Well, it's so good to be here in Greenville again. The headquarters of the denomination I'm in are in Greenville, but I'm glad to be here for a quite different Presbyterian denomination and to be able to share in this two-day conference. With my very long-standing friend, Dr. Lilback, we've known one another, I think, probably for about 20 years. But if I'm not mistaken, this is the first time in our lives we've ever been able to speak at the same conference together. And so this is a very special privilege for us. And since he's not likely to say it, the answer to the question, how is he doing it in both the church and the seminary? The answer is he's doing it extraordinarily well and we who love both the Church of Christ and Westminster Seminary are profoundly grateful to God for that. And I stand before you, as you've already heard, as a living illustration of Martin Luther's principle simul justus et peccator. We are at one and the same time justified, we are saints, and yet we remain sinners. That despite the fact that my mother, among other reasons for giving me the Christian name that I've got, she gave it to me because she believed nobody would ever get confused about it. Which just shows that mothers are not always right. Well, let's turn in our Bibles this evening to the book of Exodus, and I want to read there in Exodus chapter 20. Exodus chapter 20. And we'll read the first 12 verses, Exodus chapter 20 and verses 1 through 12. And God spoke all these words saying, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me. but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments." Or, if you're using the English Standard Version, possibly to the thousandth generation. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Honor your father and your mother that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. If I may be forgiven for using a golfing metaphor to begin with, since this is the weekend of the Ryder Cup, The arrangement over these two nights is that Dr Lilback and I are playing on the same side. It's an American-European combination. And like some of those games that will be played over this weekend, we are in the mode of playing with the same ball, but we will hit that ball in an alternate fashion. And as he and I have been extending that metaphor a little with one another, my function is to tee the ball up and try to get it onto the fairway. And then his function is to make sure that that ball, our study of the biblical teaching on family life, gets as near to its whole, its destination point as possible. And I hope for that reason that you will be able to not only stay for the whole of this evening but also make an attempt to be with us tomorrow evening as well and if possible bring others with you. Because while I suppose neither of us is altogether comfortable in speaking about all the applicatory details of the biblical teaching on family life for the simple reason that every single family is different. And God creates no clones. And your children are different. I remember even as a child when my mother would say to me, I had an older brother, she would say, I have tried to treat you both the same. And even as a little boy, I knew what she meant. But there was something in me that said, but mother, he's different from me. You need to treat us as individuals. And so you could go to the local Christian bookstore or go online and possess a vast mountain of books by leading experts on Christian family life. But there is no slot machine technique given to us in Scripture for bringing up the children God has given to us. There is no slot machine in Scripture for you engaging in the understanding of the providences of God to find the husband or wife to whom God may lead you, or for the lifelong process of, by God's grace, getting to know that person. And we must not be intimidated in that sense by experts. We must find ourselves again and again pouring over the pages of Scripture and asking for ourselves in our own family contexts and situations, in the particular providences of God at this point, at this stage in our Christian family life. Lord, enable me to understand your word in such a way that I grow in that Spirit-given discernment to know how to apply it to ourselves in this place at this time, and to these children, and to this wife, perhaps even to this husband, to these parents whom you have given to me. And that is both on the one hand the challenge of being authentic Christians, And at the same time, the enormous, exciting privilege that God has given to us of seeing how His Word works out, not simply in somebody else's family life, but to be able to say to him at the end of the day, none of your promises, not one of your words has ever fallen to the ground. And what I want to do in this opening session is to offer essentially a number of biblical reflections on the foundations that Scripture gives to us for building a Christian family. And it's so interesting to me in that context to see that right at the heart of the Decalogue, the heart of the Ten Commandments given to Moses are actually two commandments that focus in rather strikingly, albeit the first of them in a way that is almost unnoticed, on a biblical pattern and foundation for family life. You notice it's there, isn't it? In the fourth commandment. Family life is in the fourth commandment before it's in the fifth commandment. In the fourth commandment, it focuses attention on the responsibility of parents. In the fifth commandment, it focuses attention on the responsibility of children at every conceivable stage of their lives, even when their parents become elderly and frail, and sometimes especially when their parents become elderly and frail. And I find it so interesting and I think divinely insightful, if that is not an almost insulting thing to say about the wisdom of the Lord, that he has apparently organized the chronological structure of his people's lives in such a way that family life may be well governed. And He's given to us in His Word specific commandment that is worked out and illustrated and applied in a wide variety of ways that enables us to understand the principles that undergird and strengthen family life. And I need hardly say to you this evening how absolutely vital this teaching is. because we live at a time, an unprecedented time really, over the last centuries when men and women, intelligent men and women, educated men and women, successful men and women in our society are quite literally all at sea when it comes to family life. When there are whole professions of which history had never heard, that have grown up because of the radical dysfunction of family life. And as I say, it's got absolutely nothing whatsoever to do in our society, by and large, with education. It's not limited to those groupings in society that have had no education. some of the deepest and the darkest dysfunction takes place among those families that have had the greatest educational privileges. And despite all that used to be said in the 1950s and into the 1960s, if we would just educate people, then they would understand, as now shown to be so much humanistic, secularistic, God-defying nonsense. And it's become so obvious to our society now. And in the Western world, all over the Western world, governments are at almost panic stations because they know that there is a sickness and a problem deeply in society that governments cannot solve. And I think it's important for us as Christian believers, however heavily that lies upon our hearts, and to whatever extent we mourn the disintegration of family life today, also to realize that the Christian's response to that is not in the first instance to bemoan the dysfunctionality, but so to build Christian families. in our churches, that the secular world in which we live and those neighbors who surround us will be, as it were, brought in their need to come to us and say to us, tell me what it is that makes your family the way it is. And you see, so much of that has got to do with atmosphere and disposition and the fulfillment of the kind of ordinary things about which the Lord spoke to Moses when he gave him these two great commandments, 4 and 5, in the midst of the great Decalogue. And we are encouraged as Christian believers, are we not, to believe that what God has done in the promise of the new covenant, in the power of His Holy Spirit, is to write His law into our hearts, so that our greatest desire with respect to family life is to say to Him, Lord, teach me how to lay the foundations for this kind of beautifully regulated family life in which parents gladly fulfilled, joyfully fulfilled, with a Sabbath joy fulfill the regulation of their children's lives. And Christian children respond with the deep-seated longing in their hearts that they might learn how to honor their father and their mother. I speak a little from personal testimony, if I may, without intruding into this. But the evening following my late mother's funeral, many years ago now, her minister called me to say that the text he happened to be preaching on on the Lord's Day, and it was 24 hours away, the text he was preaching on was, here in Exodus 20, honor your father and your mother. He just wanted to give me a hint of what that was going to mean, lest it so overcome me in the loss of my mother that the text be painful to me. And I said to him, there could be no better text in the whole of the Bible for you to preach to me this Lord's Day. For that has been the guiding star in all our weakness and frailty as a family, in all our sinfulness even as Christians. That has been the great guiding star of our relationship. How may we honor our Father and our Mother. And so, this is the glory of the Gospel. That the Lord's commands are not burdensome to us, although we must at times bear others' burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. But that there is a sweetness and a joy in seeing that God gives us these commands in order to provide us with lenses that clarify for us the way in which we need to live. And we can surely have confidence in God's Word in our own time when many families seek to build their family life on sinking sand, that if we are faithful to the Lord in this, throughout the 21st century, one of the greatest testimonies to the gospel of Jesus Christ, to His saving and transforming power, will be the radical difference between a Christian family and a non-Christian family. And it's within this context that Peter Lilbach and I want to unfold a little. We will do little more, I suppose, than scrape the surface of biblical teaching, but to unfold what it means to be husband and wife and father and mother and son and daughter. And I want to suggest as we open up these reflections in this address, I want to suggest to you three foundational principles that are so important for us to grasp from the broad teaching of the sacred scriptures. The first is this. It's what scripture teaches about the supreme purpose of family life. What is the supreme purpose of family life that would make a difference in the Christian family? It's very obvious, I think, from the opening chapters of the Bible that the family stands at the very epicenter of God's purposes for us. As the psalmist says, God sets the solitary in families. But why? Well, of course, I suppose all of us who are in the room this evening know the answer, even if we wouldn't immediately connect the answer to this question, what is the purpose of family life? The purpose of family life is that we might glorify God and enjoy Him forever. And that's not only a marvelous vision for God to have given Christian people. It's a tremendous challenge to us too. It may not be quite as obvious as it really should be in our lives. This is what we see the goal of our family life is. And you know, that's so vital. The goal of our family life is not the education of our children. The goal of our family life is not that we have a marriage that is admired. The goal of our family life is not that our offspring end up in the better professions. The goal of our family life is simply this, that our family should manifestly exist for the glory of God and know what it is to enjoy the God of that glory. And this, of course, is deeply embedded in the whole narrative of Genesis 1, 26 through 28, isn't it? God says, let us make man as our image, and so he makes man male and female, and urges that male and female to bear fruit, not only in the sense that Adam is to be the one who will turn the whole earth into the garden, and expand the garden into the whole earth. But as those who together as this man and this woman will raise up a seed, a testimony to the kindness of God that will in its own little way, in miniature, not only mirror the glory of God by living in conformity to Him, but in joy, albeit in miniature and absolutely with His providential strength and help, will enter into the inexpressible thrill in the human heart that reflects the creative thrill in the heart of the Divine Trinity in making something other than themselves. And you see, this is the ultimate purpose of all things in God's creation, that we should be made as His image in order that functioning as His image for His glory, we might in miniature get a little taste of His glorious pleasure. That together, as it were, God might say to us, now do you see what it is like here in heaven in the fellowship of the Father with the Son with the Holy Spirit. And now do you understand what it means that you and I should have fellowship together? that we should share this communion, that you should get a little inkling of how infinitely great I am because you've had a little taste of the wonder of the bond of marriage and the inexpressible thrill of bringing something into being. Think about it, those of us who are parents. Bringing something, yes, someone into being who will last throughout all eternity. Isn't that something? That God, who Himself has brought into being creatures who will last throughout eternity, has said as it were to His children, now come in intimately into fellowship with me and share this mystery of creation that you will be the means of bringing into being creatures, children, sons, daughters, who will last for all eternity. And you see, when you think about it this way, it's so obvious that this is the great purpose of family life. But it should, as it were, be the canopy under which all of our family life is lived. As you, who are young parents, look into the crib and see this helpless little child and you feel the sense of awe. There is a spirit of awe and worship and adoration of God comes upon you. That you have had the privilege of bringing this little one into the world, for all it may terrify you. that it is such a world as this into which you have brought them. And you see, when we see family life in Scripture in this perspective, it won't at all surprise us. You know, we need Christians who are not surprised by what happens in the world. Mourning Christians are usually Christians who are surprised by what happens in the world. The Christians who cope with the world and see an opportunity to serve God in the world characteristically are those who know enough of Scripture not to be surprised by what happens. It shouldn't surprise us that if this is the purpose of family life, that it should have no less purpose than glorifying the triune God and having a taste of fellowship with Him. It should not surprise us whatsoever that this is what Satan has in the crosshairs of his sights when he seeks to tempt Adam and Eve. Now, in other contexts we might say, well, what he was really doing was denying the Word of God, and that's certainly true. But that was really incidental to something else. Because the whole character of his denial of the Word of God involved a distortion of the character of God, didn't it, in Genesis 3? Did God really say to you, You see, denying the Word of God, did God really say to you in the midst of this magnificent garden, you are not to eat of any of the trees of the garden? Now, you see, that's not just a denial of God's Word. That's a distortion of God's character. Is your God the kind of God who would place you in a garden like this and then say with hysterical cynicism, you're not to eat of any of the trees in the garden? And what's the function of that? The function of that is to bring destruction into their family life right from the very beginning. And he succeeded. Alienation between the man and the woman. alienation between the children of their womb, alienation between child and parent. And you see, this is the reason for that virulent attack. It is that God has created us as families in this way. Now, you notice he has not created any other of his creatures in precisely this way. It isn't only salvation that angels long to look into because they've never experienced. They have never experienced this aspect of knowing God. of being able to share in this uniquely human way as his image in the high privileges of family life. And you know, when a family grasps this, and isn't it interesting? I'm not particularly well-read in the literature about parenting, to tell you the truth, but the literature that I've looked on, on parenting, almost rarely if ever mentions that family is for the glory of God. And it's so important that we grasp that. Otherwise, family is so that we may have a successful family. So that we may be admired. So that we may have it all together. But you see, all of those things are not the thing itself. They're the fruit of the thing itself. And the thing itself is directional. It's atmospheric. It's dispositional. It's a matter of the heart. But you know, it transforms the family life. It transforms the family life. Exactly a month before my family came to the United States in January of 1983, December of 1983 we were standing on a platform waiting for a British Railways train to get us back to Scotland where, frankly, I wanted to stay. We had come from the American Embassy, we'd had our interviews for our resident alien green cards and I was feeling utterly miserable and it was a miserable night and our trains were diverted because of an accident. It was cold and it was raining and everything was shut on the crew, the God-forsaken crew railway station. I'll never forget it. And a girl came up to me as I was standing there with four little children She came up to me out of the darkness and I didn't know she'd been watching us and she said, would you by any chance possibly be a Christian family? You could have blown me out of the water. I didn't feel particularly Christian. My children, I'm sure they were utterly miserable. I'm sure my wife was saying to herself, where is this madman taking me now? And I've often wondered, what did she see? What did she see? And I tell you, I've often wondered this as well. Why have more people not come up to me and said, would you be a Christian family? Don't you think it should make a radical difference to my family life and your family life? That our glorious focus, it's all there in the first question and answer of the Shorter Catechism, that some of us have said a thousand times, but perhaps never really worked it into our family life. The purpose of family life is the glory of the God who has created us and redeemed us. Now, if that's principle number one, principle number two follows very clearly from it. If that's the purpose of family life, then what's the foundation of family life? And again, this to me is so marvelous. You know, I know there are many difficulties about being a Christian in the 21st century. There's also something marvelously thrilling about it. I know in a way it's awful. to find yourself in a situation where it's becoming increasingly politically incorrect to say Jesus Christ alone is the alone Savior of anyone who will ever be saved. But there's also something wonderful about feeling your back in those New Testament times when it really made a difference that that was your Christian confession. And it's vital in that kind of context for us to understand that the foundation of family life, just think about it this way. He didn't make us as individuals isolated and abstracted from one another, although he could have. He made us to be families. And that's why the foundation for family life in Scripture, really right from the very beginning, is always God's covenant goodness. God's covenant goodness. And you find, don't you, especially those of us who are familiar with the way the Old Testament works, that as God moves His purposes along throughout history, one of the dominant motifs that keeps on appearing in the Scriptures as God moves His people on towards Christ and then fulfills His purposes in Christ is that our God is a God who works by making covenants with His people, by binding Himself to His people, by means of specific promises like, I will be your God and you will be my people. And ever since the beginning, one of the most characteristic marks of those covenants, and there is actually not a single exception to this in Scripture, is that when God makes His covenant with an individual, He never makes His covenant with that individual individualistically. He always makes His covenant with that individual and with His seed. And there's no exception. There is no exception in Scripture. As he comes to Noah and makes his covenant, it's with Noah and the generations that will come from him as he makes his covenant with Abraham. It's got the promise that in his seed the nations of the earth will be blessed. When he makes his covenant at Sinai through Moses, there's this promise that he will keep this covenant not only for him as an individual, but for the families of those who trust in him. When he comes to David, it's the same. David's last words as the mouthpiece of God. Not the last words he spoke before he died, but what he regarded as his last words speaking as a royal prophet of God were all about God's covenant with him and its impact upon his family. And you find in the later prophets, as we are told of this new covenant, as the scriptures unfold that the same principle is there. It's the principle, of course, that the apostle Peter picks up in Acts chapter 2. If that principle was being abrogated, what Peter would have said was, this promise is to you who believe, and it's also going to reach those who are far off. If he was now saying God is going to deal with you absolutely individualistically in a different way from the Old Testament, he would have said he's giving this promise to you and he is going to give this promise to those who are far off, which is really technical language for Gentiles. But you notice he says. This promise is to you and to your children, and it's going to expand to those who are afar off. Now, why is this so important for our understanding of family life? Well, it's vital for this reason, especially those of you who are young parents. Try and take this in. That your family life, your rearing of your children, is not done in the anxiety of darkness, but within the context of the fact that God has given you a bond, a promise in which he says, I will be your God. And I mean also to be the God of your children. You know, when Christian parents don't understand that, you may have seen this. You may even have experienced it for yourself. There is this deep, gnawing anxiety. Is little Johnny going to be saved? And so in many Christian homes, there is enormous paranoia. And if there comes a day when Johnny walks the aisle, there is an enormous relief. Ah, now the burden is off my shoulders. Little Johnny has walked the aisle. But you see, we've been bringing up our children not in faith in the covenant God of the gracious promise. We've been bringing up our children in the gnawing fear that actually, although we call Him Father, He has no interest in giving us any promises that He will be good and gracious to our children. Now, of course, it's true. It's true that God's covenant promises work in a very specific way. God's covenant promises are not slot machines. I put in and I get out. I put in and I get out. And eventually, even if I've got to shake the machine, I will get it out. God's promises always come to us calling forth the response of faith and repentance. God's covenant promises to our children do not mean our children do not need to repent and believe the gospel. They mean the very opposite. They call our children to repent and to believe the gospel. But you see, the great thing is to know that that covenant promise is there and to look for, to anticipate, to expect as parents we hold on to the promises of God, to anticipate as we trust Him that in sweet ways He will bring our children, if He has not already brought our children to faith and repentance. Some parents need to hold on to their dying day. But you see, where there is no promise, there can be no faith. You understand that? If God hasn't promised something, there's nothing for you to believe. There's no No hope for you to hold on to. When he makes his promise, when he gives his covenant word, we're able to understand that. And you see, this is what he's doing in salvation. His grace means to run through the dried up riverbed that sin has created in family life. and to restore that beautiful fellowship and communion with Him and with one another that He ever intended for His creatures. Sometimes we're not very clear on that, I think, as Christians. We speak as though grace opposed nature. But grace doesn't oppose nature. Grace opposes sin. and transforms nature. It's such a glorious thing. And you see, it has this impact upon us as we rear our children. We understand, for example, as fathers, that our authority over our children is not dependent on anything that is natural to us. It's not dependent, as it is in the case of unbelievers, on our greater strength or our greater wisdom or our greater financial resources. If that's what it were dependent on once the children are bigger and wiser and richer, it's off they go. And sadly, that's often true, isn't it? But you see, because our relationship as fathers with our children is a covenant relationship. We understand that the authority we exercise over our children is a submissive authority. We're saying to our Heavenly Father, Father, in rearing my children and seeking to nurture my children, discipline my children, my heart is submitting to your holy will in the light of your glorious promise. It's not about me. It's about Him. And the children begin to see in their obedience. But their obedience is not in the flesh, but in the Lord. And it makes it possible, so sweetly possible, for a father to go to his children and say, I am sorry, I have sinned against you. Now you know there are multitudes of fathers who would never dream of doing that for one simple reason. They are terrified they will lose their authority over their children and they are deeply terrified they'll lose their children anyway. I doubt that there has ever been such a time in the last 500 years when there were so many parents absolutely terrorized by the fear of losing their children unless they give their children what they want. But you see, in a home where God's promise prevails, we can go to our children and ask for their forgiveness when we have failed them without fearing for a minute, I am going to lose my authority. Remember the Roman centurion who understood that principle was true even of the Lord Jesus in his humanity when he said to him, Lord Jesus, all you need to do is say the word and it will happen. I understand that because, listen to his words, I too am a man under authority. And I say to my men, go and they go. And you see it puts our relationship with our children, never mind our relationship with our spouses, in a gloriously different light altogether. as we take hold of the promise of God and work it out in humble obedience to Him, knowing that He has promised that as we walk in the way of faith and obedience, He will pour out upon us the blessings that really matter. And it's so interesting and maybe such an encouragement to us at times. You remember those last words of David in 2 Samuel 23, aren't they? His last prophetic words. Think about the shambles David's life was in at times. Where could he go? Oh, he says, does not my house stand so with God, for he has made with me an everlasting covenant ordered in all things and secure. Will he not cause to prosper all my help and my desire? That was something for a man in his situation to say. But that was still his hope. Still his hope. And so if the purpose of family life is to express the glory of God and the foundation of family life is rooted in this glorious covenant relationship, the practice of family life is going to be transformed. Family life, as we've noticed, is a creation ordinance. It's interesting today, isn't it, that at least I guess I'm more familiar with this kind of thing in the United Kingdom, but I think it happens here. A psychologist comes out with a report that says that the children of two-parent families tend to do better at school, to be psychologically less troubled, and to be in jail less frequently, and all hell is let loose. How dare you say that? How dare you minimize the hard and glorious work of single mothers? Well, of course, they're not doing that. They're simply pointing to the fact that when we sow the wind of rebellion against the way God has ordered his purposes, we will one day undoubtedly reap the whirlwind. I guess one of the most evident signs of that, at least to me today, is what seems to me as an amateur observer to be the apparent almost flood of homosexuality in the late 20th and early 21st century. Now here's one of the reasons that flood has arisen. It's not because of genetic makeup. It's because so many boys in the years of their early teens have been in homes where there has been no true relationship between a man and a woman, and no true relationship, therefore, between a man and his son. And it shouldn't surprise us at all, therefore, that young men find themselves in that situation without a model of what home and family life was meant to be, that they become in those years when they're seeking to discover their true selves prone to the lies that are promulgated. that all of this is natural. It's only natural, in inverted commas, when it's the fruit of this dreadful misfunction that has been created in our society. Awesomely, it's the principle of Romans 1 all over again. that the awful disintegrations that take place under the holy principles of how God governs the universe are usually intimately and integrally related to the way in which we sin. And it's evident to us still that we are not individuals. but that we were made to live in family life and when family life goes wrong at the core, then life goes wrong, dreadfully wrong in the future. So what difference does it make that the covenant is the foundation? Well, it's interesting to finish where we began with Exodus chapter 20 verse 12. the word that's used. You remember how when Paul picks this up when he's teaching in Ephesians, he urges children to obey their parents in the Lord. And he's giving notice, he's giving a specific application of this text. He's not just quoting this text. He's giving a specific application of this text. He's narrowing this text down to a specific response he's looking for in children. But what the text says is not just about little ones. It's about all ones. It's a principle that governs the whole of life just as the Sabbath principle governs not just one day in the week but every day in the week. So the parent commandment governs not just the first 21 years of life, but the whole of life. It's about honoring father and mother. When you're a little child, when you're a teenager, I've often thought, since I was converted as a teenager, I've often thought that one of the most beautiful things to see when a teenager is converted, perhaps not in a Christian home or perhaps in a school where Christian values are demeaned, to see that Christian boy, that Christian girl wanting to do everything in their powers. to love and to honor their parents, even as their peers want to do everything in their powers to demean and distance themselves and antagonize and terrorize their parents. And here is such a marvelous illustration of how God's covenant grace works by sending floods of obedience, of grace into the dried up riverbeds of family life and makes a teenager. And then as we grow into later years and our parents get old, oh my, what a relevant factor this is for those of you whose parents are getting old. What do you want to do? It's only what comes out of the Scriptures here. Yes, there are lingering elements of it in contexts where part of the Scriptures are still known, but it comes only from the Scriptures in our society that we want with all our might and main. Even when we are no longer to be submissive to our parents because we've begun a new family unit, We want to do everything in our powers as sons and daughters, as married couples, to bring honor to those who gave us life. You notice that in the book of Genesis with Joseph when he comes in Genesis 46 to his father and Solomon in 1 Kings chapter 2 when he comes to his mother in better days. Oh, the beauty of the honor that is given. It's a glorious, glorious reflection of the beauty of the life of the blessed eternal Trinity. Just as in marriage, Our children's friends should be able to say to them, what does it mean to be a Christian? And they should be able to say, have you ever watched the way my dad loves my mom? And the way in which my mom seeks in sweet obedience to bring honor to my dad? It's a bit like that between Jesus and His people. And what does it mean to be a Christian family? It means to be a family in which communion with the Trinity is experienced for His glory. And we begin to taste something of the sweetness of what it means to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. And how is it all possible? My friends, it's possible because the Lord Jesus Christ did it. He honored his father and his mother. Although his days were not long on the face of the earth, for he died for our sins, Even when his parents, his mother and his guardian father were in the wrong, he went down to the little village of Nazareth and he obeyed them and, listen, grew in stature and in favor with man and with God. What a great gospel we have that makes such family life so gloriously possible. Heavenly Father, we thank you together for your Word, for the privilege of being around it, but especially being under it and it being in us. And we pray that you would enable us to let the Word of Christ dwell in us richly, as in our families, some of us grandparents, some of us parents, as it were, by adoption, for we have had no children of our own. Some of us sons and daughters, younger and older, many of us with little children. Oh, we pray, give us grace to pursue and embody these marvelous privileges. And continue with us, we pray, in the rest of our evening and our conference, for Jesus' sake.