Thanks, Scott. Yeah, we were joking about the free books. But actually, this is a free book, the one you should have gotten when you came in. If you didn't get one, would you get it right now? They're over on this table. The reason they're free is they're your notes, OK? So you don't even have to take notes today. These are your notes. And I'm going to be covering this book. basically in what I say in the two lectures today. But I'm not going to cover the whole book. That's the problem. There's all kinds of stuff in here. In fact, I'm not even going to get through half of it. So you really need to get the book. It's free over there. If you want more copies, you have to buy them. But you get one free per couple. And yeah, I really want you to have that. So I am really excited to be able to be with you today for a lot of reasons. One is this has been a tough year for me health-wise. I've had pneumonia twice this year. I had to cancel a number of different speaking engagements because of that, and I'm just glad to be back up talking again. They found the problem. My pulmonologist had me do a sleep apnea test, and I have sleep apnea. And so what they found out was during sleep apnea events, I aspirate. So something goes down into my lungs, which makes me more vulnerable to pneumonia. And that's why I've got pneumonia. So the answer is a CPAP machine. So I have now, as of last week, started wearing a CPAP machine every night. And I'll tell you, if you have never had one, it is hard to sleep when you have a mask on and a tube going out of it, you know? And so I haven't had a whole lot of sleep this last week. So I'm a little bit tired today. And I'll tell you what, if I fall asleep while I'm talking, everyone just kind of tiptoe quietly out, OK? So I can get my sleep. I really appreciate it. But the doctor said, you know, your pneumonia's gone. You're just fine. You're not contagious. But you may have a residual cough for a month or more. And if you talk too much, especially, and guess what? I'm talking a lot today. So if I do cough a little bit, you'll understand. Why? So my name is Rick Elzinga. Like Pastor Scott said, we have four children. They're all in their 30s. Our youngest one turned 30 just recently. And we have 15 grandchildren. And I think that it's fair for you to ask the question, how have my children turned out? Since I'm supposed to be the expert here today on parenting, I'm not the expert, but supposedly, how have my kids turned out? And I will tell you on one condition. And the condition is this, how my children turned out is not the authority, is it? The Bible is our authority. So you have to agree with me that if all my children have turned out really well and godly, but what I say isn't consistent with scripture, you need to reject it. And if all my kids are rebels and, you know, prodigals, but what I say is scriptural, you need to accept it. Now, we have that agreement. The Bible is our authority, right? Okay, so I'll tell you. The kids have turned out well, and we are very thankful for that. One of our sons was a prodigal for a couple years, but God has brought him back, and it's exciting. Diane and I did not get married until we were 33 years old, so we got a late start on it. We had four kids. We actually had a fifth child, a daughter who died at birth, and that was a really hard time, as you can imagine. But our oldest son, he's the head counsel for the Marion County commissioners. He's a lawyer there. And he and his wife, Sonia, four children, and they are part of Evergreen Church in Salem. And then our next oldest is a daughter, Naomi. She's married to Andrew Sullivan, who's the family pastor at Grace Bible Church in Bend. They have seven children. It's really kind of an interesting story because after they got married, they didn't think they could have children biologically. So they took two foster children into their home. and they adopted those children, then they had five biologically afterwards, and they may have more still, because the youngest one is still pretty young. And then our third, oh yeah, part of Grace Bible Church, and then our third child is named AJ. He is a pastor at High Point Church, northeast of Seattle in Snohomish, and he and his wife Sabrina have four children. Just had one just recently. And then our youngest son just turned 30, and he's not married yet, but he's moving in that direction, and so we hope to have more than 15 grandchildren. It's a lot of fun to have grandchildren, and Ed and Francine can tell you that, because they have like 46, 45, I don't know what it is. Have you lost count yet? You remember all their names? Oh, good. Yeah, I was so impressed. In fact, I interviewed Ed for something I'm writing right now because he told me that he prays for every grandchild every day. Isn't that incredible? That, we're gonna be talking about prayer today, because that is so very important. So let's begin with prayer. I'd like to pray, too, and then we'll launch into what I wanted to say about this book. Lord, I thank you so much for these brothers and sisters in Christ. I thank you that the Bible is their authority, and I pray, Lord, that I will speak consistent with your word today, and that we will all be doers of your word and not hearers only who deceive themselves. Father, I thank you so much for your loving kindness. My verse for today is I will trust in your loving kindness forever and ever, and I just pray you'll help us to do that. Thank you that we can be parents. What a great opportunity. Thank you for our marriages in Jesus' name, amen. Okay, so the way this book works, if you open up to the table of contents, which is like maybe the third or fourth page, if they're not numbered, But you'll notice there's two parts. Part one is biblical wisdom for parents, and the second part is biblical tools for parents. I'm not even gonna touch on the biblical tools today. But I do wanna go through the four chapters, the four key chapters there, one, two, three, four, biblical wisdom for parents. In each chapter, I talk about, like the first one's about relationship, I talk about what the Bible says about relationship and building relationships with our children. And then I give a lot of practical ideas on how to do that. This is gonna be very practical. As you can see in the front of the book, it says a very practical guide. So lots of ideas for you. And then at the end of each chapter, I've had our four children respond and say what we did that was helpful for them. So that's really helpful for you to read that. And we might even take a little bit of look at that with one of the chapters. But let me tell you my story. When Diane and I, There goes the mic. When Diana and I started having children, one of the things that I wanted to do and she wanted to do is to, we want our children to grow up to love Jesus, right? And you want that too. Like the Apostle John said in 3 John, I have no greater joy than this. to learn that my children are walking in the truth. And that's what we want, and I'm sure that's what you want too. So I studied everything I could find in the Bible to find every insight I could find that would help our children to follow Christ. guaranteed that our kids are gonna follow the Lord. There's some mystery here between God's work and a child's decision and the influence of the parents and other influences. But I knew that as parents, we had influence to shape our children's thinking. And so I looked for everything I could find in the Bible. I studied Proverbs, I studied the law, I studied the New Testament, et cetera. And I wrote down every insight I could find. And then I talked to parents who were older than we were, who had, their kids had grown up, and I said, you know, if their kids turned out well, I said, what did you do? Tell me what you did. Give me some thoughts. So I wrote down their ideas. And then I read all kinds of Christian books on parenting, like Shepherding a Child's Heart, if you've heard of that. Very good book. And I wrote down insights. So I had hundreds of insights that I wanted to apply in parenting our kids. And that turned out to be a big problem. And it's a problem because I'm kind of a simple guy. And I can't keep in my mind hundreds and hundreds of insights on what to do. And I can't move forward on a whole lot of different fronts at the same time. So I didn't know what to do. I felt overwhelmed by all these different ideas. And then one day I was going through them and God showed me something really interesting. 85% of the insights I had written down. could go in one of four buckets, or one of four categories. The first one was building relationship with children. The second one was interceding or praying for children. The third was teaching children, and the fourth was setting an example for children. Now these are not the only four key areas of parenting in the Bible, but these are four really key areas. And I'll show you, it's all over scripture, all four of these. So what we did was, we took those four areas, and as a simple guy, I can't remember hundreds of areas, but I could remember, we focused on those four areas as we worked with our kids. And you notice it spells kind of an acronym, R-I-T-E. So it's really easy to remember. Right. Relationship, intercession, teaching, example. And so we put underneath those four categories. And we started using them and working with them with our kids. And it's turned out really well. So let me just talk to you about each one, starting with relationship. or intercession, and then we'll go on to the next lecture, we'll be teaching an example. Now, if you're looking for biblical insights in the New Testament about parenting, you're gonna be very disappointed. Did you know there are only two verses in the New Testament that speak to parents in their role of parenting? There's one in Colossians and there's one in Ephesians, and that's it. And so at first, I was kind of disappointed. I want more that tells me how to be a parent. There's more in the Old Testament, of course, but not a lot in the New. And then I realized something really important. The whole Bible is about God. God is the theme of the Bible. God is the main character of the Bible. The first verse is about God. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. All the way through, it's about God. And how does God reveal himself to us? It's a father, right? Through the word, he tells us he's our father. It's a parenting book. The whole Bible, in a sense, is a parenting book. We can look at how God works with us, and we can learn lessons of how we should work with our children. If you go to the very center of the universe, what are you gonna find? You're gonna find a relationship. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. in perfect relationship. You look at how God reveals in his word who he is, a father. When Adam and Eve sins, he doesn't get rid of them, he comes after them. I mean, he gave his son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross so we could be forgiven and be his children, right? The major, most important metaphor in the New Testament for a Christian or for the church is Family, God's our father, we're brothers and sisters in Christ. In the Old Testament, when Israel worshiped idols, the prophets said that's adultery. That's a relationship term. New Testament church is the bride of Christ, that's a relationship term. All through the Bible, you see these relationship terms. And so one of the reasons that we should focus on building relationship with our children is that God does that with us. God's example is so important. There's other reasons, too. In Proverbs 10.1, it says, this is the first of the short Proverbs. You have nine chapters of a long introduction, and then you have the first of the short Proverbs, and it says this. The Proverbs of Solomon. A wise son brings joy to his father, but a foolish son grief to his mother. You know, your emotions are going to be affected, aren't they, by how your children turn out. You want to invest all you can in those children, to build relationships with them, along with the intercession, teaching, and setting an example we'll talk about later, because you want them to turn out well. And, you know, when the kids are little, you have leverage over their behavior through discipline. But when they get older, how are you going to have leverage in their lives? If you have a good relationship, that will be the bridge to give you leverage into their lives. So there's lots of reasons why we should focus on building relationship with our children. Let me give you some very practical ways to do that. Here's some ways that Diane and I did it. Number one, we always had a Sabbath day. A Sabbath day. Now, in the Old Testament, they had to follow the Sabbath, right? It was a sin if they didn't. In the New Testament, though, we don't have to. But God sets an example for us in the very first chapter of the Bible, doesn't he? He creates in six days, and then he takes a day of rest. I was talking to an Old Testament professor in a class I was taking. I said, what was it like for the Jews in the Sabbath in the Old Testament? And he said, you know, you'd be surprised, Rick, It wasn't so much a day to gather together like we think of coming to church. It was more a day of rest and family day for the Jewish people. And I thought, well, that's interesting. That would be a great time to build relationship. You're not, have all kinds of obligations. You can really focus on building relationships. So that's what we did. As a pastor, I couldn't have Sunday as our Sabbath day. That was a big work day. Some people think it's the only work day for pastors. That's not really true. But we made Friday our Sabbath day. And every Friday, I wouldn't do any church work at all. I would just focus on the family. And we would make it a special day. I mean, I got up and I made, I wanted Diane to get some rest too, so she didn't make breakfast. I made breakfast for the kids. I made oatmeal and I put candies in it. They owe the kids like that, you know. That was, they call it Sabbath day porridge. They always look forward to Sabbath day porridge. And, oh, we just did all kinds of fun things. In fact, Diane was really good at finding things for us to do that day so we could just have a good time together and build relationship with the kids. And when we started teaching parenting seminars, I've taught quite a few different times, we came up with 183 ideas on things that are fun to do for a family on the Sabbath day. And then every time we would teach, the students would tell us more things. The parents would tell us more things. So the list of 183 became 566. And if you look at page 20 in the book, that's where the list begins. On page 20, now there are not 566 things here because I took out all the ones that you can only do in Portland. A lot of them were just specific to Portland because I didn't know who would be reading this book. But I think there's 250 different ideas here on things you can do on a Sabbath day as a family. If you're not real creative, take a look at this list and get some ideas and have some good time together. Go to page 40 now in the book, okay? Page 40. This is where the children respond to this whole idea of relationship and what we did when they were growing up that really helped them build a relationship with us. So on page 40, you'll see Steve, and he says, I have fond memories of our Friday, Sabbath day adventures, from hiking to bookstores and everything in between. Look at the next one, Naomi. She says, when I look back on my childhood, I remember very fondly all the experiences we shared as a family. I greatly appreciated the family vacations, mission trips, holidays, and Sabbath Day activities that we still talk about today. Go to the next one, AJ. These are the relationship-building activities that made the greatest impact on me. Intentionality of Sabbath days. So many of the fond memories I have from childhood took place on Friday Sabbath days. Everything from dad making special oatmeal with our Easter candy in it, to roller skating and getting dilly bars at Dairy Queen. So there you got three of the four children mentioned specifically Sabbath day as something that helped them build relationship with us and with each other. So that's one idea. A second idea, eating together. And I think most of you do this already, but it's really interesting. In the Bible, eating together was a way of having fellowship, wasn't it? And building relationship. Whether it was the covenants they made in the Old Testament, or whether it's the New Testament church in Acts chapter two, they ate together, it says. Even the communion, you know, in their day, in the first century, communion was not just a little piece of bread and a little juice. It was a meal, like Jesus' Last Supper. It was a meal. And they ate together. And you have fellowship together. I was surprised that the Wall Street Journal had an article, it was secular, secular researchers said that they studied families that ate together and those that didn't. And families that had at least five meals together every week had the kids turned out so much better. Now it's a secular article, it wasn't anything to do with following Christ, but they got better grades in school and they weren't involved in drugs and stuff like that. So even secular people see that eating together is important. Revelation 3.20, Jesus said, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him and he with me, right? The messianic banquet in heaven is pictured as a meal together. It's a relationship that we have. Now there are challenges to eating together as a family. Today, one of the biggest challenges would be electronic devices, right? Kids on their phones, parents watching TV or whatever. And I would just really encourage you, just put all that stuff aside and spend time at the dinner table just talking. What was the best thing that happened to you today? What was the hardest thing? Build that relationship. Another thing that really affected us was sports. You know, sometimes the kids get into sports, and there's practices, and there's games, and we finally saw that this was really getting in the way of us eating together, so we made a rule in our house. We told each of the four kids, you can only go out for one sport a year. And they all decided to go out for basketball. So basketball season was tough, they'd get meals together. But the rest of the year, oh yeah, we always had it. meals together and that helped to build that relationship. A third idea is family celebrations. Notice in the Old Testament all the celebrations that God commands his people to follow. In the Old Testament, Passover, Feast of Weeks, Feast of Booths, you know, the different celebrations like that to help them to remember what God had done. But they're also good for building relationships. And in fact, the Jews actually added to some of these. Purim, later on, remember when Esther saved the people, then they added another holiday. And then between the Old and New Testament, they added They added, what's it called? Oh, Hanukkah. So they had all these different feasts and holidays, celebrations, which helped them remember what God had done, but also, yeah. And so Diane and I saw that, and we said, well, let's just have some holidays, too. Some family celebrations. So, you know, we have some things in our culture. We have Thanksgiving, which is good. We eat together. That's good for a relationship, isn't it? Christmas, remembering Christ's birth. That's good. And then we added a whole bunch of others when we saw God work for us, like October 19th, you know what that is? It's mustard seed day. That's one of our family holidays. And here's why. We lived in an apartment, and as a pastor, I wasn't making a lot of money. We didn't know if we could afford a house, because we live in a fairly upper middle class area. And so one day, Diane was out pushing the stroller, and she saw a sign that had just gone up for sale by owner. And it was a house that was the ugliest mustard color you've ever seen. And thankfully the guy who owned it had to get out real fast. It's a long story there. And so he sold it to us at a really good price. And so we celebrated every October 19th when the house closed, we celebrated that God gave us that house. And we would always have mustard color food and just talk about what we saw God do providing the house. Another family holiday. was March 1st, that was the holiday or the anniversary of when I was hired as a pastor. So we would go to the spaghetti factory every March 1st and remember what God did. Another one was called Gap Day. Gap, G-A-P, God always provides. So our church had these missionaries and they were gonna have to come back because their support had gone down. And so we had been saving up to go on a mission trip for our family. We sat down as a family, we said, let's take $1,000 out of our mission fund and give it to these people so they don't have to come back home to help support them. And we all agreed on it. And then two months later, somebody wrote a check to our church for $2,000. And they said, we want your pastor and his family to go on a mission trip. And so I sat the kids down on the couch, and they were all little. Our oldest was probably only about six years old. And I said, hey, you know what God did? Remember when we gave $1,000 to that missionary? And they said, yeah. And then I said, God has provided $2,000 back for us in our mission fund. And our oldest son is a real thinker. He sat there for a second. He was about five, six years old. He's thinking. And then he said, Daddy, that was a good deal. I think they wanted us to give away all the money so we can get twice as much money. So Gap Day, that was something we would celebrate too. Spiritual birthdays, we would celebrate. So it's just another way of building relationship as well as teaching the kids what God has done, okay? I'm gonna skip some things here. I wanna go to ministering together. You know, Paul ministered with people and built relationship with them and helped them to be discipled that way. It's just, you know, Philippians 2.22, Paul says, I have no one else like Timothy who takes a genuine interest in your welfare. Everyone else looks out for his own personal interests. But you know that Timothy has proved himself, because like a son with his father, he has served with me in the work of the gospel." You know, Paul took Timothy under his guidance, and he served together, and they built such a close relationship. Paul's last letter that we have is 2 Timothy, and Paul says, I remember your tears, you know? I long to see you, Timothy. Come quickly, Timothy." Those are all statements right from 2 Timothy. You know, Paul, as you minister together, it builds relationship. We would do things as a family to minister together. Diane would make heart-shaped cookies on Valentine's, then I'd go with the children around to the different neighbors. And sometimes we pulled weeds for a single mom down the street. And we served a meal at Portland Rescue Mission. And we just did all kinds of fine ways to minister together. You learn to appreciate each other's gifts when you do that. We had a lot of foreign students living with us at different times. And that was part of our project as a family, to reach out to them. So that was really important too. Here's another idea. Expressing love verbally. I grew up in a family where we didn't say I love you. Now I don't doubt that my parents loved me. They did. They had their way of showing it. They provided for us. They helped us in a lot of ways. But they weren't verbal. They didn't say I love you. And as I look at the Bible, what does it say over and over again? God says he loves us, doesn't he? He's very verbal. For God so loved the world, he gave his only son. Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, Ephesians 5. 1 John, how great is the love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called children of God. Over and over, God expresses verbally his love for us. And when I saw that, I realized I need to do that with my kids. I wasn't used to it, I was very uncomfortable doing it. because I don't remember my dad ever telling me he loved me. I knew he did, but he didn't verbalize it. I grew up in a church where the pastor was an outstanding preacher, but he wasn't verbal about expressing love for us. The church did well, but eventually he went on to another church, and the next guy that came I thought was a really poor preacher. but the church thrived like never before. I mean, it just, it grew incredibly under his ministry. because he would tell us how much he loved us. He was very expressive about it. He always taught, oh, I love you, I appreciate you guys. And we just ate it up and responded. And I think that's the way kids are, too. And so I had to learn to say, I love you to my children. Diane's much better at it than I am, but I'm learning. I used to play a little game with him, you know, you probably played this game too, who loves the other the most? So when Stephen was maybe about five or so, I was putting him to bed and I said, Stephen, I love you this much. And he said, well, Daddy, I love you this much. And I said, Stephen, I love you from here to the wall over there. And he said, well, Daddy, I love you from here to the backyard fence. I love you from here all the way to the church building. And he said, well, Daddy, I love you from here all the way to the park. So we went back and forth a bunch of times, and I wanted to cut it off, time to go to bed. So I thought of the two things that are the furthest apart, and I knew he couldn't beat this. And I said, Stephen, I love you from here to the farthest star. And I knew he couldn't beat that, but he did. He said, well, Daddy, I love you all the way to heaven, all the way to California. Yeah, I grew up in California. It's pretty far away from heaven. I can tell you that right now. So learning to say I love you is very, very important. Here's another one. Seeing relationship opportunities in the difficulties. God wants you to have a deep relationship with your children, and so he's gonna give you opportunities to have that relationship, but they're not gonna look like opportunities. Sometimes they're gonna look like difficulties. Sometimes they're opportunities in disguise. I went to school in Israel for six months, and we had a, Israeli military guy come and speak to our class one day. And he said, you know, we have a joke here in Israel. If you get four Jews in the same room, they will make five political parties. And it's true. They have a whole bunch of political parties in this little country of Israel. And he said, you know what holds us together? What keeps us from falling apart and destroying each other? It's because all around us are enemies. All the countries around us hate us, and so we have to stick together. And I thought, that's an interesting thought. You know, when you have difficulties like that, you can look at it and say, wow, we're in a terrible situation, but it actually is an opportunity for them to stay together. In fact, he said, you know, all the countries around us have to do to defeat us is just make peace with us, and we'll defeat ourselves. And so, You know, I saw the same thing in our family, that there were certain difficulties that actually turned out to be opportunities to build relationship with their children. So one of them was the homeschooling. So Diana and I didn't want our kids in the public school. And we didn't really have money to put him in a Christian school. So we didn't really have any options except homeschooling. There's actually more options today than there were back then, but that was our only option. So, you know, we did that, and Diane was very good at teaching. She was a school teacher, actually, before we married. And she's really good with them in the younger years. But pretty soon, you know, they get up to middle school and high school math and science, and they kind of got beyond Diane. And so at that point, I didn't have any choice but to step in and start doing the homeschooling with the kids. And I was already really busy as a pastor. I thought, I can't do this. It turned out I found a way of doing it. But I thought, you know, what I did was I spent one hour every day with the kids. And there's a lot you can accomplish in one hour. Because homeschooling is not just teaching them, it's really managing their education. So I had them doing all kinds of other things. But I spent an hour. And I thought, I would rather spend an hour at church doing my work. I am so glad now that that happened, that I got to be an hour a day. Because I was able to build relationships with them that I never would have if I had gone to church and spent another hour. doing whatever I did in church. So something that didn't look so good turned out to be a wonderful relationship builder. Another was just the fact that Diane couldn't take the kids to all the different sports things or all the different classes or all the different friends' houses, so I had to do a lot of the driving. I didn't want to do that. I got enough to do, I thought. But eventually it got through my head that when I drove a child to a friend's house or a class or something, that's an opportunity just to have one-on-one time with them. And so that difficulty, what I saw initially as a difficulty, turned out to be a great opportunity to build relationship with my kids. So I'm a friendly guy, I've met most of you, but I'm not good at building deep relationships. That's just the way I am. I'm really friendly, I know everybody, but I don't do well at building good relationships. So I needed to focus on this R, of R-I-T-E, building relationships. And I just wanna say one more thing before I go on to the I, intercession, and that is, we also have to be careful that we don't destroy So our daughter, bless her, she was the messiest. She had the messiest room I've ever seen. And we would get down on her, and we would tell her, Naomi, you've got to clean your room. And she'd clean it up. And then the next day, it looked like the tornado had gone through. She just was really messy. And I kept harping on her, you know, you need to keep your room clean. And I remember one day when she was a senior in high school, I went in there and I was about to get down on her again. And I thought, you know, I think I'm going to destroy this relationship if I'm not careful. And I thought, you know, I'm going to trust the Lord here instead of continuing to harp on her to keep her room clean. It wasn't working anyway, you know. And so I did. I didn't say anything. I just let it go and left it in God's hands. She graduated from high school and she went to Multnomah Bible College there in Portland. And the first year, she had a roommate. that was even more messy than she was. In fact, she was so messy that it turned Naomi completely around 180, and now she is the cleanest and neatest housekeeper. She has seven kids, and her house is absolutely perfect almost. And I just thought, thank you, Lord. I could have destroyed that relationship. Thank you, Lord. Thank you. Another way I could have destroyed relationship is disciplining in anger. I'm gonna talk about discipline. It's one of the key, it's the question we get the most when we do a parenting seminar about discipline. And we use spanking, but to be honest with you, a lot of times I did it in anger, and that wasn't right. That wasn't right. I had to go back to the children, I had to ask their forgiveness. I was mentoring a man from an Asian culture where honor and shame is a really big thing. And his kids, all three kids had turned away from him and just were ruining their lives. And I said to him one day, I said, have you ever gone to your children and just asked their forgiveness for the way you treated them as a dad? And he said, oh, I can never do that. Because then they won't respect me anymore. And I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. And I said to him, they already don't respect you. I find when I go back to my children and apologize to them when I've done something wrong, they respect me even more. So there's lots of ways I could have destroyed some of those relationships, and I just thank God that he kept me from that. So be careful not to destroy those relationships you're trying to build. Okay, R is relationship, I, R-I-T-E, so I is intercession. If you don't get anything else out of my talks today, I know you'll get a lot of Pastor Scott's talks, but if you don't get anything else out of my talks, there's one thing I want you to know. There's no formula in the Bible for raising godly children. There is no formula in the Bible for raising godly children. Now, some people would disagree with me and say, well, Proverbs 22.6 says, train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it. But that's a proverb. You have to understand how proverbs work. They're generalizations, mostly. Like Proverbs 10.4 says, if you work hard, you're going to get rich, and if you're lazy, you're going to be poor. Generally speaking, that's true, but there could be exceptions, right? Train up a child in the way he should go. What parent even does that? None of us is perfect in raising our children in the way they should go. So it's kind of an empty promise if it's a promise. It's not though, it's a proverb. So there's no formula. If you do A, B, and C, you will get godly children. There's no guarantee like that anywhere in the Bible that I can find. And in fact, look at Isaiah. Do you have your Bibles with you? If you do, look at Isaiah chapter one. Isaiah chapter one. There are a number of different ways the Bible shows us that raising godly children is way beyond our capacity, okay? We need God to work. We can't do it. So look at Proverbs chapter one. Look at verse two. Here's what God says. This is God's words. Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken. Children have I reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against me. So even God, who's the perfect father, the perfect parent, has children who rebel against him. So we gotta be careful here in thinking somehow, you know, if we do it the right way, if we do the right kind of schooling, or the right kind of discipline, or we follow the right kind of teacher, or go to the right kind of church, or read the right kind of book, that somehow then we'll be able to have godly children. We can't guarantee that. We can't. There are a number of ways, in fact, the Bible shows us that raising godly children is way beyond our ability, our capacity. We need God's help. We need God to work. So would be an example of that. Another example is just look at the parents in the Bible. Look at all the parents in the Bible. When we know how their children turned out, how many of them had all their children turn out to follow God and believe in God and love God? Can any of you name any parents in the Bible whose children, we know something about how their children turned out, and they've all turned out to follow God? Can you name anybody? Adam and Eve? No. The patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob? No. The godly kings, Josiah, Hezekiah, David? No. Samuel, the prophet? No. How about Mary and Joseph? No. It says that Jesus says, you know, before his death and resurrection, it says even his brothers didn't believe in him. Now they did afterwards, but not before. There's only one couple I know whose children we know about and all of their children follow God. You know who that is? Zachariah and Elizabeth. They only had one child, John the Baptist. And he followed God. So, and then finally, you know, we're in a battle. Ephesians 6, right? Our struggle's not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly realms. How do you fight against the enemy you can't even see? An enemy that's way stronger than we are, and who wants to take our children down with him. I'm saying all this for one reason. Prayer is not optional. We've got to pray. We've got to go to God and say, God, I can't do it. I need your help. I can't get my kids to be what you want them to be, but you can. You can work in their lives in powerful ways. So here's some things I want to suggest to you, some practical things in your prayer life for intercession, R-I-T-E, intercession. Number one, increase the amount of time you spend praying for your children. Now that just sounds kind of simple, but listen. One day I was walking in the park by our house praying, and I was meditating on 2 Timothy 1, where Paul says, to Timothy, my dear son. So Paul takes Timothy under his wings like a son, even though he wasn't biologically Paul's son. And then the first thing Paul says is, night and day, I constantly remember you in my prayers. And I thought, well, that's a good insight. What does it mean to be a godly father, like Paul was to Timothy? It means praying constantly for those children. And then I thought, I wonder how much time I'm spending praying for my children. So I had my watch, and it has a stopwatch function on it. So I pressed go, and I prayed my regular prayers. I pray kind of the same thing every day for my four children. And then I pressed stop when I got to amen, And then I looked down at my watch and I was shocked. I was shocked. I had only prayed a total of one minute for four kids. And I thought, you know, when it comes to prayer as a father, I'm failing big time. And so that day I decided I'm gonna increase my time of prayer. And now I pray for them when I first get up in the morning. I pray for them during my prayer time. I have a prayer time each day. I pray for them when Diane and I walk. We walk together and we pray for them. I pray for them before I go to bed. It's still not, you know, I don't pray for them a half hour or something, but it's at least 10 or 15 minutes a day I pray for those kids. So 10 or 15 times more than I used to. So increase the time you're spending in prayer. It's so important. Pray with your spouse. You know, Diane has been so good. She wanted to pray together right from the beginning of our marriage, and I had my own prayer time, and I didn't really want to, and I'm thankful, thank you, Diane, you didn't nag me at it, but every once in a while, she'd say we should pray together. Finally, we figured out a way to do it, where we'd take a walk together each day, and the first half of the walk, we would just talk, and then the second half of the walk, we'd pray for our kids. That was so helpful. We would do battle for them. You know, 2 Corinthians 10.4 says, even though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world, but they have divine power to demolish strongholds. And one of those weapons is prayer. And so we pray together the second half of our walk, and it's great for our marriage, it's great to pray, and it even helps us stay in better shape. Third thing to do, have goals for your children that you can focus your prayers on. So let me explain this. In fact, let me show you what our goals were. If you look on page 48, page 48, where's Scott? I have 50 minutes, right? Okay, I still got a few minutes. Okay, page 48, you will see the goals that Diana and I set for our kids. We have 18 goals. Before they leave our home, our children, number one, will love the Lord with all their hearts and believe their purpose in life centers on Him. Number two, will be sure of their salvation and will have been baptized. Number three, will be people of worship and prayer. Number four, we'll have deep love and loyalty toward all the other members of our family. Number five, we'll be committed to a local church. Number six, we'll read the Bible daily. There they are. So these are goals we set out for our kids. We wanted to see them accomplish before they left home. Now, no kid's gonna accomplish all 18 of these goals, okay? But it gives us a direction. So what we would do, and this is really helpful, we use these goals to guide our prayers. So for example, let's take number six. They will read the Bible daily with understanding and appreciation. So we would take that goal and we'd go on our walk and then we pray about it. How is Stephen doing? Is he reading the Bible? Not so much, let's pray about that. Lord, help Stephen to really start reading your word and learning from it. And then we talk about Naomi, how's she doing with that goal? How's AJ doing? How's Matt doing? And we would use these goals to guide our prayers. And this was very helpful. I would highly encourage you to know where you're trying to go with your kids. Make sure the ladder's leaning against the right wall, right? You want them to be godly. So what does that look like? and then start praying for that, asking God to work, because you can't make it happen yourself. Diana and I also have an annual prayer retreat. In January, we'll take a couple days or more and spend extra time in prayer. We'll pray for each of the children, talk about where are they at. Now, of course, with our grandchildren as well. We didn't start this until later on, but better late than never, right? And then use scripture in prayer. You know how many Bible verses there are? Over 31,000. And you can use almost any of these Bible verses to help your children in prayer. So the one that, I'm memorizing Psalm 52 right now, and the verse for today is, I will be like a green olive tree in the house of God. I will trust in the loving kindness of God forever and ever. So you can use that for prayer. Lord, please help Naomi to trust in your loving kindness forever and ever. Lord, please help AJ. He's going through a hard time right now. And he's tempted to not trust in your loving kindness. Maybe even to see you as being mean or something. Lord, please help him to trust in your loving kindness even in the midst of this difficulty. You see what I'm saying? So you use Bible verses like that to guide your prayers. Otherwise, what happens, you know, I've taught this seminar a lot of times, what a lot of parents tell me is, well, I just kind of pray the same thing every day. You know, it kind of gets stale. Same thing, and that happens to me too. So using Bible verses is helpful here. So let me just close with this thought here. The things that I've mentioned, this is not a formula. There's no formula for producing godly children. But prayer, what is prayer? The bottom line, what is prayer? Prayer is depending on God. Prayer is going to God and saying, I need you, I can't do it myself. That's the bottom line, what prayer is. So a prayer is saying to God, I need you. What does it say to God if you're not praying? I don't need you, God. I could do this on my own. And that's the most dangerous place you could ever be in. Don't be there. Spend time praying for your children. It is so very, very important. Let me pray to close this, okay? Father, I just thank you again for my brothers and sisters in Christ, and I thank you for their willingness to listen to these things that you've put on my heart. And I pray again, Lord, anything that I've said that's not consistent with Scripture, I pray that they will reject. And everything I've said that is consistent with Scripture, I pray that they will take to heart. And I pray that each one of them will develop some kind of strategy, some kind of way to put your word into practice in their lives and in their parenting. And we look to you, Lord, I say it again, Lord, we can't produce godly children on our own. We need you. We need your help. We need your work. We need your conviction in their lives. We need you to help them understand the Bible and open their eyes to see wonderful things in your word. And so I pray, Lord, for the children represented by these parents today, that these children will grow up to love you. In Jesus' name, amen. Thanks.