Text: [1] Love the LORD your God and keep his requirements, his decrees, his laws and his commands always. [8a] Observe therefore all the commands I am giving you today…[18] Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. [19] Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. [20] Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates, [21] so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land that the LORD swore to give your forefathers, as many as the days that the heavens are above the earth… [26] See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse- [27] the blessing if you obey the commands of the LORD your God that I am giving you today; [28a] the curse if you disobey the commands of the LORD your God. (Deuteronomy 11 – selected verses)
God commanded his people to teach the faith. There are few words that say this more clearly than our sermon text for today. We are instructed to insure that God’s word is faithfully passed on from one generation to the next. The job of teaching the commandments to our children and our children’s children is a priority for God’s people. It is the task on which we are to focus as we wake up in the morning, as we sit in our homes, as we work, as we get ready to lay down to sleep. And God tells us to take this task that He has given us with great seriousness. In fact, God gives us a choice: There is a blessing for us if we do this. There is a curse if we fail to pass on the commandments of God to our children and our children’s children.
Gretchen could not remember when the church was not part of her life. She had been baptized in church. She grew up in church. She even met her husband, Sam, in church. For both of them, church and church activities seemed natural and normal – the way life was supposed to be. Their worldview – how they saw life and how they made their most important decisions - had been largely formed around the teachings of the church.
Joey was Gretchen and Sam’s oldest boy. His parents took him to church regularly. But church was not the center of Joey’s growing years. He was a busy young man with lots of activities at school and outside of school. Joey grew up as times began to change. He was a young teen during the late 1960’s and was profoundly affected by the changes in society. He remembers the protests and how important institutions - even the Presidency, seemed to be crumbling. By the time Joey got married to Marie, got a job in a big city and started his own family, church had become a place to go on special occasions – weddings, funerals and such.
Joey and Marie had their first child, Ricky, they didn’t think to baptize him – it just wasn’t on their radar screen. To Joey and Marie, baptism was a ceremony and not much more than that. Besides, they thought that when Ricky got older, he could make his own decisions about religion. By the time Ricky was a teen, he had been to church only a few times on Christmas. So Ricky knew very little about the church and almost nothing about the Bible. There are lots of Rickys in the world.
It was the season of Lent. One day a former parishioner of mine wore a beautiful three-cross broach: a larger cross in between two smaller crosses. She was at the grocery store and was paying for her groceries. The cashier at the grocery store pointed to the three-cross brooch and said, “That’s a cool; what does it mean?” My parishioner was quite surprised that the young lady didn’t know. “Oh, it’s an Easter symbol.” “Easter?” the young lady asked.
Many today are completely secularized. Does this sound familiar? The sad fact is that this story has repeated itself thousands of times. When we talk about passing the faith from one generation to the next, the ball has been fumbled so many times that, that right now, as we speak, North America has been classified by LCMS World Missions as the third largest mission field in the world. Some church scholars think that the future of Christianity on the North American continent is in jeopardy. The real tragedy is that so many people are not learning about God’s love and forgiveness in Christ and so heaven is being lost to thousands of people.
You see, beloved, the main task of the Church is to transmit the faith – to make disciples. As a body of believers, our task is to pass on the message of what God has done for us – for the entire world - through the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Transmission of the faith has been the top priority that God gave to his people from the beginning. When God instructed the Israelites so meticulously to focus on passing the faith from one generation to the next - do you think that maybe God knew that the faith could, indeed, be lost within a generation? Do you think that God wanted to make the story – His Story – a central part of our lives so that you and your children and your children’s children could be assured of a relationship with God? How do we take on this incredibly important task? I believe that making disciples is the number one priority of the church.
1. It’s going to require lots of effort and energy to make sure that we keep discipleship as job one. That means that we must see with crystal clear clarity that making disciples is what we are to be about. Nothing our congregation does is more important. In order to have clarity, we must define the process that the church will use to make disciples. We need to have a blueprint for this to happen.
2. Secondly, we the process of discipleship involved movement. People grow from one level of commitment to another. This means that we know and understand what our young children need to be doing to learn to be disciples. We need to see what our confirmation aged youth and our young men and women need to be doing to be disciples. We need to know what our young families need to be disciples. We need to insure that the seniors of the church are served in times of challenge and need so that they too continue to grow as disciples of Jesus. Movement from one level of discipleship to the next means that we have thought about what discipleship at each level looks like.
3. Thirdly, our efforts must be aligned. This means that everyone – all boards, all staff, all ministries - are pulling in the same direction. Our ministries – every single one of them – need to engage the task of making disciples. Every decision of every board needs to answer the question: How will this decision help Our Redeemer Lutheran Church make disciples?
4. Finally, we need to keep the focus the ministries of ORLC on the task of making disciples. This means that we have to say, “NO” to most things. The only things that get a “Yes” are the things that contribute to the task of making disciples. I see the task of the Church Council as insuring that the focus of the various boards remains on discipleship.
In the area of discipleship, there four principle goals that I will present to the Church Council on Tuesday night. Each of these goals relate to people at different places in their faith lives.
• For the growing child the goal will be to engage the child in the formative years so that they develop a Biblical worldview. This is to help them interpret the events around them and respond in ways that honor their identity as children of the Living God.
• For the young adult, the discipleship goal is to prepare and challenge these young men and women to assume their place in the leadership in the congregation. This is a ministry of encouragement. The church needs to demonstrate that doesn’t simply offer pie in the sky by and by, but that the truths of the church are eternal and abiding really and truly inform the challenges that they face in life.
• For adults, the goal will be to serve them as they raise their children. They need to know that the ORLC is there to provide learning opportunities for them – as parents – and for their children. We need to both help and to challenge parents to transmit the critical message of salvation by grace through faith in the Cross of Christ. We need to partner with these parents by providing appropriate engagement for the family so that children become disciples.
• For senior adults the discipleship goal is to keep them connected to their faith as they face the challenges that are part of advancing years - health, death of loved ones and friends, limited income. We need to keep our parents and grandparents connected to the community of faith as they face lives that may be more isolated.
Some of you may remember the comedian named Yakov Smirnoff. He said that when he first came to the United States from Russia he wasn’t prepared for the incredible variety of instant products available in American grocery stores. He says, “On my first shopping trip I saw powdered milk – you just add water and you get milk. Then I saw powdered orange juice – just add water and you get orange juice. Then I saw baby powder, and I thought to my self, what a country!” What a country indeed.
We like instant. But faith isn’t instant. Discipleship isn’t instant. The cost of discipleship is great. There’s an old boy named Martin Luther who once wrote, “A religion that gives nothing, costs nothing, and suffers nothing is worth nothing.” We are blessed that Christ has already paid the cost at the Cross. He has asked us to focus on one thing: As you live your lives, “Make Disciples!” May our merciful Lord bless us to be faithful transmitters of the great truths of the faith with which we have been trusted. Let us work to make disciples. Amen.
