Open your Bibles and turn to Matthew chapter 4 Matthew chapter 4 And find verse 13 Matthew 4 verse 13 This is the inerrant all-sufficient and it's sweeter than honey, and it's the Word of God. And leaving Nazareth, he came and dwelt in Capernaum, which is by the sea, in the regions of Zebulun and Naphtali, that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet saying, the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, by the way of the sea beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles, the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light and upon those who sat in the region of the shadow of death, light has dawned. From that time Jesus began to preach and to say repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And then I'm going to read Malachi chapter 4 verse 6 as a manifestation of the repentance that happens in a believer that is stated here Malachi is prophesying the impact of the gospel of Jesus Christ on families and He will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to their fathers lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.

The grass withers the flower fades but the word of our God stands forever. Let's pray. Father, thank you so much for your Word, for the beauty of it, for the transforming power, for how refreshing it is. Amen. Please be seated.

So this week is Reformation Week, Friday, the anniversary of Martin Luther nailing the 95 theses on the Wittenberg Church door, launching the Protestant Reformation. So I'm doing something really different here this morning. If you're visiting, usually we're just pounding through a passage of scripture and doing exposition on it today though I really wanted to to speak about the reformation and the impact that it had at that time and even even now today and Martin Luther Martin Luther's first thesis number one that was nailed to that Wittenberg door was this, when our Lord and master Jesus Christ said, repent, he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance. So Luther argued that repentance wasn't all about performing external works of penance, but what rather heartfelt ongoing faith that breeds repentance, constant repentance, ongoing repentance in your life. He was challenging the church's doctrine of indulgences and a view of penance But the Roman Catholic doctrine of penance was actually based on a Mistranslation of what I just read in Matthew 4 17 repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

The Roman Catholic Church had translated it, do penance, do penance for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. In other words, external acts of penance, confession, fasting, various rituals are the works of contrition that are prescribed by the church and if you don't do those you're not saved. And forgiveness could be earned. Years of purgatory could be wiped out by your penance. So this was the Roman Catholic doctrine.

But the Reformers made it very clear, the just shall live by faith. Romans 1 17 that grace is freely given it's the theological personal practical turning point in a person's life and everything changes as a result of this. I just want us to realize how absolutely revolutionary this is in the life of an individual believer. Because what it means, What it meant then was that for the first time, people in the church realized that they could be forgiven forever and they did not have to do penance. That their salvation wasn't earned.

That it's a free gift. That you are clean. That all your sins have been wiped out in the past, the present, and the future, and you don't need a priest to certify that. You need the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. But you just think for a second what it's like to be forgiven.

Wow! All your sins have been forgiven and he's put your sins as far as the east is from the west. He's thrown them to the bottom of the sea, he's thrown him behind his back, he stomped him on his feet. Well that's what the Bible says about forgiveness. So the Reformation was very revolutionary.

Of course, it promoted the preaching of the Bible. Scripture was made available to the ordinary Christian, which it wasn't before. Biblical order in the church was recovered, the rebuilding and the foundation of society was established in the Reformation of the family. And what happened in the Protestant Reformation is what happens anytime somebody is genuinely saved, he will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers. This is the power of the gospel and this this really is the seed of of family reformation.

I think this is why well we are studying Romans right we've been in the cycles of exposition of Romans. Paul starts out by saying, I'm not ashamed of the gospel for it's the power of God unto salvation. What a power it is and what a joy it is to have the gospel. Well, I think it was about 16 years ago, I wrote a book during the Calvin 500 anniversary, the 500th anniversary of John Calvin, and I wrote a book called Family Reformation, The Legacy of Sola Scriptura in Calvin's Geneva, and I was tracing the actual reformations of the family that took place during the reformation. And I did that, I think, partly because when you say the words Protestant Reformation most people immediately think of Luther and Calvin, justification by faith, and the five solas.

Well that's right, that's a right way to think. But I think that often people limit their understanding of the Reformation to the doctrine of justification by faith. They actually misunderstand the engine of the Protestant Reformation and the breadth and the scope of that Reformation. When the Word of God is restored to the pulpit, everything changes. And when the word of God is restored to the pulpit, everything changes.

And when the word of God is restored to the pulpit, it won't be long before it's restored at the dinner table. And that's this family reformation that took place. No area of life escaped the Reformers. The doctrine of salvation was one of the many doctrines that was reformed, but I want to talk about the seed of Reformation and the impact of it. I'm gonna answer six questions here.

You have them in your outlines. I'll just try to pound through them one by one. First, what was the engine of the Protestant Reformation? Well, the central force of the Protestant Reformation was sola scriptura the sufficiency of scripture The reason of the doctrine of salvation was restored to the Church of Jesus Christ was because of the sufficiency of Scripture. This is the thing that changes everything.

And when you embrace it, everything will begin to change in your life and you won't stop changing until the Lord takes you home because Scripture is that reformational power. The scriptures reforms all culture. And of course you know the five solas of the Protestant Reformation. Sola Scriptura, scripture alone, sola fide, faith alone, sola gratia, grace alone, solus Christus, Christ alone, sola deo gloria, to the glory of God alone. In other words, all of life and salvation is ultimately for the glory of God.

And when a person is genuinely saved, Their life is, the direction of their life is altered from their glory to the glory of God. What a powerful thing it is. The touchstone is Scripture's authority in the church and this cascading effect of Sola Scriptura brought about many many changes. The doctrine of marriage, the doctrine of womanhood, fatherhood, courtship, raising children, fertility, every area of life was addressed by the Protestant reformers and it was shaking up society and God appointed these reformers to be instigators of a massive restructuring of life and you know we feel the effects today even though we realize we live in a wicked and corrupt generation. At the same time, we are living on the legacy of the Protestant Reformation.

And that's why America is like no other country in the entire world. That's why America is the last bastion of freedom in the world. It's because of the Protestant Reformation, which was brought over here by the Puritans. But the most countercultural thing you can do is to repent and believe in the gospel and teach your children to do the same thing. The reformers they were catalytic dispensers of scriptural wisdom in law in politics in Economics in medicine you name it the Protestant Reformation was broad because the scripture is broad And it called calls for the reformation of everything And Calvin with his exegetical precision defined the terms of all these various reformations.

And what Calvin understood is that the authority of the scripture doesn't stop at the church door. It marches right into your living room. It marches right into your workplace. It marches right into everything and it's so it's so striking to see the remarkable things that happened as a result of a vision of the majesty of God and the authority of the word of God in your life with very tender hearted pastoral care and devotion to expository preaching. All of this came out.

By the way, Calvin never wrote a book on the family. What I did 16 years ago is I went through everything I could find that Calvin wrote and I was looking, particularly his sermons, and I was trying to find about what he said about the family and he talked about the family all the time. You know it's interesting too, He spoke really directly to the single young people in his church all the time to counsel them about how to live and how to engage in their courtships and how to get ready for marriage. Well, that's what I put in this book, all this kind of stuff. But I think the family reformation that took place in Reformation Europe needs to be understood in the 21st century because to be truly saved actually means a complete upheaval of society and particularly your society.

So, you know, just as a side note, Are things getting worse or better in America? Most people say, well, they're way worse. But if you were here 250 years ago, you'd be living in a culture dominated by nomadic Indian tribes, paganism, spiritism, many of them running around naked, trying to warm themselves by spreading grease on their bodies, living on roots and berries and makeshift dwellings with spirit guides and shamans, and they were attacking one another all the time and Guess what that isn't happening anymore. And you know why that's not happening anymore Because Jesus Christ is constantly reclaiming the spiritual darkness He's destroying the works of darkness and while we we know that America is really astray, think about what it was like not too long ago. The gospel is so wonderful.

We're not here waiting for an attack by another tribe, you know, by the next town. And that's because of Jesus Christ. You know, Paul said in Romans 16, we're headed there soon. The God of peace will crush Satan under your feet shortly. Praise God.

He's been doing that in your life. He's been doing that for years for many of you. Maybe you've just been saved. He's gonna just keep crushing Satan in your life. This is just so thrilling.

Okay, the first question is why is Calvin's Reformation, or what was the engine of the Protestant Reformation? The sufficiency of Scripture. Second, why is Calvin's Reformation important today? Well I think there are many reasons but one reason is it's a case study for the reforming of your family and my family today. Because the wisdom that Calvin applied in Geneva is the same wisdom that we need today.

Why? Because it comes straight out of the word of God. Scripture is the gold standard for family life. The Apostle Paul made that very very clear. He said all scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

The Word of God is meant to change everything in your life and that's the general principle and that's the principle of the family Reformation today. Now I think it's pretty clear if you look back in history at histories of revival, general reformations they tend to fall short and stop quickly without family reformations. Unless the faith is passed on from one generation to the next, unless there's sort of a generational, multi-generational vision for life and the transmission of the power of the gospel, the reformations fall short and if you don't have a corresponding family reformation, your general reformation will fall short. You know, we saw even in the Great Awakening with George Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Davies, these men had their roots in the family reformation in Geneva. And they were actually writing about family life and things like that.

But apparently the next generation didn't pick it up. When you get into the 19th century, it was beginning to be lost. When you get into the 20th century, it was almost completely lost. And the tragedies of the 20th century, the 20th century was a really bad time for family life. It exalted singleness and the family-free family, the family-free life.

It redefined marriage astonishingly to include homosexual unions. It banished children from the discipleship of parents in the home. It accepted this child killing, child banning philosophy of abortion and birth control. It endorsed handing children over to God hating pagans in the government education system. It promoted the dishonor of the elderly by putting them in sterile institutional state-controlled euthanasia friendly environments.

And I'm not saying that it's that it's always wrong to have somebody take care of your aging parents in a place like that. But I'm saying that's sort of just become the default for everybody in America. And Calvin spoke to these issues. And here we are, you know, 500 years after Calvin's birth and the Protestant Reformation, the seeds of family reformation are rolling on. And families are rediscovering what the Bible says about manhood, about womanhood, about marriage, about family worship.

You know, look, in the 20th century, almost no Christian fathers ever had family worship. Do you realize that? You know, almost all of you are having family worship all the time that didn't happen in the 20th century and you know recognition of the blessing of children modesty the attorney of hearts toward their fathers and their parents. These are the kinds of things that are really rising, even in our time. Okay, third question.

What was the inside story? Well, there really was a dark underbelly of the family life in Calvin's Geneva and Calvin was exposing the dark underbelly of that of family life that were really fomented by the religious systems of the 15th and 16th centuries and like a brain surgeon you know Calvin went after it exegetically but as the church goes so goes the family But the church had become a house of inventions. The Roman Catholic Church had invented hundreds and hundreds of elements of church life that are totally unbiblical. They invented offices of the church. They invented all kinds of practices in the church.

The church was a house of inventions and the 16th century family also was a house of inventions And the basic functions of family life had been conformed to the cultural norms that were really established by the Roman Catholic Church. Just extra biblical religious principles worked their way into the philosophy of the way that family life was handled. Here's some illustrations. Was handled. Here's some illustrations.

25% of the population of Reformation Europe had taken vows of celibacy, contradicting the entire doctrine of marriage. There was a utilitarian philosophy of marriage that made marriage sort of a transaction rather than an act of love. There were destructive premarital practices that were endorsed by the church that compromised the younger generation. Women were deprived of marriage and motherhood, and they were isolated in these sterile institutions called convents. Family free, child free, a kind of a life.

Fathers neglected their family shepherding responsibilities, it all fell on the church. The Church discipline was absent in the Reformation Church, and even adulterous men and women were not confronted. Family life was on the rocks in Reformation Europe. Here's how Calvin talked about it, about the family life in Reformation Europe. It's filled with errors, lies, frauds, and iniquities.

Well that's pretty clear. That's exactly what it was. You know the cloistered life in the 16th century turned really a blind eye to the immorality among the priests and also the women in the convents. Martin Luther tells a story that where they drained a lake next to a convent, and at the bottom of the lake they found 5, 000 baby skulls. Immorality was rampant.

The hypocrisy of the Roman church was remarkable. Femininity and motherhood were stolen from women and they were put in the convents. What a tragedy it is to live a life like that. Marriage became a second class, less desirable choice, celibacy was honored. Courtship practices minimize the voice of parents in the getting married of their children and at the same time celibacy was honored.

You know, children were being named after idols and saints. You know, due to the man-made inventions that flourished, they choked out family life. It was a bad time for marriage, actually. Well, as the church goes, so goes the family. If the church is a house of inventions, the family will likely become a house of inventions as well.

When the church departs from scripture, the family is not far behind. When the family departs from scripture, the culture is not far behind. These three spheres of society, the church, the family, and the state, all became houses of inventions during Reformation Europe, and chaos reigned, just like it does today. You know, you had so many remarkable, beautiful pictures of manhood and womanhood. You know, how about Martin and Katie Luther?

You've got to study Katie Luther. You know, I can't help it when we have a father-daughter treat. I always want to give a message on Katie Luther. She was so inspiring. You know, What an industrious, wonderful helper to her husband.

She was a mighty woman. So there was just, well okay, Calvin and Luther's family and their marriages, they really altered family, life, and marriage in Reformation Europe. It was their families. What was happening in their obedience to Scripture came out in their life, and then it was emulated all throughout the culture. And that's what your family is designed to do as well.

Your family is designed to shake up the culture. Okay, fourth, what were the culture clashes? What were the culture clashes? Well, it was thunder and lightning. You know how thunder blasts and lightning flashes, isn't it glorious?

When warm air collides with cold air, that's exactly what happened. There was thunder and lightning, and they just exploded across the Geneva landscape. These were just seismic culture quakes. You know, so many of you of us have had those same earthquakes in our lives where God has just shaken us up, completely turned us in a different direction. That was a blessing if it's guided by scripture.

But when you reform your family, it's always an offense. It was an offense in Geneva and it's an offense today. If you desire to live godly in Christ Jesus, you'll be persecuted because of the counter-cultural lifestyle that you're living and you'll stick out like a sore thumb because people notice and they think you're judging them, you're actually just trying to fix your own life. And people are very offended when you reform the family because it makes them feel guilty. You shouldn't be running around trying to make people Feel guilty, but you should reform your family life regardless of what it makes people think and feel But the battle the battles raged You know every culture has defining issues that need to be addressed by the Word of God And let me say it this way.

Spiritual warfare always has its earthly battlegrounds. Spiritual warfare has family battlegrounds, it has political battlegrounds, it has work battlegrounds, lines are drawn all over the place. And the spirit of the age will always be working its way into our assemblies and it will always try to keep pushing its way into this assembly. That's just a reality of spiritual warfare. Now one of the most remarkable and the most tumultuous issues of this family Reformation was over womanhood.

Womanhood was the signature battleground during that family Reformation and it was it was really a struggle to reestablish the roles of women in the church and in the home and in the state. And the state battles were vicious, as they were in all the other jurisdictions. But one of the battle lines was the conflict over women and civil authority. You know, you had Bloody Mary and you had Queen Elizabeth who were breathing fire down on the Church of Jesus Christ. And John Knox wrote his famous first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women.

And he was talking about women in civil leadership. And he says it like this, to promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation or city, is repugnant to nature and contumely to God, a most contrarius to his revealed will and approved ordinance, the first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women. It sounds kind of like Isaiah chapter three, where the women are taking over. It's interesting. In our world, we're experiencing a tremendous rise in female authority and leadership.

Last year, Mexico elected its first female president. Last month Japan did the same thing, very first. So get this. In the 1950s, Worldwide, how many elected presidents or prime ministers in 1950? Zero.

In the 60s, three. In the 70s, five. In the 80s, nine. In the last decade, 63. This is a feminist revolution, and it's worldwide.

But in the Bible, the Bible makes it very clear that women are not civil rulers, only men. If you read what the Bible says about women in civil authority, It only talks about men, never women. And it's the same thing with elders. Like there's no command in the Bible that says, only men can be elders, but whenever elders are talked about, it's men, and it's the same way in the Old Testament except in the Old Testament it's more explicit. The Old Testament says choose men over and over again and it kind of you know we've lived in feminist brine you know for an awful long time if you went to if you went to an American University You became a feminist, you know, all of us all of us who went to American universities You got a lot of feminist blood still in our system.

We're trying to work it out But this was the the great era era of complementarianism They they what was what was really powerful and helpful about the complementarian movement about 40 years ago at John Piper and Wayne Grudem is that they said what nobody was willing to say at that time, and it was revolutionary, Men are the heads of their households, and their wives should submit to them. And elders are men, and they have authority in the church. Those are the two things that the Complementarian Movement advocated. But they did not want to speak about the civil government. And I think that it was so disruptive, I think that they felt it was so disruptive they couldn't say it.

But it really is against biblical order for women to be CEOs and heads of state and civil leaders and even teachers of men. So this is what Knox and Calvin were arguing against. And in many ways, feminism, it's a Rejection of the fall because in the fall what God says is that The woman will want to rule over the man But the way it ought to be is he shall rule over you Genesis 3 16 It's a rejection of the fall and the different roles of men and women. So Stephen Osment declares that the Reformation was the heyday of the patriarchal nuclear family. Praise the Lord.

We need to bring that back today. It's being brought back today. One of the other key battlegrounds was the convent. You know, the reformers were writing tracts, they were preaching sermons, and they found their way into the convents. In his lifetime Calvin wrote letters to as many as 20 nuns speaking to them about the virtues of marriage, trying to tell them, no, you need to get out of that convent and get married.

The problem is, you know, they made vows of celibacy and their parents would rather have them in the convent than, you know, in their homes raising kids. And Luther's writings found their way into the hands of nuns. One time 11 of them were writing to Luther explaining their plight. And so he pulled together a businessman, a local merchant. He was a herring, He delivered smoked herring to the convent and He showed up one night with a bunch of empty barrels and eleven women jumped in and they escaped and one of them became Martin Luther's Wife.

Well, that's a long story It's a funny story The other defining issue was marriage a sparks flew as many areas of the Roman Catholic doctrine on marriage were overthrown by the reformers. For example, Calvin contradicted the Roman Catholic view of marriage. And he fought tenaciously against many of the unbiblical ideas about marriage. For example, The Roman Catholic doctrine of marriage prioritized the purpose for marriage in these three ways. Number one, the number one purpose is procreation, number two preservation of immorality from immorality, and number three companionship.

That was the Roman Catholic doctrine. The reformers turned it on its head and they said no, no, no, no, no. The first purpose of marriage is companionship. In other words, it's love, it's collaboration, It's loving one another, that's the first thing. You know, husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church.

That's what marriage was made for. It was for the manifestation of the love of Jesus Christ. So the performers said no, it's companionship, then preservation from our morality, and then procreation. Why did they do that? Because the Bible really makes it clear what marriage is all about.

It really is actually all about love. It's not just a transaction that you make. It's something that has something wonderful at its core, and it is its love. Another defining issue was fatherhood. Okay, here's a reality, and many of you have experienced this.

Cultural collapse begins when fathers stop catechizing their children and reading their Bibles. That's when cultural collapse starts, is when the Bible leaves the home. Every culture war in many ways is a fatherhood war in disguise. You wipe out fatherhood, if you wipe out biblical fatherhood, you wipe out everything. And that's why the devil is going after fathers and and and mothers, of course for sure Calvin believed that fathers were responsible to teach their teach their children He wrote a catechism in 1538 and then he realized oh man, this is too complex for kids.

So he rewrites it and he writes a catechism for children so that fathers would teach their children in a question and answer format. Another defining issue is abstinence in marriage. This has to do with the intimacy of men and women, in husband and wife in marriage, he was challenging the status quo regarding sexuality. The Roman Catholic Doctor of Marriage argued that sexual intimacy in marriage is actually sinful, in marriage. And they established 260 days of abstinence per year.

If you were a godly Roman Catholic, you were gonna be abstinent for 260 days out of the year. On Thursday in memory of Christ's arrest, on Friday in memory of his death, on Saturday in honor of the Virgin Mary, on Sunday in honor of the resurrection, and on Monday in commemoration of the departed. Now does the Bible say that? Thankfully no. Premarital Relationships were reformed in Calvin's Geneva.

What role should parents play in the marriages of their children because the Roman Catholic Church says your parents don't really matter what really matters is the church and And we and we want you to become celibate You know what kind of authority should children be comfortable with? Choosing a marriage partner, the reformer spoke about it. I wrote a little booklet called Calvin's Pre-Marital Counsel, something like that. And I collected up his pre-marital counsel, the kind of stuff he said to his church during his expositions on counseling young people for when the time comes when they're they're gonna get married He regularly deals with matters of courtship, engagement, and marriage. He believed that the Bible should reform everything.

You know, the Reformers really believed that the family was a foundation of society. Calvin said it like this, the family is a means of grace and vengeance across the generations. And your family is either gonna be a means of grace or it's gonna be a means of vengeance toward the rising generations. And everybody else who looks out in your family. The next one, what happened to the family doctrine of the reformers after the Reformation?

Well, what happened was the Puritans picked up the foundation that the reformers laid down and they really expanded on it. I mean, the Puritan era was an era of massive publishing on family life. And I've republished some of these works. William Goosje's Domestical Duties, it became the most popular, well-used family doctrine book for 200 years. Richard Baxter, his Christian directory on marriage, on child rearing and household spirituality.

In a few months, we're gonna republish some of his work on that. Cotton Mather, he writes a great track called The Well-Ordered Family. You have George Whitefield and others. In other words, there was a tremendous Reformation, actually building on the Reformation during the Puritan era, and they wrote lots of books about it. And you got guys like Joel Beeke and Banner of Truth that have been publishing these books as well.

Is there a family reformation in motion today? My answer to that is there is a generation rising and What you what we're seeing is Really a fulfillment of Isaiah 58 Those from among you shall build the old waste places You shall raise up the foundations of many generations and you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in." This is what happens when a person really genuinely begins to worship God. They begin to restore everything, everything in their way. You know, the family and the church have been out of order for a long time. And the bills are coming due with a torrent all over our nation.

We've got generations of families and churches that have been forged in the tears of really ignoring the commandments of God for church life and family life. But there's a new generation rising right now out of the ashes of the 20th century, a time when pragmatism weakened the church and it weakened the family. You know I think God began to really stir hearts about 25 years ago. And things are different in the 21st century than they were in the 20th. They really are, I've been in both centuries.

And fathers about 25 years ago in mass turned their hearts toward their children. Like I said, it was almost impossible to find a family that had family worship in the 20th century. And I've told this story before, I'm sure here, but I remember in 2020 I mean 2002. I was at a conference. There are 700 men in that conference.

It was the first NCFIC conference that we did in St. Louis. There's 700 men in that room. I was preaching on fatherhood, and I said, how many of you ever had your father read the Bible to you? And I stopped and I said, I mean how many ever, ever?

And about in that ocean of men, probably 10 or 20 hands went up. If I did that today, there'd be a lot of hands going up all over the country. And you know, mothers began to embrace that calling of home life. And churches began to discover the beauty and the integrity of biblical manhood and womanhood. And families all across the world really started thriving by the word of God and many have broken free.

You know, you all have broken free from so many of the change of the 20th century. It was parched ground and you have a revival of biblical fatherhood, a resurgence of large families, a rejection of feminism, a recognition of modest dress, early manhood, generational retention, books on family life are flying off the shelves. Of course, a lot of this, I think, arises out of a resurgence of expository preaching and the clarification of the gospel and really doctrinal awareness. Instead of, you know, preachers going around, you know, preaching fancy sermons that just entertain the goats, they're actually preaching doctrine. They're preaching what the Bible says about things.

And there is persecution as well. There are many young pastors leading the charge for the restoration of family life, biblical manhood and womanhood, and the primacy of the home. You just look around and see the number of churches that are turning to historic doctrine and the confessions of the faith. You just look around at the large numbers of parents who are leading family worship. Look around at the fathers who jettisoned the old model of outsourcing all the education of their children.

Look at the rising number of churches that embrace children in corporate worship. You know, I just came, Debra and I were in Idaho, and we were preaching to some churches out there. The two that gathered together and really invited us, these are family integrated churches, and guess who's pastoring them? Guys in their 30s. I have never seen so many pastors in their 30s and 40s starting or revitalizing churches to a family integrated model, never.

Look at all the children in worship services in America today. It wasn't that way in the 20th century. You know, look at the new generation and they want to have children. They really do. They really want to have children.

And it breaks their heart if they can't that's a change look at the young people who ditched the corruptions of the old dating culture you know that ever that everybody participated in in the 20th century. And they're actually trying to let scripture teach them how to do this instead of just do what everybody else is doing. These are all signs of revival. So if you're looking for signs of revival, I think you can see the signs in the quiet places, in the homes, in the little churches, and they're embracing biblical truth. Not just about family life, but about Scripture and and about salvation and everything.

You know, when Scripture is the sole authority and when repentance is the driver of all of that change. And salvation is by grace alone. Something is gonna happen. And he will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with a curse. I praise God for what's happening today.

I have a lot of hope for the future, I really do. Because it's young pastors and young families who are kicking to the curb the old worldly outmoded ways of family life. And you know, I've had it, you know, I've been watching this for 25 years. And I, I'm so encouraged by what has happened with those families that really turned to the Word of God. It changed everything and now you have all these grandchildren running around you know and and and their kids actually have embraced the truth of scripture about their family as counter-cultural as it is.

So I praise God for you because I know that's been in your heart for a long time. And I know it's happening. And I know it's happening all the time in this church You know, I couldn't be more encouraged today than ever Would you pray with me? Lord Lord, we thank you for the power of your word. We thank you for what you do in this world as the scriptures are held up high as the only authority and that Jesus Christ is the only Savior and that your word is the only rule of life.

Lord, may this tribe increase. Amen.