In this audio message, Scott Brown discusses the topic of discipleship within the Church. He provides six steps to recover the design for discipling the next generation that is laid out in Scripture. In recent years, we have wandered away from what the clear commands and precepts of Scripture dictate. This message breaks down what Scripture commands and what biblical discipleship should look like today.

Romans 12:2 (NKJV) - "And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God."

Recovering the beautiful design of God for the discipleship of the next generation in the church, you know, what's my hope? My hope really, as we're together here in this next few minutes, is to really celebrate the majesty of God, the wisdom of God, in dealing with sinners and how He convicts them, how He draws them into His community of love. And then He provides for them a way for their sanctification, a way for their healing. And God's ways are so good. And you know, when it comes to God, it's a river of delight.

That's what the Bible says, that in His presence is fullness of joy, at his right hand are pleasures forevermore. Whenever we set aside the traditions of man and we seek the Lord, what we find is the happiness of the kingdom of heaven. And I want to talk about how that works today. Open your Bibles to Deuteronomy chapter 28. I'd like you to look at verses one through six, where you really see this blessed life that God has established for His people.

Here Moses, in the last month of his life, is instructing the children of Israel for how they ought to survive in the pagan nations of the world. And here's what he says, if you diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God, to observe carefully all His commandments which I command you today, that the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth, and all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, because you obey the voice of the Lord your God. Blessed shall you be in the city. Blessed shall you be in the country. Blessed shall be the fruit of your body, the produce of your ground, and the increase of your flocks.

Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Blessed shall you be when you come in. And blessed shall you be when you go out. If we proclaim anything today, we want to proclaim the goodness of the Lord. We want to proclaim how pleasant and good are His ways, that He can bless His people in the city, He can bless them in the country, but He only really blesses them when they humble themselves and they say, Lord, not my will, but Thine be done.

So I want to talk about the beautiful design of discipleship that you see in Scripture. I want to divide my time by talking about a number of issues. First, I want to just explain that design from Scripture. I want to tell you, secondly, kind of my story, the journey that I've been on and how we've come to advocate these principles. I'd like to talk about kind of how we got here historically.

And then I'd like to really detail this beautiful design and I wanna talk about how to recover it. I'm going to give you six steps to recovering that beautiful design. So that's where we're going. I'd like to also talk about how you define whether you're successful or not, and then really call us to consider a beautiful garden that God has set forth in his word for his people. Okay, so what does the Bible say about discipleship?

That's really the question that I want to try to answer. Are there any clear instructions? Are there commands to follow? Is there really a way, is there really one way, are there many ways to disciple the next generation? Well the answer to that is, well, there are many ways, but there are very, very specific ways that God has communicated in scripture.

And so I want to talk about that design of scripture. I also want to ask, is there a need for a change? Is this the time to change course from the way that we've been going in the last 150 years? And it's really difficult to miss the beauty of the design of God. God has designed the family and the church in such a way that He would bring them together in the family and in the church.

Let's talk about the church for a second. Imagine with me for a minute a church without a generation gap, where the whole family worships together, where you have marrieds and singles and old and young and rich and poor, whole families, broken families. The little child hears the singing of his father or his mother as he's in his arms there in the life of the church. This is a church where the biblical pattern of age-integrated discipleship has been recovered. Imagine with me for a minute churches like the church in Ephesus or the church in Colossae, where the leaders just assume that the children are there.

Leaders like the apostle Paul who said, husbands, love your wives. Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. Children, obey your parents in the Lord. For if you honor and obey your parents it'll go well with you imagine a church like that where it's just assumed that the littlest ones to the oldest ones are there in the meeting of the church or Imagine a church where fathers and mothers are daily fulfilling their responsibility to teach their children the Word of God in their homes. Where six days a week, that's what they do.

Their intent is to fill their households with the glory of God through His Word. Imagine a church where the excesses of youth culture are gone and you don't see them. And where the teenagers are growing wiser. Why? Because they're walking with the wise.

Because 13 year olds aren't discipling 13 year olds. Where the older teach the younger. Imagine a church like that. Imagine a church where every fatherless boy and every fatherless girl worships and serves right alongside, walking beside other mature saints of God to teach them the way in which they should go. Every fatherless boy has fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters in the Lord.

Imagine a church where the groups of all ages talk together and not just clumping with age segregated, you know, life stage kind of conversations where everybody just wants to talk to a person in their own age category. Imagine a church where the older teach the younger. Well this is a church where scripture is sufficient for the life of that church in terms of its discipleship. And the truth is the age-segregated model of discipleship that exists comprehensively in the church today, it unravels almost everything I just mentioned. And we have to ask why is it that we set this aside?

That was my question. That's my story. I looked around and I wondered, what has happened to the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ? Now I entered the Church of the Lord when I was in my early teens as a new believer and I didn't realize it at the time but it was at the dawn of a massive movement, a new movement, Something that was so different than anything that had ever happened before, it was the dawn of the modern age segregated movement. It was the dawn of modern youth ministry, where as it happened, I ended up floating down this stream that I just inherited from those who were leading that movement.

And like most pastors, like most young people in my generation, we just accepted it for what it was. We'd become Christians and we followed those leaders who were ahead of us, attempting to be faithful. So I was a youth minister, I was a singles minister, I was a senior pastor, and about everything in between. I've really done it all. What I realized was that today's church is highly fragmented into life stage and discipleship opportunities.

There's a ministry niche for everybody. For toddlers, infants, first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade, junior high, senior high, singles, marrieds, the older singles, the younger singles, the senior citizens. Church life is fragmented into these age and life stage categories. So at a time in history when every opportunity in the secular world separates the generations. The church ended up doing the exact same thing.

And we ended up falling in love with an educational philosophy that was patterning after this public education movement that had started not too long before. What I realized is that this wasn't founded in scripture at all and that it actually was tearing the fabric of the family apart and that this age-segregated methodology of ministry actually wasn't found in Scripture. On the contrary, the only observable pattern anywhere in scripture was an age-integrated discipleship methodology. That's the only thing you can see when you open up the pages of the Bible. My fellow Elder says, you know, you can read the Bible to your eyes bleed and the only thing you're going to find is age-integrated discipleship.

And that's absolutely true. Now this practice actually came out of a number of pretty easily identifiable sources that were at work in the culture at large. There were various modern movements that affected the church, and primarily it was the rise of youth culture, something that didn't exist in past generations, and the modern public school movement. And what happened was the church embraced the whole proposition that youth culture was good and they embraced, they actually copied the public school model of age segregation. And what happened was the church ended up looking like the public school, when in fact the church never looked like that before.

We just have to recognize that as a historical reality, that we live in times that are really different from the times that are explained in the Bible. Now, what really got my attention, it really wasn't the Bible first. It was the pain I saw in families. You know, I was there as an elder in my church, and what I saw was really the destruction of a whole generation. I couldn't find a single father in our church who was actually practicing family discipleship, who was actually spiritually leading those kids that were in my youth group and it terrified me.

And I realized that we had lost a whole generation in that church right before my eyes. It was really, it was the pain in the families. It was the pain of seeing the worldliness in the eyes of those children and seeing them, you know, walk in the ways of the world. That's really what got my generation and I realized that the generations had hardly anything to do with one another. When Actually the Bible has the generations always gathering together.

It's completely different. And I realized that nearly every single program or ministry in our church separated the church into subgroups. And it divided the church into this vast age-segregated system of discipleship. And everything we were doing fragmented the family. And I realized that if all I had was scripture alone, we wouldn't do anything like this.

And I ended up hearing my friend Doug Phillips issue what he calls the Desert Island Challenge. How many of you have ever heard the Desert Island Challenge? Almost no one. Okay, here's the Desert Island Challenge. If you were stuck on a desert island and all you had was the Bible, how would you live?

How would you educate your children? What would your church life look like if all you had was the Bible? What would your relationship with your children actually look like if all you had was the Bible and you were stuck on a desert island? Now you all live on an island and it's a desert island in some parts for sure. But that's how we should think.

We should think if all I had was scripture, how would I live? That is the way that God's people trustfully walk after the pattern of His ways. Why? Blessed shall you be in the city. Blessed shall you be in the country.

Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Blessed shall be the fruit of your body. This is the way that God's people find themselves in blessedness, is by recognizing that God and God alone is the wise one in the room, to speak to them about the discipleship of the next generation and how to construct their lives. You know, I realized really that the preaching of the gospel was at stake here, because what God has done is He's called fathers to preach the gospel in their families when they sit in the house, when they walk by the way, when they lie down, when they rise up, that God actually has called fathers to communicate the beauty and the goodness of the kingdom of heaven constantly in their households. Well, in fact, that was almost never happening anywhere around me.

And I realized that that methods do matter. And I realized how beautiful it is to have a family where the glory of God is the center, and where the Word of God is communicated daily, and where the greatness of His kingdom and the beauty of His salvation is spoken of. That's the kind of family we're talking about here. Now, how did we get here? In the last 150 years, a massive shift occurred in church and family life, and that massive shift completely changed the sociology of family life and church life.

Instead of unified families that were on a mission to take dominion, you had families that were fragmenting, going in all different directions. In churches, instead of gathering the ages together, the older teaching the younger, instead of the heads of households being given encouragement to be the kind of heads that they were designed to be. The family was also fragmented in the church. And so a family would go to church and then they would scatter like rats. And then they would perhaps come together at the end of their time at church, but they would never worship together, they would never study the word of God together, they would never sit together in the meetings of the church, when in fact that was such a radical contradiction to what you see in scripture.

And these patterns have roots. I've documented in my book a weed in the church You can get it out there on the book table where I walk through the historical Track that was taken to get to where we are today And and what what what happened was you know even the stream of consciousness of the way that we think about discipleship was formed really by Greeks like Plato. Plato believed that children should be separated from their parents and trained by servants of the state. Then you have the great father of modern education, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that you should break the parent and child relationship. And he would champion Plato's thesis and really write the most important, in terms of popularity, book on education that was ever written, called Emil.

And then you have Horace Mann, the father of public education, who institutionalized age segregation in the United States. Age segregation did not exist in the public school system until 1848, in the Quincy Grammar School in Boston, Massachusetts. Before this time, there was very little attention played to this proposition. At the same time you had a very dynamic and successful church leader by the name of Robert Rakeys who took that pattern and who was really the father of the modern Sunday School movement, which really was designed to minister to the poor in London, those who didn't have parents. And so teachers were brought in to teach those children that didn't have parents.

That actually morphed into the modern Sunday school movement, where children were segregated by age. Then you had John Dewey, who was that great hater of God. He really was, he was a pragmatist philosopher, a signer of the humanist manifesto. And he would have no, he would have such a profound influence on systematizing and institutionalizing age segregation that after John Dewey the die was cast and that was the only kind of education you could see almost anywhere in the globe. It was so massively successful And so that's what happened.

You also, about the mid-20th century, you had what I'm just gonna call the invention of adolescence, something that never really existed before. At the beginning of the 20th century, G. Stanley Hall popularized the term adolescent in order to categorize young people as having special needs that you need to do some very special things for them and children you know began to be be educated that way even more. Youth culture was emphasized. Then there were in the 50s the emergence of youth rallies.

And what happened as a result of this, you ended up with a completely new, innovated kind of church leader. A kind of church leader that never existed anywhere in the history of the Church. It was called the Youth Pastor. And now by this time, millions, literally hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in the Church to create these youth ministries, these youth cultures. And this novelty of age segregation became a fixed practice in Christianity during the last half of the 20th century.

And it spread throughout the whole world. And now the whole world practices this exact same method of discipleship. And so what we have to recognize is that this practice grew out of a particular kind of soil that was composed of a number of elements. For over 200 years, the soil in which the weed of age segregation grew was the result of Platonic philosophy. It was the organics of rationalism and Rousseau and the waters of evolutionism with John Dewey.

And these were the philosophical underpinnings of this educational philosophy that we've embraced today. And the truth is this systematic age-segregated youth ministry is non-Christian in its origin. I'm not suggesting that people who operate this are non-Christians. It is pagan in its roots. And I'm not saying that everybody's pagan who practices it.

But I am saying that we've adopted the ways of the world in order to disciple the next generation. The results are disastrous. Is anybody here ready to say that this has worked all that well? Everybody that I am aware of in youth ministry says this is really, really broken. Well, I'd like to talk, though, about the counterpoint.

What is the design of discipleship and where is it in Scripture? And I want to walk through just some representative passages of Scripture that give you a sense of what this generational design for discipleship looks like in scripture and where you find it. Here are some examples in the Old Testament. In Deuteronomy 12 verses 6 through 12, Moses actually issues a command to the children of Israel to bring their whole families before the Lord, to celebrate in the sacrifices and the offerings of Israel. He says, he says, you shall come and rejoice, you and your households, in which the Lord your God has blessed you and you shall rejoice before the Lord you and your sons and your daughters Your male and female servants and the Levite who is within your gates This was a command to bring the whole family together with the Levites with the strangers It was it was one of those age integrated environments It was designed for the discipleship of God's people.

In Deuteronomy 29 verses 10 through 11 you find entire households gathered before Moses to listen to his speech before his death. And what Moses says is, come, you and your little ones and your wives and the stranger who is in your camp, and the one who cuts wood, the one who draws water. Bring everybody together. Bring the rich, the poor, the labor, the intellectual, bring everyone together in that environment. In Deuteronomy 31 you find the same thing where Moses instructs the children of Israel to gather with their whole families.

He says, gather the people together. He's commanding the elders of Israel. Gather them together, men and women and little ones and the stranger that is within your gates that they may hear and that they may learn to fear the Lord and carefully observe all the words of this law. This was a meeting where they were going to read the law of God, and all the little children were there. In 2 Chronicles 20, verse 13, you find a very similar thing where we read of a really remarkable gathering.

The people of God are getting ready to be attacked. And what happens is that, the scripture reads, now all Judah with their little ones, their wives and their children stood before the Lord. They were gathered to ask for divine help because there was a threat. And even the little ones were there gathering at such an important and actually threatening time. Yes, children should be involved, you know, even in some of the most difficult things that are going on in the church and in the family.

In Joshua chapter 38 verse 35, there's a command to bring the little ones and the strangers again to assemble together. In Joel, you even find the language of nursing babes. In Joel 2 verses 15 and 16. The prophet is urging the people, commanding them to enter into a time of repentance. And he gathers the whole congregation that include children and nursing babes.

That was the way it was in Israel. You know, when we first started our family integrated church, you know, about 13 years ago, one of the families in our church had a lot of kids and they had this new baby and they needed help. So my wife offered to hold their new baby, and my wife held that baby for two years in our worship services. And just about three weeks ago, I was in her house, and she's 13 now, and I said, hey what do you remember from that time? What do you remember from your Aunt Deborah?

Because during that time they form such a sweet bond of friendship and love. She says, what I remember the most was when the pastor would say something that she loved or if there was a song that she so loved or if there was a prayer that really moved her heart. I would hear her say, mmm, amen. Mmm, amen. Oh, I've heard that many times myself.

People ask, what can a little child get out of a worship service? Who knows what's happening in the heart of a child when they hear the prayers, when they hear the songs, when they hear the sound of a shepherd's voice preaching the Word of God. Who knows what's happening? Well I know what was happening in that girl. She was seeing love for Jesus Christ from her littlest years.

And this is the pattern of Scripture. You see the same pattern in the New Testament. You see it in the ministry of Jesus. Jesus is always ministering to an age-integrated gathering of people. In fact, when the little children were gathering around Him, the disciples wanted to banish the children.

Remember what happened? He said, suffer the little children to come unto Me. Jesus desired to minister to children in the midst of His ministry to the adults, that He would actually rebuke His disciples and change the mix. In the feeding of the 5, 000 and the 4, 000 you see the same thing. In Matthew chapter 14, here's the concluding language of this whole story.

Now those who had eaten were about 5, 000 men besides women and children. The account of feeding of the 5 and the 4, 000 is just consistent with Jesus' ministry. He always ministered that way. And you see it in Ephesians chapter 6 verses 1 through 4 where the Apostle Paul is just assuming that the children are there in the meeting of the church. This is the way it is in scripture where there's a ministry together, all the members gathering together.

Children are present during the meetings in the book of Acts. You can read about a wonderful meeting in prayer in Acts chapter 21 where the people are gathered together on the beach and they kneel down and who's there? The wives and the children. They're there praying with their parents, kneeling down on the beach. This is the pattern of Scripture.

It's the pattern where the older teach the younger. It's the pattern where fathers and mothers walk with their children when they sit in their house, when they walk by the way, when they lie down, when they rise up. It's the walk along, talk along methodology of discipleship. And it's always integrated in Scripture. Now, I've had many people say the same thing to me.

You're extreme. This is too extreme. Here's what they say. I understand you see this in the Bible, but aren't you taking it a little too far? And I've seen this written in books, it's been blogged about, websites, people speak about how extreme we are in conferences and seminary classrooms and things like that.

And I'm aware of many emails and sermon series directed at church members that warn congregations of how extreme this view is. And I just want to recognize that in order to determine if something is extreme, you have to have something to compare to it. So if you say extreme compared to what, right? If you're going to say something is extreme, you've got to somehow compare it. So, when trying to grapple with this charge of whether we're extreme or not, we have to ask extreme compared to what.

Now, if you compare our view with the modern public school methodology, and you compare it with the modern practice in the church, which is almost always age-segregated, it is extreme when you compare it with that, isn't it? It absolutely is extreme. It's just over the top. But if you compare it with scripture, then you should ask, is it extreme compared to scripture? And if our view is extreme, then you'd have to charge scripture with being extreme.

You'd actually have to charge a god with being extreme because the only, and I mean capital O-N-L-Y, explicit, observable pattern in scripture is an age-integrated model of discipleship. And secondarily, there's not a single text of scripture that advocates it. From Genesis to Revelation, there's not a single personality who ever practiced it, there's not a single principle that promotes it. But, from Genesis to Revelation, the record is really rich, and that is that you see age-integrated worship and celebration and discipleship in the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. All the godly heroes of the faith practiced it and they spoke about it.

So if the view sounds extreme then let me suggest that Moses was extreme, David was extreme, John the Baptist was extreme, the Lord Jesus Christ was extreme, the apostles were extremists because they never practiced or advocated anything. They never made allowance for it, they only did one thing. They gathered the generations together. So if you want to make the charge of extremism, you have to say, well extreme compared to what? Always compare your extremism with the gold standard and ask yourself whether you're consistent with it or whether you are extreme away from it.

That's really critical. Those who establish children's church and youth groups and nurseries and other forms of age segregation, well, let me say it this way. I, maybe you don't agree with this, I think they're the extremists. I really do, because they're doing something that's extremely different from what you find in Scripture. So there it is.

Now how do you recover this beautiful design? And I'm going to give you six steps for recovering the design of discipleship that you see in Scripture. The first thing is that you've got to recognize that Scripture is sufficient. That God has designed human beings so that they would not live by bread alone, but they would feed from the mouth of God. And that we would receive our testimony of how to live from scripture and scripture alone.

That's the first thing that you must do. There's really no hope of recovering the biblical design for discipleship unless you say in your heart, yes, I love the patterns of scripture. I believe scripture is sufficient. That's the first thing. The second thing for recovering this is you've got to get your jurisdictions in order.

Because at the heart of the controversy over discipleship in the church is really a matter of jurisdiction. Jurisdiction is all about who is supposed to do what. What's a father supposed to do? What's supposed to happen in a family? What's supposed to happen in a church?

And until we recover the biblical jurisdictions, we really don't have any hope of restoring this whole matter of discipleship. And we have to think biblically about our responsibilities, that the family has particular functions and responsibilities for discipleship, and the church does as well. The third thing that you must do in order to recover this is to restore the biblical functionality of the family. Because right now the biblical functionality of the family is pretty much broken. And one of the consequences of the innovations over the years is that the family has kind of gone into atrophy.

And The muscles of family life have kind of disappeared because we're not practicing the things that God has designed for family life. And the systems that we've been using haven't strengthened family life. And so we need to recover the whole biblical functionality of the family in order to recover this discipleship methodology. Because the church needs the family to function right. You cannot have a healthy church unless you have a healthy family.

So you've got to recover a sense of the jurisdictions. Fourth, you've got to recover biblical fatherhood. Recovering the practices of biblical fatherhood is so critical for returning to the beautiful design that's in Scripture. And unfortunately, it's almost impossible to find a father today who is practicing the commands of scripture. And it's time for a new generation of fathers to throw off the bankrupt ways of the past, to embrace scripture and scripture alone, and to recognize that it should not be tolerated.

There was a day, in the Puritan era, men actually were excommunicated for not catechizing their children. Has that ever happened in your church? Well that's because they understood the biblical doctrine of the family. They understood how pivotal it was. Richard Baxter said, unless we recover this, we will undo all.

He meant fatherhood. We've got to have a new kind of father. I'm crisscrossing the United States of America this year doing a conference called the Master's Plan for Fatherhood. I'm doing 15 expositions of fatherhood passages because this matter is so critical. Even in these family-related churches, we're so broken in our fatherhood, we continually need the refreshment of the teaching of the Word of God to understand how in the world we are to function as fathers.

So first, Scripture is sufficient. Second, get our jurisdictions in order. Third, restore the biblical functionality to the family. Fourth, recover biblical fatherhood. And fifth, capitalize on the corporate gatherings of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ for discipleship.

The discipleship of the family is not enough. The family needs the church. The family needs the preaching of the word of God. The family needs the relationships in the church. You know, every little boy needs to learn how to love the imperfect, strange, weird people in the church.

Can we agree that people in the church are sometimes kind of strange? You know, this is designed by God so that you would learn how to love. You know, every boy who's someday going to be a father needs to learn how to love. And where do you learn it? You learn in the church.

I got a letter a couple years ago from a father who said, he said, hey, there's a, my daughter is really ready to be married, there's a young man who's interested in her and he's come to me and hey, I just found out that this family's never been to church like in the last 10 years. What do you think? I said run like the wind. Why? Because in the church you learn how to exist with imperfect people.

You learn how to exist with people who aren't exactly on the same page with you. Hey you know what else is that's really great about the church? Sometimes people offend one another. People actually sin against one another. This is good.

This is good for you. It's the best thing that will ever happen to you to have someone, you know, sin against you or treat you not exactly like they should, maybe to ignore you or say something sharp or criticize you. This is the best thing that can ever happen to you. Because then you get to apply all the laws of love. You get to be patient with one another.

All the one anothers, you start flooding in when you be part of a church. There are like over 50 one anothers. You know, love one another, forgive one another. You know, God has designed the family to be in a church. If you're not part of a church, I just want to challenge you, you've got to go find a church somewhere.

This whole idea of home churching is really not a biblical idea. The church is a place where there is their biblical government, biblical church government, elders and deacons, there are biblical practices like preaching, there are the celebration of the ordinances of the church, baptism and the Lord's Supper, There's singing, there's praying, with the whole family. Not your little family. God wants you to have a bigger family than you have now. It's called the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ.

He's going to take you to heaven and the family is going to be gigantic. Every tongue, tribe, and nation, start now. I know it's easy to be disappointed about the Church. I'm sure many of you are. Don't be too disappointed.

Recognize you have a role. Go into your church, practice hospitality, pray for the leaders, bring your family, fall on your faces together and pray for your pastor. Maybe he doesn't say everything that you think he should say. Cry out to God for him, help him. Come alongside to help like the Holy Spirit.

Love the brethren. Take every grain of truth you can possibly get out of every sermon or everything that's there. Capitalize on the corporate gatherings of the church. Now, how do we know if we've succeeded or failed? We need to know that.

You can know whether you're on a path of success or not. You can have biblical assurance as to whether you are going to succeed or not. And here is success. Success is an obedience to the commands of God. The Lord Jesus Christ in Matthew chapter seven talked about two houses, one built on the rock and one built on the sand.

And He said the winds came and the winds blew and the floods came and beat on that house and one of them fell and the other one stood. And what was the difference? The difference was obedience. Jesus is saying build your house upon the rock and what's the rock in that passage? It's obedience.

You can know that you will be successful if you obey. You don't know how it'll turn out but you do know this, that when you look and you see a house blown down, it's because of disobedience. God promises to bless His people. He says, Blessed shall you be in the country. Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl.

Blessed shall you be when you come in, and blessed shall you be when you go out. This is the promise of God for this discipleship, methodology that he has established, first of all in heaven, and then he gives it to his people and their families, and then he gives it to the Church of the Lord Jesus to operate. Here's what I pray for. I pray for mighty churches to rise in this land, where the older are teaching the younger, where the 13-year-olds aren't polluting the 13-year-olds, where youth culture is destroyed, where you have little girls on the breasts of their mothers listening to the prayers, hearing them say, mm, amen, mm, amen. When you do this, and I know this from experience, you will have a completely different generation and you will have a completely different kind of church.

And I pray that God will bless this nation with those two things. Would you pray with me? Lord, help us. Help us to find all of our springs in you. Help us to realize that all scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for everything.

Oh Lord, that you would give us that sense. Amen. Now, before we break for lunch, I want to talk to you about our church network again. And you can get on this network if you'd like, and you can get connected with other families. What happened in America when we put up this networking site that really hundreds and hundreds of churches were planted, here's how it works.

A family registers itself and a church registers itself. And where there are places where there's not a church, often churches arise because people, they begin to network and they gather together for prayer, they cry out to God. And often a church, a true church pops out as a result of it. So I commend it to you. And then the churches that register, register because they agree with our confession.

We have a confession, the confession for uniting church and family. And it just explains these matters that I've just talked about. If a church agrees with these principles, they can list themselves on that site. If the church is in transition, that's fine. If the church has embraced the sufficiency of scripture and they're making progress, then that's fine.

Our perspective is we don't evaluate these churches, they evaluate us and they say, yes, we believe this, we're gonna do this. And I pray that God would raise up many many churches in this generation.