The Culture That Formed Our Family

Why are we here today? What are we doing? Because it's Mother's Day. We're going to talk today. Do you know what we're doing? Yeah. My mama's favorite color is pink. She has this nervous laugh that when people fall, she'll start dying laughing. I love my mommy reading to me. She makes me like to smile. My mom makes me smile too. She does? How? Like that. Grandma, she fell off a bike into a bush, and my mom's dying laughing at her, which isn't necessarily right, I don't think. What's something that maybe your mom has had faith for that you didn't? My height. She is bougie. She always gets new shoes, and how do you get new shoes? Daddy, buy them for me. So she likes to go shopping? Yeah. Every day, I'm like, how do you get these clothes so good? How strong is your mom? And tell me about your mom's cooking. Amazing, so amazing.

We don't talk about dad's cooking, though. Spaghetti with cheese and ketchup? No, yeah. What does mom always say? What does mom always say? She says? Stay out of trouble. If you could give your mom anything in the world for Mother's Day, what would you give her? Pizza. Pizza? Pizza. Are you serious? Her favorite chocolate. And a hug? Yeah, and kisses. Flowers! Pink flowers. She likes pink flowers. And pop-ups. And pink! Oh, my goodness, you should see my room. I don't know what's up there. I never dreamed as a teenager that my mom would get saved, that I would have children, that the children would have children, and that they would all serve the Lord. The day that our mom passed away, dad just gathered us around. He just said, we can mourn, and we can pray, we can mourn, and we can grieve, but we're not going to stay there.

And so it's OK to have joy and laughter, even during times that are hard. I never had the love of my parents. Her grandma, my sister, and my mother, they planned my marriage. I said, what? Who's getting married? They told me, you are. I was 17, he was 33. I didn't know how to be a wife. I didn't know how to be a mother. And they didn't have no one to help me. I got divorced. I was 27, and I raised it by myself. I said, Lord, if you keep me, I promise you that I will serve you the rest of my life. See my great-grandbabies, because I have eight and one coming. And the other day, I was babysitting, and I just started to cry, because I said, Lord, you have been so faithful. I think the older I've gotten, I'm more appreciative and understand legacy a little bit more. We saw my mom and dad pray, pray, pray. Even though she's not here with us physically, all the things she deposited in us, you know? And we have it with us. And that we can pass that down to our kids. Yeah. I would say just, you know, knowing that prayer is the most important thing. And you know, a little undercover, you know, New York. Don't tell me what to do.

Don't tell me what to do. We may be short, but we're feisty. What would you want to thank your mom for? There's so many. There's like 100 things. I can't tell all of them. We're all very passionate about what we do at this church, and how she serves, and how we serve together. She's very caring. She is such a peacemaker, brings peace into every scenario. More importantly, the two things that she likes the most is God and Jesus in us. No matter what we need, no matter what we do, she's always there for us. Thank you for making dinner for us. Thank you, Mom. I feel like I can never, like, show her how much I appreciate her. Like, I can say, like, thank you, and I love you all the time, but I really do appreciate Mom and everything she does for us. I think she's the best mom in the world. She's really strong mentally, and she's a really powerful woman, and a very powerful mom. One, two, three. Happy Mother's Day. Happy Mother's Day. Happy Mother's Day. Happy Mother's Day. Yay.

Get it together, girl. What a great video. And of course, we want to welcome our campuses and those that are watching from around Austin and the 13 correctional facilities. I know that many of you are mothers, and we are praying for you on this weekend. It's an honor to be with you. Celebration Church, and we just welcome everyone that is joining us right now online. Good to see you guys. Well, we're continuing our month of May is, and of course, around the theme of relationships. And today, we want to talk about parenting. In particular, parenting our families and our children. And we're asked all the time from different places how to. You guys raised your three boys, and they seem to turn out pretty good. Not perfect. Nothing is ever going to be perfect. But the reality is that our boys do love Jesus. They do love the church. They love us amazingly. They love me more amazingly. They love life. They love their purpose. And it took intentionality, and it took not just giving it to the wind, if you will, and just hoping that things will turn out, but it's got to be more than just a hope. It has to be a lifestyle of intentionality, and nothing happens by accident. Nothing great happens by accident. And of course, we know children don't raise themselves. And so today we want to talk about that. Yeah, we have three sons. They are 34, 29, and 26. They're all happily married to incredible women. And now we have a granddaughter, May Claire, who is the light of our life. She's almost three. And so we did something that we've never done before. We asked them to write our message for us, basically. But what we did is we have a family group text creatively called We Are the Champions. I don't know what your group text is called,

but that's ours. It works for us. And so we sent them a text, and we were like, hey, we want individually for y'all to send us each five things that you think that we did right that impacted you guys, that you think would help other people in our congregation who were in the throes of parenting, trying to crack this parenting code. And so we send this out. We're just waiting by our phone. They're usually super responsive, and crickets. Nothing. Eight hours later, Joe and I are like, do our kids think we did absolutely nothing right? Yes. And then Mason responds, that's our oldest. And those of you who know Mason would know this is not an unlike him response. Do you want constructive criticism too? How many of you have kids that keep you humble? And the constructive criticism began to flow. And it was, you should have made us do better academically. You should have forced us to play golf. We tried to. They said, we'll never do that. You should have made us dress better when we were younger. And then our neat freak daughter-in-law, who we didn't ask by the way, she said, I wish you would have made them do chores and pick up after themselves. But then being charming as she is, she said, but everything else you did better than anyone else. So honestly, today's message should be called, Everything We Did Wrong Raising Our Kids. And I want to just take time to encourage parents, you're not going to get it all right. It doesn't matter how godly you are. You're not going to get everything right. There's going to be things that you regret. There's going to be things that you think that you regret. There's going to be things that you think that you could have done better. But after all the joking and after we wrote a message three days later, how many know three days later there's a resurrection? And our son started sending us some really, really meaningful things that we just changed our whole message to work around them. And honestly, their answers surprised us because it wasn't about money. It wasn't about vacations. It wasn't about great achievements. They talked about the culture of our home. And they talked about what shaped them spiritually. They talked about what shaped their thinking, what made them love God and love the church and gave them confidence and made them fall in love with Jesus for themselves. And as we read the responses, we realized that this is really the goal of parenting. Paul the apostle says it like this in the book of Galatians. He goes, my children. So, you know, he's speaking as a parent, a spiritual parent. And this goes for all parents and parents to be. You look at your child and then he goes, with whom I am again in labor until Christ is formed in you. That should be the goal of parenting

is that Christ is formed in their hearts, that the reality of Jesus, the reality of Christ, the reality of his kingdom, the reality that this world is not their home and your home and our home, but that there is a world that God redeemed us from. He saved us from and notice what he says. And I have to do it over and over and over again. He goes, I have to. you over and over. I have to tell you over and over and over again. John and Charles Wesley, you know the famous brothers who were revivalists and transformed the world. Their father asked the mother, why did you tell Charles 19 times? Why did you 19, 20 times for him to get anything? Because she said, it's gonna take that forever for our sons to learn anything. You just got to keep repeating it. You just got to keep saying it. And Paul the Apostle says, I'm gonna labor. And how many know parenting is laboring? I'm going to labor. I'm gonna lay down my life until Christ becomes real to you. And of course, we can't force that. We can't make that happen. But there's a labor of birth and then there's the labor of parenting. Even after they're adults, you never stop praying. You never stop believing. You never stop loving and laboring with your children. And yeah, you can pop out children. You can birth children, but you can't necessarily just pop out and birth productive children. And that's our goal. When he says, I want to see Christ in you, it's, I want to see a fruitful life that displays the glory of God. And of course, children, we all are born with sin nature and convictions have to be developed. And I just want to talk about this because if you don't have this in your culture and culture and every leadership guru in the world will tell you culture every time will determine if that vision of that family will come to pass. Culture eats vision for lunch. And there is ultimately a culture that you and I have to have in our home. It's what you got to have in your company or you're in your church. And so today we want to share with you what our children helped us shape in our lives as well. And that is that culture formed our family. That's really what we want to show you today. And number one, of course, it has to do with unity. Unity. And they said, we always knew what mattered in our home. Some of the things that they said were, you two had a united front spiritually, relationally,

and in discipline. Standards were stable, not emotional. We always knew what mattered in our home. And their summary statement was this, unity created clarity. You know, that works in business and that works in life and that works in family. People thrive in environments that are stable, not perfect, not rigid, but consistent. And one of the greatest gifts that parents can give is clarity. And that means when standards constantly...you don't want to have a house that standards are constantly shifting, that discipline depends on the mood of the day, that mom and dad undermine each other, or the kids pit the parents against each other because all that teaches is chaos, confusion, and manipulation. But when leadership is united, children feel safe. They know what matters. They know what's expected. They know what kind of family they belong to and what values guide the home. And we started, like many of you probably in this room, we started having children in the 1990s. The 1990s, y'all, a whole century ago. And it was a very child-centered era. The teachings of the day were very, very child-centered. And by the way, we are still in a very child-centered era. And society tells you, build your whole life around your child. Your whole world revolves around the child. Today, when a couple wants to have a child, they may say this phrase, we want to start our family. And that's a really sweet way to put it, but let me just challenge that. Your family started the day you two said, I do. You started to build a culture around what your family is going to look like, and your children are added into that as a gift. And the problem with children thinking that they're the center of the world is they're not going to be the center of the world at school. They're not going to be the center of the world at their jobs. You know, it can't be me first or else, when they look at the Bible, they're going to go, what parts of this do I like about this? What parts of this serve me? And really most importantly is when children think that they're on the throne, it's hard to put Jesus on the throne. You know, children are meant to join our family. If you were a farmer in the room, your kids would learn how to ride a tractor. They would learn the seed time

and the harvest time. They would know all that. If you're children, if you're a UT fan, you're going to teach that child at a very young age how to hook them horns, right? And as Christ followers... Or not hook them. I mean, there's... Yeah, that too. Oklahoma... They get in trouble right there. I didn't do it. There. But your children need to instantly know what's important to you. What does this family stand for? And they assimilate into those things. And they know by what are your non-negotiables? In our family, obviously, we love Jesus. We go to church every time the doors are open, not because we're pastors, but because we would do that if we weren't pastors. In fact, our kids have never had to ask on a Sunday morning, what are we doing today? No, they know they're going to church. They know that integrity matters. They know that respect for people, humility, integrity, those things matter. They know that God's word is our standard of living. I like to think about with this unity idea. This is what Nehemiah had to do to just bring back to Israel that unity by the wall, the boundaries. And he began to reset the boundaries.

What is of God? What is not of God? What is right? What is not right? What looks like the Lord? What doesn't look like the Lord? Because that wall had been destroyed for 123 years. And then in those 52 days of just intentionality, it's amazing how it says, then they began to return back to God. They returned back to one another. They began to treat one another properly. So the second, if you will, cultural characteristic that we have, and that is conviction. And we, and you, I have a responsibility to teach our sons and daughters, and this is what they said. We saw conviction, not performance. We were living out a conviction. In other words, what is in the heart? Hide thy word. The word says in Psalms, hide his word in your heart that you would not sin against him. Store up the word. In other words, you're storing up convictions. You're putting the right and the wrongs. You're having already this foundation inside of you, and you're not living out of religiousness.

You're not living out of just some kind of just mindset that is plastic. It's not plastic. It's not performance. It's right. We do what is right because it's right. It's called righteousness. And our son said, you pursued God wholeheartedly whether you or we were watching or not. Because the goal of parenting is not just that you get proper behavior. In fact, if that's your goal, it's not gonna go very well. The goal is that the word of God is manifested inside their spirit, in their heart, not in their head, so that when they are old, or when they're not around you, you and I don't have to wonder what will they be doing when I'm not watching. And I think all of us know sometimes, and that's just the way it is, when we don't think anyone's watching, we have a tendency to go wild. And that's where that conviction, that truth of just putting that word in their heart, but it's also something that they see demonstrated. The loudest sermon in your home is not the one you preach.

It's the life that you live. One of our sons said, you modeled prayer and Bible reading every day. And our kids have to just see this. I think one of the powerful points is, you don't do devotions. Just live a devoted life. Now, I'm not saying don't do devotions. But most of the time, when we said today we're gonna do a devotion, that meant today we're about to fight. Today, sit down, sit down, we're gonna do devotions. It's Devotion Monday. No, it was Emotion Monday. And all of a sudden, all of this starts coming out, trying to get them to sit down and do devotions. And I'm not saying we don't have those moments in those times, but how many know the greatest fights in your family is when you're on vacation, trying to get everybody to just to take a picture by the beach? Right. And a lot of families, I think just go in all sorts of different directions, trying to do devotions rather than, let's just live a devoted life. Yeah. And yes, there needs to be those times of self-control, but it is showing them and displaying to them

just in the rhythm of life. Kids need to see that our relationship to God is not just something we turn on for church services. And that we are just doing what we're doing because we've got something to say to people in a couple hours or in a couple of days. We've been asked what it's like to live in a glass house. And of course, that idea of people knowing that you're in ministry or that they are PKs. And they said, we don't feel like we ever lived any differently than the end of the Christ followers should. We don't live to the eyes of people, but to the eyes of God. And that's all we said was that we are living to the eyes of God. not living to the eyes of this community in which we lead, and this is our job, and you are the young PKs, and we never put that on them. We never said, you have to live like this because you're a PK, or you have to do this because you're a PK. And I think that when it comes to that, we were just trying to live to the eyes of our children, knowing that ultimately, how do they see us treat people? How do they see us live privately with each other? Like, are we slamming doors? Are we yelling at each other? Are we responding emotionally? Whether church matters are going on or not going on,

if things were easy or hard, what we did not do is we didn't bring the church to the house. We didn't make the church this bad thing, or we didn't make Christians these bad people. I was raised with a father that was in the National Football League as an NFL football coach. I never hated the NFL. I never hated what that team did not do or how it did not perform, and therefore, we had to get fired. I didn't say, I hate football. No, my dad was a terrible coach. That just meant that he needed to get better. But then I see a lot of PKs. I see a lot of Christians who were raised in church coming out of, of course, high school or college, going, I hate church. Well, it's amazing. You don't deconstruct from a lot of things, but why did you deconstruct from church? And I think ultimately, of course, there is a spiritual battle behind it. Yeah, and I think what we all need to remember is parents, the kids are not looking for perfect parents, but they desperately need authentic ones. And what Joe and I always talk about is in his family, they were unchurched, but they were great moral people. In my family, we have six generations of ministry.

Neither one of us saw hypocrisy. We did not see duplicity. We didn't have to fight through the thoughts of, man, they sure are different at church than they are to us. And one of the great dangers today is sacrificing your convictions to the idol of your children. And I know that's strong, but a lot of people really do idolize their children and they throw their convictions out the window if their kids throw the convictions out the window. We've seen this as pastors. We've watched parents that started out right and they put the scripture and they put the word of God in their kids. And then their kids grow up and maybe they get a hold of some other cultures that aren't the culture that you're trying to build. And all of a sudden, the parents are just chasing after them like, I'll give up my convictions too. I just wanna show you how much I love you. We've seen Christian parents just all of a sudden just kind of lose their minds like, okay, I'm gonna let my daughter or my son take their boyfriend or their girlfriend and they're gonna have a sleepover on vacation or at our house because we just, the world tells you that unconditional love is affirmation of everything. What the kids need is for you to stand strong in your convictions.

We have this example in the prodigal father. You know, his son went wild. He went crazy. He went into sin. And the father didn't chase him and say, it's fine. All that you're doing is fine. No, the father waited for him and he stood on the word of God and he prayed for him. And he was waiting at the end of the road for that son to come to his senses and repent. And that's what love is. That's what love is, is saying, our arms are wide open for you to repent and to come home and we are ready to forgive you and restore relationship better than ever. And I just wanna tell you and just firm you up that stand strong in your convictions. It really matters, especially if you have a wayward child, they need to see a family that loves them but is standing strong on the word of God. Number three, discipleship. And what you and I have to see is that discipleship is just shaping. It's, of course, coming under. Discipling means coming under, being taught, given instruction with words and with modeling and with examples. And they said, our boys, formation happened in ordinary moments. You were always teaching us along the way,

which is Deuteronomy chapter six, six and seven. Teach them diligently when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up. It wasn't a lecture. Again, it wasn't a devotion per se. It was just constant but ongoing relationship and communication. So if we were watching a television show and commercial comes on, boom. We'd just stop and go, let's give some commentary to that. Or driving down the interstate, you see a billboard or something pops up, boom, let's give some commentary to that, or we'd go into a grocery store or however it would manifest, but it was just constant, but not in an irritable way. It wasn't something that was grinding on them, but we just were aware of the moments. Jesus took his disciples and he made them follow him and they learned by following him, they learned by watching him, and then he'd give release and then he would give them an opportunity to participate, but discipling was never him sitting them in a classroom and telling them to sit down and listen to what he's about to say and he starts communicating to them the lessons or the teachings of the day. It was never like that. Yes, he would sit, but most of the time that was along the way, and so parenting is just constant. It's in the car, it's watching the shows,

it's just at the dinner table talking about the day and asking questions, diving deep. Jesus said, who do they say that I am? And then he would go a little bit further. Who do you say that I am? And this is where parents, we've got to dive, we gotta go deeper, we gotta make sure that we're pulling out of them communication. I think what my mom and dad did well is that, and of course it was the generation in which you might have had one TV set. We didn't have two TV sets, and if we could have, my dad would have not allowed it because he says, we're gonna do life together. I watched my dad say no to certain jobs and certain NFL teams because he knew that they were going to want more from him than what he could give to his family. And he said, losing my family, but winning a Super Bowl is not worth it. If I win the Super Bowls, but I lose my sons, I am not doing it. And I think that's where we also have to come back because parenting is just not controlling the behavior, it's shaping the hearts, it's not just giving rules, it's teaching wisdom, and that takes time, and that takes proximity, and it just takes real life. Yeah, one of our sons said, you always affirm the leadership calling on our lives every morning. And I think that what they're talking about here

is a lot of times when we would drop them off in the morning and also when they were going to bed at bedtime, we would pray over them, we would declare this, you are the head, not the tail, you are above and not beneath. You will love God and hate sin all the days of your life, and you are gonna be a follower of Jesus, not a follower of the world. You're gonna be a leader and not a follower. And it was a funny story the other day, Mason called me and he said, I was putting Mayclair to bed, and he said, I always pray that thing that you prayed over me. And he said, but she was tired, she was whining, it was late, I was just gonna do a really quick prayer. I was like, God bless Mayclair in Jesus' name, amen. And she just goes, Daddy, pray the leader part. Pray the leader part. She's just yelling that, pray the leader part, because they need that affirmation of who you say they are. That's gonna be their inner voice, the prayers that we pray, the things that we say to them, the calling them up. Children will carry that into adulthood. And part of discipleship is also understanding that there are ages and stages for everything. I have a quick visual here that we used when we were growing up, you might be familiar with this, and it's the funnel principle.

And from zero to five years old, that's the low part, that's the tight is right part. Zero to five, you are not their buddy, you are their parent. They need to understand you as the authority in their life. This is the because I said so. We're not having a conversation about this. And you're establishing this, because if you don't establish yourself as parents, as the authority, they're gonna have an authority challenge with their teachers, their coaches, their bosses, and ultimately with God. And so in this stage, it's quick, it's quick action. Whenever they do something wrong, you are quickly, because they don't have an attention span to say, okay, we're gonna talk about that later. No, it is quick, it's intense, it's game on, it's all in on this stage. But the good news is, if you get this done right, by the time they're six years old, 90% of their brain development happens between zero and six. And that's most of your discipline. And it's hard from zero to six, I am not gonna lie. But you. are making sure that those kids are getting the proper foundation. The next part of the funnel, obviously, is that the funnel gets wider. That's ages 6 to 12. And ages 6 to 12, you're moving from rules to convictions.

You're telling them, this is why we do this. You're moving from because I said so to here's why this matters. Because what are you doing? You're trying to get them in the position so that when they're not with you, they can still make the right decisions. Rules are made to be broken, some would say. But convictions, they get in you. And they last through your adulthood. You're not teaching, tell the truth because I said so. You're teaching, tell the truth because Jesus is truth. Jesus lives in you. And it honors him to have truth and to have integrity and to act with integrity. That's how we honor God. And then ages 13 to 16, that's the widest part. If you look at a baseball field or the baseball life of a child, you know at the beginning it might just be the tee ball or the coach's pitch. And now we're moving into where the pitchers, the players themselves are doing the pitching and the coach is off the field. And now there's a release. And now you're letting go. This is where you're preparing them to be launched. And you are now their mentor, their coach. And you're helping them to navigate. And you're beginning to give them an opportunity to fail.

You're giving them the opportunity to try. And of course, we all so believe this, that you have to and you will have failure. But failure without effort is not acceptable. Failure with effort is acceptable. And they're learning how to drive and they're learning how to get jobs and you're giving them coaching. But at the same time, they're learning how to walk through this process of life. And this is where I think it's a major part, parents, of letting your child become what they have been called to become and trust God. Trust the plan. You gotta ultimately trust that what you have been putting into them and do these years now begins to take root. Studies show that the trajectory of a person's life can be determined by the friendships and the type of people they hang out with. And this is the big part where you are now releasing them to their friends. But you also are keeping an eye, also keeping a monitoring position because we do know that that's gonna determine everything. Yeah, so I wanna sidebar on this and let's talk about dating a little bit. People ask us this question all the time, especially when they get to the teen years. And there's a lot of people

that really wanna push their kids into dating. And we did not push our kids into dating. We did not encourage dating. Yes, they had maybe a little crush here and there and that kind of thing, but we believe that sometimes you're setting your heart up for things that it's not ready for. Song of Solomon said, "'Do not stir up nor awaken love until it pleases.'" Historically and biblically, dating is for the purpose of marriage. If they're 15 years old, they are way beyond, they are way before marriage and they don't need to start stirring up love. And you know what I mean by that. They don't need to start stirring up love before and the temptation gets so strong. And by the time they go through college, man, they've had several boyfriends or girlfriends. And so when they did date, when our kids did date, there was a big approval process. Only date someone who is marriage material. They're not marriage material at 15, by the way. Totally sold out to God. They have to have the same level of involvement in church. We don't believe in missionary dating. The same values. You date in Christian friend groups and you set strong boundaries, strong physical boundaries. No being at home together alone,

no being in closed door rooms, no sharing a blanket while watching TV. You know, you know the pitfalls. You were there at one point. How many of you were there? But you want to set your kids up for a win in life. They are not meant to have broken hearts and soul ties and fractured identity. And so many kids are over-sexualized, sexualized at an early age. We're seeing it more and more. And so just put those guardrails in your kids' lives with who they're friends with, who they're dating or not dating, and social media and all of those things. We have to protect our kids, even at that 13 to 18-year-old time period. Here, number four, confidence. Jesus began his public ministry hearing these words from the Father. You are my beloved Son in whom I'm, what, well-pleased. That was before he worked. work. That's before he worked a miracle. That's before he took one step into that public domain for those three and a half years. So the fourth cultural characteristic was confidence. And that's challenge, that's belief, that's expectation to build strong identity. And all of them had something to say about this one. You pushed us towards growth. Standards were high, but they produced confidence instead of insecurity. You always talked about expanding capacity instead of feeling sorry for ourselves. And I will say that this is often counterculture because in our society today everything is just let them be

happy and let them be comfortable and don't have any challenges. Today love means removing the challenges and and removing expectations. And we were very obviously realistic about their particular call, their particular makeup, and how they were being shaped and what they were being shaped into. We didn't go with the idea that you hear in today's world that our sons are going to be major professional football players or golfers or athletes and all that to say that we were very real. And ultimately what it comes down to it is are they being shaped to be confident in Christ? Because if that is healthy, if they knew who they were in Christ, I'm going to just tell you they're not going to be insecure in a world that wants to make you feel insecure. When it comes down to it, Connor's first day when he was at Mississippi State when he went to state and then was a part of the football program there, the coaching staff, some 20 in a room, Connor by himself, 18 years old. They said, we hear that you're one of those Christians. What kind of Christian are you, Connor? First day at Mississippi State, the night after he graduated from Georgetown High School. What kind of Christian are you? Connor knew that staff had coached Tim Tebow. He goes, well, I'm not Tim Tebow. He's a 10, if you will. And he goes, and of course I'm not Jesus. He's the standard. And he goes, but not a devil and I'm not a heathen like some of y'all in this room. He says, I guess I'm about a 7. And from that day on they knew Connor to be a real Christian because he wasn't ashamed, he was confident, didn't rock him. And guess what? They called him Woody from Toy Story from that day on with his little cowboy boots and his blue jeans. But it didn't shake him. When it comes to where your kids are going, they're going to be shaken, they're going to be challenged. Are we preparing them to be confident? Challenge without love creates insecurity. And love without challenge creates weakness. So we need the balance of both of those. And number five, we cultivated environment. Environment formed our identity is what they said. They said, we cared more about what our family thought of us than what our friends thought of us. You see, peer pressure is only as strong as the family unit is weak. And if we are passive as parents, the culture will disciple your

kids, the school will disciple your kids, your friends, your social media, and they become the loudest voice in their lives. But we believe that as parents we should be the loudest voice in their lives. In our son's words, you guarded influences carefully, you exposed us to strong leaders, you created environments that reinforce purpose. And we carefully created and curated environments not because we wanted isolated children, but because environments do shape identity. We made sure, and parents make sure, that your house is the hangout house. It doesn't have to be fancy. Feed them and they will come. I used to love to wake up on Saturday mornings and I'd go straight to the front door and count all the trucks in the front yard. Like, oh, we had six kids spend the night with us last night. I love that. And most of their school friends were either church friends or they became church friends because of the light that we provided as a family. One of our sons said, you made following God look meaningful and full of joy. And as believers, you have to know that the joy of the Lord is our strength. That's our superpower. Then lastly, and then we'll close, dependence. And we did say hard work matters. You got to work hard. You work as though it's all up to you, but then you also got to pray as though it's all up to God. And we know that God has to be the one ultimately that causes, no matter how hard we work, He's the builder of your life. He's the builder of your home. He's the builder of your future. And this is what, as we close with Joshua, Joshua chapter 24, Joshua ultimately said in his last part, he goes, as for me and my house, we're going to serve the Lord. In other words, as for me and my house, and if you look at the context of chapter 24, Joshua was warning them, don't go back. to idolatry in fact he says I think most of you are gonna go back to idolatry most of you are gonna go back in your spirit to Egypt you're gonna go back to the old way of life you're not gonna be faithful you're not gonna trust God I mean he's pretty he's pretty sober when it comes to how he's addressing those that he had been leading but he goes but as for me I'm just gonna tell you right now we're not going back and I want to pray this over all of our homes today

that asked for me and my house asked for you in your house Lord will you do a work in our lives will you do a new work in our hearts one of my favorite lines in the New Testament is in the book of Hebrews chapter 11 and it says women received back their dead from the grave women in other words the mothers believed that their sons their daughters their home could come back from the grave and I do believe that there are fathers here today that can believe that mode no matter what might be in the grave today or who might be in the grave God is the God of resurrection our prayer for you is that your home reflects the glory of God will we fail will there be failure will there be false will there be issues that's absolutely true we can't raise perfect children we're not going to be the perfect parents but we do know we have a God who's committed to us as we commit ourselves to him my prayers that every one of your sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters become what Christ ultimately wants them to become father today I just thank you that you're the God of covenant Lord I thank you that God you're the day God who has said you will never leave us nor forsake us and today father I'm just asking on this Mother's Day that there would come upon our homes a blessing an anointing a grace a power a favor that we can't explain we can't make up we can't create it's you who creates it but Lord I do believe it's created by prayer it's created by us saying God would you make our home a place a home an environment where God there's life here thank you that Lord you are committed to our families and our children as we put you first today I'm gonna ask for our campus pastors to come and close in prayer we just thank God for each and every one of you celebration Church would you just say goodbye to all of those that are watching all of our campuses this morning God bless you guys and in this room before we go I want to ask how many of you would say I today want from my heart as for me in my house that heart your house your heart I want to be about God in fact I got to start with me I got to start with my own life my own decisions Jesus will you do a new work in me how many would say do a new work in me yeah we want to work in our children and our wives our husbands but

we want to work in us Lord I thank you that you're the God who will work in us as we humble ourselves call upon your name Jesus I thank you that you came to give us brand new life Lord I thank you that this life is in your and in that powerful name that was raised from the dead would you have your way in all of us Lord we call out to you can we just say this out loud Lord Jesus I receive you as my Savior my King my Lord my God lead me today from this day forward it's about you do a work in my life thank you for forgiving me and receiving me I am yours and all the God's people said amen can we just thank God for his mercy in this you