Psalm 78 one through eight. Give ear, O my people, to my teaching. Incline your ears to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in a parable. I will utter dark sayings from above. All things that we have heard and known, that our fathers have told us. We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord and his might and the wonders that he has done.
He established the testimony and Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children, that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children, so that they should set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments, and that they should not be like their fathers.
A stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not steadfast, whose spirit was not faithful to God. Hey everybody, good morning and welcome to Christ Community Chapel. I'm so, so glad that you're here. Welcome. Those of you at, East Service and tuning in online. All right. You can tell I am, sporting the same, kind of bright orange that a lot of people are wearing right now and that Jack wore last week.
And the reason is, we don't want you to miss, premiere night, which is coming up. We haven't done anything like this in the history of the church, and, I can promise you, you will not want to. It's for everybody, and we don't want anybody to miss it. All right, so mark your calendars for February 16th. It's coming. All right. Don't forget. I'll tell you a little bit more about it at the end of the service. So we have our theme for this year. And our theme is every Minute matters.
Every Minute Matters is approximately 498,000 minutes left in 2025. And, as I talk in the next couple of paragraphs, there'll be one last minute. It goes by that fast. When we say every minute matters, it may never be more true than it is with kids. And my wife, Karen, and I have a tradition at Christmas, and we've done this for years. Ever since we had kids. We would put them on the stairs on Christmas Day, and we would take a picture of them. And every year you could see the changes in them.
And we started doing it with our grandkids. And just so you can see the change that happens in kids, one year to the next, I'm going to show you four pictures of our grandkids. The first is this is a picture from 2017. All right. This is 2018. This is, a couple of years later, 2021 and then 2022. You can see that just the radical change, not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually. That means every minute was packed, was loaded with something that went inside of them and changed them.
The psalmist in Psalm 78, the psalm we just had read, was crying out about the importance of passing our faith on to the next generation, that some of those minutes need to be packed with faith that go into the hearts and the minds of our children. That's why here at Christ Community Chapel, we have 160 volunteers in our kids area each week by Thursday night worship.
And then this morning, 160 volunteers taking the next hour and packing every one of those 60 minutes with something about the love of God so that your kids, if you have kids, if your kids are one of the 550 kids we have over there, that they are being changed minute by minute by the love of God. And I have, three points that I want to pull out of the eight verses we had read to us, to the very, very, very simple.
I want to talk about how, how, what and why when we talk about passing on our faith to the next generation, how does it happen? What happens and why it must happen. All right. First, how it happens. The first four verses of Psalm 78, they give ear, O my people, to my teaching. Incline your ears to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in a parable. I will utter dark sayings from of old things that we have heard and known, that our fathers have taught us.
We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord and his might and the wonders that he has done. The psalmist says that generations are like links in this chain, and each generation is connected to the generation before it. Like, I won't directly impact generations this far down. My responsibility is to impact this generation, my kids and this generation, my grandchildren.
And if I live long enough, I. I guess I could have something to do with my great grandchildren. Now, although I don't know how much I'll have left by that. And all right. But we are all connected, you know. And that what what the psalmist says is the way that faith is passed on from one generation to other. The psalmist mentions two things hearing and telling. Hearing and telling. Somebody has to tell the next generation about who God is, who Jesus is, what the Bible says.
Actually, every person has a responsibility to be both a hearer and a teller, and this is our commitment to you as a church. We will provide every opportunity for you to learn what you need to learn. Here, what you need to hear in order to be a teller, to tell somebody your children, your grandchildren, your neighbors, your friends, your classmates. To be able to tell them what it means to be a follower of Jesus.
That's why we have things like men's summit and men's fraternity and women's Bible studies in circles and region. And that's why we have this winter event guide that's just packed with opportunities for you to hear, for you to learn what you need to learn to be a teller. Right. And your job, your commitment is to just come take advantage. It's like we are setting the table. All you have to do is come and eat, but you have to come.
The second commitment that we will make to you is that if you have kids, we will provide an environment and programing that they will want to come to, that they will love. And your job as a parent is to get them here. Listen, somebody needs to tell the next generation about who God is, who Jesus is, what it means to follow him. Every minute is packed with something. Some of those minutes need to be packed with faith so they can catch the faith of Jesus. All right, that's the first thing.
The second thing is what exactly needs to happen? What do they need to learn? That's verse four says this. We will not hide from from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord and his might and the wonders he has done this. And the question is, how do the how does the next generation get at least your level of faith or greater faith than you have? And the answer the psalmist gives is they need to learn three things God's deeds. God's might. God's wonders.
First, God's deeds. God's deeds are what he has already done. If you've never read the Bible, you might be surprised, particularly in the Old Testament, how many times the people of God are told to remember they're told. Don't forget what God has already done.
Every feast was about remembering the Passover feast that there were to celebrate every year was so that they would remember that God had redeemed them with a mighty hand, that the angel of death had passed over their house because of the blood of a lamb. You know, every week here at CTC, we celebrate communion and we celebrate communion because Jesus said, do this in remembrance. Remember me.
We need to tell and retell the stories to each other and to our children and into our children's children. They need to hear the stories so they do not forget. Listen, sometimes people lose their faith. You know they can have an intellectual challenge, or they can have a crisis in their life and sometimes people lose their faith because their faith erodes simply because they've forgotten what God has already done.
It's my responsibility to tell my children, my grandchildren, what God has done in my life to get me to this point. That's God's deeds. The second thing is, God's might. If God's deeds are what God has done, God's might is what he can do his strength. When I was like, 4 or 5, I was my brother and I, we slept in the same, bedroom. And we were laying there in the dark one night, and I don't know what my dad had done that day, but we were talking about how strong my dad was right then.
And just then he opened the door to the bedroom to say good night. And it was dark in the room, but the hall light was on, so he was silhouetted in the doorway and we said, hey, dad, dad, that shows your muscles. And he said, what we said shows your muscles. And my dad like, looked at it and he did this right. And then he said, goodnight, guys. And he closed the door. We just laid there in stunned silence, and we both agreed that my dad was one of the strongest men
the world had ever known. Right. Some of you knew my dad. My dad was not a particularly big guy or muscular guy. Why do we say that? The reason is because we had seen him do something that we couldn't imagine doing. That's what the psalmist is saying. The psalmist is saying we need to pass on to the next generation. This I just understanding of God that God does stuff, that you cannot do it. You cannot imagine doing. How did this church get? How did all this happen?
This church here, here we have hundreds, thousands of people coming. How did you know how this happened? 44 years ago, 30 people sat in a room, 15 couples, and they talked about what it would be like to start a church in Hudson. And they agreed that they would need to raise, like $30,000 so that they could support the church for one year. And so they all took pieces of paper and they wrote down how much their family could give that year.
And they collected in a basket all the pieces of paper, and they counted it up, and the total was $38,000. All right. So they started this church. Listen, I have news for you. $38,000 didn't do all this. God did this with $38,000 in a group of people who were willing to trust him. God's might. If God's deeds or what he's done in the past. God's might is what he can do. The God's wonders.
What he will do is that if God's understanding of the future is not like your understanding of the future or my understanding of the future, we know that from the book of Revelation, God tells us how things are going to end. At the end of time, heaven will descend to earth, right? And and God will wipe away every tear, and then God will heal not just individuals, but whole nations. That's how all of time will end. And all these think that, you know, God knows what's going to happen.
He knows how the story ends. And so that's a different way to experience life. Yeah, I'm a big basketball fan and I love what's going on with the Cavs right now. It's really fun team to watch. But if you're a Cavs fan or a Cleveland fan, you know that. You know you will probably never forget the 2015 2016 season where the Cavs won their first ever NBA championship. This is, the DVD of the highlights of that run. It's the greatest DVD the world has ever known, right?
A lot of people don't have a DVD player. I have a DVD player just for this one DVD. I watch it like once a year. Listen, if you're not a basketball fan, just sit back and enjoy this story. I'm going to. So when I was watching this, run in real time, when the Cavs dropped, game for their last game four, they went down 3 to 1. I was just devastated. Really bummed. Right? Because no NBA team had ever come back from A31 deficit in the NBA finals.
Now, when I watch that DVD, when they have the press conference after the the fourth game where they have gone down three one, the Warriors are so cocky in the press conference and the sports pundits have the Cavs dead and buried. It's my favorite part, right? I love that part. If if you had never if you didn't know anything about the series and you and I watched this DVD together at that moment, I'd be going, don't worry about it. The best is yet to come. Just wait. Okay?
I just wonder sometimes if when I get to heaven and I watch the DVD of my life, if the things that are the hardest things that I experience in real time might be my favorite parts when I watch it on a DVD, is that the reason that we tell the next generation about God's deeds? God's might, God's wonders, is because a child who learns to trust God early will follow Jesus later. You know, right now, Pastor Zach is kind of, he's stuck on the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
Zach and I meet all the time, and one of my favorite things about meeting together is when one, of us is learning something about God like, and we're excited about it is Zach is so excited about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. We're going to do a whole series on it. May, but the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego comes from Daniel chapter three. And they are exiles to Babylon. And there's three young men, probably in their late teens, maybe early 20s.
And, Babylon is ruled by a king named Nebuchadnezzar is the most powerful man in the world at the time. And Nebuchadnezzar decides to build a statue. And then he has this, band that he assembles, and they're going to play really loud. And he says that. But when you hear the music, you bow down and worship the statue. And Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego decided that they would not bow down.
And you have to imagine this with me because you know, when when they bowed back, then they didn't bow like this, like when Nebuchadnezzar said, I want you to bow. They had to get on all fours and then place their forehead on the ground in the dust. That's the way you bow. So you got thousands of people with their foreheads in the dust, and three young men standing straight up. They stood out. So Nebuchadnezzar had them brought to him.
And Nebuchadnezzar said to them, listen, maybe you didn't hear me, but I said, when the music plays, you bow down and worship. So I have that music play one more time, give you one more chance, and you bow down and worship the statue, or I will throw you in the fiery furnace. Then he adds this. And what? God is there? Who can save you out of my hand? And Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, look at the king.
It is just an amazing thing here that the most powerful man in the world is just threatening them. And this is what they say to them. They said, okay, our God is able to deliver us. How would they know that? Someone had told them about God's deeds, someone had impressed on them God's might, what he can do. So they say, our God is able to deliver us and then they say this. But if he doesn't, may you know, oh, King, we will never bow down you what they're saying? You're saying, you know what?
No matter how this ends, this is going to be our favorite part. And the DVD we watch in heaven. That's the confidence of the Christian life. You pass that on to your children, to your grandchildren. We pass that on to the next generation. The next generation will follow Jesus with all their heart, mind and soul. That brings me to our third point. Why it must happen. Why it's so important to pass our faith on to the next generation. What the.
But the psalmist says that every generation is connected to the generations that follow it. So if you have one of these generations that breaks, then the whole chain breaks. I think there are three reasons why it's so important to pass our faith on to the next generation. And the first reason is that every child is a link. Every child is a link. This is verse five and six.
He established a testimony and Jacob appointed a law in Israel which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children, that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children. That means every child of the 550 children in our kids area is a link. That's the first reason.
Second reason is that every family is one link away from changing the family tree, every family, one link away from changing the entire family tree all the generations after it. That's verses seven and eight says so that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments, that they should not be like their fathers. A stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not steadfast, whose spirit was not faithful to God.
I mean, every family is a link that can change the family tree in either direction. Good or bad. My dad was the the first person in his family to be to become a follower of Jesus, first Christian in his family and he came from a pretty rough family. His two older brothers, both died of alcoholism in their 40s. Uncle Bill drowned in the bathtub and Uncle Charlie died of cirrhosis. Who? My dad or my?
My brother Brian, when he was, getting his master's degree from Ball State University in psychology. The professor, was trying to, help them learn how to administer what was called the MPI, which is the Minnesota Multiphase Personality Inventory was the most complete personality inventory at the time. And so my brother was supposed to give it to several people and take it back to the professor. He gave one to my dad. My dad filled it out, and he brought it to his professor.
And the professor looked at the results. And the first question the professor asked was this is your dad an alcoholic? Is your dad an alcoholic? My brother said, no. The next statement from this professor at Ball State University was this. Then he must be very religious because those are his only two options. My dad changed the family tree and I stand here simply because he did. Every family is one link away from changing the family tree, good or bad.
And the final reason it's so important is that every church is one link away from closing every church, one link away from closing. Zach reminded me of his story when he was planting a church in Cleveland that they were looking for, church building to have, their services in. And they just wanted an hour where that church was not meeting. And so they were looking at this church, and this woman was showing them around. And Zach said, do you have a nursery? And she said, I think so.
And then she took him to her room and unlocked the room and opened it, and it was used for storage, but the wallpaper was Noah's Ark wallpaper. And she said, yeah, this is the nursery. And Zach said, listen, what are you going to do if, if a family comes with young children this Sunday? And the lady laughed and she said, we haven't had a family with young children in five years. That church building is now a doctor's office.
15,000 churches will close in America in 2025, in the next 498,000 minutes, because they didn't know. Right? Listen, we have to pass our faith on to the next generation. We do it by telling, hearing and telling. You have to be both we we're going to tell them about God's deeds, God's might, God's wonders, because every child is healing, every family. One link away from changing the family tree. Your family one link away. Every church, one link away from closing. Every minute matters.
Would you pray with me? Father in heaven, we come to you and I am so grateful. I'm grateful because generations are linked and my generation is linked to my dad who began to follow you. And because he began to follow you, he changed the trajectory of our family tree. I pray for us as a church. I pray for the 550 kids that are in our kids area right now.
I pray that every minute will be packed with faith, and that we will pack enough minutes with, faith that they will get it in their hearts and minds and they will learn to love you and follow you. And in doing that, impact the world and the next generation and the generation after that. Thanks. We pray all this in Jesus name. Amen.