Equipping our Children for Life

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I want to invite you to take your Bibles out and go ahead and turn to Hebrews chapter 11.
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But also, if you are interested, we're going to be going almost immediately to Genesis 24.
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So if you want to have both of them marked, if you want to do that, we're going to be in beginning in Hebrews chapter 11.
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We have been studying the book of Hebrews now for a couple of years.
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We're in the 11th chapter and in the 11th chapter, as many of you know, there is a listing of faithful people, people who, by their demonstrations of faithfulness towards God, gave to us an example in different ways and in various ways as to what it looks like to actually follow God and to serve him.
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And throughout our study so far, we've looked at various people, we've looked at Abel and Enoch, we've looked at Noah and Abraham, and we've looked at Sarah, Abraham's wife.
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Well, this morning, we're going to be looking at the person of Isaac.
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And if you look there in Hebrews 11 and verse 20, you'll notice that not much is said about Isaac in this list.
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It goes from speaking about Abraham and Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah.
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And then in verse 20, it says, by faith, Isaac invoked future blessings on Jacob and Esau.
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And then it goes on to talk about Jacob and Joseph.
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And not much is said about Isaac in his faith, except that he was the one who gave the blessing to his sons, which would have been the natural thing for him to do.
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And again, when I arrived at verse 20, I was sort of surprised at the brevity with which the life of Isaac is mentioned.
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And then it dawned on me that actually not much is said in the Old Testament about the person of Isaac, even though he was of the three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
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He was the one whose life was the longest of the three.
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Much is said about his father, Abraham.
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And often we know that sometimes when a child has a famous father, sometimes they're sort of encompassed or, you know, eclipsed by the fame of their father.
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Well, Isaac had a famous father and a famous son.
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You know, Jacob is the one who was later called Israel.
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And through Israel, we have the 12 tribes and we call it the nation of Israel.
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So you sort of have Isaac sort of landing right in the middle of a very famous and important father and a very famous and important son.
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And not much is told to us about the life of Isaac.
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However, even though we don't have a lot of information, there is one scene in his life that I think is especially important to us today, and it involves the choosing of his wife.
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Now, you'll notice the title of the sermon is equipping our children for life.
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I didn't I didn't go out and write a special Reformation Day sermon.
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I think we honor the Reformation by simply continuing to preach verse by verse through the scripture.
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That's that was one of the great and powerful things that we got out of the Reformation was just to preach the Bible verse by verse.
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So today we're just continuing on.
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We're in Hebrews 1120.
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But again, our main topic of discussion is going to be going back and looking at this time in the life of Isaac and Abraham.
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It is certain that almost all parents desire not only that their children be successful, but that their children be happy.
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Yet a Christian parent has an even more lofty goal for their child, not just that the child be successful and not just that the child be happy, but Christian parents desire that their children be godly in their behavior and that they be servants of Jesus Christ.
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How we raise our children does have an effect on how they live.
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Now, you cannot ensure that your child will be a believer no matter how much you preach the gospel to them, no matter how much you demonstrate the love and grace of Christ to them.
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You are not the Holy Spirit and you cannot convict their soul.
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But we can preach the gospel to them.
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We can be diligent to demonstrate to them what godliness looks like and provide for them parameters which will train them in godly living.
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That's what we can do.
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We can't save them, but we certainly can do our best to train them in godliness.
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This is why throughout the Bible there is that consistent reminder for parents to raise up your children in a godly way.
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We've already read Deuteronomy six, which says all these words I command you today shall be on your heart and you shall teach them diligently to your children.
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And then in Ephesians chapter six and verse four, it says, Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
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And I believe in the King James, it says the fear and admonition of the Lord.
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We are commanded to raise our children well because our influence will have a lasting effect on their behavior, whether it be for good or for bad.
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Our children will be affected by our behavior.
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It is inevitable.
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So what I want us to do today is I want us to look at Genesis 24.
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And what I want us to see is how Abraham's situation with Isaac provides for us some insight into how we are to be raising our children towards godliness.
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We're going to look to Abraham now as an example of fatherhood from this text in Genesis 24.
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And as is our tradition in the church, when the scripture is read, we stand together.
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So let us stand for the reading of scripture.
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We're going to read Genesis 24, verse one and go through verse nine.
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Now, Abraham was old, well advanced in years, and the Lord had blessed Abraham in all things.
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And Abraham said to his servant, the oldest of his household, who had charge of all that he had put your hand under my thigh, that I may make you swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and the God of the earth, that you will not take a wife or my son from the daughters of the Canaanites among whom I dwell.
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But we'll go to my country and to my kindred and take a wife for my son Isaac.
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The servant said to him, perhaps the woman may not be willing to follow me to this land.
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Must I then take your son back to the land from which you came? Abraham said to him, see to it that you do not take my son back there.
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The Lord, the God of heaven, who took me from my father's house and from the land of my kindred and who spoke to me and swore to me to your offspring, I will give this land.
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He will send his angel before you and shall take a wife for my son from there.
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But if the woman is not willing to follow you, then you will be free from this oath of mine.
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Only you must not take my son back there.
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So the servant put his hand under the thigh of Abraham, his master, and swore to him concerning this matter.
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Our Father and our God, we come to you in Jesus name.
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We are humbled again, Lord, that you have given us your word to study, to make application from and to be able to live our lives in accord with your will.
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I pray, O Lord, as I preached the truth this morning, that you would keep me from error, that you would uphold my spirit as I preach.
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Lord, help me to focus upon your word and not on my own vain opinions.
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And I pray, O Lord, for the congregation, that you would open their heart to understand the truth and that you would keep them, Lord, from wandering in their minds as they hear the preaching of the word.
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Lord, all these things we trust you with and we ask you to be with us now in Jesus name.
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Amen.
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It is not my normal practice to give outlines, but this morning we are going to have somewhat of an outline of the text because there are three things that I want us to recognize at this portion of Genesis 24 in regard to parenting.
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And some may ask the question, well, is the clear exegesis of this passage necessarily the is the point of the passage necessarily Abraham's parenting style? And I would have to concede and say, no, this this is focused more on the issue of Abraham's intent in keeping his familial line unstained from the world.
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That's the focus of the passage.
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And while we're going to talk about that some as we learn in the process of hermeneutics, the process of studying scripture is that while every passage of scripture only has one meaning, there certainly are thousands of applications which can be drawn, even though the passage only has one meaning.
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And this morning, the application that as I was reading it and studying it, the application that kept coming out to me was the application of Abraham's diligent fatherhood.
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So that's the point that I would like us to focus on as we study this morning.
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And the first thing I want us to notice is that Abraham took a proactive approach to fatherhood by arranging his son's marriage.
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That's the first broad point.
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Abraham took a proactive approach to fatherhood by arranging his son's marriage.
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You'll notice if you look at the text, it does not say anywhere that Isaac himself was looking for a bride.
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It doesn't say Isaac came to Abraham and said, Dad, I'm lonely, I want to get married.
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Would you please help me to find a wife? It doesn't have anything to do.
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In fact, Isaac is not mentioned.
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Isaac is only mentioned as the the subject.
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He's not an object in the story.
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He's not a person who's engaged in the story.
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But Abraham knew that that is what his son needed.
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And he arranged for it to be done.
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He didn't have to have Isaac to tell him what he needed.
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He recognized the need and he moved forward and seeing that need be fulfilled.
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Now, in our modern day, the idea of arranged marriages seems to be the most archaic of practices.
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If we want to talk about arranged marriages today, we often are reminded of the many, many storybooks that have been written about a woman being in love with a man, but her father betrothing her to another man and her not loving that man, but loving this man.
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And there's this great divide in her heart where she wants to do what her parents wanted to do, but she loves this person.
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There's this great divide.
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And we've all read thousands of love stories like that, and we've seen those things before.
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But yet there is something very important that we see here, which mustn't be overlooked.
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Abraham is here working for his son's own good to ensure that he takes a wife, which will be a blessing to him.
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The most important thing was not that his son take a wife from the surrounding unbelieving pagans, but instead that he would have a wife from his own family who would continue in the service of God and not seek to lead them to lead Isaac astray.
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And might I say this, beloved, because we got a lot of kids at this church, you know, we've grown in leaps and bounds, but the vast majority of our growth has been the old fashioned way.
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We sort of have been growing the church by just having more children.
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And that's the best way we had to look out.
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And I see all these kids and I see everyone.
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And I think many of you, I know some of you aren't parents, some of your grandparents.
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And you think, well, this this past this sermon is going to have a lot to do with me.
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It really is because in essence, we're all and you'll see this later in the service, we're the later in the summer.
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We're all going to have a part in the raising of these children.
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We're all going to have a part in being mentors and involved in their lives.
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And as you look and you see three, four, five year old children and you see children, my children, 11, 12, 13 year olds, and you see those who are up in their teenage years and you begin to thinking very soon these children are going to be making very important life decisions, marriage.
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And then before that, they're going to be making decisions about who they befriend.
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And then before that, they're going to be making decisions about very important things like what is their worldview? How do they see the world? Do they see themselves as created beings in the image of God? Or do they see themselves as simply the the the most recent working out of the evolutionary process? And that's important because from from the very foundational levels, what a child sees him or herself as will demonstrate as how they behave.
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You know, it's not amazing that we tell our children that all they are are grown up apes and then they act like it.
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They shouldn't amaze us that that happens.
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It's just the natural outworking of what we tell them they are, they will become.
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So when we look at this, I just was in my heart, I was thinking about my own daughter.
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And if I'm selfish, you know, please don't condemn me.
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But I but sometimes I'm writing these messages.
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I'm thinking about things that are in my life.
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And when I think about my daughter, I think about this.
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She's the older of the two, by the way.
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I think about the fact that the most important decision that she will ever make outside of God opening up her heart to believe the gospel, outside of that, the most important decision she will ever make is who she is going to marry unless God, by an act of grace, gifts her to singleness.
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And that is a gift.
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There are some people who are gifted to singleness, and I don't want to make that the aspect of the sermon.
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But Jesus said there are some who are eunuchs by choice or some who made eunuchs by men, and there's some who God gives the ability to be single and singleness is a gift.
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But not everybody's gifted.
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I know I wasn't.
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I would not function without my bride.
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I don't know how to live.
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And I don't think my wife or I don't think my daughter is gifted to singleness either, not because she's interested in boys, but I just I see in her a very motherly instinct.
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I see in her something that I think is going to manifest itself later that I think God is going to use.
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So in that as a father, I have to begin considering my responsibility to be involved in her life, helping her make the absolute best decision she can in the choosing of a spouse.
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And beloved, whether it's a boy or a girl, we as parents or grandparents need to be involved in this decision.
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We need to have a part in helping them make the right decision.
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And a day where there aren't arranged marriages anymore, how can a father and mother apply this? That's the question.
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And a day where these things aren't done anymore, we don't have arranged marriages anymore.
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How can we apply what I'm talking about? Well, the first thing that I think we need to consider when we're thinking about this issue is that the modern system which we have all become associated with in our lives, the modern what we call the dating system is not a godly system.
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It's just not it's not a godly system because this is this is what I often hear out of people.
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They say, well, I'm not going to let my daughter date until she's and you put the age.
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Some people say 16.
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So I'm not going to let my daughter date until she's 18 or I'm not going to let my daughter date.
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So she's out of medical school or whatever.
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And then and what's sad is that the age hasn't gone up.
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The age has gone down.
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I'm not going to let my daughter date.
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So she's 14, 13, 12.
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I work at a middle school part time.
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I substitute teach and I see these little 12, 11 year old girls dating.
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I'm going on a date Friday night.
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I just I want you to notice the presupposition in this statement.
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I'm not going to let my daughter date until what's the presupposition? At some point, I'm going to have to let her date.
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That's the presupposition.
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And if you listen to it at some point, I'm going to have to let her date.
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That assumes that she's going to do that.
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But I ask the question, is that essential? Is it essential that I let my daughter go out on dates and somebody says, now, wait a minute now, how is she going to meet somebody? How is she going to learn about somebody else? How is she going to grow and how is she going to find that person with whom she's going to marry? Well, let me tell you something.
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I know we've been convinced that dating is the only way we've been convinced this is the only way to do it, but it ain't the only way to do it.
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Sorry for the bad use of grammar there.
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But it just ain't because let me tell you something.
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I paint you analogy.
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And this is not my analogy.
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I stole this from Vody Bokum.
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I'm sure he wouldn't mind.
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But this is something Vody said I thought was very important.
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He said, if a young man comes to my door, 17 years old, and he wants to take my daughter out and spend time with her or without the family, just wants to go out and be alone with her.
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Most fathers do what they try to make him afraid.
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Clean my gun, you know, to make him afraid.
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However, if the same 17 year old man came to my house and I own, let's say, a Lamborghini, I know I know that's a joke in of itself.
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Couldn't afford one, couldn't fit in one.
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But but let's say I owned a Lamborghini for nothing but show.
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And this 17 year old kid comes to my house and I said, now I'm going to put the fear of God into you, I'm going to clean my gun, but I'm going to hand you the keys to my Lamborghini.
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Every one of you would say I was a fool.
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Every one of you would say I was the most miserably foolish person that you know.
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If I took a 17 year old kid, handed him the keys and said, now be safe.
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But what is our culture teaching our children? The car is more important than the kid.
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The Lamborghini is more important than the daughter, because I'm willing to say to her, yes, you'll be safe.
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I don't trust teenage boys further than I can throw them.
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Because I once was one.
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And there is no way that he deserves private time.
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That's it.
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Well, Pastor, you're now preaching your opinion.
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I'm telling you, as a parent, we have the responsibility to raise our children.
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That's biblical.
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We have a we have a responsibility to protect our children.
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That's biblical.
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I'm telling you, a prudent way of doing it is not to simply turn them out to their own decisions, because the Bible says the heart is desperately wicked.
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Who can know it? And am I to say, well, my daughter is trustworthy.
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She is the only one there.
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She's not the only one there.
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Biblical principles, how to how to maintain as our children grow up to ensure that they are to do our best.
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We can't ensure anything.
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We're not sovereign, but to do our best to ensure that they will make a good decision when it comes to marriage.
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Number one, we can establish from a young age what their children what our children should expect when they come into a marriage relationship.
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My children should look at my marriage relationship and know what to expect when they get in theirs.
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My daughter should see me treat my wife and know how she should be treated.
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My son should see me treat my wife and know how he is supposed to treat a woman.
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So from the very earliest of age, that's my responsibility to love my wife as Christ loved the church so that when my children see me, they see what love looks like and they know what to expect and what to give.
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That's first.
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And the second thing, the second thing is we can be involved in the process of helping our child choose a mate when the time comes if we from the very earliest of ages begin to tell them that that's how it's going to be.
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We are going to help you.
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We are going to help you vet a suitor.
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That's old language.
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Well, it's good language because that's what it is.
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We are vetting a suitor.
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If a young man wants to spend time with my daughter, he's going to spend time with all of us because we are looking for and he doesn't even get to make it to the door unless he loves Jesus and has a job.
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But after that, then we can start the vetting process.
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Does he love her as Christ loves the church or does he love himself more? These are all things that are important, things that we have to consider.
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As fathers and mothers, and if you're not a father and mother yet, you may be one day in the sermon may be reminded to you then or if you're a grandparent now, you can look at your children and maybe you're dating.
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Maybe you're here today and you're you're a teenager.
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Ask yourself, what is my desire in this relationship? Am I simply just trying to have all the fun I can eat, sleep and or eat, drink and be married for tomorrow? I die.
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Or am I seeking godliness? Am I seeking that one day this relationship will become more? But until then.
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I'm satisfied to learn about this person and grow in our relationship.
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So I think that when we see Abraham in this story, we see Abraham taking a very proactive approach to fatherhood.
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He says he looks at his son.
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He says, I know you need a wife.
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And he goes about the business of seeing that his son gets a wife.
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Number two, the second thing that we see here is Abraham involved a trusted friend in the working out of his son's situation.
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So first, Abraham took a proactive approach to fatherhood.
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Number two, Abraham involved a trusted friend in the working out of his son's situation.
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Abraham brought to him his most his most trusted servant.
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If you read verse two, it says, And Abraham said to a servant, the oldest of his household, who had charge of all that he had.
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That's a statement of trust.
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He's the oldest servant in the house and he's the one that had control of everything.
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He was the house steward, the house manager.
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He was in charge.
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And Abraham brings this guy to him, this person who's in charge, this important person.
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And he says, look, you're going to have a part in this.
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You're going to have a part in going to find a wife for my son.
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What more important job could he have given to this trusted friend than to go and find a wife for his son? Now, as I was reading this, I was thinking about the fact that if you if you look at the life of the church, we are all involved in each other's lives.
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That's the one thing of the beauty about having a small church.
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And I mean, obviously, we want to grow the church through the evangelism and preaching the gospel.
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But but the beauty of having a church this size is we've all been in each other's houses.
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We've all we've all ate food together.
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We know each other's children.
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We're happy to spank each other's children.
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Not a lot.
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But what I'm saying is we have a trusted relationship and I know that there are places where you are gifted and I am not.
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And there are places where my children will look to you in areas of mentoring that they would not necessarily look to me.
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When I was growing up, I had two men in my life that made a profound impact as to who I am today.
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The first man was my father.
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My father taught me how to be a father.
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He taught me how to love and how to work hard and how to always try to do what was right.
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I remember Dad always said it sometimes rings in my ear.
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He said, just do what you're supposed to do and everything will be all right.
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You know, Dad's saying, do what you're supposed to do.
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That was my dad.
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There was another man in my life and I as I was thinking about important people and in our lives.
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When I was growing up and I was in high school.
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I was in public school and I was in the marching band.
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And there was a man.
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Yeah, I was in the band.
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They laughed at that.
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That's sad.
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They said I should have played football, but that didn't matter.
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But I was in the marching band and there was a there was a man who was my band director, his name was Don Reynolds.
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And.
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I will tell you this, because of God's grace on my life and getting to spend four years watching that man lead people.
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He taught me how to be a leader and he taught me how to do what I'm doing today, even though he didn't teach me how to preach, he didn't teach me how to do this part of it.
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But.
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By the grace of God, I had a man in my life who taught me what it meant to have people want.
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To follow after.
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Because I tell you what, for four years, all I wanted to do was follow that guy because he was a leader.
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He knew what it meant to to make people, you know, I always said this, none of us were in the band because we had to be.
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We were all there because we wanted to follow after that guy, he had a desire and he was a godly man, he was a Christian, even to today, he plays the trumpet in his in his.
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But but that part to me, I wasn't a believer until I was 19 years old.
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But what did seep into my heart was this guy cares about me and I want to follow after him.
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I want to I want to this guy taught me to lead other people.
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Why am I telling you this? Because you will have influence in my children's life.
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I will have influence in your children's life because we are in a community of faith.
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We need to remember that, that we are in this together.
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It's not the whole village raises a child thing.
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No, that's that's that's not what I'm saying.
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But what I am saying is this, I'm saying that as our children grow in this community of faith, we will all take part in their growth and we need to remember that responsibility when we're out and when we're doing things outside of the church, that my children aren't just looking at me for godly examples.
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They're looking at you and your children aren't just looking at you, but they're looking at the others and to me and we have a very important responsibility.
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Finally, the third thing.
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The third thing I want us to notice from this passage, Abraham understood there were things outside of his control and he trusted God with those things.
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Very quickly, just look at verse eight.
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He says, but if the woman is not willing to follow you, then you will be free from this oath of mine.
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Only you must not take my son back there.
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What is Abraham saying? He's saying, OK, here's the situation.
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You are going to go and God's angel is going to go before you and he's going to prepare this for you.
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And when you get there, there's going to be this woman who will return with you.
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But if she doesn't come back, what is their contingency plan? No, he just says.
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If she doesn't return, you're released from this oath.
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Why? Because Abraham knows that he's not God.
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Abraham knows that he's not the one that's going to make this happen.
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It's up to God and it's God's will that's going to bring this about.
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Abraham knew what it was like to make plans and they weren't God's plans.
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They remember Hagar.
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I remember the story with that Abraham knew what it was like to go through with a plan and then find out on the other end, hey, that wasn't really what God had intended.
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God had intended I have a child through Sarah, not through Hagar, but I tried to do it my way.
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Beloved, I will tell you this.
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We are not sovereign.
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All we can do is do our best to raise our children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
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And after that, we have to trust God to be faithful.
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We cannot force our children to be believers as much as we might like to make them believe we can't.
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We cannot ensure that our children will go into godly lifestyles.
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We cannot ensure that our children will not make mistakes.
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I'm sure any one of us would would want to do whatever we could to keep our children out of harm's way.
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But we're not going to be able to do all of those things.
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And at some point after we have done our best to raise them in the fear and admonition of the Lord, we have to trust God's will be done.
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Some of you might argue today and say, well, pastor, you've given some pretty difficult advice and this is easy for you to say your daughter's only 13.
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Come back in 10 years and tell us all these things.
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Well, beloved, I cannot promise that I won't have difficulties in the next 10 years.
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I mean, she's 13 already.
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Trust me, I'm not going to promise anything.
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But I can promise this.
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Her mother and I have a plan for raising our children and part of the plan is preparing for them to become adults and taking their rightful places in their own family one day.
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And I know what rules I'm going to seek to apply and I have continued to instill in them what they are to expect as they age.
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I'm not perfect.
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I will fail and they will fail.
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But I do have a plan.
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I have a plan for parenting and I ask you, do you have a plan? Do you have a plan for how you're parenting your children? My children are grown, do you have a plan to help them raise their children? Grandparents have a tremendous impact on their children, on their children's children.
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Have you thought about how you're going to impact your grandchildren? It has been rightly said that those who fail to plan, plan to fail.
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We should consider how we are going to raise our children.
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What can we do to ensure that we're teaching them in godly ways? There is no more important duty which is given to a parent than of raising their children in godliness, raising them in the gospel, raising them according to the word of God.
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Now, some of you this morning may be here today and you may hear me say that raising them according to the gospel and you may not know what the gospel is.
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And because it is important that we all hear the gospel, I want to again finish by simply sharing with you what that means when I say raising them according to the gospel.
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The word gospel simply means good news, but the good news cannot be understood unless you understand first the bad.
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The bad is that we are all sinners.
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We are created in the image of God, but we are sinners.
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We have sinned against God and by such, we deserve his wrath.
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But God and his love sent forth his son to live a righteous life so that by his righteousness, we could be made righteous and by his sacrifice, our sins could be forgiven.
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This morning, if you've never heard the gospel, I want to tell you that the Bible commands all men everywhere to repent, to trust in Jesus Christ, for there is salvation and no other and there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.
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If you think your salvation is coming through any other, the Bible says that you are wrong.
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That's the gospel and we teach our children this gospel and raise them in it, that they might be the next generation who proclaim the truth of God's word.
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Let's pray.
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Father, we are humbled again by your scripture.
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We are humbled at how it can be applied to our lives today.
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We are humbled by the fact that even so many thousand years ago, there were men and women such as we who had lives, who lived their lives, who had to go through issues like marriage and work and Lord God raising children.
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And we pray for every father and mother and grandfather and grandmother in this room today.
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We pray, Lord, that they would seek to bring their children up in godliness and in righteousness.
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And we pray for the young relationships in this room today.
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We pray that they would seek to be in godly relationships.
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And we pray for the young children today, those who many of which have not even considered marriage or relationships because they're just too young for that.
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Lord, we know a day is coming.
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We know a day is coming for them, and we pray now that you would help their parents, that you would guide and direct their parents to help them in making godly decisions.
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Lord, we know that your word is the light to our feet and the lamp to our path.
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So we pray that we would trust in the word when we're making decisions and we're helping our children make decisions.
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That you who created us and gave us life knows the best way to live life and to glorify you.
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We thank you for your word, Lord, in Jesus name.
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Amen.
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Stand with us now as we sing our song of benediction.
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And if you do have a need for prayer, we offer this time for you to come and pray.