Getting Your House In Order

 

As my followers know, I like Dr. Voddie Baugham’s sermons. I found the subject that is closest to his heart, the home and the education of children.  It was a pleasure  to summarize.

 

He begins by saying, “We are losing our young people in droves”—ie, they are turned off to God, the Bible, or church. The Bible has the answer for that, in Deuteronomy 6. We start with the first three verses:

 

“Now this is the commandment, and these are the statutes and judgments which the Lord your God has commanded to teach you, that you may observe them in the land which you are crossing over to possess, ² that you may fear the Lord your God, to keep all His statutes and His commandments which I command you, you and your son and your grandson, all the days of your life, and that your days may be prolonged. ³ Therefore hear, O Israel, and be careful to observe it, that it may be well with you, and that you may multiply greatly as the Lord God of your fathers has promised you—‘a land flowing with milk and honey.’

 

Note four things: 1) God wants His people to teach their children of God’s commandments; 2) He wants the parents to obey those written laws themselves, showing that they are not hypocrites;  3) He expects they will fear God, that their days “may be prolonged,” implying that if they don’t learn the fear of God, they will likely fall into gross sin and their days will be cut short.

 

A word about “fear:” this is not “awe,” a watered-down meaning.  It means to be afraid of disobeying God. I have a blog elsewhere on that subject.

 

Finally, 4) The only way God’s people can “multiply greatly” is: through their obedience, God will open the wombs, and they can have many children (Dr. Baugham has nine). Children were desired, and a great blessing. This is the opposite of our culture, which considers children a drag on enjoying life’s entertainment and travel, and other materialistic dreams.  But God has called us away from materialism, from our worldly culture, to sacrifice, thinking of others before ourselves—a side effect of having many children.  That quality of sacrifice would slow down the pace of divorce, too.

 

Now he gets into a little history: As Moses speaks, in Deuteronomy, the Israelites are just outside the land God promised. They would have to go to war, since many tribes are there.  They had an opportunity 40 years before to take the land, but they were afraid of the giants, and passed on the opportunity.  But God, offended by this disobedient faithless generation, “mercifully” let every adult die in the wilderness while they wandered aimlessly for 40 years.  When the children of that earlier day grew up, and were offered another chance, they remembered the reason for their parents’ deaths, and this time they feared God and voted to believe God could help them win the land.

 

In case you don’t think God was merciful in killing their disobedient parents over 40 years, Dr. Baugham says, “ask Ananias and Sapphira. Oh, I’m sorry, you can’t—God killed them.” He said one of the favorite titles he ever preached on, based on Acts 5, was “The God Who Will Kill You.” (He’s half kidding, but making a point).

 

Most people assume the God “on the left side” of the Bible was mean; but the God on the “right side” of the Bible was nice, and sweet… But truth is, God could be Judge today, same as the Old Testament—and there were Ananias and Sapphira, “right smack dab in the middle of the New Testament,” to prove it.

 

Anyway, Moses wanted to prepare the people to live as the People of God, a distinct people in all the earth (every tribe had their god, or gods, who they hope would do favors for them and keep them prosperous and alive). So Moses gives a series of sermons, since recorded in the Book of Deuteronomy, in which he orally repeats God’s Law to this “new” generation (likely Moses hadn’t written the Laws yet). Note that the name ‘Deutero’ means ‘repeat,’ and nomy comes from ‘Law.’

 

Now Moses’ sermon goes into detail, Deuteronomy 6:4-15:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! ⁵ You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.

⁶ “And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. 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. ⁸ You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. ⁹ You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. ¹⁰ “So it shall be, when the Lord your God brings you into the land of which He swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give you large and beautiful cities which you did not build, ¹¹ houses full of all good things, which you did not fill…, ¹² then beware, lest you forget the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage. ¹³ You shall fear the Lord your God and serve Him, and shall take oaths in His name. ¹⁴ You shall not go after other gods, the gods of the peoples who are all around you ¹⁵ (for the Lord your God is a jealous God among you), lest the anger of the Lord your God be aroused against you and destroy you from the face of the earth.

Note the phrase “these words…shall be in your heart.” We believe that the moral law in the Old Testament, as well as the New, still has God’s solutions for society because He loves us in any age. Note also that they were to teach God’s Word “diligently” to their children. That would include speaking to them an aspect of the Law whenever they got the chance.  In normal day-after-day routines, they would teach the Laws, piece by piece, to their children.

The verses above also have a story often-repeated: When we are prosperous, we tend to forget God. Because we are wrapped up in this world, wanting to see our Estate grow. or maybe we think we don’t need God anymore—in an emergency, I can always dip into savings. Or maybe our well-to-do friends would mock us for believing in fundamentalism, and we “need” our networking friends for influence on important people, for job opportunities, all of which helps us get wealthier.

Jesus was hard on the rich, saying that few would be in heaven (few pastors would preach that fact). The parable of the Sower is instructive here: only one of the four grounds the seed landed on turned out with consistent growth (ie, saved). One of the three failures were people who got wrapped up in the world, as Jesus put it in Mark 4:18-19:

 the ones sown among thorns; they are the ones who hear the word, ¹⁹ and the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things entering in choke the Word, and it becomes unfruitful. 

Jesus says in John 15:5-6 that people need to abide—ie, form a day-to-day-to-day relationship with Christ to become fruitful. Here in Mark He is saying, that people who are unfruitful—have no consistent growth, are unsaved.

In the verses in Deuteronomy 6 above, we have a solution to avoid the temptation of taking God out of your life, for other, worldly goals: “fear the Lord….you shall not go after other gods.” Going after wealth, or the worldly pleasures, are idolatry (no longer putting a relationship with God first is idolatry). And we should know what happens to idolaters. It says God’s anger will “destroy you from the face of the earth.” The 40-year old-and-up people to whom Moses was speaking saw that happening to their parents--their bones in the desert told a lot. Their parents let their fear destroy their faith.

 

Beginning in Deuteronomy 6:4, Dr. Baugham will give several principles to Get Our House In Order:

 

1.    Worship God without rivals. Speaking of the Jews, they were about to go into a land where everyone worships multiple gods—they have a god “for everything,” but you have a God Who IS everything. They even set their children on fire on a statue, to appease that god. If you make the mistake of worshiping rival gods, you will, like them, even burn your children on the altar to appease these gods who would supposedly bring you material wealth. Dr. Baugham asks, in shocked wonderment,  “how do you do that?” The same way you do this, he says: You’re young. If you have that baby, you won’t be able to finish school now…you can’t get as good a job, you won’t be as prosperous. But if you sacrifice that baby on the altar of Baal (abortion), you will open up your opportunity for greater prosperity. Different idol, same result. In our culture, we worship a god of prosperity. Are you, too, willing to slaughter your unborn children to achieve that? Based on the number of abortions we have, we also worship another god-- convenience.

 

One of the maladies that modern science can detect in the womb, through checking chromosomes, is Down’s syndrome. So what do we do? We abort 90% of Down’s babies. That baby is an inconvenience. Well, stretching that to the future: “what happens when we can determine eye color, and you prefer blue to brown? The chance is high, if the baby is “wrong,” that letting him or her live means you won’t get what you “want.” That’s because the “rule” in society is, you only get two children—a boy for me, a girl for you, and praise the Lord, we’re finally through. The only “exception” to our cultural rule is if your first two are the same sex: we’ll let you try one more time to get the other sex. Anyone in this room knows, if a family walked into a church, with 6, 7, 8 kids—that’s church people, now—they will look at them like you have a third eye, in the middle of your head. Why? Because we worship a god of This age. We worship a rival god. We don’t believe anymore. We’re in the midst of This culture…and we fit far too well. Our God has different rules. We must pay attention, and fear Him. God is not running for God. He was the only one around when the elections were held, and there’s never going to be a recount.

 

2.    Build your home on a foundation of biblical love. Not the Greco-Roman myth of romantic love. The myth goes that “love is an overwhelming, uncontrollable sensual force.” What’s the symbol of love in our culture? Cupid. A random hit with his arrow, and you fall in love with someone—no matter that you already have a spouse. That’s why people who have been married 25-30 years are getting divorces. That also might explain why we worry unnecessarily—when might God fall out of love for me? It might explain why prospective mothers of child #2 are uncertain of their feelings for that child being as strong as they were for their  first child. And why prospective parents of an adopted child might be unsure they can love them as much as their ”real” children.  But that myth is false. In fact, an adopted child has “a bonus:” We are reminded that we, too, are adopted children of Christ. And we know He loves us.

 

True love, not Cupid, is biblical; it is different. When Jesus speaks about loving God with all your “heart, soul, and mind” in Matthew 22:37, remember that your “heart” is a muscle, that’s all. It “knows” nothing. There is no “heart knowledge vs. head knowledge.”  The only “knower” among the three is your mind. So when we use “heart,” we are speaking in figurative terms; it is referring to an aspect of your mind. When we love God with all our mind, it's speaking of loving God with all our will. The soul, in Hebrew, means deep down in our intestines; we love God with all our “guts.” “I look at my wife, and I say, ‘girl, I love you with all my intestines.’ Well… it did not have the desired effect.”

Next week: Part 2