The family, like all things in God's world, was designed by God to function in a way that works for the benefit of God's people and for God's glory. But the design of the family is under constant attack: Our world today has tried its best to overturn the clear design of the family, and the Devil has hated the family from the beginning and tries to destroy it, and our own sinful natures fight against the goodness of God's design. Thankfully God has given an objective Word that can correct and equip the family to fulfill the glorious purpose that God intended for it.

The Bible says that the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto day utters speech. Night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line has gone to the ends of the earth.

This is what God does. He glorifies Himself in His design. From the heavens to the earth and to the creatures that He made. He really has designed us for particular purposes. And I want to talk about God's design, particularly God's design for the family.

And I'd also like to just briefly touch on the design of the church as well. I'll Talk about that in more detail later on in this conference. But God has designed all things well. Okay, so stop right there just for a second. And here's what I want you to try to do as we engage this subject in the next few minutes.

Fathers, mothers, children. That's what I want to address. I'd like to somehow look into your eyes, you children and you wives and you husbands, and ask you to just consider your design. Consider that you were made for a certain purpose. You know, you weren't made for yourself.

You were made for the glory of God. And what God has done is He's made so clear how you would find yourself in harmony with his design. And it's a wonderful thing that happens to a person when their heart is changed. They have a heart of stone, and God gives them a heart of flesh. He converts them.

And then they say, Oh Lord, teach me to do Your will. They say, I delight to do Your will, Oh Lord. That's a picture of a person who is desiring the design of God in their lives, that they would be found humble, not living life their own way, but living life God's way. It's a beautiful thing to see a humble person, and we know that God is opposed to the proud, and He gives grace to the humble. What that means, children, you young people that are here, you wives, you husbands, is that God increases His pleasure.

He pours out His grace. He gives help to those who humble themselves under his mighty hand. And they say what Jesus said, not my will, but thine be done. That's really the heart of a Christian. As we talk about the subject of knowing God's design, I just want us to somehow, if we can, as a whole group together, to sort of relax and be at peace, to recognize that God has a design.

And it is a beautiful design. And I'd like for us somehow to just consider our fitness with His design. And to ask ourselves, is there any way that I'm stepping out of the design of God? Is there any way that I'm rebelling against it? And what are the ways that God would have me to be more consistent with His beautiful design?

Because God obviously is a god of design. Everything has a remarkably complex and beautiful design. Well, here's what we know about that design in terms of the big picture. That is, the design of the family is for the purpose of communicating the glory of the gospel. And I want to talk about that in some level of detail.

And there are three elements of that design that I want to talk about. Because Each element of the design of God in the family has a purpose to declare the goodness and the beauty of the Kingdom of Heaven. The Father, the wife, and the children all have specific Gospel roles to play. Specific gospel roles to play. Each element, each person that provides an element of family life fits into God's way of communicating his glory.

It's no accident that God made fathers. It's no accident that God made mothers. It's no accident that God made children. You know, your family is constructed this way because God wanted to say something through you. He wanted to do something through your family life.

And he would do it by defining these roles as father, or husband, and wife, and child. And each one of those roles is critical. Now, if we could just back up for a moment and consider God's institutional design for the world, there are three great institutions. Two of them really formed the very greatest in terms of the function for the discipleship of his people. And that is, there is the church, and there is the family, and there is the state.

My great interest really is in the church and the family. I know we need people who are very interested in the functionality of the state. The focus of my life and ministry has been the church and the family. These two great institutions and they really are beautiful institutions and they they really are both designed for the exact same thing, for the evangelization of the world, for the rescuing of the lost, for the declaring the goodness and the beauty and the glory of the kingdom of God. And even not just to declare it, but actually be a living picture of the glory of the kingdom of God.

It's that happy kingdom, that marvelous kingdom of love, the kingdom of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit. So in these institutions of the family and of the church, these two institutions work together. They work in harmony with one other. They are separate. The church and the family are separate governments.

They are separate jurisdictions. They are not the same. You can't conflate the two, but you cannot also deny how complementary they are and how they serve many of the same functions. In the same way that the family is designed to communicate the word of God to a little family, the church is also designed to communicate the word of God to a bigger family through the preaching of the word of God. In the same way that a small biological family, the little family, is designed to be the place where the gospel is heard, so the church is as well.

So you have many of the same things and objectives that are operating in the church and the family. However, what God has done in his design is he has made them separate governments that are complementary to one another. And you can't have a family without a church. You can't have a healthy church without a healthy family. That's just the way it is.

They are so interrelated. And this is why we have weak churches. It's because we have weak families. And we have weak families because we have weak churches. They both work in the same way with one another.

But the church and the family are two of the pivotal discipleship institutions. They're the places of love and the kingdom of heaven. So they are both holy institutions. God invented the family. God invented the church.

God invented marriage. God invented the way that children are supposed to operate. None of us got to choose this. We didn't make it up on our own. We just kind of fell into it.

We fell into God's design. So the big question is once you realize that you are actually part of a design that has a purpose, then what will you do? How will you operate knowing that there is a design for you? Now, I don't know if any of you have had the period of your life where something in your body was malfunctioning, it was rebelling, that organ wasn't doing what it was supposed to do. And what happened?

Well, your whole life was out of kilter. Even if your baby toe is wounded, the whole rest of your life is affected. Well, that's what happens when we are out of sync with the design of God and the family. That we hurt everything around us. And so what we have to do is recognize that we have been designed to live in the midst of this thing called a family.

And there is a way to operate in that family. The apostle Paul said that there is a way to conduct yourself in the house of God. It's just a way you do it. It's a way that God designed the church to function. And there's also a way for the family as well.

It's the way that you want to function. Now, most of our life, we're learning that way. And so you have these holy institutions, and you have something speaking into the institutions. And it's the Word of God that speaks into the institutions to bring order, to bring biblical order to the church and to the family. And neither the church nor the family can function properly until you have on the one hand humble families and on the other hand humble elders and humble people who say, Lord, your ways are better ways.

You really can't build a healthy family or a healthy church until you come to the place of saying, you know, I might be the most creative guy on the street, but all my creativity is irrelevant. God has His ways. And so what he does is in order to provide the proper functionality of the Church and the family, in order to provide the right harmony and balance of the relationships that are there, he brings an external force to bear to show you how to reorder your family life and how to reorder your church life. Now, you know, in my lifetime I've seen lots of reordering of church and family life. You know, whenever a group of elders decide that they're going to reorder their church according to scripture, you know what happens?

Two things happen. Trouble, on the one hand, and blessing. Those are the two things that always happen. The trouble comes first, and the blessing comes later. Same things happen in family life.

There's tremendous disruption and upheaval when a father comes home and says, you know, I just realized I'm supposed to be the head of this house. I didn't know that. I just realized I was supposed to be the teacher of my children. I didn't know that. What happened to me?

I didn't realize that God had called me to lead my wife and teach my wife. I'm supposed to teach my wife? Don't raise your hands. But how many of you just kind of came to those realizations within the last few years where you thought, how come nobody told me this? Well, the design wasn't apparent.

According to the, because of the sovereignty of God, he didn't reveal it to you. But then he did reveal it to you, that there really was an intricate and beautiful design. And there was an objective resource voice to speak to your design and the way you designed your life. You know, the world wants you to just sort of design your life any way you want. You know, You've seen the designer churches that are around there, and designer families are everywhere.

Everybody just wants to be so creative today. You know, I'm certainly not against creativity, but we have to recognize that there is a fixed design for the family. And so my question is like, are you okay with that? I mean, do you want in your heart of hearts to say, Lord, I delight to do your will. I love your design better than mine.

I'm willing to set aside my design. I'm willing to stop thinking the way I've been thinking my whole life. I'm willing to take your thoughts for mine. I'm willing to humble myself under the mighty hand of God. So there are these remarkable attacks against the design.

However, you know, Scripture is sufficient, God created, church and family life, the devil is always at war with the family and with the church and, thankfully, Jesus Christ is the head of the church and he's stronger than all of these other forces. Now, when we come to this matter of design, Before we move into the matter of the particulars with a husband and a wife and a child and to try to dissect that sort of trinity of design, those three functions, I want to establish first of all that marriage is really the foundation for it all. And that in order to have a well-functioning family that is operating according to design, marriage is really the very first issue that needs to be addressed. The unity of a husband and wife is without question the foundation of family culture. And if you do not have unity between husband and wife, if you do not have husbands and wives operating according to scripture, the recovery of the design of the family is going to be all the more difficult.

So you should always begin at the level of marriage. And So the big question is, how's your marriage? Did you know that every day you're teaching your children what marriage is all about? Every day. You don't teach your children marriage only by getting out a book or reading it to them or giving them verses.

You teach your children about marriage for most of life by the way you are together. How husbands talk to their wives, how wives interact with their husbands, how they deal with the problems of life and the disagreements of life and things like that. This unity of marriage is really the first issue that has to be addressed. And so it's appropriate to ask how's it going? How's it going?

Is your house as a result of your relationship together, a house of love? Or is it a place of tension? Is it a place of resistance? Is it a place of hardness? Is it a place of sacrifice?

Is it a place of honor and submission? That's really the big question. Because so much of the design of family life begins at the top. So how are you doing? I can't answer that question for you.

It's so easy to say because of what we know about life that marriage controls almost everything that goes on on planet earth. What happens in your marriage is so important. You know, it's the same way in a church, how leaders in a church operate really determined the condition of the flock. If you have divided leaders you'll have pandemonium in a church. If you have united leaders, then you can have a family that's unified.

The most dangerous thing in a church is when the leaders become dis-unified. So, this issue of unity in the home is so critical. Okay, now I'd like to speak about these three elements of the design of family life and what they really mean. And I'd like to begin first of all with the father. Because a father has a message in his role.

In the design for the family, God places a father in a family to perform a certain role. The same thing with a wife. A wife has a role to play. The same thing with a child. Children have a role to play.

Now I'm going to summarize it and then I want to go through it in more detail. And the Father is designed by God to play a role. You know what that role is? Christ. He plays the role of Christ in His family.

That is who He is. Everything about him is designed to display the glory of Jesus Christ. The wife, what role does she play? She plays the role of the church. A wife in a home is the church.

Did you understand that? Husbands, love your wives, as also Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. So the wife plays the role of the church. Now, if a wife doesn't understand that, She's just going to be bouncing off the walls of her own emotions. But when she knows that she is the church, it helps her to understand how she should relate with everything, the authority of her husband, what's going on in her family, what's going on in the world.

She is the church. She has a role to play. The children also have a role to play. They are the children of God, the individual children of God who look to God in honor and in obedience, those two things. So every element of family life is designed to declare the glory of the Gospel, where there is a Father in heaven and a husband who is like Christ and there's a wife who is like the church and there are children who are like The individual believers.

This is the design of God for your family. God designed your family for that so that it would be a living picture of something so that everything that every member of the family would do would be saying something. Your family was designed to say something. And if you don't understand what you're designed to say, you'll never have the design of your family in harmony with God. Okay, do you get that?

You get the basic proposition here? Your family has a design. Its purpose is to declare the beauty of the kingdom of heaven and salvation that's in Jesus Christ. And every single member of the family has a role. And that means, yes, you who are 10 and eight and 15 and 18 years old, you have a role to play.

There is something you're supposed to be in your family. You're not your own. Wives, same thing. You're not your own. You can't just be whoever you want to be.

The world tells you, go girl, be whatever you want to be. Well, that's not what the Bible says. The Bible says you are the church. You need to be like the Church of Jesus Christ. Same thing with husbands.

So, if you open to Ephesians chapter 5, you get perhaps the most detailed on the one hand, but lengthy explanations of the relationship of the husband and the wife. And what we learn in Ephesians chapter 5 is that husbands are the heads of their wives. Verse 23 in Ephesians 5. For the husband is the head of the wife as also Christ is the head of the church, and He is the Savior of the body. Therefore, just as the church, the wife, is subject to Christ, the husband, So let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for her, that he might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of the water by the Word, that he might present her to himself a glorious church without spot or wrinkle. So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. So here you have this picture of a husband and he has a role to play. He can't he can't just live any way he wants to. His whole life is designed to be in a nourishing and cherishing role to his wife.

And he's actually giving up his life. He's not the macho henchman who's running around playing out, you know, some testosterone fit every day acting like a big shot. That is not what headship is in Scripture. Headship is like Jesus Christ. I mean, did you ever see Jesus Christ abuse his disciples?

Does Jesus Christ abuse the church? Is Jesus Christ selfish? No, absolutely not. He sheds his blood for his church. He walks with his church.

He cleanses his church. He cares for his church. He carries his church. He pours his spirit out on his church. He's always giving to his church.

You know, there's this discussion that rages, you know, the world about patriarchy, which is father rule. What does that mean? Here's what patriarchy from scripture means. I don't know what anyone's definition of patriarchy is. Here's mine.

Jesus Christ. That should be your definition of patriarchy. Christ is the head of the church, and he is the savior of the body. And he's nourishing and cherishing and sanctifying and cleansing. And he's not loving his own body.

He's loving his wife's body. And in turn, is loving his own body. So, a father has a role, a husband has a role to play. That's his design. He has something to do.

So, everything that he does has to be somehow ordered under what the Lord Jesus Christ would say to him. He has a role to play. He can't play life out of his own playbook. He's got to play it out of Jesus Christ's playbook. What a wonderful world it would be.

How marriages would be so improved if we could all be husbands, far, far more like that. But one thing we need to recognize is that we have a role to play as husbands. It's been summarized in different ways. Here's one way that the Puritans summarized the role of a husband and a father. He's a prophet and he's a priest and he's a king.

He's a prophet in that he speaks the word of God. He opens his mouth in a parable. He utters dark sayings of old. He teaches the word of God when he sits in his house, when he walks by the way, when he lies down, when he rises up. He's a prophet.

He's speaking what's true. He only lets true things pass from his lips. Hopefully he hasn't read a bunch of garbage and has a bunch of garbage in his head. He believed Philippians 4-8, whatever is true, whatever is lovely, he filled his mind with good things. So out of the out of the good treasure of the good man's heart comes forth good.

But he's a prophet. He's a prophet of every good thing. He's also a priest. He's an intercessor. He.

He's a compassionate high priest like Jesus Christ. He's a faithful high priest. He has empathy for the sins of those that he's under. Not only is he a prophet, he speaks the word of God, But he also has a very, very tender and compassionate side. He's a priest.

The whole imagery of priesthood is the imagery of tenderness and compassion and mercy towards sinners. A father, a husband is designed to be that way. Again, he's not the hard guy in the room. He does have rules as a prophet, but the way that he executes them is with compassion. You know, our great high priest sympathizes with our weaknesses.

And that's how heads of households should be too. They sympathize with the weaknesses of their children. And they have compassion. And also a king. And that means that he rules.

In other words, he's responsible. He's a king in the sense that he must lead. He must say, this is where this family is going to go. He must define it. He must clarify it.

And he must bring his family along the way. In the same way that Abraham, when he left Ur, he said, we're going to a place that we don't even really know, but we're going to go. And Abraham led his family that way. This is what a king does, he leads his family in a particular way. And then and then there is the mother.

Not only do we have this this element of the design of the prophet, priest, king, the father, the faithful and compassionate high priest. Not only do we have that, but we also have a mother. And she has a role to play too. She is actually living out a character. Did you realize that, women, wives?

That you're playing a role and it's not your role. Did you realize that God did not create you to go become your greatest self? He didn't. He created you to be a living picture of the church. That's your role.

And so, no matter what comes across your pathway, you always have to ask, what do I do in my role as the church? What does Jesus Christ want His church to say, to feel, to do? How does He want His church to react to different things, to the various disciplines or authorities or disappointments or whatever might happen? You have a role to play. And you can take every difficulty you've ever faced and the ones that you're facing right now, even the greatest disappointments imaginable, and you can ask this question, What role am I supposed to play?

You know, it was many, many years ago when Deborah and I were just married and we wanted to have children so badly and things were in her physical frame just made it impossible for her to have children. We cried about that a lot, but I'll never forget the day we were sitting in the hospital. I think it was after her sixth or seventh miscarriage. And there she is on the hospital bed, and she's crying, and she said, she said, Scott, I don't want to fail this test. I want to be who I'm supposed to be.

What she meant is that she wanted to be a humble church, a responsive church, one who took the disciplines of the Lord beautifully and well. And you know what? I've watched that girl do that her whole life long because she knew who She was. She wasn't really her own. She was playing a role.

She was playing God's design out in our family. And I'm so grateful that I married a girl that understood that really early on. That she had a role to play. And it was a good role. It was a beautiful role.

It was better than any role she could make up on her own out of her frustrations or her creative juices or whatever the other women were doing. No, no, she has a role. It's a very specific role and it's highly defined and it's the role of the church. So I just want to suggest to you wives that whatever you're facing right now, you have a role to play And what you say should bear witness to the role. And how you feel should somehow be found to be in submission to that role.

You know, it's so freeing to know who you really are. It's a very happy-fying thing. It makes you happy to know what to do. That you're not just on your own, pushing your own way, but that you have a role to play. Now, a wife is to play the role of the church.

And so Ephesians 5 makes it very clear what at least some of it looks like. Scripture speaks of it in many, many different ways in different places. But at least in this passage, there are three things that define a wife's role with her husband. Submission that her role in life is to play the role of a submissive church because the church is designed to be submissive to Jesus Christ. You know what happens?

When you don't have submissive wives, you don't have submissive churches to Jesus Christ. Why is it that there's so little submission in the church today? It's because wives didn't know, partly, who they were. That they had a role to play. And as a result, they carried that into the Church of Jesus Christ.

So they are submissive. They have a role to play. It's what they're supposed to do. You know, you can't make a pig fly and you can't make a fish run. You can't make a pig to sing.

It just doesn't work because they weren't designed for that. But a wife is designed to submit. It's her very best place of peace and safety. And then not only to submit, but to obey, and not only to obey but to respect. The very last section in Ephesians 5 is, and let the wives see that they respect their husbands.

So respect is a critical role to play. So whatever a wife is facing, she has a role to play like the church. The church that respects, the church that submits, the church that obeys. Now there's much more. It's a very rich and beautiful role that a wife plays, but in terms of Ephesians 5, that's what this role is.

And the family is out of its proper design when the submission and the obedience and the respect is gone. If you want to throw your family into disarray, then just quit playing your role and go play your own role. Stop the respect, stop the obedience, and stop the submission, and you watch what happens. And you'll be like that woman in Proverbs who tears her home down with her own hands. My wife ends up talking to women all the time and she'll regularly say, you're tearing your household down with your own hands, quoting that proverb.

And how does that happen? It happens when a wife doesn't know who she is. Or maybe she's not willing to play the role that God defined for her. You know, wives that understand this are the happiest people around. They have a sense of peace.

They have a sense of stateliness because they know that God is in control and they know that through their submission They place themselves under the mighty hand of God who will exalt them in the proper time because God resists the proud But he gives grace to the humble Does this you know I'm talking about wise have you seen Have you seen the peace that happens when you find yourself in harmony with the role that God has given you? Have you felt that peace? Have you felt the safety of it? Have you felt the strength that comes knowing that God is your protector? And that if you play your role, that He will bless you.

Have you felt that? Do you know that in your heart? And then children also have a role to play. Children in Ephesians 6, if you just go over to the next chapter, you find the design for children as well. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.

Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise, that it may be well with you and that you may live long on the earth. And you fathers do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and the admonition of the Lord. So children have a role to play too. Not only does a husband play the role of Christ, not only does a wife play the role of the church, children play the role of the believer. And what is their role?

To obey and to honor. That's what a believer is designed to do. To come under the authority of God. To say finally, Lord, I don't want to live my own way anymore. I want to live your way.

So whenever you see a child obey their father or their mother, They are a living picture of the beauty of salvation. Where a sinner finally gives up his own will and says, not my will, but thyme be done. Where a sinner says, Lord, I know your ways are pleasant ways. All your paths are peace. You are a tree of life.

Lord, I love You. I want You. That's what happened to me when I became a Christian in my early teens. It was so clear to me, just as clear as it was the moment it came to my mind, that I was destroying my life. And I didn't want to live that way anymore.

I didn't want to live my way anymore. And I looked around at my friends and I thought, they're destroying their lives too. I don't want to go that way. I don't want to go my way. I want to go His way.

So I repented. I turned around and I started going the other direction. Well, that's the picture of a child. They are repenters and they honor and they obey. And the great promise is that when they do, it will go well with them.

One of the most dangerous things you can do as a child is to dishonor your father and mother. It won't go well with you. You throw off the advice of your father and mother, it won't go well with you. I absolutely guarantee it. I know it from Scripture, but I know it from experience as well.

I'm old enough to have seen it play out quite a bit. You know, the men that I know that are doing well in this world. Do you know that all of them honor their fathers and their mothers? All of them. It's pretty remarkable.

There's this supernatural blessing that God delivers to those who are humble. Because he is opposed to the proud and he does give grace to the humble and it will go well with those who honor. So children need to know that they have a role to play in the family and in the world and that is to be honorable and obedient. That's so critical. So, do you see how each one of the roles in family life bear witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ?

They speak of a king who has words of life for his people. They speak of a wife who respects and honors her husband as a corporate church. A wife stands really to represent the whole church, the whole myriad of saints gathered before the throne of God. And they hear the words enter into the joy of your master. That's the role that a wife plays.

She is the church. She is the corporate body of the church. And the corporate body of the Church, of course, has infirmities and sins and difficulties. She plays that role, too. She has impurities, and she has sins.

And yet, her husband, the Lord Jesus Christ, loves her, cares for her, nourishes her, and cherishes her. She plays the role of the corporate church, and the children play a role as individual believers. So do you see how the design of God operates? Do you see what the design of God is meant to do in the world? Every single part of family life is not designed for you.

It's designed for God. To declare the glory of His loving kindness in the world. And how He is a prophet. How He has a dutiful and obedient church. And how He has children who obey Him and honor Him.

And what is the result of it all? It goes well with them. God blesses His people. God pours His grace out on His people and He helps them. And He carries them to Heaven.

So those are the three elements of the design of your family. And I just pray that we'll understand who we are. If you don't know who you are, you'll never really be able to have the kind of life that you were created for. But if you know the design, then you can fall into it and find yourself working in harmony with God to declare the beauty of His kingdom. Make a happy family.

Make a family where there's authority and submission and love and delight. Make a family like that. We're going to talk about that more in this next session as we talk about the whole doctrine of fatherhood. But there is a design And it's a beautiful design. Would you pray with me?

Lord, I thank You that You do all things well. I thank You that Your wisdom, the immensity of Your brilliance, Your infinite glory is shining through all things in the world. That there's not one single thing except that which has been designed to bring you glory. I thank you that you've made a world like that. That the heavens declare the glory of God.

Like that seraphim said in Isaiah 6, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory. Oh Lord, let Your glory shine in these families. Amen.