Transcript

Take your Bibles and go to Deuteronomy chapter 6. Deuteronomy chapter 6 as we will attempt to give us some biblical moorings for the concept of home-life discipleship. I uh used the phrase home-life discipleship. At one time I would just say family discipleship, but people would think I’m talking about the church family, and obviously that’s very essential and important, but what I’m talking about is your home and what does home-life discipleship look like as an extension of your belonging and faithfulness and service to God in your local church because it needs to be real at home because there’s a reciprocal thing there where if it’s real at home and real at church, powerful. And so the spoke you see there at the very bottom of our wheel, the wheel is our attempt to kind of lay out the uh functions, if you will, ecclesiology of a of a healthy, biblically uh true church. Preaching the word is the core, has to be, drives everything. If you go to a new church, preach the word and trust God to begin to identify competent leadership, it may not be the existing leadership that God will raise up men who can meet with you and you get to share the vision of where you’re going, and then if you can develop faithful local church- centered missions, sometimes we call it personalized procedure world missions, every member ministry through small groups and home-life discipleship. And by the way, if you do those four things well, call it five, if you include competent leadership, preach the word, competent leadership, home-life discipleship, local church-centered missions, every member ministry through small group, if you do that well, you ain’t got time for anything else. I have people like, “Well, do you think we could do this and think we could do that?” I say, it’s not wrong. A lot of things we can do, they’re not wrong, but I think in the balance of biblical truth, do this well first. When you get that done, call me because I’m on year 44 and we’re still working on it.

Okay, so anyway, and then obviously as I’ll I’ll speak on in the morning, all is vain unless the Spirit of the Holy One come down. You can dot every i, you can cross every t, you can have the most academically excellent exegesis in the world, the Spirit of God must be on it if God’s gonna use it and bless it. And quite honestly, and I’ll say this again tomorrow, I I’m a student of the Spirit of God. I I haven’t learned it all. I’m still learning and repenting, and there’s a mystery to the Spirit’s power, is it not? I do feel like one of one of the black preachers I heard one time, and they asked him about, how do you know what it is to preach in the unction of the Spirit? He said, “I’m not sure what it is, but I know when it ain’t.” Well, I think if you’re a pastor very long, you can look at your church and you can tell God did this or is this just man’s doings here? Should it not be true that it’s in the day you can’t explain our churches by man’s ability. So the Spirit’s got to be there and then if all that’s flowing, God glorifying local church, a church God uses a pattern for others.

Okay, we’re talking about um home-life discipleship and we’ve got to get going. Deuteronomy chapter 6, verses 2 through 9. Moses speaking says,

1 “Now this is the commandment, the statutes and the judgments which the LORD your God has commanded me to teach you, that you might do them in the land where you are going over to possess it, 2 so that you and your son and your grandson might fear the LORD your God, to keep all His statutes and His commandments which I command you, all the days of your life, and that your days may be prolonged. 3 O Israel, you should listen and be careful to do it, that it may be well with you and that you may multiply greatly, just as the LORD, the God of your fathers, has promised you, in a land flowing with milk and honey. 4 Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one! 5 You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 6 These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart.

Now here we take it home,

7 “You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. 8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

So here God is basically saying through Moses, God has made you his people. God is big on having a people. He even tells the nation of Israel, “If you’ll walk in God’s statutes and commandments that I’m giving you, you’ll multiply and be a a great nation. I’m giving you a homeland and you’re My people.” You know, redemptive history demonstrates that God’s purposes are not limited to individuals. God’s intent, God’s design from the beginning was to form for himself a people. We start in Genesis 1:28, “Adam and Eve multiply and fill the earth. I want a people.” Abraham, Genesis 12:1 through 3, “Abraham, leave your land, lead your people, leave all you know, go to a place that I’m going to show you and I will multiply you greatly because Abraham, it’s more than just you, I want a people.” Ephesians 3:21, “To Him be glory in the church.” Not just the individual Christian, as important as as it is and precious as it is to know that he loves us, died for us, that God wants a people.

Now, Moses says to them in verse 1, “I’ve been given from God these commandments, these statutes and judgments.” Then verse 2, “You’re to fear the LORD and keep these all the way multiplying down to your sons and your sons’ sons.” And then there’s some blessing, “Your days will be prolonged and you’re gonna greatly multiply on the earth,” and God is saying, “and I’ll have Me a people.” God’s big on having a people. Well, the point that Moses is making is is, “I’m giving you the truth the other nations do not have. And Israel, you’ll be distinct from the other nations. You will stand out from them. You will have superior lives. You will experience superior blessings. You will experience the the family of God as such that the other nations do not have. You will learn of and know the one true God, the one who is a Trinity, and yet He is a singular God.” So, God’s telling Moses, Moses is telling the people, “Here’s God’s plan. He’s forming for Himself a people that you might be different and unique and obviously bring glory and honor and praise to His name.”

Now, back to our thoughts. I. Home-life discipleship, to know him truly and to love him truly. That’s the key. The key to home-life discipleship is to know him truly and to love him truly. First of all, let’s talk about knowing him truly. We see down in verse 4 where he says, ” Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one!” So we have this cornerstone theological statement here that their God is different from the gods of the polytheistic nations. He is one. Now these gods of the nations around Israel were unethical, they were ever changing, where Yahweh, Israel’s God, was true and holy and never changed. His law, his truth, transcended the corrupt base laws of the so-called gods of the nations. We also note here that it’s evident that God created man, not just with the capacity to worship, but with the need to worship. It’s just understood, men need to worship. Today in our pagan culture, we live in men are worshiping all kinds of false doctrines and false gods, but it’s always been that way. They might not call them gods, but that’s what they’re doing.

So Israel, the elect people of God, were chosen in sovereign grace to receive the truth about the one true God and to worship him according to truth, that is, according to his law. Then he gives what’s called the Shema, verse 4 again, that theological doctorate statement may be a foundational statement of all the doctrine he’ll give them, “Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one!” Again noting the contrast to polytheism, our Triune God, three personalities if you will, but only one God who’s never in contradiction, who forms or rather dwells in the highest of unity and he is wholly in contrast, not holy, w-h-o-l-l-y, wholly in contrast to the gods of the people. The gods of the nations, they worship many gods. These false gods of polytheism often contradicted one another. Their gods were corrupt and immoral and and unethical and lustful and jealous and vindictive and capricious. They were always changing their mind.

Pam and I got to go to Greece a while back. It really impacted our lives in wonderful ways as we followed the footsteps of Paul. And and as those guides would tell us about the the gods who were worshiped in in ancient Greece, it was like, my goodness, those are some bad gods. Just the awful stuff they would do and and teach. Of course, obviously the gods did nothing. They were dumb idols, but it was the teaching about their gods. And so you have all of that insecurity. I mean, you picked you out a god and uh two things. Number one, since you picked this god, that god might now be mad at you. And the god you pick could change his mind and decide what he liked in you today, he doesn’t like tomorrow. It was a woeful, difficult, insecure lifestyle they lived. And so Moses is in effect by giving us this statement, “The LORD your God, He is one LORD,” he’s saying “Israel, you’re radically different. The God you serve is never changing. The God you serve is holy and righteous, moral and ethical.”

So he lifts Israel out of this woeful insecurity that they could trust and rely in him. Here’s what I want you to get out of this, how important it is to know God according to his word. Our subjective feelings about God just do not matter. We don’t function on emotionalism or sentimentalities when it comes to our God. So Moses out of the gate said, “You’re gonna be God’s people, now let’s get God right.” And brothers, today, paralleling over to us, there is no replacement for week after week, verse by verse, chapter by chapter, Spirit-empowered expositional preaching to teach your people about who God is so that the Spirit of God might then begin to help them love not their subjective conclusions about God, but the objective truth about God. And that’s where Moses is coming from, know him truly.

And then that leads to, as I’ve been saying, love him truly because in all reality, if you’re born of the Spirit and you’re learning of the one true God from your pastor, Moses is the prophet/pastor here, if you know him truly, you’ll begin to love him truly because Yahweh is different in every way. Yahweh desires obedience, not out of woeful fear or some selfish desire to receive a blessing from him, he wants us to love him. Um, verse 5 of our text, “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”

This one true God, he desires to be loved for who he is because again, to truly know him is to begin to truly love him, and I use the phrase in the present tense, “to begin to,” is because we never get through growing in our love for him. Now the seed is there, the germ is there the moment you’re converted, but you grow in it and it should be that every week your pastor preaches, you go home and think, “Oh my goodness, I love this God more. I treasure Him more. I joy in Him more.”

God, by the way, he’s big on having a people, but God’s really big on being loved. He repeats this same command that we see in Deuteronomy 6:5 10 more times just in the book of Deuteronomy. You see it in chapter 7, 10, 11, 13, 19, and in 30. And then we go to our New Testament. You know, the New Testament perfects the Old, it completes the Old, it brings to maturation the elementary principles of the Old. So we get to the Lord Jesus in his earthly ministry and in Matthew and Mark and Luke, he quotes this verse, “Love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your might.” Matthew 22:36 through 8 through 38, “‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?’ And He said to them, ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind,” a little different, but basically the same quotation. “This is the great and foremost commandment.”

Now, first it starts with “all of your heart.” That means no half-hearted love. He’s not one of our many loves. He’s not just one of our top loves. He’s our one and true only love. No other comes close. If any other competes with him as our one and only true love, it is to be quickly apprehended and slain on the altar of our hearts. Then he says, “all your soul.” That’s the the center of the personality. Speaking of love permeating the entire self- consciousness. Then “all of our strength.” That’s obedience to him in the totality of our lives. So treasuring him and adoring him for the God that he truly is and loving him from our core being and in our whole being is the key to fathers in home-life discipleship. You didn’t lose me there, did you? Knowing him truly, fathers, and loving him truly is the key to it being real at home. Your children don’t need you to parrot something you read. They need you to hear something from your heart, something that happened when the pastor preached that Sunday. I’m going to talk more about that in a moment. If I can get ahead of myself here. No, I’m not going to get ahead of myself here.

Well, knowing him truly, loving him wholly, the Jews on the whole missed it. Instead of treasuring God for who he is and loving him from the heart, they reduced religion down to external laws and external observances. They would claim to honor God’s law down to the jot and the tittle, yet the motive far too often wasn’t love for God, but just love for self. Religion became to them a system by which they exalted themselves in the eye of their fellow men, and tried to extort extort God into blessing them. In Matthew 6:5, Jesus rebuked Israel’s leaders because they “observed the law in order to be seen by men.” And then, again, used their obedience, their “obedience,” to extort God into blessing them. They had reduced Yahweh worship down into the same type of sinful superstition that they came out of. Just kind of changed the names.

Matthew 23:23 through 28, Jesus speaks, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others. You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel! Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean,” notice, “the outside of the cup,” externals, “and of the dish, but inside,” where your heart is, instead of loving me, you’re “full of robbery and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup,” that’s what Moses is saying, love God with your whole heart first, clean the inside of the cup, “so that the outside of it may become clean also. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. So you, too, outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”

So again, everything became an outward external put-on instead of an internal transformation. That’s why it was so radical when Jesus looks at Nicodemus and said, “Nicodemus, you gotta be born again. There’s gotta be a transformation inside of you, Nicodemus.” And Nicodemus couldn’t figure that out. By the way, I’ve never figured it out, but I know I’ve had it. It’s not the external application of, “Don’t do this and do do that.” Instead, it’s an internal transformation. Not the external application, an internal transformation. That’s the key to home-life discipleship. Daddy’s heart’s been changed and he brings that heart home from church because the love of God that God commands requires the divine transformation of the inner man. After we are born again, then we can begin to grow in this love for God because as 2 Corinthians 5:17 reminds us, we’re a new creation. Then we begin to live out the new creation that Christ has made us.

Matthew Henry said we are to love him in our desire for him, with a delight in him, with a dependence upon him, and sorry, entire devotion to him. Matthew Henry continues and says we’re to love him intellectually, not sentimentally. We’re to love him sincerely, not in word only. We’re to love him strongly. We should never refer to anything as having our heart alone, because God alone should have our heart. We’re to love him superlatively above any other, and we’re to love him entirely, the whole of our affections and energies must run toward him.

So as fathers are thinking about making it real at home and discipling their children at home, that always includes the wife, of course, he needs to have those moments regularly in the pew under the pastor’s preaching where he raises his heart toward heaven and says, “Oh my God, I love You and I wished I loved You more.” That’s the key. That’s the key. And if I might just say at this point, there’s been a whole lot taught in the last couple of decades or so about the structures, the systems, the way you do family worship, the way you do a family altar, etc. etc. etc., some of that’s good stuff, but it just doesn’t matter if you don’t love God. Matter of fact, you can get all the structure wrong, but love God and you’re better at home-life discipleship than the guy who’s got all the structure right, but his heart’s not right. That’s why Moses starts there.

So when we think about loving God with all of our being, with all of our heart, he’s our one and only, do any of us do this? No, but thank God there’s a seed in there of it. There’s a hope in there and hopefully there’s an oncoming crop coming out of that seed of true love for our God, the key to home-life discipleship. I sometimes use this phrase, I hope you don’t think it’s trite, but what we have to do is cultivate a continual crush on God.

I had two older sisters, and one of my older sisters had one boyfriend her whole life. She was mad about him. She had his pictures everywhere. She kept his cologne so she could smell it. She wore his shirts. The phone rang, she’d rush to the phone first. You know, she didn’t just have a crush, she cultivated the crush. See, God saved you and implanted to you a seed of love for God, and you’ve got to get under strong, faithful Bible preaching so you can continually cultivate a crush on God. That’s the key to bringing it home, and it being real at home.

Well, I’ve really got ahead of myself. II. The the flow the flow of home-life discipleship, bringing church home. Not creating a home church. There’s a difference between home church and a church that may meet in the home. Don’t want to be offensive to any of the brethren, but shall I say the difference is one’s biblical and one’s not. You’ve got a church. You don’t need two church homes. Just need one. But you need to bring the church home in this sense.

The Lord has commanded, Moses said, verse 1 of our text. I love this. Moses the prophet/pastor said, “Now the Lord’s commanded me to teach these statutes, judgments, and commandments to you.” So it started with the man of God. It started with Israel’s preacher. He’s the overseer and the leader of the people. The people were expected to honor their pastor, Moses, to submit to him and to heed his teaching because it wasn’t his. He said, “I’ve got to teach you what He’s given me.” And we see a illustration of how they’re supposed to be under his authority in the illustration or the the narrative of of Korah. What is that, Numbers 16, where Korah, now listen to this, Korah was a man of renown who had 150 other men of renown who joined with him to stand up against Moses and said, “Well, you may be a man of God and you may teach some truth, but we know God too.” Just one problem with that, God didn’t ordain Korah or any of them to be the pastor of the nation and eventually God opens up the ground and swallows all of them up and probably, humanly speaking, they had more abilities than Moses. They were men of renown, probably great personalities, persuasive, charismatic, strong leaders, good good good uh good uh images before the people. But God said, “Moses is My pastor/prophet.”

Have you pastored very long? Well, you’ve met Korah. Yeah, you’ve met him and here’s the Korah is a master at pointing out your faults. And by the way, you have some. You know what happens when Korah rises up and he points out your faults and you feel like, “I’m failing too. I I might as well give the church over to Korah because he’s right.” No, here’s what you do, you go get in your prayer closet and said, “God, You called me to this and You knew what I was and I’ll repent of anything I can find to repent of. But unless You show me something different, I’m pastoring this church.” Chasing some rabbits. That’s pretty good rabbit chase.

Now, then he says, “Take these things that I’ve teaching you, because they’re not my teaching, they came from God, and you’re to teach them to your sons, diligent to your son, diligently to your sons,” verse 7. What he’s saying, “when you sit in the house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up.” Now, the parallel to this in the New Testament is beyond obvious, over and over and over and I’ll just blitz through this pretty quickly. Hebrews 13:17, “Obey your leaders and submit to them.” I looked that up in the Greek and “obey your leaders and submit to them” in the Greek means to obey your leaders and submit to them. Fathers, you’re not above your pastor when it comes to spiritual authority. You’re under your pastor, and these brothers were under Moses, and they’re to obey and submit to what the pastor is. Look, I have no authority, but this book has authority and if your pastor’s striving with a holy humility to preach boldly the truth of God’s word, then you obey him and you submit to him. You stay under that pastor and those elders.

1 Thessalonians 5:13, you regard them very highly in love because of their work, live in peace with one another. Pastors are fellow redeemed sinners like everyone else, yet in the purpose of God, their gifting, their calling in their office is essential for the well-being of the local church and the well-being of the homes of the believers in the local church. Home-life discipleship begins with and is largely, if not essentially, dependent upon belonging to and exercising faithfulness to a local church where there’s a faithful preaching pastor. Go to your New Testament.

Follow the chronology of the progressive revelation of the New Testament, you find no other system for God’s work on earth but churches, local churches. It’s not there. That’s why sometimes people contact us about missions, and and they’re good folks, and they don’t mean anything wrong, but they wanna do puppets for Jesus or basketball for Jesus.

We don’t think that’s all wrong, but but we just do one thing, send out preachers, plant churches, and revitalize churches. That’s all we do. That’s all Paul did. When we get through doing that, well, we’ll go to something else, I guess.

Colossians 1:25, “I was made a minister of this church according to the commission granted me, or granted God granted to me for your benefit.” Same thing Moses is saying.

Ephesians 4:11-14, “He gave some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists, some as pastor teachers, for the equipping of the saints, for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ.” It’s all for us, and then we take it home.

1 Thessalonians 5:12-13, “But we ask of you, brothers, to recognize those who diligently labor among you and are in leadership over you in the Lord and give you instruction that you regard them very highly in love because of their work.”

So back to verse 1 of our text, Moses, “The statutes, the judgments, the commandments, they’ve been given to me to teach you.” So like in the local church, Pastor Moses must exclusively teach the people that which he received from God. In Galatians 1:1, Paul says, “I was not sent from men nor through the agency of man.” 1 Thessalonians 2:13, “When you received the word of God, you received it from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God.” That’s what Moses is saying, “God gave me this to give to you.” Preach the word, 2 Timothy 4:2.

So Moses teaches these fathers, the flow is then the fathers take it home and teach it to the children and the children’s children. So today, I believe the parallel holds that if the local church, the pastor teaches the fathers, then they take it home and teach it to their children’s children. That’s the flow. It starts at the church and flows to the home. I call this church-integrated families. You with me? You’re not mad at me, are you? I don’t want to mess up anybody’s idols this morning. Don’t want to burst any pride bubbles this morning. That’s the flow.

III. I’ve only got three. The features of home-life discipleship. When you when you study the Scriptures, and you may find, if you find please help me if you find concrete repetitive, clear instructions on what it’s supposed to look like in the home, if you find that, let me know because I can’t find it. So the features are the prominent characteristics of what your home-life discipleship or your family altar or your family worship, if you have that. The the specifics of what that’s supposed to look like, I don’t know. That’s what’s so obvious about the features of home-life discipleship is we don’t know really what they’re supposed to look like. There’s just not enough text on it. You know what that means? Grace. Liberty. We don’t, praise God, we don’t judge any other on this stuff. You know, we don’t judge the system of one brother over another brother on these things. I’ll tell you what you might judge though, you learn something being in the same same place for 43, 44 years. You get to watch a few batches of kids get raised. You begin to learn. There’s exceptions, of course, some godly parents have bad kids. We know that. Generally speaking, you begin to learn what kind of things seem to push kids into Phariseeism and and rebellion and what kind of things seem to help children love and joy in Christ. And I’m going to tell you something, our systems do not convert our children. The gospel converts our children.

So we get to verses 7 through 9 of our text and once again, you teach them diligently to your sons and talk with them when you sit in the house, when you walk, by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up, you take this, most of you take this home and repeat it again. So in this text and in the New Testament, I find no formal structures. For example, what days of the week do we have a family worship? What times of the day? Is there a particular kind of setting we’re to set up? Are are we to pray so much or sing so much or read so much of the Bible or teach so much or recite verses or memorize together? In fact, there’s just a lack, it seems a very intentional lack of structural formality when it comes to home-life discipleship because home-life discipleship is to be real at home and that is to permeate the totality of home-life. That’s why I use the phrase informal and incarnational here. It seems that’s the point of Moses and that’s the point of the New Testament by being quite silent here. Take it home and just be real in your home.

When you when you sit, when you walk, when you lie down, when you rise up, make it real. If it’s in our hearts and it’s real in our minds, then it will be real in our homes, and then God’s truth naturally comes out of us and through us one to another in the home. That’s the beautiful picture of Christianity as we take it home. You know how absurd it would be to take Moses’ statement here and make some sort of legalistic chore out of it. Okay, when we sit down at the house, at least one person’s gotta quote a verse of Scripture. When we walk by the way, at least one person’s gotta sing a song. When we lie down, well, well somebody’s got a quote of catechism. You know, it could be just absurd. But there’s some folks who do stuff like that. That’s not what he’s saying at all, of course. How absurd that would be. This is a figure of speech to emphasize an earnest pattern of being real at home because we sit under our pastor and our hearts were affected and we love God and we want it spilling over when we get home.

Now, I don’t have time to maybe develop out what’s in my text here, but when we get to to these this text, verses 8 and 9, where he says, “I want you to um bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontals on your forehead, and you shall write them on the doorpost of your house and on your gate.” I I agree with the scholars that say that this is a a figure of speech, it’s a metaphor, if you will, because they’d come out of Egyptian bondage, and the Egyptians in their superstitions would put uh uh uh amulets or or jewelry on their head and on their arm that have some sort of a mantra or incantation in it that would guard them from danger and and from the other gods, or or invoke the blessing of their gods. I think what Moses is saying here, if your Egyptian uh uh overlords were so devoted to the error of their superstitious religion, how much more should we, elect Israel, be devoted to the truth and the true law our God has given us. And then he talks about, write them on your doors. How does he word that there, bind them as a sign on your hand. Uh, verse 9, you should write them on your doorposts of your house and on your gates. Again, in ancient Israel and still to this day in Islamic Egypt, they write Scriptures and again, incantations if they’re not Muslims on the door to ward off evil spirits. He’s just saying, fill your house with God’s truth. Fill your house with God’s truth. That’s my position.

Yahweh’s law and Yahweh’s law alone can transform the heart and the life of the fathers and the children and the children’s children. So again, there’s nothing specific about how you structure it when you have it, what are the components of it, it’s just not there. I know our Puritan fathers really pushed family altars and family worship. I know Spurgeon did, uh and there’s nothing wrong with that if that works for you, but do not make it legalistic and formal. Make it more incarnational and real out of our hearts.

I I’ll never forget it. I think God sends us things like this. Pretty early in my pastorate, a young man came to me and they were good folks, good folks. And he was telling me about their family worship time and he wasn’t being negative, but he said, you know, really, we just all sit there and look at our watch and wait till the 20 minutes is up. Then we’re going back to being the people we were. When that young man was in his young twenties, we dismissed him for public drunkenness because unfortunately, it was a fair sake, legalistic structure and not loving God from your heart and just sloshing over as you rise up and as you walk along the way, as you go to bed at night. Brothers and sisters, our rules will not convert our children’s hearts. Now you gotta have some, don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with having a family worship. If that works for you, fine but I’m just saying scripturally, we’re not pinned down to any particular formal structure.

Applications, and we’re done. Applications. Prioritize discussions of Sunday’s sermon. Just throw out a statistic. Make 70% of any effort of discussing truth in the home an overflow, an extension of last Sunday’s sermon from the pastor. Why do we make this hard? Why do we make this hard? Is that not exactly what Moses said? “I’m going to teach you.” Now, you don’t go buy So-and-so’s book and do something different when you get home. I’m going to teach you the word of God, then you take the word of God home, and then you teach it to your children. So so for your family’s spiritual, your home- life discipleship, spiritual time, whatever you want to call it, family time, whatever, strive to prioritize speaking on, encouraging one another about what the pastor preached last Sunday. We just don’t need to make this hard.

First of all, this is gonna give children a high view of the preaching of the word. The preaching service at our church is not a mindless sacrament you just go through. It’s for our spiritual gain. We listen, we learn, we repent, we make application to our lives, and then we’d go home and we use these things for insights for home-life discipleship during the week. That is, during the week as we sit, as we walk by the way, as we lie down, if we rise up, we talk about the truths of last Sunday’s sermon and how that applies to our home and our life. You know, for example, a humble father that comes home willing to acknowledge that he had to repent during the sermon or maybe receive some reproof during the sermon to change his thinking, this demonstrates to his family that they are all under the authority of God’s word and all under the authority of God’s pastor who brings the word to them. In fact, if fathers are not honoring the pastor’s authority, then it’s likely the children will not honor the father’s authority.

Uh Brother Tim, y’all y’all put up the rest of my outline if you can up there on the screen.

So number one is prioritize Sunday’s sermon as your home-life discipleship, exhortations, discussions. And dads, humble yourself. If it happened to your family, tell them. “I mean, the pastor preached this morning and I had to repent of this thought. I was thinking wrong here. Helped me.” One of the most devastating schemes of Satan is to breed contempt and criticism on the pulpit ministry of the local church. I would beg you, I would beg you, maybe you have a poor pastor, I don’t think so, but maybe you do, I don’t know. Do not bring criticism of that pulpit before your children. Your children are dependent upon the ministry of the word of God for everything. You may be right in a way, but you’re doing so much damage to the heart and the psyche of that child.

Um preaching the word is foundational for salvation. Romans 10:14, “How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? How shall they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher?” It’s God’s ordained means. He could have done it different ways, but that’s his ordained means.

Preaching the word is foundational for sanctification. 2 Timothy 3:16, “All Scripture is inspired by God and beneficial for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.” Whatever else that is, that’s sanctification.

And for our service, Ephesians 4:11 and 12, “He gives some as pastor teachers, for the equipping of the saints, for the work of the ministry, to the building up of the body of Christ.”

So when you’re critical about the man in the pulpit, Satan will make sure that child goes every Sunday for the next five years and says, “I don’t know if I need to hear him or not.” Thus goes their salvation, thus goes their sanctification, and thus goes their service down the drain. Do not embitter your child’s heart about the man preaching the word or the preaching of the word of God. God will do more through a struggling, weak, floundering, shallow preacher than he’ll do through your supposed righteousness. Now there’s a time, I get it, I understand, and my heart goes out to a lot of brothers, a lot of families who are stuck in places where they can’t found find a sound pulpit, but the principle of the preaching of the word never needs to be demeaned or cast doubt upon.

My father-in-law was such a good example. He was a simple man, but he was such a good example and it just it makes me emotional to think about him because he would sit right over here, and I’d get preaching sometimes, especially if I was preaching about the goodness of Christ for us sinners, and I would see him start to tear up. It was very common. We’d go to lunch, and he didn’t say a whole lot. He might put his head down, and he’ll say something like, “Boy, I needed that message today.” That’s home-life discipleship. That’s powerful. Now I was a grown man, I was his pastor at that time, but you take a little seven, eight year old boy whose daddy puts his head down and says, “Boy, I needed that correction the pastor gave us today.” You know what that little boy does? He says, “I want to be like my daddy and go to church and hear what God’s got to tell me.” Powerful. If you just get that right, you’re doing a good family altar. Are y’all with me folks? If you just get that right, you’re having a good family worship time. Brother John, I might go on for an hour or two once daddy starts? You never know. Mom, you join in too. You need to repent.

Now look, I’m not talking about sharing details and stuff. There’s a lot of things people don’t need to share, but they can share the principle of being humbled under the word and how it’s helping them. Pam told me one time years ago that they’d come home from church. I think she and Cindy were maybe junior high or something. And they were, the preacher had gotten pretty heavy on the sins of teenagers, I think. And my wife has always been a pure lady all of her life. But they didn’t really like that. They were kind of critical about the sermon. Her daddy Clifford spoke up and said, “We’re not doing that in our house. That’s a man of God.” That’s home-life discipleship. That’s a good family altar right there. That’s what I mean by do it as it comes out and as it’s real like Moses taught.

So bring church home, keep it simple, don’t make it difficult. Let it be incarnational and not so formal or rigid. It might be no more than dad getting in the car and on the drive home saying, “Man, that truth today in the Scripture blessed my heart, that thrilled me.” And don’t worry if if Tommy and Susie in the back seat never join in. Don’t put them on, don’t bear down on them. They’re listening, they’re hearing it. And they’re saying, “Well, there must be something very, very special about the preaching of the word because my daddy respects it.” That’s the greatest gift you might could give your children to walk into the church, open their Bible and say, “This is important. This is the centerpiece of my life right here. Preach me the word of God.”

Now the New Testament, the only thing I can find that’s even close to an example of of a a family worship or something is uh Lois and Eunice, Timothy’s grandmother and mother and how Paul commended them for their study of the word in the home. But actually they raised Timothy outside of a local church because the local churches hadn’t been established. The local church wouldn’t establish in Iconium in Lystra, their their hometown area, until Paul came through and Timothy was already grown. So that’s not a real pattern but it does teach us the same truth Moses was talking, make the word of God real in your home and had a huge impact on Timothy and helped make him the man of God that he was.

If you feel led to have a more structured thing than what I’m suggesting, notice I’m using the word suggesting, not commanding, but what I’m suggesting, there are good ideas out there. You can use catechisms or times of reading the Scripture, singing together, memorizing Scripture, going over the Sunday sermon or the small group lesson that week, but I would just charge you afresh, be flexible, change it up, don’t let it become a legalism. Here’s a thought, you know, your local church properly provides formal structured times for teaching. I don’t know that a kid needs five or seven more of those during the week. What he needs is the incarnational reality of what the teaching at church did in our hearts as you sit, and as you walk by the way, and as you lie down, as you rise up. Let it slosh over. What they do need is a real and genuine pattern of the word being revered and brought to to bear on everyday home-life.

So concerning home-life discipleship, what I’m suggesting, based on the balance of biblical text, is understand the key. Fathers must truly know him and truly love him. Nothing matters if that’s not true. The flow, bring it from Moses down to the home. Bring it from the pastor’s sermon down to the home. The features, I think it’s wisest and best to keep it informal and incarnational. Make it real at home.