Family Faith: Part I | Part 1

From the Love Worth Finding studios in Memphis, Tennessee, I'm Byron Tyler. Here with Kerry Vaughn, the CEO of Love Worth Finding.

Kerry, we are in a new series with Adrian Rogers. It takes a family. You know, it does take a family to raise a child and it takes faith to make a family. Oh, absolutely. And I praise God for the faith of my grandmother who prayed for me, you know, for 30 years and the faith of my parents and a faithful mother who made sure that I was in church every single day.

In a single week. So, yeah, it's not just the family, it's the family of faith. Well, as we kick off this new series, let's hear from Adrian Rogers what he had to say about the family. Well, there is a war on the family and the devil has unleashed all of the artillery of hell on the family because he knows if he can hurt us at home, he can hurt us all over. Society is just the family writ large. We cannot say it enough that the family is absolutely the basic unit of society. And before God gave us industry, before God gave us food, before God gave us food, it's absolutely the basic unit of society. gave us education, before God gave us government, before God gave us the church, God gave us the family. Gary, you mentioned that verse of faith in Hebrews 11, without faith it's impossible to please God, and you know that chapter also talks about the prophet Moses and his origin, you know how he got started, and if it hadn't been for his parents, and of course Adrian Rogers will develop this more in today's message, but he shows us where it's our responsibility as parents to raise our children specifically and individually with God's help, God's guidance.

Absolutely, it's not the school's responsibility, it's not the workplace, it's not any place, it's the home place, and you and I both know that, you know, faith should be taught from the hub, and the hub is the home, and so as we look at Hebrews chapter 11, I think that, you know, the family faith is critical for a productive society. Well, we always enjoy hearing from our Love Worth Finding listeners. This one says, we've been listening to this broadcast ministry consistently for four years now. Our marriage and the way we raise our children have improved so much. I'm a better wife and mother because of your generosity.

May God give you a lot more in return. Don't you love hearing that? Oh, I love that, that's wonderful. You know, I think many times that things like faith is caught along the way more than it is taught. You know, it comes from mom and dad, or it comes from the family, right? I remember Dr. Rogers in a lunch one day with about 30 ministers, he looked out across the room and he said, hey, you call yourself ministers and you're in the ministry, but guess what? Without your family, you have no ministry. And what he was saying is, it's family first, right? And it's a family of faith. For anything else, family is the foundation. Kerry, this month here at Love Worth Finding, we have a premium offer that I think our listeners will enjoy because it fits real nicely with this series we're in.

It's perfect. It takes a family. It's a booklet collection and there's four. One is it takes a family, God's plan for the man, maximum mom, and honoring the father and the mother. Please take a part of that, use it, and God will bless it immensely. So with today's message, family faith, part one, here's Adrian Rogers. Take your Bibles and find Hebrews chapter 11. We are beginning a series of Bible messages on the family. You know that there is an all out war on the family and Satan is bombarding and attacking the family like never before.

But it is a winnable war and we have decided that we're going to do something about this attack. We're going to counter attack with the Word of God. We're going to be putting an emphasis upon the family. The Bible says God hath set the solitary in families and the devil knows that the family is the basic unit of society and so if he wants society to come apart, where would he start? Well, today he would start with the family to destroy the family and he does that by deception so that it might dominate the world. So we're talking about the family. It takes a family to raise a child and it takes faith to make a family.

Now that's the reason we're starting where we are. Now with that in mind, I want us to read a story that you know from childhood. That's the story of Moses in the bulrushes and it's found here in Hebrews chapter 11 and let's look at it as we read the Word of God. Verse 23, by faith Moses when he was born was hid three months of his parents because they saw that he was a proper child and they were not afraid of the king's commandment. By faith Moses when he was come to years refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season, esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt for he had respect unto the recompense of the reward. By faith he, that is Moses, forsook Egypt not fearing the wrath of the king for he endured, Moses endured as seeing him who is invisible, that is almighty God. Now God being my helper, I want to write four things upon your heart this morning that will help you to be a mother of faith, a father of faith, a husband, a wife, a grandparent of faith to bring up children, to bring a family up that will have children that will glorify and honor God.

Are you ready for these? All right, now I want you to listen to these four principles and by the way, we're going to be introduced before I get into those principles to two wonderful people. They are perhaps forgotten heroes in the Bible. One's name is Amram and the other is Jochebed.

Now they're not famous names but they are very, very important names because they are the mother and the father of Moses, the great Moses that led the children of Israel out of Egypt into the promised land. Amram, Jochebed, don't forget them, you'll meet them in heaven and they are found here in Hebrews chapter 11 in God's hall of fame which is really a hall of faith and it tells what they did. Now here are four principles we're going to learn from Amram and Jochebed. Here are four things that we're going to learn about how to bring children up by faith that is absolutely indispensable if you would have the kind of a family in these days that God wants you to have.

Are you ready for them? Now first of all, principle number one, I want you to see this, faith sees every child as special. Faith sees every child as special. Notice verse 23, by faith Moses when he was born was hid three months of his parents because they saw that he was a proper child. Some translate this, they saw he was a special child. Others that he was a beautiful child.

Others translate that he was a fitting child, they all mean basically the same thing, that they looked at little baby Moses and they saw that he was extraordinary. Now I want to say this, there's not a parent on earth who hadn't done exactly the same thing. They said that baby is a special baby. Every child is a special child. Every child is the handiwork of almighty God and it's not just some children, it is all children that are special to God and you have to see this by faith. Ethel Waters, that great gospel singer and a person with such a wonderful warm spirit talked about herself and she was born in dire circumstances and out of wedlock and some other things but some said, how does that make you feel? She said, I'm special. God don't make no junk.

God don't make no junk. God sees every child as special and therefore every parent should see every child as special. I can remember when our first son Steve was born, Joyce and I were in college, we planned to have children while we were in college and God allowed us to do so and I can remember that night, I don't know why so often they come in the middle of the night but she gave me the elbow and she said, Adrian, I believe it is time. My heart just jumped out of my throat and you know, it's an awful painful thing for a man to go through all this childbirth and I, we were supposed to call the doctor.

Dr. Valentine was his name and she said, Adrian, call the doctor and tell him we're coming to the hospital in the middle of the night. Well, we were living in a little house trailer. We didn't have a telephone in there and to be very honest with you, we didn't even have a bathroom in there.

We had a community place where we went over to shower and shave and there was a little community center with a telephone in it and I went over to get in. It was the middle of the night. It was locked.

Oh, I thought maybe she's had the baby. By the time I get back to the trailer, I went and opened my car trunk and got a tire tool out and jimmied a window. It was the middle of the night. So here I am going in a window at night and I thought I'm going to get arrested. So I went in the window and I banged my shins going in, fell on the floor, ran over to the phone. It was a pay phone. I had no money.

I backed out over to the house searching through everything, trying to find just one dime. Back in through the window again to call the doctor and tell him what was happening. He said, doctor, it is important you get here immediately.

And all of this. Got down to the hospital. Little Steve was born. I remember seeing him for the first time as he was there, Joyce holding him in her arms. He had a little fleck of blood right there on his cheek and his hair was all mussed up. He was ugly. All screnched up and wrinkled up, but to me he was pretty. He was pretty.

So I asked Joyce and kissed Steve, went home, that little trailer, got on my knees and I prayed and I said, God, if I never do anything good, never have any kind of so-called success in this world, I want to be a godly dad. I want to raise that child for you because he is special. I knew just looking at him that he was special. Every child is special. They saw that he was a proper child, a beautiful child, a special child. Faith has to see this. You have to see your child as a special child.

God made your child absolutely, totally, wonderfully unique. You know one of my life verses is this. It's Psalm 112 verses 1 and 2. Praise ye the Lord. Blessed is the man that feareth the Lord that delighteth greatly in his commandments. His seed, that literally means his children, shall be mighty upon the earth.

I want to raise up mighty children. Now, one way to do that is just to get into the instruction book which is the Word of God and Proverbs chapter 22 and verse 6 says train up a child in the way that he should go and when he's old he'll not depart from it. Now you know that the word way is a special word here. It doesn't just simply mean in the direction that he should go, but it means to be the kind of a child that God wants him to be and God made him specially to be. The idea of way here is the idea of a bend in a bow like an archer's bow. That is every child has his own particular bent.

Sometimes I thought mine were also warped, but they have a particular bent and they're different. And what you have to do is to look at your child by faith and say this child is a special child. Now, Joyce and I have five children. We have a little boy in heaven, but we have four who are here on this earth and four very wonderful children, but I want to tell you that the four who are here are so very different one from another. Our first son, Steven, as I've already told you, has a bent for music and we discovered this before he ever went to school. I taught him a little finger melody on the piano and he's been at the piano ever since and loving music, writing music, producing music and he is an ordained minister of music.

He just has that bent for music and so we would be very foolish to try to derail him or move him in any other direction because that's the way that he should go. Our second son, David, he has a bent for geography and the world. When he was a little boy, he was pouring over maps and zip codes and one time when he was just a little tyke, we were talking about taking a trip to the west coast and talking about what route we should take. And David said, well, I'd go through Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and he had the whole thing routed out. I didn't even know he knew those states existed but he had memorized them in sequence in order and he's just been a man who's had the world on his heart and David is a missionary. That's the way of his heart. He knows geography. He knows the world.

He is a world citizen and it's been our joy to pray for him and encourage him that way. Then along came Gail, born in a storm. We named her Gail because of that and we named her rightly. Gail is the one who is fiercely competitive. She has a mind like a computer.

Don't ever try it out smarter. Don't ever try to get ahead of her. Gail is an entrepreneurial spirit. She's a leader. She's a counselor. She has incredible insight into the ways that things work and it makes her a great encourager of people and a great leader of folks.

That's the bent that God put in this girl and sometimes I stand in awe as I watch her and listen to how her mind works and then God gave us Janice. Janice is my romanticist. She's sweet and gentle. She loves music. She loves poetry. She loves mountains. She loves flowers. She loves children. She has a nurturing spirit and a very gentle spirit.

Four children, but one thing about them, they all love Jesus and they all love mom and dad. Praise God for that. Praise God for that. You just have to find the way that they should go and then you encourage them in that way. But now put it down, big, plain and straight. Faith sees every child as a special child.

They don't come in standard packages and you better carefully read the label. Just look at them over and over and over again. That's the first thing I want you to understand. Look at your child and say, God, help me to understand the way that he should go, the way that she should go. Faith sees every child as a special child.

Got that? Then let's move to the second point. Faith sees every child as a special child and faith sees every conflict as a spiritual conflict.

Faith sees every conflict as spiritual. Now look in verse 23 again. The Bible says, by faith Moses, when he was born, was hid three months. Well, why did they hide him?

Well, it's very obvious. The king had commanded that the little boy babies be killed. Next is chapter 1, verse 22, and Pharaoh charged all the people saying, every son that is born ye shall cast into the river. Now they worshiped the Nile River, so this was making the little boy babies a sacrifice to the Nile River.

Take the little boy babies when they're born and cast them into the river. Well, was this a conflict between Israel and Egypt? No. Was this a conflict between the parents of Moses and Pharaoh?

No. What this was, was a conflict between the gods of Egypt and almighty God. What this literally was, was a conflict between light and dark. What this was, was a spiritual conflict. Now you have to understand that in raising children. Folks, it takes more than wit and wisdom and nutrition and good intentions and your talents. You are in a spiritual battle when you're raising children.

Did you know that? That's the reason that it takes faith. That's the reason it takes faith. For the Bible says in Ephesians chapter 6 and verse 12, for we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against spiritual wickedness in high places. You see, the battle here was a battle against spiritual and demonic forces.

And you're up against that as parents today. Now if you don't see the battle as spiritual, what you're going to use is intelligence and good intentions rather than faith. But if you see the battle as spiritual, you're going to use faith as your major weapon. The Bible says it was by faith that they were not afraid of the king's commandment. Now without faith, they should have been afraid.

I mean, they're disenfranchised helpless slaves, little unknowns, amram and jockey bed. They had every reason to be afraid if the battle was a physical, material battle. But faith sees every conflict as spiritual. Now if you don't see that, folks, I'm going to tell you, you're going to strike out as parents. Those were treacherous days in which they lived, and these are treacherous days in which we live. As a matter of fact, the Bible says in the last days, perilous times shall come, 2 Timothy chapter 2 and verse 1, and these are perilous times. Let me tell you what you're facing.

If you're a parent, a grandparent, what you're facing? You're facing liberalism in religion. There's nothing more damning, debilitating, stultifying than liberalism in religion because we have today churches that use the same religious language that we use, but they don't mean what the Bible means. They use our words and their dictionary, and that is very, very dangerous. Now I don't know of anything that would be more harmful or hurtful to your child than to have your child in a liberal, Bible-doubting church. You just need to get away from those churches.

They're dangerous, they're empty, they are futile. Now take those children and realize that liberalism in religion is a very dangerous thing, and then that is compounded by humanism in education. Now what is humanism? Humanism is a system of thought that honors man rather than God. Man is the sinner and the circumference and the sum total of everything, and it sounds so good because humanism, who could be against humanism?

It sounds so much like humanitarianism, but it is really atheism that is disguised. They call it humanism. And the chief building block of humanism is evolution. Our children have been taught that they are an accident, not an incident, that they just happened that they came up out of some primordial ooze, and because of that, there is no fixed standard of right and wrong.

You say, well, now wait a minute, Pastor, aren't you an educated man? Are you telling me that you fly in the face of science and you don't believe in evolution? Friend, I reject evolution totally 100 percent, period. I do not believe in that monkey mythology. It is not based on fact, regardless of what they will tell you. It is a theory. It is the next best guess of a mind that will not accept the Word of God that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

But now watch it. The chief building block in humanism is evolution. Built upon evolution is sex education, sex education. Again, I want to say that one of the most dangerous things in America today is sex education in public schools without a moral standard, a fixed standard of right and wrong. What are children being taught if you let all the air out of it?

I'm going to cut through the rhetoric. They're being taught how to have sexual intercourse without catching a disease or getting pregnant. That's what it's about.

Just let all the air out of it. That's blunt, but that's what it is. They are not taught that there is a fixed standard of right and wrong. They are not clearly taught abstinence according to the fixed standard of God that says flee fornication and that speaks of adultery as an incredible crime against themselves and against God.

And it can do nothing but damage unless it comes with a fixed moral base. The kids are facing, friend, let me tell you, they're facing liberalism in religion, they're facing humanism in education, and then they're facing hedonism in society. We live in a sex-saturated, alcohol-soaked society. Your children are looked upon as fodder for the liquor dealers, the beer barons, and all of these. You say, but oh, we're going to teach them to drink in moderation.

Come up close. I want to tell you something. That's the way every drinker begins. That's the way everybody begins. Nobody ever starts to drink to be a drunker. They all begin that they're going to drink in moderation or whatever.

They think it's a harmless thing. The Japanese have a proverb, first the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, and then the drink takes the man. Wine is a mocker. Strong drink is raging.

Whosoever is deceived, thereby is not wise. And I tell you what you ought to do, parents, get the alcohol out of your house, beverage alcohol, all of it, totally, period, out. You stay up when your kids go out and be awake when they come home. It's better for you to lose your sleep than to lose your child.

When that big old boy comes in, get up real close and give him a hug so you can smell his breath. So, what I'm saying is they're facing this thing, this hedonism in society. It's the same thing everything in the movies, in the films, in the situational comedies. They're all based primarily upon this, the breaking of God's commandments and laughing about it. That's the danger of a situational comedy that these kids watch.

What they laugh at, they can never take seriously again. Well, you say, well, that's just our way we get entertained by that. Many of you are using the television as a babysitter. Now, if living next door to you, there happen to be a man and a woman who are not married, and they're in the house next door, and they are cohabitating and having an illicit affair, and you go off shopping, would you say, now, Johnny, I want you to get a soapbox, and I want you to stand on that soapbox and look in the window and watch those people and see what they're doing. I want you to be entertained. This is the way I'm going to babysit you.

Well, you say, of course, I wouldn't do that. Well, you're letting them watch something like that right in the television, right in the living room. You see, these are what the kids are facing. They are facing liberalism and religion. They're facing humanism in education.

They're facing hedonism in society. They're up against it. Now, if I did not know the Lord, I would be absolutely petrified to raise children in this world in which we live, but there is a way. There is a way. Notice the Bible says they were not afraid. Faith sees every conflict as spiritual.

If you think that you're going to outwit this world, you're wrong. You're in a spiritual battle, and therefore you have to have faith. Indeed we are in a spiritual battle, and the only way to win is through faith. Maybe today you have questions regarding your faith in Jesus Christ, how to fully trust in what he did for you as Savior and Lord. We'd love to offer you an insightful resource, our Discover Jesus page. There you'll find answers you may need about your faith, as well as a response section. You can share how this message or others have impacted you. Go to our website, lwf.org slash radio, and click the tab that says Discover Jesus at the top of the page, lwf.org slash radio.

We can't wait to hear from you today. Well, thanks for studying in God's word. Are you raising your children by faith, recognizing our spiritual conflict? Remember, raising children is a spiritual battle. Our only hope is a solid faith in Jesus Christ. Be sure to join us tomorrow for part two of Family Faith, right here on Love Worth Finding.