing text that talks about this. I want to call it a phenomenon.

I don't think it's a misnomer. It's 1 Kings 10, and it's the Queen of Sheba coming to visit Solomon in his house. And she comes with all the hard questions. He answers the hard questions, and then we read this in 1 Kings 10, verses 4 through 8. When the Queen of Sheba had seen all the wisdom of Solomon, the house that he had built, the food on his table, the seating of his servants, the service of his waiters and their apparel, his cup bearers, and his entryway by which he went up to the house of the Lord, There was no more spirit in her than she said to the king.

It was a true report which I heard in my own land about your words and your wisdom. However, I did not believe the words until I came and saw with my own eyes, and indeed, the half was not told me. Your wisdom and prosperity exceed the fame of which I heard. Happy are your men, and happy are these your servants who stand continually before you and hear your wisdom." So order is really sort of wisdom expressed, It's wisdom in action. So you had this king who was the wisest man until the Lord Jesus, and his dealings expressed his wisdom, even how he set his table, how his servants were arranged.

How they were dressed. Yeah. And she says they're happy. So really orderliness is actually for our happiness. We shouldn't think of it as doing your chores, although it includes doing your chores, but it really is for our happiness and our good.

That's a great illustration, the Queen of Sheba. So we're gonna throw out five or so reasons to be orderly in your family and to give your children the gift of orderliness. And so let's just kind of bounce through them and we can talk about some of the details. First of all, your biblically commanded duties as a family require orderliness. There are things that are commanded of families, the training of children, the teaching of Scripture, the actual discipline of children, working together, walking together, saturating your family with the glory of Jesus, particularly when it comes to the local church.

Churches operate on schedules. Mm-hmm. There was a great little pamphlet, you'll remember this, it was really popular in the 80s, The Tyranny of the Urgent, I think Charles Hummel was the author of it. And the premise is often the most important things can wait until tomorrow, but the urgent things, and they may not be important at all, but they demand immediate attention. They attract your energy and your efforts right now.

One of the things disorderliness does is it squeezes out the really important things in life. So the things that we're called to do in our families often can wait until tomorrow, but they're very important. But then tomorrow comes and there's a whole other set of urgent things. And the urgencies only increase when you have a chaotic life. There are things that are demanding your attention now because you're in chaos.

You know, for probably a decade and a half, we've been running around saying, the devil hates your family worship so much that he's gonna throw up 10 alternatives, you just have to say no. Mm-hmm, true. And there's just a lot of things you can't do because you're focused on the Word of God. So I'll give you a second one now. You mentioned this earlier, and I think this is really significant.

God created an orderly world for the purposes of His glory. The world runs on rhythms. In the natural world, they're fixed daily, weekly, seasonal cycles, and they're meant to regulate our lives. God put those there before us to actually constrain us in particular ways. You know, the sun rises, it's time to go to bed.

The sun goes down, you know, it's almost time to sleep. And God promises regularity to those who dwell on the earth. You know, in Genesis 8 22, while the earth remains seed time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, and day and night shall not cease. That's the world God created. It's an orderly world.

Rhythms in life, yeah. Yeah. And having rhythms and routines and things like that are so important for children. They really form a sense of security and beauty to their lives in keeping them. So Scott, in 1 Timothy 3, we have a list.

It's qualifications for church leaders. And there are 17 things on the list. One of the things on the list is one who rules his own house well. So a couple of things to say about this. One is it's not for super Christians to be church leaders.

So this is not describing another species. Okay, it's the same species, but it's just Christians who have been brought to maturity. They have the fruit of the Spirit in their lives. So it's not a super Christian, it's just a mature Christian. Well, a mature Christian man who has a wife and children is expected to rule his own house well.

And that is saying a couple of things. One is, God expects for households to be governed, to be ruled, not with a heavy hand, but to actually be ordered. I mean, that's the whole nature of government, of ruling a household or a city or anything, is to bring it under order. And God wants that to be done well. So that speaks to this.

And then you go right to Titus 2 and what older women are supposed to teach younger women, and you have homemakers. There are women who spend their lives, their energies, the best of their time and efforts in the home. And that really is centered around the orderliness and having the ducks in a row in a home. Part of that list in Titus 2 is loving a husband, is loving a children, and I don't think these things are unrelated at all. I think they're very related.

A practical way in which a wife loves her husband and a mother loves her children is to make this home a place that functions well, to make that home a homemaker. Yeah. There are quite a few homemakers who are exposed to educational philosophers who are telling them that the orderliness doesn't matter and they should just let their children kind of find themselves and, you know, pursue the things that give them joy. Well, we all know that there's an element of truth to that. But children need to be guided.

And the things that you just mentioned that are supposed to happen in the family of an elder, those things have to do with guidance. There's a guidance system here. It's not just going after a child's preference. It's constrained. And to go back to 1 Kings 10 and Solomon's house, this is for the happiness of everyone under the roof.

It really is for the good and the happiness of everyone under the roof. Chaos and disorder gets old really fast. You know, several years ago, we had Jim Santles give a message on that passage. It was great. It was really great.

It's on our... It's on Church and Family Life resources website. It's an audio message that Jim Santles gave, T-S-A-N-T-L-A-S, if you want to know how to spell it. But, you know, God commands His people to set aside normal life, regular life, one day of the week on the Lord's Day. And it's a holy day.

It's like no other day. In other words, it requires discipline to create a completely different day in your life. And, you know, many of the older writers believe that the pattern of morning and evening sacrifices in the Old Testament should be a pattern for the family as well. So that there would be morning and evening devotions in that orderly kind of a family life. And I think all this has to do with doing all things decently and in order.

Yeah, I think it's possible, maybe even likely, to translate it in a way that's unhelpful. Meaning order equals a kind of a stern person frowning on all fun. That's not actually what order is at all. Just fun is in its place. Fun is part of the order.

So, it's not a lifeless thing that squeezes the fun out of everything at all. Proverbs 25, 28 says, where there's no guidance or no vision that people perish, it's actually negative if there's no guidance. Yeah, I know. I was just going to say that we would acknowledge that order isn't the ultimate virtue. So, in our bringing things into order, we have flexibility in that.

If you only exist to bring order to things that are in chaos, that is not the calling of the Christian. But it serves the ultimate virtues very well. So, order is really a tool to serve the things that are most important in life. Yeah. Amen.

So, disorder makes you unreliable, but orderliness makes you faithful. Okay, so let's go on to the third element here. There are biblical examples and implications that point to orderliness. I mean, Solomon said there's a time for everything, But there are just lots and lots of biblical examples. And first of all, the problem with the sluggard in Proverbs 24 is that he's disorderly.

You go by the field of the slugger and what do you see? You see disorderliness. Yeah, all of the institutions exist for the purpose of order. Home, church, civil, government, all of these governments exist to keep anarchy and chaos from proliferating. Here's another example in Job 1-5.

We learned that Job visited his children in an orderly, rhythmic way, rising early in the morning and offering sacrifices. Another example is in Titus 2, 3-5, where the older women in the church are charged to teach the younger women to be self-controlled. That has everything to do with orderliness and pointing your life in a direction. And when you think of Titus to... What is the other kind of famous woman of the Bible?

The Proverbs 31. Oh, read Proverbs 31. Order is in every verse. She's bringing order and blessing to that home. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, she rises early and she is just bringing in all kinds of goods and services and blessing on her family. You mentioned pastors managing their households well. A man needs to know how to do that. And families sometimes, they don't know how. My wife Debra has helped lots of women to bring better order to their households, to manage their households well.

Paul, the apostle, rejoiced in the good order of the Colossian church in Colossians 2 verse 5, there was an orderliness to that... A particular distinctive mark of that church was that they had things in good order, not sloppy in how they function as a church. Yeah. I think with a well-ordered anything, it's such a great platform with which to deal with moments of chaos. Orderly environments can absorb that and keep going.

When there's a life of chaos, a home of chaos, a church of chaos, and you throw one more chaotic thing into it, it kind of is devastating, but not so into an orderly environment. It's a good platform to be able to deal with because nobody's life has order all the time with no elements of chaos ever injected into it. Remember, we used to run this company many, many years ago, over two decades ago, it was an electronics company. And we had this mantra, everything returns to jungle. In other words, you've got to be hacking back the jungle all the time because things return to jungle.

And the apostle Paul addressed this to Titus in Titus chapter one verse five, he told Titus to set in order the things that are lacking. Well, things are always moving toward entropy. So there's just lots of reasons to be orderly. Paul declares to the Thessalonian church, we were not disorderly among you, 2 Thessalonians 3.7. We were not disorderly.

When you talk about spiritual health, ask a pastor in our circles to preach on spiritual health, and here's what you're gonna get, ordinary means of grace. Meaning, God has ordained regular channels through which His grace flows, things like private prayer, things like Bible study, things like being with the brethren when the church gathers. Those things all only survive in an environment of order. Otherwise, it becomes very frenetic. Days and weeks go by when you don't have it because things are not in order.

So Spiritual health depends on it. Yeah. And let's go to the fourth here. This has to do with the wisdom of rhythms. Wise people find out how things work, and they get on the right side of it.

And they realize that disorder is no help at all. And so they start moving away from it. Instead of pandering to their disorderliness and saying, well, that's just the way I am, they understand that it's better to ride the wave of a successful pattern. And that actually happens to be a rhythmical kind of a life. Yeah, a lot of the ways that we are aren't good and helpful to us.

And just because we're that way doesn't mean we always have to be that way or we always should be that way. We need to change. Yeah. I mean, families run better on regular schedules. They just do.

You know, people don't fall asleep in meetings if they've gotten decent sleep because they went to bed at an orderly time. They went to bed and they got up and they weren't pushed around by everything. Okay, then the fifth, the final. The spiritual impact alone, I think, is massive. How much discipline and orderliness is required to simply conduct family worship every day?

How much discipline and orderliness does it take for you to read the Bible every day and just fill your soul with the words of the Spirit of God. A spiritual life requires orderliness. Have you ever run into, and this is a rhetorical question because I know the answer is, yes, a thousand times I have, but have you ever run into the guy who always meant to do the right thing? He was inclined towards it. He agreed with you that it was the right thing, but he just never gets around to the right thing.

Nine times out of ten when you meet that guy, his life is out of order. And so he just never gets around to the things that he agrees that they're important, but other things waylay him on the way to the important things. And he allows it to happen day after day, week after week, month after month. Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, I want to give just here at the end some practical everyday things to consider. Number one, keep rhythmic schedules for rising and bedtime and work and meal times. Number two, don't allow your children to be late to family gatherings, and don't you be late either. Number three, insist that children clean up after themselves. Number four, teach your children to avoid Clutter by putting things back where they belong, not wherever they want, not where they drop them.

Fifth, don't allow your children to be sloppy with their things. Teaching children orderliness is really, really critical. It should be done in a winsome, but firm way. So there you have it. Look at your life.

What makes you disorderly and what makes you orderly and weigh your options. Amen. Amen. Okay. Well, the Lord has given us time.

It's a wonderful gift, and we ought to use it for the greatest advantage, for His glory. So there you have it, orderliness. So parents, give your children a gift. It's a wonderful gift, the gift of an orderly life. Thanks for joining us, and we hope to see you next time at the Church and Family Life podcast.

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 churchandfamilylife.com. See you next Monday for our next broadcast of the Church and Family Life podcast.