The Intentional Home, the Intentional Church, and the Future
Sermon Notes
1. God has a covenant plan to teach His people - don’t get side-tracked from it by the world (1,2).
2. Beware of abandoning God’s Word for your own desires - you will reap what you sow (3).
3. Hold fast to God’s plan - don’t take it casually (4-5).
4. Your reputation in the world will be anchored in your relationship with God and how He has provided for you - it is not in what you yourselves have accomplished (6-8).
5. Guard these truths in your heart, and teach your sons and grandsons - make knowing Him the highest ambition throughout all your years (9 - see also v. 15 and v.23).
6. Don’t ever forget (REMEMBER) specific days of God’s intervening hand on your life (10)!
The Challenge for DBC as a Church
1. Be intentional about holding fast to the Word even though the ideas of marriage and the family in our culture are changing.
2. Let’s be intentional about training today’s parents to hold fast to God’s Word in their living and their parenting.
3. Let’s be intentional about teaching and training their children and grand-children as best we can.
4. Let’s develop an intentional, multi-generational church so that we are all moving towards obedience in the same direction - children, adolescents, college, singles, newly marrieds, younger parents, older parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.
5. Let’s be intentional about inviting the world into our homes so that they can see the value of the God we’ve embraced.
6. Let’s be intentional about inviting the world into our ministries so that they can see that the church is filled with real people who care for real needs in a real world.
Consider the following statement as a summary statement of this series on the “Intentional Home.”
“I have concluded that the accumulation of wealth, even if I could achieve it, is an insufficient reason for living. When I reach the end of my days, a moment or two from now, I must look backward on something more meaningful than the pursuit of houses and land and machines and stocks and bonds. Nor is fame of any lasting benefit. I will consider my earthly existence to have been wasted unless I can recall a loving family, a consistent investment in the lives of people, and an earnest attempt to serve the God who made me. Nothing else makes much sense.”
James. C. Dobson