Consistency
Family Discipleship • Sermon • Submitted
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· 5 viewsSetting You, Your Household, and Your Whole Community On Mission to Love God, Love People and Make Disciples That Make Disciples.
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Consistency
Consistency
What is Family Discipleship?
Family discipleship is doing whatever you can whenever you can to help your family become friends and followers of Jesus Christ. Discipleship is both what we heard Jesus command and what we saw Jesus doing.
What does the Bible say about family?
God teaches us about our relationship with him through family.
God loves kids.
God created marriage to resemble his church.
God commands that children are to be cared for and trained.
God commands that parents are to be honored and obeyed.
God tells and shows us what to teach children.
God does not take family responsibilities lightly.
God gives families the gift of forgiveness.
We talked about spending intentional time with your children. Showing them that you are making an investment in them, looking to grow them in discipleship by you being a consistent model.
Good family discipleship is both intentional and consistent with a clear goal to see your kids conformed to the image of Christ. Because it takes intentionality and consistency, it requires a plan.
Today we remain in Section 2 of the Shema, the Family, but we are going to begin breaking it up into what we’re gonna call the 3 C’s, Consistency, Creativity, Clarity.
The 3 C’s of Family Discipleship Planning
Consistency
Clarity
Creativity
The Hebrew Shema
Deuteronomy 6:4–9 (ESV)
4 “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 6 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
Verses 5 & 6 - The Heart
Verse 7 - The Family
Verses 8 & 9 - The Community
“Be radically consistent and authentic in your own faith — not just in behavior, but in affections. Kids need to see how precious Jesus is to mom and dad, not just how he is obeyed or how they go to church or how they read devotions or how they do duty, duty, duty. They need to see the joy and the satisfaction in mom and dad’s heart that Jesus is the greatest friend in the world.” - John Piper
Deuteronomy 4:9 (ESV)
9 “Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. Make them known to your children and your children’s children—
In the Hebrew Shema in Deuteronomy 6:7 we are to be diligent in teaching our children. Here in Deuteronomy 4 we are told to keep our own soul diligently.
What does diligently mean?
Diligent means you don’t give up. Diligent means you are patient. Diligent means you don’t compromise the truth because it might make your child uncomfortable.
Consistency reinforces the truths you are teaching.
How many people have been told something just once and got it?
No human being, regardless of age, learns something by being told once, and then never again. We teach over and over and over again. Consistency breeds clarity. This will look different for everyone. To be consistent does not mean we’re doing it every Sunday at 7pm, because everything in the world will come up to keep Discipleship time Sunday at 7pm from happening. It can be 5-10 minutes or an hour a day or a week. The important thing is that it is consistent! Consistency is not monotony. Consistency is like training. Monotony is a lack of variety or interest. You can add a ton of variety and interest to this. The easiest way to remain consistent is to attach family discipleship to something you are already doing. Like bedtime, driving, shopping, breakfast, lunch after church. Deuteronomy 6:7
Our family does “What did you learn today?” and Highs and Lows fairly consistently. To the point that if we forget to bring it up Maggie usually does it for us.
You will need to be intentional. You must have blueprints, you must have a plan. It’s easy to get lost if left to your own strength. If left to your own thoughts at any given time. Think of building a house. Foundation, studs, brick or siding. They must be planned before hand. They must be operated in their proper order. The goal you have is clear: build a house. Great intentionality and consistency will be paramount in maintaining your plan. Unfortunately in the church many of us believe that discipleship will happen more organically, but they’ll shell out thousands to properly train them in sports or music or any other number of things.
Look at a garden left to grow and one well tended, and God has given you the perfect word picture to illustrate the importance of intentional consistency. You will have to make time for gospel conversations.
Mom, Dad, just give 10 minutes a week to planning out your discipleship time and I promise you’ll see fruit.
Jesus wasn’t just a model through his servant leadership to the disciples, he also consistently and intentionally taught them.
Matthew 5-7 The Sermon on the Mount
Matthew 10 The Sending of the 12
Matthew 13 Parables
Matthew 28:16 The Great Commision
Luke 22:39-46 Showing the disciples to pray
Luke 11:1-13 Teaching the disciples to pray
Luke 4:14-30 Jesus teaching from the Word of God in the synagogues
Many of Jesus’s teachings were from the Old Testament. It was expected that Jewish families would teach their children God’s word. One of my favorite pictures of this in Scripture is Paul pointing to Timothy the legacy of faith he’d inherited:
2 Timothy 1:5 (ESV)
5 I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well.
2 Timothy 3:14–15 (ESV)
14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it 15 and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
May our legacy be similar. We cannot passively train our children in the way they should go. They will not pick up on the doctrine of God by instinct. Be more than their caretaker be their teacher.
There’s a big difference between telling and teaching. Telling is the parent thinking, “What am I going to say?” where as in teaching the parent is considering, “How can I help my child understand this?” In telling parents ask their children questions like “Do you understand?” and “Does that make sense?” and are looking for a head nod. In teaching we ask things like, “Can you explain that to me?” and “What do I mean when I say…?” A positive result of telling is that children remember some of what the parents said, but a positive result from teaching goes beyond regurgitation to the ability to demonstrate, distinguish, and defend what they’ve been taught.
4 Pray that every time I open my mouth I’ll be able to make Christ plain as day to them.
4 that I may make it clear in the way I ought to speak.
Next week we will remain in verse 7 of the Shema “The Family”. And we will be moving on to the 2nd C, Clarity.