Scott Brown's sermon emphasizes the importance of centering families on the Word of God, particularly through sermons. He begins by referencing Romans 10:17, highlighting that faith comes by hearing the Word of God. Brown provides several strategies to engage children in sermons, stressing the need for active parental involvement before, during, and after the preaching. He advises parents to familiarize their families with sermon texts, prepare them to listen actively, and discuss the sermons afterward. Brown underscores the potential of sermons to expand minds and prepare hearts for faith, stressing the importance of regular church attendance and the avoidance of distractions like entertainment. He also encourages families to pray for preachers and to foster a culture of respect and attentiveness during sermons. The sermon concludes with a call to resist the devil's distractions and to prioritize the preaching of the Word of God in family life.

Please open your Bibles to Romans chapter 10, Romans chapter 10, and find verse 17, Romans 10 verse 17. Verse 17, faith comes by hearing and hearing the Word of God. I'd like to address the whole matter of the centrality of the Word of God, the treasure of the Word of God in a church and in a family, but I would like to apply it in a particular way, and I would like to apply it by giving us a number of tips for helping your family to be centered on the Word of God, and particularly helping children to listen and to understand the Word of God. I hope your children spend hundreds of hours in church, big church. Do everything you can to help them hear the Word of God through the preaching of the Word of God Because Paul tells the church in Rome faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God.

Jesus says, take heed how you hear. That's in Luke 818. It matters how you hear. It's one thing to hear, but how are you hearing? That's Jesus' question.

There's a profitable and an unprofitable way to hear. Children need help to hear. I'll say that again. Children need help to hear the word of God. They need coaching.

They require assistance to hear the word of God. Here's the reality. Passivity in this area of helping your children to hear the word of God will be harmful to your children on a number of fronts so here's my appeal have a strategy for what you will do with your children in your home before the sermons, during the sermons, and after the sermons. Another way to say this is have zeal for the house of God. Jesus was consumed with zeal for the house of God.

And as we become like him, our zeal will increase. As we become less like Him, our zeal will decrease. There are many reasons why this is important. Let's just take one, mind expansion. On the other hand, sermons are mind-expanding for discipleship and they're soul-satisfying for believing children.

They engage the hearer in matters of history, matters of doctrine, matters of advanced language, which they need. On the other hand, for unbelieving children, their mind expanding because they prepare the way for faith. Children should hear, unbelieving children should hear the Word of God to pave the way for the entrance of faith to convict of sin, to convict of righteousness, to convict of judgment. The Word of God prepares them to understand those really important categories about life. I submit that they are absolutely necessary for child development, sermons.

That's my conviction. And I want to convince you that sermons should be a very important focus of your personal discipleship and preparation of your children to be what the Bible calls godly seed. The prophet asks why marriage? The answer, God wants godly seed. Give him what he wants.

To give him what he wants, you've got to give something of your life. And so parents need to capture the opportunity with vigor and focus and prioritization. The Word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword. It's really the best thing you can expose your children to. Lots of people engage their children in hundreds of hours of movies and not much of the Word of God.

But there's only one communication tool that's sharper than any two-edged sword. It's the Word of God. You just might ask, how much time does our family engage in entertainment? How much time does my family engage in the Word of God? Faith comes by hearing the Word of God, but it doesn't come from Disney films.

So be careful how you spend your life and the time. Everything you do in your family has an opportunity cost. You do one thing, as a result you don't do another. So expand the minds, improve the vocabulary, introduce complex concepts, stimulate intellectual activity. Preaching does all of that, but it's very much enhanced when parents are proactive on the front end and in the middle and afterward.

These things are enhanced through repetition and so the regular preaching of the Word of God is a powerful tool for the transformation of the thinking and the feeling of a child. And it's critical that you gather all the generations together for the preaching of the Word of God. We all believe that. There are many well-documented times in the Bible where the Word of God was preached to children, Moses, Joshua, Ezra, Nehemiah, Jesus, Paul, all gathered people together where whole families were listening to the Word of God together. Simply put, it's the Lord's design to gather families around the Word of God.

I want to give you seven tips for doing that. Here's the first. Examine your own heart. Is it a joy for you? Your joyful delight in the Word of God is infectious.

And you know, follow the example of David when he said I was glad when they said unto me let us go into the house of the Lord you know do you do you enter his gates with thanksgiving into his courts with praise with with anticipation Say what Nehemiah said in Nehemiah 10.39. We will not neglect the house of God. So do you love the preaching yourself? It's one thing to hope your children will, but do you? Such that you're attentive, such that you're responsive, such that you're excited about it.

If you are, they most likely will be. So the first question is, what about you? Examine your own heart. This is the first, what I'm gonna call tips, first of tips for engaging your family in the Word of God. Secondly, familiarize your family with the sermon text before the preaching.

That's easy to do in our church. You ought to familiarize your family with the scripture text that the preaching, the preachers will be dealing with on Sunday. Now in our church, we have a weekly men's Bible study for this express purpose. We're trying to prime the pump with our men and our boys. And we want our men to teach their families the upcoming scripture text before the pastor preaches on it.

And we meet early in the morning and we discuss it to get the meaning. But there's a reason we do this. We do it to help our men understand the text so it will affect them on that day and every day following. And we want them to go home and teach the same to their own children. So our desire when we gather as a church is that everyone comes in and they really already know about this text.

They're going to hear it preached, but they've already heard it. They know the heart of that text, and they've reviewed the terminology. They have some sense of the theology. They understand the central message of that passage. And Our desire in our church is for the families to be working through those texts beforehand so that they can even before Sunday making practical applications and even memorizing sections of it.

Just this week, with the little kids that were in my house, we were memorizing the really simple words, you know, he will send the Spirit to convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. So when they heard me preach that they'd heard we'd we had talked about it several times already in the week and they could they can recite it. But I guarantee you their ears picked up when I hit those verses. And that can happen in every family. What a blessing that is.

My guess is that some of those kids might remember that for the rest of their life. Maybe not, but they might. You know how that works. You hear something and it sticks with you all your days because the Word of God is powerful than it more powerful than a two-edged sword it's like water it's like fire it's like a hammer it's the finger of God What a blessing it is that God's given us that resource. We also pray somehow that The meaning of that scripture that we're going to preach on will prime the pump in such a way that husbands will even wash their wives in the word.

That single men and women will grab hold of it and do something about it and see how it works and how it applies. Number three, prepare your family to hear. Intentionality is critical. Intentionally preparing your family to hear a sermon is very much important here now There's a lot that's been written About how to listen to a sermon you can Google it how to listen to a sermon There'll be some really neat articles that will come up. I'm gonna paraphrase George Whitefield's instructions on listening to sermons.

Here's what he said, paraphrased. Come with a sincere desire to know your duty. Pray before, during, and after the sermon. Listen to the sermon as if you were listening to a king, as the Lord of lords Himself. Why?

Because ministers are sent from God. They are ambassadors who speak the words of God. Do not think poorly of the minister when you think of his weaknesses." Woodfield preached a sermon that spoke of these things in the 1700s. There's lots of evidence that babies hear a lot in their parents' wombs. There's some really interesting studies even recently about that.

They hear the voices of their siblings. They hear the voices of their siblings They hear the voices of their parents. They hear the singing They probably hear probably hear the arguments. They probably can sense the tension There's some evidence that children in the womb can sense tension outside the womb. And when children are born into this church by mothers who've sat in these meetings, I'm fairly confident that they've heard the songs before and when they come out they're hearing familiar songs and they're hearing familiar voices It wouldn't surprise me if we found out that little babies when they came out of the womb could recognize the voices of the preaching Well, I know we believe that we believe that children hear That's why we all sing to our children when they're in the womb.

Number four, cast a vision for the importance of the moment. Cast a vision for the importance of the moment. It's critical that you impress your children the importance of the moment. I use the word impress because that is one of the words in Deuteronomy 6. You shall teach your children diligently.

You shall impress them. In other words, you're going to make an impression by the Word of God. God has always gathered His people together to worship Him. The gatherings of God's people are critical for a holy and obedient people. And God has ordained These moments of the gatherings of the people of God To help the people of God to be holy and obedient and happy children of in his kingdom.

Are you ready for this? It's my conviction that Worship on the Lord's Day is the most important meeting scheduled all week long. The most important meeting. Don't miss it. Don't put it on third priority.

Well, I'm thankful in our church that really doesn't happen people our people are making a high priority on Coming to the Lord's Day worship, and I'm really grateful for that So don't take that as a rebuke, but that's a that's a reality that we all need to to sort of be calibrated by Is that God has given you a most important meeting and it's the meeting of the Church of Jesus Christ So help your children see the priority and the importance of the gatherings of God's people to hear the preaching never miss Help them sense the prioritization Help them understand the expectation and the privilege of the moment when the people of God gather together. In a sense it can become easy for parents who are like those spoken of in the days of Nehemiah. They shrug their shoulders and stiffen their necks and would not hear. They would not hear. It just wasn't that much of a priority for them.

So cast a vision for the importance of the moment. It's the most important meeting you have in the week. Number five, pray for the preacher before the church service. Most of the time, people who are preaching have been engaged in battle with themselves, with the Lord, with their own flawed minds, with their own worldliness, and it's often torturous labor. And use the time to pray for the preacher and his preparation that he's engaged in.

It's labor. And you know, most preachers, they languish and cry out to God when you're asleep. And they feel profoundly inadequate. They are inadequate. They desire with all their hearts to represent the beauty of Jesus Christ and the perfections of His kingdom and how good He is.

That's what they want to do and they're woefully inadequate. How do you explain the love of Jesus Christ toward sinners? It's exasperating to think about how to do that and even to understand the scriptures and try to treat it accurately Our our desire is to handle accurately the Word of God that means that we're trying to conform ourselves to it not us to that And what that means is that your mind goes through a mind-bending vice, where you're trying to get your whole soul wrapped around those words, and try to expunge your words and get to His words. And all by sinful human vessels who are challenged intellectually and spiritually and every other way. Pray for your preacher.

Number six, Help your family during the sermon. It's really important that you can help your children receive with meekness the implanted word. That's a quote from James 1.21. Receive with meekness the implanted word. What do you have to do to ready your children to receive the word of God with meekness?

Solomon says that a child left to himself shames his mother. And it's really easy for parents to just leave their children to themselves when they show up at church. But a child left to himself, as they say, down in Redneckland, it don't hit no much. So it's really important that you help your children learn how to hear the sermons. The hearing of the Word of God is a matter of life and death.

That's really clear from the Word of God. How can you help them? Okay. I'll try to tease out a few ways that you can help them. Deal with distractions.

Help them deal with distractions. Distractions are plenteous for a two-year-old, and it's very difficult work to help children deal with their distractions. David Clarkson, the Pearton wrote, wanderings, rovings of mind, will, affections, senses caused by the cares of the world and the lusts of the flesh are the chief reasons for distractions. Well, that's for adults. But children get distracted by almost everything.

And it's hard to hit a moving object of the distracted of the distracted soul. Now I personally am not in favor of distracting children with extraneous toys and books when they're in church and move their attention somewhere else other than the moment of the singing and the praying and the preaching. I'm not in favor of that. I want them focused on the Bible. I want them focused on the songs and the words.

Children can do it, but they need a lot of help and it's not perfect. They can sit for an hour and be gripped by movies and not move their eyes. You can help them replicate some of that, but it will only happen with discipleship. A child left to himself will suffer harm. It's also important in dealing with distractions is just to relax in their different cognitive abilities because they are different.

You'll need to be extra attentive to the capacities of each child and the ages that drive those capacities. Some children can only understand one word or one concept in a sermon. Not a problem. I Help your children understand at least one element of the sermon. Maybe it's one word One thought one image I told a story about a baby stuck in a womb this morning the Bible is full of images graphic images about the kingdom of heaven pick one thing from pick one thing from the sermon and talk about it.

A child who understands one thing from a sermon has accomplished a victory. That's true with me too, by the way. Most adults are wired that way. If you can just walk away with one thing. Somebody came up to me after our service and said, Mr.

Brown, I wrote down 20 things to apply. I thought, oh no, he'll fail, you know, just like we all will if we have 20 things. But one thing piled up after another is a blessing and it's really beneficial and that's what God Does relax knowledge is cumulative. It's a slow pile up of truth. They don't need to understand everything Nobody understands everything about everything anyway, And your children only understand a little bit when they're little.

Maybe it's just the sound of the sounds in the room and you loving being there. All those things are picked up, you know, in the gatherings of the people of God. The only thing your children really need when they come to hear the preaching is just a little bit more Than what they had before Even if it's just one single word that they didn't even know before Just keep piling it up. Like I said, my prayer is that your children will exist under the preaching and the singing and the prayers of the church hundreds and hundreds of times as they grow up. There are different things that you can do.

When I have young children I would have them listen to words and I would sometimes bump their arm or have them bump my arm if they heard a particular word out of that text. When they learned to write, I would have them look at my notes and copy a word, a simple word. At other times, I'd have them illustrate scenes of the sermon, drawing pictures of the scene of the text those are just ideas I don't think everybody has to do that but what what what that did is it kept me engaging with my children during during the preaching But overall I wanted them to love the preaching I wanted them to Progressively track with the preacher I Wanted them to see that no matter who is preaching you can find You can find one hunk of gold out of that. I didn't want my children to get that cancer of the soul that says, oh, I didn't get anything out of that. If you didn't get anything out of that, it's your own fault.

But children need parents to help them get something. And Squeeze every ounce of good out of every sermon. There's always wheat and chaff in sermons We know that But help them learn how to squeeze every good thing they can Now if you go home and complain about the sermon and stuff like that, that probably won't help them that much. There's always something to complain about in a sermon, always something that wasn't said exactly right, or the preacher didn't know everything about a subject we always thought it was important to teach our children to respect the preacher by Trying to keep their eyes on them. That was a battle.

Everybody knows that. Respect for the for the preacher is critical. Creating a culture in your family where when someone is speaking Everyone is quiet. This is one of the really helpful things about preaching, is it helps your children to respect someone and listen to them and not talk to one another. I would just encourage you, don't let your children do that.

My view is you can spur them along but don't let them have conversations outside of the subject that's there. Let's talk about praying and singing. There are a lot of things that happen in the Lord's Day worship that are very interactive, very participatory, like praying. It's important that we help our children pray with the prayers, pray with the one praying, and helping them to learn how to say amen to the prayers. And it's very important to help them to sing with the singers.

Don't let your children just mumble mouth the songs. Teach them to sing. One way to do that when they're really little is just be satisfied to have them hum the tune. Most little kids can do that. They can't get all the words and they don't even understand the meanings of all the words and they'll have some of the strangest definitions of some of those words which makes family life really fun.

Number seven, discuss the sermon with your family after the sermon. Satan is always at the door to steal the Word of God. Mark 415 speaks about that, how the devil is out there Picking the Word of God Off the ground so it doesn't bear any fruit The devil is always ready with fiery darts to make your children deaf to the Word of God So do all you can to hinder him God God gives parents to children in order to protect them from the works of the devil, to help them. The truth is, is that parents pass down original sin. Parents always pass down a terminal poison unless God gets a hold of their soul.

It's parents' jobs to get in the way and preach the gospel and bring every good thing, to get in the way of the devil, to break up the road before the devil and bring the word of God. Parents owe it to their children to be extremely attentive to the teaching of the word of God in their families. Faith comes by hearing. And it's one of the primary ways that parents get in the way of the devil, is that they make sure that their children hear the Word of God, and they hear a lot of it. Here's another area.

The questions of a wife can be very helpful, not just to a husband, but to a whole family. God encourages wives to ask their husbands, not the pastors, questions about the teaching. Paul writes, if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home, for it is shameful for women to speak in church. 1 Corinthians 14, 34, and 35. So Paul desires that husbands and wives talk about the preaching and discuss the different matters that are brought up and answer questions, things unclear, things need to be elaborated on, and the command is really important because it centers the family on talking about the Word of God it actually creates a theological family where husbands and wives are talking about the Bible.

And when that happens, children, you know, can be around, and it's a blessing. One of the reasons Men don't have as good a grasp of the Bible as they could have as their wives don't ask them questions So I'm just encouraging parents to rise up. Make the most of the preaching. It doesn't start in the pew. It starts in the home.

Remove the things that hinder your children from listening to the Word of God in the church cry out to God for help The main thing we usually need help with is motivation that God would give us zeal for the house of God And to be diligent in it and You can be sure that Satan is diligent. You might not be diligent, but the devil's always diligent. He's like a roaring lion seeking those seeking those whom he may devour. So it's not the place to be passive. He'll capitalize on every distraction, every laziness of a parent, every affection you've nurtured, every manifestation of ungodliness.

Parents need to resist the devil so that the child is the one that Jesus spoke of, Matthew 13, 23, he who hears the word of God and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and produces some hundredfold, some 60, some 30. So how would you rate your diligence as parents and helping your children they're little they need help And what can you do to help your child listen before the service, during the preaching, and after the preaching because faith comes by hearing hearing the Word of God let's pray Lord Lord we thank you for giving us such clear and helpful instruction from Your Word. We thank You for the treasure of Your Word. It's such a light. It's such a comfort.

And it teaches us how to be saved and how to walk our way through this wilderness world. Lord, we're so thankful for it. I pray that in our church you would find children who've been taught from childhood your word. Amen.