In his sermon titled 'Parents' Duties,' Scott Brown addresses the importance of parental responsibilities in the spiritual upbringing of children, as outlined in Psalm 78. He emphasizes that while many parents are knowledgeable about doctrine, they often overlook the specific duties commanded by God for discipleship within the family. Psalm 78 serves as a guide, contrasting obedient fathers who impart the knowledge of God's deeds to their children with those who fail in this duty. Brown underscores the significance of a transgenerational transfer of faith, where parents are tasked with ensuring that their children, and subsequent generations, know and declare the works of God. He highlights the critical role of hope in family life, asserting that parents born again to a living hope must fill their homes with hope to inspire their children. By consistently teaching the Word of God, parents create a foundation of hope and strength in their children, preparing them for life's challenges. The sermon outlines three key results parents should aim for: children setting their hope in God, remembering God's works, and keeping His commandments. Brown calls for parents to actively engage in these duties, ensuring their children are spiritually equipped to face the world.

Please open your Bibles to Psalm 78. I want to address families, particularly parents, about duties, their duties. The world is full of good men who understand the gospel with clarity, can communicate it with precision. They understand the great doctrines of the Bible, and Yet their often great blind spot is that they're either not aware of the duties, the very specific duties that God requires of fathers and mothers in the discipleship of their children. There are duties that are commanded in the Bible, and it's good to know your doctrine.

It's good to understand and be able to communicate the gospel, but there really are duties that God requires of parents, and so I want to address that. I pray this is a helpful equipping time for parents particularly, and families. And so Psalm 78 takes us to into the realm of some of the duties that really ought not be neglected in families. Psalm 78 is a great psalm that directs its message to fathers to contrast the fathers who were disobedient with the fathers who are obedient and who bring the Word of God into their families to tell the next generation of the praises of the Lord and His strength and His wonderful works which He has done. This is one of the great duties of parents is to fill their homes with the great deeds of God and his works and what he has done.

And the psalm makes it very clear that this is part of a command of God. It's part of the law of God. Verse 5 in Psalm 78 says, for he established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel which he commanded our fathers that they should make them known to their children. He's talking about Deuteronomy 6 which demands fathers particular duties and he makes it clear that so that he did this so that the generation to come might know them in other words they might know the great deeds of God And parents dare not leave this duty to someone else or to let it go fallow. So I want to speak of that duty today and the results of it and how to know when it's taken hold.

Asaph, the writer of Psalm 78, says that all of this is so that the generation to come might know them, the children who would be born, that they may arise and declare them to their children. This is this transgenerational plan that God has that fathers and mothers pass on the knowledge of God to their children who pass it on to their children who pass it on to their children. There are three generations that are listed here in this passage. This is a view of life. It's a whole view of the world, and particularly your life, that your life doesn't just exist in a vacuum.

Your life is not your own. It matters what you tell your children and what they tell their children and what they tell their children. And we understand that God is sovereign over salvation of children. There may be a break in the generations by God's sovereignty, but let there not be a break in parents duties. So that's what this establishes.

Now my focus here is verses seven and eight. I just told you about the general thrust of the psalm, but verses seven and eight are where I want to concentrate because there's a very helpful and I think inspiring, thrilling message for parents in terms of the objectives that they have and the results that they see as a result of their doing the duties that God has required of them. It's not very popular to say that, you know, there are duties that God has required of you in the family, but unfortunately the Bible goes in a different direction and does actually itemize many, many duties required by God. Not doing them is disobedience and rebellion against his word so it's very serious stuff let's look at verses 7 and 8 all of this this declaring of the great deeds of God to the next generation, in order that they may set their hope in God, that they may set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep His commandments and not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation that did not set its heart aright and whose spirit was not faithful to God." So Psalm 78 provides us with a vision of hope in a family and how it's cultivated in the heart of a parent and as a result in the hearts of children in the home.

It's very important that parents are always casting a vision of hope before their children. And I want us to understand that this psalm teaches us how to inspire hope not only in our own hearts but in our own children. Now of course this message is directed to parents who have been born again to a living hope. You can't pass on hope unless you have it. So that's a grand assumption.

And when you are born again, you have a duty before God to fill your home with hope. And when children are born again, Then they will be born again to a living hope but you're casting a vision of it helps them to see the kingdom of heaven and Hopefully would be like honey to draw them to the kingdom of God The Bible makes this very clear that hope is central to all of who we are as Christians. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled that does not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are kept by the power of God through faith for salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time. That's 1st Peter 1, 3 through 5. So it's very important that parents keep hope in the forefront of their family life.

And it is the kind of hope that is communicated in the Word of God. And it's the casting of this vision of hope before children that helps to prepare them for the new birth. And I want us to understand how important it is to inspire hope in the heart of a child, even an unconverted child. And Filling your home with hope means that you fill your home with the Word of God and the only true testimony of hope. J.C.

Ryle said this, The man that has a good hope will show it in all ways. It will influence his life, his character, and his daily conduct. It will make him strive to be holy, godly, conscientious, and a spiritual man. And if they embrace that hope, which they hear of from the time that they're babies Then it will follow them wherever they go for the rest of their life It is an abiding asset that gets you through everything The greatest legacy that parents can leave is the legacy of the Word of God in the hearts of their children. And so this ought to be one of the great goals of parenting.

So, Psalm 78 presents this kind of parenting. It's the kind of parenting that inspires hope. And the the psalm here makes it very clear that your instruction has been designed by Almighty God to have a specific impact on your children. What the psalmist is saying is that this kind of living leads your children to be a certain kind of people in the world as they live out their lives. And it's very helpful because it helps us keep our eyes on God's objectives.

And one of God's objectives is that you have children leaving your home who are filled with hope, with a living hope. Is that what you're aiming for? Now make no mistake about it, there's a certain type of person that God wants you to shape in your home for a particular kind of purpose, And these verses offer a wonderful description of what God desires and what he is pleased with. So keeping your eye on the filling of your home with hope is something I really want to encourage you to do to make it very clear you know what you're aiming for. That's what leaders do.

They paint a target and they say, this is the bullseye right here. This is where we're aiming. And in this passage, parents are aiming to build hope by filling their homes with the Word of God, particularly the great deeds of God and the great things that He has done. And these are observable results, and I want to identify three observable results that you will see in your children when they have been filled with hope. And they are all really fruits of the power of the gospel in their lives.

If they don't embrace the gospel, they can't experience them. But if you've embraced the gospel and you put them before them, then you'll be giving them an inspiring help to believe in the gospel. And so it's a very helpful section to help us to evaluate what we are all about as parents. Now, the psalm that, at least these verses that I'm identifying speaks of results not methods. The methods come before verse 7 and 8.

The methods are filling your home with the Word of God. And then the results are declared in verses seven and eight in this psalm. So be on the lookout for the right results. So I'll give you three results. The first result that parents should set their hearts on is that their children set their hope in God.

Set their hope in God. There are many places that children can set their hope. All of them, except God, will hurt them. In other words, teach them the doctrine of God and His ways and his works. Show them the majesty of God.

Show them all of his attributes while they're in your home. Don't let your children leave home without the attributes of God in their minds, even if they're not converted. Someday if God touches their hearts, it'll all come flooding back to them, and they'll be stronger than a lion, stronger than they would have been if you hadn't sowed the seed. So show them the majesty of God in all of His attributes. Teach them theology.

The children that are described in Psalm 78 are so confident that they are described as people who have hope. Hope is so powerful in a person's life. When you lose hope, you've really lost almost everything, all motivation, all joy, and it's such a pivotal thing. And so one of your most important goals in parenting is to fill your child with biblical hope, hope in God, and to recognize particularly how fragile they will be if they put their hope in anything else but God. I'll say that again, how fragile they will be if they have their hope in anything but God.

In another Psalm, Psalm 46, David says, God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear, though the earth should change and the mountains slip into the heart of the sea. It's critical that we fill our families with hope. Now you might find parents who are cultivating a hand-wringing family, a worrisome family, a family worried about this, a family worried about that, always talking about their worries at the dinner table, you know, fathers walking in the door dragging, no hope, no happiness, And it's tragic to have a hand-wringing kind of family. And I would just encourage you to ask yourself if there's any of that in your family.

But, And hope creates in a person an undaunted will to fight. Wilheimas Abrakel said this, hope will cause the believer to battle courageously, for it ascertains the certainty of the victory." You know, we want to send children out into the world who have hope, who are ready to face the battles that are ahead, and there are many battles ahead. So do you have a fretful family? And Asaph is saying that it doesn't have to be that way, and how do you change it? Will you give your children a vision of God, and if they embrace it, they will see the power of God instead of their own impotence and their disappointments and the losses and the reversals.

That will happen to them. You know, the older you get, the more you realize how much loss and difficulty there is in the world. When you're young you haven't seen that much of it. The older you get, you're shocked to see things you never thought you'd see. Maybe even in your own family, maybe even in your own church.

Your children will face unspeakable difficulty, and you need to prepare them for it. And the only way to prepare them for it is to fill them with hope from the Word of God, so that that's what lives inside of their hearts. You know, I've known parents who have unwittingly taught their children to be angry and bitter. They're dissatisfied with people around them, and wrongs were done to them, and as a result they sinned themselves and focused their lives on the infractions of other people, the inadequacies of other people, and they spent their lives and their families nursing their sorrows, obsessing about how stressful life is, and They were unable to see the wonderful works of God and it's such a tragedy And as a result their children are going to struggle with hope Don't let your children leave home without it. It's so important David said in Psalm 146 verses 5 and 6, happy is he that has the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the Lord his God, who made heaven and earth the sea and all that is in it, who keeps truth forever." Happy is that person.

So they do, they have hope in God. Second, they do not forget the works of God. They do not forget the works of God. Well, that's exactly what the text says in verse 7, that they would not forget the works of God. In other words, the parents have done memory work and they've driven home the truth of the works of God.

They have recounted the works of God over and over and over again. This is why I'm an ardent advocate of reading through the Bible every year in your family. Do it for a decade and go over the works of God over and over again. We all need it. We need to go over them over and over again.

We're all like that. And your children need that kind of repetition so that they do not forget the works of God. Filling the mind etches the memories and their memories of the great deeds of God from Genesis to Revelation need to be exercised and repeated and they need to know how God worked through Noah and Moses and Joseph and Job and the rest of the Saints in biblical history who also faced unspeakable difficulties and sorrows And it requires repetition that can only be accomplished through reading and discussing and memorizing Scripture. Our children need to know the works of God. And what will they do when they don't know where their next meal is coming from?

How will they react when they lose a job or are betrayed or they've actually experienced a failure of some kind? Or maybe it's a barren womb or a market crash or something that somebody did to them and will they spend the rest of their lives downcast over it or will their hearts say as God fed the children of Israel in the wilderness when there was nothing. So He will feed me. As God fed Elijah when there was no food, He sent a raven, so He will feed me. As God takes care of the lilies of the field, As God takes care of the lilies of the field, as God takes care of the birds of the air, so He will take care of me." So it's so critical that we do this.

When they're in danger with no way out, what will they do? Will they run, collapse in fear, or will they go back to the Red Sea where God said to them when they were trapped right on the edge of the Red Sea, and God said to Moses, the Lord will fight for you. Be still. And when they're tempted to complain because life is hard, will they fall into depression or they will they remember that God provided water out of a rock in the middle of nowhere? This is why it's so critical that we fill our children with hope from the Word of God.

Thomas Watson said this, despair looks on things with black spectacles and Gives up all as lost Hope is like cork to the net which keeps the heart from sinking I pray for unsinkable children, but I know only God can do it. I know it's only His Word that will buoy them up. It's not their friends that will hold them up. It's not me, it's others. It's no one except God.

Only God can hold them up. He is their hope and their strength. He is their ever-present help in trouble. I won't always be there. They need Him.

They need His Word. They need the words ringing in their ears in their time of trouble. I would just so encourage you, first of all, to read the Word of God while your children are in your home, and help them to pay close attention to the sermons that they hear in the church or wherever they might be. Help them to understand the sermons. You just heard, you're going to actually have heard two of them today.

You know, be like the mother of Patrick Henry, you know, that great American patriot and orator. She took her son to church every Sunday, and she took him to hear one of the greatest preachers of the day, Samuel Davies, who was one of the marvelous great awakening preachers of the colonial era. And on the way home from church as they walked, it's the advantage of walking. Some of you drive a little ways, use the time driving home. Like Samuel Davies' mother did when they walked home from church, she required her son, are you ready for this, To recite the entire sermon with Samuel Davies' voice inflections.

Why? She wanted him to have the doctrine. She was filling her son with hope in God, and he became like a lion of the American Revolution, fearless. This kind of conversation is so important. You're serving your children well by building the right things into their memories.

But it takes work to do that. You have to do something. You have there you actually have duties as parents, Not just theologies, not just ideas. And it's glorious if you know the gospel, but if you don't speak of it and pour it into your family, well, it'll just sit in your head and do no good in the coming generations. Now some of you have little kids.

You have a marvelous opportunity. You know, talk to financial planners and they'll tell you when you invest early, boy, it gets big later on. So do that. The third thing they do is that they keep His commandments. The third result of telling the praises of the Lord in this text is that your children will keep his commandments.

That's in verse 7. So be vigilant to secure your children's obedience. Monitor their obedience even though it's out of style and in anything goes kind of world. Do whatever you want. Let children be whoever they want to be.

You know, this really arose out of the great educational theorists who said if you just let children do what they want, they'll learn what they need. The Bible doesn't really speak of it quite that way. And of course we know that there are always two parts of obedience. There is the heart and there is the deed, and children need both if they love God they will keep his commandments you want your children to say oh how I love thy law You want them to have the belief in their heart that in keeping the commandments there is great reward. That's Psalm 19 verse 11.

In keeping them there is great reward. So do your duty and look for the results. And what God is looking for is in this text. First, that your children hope in God. And of course this is impossible without faith in Christ.

Second, that they do not forget the works of God. This is impossible without your instruction. And thirdly, that they keep His commandments, And this is impossible without your discipline. So how will you infuse your family with hope? Today, how about today?

Maybe on the ride home, maybe when you get home. What are you doing to help your children remember? What are you doing to secure obedience that is both from the heart and an outward appearance? I love what John Gill said about hope. He said, Hope carries cheerfully through all the difficulties of this life and makes hard things sit easy.

So I'll leave you with the Apostle Paul writing to that church in Rome, applying it to the church in Wake Forest. Now the God of hope, fill you with all joy and peace in believing that you may abound in hope through the power of the Holy Spirit. Let's pray. Oh Lord, I pray that you would you would create in us such great hope formed by the holy and perfect word of truth that you've given to us in the Bible and I pray for parents energetic, diligent, giving their whole lives to fill their homes with the great deeds of God, the great things that He has done, so that their children might hope in God alone. Amen.