Open your Bibles to Deuteronomy chapter six. Deuteronomy chapter six. And it's my job now to speak of family life. And I'd like to begin here in this passage of scripture and I'd like to show how this whole principle is traced really all the way to the end of the Bible, that this text doesn't stand in isolation with a larger picture of the whole doctrine of the Christian family and particularly what a father does. Let's pray before we begin.

Oh Lord, it's not by might, it's not by power, but it's only by your spirit that anything good can happen in any moment of life and especially at this moment when your word is being opened. Oh Lord, I pray that you would implant this word, that you would make us bleed as the word is a sword, that you would use it as a hammer, that you would use it as water, that you would use it as a fire, that you would use it, Lord, to convert our souls and to help us now. And, oh Lord, I pray for these who are here now who have heard of Deuteronomy 6 many times in their lives. I pray, oh Lord, that you would send your spirit, that you would come and open up our eyes, that we might observe wondrous things from your law and not just observe them but to go out and do them. Amen.

Well this testimony that Deuteronomy 6 brings to us is part of the whole structure of this great institution that God has provided called the family. God has designed to govern the world through three major entities, institutions, jurisdictions. There's the church and there's the family and there's the state. And my understanding of scripture is that the two most pivotal institutions for the discipleship of the people who are born into the world are the church and the family. And I've dedicated my life really to speaking to those institutions and about those institutions.

And you know, we live in a world that's flying apart on so many fronts. You know, What do you do in an economy that we live in the midst of? What do you do in the midst of a moral environment that we're experiencing now? What do you do when the foundations are collapsing all around you? And I have a fairly simple answer.

Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand and do two things. Build a strong church and build a strong family. You can do that. You can do that today and tomorrow and the next day. You might not be able to fix the economy of the world.

You might not be able to fix the political scene and you might not be able to fix the moral landscape that exists here, but one thing you can do, you can have a family, and you can gather that family together, and bring the beauty of the kingdom of heaven into that place, and God gives fathers complete authority over this very small number of people so that they might clean the spring. Because the family is a fountain. The Family is a fountain that pours forth into all of society. And you might not be able to mount the engines of industry or politics or morality, but you can, in the quietness of your heart, turn toward the Lord, and you can pursue holiness in your heart, and you can make a holy family in this world. I think that a holy family is the most important thing that a person can dedicate himself to, and then that family also pours forth into the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ to make a holy church.

I can't think of anything more important that one can do with their life than to do those two things. And you know those of you who are not married here, there are several that are not married, here's my appeal to you. In the right time, go get married and go have a holy family. You know, you don't know what your future holds really. You don't know the effect that you'll have in the world.

But if you have a family, you will affect the world. And God has given a very simple way to bring blessing into the world. And one of those ways is through a family. And of course, Deuteronomy 6 stands really at the crossroads of the great family discipleship passages that are in the Bible. It's the most detailed, it is one of the most practical, and it really is the primary reference point for all of family life.

And it explains how a family ought to operate. Now Moses is speaking to the children of Israel. Moses is in the last month of his life and he gives a series of speeches in that last month. And here in Deuteronomy six, this exists in the context of a speech that he's been giving. And he's just delivered the 10 Commandments.

And you can't really understand Deuteronomy 6 unless you understand what happens in Deuteronomy chapter 5, where he delivers the commandments of God. If you look at Deuteronomy chapter 5, verse 31 you'll sort of get the the pathos the drama of the moment he says but as for you stand here by me so the children of Israel are standing by Moses and he says and I will speak to you all the commandments and statutes and judgments which you shall teach them, that they may observe them in the land which I am giving them to possess. Therefore, you shall be careful to do as the Lord your God commanded you. You shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left. You shall walk in all the ways which the Lord your God has commanded you, that you may live and that it may be well with you, and that you may prolong your days in the land which you are crossing over to possess." Moses is delivering this speech in order to prepare the children of Israel to go into a pagan land.

They're gonna go into a place where the culture of paganism is raging. They're going to go into a culture that's contrary to every commandment that he just delivered to them in chapter 5. And he's preparing them to go and he's saying this is how you go. And he first of all casts a vision for the commandments of God. The commandments of God are beautiful and they're life giving and He's telling them to be careful to do them in verse 32.

Be very careful. When you go into a pagan land, you have to be careful because the influences are always raging so around you. And how do you keep your wits about you in a pagan land? You must be careful. You must be discerning about that land that you live in.

And it really reminds us of how discerning we have to be in the land that we live in. That we are, we're pilgrims in a pagan land, just like the children of Israel were as they walked into the Promised Land and they were conquering that territory for the Kingdom of Heaven. In order to make that land a little picture of heaven, that's what the Promised Land is, representative of the Bible, that the kingdom of heaven comes, it crashes into the works of darkness, the land is cleansed, the people are beautified, and there's a new way. It's a land of milk and honey instead of barrenness and cursing and trouble and depression. It's replaced with a happy people.

Happy is that people whose God is the Lord. And so Moses is preparing his people to go in to this pagan land and he's urging them to be careful so that their days would be prolonged and that it might be well with them. And what Moses tells the children of Israel about how they ought to conduct themselves is not any different than the way that the Lord Jesus Christ speaks to us about the land that we live in. We live in a pagan land. And this is why the Lord Jesus Christ gathered his disciples on a hill and he told them that he did not come to abolish the law but that he would fulfill the law and then he went on to explain how to keep the law.

It's interesting when the Lord Jesus Christ wants to speak about matters of family life or Sexuality, he very often goes back to the book of Deuteronomy. He did that in the whole matter of immorality. He did it in the whole matter of hatred of brother in Matthew Chapter 5. And then in Chapter 6, he says, 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. And so when Moses says that this is the commandment and these are the statutes and judgments, what is he talking about?

Well, he's talking about the Ten Commandments. He's taking them back to the Decalogue. And it's interesting that the Lord Jesus Christ, You know, when he gives the Beatitudes, he uses the very same pattern as the Ten Commandments. The first half of them relate to your relationship with God and the second half of them relate to your relationship with man. And Moses is saying that when you go into a pagan land, recognize that the pagans around you, they're not going to live this way, but you must live this way.

And so he says, this is the commandment and these are the statutes, and you should observe them in the land which you're crossing over to possess. And so, they are to observe them in the same way that the Lord Jesus Christ said to his own disciples that you should teach them to observe all the things I commanded you. Lo, I am with you always, even till the end of the age. That's the Great Commission. You know, the Lord Jesus Christ is a prophet like Jesus.

That's what the Bible teaches. And If you look carefully at the ministry of Jesus, he replicates the ministry of Moses. And he, Moses is a type of Christ. Moses is a prophet like Jesus. And so here in the first verse of Deuteronomy 6, we're calibrated as to what this is all about, what family life is all about.

When you go into a pagan land, you Start with your family. And if you don't start with your family, then you're subverting the whole structure of the way that God has designed for His people to live in a pagan land. Because what this chapter makes it very clear is that the laws and the judgments of God are first heard in the family. They are heard when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up. God has designed that children would hear the Gospel first in their families, and then it would be supported and illuminated and elaborated upon and lived out in the Christian community as children hear the preaching of the gospel from shepherds who open up the word of God.

And so here in Deuteronomy 6 is this fundamental principle of life in a pagan land. As we're going through Deuteronomy 6, I'll just have to tell you, I fear a little bit for us because my assumption is that all of you have read Deuteronomy 6 and you've desired to fulfill it. And that's one of the reasons that you're even here. That you really desire to lead your family in a pagan land. You want to try to figure out how you're supposed to survive in such a pagan land that you live in now.

And you look around and you see children being devoured by this culture. You're seeing the entertainment and the sports machine, the defiling things that are going on in the world, and you're seeing how they're so alluring to your children. What are you going to do about it? And God gives you something to do here in this passage of scripture. What I wanna do is to walk through each verse.

Somehow our families must be reformed according to the Word of God. Somehow we've got to recover the biblical doctrine of the family. Somehow families have got to be families again. In this culture, the family has been almost completely decimated. And we're working hard to try to bring the doctrine of the family back.

It's so important that we do it. You know, it was about 16 years ago, I was an elder in a church, and I realized that we were losing all the children in our church, that even from top to bottom, as I was teaching the high school children as an elder in our church, the worldliness was taking my breath away and I realized that we really had already lost them by the time they'd gotten to high school and I was their teacher and every time we would open up the word of God it was a fight. And it terrified me what was happening. And I hearken back to the things that my pastor taught me when I was first saved in California. I grew up in Southern California and I was saved in the 1960s.

And God had it that I would have entered into a church where there was a true shepherd, where there was a man who really had a heart to train men and he also understood the doctrine of the family and He taught a lot of us what it meant to be a husband. I remember as a high school student sitting in his house having Bible studies where the whole family was there because he was one of the only people that I knew of that when the church would gather together all the families would be there. And I was there bouncing children on my knee when I was a young man in these small group meetings that we had. And it was during that time that the doctrine of the family and the doctrine of the church were deeply embedded in my mind. And I'm so grateful for this pastor who invested in me.

And he really planted the seeds of the doctrine of the family in me. So Years later, when I was an elder in a church and I was realizing what was happening, I was realizing that we had so fragmented the church and the family, and we had just followed the culture, and what were we going to do about that? And our only hope is to return to scripture. Our only hope is to go back to the holy word of God and to calibrate our whole lives against it and that we listen to the word of God and we recover the things that are there. Now Moses gives the reason why we should observe the commandments and statutes of the Lord in a pagan land.

Verse two tells us why. That you may fear the Lord your God to keep all his statutes and his commandments which I command you. You, your son and your grandson all the days of your life and that your days may be prolonged. And he's speaking of of one of the most important matters in a family, and that is that there's the fear of God in a family. We teach the statutes and the commandments of God in a pagan land so that we will fear God and not man.

The most devastating collapse takes place in a person's life when they fear man and not God. And here Moses is saying that a family, first of all, must fear the Lord, fear the Lord in order to keep his statutes and his commandments. And then he uses some language that is so counter-cultural and so startling that it runs against almost almost everything that we see around us in our culture. He says that you and your son and your grandson all the days of your life. He's speaking of a father in a house who has an understanding of who he is in the world.

And he stands really at the crossroads generationally. He has, there's a son and a grandson. And there's his whole life ahead of him. And his whole life is defined by what he does with his son and his grandson. And that means that every man ought to know what he is to do in this life.

No Christian man should ever question why he's in the world, why he has been created if he has a family. And that is that he would pay attention to his son and his grandson all the days of his life. And there God casts a lifelong vision for every man who has children. That a man is given a task that is so taxing, it's so comprehensive, that it actually would consume every part of his life later on as we read when he sits in his house, when he walks by the way, when he lies down, and when he rises up. And so what God does is he gives He gives a man a completely different vision of life.

That he's not here to build his own nest egg. He is here to make a nest for a family. And to create a place of spiritual life that's contrary to the pagan land that he's living in. And he does it his whole life long. You know, we live in a world that when your children turn 18, then you're done, right?

And people look forward to that and they retire to Florida and they walk the beaches of Florida and they buy their motor homes and they go play golf and they check out with their children and they sin against Almighty God. And God destroys a generation because of it. Because remember, when you turn your head away from the laws of God, he will forsake your offspring. So it's such a serious thing to speak of matters of family life like this, but Moses is declaring this great seriousness and so he uses this language that we have to understand. He says, you, your son, and your grandson, all the days of your life, those six words, all the days of your life, only six words, and there you have an entire vision for your life.

And you don't need to go create some fancy mission statement. God has already given it to you, that you teach your sons and your daughters all the days of your life. And yet everything in the world would distract you from that and try to take you in your own direction to go fulfill your own vision for life. Abandon your own vision. Put it in the trash can and take upon the vision of Almighty God.

It's so important for those who live in a pagan land to have God's vision and not their own. I often have pain in my soul for the wives and for the women in our culture who are told that the home is meaningless, that they're wasting their life in the home. Why don't you do something with your life? Why don't you go work for a corporation? Why don't you go be somebody?

And The world is constantly casting this message over our daughters and over our wives. And yet God has established the home as really the beginning of spiritual life in the world. It begins in a home. It begins with a father who says, I'm going to pay attention to my son and my grandson all the days of my life. And he also has a wife next to him.

And she's saying the same thing. All the days of my life, the very best, most energetic years of my life, I'm going to give to teaching my children. I'm going to walk with them. I'm going to correct them. I'm going to teach them.

I'm going to be there for them. And I'm not just going to make cookies for them. I'm going to care for them. And I'm going to care for them every day, all the days of my life. It's such a beautiful picture.

It's a picture that we need to recover in our world today. We need to have families again. Somehow you've got to recover the biblical functionality of a family. And if you can't recover the biblical functionality of the family, it'll be much harder to recover the biblical functionality of a church. Because the church receives its people from the family.

And family members go into churches, and when they've not been taught to obey, they actually become a curse to the church of Jesus Christ. How many church splits have come because people have never learned how to submit to their parents? How many wrong relationships have developed because the word of God was not loved and known and people were not governed by the word of God? How much love is lost in a church because there was no love in a family? And there was no call to obedience in that family, to obey the laws of God, to honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment of a promise.

We're speaking about very holy and fundamental things when we speak about the doctrine of the family. And verse two makes it so clear what this looks like. There's fear of the Lord in the family. And It's a focus all the days of your life. Why?

That your days may be prolonged. That means that your life will survive you. Your investment will go on to the next generation. You will die, but you won't die in another way. Your body will be laid in the ground, but the things that you've instructed your children in and the beautiful things of the kingdom of heaven will live on.

Because the Because the Word of God is mighty and powerful and sharper than a two-edged sword and it lives in people's hearts and it changes them. And Your days are prolonged. If anybody wants to do something significant with their life, then pour it into the life of a child. Because one day you're going to die and your children will live on. And then in verse 3, there's that word, therefore, 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. And here Moses is giving the rationale for all of this. Why do this? And he says that you must do it very carefully on the one hand but he says you must do it so that you would multiply greatly. God desires his children to multiply greatly.

This is the uncontradicted message of the word of God. That the people of God should multiply greatly to bear fruit. And many, many ways, The nations of the world and even people in many churches have thrown aside the idea that mothers should be fruitful and multiply. But here, there's this whole idea of multiplication. And why?

Because you're going into a land flowing with milk and honey. In other words, multiply greatly and let that milk and that honey be tasted by as many as you can. And then in verse four, he makes another declaration. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.

Here Moses is calling out to fathers to smash their idols, to reject the idolatry that's around them, to recognize that there is one God and there is no other God worthy to worship. And he says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart. In other words, so that the family is completely centered upon the love of God. And that means it's a father's job to destroy all the idols. He has to begin in his own heart.

He has to begin in his own life. And then he has to help his children understand the gods. The gods that are out there that are luring them. The gods that are trying to enrapture them and enthrall them. The gods that would steal their souls.

The gods of this entertainment age of immorality and independence and really superficiality, these gods that will destroy you, these gods that will distract you. And He says, no, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. You know, here he's really speaking about the heart. The people who say the Old Testament is about laws and the New Testament is about relationship, that's a lie. Because all through the Old Testament is the doctrine of the heart turned toward God.

And here's one example of it. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart. No one was ever saved by keeping the law. People were always and only saved by a turn of their heart. And here, this is an expression of that, of loving God from the heart.

This is not externalism, this is not legalism at all. This is loving God from the heart. We're justified by faith, by a heart of faith that is turned toward God. And then, in verse six, he repeats this whole idea as if it wasn't enough to say it once. He said, and these words which I command you today shall be in your heart.

They'll be in your heart. This is really the beginning of a revival in the world, where the commands of God are in the heart of a father, where he mourns for his sin, He hungers and he thirsts for righteousness. This is really the beginning of anything good that happens in the world, is when it's in a man's heart. It's not just in his mind, it's not just on his lips. It's in his heart.

One of the greatest failures in family life is when you have a father and the things that he says are not in his heart. He's saying them because they're important things to say, but they're not in his heart. And as a result, he leads his family in sort of a dead formalism, rather than the true and genuine love of Jesus Christ from the heart. You know, it happens often when children grow older and they begin to be lured by the world and it terrifies their parents and their parents are very disturbed about it, and the children are being lured into the world of entertainment and all kinds of other things that are so obviously there. And they can quote you line after line from a movie, but they do not care at all to quote from the word of God.

And they're losing their children and they're going off the edge. And often in situations like that, what you'll find is you'll have a father, he'll follow his children, And the family will just continue to be more and more worldly. And why does that happen? Because it was not in his heart. And then the family will be swept into the worldliness of the world, the worldliness of the world that he tried by formalism to avoid because he understood in his mind that it was bad.

But because it was never in his heart, he now follows his children rather than he following the Lord and his children following the Lord with him. And so these things shall be in your heart. And I think it's maybe appropriate to ask, you know, is it in your heart? You know, in my experience in our church, we've had people who have walked in the way but they've not had it in their heart And thankfully many of them have been converted and then their whole world's changed because their hearts turned. Here's the question.

Is your heart turned toward the Lord? Do you desire him? Do you mourn for your sin? Are you poor in spirit or are you just trying to have a really great family? There's a big difference between wanting to have a great family and having a heart like this that's spoken of in verse 6.

And then he says after this whole matter of the heart, which is the most important issue for a family, the center of a family is the heart of a father, I think is one implication of this. In my experience, it's true. The inclination of my heart, the fervency of my heart, the joy in my heart for the Lord, it's expressed. I look back at the times when I've been lazier and bringing my family together and not as consistent in caring for them and teaching them the word of God, it all comes back to my heart, always. And then he says, well, what do you do with all this stuff in your heart?

Verse seven, 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." And Here he's speaking about how a family should walk together. This is one of the most difficult things in the world that we live in. Because it's really hard to find a family that's really a family like this, where they actually walk together, where a father's actually walking with his children. And I know that probably most of you have been grappling with this and trying to readjust your life to live like this. It's a beautiful thing.

I love to see it. And it usually happens in small ways and it moves progressively. Where a father says, you know what, our family's got to figure out how we're going to work together. Our family's got to figure out how we're going to worship together. What are we going to do?

And they make little steps, one step at a time. It's a beautiful thing when a family desires to turn back to a biblical picture of reality and to have a real family again. You know, we need real families in this world again. We need families that you see pictured in the Bible where they all worship together in the church where they're not segregated by age. Did you know that there's not, there's not, there's nowhere in the Bible where there's a positive testimony that the that the people of God were ever divided by age and this age goes off this way and that age goes off that way and there's the children's church and they go off to get something on their own level.

The Bible doesn't know anything about that. In fact, it knows, it really only knows the opposite of that. The only positive case that you can make for discipleship in the Bible is that all the ages are together. The families are there together and they come together in their big family called the church. And it's a beautiful thing.

This is the way that God has designed society to work. He desires the old and the young together. He's designed things so that the generations actually walk together. You know, old people need young people. Old people need little children running around.

They need puppy dogs. You know, they need things like that. But we want to separate them from all that kind of thing. And it's a beautiful thing when families come together and they actually walk together. Now you know, my question to you is, how's it going?

How is your walking together going? I'm confident that so many of you've made dramatic steps in that direction. I praise God for that. But I also know how easy it is to lose the formula. I know how easy it is to get off the railroad tracks and you gotta get back on it.

Maybe there's somebody here who needs to get back on those railroad tracks. And maybe you used to be a Deuteronomy 6 kind of father but you're not now. Well, what do you do about that? Well, today is a good enough day to correct that and to go back to the things that you know are true and right. But here you have this whole life of a family, They're walking together, they're talking together.

You know, Kevin Swanson has been so helpful, I think, to us to talk about this whole thing of a family economy. And it's such a beautiful thing to see a man who says, well, how am I gonna do that? Well, I mean, he can't just quit his job and come home, but what he can do is he can go home and say, hey guys, how can we start working together? How can we start doing stuff together? You know, this whole conference is a result of a family doing that.

The Doran family. I love it. You know, they have this remarkably organized son and they have this daughter who has remarkable gifts and energy and a father and mother and as a result of that, out pops this gathering of people, people all over the country. It's, you know what it is? Ron Doran, at some point, a long time ago, said, hey, how are we gonna be a real family?

And he's still, he's still like every father trying to figure it out. You know, one day at a time to keep making progress in that direction. And it's such a blessing to do that. And I just want to encourage you to do it. We have got to recover the biblical functionality of the family in our society.

It's really important, do not let anybody convince you that it's not important. On the authority of the word of God and of this prophet like Jesus, Moses, We know what our family should look like. And then in verse eight, we find Moses speaking about how the family should be a living, outward demonstration of the word of God. He says, and 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.

And that means that you don't just keep this stuff in your family. You tell the whole world about it. You wrap up everybody around you. The people walking by your house, they're gonna see it on your doorpost. You're walking out in society and you're speaking of the word of God.

You know, the Pharisees misinterpreted, misapplied this and they just thought it meant, you know, slap a Bible verse on your head. That's not what Jesus, that's not what Moses meant. He meant what Jesus meant in giving the Great Commission, to go teach the nations all the things that he's commanded. That's what he meant. In other words, take it to the street.

Don't be your nice little family integrated, insulated home and church. Go out into the world and bring the beauty of the word of God into that world. I know probably for many of you this is very fundamental and pedantic and you're saying, I haven't learned a single thing here from this guy. This is just the same old stuff. Well, it is, it's the same old stuff that we need to continue to do And guess what, we're not done doing it.

We do need there to be more repentance in this land, that more families would become families again. We do need repentance in this church so that churches would become a mirror of the discipleship methodology that you find in the Bible, where all the generations are gathered together and we should not lose steam on that at all. It's right and it's something that we can give to the world as a blessing. You know what Moses said in Deuteronomy was not forgotten. Turn to Psalm 78.

In Psalm 78, Asaph connects his message with Moses with this very passage of scripture in Deuteronomy chapter six. He says, give ear, O my people, Psalm 78, to my law. Incline your ears to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in a parable. I will utter dark sayings of old, which we have heard and known and our fathers have told us.

We will not hide them from their children telling to the generation to come the praises of the Lord and His strength and His wonderful works which He has done. Now look at verse 5. For he established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel which he commanded our fathers that they should make them known to their children that the generation to come might know them. The children who would be born that they might arise and declare them to their children, that they might set their hope in God." Here Asaph is saying, remember what Moses said? That's what we need to keep doing.

Keep on doing it. And Asaph is saying, I'm standing as an example to open my mouth in a parable, to utter the dark sayings of old. I need to do what Moses told us to do. Asaph is living in the time of David at about 1000 BC. Moses is speaking about 1400 BC, then in 1000 BC now Asaph is saying yes, this must continue to be done.

There is a law in Israel and we must keep it. And then if you turn to Malachi chapter 4, you'll find this very same principle. In Malachi 4, 4, the very last prophecy in the Old Testament has its focus on a revival of family life, of a picture of fathers' hearts turning toward their children and a picture of children's hearts turning to their parents. And what does the prophet say in verse 4? Remember the law of Moses, my servant, which I commanded him in Horeb for all Israel with the statutes and judgments.

He uses the exact same language that Moses used in Deuteronomy 6. He says, Behold, I'll send you the prophet Elijah before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord, and he will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with the curse." The turning of the hearts toward the children and the hearts of the children toward the parents has always and only happened when the heart has been turned to the law of God. That's why the prophet says, remember the law of Moses. Because remember what the law does? It convicts you and it terrifies you and it drives you to the gospel.

And the gospel sweetens you and refreshes you and it returns you to the law to show you what's pleasing to God and That's what a father should do in his life Is to spend his whole life Declaring what's pleasing to God And then the Lord Jesus Christ Himself quotes Asaph. Turn to Matthew chapter 13 and look at verse 34 and 35. The Lord Jesus Christ stands and he quotes Asaph. He says, all these things Jesus spoke to the multitude in parables and without a parable he did not speak to them, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet saying, I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter things kept secret from the foundation of the world. Here the Lord Jesus Christ spoke to the multitude in parables in order to fulfill what Asaph said to Israel.

Do you see the connection? Do you see this thread that runs through? Here's what this means. It means that God has established fathers and households. They are types of Christ.

Christ opens his mouth in parables. He utters the dark sayings of old. He declares the praises of God. He declares the law of God, the beauty of God, the greatness of his kingdom. He says how good God is.

He proclaims the beauty of the kingdom of heaven. And a father becomes just like Jesus. He does the same thing that Jesus does. Jesus is the pattern for all fathers. The Bible says that, Jesus says, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father.

Jesus Christ is a type for all fathers. If you want to learn about fatherhood and how to shepherd your flock, read the gospels and see how Jesus shepherded his flock and you'll know how to be a father. Jesus Christ is a type of fatherhood. And here in this text, Jesus Christ stands and He opens His mouth in a parable, He utters dark sayings of old, He does exactly what fathers should do, all the days of their life. And there Jesus Christ is doing that, all the days of His eternal life.

He's sitting at the right hand of the Father and he's interceding and he sent forth his spirit to bring the word to convict and to apply the law of God in the hearts of people. This is why the Spirit of God has been sent. That's why the Bible says my words are spirit and they are life. And so you have this picture of what it means to be a family. It's a family together.

It's a family gathered around the law of God. And it's really a picture of what God has designed the family to be just like the family in heaven, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And they're all working together to bring many sons to glory. They're bringing sons and daughters into their name. They're being baptized into their name.

They're being brought into a family and it's a family of love. It's a family where the Father loves the Son and the Son delights to do the will of the Father. It's a family where the Spirit glorifies the Father and the Son. It's a Spirit, It's a family of delight and love and submission and obedience. It's a family that's governed by the law of God.

It's a beautiful family. Did you know why God gave you a family? To bring many sons to glory. Why is your wife sitting there by you? Why do you have those children around you?

They're there for one purpose. That your family would be like the family of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, bringing many sons to glory. And there in your family, deep within the heart of the Father and the Mother is a love for God. And His commandments are in their hearts. And they speak of His commandments when they sit in their house and when they walk by the way, when they lie down, and when they rise up.

And their whole life is dedicated to one single agenda, to bring many sons to glory all the days of their lives. And someday they will die. But what kind of children will be left behind? Will they be the worldly children of the world who have drunk everything that they possibly desired or will they have drunk deeply in the word of God? You know, one of the things about children, little children, is that they'll put almost anything in their mouth.

But as you grow older you realize you really shouldn't put everything in your mouth. And the role of a family is to put the sweetest things in the world in the mouth of the next generation, to constantly tell them how good God is. You know, when I was a young father, I had one overwhelming objective with my children. I wanted them to see how good Jesus Christ was. I wanted them to see what a kind shepherd he was.

I wanted them to know the comfort that he gives. I wanted them to know the refreshment that comes from knowing him. That they would bask in the showers of His blessing, that they would be carried in His everlasting arms, that they would know what everlasting mercy meant, that when they got up in the morning and when they traversed through the day and came into the night, I would go into their room with my guitar and I would sing them the sweetest songs I knew. And you know, now they're all grown. And you know, when I get out my guitar, they always say the same things.

They say, Papa, sing us the songs you sang us at night. Would you pray with me? Oh Lord, you've given such a grand and marvelous vision for this life. Oh Lord, keep us from being swept away in the worldliness of this world. Oh God, rescue these families.

I pray that you would use them to rescue 100, 000 million more in the days to come. Oh God, that you would fulfill it in our day. Amen.