In 'The Gift of Good Patterns,' Jason Dohm discusses the importance of imparting healthy family patterns to children as a significant inheritance, more valuable than money. He reflects on his and his wife's upbringing in healthy Christian homes and offers hope to those from unhealthy backgrounds, emphasizing that they can break the cycle and establish positive patterns for their children. Dohm highlights four key areas for cultivating good patterns: vibrant spiritual lives for both parents, constructing a biblically structured home focusing on relationships and priorities, nurturing warmth in marriage, and evolving parenting as children mature. He stresses the importance of parents modeling a love for God, having daily family worship, and creating a life centered around the local church. Dohm also underscores the necessity of adapting parenting strategies as children grow and integrating them into the family mission. The sermon concludes with an encouragement to start establishing good patterns now, regardless of past mistakes, ensuring that these will be the freshest memories for children.

Okay, this afternoon I'm talking about giving the gift of good patterns to our children. I've given a short version of this, maybe a 10-minute version a bunch of times. I always describe my upbringing and Janet's upbringing, and both of them were overwhelmingly healthy. We grew up in professing Christian homes, who and our parents knew how to cultivate and were actively cultivating a healthy home life. Now many people hear that and they don't have a frame of reference for that from their own upbringing.

And that can be discouraging because it means that you have all sorts of baggage from a very unhealthy upbringing. And you've actually inherited a bunch of bad patterns and it's like an anchor. You feel it every day, you're dragging around all these old bad patterns. But one time after giving a short version of this, a woman who had one of those very unhealthy backgrounds came up and said, keep telling those stories so that people know that they can build something very different and actually give patterns, good patterns to their children and just break the cycle of bad patterns. So her message to you if you didn't grow up in a healthy home with good patterns is you can change it all and you can hand something radically different to your children than you receive from your parents.

Let's ask God to help us. God, I do thank you for Godly Homes. Thank you for the home that I grew up in, the home that Janet grew up in, and all the ways that that has proved, proven to be a gift to us and made things easier for us on a thousand fronts than so many of the people that we've known throughout the years who didn't have healthy home life growing up. Pray that you would help us to give this gift to our children in Jesus' name, amen. So my premise, which I'll give you now and then I'll do my best to prove it to you to your satisfaction, is that the most important inheritance that we give to our children isn't money at all, that it is the patterns that we hand down to them.

So you might have a lot of money, you might give them a lot of money. What will be more important to them still is if you can hand them off things that launch them into life that do make things easier for them because they've observed it and so those things come to them more naturally. Our children have a front row seat watching us every day for two decades. I just want you to consider the impact that we have. For 20 years or something like that, our kids are going to observe us every day.

And the truth is that we're very likely to see our patterns in their future lives. Sometimes that would be amazingly encouraging and we'll say, we did that and that's part of their healthy homes and sometimes it will make you cringe because you know that things that they're struggling with they got honestly. Let's start with this thought exercise. If my children form their own homes and then do what they've seen, that's normally what happens by the way, Would those patterns be a blessing or a curse? They grow up, they've been watching for 20 years, they've been observing, they go out, they form their own homes, and they do what we did.

That will be a blessing or that will be a curse. If we're honest, it's going to be a mixture. It's unthinkable that all of the patterns that they get from us will be 100% pristine or all bad patterns. But what we want is the ratio to be as high as possible of the good patterns they get versus unhealthy things that they've gleamed from us. So this is what we're shooting for, is a really great ratio giving to them.

In the rest of our time, I want to lay out what I believe are the key categories that require the best of our attention if we are to bless our children by giving them the gift of good patterns that they then can do and it'll be a blessing for them. I'm gonna give you four categories that I think require the best of our attention. Number one, cultivate vibrant spiritual lives, plural. It's possible to have a home where a dad has a vibrant spiritual life but the mom doesn't or that the mom has a vibrant spiritual life. The dad doesn't.

What we want is to have a home where Dad and mom both prioritize cultivating a vibrant spiritual life. So whether they observe mom or dad, they see the same thing. Like the Lord is first. And they're feeding, walking with the Lord, walking closely with the Lord every day in their lives. A vibrant spiritual life is both deeply and personal, but it's also extremely observable.

Isn't it? Do you know the people around you who have vibrant spiritual lives without them having to blow the trumpet to say, I have a vibrant spiritual life. If you know them well at all, you have a sense of whether they do or don't. It is extremely observable. I suggest to you that the people who are close to us know when our souls are flourishing.

You buy that? People around you know when your soul is flourishing. Deuteronomy 6 is one of the most important Bible passages about family life. It's ground that we go over all the time. I'm going to read a few verses from there because I think the order that you see it in the text is critical.

I want to argue for that. Deuteronomy 6, I'll be reading verses 4 through 7 you can turn there if you think you can get there before I'm done reading. Here's Deuteronomy 6 verses 4 through 7. Hear O Israel the Lord our God the Lord is one You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart.

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, when you lie down, and when you rise up. To me, I think the order is everything here. So I want to just look you in the eye and just say, married couple, parents, love God with all of your being, all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength, and saturate your heart with the Word of God. The text says, these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. I think we have a sense of the difference between people who have an intellectual knowledge of the things that are in the Word of God and people who you can say the Word is in her heart.

So love God, this consuming love that engages all of the person and then saturate your heart with the Word of God, the words that God commanded in our heart, and then we teach them diligently to your children. I'm not arguing that you wait to teach your children the word of God until you have your act together. But I am saying, please notice the order that it is in the text, and don't think that that could be in another order and be saying the same thing. Children have a lot to learn, But they seem to be born good at spotting hypocrisy. Meaning of the things you have to teach them, that's not one of them.

They know when we're just going through the motions. None of us are that good as actors that we can fool our kids when we're acting like these things matter, but they're observing our whole lives over a long period of time. And these things really don't mean much to us. So cultivating vibrant spiritual lives is the bedrock of everything else that we build on. It's really the foundation that we're building on in terms of good patterns that can be a gift to our children.

If we don't have that, if we're not cultivating vibrant spiritual lives, we have nothing real to build on and our children will sniff it out. If we do have that but we don't have much else yet, I think you have line of sight to where you need to be. So I think it's so disproportionately important that if you have this element, both dad and mom are cultivating vibrant spiritual lives, that even if some of these other things are not in place you have line of sight to getting where you need to be but if you have all those other things but aren't cultivating a spiritual life you're so far from where you need to be. So my question is your soul flourishing Because you're cultivating a pattern of meeting with God in prayer, meeting with God in reading and meditating and memorizing His word, and extracting from local church life the things that help a soul to flourish. You know there's a lot of things in local church life that will help your soul to flourish.

Either you're extracting it from your local church experience or you aren't. So there are these personal means of grace like meeting with God in prayer and reading, memorizing, meditating on the Word of God, and then there are these corporate things that help your soul to flourish that we do with our brethren. And these aren't mutually exclusive. We need to be pursuing them together. Number two, construct and then routinely live within a biblically structured home.

Construct and then routinely live within a biblically structured home. I want to speak of two aspects, relationships and priorities. Relationships. The relationships in the home start with the marriage relationship. And of course, within the marriage relationship, we're talking about working to approximate Jesus and the church.

So like Scott was saying last night, we've been handed the script. I know my lines. Wives have been handed the script. You know your lines. This is what we're pursuing.

Within the marriage, The husband and father is and must be the head of the household. Of course this must mirror the headship of Jesus so we're not just talking about man gets to be the boss, me say you do, we're talking about Christlikeness. So a woman has nothing to fear and everything to gain from biblical headship. And the wife and the mother is and must be the help meet, the suitable helper, high capacity, high competency, made in the image of God, helper. Wife, mom, you need to graciously accept that.

How many people have been poisoned by what's out there? And it takes them a decade just to make peace with what the Bible actually says about this. So many people, let me just say, don't be robbed. Like stop being robbed by what's out there. Graciously accept that, embrace that, rest in that, learn to glory in that.

It's a glory. I think if we see it rightly we'll receive it as something that's glorious. You should thank God every day that God made you a woman because you get to be this and do this. I've already said a lot about this in my previous message, the duties of wives, so go back and listen to that. Now, this marriage relationship is two who have become one.

Make sure that is what your children see day in and day out. Look at a lot of marriages and you see two and not one. That's not good. Our children are watching and our children know. Work hard to maintain a totally united front.

Work hard to show your children oneness and how you relate to each other. Are there times where you need to come apart from them and sort through things that need to be sorted through. Of course there are. Should you be doing that in front of your children? Rarely if ever.

Your children are very important. They're a key part of your mission. Key part of your mission is to bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord, but they are secondary. You are primary to each other. Your marriage is more important than your parenting, okay, because your marriage has a disproportionate impact on your parenting.

Over the years, how many people, I'm looking at Jana, how many people have we see undo in their parenting what they were laboring to do because of the dynamics of their marriage? And so these are not separate categories. The parenting category is dependent on your marriage that you're living out in front of your children for 20 years. Your children are very important but they are secondary. That brings us to priorities.

So those are relationships. Now to priorities. Here's my observation. Many if not most homes aren't focused enough so lots of things get a little attention. That's the math.

100 times 2. Lots of things, 100 things, get a little attention. Two minutes a week, two hours a week, two dollars. But if we order our homes biblically, I think a few things will get a lot of attention. Four times 25 or something like that.

You work out the math. A few things, a few most important things, prioritize things, are shown to actually be prioritized by narrowing to them and then really focusing and giving them a lot of attention. And then the other things, get the leftovers. What you find when you order your life biblically is there's not a lot of leftovers. When you prioritize the things that scripture says we ought to be prioritizing, there's not a lot of leftovers to allocate.

My counsel is twofold. Number one, Make a daily time of worshiping God together the immovable rock in your family schedule. Make a daily time of worshiping God together in your home the immovable rock in your family schedule. Every day? I mean, God's worthy every day.

But at least Overwhelmingly, most days, there's what we say and then there's what we communicate, even without saying. When you make Worshiping God, Gathering to Worship God every day, that's not going to be a full-length worship service, but I am talking consistently gathering to worship God, all of us together every day in your home for 20 years, no matter what you said or didn't say, your children know this was the priority for my parents that we would gather and worship God. Two, create a life that revolves around a great local church. We could stop there and just say, if you gave just these two patterns to your children and they replicated them in their later life when they have their own home, they gather the flock however little or big it is every day to worship God in their homes, to open the scriptures and to pray together and to sing and to just be thankful and glorify God and they made themselves a local church family and the life of the family revolved around the local church so that they are extracting the good that God intended to get us to get from our brethren.

How much more would they need? There are more, there should be a longer list than that, but let's say you just gave them those two. They would be so far ahead of 98% of children in the world in terms of what they got from their parents. Let's conclude this section with a thought experiment. If all I had was your financial records and your calendar, what would I say were your priorities?

We never met, I never talked to you, but I could inspect your financial records, where the money went, and your calendar, an accurate reflection of where the time went, what would I say were your priorities? A lot of times we feel in our heart that something that is is a priority but honestly our financial records in our calendars just don't bear it out. So it's a question worth asking. Number three. Leave your children with warmth of feeling about your marriage.

Leave your children, when they leave your house, send them out with warmth of feeling about your marriage. If you ask me about my parents marriage, I'll describe it to you, I'll give you specifics, I'll tell you stories, but what I'm really trying to do is to impart some sense of the warm emotions that the thought of their marriage brings to the surface in me after observing it in decades. So it's really not about my description and the specifics. It's really about me trying to impart the warm feeling I get when you say, think about your parents' marriage. Both Janet and I witnessed marriage relationships that were very sweet and very careful.

By very sweet, I mean they obviously adored each other for 20 years. They never got old to each other. This is making me think of Grand Mary and Bill. Hello, Grand Mary. The stories are legendary about you and how you and Bill still adored each other after 70 years.

By careful, I mean they treated their marriage like it was something precious but fragile. Something precious but not very hard to break. And they were especially careful about how they talked to each other. They were especially careful about things Scott was just talking about, how they used language with each other. The words they picked and the tones they used.

My parents were careful and her parents were careful. I tell this story frequently when I'm talking about this. My parents, they had a bridge group, a peer group, they would meet once a month and play bridge, rotating around houses. One night it was our house. We are always sent to bed before the bridge started.

And in the morning, this had never happened before, in the morning they practically wouldn't talk to each other. They didn't even bother with open hostility. It was just too much tension for that. So I was probably eight or I was ten. My sister was ten or twelve, she's two years older than me.

We went off to school very concerned. I remember thinking, are my parents getting a divorce? Because there was a little attention, a little tension about the night before cards. We came home, we had dinner, and things were as normal as normal could be. The tension never returned.

I never saw it before that. I never saw it after that. So this is my drama story about conflict in the dome house. That is funny. But I'm emotional when I talk about it, because do you know what a gift to a little boy it is to have that be the story of drama and tension and conflict in the house?

Like, what a gift! So, and Do you understand how hard it makes it for us to blow our tops and have conflict? When that's what you saw and They could live with each other in that state for 20 years, and now I'm gonna blow my top. It just makes it hard to blow your top and to cultivate unhealthy patterns because we were given the gift of a wonderful pattern. That tells you what I didn't see.

I didn't often see tension and conflict, but also hints at what I did see because I was so out of character that I thought, they're getting a divorce just because they didn't want to talk to each other at breakfast. You understand how out of perspective it is. It's beautifully out of perspective because I didn't have a frame of reference for these homes where they're always at each other. Several years ago our church had a married couples night and I titled my remarks Dome Inc., so Dome is our last name, so Dome Incorporated And here's what I meant, here's what I talked about. Every marriage has institutional aspects to it.

And if you think that's a bad thing, then try having a marriage with no patterns and no disciplines. See how that goes for you. So it's not actually a bad thing, it's a natural thing, and you have to have patterns and disciplines, and there is an institutional side to every marriage. But over time, as life fills up and you get busier and busier, the institutional side can take over, and you can end up being not much more than Dome Inc. And that's not good, Where you don't laugh like you used to laugh and there's no more romance in your marriage.

So What I'm saying is this, have a very sweet marriage. Be careful with your marriage. It is precious, but it's also fragile. They're not that hard to break, or at least wound. Model that for a long period of time and your kids will never be able to escape it.

That will become the plumb line, the measuring line, which will make them so unwilling to accept a marriage partner that they don't think they can do that with. Isn't that what we want? We want them so reluctant, make it unthinkable for them to marry a knucklehead and not be able to reproduce something that they feel such warmth about when they reflect on your marriage. Number four, Mature your relationships with your children as your children mature. Mature your relationships with your children as your children mature.

Ephesians 6, 4 says this, and you fathers do not provoke your children lest they become discouraged. Dad is the head of the household so he bears the primary responsibility but of course this applies to both parents. Of course both parents can be a violation of this. There are things that we can do or say or approaches to parenting that can provoke children to anger. It's actually, you're sinfully luring them into anger.

You're sinfully luring them into sin. And that discourages them. On the other side of that coin, there are things that we can do or say or approaches to parenting which are an encouragement to our children. So we're required by God to be sensitive to these things and We need to be aware of how much these things change over time. So what provokes the anger and discourages for a five-year-old is a different set of things for a 10-year-old, for a 15-year-old, for a 20-year-old.

For a 20-year-old? If I have one parenting gear, and that is the gear that fits the five-year-old, that's going to be a problem at tenure when I have a 10-year-old and a really enormous problem when I have a 15-year-old. 15-year-olds don't love to be treated like five-year-olds. Provokes them to anger, discourages them. You cannot be a one-trick pony as a parent.

Our parenting has to evolve as our children mature. My observation about myself that I was a little slow to recognize these transitions in ways that were needlessly frustrating to some of my children. None of them are here to testify. As our children mature and earn our trust and confidence, we need to adjust and lengthen the rope. Doesn't that make sense?

So they're maturing and they earn your trust and confidence. So I'm not talking about doing reckless things with your children, giving wild liberties to untrustworthy children. I'm just saying they're maturing, they're now earning your trust and confidence. Lengthen the rope. They need to have a sense that they've become insiders on the family team.

Janet did a fantastic job of developing in our children a sense that It wasn't just that she was the authority and they were the underlings. It's that our family is a team. We have things that we want to accomplish and do at the family level and they have a part of it and this is what you're being asked to do fits into that. I'm not saying you have to explain everything to your children all the time. That's actually very unwise to explain everything to your children all the time.

Sometimes that you said so is good enough, but they should know what your family is trying to accomplish and have a sense of where they fit into that. Our children start out as totally unruly and unskilled labor. Is this true? And this is the starting point. Totally unruly, have no self control, and they don't know how to do anything yet.

And it's twice as hard to get them to do it than it is to just do it yourself. That's very true. But if you don't wanna do it yourself forever, you have to suck it up. And expend the extra energy to teach the unruly to be ruly, to become self-controlled, more self-controlled today than they were yesterday, and to learn how to do things and to reject bad work. Nope, not up to standard, go do that again.

They should end, so that's the starting point, totally unruly, unskilled labor, they should end as essentially full partners in Dome Inc. Maybe not with voting shares, but essentially full partners in Dome Inc. They know exactly what we're doing, they know exactly why we're doing it, they love it as much as we love it, And so they don't have to be commanded to do their part because they want it like we want it. Those are radically different and there's a thousand different checkpoints in between, aren't there? Understand all the transitions that need to happen on that long continuum.

That's not one transition point or ten transition points. It is a bunch of transition points where as they earn your trust and confidence, you're letting out a little more rope and letting out a little more rope until at the end they don't even know they're on a rope. They don't even know they're on a rope. You do have boundaries, but nobody's talking in those terms anymore because you trust them. And they've earned it.

And they want what you want. Over time, as they earn your trust and confidence, Make them partners in the family mission. And in doing that, you're teaching them to have a family mission. That's another pattern that you're giving them as a gift. Like our family is not just trying to exist.

We're trying to do things for King Jesus. And it's exciting. And you see your part. And let's all do the part. Part of our family culture was abortion clinic ministry.

Saturday, a month, every month, year after year. More than a decade of doing that. So what is that? 50 times 10, 500 times in the abortion clinic. And from the earliest days, I didn't have to drag my kids to do that because they learned to love life and to know that we're made in the image of God and we're going to advocate for the preciousness of human life and so they wanted to hold this on.

And honestly when they got older, they wanted to get on the microphone and appeal to young women. Don't do it. That's a baby. In conclusion, this is the big inheritance that we're giving to our children. It won't be money.

Make it a blessing, not a curse. They do so much of what you did for all those years in your home, let it be a blessing. Let it be tailwinds, wind in their sails, pushing them further faster. We want to see them be so much better than we were, go so much further than we went. And then we'll know, we had a little part in that.

We took away a bunch of obstacles that a bunch of their friends have, because they grew up in unhealthy homes, and at least they didn't have those obstacles. And we gave them some really important good patterns, and they can go further. That's what we want. If the patterns your children have been observing haven't been what they should be, Start establishing and modeling good patterns now. Here's the good news.

We all remember what was most recent. So your patterns haven't been what they should be. We've all got some of those things. We can make a list. I can make a list.

So go get a handle on those things, and those will be the freshest in their memories. God, again, thank you for the opportunity that lies before us to honor you with the children that you put in our homes, how we long to see them establish their own homes and to see healthy patterns in these new homes that at least had their start in the things that they saw. May it be so in Jesus name, Amen.