This sermon emphasizes the importance of fathers turning their hearts to their children as part of God's plan for societal transformation. It highlights the foundational role of godly families in building strong churches and communities. The speaker challenges families to live out a godly example, teaching children to love, respect, and obey their parents. The sermon stresses the need for families to have a clear mission statement aligned with God's purposes and to prioritize teaching children the Word of God daily through family worship. It calls for a return to biblical principles in parenting and education, equipping children with a solid biblical worldview to navigate the challenges of the world.

In this session, I want to try to put some feet to what we talked about in the last session and try to be maybe a little bit more practical in terms of where we go with this. We saw in the last session that God's heart is that He wants fathers to turn their hearts to their children and that that simple act of obedience is part of God's plan, God's strategy for bringing about a transformation in our culture and our society. Why is that? Because the family is the most basic of all institutions. You know, you can't have godly churches unless you have godly families. Why? Because the whole is equal to what? The sum of all of its parts. So if you have a church full of dysfunctional families, you can't expect that you're going to have a godly functioning church. And so unfortunately, we have a nation full of dysfunctional churches because we have a nation full of dysfunctional families who aren't living according to God's patterns and principles. And so the family is really the core foundation, if you will, for society. And what I believe is that families in our nation are wanting to see a real live testimony, a real live example of a godly family. They don't see it very often. They don't see children who love and respect their parents. They don't see teenagers who are under their parents' authority. I mean, imagine this. Imagine if you were out somewhere at the mall or Walmart or someplace and you saw a teenager whose mother asked him to go do something and he said, yes, ma'am, and then went and did it. What would you think? I mean, you probably would fall over. You'd think that he was an alien or something. People would love to see a family where the husband and wife love each other, where they're committed to each other, where they keep covenant, where parents have trained their children responsibly, brought them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, where they discipline their children, where they have their children's hearts. People would love to see that. And I guarantee you, I guarantee you because I've seen it happen. If you have a church full of families like that, it will grow. It will grow. You don't have to have lots of gimmicks and programs and you don't have to have games and parties and pizza and pop. You don't have to do all that. I'm not saying those things are wrong. Not saying not to do those things. I'm just saying you don't have to have gimmicks. You don't have to play, do marketing strategies and do surveys and opinion polls to find out what the people want to get them to come into the church. No, people will flock to a church that is full of godly families who love each other. I've seen it happen and it's happening all over the country. So I want to talk about what are some things that we need to do as families to fall in line with God and his ways and his principles. May I suggest to you that you'll never really be able to understand what God's purpose and plan for your family is. And you can't answer that question unless you can come to understand what God's purpose and plan for your own life is. So I told you in the first session that this was going to be kind of foundational and basic, displaying some real basic rudimentary elementary principles. Well, this is going to be real basic. You can't possibly know the direction that God wants you to go as a family and what his ultimate macro big picture purpose is for your family unless you can answer this question, why do I exist? And the thing that surprises me is that as I go all around the country and talk to churches everywhere and talk to people, God's people, we don't know why we exist. I mean, isn't that kind of surprising? You know, a few years ago, there was a guy named Rick Warren who wrote a book called The Purpose Driven Life. He was trying to answer the question of what am I here for? And would you believe that Rick Warren sold 24 million copies of The Purpose Driven Life? I'm talking 24 million copies, New York Times bestseller list. Why? Because 24 million people, most of whom were evangelical Christians, didn't have a clue why they woke up every morning, put their shoes on, and ate breakfast and breathed air that day. I mean, that is like the most basic question that anybody could ever ask. Socrates even knew that. He wasn't even a Christian. And he said the unexamined life is not worth living. And many of us sense that in our souls. We don't know why we're here. We don't know what our purpose is. And so therefore, we're being ineffective with our life. And we know it. But we don't know what to do about it. You know, you can't achieve your goals if you don't know what the goal is. Ever thought about that? Any of you guys, I don't know if they do this down in Georgia, but up in Michigan, a lot of men like to hunt. Do people do that down here in Georgia? Okay. So you see Bambi and you kill him, right? Okay. And then you eat him, right? Okay. Good men. So when you go and you're preparing to go kill Bambi and eat him, do you ever do target practice? Okay. Two of you do target practice. The rest of you, you're like, no, man, I'm good to go. Do they let you hunt with rifle down here? Lucky dogs. In Michigan, you've got to use shotgun where I live. Tyranny, I tell you. It's tyranny. But you can also get, you can do bow hunting too. So let's say, any of you do bow hunting? Anybody here bow hunt? Yeah, we have a couple diehard guys bow hunting. When you go bow hunting and you're going to do some target practice, what are a few things that you need? You need, what do you take with you when you're going to do target practice? Take a bow. Okay. That's good. What else? Take a target. What else? Arrows. Okay. So we have three basic items. Now let me tell you what I take when I do target practice with a bow and arrow. I take a bow and I take an arrow. You know why? Because I think that self-esteem is really important. And I have found that when I go target practicing with a bow and arrow, 100% of the time, every single time, 10 out of 10 or 100 out of 100, I hit something. That's pretty good. That is a really, I mean I think that really shows that I'm a skilled hunter. Now the problem does come in though if someone insists that I should have a target up here. Then all of a sudden my self-esteem goes way, way down the drain. Because now there's a standard. Now there's something that tells me if I'm being successful or if I'm not being successful. And for your life, as a parent, how do you know if you're being successful? What's your benchmark? 20, 30 years from now when your children are grown and raised, what will define success for you? How will you know if you've been a successful parent? How they turn out. But how do you want them to turn out? Godly men and women. So if they grow up and in 20, 30 years they're godly men and women, that's a benchmark for you. You'd say, I did well. Now there may be some other things we might put in there, right? I mean we might want to know how to read. We might want them to know how to drive a car or be able to provide for a family or whatever. But we have to know what is our goal. And so what I want to encourage you to do, something practical I would encourage you to do, is to work together as a husband and wife and develop a family mission statement. Develop a family mission statement. You know corporations, they all have mission statements. And businesses and churches even have mission statements. Families need to have mission statements. And so when I think about my life and why I'm here, there's a lot of scriptures that I can point to. I mean Jesus said, love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. And love your neighbor as yourself. Solomon said in Ecclesiastes 12, we've heard the whole matter, here's the conclusion, fear your God and keep his commandments for this is the whole duty of man. Micah 6.8, he has shown you, O man, what is good and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. And there's so many of these passages, Deuteronomy 10 talks about how you're to love the Lord and his statutes and to have his law impressed on your heart. There's all these different things that we could look at, you know the Westminster divines and the Westminster Shorter Catechism put it this way, the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. There's so many variations on this. Well I've taken a lot of those scriptures that talk about what our main essence is, our main purpose in life, and I've encapsulated them into a kind of paraphrase for myself. And I say, I exist to know, love, and serve God, and to love and serve other people. That's why I exist. And to me, that's the big picture, that's the target. Now, our family, ironically, surprisingly, has the same mission statement as my personal mission statement. Our family exists to know, love, and serve God, and to love and serve other people. That's why we're here. That's why we're on the planet. And I put it in that order because, you know, you really can't love somebody you don't know. And you really can't serve, in the right way, from the right heart, somebody that you don't love. So, I think it goes in that order. You have to know God first, and then out of that knowledge, when you really come to see him for who he is, then you love him. Your heart responds to him, and you're grateful, and out of that gratitude comes a desire to serve him. And what's one of the main ways that we serve God? By loving and serving other people. So for us, that's the big picture. And so, what I would encourage you to do is to look at your life, and look at your family, and say, look at it kind of like a pie. If you have a pie, and you slice that pie into a lot of different pieces, okay, I mean the pie could be anything. It could be, you know, we'll call it apple pie, or pumpkin pie, or what's your favorite kind of pie? But what do you eat down south? Pecan? I thought it was pecan. Pecan. Is it? What is it? Oh, I'm not from here, yeah. So pecan? Pecan. Okay, so we're going to have some pecan pie with some pecans in it, and so this pie represents our life. Okay? This is who we are. The pie is the whole thing, everything. But then we slice up the pie, and we could have a pie called work, we could have a piece of slice called finance, we could have a slice called entertainment or recreational time, we could have a slice called, you know, outreach or evangelism, or a slice called education, you know, of our children, or whatever slice it is. Now, here's the funny thing. If I were to ask somebody, why do you work a job? What you say is, you say, well, I work a job because I need to make a paycheck, you know, I need to earn a paycheck so that I can pay the bills, so that I can put food on the table so I can provide for my family. But you know what you just did there? What happened was, you said that the whole pie was pecan pie, or pecan pie, but this slice right here of work, well, that's apple. Did you ever think of that? Or if you said education, why do you educate your children? Well, I educate my children so that they can grow up and have a good job and support a family and, you know, provide for themselves and maybe eventually have a retirement and, you know, so they can be a good member of society or good citizen or whatever. Well, that's like saying, yeah, well, this slice is pumpkin. See what I'm saying? It's called compartmentalization. We have our little Jesus compartment over here, which is like church and reading the Bible and prayer and that kind of thing, and we have our little Christian activities here. And then over here, we have all the rest of our life, which is hunting, fishing, you know, going to Disneyland, watching TV, spending our money, you know, that kind of thing. And Jesus really doesn't have anything to do with that. See, and that's called compartmentalization, or it's called dualism, splitting things into these categories. Well, C.S. Lewis said there is no such thing as neutrality in all the universe. He said every inch, every split second is claimed by God and is counter claimed by Satan. He also said that there is not one element of all the universe that Jesus Christ does not look at that thing and say, that belongs to me. You know what that's called? It's called lordship. Jesus Christ wants to be lord over everything. He owns it all. He owns the whole pie. I mean, if you're a believer, if you've given your life to him, he didn't buy a slice. He doesn't want a slice, he wants the pie. He bought you. Why did he buy you? Because he wants you to reflect his nature and character through the way that you live. He wants you to love and serve, to love him, be in relationship with him, be in fellowship with him, and he wants you to love and serve other people. That's why he bought you. He didn't just buy you so he could forgive you for your sins and send you to heaven so you wouldn't go to hell. He had to do that, that's great. He bought you because he wants to use you. He wants to use you for a purpose. So what we have to seek to do is to make all of our life conform to the lordship of Jesus Christ. Every slice of the pie should fit with the mission statement. If not, may I suggest to you that we're being spiritually schizophrenic. We have a disconnect. We're not living lives of integrity at that point. God wants us to live lives of integrity, lives that fit, that reflect his image in everything that we do. Larry Burkett has passed away and gone on with the Lord, but he was from the Atlanta area I believe, and a great man of God. I think the last year before he died I had a chance to hear him speak and he said, I can judge your spirituality by looking at two things. Your checkbook and your day timer. I can tell what kind of a Christian you are by looking at those two things. Of course, I did what everybody else did. Come on, that sounds kind of judgmental. What do you mean? And he says, think about it, think about it. What else is there to your life than your time, because that's your life, that's who you are, the span of time that you have, and your talents and the things that God has given you. And your talents is really, you know, talent is really only effective or meaningful if you do something with it. So your day timer, that's what you did with it. So what you spend your time on and what you spend your money and your resources on, that tells somebody, tells God, what you value. That is what you value. And you may say, oh, I value my family. They're my number one priority outside of my relationship with Jesus Christ. My family is my number one priority. Well, yeah, but you spent 12 hours on Facebook and you spent 12 minutes in the Word of God. I know I'm getting the meddling here, but I mean, when we say that we value something, our lives tell the truth. Our mouths may lie, but our lives and our actions tell the truth. We may say, I value my children. Did you know that the average dad spends 11 minutes a day talking with his children? 11 minutes a day, that's it. Average American dad, 11 minutes a day. Even if the average dad spends like three hours a day watching TV. What does dad value? Where is his heart? Where is his treasure? Didn't Jesus say that? Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. What do you long for? What do you long to do? What do you desire? Pornography? What do you desire? Well, that's where your heart is. You may say, oh, I love the things of the Lord. I love my family. I love God. But how you spend your time and how you spend your resources, that is really what you love. So I would encourage you to create a mission statement, a family mission statement, write it down, frame it, and put it in the most prominent place in your house. And so that cross section, the high traffic area that everybody goes through all day, and you look at that thing and you ask yourself as you go through your life and through your days, is what I'm doing conforming to this purpose for which I exist? Or am I wasting my life? Am I wasting my time? Am I doing what God put me here to do, or am I just living as a selfish, carnal person, just like everybody else in the world? Am I living as a redeemed person, or am I just living for myself? Another practical thing I would encourage you guys to do, this is for the men, is the father's one of the greatest duties and privileges that you have is to teach your children the word of God. And I don't mean give lip service to it. I mean do it. Do it, do it, do it, okay? I, by God's grace, every day, get up in the morning, we get all our children together, and we read at least a chapter from the word of God. And we talk about it, and we discuss, and we pray, and we sing worship songs. We do what you call church, we do every day in our house. Every day. It's called family worship. It's father-led family worship. It is one of the most wonderful blessings that you can possibly do. And I'll tell you why men don't do this. Men don't do it because they're afraid of it, because they don't know how to do it. They were never taught how to do it. Their fathers didn't do it with them. And so they're afraid that they're going to do something wrong, and that they're going to be embarrassed, and so they don't do it. They avoid it. But somebody's got to start somewhere. You can't just let each generation go by without having this happen. Somebody has to break. I didn't grow up in a family where that happened. I mean, my parents divorced when I was six years old, and then from the age of six to the age of 15, I had an abusive stepfather, a non-Christian stepfather, who thought my head was a punching bag. So from six to 15, that's what I lived with, a guy who tried to kill me. When I was 12 years old, he was arrested and was going to be sentenced for five years in prison for trying to kill me. I mean, that's the kind of culture that I grew up with, okay? So I didn't grow up in this, you know, pristine, godly home where, you know, all this just happened. No. I had to make intentional decisions when I got married and had children of, I've got to break the mold. I've got to break the curse. I've got to break this cycle of dysfunction. I've got to be the first generation. The scripture says that the guy will curse down to the third and fourth generations of those who are disobedient to him, but he'll give blessings to 1,000 generations of those who love him and are faithful to him. So I'm starting on the 1,000 generations. That's, you know, that's, you've got to start someplace, but that's my goal. I'm thinking, you know, I'm going to be the first in a lineage of 1,000. Let me just share something with you. A guy who was a mentor of mine, he was the 10th descendant from a Martin, his last name was Martin, from these three Martin brothers that came over the United States in 1728 from Switzerland. Three brothers. They were Christians. All three of them Christians. Okay, get this. Ten generations down to my friend, not one of those ten generations fell away from the faith. All ten of them were godly men. This man was a pastor. Not one of them fell away from the faith. Not one divorce. You know, from 1728 to the present, he just passed away the year before last. Great loss of my life. From 1728 to the present, no divorce. And get this, every one of those children in that whole line had an exclusively Christian education. None of them ever went to a government school for their education. And that's, I think, why they were able to have ten successive generations without losing the faith and without having a divorce, because they were rooted and grounded in the word of God. Now, my friend who passed away, when he died, he had two great-grandchildren. He actually had over 60 grandchildren. He had eight children, and he had over 60 grandchildren. And he only had, like, two great-grandchildren. All of his children were walking with God. Many of them were missionaries, Christian leaders. All of his eight children walking with God. No divorces of his grandchildren. Many, many of them are missionaries. All 60-something of his grandchildren, all 60-something of his grandchildren are Christians walking with God to this day. And his grandchildren were being raised in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. None of his children, none of his grandchildren, none of his great-grandchildren ever raised in a secular education establishment. All of them received Christian education. I mean, we can't even fathom something like that in our day. That's 13 generations of faithfulness. Thirteen generations of faithfulness. But God says he'll bless to 1,000 generations of those that fear him. So anyway, I'm starting on 1,000 generations. And one of the ways that I'm doing this is I'm teaching my children systematically the word of God every single day. Now, this is where I think the church comes in, because it's not the job of the church to feed children, to clothe them, to change their diapers, or wipe their noses. I know that's radical, okay? I know this is a new revelation. It's not the role of the church to do that. Oh, and it's not the role of the church to educate them either. Because when you look in the scripture, you only find one category, and that is God giving instruction to parents to teach and train their children. You know, in fact, the book of Proverbs, if you look at it, it's 30 chapters of a father saying, son, give me your heart, follow my ways, look at my example, and do what I do. Imparting wisdom to his son. Thirty chapters of a father teaching his son, and one chapter of a mother teaching her, that's Proverbs 31, of a mother teaching her son how to find a wife, a godly wife. Now, when you look at the balance of that, where's the weight of instruction? Did you know that every single passage in the scripture that talks about discipline in the scriptures is always directed to the father, never to the mother? And yet, who ends up, if anybody disciplines a child at all, which in our culture, no one does, but if somebody does discipline a child, who is it that does it? Mom. Why? Because dad's watching a football game. Doesn't want to mess with it. I'm just telling you guys, we're out of sync with the scripture. Family worship is so important, and dads don't know how to do it. So here's what I want to encourage the church to do. Instead of us as parents thinking, well, I bring my children to church to have them get all the Christian instruction. You know, I send them five days a week to get heathen, secular, anti-Christian instruction to destroy their faith and tear it down, and then I bring them to church so that they get an hour or two of Sunday school in junior church, so that then it compensates and fixes it all. And then at home, basically, I let them play video games, and that's my job as a parent. Instead of that worldview, instead of doing that and expecting the church to raise our children and educate our children and teach them the Bible, it's not the church's job. What the church is supposed to do is to come alongside the family and help fathers learn how to do family worship. And I would like to see pastors and church leaders, elders, develop a curriculum, if nothing else, of systematic instruction in the home and to give examples of how to do it and to teach them, this is how you do it. Now you know why that won't happen in most churches? Because the pastors aren't doing it. Pastors don't do that in their homes with their children, so they can't teach anybody else to do it because they don't do it themselves. But what I'm saying is we need to have the church come alongside the family and help the family do the family's job. Not to do the family's job for them, but to equip and strengthen and help supplement the work of the family. Does that make sense? Okay, so I want to see churches that encourage parents, fathers especially, to teach their children the word of God every day. When my family attends church on Sunday, we sit together in a service, all together during the service. My children sit there. I have six children. My oldest is ten and my littlest is one. And we'll take up a whole row like that and they will sit there during the worship service, they'll participate and sing, and during the sermon, you know, 45 minutes, hour long, whatever it is, they'll try it and they'll listen and they'll learn. And people are shocked at that, scared by it even, like that's not normal. Well yeah it's normal, it's just that our culture's weird. You know, that's the way churches were for hundreds of years before, you know, Sunday schools. Did you know the Sunday schools were not created for Christians? Sunday schools were invented in the late 1800s over in England and then imported and spread out mostly by D.L. Moody because there were homeless kids in the urban environments like Chicago and so forth that couldn't read and they're just running the streets, not being educated, not being fed. So they went into the streets on Saturdays, not even on Sundays, started Sabbath schools, they called them, Saturdays they went in and had schools where they taught the children, the homeless kids, how to read and write and how to read the Bible. That's where Sunday schools came about. Then they said, well instead of doing it downtown, why don't we just bring the children into the church building and we'll, you know, we'll have them come here and we'll teach them on Sunday morning. Well, what happened eventually was that all the Christian parents sent their children to the Sunday school and in a lot of cases the non-Christian children didn't even come anymore and it basically became a babysitting service for parents so that they could sit and listen to the sermon and not have wiggly children. But up until like 1880 or 1890, every parent was expected to have taught and trained their children to be able to sit there and those, like the Puritans, man those guys would go on for three hours, like me, you know, that kind of thing. Not the little 15 minute inspirational, make you feel good kind of sermons we get today. And they would sit there and have reverence for the word of God. Why could they do that? Because their parents had taught them to. And so it's possible but, you know, people say, how do you get them to do that? Well, we do it every day. They do it from the time they're born. You know, they sit there on mama's lap and they listen to the word of God and so they don't know, you know, they don't know that they're not supposed to do that. You know, my children don't know that they're supposed to rebel when they become teenagers or, you know, that they don't know they're supposed to talk back to their parents. You know why they don't know that? Because we never told them, so they don't know. But you know, the mass majority of American children, you know what they hear all the time? Yeah, well, boys will be boys. That's just how kids are, you know, teenagers these days, what do you expect, you know, or you just wait until they're teenagers and then you'll find out, then you'll see what they're like. That's not a biblical perspective. That's the world's perspective. That's the world's expectations. We don't have to eat the crumbs that fall on the ground and get left there. No, we can have godly families that are blessed by the Lord. So family mission statement, family worship, if you're not already doing it, godly Christian children are going to need a godly Christian education. All areas of life, they need to be taught to see all of life and reality through the lenses of a biblical worldview. They need systematic biblical worldview training to help them to see how to think according to biblical terms so that they're not sucked into all the ideologies of our day because there are a lot of competing ideologies. There's postmodernism and there's humanism and there's socialism and, you know, all these different isms that are taking over our culture. We have to learn to teach them to think through those things. And finally, we want to try to help them to, you know, we want to shelter them from a lot of bad things, a lot of negative things, but we don't just want to shelter them because that's a concern people have, especially about homeschoolers. Well, if you keep them home and they're not around all the bad kids, then how are they going to know how to relate to the bad kids when they grow up and they meet the bad kids and, you know, they'll just crumple or, you know, fall on the ground and cry and suck their thumb or, you know, something, something bad will happen to them if they don't have the opportunity to be forced, you know, all this bad stuff when they're little. So, you know, it's kind of like, you know, if you don't let them go play in the street when they're little, how are they going to know not to play in the street when they're older or something like that. So, basically, I want to encourage you to help your children to think in terms of a ministry mentality and an outreach or service mentality, reaching out to the lost, reaching out to their unsaved friends, but not to just send them out there as little children, unequipped, unprepared, not really able to do it, and the fact is they don't have a biblical worldview because their parents don't have a biblical worldview and their parents don't have a biblical worldview because the pastors don't. You know, in fact, Barna, again, George Barna, you can look this up at Barna.org, you can look up these statistics on the spot, he says that only 50% of American pastors have a biblical worldview. I mean, did you just see the news report that came out about the ECLA, the Lutheran church that has decided to ordain homosexual ministers? Just came out this week, a new story, the Lutherans are now ordaining openly practicing homosexual ministers. You know, when you have lost the authority of the word of God and you've lost holiness within the leadership of the church, and they're not teaching and training the families to do their job, you know, the pastor should not be trying to do the job of all the negligent parents in his congregation and do it for him. He should be saying, no guys, this is not my job. In fact, the scripture says that the role of what we sometimes call a five-fold ministry, you know, pastors, prophets, evangelists, teachers, elders, what is it, what's the fifth one? Anyway, you know what I'm talking about, apostles, pastors, okay, you know what I'm talking about. Those five roles, the reason that they're there is not to do the work of the ministry, it's for the equipping of the saints for the work of the ministry. Did you ever notice that? We always think that it's the church leaders that are supposed to do the work of the church. No, no, you're the church and you're supposed to do the work, and it's the role of the leaders to equip you to do the work. So they're not supposed to be doing all the work, you're supposed to be doing all the work, and they're supposed to be teaching you and training you and equipping you. That's where we've gotten everything off in the church, because the leadership's wearing themselves out, they're ragged, they're tired, they're frustrated because they're trying to parent, you know, for 50, 60 families in the church who aren't doing their jobs. That's got to stop. It's just got to come back to, parents, it's your job, we know you don't know how to do it, but we're going to do everything we can to give you materials, to give you training if need be, you know, maybe even bringing somebody in, a speaker or somebody who knows how to do family worship, and just walk through a 45-minute session of, you know, practically, well, here's how I do family worship. It's a shame that we've come to that in this culture where we don't even know how to do family worship, but we're there. And so, this is something I see that's absolutely got to happen. Again, I don't want us to come away from this session with a pessimistic outlook, I don't want us to come away just thinking of, you know, oh, it's all doom and gloom and it's all bad and, you know, there's no hope and we're losing our kids to the world and all that kind of thing. I have children in my home who, by God's grace, are being taught every day the Word of God and to apply God's Word to all areas of life. Just before I left, I had an issue, it was an older issue, but I had an issue of National Geographic out on the coffee table. And on the front cover, it said, was Darwin wrong? And it had a picture of a lizard on the front and, of course, their conclusion in the article was, no, Darwin was right, evolution, it says when you open it up, it says, no, Darwin was right, evolution is a fact, in big letters. Well, as I was getting ready to leave early in the morning, I looked on the coffee table and I noticed that somebody had written on the front cover of National Geographic in a pen, it says, was Darwin wrong, and it said, yes, he was. And I recognized the handwriting as being my 10-year-old son, Benjamin, who could stand up here tonight and tell you exactly why Darwin was wrong and why evolution is a scientific impossibility. Not just to say, oh, the Bible says God created the earth, although he'll tell you that, but he'll tell you scientifically how evolution is impossible. How many 10-year-olds do you know that can do that? I'm not trying to boast about myself and my family, but I'm going to say, like Paul, hey, follow me as I follow Christ. Follow me as I follow Christ. It can be done. Does it take work? Absolutely. But let me say this to you, I cannot think of anything in my life that is more important than my children walking in truth. Didn't the Apostle John say that? How wonderful it is to have your children walking in truth, and I'll invest everything that I have in that. I will take a pay cut, I will cut out all of my hobbies, which I already have, I will spend every waking moment. You know what I'll do? I'll be so bold and so brave as to actually do Deuteronomy 6 and Deuteronomy 11. You know what Deuteronomy 6 says? It says, this law which I give you this day shall be on your heart. That's me. It'll be on my heart. Then you teach it to your children and impress it on their heart. What's the context of which I do this? You teach it to them when you rise up, when you walk by the way, and when you lie down. What does that mean? It means in the morning when I get up, I'm teaching them the word of God. It means that when I see them when I come home from work, I am teaching them God's patterns. It's not always in a formal sense. It may be while we're working outside, it may be if we're watching a documentary on TV or something like that. We're discussing it. We're analyzing it. We're talking about it. We're discussing, does this match up to God's word? When we go to sleep at night, again, imparting God's ways. The scripture says, this law which I give you, it has to be on your heart. If you don't possess it, you can't give it. I might want to give you a million dollars, but I don't have a million dollars, so I can't. You can't give your children something you don't have. If you want to teach God's word to your children, you have to be in the word yourself before they get up. You know what I mean? You got to have something to give. It's like a friend of mine, Vody Baucom, says, he says, if you don't own it, don't sell it. Does that make sense? If you don't own it, don't sell it. We have to make the commitment in our life that we're going to do what it takes. That Deuteronomy 6 model says it's a full-time job. It's a 24-7, 365 paradigm of, it's my job to teach and train my children. Not to let that word of God, that law of God, depart from their hearing, to keep it ever before them. It says, write it on the door frames of your house. Bind it on your forehead. Bind it to your hand, your wrist. Keep God's word ever before you. You may say, man, this guy's a total lunatic. He's like this raving, mad fanatic. You know, it's just all he talks about is the Bible. Okay. Guilty. You know? I'm a Jesus freak. I can't help it. But the fact is that this infinite, almighty God who created the whole universe, who hung the stars in place and created this earth that was capable of sustaining not only biological life, but was capable of sustaining my life, this almighty God found me, a nothing, a nobody, and he saved me, and he changed me, and he changed my priorities, and he changed my heart. So this is my reasonable service. Why wouldn't I want to offer my body as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God? It's the least that I can do. And I love these children that God has given to me so much that I don't care what the devil tries to do to stop me, I don't care what the world tries to do, I don't care what the flesh tells me to do, I don't care what kind of opposition is against me. By God's grace, I'm going to be faithful to do my part in covenant with God to raise these children for his glory. And then when I've done everything I can to stand, when I've done everything I know how to do, when I've prayed for them, when I've taught them, when I've disciplined them, when I've sheltered them, when I've done everything that I know how to do, you know what I do? I fall on my face before almighty God, and I say, God, have mercy on me, and make up for my lack. Because I'm imperfect, and I can't do it all right. I'll make mistakes. I do make mistakes. And so, God, I trust that you love these children more than I can, because they're not my children, they're your children. These children are yours. The fruit of the womb is his reward. And so, these children that you've entrusted to me as a caretaker and a steward, I want to be faithful to steward them well, because I'm going to stand before you, I'm going to give account before you for every word that's come out of my mouth. Jesus said that. We will give account on the day of judgment for every word we've spoken. Everything that I've done. Everything that I've allowed them to see. Everything that I've allowed them to do. Every influence that's come into their life, I'm going to be accountable before God for that. I take that so seriously. This is not a game. There's an enemy that wants their souls. He wants to destroy their lives. So, at the end of the day, in the end of my life, when I've done all that I can to stand, I just trust God, and I say, God, you have to make up for my life. You have to do your part. And you know what? I have all the confidence in the world that that God who made these children, who loved them more than I could ever, that if I do everything in my power to keep covenant with him, he will keep covenant with me. And if I train them up in the way that they should go, when they are old, they will not depart by God's grace. I have confidence in that. I can't do nothing and then have confidence that God's going to do everything for me. We're in a partnership, we're in a covenant relationship. So yes. Is it going to cost you something? Yes. Will it mean making radical changes in your life? Probably. Will it feel uncomfortable? It might mean you have to, I know that this has been true for many people, you may have to quit your job, sell your house, move to a different state, and join a different church in order to come in line with God's desire for you. If that's what God calls you to do, you better do it. And is it worth it? I know my children are. I know my children are worth it. I'll do anything God calls me to do. Anything he calls me to do. I'm just that thankful to God. I'm just that thankful to God.