The Key to Raising Faithful Children | Part 2

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Welcome to the Fortifying youg Family podcast.

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It can be daunting to navigate through an anti marriage and family culture.

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Our teacher will expound biblical principles to help fortify our families and keep these sacred institutions strong.

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And now here's this week's teaching from Sam Wood.

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So the first area is scripture.

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The second area is supplication.

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And let me just say prayer is essential in our homes.

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It's essential in our homes.

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Charles Spurgeon said, I trust there are none here present who profess to be followers of Christ who do not also practice prayer in their families.

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The practice of regular daily prayer in our families is essential, an essential element of family worship.

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And folks, listen to me, it'll have life changing effects upon your children to have prayer in your home.

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I've been reading recently a book that I'd encourage every one of you to read about missionary John G.

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Patton.

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He was a missionary to the cannibals of the South Seas.

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Can you imagine being called to be a missionary and being called to islands where they were cannibals?

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But some things that stood out in this book to me because it talks about the influence, the great influence that his dad had upon his life and his calling into ministry.

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So let me just read one little paragraph here.

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The source of Patton's stirrings for the unconverted world can be traced to his godly home.

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As a boy, he vividly recalled his father's intercessions at eventime.

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How much he says my father's prayers at this time impressed me I can never explain nor could any stranger understand when on his knees and all of us kneeling around him in family worship, he poured out his whole soul with tears for the conversion of the heathen world to the service of Jesus and for every personal and domestic need.

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We all felt as if the presence of the living Savior and learned to know and love him as our divine friend.

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And I could go on and on.

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Quotes from John Patton and the impression that having family worship in his home and his dad's prayers had upon him.

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He even talks about a time where they were having family worship and there was a lady outside their window who heard their dad praying and heard their family worship that ended up being converted from that there was not even in the room with them.

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It's amazing.

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Iain Mary in his biography of the great saint and preacher, one of my, I guess, heroes of the faith, Martyn Lloyd Jones, he says this family prayer marked the close of every day.

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And after his death, Bethan his daughter Lloyd Jones said that it was Here that she experienced the greatest loss of her father, him praying with her.

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What a great privilege it is to be able to come to God as a family with our children and petition his protection and provision in our home.

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Prayer is one of the greatest spiritual weapons God has given to us as a mother and father, as a grandmother and grandfather for our home.

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And regular daily prayer affords parents a wonderful opportunity to teach their children the need to confess and repent of their sin, even as they hear mom and dad confess and repent of their sins in prayer.

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It also affords us the opportunity to continually thank God for all the blessings that he has shown to us with our children.

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I guess one of the things that stands out to me the most with my kids in the last 20 years is when Josh called me years ago and he had a degree in engineering and architectural engineering.

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And he called me and said, dad, I think God is calling me to go to seminary.

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And he ended up going to Southern Seminary up in Louisville, Kentucky.

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And he said, daddy, he said, I don't.

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I don't know what God is going to do in my life from here on out or how he wants me to use this in the days to come, but I do know this.

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He said, I know that God answers prayer.

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And he said, I know that God will be with me every step of my life because I saw when I was growing up how that we gathered together and we prayed time and time again that God would supply food, that God would pay this bill, that God would do this.

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He said, dad, I know that God is real and God answers prayer.

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And I thought to myself, that is so wonderful to hear your child say that.

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What I'm trying to impress, I'm not trying to build us up.

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I'm trying to impress upon you how important it is that you have family worship, how important it is that you read the scripture with your children, how important it is that you have supplication, you have prayer with your children, with your family as a family.

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Thirdly, singing, the psalmist declares in Psalm 118 and verse 15, the voice of rejoicing and salvation is in the tabernacles of the righteous.

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And when I was studying this a while back, it said, the tabernacles of the righteous refers to the tents or homes of the righteous.

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In fact, Philip Henry, who is a father of the great commentator Matthew Henry, said, this means that we're to sing in our homes.

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It involves family singing as well as congregational and temple singing.

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It involves singing from home to home or from tent to tent.

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And, you know, we see this exhortation in the New Testament in Colossians 3:16, where it says, let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns.

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Spiritual song.

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Singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord, singing praises to the Lord should be part of our daily family worship.

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And we need to sing heartily unto the Lord.

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A good way to do that is to, if you can get songbooks, use songbooks.

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And I'm not saying take these songbooks, but find some songbooks.

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Have songbooks in your home.

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And it's so easy now with what we can get on our phones and on YouTube and things like this, to even have recordings that we can sing with that are done really, really well.

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One thing we did in our home was we let our boys play instruments, flutophones and all these kinds of things.

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And they would play instruments and we would sing together.

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You wouldn't have wanted to be there to hear it.

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But hey, listen, we had fun.

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We had a good time singing unto the Lord.

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It was a wonderful thing to do.

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So family worship should include scripture supplication.

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It should include singing.

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But you might be saying, but who in the home?

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I know we need to do it, but who should lead it?

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Who should lead family worship in the home?

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Since the Father is called by God to be the spiritual head of the home, he is normally the one who would lead in family worship.

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I remind you of what it says in Ephesians 6:4, Angie.

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Fathers provoke not your children to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

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The command there is directly to the Father.

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The Father is to be that spiritual head of his home.

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So he should be normally the one who would lead in family devotions.

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And some dads may be here today.

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And you may be like I was when God first impressed us upon my heart years ago.

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You know, I don't feel like I'm theologically trained to lead in family worship.

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I don't know if I really can do that.

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And listen, most fathers are not theologically trained.

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If you want to say, they haven't been to Bible college, they haven't been to seminary.

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But God commands us as fathers to do this in our homes.

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And I know when I got impressed to do this, when God impressed this upon my heart, I just started getting out the Bible and I would start reading verses to the boys, and we would read these verses together, and then we'd have a time of prayer together.

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And then we'd have a time of singing together.

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I'd never seen it done.

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I'd never seen it, like I said before, modeled before me.

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Nobody had taught me, but I thought, this is what I need to do.

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So I'm going to do the best I can at what I feel that God has called me to do.

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And, you know, I would take a chapter in the Bible and I would have the boys read a verse in that chapter.

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We would take turns reading verses and then I would talk about it.

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And I would even get them to read scripture aloud.

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And we would enjoy our time around the word of God.

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I would ask them questions like, you know, what is this passage about?

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Why is it so important?

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Does it.

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Anything in this passage surprise you?

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Is God showing you anything that surprises you?

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How does this passage relate to the gospel?

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I'd always try to bring it back to the gospel wherever I was in the Bible.

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What does this passage tell us about God and who God is?

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And how does all that apply to you?

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And we just take time.

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We might talk through that.

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Another thing dads can do if you want to lead your family and family worship is listen.

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You can take the passage that you read in your quiet time in the morning, assuming you have a quiet time that you read that morning and you studied that morning and share it with your family.

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Or you could take the notes that you take when your preacher preaches and take those notes home through the week, and you could go through the notes and expound them and make sure they, your kids, understand what the preacher preached on Sunday morning.

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You don't have to be a Bible scholar, but you do need to consistently engrave these truths diligently upon the hearts of your children and continually expose them to the gospel.

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And don't get discouraged, because I've had many parents come up and say, well, I started doing that and I did it for three or four days and I missed a day or two.

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Then I just quit.

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Listen, we will miss some days sometimes, but don't get discouraged.

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Don't quit.

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Be as consistent as you possibly can and keep at it.

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Now, some of you may be hearing, you're saying, well, what if the father's not a Christian?

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And many wives find that their unbelieving husbands, we have found, are willing to read the Bible if they ask them to do it.

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That is, they might not normally lead the whole family worship, but if they ask her unbelieving husband, will you, we want to have devotion with the kids.

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Will you read the Bible while we have devotions?

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A Lot of them will do it.

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But if the unwilling husband is not willing to participate, then the wife should take the lead and make sure they have devotions anyway.

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But she needs to make sure that she does it in a spirit that's not offensive to her husband and certainly doesn't turn their children against their dad.

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And listen, if you have two siblings even in a home, Debbie and I talked about this.

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You had two siblings in a home and the mom and dad aren't Christians, then you as siblings can have family worship every day.

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Brother and sister, sister and sister.

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What a wonderful testimony that will be for your unbelieving parents to see.

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You have a time of reading the Bible together and praying together and singing together in their home.

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What a testimony that might lead them to know Christ even as their savior.

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To make family regular.

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Family worship and devotion is a priority in your home.

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Listen, it requires coordination.

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It will require sacrifice from every family member in the home.

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And each family member must be willing to adjust their schedule and adjust some of their desires for the greater good, the greater importance of family worship in the family.

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And sometimes you may have to miss a favorite TV show.

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You may have to limit the extracurricular activities to one sport or one special event or something.

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But listen, there's nothing more important you could do in your home than what I'm talking about right here this morning.

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As a survey shows in the Bible exhorts us, making having a formal time in the word of God a priority leads to having a robust faith in your children.

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And let me just say that we liked when we had family worship to also incorporate books like this book.

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Read books like this on missionaries, Read books like Pilgrim's Progress and Narnia, books about different great men and women of the faith with our kids and have a time of doing that, too.

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Now I'm talking about family intentional family worship.

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And I'm just going to take a few more minutes.

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And I just want to briefly mention casual family worship, because it says that about.

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Talks about that at the end of verse seven, it says, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up in all of our everyday activities, continually as parents look for opportunities to point out the Lord to your children in everything that you do.

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When we tuck them into bed at night, when we first see them in the morning, listen, when we're walking outside, when we're watching something on television, when we're in the car riding down the road, let them see that your life is dominated by divine truth, that Jesus, your relationship with God is supreme and preeminent over every other relationship in your life.

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They need to see all of life as a classroom.

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Every occasion in life is an opportunity where that we acknowledge God and point God out and exalt God to them.

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And every experience in life is an opportunity to point them to heaven.

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Everything that happens to them is an opportunity to point them back to Scripture.

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One author beautifully states, I must sensitize my children to see the hand of God and hear the voice of God and the print of God in every flower, every rock, every mountain, the sea, the sky, the babbling brook, the whispering trees, the crickets chirp, the roaring waterfall, the gentle slap of the surf, the fragrance of a flower, salt air, little babies, fresh hot berries, hot buttered baked bread, a puppy, a squirrel, grandma.

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And he goes on.

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Everything in life is a classroom to draw your children back to God.

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We have a great privilege and a great opportunity to fortify our families through family worship, both formally and casually.

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But we need to do all of what I'm talking about in a spirit filled atmosphere in a home because it can become legalistic if we don't.

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Family worship should be conducted in a spirit filled home atmosphere where the fruits of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control are lived out daily before the child.

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It should be an environment where the parents are continually demonstrating love and acceptance to their children and parents.

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Spirit filled atmosphere starts with our walk daily with God individually and as a married couple.

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And listen, if your marriage isn't spiritually healthy, you undermine all that you attempt to accomplish through family worship.

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So I remind you that your marriage is one of the most powerful gospel influences that you possess.

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To the degree, to the degree that you live out the gospel before your children in your marriage.

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God will empower you, I believe, to reach your children.

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And as I close this morning, let me just say a word to the young people, the teens, the young people here this morning.

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If your parents decide to incorporate family worship into your home, you're abundantly blessed.

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You ought to thank God.

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If you're really a child of God, you ought to thank God that they are.

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Your attitude and level of cooperation and reverence will show whether your faith that you say that you have is superficial or it's supernatural.

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It'll show whether your faith is fake or whether it's real.

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How you cooperate with your family.

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Having family worship in your home, it's a chance for you to honor your parents and show them how much you love the Lord and show respect To God.

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I want to close this morning with a story about a man by the name of Rick Husband.

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You might remember that Rick Husband was the commander of the space shuttle Columbia.

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,: 2003

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The day after that tragedy, a memorial service was held for 45 year old Rick Husband at Grace Community Church in Houston, Texas where that they attended.

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At that service, a video was played where Husband said these words.

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If I ended up at the end of my life having been an astronaut, but sacrificed my family along the way, or living my life in a way that didn't glorify God, then I would look back on it with great regret.

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Having become an astronaut would really not have mattered at all that much.

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I finally came, he says, to realize that what really meant the most to me was to try and live my life the way God wanted me to and to try to be a good husband to Evelyn and to be a good father to my children.

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Rick Husband's resolve to be a good husband and to be a good father to his children was more than just words.

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A week before he left, when he was sent into quarantine before the space shuttle left, he told his wife Evelyn, I want to make a videotape for Laura and one for Matthew that they can watch each day I'm in orbit.

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I want the children to know how much I love them and that I'll be thinking about them every day.

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At the beginning of the tape, he left his 7 year old son this message.

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He said, hi Matthew, I wanted to tell you how much I love you and I wanted to make this tape for you so that you and I could have a devotional time for every day that I'm in space.

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So what I am doing is I am looking at your devotional book and I am starting on the 16th of January, which is our launch day.

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And what I will do is read through this book and read the Bible verse also and go through the whole thing just like you and I are sitting here on the couch together.

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I just wanted to do this because I love you so much and I'm going to do one for your sister as well.

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Here's a dad who was so concerned about having family worship with his children that he made a video to have family worship every day while he was in space and a dad who never returned home.

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I'm sure the 18 devotions on that video are priceless to his son, to his daughter and his family.

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You know, that's the kind of legacy I want to leave, and I'm sure it's the kind of legacy you'd like to leave for your children and grandchildren.

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Thank you for joining the Fortifying youg Family podcast.

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Remember, fortifying your family starts with a strong belief in God's Word.