Genesis 15:1-6; 17:1-8 • Family Blessings
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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)
Let me ask that you would look in your Bibles at Genesis, chapter 15, Genesis 15, as we'll look first at Genesis 15, 1 through 6. Little background, the first family, Adam and Eve, fails.
Strike one.
The newly established family after the flood where God takes care of all those whose every intent of the thoughts of their heart was only evil continually establishes Noah's family,
which fails.
Strike two.
What will be strike three?
There cannot be a strike three because God has said that He will bring from the line of Eve, ultimately from the line of Noah, a Redeemer who will crush the influence of Satan.
There will be a family plan to save the families of the world, and that's what God explains. In Genesis 15, let me ask that you stand as we honor God's Word after strike one and strike two.
Now what?
Genesis 15, 1, "After these things, the Word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision.
Fear not, Abram, I am your shield.
Your reward shall be very great, but Abram said, O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless in the air of my house as Aeliezer of Damascus.
Abram said, Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir.
Hold the Word of the Lord came to him. This man shall not be your heir.
Your very own Son shall be your heir.
And he brought him outside and said, Look toward heaven and number the stars, if you're able to number them. Then he said to him, So shall your offspring be.
And he," that is Abram, "believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness." By faith in the Lord, righteousness is being passed to a troubled man.
The troubles and the promise are not over. Go to Genesis 17, the first verse.
As we recognize, Abram has worked with God both positively and negatively, and now needs more help than he ever thought he would need. Genesis 17, "When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, I am God Almighty.
Walk before me and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you, and may multiply you greatly.
Then Abram fell on his face and God said to him, Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations.
No longer shall your name be called Abram," which means honored father, "but your name shall be Abraham," which means father of many.
"For I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful. I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession I will be their God." Let's pray.
Heavenly Father, the promise was from a covenant-keeping God who said to a greatly flawed man, "When you believe in me, I cover your unrighteousness and credit my own righteousness to you for your faith."
Father, we still treasure that, though struggle to understand it. And yet it is the blessing of the covenant for us and children after us in the everlasting nature of your covenant love.
So teach us what it means and change us by it. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Please be seated.
Christian blogger and mom, Meghan Hill apologizes. She writes, "I have no memory of becoming a Christian.
I did not pray a prayer or walk an aisle or have a eureka moment.
I don't remember when I did not love Jesus.
My Christian testimony, the story of how I came to faith, is downright boring."
Does she need to apologize for the boredom?
She writes on, "I ate my peanut butter sandwiches with a prayer of thanks. I recited prayers at bedtime from the children's catechism. The songs that I remember from my youth were my dad either singing Beatles tunes or a hymn from the hymnal.
Church life shaped the weekly rhythms of my childhood. The Sunday school teachers and the youth leaders reminded me by their very presence that there were others who loved Jesus too."
She added, "Everything important to know in life.
I claimed before memory.
I embraced before I was three or four.
God is my creator. Jesus is my Savior. The Spirit is my helper. The Bible is my rule."
Does she need to apologize for the lack of drama? No opium dens?
No motorcycle gangs?
No flash of lightning on the road to Damascus to knock her down?
Does she need to apologize? She thought she might. She writes, "In fifth grade, I began to attend a Christian school where dramatic testimonies were a regular part of morning chapel. Week after week, speakers, a drug addict, a party girl, an atheist told of God's rescue. I loved these stories, but I began to fear that I had not really been saved.
I did not have a horror story in my past, and so I became convinced that my testimony was inferior.
Was it?
While we can, and we must, have love for the accounts of those who are rescued at every stage of life from wayward paths of life, believing that God is able and willing to claim those who turn to Him, we still have to ask, what is the ordinary Christian life?
What is the normal path by which most people from ancient of times come to faith in the God who saves them?
You must recognize that as much as we must celebrate the accounts of those who are won by evangelistic tracts, the ones who read Gideon Bibles in hotel rooms and come to faith, those who receive a witness by somebody in a dorm room, those who go to some crusade and are saved with scores and scores of people while thousands look on. As impressive, wonderful, great as that is, what is the ordinary path?
The way in which most people are saved and come to know Jesus Christ through history
is by maturing in a Christian family that loves the Lord.
By those prayers at the kitchen table, by helping memorize verses at the dinner table, by regular involvement in the rhythms of church life. Children grow up understanding, "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so." My wife, Kathy, has a talk that she regularly gives to young moms to encourage their understanding, and it's just called "Red is Red."
And it's the simple reminder that when you're training up little children, you teach them, this is red, that this color is red. And it's the rare child that says, "No, it's not."
They grow up believing, "Red is red."
And when they grow up hearing, believing from beyond speech itself, Jesus loves you in the way that faith songs are sung to a nursing baby, the way that children are read Bible stories as they go to bed, the way that we pray at the dinner table, the way that we lead our children to faith is by the regular rhythms of parenting in God's covenant families.
It is, after all, what God is saying, Genesis 17, 7. He speaks to Abraham and says, "I will be a God to you and to your offspring after you." It's not a guarantee that children will believe, it is a guarantee that God will be there.
Showing love, showing faithfulness, even to the unfaithful. God says, "I will be faithful to you." Long after your parent has passed away, long after you have failed, God is saying, "I will be there. I will be God to you and to your offspring after you." It's a reminder of what that covenant is. What is the covenant that God is entering? It is a commitment based upon a prior promise, not present performance.
Long before Abram had filled the conditions, God said, "I will be a God to you and to your children. I will be faithful." And God's promise of His faithfulness is His explanation to us of what a covenant is. It's what we affirm over and over again in a wedding ceremony, what's happening. We don't make a marriage contract, we pledge a marriage covenant.
I commit before we've even come together, before you have fulfilled conditions of my expectations for better or worse, I promise to love you. What you haven't done what you're supposed to do? No, it's a covenant. It's not a contract. I made a commitment based upon a prior promise to love, not based upon present performance, but a prior promise. We can question the power or the validity of a boring testimony of a child who's like, "Well, I was just raised to believe in Jesus. That's what my family believed. I don't remember not believing that Jesus was my Savior."
That's actually something very powerful that God endorses. Do you recognize that every time that we baptize a child in this church, we pray, "May this child never know a day that they don't love Jesus?" And that's not just sentiment. That is our prayer that deeper than memory, beyond even understanding as it is growing and maturing, this child is saying, "I love Jesus because I've been planted in a covenant-believing family and those seeds of faith are in the soil of God's very promise." What characterizes such a family? We learn here as we are teaching what it means to be a covenant family with its roots planted in the soil of God's promise.
To be such a family means, first of all, just to believe in common experience, that families are powerful influences of children's relationships and emotions and spiritual understanding.
We had George Barna here a few months ago, and he said it very simply, "Children develop their worldview between the ages of 18 months and their 13th birthday. What you believe at age 13 is what you are most likely to die with as your fundamental beliefs."
How powerful is that?
Statistics we may or may not like. He simply says it this way, "What you believe at age 13 is what you will die believing, but if you are not a Christian by age 19 in this culture, there is only a 6 percent likelihood that you will become a Christian."
Most of us become Christians within the faith of family households. We are raised and influenced in an understanding, and that's beautiful as you begin to understand how God is saying, "I'm putting children into faithful homes in such a way that they will just instinctively almost begin to understand who Christ is." The Pew Research Center for Adults asked this question, "Where do Americans find the most meaning in their lives?
Work, money, friends, pets, family?"
The runaway top answer, most of us find meaning, most meaning in our family, 70 percent of Americans say. They find most of life's meaning in their families. The next was career, but that was only half as much. The next, people saying, was in money, but that was only a third as much as the career.
Five percent of Americans said they found the most meaning in their pets.
This is not the family you want to belong to when the house is on fire.
"Honey, don't worry about the kids. I've got the cat."
It's not the norm. The norm is this powerful influence of our family's child trends. A nonpartisan research firm revealed 83 percent of young adults, not just families in general, 83 percent of young adults, said being married some day was vitally important to their future happiness in a culture where families are coming undone. Young people are still saying, "I have an ideal, rightly or wrongly perhaps, but my ideal is I'll be attached to someone. We'll have a family some day." An unlikely source, an MTV survey found that young people say their families are the primary source of their happiness or their unhappiness.
The University of Michigan Institute for Social Research concludes, "There is little evidence despite the upheavals in American culture that our commitment to family is any less than it was two decades ago. We profoundly believe in the importance of families. Families shape children and therefore families have to be shaped in ways that are healthy. Do you need any proof of that?
Try to adopt a child or become a foster parent and see how many forms have to be filled out. See how much your history has to go into the forms. See how much family home study has to be done before you are approved. Why? Because even the secular sources are saying families are absolutely crucial to what we recognize about the relational and the emotional, and we would say the spiritual health of children. There are implications if families are so important. The first is just the value of our families. We recognize that they are crucial for forming spiritual understanding and health.
Because they are so valuable, they are important. A secure family, maintaining the influence of God's Word, God's Spirit in all a family life is the single greatest indicator of whether or not our children will have a Christian faith down the road. What happens in the home? Vitally important. As a result, God is calling us to place priority on our families and the relationships that make them secure and whole.
Plain talk.
Great partners make great parents.
Why?
It's not just the social dynamic of when parents stay together, the family tends to stay whole. It's the recognition that beyond the modeling, beyond the emotional health that goes into great partners making great parents is the recognition that what is happening when you have great partners.
There are people who are living out the covenant relationship. What is that? I'm going to love you based upon a prior promise, not present performance because sometimes you really tick me off.
Sometimes you frustrate me. Sometimes I have to forgive you. Sometimes you have to forgive me. And in that understanding of my willingness to love beyond the boundaries of my humanity is the covenant itself being expressed. That we in loving one another despite our differences, frailties, weaknesses are in essence saying, "This is how Christ loves.
Let me show you the covenant that God Himself is expressing to someone as ancient as Abraham in the way that I'm loving your mom, the way that your mom is loving me." These are covenant relationships that are formative. And when Christians believe that, we begin to have some uncommon priorities in our culture.
Recognize more and more as we struggle to know what it means to be families raising children, to give them direction. Every area of our lives comes into question in terms of what families have a right to do and say.
Right now a lot in the press is celebrity marriages in which people are saying of their children, "Well, I don't want to influence them to be a male or female, so I'm raising them genderless.
I'm just going to let them choose down the road whether they are male or female."
And you kind of say, "Really?
I am so thankful for a father who taught me what it meant to be a man, for a mom who wanted to help me shape, wanted to help shape my sister in terms of what it meant to be a Christian woman." And to recognize, is it really loving to say, "Let them make their own way," or to say, "Let me show you the way." Not just about your gender, but about faith, about what it means to not just let the child choose their religion, but if you really believe that there's an eternity, that souls are involved in what God is building and securing, that it becomes absolutely vital that we don't just say, "I'm just going to let the child choose."
A Washington Post columnist recently explained his perspective, "I lost my faith in faith."
There were too many unanswered questions, too many problematic absolutes, too much fear-mongering and way too much hypocrisy.
So he said, "I want my children to have a solid understanding of all religions, respect for what others believe in the golden rule.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
Pretty good rule.
But what does it mean?
As a result of his open-handedness, he said, "He and his wife intend to expose our children to everything, spiritually speaking, to honestly answer any questions they may have about God and religion, and then let them choose for themselves."
Sounds very fair.
Because to everything, spiritually? Really?
What about child prostitution in the temples of India?
What about the ISIS soldiers in Syria who have human shields and sexual slaves, according to their religious understanding?
What about going to China where spirits live in trees and stones that need to be honored?
What about going to Africa where female mutilation is what ensures male domination?
Just expose to everything and let them make their choices. What about just believing that as long as you measure up, as long as you're good enough, God may accept you?
Or would you dare also to expose them to?
By grace are you saved through faith. And that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works. Lest anyone should boast, for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. Will you teach them that? Not just let them make their own way. Show them the way that you know is hope, that you know is not dependent upon the work of their hands or the doctrines of man or the dangers of this world. God has given another way. And when you begin to say it's parents that God has designed to show the way, then it begins to change our priorities that are becoming increasingly uncommon. After all, if you just say, "What happens when parents like their kids make choices?" It's often so that parents can make their choices. And those choices are harder and harder on children. Realities. I know the figures go by fast, but you need to feel the impact.
The average five-year-old in this country will have less than 35 minutes per week with his or her dad, 25 hours a week before some form of technology in media.
The average preschooler in this country will watch more television before first grade
than that child will listen to their father in their lifetime.
Love is spelled T-I-M-E.
We are required to think of the priorities of the needs of our children because they're precious to us and they're precious to God. And He has a family plan which will help them. We struggle with the family plan because of all the things that are happening in our culture that are threatening our marriages, not mystery, not news to you. If we just look across the culture, we would say roughly, despite everything that we believe about the power and the influence of families, half of our marriage bonds are coming apart. Now there are certainly Christians that challenge is that happening in the church?
But even a group like Focus on the Family that says it's untrue that 50 percent of Christian marriages are coming apart. It's only 37 percent.
Still way too much because of what we believe is being shown, emphasized, characterized in the modeling of families of people show the covenant love of God by a committed marriage.
Only half of all America's children will now be born outside of marriage.
And we can say, well, it's not just bigotry that makes Christians think that might be a problem. It's the concern for children. It's the desire to say it's that solidarity of a family. It's that mutual forgiving. It's that living beyond difference that helps people actually show where happiness lies. So it's so interesting at the very moment that we're more and more convinced that families have profound influence on children. We see the difficulty of maintaining families. It's not a new problem as the life of Abraham will quickly show us. As we begin to recognize families are so influential, but I'm so struggling to be the mom or the dad that God calls me to be. We're so struggling to keep our family, our life, our marriage together. As we face those two realities, we have to understand that God's answer is to be an uncommon God to tell us where our hope is. It's not in us, but in His provision. What is uncommon about the God of the Scriptures?
He recognizes human realities, both our faithfulness and our fallenness, and is prepared to deal with both. We look at Abraham and our Sunday School sanctified version of his story is, "Here's a faithful man." Genesis 12, "He honored the call of God, left the land that He knew for the land He did not go." He left country in kinsmen and comfort to obey the call of God. Wonderful.
He trusted God's provision.
It was at age 75 that God first called Him to go. There's a hard age to start a new life in a different land. There was faithfulness. And when He got to the new land, despite the pagans that were there, the foreign religions, the sin of the Amorites, which was violence throughout the land, He raised an altar and praised to Yahweh, a threat to His own life. He was a faithful man. And He trusted God's promise over time. Genesis 15, verses 5 and 6, some of the most important words of all the Scriptures, "He believed God, and it was credited to Him for righteousness." When the writer of Hebrews looks back at the life of Abraham, he writes simply in Hebrews 11, "By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go, not knowing the land to which he was going. By faith he went to live in the land of promise, for he was looking to the city that has foundations whose designer and builder is God." He's looking ahead. There's the Jerusalem. There's the promised land. There is Zion. And even though Abraham knows, "I can't accomplish that. I'm believing God can work beyond my weakness, beyond my humanity, beyond my frailty, beyond my sin. I believe that." And that's faith.
What do you also know about Abraham, the man of faith?
Remarkably fallen.
After all, he has a terrible background.
You recognize he's a great, great, great, great grandson of Noah. We talked about him last week. If you can remember anything from the sermon other than the hammer crashing on the pulpit.
After his salvation from the flood, drunkenness, family incest, and he curses his own son.
Not much of a family from which Abraham will come.
It's not just family background that's a problem. He descended himself into familiar sins. He is unfaithful to his spouse. One way that he's unfaithful is he abandons her. Yes, he obeys the call of God. He goes into the promised land and there's a famine there. So he goes down into Egypt. And what happens there? Pharaoh wants Sarah, his wife. And so what does he do?
She's my sister. You can have her.
God rescues them both. They go back to the promised land.
God furthers his promise. I will make you a father of many nations.
And what happens then?
Now back in the promised land where there are pagan tribes all around them, there's another man that wants Sarah. So what does Abraham do again?
He gives away his wife a second time to another man.
At some point Abraham, who believed God and was counted in for righteousness, stops believing that God will provide a son out of his own biological wife. And so he sleeps with his wife's maid.
And then one of all things, his wife gets upset about the fruit of that union.
Abraham takes his own biological son and his mistress and he puts them in the desert to die of exposure.
He plans the murder of his mystery and his own biological son.
Remarkably faithful and remarkably fallen.
How does God make a way out of this family?
You've already heard it. God responds to the bare nubs, the bare seeds of human faith. Abraham believed God. Genesis 15.6, Abraham believed God. God said, "I will make a family. I will fulfill my promise. Beyond your age and your weakness and your sin and your frailty, I'm going to provide for you." And Abraham believed God was the answer, not Abraham.
And in believing that God was the answer, God said, "I will credit that to you for righteousness." I'm going to say this is sufficient, not what you have done, but your belief in my provision for you. And that becomes absolutely crucial to the future. That's actually what God was saying to Abraham from the very beginning, in that same chapter where God says to Abraham, "You need to believe that I'm going to provide a family for you." And Abraham not only saw the stars numbering his children, but believed God would do it. Then there's that strange ending of the chapter that we have trouble making sense of, and it's day and age, that God said to Abraham, "I want you to take some sacrifices and cut these animals in half and spread them out on the ground."
And then as Abraham is falling asleep, God in the form of a smoking pot and a torch, kind of in miniature of the cloud and the lightning that will come at Mount Sinai later, God passes between the animal halves, declaring by this, "I cut a covenant with you. I make a promise." But we now know to be a suzerainty treaty, what sovereigns of the land did. May it happen to me, what has happened to these animals, if I forsake my Word.
And you must recognize ultimately when Jesus was upon the cross, the great sacrifice, God was saying, "You have abandoned my Word. I will not abandon it because I will maintain my covenant for those who believe in me." Abraham believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness. This core, essential gospel truth that will grow not only in the biblical record, but in our understanding, and we need it every day.
Just even when I say the words to you, "Abraham believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness," I have to say it to you with both gratitude and grief.
Because my father, a lay Baptist preacher, never preached any passage more commonly or powerfully than this passage. I cannot say the words without hearing his voice in my head coming out. Abraham believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness. And yet even if I say that, I wonder if some of you don't struggle and feel a bit of confusion who listen to me preach with some regularity. Because I've tried to be fairly honest about my father's wonderful strength. He was this lay Baptist preacher who served without funds, without money, and without acclaim year after year after year for decades, and yet at the same time so wrestled to maintain a sound marriage, who so believed in the promises of God and yet struggled to be tender to his own children, who had for all kinds of reasons impeccable integrity and impossible expectations.
A man who despite years previous still bore scars in the military and difficulties of his family of origin and so wrestled for them not to be what he would teach his own family.
And so as much as I tell you things that are admirable in him, I have to remind you and me from time to time, which was he, this Wayman Chapel, my father? Was he the father of the preacher in Illinois or was he the father of the prisoner in Mississippi?
And the answer is yes.
He was admirable and Adam-like.
He was holy and human.
And the reason I have to say that is because he was a lot like me.
And for that reason, as I think of my children and my family and my flaws and how I echo even when I cannot think, even when I think I'm not going to echo my father's reactions in my own family, I have to recognize, but Abraham believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness. When there was no merit on his own, when there was no earning of God's approval, God said, "Just trust me. Just believe in me. Just believe I will make a way, that I will stand in the way of the wrath of God that should come upon you. I will make a trust me to make the way. And when we do that, when we believe that, we actually have an answer for our culture. We have an answer for our own hearts when we know our failures are so great." After all, you know, when our culture looks at us in the church and they say, "Hemacrets!"
We just say, "You know, you're right.
Remarkably human.
That's who we are."
After all, you recognize, of course, that when we are adolescents, we all have remarkable ability to spot the flaws of our parents.
The mark of an adult is not spotting the flaws of your parents, but learning to forgive them.
Some of us never move to spiritual maturity when it comes to how we view our parents. We're stuck in adolescence. I know their failure. I know their flaw.
I'm stuck in adolescence of my understanding of me, my flaws, my wrongs, my difficulty.
And then comes the flood of faith.
But Abraham believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness. And I so need that understanding. I'm not depending on me. I'm not depending on my dad. He was not depending on himself. He was pointing me to a Savior. This is the beauty of Christian families, not that we're flawless. We are hypocrites. We are human. We are flawed.
But believe in a Savior who was none of those things, who said, "Trust me. Put your faith in me and hide behind His righteousness and His righteousness becomes our own." It is our faith. It is the beauty of what we want to teach not only ourselves, but the children who follow us. After all, it wasn't just to Abraham the promise came.
The Apostle Paul in Galatians 3, looking back at these same events, says these wonderful words, "Just as Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness, know then that it is those of faith who are sons of Abraham."
The family continues. We are children of Abraham. How are we children of Abraham? By faith.
By faith we are made righteous. We hide behind the reality of God working in our behalf. Abraham did not fully understand all that would happen. We understand the story moves forward. And ultimately when God says to Abraham in the 17th chapter, do you remember? And the sixth verse, "I will make you exceedingly fruitful. I will make you into nations and kings will come from you.
We know who the ultimate king will be."
They would nail a plaque over His head on a cross and they would say, "This is Jesus. He is the king of the Jews and He would die for my sin and He would die for your sin. And we who believe in that have His righteousness applied to us." It was the family plan that God would be teaching faith, showing faith, covenantally for generation upon generation upon generation and God would ultimately bless the nations by such faith. It's just old stuff, ancient history. No, listen to me. Some of us were at a conference this past week and while we were at the gospel coalition we heard the latest accounts of Johnny Erickson Todd. Do you remember who that is? The young woman injured by a diving accident became quadriplegic, now older and very seriously ill.
We prayed for her and one of the speakers at the conference recited part of her testimony.
She said this, "I hope that I can take my wheelchair to heaven with me.
I know that's not biblically correct. There will be no wheelchairs in heaven.
We will be made whole."
Nonetheless, she writes, "If I were able, I would have my wheelchair up in heaven right next to me when God gives me my brand new glorified body. I will turn to Jesus and I will say, "Lord, do you see that wheelchair right there? Well you were right when you said that this world would be full of trouble because that wheelchair has been trouble to me.
But Jesus, the weaker I was in that thing, the harder I leaned on you and the harder I leaned on you, the stronger I discovered you to be.
So thank you for what you did in my life through that wheelchair."
And now if you want to send it to hell, you can.
A lot of us recognize we have our wheelchairs too.
The faults in our families, the faults in us, the flaws that are so real, we are more like Abraham than we ever want to concede.
But for such people there is a covenant-keeping God who says, "I will be there for you. You put your faith in me and my righteousness is substituted for your unrighteousness. I will make you right by your convincing, by your convicting, by your knowledge that I make things right for you." And that's not just changing us. It's meant to be lived out in the realities of our daily family life so that people are changed by that. Not many of you will know, but if you read John E. Ericcentada's first book, when she was first injured, she was bitter and despairing and suicidal. But there were a couple of teen brothers who began to minister to her. Their names, the Gariots.
Years later as they went to seminary to learn ministry, I got to know them. And the couple of brothers who were there when I was there, one now leads a ministry in our nation's capital called Ministry to State in which he ministers to those who work in government across all party lines, hatreds, and pluralities with the love of Christ.
Another one of the brothers has his entire ministry, ministered in the poorest slums of Baltimore.
I sometimes have quoted from his wife's book 10,000 resurrections as their life across decades have touched so many other lives for Christ's good. The youngest brother himself ultimately went into ministry, ministering to college students and high school students. And as I recognize the profound influence of these brothers upon John E. who has touched so many hundreds of thousands, their own lives touching those in leadership, in hard spots in life, in growing places of life.
I've admired them always. And a few years ago I had a chance to meet their father. And I must tell you, I wonder, man, I bet this is some kind of guy. In my imagination, meeting the father of the Gariots, I mean, I knew he was going to be some cross between Ronald Reagan and Ward Cleaver and Moses.
And then I met him.
A little man with a hesitant manner from a blue collar profession and bad grammar,
who around the kitchen table gathered his family in prayer and taught them of the Lord Jesus and took them to the rhythms of church life so that red became red and Jesus loves me this I know became their hearts conviction.
And from that family is coming nations and kings and knowledge of Jesus Christ.
So it can be in ours, not because of our perfections, but because we have said in every way that we can and God gives us opportunity, Jesus loves me.
This I know, for the Bible tells me so. It is His covenant love.
Praise God and teach our children.
Father, so work your grace into our hearts and lives, I pray, that we who love you might be changed by the knowledge of your grace.
We believe you. We don't believe us.
We see too much of the reality of us.
So may our children as they know we have turned to you, seek you as well.
Whether we're parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, Sunday school teachers, youth leaders, in whatever way you use us, let us be clear.
We believe you.
Provide a way for us through Jesus Christ our Lord. We trust Him.
Thank you Jesus.
In Jesus name, Amen.