Christ Community Chapel is a church in Hudson, OH, that invites people to reimagine life because of Jesus. Learn more about us at ccchapel.com.
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.