Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we have Joel Beeke with us and we're going to talk about how to disciple your family through sermons. Hope you enjoy the podcast. So, Robert, as you know, we place a big emphasis on sermons in our church to—we do lots of things to try to get the whole family focused on the upcoming sermon and communication and things like that. And what we think, particularly when it comes to sermons, the simplest things, the smallest things, the things closest to us are often the most powerful things, and we really want the people in our church to be completely dialed into the preaching.

Yeah, When we, when my family and I first came to Hope, the centrality of Scripture was one of the things that we just immediately fell in love with, with the church and how everything you've got men's meeting early in the week, prayer meeting, the Lord's Day and the sermon constantly is coming up, and particularly with men's meeting, preparing the men to be able to instruct their families ahead of time, giving the kids words to listen for, all that was just, it was something new to us, and it's been a huge blessing. We've loved it. Well, we have someone for whom it is not new. It is actually old. He like grew up doing this.

Joe Beeke, what a blessing it is to have you with us. Good to be with you, Scott. You know, at our national conference last year, I asked you to give a sermon. It was a conference called Making Disciples in the church, in the home, and around the world. And I asked you to preach a sermon on how to disciple your family through sermons.

And I was so thrilled with it. And by the way, the sermon is up on our website. And then Founders published this great booklet, which was kind of an expansion, and you refined, you know, the things from the sermon in this book. So anybody can get this at Founders Ministries. It's a really neat tool.

So anyway, thank you, Jill, for joining us. We really want to encourage people to use the sermons. So the beauty of sermons is that they're close at hand, and I think they're just mission critical for a family. So tell us why sermons are so critical for disciple making in your family. Well, first of all, Scott, sermons are the major vehicle God uses to convert people.

And we want to see our little nuclear families folded into the larger heavenly family that will never die, spend eternity with the Lord. So, As one of our old ministers used to say if you want to get wet you go stand out in the rain If you want your kids converted you you take them to good sermons As God's normal way I Think of a Heidelberg catechism after it expounds the Apostles Creed It says well, you know, how do you come to this faith? Well, by the Holy Spirit blessing the preaching of the Word, period, as if there's no other means. We know, Of course, God sometimes converts people through reading the Bible and through other means, but the most common way is through sermons. So you wanna get your children excited about sermons.

You wanna create in them an air of expectation, I believe, that God is going to speak to us children today when we go up to the house of God. The God of heaven and earth is really going to speak to you personally. He's going to call you to come to Christ. And then of course when they are saved, you have the same excitement in your voice and say, the God of heaven and earth is going to tell you how to walk as a more mature Christian today, how to grow in Christ today. This is the highlight of your week, children, hearing God speak to you publicly through his word.

And this was a way that you grew up, right? Your father really brought you to think like this about preaching. Yes, absolutely. He would say to me, preaching, if you're a preacher, it's more important than living in the White House because you're doing the most important work in the whole world. You're dealing with people's never-dying souls and you're using the very means that God is ordained to bring them in.

So yeah, it's the most important work you can do in the world. You remember we worked on the William Gooshe set building a God-centered family, And in the middle volume, the volume on marriage, Guj makes a very powerful statement, and he says that a husband is sinning against his wife if he has not taken her to a place where there's good preaching. And he's talking about people who live, you know, out in the country, and he's just urging husbands to make sure that their wives hear good preaching. And if there isn't any near them, he needs to take her to it. Yeah.

Wow. Very good. So let's talk about mechanics a little bit here on the how, you know, how, how should you teach your children to prepare for sermons if since they're so important you know anything that is of importance Needs preparation. So What What are your thoughts about that? Yeah.

So in the Dutch tradition that I grew up in, you know, parents would say to their kids, I don't stay out too late Saturday night. We got to start on Saturday night preparing for the Lord's Day. And if you knew what the preacher was going to preach on the following day, say he's preaching expositionally through a Bible book, The father might just sit down with the kids and read that passage. It's going to be read the following morning, and talk with them about it to the best of his ability, about what they could expect to hear. So the idea there was to arouse an appetite for the sermon and to help, especially the younger children, be able to grasp it better.

By talking with them about it at their level. But then the father would lead the whole family, you know, nine o'clock, Saturday night, whatever, in prayer, earnest prayer, maybe four or five minute prayer, just storming the mercy seat for the minister for the next day. And of course, In our tradition, my dad used to pray almost every day for the minister. He'd say, you know, be with him in the study today and things like that. So just build an air of importance, of excitement.

This is the major event of the week. We're going to go up to the house of God, and God's going to speak to us. And teach your children what to pray for. You don't only pray for the minister, that he have liberty and the Spirit's power and an unction, but you also pray for your own soul that you'll benefit from it spiritually and that you realize how awful it would be, as Thomas Watson said, to go loaded with sermons to hell. That you need to profit from every sermon.

So, my dad would say, you know, you can never leave a sermon the way you come. Either you're hardened by it and you're more prepared for damnation or you're softened and brought closer to the Lord. So this is a great event, And I think that's part of the preparation that you, also on Sunday morning, you pray longer at the breakfast table as you storm the mercy seat for God's benediction. God would send the Spirit down today under the preaching of the Word and do wondrous things that would make a difference for eternity. That type of thing.

So all of this is to stir up in your children a hearty appetite to receive the Word. Now you know, we try at our church to stir up the parents, and here's what we do. First of all, we meet with the men on Tuesday morning, early in the morning before work, and we review the sermon that we're going to preach on on Sunday. So several days ahead. And then the next day, either I or one of the other elders will send an email to the church talking about that text and trying to give some sense of the messaging of that text.

And we want those parents to then teach their children, and we want the father to teach his wife and his children, you know, way before. And then on Wednesday night in our corporate prayer meeting, we pray about what's going to be preached on Sunday. And then we're hoping the parents will actually break out that passage of Scripture before Sunday and read it and talk about it. But I really I'm struck by what you're saying about prayer, the family praying, you know, publicly for the minister. That's really powerful.

Well, I think what you just said is powerful, because I'm more used to doing it on the back end, where the father then takes the sermon. That's what I did with my own family. I didn't do so much. I mean, if you follow what you do, Scott, that'd be beautiful, but I'd be, I don't know, I'd be a tizzy because I'm often not starting my sermon by Tuesday. You know, there's so many things going on at the seminary, it'd be hard for me to get that out that early in the week.

But I tried to do it on the opposite end of things, so that you take the sermon, and then on Sunday night, you talk with your kids about it, take their notes that they did, and things like that. And then you try to weave the sermon through the family worships in the week that follows and talk about examples that illustrate what the sermon was saying. But maybe both ends is good. Some preachers have a hard time getting stuff out already on Tuesday, but maybe a little bit later in the week would be more. I fully acknowledge that what I write on Tuesday or Wednesday morning isn't as mature as what might be heard on Sunday.

Yeah. Hey, so let's also talk about listening, you know, children listening to sermons. You know, we've talked about this before. You know, parents need to be very proactive to help their children learn how to listen. But I'd like you to comment on that.

What are some nuts and bolts things that parents can do to prepare their children to listen to sermons? Yeah, good question. So first of all, we've got to teach our kids. They're not just spectators at a sermon. They're participants.

So, I mean, John Calvin set the bar so high, so high, almost, almost impossibly high, when he said, when a minister preaches, you should be as involved in the sermon as the minister is. When he prays, you should be as involved in the prayer as he is. I mean, that's almost impossible. But he's getting at something very important. When you pray, You're not just praying individually as a minister.

The whole congregation should be praying with you. And same thing when you preach. So, you're not just in the stands looking down at the minister, what he's saying. You're involved. So, you tell your children, good listening is hard work, but God requires it of us.

It means that I need to worship God conscientiously throughout the entire sermon. And we trained our kids, I don't know how the parents do this, but we trained our kids that if your mind wanders in a sermon for, you know, 15 seconds or whatever, just say a little prayer, Lord, forgive me. You're speaking to me, Lord, forgive me for my mind wandering and get right back into it." But, and then of course, we teach them that, but you know, our kids differ here. We teach them that they should take notes. And I think we were too hard maybe on one child because one child said, I listen better when I don't take notes.

And we weren't so sure that was the case. But one child took notes very well and put it in his own words, which is really amazing. Wonderful to read as a preacher later, see what really came across in your sermon to your, say, to your nine, 10-year-old child. And the other child would write exactly what I said. And then the third one, you know, wanted to bail out completely.

But generally speaking, I probably wouldn't force it as much as we tried to do. But I think it's profitable for children to concentrate to at least take some notes and leave some freedom there for how much they take. But, you, you also tell your kids we're going to talk about the sermon afterward. And, you know, there's an air of expectation, just like in family worship. When you read the Bible, they know they're going to get questions, but when they hear a sermon, they know they're going to get questions.

Now, Joel, here's a question. I mean, there are various Puritans wrote about mind wandering in sermons, dealing with distractions, And I can't remember who they are, but I've read these things, but I can't remember exactly where I read them. Yeah. There's a book by Nathaniel Vincent, Attending Upon the Word, or something like that, that we published maybe three years ago. The whole book is about how to really drink in the Word of God, listen well, keep your attention focused, profit from the sermon, and then go out and live it.

And yeah, there's another Puritan that wrote a whole book on it as well. I think the Vincent one is the best one. Yeah. And the other thing, Scott, is, you know, because you're setting up in the minds of your children—this is God speaking to you—you're stressing with them. You need to have a cultivated soul.

You need to be that good soil into which the seed falls. So you need a tender, God-fearing conscience as you listen to a sermon. Don't be like the stony ground hearer or the distracted, half-hearted listener or the thorn-ridden soil, That type of thing. So you're to listen attentively. One of the beautiful things about Jesus preaching, you know, in the Greek, you're familiar with this probably, but it literally says, Not only that they heard him gladly but they hung upon him hearing I mean picture that they hung upon him hearing like they didn't want to miss a word and You know you have to You have to Yeah, I mean you can't insist that a child hears every word of a son you have to be careful that you don't set the bar impossibly high at the same time you don't want to take the attitude well it's not that important if you tune out for a little while.

No, no, you want to encourage your child to listen well. And then you've got to accompany that by teaching them you've got to listen with submissive faith. Without faith, it's impossible to please God. So it's certainly impossible to please God if you just take it in intellectually. You need to receive it into the depths of your core being.

So Luther has this incredible statement where he says, you know, if a woman goes in the kitchen and she cooks a meal and she forgets the most important ingredient, the meal will be spoiled. And he says, that's like listening to sermons. You can do all kinds of things to listen to sermons, but if you don't do it with faith, the most important ingredient in the meal of that sermon is missing, and you won't profit. So you've got to stress with your kids. You need to listen not only with humility and with self-examination, but also with faith.

You gotta really believe the word, you gotta drink it in, and you've gotta ask God that it will be applied to your soul. How would you describe James' statement, receive with meekness, the implanted word. Meekness and faith are different, but how would you blend those? Well, meekness is not weakness, first of all. People misunderstand meekness.

But meekness here in James means with submission. You're going to obey the word. And faith obeys the word. So there's a common meeting point there. So you want to instill in your children the importance that when they go to hear the message preached, as Calvin said, two preachers are preaching at you, or to you.

One is the physical man, the other is the Holy Spirit, and he's taking the words you're preaching and he's putting them in a bow and shooting them out and directing the arrows in the congregation to every heart according to each heart's need. So if you tune out, you're missing that applicatory work of the Holy Spirit. But if you tune in, you never know what the Holy Spirit may do with that sermon in your own life. So you should always be attentive and listen with, I would say, with meek submissive faith. So, I want to sort of take you into an alternate reality here for a second.

You're looking at 35 kids. You do this all the time. You do this even if they're adults mixed in, right? But you're standing before a bunch of children right now, and you want, you're going to look them in the eye and talk to them about how to weave the sermons into their life. What would you say to them?

Well, First of all, I'd say to them, children, God is speaking to you right now, and God is inviting you to come to Him just as you are with all your sins. And when ministers or myself, when we are preaching to you, this is God speaking to you, children. And you need to listen. You can die, too, just like older people can die. And you need to be prepared to meet God.

Every sermon is a meeting with God, and you need to listen to it, and you have to do the sermon. You have to do the sermon. You have to believe what God is saying, and you have to live by faith. And living by faith means that you trust God, you trust Jesus that he's done a complete work for sinners. And you bring all your sins to God just as you are.

And you trust that He will save you, you believe in Him alone for the forgiveness of your sins, and you try to remember the sermon. If you're old enough to take notes, you take notes. You think about it, and You know what you should do, children? You should go home after a sermon and take those notes you gave and go into your bedroom and get on your knees and put that little notebook in front of you and just read a sentence at a time and then pray over it. Pray that that sentence, what that minister said, that that can be used in your life and you can remember it and you can walk in the ways of God and fear God, fear God.

Do you know children that that's one of the main things why we come to church? So that we, we're in the world for a whole week. It's pretty hard to fear God in the world. We try to. God can help us.

But every Sunday we come back and we hear the minister say to us, fear God with a childlike fear. What does that mean, to fear God with a childlike fear? Through sermons. Well, it means to value what God says to you, that the smile of God will be greater to you than the smile of men, that you want to live to please Him. And the frowns of God would be more fearful to you than the frowns of men, because you don't want to displease God.

So a sermon is a very, very important thing. When you come into the church, you should be quiet. You should be thinking. You should be praying. Just bow your head quietly to yourself.

Ask God for a blessing from the sermon today and from the whole worship service. It's a serious thing to hear the Word of God, children, but it's also a wonderful thing because the Word of God can save you. So you trust the Lord And you say, Lord, give me a ready heart. Give me that good soil. I want to receive the word.

I want to love you. I want to hate sin. I want to follow you. Things like that. Hey, I love it.

What a blessing. Well, Joel, Thank you so much. Thank you for preaching the sermon. Thank you for getting it published through founders. And I pray the Lord just uses these families to take this thing that is so simple and so accessible and use it to grow their families in the Word of God.

I really appreciate it, Joel. I know this is on your mind a lot, you've published a lot on this, around this kind of subject, we really appreciate it. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Scott. God bless you, and bless your ministry there.

God bless you Joel and thank you for joining us on the church and family life Podcast, hope you can join us next time Church and family life is proclaiming the sufficiency of scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out churchandfamilylife.com.