The following message is by Pastor John Piper.
More information from Desiring God Ministries is available
at www.DesiringGod.org Please turn in your
Bibles to Psalm 145.
I'll read verses 1 through 13.
I will extol thee, my God, O King,
and I will bless thy name forever and
ever.
Every day I will bless thee, and I
will praise thy name forever and ever.
Great is the Lord, and highly to be
praised, and His greatness is unsearchable.
One generation shall praise thy works to another,
and shall declare thy mighty acts.
On the glorious splendor of thy majesty, and
on thy wonderful works, I will meditate.
And men shall speak of the power of
thine awesome acts, and I will tell of
thy greatness.
They shall eagerly utter the memory of thine
abundant goodness, and shall shout joyfully of thy
righteousness.
The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to
anger, and great in loving kindness.
The Lord is good to all, and His
mercies are over all His works.
All thy works shall give thanks to thee,
O Lord, and thy godly ones shall bless
thee.
They shall speak of the glory of thy
kingdom, and talk of thy power, to make
known to the sons of men thy mighty
acts, and the glory of the majesty of
thy kingdom.
Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and thy
dominion endures through all generations.
Everlasting God and ruler of all things, we
need mercy now to finish this service faithfully.
And so I ask for another season of
mercy.
Give us breath, give us life, give us
faith, give us a revelation of your glory
through your word.
Give us strength, provide healing for any who
are ailing in the room, I pray.
Men relationships where they are so stressful it's
hard to sit beside each other.
Pour out your spirit for providing resources where
people feel like they are spent, and give
wisdom for tomorrow's perplexity.
And beyond all that I can ask or
think, Lord, make this word suitable for the
needs of your people.
I have ideas of what I want to
say, and you may have very different ones,
which is just fine.
Whatever you have to do, Lord, get through.
Save sinners, strengthen saints, unify the body, cause
us to exalt in you.
Shape us for a week of obedience that
magnifies your name.
Let worship extend right through the week, we
pray, through Christ.
Amen.
I'm going to focus on one verse in
this section that Stephen just read, namely verse
four.
One generation shall praise your works to another
and shall declare your mighty acts.
The first thing I infer from that verse
is that it is a biblical duty for
an older generation to see to it that
a younger generation hear about the mighty works
of God.
It is not God's way to drop a
new Bible on every new generation, or to
give new revelation to every new generation that
comes along.
It is God's way for the older generation
to teach the newer generation how to read,
how to think, how to trust, how to
obey, how to rejoice, how to get along.
Not at all to deny that the relationship
with God should be secondary for the second
generation and primary for the first generation.
No, no, no.
Don't misunderstand me.
The Holy Spirit, who is God himself, comes
on every new generation to call out for
himself a personal relationship with the people.
But he does it in conjunction with a
horizontally delivered word about God.
So they meet like this.
Here comes the word from generation to generation
being passed along faithfully through horizontal teaching and
preaching and sharing and modeling.
And here comes God loving this new generation
and takes that word, sets it on fire
by his Holy Spirit and forms through faith
a relationship between them and him that is
authentic and doesn't need a generation before for
a relationship to exist.
Once it's got the truth and got the
Spirit, it's got God.
But it's God's way that he doesn't deal
with this second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth generation
apart from what is transmitted about him through
teaching based on the book, the Bible.
That's the first thing I see in verse
four.
Every generation is responsible to get into the
heads of the next generation what God Almighty
can set on fire by his Spirit and
make them his own.
Now here's a second observation.
We're really not interested and God is not
interested in simply one generation stocking the brains
of a second generation with thoughts about Jesus.
We are interested in filling heads with true
thoughts so that hearts can explode with love
to God kindled by that truth in the
head.
And if the second doesn't happen, we've wasted
our time.
You can't do an end run around the
head.
Truth has to be there.
But if the head doesn't provide tinder for
the explosive fire of love to God, it's
just going to produce intellectualism and waste.
Now I see that in this verse in
that the psalmist did not choose to say
one generation shall teach your works to another.
Doesn't say that.
That's true, probably, but that's not the word
it uses.
It says one generation shall praise your works
to another.
Now, what's the point of saying it that
way?
Well, the point is that the goal of
this transmission and now we see the means
toward the goal is exaltation.
That's just another word for praise.
To exalt in God is to praise God.
And here this verse says one generation is
going to, out of its exaltation in God,
spill over in praise to God for the
next generation.
So there's going to be a transmission of
knowledge.
We're talking about the works of God here,
but it's going to be through a certain
mode called praise.
Now what I think this implies pedagogically for
Sunday school, Wednesday connection, parenting is that a
very high calling rests upon those of us
who are charged with the transmission of truth
from generation to generation as everybody in this
room is.
We're all charged with this task of transmitting
from one generation to the next, the truth.
And this verse says there's a way to
do this so that you won't just produce
eggheads.
You won't just produce people whose brains are
stocked with truth and whose hearts are cold.
Namely, when you do it, exalt in doing
it.
That is, praise it into people's lives, praise
it into their lives.
Isn't that what it says?
One generation shall praise your works to another
and shall declare your mighty acts.
So Sunday school teachers, beware.
Oh, beware.
Most of you aren't here because the Sunday
school is going on right now.
But someday, maybe out of this room, you
will be a Wednesday night worker, a Sunday
school worker, and there are many parents in
this room.
Beware of speaking the truth about God in
a way that contradicts the value of the
truth about God.
Oh, how sad in college and in Christian
schools and in Sunday school classes and in
living rooms and in Wednesday night gatherings to
hear people talk about the most phenomenal, glorious,
valuable things in the universe as though they
were no more significant than nothing.
There ought to be a way of talking
about things that are valuable to us so
that in the learning of them, the value
of them is also transmitted.
That's what I see the psalmist talking about
here.
One generation shall praise thy works to another.
Not just talk about them.
So our goal here at Bethlehem is education
for exaltation in the next generation.
And now we see that's not just the
goal, it's the means to the goal.
In Sunday school classes and Wednesday night meetings
and in parenting, we have to be a
certain kind of people.
Namely, people who exalt in God.
Otherwise, when we try to transmit the knowledge
of His mighty works, the kids are going
to hear them and say, they're not excited
about this, so why should I be?
Doesn't make any difference to mom and dad.
Why should it make any difference to me?
They seem quite bored with it, so why
shouldn't I be bored with it?
That's the message we'll give.
And that is a lie.
It's a half-truth at best.
Let me try to build a bridge from
last Sunday's sermon to what I'm saying here.
I said last Sunday, remember the topic was
education for exaltation among the nations.
And I said we want your kids.
We want to breed kids in this church
who are God-exalting and Christ-centered and
Bible-saturated and missions-driven and radically surrendered
to Jesus and radically committed to the cause
of world evangelization.
And what we mean by the word radically
is so deeply, so fully, so passionately surrendered
and committed that when obedience is known, it
is done no matter the distance, no matter
the danger, no matter the cost.
It's going to get done.
That's the kind of young people we want
to breed in this church.
So it's a dangerous place to bring your
kids if you don't want that to happen
in their lives, which Jim Elliott's parents were
not sure they wanted.
Jim Elliott was 22 years old when this
happened.
One of you sent me this email, so
thank you.
I'll read back what I got in the
mail.
Jim Elliott was 22 years old, out of
Wheaton College, ready to lay his life down
in South America to the Kichwa Indians, he
thought.
And so he wrote to his parents and
said, that's what I think God's calling me
to do.
They were not excited about this because not
that they were anti-Christian.
They just saw a man who was extraordinarily
gifted.
You know, he looked like Billy Graham.
I looked at his pictures in Shadow of
the Almighty.
He looked just like Billy Graham at his
age.
You know, kind of suave and debonair and
cuts a good figure.
It could be a famous evangelist in America.
And he could be a teacher in a
college, or he could have a big church
and safely preach behind an American pulpit.
Why throw such a gifted life away on
a tribe?
And here's what he wrote back.
Get ready, parents.
I do not wonder that you were saddened
at the word of my going to South
America.
He replied on August 8.
This is nothing else than what the Lord
Jesus warned us when he told the disciples
that they must become so infatuated with the
kingdom and following him that all other allegiances
must become as though they were not.
And he never excluded the family tie.
In fact, those loves which we regard as
closest, he told us must become as hate
in comparison with our desires to uphold his
cause.
Grieve not then if your sons seem to
desert you, but rejoice rather seeing the will
of God done gladly.
Remember how the psalmist described children.
He said they were as an heritage from
the Lord and that every man should be
happy who had his quiver full of them.
And what is a quiver full of but
arrows?
And what are arrows for but to shoot?
So with strong arms of prayer draw the
bowstring back and let the arrows fly all
of them straight at the enemy's hosts.
Give of thy sons to bear the message
glorious.
Give of thy wealth to spread them on
their way.
Pour out thy soul for them in prayer
victorious and all thou spendest Jesus will repay.
That's the kind of young person we like
to see grow up at Bethlehem.
So where do they come from?
They don't grow on trees.
That kind of heart doesn't grow on a
tree.
Where does it come from?
The first answer to that question is it
comes from God.
God makes hearts like that.
And before I give you the usual way
He makes them, let me make sure you
know that there are also unusual ways He
makes them.
God is sovereign.
And He can make a heart like a
Jim Elliott's heart out of a dysfunctional family
and a failing church.
Is that clear?
God can make a Jim Elliott out of
one who grows up in an abusive, dysfunctional
family and a failing church.
He can do that.
It is not His ordinary way.
That would be His extraordinary way.
It's not the way He commanded it to
be done.
So I want to tell you how I
see at this church the commanded way developing,
trusting that God can do it any way
He pleases, out of any family He pleases,
in any class He pleases.
And to get there, let me underline a
word in Elliott's response to his parents.
Here's the sentence.
I'll tell you the word.
Jesus told the disciples that they must become
so infatuated, there's the word, they must become
so infatuated with the kingdom and following Him
that all other allegiances must become as though
they were not.
Why did He choose the word infatuated?
It's because we're not just interested in, and
He wasn't just interested in, producing people who
are knowledgeable about the kingdom purposes, but who
are driven by the kingdom purposes, who are
thrilled by kingdom purposes, who are exulting in
the God of the kingdom.
And therefore, there has to be, what He
calls, an infatuation with the king and the
kingdom purposes of the world evangelization in order
that the clawing, keeping, alternative values of the
world will be done away with.
If you don't have an infatuation with the
kingdom, if Jesus isn't your thrill as well
as your commitment, then the gnawing, clawing, dragging
down, keeping, ordinary rut of American prosperity will
keep you from doing anything radical probably.
You'll just say, I want to watch another
little bit of March Madness.
Thank you.
Don't worry me with the fact that my
friends are lost or that there's a tribe
out there, 187 people groups with nobody targeting
them.
Don't even bring to my attention that 95
of these basketball players, 95% of them
don't know Jesus and need Christ more than
they need anything so that I could turn
maybe this watching into prayer.
Don't worry me with those kinds of kingdom
thoughts.
I just want to bracket reality and live
in this dream world of comfort.
Well, I hope that's not the kind of
person you want to be.
It wasn't the kind of person that Jim
Elliot wanted to be.
It's not the kind of person we want
to breed.
And so the last thing I want to
do is simply ask, how do you breed
Jim Elliot types?
And I have three answers from this Bible
that are not in the text, but I
think are pointed to by the text.
And I'll take them very briefly.
Number one, parents educate children.
These are three principles that will govern education
for exaltation in the next generation here at
Bethlehem.
Number one, parents educate children.
That is, it is the primary responsibility of
mom and dad or just mom or just
dad if there's only just a mom or
a dad to bring the works of God
and a Christian worldview and a passion for
Jesus and Bible memory and knowledge of doctrine
into the lives of our children.
That is our job.
We may not pass it off to Sunday
school, Wednesday connection, parochial schools, or any other
way.
It is our job.
Deuteronomy 6, 4, Hear, O Israel, the Lord
our God is one Lord.
You shall love the Lord your God with
all your heart and all your soul and
all your might, parents.
These words which I am commanding you today
shall be on your heart, parents, so that
you may teach them diligently to your sons,
and shall talk of them when you sit
in your house and when you walk or
ride in your car and when you lie
down and when you rise up.
Fill your mouths, parents, with the Word of
God and bring a God-centered perspective on
everything from March madness to schoolwork to sex
to money to whatever.
Bring God to bear on it.
That's our job.
And not anybody else's first.
Psalm 78, 5 The Lord established a testimony
in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel
which He commanded our fathers that they would
teach them to their children that the generation
to come might know, even the children yet
to be born, that they may rise and
tell them to their children.
There are a lot of college students in
this room right now.
Wake up!
Because if you don't hear this now and
plan on this, you're going to wake up
in five years and find yourself in a
marriage totally out of sync with the woman
you married on how to do this thing
because you never talked about it.
Now!
And I mean talk about it in small
groups, talk about it with somebody who might
be a spouse someday and say, Are we
together on this?
This is our job.
It's not Sunday school.
It's not Wednesday night.
It's not the pastor.
This is our job.
Are you with me in this?
Can we do this?
If not, no marriage.
That's what marriage is about in large measure
is filling the earth with the glory of
the Lord by begetting children who become God
-centered people.
So the first principle I lay down is
that parents rear children in the nurture and
admonition of the Lord.
If you want a New Testament verse, Ephesians
6, for fathers, it's a special burden on
fathers.
It's not unique to fathers, but especially if
there's a father and a mom, fathers, you
bear the unique responsibility here.
Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger,
but bring them up in the discipline and
the instruction of the Lord.
Dads, teach your children.
This is our vision at Bethlehem.
It's the reason why David and Sally have
the titles they do.
We try to choose titles here carefully.
They are not pastor and minister for children.
They are pastor and minister for parenting and
children's discipleship.
That's the title.
And it's intentional.
Second principle.
Parents are assisted in their educating their children
by the church.
Or, turn it around, the church is a
partner with parents in educating their children.
There are all kinds of reasons why this
is needed and biblical.
One, there are many kids without believing parents.
We can't just throw them away and say,
oh, too bad, you don't have any believing
parents, you don't get taught the Bible.
Two, there are single parents whose homes are
so stressed and so overworked, they need all
the help they can get.
Three, the whole range of competencies is out
here in this room in terms of what
you know and how effective you are in
teaching.
Some of it is sin when it's not
there and some of it is just lack
of gift.
And since there's a whole range of competencies
out there, the church comes in alongside and
supplements and reinforces.
Fourth, even in the best homes where the
best teaching is happening for children's knowledge of
God, they benefit from reinforcement in Sunday school
and other ways.
And fifth, there are some things about God
and His ways among His people and in
the world that are learned best and I
dare say only in the larger family of
believers called the church in a class and
in this room right here during worship, which
is why we don't have children's church.
We believe with all our might in what
happens in the lives of children in this
room from age about four on.
In spite of all the squirreliness, in spite
of all the difficulties of training, we believe
to watch mom and dad go hard after
God and listen to preaching, 90% of
which they do not get, is absolutely crucial
for their lives.
To listen to the hymns, to see church
happen as big people do it is absolutely
crucial.
Now let me give you a biblical warrant
for that conviction.
Deuteronomy 31.10 says, Moses commanded them, saying,
at the end of every seven years, at
the time of the year of remission of
debts, at the feast of booths, when all
Israel comes to appear before the Lord your
God at the place which He will choose,
you shall read this law in the front
of all Israel.
Assemble the people, the men, the women, the
children, the alien, so that they may hear
and learn and fear the Lord.
So the children are to come, aliens are
to come, men and women, old and young
are to come.
And here's verse 13.
Their children, who have not known, will hear
and learn to fear the Lord your God,
as long as you live on the land
which you are about to cross the Jordan
to possess.
Now picture this.
Every seven years, he says, there's to be
this massive assemblage, and it isn't the only
time, by the way, but here's one, where
all the women, all the men, all the
children come, and the law is read, and
there's proclamation, and it says, the children who
haven't known will hear and learn to fear
the Lord.
Does that mean that Moses counted on the
delinquency of fathers?
I doubt it.
I think rather that what it means is
there are things to be known about God
in His majesty, God in His covenant relationship
to a whole people, God in His receiving
and His being worthy of receiving great and
glorious praise, God in His ability to manage
huge crowds of people can only be learned
in this kind of assembly.
And therefore, it's fitting that there be children
in other kinds of groupings under God than
just nuclear families.
Very important that the church partner with parents
to help parents do what they're supposed to
do, but to do also what parents can't
do, not because of delinquency, but because there
are things about life, and things about God,
and things about worship, and things about the
way God moves in the world that are
better imparted in a Sunday school class or
in a worship assembly like this.
I wonder if there's a New Testament pointer
in this regard in Acts 22.3. Paul
is defending himself, and he said, I'm a
Jew.
He's talking to a crowd that tried to
get him killed in Jerusalem.
He said, I'm a Jew, born in Tarsus,
brought up in this city, Jerusalem, educated under
Gamaliel, strictly according to the law of our
fathers, being zealous for God, as you all
are today.
What does that mean, educated under Gamaliel?
Literally, in the Greek, it is sitting at
the feet of Gamaliel.
So the picture is, a rabbi, very schooled,
trained, probably way beyond the average dad, who
knows the Torah, backwards and forwards, probably by
heart, all five books of it, and he
is telling these young disciples sitting on the
floor around him, everything he knows.
And Paul is one of those as he
grows up.
So Paul's parents sought to get him from
Tarsus, we don't know why or how, down
to Jerusalem, as a boy, and sit at
the feet of a Gamaliel.
Now I think that's a pointer to at
least how the Jews in that day understood
these texts in Deuteronomy that I've been quoting,
namely that when it says parents teach, parents
teach, parents teach, it doesn't mean only parents
teach.
It means also avail yourself in the bigger
family of God, of those whom God has
gifted, called, trained, to do what you may
not be able to do.
Call it Sunday school, call it preaching, call
it teaching, call it Christian high schools, call
it Bethel, call it Wheaton, call it Northwestern,
call it whatever, wherever you think this can
happen, it might be that those people should
partner with you in bringing children into a
full-orbed Christian, God-centered worldview, functioning in
society as light and salt.
So that's premise number two.
The third one is very short.
The first was parents teach the children and
educate them.
The second one is the church partners with
the parents in teaching and educating the children.
And the last one is the church helps
the parents to educate the children.
That is, it targets the parents and not
the children through the parents, Ephesians 4.
Christ gave some as apostles and some as
prophets and some as evangelists and some as
pastors and teachers.
Why?
Why did Christ, from heaven, ordain that there
be and give evangelists and prophets and teachers
and apostles to the church?
Why am I here?
Why am I doing what I'm doing?
Why?
What is this?
And here's the answer, verse 12.
He did this.
He gave pastors and teachers for the equipping
of the saints for the work of the
ministry to the building up of the body
of Christ.
Now, just translate that into parenting.
John Piper is given to Bethlehem Baptist Church
along with 15 other elders to equip the
saints.
Many of them are parents to do the
work of ministry, much of which is parenting.
So the third point is when the word
is preached, when the word is taught here,
TBI, adult Sunday school classes, small groups where
each of you teach one another, the point
is help them be the kind of people
who can breed this kind of young person.
In other words, everybody in this room counts
in this enterprise.
Absolutely everybody.
I'll close with this.
A church that only educates children is going
to get shallower and shallower and shallower until
the reservoir of truth and doctrine from the
Bible has become so small you can't drink
there anymore.
Many churches once upon a time were God
exalting, Bible saturated, mission driven churches and they
began to minimize teaching of adults, growing adults,
feeding adults with more and more biblical truth
and just made it a child's thing.
And they got thinner and thinner and thinner
and what they are today is God belittling,
Bible neglecting, mission absent social clubs of Christian
nominal people.
And the aim of education for exaltation is
that that not happen, but rather that the
reservoir grow and grow and grow and that
the water in it be a water not
only that you can drink from, but you
can swim in and you can enjoy and
you can lavish your children with.
So education for exaltation is all about the
next generation and all about this generation, old
and young, because it has to do with
everybody in this room.
And I mean that.
There is parenting yet to be done if
your children are in their 60's.
So if you are a parent, I want
to pray for you.
Let's pray.
Lord, those who are standing here have tasted
and seen that you are good and that
you are needed, needed, needed in this enterprise
called parenting.
And so I just want to give a
closing prayer of blessing upon them.
Lord, we prayed for the children earlier, I
just pray earnestly for the parents now.
Oh God, have mercy upon them.
Our job is impossible because we have to
be the kind of people, not just produce,
but be the kind of people that would
model for our older and younger children what
Jesus is like.
And we are not Jesus.
And we are sinners all.
And we need mercy and we need help.
And so I ask that you take every
dad a little farther than where he is,
maybe get him going on the fight or
verses for his kids.
Take every mom a little farther than where
she is, loving her kids, teaching her kids,
and singing to them songs and blessing them
as they go to sleep in her arms.
Parents, oh God, or moms who have children
so far from the Lord they haven't seen
them for ten years, God, have mercy on
moms and dads in this room and strengthen
them and make them mighty in the Spirit
and mighty in the Word, I pray, for
the sake of their children.
And now let's all stand together and I'll
close with a benediction.
And now the Lord bless you and keep
you.
The Lord make His face to shine upon
you and be gracious to you.
The Lord lift up His countenance upon you
and give you peace.
And all the people said, Amen.
You're dismissed.
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