The sermon titled '5 Minute Charges' features various speakers addressing the importance of fostering strong, gospel-centered relationships between fathers and daughters. The event aims to cast a vision of biblical manhood and womanhood, encouraging fathers to turn their hearts towards their children and vice versa, as depicted in Malachi. Trent Moody emphasizes the importance of warm affections towards God and the need for both personal effort and divine intervention in spiritual growth. The speakers stress the significance of structures and disciplines in Christian life, which should ultimately lead to a deeper walk with Jesus Christ. Examples from scripture and the lives of godly individuals are highlighted as crucial for spiritual formation and anchoring one's soul in Christ.

Well, welcome. So I'm so thankful that we are allowed to do this. We've been doing this for about two decades out here, and the reason we do it is that we we really want to cast a vision for fathers, for their daughters. It's such a critical thing. And to try to, year by year, explain the doctrine, to speak of what biblical manhood looks like if you're a father, what biblical woman looks like if you're a daughter.

It's such a powerful relationship. And so we hope that year by year, you're just fortified in these really important matters of manhood and womanhood. And so that the hearts of fathers are turned toward their daughters and the hearts of daughters are turned toward their fathers. In the very last book of the Bible, in Malachi, it's a picture of the revival when Jesus Christ comes. And when people's hearts are revived by Jesus Christ, it's very clear something happens to a father and he's never the same again, and something happens to a daughter and a son, and they're never the same again.

And what it says is that he, Jesus Christ, He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and He will turn the hearts of the children to their fathers and their parents. And this is a manifestation, It's a power of the gospel. The gospel changes all your relationships. And you know, you grow up in a family and the most important thing that happens is that God changes your heart. And that the heart of a father would change and turn toward his children and the heart of a child to turn Toward the parents it's such a powerful thing and so this is this time is dedicated To that if you've been here before you know we give short messages and and then we have discussion time for every message.

And we're going to start out tonight with just, with a few five-minute just blasts short blasts from the from some of the men here and then and then later on after that I'm going to give a 20-minute message but after that it's a time for fathers and daughters to discuss. So at the end of every talk, these speakers are going to give you two questions to consider. Now you don't have to be stuck to those questions, But what we want, we don't want you to just hear and move on. We want you to hear and ponder it and talk about it together. We hear so many things that we just go in one ear and we keep on moving.

That's not what we're doing here. So we really want you to just pause and have a good conversation together about the topic that we're dealing with. So I pray that God really uses it in your life and I feel like he has for many years done that and So many of the daughters in our church have been fortified and I'm just extremely grateful For what I've seen over the years as a result of they're actually taking the instruction and the fathers as well. You know, nobody gets a perfect father and no fathers ever get perfect children. So we're all trying to move ahead, you know, in the Lord.

And I pray this just takes you another step in that same direction. So with that, we're going to bring guys up to give five-minute exhortations. I have no idea what they're going to say, but the Lord will use it. And so just understand these are men they've cried out to God to give a message You know to all of us. So we're gonna start out with Trent Moody.

There you go. Come on Trent All right, very good We'll go ahead and turn to your Bibles to Psalm 42 And really what I'm just sharing with you is something that's been burning in my soul these last couple of weeks. And I don't know if it's going to be as helpful for you as it has been for me but I pray that it will be. Let's ask God to bless our time. Our Father we thank you for your abounding grace, we thank you for your love for us.

Lord I pray that you would truly turn our hearts to you. Lord that you would give us Lord just a heart that has been enlarged so that we can love you with all of our heart. We ask it in Christ's name, amen. So Psalm 42 is something that I want to mention or I want to read to you here in just a moment, but as I considered what was burning in my soul, I didn't have to think really long at all. And I can bullet down to one word.

One word is this, affections. Affections. I was recently reading in this Psalm, Psalm 42, and I read this, as the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?" Now that's a beautiful and poetic and very true verse, but the question in my heart was could I sing with the sons of Korah, my soul thirsts for God for the living God?

And I want to tell you the truth tonight. I've been a Christian a long time, long enough to know that the Christian life is a life that has ups and downs and ebbs and flows. And sometimes we're up, sometimes we're down, sometimes we're lukewarm. And in fact, sometimes we're downright cold. We can go through seasons in which we simply go through the motions of prayer and Bible reading.

We can go and attend church and worship God. We can even sing the hymns of grace. We can partake of the Lord's Supper. We can rinse and we can repeat. And yet our affections can be described as anything but hot.

However, God is not satisfied with lukewarm affections. He took the mirror of His Word and He took the light of his word and he pointed them right in my face. So I began to take a closer look at myself and as I did I was convicted and I truly wanted warmer affections. But the question was how to actually make my affections hot was not perfectly clear. Well God began to work on my soul and I can't really tell you how many different Bible verses and books and sermons that I read that were all confronting me with this similar and singular thought, affections.

Let me highly recommend one particular book that has truly blessed my soul. You want to write this down because you will want to have this book and you want to keep it and you want to read it more than once. And that book is written by a Puritan named Thomas Watson. And this little book is entitled Heaven Taken by Storm. And I'll give you a one-liner.

Well, one paragraph. How about that? How hard it is, he said, sometimes to get the consent of our heart to seek God. Jesus Christ went more willingly to the cross than we do to the throne of grace. Should not we then provoke ourselves to duty if our hearts are so unstrung in religion we have need to prepare them and put them in tune.

And so I begin to ask this question and if you want to adopt these questions for your questions, how can I awaken and warm my affections towards my Savior? How is it that my affections are not burning hot when the object of my affections is altogether lovely. Why is it that I can see a full moon on a clear night and I can stop in my tracks and I can stand and turn my gaze heavenward and I can look at that full moon and its splendor and in the beauty of it and I'll stand in all of it. How is it that the beauty of a flower can motivate me to stop and bend down and examine all the intricacies of its petals and be amazed? How is it that the creation stops me But my heart does not always burn hot with the love and affection and devotion of the creator of that moon and of that flower and of so many other things in creation.

And I said that God's not okay with this, but guess what? I'm not okay with this. So I began to ask myself, is the warming of my affections dependent solely upon me? Is it dependent upon me trying harder? Is it dependent upon me of just reading more and studying more and praying more?

Or is it all dependent upon God and I must simply wait for him to move me? Or is it both? And after much prayer and reading and meditation and even counsel, I have concluded that it is certainly both. A Christian cannot sit idly by and wonder why their affections are cold. Nor can we, through a flurry of religious activity, think that we can stir up holy affections all on our own.

And let me be clear, I'm not talking about emotions, I'm talking about affections. There's a difference. I'm talking about a deep abiding love for God that is not simply based upon pleasant circumstances. And in fact, it is not dependent on the benefits that we receive from God either, or hope to receive, but rather having fullness of joy and fullness of love overflowing in Christ himself for the very purpose of delighting in him." How often do you go to God in prayer and just talk about him? Typically our prayers are things that we want to receive or even thankfulness for what we have received and both are proper.

But I want you to understand that there's actually a loveliness of Christ and of His Father and the Holy Spirit that is worth talking about and meditating about simply because of who they are. So since we're on a camp out, I want to illustrate it this way and then I'll close. Think about we're on a camp out and often in a camp out and hopefully we will tonight we're gonna have a fire, a campfire. Naturally there are things I can do to prepare for a campfire. I can prepare the paper and wad it up and get it down there in the bottom.

I can carefully stack the Kenlin. I can split the firewood and place it nicely on the frame that it needs to be placed and stacked. However, Unlike a campfire, I cannot manufacture the spark. This is God's work. Only God can create the heat and light that I need to truly warm my affections.

We cannot make God move, but we can certainly pray and beseech God to send the spark to light our affections. We can beg God to send the wind of the Holy Spirit to blow upon that spark so that it may burn with a red-hot affection. And then one more quote in closing from that precious book that has been such a help for me. Mr. Watson says, Thus, if anything may excite prayer and carry in it a fiery chariot up to heaven, it is when we know we pray for nothing but that which God is more willing to grant than we are to ask.

And so brothers and sisters I exhort you to earnestly do all the preparations for your soul to be set aflame for when it wants he sends that flame and be ready. Beseech the Lord for it. Let's pray. Our Father, I thank you for the Word of God that speaks of a man and of multiple men whose heart thirsted for God. And Lord I want to be such a man that my heart thirsts for you.

And Lord that I'm not satisfied until not only you you meet that thirst but you actually enlarge my heart to receive more of the affections that I should and rightfully ought to have for you. I pray for these fathers and daughters that you would Lord set a holy fire within their bosom Lord that they would be so hungry and so thirsty for their God and would you start that this weekend Lord and I ask it in Christ's name Amen. Well we have no idea what each other is going to say and what order we're going to go in when we arrive for this particular part but you often find that there's a theme that develops just by the providence of God and that it's just in the right order. So I think we're going to find that. If you have your program, the very front picture is a silhouette.

That's me and my daughter Rebecca in 2010. She was six years old then. She's 20 years old now. And we just keep gathering. Why is that?

Well dads and daughters need to keep gathering and need to keep hearing the Word of God. It hasn't gotten easier to go against the flow of what the world is doing. It's gotten harder since 2010. I'm so glad we're still gathering together to say these important things. Please turn to Hebrews chapter 6.

I'll be reading verses 19 and 20. Hebrews chapter 6, 19 and 20. The author of Hebrews writes this, having spoken about the security of the promises of God and how they're fulfilled in Jesus Christ. That's really the context. Verse 19, this hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which enters the presence behind the veil where the forerunner has entered for us, even Jesus, having become high priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek." The promises of God are yes and amen in the Lord Jesus Christ.

And Jesus is the anchor of the soul. The promises fulfilled in Jesus Christ anchor the soul. Daughters, we want to say this to you this weekend. We're going to spend a lot of time talking about structures and discipline, and it's important. Here's an example of structures.

Devotion to the people of God in local church life. Here's another one. Essentially making yourself an apprentice of your mother. Most or many or most or all of you have hard-working mothers. And to understand how to become a diligent woman of God.

You can apprentice yourself to your mom and learn so much. So those are good structures. There are disciplines, certain things that you should be doing and making a pattern in your life. So you do them with regularity and with reliability. So we're going to talk about structures and disciplines.

And so we'll be pointing you to these things and pointing you away from other things saying, don't let these other distractions, some that are lawful, some that aren't lawful, don't let these distractions keep you from these good structures and disciplines. But we want to say this before we say that. Only Jesus is the anchor of the soul. These structures and these disciplines are good and they're needful, but they will not anchor your soul. And it is very possible to skip past them, to skip past Jesus as the anchor of the soul, And to give yourself to these things that are so much more visible, these structures and disciplines.

We can cultivate these disciplines and structures in our lives because that's what good people do. They cultivate structures and disciplines. Let me say this, the Bible doesn't know anything about good people. The Bible knows about people who need to have their sins dealt with in the Lord Jesus Christ to have, as Scott said, their hearts transformed and changed, a heart of stone removed and a heart of flesh implanted. The structures and disciplines are important because they are the ways that God has given us to walk with Jesus.

This is about walking with Jesus. So we're going to point you to structures and disciplines, But just know they serve the purpose of walking with Jesus. When I was a boy of barely 10 years old, I repented and believed and began to walk with Jesus. I've been doing that for more than 40 years now. And I can tell you it's not the structures and disciplines that have anchored my soul, but my soul has been anchored by walking with the Lord Jesus Christ.

The things that Trent was talking about from Psalm 42 are so important. And when you hear about a deer panting for water, a deer in thirst panting for water, If you have no frame of reference for that, in other words, if that sounds strange to your ears, we would just want to invite you into a life of walking with Jesus Christ that gives you a frame of reference for that, where you say, I know times of thirst where I've been satisfied by not structures and disciplines but by just being with the Lord, enjoying the Lord, being satisfied in the Lord and by the Lord. So my exhortation is this. Don't get it backwards. Don't get it backwards.

People can see you developing structures and disciplines, and they'll appreciate that, and they'll compliment you for that. They'll approve of that but your dads know this. It's the things that are unseen that happen in secret that anchor your soul that give you a life that is is satisfied you see in the end if you just cultivate the structures and the disciplines, at some point that always runs out of steam and you find that your soul actually doesn't have an anchor. Anchor yourself in walking with Jesus Christ and let the structures and disciplines that would be pointing to serve that end. Let's pray.

Gotta do pray for the hours ahead that you would fall upon us by your spirit. That we would come away from the time saying, that was so unusual. You came among us in an unusual way, in a glorious way where we experience you. God, I pray that our daughters would know you. I pray that they would do more than know about you, but that you would reveal yourself to them and that they would repent, believe, and have their souls anchored in relationship with Jesus Christ and that the structures and disciplines that they cultivate in their life would serve this great purpose that they might know you and walk with you all of their lives that they would find their souls anchored in Jesus.

In Jesus name we pray, amen. Turn with me to Psalm 77. Psalm 77, and while you're turning, I just want to make it clear, we didn't plan this. We didn't plan this. I didn't plan much of anything really.

I typed up some thoughts here and had some, what I felt was a good thing going. And my wife said, I think you're thinking too much into it. So, I scratched some of that. But I think this will be helpful. Hopefully it makes as much sense to you as it does to me.

If it's confusing, what I'm saying is a mixture of the two things you've already heard. Psalm 77, I'm reading from the ESV, but I don't think it'll be completely unrecognizable. Psalm 77, David says, I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, and he will hear me. In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord. In the night my hand is stretched out without wearying.

My soul refuses to be comforted. When I remember God I moan. When I meditate my spirit faints. C'est la. You hold my eyelids open.

I am so troubled that I cannot speak. I consider the days of old the years long ago. I said let me remember my song in the night, let me meditate in my heart. Then my spirit made a diligent search." I'm gonna stop there. David says, then my spirit made a diligent search.

When we think of diligence, when I think of diligence, we think of work. We think of outward things, external things, being busy with our hands, busy with our feet, keeping schedules, keeping routines. We might even think of, as we've already heard, religious activities. Be diligent about reading your Bible every day. Be diligent about prayer every day.

We often equate diligence with busyness. If I'm busy, I must be being diligent. Now all of these things are really good and necessary, as you've already heard. We should be busy about these activities that God has given us. If we're not busy about the activities that God has given us, that's sin.

We have to be busy about the things God has commanded us to do, and I would say it's actually essential to the health of your own faith to be busy about the things that God has given you to do. When you get lazy with the things that God has given you to do, that's when your spiritual health begins to decline, and you're wondering, why, why, what's the problem, why am I lacking assurance, why don't I feel like I'm as near to my father as I ought to be? Well the problem is because you're not doing the things that the children do. You've drifted. I think it's crucial.

You'll see very little progress in the Christian life if you're not being busy about the things God has given us to do, but David says, my spirit made a diligent search. You see, he's talking about something spiritual. In all likelihood, David is sitting still. He's not doing anything, while his spirit is making a diligent search. And that phrase diligent search is actually one word, And it tells us something about the attitude and the intention of this searching.

It's not just moving the eyes around. It's a strong desire to find something. A willingness to do whatever it takes to find it. If you go to the New Testament, you search the word diligent. The word is essentially, carries the same idea of eagerness and zeal.

Now think about those words, attitude, intention, desire, willingness, eagerness, zeal. None of those words have anything to do with what you're doing with your hands or your feet. Those are all words that deal with the heart. These are these are internal things that flow out of the affections, as we've heard. Our spirit is where all of these things come from.

Eagerness comes from the spirit. Zeal is inside. Intentions are inside. All of our outward activity is useless if we don't have this principle in the heart. And I would say this is the difference between busyness and diligence.

It's the difference between sincerity and hypocrisy. A lot of people are very busy. A lot of professing Christians are very busy. They're hypocrites because they don't have this principle of the heart. It's not flowing from the right principle inside.

There's more to what we want to cultivate as Christian diligence. Psalm 64-6 tells us that even the wicked are diligent about their wickedness. I don't have any problem saying everybody's diligent. Everybody's busy. The question is not, are you diligent?

The question is, what are you diligent about? And where is that coming from? The hearts of men are all set on something, intent to accomplish something, eager and zealous for something. So what is it that makes us different? Well, as David's spirit makes this diligent search, it's clear that he has one focus.

If we continue reading verses 7 through 9, he asks these questions, Will the Lord spurn forever and ever again be favorable? Has His steadfast love forever ceased? Are His promises at an end for all time? Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has He in anger shut up His compassion?

Every one of us should be screaming, no, no, no, no, no. That's what David's doing. David's spirit is diligent in clarifying the nature and the character of God. In verse 15 He says, you with your arm redeemed your people. Christian diligence starts in the heart fixed on God and his salvation in Jesus Christ.

As we just heard, without that, all of our busyness is hypocrisy. And all of our diligence is just idolatry if it doesn't come from a heart aimed at God and his Christ. And just so you know, as Jason just said, I'll say it a little more tersely than he said it, you will never be diligent enough, ever. You won't be. If you could be diligent enough, God would not have sent his son.

He sent his son because we cannot be diligent enough. Christ's perfect diligence is ours. Now from that we pursue diligence, we pursue our duty. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for again your word and for the time to be together.

Please press these things upon our hearts and glorify yourself in our midst for Christ's sake, amen. I wanna invite you to turn with me to one verse in your Bible, Philippians chapter 3. Philippians chapter 3. There are many passages that we could turn to for the subject that we'll think about now for just a few minutes. But Philippians 3.17 is a very striking passage to me.

I want to go ahead and begin to read it, and if you're not there, continue to make your way. Paul writes, brothers join in imitating me and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us. This year has been a monumental year of joy in the Scroggins family. We have been in the process of adopting two little baby boys who are ten months old, and it has just lit our family up. I love walking into the room and Titus and Jude, they may laugh, they may play, they may begin to talk, but more often than not what they will do is they will find my face and their little foreheads will begin to crinkle up and they will get the most blood, earnest, serious look on their face and they will just pierce both faces at one time right at me.

Now do you ever look at a baby and you just envision thought bubbles over their head? What in the world are they thinking? And the thought bubbles that I put over their head is, Dad, we don't know what to do. We're taking all of our cues from you. What do we do?

What do we think? What do we say? And the truth is we're always taking our cues from someone and from somewhere. And in many ways we are like that as children before God. And you and I know that we're living in a culture that is relentlessly attempting to squeeze us into its mold.

And what the culture is doing is nothing new. It has taken all of the faithful examples of heroes we may call those. And then on the other side, taking villains, which are more wicked examples, and they are switching the two to cause us to think that true villains are really heroes and heroes are really villains. And this power of enculturation, I believe, has a significant impact on our daughters' lives and on our lives as fathers more than we realize. We understand the power of an example.

We understand the power of lasting impressions. I was kicking around in my yard after we bought our home and I saw these small little fingerprints that were in the concrete of the back of our home, probably been there for decades. And I began to realize that one time that concrete was wet, but now it's hardened. But the handprints are still in the concrete because of the power of impressions of example in our life. And so we want to guard that, and we want to take full advantage of that.

And in the Scriptures we see this. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul writes of much of Old Testament history. This was written as an example for you. In Hebrews chapter 11, we see one faithful example after the other. In 1 Thessalonians, the church is an example to other believers.

In 1 Timothy, Timothy is to be an example to the church at large. We see in the book of James that the prophets were an example of suffering and patience. And then in 1st Peter as well We see that Christ left us an example an impression that was Powerfully imprinted into our life even bad examples in second Peter as well as Jude the Bible says that Sodom and Gomorrah Were an example for us As we come to weekends like this, as we come to daily life, as we come to the Lord's Day, I believe impressions are being made in our life. And sometimes there's a jackhammer that goes straight to the heart, something said, whether it was intended or not, and God just uses it in a transformative way. But more often than not, what I find in my life and the life of our church is our lives are more like you could envision a rock in the middle of a river.

At one time it was large, it was jagged, but what happens is the river faithfully flows over that rock day after day, day after day, and it begins to conform it little by little through that constant movement and motion. And that's what God does in our life through every Lord's Day, through the Christian church being in one another's lives, and even in weekends such as this. An example is a pattern that struck, it's a mark, it's a blow that has taken. My exhortation to us this evening and this weekend is to consider the examples that we have in our life and to take full advantage of the examples that we have around us that are faithful and to lean into those but ultimately what we realize as believers as we live long enough is that every flesh and blood example in our life, even at some point your parents are going to disappoint you. They're not going to live up to what you thought that they should have been or what you thought that they were.

But our Father in heaven has left us an example. He has done much more than that but not less. So I want to exhort us to consider the examples in our life, to care for one another this weekend and learn from one another and to look to our Father in heaven who has left a perfect pattern to impress into our lives. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the pattern that you have set before us, a pattern of sound words, of sound doctrine, and a pattern of your spirit and your people to help us to flesh this out in daily life.

So Lord we look to you and we pray that you would help us to learn from one another this weekend and to consider the access that we give to others and especially this culture in our life use your church to conform your people by your spirit by your word to the image and pattern of Jesus Christ. In your name we pray, amen.