Family Discipleship by Scott Brown. How much are we to focus on the family? What is discipleship? It is a work of communicating the gospel for genuine conversion and teaching to obey all that Christ has commanded.

Okay, family discipleship. This is a critical issue. What happens in the family gets turned on the church, gets turned on the state. You get your employees from the family. You get everything out of the family.

It's a fountain. It issues forth a certain kind of life. What you do in your family has enormous consequences in the world and when you have people who either reject the doctrine of the family or they de-emphasize the family, you have gigantic problems in culture. People say, well, you don't want to over-emphasize the family. And that's absolutely true.

But we live in a world that so de-emphasizes the family that if you place any emphasis on the family at all, they scream idolatry. But the truth is God has established societies that are defining for other societies and the family is one of those. And so God has it so that there would be a marriage, and then there would be children, and then those children would depart and have other marriages and more children, and this is the wisdom of God. Now it's a gigantic subject. We could go in and study a number of didactic passages of Scripture that speak of family life.

We could go and be reminded of some of the great principles of family life, that I just pray all of us would somehow, you know, grasp with all of our souls. We could go back and learn from Abraham. God said that the purpose of Abraham's life was that he would instruct his children. We could go back to Job. And I pray that we who are fathers would be like Job.

He prayed for his family every day. He made sacrifices for them every day because he knew what their greatest threat was. Sin. He prayed that sin would not grip them and destroy them. We could go back to Joshua who said, as for me and my house, we shall serve the Lord.

We could go back to Moses whose heart burned many times and said this same thing in more than one place in Deuteronomy that fathers should teach their children when they sit in the house, when they walk by the way, when they lie down, and when they rise up. Or like Ezra who gathered, you know, the whole families and suckling babes, everyone together to hear the reading of the law of God. Or we could go to Asaph who in Psalm 78 said so many powerful things about fatherhood and family life. We could go and look at Timothy, who is instructed by his mother and his grandmother. So there's such a rich tapestry that we could draw from when we talk about family life.

And we could also give many negative examples as well of family life, of marriages gone in the wrong direction. We could go to Lot's wife. We could go to it. We could remember her as we're instructed in Scripture to do. We could examine consequences from Scripture of neglecting the biblical doctrine of the family and particularly the roles of fathers and mothers.

We could talk about the severe, just the terrifying warnings that were given to David if he did not disciple his sons. So it's a subject that takes us from Genesis to Revelation. So it's a large subject. So I've been trying to consider how do we deal with this great subject in one hour of calibration. So I'd like to begin with a definition of family discipleship here.

What is discipleship? And there are two texts that I think explain family discipleship in summary form, and they bring together what Scripture says about it. And that would be Matthew 28, 18 through 20. This is a passage about discipleship. It tells us what discipleship is.

And if you commingle Matthew 28, 18 to 20, with Deuteronomy chapter 6, I think you have an excellent testimony that tells about the definition of discipleship. And family discipleship is this. It's a work of communicating the gospel for genuine conversion and teaching to obey all that Christ has commanded. That is the role of family discipleship. It's gospel centered and it's eschatological in the sense that It's for purposes in the future.

It's for you, your son, and your grandson, for many generations. So it's temporal, it's eschatological, and it has to do with heaven, Because we disciple our families because God has made it that He will convey souls to heaven. Matthew 28, 18 through 20, if you open up your Bibles. And Jesus came and spoke to them saying, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Therefore, go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you.

And lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age." The operative statement in here is the discipleship command to teach them to observe all things that I have commanded. This really summarizes the kind of discipleship that God communicates in the Bible. And then of course, Deuteronomy chapter 6, verses 1 through 9. Now this is the commandment, and these are the statutes and the judgments which the Lord your God has commanded to teach you, that you may observe them in the land which you are crossing over to possess, that you may fear the Lord your God to keep all His statutes and His commandments, which I command you, you and your son and your grandson, all the days of your life, that your days may be prolonged Therefore here. Oh Israel the Lord our God the Lord is one I'm sorry I jumped therefore hero Israel and be careful to observe it that it may be well with you, that you may multiply greatly as the Lord God of your fathers has promised you, a land flowing with milk and honey.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart, and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall talk of them as you sit in your house as you walk by the way when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates." So these two passages of Scripture, Matthew 28 and Deuteronomy 6, I think form the structure of the definitional structure of family discipleship.

And of course there's more, but what we learned from these passages of Scripture is that while family discipleship includes everything that you do, It includes your education, it includes your work, it includes your church life, it includes your community life, but there's one thing that stands in the midst of all of them, that is the heart of all of them, and that is teaching. Teaching the things that Jesus Christ has commanded. And you know, there are many people who say, well, all of life is discipleship, So I take my children wherever I go, we just do life together. But if you leave out teaching, if you're not determinatively, systematically teaching, you are not engaging in the kind of family discipleship that's spoken of in these passages of Scripture. It's one thing to have your family live life with you, but there's content to that life.

And family discipleship has, as at its center, teaching. And you know, and I think these passages are clear enough to be able to say, if you don't have a family life that's focused on the teaching of the Word of God, then you're not making disciples of Christ. God has called us here to something that captures an enormous amount of our lives. It's all of our life. So, okay, that's sort of the definition.

Now I want to talk about the only true guide, and this should be obvious to all of us, the only true guide for family discipleship is Scripture. Scripture is sufficient. Imagine being left to this task without instructions. We're not left without instructions. And that is a blessing.

And so when you look at Scripture, what you'll find, you'll find at least three broad categories that describe the way that family discipleship is engaged. And again, because Scripture is sufficient, we look to Scripture alone to help us understand how our family discipleship should look. And those three broad categories are this. First of all, there's the discipleship that happens inside of your family life. Secondly, the kind of discipleship that happens in the gathered church.

And then thirdly, the kind of discipleship that happens between believers one to another. So those are the three categories that you see in Scripture. Maybe there are more, but those are the ones that I'm able to see when I read Scripture. So God has given us language, He's given us examples, He's given us personalities, He's given us principles to help us understand what this looks like. It's interesting, there are so many trip-cord words that help us know what our family discipleship should look like to teach, to quote command, to quote talk, to quote tell, to quote train up, quote instruct, guide, discipline, bring up, not provoke.

There are all kinds of words, catchphrases that you find all over Scripture that help you understand what family discipleship is all about. Now I want to bring, you know, I said the first component in terms of a broad category of family discipleship is what happens in family life, okay? And I'm just gonna machine gun you for a minute with 22 elements of home discipleship that you'll see in the Scriptures, okay? The reason I want to do this is I want us to understand that Scripture is sufficient, that there's a rich testimony, that there are many, many, many things that we do in life that have to do with the discipleship of the next generation. The Bible is very pro the discipleship of youth.

You know, while we've canceled our youth groups in this church and all that kind of thing, we've not abandoned ministry to youth at all. In fact, what we find is the demands for ministry to youth in scripture, they so far outstrip anything than any programmatic youth ministry could ever possibly accomplish. It demands more, it's more detailed, it's harder, and So I just want to click through what I'm just going to call 22 elements of family family discipleship first of all There's just home life itself when you sit in your house when you walk by the way when you lie down When you rise up, then there's a marriage marriage is also another another important tool of discipleship of the next generation. As husband loves his wife, as Christ loved the church, as wife respects and submits and is a helpmate to her husband, there is a picture of the gospel. And you have a sacrificial husband and a submissive wife, which is a picture of the church.

Christ and his church. And so a marriage becomes a chief instructional tool for the next generation. You can send your children to all kinds of classes and get them all cranked up intellectually on memorizing the Bible. But if your marriage is all messed up, your family discipleship is messed up. If your marriage is messed up right now, get it unmessed up.

The only way you unmess up a marriage is through repentance. And so marriage is a critical element as a tool for the discipleship of the next generation. Now nobody ever had a perfect marriage, so children have to live with imperfect by looking at imperfect marriages. And that also is a discipleship tool for them as well, so they understand how to live, how one might live with an imperfect help-me. I'm grateful for my wife because she's teaching my daughter how to live with an imperfect husband because someday she's going to get one.

And So, you know, my wife is playing a key role in helping her how to be a wife someday. So anyway, marriage is one of the critical components of home discipleship. Let's talk about grandfathers. Many of the pictures of family discipleship that you see in Scripture include language of grandfathers. That's why you get this you, your son, and your grandson.

The Bible just assumes that the role of a grandfather is the role of teaching. So you're a father and when your children depart you're not finished. You're teaching for all the rest of your life. And then grandmothers. We see, you know, this beautiful example of Lois and Eunice and the blessing this grandmother was to young Timothy.

So the role of grandfathers and grandmothers are also critical components to the discipleship of youth and home discipleship. And then there's the whole principle of passing the baton on to the next generation. That's a whole other category that there's something that's being transferred, intentionally transferred. There's a body of knowledge. There are categories of character and lifestyle that you actually forge your children on and then hopefully it becomes a part of them and they go out and do the same thing.

And that's passing the baton from one generation to the next. Then there's the whole matter of old age. This is another element of ministry to youth, of family discipleship. Unlike Joshua's generation who failed to teach their children who God was and what God had done. David expresses this whole matter of what those ought to do in their old age.

They communicate the majesty of God to the next generation. Psalm 146, Now also when I am old and gray-headed, O God do not forsake me until I declare your strength to this generation, your power to everyone who is to come. So there's the role of the aged, the old man, the old woman who is declaring the strength of God to the next generation. Then there's the whole matter of declaring the Word of God and the worship of God in the family. Some people call this family worship.

Family worship is implied in the statement, These words shall be in your heart and you shall teach them to your children. And the whole matter of gathering the family, centering the family around the Word of God. And then there is the communication of the law of God. This is another component of family discipleship. Deuteronomy chapter 11 verses 18 through 19 communicate this.

The communication of the praises of the Lord. This is another element of family discipleship. In Isaiah 38, 19 we read, the living man, he will praise you as I do this day. The father shall make known your truth to the children. Here's the element of family discipleship that's all about praise.

A father in a house who is so happy in Jesus Christ, who is so gratified by the presence of God, that he is praising God in his house. How powerful is that when you have a father in a house who is praising God, who's a happy man because of the goodness of God. This is the key element of family discipleship. If you have an unhappy home, then family discipleship is breaking down in your family. And every man in here ought to be examining his heart.

Is he a happy man before God? Does he walk in the house praising God? Or is he a dark cloud in the house, worried about this, worried about that, obsessing about things, and not free in order to declare the praises of the Lord day to day in his household. It's a critical element of family discipleship. And then there's confronting rebellion.

That's another critical element of family discipleship. Do not withhold correction from a child, says the writer of Proverbs. For if you beat him with a rod, he will not die. Proverbs has an enormous amount of help for us about confronting rebellion in our houses. Then there's the communication of wisdom.

That's another important element that happens in the home, in this whole enterprise of family discipleship. The entire book of Proverbs is a guide for fathers and mothers for teaching of their children. You should read the book of Proverbs over and over and over again. You never get to the bottom of it. You'll read it for for 15 years and you still read it again and you can't believe how wonderful it is.

The communication of wisdom is critical. Again, we're talking about the kind of discipleship that happens in the home because there are three spheres, the home, the church, and then there's the personal level. So we're still talking about the home. And then there's Sabbath keeping. There's the whole matter of family celebrations.

In Scripture you find the principle of family celebrating together and taking the resources of their family and having what we might call family vacations, but they really are focused on the praises of God. We could talk about joyful living and the kind of joyful living we see in Psalm 127 and 128 of the happy family gathered around the table with the olive plants and the fruitful wife. It's a scene of joyful living. Then there's the breaking of bread from house to house, eating together. There's the home as a place of evangelism.

If you read through the Gospels and through the Epistles, you'll see that marvelous things happen in homes. People are healed in homes. People repent of their sins in homes. One of the great stories, One of the great home evangelism stories were those friends who wanted to see their buddy healed so they tore off the roof and lowered their friend down to Jesus in the house. And there the Lord Jesus ministered to him.

There's so much ministry that happens in homes. It's evangelistic, it's discipleship oriented, it's for equipping, there are just all kinds of things that happen in homes. There's teaching from house to house in Acts chapter 5. This is a critical element that we see our homes as places of instruction. They're not flophouses, they're not just places of entertainment, They're not places of just relaxing, but they're places of instruction.

Our homes should be schools in every way. And we should be inviting people to come in and instruct. And we instruct ourselves, each member of the family instructing as well. There's the whole matter of hospitality. This is another element of family discipleship.

Then there's the matter of prayer. Homes were used for the purpose of prayer in the New Testament And so that's another element of family discipleship. The home was a place of compassion. Jesus was going, he went to the home of Zacchaeus, and it was a place of compassion and mercy. It was a home that the woman poured expensive ointment on Jesus' feet.

Peter heals his mother-in-law in a home. So In considering this first element of family discipleship, I just want to establish that there are so many ways that discipleship happens in a family. God has established the home as one of the richest places of discipleship. And the great thing about it is everyone is real. There are no errors that you can put on in your home.

It's all real. And it's as real as anything ever gets. So that's the one category, the first category. The second component of family discipleship is what happens in the church. And this is an incredibly important aspect of family discipleship.

If a family only focuses itself on family discipleship and neglects the discipleship of the gathered church, that family is really rebelling against another major component that God has established for the discipleship of the next generation and for the blessing of the family as well. And so God has established His people. He's always established His people. He always has His people gathered together. They always come and meet.

And what do they do? They read. They pray. They fellowship. What God's people do today, God's people have always done.

And God has always gathered his people out of their families and brought them into the church. And this is the divine wisdom for family life. Families who neglect the church are making a terrible mistake. And they're committing their families to all kinds of problems, which I won't enumerate here, but there are so many residual problems in families that neglect local church life. I'll speak about a couple of them.

One of the most helpful things about being in church life is that you get to be in close relationship with sinners who are converted. And sometimes those people will sin against you. So your family gets to learn how to deal with someone who sins against you, or speaks wrongfully about you, or who actually might lie, or they might even cheat you. Something like that. You know, God has established his church for the maturing of his people so that things like this happen in the context of a family.

When things like this happen in the context of your biological family, you can deal with it in a good way. The same thing in your spiritual family. When people deprive themselves of the fellowship of a local church, they become socially, emotionally, and spiritually backward in their relationships. They are just more immature because they haven't had to learn how to relate with other imperfect people in the church. And people who are immature and they think, well here are the perfect people and here's the rest of us, they end up finding out that that's not true if they're in a real local church.

If they go to an entertainment center where they just hear a talking head and everybody scatters like rats, you know, when the lights goes on after everybody's done, then you won't have that kind of fellowship. And so local church life is enormously important. Well, let's talk about the importance of preaching in a family. It's important that families receive the preaching of the Word of God. They hear another voice.

They hear the voice of another shepherd. They have a shepherd called their father, but they are exposed to a whole other range of speaking through other shepherds and and and they deliver the inerrant Word of God and So they they end up being Brought up in the training of any admonition of the Lord through another means. Because a father's means is not enough. You're not enough. That's just the truth.

You are inadequate for all of what God has. You're not inadequate for your task, but you're inadequate for the larger objectives that God has for his people. And so his people need the preaching of the Word of God. They also need the prayers of the Saints. They need the fellowship of the Saints.

They need the Lord's table. They need all these things that only the gathered church brings. What they need is a big family. They have a small family and everybody who has a small family has things that are missing in that family. There isn't a family here that doesn't have something missing.

And that's why God brings us into a larger family, where if there's something missing here, there's a spreading out of the blessing in the church. And so in the church, you get, instead of one father, you have many spiritual fathers. Instead of one sister or no sisters, you get a lot of sisters. That's the wisdom of God. So this is the second component of family discipleship, and that is what happens in the gathered church.

Now, My admonition to everyone in this church and every church I've ever been in is this, and I just want to make the admonition to you. And I know I'm speaking into the air to almost everyone here because we have a church that is highly involved. And when we gather the flock together, everybody comes. But I just want to say how important it is for the church to gather. And my perspective is that as we've established the gatherings of the church as elders and we find people who are not participating in those things, we will talk to them.

I know this is obvious to some of you, but if there are families who are missing prayer, quite likely I will find you and talk to you and ask you why are you not bringing your family into the times of prayer with the Church. We recognize that Wednesday night is not the only time to pray, but God has called His people to gather for corporate prayer. And so we want to urge people to be involved in that. And our gathering's here on Sunday as well. So my admonition is this, make the church a gigantic category in your life.

Don't make it a small thing. Don't you dare make the church the thing that you figure out whether you're going to participate in at the last moment. The week rolls on, well I'm tired this week or I'm busy this week or I have this going or that going. If you're that kind of Christian, I'm just going to say, you know, That is not the kind of Christian you should be. Don't let the church sort of get the leftovers at the end of the week.

Or let it be subject to every other priority that you've placed in your life. Make it a big priority and don't miss it. You know, I've always had a fairly busy life, but I'll tell you, I have always totally devoted myself to the gatherings of God's people. Here, follow my example. I think that's what I want to say.

Follow my example. So this is the second component of family discipleship. It happens in the gathered church and includes the preaching, the prayer, the relationships, all those kinds of things. And then the third component of family discipleship happens through personal ministry in the church as we minister to one another where we experience the one another's that are in Scripture. There are over 50 one another's and our personal fellowship together, the way that we know one another, talk to one another, live life together in a local church, allows this kind of personal ministry where we're not just operating on a surface level.

We bear one another's burdens. We forgive one another. We're patient with one another. We sing together. There are all kinds of things that we do together to experience the one another's.

And again, God is so wise. You know, He begins us, He provides a discipleship context in the home and then the larger church and then He gives us individuals, people who would know us and love us and pray for us. Now all of this I hope helps us to see together that the family alone is not enough for the discipleship of the next generation, or any of our discipleship. Your families are not enough. They are part of a wonderful matrix of blessing that God has for you, but they are not enough.

And so you know just getting your children out of youth groups is not enough if it's not replaced with the rich contours of church life and family life. You know there's Often I talk with people who tell me about their family integrated church, And they say that they have people in the church who are saying, why can't we do something for our young people? I get this question all the time. Why can't we do something with our young people? And there are a number of things that I typically respond with when I get that question.

The first thing I usually say is why would we want to create a sociology that's really different than anything you see in Scripture? Why would you want to create something that none of the apostles ever created, none of the patriarchs? There's not a godly person in Scripture who created anything like this. So why would we want to create something that's actually not just foreign to Scripture, but it's contradictory to everything we actually see in Scripture? Because we always see intergenerational kinds of gatherings.

And so the first thing I say is, you know, why would you want to create a sociology that doesn't exist in Scripture? But the second thing is this. Usually when someone says, why can't we do something for our young people? Usually it's code. It's code for something else.

It's code for the discipleship that we have going on in our family is really not adequate. Our spiritual life is not big enough. Our family life, my vision is not big enough to keep our young people focused on a direction that is fulfilling and it's stretching and it's godly and it brings us together. Usually why can't we do something for our young people is code for a broken discipleship pattern in the family. And you can usually trace it to a busy father, you can often trace it to a very tired mother.

So it actually surfaces other problems that are there. You know, I was speaking to some of our young men about this yesterday. And one of them said, well, Mr. Brown, what are the questions that you want youth bringing to you. And I said, I'm praying for a body of youth in our church, and I think we have youth like this who are saying, How can I advance the mission of our church?

How can I put my gifts into use? How can I bless the vision and calling of our family? How can I do that? Those three things are pretty big jobs. This third component of family discipleship happening through personal ministry, and the second component of family discipleship happening through the meetings of the church, and the first component happening through the family life itself, just provides a very energetic, a very demanding kind of discipleship culture that we really ought to be building.

Now I want to talk about the content of the instruction. We've talked about the context of it, the various ways that family discipleship happens, but I want to talk about the really four elements of the instruction, the content of the instruction that Scripture speaks of. First of all, theology. Theology is the study of God and so the focus of our instruction ought to always be, it includes theology. In Deuteronomy 6, 4 Moses declared, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

That's theology. Fathers in Israel were commanded to teach the doctrine of God. So our children must be saturated with the knowledge of God. We need to be reading our Bibles from cover to cover. We need to be finding God everywhere where he declares himself in Scripture.

The Shema, which is where Deuteronomy 6 hails from, was repeated in Jewish families twice a day. So this whole matter of declaring the nature of God is critical. So that's the first element of the content of the instruction. The second element is the law of God. The discipleship of our families includes these words, which I command you today, shall be in your heart.

These words are, this is the law of God. While we live in a world that despises the law of God and a Christian environment that makes the law of God of no account. We ought to be teaching our children the law of God. Thirdly, history and the works of God. The psalmist indicates that youth discipleship should include the teaching of the historical works of God.

Psalm 44, 1 says, we have heard with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us the deeds you did in their days in the days of old. This is the communication of history. It's in Christian homes that history is best communicated. And I know so many of you, you study history. And you should study history.

The study of history is just a study of the great deeds of God. So history is another category of the content of instruction. And then fourthly, wisdom. Biblical discipleship is always wisdom-based. And we talked about the book of Proverbs earlier.

And Proverbs is just such a fantastic baseline for all wisdom. So these four things, theology, the law of God, history, and the works of God, and the wisdom of God. So there's content. Remember, you shall teach them diligently. If you say, well all of life is discipleship and there isn't an intentional decisive content that you're teaching your children, you're not engaging in what is the biblical content of discipleship.

And then now I'd like to turn to the duties of family discipleship. Now there are many duties of family discipleship but I want to just identify a few. The first duty is this, for the heads of households. And when I used the term heads of households, I met husband and wife. The first duty is this, know the condition of your flocks.

Know the condition of your flocks. Proverbs 27 says it exactly like that be diligent to know the state of your flocks and attend to your herds that That is just a principle of shepherding. All shepherds must know the condition of their flocks. And our families are our flocks. The household, the people in the household, they are our herds in a way.

And we need to understand how they're doing. The English Puritan, Philip Goodwin, says that a father needs to be an expositor. He needs to understand exactly what is going on in their lives, their cares, their dispositions, What their gifts are in their capacities. What are their necessities. What are their iniquities.

There is a whole range of things that we need to know. There's so many categories of life as complex human beings that we operate in. And parents need to know the condition of their flocks. That means they need to talk together, they need to walk together and be together in life. The second duty of family discipleship is the provision of unity in the home.

The provision of unity in the home. Many of the problems in family life can be traced to dis-unified husbands and wives. Sometimes it's a husband and wife that they just haven't talked about things in detail like they should. They haven't covered the details of their life. What God has done is He's designed that a husband and wife would come together and form a unified body.

They would become one body and in the same way that Christ and his church are one, husband and wife are one, and they have to be one in everything. And so if they don't talk, they can't be one. I don't know if you men here have ever had your wives say, you know, I just feel like we're living different lives. Well that's disconnection. That's sort of a violation of the whole principle of marriage.

And so husbands and wives have to talk about every detail of life. For as much as they can remember, I find that I don't remember to talk about everything that is going on. Sometimes my wife finds out about things, the strangest things from the strangest sources. But the principle is obvious, that God has designed a marriage to be unified, and it's out of that unity that the direction of the family happens. And many child-raising problems, many, many problems that happen in a home, they just go back to a husband or wife who are not unified.

Sometimes because they're too busy to talk to each other, or maybe they have no mercy for one another, so when they start to talk, it always turns into an argument, because sin rises up in their hearts and they're not dealing with sin. They're not confessing. They're not dealing with the thing that's blowing up their conversations all the time. This week I was reading William Gogue on this whole matter. And he says that because wives are the weaker vessel, because they can tend to be hotter, in a sense, that husbands need to learn how to provoke their wives to love them.

Usually when a husband's provoked, he provokes back. But Gu's just saying, no. No, husbands have a greater responsibility, and therefore their sin is greater. And therefore, when they are sinned against by their wives, they have a greater responsibility to provoke her to love Him. So providing unity in the home is a really, really important issue in terms of family discipleship.

If you think you can get your family together, have Bible studies, get them through their schoolwork, and you don't have a unified husband and wife, you are spitting into the wind in many ways. Now I'm not suggesting that you stop all those things, but I am suggesting that the strength and the reach of those things will be much less. So it is a responsibility of marriage to present to the family a unified whole of husband and wife. Husbands and wives talking with one another and loving one another and dealing with their sins one to another is a critical, critical duty of family discipleship. Another duty of family discipleship is the protection from worldliness.

It's a very important duty that husband and wife protect their family from worldliness, from worldly songs, from worldly films, from worldly images. It's the duty of parents to protect the family from that. And whatever you have to do to protect your family and understand what's going on you should do it. There are so many dangers in creating love for the world and your family. You know John said do not love the world or the things that are in the world.

And he said that because the world is a vicious devourer of life. And so parents stand as gatekeepers in a home to protect from worldliness, to becoming like the world. We were talking about this element of worldliness this morning, of wanting more than your daily bread, of wanting some kind of security for the rest of your life, to have enough money that you can just live on and do whatever you want. That's just worldliness. Worldliness takes so many forms.

And those of you who are not, you don't have regular jobs right now, you're particularly vulnerable to this longing and this sin. So protection from worldliness is a duty of family discipleship. And then another duty of family discipleship is love for the church. Sowing a love for the church. Does your life revolve around your local church?

It really ought to. The church is that important. And it is something that life should be centered upon. It's not all of life, but it should become a critical part of everything in your schedule. OK, I want to talk about some dangers lurking in family discipleship.

Dangers lurking. Danger number one. I'm just going to call this drift. Drift. You might call it forgetfulness.

But here's how the drift works. You have, you know, you have six children and the first, the oldest three children received an enormous deposit with incredible energy. And then, over time, you just sort of slacked off. It just happened slowly. And what you so assiduously tried to teach your older children you're not really working that hard at it anymore because you've you've already won the day right you turn your family around you got it you you turn the ship right And then you turn the ship and then it just kept getting slower and slower and slower and that happens to homeschool families.

And So what happens is that the younger children never got the benefit of all that energy. When the ship was turning, you were so riveted, you were so changing, it was an amazing time. But now it's just sort of, you're done, you're reformed, You fixed it. The problem is now gone, but actually it isn't gone at all. And you're going to wake up someday and realize that your younger ones, they really don't know hardly anything that your older ones knew because you had more passion, more energy, and then what happened was you sort of thought you had it all together.

You were at ease in Zion and you quit the passion And now you think you're just going to run on five years ago's reformation. So often a duty of family discipleship is semper reformanda, Keep reforming. Get back on that ship and start pouring coal in that engine so that it can be cranked up again. I don't know if anybody here is in that place. They need to crank it back up.

They thought they were reformed. They thought they had it going. And now you've pulled back. And I just want to ask the question, has that happened to any of us here? I've seen it happen many, many times.

I've seen tendencies in my own life as well. It's easy to have early wins and far easier to have late losses. So there needs to be a deliberate, systematic, energetic discipleship that never stops. You, your son, and your grandson all the days of your life. In other words, you never stop.

You push hard until you're dead. That's the deal. So a duty of discipleship is to, or a danger lurking is drift. Here's another danger, prayerlessness. Prayerlessness.

I want to read to you from Jeremiah chapter 10 verse 25. Pour out your fury on the Gentiles who do not know you, and the families who do not call on your name." Okay? Two categories of people. The Gentiles and the people of God. And Jeremiah is saying, Pour out your fury on the Gentiles, but also on those who do not call upon Your name, those who do not pray." We just had a message about prayer.

Prayerlessness is a danger to family discipleship. God has given us a season where we're in all these passages of Scripture about prayer. There's a reason. I think the reason is, is we need to tighten up in the whole area of prayer. Our hearts need to burn like they used to burn, to be alone with God.

You know, that Psalm in Psalm 5 that we were singing this morning, my voice you shall hear in the morning. My voice will rise up and cry out in the morning. Well, prayerlessness is a danger lurking in family discipleship. Another is formalism. It's another tremendous danger.

And that is that you've now become committed to your local church as you are, and you're part of the gatherings of the church and you're seeking the Lord, but it just becomes a routine. Another is the neglect of your role. There are three critical roles. The role of a head, the role of a help me, and the role of an arrow. Those are the three basic roles that you find in the family.

The husband, the wife, and the children all have roles, all have critical, really important roles. And When one of those roles falls out of order, all the others are affected. And then I want to just, I want to close with seven principles to guide family discipleship. The first is this, is that all family discipleship is designed to flow from the gates of heaven itself. The three persons of the Trinity have modeled what ought to be applied in families.

God the Father, in love and mercy, looks upon the affairs of the earth, He sends His Son and His Spirit. His Son takes up the towel of service and He humbles Himself to sacrifice Himself on the cross. The Spirit of God is sent out as the breath of God to comfort and to guide. And God is there in His fatherly care. These functions are all the kinds of functions that operate in family life.

And family life is patterned after nothing greater than the Holy Trinity itself. The relationships in the Trinity are the fundamental relational paradigm for family life. So that's just a principle, That all of family life flows from the throne of God. And that's why the study of theology is really important. You must know God.

One of the reasons that families are in dis-race, they do not have proper theology. A husband doesn't know how to lead his wife and a wife doesn't know how to submit to her husband because they do not understand the Trinity. Theology is the problem. They just do not know God. And so this principle that all family discipleship is designed to flow from the gates of heaven itself.

Now this is really important because there's a tendency with a subject like this to try to reduce it all down to a bunch of techniques and a bunch of methods of discipleship. Because we always want to know the practical side. Tell me what to do. Just tell me what to do every day. I just want a checklist.

Tell me what you do and I'll do that too. But it's not as simple as that because God gives us a vision in heaven to copy. We are image bearers and we are image makers as well. And we're designed to behold the glory of God as in a mirror and be transformed by that image. And so it's not as simple as just, here, let's do these 10 things in our family life and structure it this way.

It's far more complicated and far more beautiful and far more elegant than that because it flows from heaven itself. The second principle is this. When considering family discipleship, every minute of life is discipleship. When you get up in the morning and proceed through the day and go to bed at night, every single thing that you've subjected your family to, every way that you've operated is discipleship. Now it might be good discipleship, or it might be bad, but it's discipleship.

Everybody's discipling their family. If you're a lazy husband or a nitpicky wife, you're discipling your family. It includes all of your conversations. It includes the places you go. It includes the way that you regulate your life and your relationships.

It includes the way you talk about other people. Every single minute of life is discipleship of the family. And the third principle is this, all of family discipleship somehow needs to be summed up by love because love fulfills all the commandments. You know, homes that are devoid of tenderness, or thanksgiving, or humor, or hope, all contradict the laws of love that God has desired to be operating in a home. And that's why Paul said to Timothy, the goal of our instruction is love.

And so, expressions of heartfelt affection to one another, beginning with husband and wife, and moving through the children is so critical. To be tender-hearted and forgiving one another. To understand what the fruits of the Spirit are. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. So, the third principle of family discipleship is that if somehow all has to be summed up by love, that word should describe everything that you do in your family discipleship.

The next principle is that it must include Bible saturation. The next principle is that it must include confession of sin. Because confession of sin destroys all self-righteousness. It protects children from having wrong thoughts about God and duty. It identifies the poisons.

It empties families of sins. It makes a family happy. If you have a family but you don't understand that your family problems are all sin problems, then you won't be able to have the confession that is designed by God to relieve your family of the sin. And then the seventh principle is that biblical conversion must be understood. Repenting and believing in the Gospel and the bringing forth deeds that are consistent with the repentance is a critical matter.

That there is biblical conversion and biblical baptism. Those two things are really critical. If you get one wrong, you might get the other one wrong. They affect one another tremendously. So family discipleship causes the whole family to find its focus on God and the word of His grace.

And all family discipleship is a work of the kingdom of God. It's a work of evangelism. It is eschatological in nature. And it's designed to bring heaven down into the world so that the Gospel is declared from one generation to the next, that God would be glorified in the world. And He has so designed a perfect little society for it called the family.

And I pray that we here in our church would really understand what family discipleship ought to look like, because you're not going to learn it out there in the world. It is not being practiced very well in the Christian culture that we live in. It's something that needs to be recovered and it's really worth recovering because its impact is so wonderful and so far reaching. Would you pray with me? Lord, I pray that you would pour your grace out upon us to govern our families in a way that pleases you in all respects.

Oh Lord, I pray for these families, that You would give them fruit, that You would give them happiness, that You would give them all the things of Your kingdom, the righteousness and joy and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit that is so wonderful in this world. Amen.