We need strong families. An outside the Bible, one of the best books you’ll find to build yours up is The Theology of the Family. In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm discuss this treasure trove of biblical wisdom. Drawing from the Reformers and Puritans, it features rich biblical gems from 56 different authors on: (1) fatherhood and motherhood; (2) marriage; (3) childbearing; (4) bringing up children; (5) abortion; (6) modest apparel; (7) advice to young people, and more. Packed with hundreds of short, powerful articles you can read, as a family, in minutes, the book’s already helped thousands of dads, moms, and children in their walk with God. And this expanded heirloom edition is one you’ll want to go to, again and again, for foundational truths and practical insights in raising your family. 

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we're going to talk about an exciting announcement. We've just republished this book, Theology of the Family. It's a beautiful heirloom edition. Joe Beeke says this and I quote, I regard it as a top 10 book in a family library, Ray Comfort, a treasure trove of biblical wisdom, an essential addition to any Christian home.

Hope you enjoy the discussion, and I hope you're able to go out and get the book. Jason, I'm really jazzed about this new version of Theology of the Family. We've sold out of it twice and we've vastly improved it. It's really sort of an heirloom edition of this really remarkable book that we put together several years ago. Yeah.

So when I see a book like that, if I don't know anything about it, my brain instantly says you don't have time to read that. Hold that up again. Look at the earth of that book. When you think that it's because you don't really understand what this book is. It's a book with independent articles on really helpful family and spiritual matters.

And if you just picked it up and you hadn't read anything else and you read the last article in it, because it's not dependent on any article that came before it, you would get a bite-size installment with a lot of gold in it, and you wouldn't be harmed by just picking it up reading the last chapter. So for everyone seeing this book, don't be intimidated by the size of it. Understand that this is reference material, really well organized so that when you need to get to a topic and find sort of the best wisdom over the last few centuries, it's wisdom that spans centuries that you can get right to what you need in the book. Yeah, 500 years of biblical wisdom on family, on the major categories of family life. Manhood, womanhood, being a husband, being a wife, raising children, the whole orbed picture of family life.

And almost all of it doesn't come from the 20th of the 21st century. It's five centuries of biblical wisdom. Here's my belief. If you want to learn about the family, the doctrine of the family, don't go to the 20th century writers, go to the old writers. They were unencumbered by many of the apostate views of family life that we have today.

And that's what this book is, it's timeless wisdom, particularly from the Reformers and the Puritans and their successors who attempted to think biblically. They wanted to put everything into practice the way that the Bible describes it. I think that's really the value of this book. And if you know about that era of authors, you know that they'll take a limited scope subject and then come at it from a hundred different angles, which is really helpful. Modern authors don't tend to do that, but they'll take a single topic that is manageable, and then they'll just look at it from this direction and that direction, and then begin to apply it across different groups of people.

Anyway, it's just a very helpful way to come at these topics. Jason, we need strong families. And the only way to build a family for the glory of God is out of the Word of God. And that's what these authors, 56 authors in this book, like you said, short articles that are easily digestible. You can read them in a couple, three, four minutes.

It's a fantastic tool to work through with your whole family. I get many letters about people who have done this with their families and it's really transformed the way that they think about family life because it doesn't come out of the modern world. It actually speaks to the modern world in a very, very powerful way. So from Luther to Bunyan, from Spurgeon to Sproul, we do have a few, a small number of modern writers like Joe Beeke and R.C. Sproul and George Grant and people like that.

But primarily we're focusing on the older writers. And I love the authors that you mentioned. At the same time, there's all sorts of authors in here that I had had no exposure to before it didn't know existed. And I thought, wow, I need to find some more of the works of the person who wrote this because this is so rich. Yeah, yeah.

And this book is a very high quality book. We've really redesigned it as a faux leather cover, gold foil imprinting, and actually the imprinting, the imagery on this book really harkens to the theology and the purveyors of that theology that is in this book. It's debossed in the front and the back. It has those beautiful raised bands on the spine. You know, it really looks like an older book.

The end papers are just beautifully designed. We've put high quality everything into this book. We didn't skimp on anything in quality. There's a red ribbon marker in this book, and it's just a really fantastic and actually very beautiful book. You who are incapable of resisting a beautiful book, or order now, this is a book that you'll want to have on your shelf.

Yeah, come and learn from Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Bunyan, William Gooshe, Richard Baxter, Thomas Watson, John Gill, Jonathan Edwards. Well, like I said, there's 56 authors. We've also added to the book. It's a new and improved version in terms of the content. We've added a whole new section on the Fifth Commandment, and I've added a chapter in one of the sections as well.

The chapters address a particular item of family life, and then there are several authors, typically from eight to 12 articles on that. I think the first chapter on family worship is worth the price of the book. It's just very pivotal, very helpful about establishing the worship of God in your family. That's great. Could you run us through some of the sections of the book?

It's organized in different sections, there's multiple articles in each section. Yeah, fasten your seatbelt. Chapter one, family worship. Chapter two, godly manhood. Three, virtuous womanhood.

Four, marriage. Five, bringing up children. Six, fatherhood. Seven, motherhood. Eight, childbearing.

Nine, abortion. Ten, the duties of sons and daughters. Eleven, the fifth commandment, chapter 12, modest apparel, chapter 13, thoughts for young people, chapter 14, the Lord's Day. So that's really the span of these articles, and they're just fantastic, solidly puritan, sufficiency of Scripture kind of articles. So just to a point I made earlier, each chapter probably has seven to twelve articles in each chapter.

Every one of the articles is two to five pages, maybe something like that. So it really is bite-size, and you can tell by the chapter title exactly, excuse me, by the article title exactly, what's in that article. So it's really easy, if you have a question about a certain topic or you really want to get focused on something in particular, it's really easy to find where it is in the book. This. It's truly relevant and more desperately needed than ever Conrad and Bayway.

This is a compilation of some of the best articles on the subject of the family from proven teachers in the last 500 years. Al Martin, we are all placed in great debt to those whose vision and labors have produced this amazing collage of godly wisdom in this important matter. Sam Waldron, there is certainly no greater resource for godly family life outside the Bible. So this is a solid resource for families. It's the kind of book you can build your family life out of.

I began the book with a quote from Richard Baxter talking about how pivotal it is to establish biblical family life, how pivotal it is to the church. He writes this, if we suffer the neglect of this we undo all. And what he's saying here is that if we neglect the doctrine of the family in our families, the work of the pastors goes unfinished. It's pivotal that families really embrace their role and their function. And this book is really about the restoration of the functionality of the family.

Well, Jason, this book is just now being made available And we hope that thousands of families will get this book and really ground their practices on it. I've got the old edition and now you've made me want the new one. Well, that's exactly right. You need to get the new one. Yeah, timeless wisdom is what we need.

The new chapters are fantastic too as well. So there you have it. Well, thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Hope you go get the book and I hope to see you 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.