Church is more than NOW

The first, from Deuteronomy 6, is perhaps one of the best known passages from the Jewish scriptures. It contains the Shema - the great declaration of monotheism:

Deuteronomy 6:4 NIV

4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.

Context - in Egypt - in slavery. The 10 plagues, each one targeting one of Egypt’s gods. The great rescue - the first Passover. The parting of the sea. And now, the giving of the Covenant on mount Sinai.

So God is one.

Maybe we don’t think that’s so radical. When we want to quickly understand if someone is religious, we ask ‘do you believe in God?’, not ‘do you believe in gods?’, at least in Islamic nations and in the West. But of course for the people that Moses was leading here at Mount Sinai, that was not a natural assumption. For most of their neighbours, most of the time, there were many gods. But at Mount Sinai, the One God told the people His name. If you’re reading your Bible and it says LORD in capital letters, that’s actually the translator being polite to our Jewish brothers and sisters, who don’t speak God’s name out loud, though that is a more recent tradition.

So in Deut 6:1

Deuteronomy 6:1 (NIV)

1 These are the commands, decrees and laws the Lord your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess,

He told them His name, which was something like יהוה and He made a covenant with them. He told them how to live. No trial and error here, like the other nations around them - a clear, unambiguous way of life, with 10 commandments at the heart of it all. The first commandment is linked to that great Shema:

Deuteronomy 5:6–7 NIV

6 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 7 “You shall have no other gods before me.

And the people are told to really dwell on this. Do stuff to remember it:

SUMMARISE

Deuteronomy 6:6–9 NIV

6 These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

Basically, really internalise it. And right in the heart of the first commandment is the reminder of what God did for them.

Deuteronomy 5:6 NIV

6 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

So that first passage we heard goes on to say don’t forget, and tell your children!

Here we have a lovely script: SUMMARISE

Deuteronomy 6:20–25 NIV

20 In the future, when your son asks you, “What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?” 21 tell him: “We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. 22 Before our eyes the Lord sent signs and wonders—great and terrible—on Egypt and Pharaoh and his whole household. 23 But he brought us out from there to bring us in and give us the land he promised on oath to our ancestors. 24 The Lord commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the Lord our God, so that we might always prosper and be kept alive, as is the case today. 25 And if we are careful to obey all this law before the Lord our God, as he has commanded us, that will be our righteousness.”

Now look at the attitude of this kid in verse 20. He wants to know the meaning of what he has seen and heard.

Questions are a really good thing. I don’t think that there are bad questions. But there can be bad attitudes. We can question from a place of cynicism, or from a place of genuine wonder, puzzlement even. When a young child asks their parents a question, inherent in that process is trust. Trust that there will be a good answer, and trust that the parent is good. I have never met a sarcastic, cynical toddler. Perhaps we could learn how to ask questions like children?

And how does the parent respond?

”because I said so’?

NOPE.

The parent responds with the story. ‘Because I said so’ or ‘because God says so’ only works where there is trust. Only works where the ’I’, or God, is known.

Example of drinking poison/chemotherapy.

Using Bible in council.

Our society doesn’t know God, so why would it do what He says. Not that there aren’t reasons, but first and foremost, the character of the order-giver is central to the trust.

Maybe we need to tell children, our friends and neighbours, the story of who God is, so that they’ll want to know what He says.

What covenant?

Now we should be clear that in this passage from Deuteronomy that we’ve been reading, the focus is on telling future generations what God has done, what the covenant or relationship with him looks like. We are not living in the same covenant as those people. God is still the same, and the story of what God has done in the world is now a longer story, but the start of it is the same as it was for them. God’s goodness, or righteousness, hasn’t changed. But we are not living in the same covenant, or promise. However the same principle applies of telling the future generations about the covenant that we, if we are Christians, live by. It’s one based on what God has done for us, and it consists of putting our trust in Jesus, seeking to live as He taught us.

How can we encourage great questions about this from our kids? How can we learn to ask great questions ourselves, from a stance of trust and with a sense of wonder?

What if we don’t pass it on?

We included the passage from Judges that Liz read, because it illustrates what happens when the next generation aren’t taught.

Judges 2:7 NIV

7 The people served the Lord throughout the lifetime of Joshua and of the elders who outlived him and who had seen all the great things the Lord had done for Israel.

BUT

Judges 2:10–11 NIV

10 After that whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel. 11 Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and served the Baals.

The Baals were their neighbours’ gods. Remember the most basic, first commandment? Remember the Shema? Fail. What’s interesting to me is that it says in verse 10 that they did not know what God had done for Israel. And maybe that’s important. If we are seeking to pass on moral guidance without any relationship, without any reference to the story of who God is, future generations will jettison those things. After all, if God has done nothing for me, why should I care what He thinks about how I choose to live?

The Bible is many things, but at its heart it’s the story of a great rescue. Jesus and His early followers saw his mission in the light of the Exodus, in the light of the deliverance from Egypt. So we tell the story - of what God did in history, but also we tell about what has happened in our own lives.

But when we tell our own story, we need to anchor it in the story of God that we know from the Bible. Sometimes we don’t even know our own story.

Example of dad’s ‘collapse’.

We can’t tell people the story of a God that we made up based on some stuff that happened to us. Sometimes things get better because things get better. So we anchor our own stories in the reliable story.

How are we passing on the story of what God has done?

Today has focused a lot on telling the next generation, but one of the unique things about the church family is that people get born at all ages.

If you’re asking how that’s possible, you’re not the first.

John 3:4 NIV

4 “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”

This is an encounter that Jesus had with a prominent religious teacher, called Nicodemus. Nicodemus didn’t understand what Jesus said about people needing to be born again, or from above.

People enter the family of faith at different ages. There are children and young people in the church who have been believers for longer than some of the adults. They’re still children, still developing their emotional maturity, and I for one am not going to be advocating that we put them in the pulpit, but some of them have their own stories of what God has done, and we can benefit from those.

So we invest in the future, in church being more than now, by teaching the next generation, passing on what we know of what God has done and the covenant, to those who are young in flesh and those who are young in spirit.

If I had more time, I would love us to think about other ways that church is more than now. After all, all of us are here because someone else thought beyond themselves and their immediate, daily life, and invested in the future. We are in this building because someone believed in the church to come, and built it.

Husk history and plaque.

Arguably, I’m here because someone travelled from the Roman Empire to my pagan ancestors in Poland and Scotland and Northern England and told them about Jesus. When we share our faith, at home or abroad, we build the church of the future. When we pray, we connect our now with the not-yet, ultimately trusting that God is good.

Jeremiah 29:11 NIV

11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

Great verse. Yes please! Put that on my coffee cup. This is said by a prophet to the people of Israel hundreds of years after the first passage we heard from, when it has all continued to go horribly wrong, and time and again the message has been lost. A chunk of the nation have been essentially kidnapped, taken into exile in the evil empire.

But the verse before reads thus:

Jeremiah 29:10 NIV

10 This is what the Lord says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place.

In other words, in seventy years time, this will happen. Look around the room. In seventy years time, most of us will be dead. The kids in creche, the kids in the basement, and the youth over at Lighthouse will be retired, hopefully, if they haven’t extended the retirement age to 97 by then. But I expect to be dead. I expect most of you to be dead, no offence. But when we view ourselves as part of something beyond ourselves, we take some of our joy from knowing what will come after us.

Jeremiah’s original hearers did not like that message. They had their preferred fridge-magnet prophets who would say ‘peace, peace’, and so they wrote back to Jerusalem complaining about him, and you can read all about that for yourself in Jeremiah 29 and onward.

How are we investing in the church after us?

What are we keeping safe for them? Just as we look back and we thank the Danish sailors who built this place, what will they be grateful that we did?

So, the church has a future, and we don’t just sit by and wait for it, but we actively work towards it. One of the main ways that we do that is by sharing the good news of Jesus, and by teaching new believers and children as they are part of the now and also part of the future.

By raising up and supporting interns like Abi and Esme.

By encouraging our apprentice elders like Nikson and James and training new leaders.

More than Sunday

In terms of investing in the rising generation, both in terms of adults and children, it’s got to be more than Sundays. Hannah is amazing. She loves children. When she’s not working as a kids pastor and parenting her own children, she’s studying children’s ministry at Masters’ level. But she has your kids maybe one hour a week, two if they go to Kids Klub. How does that compare to time elsewhere? Time at school? Time watching TV?

The youth team do a great job. They have a worship time on a Friday evening, and 3 Sundays a month they go out for their own teaching session. But again, how does that compare to the time that the young people are with their friends? On their phones?

I don’t think the answer is more time in church. I think the answer is that it has to be in the home. Not all our children and young people have parents or carers who can teach them about Jesus, and that’s where the rest of us can help out. But if you are a Christian and you’re raising a child, then please don’t think Hannah and Tim can disciple them fully in 1-2 hours a week.

Kids are designed to learn by imitation. And they will imitate you whether you want them to or not. One of the signs of a child that is being hurt, or witnessing others being hurt in their home is inappropriate behaviour from them to others - maybe they start hitting other children at school, or using violent language or sexualised behaviour. It’s imitation - they’re doing what they’ve seen. It works in beautiful things too.

Rez and Zeph.

So what goes on in the home is really important, and if you are a Christian raising kids, and you want some more help with that, Hannah would love to talk with you about the various resources out there.

Although it’s not all about Sunday School, those times are really important. Can I tell you that there are some Sundays where we only have a creche because certain people serve on it 2 or 3 times a month? That we have children and young people with additional needs who would get so much more out of our sessions if we could free up volunteers to sit with them one-to-one. If you’re a mature believer, you will definitely have something to contribute there, so please get in touch with Hannah or Tim if you want to know more.

Summary

Investment beyond our own time - in mission and legacy.

Practical outworking

More than Sunday school - 1 hour a week. Kids watch what adults do.

Beyond our natural family.

I don’t want to leave you thinking today doesn’t matter, it’s all about the future. because church is more than now, now matters! If you don’t believe me, believe Russell Crowe in Gladiator: What we do in life echoes in eternity.

But, let’s not think that it is all on us. Mary, Shepherds, wise men looked on a small baby, but he would go on to conquer death. You might be looking at small things now, but God can do great things in the future with those small things.