Wow, what a powerful message, brother. Isn't that good? I think we're talking about reconstructing the Christian church. I think we're talking about reconstruction of all of society. You know, a missionary from Haiti commented on my program, radio program a few weeks ago regarding boarding schools.

He called them cesspools of bitter fornicating rebellious little wretches. Or something like that. I think it was a little harsher than that. He did not like boarding schools. By the way, missionary kids have a terrible reputation.

Unfortunately, I was a missionary kid. I knew missionary children taken back to America in handcuffs. But the point the guy made on this interview was what kind of faith do we have to export to foreign nations when American evangelicalism has a divorce rate among evangelical pastors of 50% where children hardly know how to honor their father and mother, where there's 1.8 children per family, where et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they come to Muslim families in India and try to present some kind of spiritual life? These people come back and say, what do we need this for?

We're doing just fine with the Muslim faith. At least the Muslim faith has better than 1.7 children. The children honor their parents, and there's almost no divorce whatsoever in these communities, almost none. So you know, there's something to be said for the fact that before we do any more missionary work, maybe we need to start cleaning up our act here in America. Maybe we need to change the church here.

We have so much work to do to reform the church of Jesus Christ. It's hardly worth it for us to even engage in missionary work. You know what I'm saying? Well, you know, the fact of the matter is that we have been infiltrated by a foreign worldview. I refer to that a little bit in previous presentations.

That's what it is. We have been syncretized, synthesized. We have taken on the wrong worldview. We don't live like Christians. We believe in somebody named Jesus.

We're not really sure why he died on the cross. We think it might have been for sin, but we don't want to define it, sin, as a breaking of the law of God. So effectively, without a moral code, you have no sin and you have no definition of spiritual life. And that's where we are. Now here's the question I have.

Who killed the family? The family is dead in the 21st century. Who killed it? I think it started with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who effectively killed five of his own children, abandoning them on steps of orphanages. And also, you know, Karl Marx said, we have got to abolish home education.

Do you guys know that? That's in the Communist Manifesto, the most important social document of the last 150 years. Right in the middle of the Communist Manifesto, we must replace home education with social. Okay, so the modern socialist worldview has set a social situation where you do not have the covenant family or the covenant community recognized. The individual has a relationship to the state and that's it.

That's the perspective of Karl Marx and Geist. That perspective has infiltrated all of our education systems virtually. So we all have been raised with this idea that the family, the covenant family, is not important. What's important is that the individual has his own lifestyle, has his own economic situation, and he is effectively beholden to a corporation or to a corporation controlled by the state, and that's about it. By the way, Marx and Rousseau got their ideas from Plato and Plato said that the only purpose for men and women coming together is to procreate to give children And those men and women should not live together.

They should have no relationship. They should not be married. And no child should know his father and no father his child. And he uses the word know there. Know.

Know. The biblical word for relationship. By the way, the biblical word for intimacy, for marital intimacy, is not intimacy and it's not s-e-x. It is no. No.

God wants us knowing each other in family, in marriage and family and in church. And he wants to know us and he wants us to know him because God is relational and he wants a relationship with us. Anyway, this is where we lost the family. We lost it with Rousseau, Marx, and Plato, and that's the world you live in today. But I think we are trying to reintegrate the family, And as we reintegrate the family, hopefully we'll recover the relational church.

That's why I think the proper stepping stones to a biblical reformation of the 21st century is going to be a reformation of the family first and then the church. The family is reformed when homeschooling happens. Why is it so important to be educated in a relational model? Because that is what forms a person's relational idea in terms of how life should be lived. That's how one's social circumstances are created.

And if we reconstruct the family by reintegrating the family, the next step is the reintegration, the reconstruction of the church. I just don't think it's possible to see a reconstructed, reintegrated church without families that understand they've got to reintegrate their families. You follow me here? Just not sure we can do that. Now, what home schooling has been for the family, I'm not saying home schooling is the only way to reintegrate a family.

I'm saying it's a tremendous application and it has helped millions of families across the world reintegrate. But what homeschooling has been to the family, hospitality will be to the church. And hospitality obviously is a biblical application. Now let me contrast programs and relationships for you. I think we've mentioned this one or two times in the conference.

Here we go. Programs are usually large groups or heavily segregated groups united on a narrow common interest. Relationships are smaller groups united on a broadly defined interest, i.e. A program is 3, 000 people united to build a missile for Lockheed Martin. Notice it's a very narrow purpose in mind.

Relationships are a very small number of people, i.e. Two people, united to take dominion over God's creation together and extend the kingdom of God into the generations. That is a broad purpose. And I would add there's some significant depth to it. The prerequisites to participate in a program are very narrow.

For example, if you have a program for twice-divorced children of alcoholics. And I had a pastor who came to me and somebody called up his number and said, do you have a program for twice-divorced children of alcoholics? And that was the day he put an end to it, walked away from the mega-church movement, and walked into the family-integrated church movement. I just can't do it anymore. I can't do these.

Now, you see, the qualifications for participating in the program is you've got to be twice divorced, and you've got to be a child of an alcoholic. Or you've got to be 16 years old, Or you've got to be this. You've got to be this. It's very narrow. You've got a very narrow segment of prerequisites.

The prerequisites for relationships is not narrow at all. You need love. Okay? You need love. There's nothing technical about this.

It's just that's what you need. You have to love God and love your children, and you have to love others. Brothers and sisters in the church. I'm going to give you a few other examples as we go here today. But you know, somebody has asked me, why it is that once you get into a family-integrated type of church, you move from a megachurch more into a family-integrated relational church, Why is it that you always wind up in some complicated doctrinal discussion about the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of men or whether or not children ought to be taking communion or whatever.

It seemed like when we were attending the megachurch, we weren't all that concerned about it. You follow me here? Well, that's because a megachurch by definition is unable to go into depth. Relationships are able to go as deep as you want to go. As long as you can attend it with love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, and obey the commandments of God as you go through this, that is the definition of love.

As long as you exercise these things, relationships can go as deep as you want it to go. But with the mega-church, with the programmed church, you are by definition unable to go deep. This is one of the reasons why I think the solution to solving our problem in our world, that is to bring a worldview shift into the minds of young people, you attend it with relationships and you can go all the distance. In fact, you know what? The worldview programs that we know about today, the creation ministries, the worldview ministries, they would not exist without home education.

All right? These huge ministries that are radically changing our worldviews and doing some tremendous work, they wouldn't exist without home educated students participating in these things. Why is that? Because the only way to shift a worldview significantly is when you do it in relationship, in discipleship, and by God's grace that sort of thing is happening. Well, relationships are tough.

Relationships involve conflict. Relationships are time-consuming. I asked somebody one time, would you rather teach 10, 000 people for three hours the gospel of Jesus Christ or spend 10, 000 hours with three people? Which would you rather do? Well, what sounds a little bit more like the Great Commission to you?

Teaching them to observe whatsoever I have commanded you. You know what? That takes a long time. And he didn't say, I don't want you, just to teach them whatever I commanded you. I want you to teach them to observe whatsoever I commanded you.

And if you've ever tried to teach a little child to obey their mother and father one single solitary command, okay, just one, you know that it takes more than ten minutes or three hours or three years. We're still at it ourselves. So relationships take a long time. They're time-consuming. The payback is long-term, not short-term.

Relationships hurt, it introduces vulnerability. I gave you an example of Jesus in the previous presentation. Relationships are not strictly economic. And this, this is a, introduces some tough issues and we've talked about whether you should give an allowance to a child or not, or pay him for doing the dishes. Well, if you're paying your children to do the dishes, you're seeing the family as something that is merely an economic arrangement.

You're not seeing it as a covenantal, team-like relationship. Relationships are not strictly economic. You can't say, give me a thousand bucks and I'll save your marriage. I know that there are biblical counseling centers that do this sort of thing. Give me a thousand bucks to save your marriage.

Give you a ten thousand I'll get you saved. I don't know if they say that or not. But you know you can't do that and that's one of the reasons pastors by the way are not paid. Pastors are not paid even as oxen are not paid. You ever think of this brother?

The Bible says that you feed the oxen that's treading out the corn, you're not doing it in an economic arrangement. You haven't filled out a contract with this guy, with the ox. The ox is a dumb ox. He's just treading corn. You're giving him food as a gift, even as he's given you his work as a gift.

Same thing with pastors. See, pastors do not work in a free market. Why? They're in a covenantal context. Very important.

Also very important for the arrangement of husband and wife in creating the oikonomiya, the economic vision. The oikonomiya is law of the home, law of the household, vision of the household. The basic fundamental economic unit is the household, not the individual in a biblical construct of things. Okay? So when a husband and wife get together, they're coming together for one single household vision.

Hopefully it's a household-based business, if at all possible. The modern world does not allow for much of that anyway relationships are not strictly economic relationships empower others to serve relationships only prosper as we cultivate our relationship with God now turn if you will with me to mark chapter 2 to mark chapter 2 and I think I just left my Bible down here. Could somebody grab it for me? Mark 2. There are so many examples of hospitality and the Word of God.

And I'd like to read this tremendous example of Jesus. Mark 2 and verse 14. As Jesus passed by, He saw Levi the son of Alphea sitting at the receipt of custom and said unto him, Follow Me. And he arose and followed him and it became to pass that as Jesus sat at meat in his house, many publicans and sinners sat also together with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many they followed him. When the describes the Pharisees saw meat with publicans and sinners, they said unto him, his disciples, How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners?

Jesus heard it, He saith unto them, They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick, I am come, not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." Now, The situation I want to describe for you is the situation of our churches. You see, one of the challenges of the church of Christ is once we establish a church, we begin discipling our people and we begin to see life in the body of Christ. We begin to see a distinction between those that are within and what the Bible calls those that are without. We begin to see the difference between those that are godly, those who live godly in this present age and those that do not. And so when you have your nice little homeschool church where there's discipleship happening, where fathers are leading in the home, and somebody walks into that church with a bone in his nose, What do you do?

Well, I'll tell you I'll tell you what the modern church does Everybody starting with the youth pastor puts a bone in his nose Right, that's what happens Why is it because we must conform the Christian culture to the pagan culture. That's not at all what what the missionaries to the New Hebrides did when John Payton and other guys made it over there. Guys were getting tattoos and eating people, so but They didn't do that. They didn't strip clothes off of themselves and their wives. They put clothes on the natives.

They conformed the natives to the laws of God. You see, so we have The same problem though in our churches where we are dealing with the pagans that have no idea how to live the life of Christ in their own families, in their own social situations. We have the same challenges. When a prostitute walks into the church, what do you do? Now see, every church has to deal with the issue.

It doesn't matter who they are. The mega church will put her in the program for recovering prostitutes, right? That's exactly where she goes. She gets stuck into the slot and she gets programmed through. But that's not what Jesus does.

Jesus sits down and has dinner with him. That's what he does. Jesus sits down and he has dinner with them. And this is relational living. This is what's involved.

Now the reason Jesus catches flack, the reason the Pharisees have concerns, is because they just did not understand the laws of God. The laws of God did not really convict the Pharisees. In fact, Jesus spends most of his time trying to correct the misconceptions of the law of God in the hearts and minds of Pharisees. They acknowledge something about the law of God, but they got just about everything wrong. They didn't understand mercy and justice, for example.

By the way, commanded in God's Word. Mercy is absolutely commanded in God's Word. It is an overarching law of God. Jesus said to the Pharisees, you guys should have known that you had to tie the mint anise in common. You don't leave that undone.

Of course you need to tie it. That's Old Testament law. But you forgot The major issues of the law of God, mercy, justice, and faith. Did you know faith, belief in God as Savior is absolutely required in the Old Testament? So that may take you by surprise.

God commands faith, as He does in the New Testament too, Acts 16, 31. It's a command. There are no options here. You are to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. That is the assigned Messiah of God.

The same thing in the Old Testament. Anyway, the Pharisees had missed the picture. They missed the picture. And here's the point. See, they had so systematized the law of God, they standardized their social and cultural expectations.

And we do the same thing. This happens in every social context. We begin to establish a basic standard of expectations. For example, one particular area may require that you home school, dress a certain way, keep the Sabbath, etc., etc. We have certain expectations we lay on people.

Now granted, we don't always narrow the applications real tightly. We may just say you need to be modest in your approach, in your dress, make sure you take that into account. But every social context has its basic social expectations. And once you achieve that, you're doing pretty good. Think about sinners in the public schools.

Sinners in the public schools get F's on their report cards, they can't sit still, and they go to the bathroom without a pass. That's a sinner in a public school. Okay? Now, not to say that any of that is really a violation of the law of God, but it is somewhat of a falling short of some expectations. Anyway, the reason why these Pharisees had a hard time Engaging in hospitality and seeing Jesus engage in hospitality which by the way, let's say it right away.

The word hospitality is phileo xenia Phileo is the word for love brotherly love Xenia is the word for stranger as in xenophobia Alright, so you have phileo xenia that word is love of strangers Now there are different kinds of strangers in our lives. There are those strangers that do not appear at our dinner table Monday through Saturday. Because evidently we may not exercise hospitality beyond our own family six days out of the week. We may engage in hospitality on the Sabbath as we do on Sunday. And the people that come to our dinner table on Sunday once a month or once every three to four months, These people are strangers to us.

They're strangers because they're not always there. We don't know them as well as we know our brothers and sisters in our family, the family members. Okay, now there are also strangers that we are just getting to know, visitors, those that are repenting of their sins coming to Christ. And an example here of publicans and sinners eating with Jesus would be an excellent example for those forms of strangers. Jesus is extending himself to these strangers.

Now my question here is why do people feel uncomfortable with strangers, especially publicans and sinners? Why are we uncomfortable? Why are the Pharisees uncomfortable eating with the publicans and sinners? That prostitute walks into the church for the first time. She's not dressed the way that you think she ought to be dressed because she hasn't quite made your standard yet of morality.

Now granted as we preach the law of God, hopefully we're continually convicted of God's law and brought to the cross of Christ, I'm getting ahead of myself, there are several reasons why people are uncomfortable. The number one reason they forget that they are sinners. We are all sinners. We have all fallen short of the glory of God. As I said earlier today, brothers and sisters, the cross of Christ needs to be the place where we are convicted of our sins week in and week out, month in and month out.

We have a confession of sin time that comes right after an exhortation every single Sunday. Because We don't want one week to go by where our brothers and sisters forget that they are wretched sinners deserving of hellfire forever because they sinned just last week. We're going to exhort them. We're going to exhort them first of all in the law of God. Then we're going to ask them to confess their sins, pour out their hearts to God again.

Confess their sins to God, and ask for His forgiveness as they forgive those who have trespassed against them. So number one, they forget they're sinners. Number two, they have no faith in the power of God to overcome sin. Sometimes they fear contamination. These ungodly people might contaminate them.

Oh, if I invite this prostitute over for dinner, I might get some contamination upon me. So again, lacking in faith. Lacking in faith that Jesus is the way in which sin is conquered and death is overcome at His cross. Thirdly, sinners have a hard time mixing. They don't integrate very well.

Especially those who have been stuck in sloths a good part of their lives. They understand that there are all kinds of sinners in the world. There are prostitutes. There are covetous millionaires. There are liars.

There are wife beaters. There are rebellious teens. There are fathers that aren't nurturing their children well. There are angry patriarchs. You name it, we've got it.

Now the point here is that we're all sinners. It doesn't matter what kind of sinner you are. And the unity that we ought to enjoy as brothers and sisters around this table is the unity we experience when we know we're all sinners saved by the sovereign grace of Christ. Amen? That's the unity!

That's the unity. When we come around that table, there's a repentant, covetous millionaire, there's a repentant prostitute, there's a repentant liar, And here's a repentant, angry, bitter man, but we're all here around this table enjoying the grace of Christ today. That's the unity. And you know what? We as Christians above all people ought to be diverse, but maximize our unity because we have all enjoyed 100 million tons of grace from Jesus Christ himself.

And the final reason why we have a hard time with strangers is that we just don't have enough love. And that's the real issue. You know, if we've been to the cross of Christ enough and we've seen how much He loved us, I think we would start loving others as well. This is the real issue. Jesus Christ, do you understand what He did?

This to me is amazing. You talk about how hard it is for you to walk up to an unsaved neighbor and have them over for dinner, or how hard it is to invite that prostitute that walked into that church. Here's a sign of repentance. An interest in the Gospel of Christ. She's interested.

She's not a saved sinner. She's not all cleaned up yet. She's still a little messed up. But you know what? You've got to cross a boundary.

You've got to walk across that boundary. You don't put her in a slot. Love will cross the slots. Love will cross the distance that make the differences between us. We can cross it and we can invite her over for dinner.

We can make the distance because Jesus crossed a universe to have dinner with publicans and sinners like us. He crossed a universe to do it. I don't want you ever to forget this. If Jesus can cross a universe to enjoy a meal with publicans and sinners like us, then certainly we can cross distances ourselves. Relationships are like bearings upon a rod.

I would put programs as hard and fast distances between people. It just sets the distance between us. That's the way programs work. It's a safe distance. It's a set distance.

It's always there. 6.0 plus or minus 0.003 inches. Got the distance set right there. Relationships are like bearings on the rod and they float freely. They just float.

And you know how relationships are. Sometimes we get a little closer, sometimes we get a little further away from each other. But relationships just kind of float there. That's why they're so vulnerable. And they're hard to deal with.

Because they're always just kind of floating. And they're that way within the family, and they're that way within the church. And love basically greases this thing and enables us to get closer to each other. The only two problems with love, it's really hard to love people who are close to you, as our brother just mentioned. That's so hard to do.

You know, your boss comes to your house and spills Kool-Aid all over your nice white carpet. You don't slug him in the face. You don't even raise your voice at that. Because You understand, you have a distance that's been set, and you're not going to compromise that distance, but your little two-year-old does that the next day, you're all over his case, you're yelling at him, you're having a little temper tantrum right in front of him. Why?

It's hard to love the people who are closest to you. It's also very difficult to love people who are very far away from you. And here's why. Here's why. The people who are far away from you are weird, gross, and sinful.

Okay? The people far away from you are weird, gross, and sinful. And the people you get closer to, as you get closer to them, are what? Grosser, weirder, and more sinful. I've always thought it's interesting that even the most gorgeous people, you know, every now and then you run into somebody who's just this movie star kind of person.

And you just, just for fun, you kind of move up a little closer and sure enough, there's a mole right there and there's just kind of a little bit of a hump on her nose, and you think, she's kind of ugly. You get real close. And that's the way people are. It doesn't matter who you are. It's hard to love.

It's really hard to love. There's only two problems with love, as I said. You have a hard time loving people who are far away from you and those are closer to you. It's easy to love everybody else. But then again, you're not really loving them, are you?

Okay, let's wrap it up with just a little application work on this thing called hospitality. Hospitality. You know, about four to five years ago, we were just starting out as a church, and lo and behold, a 28-29 year old lady showed up at our doorstep. She was a single lady. She'd been saved in Zimbabwe.

Don't ask me how. It seems like I've had a lot of stories like this where people have to go out of the United States, they get saved, they come back. But anyway, she was saved and she wound up at our doorstep and she began to watch our body function. And she began to love the vision, the vision of children as a blessing from God. The blessing of being a godly mother.

The blessing of building godly unified households. These were the things we were preaching and by God's grace starting to emulate and some good things God has blessed our church in a lot of ways sure she comes to this church. She says I like it I want to be part of it and you know what she began to live with people in our church We had three to four families that took her in. She moved from family to family. She'd help out with the children.

And she had a master's degree. She was set to make $75, 000 a year. She had just gotten her master's degree. And she decided to just blow all that and just focus in on learning how to be a godly mother and a godly wife someday. What a beautiful story!

She began to, she lived with one of our elders. And as she moved in with this elder she says, I want to get married, will you help me? I want a godly courtship out of this." And so he went out and he kind of advertised and tried to find every reforming family integrated type of outfit and finally found a guy out in Wisconsin and and she began the courtship with this guy. And I kid you not, she eventually moved into another elder's house because that elder moved out to Hawaii. And over the period of about a year, we must have put thousands of hours, thousands of hours, discipling this single lady, thousands of hours monitoring the courtship.

We were there on every single phone call. We were there trying to educate and disciple her in the rudiments of the Christian faith. We wanted to make sure she was the godly woman, the godly wife of this man. There was so much that went into this young lady. She was finally married a year ago.

Now they have their first little boy and it is such a blessing to the body. Now she got married a year ago and she moved away. I told somebody this is our singles program. We pour thousands and thousands and thousands of hours, tens of thousands of dollars into these people and then they move away, get married and build a household for the Kingdom of God. That's our singles program.

It involves hospitality. It's horribly inefficient. Horribly inefficient. But by God's grace, We have a strong marriage today and a huge vision that won't quit for the Kingdom of God. And I think it was worth it.

Amen? Without hospitality, the vision of your church will fail. If families will not connect with one single on a Sunday afternoon, if they won't bring that single into their homes every single Sunday afternoon, you can't bring them into the warp and the woof of the church if families don't connect with visiting families and deacons will not visit the widow. I mean really visit. We had our first widow come to the church some five, six years ago.

It was towards the beginning of the church. And I can remember the time she was in desperate straits. I mean this was a bad situation and economically speaking and I had made the mistake of turning to 1 Timothy 5 and find out that you can't turn over to the state. Okay? And I'm thinking here, we're a young church just starting out, I'm thinking this is going to cost us at least 20 grand a year.

I know that's a little faithless and narrow sighted of me, but you know, we just jumped in on this thing, and I will say that you need to attend it, and this is even harder. Writing the checks is the easiest part of this, okay? What's hard is ministering spiritually, building trust, overseeing this woman, showing her how she needs to raise her children, being in her life for hours upon hours, every week! Every week! I mean, I think thousands of hours in any one widow that's going through difficult straits, we're doing the same thing now with another widow and her 14-year-old son.

But it's tremendous the amount of... I think we're up to spending $30, 000 to $40, 000 a year on widows in our congregation for widows and orphans. Now that's nothing compared to what the church has done in the past. In the past, the church has given a third. That's what Calvin brings out in his Institutes.

That the church historically has given a third of its income to widows and orphans. We don't turn them over to the state. So a church that's bringing in $200, 000 a year is going to be moving about $67, 000 into the widows and orphan fund. That's the goal. Now we're not there yet, but we're well on our way.

We're well on our way. It's going to take some time. But see, this is the sort of thing God wants the church doing again with widows. The first requirement is we check with the family to make sure the family is going to provide. Now, if they have sons, if they have fathers, we go to those folks first.

And we ask for some help there. A lot of times they're unsaved, and so you can't expect a whole lot from unsaved folks. But we're going to press the point as best as we possibly can. Well, here's the bottom line. If we do not exercise this form of hospitality, if we can't build up our widow's funds, if we can't visit the widow and her affliction, if we cannot have the single over every Sunday, let's just stop what we're doing and let's go back to the program at church.

And whatever you do, don't criticize what they're doing. If we're not replacing it with something better and more biblical, I think at Sunday schools are hospitality. Small groups are hospitality. Youth groups are hospitality. It's either one.

But it's got to be hospitality. Absolutely essential in the operation of a family-integrated church. Romans 12 and verse 13 refers to the idea of being given to hospitality. And this word given is pursue. Pursue hospitality.

Pursue it with everything you have. Hunt it down, as one commentator put it. You hunt it down, you shoot it, you put it on the front of your car, and you drive home. And that's what I encourage our congregation to do. Every Sunday you go after those visitors, you go after those brothers and sisters, and if you can get somebody across your dinner table, you put them on the front of the car and drive home with them.

You pursue hospitality with all that you have. Use hospitality one to another without grudging. 1 Peter 4.9, let brotherly love continue. Hebrews 13, be not forgetful of hospitality, for thereby some have entertained angels unaware. Many, many biblical examples of this, but suffice it to say God wants us engaging in hospitality.

In Luke chapter 22, just briefly, verse 24, there was some strife among the disciples. Which of them should be accounted the greatest in the kingdom of God? He said unto them, " this is Jesus now, the kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them and they that exercise authority upon them are called benefactors." See what he's saying is that Gentiles engage in this power-based system Even when they take care of others, even when they call themselves benefactors, their commodity that they trade with is power, not love. And This is what welfare systems are based upon. If your people, if your widows are all caught up in the welfare system, that's a top-down system where there's a lot of pushing and shoving people around rather than engaging people in relationship and discipleship.

A lot of times people in the social services system, you know this, once they get hooked into welfare, they lose their children. That's the next step. They lose their children through the very same system. A lot of home schoolers have been in serious trouble because they began taking child welfare checks. That's because inevitably they're not interested in the best interests of the child or the family, and they're certainly not interested in the spiritual interests of the family.

That's the business of the church. And the church therefore needs to engage both the physical and the spiritual in helping those that need it. There's also not a sacrificial giving of oneself in the Gentile system. Rather, it's a confiscation of other people's money. And this is a horrendous thing.

Brothers and sisters, when we see our needy, whether it be the elderly or the poor, taken up in the welfare systems, understand it is a redistribution of the wealth. It's a stealing scam. And you're getting them all tied up in this stealing scam that ultimately will destroy them and ties them into a very sinful issue, a very sinful system and does not produce good consequences whatsoever. When you reach for your own wallets, it calls for love, sacrifice, and personal involvement. This is the biblical system of charity.

You'll find it all the way through the Old Testament and the New Testament. There's no difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament on this issue. Charity in Scripture is voluntary. It's charitable. And there is personal accountability and spiritual discipleship that always goes hand in hand.

I tell you, when we have started to help these widows, it has been a challenge for us to make sure that they are doing their part, that they're not mooching off the congregation, that they're willing to submit to the spiritual council of the elders and deacons. These are tough issues. You think that social welfare people are going to do this kind of stuff? Absolutely not. They're not doing it from the heart.

Now, by God's grace, there are some that are actually trying to make a difference, but the entire system is not based on sacrificial giving of oneself. It's all about confiscation of other people's money and the redistribution of that money. Also, there tends to be an expectation of quid pro quo among the pagans. It's also disconnected and disinterested and lacking in depth. So again, Luke 22, the kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them.

They that exercise authority upon them call themselves benefactors. But for you it should not be so. He that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger. He that is chief, as he that doth serve. For whether is greater, he that sitteth at meat, or he that sitteth, he that serveth.

Is it not he that sitteth at meat, but I am among you, as he that serveth. So Jesus said, we are to be the ones serving, the ones serving the food, the ones serving others. You know, it's interesting that God wants us in communion. Communion with each other, communion with God. You know the word is koinonia, and when you think of communion what do you think of?

Well obviously you think of what happens on Sunday when we break the bread and we bring out the wine or the grape juice. That's because when Jesus implemented fellowship or communion, this quintessential, the most important, the most basic expression of communion or koinonia is what happens at the Lord's table. Communion is the breaking of bread. Communion is the sharing of food around the dinner table. Don't ask me why when God establishes communion, He wants us eating together.

I don't understand it. Don't ask me why Jesus comes and eats with the public and sinners. Why it's so important for Him to eat with others. Why it's so important for Him to establish a communion with us. And when He does so, there's got to be wine, grape juice, and bread there at the table.

Don't ask me why but God says it's got to happen And I think one of the signs that Koinonia relationship building fellowship communion is ceasing to happen in homes is When families become so busy, they're no longer eating together anymore As this happened anybody's live here starting to miss breakfast Starting to miss lunch a little bit more. This happens in our lives from time to time. We just get too busy for this. Well, as you begin to cease to eat together, you're ceasing communion. This is what God calls communion.

What He calls fellowship with each other. May God help us to do this. Titus 2 and verse 3 speaks of the aged women teaching the younger women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, keepers at home. When does this sort of thing happen? See I think a lot of the modern church thinks this happens with some older woman getting up and lecturing to a hundred and fifty younger women in one room.

This is the first thing that comes to their mind. The first thing that comes to our mind is this sort of thing is engaged in the one another's. It's engaged in the hospitality of the saints. When the elder women teach the younger women one-on-one, respecting the principle of individuality, engaging the principle of relationships. Again, bringing these vital, important aspects to discipleship back into play.

And you know, the modern world has abandoned this sort of thing. Solutions for life's problems now in the modern world are very complicated. When you live in a world without relationship, you live in a world with professional counselors, psychiatrists, and university trained teachers. You don't live in a world where there's relationships. The principle of individuality is engaged.

A world with grandmas, grandpas, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters in Christ, in relationship, in hospitality where distances between us are compassed. If we had this sort of thing, I think we'd see God's order restored in the modern world. Well, just a few practical things as you have folks over. Again, I've established, I think, a fairly broad definition of hospitality. It's serving others.

It's visiting the orphans and widows and their affliction. It's providing food to others. We do this in many different ways. I would also encourage, As you engage in the feeding of the body, you also engage in the feeding of the soul. These sorts of things come together in hospitality.

This is the engaging of the one another's. So as you have folks over for dinner, you might consider edifying conversation. Sometimes when we do hospitality, we think that it's all food for the body. And all the pressure sometimes goes to our wives to prepare the food, fix the meal, clean the house, clean up afterwards, etc. Everybody just sits there and consumes the food.

But as fathers, I think we have an obligation to sit and think for a while what's going to happen in this hospitality situation. Are we going to present an edifying word that could help the guests? And how are we going to direct the conversation such that it doesn't fall into some edifying discussions on sports teams or how bad work is going or you know other things that have very little to do with edifying the saints on the Sabbath day. Hopefully the entire household is engaged in these activities. This has been one of the most edifying things for our family.

We plan to have folks over. And we've actually gone to doing this three, four times a year, some 10 years ago, to engaging in some form of hospitality probably 100 times a year, several times a week now. And our whole family is involved in this sort of thing. We would like to be like the household of Stephanas who have addicted themselves to the ministry of the Saints. We want our little boys to learn how to serve as well.

Sometimes our little boys want to be the first at the trough, as I've seen it, and to tell the little boys to serve the little girls or to serve the little babies, help serve the little babies as part of the hospitality. It's always been a good thing. I also think it's a good thing to end the time of hospitality with a time of singing, of gratefulness to God, of time for prayer, for lifting up our concerns to God, and so forth. One indispensable element of hospitality is to do it without grumbling. Use hospitality without grumbling or murmuring.

The only way to totally ruin your hospitality experience is to wine and grumble the whole time you prepare for it and the whole time you clean up afterwards. That pretty much ruins it. So be sure you're doing this with gratefulness. And here's the other thing. Let's be careful that we don't do too much.

I mean Jesus provides us with a little something to drink and a little bread to eat. That's it. If it has to be that basic, so be it. Get some grape juices, two loaves of bread. If you have butter, then God bless you.

That's just going to make it go down a little bit better. But don't make it too complicated. Some of us make it way, way, way too complicated. I guess we're trying to impress somebody. Well that's not what needs to happen.

Alright, let's just take a few minutes and address any questions that may be on your mind as we end this evening. Questions on hospitality. Anybody have any suggestions or questions, things to add, what you've done in terms of hospitality? This is really what needs to happen in our churches if we're going to begin to establish relational churches instead of the more programmed churches. Yes, this young man right here.

This is the guy with all the good questions tonight. You know, as you were saying about, like, accepting the prostitute, which may not have modest apparel, where do you draw the line between things that they may bring with them as accepting them and as controlling things that would be potentially harmful Well my mother told me something important when I left the home some 20 years ago. She said when more of them is rubbing off on you, then you is rubbing off on them. You're probably in the wrong situation. So that's the best way to address that.

Chances are people who don't know how to minister to sinners need to mature in the faith a little bit more themselves. So I would answer that question that way. And we are ministering to our neighbors. We're inviting neighbors over to our house and we put them right in the context of our family. We share a meal together.

We pray and read the word of God together. We have opportunities to minister to our neighbors. We have one neighbor that we think is going to come to know the Lord here one of these days. We took him, took us eight years to get him over to our house. Eight years.

Now he's enjoying our family. We're having a good time with this man. He's some 75 years old. So he's our project. He's our project.

So we're not putting him in the old FART program. We're keeping them right there. They're a family, and we're getting to know them. Okay, any other questions? I know you're all pretty tired.

Okay, God bless you all. Amen. I love you all. Amen.