Training one’s children is not a wooden, academic exercise, but involves relational, one-on-one discipleship at every turn. In this message, Joel Beeke will show to build your family through practical biblical teaching. This requires thoughtful catechizing during family worship—but it’s much more than this. Parents are to be godly models to their children (Prov. 23:26). They are to lovingly pray for and with their sons and daughters—nurturing, admonishing, and teaching them at every moment of the day (Eph. 6:4; Deut. 6:4-7). 

It's great to be here again. Turn with me please to Ephesians 6, Ephesians 6, verses 1 through 4. Verse 1 through 4. My focus is on verse 4 this evening. Children obey your parents in the Lord for this is right.

Honor thy father and mother which is the first commandment with promise That it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest live long on the earth. And ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Let's pray. Lord God, help us, help us, help us, to glean the principles of Thy word for child rearing and to raise our children based on the sufficiency of Thy holy word. And grant that when we do by grace raise them on scriptural principles, we would also experience that general sweeping promise of Proverbs 22 that when we raise them in the fear of God, train them up in the way they should go, when they are old, they shall not depart from it.

And help us to plead that promise of Jeremiah, all thy children shall be taught of the Lord. That's what we want, Lord. That's what we need. Come and help us and bless us. Help us to bring our children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord and then put thy stamp of benediction upon our meager efforts that they would be born again and serve thee the triune God all their lives.

We ask all this in Jesus name. Amen. In Jesus' name, amen. Well we sure live in a Babylon, don't we? Oh my.

I lost my mother 11, 12 years ago, father 30 years ago, but if they were to be able to see what's going on in our society today, you ever think about that? Your loved ones departed, they wouldn't believe it. They wouldn't believe what's going on, the crazy insanity of our modern day Babylon. This week, the Supreme Court of United States of America is hearing a case of parents from Maryland that they don't have religious liberty in the public school anymore and their children are being taught very gross, ungodly, abominable, insane things. The arguments went back and forth and when they made the case they actually said this.

Here is something our children are being taught by our teachers in the public school when it came to teaching them about their gender. This is in the teacher's manual, word for word. When we are born, this is what the teachers are telling the children, people make a guess about gender, About whether you are a boy or a girl based on your body parts Sometimes they're right and Sometimes they're wrong Because our body parts do not decide our gender. Our gender is decided from inside of us because we might feel different than what people tell us we are. Is that absurd or is it it defies common sense, it defies everything in the Bible, it is absolutely perverted, sick, twisted, but this is the lie that the left and The liberals want to teach our children blatant indoctrination, obvious ungodly unbiblical teaching and recruiting for the homosexual, transgender, whatever movement.

You've heard enough already, haven't you? So tonight, I know many other speakers are going to be talking about fighting distinct things in Babylon. I've been assigned to flip to the positive side. I don't need to teach you the kind of Babylonian world we live in. This is just one little snapshot.

We need to fight against Babylon by the grace of the Holy Spirit, by presenting the positive biblical mandates to our children from us as parents and as grandparents to raise our children in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord. I love the statement of Martin Luther in the time of the Reformation when they were battling the Roman Catholic Church and its freewill, grace, combination, slash works religion. Luther said, help me to raise a child until he's seven years old and I will imbibe him with principles for the rest of his life and Rome can have him for the rest of their life. Now that's a bit of an exaggeration and Luther was prone to exaggerate at times. But the point is this, you see, what you, how you train your children in the nurture and ammunition of the Lord, even when they're very, very young, will leave an impress upon them, an imprint for the rest of their lives.

And when God blesses that training with their genuine conversion, and that you cannot do, but He can, And he's promised to do that in the seed of believers who raise their children, nurture and admonish the Lord. You see, then you may have the joy of seeing the fruit of your labors by the grace of God for generations to come. And so my topic with you now is this. How to build your family through, my full topic is, practical, biblical, prophetic teaching. That is, being prophets, being teachers whose mouths spill over, whose lives exemplify biblical teaching.

So it's in the home, it's in your life, dear mom, dear dad, that you give your children a foundation on which to build for the rest of their lives. Building, building your family day in, day out in a variety of ways on the principles of sacred scripture. Now what I want to do then this evening is I want to look with you at six biblical nurturing mandates that you are called to exemplify to your children. Six of them. Number one is nurture and admonition, as we just read from Ephesians 6 verse 4.

The apostle Paul envisions two approaches to Christian parenting. The first approach that he has in mind here when he uses the word nurture and ammunition is to correct the disciplinarian whose only concern is to see that his children toe the line and punishes all infractions of every rule. Charles Hodg said, this is precisely what parents are not to do. They're not to excite the bad passions of their children by bringing them to wrath by excessive severity, injustice, partiality, or unreasonable exercise of authority. The other approach is a combination of roles involving education, physical and spiritual nurture, and moral training through biblical discipline.

This is what we are to do. Such a parent is a teacher, a coach, a pastor to his children, her children, as well as a true father or mother. Interestingly, the word nurture, padaya, is the general training of all parts of the child, instructing his mind, shaping his character, bending his will, awakening his conscience, enriching his soul, and building his body. The word admonition in Greek, nufasia, has to do with the conduct of the child, encouraging the child to do what is right, rewarding good conduct, confronting them when they do what is wrong, and punishing their misconduct in a way that is commensurate with the offense committed. Charles Hodge goes on to say, as Christianity is the only true religion and God in Christ the only true God, the only possible means of profitable education is ascribed in the Bible in two words, nurture and admonition of the Lord.

That is, the whole process of instruction and discipline must be that which he prescribes and which he administers so that his authority should be brought into constant and immediate contact with the mind, the heart, and the conscience of the child. So this means that we in our minds must have a clear vision as parents or even as grandparents of what we want our children or grandchildren to become. And that vision should be modeled after the very vision of Jesus himself, of whom the Bible says in Luke 2.52, he increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God in man. You see, as Jesus grew from infancy to adulthood under the teaching of Joseph and Mary and was subject to his parents, the Bible says, he developed in a well-rounded way, physically, intellectually, socially, spiritually. And so we are to train our children in every area of life and strive for completeness and balance of development, and that is a full-time job, as you well know.

So this is not the work of a few days or even of a few years, but Paul implies here that this is a decades-long process, a journey through childhood to adulthood that we must make hand in hand with our children. So just as our personal sanctification in life, in spiritual life, is progressive. So is the teaching of our children. We never reach the point where we can say, finally, I've taught my children everything that is required. We've done our part and now sons and daughters, you must do the rest.

No, even when we give our children in marriage, we really don't have a final product. We're still in the process, aren't we, of bringing them up and the nurture and the admonition of the Lord. But at that point, you see, we need to surrender them. And our goal should be prayerfully to surrender them to that spouse for life as spiritually mature, physically mature, affectionately mature, emotionally mature, intellectually mature as we can do as a great blessing for that spouse to receive such a godly partner for life. It isn't that what God was really implying when he said to Abraham, I know Abraham that he will command his children and they shall keep the way of the Lord.

Notice the word commander. We're not to say to our children, here's what the Bible says about these things, what do you think about it? Or I don't want to interfere in your life, but this is what the Bible says, but you need to make up your mind. No, God is saying that we must teach our children truth. We must command them lovingly, persuasively, verbally, to follow Him.

We're not neutral prophet parents in our home passing out information and sitting back as disinterested parties. We're not just Rogerian counselors who listen effectively and never give solutions and never give answers and never give direction. So from the very outset, as we raise our children, we must think in terms of the covenant, both past and present and future, that God has given us children whom he calls us to raise in covenantal terms, to represent Him in society, in Babylon, in the church, and in every area of their lives, also in their own families one day as married people with children and grandchildren themselves. So we're to be mindful of all these principles that God conveys to us in Scripture that are summarized in these two wonderful, profound, broad-sweeping terms, nurture and admonition. Always remembering that we are raising tomorrow's fathers and mothers.

We are raising the next generation of God's gate-keeping servants and witnesses, tomorrow's leaders and preachers and teachers and authors and artists and businessmen and scientists and doctors and nurses and lawyers and merchants and tradesmen and soldiers and police officers and firefighters, praying that every one of them will be a Christian in those occupations. From our pulpit In Grand Rapids, we often pray for Christian placement, Christian firefighters, Christian nurses, Christian doctors. My son's a businessman, so he says, "'Dad, you should pray more for Christian businessmen.' So I've been doing that as well. You see, every area of life desperately needs Christian leaders. That's our task, looking to God for benediction.

Now, no two children are exactly alike. This is what makes parenting so challenging. Even twins are not exactly alike, and we can't raise any two children exactly like one another. Yes, we strive for fairness and equality. We teach them the same principles, but every child has his own personality, and I think purposely so, so that we throw ourselves upon God to say, Lord, I need wisdom to raise this child, I need wisdom to raise that child, and that child.

So we're dependent on God in the whole process. But God has given us a manual in the Bible how to raise our children. So that is our guidebook, That is our teacher's manual, not this dreadful teacher's manual that I just read from, that the Supreme Court just heard. So the point is this, raise your children in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord. Now that leads to principle number two, which is the primary foundational way of doing that, which I spoke to you about in greater detail than I will now some years ago, namely family worship.

Family worship, daily instruction in the Word of God, daily reading of the Word of God, daily prayer to the throne of God, and daily singing of the praises of God. These are the four things Scripture says you are to do every day with your family. Daily reading of the Word of God is a no-brainer. I hope there's no family here that dares to go a day without reading scripture in front of your family. Paul says to Timothy, you were raised on the scriptures.

From a child, you have known the scriptures. It's hard to be a conscienceable parent and skip reading the Bible every day to your children. I hope you're not doing that. That's a travesty. Your children need to hear the scriptures every day of their lives.

But you also need to daily instruct them in the word of God. You need to, that chapter you read today in family worship, you need to take it, especially you dad, and with the help of your wife, You need to bring the major takeaways of that chapter to your children. And that's that's a tall order. And that's why a group of us guys, as you as you know, several writers combined five years of work to pour into the Family Worship Bible Guide which actually does it for you. So after the chapter is read you simply read point one, point two, usually just two point major takeaways and each one ends with a question.

And then you discuss that with your children so that every day you're discussing another truth or two truths in the Bible. So by the time you get through the Bible in two or three years, you will have talked about every subject under the sun with your children because the Bible talks about every subject under the sun. Now if you don't do that, I don't care how good of a dad you are, how good of a mom you are, there will be subjects, important subjects, that you will not bring your children up in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord because you'll never think about teaching them about it. But the Bible, The Bible is your guide. And when you go through every chapter and you teach from every chapter, you will cover all your bases and it will be a robust, well-balanced presentation of the whole council of God to your children, sitting, talking to them, family member by family member, about all the truths of the Bible.

That is the beautiful gift God gives us in family worship. So I know most of you already have this book. I'm not going to make an extra pitch about it tonight, but family worship Bible guide is a gift of God to you to help you do that most challenging part of family worship. Use it. It will transform your family worship time.

Thirdly, you need daily prayer to the throne of God. Jeremiah says, God will pour out his fury, that's a strong word, upon the family that does not pray to God. Thomas Brooks, the Puritan said, a family without prayer is like a home without a roof exposed to all the storms of heaven. You've got to teach your children how to pray as well. In family worship, you can do that.

Use the Acts formula. Teach them to adore God at the beginning of their prayers, then to confess sin, then to have thanksgivings, and then supplications. That's a balanced prayer. And as you model that prayer for your children, they will learn to model their prayers after your prayers. And there are so many things to adore Him for.

There are so many things, sins to confess. There are so many things to thank Him for, also in the family. And there are so many supplications to make. Pray earnestly every day with your family. And finally, the daily singing of the praise of God.

Psalm 118 verse 15 says, the voice of rejoicing and salvation is heard in the tents of the righteous. The right hand of the Lord does valiantly. Philip Henry, the father of the famous commentarian, Matthew Henry said this is an obvious reference to singing in family worship coming from the tents of Israel. It's not synagogue singing, it's family singing, daily singing, the voice of rejoicing, the praises of God is heard in the tents of the righteous. Now it's good if you can combine this family worship also with catechizing or do that a separate time maybe in your homeschooling where you actually teach your children what our forefathers called katechesis, coming from the Greek word katekeo, which means to sound or to recount something.

The idea was you would instruct your children on some truth, and they would memorize it and sound it back to you. That's the idea of catechism. So what a blessing it is when parents take their children aside for times of catechism training and the church can help you perhaps in this area as well, but where you actually have your children memorize whatever confession, whatever Reformed confession, your church espouses. And whether it's 1689 or whether it's 1640s, Westminster standards or whatever it is, teach your children the grand truths of the Bible in these short, wonderful answers. Shorter catechism is amazing.

Short answers, they can memorize them. I was just talking to a man last week at a conference, and he said to me, with a tear streaming down his face. He said, my daughter called me yesterday, and she had lost the way. She had become ungodly. She abandoned all the principles, all the principles of her parents.

And she became a child of many prayers for 10 years after she left the home. She got involved in all kinds of wrong things. But he said when she was 5 years old, I started catechism with her. I started having her memorize the shorter Westminster catechism from the very beginning. And by the time she got into 10th grade, she could say the entire shorter catechism by heart.

But she went astray, and the tears flowed some more. But he said, yesterday she called me up. And he knew that for the last two months she had been turned around and she was going back to church And one text that someone said in her life, one text convicted her soul. And she said, I'm doing wrong. I need to go back to church.

And she called her dad last week. This is what she said. Dad, she said, God is dealing with me. God is turning me around. And I want to tell you something, Dad.

I want to thank you for making me memorize the entire short of catechism because I thought I had forgotten it all, but now that God is dealing with me, I can say it all again. It's all come back into my mind. What a glorious thing that is. I had a niece who also went the wrong way. When she was about 27, she got converted.

She went to my brother and sister and she said, everything you taught me, which you thought I threw away and I did throw away, the Holy Spirit has brought back to me. I remember it all now. And It's so meaningful now. It's my treasure now. You see, train up a child the way you should go doesn't mean he will always embrace it and always be saved in your home.

You may have to release that child as an unsaved child in adulthood. But your prayers go on even when you can't talk to them anymore, even when they say, don't talk to me about God anymore. My dad used to say there comes a time in some cases, sad, tragic cases, I hope it's never you boys and girls, you young people, but where you can't talk to your child about the Lord, but even then you can talk to the Lord about your child. You pray on, you pray on, and who can tell? Train up a child the way he shall go, and when he is old, he shall not depart from it.

God can bring them back. But your duty is family worship, catechization, training your children in the ways of God. Not to the point, of course, of having long family worships, having rigorous disciplinarian pounding the catechism into them. No, no. A little bit at a time.

A little bit every day. Ten, fifteen minutes family worship a day. Walking through these four steps. Doing a little catechization. Memorizing one question at a time.

When I look back, we did family worship with our children all their lives. I wish we had done more catechization. I really do. And it's good for children to memorize in the depths of their soul the great truths of God. Don't hammer them into their heads, but reach their consciences with conviction to incline their hearts to embrace biblical teaching by the grace of God with true faith and to stir in them the desire to bring forth the fruit of that faith in their lives.

Now, the third thing, nurturing ammunition will necessarily involve family worship and catechization. But the third thing it will also involve is using every teachable moment in love. Using every teachable moment in love. What do I mean by that? Well, Deuteronomy 6, 6 and 7 says, "'Thou shalt teach my statutes diligently unto thy children, "'shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, "'when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, "'when thou risest up.'" That means to say, yes, family worship is the foundation, but if that's all you do in the home and you don't talk about God any other time, your children are not going to say, that's just a show.

You see, God, we live in Coram Dale, we live in the consciousness of God, in the face of God for all of life. And therefore we should be using teachable moments to talk to our children in the middle of the day about the things of God. We should take advantage of each opportunity that comes our way to speak to them. The Hebrew expression, when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up, that's simply a Hebrew idiom that says, because you do all these things every day, talk to your children every day. So what does that mean practically?

Well, it means when you get around the supper table, the evening meal, you don't say to yourself, Well, we're going to have family worship after supper, so we're just going to talk about nothing. Well, maybe I'll take out my cell phone while the family's chatting. No, no, no. Get out from behind that cell phone, Dad, Mom. And don't let the family sit around doing cell phones.

This is a rich time. You talk about each other's day. You ask questions. You enjoy one another. And naturally you'll end up talking about some of the things of God.

A true friend. A true friend. And you are to be a true friend, you're to be more than that, but you are to be a true friend to your children. Wants to know what is on your mind, what you're struggling with, what makes you happy, what you're afraid of, what you hope for. Open up your children.

Be a true friend to them. Teach them in teachable moments. I know it's not always easy to do. My wife was really good at this, better than I was, And she realized it. She was gracious.

I'd come home from work rather exhausted. And she'd say to me, whisper to me, quite often, happily she didn't have to do it every day or every week. But quite often, she'd say, remember, remember supper time now. Let's try to have meaningful discussion. Meaningful discussion.

I know what she meant. Let's talk about real things. Let's make an effort, Don't zone out. And that's what we need. We need to admonish each other as husband and wife.

Let's have meaningful conversation with our children during times when we are gathered together. Family Evenings. Just don't let them meander all night long just with laughter and fun and but try to have some some meaningful talks about things. Raise questions. Raise questions.

What do you think of this? Maybe a doctrinal question. Children, what do you think of the intercession of Jesus in heaven? What does that mean? And don't do that just during family worship, but just talking times about the real things of God.

That's what Deuteronomy 6 is saying. You shall teach them diligently to thy children and shall talk of them daily when you sit down, when you rise up. Now, we are to do this, I say, with love, with love. That's important. Our children should never have the impression that we are doing this to drill into them or to force them to be more religious, for example.

But we're to do it with love for their souls that is conveyed by our tone of voice, by the questions we bring up, by the things we say, and by our own walk of life. Our children will know whether we love their souls more than anything else on earth And God forbid if we don't. That's a tragedy. You know this life is very short parents. You know that.

You blink a couple times. You have kids. Not only. Blink a couple more times. They're teenagers.

You blink a couple more times. They're married. You blink a couple more times. You have grandchildren. You blink a couple more times.

Your kids are taking care of you before you die. You blink a couple more times, You're gone. You need to show your children that you love their soul more than anything else. Soul love is the soul of all love. My parents were tremendous at that.

My dad would weep over us, weep over our souls. He'd cry out in prayer so many times, Oh God, I can't miss one of our children on the right side of the Lord Jesus Christ on the Great Judgment Day. How many times I heard him pray? Hundreds of times. Oh Lord, let the lives of our children be nothing but preparations to meet Thee in the righteousness and peace of Jesus Christ on the great day.

If we love our children, we will yearn for the well-being of their never-dying souls. And that means we teach them with love. That means we teach them with compassion. That means we teach them with prayer. That means we teach them by our own experiences, our stumblings, as well as the sweet times of communion we've had with God.

What a wonderful opportunity we have in family worship when we read a Bible chapter And a text in that chapter has been made very precious to us to share that with our children so that they know that mom and dad love the Bible and mom and dad love their soul and mom and dad treasure the word of God. And that's the way to live. Teach them, teach them, teach them, talk with them, talk with them about the things of God. And then fourthly, we need to exercise what I call godly modeling, godly modeling. Though children learn from what we say, they learn even more from who we are and what we do.

Our lives next to the Bible are the most important book our children will ever read. I want to tell you something that I don't know how I can explain it. I'll just tell you what it is. When I was an early teen, just before God stopped me at the age of 14. 13, I was an unsaved boy.

Sad to say, I wasted children, I wasted 14 years of my life. Don't do that. You seek the Lord now when you're very young. You're not too old to be converted when you're three or four or five. Seek the Lord now.

But when I was 13, my friend wasn't an ungodly kid in a real bad sense of the word, but he wanted to take me to a place that I knew was not good for my soul. Actually, he wanted to take me into a theater to see a movie and I knew It wasn't good. And we didn't have television in our home, and I never went to a theater in my life. But I said I would go with them. I knew it was against the wishes of my parents.

And as we came close to going into the theater door, I can still see it today. Right in front of me, it was as if I saw my mother underneath. I turned to my friend and I said, let's do something else. I didn't have the courage to tell him why. Let's do something else.

You see, the prayers of my mother, seeing her on her knees so often made an impression on my unconverted heart that actually influenced my life. So what I'm saying to you is something that we've got all mixed up. When company comes over to your home, you're in your best behavior. And in front of our own family sometimes, we're not. This is crazy.

You're influencing your child every day by your lifestyle. It's far more important for you to behave in a godly manner, while in front of everyone, of course, but especially in front of your children. This is critical. You See, your children will figure out who you are. It's hard to keep secrets from anyone when we live under the same roof.

Children are always reading into what we're doing. When they do not see a perfect mom or dad, and of course they don't. But they see a dad who never says I'm sorry to them. A dad who never asked for their forgiveness. Something's wrong.

Children are quite resilient. They'll forgive quite easily when you bow in humility and confess your wrongdoing. Have you ever confessed to your children that you responded too strongly to a certain situation, or that you neglected to treat them right in another situation. I'm not advocating apologizing to your children every day, But what I'm saying is children need to see the fruit of repentance in your life also toward them. They need to see in us an unwavering commitment to Jesus Christ, a tender conscience before God, which we're trying to inculcate in them, an unconditional love for them, a strong bond of love for each other as husband and wife.

They need to see mom and dad laboring shoulder to shoulder, loving each other like crazy in order to model for them what a true marriage looks like, a biblical marriage looks like, where both partners love God most of all, love each other in the second place, and then love themselves third. They need to see holiness in your life, mom, dad. They need to see Christ in you. Godly modeling is an important part of your nurturing And admonishing of your children. I was telling someone just the other day that my mother was very, very tender in heart.

And she just could not stand it. Even when we would kind of squabble with each other as brothers and sisters like sibling rivalry. Oh, that was out of order. So I grew up in a very naive home. If we started to argue with each other, my mother would stand up and she'd walk out of the room.

And she'd walk into the bedroom. And we knew exactly what she was going to do. She was going there to pray for us. And she didn't have to say a word and we just stopped arguing just like that. We don't want to offend our mother You see just her walk of life was so godly that it impacted us in a major way.

I can remember one of my brothers began to kind of court a girl in the neighborhood that wasn't from a church-attending family. My mother wept over that. My brother would come home. He was like, I don't know, 16, 17, 18. When he'd come home, he'd find her weeping in the kitchen.

And you know what he did? He went to that girl and he said, you know, I really like you. And I personally would like to get to know you better, but my mother, my mother does not like it at all that I'm going with a girl from who's unchurched and doesn't believe in the Bible and in God. So I need to break it off. So he was unsaved at that time, but he broke it off for his mother's sake.

Because of the power of love. The power of godly tears. So my question, and we all need improvement here, don't we? My question is, do we model godliness or worldliness to our children? Are we part of the Babylon that impacts our children for ill?

Not because we walk in outwardly, worldly ways, but we exude inwardly from within worldly behavior. That's why it's critical, you see, that we demonstrate the kind of attitudes and actions we want our children to learn. Other training grounds, such as the church or maybe even a Christian school for a few of you, can also be important to assist in some way. But in homeschooling, Christian homeschooling, we need to remember that by a combination of Christian homeschooling and the home environment, Children see that as real life. That's the real deal.

That's the real thing. The church can assist you. But children get their deepest impressions at home. Parents, you are the most influential people in the lives of your children. And you and I will never be perfect.

My wife and I look at each other once in a while now and we say, You know, this is the amazing grace of God. We actually sit in our living room chairs at night sometimes and say to each other, it's amazing. Our kids turned out better than we raised them. It's just amazing to see godliness in your children. You know you can't convert any of them.

And to see that in their children, to see them follow in your footsteps and do some things far better than you did them. It's very humbling. And you just have to say, it's the great grace of God. So it's one thing for children to see flaws in us. That's understandable.

We all have them. It's another thing. If children have to say, I can't see in my dad or my mom, I can't hear in their talk, I can't see in their lives that they love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity. That's disaster. They need to be able to say, my dad, My mom have their faults and their flaws, but one thing is sure, they love the triune God.

And they love my soul, and they want me to know that God, the bottom of my heart. Godly modeling, That is an important part of nurture and admonition. And so is, number five, praying for and with our children. Praying for and with our children. Prayer is a gift of God.

It's a tremendous gift that we have in our arsenal of raising our children in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord. We should teach our children to pray for everything. Things small, things great. I love what my wife did when I would come home from work. She would say, Esther is in her bedroom, she is feeling a little bit sick, maybe you better go pray with her.

Yeah, I wasn't aware of that. Happened during the day. I would go into Esther's bedroom, say, Esther, you're not feeling well. No, Dad, oh, can I pray with you? And I find out how she was feeling, and I would pray with her, of course.

And Calvin's got a big test tomorrow. Okay, bring that into the prayer. Family worship prayer. Help Calvin as he prepares tonight, as he goes through that test tomorrow. So big things like their soul, small things like a cold or a test, you bring it all to the Lord.

You model for your children that we are to acknowledge him in all our ways and he will direct all our paths. So you pray with them. But you also pray when they're not present for them. Like Job, It may be my children have sinned in their hearts before the Lord. Job 1, 4, and 5.

So we offered sacrifices daily. Thus did Job continually, constantly slain animals, pointing to the blood of the Messiah to come. We don't have to slay animals anymore, of course. We simply go back to the cross. We lay our children at the foot of the cross, and we say, Lord, save them, grow them, nurture them, sanctify them.

We pray for them every day. And I'll tell you something that's very beautiful, very beautiful. When you go to bed at night, get down with your wife on your knees, hold each other's hands, and take turns crying out for your family and for all other needs too. But don't ever forget your children in any one of those beautiful evening prayer times together. It is sweet as a husband and wife to storm the mercy seat, don't you think, together for the welfare of your children?

Yes, in their presence in family worship, but also yes, privately as husband and wife, and in your own private time as a parent. When you drive down the road and you're going somewhere and you're all alone in the car, what a great time to pray out loud to God about your kids. Go through them one by one. Just spend three, four, five minutes praying for every need of every child. What a sweet time it can be for your own soul.

Keep that stupid radio off. It's empty. Probably wrong music. But pray. Use opportunities, windows of openness.

Use it to pray for your needy children. I love what Spurgeon said about Job's prayer. Job did it early in the morning. He said every morning, Job hurried to the cross with his children, because it may be that they were going to sin that day. Job wanted to beat them to the cross as it were, crying out for mercy for his precious, precious children.

And teach your children to pray when they're very young. The Holy Spirit alone can teach them to pray truly. I know that, of course. But put them on your lap. Show them what to pray in family worship.

Whisper a few words into their ears. Let them repeat it when they're three years old. Four years old, let them start their prayer themselves. And when they come in trouble, you help them finish. By the time they're seven, they'll be able to take the whole daddy's prayer.

And that will help them so much when the Lord does work in their souls his salvation. They will have so much more freedom to pray and to pour out their hearts to God. This is all part of nurturing ammunition. Prayer is at the center of it all. And then number six, meeting our God-given responsibility.

Meeting our God-given responsibility. When we hear all of these things, it's rather overwhelming. It's daunting. We can so easily become like ships passing in the night between husband and wife, so careless in our conversation during the day with our family. We can skip family worship one or two nights a week or maybe not do it at all, God forbid.

And pretty soon it's just like we're living together. Oh yes, we have Sunday. Oh yes, we hear the sermons. Thanks be to God for that. But we don't live out the sermons during the week and our children will be prone to say, there's a disconnect between Sunday worship and my parents at home.

You see, that's the worst thing they can say about you. They need to be able to see that you are striving for holiness every day of your lives, striving to walk in the ways of the Lord. So please, please love the souls of your children enough to model for them that godly walk. Pray for consistency in your own life. Pray that you may be godly, also in front of ungodly children.

It will give you the satisfaction of a good conscience. It will give you more hope to pray for the wellbeing of your never dying children, never dying souls of your children. You know, I love what Matthew Henry said on his deathbed. He got all his children around him, and he said, children, will you forgive me for this and for that and for the other thing? Mentioned several things.

And they all forgave him. And then he said, children, I charge you, don't meet me on the wrong side of Jesus on the day of judgment. They said, whoa, how could he be so bold with them? Well, he went on to explain. He said, every day in family worship, you know that despite all my faults, I love the Lord Jesus Christ, and I tried to bring him to you every day in family worship.

And if you reject him all your life and you have to face him on the day of judgment, without him, Hell will be a double hell for you because you've known the truth all your life and you've pushed it away. What a solemn warning. There's another Puritan named Richard Mayo, not a very well known Puritan, but in his sermon he's warning parents of the importance of living godly lives in front of their children and speaking to them about the things of God every day. And he pictures at the end of his sermon a father and a mother who are both on the right side of Christ, the sheep, and all their children are goats on the left side of Christ. And he says, the children, dear parents, will cry out to you on that day if you don't talk to them about the things of God.

They'll cry out to you on that day, Father, Mother, you may have taken me to church, but you never talked to me, you never showed me the life of God in your own soul. You never walked me through the Bible. You never spoke to me. You never nurtured me, admonished me in the things of God. And now we have to suffer eternally because you did not nurture us in the things of God.

What a terrible thing that would be. We come far enough short in everything. We have enough guilt on our conscience, don't we? As parents, we always come short. But to become short in this, not to be talking to my children day by day of the one thing needful for this life and for the life to come is a disaster.

Don't go another day without doing family worship. Don't go another day without teaching to, talking to your children about real things. Oh, what a tragedy. What a tragedy to forsake our responsibility and not teach our children when we sit down, when we rise up, when we walk by the way, and not teach them passionately. God have mercy upon us.

We need, we need to raise our children in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord. And when we may do so and he may bless it and he will bless it, he's a covenant-keeping God, that will be the most powerful thing to save them from this Babylonian world. Your example, Your talk, Your lifestyle, Your commitment, Your love for their soul. Dear parents, Bring your children up in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord. Let us pray.

Lord, the task of raising children we might think should be given to holy, sinless angels. But even for them it would be a big task. It's too big for us, Lord. We're sinful human beings. But oh God, help us to confess our sins, our inconsistent walk, our ignorance of the Bible, our failure to teach the Bible, to evangelize our children by the Bible.

Lord, we're grieved by these failures. We turn to Thee for grace and light. We turn to Thee to realize our covenantal responsibilities. We take refuge in Thee, Lord. Wash us clean.

Help us to lean on Thy covenant promises. To plead for thy covenant mercies in our children. Help us to lay aside sin and run the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. Help us to look to him who's thy son as our model, our guide, our strength, our prophet, to teach us to be prophets to our children. Teach us, Lord, the truths of thy word, so that we may teach them to our children.

Open our mouths, open our hearts, move our affections to love the souls of our children. And by the work of thy Spirit, make us as parents, as grandparents, fruitful in this knowledge that we may live these truths before their eyes. And Lord, if we're fearing right now that it's too late, help us to have the years the locusts have eaten to be restored, to go to our children to ask for forgiveness and to begin family worship tomorrow, and to begin teaching them, talking to them about the things of God tomorrow. Help us open our hearts to receive thy instruction and in thy grace crown our feeble efforts with success beyond anything that we have a right to expect. Lord, we can't bring anything into heaven with us.

We have to leave everything behind except one thing, our children. Please Lord, help us to worship Thee forever with our children at our side, all of us gazing upon the Lord Jesus Christ. And oh, God forbid, forbid that our children would have to testify against us on the great day of days. Have mercy, Lord. Have mercy upon us and help us to bring our children up in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord and bless it and own it and convert them and save them and use them to build, to dwell, to plant for generation after generation the fear of God in our descendants.

In Jesus name we pray for the pardoning of all our sins for Christ's sake