Well, this is the final session of these last four weeks working through this book, The Family at Church, How Parents are Tour Guides for Joy, 20 Days to Transform Your Local Church Experience. The whole proposition of this book is very easily stated, and it's stated like this. The Church of Jesus Christ is the only institution that he established on the earth. It is the greatest institution, and therefore you should have the greatest focus and prioritization for the involvement in that institution because of what Jesus has commanded us to do to not neglect the gathering together. Now, this book really is designed to be a help for everyone.A single person can read this book, a person that can read this book that doesn't have any children, and still really understand how they ought to engage local church life. Maybe you're not raising children, but you're still trying to raise yourself. And that goes for all the adults that have children as well. My guess is that many of the things here are highly instructive to the parents. But what I'm asking in this book is that you instruct yourself if you're a parent and teach your children these things and bring them up with a sense of gravity and sense of priority, a sense of importance of the local church.So we've been working through these chapters, five chapters a week. In the last week, our encouragement was for you to read the last five chapters, listening to sermons, applying sermons, prayer meetings, the ordinances of the Lord's Supper and baptism, and then the final chapter is called At the Gates of Everlasting Joy. So these last five chapters really focused on everything we've done this week together, including the ordinances of baptism and the Lord's Supper. We had a prayer meeting on Wednesday. There's a whole chapter on how to try to engage your family into prayer meetings.But the first one, chapter 16, was listening to sermons. And that's based on the proposition is that Faith comes by hearing. Jesus said, be careful how you hear. And from that I say, you know, parents, singles, all of us should be careful how we hear. And then we should teach our children how to hear as well.They need to learn how to hear and who will teach them such a thing, their parents. So that's what we were saying here. I'll quote something in the book. Sermons stimulate thinking, improve vocabulary, introduce complex subjects, and foments intellectual activity. I had a nine-year-old boy come up to me just this morning and said, Mr.Brown, something that Mr. Keith read in First Corinthians really hit me. Praise the Lord. We so minimize and underestimate what children can hear. But children actually need their parents to help them to learn how to hear as well.And I gave us kind of a six point checklist for parents or adults. First, examine your own heart. Is it a joy for you? Second, get focused on mind expansion, vocabulary, history, geography that you find in the Word of God. Third, familiarize your family with the sermon text before the preaching.I think that's really important. That's why we have Tuesday morning Bible study, is to inculcate the men and whatever boys come on that passage. We want them to go home and teach their wives and their children so that when they hear the sermon on Sunday, they've already gone through it. And it's just an addition. It's repetition, we need repetition.In this church, we're encouraging the men to come to men's Bible study because we want the word of God to be repeated in their homes that week over and over again. I realize maybe every church doesn't ask you to do this, but we are, because we think it's better for you. How about that? Fourth, prepare your family to hear. In Luke 19, 48, we find people who quote, were very attentive to hear him.Fifth, cast a vision of the importance of the moment. The preaching of the word of God, the reading of the word of God is the most important communication that your family will ever experience during a given week, most likely, because it's the word of God. And then six, pray for the preacher. Help your children succeed. Help yourself succeed.Maybe adults in the church have kinda lost track of the seriousness and the prioritization of the moment. Okay, the next chapter is chapter 17, and that was how to apply sermons. Our fellowship meals are so pivotal for that. You know, what struck you in the sermon? I'm always asking people that when I go sit down on Sunday afternoon.But we ought to be engaging one another in sharing the things that we heard and maybe answering questions, dealing with difficult issues that were in the text. There's always something difficult in the text of scripture and the preacher doesn't always get all of it or even get all of it right. But how to apply sermons, discuss them, memorize sections if you can, even during the week. Think about memorizing one phrase that's in that sermon text with your kids. It'll take just like this, repeat it, repeat it at dinner time every day.Very easy kind of things. The next chapter was prayer meetings. Well, when we had our prayer meeting on Wednesday, I went through some of the items that appeared there. Here's what I want us to really get ahold of, that the prayer meeting was designed by God in a local church to increase the joy of that church, the joy of hearing the expressions of faith, the intercessions, hearing the fears and the hopes and the troubles and the pains and the sicknesses that are in the congregation, lifting them up before God, but not just that, watching God answer the prayers. That's why we read in the Old Testament, I will make them joyful in my house of prayer.I will make them joyful in my house of prayer. That's one reason you should go to the prayer meeting. That's one reason you should pray, is because God makes it really a gateway for joy. It teaches a congregation that they're dependent on God. It teaches us that we're not all powerful.It teaches us that we're not all wise. It teaches us patience because sometimes we have to wait. Sometimes for years, and yeah, we should keep praying for the thing we were still praying, we were praying for three or four, five, six years ago because what you'll find is if you're in a local church long enough, you'll see that God is gonna answer a prayer that you prayed 10 years ago, and you'll rejoice. So help them see that this is what a local church does. Churches gather for prayer.Nobody else gathers for prayer. Your company most likely is not gonna gather for prayer, unless you work for somebody who runs one of the companies in this church, they will gather you for prayer. But The institutions of the world don't gather their people for prayer. We're the only ones that really do it. It's what the, it makes the church distinctive in the world.And you know, just help them to understand the beauty of the prayers. And then the next chapter, chapter 19 on the ordinances of baptism and the Lord's Supper. It's so interesting to me that God gives these ordinances that are to be repeated regularly that are just graphic illustrations. They are visual pictures. Visual pictures that engage the eyes, pictures that engage the ears, and all the senses, the sense of touch, the sense of taste.God wants to wrap your whole body into the experience of recognizing the beauty of the gospel and the forgiveness of sin. He wants it to be viscerally impactful in your whole body to hold that bread and say Jesus Christ is the bread of life. He shed his blood for my sins, and to do something physical. We're going to a baptismal in just a few minutes, and we're going to be able to watch a sign that somebody's been saved, And what's the sign? It's so beautiful.A person dies to their sins, is washed, cleansed, and is raised up to new life as a new creation, justified and glorified by God. It's gotta be one of the happiest things you can consider, that God would do that to you. You know, did you deserve, did you deserve bread or a stone? Did you deserve poison, drink, or did you deserve the fruit of the vine? Did you deserve death or did you deserve resurrection?So all of these ordinances, they just speak of how kind God is to sinners and what a relief it is to know Jesus Christ. And then the final chapter, At the Gates of Everlasting Joy. I don't know exactly what to say about this except God has designed local church life to increase the joy and the confidence of his people, that they would be a fearless people, a happy people. Do you want to be a person who's singing songs of deliverance all through the week? David said, Lord, you always fill my heart with songs of deliverance whenever I'm afraid.Is that the kind of person you wanna be? You wanna be the kind of person that's just overburdened and buried in your troubles? No, God doesn't want you to be that way either. And he wants you to help your children to not grow up like that so that they have a sense of everlasting joy. Isaiah 51 11, so the ransom of the Lord shall return and come to Zion, that's code for the local church, and come to Zion with singing, with everlasting joy on their heads, they shall obtain joy and gladness.Sorrow and sighing shall flee away. Okay, so there you have it. Family at church, how parents are tour guides for joy. Let's be a church that has a very clear distinctive about it. We are stirring ourselves up to see God.We don't want to be ungoded, We want to be fully goded. We want God to fill our minds and when we come together We're the people that have already thought about coming together We've already prepared our hearts to come together We've prepared our children to come together and then when we come together we regale the things that we have heard and we talk about it And then we go out into the world with everlasting joy in our heads, so that's my prayer for this local Church that we operate in a different way that acknowledges the greatness of the greatest institution.