Thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we're going to talk about a really critical thing that we do in our church. We do a father-daughter retreat every year to equip our daughters to face the music of this culture and to display the beauty of the Lord. I hope you enjoy the discussion. You enjoyed the discussion.

Jason, the collapse of biblical manhood and womanhood has been so astonishing, so harmful, that what we've done, what you and I've done, really, for the last 20 years, is every year in our churches we have a father-son and a father-daughter retreat, and we do that to refresh the memories of our kids and our fathers about what manhood and womanhood looks like. We have done it every year, I think, Father-Daughter and Father-Son Retreat every single year for the last 20 years. So I like our credentials for this. I think we're able to speak to it. I wonder how many messages we preach.

We're going to talk about some of those messages because I think they're instructive to the problem. This year, our Father-Daughter Retreat is June 20 through 21. It's on my farm in Wake Forest, North Carolina. You can sign up for it at the Church and Family Life website. Yeah, I think one of the things we want to do is just promote these because they've been so helpful to us.

And so they're open to everyone now. So if you are a dad with a daughter June 20 and 21st, that's a Friday evening and most of the day, Saturday. These are very sweet times with our daughters. So consider joining us. Yeah, we're sending our daughters out to war and we want them to understand how to, how to wage the battle.

We also, the father son retreat is in the fall at September 26 and 27. Same deal, same reason, on, on, on my farm in Wake Forest, September 26 and 27, and you can sign up on that for that at our website. But we're gonna focus on the father-daughter. We wanna talk about all things father-daughter right now. This year, we're gonna talk about the aspirations of a godly daughter, and we're deriving this out of 1 Thessalonians 4, 11 and 12.

I'll read it. That you also aspire to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands as we commanded you, that you may walk properly to those who are outside, that you may lack nothing." Yeah, so we definitely want daughters who aspire to things and who are busy having productive lives towards good things, but not busy bodies. So this is good. It's a good time well spent. Yeah.

Yeah. There are lots of things that we can talk about under that subject of making your ambition to lead a quiet life. As it turns out, the quiet life is the powerful life. As it turns out the small things are actually the biggest things in terms of being a blessing in the world to, to children, to husbands and things like that. So we've been doing this for 20 years.

What is the schedule like? What do we do? Yeah, we give, well, hey, we give short messages, right? We give 20 minute messages. Not back in the old days.

Well, not, yeah, we droned out what we're doing. We droned on and on, you know, back in the early father-daughter and father-son retreats. We decided, nope, we're going to go hard, 20-minute messages and 10 minutes for a father and daughter, or fathers and their daughters to have it, to talk about what they just heard. We do the same thing with the fathers and sons. So it's fast-paced.

It's fast. It forces the preacher to get down to what he wants to say. And it Also, every time we preach, we bring the fathers and daughters together to talk personally about it. We'll also send them out on a walk to talk about, we send them out with a list of questions that are really helpful. We've seen a lot of healing happen.

We've seen sin exposed. We've seen really good things happen. And frankly, I think God's answered our prayers over the years, because so many of our girls, they really understand what it means to be a woman. They're not confused about it at all. So on Fridays, the official kickoff is usually dinner time, but we open the gates around lunchtime so that people who can come early will come early and just spend the afternoon out on the property, then we have an official kickoff with dinner, then we have evening teachings, then we have morning teachings.

And usually all the teaching is done by noon, but the retreat's not over till four. So it's a really good mix of teaching time and fathers kind of proactively and intentionally speaking with daughters, but also time for canoe races and swimming in the pond and different competitions and different activities. Archery, kickball, whatever. Volleyball, also there's lots of, it's a really good mix of teaching, profitable teaching times, but a lot of fun time mixed in. Hey, this is also a camping retreat.

Most people camp, everybody doesn't. Sometimes They stay in hotels or if they're in our church, they're going to come from their houses. But it's amazing how many camp. So bring your camping gear or stay in a hotel or whatever. There's real flexibility there.

But I want us to talk about what we have talked about over the years. We were just reminiscing, looking back at some of the messages that we preach. I'll just list some of them. The Seven Pillars of Biblical Femininity, How Fathers Protect Their Daughters. One of my favorites was Taking Aim at the Enemies of Biblical Femininity.

What we did there is I drew up this big target and we had androgyny, feminism, all these other things on the target. And they were, they were shooting with 22s. Okay. And, And then we said that we're going to go have a tea. We're going to have a tea.

And we'd led them down and there were these teacups sitting on these long logs. And we had them shoot at the teacups. We haven't had a live fire retreat in a while. It's been a while, yeah. But that was really fun, taking aim at the enemies of biblical femininity.

You know, the blessings of womanhood. Here's one message, how fathers and daughters covenant with one another for victory. That's really important that fathers and daughters have that bond. A lot of the teaching comes right out of a text of Scripture that has to do with the topic at hand, often biblical femininity for father-daughter retreats, biblical masculinity for father-son retreats. We've also done quite a number of biographies, too, and those tend to be favorites of people who come, because you get to learn from somebody from history and an inspiring woman from Christian history that can help us understand.

Yeah, you did one on Mary. That was really remarkable. My favorite message, and I might have given this twice in 20 years, on Katie Luther, Katarina von Bora. We did Sarah Edwards over the years. We did Sarah Edwards.

I'm a Jonathan Edwards wife. Yeah. There's a bunch of inspiring Christian women, and it's just helpful to educate people on the biographies of these women who laid it all on the line right alongside their husbands. Lydia, Abigail, Dorcas, we've done profiles. We did, we did jail.

How about that? That was wild. You know, there are only two women in the Bible who are called blessed Mary and jail. You know, we, we think of, femininity, not particularly of strength. This was a strong woman.

Right, who was driving tent pegs through the temple of a general. She kind of like powered up, you know. Here's some other titles. Daughters in the Family Economy. Beauty Preparing Daughters to be Teachers of the Next Generation.

The Woman Who Launched the Protestant Work Ethic. That was Katerina Von Bora. You talked about a word to women at ease. Yeah, there's a text in Isaiah, I forget which chapter it is, but it is a rebuke actually of women at ease. God calls his daughters to such a vigorous life and in really important categories.

So it's not appropriate for men of God or women of God to fritter their lives away. We're called to very inspiring things and we should engage with them wholeheartedly. Yeah, we've seen women really dial into the proposition in the Bible. We think that they need to hear it every year. We think that There's such a relentless attack on women, on daughters, and particularly young daughters, that it's incumbent upon us to cast a vision over and over and over again.

So Scott, we are at war, and The most dangerous position to be in is to be at war, but you not know it. An enemy is waging war against you and you think you're strolling through the meadow. We're not strolling through the meadow here. The world is demanding that our boys be feminine and demanding that our girls be masculine so that we all meet in the middle and there are no gender distinctions. And that's completely contrary to what the Bible gives us.

The Bible gives us so much more of a compelling vision for both manly lives and the lives of women and how they work together in a beautiful way to do more than we could do if we all just meet in the middle and act like we're just one interchangeable thing. Yeah. We wanted to make it really plain that God created women to do particular things. They're the most wonderful things. That They take care of homes.

They take care of husbands. They take care of children. They raise the next generation They have in their hands eternal souls. We want them to see how significant that is We don't want them wasting their times as CEOs and presidents and senators God did not call women into those kinds of positions in the world. The Bible tells me so.

So we wanted our women to be content with the biblical vision. Not just content, but fired up about it. Yeah. What educated and supremely talented women find when they engage in the biblical vision is that every skill that they've developed, everything that they've learned is needed to be put into play and to be exercised to do the things that God has called them to do. So this isn't a second class thing by any stretch of the imagination.

You will find it will take every skill you can develop, it will take every talent that you have, it will take every educational opportunity that you've improved. You'll need it all to do what the Bible is calling you to do. Think about the Proverbs 31 woman, this is a power woman, She's out there driving blessing toward her home on a number of fronts with real estate, with clothing, with food. She's really a magnificent picture of vigorous womanhood. She's smart and she knows what she's doing.

And she's inspiring. That's the kind of woman we're really praying for. Let's do a retreat. Let's do a retreat. Another one next year.

You know what? It's been a while since we did Proverbs 31. I think I got to do that again. All right. We already have a team for next year.

I want to close with the statement by John Angel James. Woman was the finishing grace of creation. Woman was the completeness of man's bliss in paradise. Woman was the cause of sin and death to our world. The world was redeemed by the seed of the woman.

Woman is the mother of the human race. She is either our companion, counselor, and comforter in the pilgrimage of life, or she is our tempter, scourge, and destroyer. Our sweetest cup of earthly happiness, or our bitterest draft of sorrow, is mixed and administered by her hand. She not only renders smooth or rough to our path to the grave, but helps or hinders our progress to our mortality. In heaven we shall bless God for her aid in assisting us to reach that blissful state or amidst the torments of unutterable woe in another region we shall deplore the fatality of her influence." God created women to glorify himself and to exercise His power in the world.

And that's why we do Father Daughter retreats every year. So we're recording it now and hoping to get it out in plenty of time for you to register and join us come. If you come, you'll be subsidized by our churches. This is money losing them for us. Super cheap, yeah.

But we value it and want as many people as who think it would benefit to just come be with us on June 20th and 21st, Friday and Saturday. Yeah, and if you can't afford it, we'll let you come for free, but it won't cost almost nothing. Okay, thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. We hope to see you at the Father Daughter Retreat. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches.

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