Raising a Righteous Generation

Hello, and welcome to the Salt Church Podcast. Thank you for tuning in to this week's message. Join us as we explore God's Word providing practical teaching for day-to-day living. The message you are about to hear was recorded live at our Sunday morning worship experience. If you would like to learn more about Salt Church, please visit us at saltchurch.

org. We hope that you are encouraged by today's message. Over at the Welcome Center, if you drop off your card at the Welcome Center, we've got a nice few little things over there for you. Because we do love you, and we're so thankful you could have chosen anywhere else to go to church today, but you decided to come here and be with us today. So we thank you for that.

And we also have, just to let y'all know, just two quick announcements. One of them is our small groups. If you aren't connected to a small group, we run a short semester during the summer because we know a lot of people are busy. But what a phenomenal time we had with our small group this past week. It's just a way in.

We were digging deep in theology and scripture. I'm going through a study called Greater Than, and it's been really awesome. And on Sunday mornings, you know, it's kind of where you get your little bump in momentum, you know. But when you're meeting with your small group, that's where you really get down to the heart of the matter and grow in Christ, doing things together. Even when we do these serve days, we do those as groups, and we connect together.

And it's just, we just grow. We just grow and grow and grow. And so if you're not a part of one, check us out. We've only got a few more end of the month. We'll be ending our summer semester, but you can at least, you know, come pop in and be a part of us and share a little bit.

And then we'll relaunch our September. In September, we relaunch another small group right around fall time. And that lasts a little longer. So that goes for a few months, close to Christmas. So that's where we have our longer spout.

But I do want to encourage you to be a part of that. I don't know how much I can say it, but it is really, really important if you can connect with people during the week and get to know each other at deeper levels. Yeah. Also, next week is what we call Sunday Night Salt. We have that every 30-something.

And it's a really fun thing we do in the summer. And last month was really fun. It's just another way for us to hang out and get to know each other a little better, deal with the community during the summer. And we meet at the beach at 43rd Street. So there's free parking around that area.

So we all go out there and we bring, you know, a food item or whatever and hang out and just chill and have some music and devotion, you know. But mostly it's just about us being together and getting to know each other a little more at a deeper level. So I encourage you to come out with that next, this month, next week. And it happens at 6 o'clock p.m.

So we start at 6 o'clock p.m. and we end around 8-ish. Some people stay a little longer, but you're free to come and go as you please. You know, it's just a fun thing we do.

So, okay, so we're in our Summer of Salt series. Let's get started. And let's go to the Word of God. In fact, let me just open up with a word of prayer. Father, in the name of Jesus, we ask that you speak to us today, that you open up our hearts, that we would learn and take something away.

Although the Bible never changes, we always can learn something new and we can also learn something that we already know to a newer level. So, God, we're asking you to enlighten our hearts, enlighten our lives, enlighten our minds as you speak, as you're speaking today, Lord, through your Word. In Jesus' name, everybody said, Amen. Amen. Amen.

Okay. So, we've had an exceptional, in fact, I haven't been up here in like a month, I believe. It gave me a little break, but just hearing from different people in the church. In fact, next week, that tin thing that just dropped, that's Seth. That was Seth.

Woo! And he'll be speaking for us next week. He's one of our elders here in the church. Woo! A prayer warrior, just a lot of things.

In fact, we've got a really cool event coming up, and is it September or October? September. A lifestyle of Christianity. You'll be hearing more about that in the closer we get to that. Todd White, he's kind of heading that up and wants as many of the church to go to this event as possible.

It's going to be really awesome to be a part of that, but he's going to share with us next week. But this week, I want to talk about raising a righteous generation. In fact, I was working with the title of this message, and I said originally, I was like a generation that seeks God's face. A generation, but the generation that I'm referring to is the generation below us. The generation below us are kids, our teenagers, and our youth.

When we started Salt Church, we didn't have anything. We had, you know, a few speakers and things like that to set up, and we met in this little workout room. It had like this kind of blue beach theme, a little laminate floor and all that kind of stuff. It was probably about as big as half this area you're sitting in right now, and we would just set up and have church. And from the very beginning, it was non-negotiable.

We could do without good music. We could do without lights. We could do without a lot of, we didn't even have TVs or screens or anything like that. I think we had one screen that we popped up in the back. And at the very beginning, we didn't even have that.

We just like played. The band got together and played, and we just worshiped, and we didn't even know the words. A lot of people didn't know the words of the song, but they were just like this, you know, just doing their thing. And they didn't even know the words. But one thing that was non-negotiable was that we had to have something for the kids.

We had to have something for kids. We were not going to go without that because we knew the importance of the younger generation, the generation that's below us. And there has, from the beginning of time, been an all-out attack on kids. So for me, I want to fight for your kids. And I knew that this church was going to be all about kids, and not just kids.

I'm talking about kids to 18 years old. I'm talking about one-year-old all the way up. I mean, birth age all the way up to the time that they're adults. It's that important. It's that significant because there is an all-out battle.

And we work hard here to provide a safe teaching, a fun environment for your kids. But I tell you what, they learn a lot when they come home. My kids, when they come home, they love church. They talk about church every week. And that excites me when they say, Dad, it's almost church Sunday, isn't it?

And I'm like, yeah, well, no, you know, it'll be Wednesday, and we'll have something. Now, tomorrow's church, right, Daddy? No, tomorrow's not church. Because they're excited about coming to church. They love church, and they know Scripture, and they're telling me Scripture.

They're quoting Scripture. And I see this happening in our kids. And another thing is they love your kids. They love being with your kids. And so they're excited about coming to church to see your kids and to be together.

And it's just like us getting together. They want to be together. And we work really hard to create an environment for them. And then we talked about, you know, we had a youth ministry for a while. And it was kind of off and on for a while because we really couldn't establish a good leader base, a leadership base.

And we knew we had to hold off until we could do it well because we didn't want to launch something. And we tried to pass, and it kind of petered off a bit. But we've been praying for, like, six months. Okay, well, can we do this? We know it's needed.

And, God, when do you have somebody? And then Eli and Sharon show up and say, hey, we want to do it, okay? So Eli and the back on the soundboard. And I think, I'm not sure if Sharon's in here right now. But they stepped up, and they've taken the youth, and they've launched something.

And so far, it's been great. I mean, they've been getting together. I served with them at the JCLC Christian Outreach Center down the road last Friday. And they were together. They were serving.

It was a wonderful thing. It was awesome. So we realized that that's significantly important because we have a generation. And we were that generation. And the generation before us, when they were young, were that generation because there is a constant war going on with the generation below us.

Did you know? Yes. It's happening. In fact, the latest young generation is what we were tagging Generation Z. This is the generation after the Millennials.

And there's some alarming statistics here. First of all, the cool thing is they're a large group. A huge group. In fact, they're beating out baby boomers. In fact, one statistic says that there are 74 million Generation Z-ers.

These are people that were born between 1995 and 2015. And that's kind of a relative because they haven't really defined it completely like my generation, the next generation, and then the Millennials and so on. We have a definite idea of when those times happened, but here they're still kind of defining that. But 74 million, that's one out of four humans. That's a large, large group of people.

A powerhouse, actually. They can influence a society one day, right? Amen. That's right. But here's the alarming part.

They say that 64% will have left the church. If they grew up in the church, they will have left the church by adulthood. 64%. That means almost, you know, more than half. That means if I have two babies in the nursery right now, by the time they're adulthood, one of those children will not be in church.

They will not be a part of the church. Another statistic says that only 3% will have read the Bible, much less know what it says or means. That's alarming to me. That's a scary thing to me. That we're raising a generation that is going to be predominantly biblically ignorant.

Ignorant. They're not going to know. They're not going to read the Bible. They're not going to know about God and His goodness and the hope and all those things that we get from God. In fact, when I was in youth ministry, Miranda and I were in youth ministry for about seven years.

And we had all kinds of kids come through. And one thing that I noticed is just how biblically ignorant they were, you know? I mean, pizza parties were fun and all those kind of things. We had all the cool things. But one day, and Miranda kind of mentioned it to me, we had one kid in our group.

And I was talking about, we were talking about the betrayal of Jesus. And we mentioned Judas. And this kid was 15 years old and says, who's Judas? He grew up in church. And he grew up in church.

Yeah. And we're like, how in the world can you not know about Judas and grow up in the church and be in the church? So it led me to really digging in and digging a little deeper with the youth. Really talking about doctrinal issues, talking about theological issues. And some of them liked it.

Most of them didn't like it. They thought it was boring in a class and all that. But I'll tell you what, today I can say confidently that most of those, most of them, not all of them, but a lot of them are actually either in ministry or in the church. And they come to me and say, you know what? That stuff that you talked about before I went to college was like super boring at times.

But man, I want to hear it now. And I know it. And I was able to take it with me. Amen. Because we were able to really dig deep into what they needed to know.

And so we have a generation that's dealing with this. In fact, Dr. Cornet Becker, I work with Dr. Cornet at the university. Somebody knows him back there.

Yeah, he's a good friend of mine. He would say this, that we are entering into a dark age where relativism will take over absolute truth. What does that mean? It means that the definition of who God is will be no longer relevant. It's only what you believe.

If a flower grows upside down, then a flower grows upside down, right? Because that's truth. Whatever I believe is truth. And it will enter us into a dark age in which we will not be scripturally relevant. We will not understand or we will not be, we will be biblically ignorant, basically.

And it will lead us into a place of experientialism, which we're already experiencing, and just a very dark place that we want to be. We don't want to be, excuse me. And so what do we do? How do we look at this? Scripture talks about this quite a bit.

In fact, at the very beginning, if you go to Genesis, the book of Genesis, Genesis 3 is where I'm going to be reading from. This is basically the doctrine of the fall of man, right? So most of you know, but if you don't, let's just kind of go back, backtrack. Okay, God created the heavens and the earth. He created everything, and then he created the magnum opus of his creation, and that was man, right?

Man was the greatest of all. He breathed the breath of life of man. He didn't breathe the breath of life of anything else, but he just spoke it into existence. But he literally got on his hands and knees and created man. And he set them in this garden, this perfect place, because it's a paradise.

It was heaven to them. They got to walk with God. They got to talk to God. God was, they said that God would just walk with them through the cool of the evening in the garden, you know? And they had this one-on-one relationship with God.

And God gave them two trees, the tree of life, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And he says, from that tree over there, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will not eat. Well, this snake comes into the garden, and most of you know him as the name Satan. And he comes in, and he says, you know what? If you eat of this fruit, you'll be like God, because he's holding back from you.

He doesn't want you to have everything. And it was truth. There was a little bit of truth there, because they wouldn't know what he knew. But he didn't want them to know what he knew, right? Because it would devastate them.

So he says, you're holding back. So what happens? Eve comes into the garden. The woman comes into the garden, takes the fruit, gives it. Then the husband protects the fruit, and sin enters into the world.

And that's where we get the doctrine of we are born into sin, inherited sin, or whatever you want to call it. So we have the fall of man that takes place. And God did three things when it happened. And he found them, and he began to speak to them. The first thing he told the man is that they were going to have to sweat and toil in the fields, right?

You were no longer going to be able to chill and relax and enjoy nature and all those kind of things. You're going to actually have to work. He told the woman that, and that was kind of the last thing he told, you're going to have to bear a child. You're going to have to, it's going to be hard, and life's not going to be as easy as it always was. And then in verse 15, and then verse 14, 15, and 16, in chapter 3, he actually talks about Satan.

He turns to the adversary, Satan, the devil, and he says to him, you're going to scrawl on the ground. So he curses the snake, you know, and pulls him on the ground. Then he says this, and he says, I will put enmity between you and the woman and between the seed, that's key, your seed and her seed. Now, in the context of this verse, he's referring to, and he goes on to say, he will bruise your head and you will bruise his heel. And that's a prophetic statement to Jesus, you know, when he dies on the cross and raises from the dead, the victory of that.

So you have all that going on, but in another, and in a broader look at it, and I thought this was very interesting, and I never really saw it from, from this, from this point of view before, but it really is talking about the generation that he is going after, that Satan is going after. I'm going to put war between you. I'm going to, I'm going to put this, this, this thing between you and the seed of human beings. You're going to try to fight this. You're going to try to wipe them out, but they're going to fight back.

You're going to try to annihilate them from the earth, but guess what, Satan? You've got something coming to you, because we've got a generation that's coming up through the seed of Abraham, who is Jesus Christ. He's going to crush your head, and there's going to be a generation that comes after you, and they're going to be mighty, they're going to be strong, and they're going to be powerful, and you're not going to be able to defeat it. So Satan, get ready, because this is what's going to happen. So from that day, Satan has done everything he could to destroy mankind through our children, through our children.

In fact, if we take a look at the Old Testament, Exodus 13, 16, when Pharaoh and Israel, you know, what did Pharaoh do? He saw that the Hebrews were multiplying and growing. He became fearful of them, and what did he do? He attacked the children. Let's go and go into the children and the nels of the families and ask the midwives to murder them, and obviously God's victory came from that.

Moses came out of that, and Israel continued to prosper because God is that good. And then we have Jesus and Herod. You know, when Jesus was born, Herod heard about this king, the Magi were talking about him, and he wanted to so desperately find this king. So the adversary uses someone like Herod to put a bill out, or whatever you want to call it, that's stuttering a little bit, to have the child, the children, the firstborn of those families, or the little boys, two years and younger, killed and wiped out of that area that he thought that the king was going to, or that king was going to come out of. So you see, in the Old Testament and the New Testament, we see this war taking place.

Satan wants children. He wants to take out children. He will attack the children. If he can stop a generation, he can stop and thwart, or he believes he can stop and thwart the plan of God. So we have a battle.

And I don't know about you, but I want to fight for our children. And I'll fight for your children. And if you will join me in this, we will fight for our children together, and we will win, and we will prosper, and we will have victory. Amen. Do you believe that?

Yes. Yes. So I want to give you a few practical things to share with you today. And if you don't have children, this will prepare you. And these are just practical things that you need to know anyway in your Christian walk, in your Christian life, to grow closer to Christ.

So how do we fight for our kids? What are some things we do? And you can follow along in your notes, fill in the blanks, kind of keep up, take notes, dig in deeper later on if you need to. But the first one is, we've got to teach them how to run with the right crowd. Run with the right crowd.

We've got to help them make decisions of the people that they need to be around. We have authority to do that. Yes. Amen. To keep them running with the right crowd, being with the right crowd.

Relationships are significantly important. But if I can, if I see who you're hanging around with, I'll tell you who you can be in five to ten years from now. Because relationships are infectious. They, they, they, you start looking and acting and being like the people that you're around. And I don't know if y'all remember back in the day, I don't know if they still do this, but I remember, you know, radio news came on or the TV, television, evening news came on.

They always said, it's 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are? I don't know if you remember that. It's 10 p.

m. Do you know where your children are? And then they'd go, hey, today's news, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they're just like, wow, that's just out of nowhere. And they would always start at this.

11 p.m. Do you know where your children are? And the latest in the weather, you know. And you're like, where did that come from?

But there was some psychology happening in that because it would make people think, okay, it's late. Do I really know where my children are? And for many, we are like that, right? Do we really know where our children are? Do we really know what they're doing, who they're around?

Proverbs 13.20 says this. He says, he who walks with wise men will be wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm. Let me repeat that again. He who walks with wise men will be wise.

It means if you're around wise people, you'll become wise, right? But he who goes with fools will become fools, right? We have a responsibility to help our children navigate. And I know, oh, we don't want to do that. We don't want to be those kind of, that picks their friends.

No, you need to pick their friends, especially when they're at an age where they don't understand. Instead of letting the fool affect them, bring the fool into your life and let you affect them, right? We want them. We want an influencer. We don't want to be influencers, not influencees.

So we need to help our kids decide who they want to be around. In fact, some very practical ways to do that is our youth group, as they need, you know, getting our kids together, being in our kids' ministry. Being at church on Sundays is really significantly important. And I don't say that just so that I'll have a full Sunday every Sunday. I say that because I really mean your kids need to be around my kids.

My kids need to be around your kids. They need to be shaping each other. Your youth need to, your teenagers need to be with other teenagers that are thinking the same way and doing the same things and walking the same paths. At a greater degree, Peter says, or Paul rather, says this in 2 Corinthians 6, 14. He says, do not be bound together with unbelievers.

For what partnership with righteousness and lawlessness or what fellowship has light with darkness? I love that analogy of light and darkness. I mean, when light comes into a room, you know, darkness can't stand, right? So there's no way it possibly can't be together. Now, let me step back for a second and say that doesn't mean you don't associate with unbelievers because you're supposed to be ministering to unbelievers, right?

Yes. I mean, you've got neighbors. I just take my neighbors, for example. I love my neighbors and I talk to them often. And sometimes we eat with them and do things with them.

But this key phrase here is bound together. Don't be bound together. People and things that are bound together are connected by qualities that they all share. Families are bound together by values, those values that you have. So you're sharing values and experiences, right?

So when you're connected with unbelievers, there's different values going on. And sometimes those values can affect them. But in a lot of cases, when we surround ourselves with people that are not like us, that don't believe like us or don't have values like us, they begin to affect us. We begin to think like them. We begin to act like them.

We begin to do the things they do. We begin to go into old habits maybe that we've come out of. I've seen it over and over again. It's important for us to be with the right people. The bound together means to be linked or surrounded by.

Who is surrounding you? And when you look at that unbeliever that you care about so much, who are you causing them to be surrounded by? We are to be witnesses to people. So how do we get them to a place where they can be in a better situation, that they can be changed and transformed by the love of Christ through people, through a community of people that love each other? Who do we surround ourselves with?

Don't be bound together. Love them. Appreciate them. Pray for them. Take opportunities to minister to them.

But you cannot be bound together with them. Separate. That's what holiness means. When we be holy, be separated. Be separated.

Step away. It's time to grow up. The meat is there. The milk no more. Grow up and be with people.

And we want to help our kids make those problems. Be with those who believe like them. Have a value system that all of us share together and encourage each other. The second thing is we want to teach them who they really are. Who they really are.

That they are not just a product of random chance. Yes. That they are not just some numbers that somebody put together that a million years ago or 10 million years ago or what billion years ago, whether you're old earth creationists or young earth creationists. I know there's a lot of debate about how the earth was formed. Was it 6,000 years or was it, you know, 10 million years and how that all works out.

It doesn't, all that doesn't really matter. The fact is that the bigger picture is that God created the heavens and the earth and he's an intelligent designer to design things. The fact that we're even here sitting or standing on a big ball with a massive gas thing that's like just a few million miles away or whatever it is, is amazing that we're spinning a thousand miles around the solar system. That whether it was like a big bang that happened or some kind of molecular structure took place at some time at some point in existence. There was a first cause because even science tells you, right?

Science tells you nothing creates itself. Everything is created or made to happen by something equal to or greater than itself. Right. And then there can't, and then science would also tell you, but there has to be a first cause, but we don't have to find that first cause in science. Right.

So we would, so these, these scientists are working around the clocks to figure out, okay, what was the first cause of the cosmos? How did all of this take place? How did all of this come into existence? Well, we know there was a creator. He was the first cause cause he was not created.

It is the only thing that really logically makes sense. And scientists would say, well, that just can't be, you know, but it's the only thing that we have that's plausible. And we believe that because we've got the word that God sent to us through man inspired by the Holy Spirit to show us the way. Amen. Amen.

And we are created beings. We are beautiful, created beings that we can go back to Genesis and see that God actually dug in the ground and created us. He was the first cause and we need our children to understand that they were created beautifully, that we were created purposefully, that everything that they are, everything that they aren't, their ups, their downs, their flaws, their, their perfections or whatever they have is all designed by a creator. Yes. And the Proverbs 22.

6 says this, start children off on the way they should go. And even when they are old, they will not turn from it. Now, a lot of people would say, you can kind of pull from this a little bit if you want to. That means I need to raise them up in church and biblically and do, you know, if I get them to come to church, you know, one day they'll, they'll, they'll fall away from church. If they, if they fall away from church, they'll come back, you know, kind of things like, yeah, yeah, you can practically put that together.

But really what the, the deeper thing here is, is you're helping them understand who they actually are, how they were designed, their, their giftings, their, their personalities, their, their idiosyncrasies or whatever you want to say is a part of who they are. You're helping them understand that God didn't make a mistake. God created them a certain way. I think about Max, my son, he's seven years old. And when I heard, first heard when he was two years old and I was sitting in the doctor's office, he wasn't even quite two years old yet.

I heard the word autism. And I, you know, the first thing that went through my mind is like, my son is autistic. What went wrong? Is he going to be able to do this and do that? And here's one thing that the doctor told me and Miranda, when we were in there and we first heard that word autism and, and it has spoken to Max.

Max is, she said that Max is the same Max you knew yesterday. He just has a diagnosis now, but he is the same person. I don't know if this doctor was a believer or not, but when she said that, it made so much sense. Yes, Max was created exactly how Max was created. He may have some deficiencies.

He may have some, some things that he has to work out in, in his way, in his social life and in school. And, and, and the way he connects with people may be a little, a little different, but you know, he's Max and he's always been Max. And before the beginning of time, he was Max because, because God already knew Max was going to be here. Max was going to be exactly who he is. And, and I appreciate those qualities about him that I see now.

When I see that, that he doesn't lie, you know, that's a great thing. He's very, very, very honest. He'll be straight up. He'll come home and say, Dad, you know, I talked in class, but, you know, and he'll try to explain it away. You know, the, the, the, the, the teacher gave me a, a, uh, what colors are they?

Like red or blue or yellow or something. There's a lower color. He says, he gave me a blue today, but you know, I, I, I didn't do it because, you know, this and that. He's trying to explain it away and I love that about him and the way he, he's detailed in certain things and certain things have to be processed in a certain way. And I see the beauty in that.

And as he grows older, how, how he's come so far from where he was and how God's really designing him. My, my beautiful little boy is really becoming a man that God had created him to be. And I've been helping him and Brent and I intentionally help him and understand that, that he is not a mistake. And he is, you know, he is everything he is supposed to be. And, and the intelligence of, of him when he, when he looks at things and the way he works things out, it's a beautiful thing.

And, uh, so, so we need to guide them. We need to lead them on the way they should go. We should put them in places, put them in situations, help guide them along so that they can be everything that God wants them to be. And the third thing is, uh, teach them how to be selfless because selfishness is so easy to teach. Yeah.

I mean, you don't have to teach it. It just, just happens, right? Your kids from the time that they're old enough or, or, or busting with each other about who's, who was first and this is mine and I want this and, and, and I, I need this. Right. And that's why I love serve day.

When we did serve day, we had a lot of families out there and they're working together and it was beautiful because, uh, people are just, when, when you're together, when, when your family's together serving, you're teaching them, you're sharing them and you're seeing you served or seeing you be a part of something bigger than yourself. And, and, and it affects them. Right. And, and I've heard that, you know, the sayings and my kids are the center of my world. My kids are my world.

Now, you know, it's wonderful that you love your kids. I love my kid, man. When I'm away from my kids for, for more than a few days, I miss them so much. I want to be with them. Miranda might be a different story.

She's like, keep them away about two or three more weeks. But I really do miss my kids. I just have this natural inclination to just love kids and drawn to kids and, and have, have parents and grandparents that were the same way that were in kids ministry and things like that. So it just naturally comes to me. But, but when, when I hear the statement, the king, my kids are my, my world.

Your kids are your world. We're in danger of a really tough life. They're your world because someday they're going to grow up and they're going to leave you. They're going to love you, but they're going to, they're going to, they're going to, they're going to leave and cleave or whatever you want to call it. They're going to, they're going to, they're going to disappoint you.

They're going to do things that you're not going to expect them to do. They're not the center of your world. They're God, they're a God given gift to you that you are to love and direct them and show them how to be selfless, to be more like Christ so they can go out and they can raise their kids in the same way. They are not the center of your world. God should be the center of your world.

Your husband, your wife is your first, right? They're the people that you focus on the most. You love your kids. You raise them well. You, you do.

Well, you do all that you need to do for them, but don't ever make them the center because if something happens to them or something goes astray with them, then you're going to be disappointed and hopeless and feel like you've failed. So God doesn't want that for you. In fact, if you look at it, back when I was at Regent University, you know, we had a, I saw it. It was interesting, you know, the generation, because, you know, I was made to do everything, you know, on my own. My dad says if you're going to register, you know, if you're going to go to college, you need to go fill out your own applications, do all that kind of stuff.

I mean, he was helpful in everything. He did everything he could to get into college, but it was just like, but being in academics and being an academic advisor and working with young people just 10 years ago, actually, you know, it was very interesting. I mean, there's these things called helicopter parents. You feel me? Helicopter parents, they're just always around trying to do everything for the kids, make sure the kids are in place and this and that.

And I would literally have moms that filled out, they filled out the form where they had permission to look at their kids' classes and all that, and I'd have moms call in to schedule classes for the kids. I mean, I would never see their kids even come in and talk about their academic future and their jobs and the direction they're going because moms, the helicopter parents that were always around, floating around, you know, doing their thing, you know. And I was just thinking, wow, you know, they don't have to do anything. I had to do everything, you know. I had to do it all on my own.

I had to go to an academic advisor. I had to get enlisted for classes. I had to plan ahead. I had all this stuff I had to do. And because parents are kind of different today, and it might be changing, I don't know, but I know then it was just like us that worked there, we just talked about it a lot.

Wow, isn't it a different generation? Isn't it different that they could just do, they could just float and do, and we love our kids and we want to do things for them, but I think sometimes we just do too much because we don't allow them to grow up and allow them to be independent. And when they're independent, they don't know what to do, you know. But there's an example of a helicopter parent in the Bible, and she was the mother of James and John, the sons of Zebedee. You know James and John, that was like Jesus' inner circle.

And she asked Jesus a question. She said, hey, you know, James and John over here, they're like your inner circle. Why don't you put one on the right and one on the left? Why don't you put them on thrones beside you? Will you give them favor when you enter your king to put James over here and John over here?

That was a place of authority, a place of leadership, a place of honor when you were sitting beside the king. Could you put them there? And Jesus looks at her and says, you don't even know what you're asking because I don't even have the authority to do that. Only the Father in heaven has the authority to do that. But he looked at his other disciples and he's like, man, they're not cool about this.

I can see it on their face. So he says, are you guys willing to drink my cup? Are you willing to drink this cup? And then, oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. Well, here's the cup you're going to have to drink.

Whoever wants to be great, Matthew 20, 26, 27, 28, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant. And whoever wants to be first, he must be your slave. He didn't even use like a proper, he used like an even deeper term there. You've got to be your slave. You've got to be a slave to people.

Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve. And here's the cup that they all eventually, as we know in history, happened. Maybe with the exception of, you know, there's different stories and different things that the martyrdom that took place, they would all eventually have to drink of this cup. It says, just as the Son of Man did to come to be served, but to not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. Meaning I'm going to die for people who don't even like me, for people who hate me, for people who don't don't care about what I have to offer.

That the very creator of the world was going to die under the hands of the people he created. Do you want to drink of this cup? Because that's really what I'm trying to teach you, guys. I'm trying to teach you. Jesus is like, I'm trying to teach you 12.

I'm trying to show you that it isn't about leadership or authority or anything like that. Leadership and authority is really when you become the meekest of people, when you serve others, when you give your life for others. Yesterday, we kind of posted some stuff on social media about our serve day. And my aunt, my mom, they go crazy when they see stuff like that, you know, how mothers are. And my aunt wrote something about my grandparents, and it kind of brought me in tears a little bit.

Because I think about how they taught us to be selfless. They taught my parents to be selfless, and taught us to be, and my parents taught us to be selfless. And then my grandfather, who basically packed up his bags in Chicago, Illinois, and moved out to North Carolina in the middle of nowhere. A little place called Falcon, North Carolina. The Falcon's Children's Home is what they call it.

Children's Home that our church is actually a part of, kind of supports and things like that. And gave his life to serving children, to loving children, to being a father. And my grandmother, the same way, you know, just left her home and went. That's actually where they met as house parents. They initially were married and continued to serve children their entire life.

Gave up a lot to do that, but it taught us something. And then my grandfather, you know, he, when he passed away, I'll never forget, we were in the kitchen that very week. And we were in grandmother's kitchen. And I was really young then. I was about 12, 13 years old when he passed.

And I remember getting a phone call. It was probably a couple, actually a couple of months after he passed away. And my aunt answered the phone. It was a man who was calling E.R.

Dunning, which my, Evan Rayford was my grandfather's name. And he says, Mr. E.R. there.

And she said, I'm sorry, he passed away a few months ago. And it got really silent. And the guy began to tear up and cry. He said, E.R.

was the only father I ever had. And, you know, these kids, they come into this home and they don't have families and they don't have anything. And he was just so disappointed. He didn't know. And he had lost his father.

He had many, many sons. My grandfather had many sons. And just to look at his life and his legacy and see it pour down into my parents and then into us. And all of us are serving, some of us are serving in the mission field, some of us are serving in other churches. And my father's a pastor.

And my uncle's Santa Claus and does a lot of kids' ministry. He was here a few weeks ago. My cousin was sharing his missions, endeavors, and stuff like that. And it just, it's like, wow, you know, because they taught us to be selfless. And we become who our parents are because they teach us and they show us.

And we have a responsibility to do that. Teach them to be selfless. Teach them how to love others. Some practical things is let them sit down at the table and write thank you notes to people who've done favors for them or done things to them, you know, like adults or even other kids. Maybe the school gave them a toy or something.

Write a thank you note for them. Or let them participate in ministry just like Serve Day, you know. But do things together. Somebody asked me one time, well, how do you find time to raise kids and do ministry? At the same time, I said, I bring my kids into my ministry.

We do it together. We were at the JCOC the other day. I have a picture of our kids, like, pulled in a little box, you know, walking across the thing. We do it together. We do ministry together.

And we get to spend time with each other as well. It's a beautiful thing, it's a beautiful thing. And lastly, and probably most important is, and I'll end there, is you've got to teach them to live out an authentic faith, an authentic faith. Live out an authentic faith, you know, authenticity is a tagline today, you know, like a lot of people like, use that in church, we're an authentic church, we're authentic about this, we're just raw, we're this and that, but authenticity in church sometimes becomes unauthentic because we're so about being authentic that we're not really authentic, right? And it's just this tagline, and are we really being authentic?

Are we authentic with our faith? Are we living out our faith the same way we do in church? Are we going home and living out? Well, I'll be honest with you, I don't always do that. I don't always do the things that I preach correctly, you know?

I don't do that, I make mistakes all the time, but we have to look at that, are we really living it out? Because your kids become who you are. Yeah, that's right. If you're a miserable, depressed person, your kids become miserable and depressed. I've seen it, like I've seen ups when people are up, their kids are up, when they're down, their kids are down.

I mean, they're becoming like you. And how is your relationship with God? Are you living out your faith? Are you plugged in with God? Are you reading?

Let's just take disciplines, for example. Are you reading your Bible? Are you praying to God? Are you, are you living out your faith and loving people without, not just saying it, not just words, not just theology, not just doctrine? Oh, I know about my Bible.

I know everything in it. I know this word and what it means and how it works and that's all good and everything, but it doesn't mean a hill of beans if you're not living it out. It's practicality, application. is what makes it work. Yes, amen.

That's what you need. You need an authentic faith. I love how Rick Warren said this. I read this a few months ago as I was reading an article by him. He says, you can tell a person's relationship to God not by their theology, but by their kindness and their joy.

Yes. A lot of guys have a great theology, but they don't know God. You don't see it. You don't see it. We need people to see it.

We need people to see our faith and live out our faith. I find it interesting that so many people will live one way. I know it's indicative of society and where we are right now, but we got to turn it around because people will come to church. They'll have their Bible. They'll have it memorized.

But man, they get into the home and they're cursing and they're acting up and they're hateful and they're mean to their wife. They're mean to their husbands. They're doing and we're not really living and how kids see that. And they start acting that way. They start interpreting things.

They're interpreting life. They're developing a value. They're a value system based on what you're doing in the home. And I'm going to end with this particular scripture here. And this is what Jesus says.

Very, very heavy, heavy scripture. It says, many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? Did we not cast out demons in your name? Did we not perform miracles? Did we not do all these things?

And he says this, and then I will declare to them, I will declare to them, as you're standing before a holy, righteous God, and you're saying, God, I did the miracles. I prayed for people. I actually saw them healed. I saw them. I saw them.

And those are great things, you know, and we're not like putting them down as a church. We're a church that believes in miracles and we want to see miracles. We want to see all that happen. But if we're only looking at that and we're like, oh, I prophesied in your name. I did prophecy.

People received prophecies and were encouraged and moved forward. And then people performed, you know, we cast out demons, actually devils, people in your name. We said, come out in the name of Jesus. And they came out. He says, people will do that.

But when they get before a holy, righteous God, he says, then I will declare to them, I didn't know you and depart from me. You practice lawlessness. Depart from me. You practice lawlessness. Me.

Because it's all about what you're doing and not like who you are in Christ. It's all about what you know and what you believe and how you're, because that's outward. See, that's not what he, he doesn't want outward stuff. That's all good. God can do all of that outwardly.

But what he really cares about is where your heart is and where, where your focus is. And it should be in him. It should be a relationship in him. And when we're teaching our kids how to live out an authentic faith, we need to have a real faith. We need to know, they need to know that we really do love Jesus.

And we want to walk with Jesus. And we've given everything that we're all in with Jesus. We're not just putting Jesus over here. That's our church time. That's our, you know, that's our Sunday morning time.

That's whatever. But we're not going to talk about Jesus the rest of the week. We're not going to live out our faith and they're going to get that. They're going to see that when, when, when they become of age, because they're going to say, hey, you know, we don't really know that relationship thing. You know, we'll, we'll be religious and we'll do all of our stuff, but we really want them.

No, no, no, no, no. We, we need a, we, we need a deep relationship with Christ. We need him to be our best friend. We need to be all in. We need him to be a part of every part of a life that, that, that, you know, those who follow him are willing to give their lives for him.

I don't have, so many people aren't willing to give their lives. Are we willing to give our lives for him? Are we willing to say, God, I'm, I'm all in today. Are we willing to, if, if, if, if it costs everything, are we willing to give it, give it all? Is that, that's an authentic faith.

That's what Jesus wants. He's not saying that you're going to, you're going to have to give up everything. In fact, he's allowed us to live in a blessed, westernized, beautiful culture where you live in freedom and you can make money and you can live. You know, next to the beach and have everything you ever wanted and, you know, 15, 20 surfboards. I'm not calling out surfboard surfers, but, you know, I'm a surfer, so I know that.

You got 15, 20 surfboards in your garage and that's all, all good. And you have a boat in, in the, in the, in the harbor over there and all that. He allows you to have all that stuff, but we like, we're like, oh, well, well, well, you know, you know, I, I'm not willing to give any of that up, you know, because, because, you know, I just can't. And Jesus is, is like, I don't want your heart. I mean, all of that I've given to you already.

I just want your heart. I don't want you to be willing. And I want you to enter into that next phase, that next state of your faith walk. So that you can really, truly experience what life and life authentically is about. So it's not about money.

It's not about things. It's not about any of that stuff. I don't want to teach your kids that because Satan's going to throw everything at them. The world's going to throw everything at them. Satan's using that.

He's just like fiery arrows. I'm sorry I'm going over guys. I know I'm got 10 minutes. Some of you are like, it's lunchtime, but I just want to, I'm just saying, gosh, it's so important that we get this one thing. Can we believe that?

Do we believe that today? Do we believe that God is all we need? That God is everything? That our identity is not in any, it is how we, what we wear and how we look and how, and how the people that we're hanging out. Like my, my identity is in Christ and I just don't care what anybody thinks.

If Christ calls me to do it, I do it. I walk in the ways of him. And my hope is that y'all can experience the abundancy of life. Yeah, there's downs in life, there's ups and downs, there's all kinds of things that go on. I experience depression, I experience hurt.

I'm such an dieta sp green sandwich. Oh my God. Okay. I really? I feel like she's crazy.

I've experienced pain and all those things. I'm not saying that, but there's a joy deep down in me when I'm going through those things. And I can walk it out because I know who my hope lies in. It's Jesus. And you can have hope today if you don't.

You can experience it at a level if you don't have that level of experience with it. You can have that today. Can we bow our heads for just a second? Father, in the name of Jesus, we thank you, God, that you are our all in all, that we can have everything, abundant life, full of your glory. God, but today I really want to take this opportunity.

There are some people in here that haven't really given it all. They haven't really completely surrendered to you, that they would make a decision for you today. There are some of you here, with all heads bowed and all eyes closed, there are some of you here today that so desperately want peace and all that you don't have it. Because you have completely surrendered to you. If that's you today, if you would just gently lift your hands and say, I'm ready to surrender.

I'm ready to surrender. Because it's not about outward action, it's about inward, authentic faith. God just wants relationship with you. If you pray this with me, and believe this today. Father, in the name of Jesus, I believe that you are the Son of God, that you died on the cross for my sin, and those of the earth, including that you were there.

Today, I realize that I am far from you, even though when I thought I was close to you, and at times I realized that I wasn't fully in. But today,