Faith for the Generations
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Faith for the Generations, part 1
April 25, 2010
by Rev. William “Buck” Day
For our scripture today we turn to the Old Testament. We haven’t spent a lot of time in the Old Testament lately so I thought what the heck, let’s go for it. So we are going to read some fairly famous verses out of Deuteronomy, the 6th Chapter. So I invite you along as we read God’s word today. (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)
Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
God’s word for us this day. Let’s pray one more time:
Lord we ask that you would, by the power of your Holy Spirit that is fully present here right now, we ask that you quicken our hearts and that you would speak to us what you have for each of us this day. Lord that is what we ask because of Jesus. Amen.
Well, Dr. Ed Young was a senior pastor at Second Baptist Church in Houston, Texas. He was a long time friend of Cliff Barrows. If you are familiar with that name, Cliff Barrows was a longtime member of the Billy Graham crusade team. His first wife past away and Dr. Young was performing the funeral along with Billy Graham. In the midst of his remarks, Billy Graham made this kind of parenthetical apology to all the team members that were there as a part of that. This is what he said, as he looked out on the families and the generations that were representative, he began to cry, and he said, “I want to take a moment to apologize to the families of all the members of this team and even my own children, for we stayed away from home too long. There were months that we were on the road for crusades and trips around the world and it was too much. I made a critical mistake as a father and as an evangelist.” And he asked his family to forgive him and the family members of the team members that traveled with him. He said, “Family is irreplaceable. They are more fragile than we would like to admit. We need to protect this sacred institution against anything that would undermine it.”
Pretty sobering words, aren’t they, for anyone who has worked long hours and we maybe have not verbalized those words but we have at least thought those. So these are sobering words because family is part of God’s design. That is how God has wired us up. God is a relational God. God has designed us and himself for relationships. I think that is part of what being made in God’s image is all about, the ability to have relationships, obviously first and foremost with God, but also with the people around us. Those primary relationships with the people around us are our families, for better, or for worse in some cases. But that is part of how God has designed us in his creation, to be in that kind of relationship. So if God sees families as vital to our lives, is it any wonder why God is using Moses in these scriptures to help the people of Israel and now us two thousand plus years later to lay this ground work for how do we pass our faith on to the next generation.
Well in the next couple of weeks what I want to do is I want to look at this passage and we are going to look at the first half this week and then the second half next week. We are going look at this passage that is called the Shema. It teaches us about God and his desires for us. Much of what I am going to talk about today is contained in a book called Think Orange by Reggie Joiner, if you have not heard about it, that’s O.K. But, I want you to know that that is part of where we are in the life of Faith going forward, not only just in Family Ministries but for us as a whole church; for in it I think it helps us understand how the church and families can join together to grow closer to God and to each other.
Let me also note, obviously there are some of you who do not have children under your roof anymore. But you know what? You are still part of this family called Faith. We are still called to be a part of raising up and supporting and encouraging and building up the families that do have children under the roof. That is what Joanna was talking about in terms of helping out with VBS; that is just one very practical easy way to do that. So in other words all of us have a role in growing families, parents first and foremost, but everyone else here in the church, as well, because we are family, we’re family.
So with that, let’s take a look at the context of this statement that Moses makes to help us understand how it speaks to us as a church and to families, in particular. Moses has just spent forty years leading the people of Israel through the wilderness. They have now come to the point where they are ready to cross over into the Promised Land, the land that God would provide for them, the land that was to be “flowing with milk and honey” is the phrase that is used. God would take them there and this would be the place where God would provide everything that they would need in this new land for a good life. But Moses also knows he is not going with them. He is not going with them and he knows the temptations that are going to come upon them as they cross over into this new land. There are things in that land that are going to seek to draw their attention away from God, the God that has been with them over the past forty years. He knows the nation of Israel is going to be tempted to forget about the God of Israel and follow other gods, forget about how faithful God has been over those past forty years since they left Egypt. So Moses wants to guard this heritage and he calls the whole nation, not just parents, but the whole nation to be responsible for the next generation, to pass down the faith. It is out of that background that Moses calls on the whole nation, including families, to build up that next generation. So he begins this thing called the Shema. The Shema, sometimes referred to as the great commandment, is something that was to be recited every morning and every night by everyone. It was part of their duty but it was also a proclamation of their faith, as well. And over time the reciting of the Shema was the way that the Jews bear witness to their faith. Young boys as soon as they could speak were taught to memorize the Shema. Later on it said that martyrs were reciting the Shema as they were being executed by the Romans.
So the Shema stands as the central theological strand that moves people from birth all the way through death. It acknowledges that God is the one God, the Supreme ruler over all, the one who will find his climax in the Messianic Age that is to come. We know in the New Testament Jesus affirms the Shema because he is asked about it and he not only adds another commandment but he also says “all the laws and the prophets hang from this declaration,” the Shema. So you think about it, think about where the Shema is in relationship to the rest of the statements that Moses is making, he makes the Shema right after he has given them the Ten Commandments. Hmmmm. So Moses starts this, he starts the Shema and he says “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” This is the most central truth for them and for us, folks. It is to shape their identity. It is how they are to set their lives, this beginning portion of the Shema, if you notice, it is not a demand, it is a claim. It is a claim, it is to set the foundation and be that center of who they are in God. The truth is that the Lord is alone, or as some translations say, one, and the fact that the Lord is God alone speaks to the very nature of that relationship between God and his people. Our God, Yahweh, that’s the term that is used, Lord, his personal name is God alone, there is no other. It is a confession that they are to making here that is to guide all that they do, that the God we can know personally, relationally, is one. There is no other. That is what he is saying here. It all begins and it all ends with Yahweh.
So as they move into this new land Moses is saying, “You are going to be tempted to lose focus, to shift your priorities. Don’t let your loyalties get divided,” he is saying. “Keep the Lord as the Lord alone. The Lord is the one who creates your identity, no one else.” In other words, keep God at the center of your life. Keep the most important thing the most important thing. O.K.? So that when all is said and done as you settle into this new land, I will be there with you. I will still be your God. I will still be fully present. I will continue to be faithful in the midst of that. What Moses is saying here is that God needs to be first and only.
So when we think about that for families, for the families of the Israelites and more importantly probably for us, the families for us, what does that say? What is that telling us? Well, as I think of that, there is a question that comes right to my mind. Who do we want our children to become? Who do we want our children to become? Understand that that is not a vocational question; that is a spiritual question. It is not about what do you want your child to do, it is about who do you want your child to become. If you think about our world today and our culture and how technology just continues to exert its influence over our children, I mean, think about how much technology has come into play just in the last thirty years. It is incredible, isn’t it? This technology seeks to draw our children and us into virtual social networks and communities, think about online gaming, fantasy sports, all of these things that have just exploded around our children. Here we want to say that they are not a bad influence in and of themselves, but what I am saying, is asking the question, how do they influence our children toward God? And I raise the question of saying are these things, do they have the potential to be the false gods of our world just as the Israelites had false gods in the Promised Land?
For when all is said and done I don’t think any of us would disagree that a child’s relationship with God is the most critical thing they can have in this world. I think the goal of every parent, of every church that is worth its salt, is to grow them up in the faith. So what we are saying is that God needs to be up on the top of the heap of all the priorities for your children’s loyalties. Our job as parents and church is to ensure that happens. We have our work cut out for us, don’t we? So what Moses, I think, is saying to parents here is as you grow your children, as you pass on this faith, keep in mind the end goal of what you are trying to accomplish with your children. The end goal being that the Lord is God alone.
And Moses continues with the Shema, with these famous words that Joanna talked about with the children. “Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, all of your soul and all of your strength.” This is the first place in Scripture where we are called to love God. In fact, we are not just called to love God but we are commanded. This is a command: We are to love God. This love is be understood as a total commitment, not holding everything back, using all that we are, our heart, our soul and our strength. This love that we are to give back to God is not just to be lip service but it is to be with loyalty and service. Now what Moses is talking about in terms of loyalty is how do we show our loyalty, our love, back to God? Well it’s through loyalty. What does that look like? And it is what one of our children said (right out of the mouth of babes), “obedience to God.” It is obedience to keep the law, to keep the commandments that Moses had just handed down to them. That is how we demonstrate our love to God with that kind of loyalty by being obedient . But we also demonstrate our love through service, and he is not talking about how we serve each other. What he is talking about is how do we give our service back to God. How do we do that? It is what we are doing right here, it is worship. Worship is how we demonstrate our love back to God. Moses is telling the Israelites this because he doesn’t want to leave any ambiguity for them to show, to understand how this love is to be shown, how they are to keep this commandment to love the Lord God. He didn’t want to give them any options. He didn’t want to leave the Israelites on their own to come up with their own understanding of how they might love God and define it how they wanted to.
So for us as families, first and foremost, adults, our hearts and then our children’s hearts are the most important thing to God. Everything that is said and done, that is what matters most to God. It is that relational connection that is what is most important. And what he is saying is if you want to pass your faith onto the next generation it has to be done relationally in the context of love, in particular, how we demonstrate our love back to God. For God is the one who can be loved, not just feared; not just the one who lead us as a Pillar of Fire, who zapped us down when we cried out for meat. But he can be trusted; he can be trusted with all that you are, every part of your being. For God is the One who has been with us not only through forty years of traveling the wilderness but through every day of our lives, as well. He is the One who keeps our lives from being pushed beyond our limits and we think “well, wait a sec…” but he has. He has been the One even as we have been pushed and pulled through our lives. God has been the one, the one who has been the object of our loyalty and our allegiance, the one who has stood by us and called us out to be obedient and to give worship back to him.
So for families, what Moses is saying is fight for your children’s hearts, fight for their hearts because that is what matters. Fight for it in the context of this relational love, how you demonstrate your love to God first and foremost but also to others as well. For, if we seek to pass on our practices of faith without that kind of love context it isn’t going to happen, folks. It isn’t going to happen and it may even, in fact, have the potential to lead to abuse and to rebellion even in the name of Christ, and can’t we see how that has happened in places in our world.
Our God can be trusted ultimately with your love and out of that comes trust and when there is trust, there is natural obedience because you trust that God has your best interest at heart and so you are willing to walk in his way. And so parents, and adults as well, understand that your children are watching us, they are watching how we live in relationship to God and they are learning from that. So the question is how are you loving God? That is the question for us today.
Well, in 2008 Jim Nance, the CBS sportscaster, wrote a book and its title was “Always By My Side: A Father’s Grace and a Sports Journey Unlike Any Other.” In it he chronicles a sixty-three day period in 2007 where he was the lead announcer, first at the Super Bowl, then at the Final Four basketball tournament and finally at the Masters golf tournament. He used that as a backdrop to share his experiences that he learned from his father. You see, his father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1995 and their plan all along was as soon as the father retired they would travel together to Jim’s spots. Well obviously his illness precluded that happening. So Jim said, “We never got that special time. So I wrote this book as a celebration of my father’s life, as a celebration of all the wonderful things we were able to do in this life, the messages that he sent me and how those messages I saw in other people’s lives, as well.” Nance said he considered his father to be the consummate father, never rich, never famous, but a great dad. He provided for his family and tried to make life better for the next generation. He said that was the measure of his success. Well his dad died in June of 2008 but he said that his legacy lingers on in generations to come. I wonder for us, spiritually, how is our legacy lingering for the generations after us? How can we foster that? What kind of messages can we send that will last beyond us?
Next week we will continue to look at the last half of the Shema and continue to look at how we do this thing called life together as the family of God passing on the faith. To that end, let’s pray.
Lord thank you, thank you that you are Lord over all. Lord we do ask that you would, in fact, help us, help us as we move to a new place to be able to pass on our faith. So, Lord that is what we ask this day, in your name. Amen.