Our text for our sermon today is found in Ephesians chapters 5 and 6. As we pick up where we left off last Lord's Day, we've been talking about really what the message of the prophets is to us today. As you've gone through hearing what the prophets of the Lord have said to us, How do we apply them? How do we live? And part of my burden here is that we would take to heart the message of the prophets in light of the coming of Jesus Christ and connect that very closely with life in the church, life in our families, and life in society today. What we're looking for is a just world with Jesus at its heart. And we need to live for that. We need to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. We need to have that true valor that we just sang about to be pursuing that with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. So we're thinking about how we do that together as God's people. We've come now through a just community, the church, to a just family. And last Lord's Day, we contemplated how fundamental the family is to social justice. If we want to talk about social justice, which seems to be all the rage these days, let's talk about social justice. How do we actually have a just society? The fundamental unit that God has given to create a just society is the family that he has created. Without that, you won't have a just society. That's got to be fundamental. That's what we talked about last Lord's Day. Today, we want to, if you will, turn that focus inside a little bit and talk about how the family forms its members in social justice. If the family is fundamental to social justice externally, so to speak, The family is also important to social justice because it's a means God has given to make us just people, to train us, to habituate us, to give us the character and the skills to become just people. The family unit is essential for that. Pardon me. So let's remember as we enter into this that we are talking about the connection between Jesus and justice, the connection between God's good news and justice for the world, How does that work out? Works out in the church. And as the church is doing its job making disciples of Jesus Christ and we are following Christ as the one who brings justice to this world, we now live in this purpose. The family can attain the purpose when it is lived in Christ by the power of the spirit. So let's talk about, picking up where we left off last Lord's Day, how the family forms its members in social justice. We talk first about husband and wife, husband and wife. You remember in Ephesians chapter five, as the scripture applies to us, this vision of this whole world reunited in Jesus Christ, it tells us to walk in love like God. imitators of God. It tells us to walk in the light, like we looked at before. It tells us to walk carefully, being filled with the Spirit. And that works right into, wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. Husband and wife is a first area here where the family unit, as God has designed it, shapes us into just kinds of people. Pardon me. As we follow these instructions that God gives us, I want to encourage you today to think of your marriage relationship, for those of you who are married here, as a way that God is forming you into the kind of people who can live in a just world with Jesus at his heart. This formation starts by simply being forced, if I can put it in this way, forced to live with another person who is different than you. Here's how that formation starts. You two are bound together, husband and wife, till death do us part. And now you have to learn how to do that. And guess what? That's going to shape you. You no longer are an independent agent just sort of doing what you feel like doing today, right? Now you're having to live with somebody else who's a counterpart to you. It's a wonderful relationship, it's a gifted relationship, it's a relationship of love and all those kinds of things, but it does push on us. It does shape our souls into certain patterns. If justice is about, as we've said earlier in this sermon series, a constant and perpetual will to give to each right, a constant and perpetual will to give to each what is right, in the covenant of marriage, is a perfect place to exercise that constant and perpetual will. How do I live with somebody in such a way that my heart becomes desiring to give to this other person what is right all the time, every day, day in, day out, year after year after year until we die? That takes some work, doesn't it? But that's exactly what justice is about, a constant and perpetual will to give to each what is right. You're consistently having to live your life thinking about what is good for the other? What is needed for the other person? How am I going to work together with this person? We all need that. We need that sharpening, we need that changing, we need that pressure. We're all prone to think of ourselves as the center of the universe. And to think of our lives, from our own perspective, right? What's good for me? What's going to fulfill me? What's going to satisfy what I want today? But when you're put into this relationship now, you're forced to think differently. Many people's ideas about justice, in fact, reinforce that self-centered posture, don't they? Justice is all about my rights, what other people owe me. That's a just world. A world that operates according to what other people owe me. But now you're being put into a relationship where you're constantly having to give yourself. And it isn't all about what somebody owes you, it's about how you can give to what is good for someone else. The obligations of marriage, in fact, I think draw us out of ourselves, into the light. Sometimes we talk about sin being something that we're curved in on ourselves. and God very graciously uncurls us and opens us up to others, to what's good, to what's bigger than ourselves and what we want. Marriage is a perfect place for doing that, is pulling you open, pulling you, exposing you to another, to work on what is good and right and true together. This is a gift from God. And what we're seeing here as we think about this marriage relationship is that mutual interdependence is actually a good and a freeing thing. If we have this idea of justice, that justice is again about what other people owe me, and it starts from my independence from others. I am who I am independently of others. And we have a just world by you giving me what you owe me, and me giving you what I owe you. And we think about the world that way, but it's all independent. Now we're forced into a relationship, sweetly forced you might say, of mutual interdependence. And we find that it's actually good and freeing. We have not established a just marriage, and we don't become just people, by avoiding that mutual interdependence, by establishing our territories and staying within those boundaries and therefore having a just relationship. I'll never forget an example I saw, this has been many years ago, of an older couple at that time that I knew. Fascinating case study to me. I always remember wondering how this actually worked. But there was an older gentleman. He had actually, years before, been the overseer of a hay mill that now belonged to some farmers that I worked for. And he was long retired, but he'd still come out there every day and do stuff, putter around, work with us on the farm. And he was kind of an honorary fellow, definitely an honorary fellow. Not just kind of, very honorary fellow. But he'd been married to his wife for a long, long, long time. I don't know how long. He seemed really old to me when I was a teenager. But you never heard a good word come out of his mouth about his wife. Never. In fact, I came to find out He and his wife had sort of made their marriage work, and they'd been married, they never got divorced, they were always married, but they'd made their marriage work by dividing up everything according to his and hers. Everything in the house was either his or hers, and you did not cross the boundaries. Even down to the burners on the stove. These two burners were his burners, those two burners were her burners, and you did not use the other person's burners, because somebody was gonna get mad if you did. Well, they stayed married. You might say that was something, but you can't say that was a just kind of relationship, right? My little brother was actually on their grandson's little kid ball team. They would come to the ball games. He would sit, they would drive separate cars. He would sit on the top of the bleachers, as high as he could get. She would sit on the bottom of the bleachers, as low as she could get. But they stayed married. Is that actually what we're looking for in a just relationship? We could say, well, in one hand, you know, they might say they honored their covenant, they stayed married. That's not at all a just, everybody recognizes something's really, really wrong here. If that's what you think, a good, you know, we've got the boundaries, everybody's keeping their boundaries, we're not, everything's just, right? Wrong. That's not what this, actually, mutual independence. Because you see, marriage is actually aimed at true goods. The true purpose of marriage can be summed up in union and procreation. That's why God designed marriage and gave it to us. Union and procreation. Two becoming one. And a just marriage aims at precisely those ends. Remember, justice is always connected to what is good. What are we accomplishing that is good? A just marriage aims at those ends of union and procreation, which implies that a marriage cannot be just if the spouses are trying to maintain their independence from each other. Justice comes about through mutual interdependence, not through independence. And in doing that then, marriage trains us in faithfulness over the long haul. Again, there is a reason why you might say it takes faith to promise yourself to somebody until death do us part. You can't guarantee the future. You don't know what's going to happen to that person or to yourself. And yet you can enter into that kind of a covenant that's a lifelong exclusive covenant union. And it trains us, even through that commitment, to faithfulness over the long haul. It means in order for us to become the kind of people that carry out the mission of marriage, we're gonna have to become the kind of people that can carry out a commitment over the long haul, that know how to work through the difficulties, that know how to forgive, that know how to build a good relationship and to grow together. It's gonna force us to do that. And of course, it will often expose when we don't. We see marriages fail all the time because they don't have the ability to maintain that faithfulness over the long haul. Marriage trains us in a just relationship. Now at the same time that marriage forms us in justice by teaching us to constantly, faithfully give ourselves for the good of another, it also forms us by teaching us more about what justice is. It teaches us that that the equality that justice seeks is not just something abstract and impersonal, but is actually concrete in a particular context and personal with particular people. Here's why I bring that up. You'll often hear justice is related to equity or justice is about equality. And there's a certain sense in which that is true, actually. Justice does want an equal world where everyone is getting what is right, right? But what is that equality? How does it actually work? What does it look like in practice? That's where a lot of the problems come into play. Justice is related to actual persons in actual relationships which determine what that equality looks like. It's never something that can be determined in the abstract. Here's why I think that our text teaches this. If we look at what our text says, it says, wives, submit to your own husbands. And then it goes on to say, husbands, love your wives. Pardon me. That's a recipe for a just marriage. You want a just marriage? Here's God's instructions. Wives, submit to your husbands. Husbands, love your wives. But isn't that unequal? It's different things for different. Why is it that the wives are told to submit, not the husbands? Isn't that, I mean, aren't all people equal? We're all equal before God, right? Isn't that the way it's supposed to work in a just world? We're all equal before God. Isn't it then unjust to tell the wives that they're the ones who have to submit? Why doesn't it work both ways? Wouldn't that be more equal? There are actually a lot of people nowadays that reason exactly that way. It's more equal if we have mutual submission here rather than just one party in the relationship having to do that and the other party have a different responsibility, that kind of a thing. Let me try to illustrate why this is not the case, why this is a wrong idea of equality and therefore not just. I'm an American citizen. Therefore, I am equal. Don't we believe in that kind of thing in our nation, right? We're all equal. We believe in equality for all. But I've noticed here in this country, as I've lived here, that the president sure seems to share an authority in this nation in ways I don't. And that's not equal. That's unjust, isn't it? I mean, why does the president, just because he happens to be in that position, get to do things and say things, make executive orders and people do what he says? And I don't. Is that unfair, unjust in that kind of a situation? I think most of us would almost intuitively say, well, no. How is a nation going to be a nation if everybody's the president making his own executive orders? We wouldn't be a nation very long, would we? We'd pretty much not exist after one day. There has to be a proper order to things in how even authority works or how structures work. We do this in every single institution. It isn't inherently unequal. In fact, I hope you can see from that example, it's necessary to proper kinds of equality functioning. There have to be those kinds of differences, even hierarchical kinds of differences, in order for equality to actually work. This is why, for example, you can't define equality by amounts of material goods. OK, we believe in an equal society. That means every single person in this nation should have $100, no more, no less. Now we're all equal. Now we have a just society. How would that work? It wouldn't. you couldn't make it work, right? In fact, you would have no society, and therefore you would not have any equality. It would all fall apart. That's not a just world. You can't define equality by the amount of material goods, let's say, in a given kind of relationship. You can't define equality by these kinds of metrics. It's why sometimes older writers tried to talk about this in turn, trying to illustrate this point by saying, You can't define the equality that justice is about by simply arithmetic. It doesn't work that way. It's a relationship between persons. And relationship between persons always respects who people are in their given relationships. If it doesn't respect that, it's not just. You give honor to whom honor is due. Some people actually are due certain honors by their relationships, by their responsibilities, by their positions. And that's how a just world works. That's how we all work together. It actually fosters love. Pardon me. This is one of the great errors that we've seen in our civilization over the 20th century on into the 21st. Where so often, if you notice, where so often, let me just use this illustration, movements that were labeled feminist began defining equality in terms of the same as men, right? How are women going to have equality in our society? Well, when everything is the same as men. Like, so we have this job and we get paid the same amount that men in this job get paid, or we get to have this job that men have, it's the same. And actually, even some feminists notice this kind of contradiction, by the way. Begin wondering, why is it that we're saying everything it means to be an equal woman is defined in terms of a man? And what they were noticing was actually right. God did make us different. There's men and there's women. And there are differences. And they're actually essential to a just world. And if you try to create a just world by eliminating those differences, you've eliminated a just world. Now you've eliminated good relationships between men and women. Those differences are essential to the very relationship. And you have to honor those differences. If you don't, you destroy the relationship. Pardon me. Marriage teaches us this. Marriage is good in that way. It doesn't eliminate the differences between men and women, does it? In any way. In fact, if nothing else, it highlights their respective differences. But then it puts those differences together in a relationship of love, in which you are mutually strengthening one another, you're mutually independent with one another, and you're working together to accomplish the mission that God has given to us. It's actually a beautiful form of training. So it's teaching us what real justice is like. It's helping us to understand in a good relationship, this is what justice looks like. You can't define it by abstract equality. That leads me to talk about here, parents and children, because our text goes on to that next here in Ephesians chapter six. So if marriage forms its members in social justice, it begins to teach them, to give them eyes to see what real social justice looks like. It does the same thing with parents and children. Ephesians chapter six, verse one says, Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. That's a statement of justice. This is right. This is just. This is the way a good relationship works. And it's defined like this. Children, obey your parents in the Lord. The relationships of parents and children form us and shape us in justice. Now, in a minute, I'll get here to how this forms parents. But let me first of all bring out this command to children. Obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother. This is the first commandment with a promise, that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land. This is a right and just relationship when children obey their parents, and in fact, there is a blessing attached to it. This is how you enjoy the fullness of God's favor, his goodness poured out on life. Children, when your parents give you instructions, Obey them, and you will be blessed. This is a good thing that God has made. Children, speak to your parents with respect, and you will be blessed. Children who talk back to their parents are setting themselves up to be unjust people living in an unjust world. Your character will be formed in bad ways if you talk back to your parents. You can't avoid that. You may think you're fighting for your rights. I don't know if children think about it so much that way. They just feel what they feel and think, I'm asserting myself here, right? Well, you're actually destroying yourself and a good world. You want good relationships? Honor your father and your mother. Learn that young. The more you learn that, the younger you are when you learn that, the better off you will be. Honor the good authority, the good gifts God has given to you in your life. Receive it as a good gift. In fact, as an important and weighty gift. God gave these parents to me precisely because I can't be, well, I was gonna say, you can't be normal human being without them. You're gonna be a little weird. if you don't have good parents teaching you good things. And you need that. It's actually true. You need to be shaped that way. You need to be formed that way, your character developed that way. Otherwise, without going through the testing and the forging, the honoring and obeying your parents provides, your character will not be formed in good ways. It will be deformed. God gives you this instruction because he's calling you to blessing, right? Honor your parents. And of course, this applies to us even into old age. We give honor to whom honor is due. We are to, even as churches, honor widows who are widows indeed, right? Make sure they are taken care of. Now, the church, the Apostle Paul specifically says, is to care for those who are widows indeed. That is, they don't have family to take care of them. What is the family supposed to do? Honor them. by providing for them, making sure their needs are met. That's part of what it means to live in a just world. The more we cast off that responsibility onto somebody else, the more we become unjust people. The more our character gets shaped, the more our eyes get clouded to what real justice is. If it becomes difficult, let's say, to care for aging parents. And it often is, by the way. It often puts us in situations that are difficult and can make difficult judgment calls part of how we have to live. But if we want to cast that off, feeling that somehow that's an emburden on us, an impediment on us living our fullness of life, then you realize we're becoming unjust people. We're wanting to have our cake and eat it too. I want all the blessings parents provide, but I don't want to have to actually work at it when it becomes difficult to have parents in my life. That's not a just person. God gave you that lifelong relationship precisely to forge your character, to be the kind of person who's not in it for yourself, but is really in it for others. Again, that doesn't mean it's always easy, but it is good to have that honor. Honor your parents, including their old age. But that brings us to Ephesians 6.4, where it says, fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Here's where we see the family forging us in justice by parents teaching their children to be just people. Now, parents, this instruction is directed to you, and of course, particularly to fathers. And I think that's intentional. We'll get to that in a moment. But parents, that means you have to learn what is just yourself if you're going to teach your children how to be just people. This is one of the ways the family forges it. It forces you into a position where if you don't know what's just, you're not going to be teaching your children what's just. You have to become a just person practicing justice in your home if you want your children to be just people. You know the proverbial, do what I say, not what I do? It doesn't work, does it? Especially with children in the home. They see how you live. They know what you're like. They see you at your best and at your worst. And if you're not a just person, you're not gonna do well at forming that in your children. See, already it puts a burden on us to be pursuing this truth, the truth of Jesus Christ, to be living in that well, developing the character and skill ourselves. If you're in a parent well, you have to become a just person. Children then learn justice as their parents exercise good judgment in their household. What's the role model? What's the example for children? They need to see good judgment being exercised. They need to have somebody in their life who's wise, who understands what's good and evil, who understands what's right and wrong, who understands what's best, even as opposed to what's just okay, and can make good judgments for the household of how we live together. Here's why we get up in the morning at this time. Here's why we go to bed at night at this time. This is a good judgment not to stay up all night long, because you won't be a good person if you don't develop the ability to do that. I mean, that might sound simple, but that's a parent's job, right? Children don't just automatically come into this world knowing how to function in good ways. Parents have to be the ones who have wisdom in scheduling your life. Here's what we give our lives to. Here's good work to invest ourselves in. These things over here aren't wrong, but they have to be in their place. You know, playing with your friends is a really good thing to do for a child. And good parents want their children to play with their friends, right? Good things. But all of life is not play. And you're gonna have to learn things in life, and you're gonna have to do things in life that sometimes feel hard. The parent is here to say, this is good, let's do this together. You're forming a character. You're giving your children the discernment to understand what really does seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and what doesn't. This is why you should go through Proverbs together as a family, right? There's a lot of wisdom there about what is God's good way and how do we live in it. Pardon me. In fact, I believe one of the most unjust things parents can ever do for their children is to fail to train them up in the way they should go. Just don't train them. That is unjust. That is doing wrong to your children. You are put there to give them that justice. And if you default, you are doing injustice. And you're setting yourself, your children up, not to mention yourself, to live in an unjust world. People who don't know how to live. I mean, this is a huge responsibility. Of course, all of us as parents say, in one sense, who is sufficient for these things? None of us are what we ought to be. None of us even know how we do all of these things, and yet, in faith, working through love, by the power of the Spirit. And that's why in this sermon series, we started, God is just and the justifier. He sent his son, Jesus Christ. He sends out his Spirit to enable us to live in his reality. So trusting in that, fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and the instruction of the Lord. Pardon me. We step up to the challenge of being parents. We arise to that call to justice. We become conduits of the Lord's training or discipline in our children's life. And that's the idea of this discipline and instruction of the Lord. It's the discipline and instruction that the Lord gives. You're the conduit of the training the Lord is bringing to your children. You're supposed to take that from the Lord and give it to your children. Right? So you discipline, you train. The worst thing you can do is not to do that. You might even feel like you don't know what you're doing, but you have to. You discipline them. You give them admonition and instruction and training in a context of love, but you give them what the Lord gives us because that's what you're there for. That's a just world. And to come back to something I mentioned earlier, there is a particular responsibility given to fathers here. I don't think it's an accident that Ephesians 6.4 singles out fathers. Now, we obviously know this applies to mothers as team members together with fathers, all that sort of thing. But when he switches in verse one from parents to fathers in verse four, he's pointing his finger right at fathers, not just parents. And he's saying, fathers, here's your job. You have to make sure this is happening. Bring your children up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. And so let me give that challenge to the men here today. If you're a father here today, the scriptures are calling on you. You want a just world with Jesus at its heart? Be a father. Train your children. Be that conduit from God to them. It means work. It means giving yourself and all that you have. It means fighting the good fight of faith, fighting all the sinful tendencies, not just in yourself, but in your children. But you're there to be that soldier on the front line, so to speak, to be that trainer, to be giving them what God needs them to know. You need to be making sure it happens. Fathers, take up that mantle. Be the man in the house, so to speak. Yes, your wife is a perfect complement for you in this, and you need to be working as a team, but you can't punt to your wife. You can't just expect your wife to pick up where you left off. You have to be leading the charge. You have to be investing. You have to be engaged in what's going on in your household. That's why, men, it's not enough just to bring home the bacon. I go out and I work hard all day, and I give my wife a paycheck, and she can take care of the kids, right? I'm tired when I get home at night. I don't wanna have to think about all the kids. That's not good enough. That's not being a man, right? You engage, you be there, work hard. God will enable you to do this. Bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. I believe one of the frightful features of our contemporary generation is it's fatherlessness. And I believe that is involved in a lot of the social pathologies that we see in our society. All kinds of problems. We talk about a just society. You need fathers doing their job if you want to have a just society. And by the way, this applies not just to situations where there's no father present in the household. That too is a dereliction of duty, obviously. This is why God created men and women to get married and to have children together. But it's also true when fathers simply check out. They might be there, but they're not actually doing their job. That's still a situation of fatherlessness. And when you have that, I don't think we can even count or tally up all the effects that that creates in children. Not at all saying children can't, by the grace of God, change and learn, and by the power of the Spirit, become fruitful adults themselves. Nevertheless, when there aren't fathers actively training their children, people get a skewed perspective of the world. They really don't understand the way the world works. They become afraid of authority, of good authority even, many times. They see it not in the context of love, like a loving father applying good training in their lives, but they see it in the context of a threat, something that's a power that's over me that I can't control, that's going to harm me. And that's what authority is. Therefore, I have to rebel against authority. I have to make my own way. They don't know the love of an authoritative, good father in their lives. We need that in so many ways in our situation. So, let's men, let's step up to be fathers. And in fact, let me say this as well. I would encourage us as men to do whatever we can to be a father to the fatherless. Even in the context of the church, and again, that's God's good context for this happening. Come to Christ, follow him, and guess what? In his body, the church, you can find fathers in the faith. You can find good men who are seeking to please the Lord. And it's a good thing, and it's a beautiful thing. And we begin to love this relationship. Let's be those kinds of men, fathers. Parents, your work of adjudication in the context of Christian love is probably the most powerful force in the world for forming just people. If you wanna form just people, you have to do the work of adjudicating justness in your household. Now, anybody who's been a parent here, do you ever get weary of doing that? I wish my kids would just get along. Why do I have to again and again and again step in and say, no, that was dumb, don't do that, or something. Hopefully you're not, right? Or saying, why are you fighting again? You can get weary of that. But folks, children need fathers, mothers, who are adjudicating life for them. who are saying, no, this is a just way to live, and that is not a just way to live. Don't live that way. If you live that way, there are bad consequences, right? And I'm going to help apply some of those consequences so that you learn. Don't live that way, right? I need you to learn to live this way. And that's where you can bring to bear all the goodness of God that we've been talking about here throughout this whole series on justice. and how God did really create us, not in a world of competition, but a world of love. And that it isn't about a battle for scarce resources. That's my toy, right? This is my room. You can't come in it, right? No, no, no, that's not the way the world works. Not in a just world, not in a world that God made. It's not about battling for my stuff. It's actually about, yes, taking responsibility for what I've been given, Lavishing that, I'm taking responsibility precisely so that I can benefit others. And isn't the family context a wonderful way to do that? I hope your children have chores or some responsibilities in your household, right? Where they're learning the goodness, what's good for me is actually what's good for the whole family. And then as I take responsibility for what's been entrusted to me, I actually find the whole family works together really well. And we enjoy our relationship together. But if we're always concerned about my rights and my territory and my stuff, guess what? We don't work together very well. The best place to learn that is in the family. Learn that from the very beginning. You're learning what a just world looks like. Parents be teaching your children this. Even as you are adjudicating their squabbles over toys or who gets what, or that's not fair because my brother got to do something that I didn't get to do. That's a perfect opportunity. This is like gospel gold, like opportunities. Show them Christ. Show them what a good world looks like in Christ. Here's why you don't have to fight over whether your brother got something you didn't get. Because that's not the way equality works. In fact, that's not looking to Christ and love at all. That's looking at myself. And the more selfish I am, the worse my relationships will be. But the more I give myself away in love, lo and behold, the better my relationships are. Parents, seize those opportunities. Train your children. I'm just looking down here and I'm seeing our youngest attendee right over here, Shepard, right? So from Shepard's age, how many days old is Shepard now? Okay, two weeks. All right, two weeks old. Here we go. This is good, right? We're inducting Shepard into a good world of love with Jesus at his heart, and we're teaching him all the goodness of what it means to be a loving family, which means we're lavishing love on him we're also teaching him some things, right? And we just grow up that way, and it becomes good. And then, by God's grace, we grow into adulthood, loving our relationships, even with our siblings. I know some of you here have extended family relationships that are struggles, bitternesses, conflicts, sometimes of many years standing, right? How do you live in a just world? We can't always resolve all issues in this world, but we can sure start in our households. And we can train up a generation of adults who love each other as brother and sister. And who know how to, lo and behold, it begins to look a lot like we were just talking about in marriage. They know how to live together over the long haul. They know how to work together. They know how to play together. They know how to forgive each other. They know how to accomplish good things together. And this is a really just world. You see, Folks, well, let me close by saying this. You want to be a social justice warrior in the world today? You really want to see social justice in the world? There's a really good place to start. Build a just household. Build a just household with Jesus at his heart, where you trust Jesus, you look to him, you walk in the spirit, and you begin to see the world open up in so many good ways. God has given the family unit, as it comes to fulfillment in Christ, to bring about a just world with Jesus at his heart. Let's follow that path together. If you would commit to that as God's people today, would you confess your faith, Jesus is Lord. Jesus is Lord. Amen. All right, let's pray and seek the Lord. Heavenly Father, you are a good father to us, and you have shown us justice and a son through your spirit. And we praise you for this, Lord. We praise you and thank you for these many opportunities that you have given to us, even for little ones like Shepard being here and other young children who are just learning to see Christ and how a just family, a just church lives out faithfulness to you. And Lord, in this we need your help. Lord, would you bless parents, fathers, and mothers with wisdom, a continuing strength to strive and grow and progress in their faith. They might be conduits of love and personal connections to speak the truth and to show this good way that you have communicated to us. Lord, in these families within your body, I pray that there would be close relationships of love, where there is conflict, that there would be reconciliation and peace. where there is confusion and disorder, that you, in your word, through even the loving words and actions of other parts of your church, will bring into clarity and trust and hope. We are so needy in these situations that you bring us into. We are so dependent upon you. And so Lord, we're asking you to act in the families and in the parents, or even thinking of new families. Even ask for your blessing on Katie and Adam, if you brought them to be one flesh. Lord, I pray that they would grow in wisdom. Adam would be a good leader in his household, loving his wife, and Katie would submit to her husband, and all the marriage relationships that you've blessed our church with, that this kind of love, this kind of justice would be the characteristic of us, that we might proclaim your truth. And even those, Lord, who you might, who are single now, but you might bring into marriage, I pray that you would prepare them even as young children, to obey parents, parents giving just and loving direction and instruction, godliness. Lord, there is so much good, life, and all of these things. Help us to realize it and accomplish it, or draw us and lead us into this as you are our good shepherd. Amen.