Okay, well we're here today to say double down on your family, not just double down on your family, but why you should do it. Hope you enjoy the discussion. Well tis the season to double down on your family life. That's what we want to talk about today. You always think it's that season.

I know it is. It is always that season. And we've got our buddy, Carlton McLeod, right here with us to talk about it. How many of the, have we done together? We need to count.

It's probably eight or something. Oh, I love it. You guys make me seem smarter. So I'm happy to be here. Okay, so we're going to cut to the chase.

We're going to give five ways to double down on your family and five reasons to do it. Okay? So it's going to be a lightning round. Okay. Are you ready?

Okay. The first way to double down on your family, identify a consistent spot in your schedule for family worship. At our house, if, if I let the scattering happen after dinner, the recollection of people is so difficult to do, especially once your children start getting older. So we, as soon as we're done for dinner, we sprint to the living room for family worship because if we don't do it then we might not do it at all. And so I think all of our encouragement is make this the immovable rock in your schedule.

Find a time that you can carve out and consistently commit to. And then dad needs to be ruthless about making it happen. Amen. Yeah. I mean, I totally agree.

This was our problem. When we, when we first started, it was scheduled throughout the day. It was kind of as we came to it and that didn't work well at all because we failed to attain any real consistency. So for us, it's in the morning. And hey, Jason, we even use technology to help us.

Alexa reminds us five minutes before. True story. Five minutes until family worship. So people listening to the podcast, their Alexa just went off because we said her name. The devil helping the saints.

Plunder the Egyptians. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Okay.

So identify a consistent spot in your schedule. The devil hates it. You better nail it down. Yeah. Amen.

Number two, number two, pick a strategy for Bible reading. Oh, I'm starting. I'm going to start. Have you ever heard of journey through the Bible? Well, absolutely.

Journey through the Bible also has an app. It has an app that I well, I use it every day and it's fantastic. And it takes you through the Bible in a year. And also you can read Matthew Henry, you can listen to it on audio, you can hear a sermon about that book of the Bible. You know, it's all right there.

Well, okay, So the sales job is over. What, what do you say? Pick a strategy for Bible reading. Yeah. And that, and that strategy obviously is going to depend on the kind of the age of your children and what they can handle.

You know, if you have very young kids, it might be a little bit different than when you have teenagers in the house. But our family particularly loves to throw the Bible in a year format, no matter what else we may be doing. That one there seems to pay lots of dividends. To the domes, I think we've done that one time. I mean, we have consistent family worship, but I think we've been through it.

It has felt like a sprint to us. It is wonderful in many ways, but it does have you reading a lot, and you definitely can't go to depth on because that that is three plus chapters a day right so you're not going to depth on that so you sort of have to pick your strategy a strategy that I've appreciated is the George Mueller strategy, which is he had a bookmark for the New Testament and a bookmark for the Old Testament. And he would read from both every day. And when he got to the end of Malachi, which is the end of the Old Testament, he would just start again in Genesis 1. And so there was no date on it.

You know, when he got to the end of Revelation, he would go back to Matthew 1. There was no date attached to it, and he would just keep reading them both all the time. And so he was never ahead or behind. He was just reading in both testaments regularly and just kept going, you know, until he died. That sounds fantastic.

Yeah, the strategy we use for daily family worship is a three-year Bible plan, So it's not quite so rushed. And then kind of personal time for familiarity. We have, we do a yearly plan. Yeah. Yeah.

Same here. So I think the point is have a strategy, not to have a strategy is to end up with what you targeted which is nothing nothing get nothing that's right okay so number two is pick a strategy for Bible reading number three squeeze more out of the lot of life in your local church oh I like this one a lot leave it to three pastors to put this one down. Give us more give us more. We wrote a book about this it's called the family at church how to squeeze more glory out of the glorious institution. Hey, this is a little book, but don't be fooled by it.

Our church just got done reading most of it. We didn't read every word. We read most of it after lunch for us on Sunday afternoons. We were regathering more Sundays than not and in reading a day or two. It's 30 days, 20 days, 20 days.

And so a day's reading is maybe three of those little pages or four or five, depending on which day you're on. And there's so much gold. It's a little book, but there's a lot of good wisdom there for families and how to get the most out of church life. Amen. We read it when it first came out as a congregation, but it's been a couple of years now.

It's probably time to go back through it again. It was so good. Yeah, there you go. Hey, your local church, you can get so much good and not even realize it. And what I mean by that is no one event seems earthshaking or tremendous or maybe even all that scintillating, right?

But over time, what you find is that as, as you give yourselves more touch points, you, you get sort of a compounding effect on that. So, so we want people, we want to exhort people to go for the compounding effect. I get the drip drip drip drip of really regular touch points with your brethren and local churches with good solid teaching with praying together with singing together all that stuff and you get the compounding effect. Amen. Very true.

Amen. Yeah. 20 days to transform your local church experience, how parents are tour guides for joy. So crank it up, crank it up parents. Have a disciple.

Absolutely. You know, squeeze more out of the life of your local church. That was number three. Number four, have a discipleship goal for each of your children. Yeah, that's a good one because it's good to try to set markers for the children.

They don't have to be kind of, you know, Gestapo, you know, sort of a drill sergeant, markers. However, if you notice a deficiency or if there's an area in which your, your children are struggling or even an area in which they're particularly gifted to cultivate those things, would be a good thing, I think. Well, you know what? I don't think I did very much of this. I was thinking, I wish I could get my children back.

I could have more discipleship goals. So one of the things that I've done periodically is to is to read a book that I thought was an important book for that child at that time one-on-one. So most of what we do, so much of what we do, is as a family. There's so much virtue in that. But our children are also individuals and they do have individual needs at different times in their lives.

They need something different, you know, when they're five or when they're 18. And so to read a specific book for a specific purpose with just one of your children can be tremendously profitable. I just ended that with one of my children and started another book with another one of my children recently. So actually at her prompting, she came and said, dad, it is my birthright to read a book one-on-one with you. And so I said, okay, I've got I've got the title.

Let's go. That's great You know, I like this one because it makes a parent begin to pray and think strategically, you know To look at their child and go what what do they need? Who are they? How is God shaping them? How is God forming them?

What are some things that I need to get in place? For example, I really appreciated the words in Scott's book on preparing boys for battle, where there were markers, there were some things that a young man needs to know, there are people that he needs to know, there are skills that he needs to have, there are doctrines that he needs to understand. And just to think like that, you know, we can kind of get into this devotional mindset without sometimes looking at the larger picture. And that's why I think this particular one is important. Okay.

Number five, take one high impact trip as a family. So you're on the East coast, you know, go to Williamsburg or Plymouth or Boston. If you're in the midsection, go to the arc. If you're in the West coast, go to Alcatraz or something like that. So yeah, we do this every single year.

Just about. It's called the church and life family conference. Hey, there you go. While we're salesmen today, we've sold two books in a conference. Yeah.

Some of the most memorable times for us. Our family loves Williamsburg, Colonial Williamsburg. I don't remember anything from my high school history classes, but I remember so much of what we learned about history and you know some of that in the United States is Christian history. Going to Plymouth is learning Christian history of the faith in the United States. So there are great vacations and then there are high impact vacations.

And we're exhorting people to think about what could be a high impact vacation where we could go somewhere and learn something firsthand about the faith of our fathers in this country. Okay. That was, so we just had five ways to double down on your family. There you go. Now five reasons to double down on your family.

Now reason number one, the Bible has put family discipleship squarely in your lap as parents? He certainly has. God has through his word and from the uniform testimony of scripture, from the Old Testament through the new. And for some parents, that's a new understanding. And one of the things I love about our ministry is that we're helping people understand that God has indeed put this great privilege into the lap of parents.

And it's just that it's a privilege to be able to instruct and, to pour into the lives of your very own children, hopefully with whom you'll spend eternity. It's a magnificent opportunity. Joshua said, as for me and my house, it's my house. It's not somebody else's house, it's my house. We all of us together, in other words, I'm going to pull this family together.

We will serve the Lord. And the idea of serving there really has to do with the worship of God. But God places ownership in the hands of parents to raise their children. So it's a really super duper serious thing. Deuteronomy 6, 4 through 9.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, who shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house when you walk by the way when you lie down and when you rise up you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. You could just trace that theme through the Bible. This is Deuteronomy 6.

Carl, you started an organization called D6 around Deuteronomy 6 and a father's responsibility to see that this is happening in the home. He's cultivating a rigorous spiritual life for himself. And then that's bleeding over into the discipleship of his children. That's right. That's right.

I've always been particularly inspired by Genesis 18, somewhere around verse 19 with the Lord speaking of Abraham. And he says, I know him, he will, he will command his, his family after, after him, to keep the ways of the Lord and to do justice, etc. And I just want that to be said of me. Oh, I know him and he's going to teach his children. He's going to love his wife and he's going to bring them before me.

Amen. Okay. So reason number one, the Bible has put family discipleship squarely in the lap of parents. Reason number two to double down on your family because you love your children because you love your children. The quote that stands out in my mind here was preached by a friend of ours, Kevin Swanson, many years ago.

And he said that, you know, we just need, we need more love for God and we need more love for our families to disciple our children to love the God that we love. And I've held on to that for year after year after year. If we love God with all of our hearts and all of our minds and all of our souls and all of our strength, and if we truly love our neighbors as ourselves, which of course would include our very families at the top of that list. And why wouldn't we, you know, why wouldn't we bring them before the God who sent his son to die for our sins? So yeah, I mean, love is the chief motivator.

Yeah, you have no greater joy than to hear your children are walking in the truth. That's right. Amen. Okay. The third reason to double down on your family.

This is a biggie. The window is smaller than you think they're in diapers. You blink. You're having high school graduation and it's really a sort of like that. And our parents warned us about this and we thought they don't know what they're talking about.

As it turns out, they did know what they're talking about. They did know, that's right. Now we're warning the same. Yeah. And You might be hanging around saying, oh, I wish we had done this, I wish we'd done that, I wish I'd been a little bit more diligent, things like that, the window is really short.

Enough said? Enough said. Enough said. Okay, The next reason to double down on your family is tomorrow is the devil's day. That's a quote from J.C.

Ryle. J.C. Ryle. There are a few lines by J.C. Ryle that you can count on encountering in every one of his writings and this is one of them tomorrow is the devil's day what does he mean well we have a saying for this too the road to hell is paved with good intentions you know I meant to do it I thought about doing it I saw the value in it yeah here's another line that you encounter the best way to do a thing is to do it.

Meaning, get on with it, enough strategizing, like move. And so parents need to have a bias for action for sure. Yeah. Yeah, procrastination, you know, is the devil's workshop. And you know, how do you deal with procrastination?

It's really, really simple. Just do daily routines and just do them. And you know, you don't have to have a whiz bang day every day, but I think, you know, establishing, you know, blessed patterns that you just do every day is really the best way to do it. Amen. And then the last reason, the final reason to double down on your family, this is one of the great privileges of a lifetime.

Yeah, it makes me think of Proverbs 31 and the Proverbs 31 coming to the end of her years and her husband's praising her and And her children are rising up to call her blessed. Well, that that's true definitely of wives and mothers, but but true of husbands and fathers too and we should sort of parent now with the end in mind in in hopes that our children will see how much we loved them and actually did something about it expressed it in practical ways by giving them the most valuable thing that we have. And what it is, it really is the privilege of a lifetime is to be entrusted with these eternal souls in our homes and have the opportunity to employ the means of grace, the ordinary means of grace, like pulling out the Bible and reading it and praying together and singing together and going to church together and taking high impact trips together and on and on. I remember when my first child was born and my wife and I had, it had been years of infertility and we were, we had adopted our first baby and we were in mid thirties and it was just amazed by the grace of God.

And I remember many, many moments of holding her in my arms at night and looking at her in her eyes and thinking, you know, if I'm blessed, I get to spend eternity with this, with this little girl. And between now and then, if the Lord Terry's, I have a lot of work to do. And I just remember thinking, what an absolute honor that is. And I think sometimes when we get in the midst of it all and we're tired and, you know, kids are screaming and the, and you know, the dog needs shots in the car went out. You can lose sight of just how important and how wonderful it is to literally shepherd a soul throughout throughout their lives.

And that's the call of parents. And, hopefully we won't forget that. Amen. Hey, pay plus there's a return on investment. Thank you.

Fathers who have given themselves to establishing these patterns will will say the same thing which is I think I feel like my attempts were so meager but I feel like the return on those meager attempts were just just disproportionately fruitful in every way and I I would definitely say that I wish I had done more but the little that I did has, has yielded a lot of good in our home. Amen. Amen. Okay. So double down on the family in 2025.

Let's go for it. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and I hope you can be with us next time. By helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out churchandfamilylife.com.