How should you train your children to prepare for worship services? How should children listen to the preached Word and receive it? How can you help them retain it and put its content into practice? What role should the prayer meetings have in your family? Why are they so important biblically and historically? Answering these questions, we see the need for families - parents and children - to be actively involved in the church’s core callings of corporate worship and corporate prayer. To begin with, it is crucial that fathers teach their children first how to listen attentively to the preached Word.
Well, if you turn with me please to Luke 8, Luke 8 and Acts 1. And as you turn there, let me just say what a tremendous delight it has been for me to be with you in these days. I had a pretty high level of expectation when I came here, and that expectation level has been exceeded by this conference greatly. I want to just read two verses with you, Luke 8-18. Take heed therefore how you hear, For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken, even that which he seemeth to have." And then turn with me to Acts 1.
Acts 1 verse 14, these all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus and with his brethren. And with his brethren. May God bless his holy word. Let's go to prayer. Glorious and beautiful God, We come before thee this morning asking that this address, by thy grace, may magnify thy name and may move us to impress upon our dear families, our precious children, the importance of coming to sermons rightly, receiving the word with meekness, the meekness of engrafted faith, and then going home and living the sermons, doing the sermons.
Help us not to be forgetful hearers who look in the mirror and then straightway go out and forget what manner of man we are called to be. And help us too, Lord, to be like the New Testament Church that gathered together faithfully with their families in prayer meetings, storming the mercy seat, believing that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent take it by force. Help us Lord in delivering this topic and grant that it may be eminently practical and applicable to every parent, every teenager, every boy or girl gathered here this morning. Be in our midst, we pray, and bless this conference, bless Scott Brown and all the people involved. We thank you for them, Lord, and we thank you for the wonderful time of fellowship, the time of conviction, the time of upbuilding, the time of teaching that we've received in this place.
We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, the topic before us this morning is a very broad one. There's no way I could begin to cover everything that's involved in the family at church. So what I'm proposing to do is basically three things.
First, I want to look with you at the whole idea, the subject that's often ignored, of training our children how to profit from sermons. That will take up actually the bulk of our time. Because I believe that preaching and sermons is really the main part of church, church service. We don't come ultimately for social fellowship, as important as that is. We don't come ultimately for any kind of program, but we come to worship God.
We come to have our souls fed, our lives transformed, we come to hear, as the Scottish used to put it, we come to hear sermon. So it's critical that we train our children how to prepare for sermons, how to receive them, and how to respond to them after they're preached. That's the first thing we're going to do. Secondly, I want to consider with you the importance of prayer meetings and why you should attend them conscientiously with your entire family. And I mean entire family.
And then I want to conclude by just looking very briefly at a few pointers. I'll just give them to you in bullet point type things of how you can move your children by the grace of the Holy Spirit to a greater genuine love for the church of Jesus Christ. Now all three of these things I must tell you from the outset, no matter what I say or what advice I give to you and no matter how diligently you implement that advice, you cannot do this without dependency on the Holy Spirit. Your children will not automatically listen well to sermons. They will not automatically thoroughly enjoy attending prayer meetings.
They will not automatically thoroughly love the church without the blessing and the application of the Holy Spirit. And so it's true here too as it is of all our parenting, except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. And thus, dear parents, all our labors must be salted with earnest prayer as we labor to pull down the benediction of our Heavenly Father upon ourselves and upon our families in our homes. Let us never forget what the Puritan Thomas Brooks said, a family without prayer is like a home without a roof, exposed and open to all the storms of heaven. So let's look first then at training your children to listen to sermons.
Few years ago, I received an invitation to speak at a conference in Louisiana on this subject, how to come to church, how to profit from sermons. So I went to my library and I thought there'd be lots of sources on rightly hearing the Word of God. Typed it in. I came up with one book, a 19th century book by Edward Bickersteth, a couple small articles, and I was overwhelmed. Here I've got between 1, 500 and 2, 000 books in our library, in our Seminary Library, on how to preach, and only one book on how to listen.
It's amazing how little has been done on this subject. Every book is written, every day there's a new book coming out every week certainly, on how to preach, but what about listening? Well, I found out as I studied the topic that John Calvin actually did more in training his congregation to listen to the Word of God than any other preacher in church history, particularly in his sermons on Deuteronomy. Calvin is constantly teaching his church how to hear the Word of God. In fact, Kelvin makes some remarkable statements.
He says, when you train your congregation rightly, they should become as actively involved in listening as you are in preaching. That's an amazing statement. And Kelvin said, listeners should have the willingness to obey God completely and with no reserve. So Calvin's idea is that when you come to church you come with a ready mind and you come eager to hear the Word of God and with a heart that is fully conquered, fully yielded to the very Word of God, the preacher will bring to you that particular morning. Now, Calvin tells us why he emphasizes this.
He says, I do so for two important reasons. Number one, because few people really listen well to sermons. That's true in daily life too, isn't it? I mean, really, how many people are listening to you when you talk with them? Most people are poor listeners.
Most people are thinking about what they want to say next as you're talking to them. To be a good listener is an amazing gift of grace in human communication. To be a good listener in the house of God is a double amazing gift of grace. In fact, Calvin said so few people really listen in church that he feared, even though he thought highly of people and as long as they walked outwardly according to the truth, he Gave them the judgment of charity that they may be children of God, but deep in his heart he believed that the majority of his listeners actually were not even children of God, because they didn't know how to listen to the Word of God, didn't drink it in, didn't live it out. I found thirty times in his Institutes, nine times in his Commentaries, where he says things like this, if the same sermon is preached, say to a hundred people, twenty receive it with the ready obedience of faith, sometimes by the way he says 10, while the rest hold it valueless or laugh or hiss or loathe at it." One time he must have had a very bad day, he actually said one out of a hundred.
You see, if proper hearing was a problem in Calvin's day, when coming to church was the high mark of the week of the people. What must it be today when preachers have to compete for the attention of parents and children bombarded with all the various forms of media that surround us on a daily basis. But secondly, Calvin said, I need to stress proper hearing because of a high regard I have for preaching. Now this is how Calvin looked at it. He said in every sermon there are two ministers.
There's the external one who stands behind the pulpit, brings you the Word of God in human vocabulary, and there's the internal one, the Holy Spirit, who stands beside the preacher and takes those words as they go out of his mouth and shoots them as arrows into the hearts of the hearers, exhorting those who need exhortation, inviting those who need invitation, comforting those who need comfort, warning those who need to be warned. And so what happens, you see, is that the external minister is called to hold forth Jesus Christ to proclaim the Messiah, and the internal minister, the Holy Spirit, is eagerly awaiting the preaching of the external minister so that he can apply Christ and his work and his truths to the hearts of sinners. And the faithful preaching is the means by which the Spirit does his saving work of illumination, of converting, of sealing sinners and leading them to the Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore Kelvin said, wherever the Gospel is preached, it is as if God himself comes to stand in the midst of us. And so as Calvin taught these truths to his congregation, I believe we, and especially you, fathers, need to teach these truths to your own children.
Your Children need to know and feel and believe that when they come to the house of God, as long as the minister does not contradict the scriptures, that they are hearing the very word of God. And God is coming to deal with them, God is coming to speak to them. This is the high point of their week. This is the market day of the soul, every Sabbath. And of course that's exactly what the Puritans who follow Calvin called it, the market day of the soul.
The Westminster Larger Catechism has the most profound statement about coming to sermons in any Reformed confessional literature. Question 160 says this, It is required of those that hear the Word preached that they first attend upon it with diligence, preparation, and prayer." That's preparing for the preached Word. Second, examine what they hear by the Scriptures, receive the truth with faith, love, meekness, and readiness of mind as the Word of God. That's what you're to do while the sermon is being preached. And third, meditate and confer of it in their hearts and bring forth the fruit of it in their lives.
That's what you're to do after the sermon is done. Not talk about the ballgame, not talk about the last thing you did last week or the people you visited with, but meditate, confer of it in your heart, and bring forth the fruit of it in your life. Take heed therefore, Luke 8, 18 says, how ye hear, For you are hearing the very Word of the living God. You know, if you had an audience with the President of the United States of America, you'd listen to every word he said. You might not agree with it, but you'd listen to it.
But if you have an audience with the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, and the living God of heaven and earth, the God who has your soul at stake in his hands, the God who can but let go his hand, as Job says, and you go down into the abyss, how ought you to listen to the Word of God? You get told you have cancer. You lean forward in the chair and you listen to every word the physician tells you about chemotherapy and about radiation and you ask questions and you take notes and you want to know everything he advises you. Well, my friends, we all have a spiritual cancer by nature raging through us and we need to hear with rapt attention the word of the living God about the physician of physicians and the remedy for sin and what is to be done and what must be done and how we are to live in this perishing, waste-howl-ing wilderness here below. And so we need to train our children.
We need to ask ourselves the question even right now. Is my family really hearing the Word of God? Am I, is my wife, are my children wrapped, Intense, good listeners of the Word of God. Let's take this Westminster larger catechism basic division into three parts, and let me enumerate those parts briefly for you. Number one, preparing for the preached word.
There are three or four things I believe I want to say here. Preparing for the preached Word. Number one, you need, as the Puritans used to say, to dress your soul with prayer before you come to the house of prayer. Many people forget this. They're out late on Saturday night.
They drop into church. They parachute into church the last moment, And they wonder why they don't get anything out of the sermon, but they haven't warmed their soul. One old Puritan, George Swinnock, put it this way. He said, just as a woman in those days would bake bread on Saturday and put it in the oven and it would warm overnight. On Sunday morning for breakfast, we'd have this wonderful, warm, delicious bread.
He says, so you must put your soul, as it were, into God's oven, the oven of his word, and let it bake, let it cook overnight, as it were. And Sunday morning, when you come to the house of God, your soul should be warmed with the truths of God, even as you enter the sanctuary of God. Warmed by prayer, as you storm the mercy seat for divine benediction. Number two, come to the word with a hearty appetite. A good appetite promotes good digestion, said Thomas Watson.
And Peter put it even better, didn't he? As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word that you may grow thereby." If you have a good appetite, you have a tender, teachable heart. And you say with Saul on the way to Damascus, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? If you come into church filled with the world, filled with a hardened heart, an unprepared heart, a worldly minded heart, well unless God intervenes miraculously you're not going to get much out of the sermon. You need to be hungry.
You need this appetite, and you need to pray for this appetite, that you might come hungry to the Word of God. Three, you need to come entering the house of God with an impression of the importance of what you're about to do. As Thomas Boston said, the voice you are about to hear is on earth, but the speaker comes to you from heaven. Same idea as Calvin. The Holy Spirit is speaking to you.
What the Spirit has to say to the church today, that is what you are hearing. And what an awe-inspiring thought this is. And therefore we should go beyond the preacher, and we should pray as we enter the house of God, that we will see no man save Jesus only. That we will look beyond the ambassador, beyond the herald, and look at the good news and the content of what he's called to bring. So we need to train our children.
Don't focus on the minister, but on the Word of God he brings. Remembering that one day you will have to give an account before God Almighty for every sermon you have ever heard." And what an awesome thought that is. Both as preacher and as people, this weekend on the day of judgment, I will have to give an account to God if I've been faithful in bringing you the Word of God. You have to give an account how you receive the Word from all the speakers you've heard. This is not just an entertaining weekend.
This is the word of God coming to you. And we need to teach our children that every sermon counts for eternity. Salvation comes through faith and faith comes through hearing God's word. So every sermon, as Deuteronomy 32 puts it, is a matter of life and death. The preached gospel, my friends, will either lift us up to heaven or it will cast us down to hell.
We need to teach our children that. This will either advance your salvation or it will aggravate your condemnation. It will draw you with the cords of love, or it will leave you in the snares of unbelief. It will soften you, or it will harden you. You can never leave a sermon as you have come.
I used to have an elder and he would often pray this way, Lord please don't let the people leave as they came this morning. I had to take him aside one time and say, brother I know what you mean but it's really not a right prayer because no one ever leaves as they've come. They're either hardened the more or they're softened the more. You see, the Gospel always does something to us and our children need to know that. You can't stay neutral under the word of God.
The nearer to heaven any are lifted up by Gospel preachings, " said the Puritan David Clarkson. The lower they will sink into hell if they heed it not. Take heed, therefore. How you hear. May I say a word just a moment to you teenagers, you dear young people?
God has blessed you, so many of you with God-fearing parents. You have so many valuable means of grace coming to you. But I'm asking you this morning, are you really hearing the Word of God? And are you doing the Word of God? Or do you go through the motions and really, in your heart, live for the world.
Like that little girl that I spoke about yesterday in the breakout session, three years old, whose daddy made her wear a seatbelt, and she sat down and put it on, and she really wanted to stand up, and said, Daddy, I'm obeying you on the outside, but in my heart I'm still standing up. How are you? Are you really listening to the Word of God? Are you living for the world? You know, Roland Hill, a close friend of Charles Spurgeon, was once very, very depressed about how ineffective his ministry was with young people as he offered them the gospel week after week and it seemed like they weren't really living it.
And he looked out his window one day as he was depressed and praying and weeping and he saw a pig farmer going to market. All the pigs were following willingly behind him, went right into the slaughterhouse, and the pig farmer came out and Roland Hill was there to meet him. He said, sir, tell me how you do this. I'm bringing people the Gospel. I'm bringing them a life transforming Gospel that can give them true joy, true purpose, true meaning in life, and they're shunning it.
And you got pigs that will follow you to their own death? How do you do it? Because I can't get people to follow me to eternal life. And the pig farmer said, didn't you see what I was doing as I was walking along? Didn't you see that every few steps I took I just let out a few crumbs of pig food?
And they followed me to their death for a few crumbs. Dear young people, don't follow Satan for a few crumbs of this world to your death. Hear the word of the living God. Don't waste your life. Hear and obey the word of God.
So you come to church, you see, with this kind of conviction. You're about to hear God speak to you. Then fourthly, remember that when you come to church, you're coming into a battleground as you step across the threshold into the sanctuary. This is how we should talk to our children. Dear children, many enemies are going to oppose your listening.
Internally you may be distracted by worldly cares and employments and lust of the flesh and cold hearts and critical spirits. Externally You may be distracted by mundane things like the temperature or the weather or behavior or the dress of others or noises or people moving about. Satan opposes your listening to God's Word with might and mean. He'll do anything to disturb the sermon, to distract you during it, to dismiss it from your mind as soon as it's finished. Like a bird plucking away newly sown seed, Satan attempts to snatch the word from your mind and heart so it can't take root.
So children, you need to be, this is the way to talk to your children, you need to be like Samuel Annisley, who was another Puritan, who said this, as soon as your mind begins to wander in church, you should say, be gone Satan. I will die no longer. If others neglect salvation, therefore must I, with their missing of salvation, relieve me for the loss of mine? Through Christ I defy you. I will listen.
I will concentrate. I will focus on the Word of God. Pray, children, that you may listen well. And finally, teach your children to come with a loving expectant faith. Teach them to come pleading God's promise that his word will not return to him void.
Teach them to come with reverential fear of God, with reverential delight in God, with reverential expectation in the Word of God. Say to them like the Puritan Richard Greenham said, we must come to the house of God with the eagerness and expectation of a man digging for hid treasure. Well, how must you receive the preached word in the act of preaching? That's the second main subdivision. Not only to prepare for the Word, but to receive the preached Word.
I've got a few thoughts here as well. Number one, we must say, dear family, let us go to the house of God to listen with an understanding and a tender conscience. You know, Jesus spoke a parable about four kinds of listeners. There was the stony-hearted superficial listener. It was like a hard path.
When the sower went forth to sow, the Word of God made little impression on this hard heart. It just bounced off the path. A lot of people are that way today. The sermon just bounces off of them. You can hear the most earnest sermon and it just bounces off.
Second, there was the easily impressed but resistant listener, who's like rocky ground. A plant may spring up from the seed, but as soon withers and dies because it lacks sufficient nutrients. And then third, there's the half-hearted, distracted listener, like thorn-ridden soil. This kind of listener tries to absorb the Word of God with one ear, while he's thinking about business or sports or interest rates or pension funds or inflation with the other ear. He serves God partially.
But the fourth hearer, the fruitful listener, applies the gospel teaching he hears to his conscience. And he leaves the house of God asking himself, what must I do to change? What must I do like a chiropractor trying to straighten out my spine to get aligned with my body rightly. What must I do to align myself with the will of God? What changes do I need to make in my life?
How must my conscience be molded and be malleable to the Word of God? Come with a tender conscience. Number two, dear family, listen attentively to the Word while it's being preached. Like, was listening Luke 19, 14, Luke 19, 48 says the people were very attentive to Christ. The text is literally, they hung, in Greek, they hung upon him hearing.
They hung upon him Hearing. You find the same word in Acts 16, 14, where Lydia attended to the words spoken. She turned her mind to the things spoken by Paul, Acts 16, 14. You see, such attentiveness involves banishing wandering thoughts, dullness of mind, drowsiness. It regards a sermon as a matter of life and death as it is.
You see, there's something different about coming to a sermon than about any other gathering you attend in the world. In any other gathering you go to in the world, you go as a spectator. When you come to church, you come as a participant. Good listening is hard work. Good listening demands continuous worshiping.
An attentive listener responds quickly. Repentance here in the sermon, resolution here, determination here, praise here, confession here. And you're following the preacher, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, responding all the while. And your mind, you see, attends to it. Actually, the word attend is a very interesting word.
It's derived from two Latin words. The first means to and the second tendo means to stretch. What it really means and that's where we get the word tending from, it's a sin, it's like a sin that stretches. As we listen to the word conscientiously, we stretch our minds by listening. It implies reaching out with all our mental and spiritual powers to grasp the meaning of a message.
So we need to ask our children after the sermon, did you stretch your spiritual muscles this morning as you listen to the word of God? Did you attend to the Word? Did you ask this question? How does God want me to be different after hearing this sermon? And thirdly, dear family, listen with submissive faith.
If you don't have faith, well, you miss everything. You know, once in a while, our wives present us with another wonderful meal. And I've got the blessing having a wife who's a great cook. I tell her most of her meals on a scale of 1 to 10 are between 12 and 13. But once in a while, great while, she'll forget an essential ingredient in a recipe and you taste it right away, don't you?
Something's missing. It doesn't work. Of course, as a wise man, you don't say anything. She discovers it. But you see, the point is this.
You've got to have faith in listening to a sermon because if you have all your other ducks in a row and you don't have faith, you miss everything. You miss the chief ingredient in the recipe of gracious listening. The whole word must be our object of faith, said Thomas Manton. And then fourthly, you must say, dear family, listen with humility. Let us listen with humility and serious self-examination.
Let us open ourselves in every sermon. Let us become vulnerable to the rebukes, the challenges, the self-examination that we've heard about also at this conference. Let us ask ourselves serious question. Lord, what shall this man do? Like Peter, not listening for somebody else.
Oh, so-and-so really needs to hear that sermon. But what is that to thee? Follow thou me. We have to listen for ourselves. When there are marks of grace set before us, we need to ask ourselves, am I manifesting these marks by the gracious work of the Holy Spirit?
Do I relish having the Word of God applied to my life? Can I say with Robert Burns, the successor of Thomas Halliburton, and put together his works, that great Scottish divine, It was buried right next to Samuel Rutherford at his request? God takes his word and applies it to my business and to my bosom. That is to say internally, externally, I am open to hearing the word of God. That's the way to listen to the Word of God.
Then thirdly, we need to practice the preached word. How do you do that? Well, number one, you need to strive to retain and pray over what you've heard. Hebrews 2, 1 puts it this way, we ought to give earnest heed to the things which we've heard, lest at any time we should let them slip. Thomas Watson warned against speaking about frivolous things right after the sermon.
He said, for this reason, not out of legalism, but it helps us, or rather, it hinders us, so that we let sermons run through our minds like water through a sieve. Our memories should be like the chest of the ark where the law was put, he wrote. And another Puritan, Joseph, a lion, put it this way. We must come from our knees to the sermon, and we must come from the sermon to our knees. That's the way to hear a sermon, to go home afterward, and to fall on your knees in the privacy of your own bedroom and say, oh God, apply this sermon to me and let me take the things I heard in this sermon, in which my life needs to change.
Let me put them into practice, O God." I was mentioning the other day in a breakout session of a woman in my congregation who would take as many notes as possible of all three sermons throughout. We have three sermons in our church, all three, and she'd have pages and pages of notes, and then Sunday evening she'd lay them on her bed, she'd get down on her knees, and she'd read through them, she'd pray through them, sentence by sentence, page by page. And she said, Sometimes the best part of my Sabbath was just spending an hour and a half on my knees, praying my way through all three sermons. Number two, familiarize yourself with the truths you've heard. The Westminster Directory for Public Worship advises parents to engage in, quote, repetition of sermons especially by calling their families to an account of what they have heard.
How many of you fathers talk to your children after every sermon you hear? I mean, do you at least ask them, son, what did you get out of the sermon? Or do you say nothing? Do you ride home and on the way home you talk about other things as if you just weren't in the audience of the King of Kings. If your son plays a ballgame, you at least ask him who won or who lost or how did it go or how'd he do, and he goes to hear the living Word of God And you don't ask him how he fared under the sermon?
In Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the Kalamazoo Gazette, there was once an editorial by Sidney Harris and He said this, Americans today live life with a levity with which they ought to play sports and they play sports with a seriousness with which they ought to live life. My friend, we need to speak to our children about the sermons they hear? We need to familiarize them with it. We need to apply it. We need to talk about it.
We need to train them to take notes on the sermon. We need to go over those notes, especially when they're young, and speak to them about it, ask questions and dialogue and ask them how shall we apply this today? When your children are five, six, seven years old, they can't understand everything. They're in church. Thank God they're in church.
But you need to take that sermon now from a 12 year old level or 14 year old level, however, what level your pastor preaches, and you need to bring it down to their level. That tests your level too. And what a blessing it is to have a father in a household who brings the sermon back to his children afterward at their own age levels. But also, we familiarize ourself by meditating upon it. We've lost the art of meditation today.
It's one of the greatest tragedies in the Christian church. We keep up almost all the spiritual disciplines, all the means of grace, except the old means of meditation and journaling. Spiritual journaling we don't do either. But meditation is the greatest problem. We go straight from the Scriptures to prayer and we forget what the Puritans taught us, that there's a half-lay house between Scripture and prayer.
And that's the art of meditation. Mulling over, chewing the cot, as they called it. We need to meditate and the sermons we hear. Better hear one sermon and meditate on it, said Richard Baxter, than hear a thousand sermons without meditation afterward. And then third, we need to put the sermon into action.
You see, a sermon isn't over when the minister says, amen. It actually just begins. Perhaps you've heard the old Scottish story of a man named Donald who came home a bit earlier than usual from the sermon. His wife was sick. She heard the back door.
She said, Donald, is that you already? Yes, my dear, he said. Is the sermon done, she said? No, my dear, he said. It's been said, but it has yet to be done.
That's what James means when he says, be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only deceiving yourselves, who so looketh into the perfect law of liberty and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hero but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deeds." How many people leave a sermon directly after And don't give another thought to it. Thank God for all that you receive from sermons and then go home and lean upon the Holy Spirit to bring these sermons into practice. Thomas Watson put it this way, the effectual word will be effectual one way or the other. If it doesn't make your hearts better, it will make your chains heavier. Take heed therefore how you hear.
Dreadful is their case, Watson concludes, who go loaded with sermons to hell. Teach your children how to come to the house of God, prepare them, teach them how to listen, teach them how to put it in practice, and model that for them yourself. Well, in the little time left, let me give you a few thoughts about bringing your children to prayer meetings. Now, I spent the better part of a summer about three years, four years ago perhaps, studying the history of prayer meetings and what I found just absolutely floored me, astonished me, overwhelmed me. And basically what I discovered was this, that very few revivals have happened anywhere in the world that weren't preceded by God moving his people to a spirit of prayer and supplication.
That's true not only at Pentecost where they were praying with one accord in one room, Acts 1.14, but it's true in the Great Awakening, it's true in the Second Great Awakening, it's true in the Third Great Awakening, It's true in 1859, the last great awakening in America. And six men began to pray at lunchtime in New York City. And then ten, and then twenty, and then the restaurant was too small, and they divided into different restaurants around the city, began to pray and pray and pray for revival. And then it began to spread to churches, and churches had prayer meetings all up and down the eastern seaboard, and there were in the end, according to many accounts, between 50 and 200 thousand genuine conversions, and it ran all the way over to Chicago. God normally blesses prayer.
God delights to answer the petitions that come to him signed with more than one signature. Sometimes if you have a very important letter in your company or in our case in our seminary that we want to send, I say I want the whole faculty to sign this. I want the person to receive it, to realize we all mean it. Not just me, but give every signature. And you see, that's what happens in a prayer meeting, a corporate prayer meeting.
And I hope your church is meeting corporately for prayer, storming the mercy seat, together, crying out to Almighty God. You see it even today in various countries. I think first and foremost of Korea. Korea in recent decades has seen so much blessing of God. It's waning now, sad to say, in many places.
But still today the Koreans get up 365 mornings a year for prayer at 5 a.m. In the summer, 6 a.m. In the winter or so, and they pray for an hour or so, half an hour, hour and a half, depending the amount of time they have. They pray corporately. Now this is not only biblical and historically validated, but it's critical.
There are so many benefits from prayer meetings and bringing your family to the prayer meeting. Praying together as a church family with our own families is often the means God uses to initiate not only, but also to increase revival. And praying together increases the commitment of believers to the Kingdom of Jesus Christ at home, throughout the nation and around the world. Where can you better teach your children to be intercessors for the entire world than bringing them to prayer meetings and having them hear gracious people, men of God, praying from all directions for all kinds of nations and peoples and languages and tongues. It gives them a worldwide vision.
And praying together also provides an important spiritual oasis in the midst of a busy week, in the midst of the world, when we get our boots muddied by this world, we come to the house of God midweek, we pour out our souls as a congregation to God, and we leave the prayer meeting encouraged and our souls lifted up, having come near the throne with the corporate family of the Most High." You see, praying together increases the unity also in the church. There's nothing like prayer that unites people together. Have you got a big enemy in your life that's weighing you down? Pray for him. If you truly pray for him, most of the burden will be taken away.
Praying together increases unity. Praying together utilizes the spiritual life of the church for the good of all the church's ministries, and for the good of the entire worldwide church. And praying together also helps your children learn to pray better, as they hear not only you pray, but other men of God pray. Praying together increases the Christ-centeredness of believers as they learn to storm their mercy seat together. Praying together provides an education in prayer for the entire Church of God, and praying together demonstrates our complete dependence upon God's sovereign power and gracious blessing for all his ministries and all his work in his church, in his kingdom.
Praying together delivers us from our self-centered isolationist mentality. We need to pray together. I'm convinced of it. This is critical. Jesus tells us we need to do that in many places.
If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them and my Father which is in heaven." Pray together every day. Storm the mercy seat as a family. Storm the mercy seat as a church. Don't let the Lord alone. As the Scottish divines used to say, pray until you've prayed through and laid hold upon God Almighty.
I've just edited a book on prayer actually with a very dear friend and we're putting the last touches on it, we'll go to press next week. It's called Taking Hold of God and the subtitle is The Reformers and the Puritan Perspectives and Prayer. We're looking at Knox, we're looking at Calvin, we're looking at Luther, looking at seven Puritans and then we're concluding the book by asking, how shall we pray today? But you know what, what overwhelmed me in this study was this, that many of the sermons of these great men, even though ours don't mash up, don't come up to their level, were really saying the same things. But why did they see such showers of blessings?
Is it only the sovereignty of God? Well, it is that, of course. But it is also unpersuaded that they were great men of prayer. They knew how to pray individually. They knew how to pray in their prayers, instead of all this prayerless shallowness of prayer.
But they also knew how to pray together, storming the mercy seat together. So do you support your church's prayer meetings? Or if you don't have them, will you begin them? You need to pray. Matthew Henry said, when God designs mercy, he stirs up prayer.
Do you believe that? Do you implement that? Or do you have, perhaps, prayer meetings and you don't bother to take your children to them? And so your children sit at home and guess what they're thinking? Well, we're sitting at home on a Wednesday night and we've got a prayer meeting.
And so my dad is saying by his absence that it's not all that important that the church gathers together to storm the mercy seat. What would happen if every God-fearing family in every God-fearing church around the world took the congregational prayer meeting seriously. What impact would it have around the globe? John Newton said, My best friends are the ones who are praying for me and lifting up my worthless name and listening in the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. And I feel the same way.
People pray for me. I count them among my very best friends. That's how we should all feel toward each other. Let us pray for each other. Let us pray for this conference.
Let us pray for this movement. Let us pray for the churches. Let us pray for Christ's kingdom to come everywhere, in every land, among persecuted churches, established churches, evangelistic endeavors, mission meetings, places, everywhere, let us treasure prayer and prayer meetings. Well in conclusion, may I just give you a couple bullet points on how to teach your children to love the church. If you're going to really be a family at church, you must not only attend church faithfully, you must not only attend prayer meetings faithfully, you must also teach your children to love the church.
How do you do that? Well, again the Spirit has to bless it, but number one, you need to teach your children how to worship. Not just a sermon, but the whole worship. Why is there an invocation? Why is there a salutation?
Why is there a benediction? Why do we sing? Teach them the various elements of worship and why we do it and how we are to do it in spirit and truth. Show your children you love the church. Model it for them as the bride of Jesus Christ.
Let them see it as a big place in your mind and heart. Stress with your children. They must be born again. They must repent and believe the gospel. And the most common place God gives that is in the sanctuary of the Most High.
There's a Puritan who has a wonderful sermon on the text that runs something like this, that God dwells, delights to dwell in his sanctuary more than in all the tents of Jacob. And the title of the sermon is something like this, God's favorite place to be is in the house of prayer even more than in our individual homes because there His people are gathered together. Let your children feel that and explain to your children and model for them the joy of Sabbath keeping, the joy of keeping the entire day to God in His house and at home, worshipping him and enjoying him and glorifying him and examining ourselves before him. And encourage your children to pray for those in need in your church and to cultivate with them the conviction that The church is their bigger family. If you have a list in the bulletin of all your sick, encourage your children to pray for them during the week, one by one, that they feel they are part of the family.
And encourage your children to use their gifts whenever possible for the church's well-being. And then here's an important one. Speak well of your minister and of your brothers and sisters in church. Never let your children hear one word of criticism from your mouth against the bride of Jesus Christ. And teach your children that the imperfect militant church on earth is but a foretaste of the perfect triumphant church in glory.
Let them know that if they don't love the militant church here, they'll never love the triumphant church hereafter. But they'll forever be separated from the favor of God and all that is good. Teach your children they must belong. They must belong to the invisible church. So train them that you will have the courage like the Puritan Robert Bolton when he came to his deathbed to gather your children around you and say to them, dear children, I wasn't a perfect father.
I had my flaws and my faults, but you know that I tried to lift up Jesus Christ as the center of this household. I tried to lift up Jesus Christ as the center of the church in the house of God. And I say to you children, don't you dare to meet me on the wrong side of Jesus Christ on the great day. I have trained you. You must repent.
You must believe. You must be born again. Not to do so is not to live. Not to do so is to miss the purpose of what life is all about. Take your children to church.
Be a family at church. In the sermon, in the worship, in the prayer meetings, and reflected at home and cultivate in them a love for the bride of Jesus Christ. Let's pray together. Great God of heaven, we thank thee so much for thy bride. We thank thee for how she spiritually nourishes and trains and molds us in the things of God.
And we pray that we might be men and women, teenagers, boys and girls of prayer to storm the mercy seat for the well-being of Zion. Oh God, help us to be a family at church. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. For more messages, articles, and videos on the subject of conforming the church and of the church and the family to the word of God And for more information about the National Center for Family Integrated Churches, where you can search our online network to find family integrated churches in your area, log on to our website ncfic.org.