So if you travel through parts of Europe, you'll see something
striking. There are massive, beautiful
church buildings, centuries old places that were once filled
with worship, with singing, with hearing of the word.
But if you walk around them today, many of them are empty.
Many of them have been turned into museums.
Others have been turned into cafes, restaurants, some even
apartments. One of them that that came to my
mind was Saint Anthony of Padua. Park now is turned into a
climbing gym and you get to see the beautiful stained glass
windows as you scale the rocks. And it is easy for us to think,
man, that could never happen here, not in the USA.
But the reality is something similar is already happening.
Thousands of churches every year close their doors.
Depending on what statue you look at, anywhere between 4000
to 10,000 churches yearly close their doors, whether by just not
having enough, whether by unforeseen circumstances or just
the fact that they drifted from their first love.
And it, and it has to, to bring up this question in our mind, is
what happened? Because Christianity doesn't
just disappear overnight and what happens quietly and it
happens across generations. You see, one generation follows
after the Lord, the next one just kind of assumes the Lord.
And then the next one leaves completely.
Not because God failed, not because the truth disappeared,
but because our hearts were prone to wander and we failed to
teach the next generation something that was once real,
that was no longer remembered, no longer lives, no longer
passed on. And if we're honest, that kind
of drift doesn't just happen out there.
It happens in here. It happens in your homes, it
happens in our routines. It happens in our own hearts.
And that is exactly what Moses is addressing in Deuteronomy 6.
Israel is standing at the edge of the promised land.
They could, they can see it inside.
They're about to step into a blessing that they did not build
homes, they didn't fill vineyards, they didn't plant.
And Moses knows something. He knows that the greatest
danger that Israel's going to face is not the enemies outside,
but it's what's it within them, the drift within their own
hearts that in the middle of blessing they might forget the
Lord. And if they forget the Lord, it
won't just affect them, it will affect the next generation.
And so the main idea this morning is, is the direction of
your heart determines the direction of your life and the
faith of the next generation. Read with me in Deuteronomy 6,
starting in verse 10. It says then when the Lord your
God brings you into the land that he swore to your father's,
to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you with great
and good cities that you did not build.
And a house is full of all good things that you did not fill,
and cisterns that you did not dig, and vineyards and olive
trees that you did not plant. And when you eat and are full,
then take care lest you forget the Lord who brought you out of
the land of Egypt, out of the House of slavery.
It is the Lord your God. You shall fear, Him you shall
serve, and by his name you shall swear.
You shall not go after other gods, the gods of the peoples
who are around you. For the Lord your God in your
midst is a jealous God. Let's the anger of the Lord your
God be kindled against you, and he destroy you from off the face
of the earth. You shall not put the Lord your
God to test as you tested Him at Massa.
You shall dig diligently, keep the commandments of the Lord
your God, and His testimonies and His statutes which He has
commanded you. And you shall do what is right
and good in the sight of the Lord, that it may go well with
you, and that you may go in and take possession of the good land
that the Lord swore to give to your Father's by thrusting out
all your enemies from before you, as the Lord has promised.
When your Son asks you in time to come, what is the meaning of
the testimonies and the statutes and the rules that the Lord our
God has commanded you? Then you shall say to your son,
We were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt, and the Lord brought us
out of Egypt with a mighty hand. And the Lord showed signs and
wonders great and grievous against Egypt and against
Pharaoh and all his household before our eyes.
And He brought us out from there that He might bring us in and
give us the land that He swore to give to our fathers.
And the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the
Lord our God and our good always, that He might preserve
us alive as we are this day. And it will be righteousness for
us if we are careful to do all this commandment before the Lord
our God as He has commanded us. You see, Israel is still
wandering in the desert, but the Promised Land is closer than
ever. And, and Moses shows us that
there are these two cycles that we can live in.
And the first one is this cycle of drift when God is forgotten.
And listen to how Moses sets this up in in in verses 10
through 11. And when the Lord your God
brings you into the land that he swore to your father's, to
Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob to give you with great and good
cities that you did not build, houses full of all good things
that you did not fill and cisterns that you did not dig,
and vineyards and olive trees that you did not plant.
And when you eat and are full, he sets up the beginning of this
drift cycle. It's this, this reality of
there's blessing. And when blessing happens, it
can it can lead to forgetting. He says everything that you're
about to enjoy. You did not create.
You didn't build the cities, you didn't fill the houses, you
didn't plant the vineyards. You just got to enjoy them.
They were already there for you. They were spoils of the war.
And over and over and over again, Moses presses the truth.
You did not. You did not Why?
Because Moses is trying to anchor their hearts and grace.
You see, the blessings that they're going to enjoy in the
Promised land are gifts that they receive, not gifts that
they earned. And yet here at the height of
God's provision comes the warning.
Moses says care, take care, lest you forget the Lord.
You see, as Moses is speaking, this should stop the Israelites.
One would expect Moses to warn these people of hey, there's
going to be enemies that we're going to have to deal with,
there's going to be war, there's going to be suffering.
But instead he says, no, take care that you would forget, that
you would not forget the Lord. Instead, he warns them about
this prosperity and the danger that it can bring as they go
into the promised land. He warns them about forgetting
God in the middle of blessing. One of the most dangerous
moments in your life, physical or spiritual, is not when you
are empty, but when you are full.
You see, as one commentator notes, the danger of the land is
not just its idols, it's its abundance.
Because abundance can quietly shift your dependence away from
God. And Moses is saying you're about
to go into a land with houses that are already built, water
that you don't have to dig. This repetition was to keep
Israel from taking credit for what only God has done.
And then he presses it even further.
When, when everything is handed to you, when when you step into
blessings you did not build, you can lose sight of the God who
gave it to you. Because you see, when you're
empty, you know you need God. And all of us know that we've
had, we have experiences of that in our life of when we are
empty, we know we need God and we run to him and we are
desperate. But when you're full, it becomes
very easy to live like you don't need God, not intentionally, not
not consciously, but subtly. You stop praying the prayers
that you used to pray. You stop depending like you used
to you. You stopped trusting what you
can't see and and trusting what you could.
And this is not a subtle drift that Moses is.
This is this is a subtle drift Moses is trying to get apart.
He's saying Israel didn't wake up one day and say, you know
what, I'm done with God. No, the drift begins much
quieter than that. It begins when you start
enjoying the gift instead of remembering the giver.
And so blessing leads to forgetting.
And Moses is not talking about forgetting God.
He's not saying the Israelites have this memory loss.
What he's saying is it's covenantal language that that we
have looked at all throughout Deuteronomy up to this point of
they are forgetting redemption. They're forgetting that they
were once slaves in Egypt and God brought them out.
And sadly, Moses doesn't just warn them once.
We're going to see in a couple weeks in Deuteronomy 8, he says,
take care lest you forget your Lord, lest when you have eaten
in our full, your heart be lifted up and forget the Lord.
This is saying you're full, you're satisfied, you're
successful, and then your heart quietly begins to lift away from
God. And just a few verses earlier,
we saw that God commanded you shall love the Lord your God
with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your
strength. And now Moses is warning them
here, Hey, pay attention to your heart.
Blessings can lead you to forgetting God.
And when you forget God, your heart begins to loosen its grip
on him. And once your heart loosens its
grip on God, it's, it stays empty.
And then it will reach for something, which leads to the
second part of this cycle of, of blessing leads to forgetfulness.
Forgetfulness leads to idolatry. Notice what he says immediately
in verses 13 through 14. He says it is the Lord your God.
You shall fear him, you shall serve, and by his name you shall
swear. You shall not go after other
gods, the gods of the peoples who are around you.
Moses is going back to that 10 commandment language.
He's rephrasing the first two commandments of you shall have
no other gods and you shall have serve no idols.
And don't miss what Moses is doing here.
You see, in the Hebrew, God's name is the one that comes
first. And So what it's doing is he's
literally saying, Yahweh, you shall fear, you shall serve, you
shall swear by his name. And so he's front loading this
whole sentence with God himself. And he's saying because this is
not about behavior, it goes back to allegiance, goes back to
loyalty. Moses gives 3 words.
Fear, serve, swear. Those are all covenantal
language. To fear him just means you
Revere him above everything else.
To serve him means you belong to him and you seek his good.
And to swear by his name means your life is anchored in Him.
This is total life allegiance that Moses is telling them.
And here is why that matters. It's because Israel already
knows what it means to serve under a master, right?
They they were just in Egypt serving under Pharaoh being his
slaves. They knew what it was like to
wake up every day and to belong to someone who demanded
everything and gave nothing back.
And now God brings them out, and he says, you are not free to
belong to no one. I brought you out so that I can
bring you in. You are now mine.
But here's the difference. Pharaoh enslaved them, God
redeemed them. Pharaoh took from them, and God
gave to them a land that they did not build.
Pharaoh ruled through oppression and God rules through covenantal
love. So when Moses is saying, hey,
fear God, serve God, swear by his name.
He's saying don't drift back to the thing that was taking life
from you because the reality is you will all serve someone or
something. We are created beings to
worship. And when our heart loosens its
grip on God, there is going to be something that is going to
fill that spot. And if you don't intentionally
worship God, you will replace Him with something or someone
else. And here's the hard part.
Most of the time it's not something that's evil.
It normally is something that looks normal.
Career, comfort, reputation, sports, entertainment, friends,
your spouse, your kids. We replace God with something
else and say that this is now my idol.
And these are things that are not bad in themselves, but they
become ultimate in our heart. As John Calvin said, the human
heart is a perpetual factory of idols in Israel.
Moses is saying is you are not immune to this, but I can't help
but think that Moses is is sharing this warning with all
these things in his mind that he's watched the Israelites
struggle in and we could be here all morning talking about how
Israel drifted from the Lord in the stories of it.
But remember Exodus 32, Moses had gone up to the mountain to
hear the Lord and the Israelites got bored and they were like,
man, I don't think Moses is coming back.
So what do the Israelites do? They go to Aaron and say, hey,
Aaron, will you? Will you build us a, a God so
that we can worship him and we can dance around him because we
don't know if Moses is coming back.
You know, these are the same people that saw the Red Sea part
and that was not long ago. They had seen God deliver.
They had seen the pillar of smoke and the pillar of fire
leading them. Yet now they're over here saying
let's dance around this golden calf they forgot and they were
placed and Moses warns them to not go after other gods.
You see, this is more than just bowing down to statues.
This, this language of go after is the direction of your heart.
It's saying, what? What are you moving towards?
What are you chasing? What are you building your life
around? It looks like trusting yourself
more than God. It looks like building your life
around comfort instead of obedience looks like longing for
what God has already called you out of.
So let me ask you what what do you run to when life gets hard?
What do you rely on when you feel uncertain?
What? What do you fear losing the
most? Because the answer to that,
those questions, that's what your heart's going after.
And Moses adds something that should have sobered Israel and
should sober us. He says, for the Lord your God
in your midst is a jealous God, lest the anger of the Lord your
God be kindled against you and he destroy you from off the face
of the earth. Hear me, This is not petty
jealousy. This is not a jealousy of a weak
king. This is the jealousy from the
righteous king who brought you out.
He's telling you so. This is the the rightful king
who brought you out of Egypt. And what he is saying is I will
not share you with anyone. He's not introducing a new idea.
He's taking them back to Mount Sinai in Exodus 20, three
through 5, where he says, you shall have no other gods before
me. Don't make any carved images,
nothing on my likeness. You shall not bow down to them.
For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.
He will not share you. In other words, this has always
been about exclusive devotion. This is the jealousy that a
husband has for his bride, that he will not share you with
anything or anyone because he alone is God.
He alone saved you, he alone brought you out of bondage and
he alone is worthy to be praised.
To go after other gods is not just a a bad day, it's a
betrayal of the rightful king who demands your allegiance.
And so when God is forgotten, he is replaced.
And when you don't trust him, you start demanding that he
prove himself to you. Notice the third part of the
cycle. Idolatry leads to testing.
And as, as the heart goes after
other things, it leads to this, this moment of, of questioning
God and not in a rightful way. But Moses brings up a, a not
great story of Israel. He brings them back to Exodus
17, back to NASA, where these the Israelites are thirsty and
they say and they, they complain like man is, is the Lord really
among us? Like, is he really for us?
But don't miss what's happening here.
When I, when I've read this in the past, I was like, man,
that's it. That's an honest question.
They're walking around the wilderness.
They're thirsty. They're like, OK, what are we
doing? But this is not an honest cry
from the Israelites. No, God has already delivered
them from Egypt. They've already seen the Red Sea
split. He's already provided for them
again and again. And yet the Israelites demand
proof. Why?
Because once your heart has shifted to something else.
God is no longer the one you trust.
And when you don't trust him, you start putting him to the
test and you start putting him on trial and and to to test God
is not just asking questions. It's OK to to ask questions from
the Lord. This word to test is to demand
that God prove himself according to your expectations.
It's to demand him to do something contrary to his nature
and character. To test God is really saying,
hey, if you are really good, then do this.
If you are really with me, then then show up like this.
And if we're honest, we do this more often than we think.
This is not just an Israel problem.
This is an US problem. This is a me problem.
This is a you problem, you see, when life doesn't go the way you
expected, what do you do? When prayers don't get answered
the way that you hoped, when circumstances feel uncertain,
you begin to question God. Are you?
Are you really good? Are you really for me?
Are you really there? And once you get there, once you
get to the part of can I really trust you?
Once God is no longer trusted, drift is not far behind.
You see, the Israelites had forgotten God.
They had made themselves their their idol and now they are
demanding God to do something for them.
When God has forgotten, you no longer trust Him and therefore
you test Him. And this is reinforced in the
New Testament when Jesus in the wilderness in Matthew 4, Satan
comes to him and tempts him with this very thing.
He says, hey, if you are the Son of God, just just throw yourself
down because surely God will save you.
In other words, Satan says force God to prove himself.
It's the same temptation Israel faced at Massa.
Is the Lord really with me? Will he really come through?
And Jesus answers by quoting Deuteronomy 6.
You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.
You see, where Israel failed, Jesus remained faithful.
Like think about that. Israel has seen the Red Sea and
still tested God. Jesus was alone in the
wilderness, hungry, thirsty, alone under pressure.
And yet he trusted his Father completely.
Because Jesus didn't come just to teach you what to do.
He came to show us what to do. Where you question, he trusted.
Where you demanded he submitted and where you drift, he stood
firm. And that's why this matters so
much, because the cycle Moses is warning about is the exact place
where your hearts are prone to fail.
Like we just sang. And we are prone to wander,
prone to leave the God that we love.
And and so it leads us to the final aspect of this drift,
which is disobedience. This is not necessarily dramatic
rebellion, but it's slow, it's quiet, and externally everything
may look fine. Why?
Because Israel's still going to be in the land, he says.
I'm going to give you the land. That's I guarantee that.
I promise that to your father. So you will live in the land.
But how depressing would it be to live in the land and not have
the heart to live in the land, to still have their heart back
in Egypt, back to the things that God had redeemed them from.
He's saying yes, you will be in the land because I promise that.
But you'd only be in the land externally.
Internally, your hearts would have been moved.
It's like 1 commentary said their bodies were in the
wilderness, but their hearts were still in Egypt.
They had moved physically, but their hearts kept drifting
backwards. And Jesus gives us one of the
most sobering pictures of this cycle in Luke 1732.
It's just three words. Remember Lot's wife?
What happened to her? Well, God was rescuing her.
He was pulling them out of judgement and leading them to
safety. And she looked back.
It was turned into a pillar of salt.
You see, she didn't run back to Sodom.
She didn't openly reject God and just run back to what she
wanted. No, she looked because her heart
was still there. Her body was leaving, but her
heart was still in Sodom. That is the drift that Moses is
warning the Israelites about. A heart that is still attached
to what God has called you out of.
He's saying don't let your heart drift.
And church hear me, this is the danger for you.
You can still show up. You can sit in the Pew week in
week out. You can sing the songs, you can
listen to the sermons. You can serve and look fine
externally. Yet internally your heart has
moved away from God. So where is your heart looking
back? Where were you tempted to
return? Not physically, but in your
desires. Back to old patterns, back to
old sins, back to old comforts, back to your old identities.
What has God called you out of that your heart still longs for?
Drift begins when your heart starts looking somewhere else.
And here is the cycle. Moses warning Israel blessing
leads to forgetting God, then to idolatry, then detesting, and
then drift from God and left to our own selves.
This is the natural direction of the human heart.
We will naturally be on this cycle, a cycle of drift, a cycle
of finding something else to replace our love for the Lord.
And this is true of Israel and this is true for you.
There is no middle ground. You are either drifting from God
or you are standing firm in Him. And if that is where Moses would
have stopped, this would just be a warning to your life.
But he doesn't stop there because this doesn't just affect
you, it shapes what comes after you.
And He shows us something even more weightier.
The cycle of drift doesn't just affect the Israelites hearing
the instruction. It doesn't stay contained to
their life. It shapes their future.
The hinge verse in this whole section is verse 20.
When it says when your son asks you in time to come, not one
sentence changes everything. It means the condition of your
heart today becomes the starting point of someone else's faith
tomorrow. Moses is about to show them that
they are not just living for themselves.
They are setting a trajectory for the future generation, which
leads us to the second point this morning, is that your
worship shapes the next generation.
This is the hinge of the whole passage.
It ties it together. And as I look at verse 20, when
your son asked you in time to come, I'll be honest with you.
This part of the passage hits me differently now than it used to
before I had kids. I've always known this was true.
I was serving the youth. I was unstaffed, so I knew that
this was a responsibility to teach the next generation.
But the moment Judah entered our life, the moment Silas came
after this part in Deuteronomy no longer became just like, oh,
yeah, that's part of my job or I know that's a responsibility.
But now I have little eyes watching my life and there are
questions coming in and and Judah is getting to an age where
he's asking these questions. Why do we do this?
Why can't we just go to play space on Sunday?
Why do we even come here? Why does this matter?
Is this real? And I am realizing more than
ever, they are not going to be shaped by what I say.
What they're going to be shaped by is what do I love?
What do I prioritize? What do I live like my faith is
real. What do they just hear Dad at
night reading the Bible stories going through the motions and
that's not just true for me. Parents, you feel the weight.
You don't get to press pause on that responsibility.
And even if you're not a parent, your life is still shaping
someone some little eye is looking up to you going.
I want to model my life around them because this is what the
people of God do. Faith is always meant to be
passed on and lived out. That's why Moses says when your
son asks, it's not if, but he says when.
Because Moses is not just concerned with the heart of
Israel's people today, He's concerned with the future.
He's concerned not whether this this next generation is going to
inherit the land, because they will.
He's concerned with whether the next generation will know the
Lord that gave them the land. And all throughout this chapter,
he's been pressing this. There was one God.
He alone is worthy, and he alone is to be praised.
And so the word he says, it must be on your heart.
It must shape your life. It must fill your home, right?
You shall teach them diligently to your children when you sit,
when you walk, when you lie, when you rise.
This is not occasional instruction.
This is a life where God is constantly brought into view to
the next generation. A word of God is meant to
saturate their home. And so when we get to verse 20,
this is this is not a new idea. This is the expected outcome of
a life lived out for the word. And now Moses says when that
kind of life is being lived, when your son asks not if, but
when your son asks Chevy parent in this room.
A little side note, this is not a new development in parenting.
Kids have been asking why since the beginning of time.
And many of us laugh because we know it.
Remember serving at summer camp and they're like, there is no
dumb question. I was like, that is not true
because I have two little ones that asked why questions over
and over again. Some of you probably said that
today as we were going to church.
You were like, I don't want to answer this.
And there might be this temptation in that moment.
Us parents, we love to say, because I said so now that might
get you through the moment, but it doesn't address the heart.
It doesn't fix the situation and Moses is going to hit on this
because he said, hey, when your son comes and asks this question
of what are these statues? Why do we follow the Lord?
Most commentators said the natural flow of thought would
have just jumped straight to verse 24.
Hey, dad, why? Why do we follow God?
Because the Lord said so. You see that the sons, they're
noticing something in the life of their parent that is
different than the culture. You see a faith that is visible
will be questioned. A faith that is visible will be
questioned. No obedience equals no
questions. Because he's saying, hey, the
next generation is watching. They are listening.
They are forming their understanding of God by what
they see in you. So they ask, hey, what is the
meaning? They're not wanting the rules.
They're asking, hey, why do we live this way?
Why does this matter? Why?
Why don't we go to play space on Sunday instead of church?
And here is the weight of it. If they don't physical doesn't
answer this question, something else will.
Moses knows that they are about to enter a land filled with
other gods, other values, other stories.
And if the people of God are not intentional to teach the next
generation why we follow after the Lord, He knows that someone
else will. They will be shaped by
everything around them. And so this is not teaching
information. Moses is addressing forming a
worldview in your in the next generation that knows the God
who saved them from Egypt. If they only inherit the
commands without the understanding, they will
eventually abandoned both. And this is not unique to
Deuteronomy. This is the pattern of
Scripture. God's works are meant to be
declared from one generation to another.
Psalm 145 six. They shall speak of the might of
your awesome deeds. Psalm 78 four.
We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming
generation the glorious deeds of the Lord.
Psalm 78 seven. So that they should set their
hoping God and not forget the works of God.
Because what you worship will shape what they inherit.
If the cycle of drift continues, if God is forgotten in your
life, then what gets passed down?
Not intentional rebellion, but silence.
Parents stop talking about God, Homes grow spiritually quiet and
kids grow up without context of the God who saves.
They may know the rules but they don't have the reason why and
eventually they don't know God. That's Israel's history.
Judges 210. It's one of the saddest verses
in all of Scripture, in my opinion.
It says in all that generation also were gathered to their
fathers, and there arose another generation after them who did
not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel.
Joshua had just died, and now we have a generation that raises up
that does not know God. And if you're familiar with the
story of Judges, it gets really bad.
Not because God failed, not because the truth disappeared,
but because the story was no longer told, explained, and
understood. So Moses presses into them
before they even enter the land. Do not just obey, teach, do not
follow, explain. Do not just carry the commands.
Pass on the meaning on why we do it.
While we are not entering the land of Canaan, we are living in
a world filled with competing voices, competing truths,
competing identities, competing gods, and they are all coming
after the next generation. Look around at the kids in this
room. The world is coming after them
and telling them lies. And if we do not teach them,
Moses says we will have a generation that does not know
God. We are one generation away of if
if we just assume that they'll know the command has not
changed. The New Testament picks up this
same responsibility. Ephesians 6 forefathers bring
them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, and
even it goes beyond the home. What you have heard from me
entrust the faithful men. Second Timothy 22.
The pattern is the same. Truth received, truth lived,
truth passed on, and Moses is making something clear to Israel
and to us today. The responsibility is not
optional. So it's not a thing.
We sign a waiver and say, yeah, I'm going to opt out on that
class. Parents, this is primarily
yours. You are the frontline disciple
errs. You are the ones that answer the
why. You connect obedience to who God
is and what he has done and you do not outsource that.
As Wright points out in his commentary, God is forming a
nation by forming households, parents.
What that means is you are ordained to be the primary
teacher of your kids and as someone that feels the weight of
that, you can go in confidence knowing that God gave the kids
to you, nobody else. He said you are to teach them.
But it doesn't stop there. The people of God also share the
responsibility. Notice he didn't just pull in
all the people that have that have kids.
He's he's teaching the whole Israelite community.
And So what that means for us is the people of God are the ones
that preserve the truth. They model faithfulness.
They guard against idolatry because every generation is
either passing down truth or losing it.
God's design is multi generational faithfulness
through both family discipleship and community reinforcement.
That's just design for the body of believers is that the parents
are teaching it. And then us, me, Amy, all the
teachers in, in Sunday school, all the adult teachers, all
we're doing is reinforcing what parents are to be doing.
We are one generation away from forgetting God.
And so because Moses doesn't just assume the question, he
gives the answer, If this is the cycle of drift, how do we break
this? And Moses doesn't point to tell
Israel, hey, try harder. What he does is he points them
to remember which point #3 is the cycle of remembering when
God is rehearsed and passed on. See, Moses gives the answer to
the son's question, and for me it was, it was a striking 1.
Moses doesn't answer with a rule.
He doesn't say because God said so.
He doesn't say because this is what we do, because really, in
my understanding and my thought was moral obligation to an
imperative God should be enough to elicit obedience.
But all of us have kids in the room.
We understand that that is not true.
In other words, we think, hey, yeah, just since God said so, do
it. And in the language of a parent,
hey, because I said so. But this is not what Moses does.
Instead, Moses answers the question with a story that yes,
the commandments and the statutes and all that is wrapped
into it, but he he answers the sun with a story, and it's the
story of redemption he begins. As one commentary has said, this
is the most concise but comprehensive summary of the
Exodus. It is the Gospel of the Old
Testament in a nutshell. And so he begins by saying, we
were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt. We were once in bondage.
We were once helpless, bound. There was no way out.
We could not fix ourselves. But then God stepped in and he
rescued us. He brought us out.
God acted, God intervened, God delivered us from Egypt.
And then he continues and says, he shows signs and wonders to
Egypt, and God exercised his judgement on Egypt, and then he
brought them out to bring them in.
God didn't just save them from something.
He says, Son, he brought us out of Egypt so that we could be
brought into the promised land, from slavery to promise, from
bondage to belonging. And then the Lord commanded us
to keep these statutes, keep these rules, keep all the
commandments. After deliverance came the
commandments, and that order matters.
God did not save Israel because they were good.
He saved them and then gave them the commandments.
Redemption, then obedience, grace, then response.
And then he says the fruit of that will be righteousness, not
because they earned it, but but as the fruit of trusting God in
walking in his ways, Right? Do you see the pattern?
This is the opposite of the cycle of drift.
That was forgetting God, idolatry, testing, and then
drifting. Now what we see is it starts
with remembering. They've got to remember that
they were once slaves. Then they worship the Lord has
brought us out. They trust the Lord has brought
us in to something and then they obey the Lord has commanded keep
these statutes and then they pass it on.
Then you shall say to your son, we were Pharaoh's slaves.
Do you see this? This is how Israel is to break
the cycle of drift. And sadly, they don't many, many
moments in their life that we, if you read the Bible, you will
see Israel fails to do this. And when they fail to remember,
when they fail to worship, when they fail to trust, when they
fail to obey, when they fail to pass it on, it leads them into a
cycle of drift like we saw at the beginning.
But the beauty of this is this is not just Israel's story.
This is the gospel. We were once slaves to our sin,
in bondage with no way out, no way to get us out.
Ephesians tells us that we are dead in our sins and trespasses,
that we were once that way. But then God stepped in.
God intervened. God put on flesh and live the
life that we were supposed to do.
He didn't come with plagues and signs.
He didn't come with all these commandments.
He came with his Son, God, put on flesh, dwelt among us, live
that perfect life that we were supposed to.
He was obedient when Israel failed, He when we forget, He
remembered. When we drift, He stood firm.
And then the beauty of it all is he.
He took the exodus and like magnified it and He went to the
cross and He bore the sins that and He bore the death that we
deserved, and the wrath of God was poured out.
The thing that was meant for us, the cup that was meant for you
and me, God took it on himself and He died so that through Him
you could be brought out, and not just brought out, but
brought in. He does not leave you alone and
you're wandering. He says, I have brought you out
of bondage into my family, brought into forgiveness,
brought into life, brought into relationship with God.
And so when Moses says you were once slaves, that is the shadow
in the gospel is the fulfillment.
So when your kids ask, when the next generation comes up to you
and asks, hey, why do you follow?
You don't start with rules. You start with the gospel.
You start with Jesus of this is who I was, this is who I was in
bondage. But then God stepped in and he
redeemed me and he saved me. And This is why I follow him,
because obedience is not the basis of righteousness, it's the
expression of devotion. We obey not because we get
something from it, but it's because it's the only logical
response to the sovereign Lord who paid for our sins.
Why would we not obey? And so Moses has shown us 2
paths, 2 cycles, 1 begins when you forget God, the other begins
when you remember him, when you obey, when you trust, when you
worship. And some of you in this room,
you, you hear these words of slavery, bondage, redemption,
deliverance, and, and maybe you just always thought that was for
someone else. But the reality is apart from
Christ, that is all of us, we are not as free as we think we
are. We are bound in sin.
We are under its weight. We cannot fix ourselves.
We cannot free ourselves. And the bad news is you deserve
death. But the good news of the gospel
is that there is life in Jesus. The good news is that God does
not leave his people there. He steps in.
And if you have never trusted him, this is where your response
begins. Not with trying harder, not with
cleaning yourself up, but with surrender, with faith, with
saying God, I need to be rescued because I cannot do it myself.
And for those of you who do know him, this passage should press
you in a different way because the question is not have you
been brought out, but what are you passing on?
Because your life is not neutral.
It is shaping someone. It is forming someone, it is
teaching someone. And so parents, you feel that.
So let me ask you a question that has been on my heart this
week is, are your children learning from your words, from
your example, from your experiences, your expectations?
Are they learning that you care about nothing more than this,
that their lives would be fully spent for the Lord Jesus Christ?
Do they know clearly, consistently, unmistakably that
that your greatest desire for them is not success?
It's not comfort, it's not reputation, it's not a good job,
it's not marrying the right person, it's not even about
making you proud, but your greatest desire for them is that
they would belong fully to the Redeemer and live for His glory.
The Lord has been wrecking my heart this week with this.
That is, that is something that we pray with Judah and Silas
every night. It's not that, oh man, they'd be
amazing, man, which we want that, but we pray that God, you
would bring them out of their bondage, that they would follow
after you. That is our greatest desire
because they are asking and any of the even if they don't say it
out loud, they're asking you what will you give them?
What will you give them rules or will you give them a reason?
Will you give them expectations or will you give them the story
of their Savior and church? This is not just on parents.
We are a people. We are called to preserve the
truth, to model faithfulness, and to pass it on to the next
generation. Everyone of you in this room is
shaping someone. So what does your life make
clear about him? If someone watched your life
closely, what would you say? What would they say you worship?
What would they say matters most in your life?
Because whatever that is, that is what you are passing on.
So maybe for you the response is simple.
You need to remember again, you've been drifting, your heart
has been pulled in other directions and today the moment
is to come back. Maybe for you the response is
repentance. The there are things you've been
going after. There have been parts of your
heart that you have given to something else that you need to
go back and trust God. Maybe today is the moment to
turn. And maybe for you the response
is responsibility to stop assuming faith will just carry
over and start intentionally passing it on in your home and
your conversations in your life. And maybe for some of you, this
is the moment you trust Christ for the first time.
So as we respond now, as Jeff comes and leads us in a time of
response, don't just think about what you've heard.
Think about what your life is becoming, because the question
is not what do I believe? The question is, what will the
next generation inherit from me? Let's pray.
Heavenly Father, thank you for your word.
God, I thank you for this warning that Moses gave the
Israelites years and years ago, but it's still true for us
today. Now, God, our hearts are still
prone to wander. We are still guilty of, of, of
falling away from our first love and putting other things in, in
your place. And God, I am thank, I am so
grateful that that the story did not end for Israel in Egypt, but
that you brought them out. So that means that you came and
you stepped in because God, we know that that the Scripture
tells us that all of us have sinned and we've fallen short of
the glory of God and that the punishment of that is death.
And the beauty of the gospel is that you paid it, God.
So I pray for the hearts in this room that don't know that that
they are still living in bondage to whatever sin has a hold of
them. I pray that your spirit would
break those chains and deliver them.
And God, I pray for the one that's drifting, the one that's
forgotten you, the one that's that's bought into the lies of
the world. I pray that you would use this
morning in your word to bring them back to you.
God, man, we go live out what we know is true.
See you name we pray, Amen. Thanks for listening.
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respond to this sermon, visit our website at
www.heritageshawnee.org.