How should families function when the culture around them is pulling against everything the Bible teaches? In Deuteronomy 6, Moses is telling the children of Israel how to remain distinctively Christian in a pagan land. He is focusing on families and specifically he is telling fathers what they must do. Why? Because when their children enter the land of Canaan, they will see paganism as they’ve never seen before and will be enticed to follow the ways of the gentiles. What’s a family to do?

As I've prepared myself to try to bring some kind of setting forth at the table tonight to prepare us all for the messages that are ahead of us, I've been so aware of how different this conference is than any conference we've ever done, and it's been more difficult in that sense. But right at the beginning, we all need to understand with all of our hearts that there is only one hope for the family, and that hope is found communicated in the inerrant and holy, sufficient Word of God. We have the 66 books of the Bible, and the Bible makes it clear that the only hope for the family is the power of the new birth. That's a long discussion, but the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the love of God that transforms us into the likeness of Jesus Christ and its power to cause us to obey is the hope for the family. The Lord Jesus Christ said, if you love me, keep my commandments.

And so the Bible makes this very, very clear. And there's only one way to navigate the chaos or anything else that comes to us in life, and that is to hear and obey the Word of God. Now we're talking about culture here at this conference. I think we need to recognize that God is the best culture maker, that while we live in a culture of chaos, God has established cultures. Holy cultures, happy cultures.

And I'll just describe those cultures in three ways. There's first of all the culture of the heart, the transformed heart that recognizes the love that will not let you go. A changed heart, a heart of stone that turns to a heart of flesh, that's one culture. The culture of your heart is the most critical culture. And then there is the culture of the home.

God has defined very clearly what the culture of a home looks like. Whatever culture you live in, you can create a culture in your home that's different than whatever that culture is. God has designed it that way. God sort of isolates culture so that his glory shines through that culture. The culture of the heart, the culture of the home.

And then there's the culture of the Church of Jesus Christ. God has put the church in the world to create cultures of truth and love in the world. These are protective cultures. These are cultures that preserve beauty. These are cultures that uphold truth.

And God has given these various cultures for us. Now, when we think about these cultures, how are they designed? And I think most of us recognize that evangelicalism continues to be divided on how these cultures should be developed. These cultures are either developed along the lines of pragmatists or biblicists, and the pragmatists are always trying to find a better way to engage the culture, reinvent the family, tweak the church, and they actually end up following culture. And then there are the biblicists, and they're the ones who believe that the Word of God is the only rule for the heart and for the family and for the church.

And that's really what we are advocating here. And so, the hope for the family exists in God's design of these various institutions that He has designed to preserve the love of Jesus Christ. Now we are living in times of chaos and this whole conference rests on the conviction that we're in the midst of a massive social and religious revolution. I know a little bit about revolutions. I grew up in the 1960s.

That was a revolution. People called that the sexual revolution. Where I stand now, it looks to me like the 60s was like a category 2. This one we're in the midst of now looks like a category 10 to me. Things have changed very much.

Where we find complete redefinitions of family life, redefinitions of manhood and womanhood, and redefinitions of the gospel. Here's an illustration. All of this reminds me of Pilgrim's Progress and Vanity Fair. I think we need to recognize that we're living in Vanity Fair, very much like that city that Christian encountered in Pilgrim's Progress. And when Christian walked into Vanity Fair, they were selling all the devices of the devil in order to distract from the Celestial City.

And Bunyan uses Vanity Fair to illustrate the moral and the ideological war against Christian and faithful who were there in that city. And the temptations were everywhere, Because it's temptation that causes ideology to collapse, and that's what we have going on today. The townspeople in Vanity Fair treated Christian and faithful like they were insane, and the way they talked, the way they thought, the way they dressed, they called them bedlams, which was the name of a terrible, insane asylum. And now the Christians are called insane in Vanity Fair. As we go on through this conference, we'll hear our speakers speak of that and the difficulties that those things, that kind of condition creates for us.

And in Vanity Fair, the mocking crowd was taunting them and The crowd was saying, what are you buying? And Christian and Faithful said, we buy the truth. And I pray that that's what we're buying here at this conference. Faithful is finally tried and beaten and he's martyred and our heroes are mocked and they're smeared with dirt and they're thrown into a cage. And it remains to be seen whether that kind of Vanity Fair will come like a vengeance upon the cultures that we live in.

Every sign is that it's possible. And so we're asking the question, how does a family navigate the cataclysmic shifts in our culture that have made us like Vanity Fair. You know, how do you build your house on the rock, amongst the shifting sands of the moral and the behavioral landscape? How do you prepare your children for a world like this of gender fluidity and hyper-relativism and the whole LGBT movement and the whole direction that it's going? I think we're all pretty aware that the news stories about the madness of our culture are like tsunamis every day.

It's astonishing to me how often, daily, multiple stories come out that describe this vanity fair that we live in now. The younger generation is severing their roots from Christianity. There's a growing antagonism toward Christianity that I've never known in my life. America's more secular than ever. The trend lines are running hard in all the wrong directions.

And I want to suggest that what's happening today is the rise of a new religion. It seems to me, and I'm sure other people can analyze this more accurately than I, But this new religion seems to me to be a mash-up of the sexual revolution and the social justice movement. And this social justice, sexual revolution mix is the new religion that's coming upon the world now. It's thorough secularism but these two forces are so intertwined I don't know how to distinguish them. And this movement is demanding total capitulation.

It's the new DNA. It's the new litmus test. It's the new ticket for legitimacy. It's the new permission to speak. It's really the new big brother.

And big brother is teaching you things that aren't true. I was reminded of George Orwell's 1984, And after the torture of the main character in the story, he finally capitulates and he says, yes, two plus two equals five. Yes, two plus two equals five. So how will we ride these waves of change? How will we deal with our cultures?

All of us have a culture of the heart, all of us exist in the culture, hopefully in a local church and in a family. But where are we going? And it's critical that we stop and ask ourselves, where are we going? Where is our thinking moving at this time? You know, Francis Schaeffer used to say that the church is usually about seven years behind the culture.

That seems to play out. It seems to me that the church is far closer than that now. It's like the church is driving in heavy traffic and following the car ahead wherever it goes, just following that car wherever it goes, just a few feet behind. And we need to be very careful that we're not tailgating the culture. It looks to me that much of evangelicalism is on a tailgating maneuver of the culture today.

But what about us? I want to bring a passage of scripture to us tonight that explicitly explains how to navigate the cultural chaos. And in the hours ahead, the preachers at this conference are going to bring dozens of examples and illustrations for how to navigate the cultural chaos. And so I'm going to start this conference with probably the simplest and possibly the most common text that addresses family life. It's probably the flagship Old Testament text on family life.

So please open your Bibles to Deuteronomy chapter 6. Moses in Deuteronomy 6 gives very practical instructions about how to preserve your family in pagan lands. Now, Deuteronomy is composed of three speeches that Moses gave on the very last month of his life, and you remember these people had been wandering in the wilderness for forty years and the first generation that came out of Egypt have all died off because of their wickedness, and this new generation now is coming into the Promised Land. And we need to recognize right off that Moses is speaking to the rising generation. He's speaking to a younger generation.

And this younger generation, as a result of the wilderness wanderings, had become fairly much disconnected from the paganism of Egypt for a very long time. And Moses is anticipating the moral dangers ahead for the people, and his words are spoken to prepare the children of Israel to enter into a pagan land, and to take up residence there, to live in the cities, and to this younger generation he gives very, very specific instructions. It appears to me that desert life protected them from the worldliness of the big cities that they once inhabited. They didn't grow up in the city and they were sheltered from some of the temptations there with a whole different set of laws and moral categories to deal with. And so, in Deuteronomy 6, Moses is preparing families for what's coming.

And he's preparing them, and he's preparing us. We who live in a wicked and perverse generation. Now in the previous chapter, in Deuteronomy chapter 5, Moses declares again the Ten Commandments, God's moral law. So you have to understand the context. Moses delivers the law of God in Ten Commandments, and then he turns to the families, seamlessly.

And I would like to point out eight instructions, eight exhortations, that Moses brought to the families of Israel. I want to bring them to us. And they all teach us how to navigate the chaos of pagan lands. I hope you have your Bibles opened to Deuteronomy chapter 6. We'll begin in the first verse.

The first exhortation is, keep the commandments of God. That's verse 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." In this first verse, Moses is telling the families of the children of Israel how to remain distinctively God's people in this pagan land, and they do it by keeping God's commands that are communicated in his moral law. And he's focusing on families, he's telling families what they must do. When their children enter the land, they're going to see a paganism that they had not likely seen before.

They'll be exposed to a morality that was completely foreign to their experience in the wilderness. The depravity in Canaan had been growing and festering for an awfully long time. The people of Canaan were the descendants of Noah's wicked son Ham, and it shows in that culture. The sexual ethics of the land will contradict everything that Moses taught them in the wilderness. They will see a radical immorality.

They'll see temple prostitutes, they'll see fertility cults, they'll see Asherah Poles, they'll see prophets and temples of Baal, they'll see Moloch, They'll see shrines and groves and high places and wherever they go they'll see the contradictions to everything that Moses taught them in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers and Deuteronomy. And for the most part they've been sheltered from these kinds of things. In Canaan they won't be sheltered any longer. They'll find themselves in a land of child sacrifice. Open homosexuality in the high places.

Beastiality. Temple prostitutes as they go up to the high places. By the way, let's just be real about the high places and the statues. The people were not going up to look at wooden statues. That's not what they were doing.

They were going up to see nakedness and sensuality and music and prostitution and all these things. That's why they were going to the high places. Idolatry hasn't changed at all. It's like clicking on the wrong side of the internet. It's like watching the Super Bowl half-time.

It's not anything different than that. And they're going to face these kinds of things. This is a land where the people call evil good and good evil. And Moses is warning them what will happen to them if they accommodate with the Canaanite life and they defile themselves. He promises them that he'll vomit them out of his mouth.

In Leviticus 18, 24, he says, do not defile yourselves with any of these things, for by all these the nations are defiled. So the First critical thing to recognize is that Moses calls the children of Israel to keep the commands of God in their families. Don't miss this. Their families were the first line of defense against paganism. This little culture called the family.

Here's the Second exhortation, fear God, verse 2, fear God. He says that you may fear the Lord your God. Fearing God speaks of how you feel about God. And there are two main aspects of the fear of God. The first is the fear of sinning, the fear of offending God.

And the second is the fear that draws you near to God. This is the loving fear of the believer, which is a gift of salvation where you desire to be near Him. It's a pleasing fear. You know, we did a whole conference on the fear of God. If you want to learn more about it, we gave lots of messages on the fear of God.

And the question that one should ask is, do I fear sinning and do I adore His purity? That's a litmus test of salvation. The third exhortation, pass on the knowledge of God. Verse 2, pass on the knowledge of God. You, your son, and your grandson, all the days of your life that your days may be prolonged.

Moses is exhorting the families to have a view of life that goes far beyond their own family in that generation, but to have a transgenerational view of life. And How do they do that? Well, they pass on this faith to their sons and their grandsons. And Moses is telling them they cannot stop doing this. We don't have the luxury to stop when our children turn 18.

We live in a culture like that right now. Most people when children turn 18 or leave the home, parents think, I'm done. Let's grab the motor home and roll. No, the Bible says you, your son, and your grandson all the days of your life. In other words, Moses is commanding the families of Israel that the discipleship is something that goes on until you're dead as the head of a household.

This isn't very popular today, but it's so critical. And then fourthly, carefully obey. Emphasis on the word carefully obey. Verse three. He commands them to carefully obey the statutes and judgments and then notice the promise.

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." Connect the word carefully with the multiplication and the blessing of the land. God is telling the families of Israel that it will be well with them. He's explaining that blessing will be experienced by their families. All around us are forces that would encourage us to take the commands of God lightly. And the question is, will there be a people in the world, will there be families who take the Word of God so seriously that they believe that God will bless them.

And there are two types of people out there. There are careful people and there are careless people. And Moses is calling the families to be careful in their obedience, to be particular in their obedience, to be detailed. And when they read the Word of God, they should look for every possible way it might impact their lives. You know, this matter of obedience has kind of fallen on hard times.

People don't want to hear a gospel that includes obedience anymore. And it's because they haven't really embraced the whole gospel. The Lord Jesus Christ, in John chapter 14, said that if you love me, keep my commandments. And he said that, and then he said, and, as a marker of the sequence, and I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever. And then if you go to verse 21 in John 14, he says, He who has my commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves me, and he who loves me will be loved by my father and I will love him and manifest myself to him and Then Jesus said if anyone loves me he will keep my word and my father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him.

He who does not love me does not keep my words and the word which you hear is not mine but the Father's who sent me." The power of the Gospel is that it changes your heart from a heart of disobedience to a heart of obedience. When God saves sinners, it's never separated from obedience, and it's never separated from the work of the Holy Spirit. If you love me, keep my commandments and I will give you the Helper, the Holy Spirit. The work of the Holy Spirit is to help you to obey. The work of the Holy Spirit, the filling of the Holy Spirit isn't primarily some feeling.

It's an equipment to obey. And that's what Moses is saying. Be careful to obey. The fifth exhortation, Confess your love toward God, verses 4 and 5. 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. Now Jesus later on calls these words the first and the greatest commandment. And this really is the heart of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is a heartfelt confession that there is one and only true God, and you love Him. That's the confession.

It really is a confession of love. This is the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And the true gospel has always been and always will be heartfelt love toward God. And here Moses is speaking of this heartfelt confession. The confession is the Lord your God is one.

The outworking of the confession is you shall love the Lord your God. So it really is a, it's a confession of love. I think the New Testament, a New Testament parallel equivalent is found in Paul's words when he said if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you shall be saved. And with Moses, we learn that the heart of a family being protected by the paganism of the land is a belief in the reality of God, the true God, and heartfelt love for God. And that's why Moses says, these things shall be in your heart.

You know, this is no different than the family life codes that we find in Ephesians 5 and 6 and in Colossians 3 and in those texts we learn that the heart of family life is the filling of the Holy Spirit. In Ephesians 5 18 the Apostle Paul says, do not be drunk with wine but be filled with the Holy Spirit. And then he begins to itemize the ways that the filling of the Holy Spirit is manifested. First of all, in the church, you begin to speak one another to one another differently. You begin, in the church, there's a way that we submit to one another in love and then wives, they submit to their husbands and husbands love their wives and children obey their parents and fathers don't exasperate their children.

These are all works of the Holy Spirit. These are all works of genuine conversion. The heart of the family is the heart of the Gospel. You know, it's very easy for families to sort of try to get it together, men to want to be the men they ought to be or the husbands they ought to be, and sometimes they come to your church and they're trying to figure out how to get a better life. And the problem is, they haven't dealt with their hearts, they haven't been converted, and so they put on a form of religion, but there's no power in it.

And it'll collapse eventually. And that's what Moses is getting at here. Family life is by the filling of the Holy Spirit as a result of salvation by grace. Well, that's the big question, isn't it? You know, you've grown up in a family and you know it all, you've heard it all, but do you know Him?

Do you love Him? Do you desire to keep His commandments? Do you love His law? Do you confess the Lord is one? But there's a sixth exhortation.

Teach the commandments of God. Verses 6 and 7. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children You 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 and Moses is calling for parents to launch an all-out educational assault on the doctrine of God and everything that has to do with his ways, and he calls them to make the teaching of their children the center of their whole lives. Not a by-business, but the main business.

And he's calling fathers to be full-time teachers of their children. The idea that it's legitimate to send your children to be educated by pagans is directly contradicted here. You know, right now, 83%, so they say, of evangelicals send their children to schools which are pagan by federal mandate. But the commandment of God is to teach your children when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up, being obligated to give a truly Christian education. You know, I grew up in Orange County, California.

Recently the Orange County Board of Education has made it so clear that they've completely embraced the LGBTQ revolution. They recently issued an opinion, I'll quote it, parents who disagree with the instructional materials related to gender, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation may not excuse their children from this instruction. Translation, you must get your children out of these schools. But for some reason, evangelicals feel that it's lawful to do such a thing. The seventh exhortation, remind everyone around you of the commands of God.

That's verses eight and nine. Remind everyone around you. How do you navigate the cultural chaos? Open your mouth, declare the Word of God, post it, make it known, make it public. He's exhorting them to take a public stand.

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." For a family to survive the paganism of the day, they must take a stand and make it public and declare the words, the words, Saying what Joshua said, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. No secret service, Christians. I'm sure our other speakers will speak about the great temptation to become a secret service Christian, if there is such a thing. To hide the truth, to avoid persecution.

What's going to happen? Will Christians be driven underground because of the threats of the left and the sexual revolution? What will we do? Will we shut our mouths on manhood and womanhood, man made in the image of God? Will we shut our mouths on biblical morality?

We dare not do such a thing. Eighth, do not go after other gods, verse 14. Do not go after other gods. You shall not go after other gods. The gods of the peoples who are all around you.

A god, let's make this really simple. A god is something that you like. That's probably a little too simplistic. It's something that you enjoy. It's something that you go to and The people around us enjoy particular things don't follow them in their enjoyments follow the enjoyments of God Be satisfied with the fullness of His house.

Let His water be what satisfies you. Let His bread be what feeds you. Let His light be what guides you. Not the bread of this world, not the water of this world, not the light of this world, but the light that comes from Jesus Christ. And so Moses, with these exhortations, is giving very clear instructions about how to thrive in a pagan land.

I've realized the danger of doing such a thing tonight because this passage is so...it's so well known by all of us here. We may not be able to transform Hollywood, we may not be able to transform the United States government, But we can focus on these microcosms that God has established. The culture of your heart, the culture of your family, and the culture of your local church. Church. Now what we do with our children determines the destiny of our nation and the quality of the church.

And what we do in our homes, it reveals who we really serve. And I think that's why Moses' words are so hard hitting. And the question is, you know, how are we living? How are we preserving our children in a pagan land? Are we doing it like this?

Are we keeping the commandments of God? Do we fear God? Are we passing on the knowledge of God? Are we carefully obeying God? Are we confessing our love toward God?

Are we teaching the commandments of God? Are we reminding everyone around us of the commands of God? And are we going after other gods? That's the exhortation that Moses brings. Now, every generation brings a new crop of families into the world, and particularly for those who are younger, and you're in your teens, you're in your 20s, and you're making your way out into the world, I want you to understand that having a true Christian family is the best thing you can do with your life.

It's the best thing you can do with your time. I want you to see the beauty and the glory of the kind of home life that's created when people living in a pagan land obey what Moses says here. I want you to see how important it is to just simply believe God and obey Him and to love Him from the heart as the greatest treasure that there is. No success in the world is worth failing in your family. If you fail there, you failed for many generations.

Just very briefly, but not to diminish the importance, we dare not attend to our families without attending to the culture of a local church. Local churches are critical to navigating the chaos of the culture, and it's in churches that we build the culture of the kingdom of heaven. And I am so thankful for the local church that I'm a part of, and my understanding of many of the churches that are listed on the NCFIC website. These churches are far from perfect, but one thing is certain, they are living differently, and they really do believe that the word of God is sufficient, and they really have intended to preach a true gospel. They believe that only God can regulate worship.

They believe that fathers should be shepherds. They believe that wives should be keepers at home. You know, I meet with pastors all over the country all year long, and I'll often ask them, how are the wives doing, what are they doing? Every time I've asked that question, they tell me this, every single wife in our church is at home raising their children. I praise God for that.

Why are they doing that? Because somewhere along the way they read in the Bible That a wife should be a keeper at home and that she should raise her children And that she should be a home desperate as the Bible teaches, but I praise God for that. One of the truly remarkable things about these churches is what the women are doing, and I am so thankful for that. Now, the roots of the chaos are very clear. These are skirmishes in a long war.

And it's communicated – I'll just give you two places it's communicated in Genesis 3.15 and Revelation 12.17. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed, he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel." This is the announcement of war. And John, the apostle, speaks of it again in Revelation 12, and the dragon was enraged with the woman, and he went to make war with the rest of her offspring who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ." What John is making very clear is that the devil is waging war against those who keep the commandments of God, if that's you, he's waging war against you. Doing it through this cultural chaos, and he's waging war against offspring. Do you understand?

That's all he has to work with, is your offspring? And of course this war against the seed of the woman is ultimately a war against the Church of Jesus Christ, you who keep the commandments of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ. And at the heart of the tumult is really the urgency of the devil to destroy biblical morality and the categories of men and women made in the image of God. These attacks are against matters of personhood, And they come in many different forms. As I said before, it's a mashup between the social justice movement and the sexual revolution.

And now reproductive justice is the freedom to kill your baby in a womb. The sexual justice of our time means the celebration of every form of sexual expression, Particularly those that God calls abominations. It's celebrating the right to deny your biology and choose your own gender. By the way, there are only two genders. There's no such thing as transgender.

It's an illusion. It's a fabrication. It's a manifestation of corrupt affections. That's all it is Well, they're real affections You know one of my daughters had a baby this year And she was in the hospital, and she was asking the nurse why they changed the registration forms and on the registration form in her hospital they asked her to declare her preferred gender pronoun. She was stunned by that.

And then the nurse told her that they'd also just changed the badges on the bassinets from what used to be blue for boys and pink for girls and changed them out for gender-neutral colors. And then the nurse told my daughter that she had just come out of a room where a baby was just born. She entered the room. She was so excited and she went into the room. She said, is it a boy or a girl?

And the mother looked at that nurse and said, we're going to let the child decide. The new justice demands that referring to people by their biological gender is oppressive. I'm sure Dr. Mohler will tell us more and more about that kind of thing. Now a successful woman is one who behaves like a man.

A successful man is one who behaves like a woman. Now I have a particular compassion particularly for women in the midst of this revolution. The poison arrows of the devil have always been aimed at women. It began right in the garden. Why do you think that the devil attacked Eve first?

Why did he go after the woman? Sideline her. There are such vicious attacks against women in our culture. And isn't it ironic that the women's movement wanted equality? And now you have men knocking out women in mixed martial arts.

How's that for equality? Men are dominating women in wrestling, and they're blowing women away on the track, and in cycling, and running, and basketball. Well, here's a proposition. When you take down a woman, you take down everything else. When you distract a woman, You lose marriage, you lose babies, you lose home life, you lose nurture, you lose taking dominion together as husband and wife.

You lose beauty. And men end up losing connections and accountability. They lose the very best things, and Everything comes down when you take down a woman. You know, William Gouge wrote, became one of the most popular family life volumes in the Puritan era, really probably for maybe 200 years, and his book, Domestical Duties. And when he hits Ephesians chapter 5, he makes an observation that the apostle deals with the woman first.

And in reading he would think, well wouldn't the apostle address the men first? After all, they're the heads of the households. William Gooch presents a possibility, an opinion about why the Apostle Paul deals with women first. Because if a woman doesn't submit to her husband, then the whole family falls apart. Headship falls apart, the raising of children falls apart, everything falls apart.

Without holy women, you lose the next generation. You know women have always been in the crosshairs and I just have a particular tenderness, particularly for young women growing up. They're the most vulnerable and the devil is out to get them. You know, one time I was with Jeff Pollard this last year, and we were doing a conference together. He said, Scott, you need to read a book.

He said, it's the best book on feminism I've read in a long time. It was, it's Rebecca Merkel's book, Eve in Exile. And so he recommended it, so I bought the, I bought the Kindle version of the book and I read it on the airplane going home. I liked it so much about the hard copy and started reading it to my girls. I liked it so much I bought the audiobook, okay?

In the first half of the book, she speaks of the devastating effects of feminism, and she gives a historical analysis of the roots of feminism, first wave, second wave, third wave feminism, the personalities, and all the drivers of feminism. But the second half of the book contains one of the most beautiful pictures of biblical femininity I've ever read. I was astonished the way she ended the book. I'm going to read an extended section of how she ended this book. She first acknowledges the fierce attack against women.

She writes, As we look around us at our various societal ills, and there are many, the majority of our most pressing moral issues are the direct result of the women of this nation fighting for what they have declared to be their rights. She says, I'm not arguing that the men have had nothing to do with any of this. Obviously, they share a great deal of the responsibility for the smoking crater that is our nation. But there's no arguing with the fact that while men stood around with their hands in their pockets, the women ran around with torches setting fire to everything and chucking on the cans of gasoline. And then she gives an illustration.

The most obvious example, of course, is abortion. This is because for a century we have been catechized by feminism to believe that a woman's decision to kill her baby is a basic human right, and that when a woman's body is invaded by another tiny human, that tiny human is trespassing on private property and therefore forfeits all rights and cannot claim protection. And then she goes into some of the historical realities. And who has fought for that story to become the accepted narrative? The women, of course.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton taught the women of her day that motherhood should be voluntary. Margaret Sanger fought for the practical rights to make that true. And Gloria Steinem has diligently worked for abortion to be seen as normal and good. For the last century, it was women who lobbied Congress, women who marched on Washington, women who published the magazines, and women who relentlessly fought for this right. The body count is now at 58 million.

58 million tiny Americans slaughtered. Of the women, and by the women, and for the women, that the right to consequence-less sex should not perish from the earth." And then she says, American mothers have waged a war on motherhood itself. And this is a war with real casualties, with real blood, and with 58 million unmarked graves in our nation's landfills. And Adam called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living. And we Americans have insisted on hacking away the fertility of Eve so that the name Eve might itself become meaningless.

We might still be stuck with our bodies that get pregnant, but at least you can't make us be mothers of the living. We'll be mothers of the dead, thank you very much. She writes the Hebrew word for the mother's womb is Raham, and the root word means mercy. In the Old Testament, the womb was literally the place of mercy, the woman's body the embodiment of mercy, and yet we have turned the womb into one of the most dangerous places in our nation. And then she asks, who was it that worked tirelessly to break all the cultural taboos that had been in place for centuries?

The feminists. The feminists are the ones who fought tooth and nail to dismantle traditional marriage. And they did it long before the homosexuals ever started talking about it. Remember, if you think about the logic of all the insistence on reproductive rights, The thing that the women were demanding to be freed from was the constraints of their own biology, the restrictions of their bodies. They wanted freedom from their own bodies, which is a staggering thing to think about.

And they won. This is what a country looks like when selfish women have won every single battle they have fought. And then she quotes Proverbs 14, 1, which says that a wise woman builds her house, but a foolish woman tears it down with her own hands. She says, what we have witnessed over the last century is millions of women in America, in unison, tearing down their houses with their own hands, and the result is that they have dismantled this nation piece by piece. The women have been focused, tireless, relentless, and driven.

They have passed the baton from one generation of activists to the next, inciting foolish and selfish women everywhere to pick up their sledgehammers and start swinging at their own walls. And then finally she turns to the women in scripture who were holy women. And you know as I am looking out here, I'm standing before a group of women who lived entirely differently than this, and they had lots of children, and they stayed home. I don't read this, certainly, as a rebuke to this crowd. This crowd has taken seriously the priority of the family.

And I'm so thankful for that. She says, think of the women in scripture who gave birth to, nurtured, built up, defended and saved the nation of Israel. Sarah, Naomi, Tamar, Ruth, Esther, Mary, these were women whose obedience had incredible results. As we look around us, though, we see that American women have a lot to answer for. And then she goes on to talk about what it really means as a mother to be sitting in her living room with three toddlers who need 24 hour care.

Three people to shape who are going to live forever. How could that possibly be a small thing? You know the Bible makes it clear that there are two things that are eternal. Bodies and souls. Your body exists forever.

It will be resurrected either to everlasting life or everlasting damnation, your body exists forever, you're not going to get rid of your body, you will get a new one, and your soul lives forever. Which makes the whole proposition of family life so important, and motherhood so important, and fatherhood so important. And the devil is definitely at war with women. Well, all this to say that there really is hope for a family. And that hope is entrusting in the word of God alone.

There's hope in the power of the new birth and the filling of the Holy Spirit. And a relationship with God that transforms everything where you desire to obey. There really is hope for a biblically ordered family, and I pray that God would give us grace to raise our families in the ways that Moses exhorted the children of Israel to raise their families. You know, you don't need to fear the chaos, because the Word of God is sufficient. You don't need to fear the chaos because Jesus Christ is a sufficient Savior and the Holy Spirit is a sufficient Helper, and the grace and the truth of Jesus Christ is all we need.

And I don't think we should forget that God is in control. These things have come upon the world as a result of God's providence. He's put us here for this moment. His hands fashioned you so that you might learn his commandments and take very seriously and to be careful to obey all that he has commanded. Now, let me just give you a quick flyover of what you're gonna hear at this conference.

Joel Beakey is gonna come and speak about how you use and abuse the world and its culture and how you follow God fully. Jason Dome is gonna come and speak about what it means to be a keeper at home and women in the meeting of the church. And Clarence Simmons is gonna speak of many aspects of family life and applying scripture to the gender confusion of our times. And he's also gonna speak of responding to race and racism, God's way. John Snyder is gonna take us to the very end of the family life codes in Ephesians 5 and 6, the culmination, really, of the family life instructions that end with, be strong in the Lord.

Anthony Metheny is going to come and speak about our preborn neighbors and various matters about marriage. Jeff Pollard will come and bring us a message that answers the question, what will you do if God puts Esau in your house. And speaking of the erasing of the creation order, he's going to be defending complementarianism and dealing with feminism and the feminization of men. Sam Waldron is going to come and give a portrait of the man as priest in the home. Mike Davenport is going to speak about what it means to pitch your tent in the shadow of Sodom.

Paul Carrington is going to speak about invading the darkness, equipping your family for the battle. And Pouyan Mirshahi is going to come and bring us the stories of Lot's wife and Gideon, two very, very poignant family life texts in the Bible. Malamulo Cendango is going to speak of reforming your family life and your culture as he has had to deal with that in Malawi, Africa. And in just a moment, Dr. Albert Mohler will come and address how the family should respond to the pressures of the sexual revolution.

Would you pray with me? Lord, we need your help. We need your son, Jesus. I pray, oh Lord, that he would be the sweetest thing to us, all our life long, and that the cultures of these families would be so reflective of the beauty of the kingdom of heaven, and all of its happinesses, all of its good graces, all of its truth, all of its love. Oh Lord, we need you in times like these.

Teach us in the ways in which we should go. For unto you, we lift up our souls. Amen.