I’m Building An Ark For My Family

I'm excited. It's back to school bash today. I don't even know what that means. What is a bash?

They did those things in the 50s, right? Is it bash? I feel like I'm not going to talk about it anymore. I got a limited amount of time to deliver the word that God gave me uh to you.

I pray that the deposit would be helpful. We are going to be in Genesis chapter 6 today and we are beginning a new series. If you don't have your Bible, don't stress. It's going to be behind me.

You've also got your phone. Most likely internet's terrible here. may or may not work for you, but if you can get there, we're going to be in the New International Version. If you feel led to buy a Bible after today because you're like, I need the Bible, you should go do that.

Amazon sells plenty of them, but you can also get it for free on your phone. We use the New America or New International Version of the Bible. The new series we're doing is called Passing the Baton. Um, I don't know if you ever ran track.

I ran track for like a minute. I don't mean for a long minute. I mean, for a real short minute, I wasn't very good. I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas.

And let's just suffice it to say, Little Rock Central had way better track stars than me. Um, but I did run a little bit and I didn't run relay races. I ran mid to long distance. But I would have to sit there for the whole meet.

And when I watched these relays, there was something interesting during the relay races is they would always pass this baton. and the way that you pass that baton, like it could it can make or break the race that you're running in. And I think about that in terms of our families and the people we engage with throughout the week. I told the first service, I tell you this, this is ultimately a family series that we're talking about.

What does it look like for you to build a culture within your home? husband, wives, children, I don't care who you are in the home, but what does it look like for you to start creating a culture in your home where God is prioritized and faithfulness is the norm. That's what this series is about. And I believe if you can do that now, it creates a not just a culture uh but really an environment where you get to effectively pass the baton to your kids, to your extended family, to whoever you're leading.

That's the goal of this series is to learn how to pass the baton of faith. Well, and we will be in two general stories over the next four weeks. The first of those uh the first two weeks of the four weeks will be in the story of Noah and the ark and the destruction of the world. Anyone heard of Noah before?

Just just gauging the audience. I met someone last week who had never been to church before. Um so this person specifically probably would have known the story of Noah, but many people don't know. And so we're going to be going through that briefly under the topic of building something uh special and faith oriented for our families.

I I I think we'll talk on relationships in different series. We'll go straight from the Bible in other series. I've done fun faith oriented series. But I I look at the individual nuclear families in our church and I think like what can what can the Bible give each of you that will help you build what God has called you to build?

God's called you to run a race of faith and that's your race. But he has placed people around you and you directly and indirectly have an impact on those people. It is crucial uh that our faith um is constructed in such a way that those around us are positively impacted. That's what this is about.

And some of you, you know the story of Noah so well that you can immediately think of some places I'm going to take it. But my hope would be to be very practical. Now, I want to I want to apologize upfront for something. If if I strike a chord in a way that that triggers you, I'm sorry.

I didn't mean to. I'm telling up front. I told him that up front. I I'm I'm going to share some things from my family situation.

I'm going to share some things that I've experienced as a pastor over the last 15 to 17 years. I'm going to give you what I found in scripture and I'm going to give you what I see in culture. Some of that might strike a chord in a bad way or trigger you. Just know it's not me trying to do it.

I don't like to make people frustrated, but I am trying to deliver some truth to you that might be difficult if your culture has been wrapped around what the culture tells you versus what God has told you. So, it might trigger you, but the hope is that I would be casting a vision or painting a picture of what your family and future in future generations could look like if you start right now putting Jesus first. Y'all with me? Say, "Amen.

" All right, we're going to dive right into the scriptures. Genesis chapter 6, starting in verse 9. This is the account of Noah and his family. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God.

Noah had three sons. How many sons, guys? Three sons. Shim, Ham, and Japth.

I don't know if it's Japheth. Japath. Japth. I don't know how to say it, but that's how I said.

Jaffith. Now, the earth was corrupt in God's sight. It was full of violence. I don't know if you've ever noticed this.

We're like, God just destroyed the world cuz he felt like it. No, it was full of violence. And and we tend to call God violent for the very thing he destroyed the world there for. I think there's something we got to remember about that for anyone in here who maybe you're like, "God's an angry God.

" I don't think he's angry. I think he actually hates the things um like violence and and what sin produces. So anyways, I'll move on from that. Uh God saw verse 12 how corrupt the earth had become for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways.

So God said to Noah, "I'm going to put an end to all people. For the earth is filled with violence because of them. I'm surely going to destroy both them and the earth. So make yourself an ark of cypress wood.

Make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. This is how you were to build it. The ark is to be 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high. Make a roof for it, leaving below the roof an opening one cubit high all around.

Put a door in the side of the ark and make a lower, middle, and upper deck or make not a but lower, middle, upper decks. Verse 17, I'm going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens. every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish.

But I will establish my covenant with you. And you will enter the ark, you and your sons, and your wife and your sons wives with you. You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal, and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive.

You were to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them. Verse 22, Noah did everything just as God commanded him. My sermon title for today, and I'll break it down over the next few points, is I'm building an ark for my family. My goal today is not to tell you about all of the uh theological components attached to Noah and the flood story.

It's not to tell you about the historical comparisons that you can make to Noah and the flood story. I'd love to chat with you about those. If you've talked theology with me, there's nothing more that I love than to geek out about theology. So, shoot me a text, call me up.

They can put my number on the screen if they feel like it later. It's 501-944-9468. I'd love to chat theology with you. But what I want to do today is I want to talk to you specifically not about the flood, not about the people that were destroyed, not about the character of God who would do such a thing.

I want to talk to you about Noah and his family and how God interacted with Noah and his family. And here's my first point that I want to give you. It starts with obedience. It starts with obedience in building an arc for your family.

This is not a physical ark. If you go out there and build a boat, people in Arizona are going to look at you like you're crazy. Very similar to the way they probably looked at Noah because according to the Bible, it had not rained up to that point. So this dude's going to be building a boat with Cypress wood.

I don't know exactly where he was in the grand scheme of things. It was Cypress far, Cypress close, but he's building this boat in the middle of a location where he never built no one had ever built a boat. There had never been rain before. So I I I don't know what they looked at him like.

And if you did the same thing, we'd look at I would look at you like you're weird. But the ark that I want to encourage you to build is the ark of faith within your household. You, not your wife, not your husband. I'd love for them to do it, too.

I'm talking to you, though. Not your kids. You, not your parents, you. I don't want you blaming all the things that happened in the past.

I want you to take responsibility to be obedient where you are. When we look at Noah, we see that he was a man who was obedient to God. and thus considered righteous. Now, there's a lot of theology to break down what obedience and righteousness looks like.

Not the sermon for that today. I'm talking about Noah, his family, and their interaction with God. It says in verse 9, Noah was a what type of man? Is it there?

Verse 9, Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God. Now, I know Noah's not perfect. I want to tell you that. Well, that's Noah.

I don't want to hear that. Mm-m. No, it was not perfect. The scene I'm going to talk to you about next week is when he got naked cuz he was drunk and he cursed one of his grandkids.

Like that that's not perfect. Uh he probably struggled with plenty of things. But when God looked at him, he saw a man of obedience and thus was considered blameless among the people of his time. And he walked faithfully with God.

So much so that he was having a conversation with God. And God told him, he disclosed to him ahead of time what he was going to do to the world because of his disobedience. You can be a person in your family who receives disclosure from God because simply you are continually obedient to God. I've learned that in my obedience, God starts to disclose things for me.

When I open his word, he discloses things for me. When I look at Noah, I see that he was a man who walked faithfully. And I want to tell you, if you can walk faithfully, a follower of God, follower of Jesus, someone who obeys his commands like Noah did, then you will create a foundation for your family that will be a blessing to your family and beyond. What you do right now is creating a foundation for those around you.

And if you have a flaky foundation, one marked by instability and inconsistency, the people around you, they're going to be equally shaky, especially if you're a leader of your household. But if you can create a firm foundation rooted in the gospel, the good news of Jesus, following the commands of God for your life, then it's going to be firm, stable, and not only will the people presently around you be more stable and potentially faithful, then people around you, just like it said with the animals, they're going to flock to the beacon of stability. Now, I'm not telling you that you need to go seek out clout by being faithful so that everyone will come to you about everything. I'm not telling you that.

What I am telling you is your faithfulness is building a foundation. And the type of foundation is marked by the level of your faithfulness and obedience to God. Y'all with me? Say, "Yeah.

" Awesome. It starts with my obedience. And one thing I've I've found and encountered as I've started this church and as we've done ministry for the past I think it's been 17 years, 15 years at this point is I've encountered a lot of different types of people. Uh, it might be a husband who comes into church absent their family.

It might be a wife who comes in absent the husband and the rest of their family. It might be a kid who comes to youth ministry absent their family. In any of those cases, you might be one of those very three people. If you're a husband, a wife, or a kid, this speaks to all of you.

You come in, you encounter God, and uh you you have faith. Now, I don't know how much faith you have. It might just be I showed up one time. It might just be that I grew up in the church and then I left the church and I married someone who didn't grow up in the church and now I'm feeling nostalgia about not going to Easter and Christmas and now I'm going to show up at church but my spouse doesn't want to come with me.

I don't know what level of faith that you are but I've encountered people who they don't start with themselves. They start with everybody around them. And I want you to know if you start with everyone around you will much more slowly if you do get to your destination. But if you can look inward and see where it's time for you to be more obedient, you to look at God's commands, you to create and cast a vision for your household, you to live what you're telling others to live, like you need to look inward to find that becoming obedient.

But there are a lot of people who come in and what they'll say to me, and I'm not mad at you if you tell me this. I like I'm I understand. Again, I don't want it to trigger you, but it might. But if you're the person who's coming to church or if you're talking to somebody else and you have a vision for your household that's not being currently enacted, you might say to somebody, "Man, I can't get my family to come to church.

Man, I can't get my family to wake up in the morning. Man, I can't get my family to sit down and have a Bible reading time. I can't get them to have a dinner together. Man, I can't I'm going to go out of spiritual.

I can't get them to eat their vegetables. I can't get them to do their chores. I can't I can't get my wife to change her personality. I can't get my husband to stop being a lazy uh never mind.

You can't get stop being lazy. You know, it might be something like that. And I encounter that. Guys, I'm a pastor, which means people think I'm a counselor even though I'm not as good of a counselor as my wife.

But they think it cuz I'm a pastor and that's the way I'm supposed to be. I can preach you the Bible and I'll counsel you. I'm a pretty de I'm pretty decent, right? I'm a pretty decent counselor.

But go pay somebody if you want real counseling. All I hear sometimes when people come in and I want to be nice, empathetic, and encouraging, but I default to my my discernment, which says, man, they're blaming everybody else, but they're not taking responsibility for their role in the situation. And if you're the one that says, "I can't get my family to do this. " My first thought isn't, man, their family's terrible.

My first thought is, I wonder what you're doing and what culture you're creating by your own activity because you're telling me you want a family of faith, but the way that you're living is what's going to create it or not. How are you living? How are you living will determine I wrote this down um a couple weeks ago. It might not be in my notes, I don't know, but I wrote it down so I would remember it.

Your intentions don't move in the direction you want. It's your actions and obedience that's going to move your family down the road. Um, uh, one question I I I want you to think through is say you want your kids, a lot of people that come to church kind of later in life, their kids are already 15, 16, 17, and they're trying to get them to come and you're defaulting to what they barely listen to, which is your voice, rather than modeling, which is what they actually follow and listen to. You're like, you need to come to church, rather than you just go to church consistently.

And eventually, they're going to realize that what you're doing actually makes a difference because it changed your peace level. It changed your anxiety level. It changed your niceness level. It changed your empathy level.

It changed everything about you because Jesus does that to us. And when they see your inward to outward transformation, they're going to start following the model that you've been living. But we're just like, "You need to go to church. " And they're looking at us like, "But you don't go to church.

But you don't read your Bible. " I had a person come up to me. They were totally wasted. And they said, "Man, I ain't get my kid into a This is exactly how it went.

Man, I got my kid into a Christian school so they can be raised up on the Lord's commands. And I'm like, Christian school ain't going to help your family. It might help a little bit, but good. Well, look at you.

How you are living impacts it. And I love the story of Noah because I don't know anything about his kids. Definitely don't know anything about his in-law daughter or daughter-in-laws, but I know they went on the ark with him because they were both blessed and impacted by his faithfulness. It's time for us to be obedient to God.

This is how deep it goes. Verse 18 says this, "But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark. You and your sons and your wife and your son and your sons wives with you. " Your faithfulness to God, your obedience to his commands in your life, you being willing to press toward the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus, it's going to build a foundation where your kids and maybe even grandkids can become victorious.

And you you might not be the person where the buck stops. You might be the person that starts the process of faithfulness and eventually someone else picks it up. I'll talk about that in a few moments. But but man, it it's such an impact if you change rather than focus on whether somebody else is changing or not.

Um, that's not supposed to be marriage advice, but it'd be good marriage advice. If every person in this room started taking responsibility for their actions as opposed to spending 90% of the time dwelling and pondering on the other person's failures, y'all probably stay married longer. I mean, we'd fight less, right, Hannah? It's like, you do wrong stuff, I do wrong stuff, and then we talk to each other about the wrong stuff we're doing.

And then we spend half the time defending ourselves by telling them the wrong things that they need to focus on instead of the things that they're telling me about. Right? If we would focus on how God calls us to live, everything in your life would radically improve and over time that culture is going to shift and your kids are going to be reaping the benefits of your present decision for discipline. Anyways, I'll move forward.

A 2014 Bara study found this. Children whose parents actively practice their faith are 400% more likely to retain faith into their adulthood. Kids with emotionally stable parents, this is an interesting one, they earn 20 to 40% more as adults than other types of people. This is a Harvard study.

And I say that not because it's a spiritual thing, but it shows that what you create in the household impacts the way your kids and extended family will think about the way they encounter the world. And so if you're stable because you have created a faithfilled culture in your household, then your kids are going to go out into the world confident. And the more confident they are, the more opportunities they're going to have. Studies literally show that your confidence impacts your ability to get a high-paying job.

Here's another one. Adult children, you got to listen to this one. Adult children of parents with strong marriages are over 60% more likely to have healthy marriages themselves. How are you living?

Because that's what's going to impact mostly your kids, your extended family, and the people around you. I want to say this specifically to dads because this is an interesting finding. Many of you have probably heard it. It's not uncommon, but I want to tell you just in case you haven't heard it.

If a child in the first uh if the child is the first person in the family to believe in Jesus to to start following Jesus, then there's a 3. 5% chance that the rest of the family is going to join them at church or in their faith pursuit. If the mother is the first, then that rises to 17%. 17% likelihood that the family's going to follow the mom if she trusts in Jesus.

Y'all know what's coming, dads. If it's the father first, like Noah with the ark, right? If it's the father first, there's a 93% chance that the rest of the family is going to follow. I will talk to the men real quick.

Take that responsibility seriously, men. Cuz what you do impacts your home more than what your wife does or more than what somebody else outside your home does. Now, I think if you're a spouse, this is not your job to go home after this. Say, "You hear what Pastor Matt said?

It's time for you to step your game up. It's not going to work for you if you do that. No, I'm talking to you separately. If it's 17.

5% likelihood they're going to follow, you better own that 17. 5%. Kids, I know you got a limited responsibility. It's all you can handle at 15 years old, but take it all.

Own it and start living your life in such a way that you're modeling faithfulness. And then when God transforms you, when he performs miracles in your life, when he moves you from point A to point B, people are going to look at how much you've changed and they will not be able to help but see the miraculous work. And then they're going to be like, I don't know, maybe I should go, too. That is that is how we're called to live.

But it starts with you. Point number two, I'm going to break this down in a couple different points. You're called to build what God commands, not what culture demands. I mean, all you people who want your last name to be Jones, I'm telling you, you got to quit that.

I mean, honestly, anyone who's moved beyond that, they see it. It's like, we can tell when you're trying to keep up with what the people down the road are doing. I'm not saying that you shouldn't have a well-kept house. I'm not saying that you shouldn't have nice stuff.

I'm not saying you need to live like you're impoverished. All I'm saying is if your identity is rooted in what you have and what you are acrewing externally so that other people will view you in a certain way, you're going to end every single day more frustrated than you have to. But if you start revolving every aspect of your life around Jesus and start building what he's commanded you to do rather than what culture says, cuz culture doesn't know how to have a good life. Culture doesn't know how to have a good marriage.

Culture doesn't know how to have good kids. I would talk about it, but then half the people would leave the room. how they tell us to parent our kids. Now, don't hear me saying I'm telling you do the opposite of certain things.

I know psychology is helpful, but but God is ultimately he's the giver of life. That's right. He's the one who will supply you the things when you can't handle them. He's the one who's going to get you through the storm.

His instructions will enable you to build a boat that is going to help you not only weather the storm, but get to the final destination effectively and with stability. Follow God's commands. It says this in verse 14. So make yourself an ark of cypress wood.

Other translations would say gopher wood. In fact, that's a Hebrew word. No one knows what the meaning of it is, but a bunch of ship builders when they wrote the Greek Septuagent, they were like, "Hey, it seems like it's probably cypress wood cuz that's the best wood for building boats. " So we translate it cypress wood.

Uh it says, "Build it. Make yourself an ark of cypress wood. Make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. " Now, I'm going to do something that you shouldn't do when you're reading the Bible, but I think it fits uh right now.

When you're reading the Bible, I'm going to tell you, read the scriptures. Don't read into the scriptures something that's not there. And I'm going to tell you right now that there are some things that I think will be helpful, but really I'm using this as a metaphor to help you understand what I'm talking about. Okay?

This is not how you would read this text. But I'm going to talk to you about the elements that went into God's instruction to build the ark. And I'm going to talk about how that actually relates to you and your family. Does that make sense?

Okay. I I probably should have articulated that better. I know how to interpret scripture, but this is a metaphorical take on the items in the boat. I think it'll be helpful for you.

There were three items. Cypress wood, rooms, and he said, "Coat it with pitch. " If you don't know what pitch is, I don't either. Pitch is just like the glue that came from the cypress wood that holds the things together.

That's all I know. You can do research on your own if you feel like it. Remember, I'm not talking theology today. I'm talking about what helps you and your family.

But there are three points and they all come from those three elements that God instructed Noah to put into or into the building of the boat. The first was Cyprus. So my point is build with the right stuff. I had this weird image in my head of Noah trying to build with bamboo or something else.

I don't even know if they got bamboo over where he lived. I don't even know where he really lived. I don't know if it was north, south, east, west, mid midwest. I I don't even know where it was.

Uh, but I know that if he had built with bamboo or something else, I'm just not an architect or a construction worker. I don't know what types of wood are terrible for boats. But picture if he hadn't listened to God's instruction to use Cyprus. I know Cyprus is good for boats because boat builders in the ancient world told us that Cypress was good for boats.

But if Noah was like, "Yo, I'd rather use some different type of wood. " That's us, right? We're like, "Yeah, God says it, but I can I can I can do this. " is he gives us a direct command and we're like, "Yeah, but we can like work around that a little bit because we have desires that don't fit God's character, but we want to do them anyways.

" And it's totally fine because Jesus died on the cross and he saved us from our sins, even the ones that we will commit. So, we're good to do it, right? Once saved, always say that's the mentality that we have. But, but if Noah had built with the wrong thing, would he have gotten through the storm?

No. No. Okay, I'm over overemphasizing this point. But Cyprus, it doesn't rot or decay like other woods would because of the oil within the wood.

Cyprus is this interesting thing that I don't understand, but it's super hard wood, but they call it a hard, soft wood. Make sense of that. It's hard, but it's flexible. It joins together well with other pieces of Cyprus.

It's also a lightweight wood that makes it very buoyant. That's a helpful piece of wood. If Noah had gone the other direction with the wood he would have preferred, I don't know what would have happened. They might have sunk.

It might have gone through. It might have been a weak wood that when all the animals start peeing, as animals do, then it sunk through and then eventually it would rot. They'd have black mold all over the place and then they cough themselves to death. I have no clue what would have happened in the art.

This is what I do when I'm interpreting the Bible, by the way, is I just I just walk through stuff. Um, but he listened to God's command, utilize that cypress wood. But what I want to tell you, um, you got to build with the right stuff. And I could give you so many things to build with.

build with love, build with empathy, build with grace, uh build with, you know, biblical community. But I'm going to give you one thing on which I think is a is a really helpful um just launch point or launch pad for you guys to go into your calling with God. And you got to build on the word of God. You got to build with God's word.

Listen to his commands. You got to build with his word. It doesn't fade. God's word doesn't rot.

It's 2,000 plus years old. We still using that stuff today. It is still valuable and healthy. Hel health helpful.

Healthy. It's healthy and helpful. It fits together well. You look through all the scriptures, they all tie in.

And I know there's a bunch of people out there saying there's contradictions. That's just cuz they don't know the word the way I do. They don't know what the word actually says. They don't know how it fits together properly.

But I can tell you from experience and tons of study that God's word fits together well. All the way from Genesis to Revelation, it's helpful. It makes sense. It holds the truth about grace and the truth about sin.

And when you put those two together, you understand why Jesus had to come and offer us the grace so for the forgiveness of sin. And it's applicable even to today. You've got to stand on God's word. I was so excited cuz someone came up to me before the first service started and they said, um, they said, um, hey, h, how can I how can I start reading the Bible?

I just get so excited. I told them something simple like start with Mark. It's only 16 chapters. It's super cool.

like a narrative study or whatever, but but they're starting to build their life on something that is stable and helpful. Number two, you need a floor plan. What does it say? It says, "Build the ark with rooms.

" And I found that interesting with rooms. I don't know what y'all picture. Maybe y'all gone to Kentucky and seen the the ark. I don't know that they knew exactly what it looked like.

Uh but it was filled with rooms. And you might have pictured it uh with rooms or like some big corral where he'd go through and throw feed to all these animals. I don't know how you pictured it, but it had rooms. And when I I read that as I was prepping to preach, I was like, it had rooms.

It had spaces that were going to be filled with something. So, the rooms that were created had to have intention behind them. But in our lives, so often, we let all of the space in our life just get filled. We're not creating segments, boundaries, or rooms in which we're trying to do something special.

And when you're building an arc of faith for your family, you got to start on the front end and say, "What rooms am I creating? What am I going to create for my family? What am I going to create for my hobbies? What rooms am I going to create?

What size are these rooms going to be? There's some people in this room, you're married and you got two kids, and the room for the kids is 10 times the size as your room for your husband or your wife. Some of you, your room for your job is bigger than your room for your spouse and your kids. Some of you, the room for your golf hobby, I'm stop.

But it takes a long time to do 18 holes. I love golf. It's super fun. If I'm spending every Saturday doing that, working Monday through Friday, then how much time do I have for my family?

That room might be a little large. I'm not saying I love golf. Y'all should come play with me. If you want to play for the pay for the tea time at Verado, I'm down.

Let's go. I'll do it myself. I can do it. I shouldn't have said all of that.

But my point is, you've got to look at the rooms within the ark that you're building. And you got to determine, hey, do I need to not build this room? What space do I need to put here so that I can help my family have faith in Christ Jesus? It's easy for me to have a bigger work room than it is to have a bigger family room as I'm building my ark.

Why? Oh, because it's easy to open up a spreadsheet, open up a Google doc, and just do work. It's hard when my kids get home after school having spent the whole day trying to be good and quiet. Then they hop into the car.

They start yelling at each other. 5 years and 8 years old, and I got to figure out, hey, don't yell at them. Cast vision for them. I got to It's hard, but I got to increase the size of the room there because God's called me to develop a family.

And as much as I love you guys, my work room needs to be smaller than my family room. I'm not talking time or energy. I want to work hard, but my time with my family needs to be solid because 50 years from now, I want my kid to be able to stand on my shoulders, and I want my grandkid to stand on his shoulders so that the family of faith that we've been able to develop over the generations is radically shifted. All because today, I created the right space to create it.

That's that's that's what I feel called to do. You need a floor plan. And the last thing I'll say, they use pitch. Pitch was something you put in between the crevices of the cypress wood so that you could waterproof your situation.

And I thought that was really helpful. The pitch defended against rains and insects. Have you established a way to keep the wrong things out of what you're building? It's not only creating boundaries, but that's saying this is a non-negotiable.

We are not doing this or we are going to do this, which means we have to say no to other things. And I won't spend too much time on it, but I do want to tell you this. The problem with many of us is we've allowed too many of the wrong things into our ark. And you need to really think through what it looks like.

And there's a whole lot into this planning process. It's interesting how long it likely took uh for Noah to build this ark. Midrash tradition tells us it was about 120 years. Many of you memorized it as 120 years, but that's tradition.

It's not what the scriptures say. We don't know how long between when God called him to build the ark and the floods came. We don't know how long it was. We do know this that at 500 years old, Noah had his kids.

And we know that they were grown up and they he had in-laws by that point, daughter-in-laws at that point. And so when they came in, those kids would have been full grown. It could have been 50 to 70 years. could have been all the way up to a hundred years or more.

But what I want to tell you is this and this is my final point that this this arc building thing that you're doing, it's generational. It's generational. And when you start thinking in terms of generations rather than seasons or hours or days, it radically shifts the rooms that you put in. It radically shifts how you build it.

And it radically shifts the energy you put into it because it's generational. It also shifts the amount of fear and pressure that you feel about other things. Knowing that I don't have to be the beall endall of my family spiritual walk. I simply need to do what God's called me to do so that I can create a better environment for my kid to do the same if he chooses to do so.

That's way less pressure filled than I've got three years to be the beall endall for my family. All you're called to do is be obedient to what God calls you to do and then recognize that it's a generational pursuit. It took Noah a long time to build that ark, which I don't know this for sure, but my assumption now tradition tells us that the kids were like normal kids and it took him a little bit to get on board with Noah's ship building hobby and then eventually they got on board as they realized it. And some midrash tradition actually tells us that it wasn't until the flood started to come that they're like, "Okay, can we get on the boat?

" I don't know when the kids got the picture, but it would have been a family pursuit. Noah, his wife, Shim, Ham, Jeff, the the in-laws, uh the grandkids weren't mentioned. I don't know if they had grandkids. They didn't have grandkids at that point.

And so, so what was happening? Noah was in this place where he was leading by example by being faithful to God in a world that was violent and against what God wanted. He was modeling that for his family. But I like to think that it wasn't just modeling that got him onto the boat.

It was also telling. So I want to tell you this. While it's a generational thing, your intentions won't move them. Your consistent obedience along with talking and vision casting will.

I said this show model 80% of what you do or sorry 80% of what they retain is going to be what you do, not what you say. But that 20% is still important. So I always tell our leaders this show and tell. So, when someone's walking around trying to learn something here, this is so so simple.

If if someone needs to know how to put together the drum set, what I say is show and tell. I walk up, I'll start doing it, and as I'm doing it, I'll tell them. My dad used to do this when he was fixing cars, and he want me to learn how to fix cars. Never learned how to fix cars.

But he would say, "Like so, son. " And I'm like, "That's cool. " But he would walk around and model and tell me the vision for what we were trying to build, fix, or do. This is what you're called to do in your family.

You show by living the way God called you and you tell. This is the hard part for many of you. It's casting vision for what you want them to become. I've been opening this conversation with my kids, my wife.

Like, what do we want to be? What do we want to become? I don't care what job you do. You could be a doctor, a lawyer, a a a garbage collector.

You could be a home builder. You could be whatever you want to be. But here's the base level that I want to build for us. And it's a faithfulness foundation.

Show, but then tell. I don't know what Noah told his kids. Um, but at some point, they clearly saw the picture. Um, kids aren't going to learn your values.

Even your spouse won't just learn your values by just watching. You've got to talk to them. That's directly from a book I read called The Intentional Father. It's by John Tyson.

He said, "Kids don't learn values just by watching. They learn when values are named and lived. " You've got to tell your family about the vision God's been giving you. Um, I'm still figuring this stuff out, but what I do know is this, that I'm called to build something within my house, similar to an ark.

It's not built with wood. It's not built with pitch. It's not built um with it's built with rooms, but it's not built with physical rooms. It's built on the basis of faith where God gives me image after image of what faithfulness looks like.

And then as you are faithful, he gives you an image for what those around you can do in their faith. And then you start casting vision for them. And and I I I have had the luxury of seeing this. Uh growing up in the south, it's the Bible belt we call it.

Now, I didn't grow up in a superchristian household. My mom's a believer, my dad's a believer, but that that was a whole process. Um, I didn't grow up in a overly Christian household, but when I started going to church, I would see people who were like a fourth or fifth generation Christian and sometimes I'd look at them and be like, "Yo, you're you're not anything. " But then they would start talking about the faith of their father or mother or their grandparents, their great grandparents.

And there was this one time I interacted with a guy, he was 15 years old. He starts telling me about some statement his great great great grandmother said and that was passed down. It was written down so that they would say it over their household periodically. I don't even remember what the thing they said was.

I know I'll let y'all down there with that. What I do, what I do remember is the feeling I had when I thought, what does it look like to create a culture in your life where you write down, speak, create cultures that are passed down from generation to generation to generation and four or five generations from now, someone standing in your in your lineage really tall. All because you started trusting Jesus today and revolving your life around him. I don't think I'm going to be by the end of my life where I want to be.

Um, but I know my kid can go farther and I know their kids can go even farther. But with an inconsistent walk, with a lack of obedience, the inconsistency just makes it hard to have a stable culture in your home that follows Jesus. So, what does it look like for you right now to start putting Jesus at the center of your household, choosing the way that you're supposed to go and living that out so that eventually, look at your neighbor again and say, "It takes time. Eventually, they're going to follow suit.

" Now, there are two different main groups I'm talking to. There's a group right now. You've trusted in Jesus. Maybe you've been baptized, made your faith public.

You've been coming to church. Uh, but there's a culture in your home that needs to be radically adjusted to put Jesus at the center. I want to encourage you right now. Make one decision today.

That decision, what do I need to change to start living the way God's called me to so that my family would follow? Now, there's another group of people. You don't even have a basis for the faith that we're talking about because you don't have a relationship with Jesus. And if that's you, I want to encourage you to to start that relationship if you're ready for it.

He's been ready for you. So the way we do that here is we invite you to simply confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead and you'll be saved. So if we could bow our heads, close our eyes, I want to give that opportunity to everyone in this room. Repeat after me.

Say, "God, I believe that Jesus is your son. I believe he died on the cross and rose from the grave. I believe I can follow that. I commit to follow that.

Give me the strength to do that. [Music] And God, help my family follow. God, I pray these things in Jesus name. Amen.

Isn't it interesting how similar? Yeah.