In his sermon, Scott Brown emphasizes the importance of dedicated involvement in a local church for a healthy family. He highlights several benefits that the church provides for families, such as new relationships, a new authority, a new calendar, additional trials, and doctrinal discussions. These benefits help families grow in love, sanctification, and maturity. Brown also discusses how being part of a local church prepares children for their future life and relationships by exposing them to various situations and teaching them how to navigate through trials, disagreements, and sinful behaviors. He encourages families to prioritize their involvement in the local church and to view it as a significant part of their lives.

We're here to drive a stake deep in the ground and say that the family needs the church. The church needs the family and the family needs the church. And Here's something I want to say slowly in order to give emphasis to it. And it's this, you cannot have a healthy family without dedicated involvement in a local church. I'll say it again, you cannot have a healthy family without dedicated involvement in a local church.

You know, the church is really a marvelous thing in people's lives. It introduces many things into the life of a family that a family can't provide. A family is a small organism, highly limited in its relationships and the variations of life that exist. There's a lot of variation of family life, but nothing like the variation that exists in church life. So The Church introduces many things into your life that your family can't provide.

There are people who think that your family is enough. It's not enough. God gives you more than just your family. He calls you to more than just to your family. And it's a critical thing that people need to understand.

The Church actually provides some levels of upgrade to your family. And, for example, it gives new relationships. It gives you relationships with a broader base of people. And they're people that you have to coexist with in a church that have different perspectives and have completely different backgrounds than you do. You know, the church is an interesting admixture of different kinds of people.

I don't care what church you go to, But you'll always find a really broad range of people, always. There are no churches that where everyone is just all alike. Well, at least I've not seen any. Because everybody is coming from somewhere. Everybody's got baggage, some kind of baggage.

Some people come from really broken situations. Some come with not so broken situations. Everybody comes with a theological perspective. Everybody comes with a different brain. Everybody comes with a different set of experiences.

Everybody's got a different bag. And that's a valuable thing for people, it's good for your family to be in a culture that's different than the culture of your family. For some reason, God deemed it very, very important that you would be with people who are completely different than you are, to add relationships that you never could have just in your own little family. Because God is interested in your sanctification, he brings people into your life, all kinds of different people. And that experience with those people drives you to God.

You might have glorious experiences with some of those people. You might be so improved and encouraged, and you also might be disappointed. You might be hurt by those people. You might be disagreed with. You might be betrayed by those people.

But God in his sovereignty brings you into a culture of a local church to expose you to more than what you would be exposed to just in your own family. And what often happens to people is that they get to have a disappointment in a church with someone or a number of people in a church, and then they kick that church in the head and go to the next place, when in fact God was just being kind to them by exposing them to different kinds of people so that they would grow in love. So, a church is really a big upgrade to a family because it introduces lots of different kinds of people. Now, it's not always the most comfortable upgrade. There are uncomfortable moments.

Well, I mean, it's uncomfortable when you're talking with somebody who disagrees with you about something. It's uncomfortable when you're dealing with somebody on a matter where you don't see eye to eye at all. You have a completely different perspective. That perspective was born as a result of your background, the teachers that you've had over the years, the experiences, the limitations of your own brain and your own idols. Add that to their experiences and their idols, and you have, you know, uncomfortable moments.

But God has ordained the uncomfortability for you. He calls his people not to neglect the fellowship of one another. He actually commands his people to come and gather to worship. You know, I have this sense almost every Sunday when we're gathering to pray just before the service and people are coming that what's happening is what God has always done with his people. God has always gathered his people from out of their community to come into one place to bring them out of their houses to come across town to come into a place where they all gather and they either gather for prayer or for instruction or for worship or celebration or something and you find that all the way back to the beginning.

God always has brought His people together. He's always drawn from the community, a diverse group of people. It's normal. It's what God desires. God wants you to get out of your house and Go and meet with a bunch of people who are really different from you isn't it amazing that God does that that he would just jerk you out of your little comfort zone of your house and pull you out of it and push you into relationships with people you did not choose.

And people come to the church and they're added to it. You didn't choose them. God sent them there. But there are new relationships. That's the first thing that God does when he brings you into church.

He also brings you in the range of a new authority. The authority of the elders and actually the authority of the church. Because the Bible has it that both Elders and churches have authority and they have real authority. The church has the authority to excommunicate you. And any believer in the church has the authority to go to to go to you as a brother and speak to you about your sin.

So there are all these new authorities, there are the authority of the elders who teach, they preach, they reprove, they rebuke, and they exhort with great patience and humility. They have a role in your life. I mean, they actually have authority over you. How's that? So you come out of your house, you as fathers, where you have the authority over your house, and you come into a place where there's another authority that exists right next to you.

And actually you are under their authority, and there is a way that your family is under their authority as well. It's not exactly the same kind of authority that you have as a husband and a father, but it's an authority that exists simultaneously in parallel with that other authority. Now, I've met men who say, you know, you're not the boss of me. You're not, you know, you're not an authority over me. I'm the sole authority over my family.

That's not true. Well, it may be true in someone's own brain, but it's not true according to scripture. Because God brings a new authority into your life when you go to a local church. Isn't that amazing that he would do that? That you're not really all cracked up to what you ought to be as an authority.

So he gives you something more. He gives you another voice speaking into your life so that the voice speaking in your brain is not your own voice exclusively, but there's another voice. And so he puts you in a place where there's preaching, where qualified elders open up the Word of God and they deliver the ways of God to you. Because you are not quite well enough on your own. You need preaching.

You need an authoritative word from heaven, spoken out of the mouth of a preacher. So there's a whole new authority that that enters your life when you go into a local church. You know, if a wife is languishing under the sin, the sinful behaviors of her husband and and he's rebellious against the Lord, she actually has some recourse. She's not alone. She's not alone just to be completely victimized by the sin of her husband, because her husband is also under another authority called the authorities in the local church.

And he can be disciplined, he can be excommunicated. Or a wife in sin can also be excommunicated after a duly ordained process, according to scripture, of discipline. So when you come into that new authority as a family, it means that your sins are in some way on the table because they can be exposed. And you're in a community of confession, repentance. And if it's a good church, there really is a culture of humility and listening to one another and speaking the truth in love.

And brothers and sisters going to one another when they sin against each other. Like in Matthew 18, where it talks about when there's a personal offense, God gives a way for you to deal with personal offenses. By the way, he assumes, God assumes, that you will be offended in a local church. So he gives you a way to deal with it. You are either going to be offended or you're going to offend.

It's going to happen. So what do you do? What in the world do you do when you've been offended or if you offend? Well, the Bible says go to your brother. You know, you don't go to somebody else and say, oh, please pray for us, we're having this trouble.

You go to your brother. You don't write them a letter, you go to your brother. You don't send them an email, you go face to face with your brother. You don't write a blog about them or Facebook their sin against you, you go to your brother. That's what you do.

That's how Christians deal with personal offenses. So when you come into a church, you come into a place where there are all these new authorities in your life, where you actually are accountable to your brother and your sister, and they actually have a God-ordained authority to speak the truth in love. And sometimes that can be kind of hard. It really, in our, you know, our pride can so easily be offended. But this is why the family needs the church.

You know, there's all these new relationships, and then there's this new authority. The church needs the family, and the family needs the church. Here's another thing, a third thing that being part of a church gives you. It gives you a new calendar. It gives you a calendar from which you need to respond and incorporate into your own calendar.

So it gives you more stuff on your calendar, because the churches have calendars, and God has established churches to bring forth a discipleship agenda for the people that will bring them together for instruction and fellowship and worship and celebration and that has an impact on your calendar. And some people think well you know what I'm just going to sort of fit in what's interesting to me in the church calendar. It's sort of like the food court church mentality. You just you go to you go to the place that suits your fancy. Well I like this but I don't like that.

I don't really want to go to prayer or prayer meetings but I do like to go to this meeting over here. So instead of incorporating the church calendar, you're just sort of picking and choosing from the church calendar. Now it is the responsibility of elders of churches not to over schedule their people so that they have no ability to fulfill the commands of God to provide for their families or to be involved in family worship and family discipleship. You know, we live in a time where, you know, where church leaders are legendary for totally over scheduling everybody and there's no time to even have any kind of family life at all. But on the other hand there are those people who say I don't really care about the church calendar I really just care about what I like.

And people like that, they really, they don't believe that churches have any authority. They don't believe that elders have the authority to set the discipleship agenda of the church. And so they just sort of do whatever they want to do. Or sometimes it turns out to, well, I'm going to decide if I'm not too tired or I'm not too busy. You know it's Wednesday night prayer meeting and you've got half the people in the church who are trying to figure out at the last minute whether they're tired enough to go or not to go, or whether they've been too busy that week.

But those are people who actually have a small view of a local church, and actually the calendar, the discipleship calendar of the church. And often you can find rebellion in people's hearts from the way that they deal with the church calendar if they really think their life is more important, if their calendar is more important than the calendar of the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. I mean, my appeal to family is make the Church a gigantic part of your life. Make it the biggest thing in your life. You have your family life, and you have your work life, and you have your church life.

Prioritize your whole life around the life of the local church. You know, that's what I did when I was raising my family. And the reason I did that is because the church is the bride of Christ. Jesus Christ shed his blood for the church. That should take your breath away.

The price that was paid to gather the church together from the four corners of the community to come and worship him and to give thanks. To learn from one another and to be part of one another's lives, to be part of a holy community, a holy nation, and a peculiar people that come together to learn and to learn how to love one another. You know, the prioritization of the schedule of the church is something I really want to challenge all of you about. Have you properly prioritized the calendar of your church? Or are you kind of a food court Christian?

Or are you sort of a tiredness, busyness Christian? In other words, you just decide whether you're going to be part of things whether you're tired or busy. My counsel to families is all the same. Put the calendar of the church as as preeminent in the priority of your family. And do that first, and then let life fit in around that.

Because Jesus Christ shed his blood for a church. Because Jesus Christ did appoint leaders in churches to set a discipleship agenda. I know there are a number of pastors here in the audience and I know exactly what you're thinking. Preach it, brother, preach it. You know, often what happens is that a relative comes over to your house and somehow that means that you don't need to go to church anymore for that weekend.

Or there's something just more of a priority in your life. And so you neglect the meetings of the church. You know, I'll just have to tell you, you know, it makes life hard on pastors because they usually work really hard for the discipleship of the church. And they really languish over the calendar of the church. And then if you don't care about it, it just makes life a grief to a pastor.

That's why the writer of Hebrews said in Hebrews 13, 17, obey those who are over you. And the whole idea that he communicates is if you don't, it'll just make their life of grief. So one question I wanted to just ask is, had you prioritized the calendar of the Church according to the seriousness of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. You know, Christ died for the Church, certainly you're not too tired to go be part of the saints. Certainly you're not too busy since Jesus Christ shed his blood for the church.

Jesus Christ placed a very, very high priority for the church of Jesus Christ of his own. So, you know, in other words, you get a whole new calendar when you're part of a local church. My appeal to you for your family is to make the local church a great priority in your life. And don't determine your involvement by your tiredness or your busyness or your own personal schedule. Wrap your schedule around the schedule of the local church unless of course you are in a church that really genuinely is over scheduled then you have to you have some tough choices to make.

Well, here's another thing the Church provides. The Church provides new and additional trials, because You can't be part of a church without there being trials and difficulties, controversies and things like that. God knows that you need these controversies for your sanctification. Controversy in the church is not grounds for leaving that church. It's grounds for learning in that church.

It's grounds for personal examination. It's grounds for studying the Bible to understand what's going on. It's grounds for patience. It's grounds for devotion and love. That's what the trials and tribulations of a church are designed for.

Did you ever wonder why it is that there never was a church you've ever been a part of that didn't have some trouble? I mean, how come that's... How come? I thought this was Jesus' church. Isn't it supposed to be perfect?

Well, no. You know, it's not an accident that the church is full of imperfect people. It's God's design. He saves sinners, and then he brings them together. And when they come together, they have trials.

So if you've experienced trials in your local church, just recognize that this is how God designed his church to operate. You know, we have to have a mature attitude, a right attitude about life, and if you If you have some kind of a Pollyanna view of the church, that somehow there's this perfect, beautiful church out there with no conflict, with no tension, with no issues, you're living in dreamland. Because they don't exist. And they don't exist because they are full of functional sinners. And so God, but it's actually God's will.

It's part of his perfect design to bring you into proximity with trials in a church. You know, James says to rejoice in your trials. So rather than despising the church for the trials, we ought to rejoice in the trials. Well, here's another thing that happens to you when you're part of a local church. There are doctrinal discussions, doctrinal disagreements.

I said earlier that everybody comes into the church with a certain doctrinal persuasion and background. You know, some of those backgrounds are really shallow and some are really deep. But generally, there's some differences. They've had different heroes, they've read different books, they've had different convictions and they come into a church. I mean, it is God's design that you go into a church where there are doctrinal differences.

Did you ever think it was an act of love of God toward you to bring you into an environment like that so that you're actually having discussions where you disagree with brothers and that drives you back to the Word of God? It puts you back to the place you need to be. And that is in the words of Holy Scripture, to calibrate everything according to the word of God. It's God's design that you're in a church where there's doctrinal disagreement. If you're in a church and there's no doctrinal disagreement, either people aren't being honest or something else is really wrong.

Because it's not reality. You know, we have different perspectives. You know, even with the men that I am the most unified with in the whole world, we still see certain things differently. Like In our elder group, in our church, we have substantial unity on doctrinal matters. But you know, we don't see every single situation the same.

So we have to learn from each other. We have to work together. We have to keep talking. We have to pray together. We have to keep going back to the Bible.

We have to keep humbling ourselves before one another. We have to sometimes submit to one another. We have to sometimes lay aside our own strong opinion and wait for one another. That's what elders have to do. But when you're brought in a family, So it gets put into a church where there are these doctoral discussions going on.

That's a good thing. You should have those discussions. You should be discussing the Word of God among you. So it's really a good thing. Hey, I'm just trying to itemize how good the local church is for the family, okay?

Here's what I've said so far, is that it introduces new relationships, a new authority, a new calendar, additional trials. It introduces doctoral discussions. These things are really helpful for the family. They are beneficial things that God has designed local churches for. Well, I'm not done yet with what is so good about the church.

The church also brings the family into an environment where sin exists and is exposed. You're there living with sinners, And sometimes the sin comes out and sometimes it affects your life. And so you as a family have to figure out how you're going to respond when you're sinned against. Like if somebody says an unkind word. Or if someone speaks harshly to you in the midst of one of those doctrinal discussions.

You know, sometimes people just can't stand it if somebody speaks harshly to them. They're spoken harshly to and then it's over. I mean, is that the way it's supposed to be in the church? Is that the way it's supposed to be in the church? No, not at all.

We love one another, we're patient with one another, we're kind to one another. The gentle answer turns away wrath with one another. But the problem is we're all learning how to do that. Nobody does it perfectly. So we're always trying to figure out how to do that with the next person that we need in the church.

Have you ever had somebody in your local church gossip about you? You know, if you've been in a church very long, somebody's going to gossip about you. I guarantee it, somebody is going to say something behind your back. It's going to happen. So what are you going to do?

I mean, like, what are you going to do about that when somebody gossips about you? Are you going to hit the trail because of that? Or declare, you know, your righteous soul to be so above it and different? You know, you know what the right, what Solomon said in Ecclesiastes, he said, when, you know, when don't pay any attention when somebody slanders you. He says, haven't you done it many times yourself?

That's what Solomon says. So, there you are in a church and people are going to sin against you. What? Hey, it's the perfect place for a family. For some reason, God wants members of the family to be sinned against in different ways than they are just in their local families.

Because, I mean, sin runs in families and family members sin against each other, right? Ask any husband, ask any wife, ask any child. There's, you know, children bonk one another over the heads, they grab toys, they're mean to each other. Sin happens in families. But then, you're sent to a church, and there is sort of sin from the outside.

It's one thing if your brother bonks you in the head. It's not so bad, you know, but if somebody in the church does, then it's like a capital crime. You know, You can mess with me, but don't mess with my brother. So sin runs in churches, and families need to be in churches so that they will be sinned against, so that someone is going to treat them poorly, speak to them harshly, someone is going to speak behind their back so that they'll learn how to love. Because one of the functions of a local church is to learn how to love.

So God gives you a church so that you'll learn how to love people. You know, it's by and by the way too, my perspective is that churches are preparation grounds for the future for children. Like I'll just give an example. If you have a child who watches his father get slandered or gossiped against, and he watches the way his father deals with it, it matures him. And it prepares him for two things.

It prepares him for his life in the church later on, not to become a fellow gossiper, but it also prepares him for the workplace. Because you know what? The same kinds of things happen in the workplace that happen in the church, and the same things that happen in the church happen in the family. God has these preparation grounds that he uses to mature his people, to prepare them for life. You know, like if a child doesn't learn how to honor his father and mother, he isn't going to learn how to honor the authority of the elders in his church.

And if he can't learn how to honor the authority of the elders in his church, he's not going to honor the authority of his boss. And If he can't honor the authority of his boss, he's going to be a nomad in his career. He's just going to go from one place to another, finding some flaw with absolutely every person he ever works for. And He has no toleration for imperfection in leaders. But if he watches his father deal with the imperfections of the people in the church and the leaders in the church, it will mature that boy.

And he'll know how to be an employee, an honorable employee. And you know what the Bible says about honor, right? It goes well with you if you honor. That's the deal. That's the uncontrovertible principle of life.

If you honor those who are in authority, God will bless you. But if you don't, You'll find yourself banging your head against every wall you come up against. Here's the problem with dishonor. If you don't learn how to honor those who are with you, now God always sends those same people to you with different names, like for the rest of your life until you can figure it out. You know, some of you young men, you know, you're thinking your dad just isn't hitting on all cylinders, and so you think that's a reason to dishonor him.

Here's what's going to happen to you. You're going to meet your... When you leave your house mad, you're going to meet your dad in the next place you go. He's going to have a different name and a different body frame, but God's going to make sure you meet that man. And he's going to bring that man in your face until you until you learn how to honor him.

And tragically, some some people, they just they go to their grave in dishonor. And God just kept kept sending one rescue job after another to that boy. And he never learned it. So here's the deal. Why don't you just learn it now?

Just learn it right now with your dad, on your father. My pastor used to say, there are only two ways to chop off a dog's tail. You can just chop it off or you can just chop it off one inch at a time. Well, that's what a lot of people do. They just have the hatchet come down fifty times because they're not willing to learn it.

They don't learn it with their fathers and they don't learn it, they don't learn how to honor their church elders. Hey, the family needs the church because of sin. Because of the presence of sin and the dealing with it. Here's another reason. The family needs the church because of discipline.

Now hopefully you're in a church that has embraced the doctrine of church discipline. That sin is not covered up, egregious sin is not covered up, but it's actually exposed and dealt with in a proper way. There's several passages of scripture that talk about how you deal with sin in a congregation. But there are personal offenses. There are sexual sin that's dealt with in the Bible.

You're dealing with people who have an unruly life. There's a way you deal with them. There's a way that you deal with divisive people. You mark them and you avoid them. That's Romans 16.

So there are different ways that you deal with sin in a church. But children and whole families, they need to see how sin is properly exposed in a church, according to Scripture. You know, there are parents that want to protect their children from all sin. They want to make sure they don't hear about it. But actually, the church has a system of exposing sin for the purpose of reconciliation.

And your family really needs to be in a place where discipline is believed and practiced because it'll show your children why they should fear sin. You know, you do these things so that all may fear. Like 1 Timothy 5 20 says, if an elder is caught in sin and they're two or three witness and it's a serious sin and it's verified by witnesses and it's not just because somebody's disgruntled with somebody else, then what you do is you rebuke in the presence of all. All. The whole church.

Like you don't take the children out. You rebuke in the presence of all. Because God wants to mature His church. And He says, why? Why do you rebuke that elder in the presence of all?

So that all may fear. They fear the sin. They saw how that elder sinned and then the fear comes over the congregation and now they fear that same sin. Because the truth is, If that elder was caught in that sin, probably other people in that congregation are either moving toward that sin or trapped in it. And God does that in order to relieve the pain of sin in that congregation and to give them a hunger for holiness and a hatred of that sin.

So, you know, the church is really good for the family. God designed the church to be a place of refuge, love, discipleship, growth, and improvement for the family. And so the family should be a part of the church. That's why in all of scripture, what you find are whole families coming together for worship and celebration, it's the only pattern you see in Scripture. The whole family comes before God for preaching, for instruction, for celebration, for discipleship.

The whole families come. And that's the only pattern you see in Scripture. So that's what you should do. You should bring your whole family to the church of Jesus Christ. And you should not neglect the meetings of the Church.

And you should make sure that as you're raising your family, you don't make the mistake of thinking that you have this little island out there called your family, and all you need to do is figure out how to disciple your family. Because God has a whole other discipleship institution outside of your biological family that He wants to bring you into so that The discipleship is more complete. In other words, it's not enough for you to get all the child-raising principles right in your little family. There's way more that God has for your family. And it has to do with the preaching and the fellowship and the ordinances of the church.

The disciplines, the sins, the troubles, and everything, all that is designed to bring maturity to your family. Does that make sense to you? I mean, God, it's a God that created these institutions. Remember, there are three great institutions that God uses to govern and disciple his people, to express his love. Three of them.

There's the family and there's the church and there's the state. And here's what God has done. He's given a little bit of it in terms of the state. He's given a little bit of authority over lots of people, right? Just a little bit like there are civil laws and there are, you know, there's the punishment of evildoers.

That's given to the state. Unfortunately, the state's trying to do everybody else's job right now. It's horrible. It's a horrible mess. But the state has really, according to scripture, a little tiny bit of authority over lots of people.

The church has a lot more authority than the state over a smaller number of people. Got that? And then, God has established a family where a father has enormous authority over a much, much smaller number of people. You see how that works? That's how God designed to govern his people.

He gives the most authority to those who are under the smallest number of people because you can know a small number of people and you can know how to deal with them properly in love. And then he gives a little bit less authority to more people in a church. But the family needs the church. And that's why I said right at the beginning, you cannot have a healthy family without dedicated involvement in a local church, because it introduces many things in your life that your family cannot provide. And You think about all the different things that God provides through a church.

Think about the meetings of the church, OK, and how beneficial the meetings of the church are to a family. Here's what happens when you gather in a church. There are prayers that are prayed. And in other words, there are longings and needs and troubles and physical ailments that need to be prayed for. There are so many things that are on the table in the prayers of the saints.

And prayer is just an acknowledgment that you are not in control of this world, but God is. Prayer is an acknowledgment of your weakness and his strength. And God wants your family to be in an environment where there are prayers going on that just acknowledge your complete inability to govern the world, but that God does. But he does love, he does love people. And he's placed you there to see the troubles that need to be prayed for, and you intercede for those people.

And you pray that God would glorify Himself in the world. A family needs to be in an environment where there's prayer going on. Your family needs the church for the gatherings of prayer. How else does God disciple His church? They're singing as they come together and as they sing.

The whole family singing together. The little family there sitting together in the church with the big family. Everybody singing as one, as one family. And marvelous things happen as you sing. You know, I get the question often, you know, How little should a child be when they're in the meetings of the church?

Like, should you have a nursery or not? I'll just tell you my answer. No, you shouldn't have a nursery. Why? Is there any evidence in Scripture that you should do that in a church?

Well, I don't know how you could make a positive case for even taking infants out of the times of the worship of God. But, you know, somebody bring me some biblical case for that. I've never seen one. I've asked the question many, many times, but I've never seen an actually biblical case for it. So when in fact all you really see is the families are all meeting together, even the nursing babes are brought together for extended teaching of the word of God in the Bible.

But what's the effect on a child when they hear the singing of the saints? What's the true effect when they hear the voice is lifted up before God? When we first started our church 13 years ago, our family integrated church 13 years ago, there was a family that had a new baby. And they're a big family, and they're struggling trying to figure out how to keep their family and how to keep everybody in church. You know, all these little kids, you know, two year olds, three year olds.

And anyway, they had a new baby. So my wife held their daughter for the first two years of her life in church, you know, as we were sitting there. And she would just hold her. And as she was there singing and, you know, worshipping the Lord, my wife, and hearing the preaching and everything, She had this little girl in her arms. And so they became really close.

It was really interesting. She calls her Aunt Deborah. And so she's 13 now. And so we were over at their house a few months ago. And I said, I said, hey, so you remember when your Aunt Deborah used to hold you?

I said, tell me, tell me the first thing that comes to your mind from that time when she was holding you. Remember, she was a newborn baby up to two years old. Immediately without stopping, she says, the thing I remember the most is whenever there is a prayer that Aunt Deborah was moved by, she would say, mm, amen. Or if there was a song that was announced that she loved, she would say, hmm, amen. Or if the preacher said something that just touched her heart, she would say, hmm, amen.

She says, that's what I remember when she was holding me. And then she said, And you know what? I found myself doing the same thing. I mean, what can an infant receive from the gathering of the saints? What?

More than you think, right? More than you think. There's a greater impact than you'll ever know. You know, it always makes me laugh when I see parents, they have a one and a half, two year old, three year old, and they're standing there and they're talking. They're talking about their children.

And they think those children don't know what they're saying. Or they're talking about somebody else and they think those children don't know what they're saying. They would never say that thing in their presence if it was an adult. But what they don't understand is children understand a lot more than you think. It's kind of like people who are trying to be bilingual.

You know, you can understand more than you're able to say, right? Children are like that. They understand more than they can communicate and articulate. But the family needs the church, the family needs to be in the church so that the singing of the saints is there. Even the nursing babies on the breasts of their mothers and fathers while their voices are vibrating their bodies while they sing and they hear the sound and they hear the sounds of the prayers and they hear the voice of a preacher who's opening the Word of God and they hear the Word of God being preached and they hear the sound and they see the people stand in honor of the Word of God.

Families need to be in a church. Even the littlest ones need to be there. So not only do you have prayers and singing, but a family also needs to hear preaching for at least two reasons. First of all, so that they would be instructed in the ways of godliness and they would grow. Again, like I said, they have another voice in their heads beyond their own voice.

I mean, God doesn't want you just talking to yourself. He wants somebody talking to you, and he wants somebody talking to you out of an authoritative testimony. So he brings the family into the church to bring a testimony external to their own experience, to actually shape their lives, to change the course of their thinking and their living, really to change their future. God uses preaching for that reason. Well, there's another reason he uses preaching, and that is for the salvation, for the conversion of sinners.

So he brings people in to under preaching so that they'll be saved. So the family needs to hear the preaching. Here's the problem with preaching. Nobody ever preached a perfect sermon. And so every time somebody preaches, there are questions.

That's a good thing, because it drives you back to the word of God so that you don't just rely on men, but you understand how to interpret what God has said. Because God wants to grow you up. He doesn't want you to be a spoon feeder, somebody who just comes up and, you know, opens his mouth. But someone who is discerning, someone who is like the person that that Solomon talked about in Proverbs. Proverbs says, get wisdom.

You go get it. Go get it. Take action. Move in that direction. Don't just, you know, God actually has designed his church so that you might have questions about what's being preached.

And if you do, you should test them by the word of God. There's a way to have a holy, loving evaluation of the preaching. On the one hand, it's very dangerous when you have people, they're just contrary to everything and they pick apart a man's sermon. That's dangerous for a person to be in that kind of a situation. But there's a godly way of evaluating what's being taught and taking it before the word of God and humbly dealing with the issue.

And maybe even going to that pastor and say, hey, could you be wrong on this matter? So it's a good thing to be in the midst of the preaching for the instruction and also for the evaluation process that it launches in your mind where you're trying to evaluate what people are saying according to scripture. So all this is just to say that your family needs a local church, and I'm here to appeal to all of you to build your lives around local church life. Find the sweetness in it. That doesn't mean that it's always comfortable.

That doesn't mean that it'll always be so pleasant, everything you hear and experience in the church. God didn't make the church for you for that purpose. He did it because he loves you and he wants to increase your love, increase your knowledge, increase your patience. He's sanctifying you. He's using the flaws in his church to glorify himself in the salvation of sinners.

And he does it by bringing you together with other sinners. If there's anybody in this crowd who's rejected the local church and who's just meeting in their own families and calling that a church. I'm here to challenge you to say that's not a church. If you're just meeting in a home with your family, you're not in a church. And you're being deprived of one of the most wonderful things that you really need.

And most of the time people get there because they're offended or they have no toleration for any doctrinal variation from their own brain. But you know what? God wants you to be in a place where your thoughts are going to be challenged. And if you're sitting in your house and reading the Bible to your family and thinking you're in church, I'm here to say you're not in a church. You're just creating your own little world.

And you should stop doing that. And you need to go find a local church and figure out how to get along with these sinners that are in His church. And you know what? You can find a church like that. You can find a church that has sinners in it.

They're everywhere. They're in every community I've ever lived in. And so the benefit is there in every community to be gathered together with sinners. Don't miss that opportunity. Flee these leaderless house churches and go to a church where there is preaching and there's sinning and there's discipline and there's disappointment and there's flaws and there's questions.

Go find a church like that and go devote your whole life to it and build your whole calendar around it and watch God bless your family. Would you pray with me? Lord, Lord, I pray that You would give us such a love for Your church. You loved Your church so much that You would sacrifice Your Son. And He loved Your church so much that He would bleed and bear all of her sin.

Oh Lord, help us to love the church. Amen. Thank you.