Sermonette: Teach Your Children

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

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Please take your Bibles and turn to Matthew 3. These words were spoken by our God about His Son. We will look at verse 17:

Matthew 3:17 And suddenly a voice came from heaven, saying, "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."

God made an audible voice out of heaven, saying, “I am well pleased with what My Son is doing on the earth.” And when we look at our children, when they do things that exhibit godly traits and godly character, we say to ourselves and maybe even to other people, “These are my children. I am well pleased with what they are doing.”

God's Word tells us how to teach our children and give them traits that will lead them and guide them into God's Kingdom.

So today we are going to read a familiar scripture passage which tells us how we can teach our children and how we can give them godly traits. Some of you have probably already turned there to Deuteronomy chapter 6.

Deuteronomy 6:5-6 “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart.”

Right off the bat, God tells us we have to have a passion for God. We have to love God with all our heart, with our total being, and we have to put His Word in our heart. Does it sound like we do a lot of Bible study and reading? Does it sound like we memorize the Scripture? Enjoy singing it? And, maybe even making up songs about it? And, making it a center focal point of our lives where when we do things that we have these words ringing in our ears, giving us guidelines of conduct of how we should treat people? And then we live it and experience the abundant life, the excitement and the joy from obeying God's laws and how great that kind of life is! That is the first step.

David had a passion for, and we should have a passion for God, and a love for God. David is a great example of one who had a passion for God. He sat in the beautiful wilderness, and he saw the trees and the flowers and the great creation and the stars, and he wrote many beautiful hymns praising God and expressing his confidence and trust in God. He trusted God for deliverance in all things.

And when he saw Goliath shaking his fists at the armies of Israel, saying, “I defy you to give a man, a champion, to stand up against me, Goliath.” And David said, “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that dares to shake his fist and defy the armies of the living God?” And he went before Saul and he said, “I will fight him!” He said, “God delivered me from the lion and the bear, and God will deliver me from this giant. And I do not need a sword and a shield and a spear. I have not proved them, but I know that God will deliver me.”

When he got before Goliath, Goliath was standing there shaking his fist, he was twice David's size, cursing him by his gods and cursing Israel, and saying, “Why has this dog come out before me?” David was not afraid. He was angry at a man that he would say these things about God. And David said, “You come with a sword and a shield and a spear, but I come in the name of the Lord God of Israel, whose armies you defy.” He said, “I will smite you. I will take your head off. I will feed the carcasses of the army of the Philistines to the birds,” and he started running towards Saul. He was ready to do exactly what he said. He did not even have his stone in his sling yet, or in his hand. It said he reached his hand while he was running.

And he did exactly what he said. You know the rest of the story. David did this because he had a passion for God. He had a love for God. He had a confidence in God because he trusted God in everything that he did. His mind and heart was on God.

So we should have a passion for God. And when we develop a passion for God, when we put His words in our heart, we have something to give to our children. We can give them our example of righteous living. We can give them our knowledge of the Scriptures, and share it with them. We can give them confidence and faith and love. And we can give them guides along their way for their lives.

Let us read verse 7.

Deuteronomy 6:7 “You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.”

Now, if you were to diagram this sentence, it has two branches. It says, “you shall,” and then “teach and talk.” So they are two different facets, and we will talk about those in a few minutes, but it tells you what to teach—teach them the words of God.

Moses was talking specifically about the Ten Commandments, but we certainly understand that we have the whole Word, and God intends for us to live by it, and to teach it diligently to our children.

It says teach diligently. How do you teach diligently? It takes perseverance, it takes drive, it takes consistency, it takes planning. To me it sounds like He is telling us that every day we should teach our children; have a teaching session.

And then it says when you sit, walk, lie [down], rise [up]—virtually every facet of your life. You should have eye-to-eye contact with your children in conversation with them, talking to them.

So teaching is, by definition, you have a set time that you are going to teach. You have a set place. The teacher is designated. The students are designated. So it is a planned activity.

The teaching is much like a Spokesman's Club speech. You have a specific purpose, a one sentence idea of what you are going to teach. And everything you say should be directed toward getting across that point.

I would say for young children especially the teaching is probably more effective if it is brief. I think like reading a Bible verse, maybe letting this be the memory verse for the day, or something like that, showing by an illustration how it can apply to their lives.

What I have in mind is something like the verse in Exodus that says, “I am the Lord that heals you,” and then tell them the story about when Paul was shipwrecked on a Mediterranean island with all these prisoners. And instead of saying, “Woe is me,” and shivering in the cold, he encouraged them. He said, “God's going to deliver us,” and he gathered wood. He encouraged them, gathered wood, and a serpent bit him on the hand, a poisonous serpent that would normally kill a man. He shook it off into the fire, and he was healed instantly. And so you might want to tell it before bedtime. Maybe you have a set time every night before you go to bed, you will read the Bible and talk about it. Let this be the last image that goes into their mind before they go to bed, that God protects the righteous, and God will protect them if they are righteous.

You might do it when you sit in your house at mealtime, or you might do it before meals, or after meals, or you might do it when you get up in the morning and everybody is cleaned up. But the idea is God wants us to have a specific time to teach our children. Teaching is a planned activity at a set time.

It will not be accepted if you jerk your child away from the TV and say, “Come on, let me read the Bible to you.” But if they understand every day at this certain time, we are going to read God's Word because it is a Word that's going to give us life, it will give us direction. It will give us purpose and tell us how to be happy. Well, that is what teaching is.

You are engaged in a conversation. This conversation may be casual, but your idea in the conversation is to listen; you want to listen to your child; you want to know their minds and hearts. You want to talk about them, talk to them about everything, and to try to understand exactly how they feel, and how they think. Then you may guide the conversation to God's Word, or you may not, but it might be that in the conversation, your knowledge of Scripture, or your experience with trying to apply the Scripture gives you an example: You can say, “I had a man angry with me at work, and I had a soft answer and it turned away wrath.” Sometimes if you have somebody angry with you, if you are kind to them, they might change. Or you can give suggestions.

But it says, “When you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.” This suggests that you spend much time with your children. More importantly spend time with your teenagers because they are bombarded from the media that says, “There’s a generation gap! You’re not supposed to listen to your parents.” They get negative things from this world.

So talking and listening—you best stop everything you are doing, look them in the eye and talk with them. Plan activities where you walk with them, and sit with them, maybe when folding clothes, and doing housework, or out in the yard raking leaves, or something where you can talk, even playing sports, but the casual conversation is where you try to understand your child. If you can give them any guidance with the Scriptures, then that is the opportunity, by spending time with your children.

I was associated with camps which had a Christian biblical background. And these camps, most of them, had a time when they would get all the campers up, and they would have a morning devotion, a scripture would be read, and an application would be made, and they would tell a story. It would not be a long thing, but a brief thing. And at the end of the day, the directors would take their own particular group of counselors and read the Bible and talk with them. And some camps even had a midday worship service every day.

But did this saturation of religious instruction turn the campers off? No, it did not, because the camps were filled with interesting and wonderful activities—horseback riding, archery, horseshoes, tennis, and many activities that children love, swimming and those kinds of things. They knew that the guidelines were to be kind, to be honest, to do the things that are in the Ten Commandments, and the camp focused on God's Word, and used it as a guideline for behavior.

Now I want to tell you about a man who predestined his child to become a professional baseball player.

Some of you have heard of Mickey Mantle, but he was a famous baseball player that played for the New York Yankees, and he could switch hit. He could whop that ball over the fence to the right hand side of the plate, and whack it in over the fence to the left hand side of the plate. He was a switch hitter. He was very skillful with his glove. He could run fast and beat the ball to first base. He was very quick.

He had these baseball skills not by accident, but because his father predestined him to be a baseball player. Before Mickey was born, he said, “I’m going to have a boy, and he’s going to be a professional baseball player.” He walked in the house one day and they said, “You have a child,” and he said, “It’s a boy!” And they said, “How do you know?” And he just said, “It’s a boy, and he’s going to be a baseball player.” And while Mickey was a little baby in the crib, he would put baseballs in the crib, and say, “Son, do you see these balls? One day you’re going to knock them out of Yankee Stadium.” He said, “You’re going to catch these balls, and throw them so very fast, you’re going to throw people out. You’re going to run!”

So he was talking all the time to little Mickey. He put a ball in his hand, probably rolling it on the floor. He took a bat. He taught him to run and bat and hit. His father would stick the bat in one hand and say, “OK, you hit from this side.” His father would stick it in the other hand and say, “You hit from this side now.” So from birth, he was taught to be a switch hitter all his life and that is the way it happened because Mickey Mantle's father put baseball in his heart, and because he taught it diligently to his child in virtually every facet of his life.

Mickey Mantle said he had to beg and beg his father to be able to get permission to play high school football. He was a standout in that too.

But the point is, if we diligently teach our children, and tell them how great it is going to be in God's Kingdom, and show them what is going to happen when we apply God's laws, and point out the things that they can do and they can accomplish within the realm of God's law, and how wonderful activities are when they are done correctly, our children are not going to be turned off when we teach them God's Word if we teach them by our example—without hypocrisy.

Now, if we are sitting on the couch reading a newspaper, and say, “Come here, son! Let me talk to you. I want you to look at me straight in the eye when I’m talking to you.” They are going to be turned off.

If you say, “Son, you shouldn’t shout at people. You should be kind to people. Now don’t act like a jarhead.” They are going to be turned off.

But if they see our example, if we love them, we look them in the eye, and stop everything, and listen and talk with them, saying “I love you,” you are telling them they are more important than this newspaper, or this Internet, or this thing that I am doing. You might even while talking with adults, say, “Please excuse me” and bend down and say a little something, “Well, honey, I’ll talk to you just a minute, I’m talking to Mr. Jones” or something like that. You show your child that you care about them, and you love them. So this is part of teaching diligently to your children. You do it because you love God's law, because you love God, because you put His Word in your heart, and you have something to give to your children.

As parents, we have a unique opportunity, the thing that no one else can do, a relationship with our children, and we can teach them the love of God, we can teach them the knowledge of His Word. We can show them by our life and by pointing out and helping them in their life the joy and the happiness that comes from living God's way. We can give our children a wall of protection; faith in God that is going to help them quench the fiery darts of this world full of selfishness, strife, and false ideas.

We can ask ourselves a question: If we do not teach our children the Word of God and the way of God, who will?

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