We are here to encourage you to prepare Kids for Morning and evening. There is a Christian way to go to bed at night and get up in the morning. This is the sufficiency of Scripture for the morning and the evening. The Lord gives careful guidance on how to start the day and end it. The Bible speaks of these two bookends of the day in terms of "morning and evening."

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture, and so we're here to talk today about what Scripture says about waking up in the morning and going to bed at night. Yes, Scripture is sufficient for the morning person and the evening person. So there you go. Hey Jason.

Hello. The beginning of the day and the end of the day. Yeah. And as it turns out, the way I understand what the scripture says is that the beginning of the day and the end of the day might have a big effect on every other part of the day. Right.

So, we're here to talk about how to start the day. And I got captivated by this years ago when I had little kids. And of course, you know, if you have children, you know that some do better in the morning and some do better at night. So I wanted to say, you know, whatever kind of person you are, you need to be a morning person the way that God has called you to be a morning person. And so that's what we're going to talk about, about really how to seize the day and how to go to bed at night.

And it's something I think it's really worthwhile talking about because it's something that we do every day. Very practical. Okay, it's really practical, it's very ground level. And the Bible speaks of these bookends, morning and evening. And so what I'd like to do is, first of all, camp on the morning verses in the Bible, and then shift and talk about the evening.

Because there's a specific way that God urges his people to engage the morning and the evening. So if you're gonna say you're not a morning person I want to know what kind of morning person you are, because you're going to be some kind of morning person. And the Bible, I think, helps. I think the other thing to me that's important is that we live in a world of change. We live in a world where there are troubles that can disturb mornings and evenings and everything in between.

And parents should help their children engage all of those kinds of things. Parents should help their children know how to deal with trials and tribulations, betrayals, hardships of different kinds, sicknesses. Parents should help their children prepare for these kinds of things because they're going to face them. They're going to have people who don't like them. They're going to be slandered.

So parents need to help their children prepare for those things so that they know what to do. And of course preparing for the morning is what we're here to talk about and preparing for the evening. Prayer in the morning, of course, is modeled by David in Psalm 5. Give ear to my words, O Lord, consider my meditation. Give heed to the voice of my cry, my King and my God, for to you I will pray, my voice you shall hear in the morning, O Lord, in the morning I will direct it to you and I will look up." So whatever kind of a morning person you are, you should help your children to look up to heaven when they wake up.

Scott, one of the key functions of a dad in a home is to set the tone. He sets the tone all day long, I guess, but particularly in the mornings and the evenings as well as the day is winding up. And as the day is winding down, it's a good thing for a father to do to set the tone for a home. I think we want our children to find us with a Bible on our lap and a cup of coffee in our hands in the morning often, and maybe even praying for them or praying over the day. We want our children to understand that this is how we think the day should start.

And that's kind of what the psalmist in Psalm 88 13 implies, you know, crying out to God in the morning. But to you I have cried out, O Lord, and in the morning my prayer comes before you." There's this picture of praising God in the morning. You know, I have a wife who is naturally upbeat in the morning. I'm more melancholy, frankly. Hey, she helps me all the time.

But the Word of God helps me. The Word of God pulls me out of my melancholy if it's before me in the day. But Psalm 57 verse 7, my heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast. I will sing and give praise. Awake my glory, awake, loot and harp.

I will awaken the dawn. I will praise you, O Lord, among the peoples. I will sing to you among the nations, for your mercy reaches under the heavens and your truth to the clouds." Now, he says, I will awaken the dawn. And how? With praises to God.

We are told how to awaken the dawn. Don't just do your own thing. Go do what's good and we'll bring joy, not just to your own heart, but to everybody around you. So How are we teaching our kids? Well, with words, but also with actions.

Sometimes we're teaching them really profoundly and we're not saying a word. We have the opportunity to do that in the morning. We're sort of making a declaration about prioritization with how we start our day. And you can communicate powerfully to the people in your home what matters most by what you undertake first. Now David cried out for help in the morning.

And frankly, that's what I need in the morning. In Psalm 119 verse 147, I rise before the dawning of the morning and cry for help. I hope in your word. We need help. I think, you know, the psalmist just acknowledges that we need help.

We might wake up in a bad state, you know. We might say, well, I'm not a morning person and I'm just gonna sit in it. No, God calls you out of that. So whatever kind of morning person you are, it ought to be this kind of morning person that the Word of God speaks. Psalm 63, Oh God, you are my God, Early will I seek you.

My soul thirsts for you. My flesh longs for you. In a dry and thirsty land where there is no water." I mean it's like a discouraging place, but you need to seek Him. So I have looked for you in the sanctuary to see your power and your glory, because your loving-kindness is better than life. My lips shall praise you.

Thus I will bless you while I live. I will lift up my hands in your name in the morning." Lift up your hands before God. So are all mornings created equally? It depends on exactly what you mean by that. There's one, there's a special day.

So there's a special morning too. The Lord's Day is a special morning. I remember one time I was out at Kevin Swanson's place, and I came up on the Lord's Day morning. No one was really up yet, but there was already music going. And there weren't even any people down there.

I don't know who started the music or where they came from or where they went, but there was already beautiful praise and worship music going. And I thought, you know, why am I not doing that in my home? So I went home and really every Sunday morning since then, because I'm preaching, I'm always up before everybody else. And I just have made it a pattern. I have playlists, Sunday morning playlist just so that when people come out into the common areas in our house, that that's the thing they're hearing that's hitting their eardrums first thing in the morning.

And it helps me. I think it helps our whole family. No, that's great. That reminds me of Lamentations 3.22, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning.

Great is your faithfulness. Parents need to help their children experience the compassion and the mercy of God, that it's new every morning. You know, every morning you have a clean slate. You have a new day, you know. Welcome to a new day.

What does that mean? That means you got a new day. It means you got a clean slate. I remember when I first was turning toward the Lord, that hit me so hard. Every day was a new day for me.

And it was his compassion, his mercies, his faithfulness. They were new again. Yeah, new again. You know, then there are these appeals for the evening in the Bible, too. Psalm 55, 16-23, mainly.

You know, David, he talks about the, it's the time to remember the power of God in the evening as for me I will call upon God and the Lord will save me evening and morning and at noon I will pray and cry aloud and he shall hear my voice. Psalm 92, it is good to give thanks to the Lord and to sing praises to your name almost high, to declare your loving kindness in the morning and your faithfulness by night, to go to bed giving thanks to God for his faithfulness. I mean, there you are, you're in bed, you're not dead. You're going to bed. And he kept you alive.

This mirrors in some ways the daily schedule in the sanctuary in the Old Testament, it was the morning and evening sacrifice. And a lot of the Puritans felt like it was a pattern that ought to be replicated by us, so they would gather their families in the morning and gather their families in the evenings, and they would even use those terms, the morning and evening sacrifice. The domes aren't very good puritans, we don't gather in the morning, but we do in the evenings, and it's in a movable rock in our schedule, meaning it's the one thing that we make sure happens, and we schedule the other things that we might like to do around it. But if you just schedule the things you might like to do, and then you gather to worship God when there's not something else going on, you find that you're not doing that very often. So you really need to make gathering together around the Word of God in the evening and a moveable rock in your schedule, and then let the other things that you do or don't do be scheduled around that.

Amen. Now, that's so critical. In Psalm 16 verse 7, there's this idea of learning from Him at night. I will bless the Lord who has given me counsel. My heart also instructs me in the night seasons." What a wonderful way to go to bed, to say, Lord, instruct me.

Hey, I go to sleep pretty fast, So I don't have a very big window of time, asked Deborah. But what a blessing it is to go to bed like that instead of grinding and pining away about whatever failures there were in the day or whatever fears, you know, that are in your heart, but to be instructed by the Lord. The psalm continues, the Lord will command his loving kindness in the daytime and in the night His song shall be with me, a prayer to the God of my life." But this whole idea of singing to him, Deborah and I went through a period where we would sing a hymn. We've kind of fallen off of it lately, but it was so nice just to lay there and, you know, sing a song that we both knew. Psalm 143 verses 7 through 12.

Answer me speedily, O Lord, my spirit fails. Do not hide your face from me, lest I be like those who go down to the pit. Cause me to hear your loving kindness in the morning for I trust in you. Cause me to know the way in which I should go for unto you I lift up my soul." You know, lifting up your soul to the Lord. You know, it's so much better to do God's thing than to just do your thing.

Look at what he calls you to do, is to rest all of your hopes in him and to remember his loving kindness, his faithfulness by night. It's such a good thing. Here's Isaiah, Isaiah 26, 9, with my soul I have desired you in the night. Yes, by my spirit within me I will seek you early. So there you have that morning and evening pattern.

Lift up your eyes to the hills from whence comes your help. And then he says, the Lord is your keeper, the Lord is your shade on your right hand, the Lord never slumbers. You might go to sleep on Him, but He won't go to sleep on you. So anyway, I just think, you know, it's so important to look on the day as a clean slate in the morning, and then look on the evening as a time just to fall into his arms. Let him instruct you in the night, give thanks to him for his faithfulness by night.

What a way to live. What a great way to live. And here's the proposition that I want to make. If you wake up this way and you go to bed this way, it'll have a profound effect on everything else that happens in the day in between that. So that's the sufficiency of Scripture for morning and evening.

Amen. Praise the Lord. Well, thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. I hope you're blessed by these Scriptures. They're so helpful to us.

We'll see you next time. Up. Hope you can join us. Go to ChurchandFamilyLife.com. See you