Faith Comes By Hearing // Building a Godly Family, Part 13

So many people want to build a godly family. To have a family that’s not necessarily perfect, there ain’t any of those, but one that’s full of peace and joy. A safe place for children to grow. But if we want our kids to grow up to be godly – one of the things we have to do, is actually talk to them about Jesus.

Every time I look up at the stars and the moon at night, I'm utterly gobsmacked by what I see; this whole Milky Way thing. When you get away from the light and the smog of the city and see the sky clearly, it almost looks like a glowing cloud. Like countless specks of star dust strewn across this great dark blue/black firmament. And then, like clockwork, every morning this amazing ball of fire and light and warmth comes up over the horizon. That thing we call the sun. It never fails.

Now, I'm wondering if you or I had never been taught anything about the cosmos, the earth, the solar system, the sun, the moon, the galaxy, the universe; if we knew absolutely nothing about any of those things, not even the simple stuff they taught us in grade school, what would we make of it?

If we stood here on planet earth and watched this whole heavenly display go by, day after day, week after week, maybe we could tell the position of the stars changed overnight; that the sky looks slightly different across the seasons. What would we make of it all without the knowledge that science has given us?

I wonder.

Well actually we don't have to look too far because there were so many theories down through the ages – that the earth was flat; that the earth was at the centre and everything else revolved around it; that stars were like little holes in the firmament; this skin stretched up there in the sky.

What happens is, we look at this incredible, cosmic light show that rolls past every day from our own miniscule perspective not realising how small we are; how narrow our view is. And we get a distorted picture of reality. We think the earth's the centre of the universe. We think we're the biggest, most important thing in the cosmos because that's all we can see and this whole light show revolves around us.

Do you see what happens? It's exactly what's happened down through the ages. In fact when scientists started wanting to postulate that the earth was in fact round and not flat and that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way round. Well people wanted to burn these scientists as heretics.

But once we got the facts we started to look at things completely differently. At least a trillion trillion stars in the known universe which, by definition, means there's a whole bunch out there, God only knows how much, that we don't know about. And our sun is just one of those.

And even our galaxy of billions of stars is such a small pin prick on the map of the universe. That it's infinitesimally small even though it takes light at 186,000 miles per second or 5.88 trillion miles per year – it takes light over 100,000 years to travel from one end of the galaxy to the other.

Do you see how radically, I mean HOW RADICALLY the facts transform our understanding of reality? It is mind blowing stuff.

Well what, if anything, does that have to do with the subject we've been talking about these last few weeks on the program, ‘Building A Godly Family’? As it turns out, a whole bunch. I mentioned yesterday on the program that I asked a good friend of mine, Mark, for some advice on building a godly family. Now Mark and his wife have nine children – nine! They live in the USA and he's one of the godliest men that I know. So I thought who better to turn to for some advice on how to build a godly family.

My hunch is he's qualified. Now the question was, 'what are the three or four most important things that you've learned about building a Godly family?' Yesterday I shared with you what he had to say about setting a godly example. Ultimately our children will end up being like us and so how we live our lives will be the most important sermon we ever preach to them.

Today I want to share one of the things he listed in his top three or four. Let me read to you what he wrote in his email. Have a listen. He said:

Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ. (That comes from Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 10)

What do I mean by this? That the written Word of God is absolutely central to everything we do in parenting and to birthing faith in the hearts of our children. My wife and I can talk, lecture, admonish, discipline, correct, nag, whatever until we're blue in the face and it will do not good at all unless the Spirit of God takes His own Word and does a work in the hearts of our children.

Therefore, we believe we have to expose and challenge them with God’s Word as often as we can. In our home that's taken the form, over the years, of bedtime stories, scripture readings at the dinner table, family devotional times in the morning or evening or both where possible. Scripture memory, using real life experiences to show how God’s Word speaks into every situation.

See, to someone who hasn't grown up in this sort of environment, it may seem a little bit odd, even a little bit old fashioned but it makes so much sense.

We started out by talking about the different perspectives we can have on the great cosmic light show. Depending on whether or not we know the truth about what it is and how it works. If we know the truth we understand that the earth is just this tiny little speck of dust in a vast cosmic array. If we don't, we imagine somehow we're at the centre of the universe. We only learn the difference when we hear the truth, right?

And it's exactly the same for us as people. If we don't know the truth about God – who He is, What He did for us through Jesus His Son, who we are when we believe in Jesus, how we can respond to this incredible love that Gods lavished upon us – unless we know this then we're going to live our lives in complete ignorance, completely from the wrong perspective. It's when we teach our children the Word of God that they develop a godly perspective; a perspective that bears so much fruit.

It's exactly what God taught His people, Israel, just before they crossed into the Promised Land. This bit that I'm going to read comes from Deuteronomy chapter 6, verses 4 to 9. He says:

Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. Keep these words, that I am commanding you today, in your heart and recite them to your children and talk about them when you are home and when you're away and when you lie down and when you rise. And write them on the door posts of your house and on your gates.

Mark, in his little thing that I read to you, quoted Paul. Let me share the whole thing. Romans chapter 10, verses 13 to 17:

Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved but how are they to call on the one in whom they have not believed. And how are they to believe in one of whom they have not heard. And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim to them. (Romans chapter 10, from verse 13 onwards)

So in other words, if we want to build a godly family we have to tell them about God. And here's the amazing thing, I asked Mark’s children for their comments. I mean, I thought, you know, will the kids really wear this? What do those kids think?

Well they said, "You know the things we really enjoy? Reading the Bible together; the creative teaching we get from mum and dad; family prayer time." These were some of the things the children themselves said they liked about living in a godly family. Go figure!

If we want to have a godly family, we've got to talk about God; got to tell them about God; got to share the love and the faithfulness and the power and the grace of God with our children because unless we do we're not going to have a godly family.