What does a Christian family look like? While many aspects will vary from family to family, there should be at least one constant virtue that appears in all Christian families: they are families that worship God. While all of life is worship in a sense, there are particular times of dedicated worship in three settings; privately, as a family, and corporately with the gathered church. A godly father is to be a role model of worship and must be diligent to impress on his children - with the help of the Holy Spirit - the importance and privilege of true heartfelt worship in each setting.

Turn with me please to Psalm 128. Psalm 128, Luther called this the family Psalm. You know in Hebrew when something is repeated twice, that That's the theme of the psalm in Hebrew poetry. And so you'll notice that verses 1 and 4 are basically repeated twice. So the theme of the psalm is blesses the man that fears the Lord.

And you remember this morning we said the fear of God is to esteem the smiles of God, to be more than the smiles of man, and to fear the frowns of God more than the frowns of men. As I read this psalm, I want you to think about all the different ways in which the man who fears the Lord is blessed with his wife and family. Well, I'll mention them as I read it. How's that? Blessed is everyone that feareth the Lord that walketh in his ways.

So that's the theme. For thou shalt eat the labor of thine hands. You'll be blessed in your work and you fear the Lord. Happiest shalt thou be and it shall be well with thee. Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house, thy children like olive plants round about thy table.

So you'll be blessed in your family and happy with your wife and children. And the olive plant, you know, has a big stalk on it. And then little seedlings drop from the olive plant and the little olive plants that spring up look like the big olive plant. So your children are going to look like you, sound like you, act like you most likely. That's a scary thought sometimes, but it's an important thought.

Behold, here comes the theme again, that thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the Lord. And then here it comes. The Lord shall bless thee out of Zion, and thou shalt see the good of Jerusalem all the days of thy life. You'll be blessed in your worship, blessed in church. Yea thou shalt see thy children's children, be blessed with grandchildren, and peace upon Israel.

This is God's norm. He'll give peace in your family, he'll bless you in your work, bless you in your marriage, bless you in your family. Blessed is the man that fears the Lord, But you will be blessed in all these areas when you fear the Lord because worship is at the center of the fear of God. And so it's critical that you teach your children to worship the living God. Now the Holy Spirit alone can do that, of course, in truth.

But you, fathers, with the help of your wives, you are called with all that is within you to seek to rear your children in private worship, in family worship, and in public worship, in the fear of God, teaching them to worship in these three important domains. Of course you're to teach them to worship in a whole way of life, but this afternoon I want to just focus with you on these three thoughts, teaching your family to worship privately, your children, teaching your children to worship in the family, and teaching your children to worship in the house of God. So let's turn to prayer. Great God of heaven, we thank you so much for this time together again, And we ask thy benediction as we take up this central theme for life, for true life. Lord, there could not be a more important subject in parenting than this subject.

And so we pray, be in our midst in this hour, give rapt attention, give good note-taking, give fruit afterward that people may, every family here may take these things to heart and that thou wouldst transform families, change families, that the principles of worship may be central to worship the living God as broken sinners, trusting in a broken savior for a full and rich salvation. So be with us in these moments, we pray, and fill us with thy spirit as we speak, as we listen, and let it be a very, very important hour in our lives. We pray In Jesus' name, amen. Well, this morning, you heard me give a definition of worship, which I gathered piece by piece from various Puritan books, And I'm going to repeat that definition now because it's the foundation, the most important foundation of parenting. This is your goal, fathers, mothers, to try with God's help, leaning on the Spirit, to inculcate this in your children.

Here it is. To worship God, now think of your children now, is to bow down before his majestic glory. And in spirit and truth, to bring him in and through Jesus Christ, and according to the Scriptures, the honor and praise that belong exclusively to him. So how do you teach that to your children in private worship? That's our first thought, private worship.

Let me give you seven basic guidelines that may assist you. And each one begins with the letter P, so that will be helpful for you from memory. First, impress upon your children the priority, the priority of private worship. John Owen once said, a man is what he is, and you could say a boy or a girl is what he or she is, in private alone with God, in worship, no more and no less. That's who you really are.

When you're all alone with God, in private worship. That shows the real man, the real boy, the real teenager, the real girl. And Jesus said, and we must teach our children this, But thou when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, when thou hast shut thy door, Pray to thy Father which is in secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly. So we must teach our children that they need their private times with God. They must not be prayerless in private.

Closet, of course, here, boys and girls, means an inner room, a place somewhere in your house where your words cannot be publicly heard, but where you pour out your heart to God. You can do all kinds of edifying family worship and look very good on Sunday in public worship, but if you don't know what it means to privately worship before God, you don't know what true worship is. Matthew Henry said, counterfeit piety can never bring in true pleasure. He that acts upon a stage does not experience true worship. Experiential worship begins alone with God.

Teach your children that. Number two, explain to your children that personal relationship, personal relationship is the heart of private worship. Teach them they must be born again. They must repent and believe in Christ alone for salvation. And having been born again, God commands us to love him with all our hearts.

And private communication is the way of love. Can you have a good relationship with your wife if you spend only five minutes a day with her? It's impossible. And can you have a good relationship with your wife if you never talk to her alone, You always are in front of other people? Impossible.

You must have time alone with her, time of communion alone with her. And so, we must teach our children you need time alone with God. Personal time. Time when you behold the beauty of the Lord in private. Time when you read his word, when he speaks to you, and you speak back to him in prayer.

Communication's a two-way street. You need private time with God, through the word and through prayer, to have this two-way communication. The Puritan Thomas Manton said, if we have a love to God, we cannot keep long out of God's company, but we will be with him, pouring out our hearts to him. Teach your children that. Number three, motivate them with the privilege of private worship, the privilege of private worship.

Remember, Jesus said, thy father would seeth in secret. There's intimacy, there's beautiful intimacy in those words. To be sure, God remains our father, which is in heaven. He's our King in heaven. And yet through that kingly royal heavenly presence we enter into sacred intimacy with God.

William Gooch said, By prayer we enter into the court where God sits in his majesty and we present ourselves before him, speaking to him as it were face to face. What a privilege private worship is. You know, William Grenell said, "'Tis a mercy to pray, though you never receive the mercy prayed for." Just to have a place to go. To have the ear of God. To have communion.

To have the privilege of private worship. Fourth, teach them the principles of private worship. By principles I mean the ABCs of how to do it. The disciples came and asked Jesus, Lord teach us how to pray. And He did.

And we must teach our children as well. You could use the Lord's Prayer as a model, for example. You know, every petition in the Lord's Prayer is a model of how we ought to pray in different areas of our lives. So you come to God with reverence. You teach your children to come always with reverence and yet personal warmth, our Father, which art in heaven.

You then teach them to move from meditation about God to intercession to God, that He would be glorified in your life, in their life, and that He would work submission in them and in you. Hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. And then you tell them to pray for physical and spiritual needs for themselves, for their family, for the church. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Then you tell them to close their prayers with extolling God's attributes. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. But also you teach them the concrete practical things, how to read the Bible. I just wrote a little booklet that's coming out in a few months called How Should Teenagers Read the Bible? We need practical things like that to teach our children.

How do you get the most out of reading the Bible? How do you read good books, orthodox Christian literature? How do you lay aside time to do that? Well, these are things that you need to teach your children when they're very young, as soon as they can read. They go to bed at night, just kind of lay beside them when they're eight, nine years old or younger and talk to them and say, so what book of the Bible are you in, my son, in your private devotions now?

What Christian book are you reading and what are you getting out of it? And share with me what's going on in your mind about this book that you're reading. I have a colleague in Grand Rapids and he just gave a sermon on private worship and these are the guidelines he gave to children in worship. He said, take your guilt to God, turn off your phone and avoid the computer. Don't share daily devotions on social media, just time alone with God.

Establish a regular time and place. Get to bed early in the evening so you have time to worship God in the morning, build a systematic routine, don't fall prey to the digital deluge where you always got to be doing something digitally, start small, read easier parts together with more difficult parts of the Bible, start a short prayer list to pray for your friends, sing and speak out loud so your mind doesn't wander, turn your songs and Bible readings into prayer, Learn from set prayers, perhaps journal spiritually. Don't end your devotional life just with devotions. Fight formality and self-righteousness and learn how to biblically meditate. You see, Here's a field of what, 18 things or so, that you can teach your children one by one how to do each one of these things.

Teach them the principles of private worship. Five, live before them a pattern of private worship. They need to see your own example. They need to see like the disciples saw Jesus, Luke 11 says, praying in a certain place. It wasn't the first time they saw him praying.

Luke records five instances when The disciples saw Jesus praying in a solitary place. Fathers and mothers, does your family ever come across you by accident, as it were, and see you on your knees praying to God? You've got to be an example, you see. You can't be teaching them all the time how to do it when they don't see you doing it. The secret of home rule is self-rule.

Be yourselves, first of all, what you want your children to be. And sixth, support your children with periodic encouragements in private worship. A very good thing to do is to say to your children, Do you have any challenges in private worship? Are you having some frustrations? How's it going?

Encourage them. Encourage them to get good books. There's lots of vendors here, so you got no excuses here. When I was, when our children were younger, now, we've kind of dropped that now because they've got so many books, but when they had a job and they would go out and make money when they were 12, 13 years old, we taught them the importance of reading by saying to them, you need to put 5% of all your income into a book fund. And when they got $20, $30, $40, $50 from that 5%, I'd walk over to the bookstore with them and I'd spend some time, an hour with them, picking out books.

And they got excited and I would get excited. And they'd come home with books. And, well, Dad's so excited about these books, they must be really good to read, and they would read them. In fact, we had one child that would just have a pile of books beside her chair. We called it Esther's Chair.

She'd just read there constantly. We had to actually pull her out of the chair. She'd finish one book and she'd set it down and she'd pick up another. It was great. And today she benefits from that tremendously.

Number seven, employ your prayers to seek God's grace for their private worship. When's the last time you knelt down beside your bed with your wife, hand in hand, on your knees, cried out to God in your nightly prayers, and prayed for your children who just had private worship maybe an hour before you, or maybe in my case, sometimes the children go to bed after us, maybe still to come. Pray for their private worship. William Gunnell said, prayer is the creatures act but the spirit's gift. Pray that the Holy Spirit will give them the gift of private worship.

So those are seven guidelines for teaching your children private worship. Now, how do you teach your children to worship God in family worship? Well, I spoke a bit about family worship, I believe, last year here, so I don't want to duplicate that. But what I want to do here is take the four parts of family worship, Bible reading, family instruction by the father from the Bible reading, prayer and singing, and show you how you can train your children, with God's help, to worship God in family worship. So first of all, for the reading of scripture, when you teach your children that you have a plan how to read scripture, you're actually teaching them how to worship God by working systematically through the Bible themselves.

And you're showing them how to do it one day when they have families on their own as well. You're teaching them, as J.C. Ryle said, a whole Bible makes a whole Christian. And when you involve the whole family in the Bible reading, have them all share the reading, you are saying to each child, the reading of scripture is so important. Everyone needs to do that on their own before the living God.

And again, you're modeling for their future family worship. You're also training them at the same time to worship God with reverence, because if they read too fast or they read too irreverently, you can gently stop and lovingly guide them and say, wait a minute, my son, we're reading to the living God. Please read a bit slower. Please read with reverence in your voice. And you're teaching them to worship God by the very way they're reading the Bible.

And what about biblical instruction? Well, you're teaching them at their level, and I think last year I explained that to you, how to do that, how to ask questions to each child at that child's level. To be plain in meaning, in dialogue, one on one. And when you do that, you're teaching them indirectly, aren't you, That real communication with God, even in a group of people, takes place one on one. God deals with our souls and we respond to him.

When you encourage family dialogue, you're teaching how God's people in the house of God commune with God. You know, family worship is actually preparation for public worship. When you teach your children how to sit still in family worship, you're preparing them to sit still in the house of God. And when you're relevant in application, when you share with your children about how various Bible texts have meant a lot to you, have spoken to your soul. Well, you're teaching them that the Word of God is relevant today.

They're going to look in their lives for times where particular texts mean a great deal to them. If we read Psalm 27 and we come across verse 14, wait on the Lord I say, be of good courage. Wait I say on the Lord. I'm going to tell my children." That's the text in which we got married. And the pastor picked out that text because I shared with the pastor how much that text meant for me in a waiting period in my life.

Little things like that. And when you're affectionate in family worship, as you teach your children, you're teaching them so much. When you come as a father friend to them, when you take the little ones on your lap and you talk to them about heaven and hell and truth and who God is and who Christ is and what their heart is like. And you do it with love and you do it eyeball to eyeball and you do it in the spirit of the writer to the Proverbs. My son, my son, come near to me.

I will teach you the understanding, the wisdom, the knowledge of the Lord. You're teaching them that God is affectionate. You're teaching them that when they worship God, they may come to one who's a father and a true friend in heaven. And when you teach them, with tears, as you teach them and tell them, I cannot miss any of you in heaven one day. You need to be born again, children.

You need to come to repentance and faith, children. You're embedding in them principles of worship they'll never forget their entire lifetime. And then when you go to pray, and you remember all their needs, and you make sure you talk to your wife ahead of time and say, is anyone sick today, or anyone have a big school assignment tomorrow, or a homeschooling assignment, a test or something, and you bring that into your prayers, you're teaching your children to worship God by acknowledging him in all their ways. Ways big, ways small. What an important lesson that is.

And when you model the Acts formula, adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication, you're teaching them how to pray and to worship God as well. I mean, you take those little ones on your lap and you whisper words into their ears to pray, and then gradually, as they get older, you, four or five years old, you ask them to start out their prayer and you help them when they get stuck. You're just training them, training them to worship God in prayer. You realize how many people, as they grow into adulthood, even true Christians have a hard time framing words to pray and even if the Holy Spirit does not work in them savingly until they get older, at least they'll be able to utter words with a certain amount of alacrity and a certain amount of ease and freedom because you've trained them in prayer. And when you train them to sing, to sing heartily, to sing with feeling, to sing pure songs with you, you're training them for singing in the house of God.

You're training them for one day God helping them, the heavenly choir to worship God forever. Now what about teaching your family to worship publicly at the house of God? Well, there's lots of things here, Teaching them to sing, but you're doing that in family worship, so that should carry over in the house of God. You're teaching them to sit reverently, to listen attentively. That you already teach in family worship.

So let me do what I did this morning. Let's focus on the most important aspect of the content of the sermon and say, how do you teach your children to prepare for the sermon, to listen to the sermon, and to grow from the sermon afterward. So let's, my last point, I want to break it down into these three categories, preparing for the preached word, hearing the preached word, responding to the preached word. And this is the part where most parents struggle. I mean, my children were six, seven, and nine years old.

I still remember the frustration I had. I had them taking notes, but so often The notes weren't that good, and I felt I wasn't getting across. But you know, you just persevere. And before you know it, they're getting more out of sermons sometimes than you are, and their memory's better. But you persevere.

Now very few people listen well to sermons. John Calvin, more than any other writer I know in past church history, taught his people how to listen to sermons. In the sermons he preached. But he often complained. He said if the same sermon is preached to 100 people, 20 receive it with a ready obedience of faith, while the rest hold it valueless or laugh or hiss or loathe it.

One time, he must have had a very bad day, he said, scarce out of one out of 100 really listen to a sermon. Well, you see, Calvin had such a high regard for preaching that he found it incumbent upon him to teach his people how to listen. And that's how we should be to our children. You know, Calvin said there's really two ministers in every sermon. There's the external minister who stands behind the pulpit and preaches, and there's the internal minister, the Holy Spirit, who takes the preached word and brings it home to the heart.

So how do you do this? How do you prepare your children for the preach word? Well number one, you're already praying in your family worship on Saturday, maybe even on Friday already, for the preacher and for the coming Sabbath. And as you get to go to the house of prayer. What a glorious thing that is.

When you wake your children up on Sunday morning, say to them as you wake them up, good morning, it's our favorite day, we get to worship the living God today in his house. I've been doing that to my kids for 20 years. I refuse to stop. Every Sunday morning they hear me say that. It's our favorite day today.

We get to worship in the house of God today. God is going to speak to us today. What a day. What an opportunity. So, you dress your family, figuratively, with prayer, and with a sense of importance of what we're about to engage in.

And you tell your children, there are different kinds of hearers. Jesus mentions four kinds of hearers in the parable of the sower, and only one kind hears the sermon properly. My dear son, my dear daughter, I am earnest, I will not rest until you are that kind of good hearer, that the word of God may fall into good soil in your heart. And so pray that you and your children will come to God's house as needy sinners, purging your hearts of carnal lusts and clinging to Christ for the cleansing power of his blood. Pray for the sanctifying presence of God in Christ, for true communion with God in mind and soul.

And then number two, stress with your dear ones the need for every family member to come with a hearty appetite for the word of God. Puritan said a good appetite promotes good digestion and growth. Peter said, as newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word that you may grow thereby. Solomon said, Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God, and be more ready to hear than to offer the sacrifice of fools. So what does it mean to have a good appetite?

Well, it means having a tender, teachable heart for the first thing. It means coming to the house of God with the Spirit, Lord, what do you want me to do? You see, it's foolish to expect a blessing if we come as families to worship with hardened, unprepared, or worldly-minded hearts. And so, follow the advice of the Puritans. They began to get ready for Sunday worship, not Sunday morning.

They didn't drop into their pew one minute before the service began. They said, wow, I'm here. They started on Saturday night. They had an extra long family worship, used on Saturday evening to prepare for the Sabbath. They got in earlier on Saturday evening if they had to go out, so they had time for private devotions to prepare for the Sabbath.

One Puritan put it this way. He said, it's like baking bread. You know, they made their bread, the Puritans, on Saturday evening. They wanted to avoid as much work as possible on the Sabbath, for one thing, but they put the bread in the, above the fire, so it was nice and warm on Sunday morning. And so the Puritan said something like this.

This is a paraphrase. Warm your heart on Saturday evening so that when you wake up on Sunday morning, it's warm and ready for worship. Three, discipline yourself and encourage your children to meditate on the importance of the preached word when you enter the house of God. You need to say things like this, dear children, today the high and holy triune God of heaven and earth is willing to meet with you and He's going to speak a message to you, directly to you, to your brothers and sisters, to your mom and dad. We're going up as a family to the house of God.

The voice is on earth, but the speaker is in heaven. And I hope, children, that today you'll see no man save Jesus only. God's ambassador is going to bring you His Word. Children, don't focus on the minister, but focus on the Word of God he brings. So teach your children that every sermon counts for eternity.

Salvation comes through faith, and faith comes through hearing God's word, Romans 10. So every sermon is a matter of life and death. The preached gospel will either lift us to heaven or it'll cast us down into hell. It will draw us with the cords of love or it will leave us in the snares of unbelief. Puritan David Clarkson said this, the Nearer to heaven any are lifted up by gospel preaching.

The Lord will they sink into hell if they do not heed it. Take heed therefore, Jesus said, how ye hear. That is what we need to tell our children. No wonder the Puritans called the Sabbath the market day of the soul. You see, once a week they went to the market.

They got all the food they needed for the week to come. And So they said once a day, we go to the house of God, and we get the spiritual food we need for the week to come. How critical that is. And we need to teach our children to eat good food, just like you've got to teach them over and over again in the home, don't you? Eat your vegetables, eat the good food.

Eat the fruit, not the sweets. You know, there was once a minister by the name of Roland Hill. He was a friend of Charles Spurgeon, 19th century, and he was very frustrated. It seemed like his ministry wasn't successful for a while. He saw a farmer walking by his house one day, a pig farmer, and the pigs followed him straight to the slaughterhouse.

And he came out of the slaughterhouse without his pigs, and Roland Hill walks up to him and says, how in the world do you get pigs to follow you into the slaughterhouse to their death and I can't get sinners to follow me unto life eternal? Well the farmer said, it's easy. Didn't you see what I was doing when I walked along? I was just dropping a few crumbs of pig's food all the way along. And for a few crumbs, they followed me to their death.

Don't you young people, you children, don't you for the pig's food of this world follow Satan to your death. Seek the Lord. Serve the Lord. Go to the house of God believing God is going to speak to you and you need to do the sermon. Number four, remind your family periodically that as they enter the house of God they're entering a battleground, A battleground.

This is how you should talk to your children. Dear children, there are all kinds of people that are coming to church. You may look at them, you may have your mind wander when you look at them, there may be other enemies that will oppose your listening, internal enemies that will distract you by worldly cares, by a wandering mind, by lust of your flesh, by cold hearts, by critical spirits. Externally, You can be distracted by the temperature, by the weather, by the behavior or dress of others, by noises, by people moving about. But know this, when you get distracted, Satan's rejoicing.

Satan opposes your listening to God's word with might and main. He tries to disturb you before the sermon begins, to distract you while the sermon's being preached, and to dismiss the sermon from your mind as soon as it's finished. Like a bird plucking away the seed, Satan attempts to snatch the word from your mind and heart. And you children need to say to Satan, be gone Satan. Don't tempt me.

I'm going to listen to this word because it's a matter of life and death. Samuel honestly appeared and said we should rebuke Satan when he tempts us not to listen in the house of God by saying this to him, Satan I will parley with thee no longer. If others neglect salvation, must I? Will their missing of salvation relieve me for the loss of mine? Through Christ I defy you, and I will listen to the word of God.

Number five, teach your children to pray that they may come with a loving, expectant faith, with a reverential fear of God, a reverential delight in God, and a reverential expectation from God. There's all kinds of text you can use here, especially from Psalm 119. Thy word is very pure, therefore thy servant loves it. Again, I love thy testimonies exceedingly. Again, I love them more than gold.

You see, David loves the beauty of God as he meets with God in the house of God. One thing have I desired of the Lord that I will seek after, that I may behold the beauty of the Lord in the land of the living, all the days of my life, to inquire in his temple. So in all these ways, you prepare your child to worship in the house of God. And then, secondly, you teach them to receive the preached word. You talk to them about listening with an understanding and a tender conscience.

Talk to them about the different kinds of listeners, about the stony-hearted, superficial listener. The word falls on a hard path, a hard heart, and it's gone. Talk to them about the easily impressed but resistant listener who's like rocky ground. A plant begins to spring up, but it soon withers and dies because it lacks sufficient nutrients. Talk to them about the half-hearted, distracted listener who's like thorn-ridden soil and the cares of this world choke it all up.

And then tell them about the fruitful listener who applies the gospel teaching to his own conscience and his own life also throughout the week. And then second, say to your family, listen attentively to the preached word. Luke 19, 48, describes people who are very attentive to Christ. The text says in the Greek, they hung upon him. They hung upon him, hearing.

Lydia showed such an open heart when she attended or turned her mind to the things spoken by Paul, Acts 16, 14. We named our youngest child Lydia, so I could tell her that when she grew up. I want you to be like Lydia, Lydia. I want you to attend to the word of God, to turn your mind to the things spoken by the servants of God. You see, we're not called to be spectators in the house of God, but participants.

The minister is not the only one working during a sermon. Good listening is hard work. It involves worshiping God continuously. You know what Calvin said? It's gotta be a bit of an exaggeration, but it's powerful.

He said, everyone should be as involved in the sermon as the minister himself. That's a tall order. We're to attend, attend to his word. You know the word attend derives from two Latin words? The first means to, and the second means tendo, which means to stretch or bend, from which we get tended, a sinew that stretches.

We're to stretch our minds as we listen. How does God want me to be different because of this sermon? Teach your children that. God wants us to change through every sermon. And then, three, dear family, listen with submissive faith.

As you listen, bow under what you hear. As long as it's biblical, receive with meekness the engrafted words, says James. This is a meekness that can change your life. This is a meekness that can make you grow spiritually. And if faith isn't there, everything isn't there.

You know, my wife made some soup the other day. She's a great cook, by the way, but she missed an ingredient, and it was flat. She asked me what I thought of the soup before she tasted it. Oh, boy. I said to her what she says to me when one of my sermons flop.

She's very gracious, she's very gracious, too gracious. She says to me, well, they can't all be your best. So what do you think of the soup? Well, not every meal can be your best, honey. But if you miss faith, you miss everything.

No matter how good you look or how good you act. Children, you need faith. You need to believe the word. You need to embrace it. You need to drink it in.

What's the difference between historical faith and saving faith? Well, there were once two men that sat down to have some pizza, but one man, I mean they got fed pizza, but one man couldn't have it because he had stomach cancer. But he was a nutritionist. He knew everything about the pizza, but he couldn't taste it. The other man knew very little.

He knew something about the pizza. He couldn't recognize pepperoni and cheese, and he ate it. Now who really knew the pizza? Well, the one, of course, who ate it. And so Jeremiah said, thy word I did eat, and it was sweeter than honey in a honeycomb.

I digested it. I internalized it by faith. That's the way to listen to a sermon. Number four, dear family, please listen with humility and with serious self-examination. You know, we all want to shy away from self-examination, but the Lord has ways of bringing us back, and we ought to be open for it.

We ought to be open, not run from his gymnasium in which he trains us, exercised under his word, but we ought to say, Lord, Please train me, please examine me. Say with the Psalms in Psalm 139, search me and know my ways and try me and know my thoughts. If there's any evil way in me, root it out and lead me in the way everlasting. Too often we think of other people in church instead of ourselves. We're like Peter, Lord, what shall this man do?

And Jesus says to us, what is that to thee? Follow thou me. Examine yourself. Tell your children that. Now, the last thing I want to talk about is practicing the preached word.

You gotta teach your children how to come to the word, how to listen to the word, and now how to practice the word. I've got four or five things here as well. Number one, strive to retain and pray over what you've heard, children. Hebrews 2, 1 says, and you can use this text for your children, we ought to give earnest heed to the things which you've heard, "'lest at any time we should let them slip.'" Puritan Thomas Watson said, "'We should not let sermons run through our minds "'like water through a sieve. "'Our memories should be like the chest of the ark "'where the law was put.'" Joseph Aline and other Puritans said, "'One way to remember the preached word is to come from your knees to the sermon and come from the sermon back to your knees.

How many of us, even some preachers, we get back home and we don't go to our knees. We pray ahead of time, though we forget to pray behind time. I had an elderly woman in my congregation. She actually worked for me for 15 years. She was just a wonderful, God-fearing woman.

Those days, I preached three sermons on Sunday. She'd come to all three services, so she'd listen to about 180 minutes of preaching on a Sunday, and she'd be writing the whole time, just taking notes, notes, notes, notes. Then she said to me, what I do with all those notes, I never look up at you while you preach, I'm just taking notes. And Sunday night, I get down on my knees beside my bed, I open my notebook pad, And I pray my way through all my notes. Oh, what a way to listen.

What a way to listen. And she said to me, many times, most of the time, I get more of the Sunday nighttime alone with God than I do from the three sermons in the house of God. Number two, familiarize yourself with the truths you've heard. When you come home from church, a very good exercise for you as a parent, it's good for your soul too, is to repeat the sermon to your youngest children. That will tell you whether you've grasped it, but it will also help them to grasp it.

Ask them questions. If they know that you're gonna talk about the sermon afterward, They'll listen better themselves. So encourage your children to take notes of the sermon. My wife and I trained our children from the time they're six years old to take notes and you say, well, they can't even write yet. Well, they write a few words And my wife would make a few dotted lines, G, O, D.

And then the children would, even when they're three or four years old, they'd fill in the dots, God, et cetera. And they'd come home with a few notes. And the three-year-old would show me these simple notes. And Sunday night, as we gather around for snacks, I'd say, okay, children, bring me all your notes. Let's talk about the sermons.

And sit on my lap, and we'd talk about the sermons. You can also talk about those sermons in family worship times throughout the week. Try to find a connection from this family worship lesson to the sermon they heard last Sunday. That teaches them The sermon isn't over when it's over. The sermon, and that's my third point, must be put into action.

You've probably heard the story in Scotland of the Scottish man who came home from work, I'm sorry, came home from a sermon a bit earlier than his wife expected him. She was sick. She heard the back door. She said, Donald, is the sermon done already? No, my dear, he said.

It's been said it has yet to be done. James 1, 22, Be you doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. You see, too many people do just what James said. They listen to a sermon, they look at themselves in the mirror of the word, they say, oh wow, I've really got to change, this is bad news. I've really got to do this or I've got to do that.

They leave church convicted, on Monday morning they abandon everything, They go right back into the world. And finally, teach your children how to be thankful for the sermons they've received. One of the most wonderful things about this conference is how many children walk up to you as a speaker afterward and thank you for the sermon. A lot of you parents are doing this very well. It's amazing.

Eight-year-old, ten-year-old children thanking you for preaching. Praise God for that. Keep doing that. Teach your children to be thankful for the word of God when they hear it. Well, that leads me to this conclusion.

Private worship, family worship, church worship. These are the three dimensions of worship in which every Christian father and mother want to see their children flourish. Help them to do that and look to God for blessing. The Spirit can bless all your efforts. You know there are no shortcuts to parenting.

Parenting is a long, hard process that finds partial respite when your children leave home and establish their own families, but doesn't find Complete respite until death. Teaching your family to worship is not a sprint. It's a marathon. But you don't engage in this marathon alone. In fact, you can't do it alone.

The Lord Jesus says, Abide in me and I will abide in you. Lean upon Jesus. You will often fail, but hide yourself in his blood and righteousness, and persevere on and say, forgive me, Lord, for not making the most of that opportunity today. And then go forward and talk to your children again. And lead your family with optimism, with eternal hope, and with a sense of the beauty of God you heard about last night.

And remember, don't ever be satisfied to raise your kids to be merely outwardly obedient, to be outwardly good church pewwarming members. Your ultimate goal is for your family to gather at the throne of God in eternal sin-free worship. And keep that expectation in front of you. So teach them with love and be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord and your labor will not be in vain in the Lord. Now I want to close with an illustration.

And I think I gave you this illustration last year, but you need to hear it once more. It's the illustration of John Paton. I want to say to you that everything I just spoke to you about in these 50 minutes or so, if you forget everything I said and you remember this illustration, your time has been well spent. Because this illustration is a summary of the impact of teaching your children to worship God in love. You see, to teach them to worship God forges a real love, a real sense of trust between a father and a child.

And that's what you see in this illustration. John Payton was about to leave home, and he says this. My dear father walked with me for the first six miles of the way when I went to university. His counsels and tears and heavenly conversation are as fresh as it were yesterday. Tears are on my cheeks as freely now as then whenever memory steals me away to the scene.

For the last half mile we walked almost in silence. My father, as was his custom, carrying hat and hand, his lips kept moving in prayer for me. His tears fell fast when our eyes met each other and looks for which all speech was vain. We halted on reaching the appointed parting place. He firmly grasped my hand, and for a moment in silence, solemnly, affectionately, he said, God bless you, my son.

Your father's God bless you and keep you from evil. Unable to say more, his lips kept moving in silent prayer. We embraced in tears and we parted. I ran as fast as I could and went about to turn a corner in the road where he would lose sight of me. I looked back.

I saw him still standing with head uncovered where I left him gazing after me. Waving my hat goodbye, I was around the corner, but my heart was too full, too sore to carry me further. I darted into a side road. I wept there for a while. And then I cautiously climbed the dike to see if he yet stood there and caught a glimpse of him climbing the dike, looking for me.

He had not seen me, and after he gazed in my direction for a while, he got down and set his face towards home and began to return, his head still uncovered, his heart still rising in prayer for me, I'm sure. I watched through blinding tears until his form faded from my gaze and then, hastening on my way, I vowed deeply and often by the help of God to live and act so as never to grieve and dishonor such a worshiping father and mother as he had given me. The appearance of my father when we parted, his advice, tears, prayers, the road, the dike, the climbing up on it, the walking away, head uncovered, have often all through life risen vividly before my mind, and do so now while I am writing as if it was an hour ago. And in my earlier years particularly, when exposed to many temptations, his parting form would often rise before me like that of a guardian angel. It is no Pharisaism, but deep gratitude which makes me here testify that the memory of that scene has not only helped me by God's grace to keep me from pure, from prevailing sins, but also stimulated me in all my studies that I might not fall short of his hopes, and in all my Christian duties, I might faithfully follow his shining example.

How much my father's prayers at this time impressed me, I can never explain, nor can any stranger understand what his worship did to me. When on his knees and all of us kneeling around him in family worship, he poured out his whole soul and tears for the conversion of the heathen world to the service of Jesus and for every family personal need. We would all feel as if we were in the presence of the living savior and we learned to love and to know him as our divine friend when we were children. And as we would rise from our knees, I used to look at the light on my father's face and wish I were like him in spirit, hoping that in answer to his prayers, I might be privileged to carry the gospel to the heathen world in some way. My dear friends, it's no coincidence that John Paton carried the gospel to cannibals.

And no coincidence that he had the strength when his wife died and his child died, she dying in childbirth, and he had to bury them both and then sit on their graves so the cannibals would dig up and eat their bodies. And While he was sitting there, a cannibal went and burned down his home, and he had nothing left in all the world, and spent that night in a tree to escape from the cannibals. It's no coincidence that he says in that tree, having no thing and no person dear or near to him in his life that it was as if God would cast in golden capital letters across the sky, lo, I am with you all the way even to the end of the world. And Peyton could say in that tree, I worshiped God. Let's pray.

Great God of heaven, we thank you so much for the gift of worship. We pray, give us diligence and perseverance to teach our children how to worship thee, an old spirit of God, do bless it, in private worship, family worship, in public worship, that they may worship thee in spirit and in truth, and that we may be the happy recipients that may one day say, I have no greater joy than this, to see all my children worship and walk in the truth. We ask all this in Jesus' name, amen. Just a two minute word again on books because I can't waste an opportunity like this. There are three books that you'll find in a series, Family Worship, that expands on what I've just said, and Bringing the Gospel to Covenant Children, How to Talk to Your Children, this book is all about that, and The Family at Church.

This is a more expansive view of the last part of my talk, how to get your children to listen to sermons and how to attend prayer meetings. We're going to give a special, all three books for $10. All three books for $10, Family Worship, Talking to Your Children, and The Family at Church. And then there's also this book, which enlarges more on these things, called Parenting by God's Promises, a $20 book, a hardback book, which you can have for $10. That's Parenting by God's Promises.

Now, some of you have been asking about how can you start reading the Puritans? And we've been doing a series of books through different editors of short Puritan titles, about 100 pages, and they're edited so that no content is changed, but They read like they were written yesterday. So I recommend, here's where you start. There's a series of four here, and we're having a special today of $5 each. The Fading of the Flesh and the Flourishing of Faith by George Swinok.

Stop Loving the World by William Greenhill. That's pretty powerful. Contentment, Prosperity and God's Glory, Jeremiah Burrows, that is how to use your money for God's glory. And Triumphing Over Sinful Fear by John Flavell. And then finally, I want to recommend this brand new book to you came out this past week, The Holy Spirit and Reformed Spirituality.

This is a book about different aspects of the ministry of the Holy Spirit working true worship into our lives. Thank you very much and God bless you all.