Kevin Swanson explains in this audio message that there are many young people that are walking away from the faith. How to we combat this? By looking to Scripture. An important thing to bring back is biblical fatherhood. We need fathers who are invested in raising their children in accordance with Scripture.

Ephesians 6:4 (NKJV) - "And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord."

Good evening. I have to tell you that I am very concerned about the church, about the state of the church in the Western world that happens to be where we live. And the state of the church affects the state of the family, and the state of the family of course affects the state of the church. These things play off on each other. I wrote a book called Apostate that just was published about three weeks ago.

I outline how the Western apostasy has happened. It is important for somebody to write the book because this is the largest apostasy in the history of the Christian church. We've never had this many people walking away from the faith. Of course, that happens generationally. And it's happening right now in America in a significant way.

Maybe it's already happened in Australia. People tell me that you're in a post-Christian country here, and the Christian culture is very, very, very sparse. But in our country, we are seeing that the youth are walking away, and the numbers are up around 88%, but the most shocking statistic was the statistic is only a half a percent of American mosaics believe in absolutes down from 14% with their parents and that itself would indicate a 97% apostasy rate amongst the mosaic generation. That's 97% of kids raised in those houses where 14% of parents still believe in absolutes, 97% of them don't believe in absolutes anymore, which means that those kids that are really part of the culture, those kids that are part of the educational systems and the cultural systems are abandoning any little tiny semblance of the Christian faith in our generation. So it's sort of falling off the cliff and you know this movement, the NCFIC movement, is based on the idea that we need to get back to scriptural solutions.

We have to get really radical. We really need to get back to the Bible. We've tried a lot of different things. The last 20 to 30 years, I think Christian churches have spent more money than any other time in all of human history on youth groups and youth pastors, Sunday schools, and all the rest, and seen a 97% failure rate. That's the worst possible failure rate with the most finances, the most resources thrown in that direction that we've ever seen in the history of the Christian Church.

So we can at least come to the conclusion that whatever we've tried for the last 40 to 50 years are not effective and the breakdown of the faith in our generation is really a serious serious problem. But how in the world are we going to be addressing these sorts of things? That's really the question I want to address tonight. We always seem to get back to fathers, you know, no matter what the issue is, whether it be the breakdown of the church, the breakdown of the faith, the breakdown of family, it seems like every solution we ever back into is fatherhood. We need to bring back fatherhood.

Now that's almost unthinkable for the average church congregation. You stand up and say, the solutions to this church's problems will be fathers engaging. Now those are fighting words, those are difficult words, and most of the fathers probably don't really want to receive that. But I do believe that's the issue. We get back to it again and again, that's the fundamental issue.

When fathers walked away from the family farms and walked away from the families and the mothers walked away from the families in later generations we began to see the ongoing breakdown of the family and the faith as well these things I think play off on each other Also if you think about the issue of homosexual marriage which is I know at the gates here in Australia we have 12 states around America that already succumb to it. As it turns out this is I think an important indication of the breakdown of Western civilization. I map it out from Jeremy Bentham and others. Shakespeare was a pro-homosexual advocate in the 1600s. I know it's shocking to those who are classical educators, but we need to be very careful with classical education.

And I make some of these points in my book that we have to look at the trajectory sent by great thinkers, great writers of the last three to 400 years in England and America. And we find that these writers set a direction. Emerson as well, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Shakespeare, and Jeremy Bentham, these guys set a direction for where we are today. But where we are today is a radical, radical departure from a Christian heritage, and it's in fact what I call the neurotic agenda. Now Nero was a Caesar in the Roman Empire.

Any of you ever heard of Nero? Nero was the most despicable Caesar that probably ever lived. Even the pagans thought of him as a terrible person He tried to burn down Rome he persecuted Christian so Christians hated him and so did the secularists Okay, even the pagans thought he was the worst pagan ruler ever in fact probably the worst person who ever lived, the most tyrannical person, the most despicable person that ever lived. And something else you need to know about Nero. Nero was the namesake for civil unions and homosexual marriages.

He tried to engage homosexual marriage in A.D. 65, right around the time he ruled the Roman Empire. So I want you to understand that Nero, the worst most despicable man that ever lived, from the perspective of the pagans as well as Christians, is now his agenda, his most despicable agenda, is being promoted in most of the Western world. This is an indication of the total collapse of Western civilization. If you go to Wikipedia, you're gonna find a map that depicts what's going on in civil unions, the homosexual marriage, the same sex marriage around the world.

You're gonna find that most of Europe is blackened out, Australia is somewhat blackened out, and so is New Zealand, and about 1 5th or 2 5ths of America as well. 2 3rds of South America and of course all of Canada. Now this effectively constitutes a Western civilization, what we have known as Western civilization. And my point is this, is that it is the apostate nations that have turned on the Christian faith to the point that they have embraced the neurotic agenda and brought about one of the most despicable things, probably the most despicable thing that has ever happened in the entire world. And they have brought it to nations like Australia, New Zealand, and my country as well.

This is an indication of apostates, of Christian Protestants and Roman Catholics that have turned against Christ, against the Bible, and they have embraced the absolute worst abominations they're going to find listed in the Bible, which is the word of Jesus Christ, and they have imposed it upon civilizations and effectively brought about the beginning of the end of civilization in the Western world. So That's why I call my book The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization. And I would encourage you to take a look at my book Apostate. I put two years into it and I believe it's going to be a book that will be discussed and debated for the next 10 or 15 years. Now how are we going to deal with this level of apostasy?

If you look at homosexual marriage and same-sex marriage, they do surveys in America to find out who's in favor of it. It's about a 50-50 or right now I think it's more like 55-45, 55 in favor. Just about every two or three years we see the movement towards embracing the neurotic agenda on the part of most Americans. Most Americans love Nero and they love the neurotic agenda. But if they interview people who are under 30 years of age they find it's more like 75-25 and if they also interview people with master's degrees, that is those who have advanced degrees, in America they find that it's again about a 75-25 in favor of the neuronic agenda.

That is if you've been to American schools, American public schools, if you've been indoctrinated in the educational system in America, to any extent in the last 25 to 30 years, you are very much likely to embrace the neuronic agenda and the destruction of Western civilization. So it tends to be a generational trajectory and the generational trajectory that is the younger generation tends to embrace these sorts of immoral lifestyles more than the older generations, and they do that primarily because they have been educated in American schools. Once again, bringing us back to what did I say was D-Day in the war of the world views, what is the key battle, where is the battle raging most ferociously, if anybody is worth their salt, and if anybody is really going to engage in the war of the world views and engage for the cause of what is righteous and what is good, they're going to engage in the area of education. This is the battle and I'd like to welcome you to the war. But there's another aspect to this that I think is important.

Dr. James Dobson has a book called Bringing Up Boys. He's got an entire chapter on homosexuality because it's an issue in our country. He talks about the studies done by largely Christian psychologists on the incidence of homosexuality. He says the largest nurture factor in the incidence of homosexuality.

We'd say nurture nature. Nature people make choices based upon their nature. And we grant the fact that everybody has a basically fallen nature. So we're all dealing with that. And all of us are going to make unrighteous, sinful choices, and we all need to be washed by the blood of Jesus Christ.

Amen? I mean that's where we all begin, but as it turns out there are some nurture factors that seem to play in to the incidence of homosexuality and according to this Dr. Nicolosa, he quotes this book, he says he's talked to hundreds of homosexuals, and of all of the ones he's ever counseled, he never met a single one who had a loving, respectful relationship with his own father. As we consider that a relationship with a man's father is important to what happens in terms of his sexuality, we have to ask ourselves, is the father-son relationship today as good as it was, say in 1960? That's, I think, an important question.

Now, if you think about the fact that 42% of little boys are born outside of wedlock in our country, your country is actually fairly similar to that, up from 6% in 1960. Okay, now we're talking about the tip of the iceberg in terms of a young man who either has a relationship with his father or does not have a relationship with his father. Many of these young men born without fathers will not have a relationship with his father. We're again not discussing the divorce situation and the breakdown of family relationships and the separation of the hearts of fathers and sons for long periods of time throughout that young man's nurture. If the relationship between fathers and sons are so broken down that the incidence of little boys born outside of wedlock today is seven times worse than what it was in 1960 when the homosexual activists today were born and raised, then let me ask you this.

What is the world going to look like 20 years from now? I want you to think about that for a moment. If the conditions whereby the breakdown of society, family relationships, social sexuality, is seven times worse right now than it was in 1960, Friends, I'm here to tell you, we have yet to reap the whirlwind. We have yet to reap the whirlwind. The next 20, 30, 40 years is going to be much worse, much worse than the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.

And you know we try to solve these issues politically. We were trying to stop the Civil Union's bill in Colorado. By the way, it passed this year. We were out there last year. We were able to just barely engage a win.

We actually won one at the Capitol last year by one single vote in a committee, and we lost it this year. So we were just on the edge last year. Now the dikes are run down, and we're just totally overwhelmed. But last year we were fighting it, and I knew we were losing. You know why I knew we were losing?

It's because almost every one of the conservatives on the committee referred to friends, Family members, sons and daughters that had already been taken by the scourge. So if that be the case, with the conservatives, how in the world are we going to win our political battles, If the hearts of fathers and sons are so devastated, so destroyed in the present generation. And friends, it comes down to this. It comes down to this. The political situation, you know, 10, 20 years from now, so tied into the relationships that occur between fathers and sons in the present day.

So if a father is making those decisions, you know, we make tens of thousands of decisions in the raising of our sons, don't we? We're prioritizing our life. Should we add more hours at the business in order to increase income? Should I come home on a Saturday? And when my son was younger, these things were, these things were pulling me.

I was working the 45, 55, and then 60, and then 65 hour weeks. I was reporting to a president of a $200 million company. I was on a fast track to be a vice president for the company. I understand the tensions, and I understand the tendencies to want to do my own thing on a Saturday. You come home on a Saturday, And you've got the pole to do your hobby, to play your golf.

Here's a dad who's got a little seven year old son or eight year old son, his heart's crying out to his daddy, wants to be like his dad. Walking around the house in daddy's shoes, trying to put daddy's suit coat on, wants to follow daddy around, wants to be part of daddy's life, but daddy's got more important things to do. Daddy makes decisions that will affect the future of a nation when he decides to do his golf game over spending time giving up of himself, his love, his emotions, his time, his energy to his little 7, 8, 9, 10 year old son. Now, the only solution, the only solution from what I can see from my own experience, the only solution to these issues ultimately is a father spending more time with his 10 year old son. I don't see any other solution to solving our problems except for finding some way to bring our sons into our lives.

And granted it takes sacrifice. Friends, I'm the first to tell you, I walked away from a corporate job in order to have more time with my son. I understood that there was no other option for me. My wife was having struggles with my little 11 year old son, and he was strong willed, he was a leader type, he had emotions that were running, he had character issues, he had some sinful inclinations that I recognized because there was some generational component to it. I knew that my wife was not able to do what I could do.

There was nobody who could work in my son's life. God was pointing at me and said, you're the man! You're it! Son, you've got to work with this boy. There was nobody else.

No Sunday school teacher, no day school teacher. Nobody could have a relationship with him. Your own wife is not able to do what you can do in this young man's life. God was pointing at me. I knew that I was it.

I could see my wife trying to engage. It was almost like she was trying to frame a house with a little two-gram hammer. Tink, tink, tink, tink, trying to get the big nails in with a little tiny hammer. I had the big nail gun, you know, bang, bang, bang. I could apply the leverage that a man could apply in this little boy's life that my wife couldn't apply, and I knew I had to walk into his life and share of my own life my own time with my son.

Now I don't know what the Holy Spirit of God is going to do in your life. I don't know where he's gonna call you. I don't know if you need to quit your job and do some of the things that I did or you need to open up your life in this area or that area. And by the way, sometimes God just calls us to take little steps, spending the entire Saturday with your son at nine years of age. I began to ask myself the question, is there any reason why my son cannot be with me today?

It was the question I would ask. And I would bring him with me everywhere I went. I mean, I was a pastor, I did a lot of counsel with people, but I'd meet in a restaurant, might be a heavy-duty counseling situation, a marriage situation. I'd be working with a couple here, my son would be seven feet away, just out of ear distance, but he was there, he was close enough to me to engage and to see what I was doing in my own life. Quantity of time.

There's nothing that can beat quantity of time. We've got to apply quantity of time. You say, how do you deal with the issues we're dealing with? What's the solution? Well, I think giving your sons the book of Proverbs is critical.

You've got to give your sons Proverbs. God wrote the book for them. Give them the book of Proverbs. Teach them through the book of Proverbs. But the only other thing I can tell you, men, is you've got to increase the time.

You've got to trade time and money for relationships. Somebody once said that, it's a friend of mine who had seven or eight boys, he said, discipling boys is like duck hunting. You spend about two hours behind the blind for ten seconds of action. Does that make sense? Now, as with boys, it's not like you have to sit around saying, I have to engage in quality time now, I have to find some way to talk about the sensitive issues.

Where is that Christian psychologist that told me I need to spend quality time with my son. What questions was I supposed to ask him now during this quality time, this experience of discipleship I'm having with my son? No! It's not like that at all! You just hang out with him for hours and hours and hours and as you're traveling through some dark country road at 2 in the morning suddenly says, hey dad what do you think about this?

And you go whoa that's a heavy-duty question and you start engaging the issue a little bit and then you move on to something else, get back into duck hunting. That's the way it works with boys. I just wanted to share a little bit of that with you. I will tell you that in my own life, my dad was a tremendous asset. I mean, my dad did a lot for me.

I was raised in a Christian home. My dad did family worship with us every day, 40 minutes a day. I mean, that was really critical for us. And my dad was faithful, just really, really faithful. He was consistent.

He was just really consistent in his discipleship. There's a lot to be said about consistency by the way. I just want to honor my dad for a moment and tell you, my dad was boring. And I just want to say, you know, sometimes you got to appreciate boring. He got kicked out of an eldership or a pastorship one time for being too boring as a speaker.

Can you imagine that? But he was consistent. He just was consistent. Every day he taught us the word of God. And today, six children, all six children are serving God in some capacity somewhere around the world today.

I think because of my father's heritage. And my dad gave me the basic worldview that I expounded. My dad wrote one of the first books in Japanese on creationism. He really believed that God created the world in six 24-hour days. He has a Master's in Chemistry as part of the Institute for Creation Research, and he wrote the book called Seisho Togendaikagaku in Japanese, the Bible of Modern Science, and got that around the 1970s.

He believed that it didn't matter what scientists said. They brought the rock out, said, the rock is four billion years old. We assumed all kinds of starting conditions, radioactive decay rates all along the way, and we have no idea where the leaks were, whatever, and we realize that there is all kinds of instrument error. So we believe that this rock is anywhere between 20 billion years old and two years old, but trust us, the average is right around six billion, so trust us. So you know, whatever these experts are saying about the radioactive dating, who cares if God said in six days, I created the heavens and earth to see and all that and then this, then we're gonna go with God on this one.

So that's the way my dad was. He just believed in the epistemological authority of God's Word. If God said it, He's gonna go with it. That was something my father conveyed to me and I carry that forward. My father also wrote a book on the law of God because he realized that most American evangelicals were not all that interested in God's law.

So he wrote a book on the Ten Commandments. He also wrote a book on God's sovereignty in salvation. He believed God was sovereign over all things. God is the source of ethics, God's the source of truth, and God's the source of reality. By God's sovereignty He controls all things providentially around the world, including kings and dictators and hurricanes and whatever happens in the world, including whether somebody gets saved or not, and that is usually the most controversial element of God's sovereignty because man wants to be in control of something, you know, just give me something to be in control of.

I don't want God to be in control of salvation. My dad said, forget what man wants, forget humanism. Humanism says man wants to control his own reality. That was the first Cumulus Manifesto. Man will control his own reality, but that seeped into the church and a lot of people began to teach that.

Man is the ultimate hinge point in whether somebody gets saved or not, and my dad says, no way, uh-uh, ain't gonna happen. God is totally sovereign. God is sovereign over man's truth, man's ethics, and man's reality, and that my friends are the basic building blocks of a Christian biblical worldview, and that's what I've been teaching to hundreds of thousands of people my entire life. My father is the guy that got me started. I stand on his shoulders and I'm telling you, developing generational heritage like this, where a son will honor his father's heritage, develops what I would call a momentum for the kingdom of God, a leverage for the kingdom of God that will do amazing things in future generations.

If, if, if, if the children that hear these messages, the children that embrace their parents' worldviews will stand on their parents' shoulders and be faithful to that vision. Now granted, there are little elements of tweaking and such. I remember writing my book Upgrade and sending it to my parents. My parents looked at it, my mother got back to me and said, wow we really love this book. It was about the homeschool vision.

I was trying to really understand the homeschool vision. It's basically what I gave you this morning. And so my mom looks at this and says, Kevin, this is great. I wish we had done this with you. And I said, mom, I wouldn't have gotten the vision if I wasn't standing on your shoulders you follow me here because my folks got started with a little bit of an educational bent it was all about getting you into college that was kind of where the homeschool movement started in the 1960s 70s and 80s And yet over time we began to understand what we were doing, you know, and as we were standing on on our parents' shoulders we could see a little further and we began to develop that heritage.

And friends, I think this is the secret to the apostasy. This is the radical nature of somehow retaining a generational heritage that will accomplish. On the one hand, we do see a breakdown of culture. We see a breakdown of music. We see that church music moving from Bach down to M&M's rape rap dragged back into the church has been a very strange approach to culture and a successively broken culture from generation to generation to generation.

We've seen that with culture. The way you break down culture is by successive generations that will not honor their mothers and fathers. And when you have this teenage rebellion that seems to predominate in the church where each successive generation can't stand their parents' music, won't honor their parents' approach to culture and music and dress and all the rest, as you get this patricide generation by generation by generation, That's how you destroy cultures. But the way you build them back is by the honor of fathers and mothers. That's how things will go well with you in the land.

That's how you will build back halfway decent cultures and civilizations in the years to come. Now, I think it's happening. There is a generational reformation going on right now. It's amazing. Vody Baucom talks about the breakdown of evangelicals.

He says there's about 30 million evangelicals in America, and sadly they've got about an 88% leak rate, which means that their kids are not really following in their parents' footsteps. Moreover, their birth rate is down around 1.2 or 1.3, maybe 1.4, and that's pretty much what the world is doing because there isn't much of distinction between the worldview of your average evangelical that is the existentialism and the materialism that just seeps into the pores of the evangelicals and what's happening in the broader culture. There's just almost no difference. So if you walk into an evangelical church, you say, how is the culture, how's the social situation, how's this different than the world? You're not going to see all that much because there isn't really much of a contrast being preached between the Word of God, the thesis, and the antithesis, or the philosophical systems of John Paul, Sartre, and Nietzsche, and all the others on the other hand.

The church is oblivious to that sort of thing. And so as it turns out, with the birth rate as low it is among evangelicals, and with the leak rate at 88%, the 30 million evangelicals, according to Bode Baucom, are going to turn into 250, 000 Christians by 2100. That's pretty depressing, right? That's like, okay, so this is the end, right? Well, I did my own calculation.

As he was talking, I got out my calculator and said, OK, I've got five children, and if my five children walk in God's ways by the grace of God, and by the vision of a father, and the consistency and the faithfulness to a heritage that I have received from my own father. By the grace of God, by children walk in God's ways, and they have five children, and they do the same thing. I mean somehow the vision penetrates into the next generation. So my children take on the same vision, and they have the same passion and commitment and they walk with their children and talk with their children and they disciple their children as they sit in the house as they walk by the way and by the grace of God. Their children walk in God's ways too and then their children have five and then their children have five.

At the end of six or seven generations, I have 250, 000 followers of Jesus Christ, and I have beat 30 million evangelicals all by myself. 30 million people versus Kev, with a vision. Now can I get at another couple people to join me in the vision here? You know anybody else want to? Okay I got one over here.

Got two, three, four. Okay I got about five. Good. Okay that makes 1.2 million. We're on a roll.

You see how that works? You see how that works? You know, we're not talking perfection. We like to say direction, not perfection. So We're not going to be there overnight.

Now, I think we've been capturing something of this vision. My grandfather was a faithful evangelical at Wheaton College. He was a business manager at Wheaton College, a big evangelical mothership for Christian colleges in America. And he was a follower of Billy Graham and he was doing the kinds of things that they were doing back in the 1950s and 60s. So Billy Graham sends his children down to boarding school in North Carolina.

My my grandfather did the same thing. That's what they all did. And that's what the missionaries were doing all the way back to the 1830s and 1840s. You know, those early missionaries to Hawaii. The first generation didn't, by the way, they homeschooled.

They homeschooled for like one generation, and then some brilliant missionary came up with the idea of, hey, why don't we stick our kids in boarding school and go do the Lord's work? And so that's what they did for a hundred and fifty years. And so here my grandfather sends not my dad, but his younger brother, my uncle, down to the boarding school in North Carolina, and as history bore out in the Swanson family, here's what happened. Very sad thing happened in our family where this young man, his heart was so separated from his father. I mean, There was no question about it.

I have done research, I have read the letters, I have seen what happened, and while that young man was participating in the youth culture and the pop culture and the teen culture and everything that was going on, Somehow the heart of the father was separated from the son and my uncle became a homosexual and he died of AIDS in San Francisco in the early 1990s. And that, my friends, is a sad chapter. In many, many, many, many generations of Christians in the Swanson family, that was a signal that there was something wrong, something very wrong. So 1969 comes along, we're on the way to the mission field. My dad is going to the mission field, and we're heading to the Philippines.

And I remember we had tickets in hand, it was about a month ago, and this is an important story. This is the story that makes me who I am. You want to understand Kevin Swanson, these are the kinds of things that make a son who he is in the Swanson family. My dad is on the way to the Philippines with his six children and the mission board turns to my dad and says, you're going to the Philippines, you're going to send your children to boarding school. My dad said, no, no, over my dead body, that's gonna happen, we're not going.

And he made the decision not to go because he would not send us to boarding schools And I'm telling you It's decisions like that That make all the difference in the world to children like me. And it was the beginning of the homeschooling movement because the board came back to my dad, said why don't you go to Japan, you can homeschool your kids there if you'd like. And that's how we wound up in Japan. My father always put his family first. That was so important to my dad.

I can give you multiple instances where my father would have sacrificed everything. And even to this day, my dad is reaching out to us. I can tell this. I asked my dad two years ago, we were traveling together, he came out to visit us, and I asked my dad, did grandpa ever disciple you? That's the first time I ever asked that.

Did grandpa ever disciple you? And my dad said no. He said, grandpa never had a relationship with us. Which is really a shock to me because my dad's never used the relationship word before. He's never used the R word before.

I can sense that my father is desiring this relationship. He wants to know what it's like to love a son and to love his daughter. It's growing in this. And I can sense that generations are growing in this. Even in my own life, I didn't automatically love my son.

It just took time before I learned how to reach out to my own son and disciple him. And God has really worked in my heart over a long period of time to teach me what it's like to get to the heart of a son and to really engage and to be open and to be willing to be somewhat transparent. To share with my son my greatest concerns or my daughters my greatest concerns for their lives and God's been working in me tremendously and I think it's something where we're gaining. This isn't something we recapture right away. I honestly think that the institutionalization of education and the separation of the father and son in the work situation has done incredible damage to the family relationships over many, many years.

It's almost as if NASA is putting us on a space mission to a distant planet. This is the closest illustration I can think of. NASA is the space exploration thing. I don't know if you guys, Australians, do space exploration, but let's say NASA came to you and said, we're putting you on an exploration thing to a planet beyond our solar system. It's way out there.

It's beyond Pluto. It's going to take you 200 years to get there, but here you go. You'd have to go with your wife. You'd have to take other families. It would be a 200-year venture.

And here's the deal. I mean, this is the vision. You can see, you know the mission, because the mission says that's the vision, that's where we're headed, and we get a sense for where we're going, we get on the spaceship, And we have to teach our children the mission. We have to pass the mission on. We have to express them.

And the mission needs to be, I think, in the warp and the woof of the daily activities on the spaceship. Why? Because you don't want your children to forget the mission because you're going to die. And you have to pass the mission on. And one more thing, before you die, you have to turn to your children and say, children, you're not going to make it there either.

So you need to pass this mission on to your children, and then on to their children. And NASA has put us on this mission and here we are. And the mission in this case is to recover the vision of fatherhood. I don't really care you know who you are. You may not have had the best father in the world But let me tell you, you gotta stand on your father's shoulders.

Even if your father is in a maximum security prison somewhere in Australia, you get up on his shoulders, even though he's laying flat on the ground, you get up on his shoulders and you're six inches off the ground. That gives you six inches. Well, in the Old Testament, you don't get many great examples of fathers, and this is one of the challenges you have in scripture. Throughout the Old Testament, we have examples of men like Noah, who didn't have much of a heritage, at least there when he was drunk and he had problems with his sons, and then on to Eli and Samuel and David. You know, all of these men, even during that great time, you know, we talked this morning about the glory days of the great men, you know, who did such wonderful things.

It was kind of a one generation deal, wasn't it? Didn't really extend into the generation of Solomon very far and Rehoboam, and it was hard to find any real faithful father to son generational faithfulness. Then you hit Malachi 4 and verse 6, and after all of these failures over 2, 000 years from Noah on to David and so forth and so on, you have all these failures it seems, where the kingdom kind of gets the fits and starts, but it really doesn't get much momentum. So here you have, you know, all these problems until you get to the very last verse of Malachi, and chapter 4 and verse 6 speaks of the coming of the New Covenant. It's interesting, it doesn't even refer necessarily to redemption.

It doesn't talk about the resurrection. It doesn't talk about a lot of things. It's really interesting what it does refer to. I think it's worthy of some meditation that here we have the grand verse, Malachi 4 and verse 6, the hinge point verse between Old Testament and New Testament, and there it is, the promise that John the Baptist comes at the forerunner of Jesus Christ to turn the hearts of the fathers to the sons and sons to the fathers. See, isn't that interesting?

Here I take this to mean that the quintessential element of a New Testament spirit-filled revival or reformation, if you want to know whether or not a reformation revival is happening, the quintessential sign that is happening is the hearts of the fathers turn to the sons and sons to the fathers to the point where you get generational reformation. That's the indication that Jesus Christ is risen and the Spirit of God is here. And no, the indication that you've got a spirit revival is not that somebody starts barking like a dog and people start biting the carpet and people run forward to get saved and give their little hearts to Jesus. Our revivals over the last two or 300 years have kind of expressed themselves in these sorts of ways. I'm not saying that there isn't some emotional fervor from time to time amongst the people of God, but there's so much fake out there, aren't y'all?

Some of you are kind of like, oh, I'm tired of all the fakie stuff. I really want to know whether there was something substantial that happened in that revival some 25 years ago. Well, here's the way you know. Whether or not something happened in this building at this time in June of 2013. How would we know if the Spirit of God came by His grace through the preaching of the Word of God and the reception of the Word of God?

How would we know but that 35 years from now your grandchildren are walking in the ways of God. That, my friends, is the indication of a New Testament style revival. And I am blown away, blown away, that David had Adonijah and David had a number of sons that did not do well. But my father had six children serving God as missionaries, pastors, elders, homeschooling moms all around the world. My dad is doing better than David!

Is that amazing? David! A man who was that close to God's heart. My dad, my humble dad, He's a nobody in the kingdom of God. You know, he's just a humble guy, this church maxed out at nine and a half people.

I'm serious. My dad, he has six children, loving God, serving God. Praise be to God, amen. Is the Spirit of God alive and well on planet Earth? Somebody say Amen.

Yeah, He is. Amen. Yes, He is. Let me give you a few indications that you've got a man of God, a father in the home, who loves God and is seeking his kingdom. He's got to be a kingdom man, he's got to be a visionary man who seeks the kingdom of God and his righteousness first.

A man with a broad sense of the kingdom of God and excitement, enthusiasm for any little aspect where the kingdom of God is happening. A man has got his kingdom antennas up and wherever there's something going on, He gets excited and he shares it with his children. He gets down on his knees and prays for God to really work in that area or this area. And the kingdom of God is broken down into the geographical, the institutional, and the generational. That's the best way.

I think fathers just need to be watching all of these things. When it comes to the geographical, we want to see the kingdom of God in new areas, new islands, new neighborhoods around Melbourne or new nations. Let's get the gospel into Saudi Arabia. It's our family's vision to see that the kingdom of God makes it into Uzbekistan or China or North Korea. He's just excited.

He's thrilled to death that the kingdom of God is spreading around the world. The geographical is a commitment. He wants to see. Now, that's not the only extent of the kingdom. We're going to talk about other aspects to it.

Nobody better than John G. Paton is an example of one who just, he got the vision. He got it. How do you get a John G. Paton?

We were just at his tomb down here in Melbourne yesterday. It was wonderful. It was just inspiring thing for us to be there and to remember the great man of God. Not too many heroes, as far as I'm concerned, not too many heroes. I mean great heroes of the last 120 years in the Western world at least.

But here's a man who gave his life, risked his life probably a hundred times on Tanna and then also on Onewa. I mean, a hero to the faith. Be sure you read his autobiography. We have narratives that has five of the greatest autobiographies ever written in the history of the Christian Church, and one of them is John G. Paton's.

We also have a study guide we put in with that because we think that families need to read these things. It's my favorite book beyond that of the Bible. So if you want to get beyond the Bible, read the great autobiography of John G. Paton. But this man did so much.

He was so effective for the kingdom of God, and it all started in family worship. Here's a little excerpt from his autobiography. There he was in this impoverished little cottage out in the Scotland plains, And he said, my father would do the family worship, and how much my father's prayers at this time impressed me, I can never explain, nor could any stranger understand. When on my knees, and all of us kneeling around him in family worship, he poured out his whole soul with tears for the conversion of the heathen world to the service of Jesus. For every personal and domestic need, We all felt as if in the presence of the living Savior and learned to know and love Him as our defined friend.

He said, I would look in my father's face as he was on his knees, tears streaming down his face. He said, I'd look at my father's face and I wish I could be like him and that by God's grace God would use me to extend the blessed gospel to some place in the foreign world. See the whole vision that I think inspired this man, this is what I find in many many many examples of great men of God used in great ways. Their fathers shared the vision and they got it. Their fathers were committed to the kingdom of God.

Yes, they might have been impoverished little sock manufacturers in Nowhereville, Scotland, but there was that commitment, that hard commitment to something bigger than the cottage, something bigger than socks, something bigger than materialism, something bigger than another car. It was a man who just was bleeding the kingdom of God, and his son got that vision. And friends, I'm telling you, John G. Paton, probably the most courageous, the most intrepid, courageous, faith-filled man I've ever read in any missionary biography. John G.

Paton, this man, he got the vision in his own father's house. Also, let's remember that the kingdom of God extends to institutions. We want to see the kingdom of God press into other things, and every family is different. Every family might have different visions. One family might be interested in bringing about strong family economies.

Another family might be interested in bringing the message of God's Word, the area of politics. Others might be interested in the area of art and movie production. We see that more and more families are interested in movie production, especially with Hollywood bringing out all the decadent forms and such, but now we're finding ways to bring powerful, inspiring films into production and now with the decentralization of media and the access to getting this out on the internet has given way, way more opportunities for people who want to produce music and motion pictures and such. So budding artists that have a biblical worldview are going to have more opportunities in the years to come. And there are families out there saying, I can do better than Hollywood.

I can do better than Nashville or whoever is producing music here in Australia. I can produce some good stuff that will accomplish something significant for God in the years to come. And I'm telling you, if nations are going to form, I mean Christian nations, if there's going to be freedom in the next 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 years, I personally think it's going to happen probably closer to 2060 or 2070, we're going to have a tremendous opportunity to form some kind of nation or nations or small nation states or decentralized states that will protect some basic human freedoms and enable families to survive. I mean, just basic survival and hopefully flourishing by way of protecting homeschooling and family-based discipleship and a biblically oriented discipline. You know what?

I mean we've got to have people out there fighting these battles and planning some of these nations. That's really the roots of America. America was rooted in the ideas of the Puritans and ultimately the Puritans were rooted in a Reformation theology, but they were also very, very committed to what was known as family worship. It was really the first time that family worship had come back into vogue in European nations, largely through Presbyterian churches and other Reformed churches, but the Puritans grabbed onto this and they encouraged family worship, family discipleship. This is a huge part of the Protestant Reformation.

You want to know why the Protestant nations today have spread all around the world and gave birth to a missionary movement like what John G. Payton did, family worship. You want to know where John G. Payton's father got the idea? Family worship all the way back for the Reformation.

They conveyed that from generation on to generation and this is how they grew this tremendous kingdom outreach to take another two-thirds of the world for Jesus Christ through the 1800s. It all was rooted in this reformational idea of family discipleship and family worship. It was largely displaced by Sunday schools thanks to Robert Rakes in the 1780s and 1790s. Family worship had virtually disappeared by 1860, but generally speaking it was family worship that changed the entire direction for the world and gave birth to a missionary movement that accomplished amazing things in the late 1700s and 1800s. It was the Mathers that really extended so much of this into America in the early colonies.

Richard Mather, Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, this was a legacy. These guys were the early people who started Harvard College, and they were able to keep Harvard College fairly conservative until the 1700s when the Latitudinarians took over and the rest is history. Typically, it's the colleges that have been perverted. But increased matter was trying to keep it as a discipleship center and was trying to keep Greek studies out of it in the latter part of the 1600s but lost the battle. But these guys had a heritage they brought to America and was largely based in family discipleship.

This was the roots, the roots of America. If you want to know what America was like in the 1600s, it was all about family discipleship and family worship. It was a family vision, it was a generational vision that formed early America, and the most popular book sold in Boston in the 1680s were Increase Mather's sermons, and the most popular book sold in the entire decade of the 1680s in Boston was Increase Mather's book on family worship and generational continuity, carrying on a parent's vision from one generation to the next. This is what Richard Mather, Increase's father, would tell his own children, you must not leave your children to themselves neglected to instruct them in the ways of God. But as you love yourselves in your comfort, you must be careful of this duty." Increase Mather had a diary that people have gotten a hold of, and in his diary, he's constantly referring to his children.

His children, the generational aspect of his own life was, it seems, more important than anything else he did, even though he was a man that was involved in politics, he was involved in Harvard College, he was involved as the pastor of the big church in Boston, he passed on his church to his son Cotton when his son was 18 years of age, his son Cotton was writing down his messages and publishing them at 16. I mean, this is the kind of heritage America had, but these are the kinds of things that Increase Mather would say. I'm going back into history right now to find examples of men who had heart, men who had vision, men who understood the importance of generational continuity. We don't have very much of this today, that's why I have to go back in the 1600s to find these sorts of things. But here's what Increase Mather would say in his diary about his children.

After I had prayed as I was in my garden and had this soliloquy. God has heard my prayer for this child. God will answer me. The child shall live to do service for the Lord is God, the God of his father. My heart was melted before the Lord and therefore I am not altogether without hope that this child should be blessed and made a blessing in his generation.

Amen, O God in Christ Jesus. Amen. Tears gushed from my face before God. I trust prayer and faith shall not be in vain. I have prevailed and obtained mercy for my poor children.

Amen, Lord Jesus. Do you get the passion? You get the feel? You get the idea of this man and his priorities. Increase Mather had a son named Cotton.

Cotton had 16 children. Cotton had resolutions for his children, something like 15 resolutions, but it would go something like this, at the birth of my children I will resolve to do all I can that they may be the Lord's. I will now actually give them up by faith to God in treating that each child may be a child of God the Father, a subject of God the Son, a temple of God the Spirit. As soon as my children are capable of minding my admonitions, I will often admonish them saying, child, God has sent his son to die to save sinners from death and hell. You must not sin against him.

You must every day cry out to God. He would be your father, your savior. Let me daily pray for my children with constancy, with fervency, with agony. Yea, by name let me mention every one of them. Every day before the Lord I will importunately beg for all suitable blessings to be bestowed upon them and on and on it goes.

This is the hearts. These are the men that were working at the height of the Christian faith in Europe and America. This is what it looked like. I know we haven't seen this in a very long time. But friends, I think ultimately it was a commitment to the Kingdom of God.

Yes, they wanted to form a nation. They did. They wanted a Christian nation formed on Christian principles, they did. But fundamentally they knew that the kingdom of God relied on generational continuity. So we've got the geographical aspect of the kingdom of God.

A Father should be very connected to missions and the geographical aspect of the kingdom. Fathers should be connected to institutions and how we disciple institutions. And we need to press the gospel into every aspect of life, from marriage to family to economics to politics to business to art. Yeah, we've got a big, big, big, big jaw. We've got a big, big, big vision.

And fathers need to be big, big, big visionaries and find elements of these things. But let's remember the third aspect of the kingdom is generational. What would happen if you had discipled a little bit of the institutions, discipled a little bit of the geography, you got the kingdom of God in this country, that country, this island, and that island out in the South East, but somehow you forgot Proverbs, Deuteronomy 6-7, Ephesians 6-4, 1 Thessalonians 2, all of the verses in Scripture that deal with the conveying of the message to the next generation. What if you forgot it? What if somehow you did Sunday schools and youth groups instead of instructing fathers to do Ephesians 6, 4 and do it on the 6th of September?

What if you did that? And friends, I'm here to tell you that's pretty much what's happening all over the place. There's a very, very precious little commitment to generational extending that kingdom into the lives of children and grandchildren that's coming out of the mission work and the churches in our present day, we need to have a generational commitment to the kingdom of God. Now let me give you a couple of practical things here. In order to be the man of God, in order to be a father, Brothers, we need three things.

We need courage, love, and wisdom. These are the character traits of a godly man. These things need to be honed in our lives like three legs on a stool. You don't want just two legs, otherwise you fall over. So you need to have courage.

Courage is a very, very important part of godly manhood. We read in 1st Corinthians chapter 16, quit you like men, be strong. God wants us to be strong. God wants us courageous. It takes a man of some courage to step out and say, our family is not going to do this.

Our family is not going to participate in this activity. It takes courage to stand up and say to a relative who's using God's name in vain in your home, you know you can't do that in our home. You just can't do that. We're not allowing that in our home. Now again, it takes some wisdom and love.

It takes wisdom and love, doesn't it? But courage as well. A man needs to up the standards in his home in the area of culture and dress and all these other things. Sometimes theology, that can be difficult as well. It takes courage for a man to turn off the television set.

If he sees something ungodly over that takes a little courage to break the silence, that's ungodly. That billboard over there is ungodly. It takes a little bit of breaking the silence. Or if a father sins against his wife or his children, it takes a little courage for that man to be the first man to repent. The first man to lead and humility and confession of sin before his family.

This happened to me from time to time. You know, I remember a few years ago I was just a little shocked to my wife as we were preparing dinner And we were sitting down to pray and I was about ready to pray and I couldn't pray because you know here I just sinned against my wife, and I'd sinned against my wife in front of everybody and It was like I knew I needed to say something it was really hard it was just And everybody's looking at me I remember my children were looking at me like, what's wrong with Dad? And I'm like, I'm sending it to you, Mom. You know, you just kind of had to get it out there. And Mom said, oh, you sinned, I forgive you.

Okay, and she forgave me and everything's good. Sometimes it's hard to be the man, you know, to be the man of courage and say the things that you're supposed to say and humble yourself and confess sin in front of your own family. And that takes courage, but it also takes love as well. We need to love our wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it. Even when she's not feeling real loving herself or she's not lovable, it's difficult to love somebody who's unlovable.

By the way, it's also hard to submit or respect somebody who's not being respectable. So, you know, there's a flip side on that. You know you come home with a bunch of flowers for your wife or something and you're just gonna love her and she's maybe pushing back. Maybe she's, you'll never believe what your son did. You ought to be, yeah, yeah, And then you're sitting there and you've got flowers behind, the flowers kind of wilt behind your back, and you're thinking, you know, the first thing you want to say is, well, you think that about me, well here's what I think about you.

Take that, you know. That's the first response you want to take, right brothers? But it takes love to say, you know what, putting a little nail in that hand, how about another nail in the other hand? Let's put another nail in the foot and another nail over here. Jesus took four nails.

That's my understanding. If Jesus took four, If Jesus died for disciples who denied Him two hours before He made it to the cross, then we can love our wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for it. Amen? Amen. And wisdom.

Wisdom determines the right time to say something. Okay, you see that your wife needs a little work maybe in the submission department. In the middle of that confrontation where you're having a huge loving problem, She's having a huge respecting problem, and the tempers are going higher and higher. Probably not the best time to say, and honey, you've got a big problem with submission. Your timing is critical.

Your approach is critical. This is the man, this is the Christian husband. We of course need to pray to God for his assistance in these areas. I mean, man, we need the courage, amen. We need the love, we need the wisdom, and we need that for our daughters.

Your daughter comes down on a Sunday morning and she's dressed in something that's just not quite right. And you know what? You had courage. You could blurt out something. No love, just courage.

You could blurt out something and you know you're just not expressing the love. She gets that and that might set back the relationship, okay? You need the wisdom, you need the love, you need the courage, you need to bring these together and be the man, be the man in the house. And may God give you these important elements to being a Godly husband and father in your home, and you know what I don't have time to talk about family worship But let me just encourage you get in the word every day a father teaches a father and monishes He's in the word exhorting his family daily as long as it's called today people say well where in the Bible does it say it's gotta be daily? Deuteronomy 6, 7, Hebrews 3, 13, gotta be daily.

It's gotta be daily. You've got to be in the Word on a daily basis, getting your children into the Word. You've gotta submerge them in it. I would encourage you to be singing throughout the day and exhorting one another through the Word of God and then bringing your family's sins to God and asking for His forgiveness. Try to do these sorts of things on a daily basis.

Wash your wives in the Word, wash your children in the Word, and by God's grace, God will turn your family into a beautiful garden. This is my prayer for you, amen. I'm out of time. Thank you very much.