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Sunday Sermon
Lake Grove Presbyterian Church - All rights reserved
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Sunday Sermon |
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To download the text and/or audio file for this week's sermon, please go to the "Sermon Archive" page and follow the instructions you'll find there. For a study guide to prepare for next week's sermon, please click HERE FAMILY: RUNNING THE RELAYBuilding Great Relationships, Part 7 Deuteronomy 6:1-9 June 17, 2007 Pastor Bob Sanders Deuteronomy 6:1-9 1Now this is the commandment—the statutes and the ordinances—that the Lord your God charged me to teach you to observe in the land that you are about to cross into and occupy, 2so that you and your children and your children’s children, may fear the Lord your God all the days of your life, and keep all his decrees and his commandments that I am commanding you, so that your days may be long. 3Hear therefore, O Israel, and observe them diligently, so that it may go well with you, and so that you may multiply greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, as the Lord, the God of your ancestors, has promised you. 4Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. 5You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. 6Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. 7Recite 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. 8Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, 9and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Father’s Day Happy Father’s Day to the dads with us this morning. The website of the Hallmark card company reports that Father’s Day is the fourth-largest card-sending occasion with approximately 103 million Father’s Day cards expected to be given this year in the United States. It didn’t say what the top three card-sending occasions were, but I’m guessing Christmas, Valentines Day, and Mother’s Day. It said that Father’s Day is the one day when people feel free to tell dads how much they mean to them. The one day? What’s more, according to Hallmark’s consumer research, young and middle-aged mothers report that (and I quote) “lack of acknowledgement by their husbands at Mother’s Day can affect how they celebrate their husbands on Father’s Day.” We’ll just pause and let that one sink in. Guys, if you’re a little underwhelmed by the Father’s Day festivities at your house, it might have something to do with that vacuum cleaner you gave your wife for Mother’s Day. Just a thought from those friendly folks at Hallmark cards. We have a wide range of experience here when it comes to fathers. Some of you are fathers of toddlers or pre-school children. You understand what comedian Martin Mull meant when he said that having kids is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain. Some of you have teen-aged children, and you’re discovering that adolescence is a time of rapid change. It’s been estimated that when a child is between 12 and 19, a parent ages as much as twenty years. And some of you have grown children with grand-children and even great-grand-children. You’re the ones who should speak on Father’s Day, not me. I agree with Tom Howard, Christian father and teacher and writer, who says,
I think I’ve told you about how years ago, before I had children of my own, I did a fair amount of speaking at retreats and classes on family issues. Back then, my title was something like Ten Top Principles for Perfect Parents. Then I became the father of my own two children, and as my daughters grew older, my talk became Five Hints for Hopeful Parents. When my kids were in high school, I didn’t speak a lot on parenting. The best I could come up with was Two or Three Suggestions for Surviving Parents. The Hand-Off We’re nearing the end of series of messages on Building Great Relationships, and on this Father’s Day I’d like to think with you about family life – specifically, family life as a relay race. Years ago our daughter Kristin was chosen to run on her elementary school’s track team. On the day of the big race she did very well in her individual events, but was disappointed by her team’s performance in the relay race. She and her three teammates were faster than the other team and should have won. But one of the runners dropped the baton in the hand-off. By the time she picked it up, the other team had gained too big a lead. If you’ve ever run on a relay team, you know how important that hand-off is. And how difficult it can be. One runner slaps the baton into the palm of another runner, who grasps it and keeps going for another lap, then hands it off to the next runner. When I ran track in high school I was on the relay team. I remember how every day the coach made us practice that hand-off – how to pass the baton while running at top speed, doing it over and over again until we got it right. The hand-off is the key to the relay race. Our reading from Deuteronomy describes family life as a spiritual relay race in which we have this hand-off of truth from one generation to another. Let’s put it in context. The people of Israel are standing on the edge of the promised land. As a nation they had been at this place before, but they listened to their fears instead of their God, and turned back. The result was a forty-year wilderness experience in which that generation died away. Now a new generation stands ready to cross the Jordan, and Moses their leader delivers a final, farewell message we know as Deuteronomy. He won’t be going with them into the land, but he reminds them of who they are, of what God has done for them, and what God expects them to be. Verses 4 and 5 stand at the very heart of Judeo-Christian faith:
The one true God wants our undivided love and trust. Then notice how the people of God are instructed to pass on the truth of God to the coming generations. Notice the multi-generational emphasis of verse 2, how God’s concern is for “you and your children and your children’s children.” We transmit God’s truth to our children and through them to our grandchildren. It’s a relay. As Christians, we have received truth from previous generations. We are the latest in a long series of runners carrying this baton. You and I didn’t invent this faith. It was passed on to us by previous generations of believers, by their faithful living and teaching, then made real in us by the work of the Holy Spirit. It is therefore up to us to not only hang onto this truth we’ve received, but to pass it on to the next generation, and then hope and pray they will transfer it intact to yet another generation. This relay race of faith is won or lost in the hand-offs. Verses 6 and following speak of this transmission of truth in the relay of the generations:
“Keep these words . . . in your heart [and] recite them to your children.” Have the things of God in your own heart, and talk about them with your children in the course of daily living. Sunday School and worship services and youth groups can help. But Deuteronomy makes it clear that children are to hear the truth from their parents and their grandparents. Truth gets handed down at the breakfast table, at dinner, at bedtime, when out walking together, when driving home from a sports event, when sitting together before a sunset or a fire. God has entrusted the family with the responsibility to pass on to the coming generations the knowledge of who he is and what he has done for us in the past, how we live for him today. In other words, pay attention to the hand-off – you and your children and your children’s children. Our Legacy As I worked on this message, I thought about what Debbie and I have wanted to pass on to our two children. I’m not thinking about money or material possessions (there’s not a lot there to have to worry about). Rather I’m thinking about a legacy of spiritual values we’ve wanted them to receive, the character qualities we’ve prayed for and still pray for them to have as their own. As you know, they’re pretty much grown and launched, but here is a partial list of what we’ve tried to hand-off to our daughters in this family relay. First is a sense of security, and by that I mean the security of being loved. I want my children to know that they are deeply, permanently loved. Not for what they do but for who they are. Marilynne Robinson wrote a very moving, very theological novel called Gilead. The central character is a pastor named John Ames who writes a letter to his young son as he, the father, approaches his own death from heart disease. At one point John Ames tries to describe to his son how much his parents love him: Your mother could not love you more or take greater pride in you. She has watched every moment of your life, almost, and she loves you as God does, to the marrow of your bones. So that is the honoring of the child. You see how it is godlike to love the being of someone. Your existence is a delight to us. I hope you never have to long for a child as I did, but oh, what a splendid thing it has been that you came finally, and what a blessing to enjoy you now for almost seven years. 2 I suspect we all long to hear something like that from our father and mother, but especially from our father. To know we’re loved not just for what we do but for who we are. “Your existence is a delight to us.” Some people experience a stab of pain when they hear God referred to as Father – mainly because they carry a lot of pain from their relationship with an earthly father. They received a very conditional love – “I’ll love you if you do the right things, if you’re good enough or smart enough or achieve enough.” I don’t want my children to carry the spiritual scars that come with that kind of conditional love. I’ve made my share of mistakes in this area, but I have wanted to pass on to them the security of knowing they are permanently loved, and that they in turn might pass that same kind of security on to another generation. And yes, certainly we have wanted to pass on to our daughters a strong sense of values: a conscience that discerns right from wrong and the courage to act on what’s right. But along with values, I hope we’ve passed on a sense of humility. By that I don’t mean a poor self-image but rather the freedom to be human, the freedom to fail, the freedom to make mistakes and ask for forgiveness. That’s an increasingly rare thing today. I see so many marital and family breakdowns that stem from a lack of humility. People are unwilling or unable to admit they made a mistake. They make excuses instead of offering an apology. They want to blame others and remain victims instead of being responsible adults. And I realize the only way my children can receive this humility is by seeing it in me. I continue to pray that God will soften me and help me confess my faults and ask their forgiveness when I blow it. Humility. I’d also like to pass on to them some idea of what a healthy marriage is all about. Not a perfect marriage because I’ve never seen one of those, and I certainly am not part of anything close to perfect. Not a struggle-free marriage, because that’s a fantasy. But a healthy marriage – one that keeps its promises, one that works through conflict, one that expresses affection. Many years ago Dr. Charlie Shedd said it so well: “The best thing I can do for my children is to love their mother well.” I believe that. I am still trying to live up to it. But I pray my daughters know that I love their mother and that she loves me – warts and all – and be blessed to find it in the men they might marry one day. I’ve prayed that we might pass on to our children a model of growing faith in Jesus Christ. I cannot pass my faith directly on to them. Like all of us, they’ve had to go through their own searching and questioning, their own doubting and struggling, and come to their own decision in their own time. I’ve often wished there were something we could do to guarantee the outcome of their faith journey, but no parent can do that. My children will never see perfect faith in me. But what I want them to see in their mother and me is growing faith – authentic faith, seeking faith, becoming faith. I’m still praying for that – every day. And one more: I’ve wanted to pass on to my children a sense of compassion, a tender heart for the needy and hurting, a profound concern for the least and the lost. World Vision’s Bob Pierce said it best when he prayed, “Lord, let my heart be broken by the things that break Your heart.” It’s so easy for our children to buy into the affluenza that’s all around us in this area – to see the good life in terms of career and clothes, money and material possessions. One of the things that gives me great joy is to see in my adult daughters this heart for the hurting, this compassion for the poor. There have been times when we’ve tried to shield them from these realities. We’ve tried to protect them from the pain of the world. But we cannot do that if we want our children to grow up to be men and women of compassion. I’ve always been grateful for our youth department’s mission trips to places like Mexico and the Gulf Coast. I know for my daughters it exposed them to a level of human need they couldn’t get around here. It sharpened their impatience with injustice. It helped create compassion. All of Us These are a few of the qualities I hope we’ve passed on to our daughters in the family relay race: security, values, humility, a healthy marriage, a growing faith, and a sense of compassion. Quite a list, now that I’ve said it all. And the danger of saying it is that it can sound like we’ve actually accomplished it. We’ve tried. We’ve prayed. But only God knows how we’ve done in the hand-off. The real test is still to come – in the years ahead, in what they keep and pass on to the next generation. “You and your children and your children’s children,” is how Moses put it. We need to have that multi-generational view because, as it has been often said, the Christian faith is always one generation away from extinction. If one generation drops the baton, if one generation fails to pass on what they’ve received to the next generation, the spiritual cost can be very great. It’s why I’m deeply concerned for families that are raising kids highly skilled in soccer or skiing or gymnastics, but void in spiritual values. Kids who are experts on the internet but largely ignorant of the living God. Kids who have the grades to get into the best colleges in the country but no solid faith to take with them. And I’m also deeply concerned for the people you generally don’t see in this congregation – the 20 and 30-something aged folks who don’t find what they need in a church like ours. Some are going to other churches, which is fine. But many have given up completely. There’s an entire generation that’s missing in most congregations today, who seem to have missed the handoff. Some of them are our daughters, our sons. Shouldn’t we at least be praying about that? Parents, grandparents, how are we doing when it comes to running the relay? It involves all of us, you know. Parents and grandparents and every one who belongs to this family of faith. Every time we baptize we all of us promise to be part of the relay race of the generations. Every one of us is the beneficiary of the faithfulness of a previous generation. Will we likewise be faithful? As fathers and mothers, as grandparents, as family of faith – we have privilege and responsibility to pass on what we’ve received, that the coming generations may have the same opportunity we did – to hear the truth of God, and to respond in faith and trust to the one Lord, Jesus Christ. |
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