sermonette: Teach Your Children

Bill Cherry
Given 26-Sep-02; Sermon #FT02-09s; 19 minutes

Description: (show)

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A greetings to you all. I hope you're having a wonderful feast of Tabernacles. Please take your Bibles and turn to Matthew 3. And these words were spoken by our God about His Son. And we will look at verse 17. And lo, A voice from heaven saying, this is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. God made an auditible voice out of heaven, saying, I am well pleased with what my son is doing on the earth. And we, when we look at our children, do things that exhibit godly traits and godly character, we say to ourselves and maybe even to other people, these are my children. I'm well pleased with what they are doing. And God's word tells us how to teach our children and give them traits that will lead them and guide them into God's kingdom. So today we are going to read a familiar scripture. And scripture passage which tells us how we can teach our children and how we can give them godly traits. Now some of you have probably already turned there to Deuteronomy chapter 6. And we will start with verse 5 and 6. And thou shalt love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I commend you this day shall be in your heart. Now, Right off the bat, God tells us we have to have a passion for God. We have to love God with all our heart, with our, with our total being, and we have to put His word in our heart. Does it sound like we do a lot of Bible study and reading? Does it sound like we memorize the scripture, enjoy singing it, and maybe even making up songs about it, and Making it a center focal point of our lives where when we do things that we have these words ringing in our ears and giving us guidelines of conduct of how we should treat people and how we should do people and then, and then we live it and, and experience the abundant life, the excitement and the joy from obeying God's laws and how great that kind of life is. That's the first step. David had a passion, we should have a passion for God and a love for God, and David is a great example of one who had a passion for God. He sat in the beautiful wilderness and he saw the trees and the flowers and the great creation and the stars, and he wrote many beautiful hymns praising God and expressing his. Confidence and trust in God, and he trusted God for deliverance in in all things. And when he saw Goliath shaking his fists at the armies of Israel, and he said, I defy you to give a man, a champion to stand up against me, Goliath. And David said, Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that dares to shake his fist and inside the armies of the living God? And he went before Saul and he said, I'll fight him. He said, God delivered me from the lion and the bear, and God will deliver me from this giant. And, and I do not need a sword and a shield and a spear. I haven't proved them, but I know that God will deliver me. And when he got before Goliath, Goliath was standing there shaking his fist of twice David's size, crushing him by his gods and crushing Israel and saying, Why has this dog come out before me? David was not afraid. He was, he was. Angry at a man that would say these things about God. And David said, you come with a sword and a shield and a spear, but I come in the name of the Lord God of Israel, whom armies you define. He said, I will smite you. I will take your head off. I will feed the carcasses of the army of the Philistines, and he started running towards Saul, and he was ready to do exactly what he said. He did not even have his stone in his sling yet or in his hand. It said he reached his hand while after he was running. And he did exactly what he said, and, and you know the rest of the story, but David did this because he had a passion for God. He had a love for God. He had a confidence in God because he trusted God in everything that he did and his mind and heart was on God. So we should have a passion for God. And when we develop a passion for God, when we put his words in our heart. We have something to give to our children. We can give them our example of righteous living. We can give them our knowledge of their scripture and share it with them. We can give them confidence and faith and love, and we can give them guides along their way for their lives. Now let's read verse 7. It said, and thou shalt teach them diligently unto your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. Now, If you were to diagram this sentence, it has two branches. It says, you shall and then teach. And talk, so they are two different facets, and we will talk about those in a few minutes, but It tells you what to teach, teach them the words of God. Now, Moses was talking specifically about the 10 Commandments, but we certainly understand and project that we have this whole word and God intends for us to live by it and to teach it diligently to our children. And it says teach diligently and how do you teach diligently. You really, it takes perseverance, it takes drive, it takes consistency, it takes planning, and to me it sounds like he's telling us every day we should teach our children have a teaching session. And then it says when, when you sit, walk, lie, rise, virtually every facet of your life. You should have eye to eye contact with your children and conversation with them and talking to them, so teaching. is by definition you have a set time that you're going to teach. You have a set place. The teacher is designated. The students are designated, so it's a planned activity and the teaching is much like a spokesman's club speech. You have a specific purpose, a one sentence idea of what you're going to teach and everything you say. Be directed toward getting around across that point and I would say for young children especially the teaching is probably more effective if it's brief, and I think having like reading a Bible verse, maybe letting this be the memory verse for today or something like that and showing by an illustration how it. and how they can apply it to their lives and what I have in mind maybe is something like the verse in Exodus that says, I am the Lord that heals you and then tell them the story about when Paul went on was shipwrecked on a Mediterranean island with all these prisoners instead of saying, woe is me and shivering in the cold, he encouraged them. He said, God's going to deliver us, and he and gathered wood. He encouraged them, gathered wood, and a serpent bit him on the hand, a poisonous serpent that would normally kill a man. He shook it off into the fire and he was healed instantly. And so you might want to tell it before bedtime. Maybe you have a set time every every night before we go to bed, we will read the Bible and talk about it and Uh, let this be the last image that goes into their mind before they go to bed, that God protects the righteous, and God will protect them if they are righteous. You might do it when you sit in your house at mealtime and might do it before meals or after meals, or you might do it when you get up in the morning and, and everybody's cleaned up, but the idea is God wants us to have a specific time to teach our children, and teaching is a planned activity at a set time, and it is accepted if it is not, you know, if you jerk your child away from the TV and say, come on, let me read the Bible to you. It's not accepted, but if they understand Every day at this certain time, we are going to read God's word because it is a word that's going to give us life. It will give us direction. It will give us purpose and tell us how to be happy. Well, that's what teaching is, but talking about it, and I, I wanna, you are engaged in a conversation. This conversation, it may be a casual conversation, but your idea in talking is to listen. You want to listen to your child, you want to know their minds and hearts. You want to talk about them, about, talk to them about everything, and, and to try to understand exactly how they feel and how they um How they think and then You may guide the conversation to God's word or you may not, but it might be that in the conversation, your knowledge of scripture or your experience with trying to apply the scripture, you can say I had a man angry with me at work and I a soft answer and it turned wrath and sometimes if you can if if you have somebody angry with you, if you're kind to them, they might change or you can give suggestions, but it says when you Sit in your house when you walk by the way, when you lie down and when you rise up. So this suggests that you're spending much time with your children, and I'll say a lot of times, probably even more time more importantly to spend time with your teenagers because they are bombarded with from the media that says there is a generation gap and you're not supposed to Listen to your parents and, and they get negative things that come from this world. So talking is listening and you're, you're best stop everything you're doing, look them in the eye and talk with them and, and plan activities where you walk and walk with them and sit with them maybe uh. Like folding clothes and doing housework or or out in the yard raking leaves or something where you can talk about playing sports or something like that, but the casual conversation is where you try to understand your child and if you can give them any guidance with the scriptures, then that's what you that's um. You have that opportunity, but you do it by spending time with your children. Yeah I was associated with, with camps which had a Christian biblical background. And these camps, most of them had a time when they would get all the campers up and they would have a morning devotion, a scripture would be read and an application would be made and they would tell a story and it wouldn't be, wouldn't be a long thing but a brief thing. And at the end of the day, the counselors would take their own particular group of counselors and read the Bible and talk with them. And some camps even had a midday worship service every day. But did these Saturation of religious instruction turned the campers off. No, it did not. Because the camps were filled with, with interesting and wonderful activities, horseback riding, archery, horseshoes, tennis, and, and many activities that children love, swimming and those kind of things, and they were all based on the activities, they knew that the guidelines were to be kind, to be honest, to do the things that are in the 10 Commandments, and they, the, the camp. Focused on God's word and use it as a guideline for behavior. Now I want to tell you about a man who predestined his child to become a professional baseball player. Now, most of you, well, some of you have heard of Mickey Mantle, maybe some of you do not, but he was a famous baseball player that played for the New York Yankees, and he could switch it. He could walk that ball over the fence to the right hand side. Plate and whack it in over the fence, the left hand side of the plate. He was a switch hitter, but he was very skillful with his glove, and he could run fast and beat the ball to first base. Sometimes he was very quick, but he was, he had these baseball skills not by accident because his father predestined him to be a baseball player. And before Mickey was born, he said, you're going to be, he said, I'm going to have a boy, and he's going to be a professional baseball player. He walked in the house one day and they said, you have a child, and he said, it's a boy. And they said, how do you know? And he said, it's a boy, and he's going to be a baseball player. And while Mickey was as a little baby goo goo goo in the crib, he was saying he, he would put baseballs in the crib and say, Son, you see these balls. One day you're going to knock them out of Yankee Stadium. He said, you're going to catch these balls and throw them so very fast, you're going to throw people out and, and you're going to run and you're gonna. So he was talking all the time and when little Mickey could put a ball in his hand, probably rolling it on the floor and, and taking a bat, and he taught him to run and bat and hit his, his grandfather would stick the bat. In one hand and say, OK, you hit from this side. His father would stick it in the other hand and say you hit from this side. So from birth he was a switch hitter all his life and that's the way it happened because Mickey Mantle's father. Put baseball in his heart, and because he taught it diligently to his child in virtually every facet of his life. Mickey Mantle, he said, his father said, you're going to be a professional baseball player, and he had to beg and beg his father to be able to get permission to play high school football. And who was a stand out in that too. But The point is, we, if we diligently teach our children and tell, tell them how great it's going to be in God's kingdom and show them what is going to happen when we apply God's laws and point out the things that that they can do and they can accomplish within the realm of God's law and how wonderful activities are when they are done correctly. Our children are not going to be turned off when we teach them God's word. If we teach them. By our example. If we teach them without hypocrisy. Now, if we are sitting at the, at the at the couch reading a newspaper and say, come here, son, let me talk to you. I want you to look at me straight in the eye when I'm talking to you. They're going to be turned off. And if you say, Son, you shouldn't shout at people. You should be kind to people. Now do not act like a jarhead. They're going to be turned off. But if they see our example, if we love them, we look in the eye, look them in the eye and stop everything and listen and talk with them. We're saying I love you. You're more important than this newspaper or this internet or this thing that I'm doing, and you might even as talking with adults say please excuse me and bend down and say a little something. Well, honey, I'll, I'll talk to you just a minute. I'm talking to Mr. Jones or something like that, but you show your child that you care about them and you love them. So this is part of teaching diligently to your children, but you do it because you love God's law, and because you love God, because you put his word in your heart, and you have something to give to your children. As parents, we have a unique opportunity, the thing that no one else can do, a relationship with our children, and we can teach them the love of God, we can teach them the knowledge of His word. We can show him by our life and by pointing out and helping them in their life, the joy and the happiness that comes from living God's way, and we can give our children a wall of protection. Of faith in God that's going to help them quench the fiery darts of this world was full of selfishness and strife and false ideas. And we can ask ourselves a question. If we do not teach our children the word of God and the way of God, who will?