Well, I'm so delighted to be here tonight. I would like to bring you a great text of scripture that defines so much of the foundational elements of fatherhood. And I would like to walk through that text with you and I'd like to identify eight characteristics of a father who operates like a prophet in his household. And the idea that a father is a prophet and a priest and a king is something that began to be understood during the Protestant Reformation. That this was the role of Christ.

And then the Puritans picked up this idea that Christ was prophet, priest, and king and said, Isn't it so that this is the same role that a father has in his household? That every household would have a prophet, a priest, and a king in which to bring blessing to it. And so this personality in the home, this communicative father, first of all, his heart is turned toward God, he hears from God, he stands in the place of God, he speaks for God, he speaks the word of God, he's a pastor, he's a theologian, he's a shepherd, and he is like Christ, our great prophet who spoke into our lives and has brought such benefit to us. So that's what this text that I want to deal with is all about. And Ron read a portion of that text, and it's Deuteronomy chapter six.

Now I'd like to talk about this text for a moment. The first thing about it is that it casts a vision for God's design for fatherhood. The design for fatherhood, of course, is in heaven. God the Father, he forms the original factors of the design. And as fathers, what God has done for us is he's given us a pattern in heaven.

He's given us a pattern in himself. And so the foundation of the universe is the love of a father for a son. You can see this very clearly in scripture. Did you know that the first mention of the word love in the Bible is the mention of a father's love for his son. When God spoke to Abraham, he said, take your son whom you love and sacrifice him.

That's the first mention of the word love in the Bible. And it's the mention of a father's love for his son. I think that's significant. If you fast forward to the New Testament, the first mention of the word love, the first appearance of that beautiful word love occurs when a father is speaking to his son. When he says that Christ, when God the Father at his son's baptism says this is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased.

And so The structure of the universe is founded upon the love of a father. It's a prophet speaking into the life of a son. And that's what this text in Deuteronomy, chapter six is all about. It's about God's design in placing fathers as heads of households so that he would be a prophet. And in being a prophet, he would have a life of communication, that he would set his whole life to deliver the glory of God to his children by communicating the word of God.

And that's the design that is in Deuteronomy 6. Now, I'd like to talk about this whole subject, and really all of the talks that we'll be having at this conference, I think we need to understand this. If you heed the words that are in this text, then be fearful, because it'll turn your life upside down. With the recovery of biblical fatherhood, there's always social upheaval. In this text and in the text that we're going to be covering we have to understand that when they are applied, when they are obeyed, seismic quakes are touched off.

Because massive categories of life that all of us and all of us around us have become used to, they get shaken up. And the foundations begin to shift. When fathers rise up and they apply this, enormously significant things happen. Institutions topple when fathers take up their responsibility as shepherds because institutions have co-opted this Responsibility and taken it from fathers, but when fathers take it back the earth shakes Econ Economies are threatened when fathers take their rollback, and we can talk about many, many ways that that happens, and how dangerous it is to apply what's here in Deuteronomy 6. If you apply it, you will have splits in your family, you'll have splits in your church, you'll have splits from yourself and the institutions that you've grown so comfortable with.

Because this is a call to a radical shift of living. This is not just another way to cook meatballs. This is not just another alternative of education. This is the Word of God and because it's the Word of God, it's a revolutionary force that's meant to transform everything in its way. And so when we deal with this text, I want to understand how dangerous this text is.

And if you decide to obey it, then you will find yourself in trouble, But at the same time, for all those who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus and who suffer persecution, the fruits are beautiful and they're refreshing and they're exactly what God ordained for his children. This text is revolutionary in its nature. It contradicts the entertainment saturated family life that exists in most of the households of America. It contradicts, it destroys a sports obsessed church life because it centers the family on something very, very specific and issues commands that are so clear, that are meant to upset all the other activities of life. And so if anyone would decide to obey the words of God regarding fatherhood, they need to know that we're not just talking about another alternative, Another way to cook meatballs.

We're talking about the very commands of God. And that's why Deuteronomy chapter six verse one begins with these words. Now this is the commandment, and these are the statutes and the 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. So these are commands and statutes and judgments and they're meant to destabilize everything you've been doing in your life in order to be faithful to God. The very approach of the fatherhood commandment here is stunningly demanding because it calls for the faithfulness to the commandments and the statutes and the judgments of your life.

And here's what this means for all fathers. God wants to control your life. God wants complete authority over your schedule. He wants every minute when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. So you have to understand that in order to apply this text, it means revolution.

It means a binary understanding of the world, light and darkness, faithfulness to God, and something else that we might try to put a nice name on. God so says in Deuteronomy 6 verses one and two that he wants to govern your life and he also wants you to govern your family. So this is a very dangerous subject because God wants control of every moment of your family life. And he has placed you as fathers in the role of secondary governance. God works through representatives.

And in this case, he's working through a representative head. He is head over all things, and yet he establishes headship in homes to establish his government there. And this is what God has done. He does it in the family and he also does it in the church. He establishes elders to provide shepherding and governance to a church.

And he does it also in the civil government by putting heads over nations. But we need to, I just want to absolutely make sure we understand how demanding this text is because God wants to control your life and he wants complete authority as Lord over your family life. And you dads, he has given you, he has delivered to you authority to partner with him to bring the glory of his name into your house. So that's the first thing that we see here. Now in the midst of this, in the midst of this understanding of what God is doing, that he wants authority, he wants to govern your life, he wants to control your life.

We need to understand, and I think it's plain to all of us, that there is a breakdown of fatherhood. There's a devastating breakdown of fatherhood afoot in the world today. There are dozens of explicit commands and patterns for fathers, but fathers don't feel guilty anymore when they let them go. Pastors of churches do not take any action upon the fathers and their congregations when they do not fulfill this role. It wasn't always that way.

If you lived in 17th century England and were in Richard Baxter's church and he found out that you weren't catechizing your children, He'd put you under church discipline because you weren't teaching your children when you sat in the house and in all of family life. So we have a situation of tremendous collapse of the family. I'm confident that Kevin Swanson will address this subject in just a few minutes later tonight in a very colorful and helpful way, as he always does. But what's happened is there has been a collapse of authority, and it's the authority of God over fathers, and therefore there is no authority of God in families. There's no vision or leadership, but you have the classic couch potato father.

And in many cases what you find is the older generation is still playing games, and they're giving their children affection for games so that when they grow up and become fathers, they're going to lead that next generation into games instead of the praises of the Lord. These are times of emergency. I believe that we happen to live in times where it's not appropriate to be genteel about this subject. It's not appropriate to soft pedal it or pussyfoot around with it. It's time to say what's happening and then to identify the marks of the devil on the church and on the family.

It's time really to stand up and say, here is how the devil has worked in us. The devil has been destroying the church through a federally mandated public education system that's destroying the next generation, while the church continues to send 80% of its youth to be indoctrinated in these pagan education systems. It's time for us to say it's not lawful for God's people to educate their children that way. It's a complete contradiction to this text, which begins with 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 that you're crossing over to possess. Our problem in the church is always the same problem.

We don't have a heart to obey. We don't want to obey those things. We don't want God to control our life. We want to govern our own lives. Aren't we smart enough to do it?

But God says no, like he said in Deuteronomy 5.29. Oh, that they had such a heart in them that they might fear me and always keep all my commandments That it might be well with them and with their children forever. No, you can't just pick and choose from his commandments That's what he says in Deuteronomy 529. That's what he says right here as well. When it comes to fatherhood, there are commands, there are explicit demands upon fathers, and when they do not fulfill them, they are apostate.

And so we come to a collision between our own inclinations and the explicit statements of the word of God regarding fatherhood. The truth is this, Pastors have been content to ignore disobedience so that they could have nice friends and high growth in their churches. When was the last time a pastor in America ever put anybody under church discipline for not leading their family spiritually? We live in an era where there's been a dramatic collapse. And in times of collapse, it's not appropriate to play patty cake with the devil when he's destroying entire generations.

When 80 to 90% of the next generation doesn't even have a biblical worldview, it's actually 95%. Does in the church, in the most conservative churches, they don't even have a biblical worldview, why? It's because fathers have not been teaching when they sit in the house, when they walk by the way, when they lie down, when they rise up. Fathers think that it's appropriate for them to create their own life any way they want. And then they take it in the church, and the church does the same thing.

But God wants to govern the family. And so what he does is he gives the family a governor who would stand in his place and declare the glory of God from day to day. So this text is meant to rock your world, it's meant to identify a devastating breakdown in our culture, this text is also holy ground. This is an enormously important text. And it outlines so many critical issues of Christian living.

Jesus quoted Deuteronomy 6 when he spoke of the greatest commandment, to love the Lord your God with all your heart. And there are people who say, well this commandment, Deuteronomy 6 doesn't apply today. Well then I would just like to suggest that neither does the greatest commandment because they are embedded, they are intertwined in this text. And I don't believe you can have one without the other. You take it all, you take nothing unless you want to just decide which ones that you like.

But this text really is holy ground. This is one of the most important discipleship passages in all of scripture. And it's here that we learn that discipleship begins in the home at the feet of a father who has something burning in his soul, he has the gospel burning in his heart and he wants to communicate it to his children. It is in his heart. It's perhaps one of the greatest education manifestos ever written.

It identifies that education is father directed, it's life oriented, it's home based, it's Bible-centered, and even more striking, it exposes an educational format that is really very unusual to observe in modern times, and that is, it's education that's just integrated in everything in life. Education happens while you're going and doing life. That's what this text has to say about education. It's perhaps one of the most important youth ministry statements in the Bible. In the last 50 years we've engaged in a in a gigantic youth ministry experiment that has produced lots of high powered organizations and massive focus of resources and staff to create what we call today youth ministry, but what, do you see any of that in the Bible?

Well, what you see here is there is a biblical kind of youth ministry, and it is revealed partly here in this text that youth ministry begins with a father. It also is one of the most important counseling passages in the Bible because it's here that you find that a father's role is the role of counselor, that he's there with his family to help them along the way when he sits in his house, when he walks by the way, when he lies down and when he rises up, he's there. He is there as a 24-7 counselor to his family and it focuses on the family. The last thing I think we need to understand about this is this command here is expected to be done collectively as the people of God. Yes, there's an individual application for fathers here, but there's also a corporate understanding for the whole church that the whole church is meant to do this together.

And so this is a text of enormous significance. Now it gives practical advice to fathers, and I'd like to give eight characteristics of the Father, the communicative Father, the Father who is the prophet in his house out of this text here. And so let's begin to look at these. First of all, he is governed by the statutes and the commandments of the word of God. And that's why he begins, 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.

Now, you notice the seriousness of the tone here, that a father is to be governed by commandments and statutes coming from the Word of God. This is where a father gets his road map. He doesn't necessarily get it from his dad, he doesn't necessarily get it from his culture, he gets it from the Word of God. And so the first characteristic of this prophet as a father, this father as a prophet, is that he is governed by the word of God. We happen to live in an environment where the church does not want to be governed by anything.

It wants to be governed by things at work. It wants to be governed by things that make people feel good. But fathers are designed by God to bring something both of disruptive nature and also of a healing nature, and that is the word of God. And so God is calling fathers to break, brank with worldly thinking. And to begin to be governed by the commandments and the statutes of God.

So that's the first characteristic. He's a man who is governed by God. Here's the second. He has a transgenerational vision. He has a transgenerational vision.

You, your son, and your grandson, all the days of your life, that your days may be prolonged. So God is saying that if there would be a father there, if there would be a prophet in a home, if there would be a governor who is bringing forth the word of God in a family, then he should be thinking about a transgenerational vision, you, your son and your grandson all the days of your life. You know, there's an individualism that runs in our culture which makes us think that we're the only ones that matter. You know, you take care of yourself and your own generation and you spend your children's inheritance and let them go figure it out for themselves. That's not a biblical worldview.

The biblical worldview is one in which a father is very careful to see way beyond his own generation and to prepare his children for life in that next generation. In a way, he spends his life and he dies so that the next generation has a foundation to stand upon. It's not for us to build kingdoms in this world. You can build a physical kingdom. You can build a financial kingdom.

If you have no spiritual kingdom, you have nothing left. Nothing. And we often think of, you know, how important it is to build a physical inheritance for our children, and that is important, but it's absolutely nothing compared to having a vision for the transgenerational communication of the Gospel from one generation to another. So that our most important task as fathers is to preach the Gospel to our children, to open up the beauty of His Word, to show the preciousness of Christ, to explain how good God is, to say that He is perfectly sovereign over all things and no one has to have any fear in this life because God is good. That a father must deposit things in the next generation that will allow them to stand.

And he does that by thinking forward. He's thinking of his son and his grandson all the days of his life, that his days may be prolonged. And so this is the second characteristic of this man. He has a transgenerational vision. The third quality, The third characteristic of this man who is a prophet in his house is that he fulfills God's desire for fruitfulness and multiplication.

He says in verse 3, 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. Here, Moses is casting a vision for multiplication in the land. And it describes a mentality that God desires in his children, and that is that they should desire to have many children. Only God can open and close the womb, but man often gets in the way. Now here's something that you need to observe about scripture.

In the midst of all the debates about birth control, contraception, and all these kinds of things. Here's one thing that at least you must acknowledge, and that is this. Whenever the subject comes up in scripture, it always is an apologetic for fruitfulness and multiplication. Always, 100% of the time. But it's astonishing that in every single text that addresses the issue, it's always for multiplication.

But when the church reads it, it says, yes, but you can do whatever you would like in this matter. It's astonishing how easily we set aside the commandments of God for the sake of our tradition, or the pleasing of our parents, or the pleasing of our grandparents, or the pleasing of ourselves, because we don't want too much trouble in this world, children are trouble. Children are work, they are trouble. And God though says have many of them. Children are a burden to so many who think in this world.

But God has said, no, fulfill my desire for fruitfulness and multiplication. And as a father stands in the place of God, He must stand to uphold this great principle that is uncontradicted everywhere in scripture. So if you want to contradict something that's not contradicted anywhere in scripture, then so be it, but you need to know what you're doing in doing so. The Bible says to be fruitful and multiply. We understand that today there's a global meltdown.

The economies of the world are in crisis. They're in free fall. One of the reasons they're in free fall is because they've been aborting the next generation and have been having 1.1 children. And now, there's this global cataclysm that is in place and it's irreversible for many nations. Once the birth rate falls below a certain point, it's irreversible, France has reached that point.

And you can't get back. Our prosperity depends on our multiplication, so we should multiply greatly as the Lord God of your fathers has desired. So that's the third characteristic of this prophet, is that he sees multiplication and he desires it and he implements it. Number four, He treasures God above all other treasures. He treasures God above all other treasures.

Verses 4 and 5 say, 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 so this prophet in the household, if he would be a proper representative of almighty God, then he would have to treasure with all of his heart the word of God. And so Moses here is casting a vision for the man who loves God. And he presents a vision of God by saying, hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, The Lord is one.

He is stating the nature of God, that God is one, that there is only one God among all the other gods. And a father, if He would be the shepherd of His sheep, if He would be the prophet in His household, then He would have to be the kind of man who is discerning enough to distinguish between the gods of this world. And that he would take Scripture so literally that he would understand that there was one God who was different than all the gods of this world. And he says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all of your mind. And then, fifthly, the next characteristic of this prophet is that He treasures the Word by honoring it in His heart.

He says, and these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. And What does that mean? I think it means many things, but let me suggest this. It means that he's truly converted. It means that his heart is moved by Christ.

It means that he feels God in his heart. It means that he desires, he has an affection, he has an experiential emotional understanding that he loves God. And here Moses puts the finger in the wound. The wound in men who've been doing the right things, who've tried with all their hearts to be men who do right, but they don't love God in their hearts. They've not truly been converted.

And you can have a very nice family and not be converted. You can train your children up in the law of God, and they can be respectful and honorable, and they can dress well and speak well, and they can memorize scripture, and the Father can memorize entire books of the Bible and never have his heart warmed by God. Is it possible that any of you fathers are unconverted tonight? You've tried all your life to do what's right, but you don't love God in your heart. That you do not have affection for him.

But in your soul you say, oh God, help me, give it to me. Oh Lord, come and give it to me. I know I can't have it on my own. If you're that man, cry out to God that you would be converted tonight. It takes a second to be converted.

All God has to do is open that heart and give affection toward Him in your own heart. And here Moses says, these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. That means that there are some who do not have it in their heart. They're just doing it out of obligation, social convention, because they know it's right, because they do believe that there's a God in heaven. They even believe that Jesus Christ died and rose from the grave.

They even believe that this is the inerrant word of God sufficient for all things, and they may not be converted. You can believe all those things and not be converted. And so I would just ask, let's take this opportunity tonight to genuinely and honestly ask, am I converted? Does my heart warm, Do I love Him? And this is a major issue in this text, that a father's faith is authentic, that he is filled with the knowledge of the goodness of God, so that when He does sit in His house, when He does walk by the way, when He does lie down and when He does rise up with His family, His family knows of the goodness of God, that they feel the sweetness that their Father knows, and they can look at it and say, oh how my Father loves this being.

Oh He does, He does, His heart does say, oh how I love thy law. It's my meditation all the day. My Father's not a phony. He does love God in His heart. And so He treasures the Word by honoring it in His heart with sincere love, not in tongue only, but to love Him inwardly and to find all of your happiness in Him, to find all of your peace and your solace in Him, to understand that he is God, where your heart says, you are my God and I am your son.

And this happens to a man who treasures it in his heart. You know, God places no hope for those who do not genuinely love Him. And then the sixth characteristic of this Father, this prophet, is that he teaches the next generation. Verses seven through nine. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall talk of them when you sit in the 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, and you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates." So this is the work that a father does. He teaches, and he's constantly teaching. If a man would fulfill the explicit commands of scripture for fatherhood, then he would be a teacher, and he would set himself as the pastor, the teacher, the theologian, the historian of the house. That's his role. God appoints every man to that role.

You may say, well I'm not a gifted teacher, it doesn't matter, you are appointed a teacher. I'm not a theologian, God has appointed you a theologian. I'm not a historian, you better be one. God calls men to be something different than who they are. Do you want to just be the same old man that you've always been all the days of your life?

I don't think most men want that. They do want to be, they want to be transformed into the image of Christ, they want to change. They want to take on the characteristics that God has appointed for them. And So this is the activity of teaching. Notice there's so much, I love this section of Deuteronomy 6 because it's so practical, it's so down to earth, it's so explicit about exactly what a father should do.

There's so much detail. For example, he gives us the type of activity. What kind of activity is it? Well, he answers it. It's teaching, meaning to impress upon, to make an impression upon.

You know, the parents of my parents' generation actually believed that it was wrong to impress children to do anything or think anything. And Most of the parents of the kids that I grew up with, they thought the best thing in the world was, don't force any of your religion on your children. But here is the diametric opposite, that we are to impress, We are to teach the manner of the activity. It's to be done with diligence. He says, you shall teach them diligently to your children.

What does diligently mean? What does the Hebrew mean? It means diligently. It means like take a lot of effort. It means just like exactly what it sounds like.

That you exert enormous effort in labor to do it, to work yourself to exhaustion in this labor. That's what this word means. To teach them diligently. And then who? Who is the person who teaches?

It's the father. Does it exclude mothers? No, it does not exclude mothers. They have this very similar calling. What is to be taught?

The commands and the statutes and the judgments of the Lord. There you have your curriculum. You want a curriculum, you can buy it right here. It's in this book. And then where the location of the teaching is explicitly identified.

It's in the home and everywhere else. And then when? It gives the timing of the teaching. When you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up, It's all the time. And so Moses is very, very specific that this teaching happens in the house.

You know, most of us grew up in a world where instruction, education happens in a government building. It happens in an institutional setting. Is there any indication from the Bible that that is the model of education for his children? No. There's no indication anywhere that that's the model of education.

But the model of education in this case happens in the home and everywhere else. And when does it start? It starts when you rise up. It starts at the beginning of the day. When does your home school start?

That's a good question. Well, it starts when you rise up. And then it continues when you lie down in the evening, just before bedtime. Do you see how practical this is? It's so clear, it's so explicit, it's so detailed.

And so you find that God would have children born into this world to have a 24 hour a day, seven day a week shepherd who would care for him and take him wherever he would go to help them to know the wisdom of God. I take this literally. I think that I honestly believe that we should look at this and say, how can I do this as best I can? How can I live this kind of life with my children? I know it's very difficult in the social structure that we happen to exist in, but we have to ask ourselves this question.

How can I get myself by degrees closer to this or how can I get to it right away? It's very important that we have a walk-along, talk-along philosophy of education that is father-directed and home-based and life-oriented and it covers all of the all of the day. So he teaches the next generation. That's a mark of this prophet. He teaches and he does it all the time.

Here's the seventh mark of this prophet. He makes a public display of the word of God, verses eight and nine. He says, 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. That means that this prophet who's a father, he is so bold that he wants the whole world to know that he belongs to God.

And this family belongs to God. And this house is governed by God. And when you walk in the gates, that's what you get. You get the knowledge of God. So this man is not a Secret Service Christian.

He is literally wearing, he's wearing his religion on his sleeve. You know, George Whitfield, that great evangelist of the Great Awakening said, God forbid that I would have more than a quarter of an hour before I begin to appeal to the soul of a man. In other words, I'm not going to be with someone more than 15 minutes. If I'm with them 15 minutes, I'm going to begin to appeal to their souls for the gospel, and we should be the same way. Moses is talking about an outward life of spreading the Gospel.

That you make a mark in your community. You live in a neighborhood, you live in a city, your house is there for a reason. It's a marked house. You know, I just read recently that the Obama administration has deployed, I think, 200, 000 workers to get a GPS reading on every doorstep in America. He wants to know where your doorstep is.

Well, when he gets there, what will he find? Will he find that this is a godly house? Because I suggest that someday he will get there and will he find someone who has the name of God breathing in that house? And when he walks up to that door, he knows it's a house that is owned by God. That there's a father in there who says, God is my governor.

He makes a public display of the Word of God. And then lastly, number eight, he communicates the meaning of life through the lens of history. He communicates the meaning of life through the lens of history. Verses 20 through 25 say it this, and when your son asks you in time to come saying, what is the meaning of the testimonies, the statutes, and the judgments which the Lord your God has commanded you. Then you shall say to your son, we were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.

And the Lord showed us signs and wonders before our eyes, great and severe against Egypt, Pharaoh and all his household. Then he brought us out from there that he might bring us in, to give us the land of which He swore to our fathers. And the Lord commanded us to observe all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God for our good always, that He might preserve us alive as it is this day. Then it will be righteousness for us if we are careful to observe all these commandments before the Lord our God as he has commanded us. Here we find a picture of a father who is a historian.

He looks back to times past, and he interprets the events of history in light of holy truth, and that's what a father must be. There are two great subjects that fathers must traffic in, theology and history. Those are the two musts. Then there are various callings and professions that men should pursue by virtue of the way that He has made them. But these two, theology and history, are the ones that fathers must major on first so that they can interpret all that has happened in the past in order to know how to live in the future and to see how God's Word applies to everything.

And so we have this Father. He's governed by the commandments and the statutes of the Lord. He believes His life is not His own. He has a transgenerational vision. He fulfills God's desire for fruitfulness and multiplication.

He treasures God above all the other treasures in this world. He treasures the Word of God by honoring it in His heart. And He teaches the next generation diligently, and He makes a public display of the Word of God, and He communicates the meaning of life to the next generation. Now, I want to make it very plain to us somehow how strikingly different this vision of fatherhood is than the vision that we're taught in this world. And I would just like to suggest that there's a divine pattern that's better, that's sweeter, and it does run so contrary to the ways of the world and many of the things that we've learned on our own and in our churches.

And in our churches. In the church, we have become content with an innovation That is almost the opposite of what we see in this passage of scripture. During the latter half of the 20th century, an innovative phenomenon, commonly called youth ministry, rapidly became part of regular church life. And the result was the growth of what we would call age-specific ministry to disciple youths, and to teach them how to mature as believers. We thought that we should aggregate children in their own age categories to do that.

And I hope that we can see, though, that the Bible is pro-youth ministry, that the Bible does have something to say about youth ministry. We should be very passionate about youth ministry. But it should be biblical youth ministry and not the kind of youth ministry that this world has served up to us. I want to give you 14 reasons why we should reject this modern, programmatic, regular, comprehensive, age-segregated ministry to youth. That is so comprehensively used in the church today.

I'm gonna give you 14 reasons why we should reject it. It's not demonstrated anywhere in scripture, number one. Number two, it's not identified in scripture anywhere as a godly practice. Number three, it's not illustrated or legitimized by a biblical story or a biblical principle. Number four, it's contrary to the patterns of New Testament church life, which from all we can gather was always age-integrated.

Same with the Old Testament. The gatherings of the people of God were always age-integrated. And all you have to do is just look through and you'll see them. Number five, it's not commanded by God. Number six, it subverts the role of fathers as the primary disciplers of youth.

Number seven, it turns the hearts of children away from their fathers and toward their peers and youth leaders. Number eight, it places youth in peer environments for discipleship rather than age-integrated environments, as is the whole pattern of scripture. Number nine, it leads churches to create offices in the church which are not ordained by God. As far as I understand scripture, there are two offices in the church, elder and deacon. Youth pastor, singles pastor, children's pastor are not offices of the church.

Number 10, it separates youth from adults and adult instruction, which is contrary to the commands of scripture. Number 11, it's a new and unnecessary creation. Number 12, it's based on a false philosophy of youth. Number 13, it divides the generations by creating youth culture. Number 14, it produces bad fruit.

So what am I saying here? Let's understand something that God has given, a paradigm for youth ministry. And it begins with fathers in the homes. When they sit in their house, when they walk by the way, when they lie down, and when they rise up. And so when God puts a governor in a home to be a prophet there.

He does desire him to continue that ministry and that as he does it, he sees his sons and his grandsons and his great-grandsons until the day he dies, and he does it all the days of his life. I pray that God would raise up a mighty army of fathers who do this and who are willing to defy the patterns of this world and to be obedient to the Lord Jesus Christ. Would you pray with me? Lord, I pray that you would help us to do these wonderful things, these very sweet things, to be a mouthpiece of the goodness of our great Father. In Jesus' name, amen.

Thank you. Thank you.