We are about to be mentored in fatherhood and family life by one of the greatest father and son duos in history – Philip and Matthew Henry. What we hope to communicate, with as much clarity and detail as we can, is how critical it is to create a culture in your home. God has arranged society so that it is from a home that blessing flows out into the world. This is the Puritan view of the family, which we can see

   What kind of family life is this? This is sweet family life. This is godly family life. Full of hope, it is a place of blessing. It is heaven on earth. It is ‘as unto the gates of Heaven’. That is what we so desire to communicate here. We have an opportunity here in this generation to reverse something--a corrosion, a spot, a stain on the world of a home. This corrosion is family life that is more like a way station or a hotel, instead of a home in which the promises of God are known, a home in which the love of God is understood. We have a chance to create a home in which the happiness of the Kingdom of Heaven is felt. We have before us a father-son duo from the 17th century who had this kind of life. The father had it, and he delivered it to his son who had it. On this subject, Matthew Henry is not a cold academic, because he draws from holy Scripture and his rich life experience. The family life that this father-son duo fostered has caused blessings for centuries, issuing forth in the publication of volumes which have been a blessing to pastors and families ever since. 

   Home life will drift wherever the forces of culture will take it, if you allow it. We live in an era where most families do not understand the biblical doctrines that should be governing home life. In our age, we are afflicted with a shallow understanding of the government of God in the home. What we learn from these great Puritans is the potency of establishing a strong foundation of home life, to find a compelling vision for home life. It is definitely not a TV sitcom vision for home life, but a home permeated by the love of God and a knowledge of Him and His kingdom. God has made it so that fathers would take the bull by the horns, and take that bull in a certain direction. A father will be wading against everything in the culture that fights against this kind of family life. It will take a man who is determined, willing to cross cultural divides, willing to face anything in order to recover the pictures that we see in Scripture. It will mean long, sometimes arduous days in the field, but I think we will be harvesting the fruits of recovering a home life ‘as unto the gates of Heaven’ for generations to come. 

   In times like these, we need the Biblical vision of home life to refresh our memory in the midst of our spiritual amnesia. As a summary of what a family shepherd does, A Church in the House is the kind of message that we need today. It promises to expand our vision beyond the thinking of our own era and fortify us with timeless principles that the Great Designer has established. The great commentaries and sermons that Matthew Henry wrote arose directly out of the seedbed of family worship in his father's house when he was a little boy. This goes to show that we should never underestimate what can happen to an eight-year-old boy in a house in which the Kingdom of Heaven is full. I love the story of Philip and Matthew Henry because it brings an example to us of what home life really can be. Matthew Henry, along with all the other Puritans who wrote about this subject, believed that the head of the household was the prophet, he was the priest, and he was the king. He was the prophet in the way that the Lord Jesus Christ was a prophet, speaking the Word of God. He was the priest in that he dealt with sin in the household, and he was the king in that he was the ruler of the household. 

   This is what we love about the Puritan era: they sought to find out what was acceptable to the Lord, and they desired to put it into practice. That is what was happening in the in the Philip and Matthew Henry households, which is why we've reprinted this sermon. This sermon summarizes the things that Matthew Henry’s father taught him about family worship, and it describes the things that his father did, and he turned around and used in his own home. This is what I trust will happen in this rising generation of families, who are working to establish establishing patterns which are unknown to the modern world, yet so carefully explained in Scripture and demonstrated in the Puritan era . It is a clear representation and a summary of the Puritan doctrine of the family, and it shows fathers how to lead their households in prayer, in the Word, in singing and Scripture memory, in a manner that only Matthew Henry can. If you have ever read his commentaries, you know how tender they are. You know how glowingly he speaks of the Lord Jesus Christ, how God is exalted so beautifully in that commentary set. This is the source of life for a home, that God would be exalted, that God would be the center of all of home life. 

   Let me give you a few amazing statements that Matthew Henry made regarding the Word of God in home life. Here is what he said: 

    "It is better to be without bread in your houses than without Bibles. For the words of God's mouth are, and should be to you, more than your necessary food. But what will it avail you if you have Bibles in your houses if you do not use them? To have the great things of God's law and gospel written to you, if you count them as a strange thing? You look daily into your shop books and perhaps converse much with the news books, and shall your Bibles be thrown by as an almanac out of date." 

   What is the central book of your household? The central book of the Henry household in both generations was the Bible. They preferred it. It was the first Book. It was the sun of the solar system. It was the primary Book. My home is full of books, but which will be the preeminent book? Which will be the one that we prefer above all others? One of the things that disturbs me so much about modern church life is that we have thousands of children in our churches who can quote lines from movies verbatim, but they can't quote one line of Scripture. It's because the center of things is askew. We have the wrong sun. It is a darkstar that we gravitate around. Building our lives around entertainments that keep our children from knowing the promises of God is a disobedience to Almighty God. We should understand that this is a terrible neglect in our household, and we must take pains to correct it. I would appeal to all of us: if there are other books that have take taken precedence, let it not be so. Let the Bible be the preeminent Book. 

   Henry says, 

   "It's better to be without bread in your houses than without Bibles," and the way the Henrys lived, I believe he meant it. I believe he meant that it would be better to starve and have a Bible, than to have it the other way around. 

   We all have excessive busy-ness. We have hundreds of opportunities for involvement. Here is my counsel to myself and to all of us: Let's focus. Let's bet the farm on something. Let's make it as if the Word of God was the most important thing, and let the world go by. Let these other interesting, entertaining things go by the wayside, and fill your houses with the Word of God. This is what was happening in the Henry household. 

   Henry believed that making the family a little church (not to replace the local church, but to work alongside it as its own institution) was the key for the Reformation, and that there would be no reformation without it. He said,

   "Now I know not anything that will contribute more to the furtherance of this good work than the bringing of family religion more into practice and reputation." Then he says this: 

   "Here the reformation must begin. Other methods may check the disease that we complain about, but this, if it might universally obtain, would cure it. Salt must be cast into these springs and then the waters would be healed." 

   There are so many other methods that we use in the discipleship of our families, but they are not the methods of God.This practice of family worship is so foundational to the reformation that we look for. We truly believe that there will be no reformation unless there is a reformation of family life. It is true that God will rescue people from every tongue and tribe and nation, from every bad practice, every bad family as He desires. This is true. But there is a way that casts salt into the well, and purifies it for many generations, and that is what Henry is talking about here. There is a way that multiplies the effect. Why is it that the Devil would wage war against the seed of the woman? Because the seed multiplies--it is an attack that assails multiplication. 

   With family worship, if there's an attack against a family becoming as a little church, then that attack will cause destruction for many generations. On the other hand, if there is a godly pattern of life established, the generations will roll. This is why you see a Philip and a Matthew Henry, which is why we're going to end up talking about three generations of Puritans and the multigenerational vision that they had, and the power that it was in their time. This father and son in the seventeenth century present some of the best models in Christian history for the dynamics of fathers passing on their faith from one generation to the next. They are good mentors for us as fathers. The waters would be healed if we would have these practices. 

   The Philip Henry home was a home in which family worship was almost never missed. Each day, twice a day, they gathered to read Scripture and to pray. They would not allow anything to get in the way of it. There were family prayers and there was Scripture in each part of the day, and Matthew ended up replicating this same pattern of life. 

  If you were in Philip Henry's home, you were required to take notes in the times of family worship. As Philip would preach through the Word to his children, read it and explain it, the Henry children were were scribbling notes. As a result, all of Philip Henry’s children exited their father's household with a commentary of the Bible, written in their own hand. 

   Matthew took that commentary, and he became a preacher of the Gospel. He not only used his father’s commentary, he continued to expand upon it. And Matthew Henry had his children do the same thing he did growing up. Matthew had five daughters that survived past infancy and one son named Philip, and they were all taking notes throughout their times of family worship. When Matthew died, there were those who wanted to put his commentary of the Bible together, but there were gaps in the commentary set. His daughter was able to take her notes, and take the other children's notes and stitch them together to fill in the gaps in the commentary. That is where Matthew Henry’s commentary set came from. It came out of the soil of Philip Henry's household, as they worked their way through Scripture. 

   Who knows what might happen in your house if the Word of God dwells richly there, if the sweetness of the gospel is constantly breathing in that household? Who knows what might happen a hundred years from now, or three hundred years from now as a result of your house becoming as a little church? The atmosphere of the Henry home gave birth to this rich exposition of the Old and New Testaments. If you've ever read his commentary set, you know how warm and how tender-hearted it is. It is full of detail. Famous preachers like George Whitfield and Charles Spurgeon used Matthew Henry's commentaries, and recommended them. One commentator says that Whitfield read it four times, and the last time Whitfield read this extensive, lengthy commentary, he read it on his knees. Spurgeon said,

   “Every minister ought to read it entirely and carefully through once at least.”.

   Know where the commentary came from. It didn't just come out of the air. It wasn't just some smart guy writing down some of his thoughts. It came out of rich soil. It came out of well-cultivated ground that was watered and fertilized with the very words of Scripture day upon day, line upon line. Imagine Matthew Henry as a one-and-a-half-year-old sitting in his father's house as his father is explaining Scripture. That little boy is squirming around, who would think Matthew is getting anything out of this? Well, he was getting something out of it. He got a little bit here, and a little bit more there, and a little bit more over here. As he moved into his teens, he started getting a lot more. The cumulation was building, almost like a firestorm. When it finally came to putting it down on paper and collecting it into a commentary set, it was something as wonderful as as anyone can imagine. 

   I would like to give you a window into the Henry’s household and family worship. I will be quoting from biographer J.B. Williams, who recounts the spiritual disciplines of the Matthew Henry household. 

   "He was comprehensive, but neither tedious nor hurried." 

Fathers, we are being mentored now about how to conduct family worship. Do you understand that? Where should we go to be mentored? We should go to those who have done well. These brothers have done well, and they have a worthy voice for us. While we don't have to do everything exactly the same way, there is much to learn here. Back to J.B. Williams: 

   "He was comprehensive, but neither tedious nor hurried. The exercise commenced by invocation [prayer] ... unless the chapter was short, he divided it into sections; confining himself generally, to eight or ten verses, of which he gave a brief, and edifying explanation. 

   “How the houses of good old Protestants were perfumed with this incense daily, especially on Lord's Days. 'We', says Mr. Henry, 'Have heard with our ears and our fathers have told us.' Prayer succeeded singing. The whole was usually comprehended within the space of half an hour, or a little more. 

   “When prayer was over, his children received his blessing, which he pronounced with great seriousness, solemnity, and affection". 

   Do you see what this requires? This requires that a father is humble before God and passionate for God, full of thoughts of Him. How would a father be this way, unless he was himself prepared? He was preparing to engage his people. I know that the men here who have been speaking have spent the last few weeks crying out to God working to have something meaningful to say. Fathers need to do that too. We need to be before the throne of God. We need to be prepared and ready to breathe life into our homes. That's what was happening here. The Henry fathers had something to say, and they were prepared, and their passion was high. Williams writes that,

    "The better to engage the attention of his family he required of them, at the close of the exercise, an account". He would ask the family members to recount to him what they had just heard. That is a good and useful practice. It meant that the children were reciting the precepts of Scripture out of their own mouths. 

    "On the Sabbath the same order was observed, the household assembling about eight o’clock. Nor were his public engagements on that sacred day allowed to interfere, either with the observance itself, or his own personal attention to it". 

   Think of the busyness of the Sabbath day, how difficult this must have been. This is very difficult for me in my own household. We have to fight to have a time together. It's usually in the late afternoon before dinner that we finally gather gather our family around. Again, everything in the world is working against this. This is why a father has to have life organized to facilitate it. Because if he just lets life go by, it will never happen. It just won't. We have to fight like tigers to claim this time. 

    "The worship being concluded, Mr. Henry took his family to the solemn assembly. After dinner he sang a psalm, offered up a short prayer, and so retired to his closet till the time returned for meeting the congregation. In the evening he generally repeated in his own house both the sermons; on which the occasion of many neighbors attended; the repetition was followed by singing and prayer; two verses more of a suitable hymn were then sung; the blessing pronounced and the younger children catechized. After supper he sang the 136th psalm; then catechized his elder children and servants; heard them repeat what they could remember of the sermons; and concluded the day with supplications." 

   Does anyone feel overwhelmed at this point? How do we deal with that with that feeling? Here is my recommendation: Do more. Don't be satisfied with a skinny offering. Rise up, and make it fuller. Make it more beautiful, if you need to. Because of the pressures because of our own constitutions, we often settle for less than we should. The world is full of men who settle for less. Let's not be that kind of father. 

   How easy it is to just settle for less. This is not about accumulating righteousness, it's not about being elevated above someone else, this is about duty. It is about responsibility. It is about carrying something out. It's not about looking down your nose on the guy who does less--it has absolutely nothing to do with that. It does have to do with a passionate execution of faithfulness toward God, and to present to God what He desires, godly seed. 

   How does seed become godly? Well, there must be planting and watering and fertilizing. That is how seed will become godly.Then God, for some reason, seems to bless this. He seems to bless duty. He seems to come alongside the father who preaches the gospel and drives it into the heart. Fathers who deliver the Word of God generally have more real disciples. Why is that? God is sovereign in salvation, He can save any way He chooses. But here's what seems to be the case: God blesses faithfulness. You do not and cannot control God, but for some reason he does bless the one who prays. Can He accomplish His will without your prayers? Absolutely. But He blesses prayers and He says no, ‘Pray the Lord of the harvest, that He would send forth laborers’. He still asks us to do that. He does the same thing in our families. He blesses the duty. The duty doesn't save us, it should never make us proud, but He does bless the duty for some reason. It matters what you do. We believe in the absolute sovereignty of God, but we also believe in the absolute duty of man. Both walk side by side, and they are not contradictory in the least. It is this same principle operating in family worship. We must do our duty and cast the salt into the spring, and deliver the promises of God with all of our hearts. God will bless it in His own way. Williams wrote, 

    "Besides the daily oblations, Sabbath services which have been noticed, Mr. Henry often kept family fasts; sometimes in unison with invited friends...". 

   Do you understand what he is saying here? First of all, the reality of fasting, which is almost completely nonexistent in the church today. Our families should be fasting. Fasting for crises, fasting for fruitfulness, fasting for the lost, fasting for all manner of issues going on in the church. There are always enough things going on in your church that you should be fasting; there are in our church. I've never known a week where there was not a reason to fast for some crisis, some hardship, some disappointment in the church, some medical condition--there is always a reason. Our families should be fasting, and the Henry family kept the fast even when visitors were showing up. 

   The Henrys were not going to be controlled by what was going on, they were going to follow through. I think that's good encouragement. Keep the course.It's easy to let practices fall off when unusual times are upon us. This happens to our family all the time, especially when conferences or big events are in process. It's so exacting, it's so time consuming, and everybody's working so hard on it that there are these brackets of time where life as we know it just comes to a halt. But that wasn't so in this, the better example of the Henry household. 

   "And frequently he fasted alone. On these occasions, like the believing patriarch, he wrestled for ‘spiritual blessings’. And whatever were the cares, or fears, or trials of himself or his friends, they were committed with filial simplicity, and confidence, to God.

  “His piety ‘at home’ embraced the whole compass of relative religion or relative religion; he was an ‘example to believers’ not only as a husband, a father, and a master; but also as a son, a son-in-law, a brother, and a friend". 

   This describes beautiful home life. It describes a home life that is ‘as unto the gates of Heaven’. The Henrys fostered a beauty in his home life that is rare, but it is recoverable, and it was maintained by three primary means: consistency, simplicity, and leadership. The Henrys kept at it on a daily basis, with just a simple curriculum of the Bible itself, supplemented by catechisms and confessions. 

   What the Henrys had was God-centered home life. It is so critical to note that we should not be aiming for family-centered home life. We should be aiming for God-centered family life. Our end goal should be that God almighty, His words, His thoughts, meditations of Him would be the center of our homes. That we would be going through our households singing songs of the faith, reciting Scripture together, filling our homes with what we know is gold. 

   Why do we labor for that which is not bread? Why are there so many unfulfilled people in our houses? It's because we have not been feeding them bread. We've been feeding them fluff. They have nothing for their souls to nourish on, so they are empty and directionless because we have not given it to them as their shepherds. 

   One of the sweetest things that the Henry household engaged in was a baptismal covenant. On October 20th 1686, Matthew Henry delivered a baptismal covenant to his children, and they would all hand write this baptismal covenant, and they would recite the baptismal covenant every Lord's day evening. It is a beautiful, heart-warming Trinitarian devotional, and Matthew took pains that his children understood it. 

   "I take God the Father to be my chiefest good and my Highest end. I take God the Son to be my Prince and Savior. I take God the Holy Ghost to be my sanctifier, teacher, guide, and comforter. I take the Word of God to be my rule in all my actions. And the people of God to be my people in all conditions. And this I do deliberately, sincerely, and freely forever." 

   What a beautiful way to grow up, reciting this every Sunday night. Committing oneself to these very special, beautiful things. 

   This is a tale of two expository fathers. We like to talk about expository preaching, and how critical it is to recover this in the church. If you want to recover it in the church, you had better recover in the home first. We can learn to how to win it back from these expository fathers. They saw themselves as deliverers of a message that has come from heaven, and they let the text of Scripture drive the teaching in the home. They were not out there looking for popular, interesting, entertaining things. They were expositors of the Bible. This is the kind of father that we want to create in this generation, so that there would be more expositors in the church and in the home, multiplying massively throughout the generations. If there were ten thousand expositors in America today, we hope that there would be five hundred thousand in two generations that would be preaching the Word. We hope for preachers that would trust the Word so heartily, and that would foster a deep love for it. 

   Why would we say that father should be expositors? Because the commands of fatherhood are really commands for exposition of Scripture. The commands to fathers to bring the Word of God into their homes are very much like the commands to preachers to preach the Word. They are so similar it's absolutely remarkable. Genesis 18:9, we learn of the purpose of Abraham's life. 

   "For I have known him, in order that he may command his children and his household after him, that they may keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice, that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has spoken to him.” 

   Fathers are to be commanding. What are they to command? Not their own big ideas--they command the things that are in the Word of God. They command everything regarding righteousness and justice, everything regarding love and what is found in Scripture. In Deuteronomy 6:6-7, we read:  

   "And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up." That is exposition around the clock. In Proverbs 1:8-9 we read: 

"My son, hear the instruction of your father, and do not forsake the law of your mother; For they are graceful ornament around your head, And chains about your neck". Psalm 78:1 says, 

   "Give ear, O my people, to my law. Incline your ears to the words of my mouth". 

   God would have us be expositors with ears turned toward the words of God's mouth. This is so that our children would be found understanding the will of the Lord, being brought up in the training and the admonition of the Lord. That every father would go and make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe all that has been commanded of them. And this is a role of a father: to be an expositor. 

   The Puritan vision of fatherhood is the vision of the expositor. But what kind of expositor is he? 

   He is as tender of a tender-hearted expositor as you have ever seen. He is delivering beautiful things to his family, and he is making his family life ‘as unto the gates of Heaven’. I pray that that would be the legacy of our time here. That somehow all of us, including the Brown family, would go another length of creating the Kingdom of Heaven in home life so that the Kingdom of Heaven would be seen and demonstrated beautifully in church life. So that we would be fanning out into the world, into the community, into business, into the government. Not keeping ourselves from it, but into it, so that the ways of God can be seen. So that there would be somebody on this earth who seeks to know what is acceptable to the Lord. May it be so. Would you pray with me? 

   Lord, we pray that You would give us these great things. We realize You are more wonderful than all else. We pray that You would be the center of all of our home life. And that You would now send us into our homes as we make our ways there later tonight. To reform, to transform, to go another length, to be more faithful than we ever were before. 

In Jesus name, 

Amen 

Resources referenced: 

1. Commenting and Commentaries: Two Lectures Addressed to the students of The Pastors’ College, Metropolitan Tabernacle, by C. H. Spurgeon, President London: Pass more & Alabaster, Paternoster Buildings, 1890 20 21

2. J.B. Williams, The Lives of Philip and Matthew Henry, Two Volumes in One, The Banner of Truth Trust, 1974, Vol. 2, pp. 167-169.

What we hope to communicate with as much clarity and detail as we can is how critical it is to create a culture in your home. And God has so arranged society in the world so that it is from a home that blessing flows out into the world. That's obvious from what we understand from the puritan view of the family. And what kind of family life is this? This is sweet family life.

This is godly family life full of hope. It's a place of blessing. It's heaven on earth. It is as unto the gates of heaven. And that's really what we so desire to communicate here in this conference.

That we have an opportunity here in this generation to reverse something, a corrosion, a spot, a stain on the world and that is family life that is not as unto the gates of heaven but that is more like a flophouse, more like a way station or a hotel instead of a home in which the promises of God are known, in which the love of God is understood, in which the happiness of the kingdom of heaven is felt there. And that's really what we're advocating here. And we have a father and son duo from the 17th century, Philip and Matthew Henry, who had this kind of life. The father had it and he delivered it to his son who had it. And the family life that this father and son duo fostered has caused the blessing for hundreds of years after.

What this father and son did in their family life has issued in the publication of volumes of literature that had been a blessing to pastors and churches and families ever since. The great commentaries that Matthew Henry wrote arose directly out of the seedbed of family worship in his father's house when he was a little boy. Don't underestimate what can happen to an eight-year-old boy in a house in which The kingdom of heaven is full. And so I love the story of Philip and Matthew Henry because it breathes an example to us of what home life really can be. Home life will be whatever the forces of culture will make it if you allow it, but God has made it so that fathers would take the bull by the horns and take that bull in a direction because everything in the culture fights against this kind of family life.

So it would take a strong man, really. It would take a man who's determined. Fortunately, we have in this nation an uprising of very determined men. I've never seen anything like it. It's like something has snapped in their brain.

And now they're willing to cross divides, they're willing to be shunned, they're willing for anything in order to recover the pictures that we see in Scripture. And brothers, we must do that. It will take that in this generation. It'll take courageous men. I trust that we'll look back at some time and see the courageous men who broke rank and they they will be the norm among us someday I trust.

I think particularly as this next generation grows up these thousands and thousands of children in these families with six, eight, ten, twelve children fan out across the earth. I think something is going to happen in two or three generations here. What we're doing here is like unto what happened in the Henry home. Don't ever underestimate the eight-year-old girl in your household or the boy who's 12 and is hearing the precious promises of God. What can happen through a home?

This is the way that God has ordered, ordered society. So we're about to be mentored in family life, in fatherhood by Philip and Matthew Henry. And the technique of their family life I really believe is summed up in this sermon that Matthew Henry preached in 1704. He preached it and it's called A Church in the House and it's a sermon on family religion, that term that we've heard so many times. But what he communicates in this sermon is a coalescence.

It's a summary of what a family shepherd does, and what I love about this sermon is that it gives this picture of life as into the gates of heaven in home, And I bumped into this sermon about two years ago. I was in St. Louis and Dan Ford had a copy, an ancient copy of this sermon, and I read it and I just found myself, I was lost. I was reading it and I thought this is this is the most amazing thing I've ever read. And of course Matthew Henry was summing up so much of what others had already said.

You can see where he's pulled from it and then what you find is that many others, Jonathan Edwards and so many of the preachers of the Great Awakening like a number like George Whitefield quote directly from this sermon. And he was quoting from the early Puritans as well. And so there's this consistent stream of thinking that began to be played out in this generation. This is why we love the Puritan era. You know, there are many things we don't like about the Puritan era.

We don't like their clothes, we don't like their technology, and we definitely don't like their hair. But what we do like about the Puritan era is their doctrine and their practice. We like it that they sought to find out what was acceptable to the Lord. And that's what was happening in the Philip and Matthew Henry household. And so we've reprinted this sermon.

It's available out there if you'd like to get it. But I like it because It's a clear representation and a summary of the Puritan doctrine of the family. And it really shows fathers how to lead their households in prayer, in the word, in singing, and all those kinds of things, and in language that only Matthew Henry can have. If you've ever read his commentaries, you know how tender they are, how glowingly he speaks of the Lord Jesus Christ, how God is exalted so beautifully in that commentary set. And this is the source of life for home, that God would be exalted, that God would be the center of all of home life.

And so this sermon summarizes the things that his father taught him about family worship and it pictures the things that his dad did and he turned around and did in his own home. And this is what I trust will happen in this generation, in this rising generation of men who are establishing patterns that are unknown in the modern world, but yet they are so carefully explained in scripture and demonstrated in this Puritan era. And What he does is he shows fathers in very specific ways how to make their houses little churches. And we live in an era where most families do not understand any of these things that should be governing home life. And so we in our age were afflicted with a very shallow understanding of the government of God in the house.

And what we learn from these great Puritans is about the potency of establishing a strong foundation of home life and to find a vision a compelling vision for home life not a TV sitcom vision for home life Definitely not the kind of home life that you even see in house beautiful, but the kind of vision of home life that is filled with the knowledge of heaven. And that's the kind of households that we we desire to encourage. Now the Henry household was like unto the gates of heaven where the parents governed all of family life by the Word of God. Now the people who encountered the Henry household say this about their home And I trust that God would give all of us households that are as little churches, never to replace the church. Henry never wrote this book, he never gave this sermon to attempt that fathers would replace the church and make their their little houses independent churches where they are like donkeys going in their own direction without any authority or care or teaching from the local church.

He understood this all in the context of a local church, that there were these two powerful jurisdictions that God had established. One was the home and the other was the church. Both were vital and one does not upstage the other. Matthew Henry believed along with the Puritans, all the other Puritans who wrote about this subject, that the head of the household was the prophet. He was the priest and he was the king.

He was the prophet in the same way that the Lord Jesus Christ was a prophet and he spoke the Word of God. He was the priest in that he dealt with sin in the household and he was the king in that he was the ruler of the household. And this in this sense, the the home is like is like the church. And so we find in in the church we have we have the head of the church, We have the preaching in the church and we have the communion in the church, all dealing with these same sins. Communion and dealing with sin, the preaching, dealing with lifestyle and behavior, and the head, the headship, the leadership that's necessary for a church, we see in the home a mirror of the church.

Let me give you a few amazing statements that Matthew Henry made regarding the Word of God in home life. Here's what he said, It is better to be without bread in your houses than without Bibles. For the words of God's mouth are and should be to you more than your necessary food. But what will it avail you if you have Bibles in your houses if you do not use them? To have the great things of God's law and gospel written to you?

If you count them as a strange thing, you look daily into your shop books and perhaps converse much with the news books and shall your Bibles be thrown by as an almanac out of date. What is the central book of your household? Well, the central book of the Henry household in both generations was the Bible. They preferred it. It was the first book.

It was the son of the solar system. It was the primary book. And how critical this is. My home is full of books, but which will be the primary book? Which will be the one that we prefer above all else?

One of the things that disturbs me so much about modern church life is that we have, you know, thousands of children in our churches who can quote to you verbatim lines in movies, but they can't quote you one line in Scripture. It's because the books, the movies, the things are wrong. It's the wrong sun. It's a dark star that we gravitate around. Building our lives around entertainments that keep our children from knowing the promises of God is a disobedience to Almighty God.

We should understand that this is a terrible declension in our household and we must correct it. So I would just appeal to all of us, If there are other books that have taken precedence, let it not be so. Let the Bible be this book. Henry says, it's better to be without bread in your houses than without Bibles. And the way that the Henrys lived, I believe he met it.

I believe he meant that it would be better to starve and have a Bible than to have it the other way around. You know, we have excessive busyness. We have thousands of opportunities of involvements. Here's my counsel to myself and to all of us. Let's focus.

Let's bet the farm on something. Let's make it as if the Word of God was the most important thing and let the world go by. Let these other interesting, entertaining things go by the wayside and fill your houses with the Word of God. This is what was happening in the Henry household. Henry believed that making the family a little church was the key for the Reformation and that there would be no Reformation without it.

He said, now I know that not anything that will contribute more to the furtherance of this good work than the bringing of family religion more into practice and reputation." And he says this, listen, here the Reformation must begin. He says, "...other methods may check the disease that we complain about but this if it might universally obtain would cure it. Salt must be cast into these springs and then the waters would be healed. There are so many other methods that we use in the discipleship of our families, but they are not the methods of God. And so this practice of family worship is so foundational to the Reformation that we look for.

I mean honestly we really truly believe that there will be no Reformation unless there is a Reformation of family life. It is true that God will rescue people from every tongue and tribe and nation, from every bad practice, every bad family as he desires. This is so true. He is, and you know what, he snatched us all out of these places, these trajectories that were taking us to hell. He's done that.

He is so kind to do that. But there is a way that casts salt into the well and purifies it for many generations, and that's what he's talking about here. There is a way that multiplies the effect. Why is it that that the devil would wage war against the seed of the woman? Because the seed multiplies, that's why.

It's an attack that attacks multiplication, And it's the same thing with family worship. If there's an attack against a family becoming as a little church, then that attack, that war waged will cause destruction for many generations. And on the other hand, if Godly life is established, the generations will roll, which is why you see a Philip and a Matthew Henry, which is why we're going to end the conference today talking about three generations of Puritans and the multi-generational vision that they had and the power that it was in their time. The waters would be healed if we would if we would have these practices. So this this father and son duo of the 17th century presents some of the best role models in Christian history for the dynamics of fathers passing on their faith from one generation to the next.

And so they are good mentors for us as fathers. One of the most interesting parts of this story is Matthew Henry's mentorship with his own father, Philip. The Philip Henry home was a home in which family worship was almost never missed. Each day, twice a day, they gathered to read scripture and to pray And they would not allow anything to get in the way of it. And so there were family prayers and there was scripture in each part of the day.

And Matthew ended up replicating the same pattern of life that his father had. In the Henry home, if you were in Philip Henry's home, you were required to take notes in the times of family worship. As Philip Henry would preach through to his children, read it and explain it, the Henry children were taking notes. All of the Philip Henry children exited their father's household with a commentary of the Bible written in their own hand. And Matthew took that commentary and he became a preacher of the gospel and he continued to expand upon it.

And Matthew Henry had his children do the same thing. Matthew, I think he had seven daughters and they were all taking notes. When Matthew died and there were those who wanted to put his commentary of the Bible together, there were gaps in the commentary set. And where did they... Well, his daughter took her notes and took the other children's notes and cobbled them together and filled the gaps in the commentary.

That's where this commentary set came from. It came out of the soil of Philip Henry's household as they worked their way through Scripture. Who knows what might happen in your house if the Word of God dwells richly there and if the sweetness of the gospel is constantly breathing in that household? Who knows what might happen a hundred years from now or two or three hundred years from now as a result of your house becoming as a little church. The atmosphere there gave birth to this great exposition of the Old and New Testaments.

You know, if you've ever read this commentary set, you know how warm and how tenderhearted it is. He's full of detail And famous saints like George Whitefield and Charles Spurgeon used Matthew Henry's commentaries and they recommended them. One commentator says that Whitefield read it four times and the last time Whitefield read it, He read it on his knees. It's about that long. He read it on his knees.

I can see why you would want to read that on your knees because it's very beautiful. But know where it came from. It didn't just come out of the air. It wasn't some smart guy just writing something down. It came out of rich soil.

It came out of well-cultivated ground that was watered and fertilized with the very words of Scripture day upon day, line upon line. Imagine Matthew Henry as a one and a half year old sitting in his father's house as his father's explaining Scripture and he scored that little boy is squirming around who would think Matthew is getting anything out of this well he was getting something out of it he got a little bit here and a little bit more there and a little bit more there and as he moved into his teens he started getting a lot more but the accumulation though is was it was like a building almost like a firestorm that kept going. And then when it finally came down to putting it down on paper and collecting it into a commentary set, it was something as wonderful as anyone can imagine. Spurgeon said, every minister ought to read it entirely and carefully at least once. I'd like to give you a window into the Philip Henry family worship household.

I'm gonna quote from biographer J.B. Williams who recounts the spiritual disciplines of the Henry household. So here it is. He was comprehensive but neither tedious nor hurried. Now we're being mentored here, okay?

We're being mentored now about how to conduct family worship. Do you understand that? Somebody's teaching us what they did. Now we don't have to do it exactly the same way, but there's much to learn here. We look, how do you, how do you, where do you go to be mentored?

You go to those who have done well. That's where you go and these brothers have done well. They have a worthy voice for us. He was comprehensive but neither tedious nor hurried. The exercise commenced by invocation.

Unless the chapter was short, he divided it into sections, confining himself generally to eight or ten verses, of which he gave a brief and edifying explanation. How the houses of good old Protestants were perfumed with this incense daily, especially on Lord's days. We, says Mr. Henry, have heard with our ears and our fathers have told us." Prayer succeeded singing. The whole was usually comprehended within the space of a half an hour or a little more.

When prayer was over, his children received his blessing which he pronounced with great seriousness, solemnity, and affection. Did you see what this requires? This requires that a father is humble before God and passionate for God, full of thoughts. How would a father be this way unless he was himself prepared? He was preparing to engage his people.

You know, I know that, you know, the men here who've been speaking, you know, have spent the last few weeks banging their heads against the wall, crying out to God, working to have something meaningful to say, Okay. Fathers need to do that too. We need to be before the throne of God, being prepared and ready to go and breathe life into our homes. That's what was happening here. He had something to say and he was prepared and his passion was high.

The better to engage the attention of his family, he required of them at the close of the exercise an account. So he would ask the family members to recount to him what they had just heard. That's a good practice. So out of their own mouths they're reciting the principles. And then on the Sabbath the same order was observed.

The household assembling about 8 o'clock, nor were his public engagements on that sacred day allowed to interfere, either with the observance itself or his own personal attention to it. Think of the busyness of the Sabbath day, how difficult this must have been, how difficult, this is very difficult for me in my own household. We have to fight to have a time together. It's usually in the late afternoon, you know, before dinner that we finally gather our family around and again you know everything in the world is working against this. This is why a father has to have life organized to facilitate it because if he just lets life go by, it'll never happen.

It just won't. Because nature will not allow it. There's something about nature that hates this. And so we have to fight like Tigers to claim it. The worship being concluded, Mr.

Henry took his family to the solemn assembly. After dinner he sang a psalm, offered up a short prayer, and so retired to his closet till the time returned from meeting the congregation. In the evening he generally repeated in his own house both the sermons on which the occasion of many neighbors attended. The repetition was followed by singing in prayer two verses more of a suitable hymn or son within son the blessing pronounced and the younger children catechized. After supper he sang the 136th psalm then catechized his elder children and servants, heard them repeat what they could remember of the sermons, and concluded the day with supplications." Now, does anyone feel overwhelmed at this point?

How do we deal with that feeling? Here's my recommendation. Do more. Don't be satisfied with a skinny offering, but rise up and make it fuller and make it more beautiful. If you need to, you may need to.

Because of the pressures, because of our own constitutions, we often settle for less than we should. The world is full of men who settle for less. Let's not be those kind of men. How easy it is to just settle for less because we live in the age of grace, don't we? Well, this is not about being legalistic.

This is not about accumulating righteousness. This is not about, you know, being above someone else. This is about duty. It's about responsibility. It's about carrying something out.

It's not about looking down your nose on the guy who does less. It has an absolutely zero to do with that. It does have to do though with a passionate execution of faithfulness toward God and to present to God what He desires. Godly seed. And how does seed become godly?

Well, there must be plantings and waterings and fertilizers. That's how seed would become godly. And then God, for some reason, He seems to bless this. He seems to bless duty. He seems to come alongside the Father who preaches the gospel and drives it into the heart.

He seems to do that. Fathers who deliver the Word of God generally have more real disciples. Why is that? God is sovereign in salvation. He can save anyway.

But here's what seems to be the case. God blesses faithfulness. We don't control God, But for some reason, he does bless the one who prays. Can he accomplish his will without your prayers? Absolutely.

But he blesses prayers. And he says, no, pray the Lord of the harvest that he send forth laborers. He still asks us to do that. He does the same thing in our families. He blesses the duty.

The duty doesn't save us, it should never make us proud, but He does bless the duty for some reason. It matters what you do. All the child-raising commands make this very clear. It matters what you do. If you spare the rod, you'll spoil the child.

It matters what you do. Results will be different if you don't rise up and act. We do believe in the absolute sovereignty of God, but we also believe in the absolute duty of man. Both side by side, they're not contradictory at all. And it's the same principle operating in family worship.

We must do our duty and cast the salt into the spring and deliver the promises of God with all of our hearts. And God will bless it in His own way. Besides the daily oblations, the Sabbath services which have been noticed, Mr. Henry often kept family fasts, sometimes in unison with invited friends. Did you understand what he's saying here?

First of all, the reality of fasting, which is almost completely non-existent in the church today, Our family should be fasting. Fasting for crises, fasting for fruitfulness, fasting for the lost, fasting for all manner of issues going down in the church. There are enough things going on in your church right now that you should be fasting. There are in our church, absolutely. I've never known a week where there was not a reason to fast for some crisis, some hardship, some disappointment in the church, some medical thing or whatever.

There's always reason. Our family should be fasting and the Henry family kept the fast even when visitors were showing up. They were not going to be controlled by what was going on, okay? They were going to do it. So that's, I just think that's good encouragement.

Keep the course. You know, it's easy to let practices fall off when unusual times are upon us. This happens to our family all the time, especially when conferences are going or something like that. It's so exacting, it's so time-consuming, and everybody's working so hard on it that they're, you know, they're these brackets of time where life just sort of stops. But that wasn't so.

This is the better example right here in the Henry household. And frequently he fasted alone. On these occasions, like the believing patriarch, he wrestled for spiritual blessings. And whatever were the cares or fears or trials of himself or his friends, they were committed with filial simplicity and confidence to God. His piety at home embraced the whole compass of relative religion or relative religion.

He was an example to believers not only as a husband, a father, and a master, but also as a son, a son-in-law, a brother, and a friend. And this just describes beautiful home life. It describes home life that is as unto the gates of heaven. And he fostered a beauty in his home life that is rare, but it's recoverable. Something that is rare can also be recoverable, and so we must recover it in this generation.

The Henry's kept at it on a daily basis with just a simple curriculum of the Bible itself. And they used catechisms as well and confessions. It was God-centered home life. And this is so critical. What do we advocate?

We don't advocate family-centered home life. We advocate God-centered family life. That God Almighty, his words, his thoughts, meditations of him would be the center of our homes. Going through our households, singing songs of the faith, reciting scripture together, filling our homes with what we know is gold. Why do we labor for that which is not bread?

But there is bread. There is something fulfilling. Why are there so many unfulfilled in our houses? It's because we've not been feeding them bread. We've been feeding them fluff.

And they have nothing for their souls to nourish on and so they're empty and they're directionless because we've not given it to them as shepherds. One of One of the sweetest things that the Henry household engaged in was a baptismal covenant. On October 20, 1686, Matthew Henry delivered a baptismal covenant to his children and they would all hand write this baptismal covenant And they would recite the baptismal covenant every Lord's Day evening. And it's a beautiful Trinitarian devotional. It's a very warm-hearted covenant.

And Matthew took pains that his children understood it. I'm going to show it to you now. I take God the Father to be my chiefest good and my highest end. I take God the Son to be my prince and Savior. I take God the Holy Ghost to be my sanctifier, teacher, guide, and comforter.

I take the Word of God to be my rule in all my actions and the people of God to be my people in all conditions. And this I do deliberately, sincerely, and freely forever. What a beautiful way to grow up reciting this every Sunday night, committing oneself to these very, very special, beautiful things. Now this really is a tale. It's a tale of two expository fathers.

We like to talk about expository preaching, how critical it is to recover this in the church. If you want to recover it in the church, you better recover it in the home first. We do desire to see an army of expositors in our churches in the coming generations. And we in fact we do a conference each year on this subject. And it does what we found is that people go back and they begin to preach the word like they actually never did before.

It's so important that we raise up a generation of Bible expositors. But these fathers were expository fathers. They saw themselves as deliverers of a message that has come from heaven and they let the texts of Scripture drive the teaching in the home. They weren't out there looking for popular, interesting, entertaining things. They were expositors of the Bible And this is the kind of father that we want to create in this generation so that there would be more expositors in the church and in the home, rolling hard, multiplying massively throughout the generations.

That if there would be 10, 000 expositors in America today, that there would be 500, 000 in two generations that would be preaching the Word, that would trust it so heartily and that would love it. Why would we say that fathers should be expositors? Because the commands of fatherhood are really commands for exposition of Scripture. The commands to fathers to bring the Word of God into their homes are very much like the commands to preachers to preach the Word. They are so similar.

It's absolutely remarkable. Genesis 18, 9, we learn of the purpose of Abraham's life. I have known him that he may command his children and his household after him that they may keep the way of the Lord to do righteousness and justice that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has spoken to him. Fathers are to be commanding, and what do they command? They command the things that are in the Word of God.

Everything regarding righteousness and justice. Everything regarding love and what is found in Scripture. In Deuteronomy 6 we read, 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 speak of them when you sit in your house when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up." That's exposition all the time. And in Psalm 1-8, we hear, we read, or Proverbs 1-8, "'My son, hear the instruction of a father, "'and do not forsake the law of your mother, "'for they are a graceful ornament around your head and chains about your neck. Psalm 78 1 through 4 says give ear all my people to my law incline your ear to the words of my mouth.

God would have us be expositors with ears turned toward the words of God's mouth so that they would be found understanding the will of the Lord, being brought up in the training and the admonition of the Lord, that every father would go and make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe all that has been commanded of them. And this is the role of a father, to be an expositor. The Puritan vision of fatherhood is the vision of the expositor, but what kind of expositor is he? He is as tender as a tender-hearted expositor that as you have ever seen. He is delivering beautiful things to His family and He is making His family life as unto the gates of heaven.

And I pray that that would be the legacy of our time here that somehow all of us, including the Brown family, would go a whole other length of creating the kingdom of heaven in home life. So that the kingdom of heaven would be seen and demonstrated beautifully in church life. And so that we would be fanning out into the world, into the community, not keeping ourselves from it, but into it, into business, into the government, into the ways so that the ways of God can be seen and that there would be somebody on this earth who seeks to know what is acceptable to the Lord. May it be so. Would you pray with me?

Lord we pray that you would give us these great things. We realize you are more wonderful than all else. We pray that you would be the center of all of our home life and that you would now send us into our homes as we make our ways there later tonight to reform, to transform, to go another length, to be more faithful than we ever were before. In Jesus' name, Amen. Thank you.