You're listening to audio from Ascend Church. For more information about Ascend or to access more gospel-centered tools to grow as a disciple of Christ, visit ascendkc.org. Well, good morning, my name is Lee White, and I have the privilege of serving here as the Director of Family Ministries. While Pastor Jeff is away, I have the great responsibility of opening God's word with you all this morning. And it's something that I enjoy doing, is I have this opportunity to take and to share with you what God has been placing upon my heart, and how he's been molding and shaping me through his word. And I pray that it has that same impact upon you this morning. So some of you guys know I drive the yellow or orange, depending on who you ask, Jeep that you see often here up at the church. And I've had that car for 12 years, and I bought it when I was in Southern California, and I had used it to drive out to the beach with my buddies, you know, taking the top off, ripping the doors off, doing all those different things. It's a little bit more challenging to do that here in Kansas, as we have pop-up showers, and we're also like 24 hours from the beach, but, Still enjoy taking it out in nature and exploring the different things that are there. My kids love going to get ice cream with the top down in the summer. And really, that's what you buy the Jeep for, right? It's not a commuter car. You're not worried about the miles per gallon you're getting, or if you are, you're really disappointed. You don't really care about a lot of the other things. You bought it for the experience that comes with being a Jeep owner and the opportunities that you have to make the most out of that. But I quickly learned when you buy that they give you a manual that tells you like everything you need to know about making sure the car is not going to blow up, but they don't tell you what you need to know about really enjoying the Jeep experience. And so the first time I take the top off after I find out that you have to have a special Torx bit to do so, take the top off and as I'm holding the 140 pound top thinking to myself, where am I going to put this? Like, where does this go while it's not on the top? And the same thing with the doors, right? It's got the old crank doors that you have to, you guys know what I'm talking about. This little motion gets it to go, and then this gets it to go back up, right? A lot of kids jump in there, and they're like, how do you open the windows? Like, OK, it's like this. Been doing this for years, right? And on the outside of the door, it looks like you should just be able to pull on the handle, and it opens. But there's a big circle button next to it. You have to push the button and pull at the same time. Get the doors open, right? And so that also means that the door doesn't lay flat, because it's got these appendages on both sides. So now you've got the top that's massive and strange, and you've got these four doors. Where are you going to put them? Right? Remember the first time I was living in a house with some other people, and I just took them inside the house, and just set them in places in the house, and just left them there. And I drove around, and I made those parts of the house basically useless, because you have to dodge these car doors that are just chilling there, right? And so I had all of these things to enjoy this big experience, but I didn't really know what I was doing. I didn't really know how to make the most of the Jeep. And so I had another friend who drove one, and he's like, hey, you know, there's actually these huge communities. that come together and explain what they're doing, and whether it's an online blog or a forum or whatever, and they give you links to, hey, buy these things, do these things. This is how you do it, so that you can actually enjoy what you have, rather than damaging it or just putting it out there and saying, OK, well, I'm never doing that again. I'm never taking the top off. Because if you have a Jeep and you're not taking the top off, why do you have a Jeep? Preparing this this sermon this morning. I was reflecting on Something that I believe kind of corresponds with this and that is this concept of parenting, right? And as we are parents and my wife and I we just had the blessing of our third child and he's sleeping here in the front Hopefully he's the only one sleeping during this service But as we worked through getting a new child and revisiting all the things we'd forgotten about having children, right, all the things that you have to do to keep them alive and all the different rules and all these other things, you know, I just am amazed that they let you walk out of the hospital with a child with how underprepared you are for what's coming, right? They've given you the bare minimum. They've told you feed it every three hours, change its diaper, don't do these three things. If these things happen, call this number. But you really don't know what's happening or what's going on or what that child actually needs, right? And so that's our third. I have two older girls, and then we have Austin here. And Austin right now, he's pretty chill. He just kind of sleeps and does his thing and wakes up and lets us know he's hungry. And I have two other girls that have very drastically different personalities. One is very much a rule follower and wants people to know that she would like to do the right thing. The other one will intently stare at you while she does exactly what you just told her not to do. Right? So what do you do with that? Like, how do you, what works for one kid doesn't work for the other kid? Like, what am I supposed to do to help this kid not to just stay alive, but to actually really succeed at what she's supposed to be doing and that God has given to her? And as I'm saying this now, I do so at the risk of thinking that some of you guys have already said, great, he's going to talk about parenting. I'm going to go ahead and check out. Because either I'm not a parent, I don't plan on being a parent, or my kids have already grown up, right? And so before we jump in, I have a couple things to say to people who might be in that situation. First, I do think it applies to you. And I think that because of several things. Number one, what we're gonna see and what we're gonna explain here is yes, directed at parents who are discipling their children. But I believe that the same truths can be found in other places of scripture to explain how any believer or any disciple is called to be a disciple-making disciple wherever they're at. Parents just merely have a captive audience at home for which is their primary focus for that. Everyone else has to go find that. Everyone else has to go find and seek the people that they're going to be evangelizing and discipling to fulfill the commands of God. And the second one, and I spoke to, if you're familiar with the Sin Church and you've ever come to Second Service, we have a huge segment of young adults that sit over here, to which I addressed specifically and said, there's a big thing that I truly believe that a lot of young adults fall into, and a lot of people in general, that, hey, I'm gonna magically wake up someday and then I'll have everything figured out. It's just going to work that somehow, like, I see people figure it out eventually, like, one day I'm going to wake up and it's all going to work out, and so I can just kind of wait until that happens. To them, I would say, you are today the person you will be tomorrow. By that I mean, you are the person today that you will be tomorrow, because you can't change who you were in the past. But today you can resolve to apply yourself and to, with God's grace, grow to be the person he desires you to be. And so I firmly believe, and I shared with the services before, if my wife would have met me when I was in high school, she would not have talked to me. If she would have met me when I was in college, she would have not have talked to me. Even if she would have met me in seminary, she probably would have had very little interest in talking to me. Because I was a project that needed to be worked over. I needed to learn, I needed to grow, and I did so because of the people who were in my life who helped mold me and shape me into the individual that I am. Honestly, I was reflecting on this, just even in between services, one of the reasons that I came to Ascend Church was because I knew Pastor Jeff. And I knew the type of person he was, and I said, that's the type of person I want to imitate. That's the type of person I want to model my life after. And so, you might be in that situation where you're saying, hey, I'm not a parent yet, maybe the Lord has that in your future, maybe he doesn't, or maybe your kids are already grown and maybe you're reflecting on saying, hey, maybe I've missed on this opportunity. I still believe that God's word has an opportunity for you to grow in your understanding of what it means for each one of us to be a disciple-making disciple this morning. And so the big idea that you're gonna see in your notes is gonna be drawn out of Deuteronomy chapter six. And so I invite you to turn there as we share that big idea together. And it says, they're one of the greatest demonstrations of the sincerity of your faith can be seen in the pattern of discipleship within your household. So one of the greatest examples of how serious you're taking your faith is displayed in how your household is set up to be an environment that puts the gospel on display. This morning we're going to be breaking down Deuteronomy chapter 6, and really you've got two points in your note. The first one we're going to be doing an explanation or an exposition of the scriptures, and the second one we're really going to be applying that. And so when we focus on the explanation or the exposition, we're gonna be focusing on it in terms of the failure that took place of people to heed what is there. Because I believe that the scriptures in our world today displays the lack of applying these principles to our life. And then in the second part, we're gonna be able to build up a framework that hopefully puts us on the right track for trying to apply this to our own lives. So we'll begin this morning in Deuteronomy chapter six. starting in verse one it says now this is the commandment the statutes and the rules that the lord your god commanded me to teach you that you may do them in the land to which you're going over to possess it that you may fear the lord your god you and your son and your son's sons by keeping all the statutes and the commandments which i command to you all the days of your life and that your days may be long Hear therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them, that it may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has promised you, in the land flowing with milk and honey. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children and you 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. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and as a frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts to your house and on your gates. So what we see in this passage is that in order for us to obey what God has commanded us to do, we must be involved in being disciple-making disciples, people who are followers of God who help others to follow God too. It's the same thought that we see in Matthew 28, 18 through 20, where Jesus is addressing all the people that have gathered and he says to them, all authority is given to me in heaven and on earth, go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit. So what are they teaching? They're teaching who God is. They're teaching to love God with all they are, and they're displaying that love through how they live their lives. And what we see is that this is actually intrinsic to what God's original command to people were. If we go back to Genesis chapter two while we're in the garden, we see that there are two actions or two main verbs that signify that passage. The first one of them is asking us to work or to guard, and the second one is asking us to keep or to maintain. But these two tasks of working and keeping are also seen here in Deuteronomy 6, where we're called to keep and maintain the call of God, to obey His commands, and to be careful to do all that He has said. And so these commands to do what's happening here are intrinsic to God's commands to us as individuals. We're to take what God has given us, that task, to do it seriously and to guard it for the sake of his kingdom. But the study of time shows us that this is not an easy task to do. In fact, most of the time we're going to see that we fail at this more often than we succeed. When we look into this passage specifically, picking up in verse four, this section, verses four through nine, are called the Shema. The Shema comes from the first word there that is hear. And by hear, it actually means not just listen, but actually to obey. But sadly, even though this passage is central to the nation of Israel and their faith, and it becomes a part of their religious recitations in their everyday life, they do not seem to have understood the spiritual reality for which the text speaks. So what is it that the text is asking us to do? We have to first answer that. When we look here, it's giving us this portrait of having an intentional and repetitive patterns in our life that focus on the gospel, that focus on the goodness of who God is, and explaining that to others. When we look here in this passage, verse 7, it tells us to diligently teach them. This verse, this word that we have in the verse, it occurs nine times in the Old Testament. And when we look at each of those other times it occurs, it's not talking about teaching or instruction. In fact, it's talking about sharpening a tool. And when we think about that image, it's one that if you ever use tools for things, it's a very clear picture, right? If you have a dull tool or the wrong tool to try to do a job, it's going to be very difficult to do that. But if you continuously monitor that, you sharpen it, you put it into its full usefulness, it's going to make easier the path to success. And so just as we prepare a tool for a job, our children are to be prepared for what God has for them. And so by carefully and repetitively teaching them, by instructing them, by raising them up, we prepare them for what's ahead. And it's the same for anyone in our lives that we're discipling. We're preparing them for the task that God has. We're putting in the time to work through that process to allow them to be successful at what God has for them. The second parts of this verse really tell us the importance of the totality of our life, focusing upon this. In the Hebrew grammar here, we have this structure, it's called a merism, where you have two items at the opposite end of the spectrum, and by mentioning them, you're not mentioning just those two points, but everything that's encompassed within them. And so the first of these that we have here, it's talking about as we abide in our home or as we're sitting in our home and as we're going by the way. It mentions those two things, not to say, hey, these are two times to do this, but whether you're in your home or whether you're on the go, this is the type of person that you're to be. The second one that's there, that's the same thought. It says when you rise, or sorry, when you lie down and when you rise up. It doesn't mean that this is where we get our idea for having a bedtime prayer or morning prayer, but rather it means whether you're rising up to start your day or ending your day or everything that occurs in between, that is to be focused upon you explaining the goodness of God and the relevance of his commands to those who are around you. But as I mentioned, however, when we look at the history of this, this was something that we can look back and see that not even the original audience who heard this, he did this. And so much of history is given to focusing on what went wrong. I call that our Icarus moment, right? Icarus in Greek mythology, he was given these magical wings that were made of wax and feathers and allowed him to fly through the sky. And he was given a great warning with that to say, hey, don't go too close to the sun or these will not work. Yet he became infatuated with what he was doing, and he's flying, and he stops listening or thinking about those concepts. He heard the warning, but he didn't do what the warning had said, and so as he continuously rises and goes up and explores more of what's there, even as the wings start to melt off, he does not heed the warning that's there. It's only when he is left hurling to the sea in his own demise, as his wings have melted off, that he realizes the seriousness of his failure. So what happens to keep the Jewish people from following what God has said here? And how do we know that they didn't do that? Well, the way that we know is we flip over to Judges chapter two, and we see that the generation that immediately followed this, the generation that had been given this warning, failed to do what God had said. Because he says, you're diligently teaching this, you're giving it to your sons and your sons' sons, and you're teaching them to keep these statutes and these commands. But what the scriptures portray to us is that there arose a generation that came after them who knew not the Lord, nor what he had done for his people. So those people were honestly okay with what verse five, or sorry, verse three calls, enjoying the land flowing with milk and honey. They sat in the rest as God dealt with their enemies and did all of those things, and instead of continuously teaching their children about what was going on, they chose not to. They chose to instead enjoy the blessings of God's rest. And they did that at the sake of their children and their children's children and the safety and security of their nation. Throughout the rest of the Old Testament, we see that the people start to circle back at different times. They realize that this has taken place. We can see in the periods of the kings and the judges, how there are people who rise up, who draw the people back to him. Even this morning, I was reading in the book of Nehemiah, how they were trying to celebrate and turn God's people back to his heart, to say, restore us to the place where we had repentant and forgiven hearts, where we understood our need for you. And even through those times, they develop rituals in different situations that bring them to doing this. And some of them are built directly off of this passage. Here up on the screen for us this morning, we have three objects that are central to Jewish rituals of remembering this passage, the Shema. We have the phylacteries and the teflons, they're boxes that are attached to one's body, and they're drawn directly from this passage. They're literally doing what the passage says, right? You look down in verses eight and nine, and it says, write them, these things, and bind them to your hand, and on the frontlets of your forehead, and put them on your doorposts. And so they take these passages from the scriptures, they take Exodus 13, 1-10, Exodus 13, 11-16, as well as this passage, Deuteronomy 6, 4-9, and Deuteronomy 11, 13-21, they fold it up, and they put it in these little boxes, and they wear them. Now there's a reason they're doing that, right? The reason is it's supposed to remind them of what the teaching is there. They're supposed to memorize that. They're supposed to internalize it. They're supposed to be a part of your life in doing that. And so this might be dating me a little bit, but I'm part of the what would Jesus do bracelet era, right? Anybody else in here know what I'm talking about? I can tell you this. In my middle and high school, there were a lot of kids wearing bracelets that said, what would Jesus do? They were not doing what Jesus was doing, okay? So just simply having a piece of jewelry or walking through a physical action does not ensure that the heart transformation that is intended with that has taken place. You know, wearing a Christian t-shirt or a necklace or even having a tattoo of a Bible verse does not necessarily mean that you're doing what God has called you to do. It's not saying those things are wrong, but if that's where the experience stops, you've missed the point of what's being challenged. You know, a third point that I think is important for us to understand is, you know, we've been talking about the failures here in history and failures here in the nation of Israel. You know, honestly, if we look at it, the church is much the same way, and as I'm standing here, God has just revealed this once again to me, and I hadn't shared this with the other services, but I've had the privilege of taking kids on mission trips to England. And I don't know if you know much about the country of England and the spiritual state of what's there, but it's in shambles. You have churches that have turned into businesses or nightclubs or any other thing because the people are no longer following God. They don't need the churches. These magical cathedrals that were once pillars and bastions of truth, they are no longer present as places of worship. And there are very few Christians and Bible-believing Christians spread out through the country of England. So much so that even North Africa and other places in the world are sending out significant amounts of ministries and missions going back to re-evangelize the people of England. And as we think through that, it gives us a picture of what could happen that we as Christians can fall into the same pattern of trying to live with the corporate or national blessings of God without actually experiencing and investing in what God has challenged us to do within even our own families and our nation. So what are we supposed to do? Do we give up because this is unattainable? Do we just commit to trying to work hard and do it even harder? And in fact, I think that's the opposite of what this is saying. Instead, I think what it's telling us and what it's reminding us is we have to remember the truth of the gospel. the heart of the gospel, and we have to saturate our lives with that because it's when the gospel is on display in our lives that we're able to point others to Christ instead of to ourselves. And so in the second half of what we're going to look at this morning, we're going to develop this framework. or this pattern that we can create in our homes that's going to help us to make sure that we have a gospel-saturated environment that is reminding us consistently and intentionally to put the gospel on display beginning in our homes. And we mention our homes first because your home is the last place that you have control over in your day. Soon as you step out of that, you're now on the world's terms. Whether you're going to work, running an errand, just walking outside, as soon as you leave your home, you now have to respond to everything that's out in the world. So by creating these havens or places in which we can saturate ourselves in the gospel in our home, we do so preparing ourselves for walking out into a world that lives in opposition to what God's word says. So when we leave our turf, so to speak, we are ready for what is out there. And we do that by intentionally investing and developing these skills within our lives and helping our children and the others that we have influence over to do the same thing as well. So our framework this morning is gonna begin, we're gonna have these four M's that are gonna be present, and it begins with the first one of modeling. When we talk about modeling, what we're talking about here is, in order for us to point others to God, our life has to be pointing to Him to start with. Charles Spurgeon says it this way, train up a child in the way that he should go, but be sure that you go on that way yourself. What he's talking about here is the apparent opportunity for there to be a hypocrisy of a double standard where you say one thing for your children, but you live a different way yourself. C.S. Lewis says it this way, every Christian is to be a little Christ. That's a challenge that he lays out in Mere Christianity, but it's drawn directly from the call to imitate Christ and to imitate those who are imitating Christ in scripture. Ephesians 5, 1 says be imitators of God. 1 Peter 2, 21 says, Jesus displays that we're to ensure that our life points others to God and to call others to imitate us as we are doing what God has called us to do. We've seen it in our study in 1 Thessalonians, where 1 Thessalonians 1.6 says not only to be imitators of the Lord, but it says, be imitators of us, Paul and the people who are the missionaries that are there, but also as we're imitating the Lord. We see he repeats that in 1 Corinthians 11.1, where he says, be imitators of me as I am of Christ. To model Christ is to point others to God and to call others to imitate the behaviors that you have in your life that are displaying the truth of the gospel and pointing them to God. And you might be saying, hey, fantastic, you've called me to live like Jesus, which is pretty much impossible. You're right, I have called you to that. But I've called you to do that because Jesus displays the gospel, and you cannot display the gospel perfectly. But what you can display is the fact that you're broken, and that you need God's grace, and that you need to display the forgiveness, the repentance, the grace, the reconciliation, and the restoration that is displayed through Christ's life to your children and the people around you. They need to see that when you mess up, you say, I'm not perfect. but I can point you to the one who is. I can show you how God is calling us to live this way, and how he empowers us to do so by his spirit, and how I am intentionally doing everything I can to allow his gospel to be on display in my life. that's why I spend time in prayer, that's why I spend time with God's Word, that's why I spend time with others who point me to those things, is so that I can prepare for my life in the best possible way I can, by His grace and through His Spirit. Because when we have this model of putting Christ on display, our kids see that they don't have to be perfect and that they can't be perfect. But that's not what God is calling them to do. He's not calling them to perfection. He's calling them to put the gospel on display. And they do that by repeating those opportunities to point others to the truths of the gospel and internalizing that themselves. So within this thought of modeling, I would encourage you and your family to develop a family mission statement, or a purpose statement, because it helps to develop an identity for who you are as a family. If you were here in 2023 at the marriage conference, Dr. Ellen not only provided a great encouragement for creating this, but he gave us some phenomenal resources to walk through, to see what it is to develop that family statement, as well as then even job descriptions for each of the people in your home to say, this is what it looks like to be in a member of our home. And we don't do that to just create this little system, but it creates this true identity. Because if your gospel-centered statement for your purpose of your home is to sacrificially love others and point others to Christ, that's just an example. But if that's your statement, that you say, this is what it means for our family to be our family, then that becomes the lens through which you filter all of your life. The decisions that you make, the commitments that you have, your decisions of how you're gonna spend your vacation, what your finances do, what activities are your family gonna be involved in. Everything you do, even the most daily decisions, have to be filtered through that process of saying, does this allow me to sacrificially love others and point them to Christ? And if it doesn't, it's something that you collectively, as a family, would say, therefore, this is not what we're going to be a part of. And so, when you do that, that's obviously, like, a really lofty thought, right? I have a six-year-old, a two-year-old, and, like, one-month-old, right? The bottom two are not getting any of that right now. They're not understanding that. You know, and the six-year-old, honestly, she's just learning a little bit of what that means. But more is going to be caught than taught in these opening times. And so she does see and imitate and mimic the things that we do. And so she sees and understands the patterns we have in our life. She knows what it is she's supposed to do based upon those things. And when she gets to the opportunity where we can begin to unpack and explain those things, we're going to welcome that opportunity to let her question why we do the things that we are doing and to work through reason and understanding and for her to be a part of defining what it means to be in our family and to live on mission for God. But sadly, studies show that many parents think they have to wait until their kids are six or eight and can reason before they start to develop those patterns and work through those things. But what they do by doing that is only give themselves a small window of maybe three to five years before they will be replaced as the main source of knowledge of their children. Their children will begin to look to other places, possibly even rejecting the authority and the discipline that are in place in the home. And instead, they move into this opportunity where they've missed the window to truly do what matters for their kids. Because they've waited until they thought they had everything in place for them to understand what's going on. So developing and modeling a personal and family mission statement helps to create this gospel-centered environment in your home. But also important to that modeling is if you are doing this for your children, you're displaying that you also need others to be doing that for you. And so who is it in your life that is helping point you to Christ? Who is it that's several steps ahead of you, who's living their life and spurring you on to do so in a way that points you to the truth of the gospel? Who's mentoring you? Who's discipling you? Who's helping you to see how you can effectively grow each day and mold and shape your life into the pattern that God desires. You know, it's one of the things that I'm grateful for here at the church, that we have small groups that are doing that, that we have a mentoring ministry that has an opportunity for that, that even our student ministry, that we've developed a pattern where we're putting men and women in the lives of boys and girls to help them to see those things. But all of that is important, but all of those leaders have those things in their life as well. They have others who are over them helping them to see what it is that God desires of them, and they're modeling that to them. You know, one of the greatest examples I've seen in all of history about the importance of that is Socrates mentored Plato, who mentored Aristotle, who mentored Alexander the Great. So Alexander the Great, you know why he was great? He stood on the shoulders of the men who went before them. He learned from the wisdom of those other men, and he was able to apply that to his life, to the situation, that he was able to have greatness. He didn't have to do everything by himself, because he learned from those who had gone before him. It's the same thing that we see laid out for us in the wisdom of Solomon, who says, you don't have to experience everything that's in the world, but you have to, at the end of the day, understand that you're called to fear God and keep his commands. And so if we can learn to learn from the wisdom of others, and to display how we can do that for our children, we can help them to see how the gospel applies to every facet of their lives. So it's not just modeling, which I do believe is foundational to this, but the second M that we're gonna talk about today is meals. And when we talk about meals, I've shared this previously in other settings, but the number one common trait for children who grow up and leave the home, who remain active in the church, is that they ate dinner together five to seven times a week as a family. And that's something that's really wild to think about. That's the number one thing that statistically shows that. You'd think that it'd be so many other things, but hey, what is it about this that's there? It's this, it shows us the identity of those families. That those families understood important things and were willing to protect those for the sake of their children. You know, I call this our big rocks in our life, right? You've seen the example where you have a glass jar and you fill it with sand and then rocks and you try to put big rocks in on top of it. Big rocks fall off to the side because there's no space for it. But if you begin by putting in the big rocks, and then the smaller rocks, and then the other smaller rocks, and then pour the sand in, it all fits in because the large rocks have their place already, and they're able to be filled in by the other things in life. And so these families who eat meals together, they do not allow life to dictate their schedule. They do not allow life to tell them what's going on, but instead have said, these are the items we're valuing, whether it's that or many other things in their home, and saying, we're going to hold fast to these, and we're going to ensure that who we are is not impacted by all of the things that are around us. I also understand that the older you get, the harder that's going to be. I have one child who has very few commitments outside the home, and the other two have zero commitments outside the home. And it can even be sometimes where it seems like there's 1,000 things that are going on. I've got one kid who's doing activities, right? And so I understand it gets harder and harder as you work through those things. But by prioritizing these meals, something you have to do, You have to eat. Everybody does it at some point. And if you don't, you experience the lack of energy and the lack of nutrients that will affect and impact how you live your life. But if you are prioritizing that, and your children see that, then when you have something that they might say is not necessary or not needed, like a family worship time or family devotions, They're going to see that, hey, this is not something that is just being added, but this is a part of me being who I am. It's central to their identity. Because, you see, when we sit down at a meal with others, we display to them some important truths. We value them. We're willing to share the blessings that God has given with them. We're looking at them face-to-face, and I think it's really hard for us to think about how different the homes of ancient Near East people are from our homes today. Most of those homes would have had two rooms, a large room downstairs and a large room upstairs. This idea of individualized bedrooms or other rooms that we can go to do different activities, it's completely foreign from what they had as their pattern. They lived very much communally. They lived very much with everything in common. They shared those things. So as they came to eat, they all did that together. They reflected on what took place in the day, and even at times they celebrated what God had given to them. Those are calls that we see clearly given to us in the scriptures. They lived very much a family-oriented life. But for us today, honestly, mealtime is one of the few times that's left when the people inside a home sit in the same room together, face to face, doing the same activity. It's one of the few times that that's left. And it could be very different in your home, but speaking generally, it's one of the fewest times that everybody is engaged in the same activity. And so taking that meal and using that as an opportunity to build upon the importance of what God has given is central to developing this framework. Because one of the things that we've grown out of those meals together is we have what we call meetings at our home. And I'm not saying that we have everything figured out or that we're all perfect. I've already shared with you. My kids are very young, but we're trying to lay a foundation. We're trying to set these things up. And with our meetings, Rory, my six-year-old, gets to decide the opening topics for the meetings. And she takes it very seriously. Right? And so I have some of my ASM leaders in here, and they can tell you that when they come over and share that meal with us, she is prepared for them. She's prepared questions, she's prepared that, and she's going to tell them exactly how many people get to answer, and then she's going to provide her answers, and we're going to go through her little agenda of what's going on. It's because when we share a meal together, we talk about things. We have questions for each other. We want to learn and to grow with one another. And she starts that process so that then when she's finished, we now have an opportunity to ask the questions that we've prepared, or to talk through the items that we've seen during the day, or to center our focus back upon something else that gives us an opportunity to grow in our likeness to the Lord. And so we're not perfect. We're not doing everything that way. I know that it's hard to get even myself sometimes focused on not thinking about the next thing that needs to be done, or the dishes, or whatever it is we have to get off to, or the television, or the phones, or whatever the kids want to do. It's hard, but we have to try to protect those things. We have to try to develop those. Because then wherever we're at, as we share a meal with people, we're focused on the people that are there with us. And that's what we see modeled by Jesus, is that he sat with people, he ate with people. He used those times to ask them questions, to answer the questions about what was going on in their lives. And he did so because he cared greatly for the people that he ate with, that he had compassion upon them, and that he desired to see them not just live, but to truly experience all that life meant by living according to the blessing of God. You know, I do want to at this point mention, you know, some of you guys are like, hey, this is impossible. You don't understand what's going on in my life and how hard it is for us to get these things. And I understand everybody's life looks different. Everybody's situation looks different. But a good friend at the last church that I was at, he was one of the most busy people that I have ever known. And he had three very talented daughters that were all involved in different things. He constantly was moving from one place to the next, taking his kids who couldn't drive to these different situations and that. They said, yeah, you know, we can't spend the mealtime together. Well, we have that time in the car. And so we've committed, the phones are down, the radio's off, at that time in the car, driving 30, 35 minutes sometimes to activities, that's when we're gonna talk. And we're gonna develop that pattern, that we're gonna talk about the things that matter, we're gonna talk about our days, we're gonna reflect on who God is, what he's doing in our family, and that that is going to be where he finds that time. Because he would often say, busyness is not an excuse I can use for failing to do what God has called me to do. Busyness is not an excuse for failing to do what God has called me to do. And so he had to create that time. He had to develop that. He had to sacrifice other things to make sure that he was doing what God had called him to do. And so it could look like that for you. It may be that you can't have those meals together. But where do you find that time to reflect on what God is doing in your life? and to help your children, and to help the others you have influence over, to see that that's a priority for you. You know, the third opportunity that we're gonna walk in today is one that's really exciting, you know, especially even on a day like today. It's celebrating milestones, right? Father's Day is a milestone, it's a holiday, it's set apart as a day to recognize fathers for who they are, to celebrate them, and we see that we're called to do those types of things. Throughout the scriptures, it gives us pictures of items and events that were set apart and were distributed throughout the nation of Israel, as well as their calendar, so that they would stop, they would pause, and they would remember. Whether it's the stones of remembrance, whether it's the rainbow in the sky, the Ebenezer that was raised, the Lord's Supper, any of the other feasts, all of these were times or places or opportunities to pause, to reflect, to celebrate, and to point others to do the same. Here at Ascend, we do this corporately, right? We celebrate with you all child and family dedications, third grade Bible dedication, baptisms. We even celebrate the graduations that take place. We want to be there for the milestones that are taking place in your life, and we want to celebrate those with you. But it's also not just those good times that we can celebrate, but also other times for which you will have even times or periods of sadness or periods of grief that have taken place. Matt Chandler in his book Family Discipleship points out that milestones are not always focused upon happy occasions. It could be remembering the anniversary of a birthday or the death of an individual. It could be a significant traumatic event that's taken place in your life that you reflect on and that you know is coming. By recognizing these, he notes that you'll remind them, being your children or the others that you have influence over, that in the valley of the shadow of death, they need fear no evil, for God is still with them, that God is the God of all comfort, that God is the God who is near to the brokenhearted, and that your family trusts God, and like a tree that's planted by the water, so you do not get anxious about whether there's a downpour or drought, because you display to your family that in all things, God is present, he's working, and he's working his plan out, and you will live to seek to honor and obey him each step of the way, even when it's difficult. And so what that looks like, that changes all over the time, right? I'm at a point today where I am probably, for the second year, going to Chuck E. Cheese for Father's Day. Because my daughter picks what we do, and that's what she thinks I enjoy. And it's not the worst place to go, right? It's pretty fun, right? But as she grows, she'll probably, maybe when she's 10 or so, realize, like, nah, Dad might actually want to do something else. We recognize, we stop, we celebrate, and for me as a father, I celebrate the fact that God has blessed me with those children, and this is how they perceive me. This is what they see that I enjoy and what I value. And as we work through that, we have an opportunity to develop who we are as a family and what that looks like, as we celebrate His goodness, as we reflect on what He's provided for us, as we point others to do the same. Which leads us to the final area that we're going to discuss this morning. It's honestly the most difficult. It's the least structured. But it's the one that's most often present. And it's what I'm calling the moments. You see, moments, they just pop up. Life happens. You're not prepared for all of it. But you have to respond to everything that takes place. When we capture everyday moments and we filter them through the lenses of the gospel, we're able to point our children and to point others through what's going on and how we should view things. As we were preparing for our third child, we wait for our kids to be a surprise. We don't find out if they're boys or girls, and so we just call them baby for the longest time. Amy was sitting down with Rory, and Rory was explaining all of the amazing things that we were gonna do with this baby as soon as it came home from the hospital. And Amy was like, hey, let's pump our brakes here, OK? Because baby really only does a couple things, eat, poop, and sleep. And as she said that, you could see that Rory was just puzzled, right? And Amy's like, hey, so what are you thinking about? And she goes, why does baby eat poop? It's like, oh, OK, right? We need to stop. I have said something that you have misunderstood. I need to correct that. We need to develop how we understand now fully that those are separate actions and how we move forward with that, right? And so that's a silly example, but it's a failure of a parent to explain something to a child that needs to be corrected for that child to understand the real world. And so the moments are our opportunity to do this, whether it's taking advantage of a positive moment where we're trying to say that, hey, these are the great things that we see. out in the world, and this is our opportunity to thank God for the amazing things that we have. Yesterday we were at the zoo looking at the many creatures that he'd created. Maybe it's a time like that. Other times, honestly, it's correcting the behavior that's taken place. Why have we hit sister? Why have we taken this? Why are we raising our voice? Let's talk about those things. Let's spend that time to invest in that moment to correct a behavior and to do so with a redemptive attitude. To do so by humbly and boldly and clearly explaining what God's Word says and doing that with gentleness at an appropriate level for each of those we speak to. And we see this model by Jesus as well, right? As Jesus walked through his life, he invited the disciples and others to live life with him all of the time, wherever he was at. He used all of the surroundings to teach and instruct them about what God was calling them to do. was the widow who was giving her offering, or the Pharisees who were heaping up empty prayers, whether it was the fig tree that was by the way, or the stones of the temple, wherever he walked he used what he saw to explain the realities of the kingdom of God to the people that were with him. And he was committed to doing that to meet the needs of all of the people that are around him. But if we're honest, that's really, really hard. Because we don't know what kids are going to say. We don't know what questions they're going to come home with. My daughter has come home with questions that I'm thinking like, yeah, I probably have to tell her in middle school to think this. It's like, can somebody have two mommies? Great, you're in kindergarten. This is where we're going. Let's talk about this. Let's walk through what this says. Can I marry a girl? Let's talk about this. Let's walk through this. Let's see what God's Word says. Let's see what honors God. And let's explain how we're supposed to pattern and live our lives after those things. And so we have to take that time to do that. And we have to prepare ourselves for that. We have to provide ourselves with resources that will help us with that. One of them that I think is great, it's called Wise Words for Moms. It helps take the attitudes and actions that you're seeing in your children, and to take them back to sinful tendencies, to take them back to the root issues in their heart, and then to correspond that with scriptures that help instruct on those things, to help us to be able to be ready to respond when something takes place. And there's many such resources out there. But what it's on us to do is to commit to grow and to develop and to create these patterns where we're habitually ready to respond to life as it occurs so that we can consistently and redemptively point our kids to Christ and to point others in our lives to him as well. You know, by separating this list into these four items, I don't intend for this to be an exhaustive list. I don't think that if you do all four of these things, you're 100% gonna get there. Because we still need God's grace. We still need his spirit to be active in our lives, in our kids' lives as well. It's similar to the Proverbs, right? Proverbs are not a direct promise that if this, then this will occur, but saying this is the pattern that God has laid out for us. And by habitually putting ourselves into these situations, we give ourselves and our children the best opportunity to see the gospel on display. And then as we pray that God reaches to them and implants seeds of the gospel and grows them in his timing, that they will grow to the mature fruit that we desire to see for his kingdom and for his glory. And so as we develop this, may it be just a starting point for many of you, or you might even be beyond what it is already in this framework. But may you see how God is calling you to grow ever more in your opportunities to intentionally and specifically and repetitively pattern your life after the call of the gospel so that others will be pointed to Christ through your life. We pray with me. and we thank you for the way in which it encourages us And we know, we've seen it this morning, we are just broken vessels, God. We are nothing great in and of ourselves, but that you give us our worth. Because you've created us in your image, and you desire us to live in a relationship with you, and you desire us to point others to do the same. And so we pray that our community of believers here that is made up of so many households would have that as a hallmark. That we would be committed to creating gospel-saturated environments wherever we're at in our stage of life, so that we can point our children and our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, anybody that you bring into our life, to you. And that as we do so, that you would draw lost people to yourself, that they would mature, and that they would multiply for your kingdom and glory purposes. May that be so in our midst. It's in Christ's name we pray. Amen.