In the war that we are engaged in we can often be led to think there is no hope, especially no hope for our families. But the truth is that there is a great and beautiful hope - the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. The good news of the salvation that Jesus Christ has brought, and the power that it unleashes in the heart of a repentant sinner, is the only hope our families have.

Please open your Bibles to Deuteronomy chapter 6. Deuteronomy chapter 6, and I'd like you to find verse 1. I want to read it because this really is a seminal text on family life. It connects to all the others, and particularly in the New Testament. But I'd like for us to read it and then I want to make some comments about it.

Again, I want to lay some foundations, biblical foundations here, Deuteronomy 6, 1. Now this is the commandment and these are the statutes and judgments which the Lord your God has commanded to teach you, that you may observe them in the land which you are crossing over to possess, that you may fear the Lord your God to keep all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you, you and your son and your grandson, all the days of your life, that your days may be prolonged. Therefore, hear, O Israel, and be careful to observe it, that it may be well with you and that you may multiply greatly as the Lord God of your fathers has promised you, a land flowing with milk and honey. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You 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, and 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." Let's pray. Lord, we pray that you would take these words, that you would transform our lives by them, that You would refresh us, remind us, heal us, Lord, help us now. We pray that You would help us to understand what You've written here for us. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, I want to do, I want to try to do three things here. I want to tell you a little bit about what some of my hopes are for this conference and for all of us who are gathered here. I want to also talk about the war that we're in the middle of. And then finally I'd like to talk about how you preserve your family in pagan lands in the cultural chaos that we are living in now. And of course, our speakers are going to detail these times of cultural chaos, but we do live in times where matters of family life are being obliterated right before our eyes.

God has raised up his church to preserve holiness, to preserve family life, the place where the gospel is first heard in families while the world wants to destroy every vestige of family life and call it, and call it misogyny, call it hate speech, call it oppression. Well, that's not what the Bible says. And we've just read a remarkable text about it. Okay, you know, is there hope for the family? Well, of course there's hope for the family.

But where is that hope? The hope for the family really is in the power of the gospel. And that's why Moses, when he's speaking to the families of Israel, He says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. This is a picture of the Gospel. This is a picture of the power of the Gospel in a human heart.

And then he says, these words that I command you today shall be in your heart. Moses was speaking about the power of the gospel, working in the heart, the power of justification by faith alone at work in the heart of the believer. That is the transforming power of a family. And while God has given us many commands and principles for family life. They all fall to the ground unless they're upheld by the Gospel, by the power of the Gospel.

And I hope to explain that. You know, I think I want us to be very clear in this world where the foundations are being destroyed, where the waste places are all around us, that there's only one Savior and there's only one authority. And that Savior is Jesus Christ. And He's the only hope for the family. He's the only hope for my family.

He's the only hope for me. And there is only one authority and that is the word of God. And how we have any hope for the family really is to believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and to follow Him and to stop following this world and to believe that all of His commandments are good. You know, in Proverbs 3 it says of wisdom, all her ways are pleasant ways and all her paths are peace. And that's what God offers for us.

And that's how you really rebuild the family. And I want to encourage all of us, and particularly a new generation, to throw their whole weight behind the power of the gospel at work in their families to raise up truly Christian families. You know, there are a lot of young people in this room. I'm so grateful for that. I pray that you are a new generation that is gonna believe with all of your heart that the best thing that you can do with your life is to believe that there is only one savior and that you would throw your whole weight behind this institution called the family.

And you would do everything you can to beautify it and you beautify it by really obeying what the Lord has done. And that you take your family and you plunge your family into the life of a local church and you make that local church family the very center of everything in your life. Because it's in these two institutions that God has designed to preserve the beauty of Jesus in the world. You know, every generation produces a new crop of families and you're laying down patterns, You know, or you're thinking about the patterns that you'll have. And you need to know that your patterns today will become hardened tomorrow.

It really matters how you think about family life and what you're doing now. You know, I was born in Alaska and back during that time, I understand there was a sign at the beginning of the Alaska Highway that said, choose your rut carefully. You'll be in it for a long time. And that's true of our lives as well. Establishing our lives, our family life on the word of God is setting it in the right direction.

And I pray that we really can advocate that while we're here. You know, choose carefully. There's no success in this world that is worth failing in your family life. And here's one reason, because it's not all about you. When you neglect your duties in your families, there's failure for many generations.

And this is the devil's plan. This is why the devil is trying to destroy families. If he destroys one of the offspring, then he destroys perhaps thousands, maybe millions of offspring as the generations pass. And you know what God has done is that he has created man as male and female in his own image. And he called these males and females to be fruitful and to multiply having become one flesh, having become co-conspirators really in the glory of God in the world, to take dominion in the world.

This is God's plan. This is God's absolute fixed plan and everything in the world is waging war against This whole proposition that man is made in the image of God as male and female and they're designed to get married and have lots of babies and bring their children up in the training and the admonition of the Lord. I pray that you will grab onto that with your whole heart and you'll realize how important that is. You've, when you're raising a family you've got locked in to one of the two greatest discipleship institutions that God created, The church and the family. These are the two most important institutions and God has designed them to work in a particular way and our intent here is to try to speak of that design and how and how we might stem the tide of the attacks against what's happening in our culture now.

And I'm confident that, well, all of us, all of us are trying to get back what's been destroyed by sin. All of us are there. And I pray you'll be able to get back some while you're here and that you'll have a fresh vision of what it really means to be a family in the midst of a wicked and a perverse generation that's trying to destroy everything that God has established. And all of this comes back to the power of the new birth, the filling of the Holy Spirit. This is the relationship that transforms everything.

And that's why Moses said, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart. That is equivalent to believing in the gospel of Jesus Christ. That's why in Malachi chapter 4, the great manifestation of the coming of the Messiah that Malachi is prophesying, The very last prophet in the Old Testament, he ends his prophecy by saying, when the Messiah comes, he will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their parents, lest I strike the earth with a curse. The power of the gospel is demonstrated in family life the way that Malachi spoke of it. Now there are many things that happen in your life from the power of the gospel.

There are dozens, there are hundreds of things. Why did Malachi zero in on that one thing that God would transform families. And I think it's because of the transgenerational power that God has invested in families in the world. In fact, when you get to the New Testament and you read the family life code in, which is what it's called, in Ephesians, Chapter 5 and 6. In the family code, it starts really with the power of conversion.

It starts with the power of the Holy Spirit. You know, in Ephesians 5, the Apostle Paul, he says, do not be drunk with wine but be filled with the Spirit. And then he begins to explain various manifestations of the work of the Spirit in your life. Like you start speaking to one another differently, psalms and hymns, you start singing. How about that?

And and then you actually you love one another to such a degree that you actually submit to one another You say you you're not high above your brother you you serve him you take up a towel like Jesus and you submit to one another in the church like that. And then wives submit to their husbands. And then husbands love their wives like Christ loved the church. And then in chapter 6 when you turn the page, children obey their parents and the Lord. They honor their father and their mother.

And fathers, they quit hurting their sons and their daughters. And so Paul says, fathers do not exasperate your children. In other words, don't make them angry. These are all manifestations of the gospel. And then he speaks right after that of sort of this household that you find particularly in the societies that the New Testament was written to where you have a family economy.

And there are servants. The household was larger than just the biological family. And he gives instructions about how to navigate in this household economy. So this is the family code. But what is the center of the family code?

Be filled with the Holy Spirit. Everything that happens that's good in the family arises out of the power of the gospel and the work of the Holy Spirit. You know, in Christianity, we don't just put on laws and regulations, God has given us many and they're all good, They're all laws of love, every one of them. We should embrace them and love every law of God. But the heart of obeying the law is the heart of love for Jesus and the filling of the Holy Spirit.

And so this is the center of family life, the new birth. You know, just early this morning I was with Will Arterburn who I brought here who's assisting me at this conference. And he was reading to me Joshua chapter 4. And he's speaking of the fact that when the children of Israel crossed over the Jordan River, they erected 12 stones to commemorate the deliverance from bondage. And this commemoration I think really is a picture of the gospel.

And I'll just read it. He said, then you shall let your children know saying Israel crossed over this Jordan on dry land For the Lord your God dried up the waters of the Jordan before you until you had crossed over as the Lord your God did to the Red Sea, which he dried up before us until we had crossed over. That all the peoples of the earth may know the hand of the Lord that it is mighty that you may fear the Lord your God forever." What's he saying? He's saying these stones are to commemorate What a glory it is that God rescues his people from the bondage of Pharaoh. The Exodus is the premier imagery of salvation by faith alone, by the way, in the Bible.

It's the most often repeated imagery of the Old Testament that depicts salvation. And what we learn here in Joshua is that these stones were set up so that the children would know and fear the Lord God forever. You know what he's saying? He's saying that salvation by faith alone, the gospel of Jesus Christ is the center of family life. And you teach your children the power of the gospel in various ways.

And you know this very powerful institution is the most thrilling place to invest your life. The whole world wants to convince you opposite of that. And it's the most taxing thing you'll ever do. It's the most stretching thing. In many ways it's the most unnatural thing you'll do and everybody around you is going to tell you how stupid you are to invest your whole life in your family, especially women.

But the reality is that God has made the family the place where eternal souls are treated. And, you know, to raise a family really puts you in the center of God's plan to rescue sinners. And you're not only dealing with eternal souls but you're actually dealing with eternal bodies because the Bible says that your body exists for all eternity. You die, you're laid in the grave, the worms will eat you and God is going to resurrect your body and he's going to resurrect some to eternal life, bodies to eternal life, not just souls and souls to eternal life, to spend eternity either in hell or in heaven in the body. And when a body is born into your family, you need to recognize what's happening.

That body is headed somewhere. And it's very important that we understand our role. We are, as parents, in a locked battle against the devil to rescue those souls for Jesus Christ. And that's why the commands of God for family life are so clear and they're so demanding. It engages everything that you are so that you would become a teacher of eternal truth so that for 20 years you're going to pour into this child and you're going to give your whole, you're going to give all the years of your youth to these children.

Moses says actually all the days of your life, you, your son and your grandson, all the days of your life. In other words, you're not done when they're 18, right. But the whole world rages against this whole proposition. But you are the teacher. You are the disciple maker.

And you don't outsource them, you know, to pagans in order to raise them. You raise them. And their particular commands for husbands and wives for how they ought to do that. And, You know, you're offering prayers up for your children. You're like a priest offering incense up for your children day by day.

And but the power of the energizing of the gospel through the work of the Holy Spirit is the heart of family life. And I believe the Bible makes that clear from Genesis to Revelation. For 20 years I've been preaching on passages of scripture that speak to this matter, and I'm confident that that's absolutely true. Now, you know, I want the women and particularly the young girls here in this room to know how important it is that you give your whole years, your whole life to the raising of a family, if you have a family. And that children should not be thought of as interruptions or distractions.

You know, hey, By the way, we live in a world right now where people, where millions of people are willing to commit murder to remove the distraction of a baby. What would you be willing to commit murder for? Well, we live in a world right now where a woman will commit murder so that she can go to school and have an education. A woman will commit murder so that she can have a career. We will commit murder in our society for this type of thing.

And it's very important that we understand how critical it is that we do not think of children as interruptions to life. They are our life. But we live in a world where everybody thinks very differently. And I pray that you'll hold on to the standard of truth that man is made in the image of God as male and female and that they have a role to play in this world. And we live in a world where families are fragmented in almost every aspect of society.

Marriage is not seen as a dominion taking responsibility. It's taken as sort of a lifestyle choice. You know, the whole idea of families working together is completely foreign in our society. You know, we live in a world where almost everyone is sending their children to pagans to be educated in schools that are federally mandated to be anti-Jesus Christ, where they'll teach you things that are despicable and they never should even pass the lips of a human being, that contradict everything that God said about personhood. I plan to talk about personhood tomorrow at some point in this whole matter.

But children are regarded as a ball and chain. You know, women do not want to be keepers at home. They think it's belittling. They think it's beneath them. They think that, well, the truth is that they're regarded as stupid.

They're regarded as underutilized. They're, how could you waste your life with babies? Oh, why don't you rather, you know, go file papers for a CEO somewhere, wouldn't that be, go to find yourself in a cubicle. Go do that. That's better.

That's better for the whole world. Go girl. Go file the papers. And you have eternal souls to raise in your home. You choose.

Well God's ways are better. They're far, far better. And I pray that we're able to put on the mind of Jesus Christ. You know, Jeremiah said, do not learn the way of the Gentiles. Paul said, you shall not no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk in the futility of their mind.

And I pray that God would raise up a generation that doesn't learn from the Gentiles about how to do their family life. But they learn from God. They learn from the word of God alone. And they only care about God and what He says. Well, this is war.

This is war. And we know it's war because in Genesis 3.15 it was announced that this war was described as enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. In Genesis 3.15 we learn what this family war is all about. It's a war against the seed of the woman.

Here's something we all need to recognize. Every morning when we wake up the devils cross, you're in the devil's cross hairs. Every single day, he's always aiming at you. And he's driven by animosity. And he hates you.

And he hates your family. And he hates headship. And he hates submission. And he hates children. And he hates obedience.

And he hates purity. He hates everything that God has designed to beautify your family. He hates the beautiful savior. And that's really the heart of it all. And I hope that we're very careful to discern the schemes of the devil upon us.

I'm confident that the schemes of the devil are working on every one of us here in this room. Take a moment right now and ask What schemes of the devil have taken hold in my heart, in my family life, in order to take it in the direction of hell and to deal with the offspring that way? I hope you feel it. And I hope we're very, very careful with it. You know, some of the attacks of the devil are subtle, and some of them are not.

You know, it wasn't so subtle when Pharaoh and Herod started murdering infants. That wasn't so subtle. But there are very subtle forces. You have Hollywood, you have Nashville, they saturate your soul And they kill you from the within. They take you into the kingdom of darkness.

And I'm just going to call these two agents spiritual spermicide. Now spermicide stops the sperm from reaching the egg. And it's an effective birth control. And it kills the sperm so it can't swim. And this is what the modern entertainment industry is to the soul.

It's compelling, it's beautiful, it's engaging, it's entertaining, and it's deadly. It's just like what the devil said to Eve when he was speaking to her. It was pleasant to the eyes and desirable to make one wise. But it's death. Our educational systems are like spermicide.

The way that fatherhood is engaged and the passivity of fathers not being teachers is spermicide. Distracted mothers are like spermicide in a family. These are very, very serious matters. You know, the devil seems to me to point so much of his arsenal at women. Because he knows if he can wage war against the women that he can destroy the next generation.

Did you ever wonder why the whole abortion industry is run by women? You know, all the CEOs of the big abortion industry providers are women. The CEO of Stericycle, that company that recycles all these baby parts. CEO is a woman. It's the feminists that have destroyed millions and millions of offspring.

It was the women who did it And I think that's exactly what we see in the garden. If the devil can get a hold of a woman, he destroys billions as a result. And that's why we have the abortion industry today, to kill the next generation, to cut off that seed. And his ways have never changed up to now and we should not be ignorant of his schemes. And so there is a war going on and It's a war against every part of us.

You know, go be your own person. Don't let anybody tell you what to do. God will cheat you of your potential. God is going to cheat you of all the good things. That's exactly what the devil said to Eve and That's what the devil says to every man and every woman in this society today.

Go get your needs met. Don't let your children get in the way of your career. Your husband is not meeting your needs. You know, I mean, the devil speaks in so many destructive ways for family life. And the effects are absolutely devastating.

His antagonism, his animosity toward the family is absolutely fierce. Now he's there to destroy the seed of the woman. What's the seed of the woman? The seed of the woman is code for those who are saved by grace. It's code for the people of God.

He desires to destroy the people of God. And if he can distract parents from raising up a people for God, because the Bible says very clearly why God created marriage. In Malachi, we have this question, why marriage? The reason we have marriage is for godly seed. God says I desire godly seed.

That's why we have marriage. That's why we have babies. Because God wants godly seed And the devil is out to destroy that godly seed. Okay. How do you preserve your family in pagan lands like we live right now?

And Deuteronomy 6 is really very helpful. Because in Deuteronomy 6 we really learn how family navigates the cataclysmic shifts in our culture. You know, how do you build your house on the rock with the shifting sands of the culture that we're living in? How do you prepare your children to engage this world? It's an insane world, okay?

People don't know what gender they are. People are praying to plants. People are worshiping trees. The world has gone so far off the rails. How do you deal with a world like that when your children are growing up in it, where most of the people are trying to figure out what gender they are?

What are you going to do about that? Well, Deuteronomy 6 tells us very clearly how to deal with the challenges of the age. And the answer, of course, is in Deuteronomy 6. It's by the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit that changes the heart so that you would love the Lord your God and fear the Lord your God. That's Deuteronomy 6 verses 2 and 4.

And this is the central preserving force of true family life in the world without this energizing power the family has no sustainability without the power of the gospel And that's why the Apostle Paul begins with the family life codes with be filled with the Spirit. Because it all comes back to the power of God working in a converted heart. And these are the means that grow out of the center of the love of God. And Deuteronomy 6 shows us how families are preserved in these pagan lands. Now When Moses was writing, the children of Israel had just come out of Egypt.

They'd just escaped bondage. And now 40, Moses writes Deuteronomy at the end of his life, at the very last month of his life. And he's looking back on all that's happened after all these years and he's explaining how the children of Israel will be preserved in a pagan land in Canaan. These instructions are people who are going to go live in Canaan. Now the children of Israel hadn't been in cities for 40 years.

They had never seen child sacrifice out in the cities of Canaan. They weren't there. They hadn't seen the radical immorality and the diminishing of personhood that existed in Canaan. They hadn't seen it, and Moses is instructing them about how to survive in a pagan land. In Deuteronomy 6, it was written specifically for that purpose, after these 40 years.

Now, here's what Moses says. There are seven things very specifically that Moses instructs the children of Israel for how they would survive in a pagan land. And I'll give them to you. First of all, fear. Fear God.

When you fear God, you fear sinning. By the way, when you fear God, you don't fear anybody else, only God, the God who's merciful. Joseph said, how can I do this great wickedness and sin against God? Fear God. This is how you preserve true family life in a wicked and perverse generation.

You fear God and not man. They said of John Knox, he feared not the face of man. That's usually our biggest problem. We capitulate to all the pressures around us from friends and family and institutions. Second, obey.

He says that they ought to obey the statutes and judgments. And notice there's a promise to those who obey. Therefore, hear O Israel and be careful to observe it that it may be well with you and that you may multiply greatly as the Lord God of your fathers has promised you, a land flowing with milk and honey. The second way to survive in a pagan land is to obey God. And that means you need to know the word of God.

The third is to love. They must love the Lord their God with all their heart. Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. Loving God, that's how you survive in a pagan land.

Number four, teach. God calls the fathers to be teachers. You might not be qualified, feel qualified to be a teacher. It doesn't matter. God made you a teacher.

Don't say I'm not a teacher. You are a teacher. God made you a teacher if you're a father. That's just the way it is. And you just need to rise to the occasion and learn how to be a teacher.

He says these words which I command you today shall be in your heart and you shall Teach them diligently to your children and talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up. You say, well, I'm not really a very good talker. You need to talk. You need to get out of yourself and talk. And stop acting like you're the center of the world.

God commanded you to be a talker. Fifth, remember. We must remember what we believe. 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 doorpost of your house and upon your gates.

Remember, that means that we need to be in the word of God every day. We need to be reminded of God and be recalibrated every day by the word of God. Sixth, seek. You shall not go after other gods, the gods of the peoples who are all around you. In other words, seek the Lord.

Families need to be very careful about what they're seeking. Don't go after other gods. Number seven, persevere. They must do this all the days of their lives and take their sons and their grandsons with them. You, your son and your grandson all the days of your life that your days may be prolonged.

A family can never stop the work. They must do it until the day that they die. They must walk with them, with their children until they're dead. Interestingly enough, that happened to Job only the other way around. You know, Job, It says he ministered to his family daily and he would go to them and he would pray that they wouldn't fall into sin and He did that right up until the day they died He cried out to his children up to the day that they died and they were all killed in one day But he was a faithful father.

I don't think Job had to look back with regrets. He cried out for his children every day. He did it until they died actually. So Moses gives very clear instructions about how to survive in a pagan land. And here's the reality.

How you guide your family affects everything. What you do with your children determines the destiny of our nation. It determines the quality of the church. What we do in our home reveals who we love and who we're serving. And ultimately, it protects our families from being devoured by a wicked and a perverse generation.

I pray that God would give us great hearts to keep the commands of God. But first of all to pay attention to this one thing. Are you saved by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ? Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God? Is it your desire to follow Him?

Do you believe His ways are pleasant ways? Do you believe that His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom? Do you believe that all of His commands are commands of love? Do you believe He's good? Do you believe that He's the best thing you can ever find?

Do you believe that? If you believe that, praise God. And that's the source of all family life, the power of the gospel and the filling of the Holy Spirit. So may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Would you pray with me?

Lord, you've given us ways to navigate this world, to walk through this wilderness wasteland, through this war that we're in the middle of. Lord, I pray that you would raise up mighty and beautiful families as a result. We thank you that you have given this institution in order to preserve every good thing, to preserve love in the world. Oh God, I pray that you would bless us as we engage all these thoughts. I pray that you would shape us.

Lord, we need healing, we need help, we fall short in every way. Oh Lord Jesus Christ come and help. Come and save. Amen.