May 6, 2024 • 30 mins
Join us as we take a deep dive into the Bible's view of cause and effect principles and their influence on subsequent generations. This episode examines the depth of our connection with God and the lasting effects it has on our lineage. Consequences of straying from righteous worship are discussed, as told explicitly by God in these biblical passages.
We critically examine the 'sins of the fathers' principle and its implications, shedding light on cultural and genetic elements that persist through families, shaping entire communities. With King David as an illustrative example, we explore the dichotomy of his relationship with God and his personal failings, highlighting key lessons of surrendering to flawed human instincts.
Our reflective study serves as an eye-opening reminder of the spiritual fallout brought about by poor spiritual leadership and decision-making. We invite you to embark on a spiritual journey with us to harness the transformative power of a righteous relationship with God, which influences both our lives and those of our descendants.
We delve into the New Covenant and its promise of personal spiritual evolution through a connection to God. The Holy Spirit works within us, enabling us to break generational sins and patterns. We emphasize the necessity of commitment and patience in this transformative journey, which like grafting into a healthy tree, can be painful yet rewarding.
Ultimately, we must strive to build a legacy that reflects the glory of God, echoing with love and faith for future generations. We advocate for parents to nurture their children's faith and elders to guide upcoming generations, thus, aiding them in a righteous path, fostering a strong community of faith around them.
Let us break these chains and usher in a new era of righteousness, reinforced with love and faith.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Music.
(00:08):
The readings, there are four of them. They're all fairly brief,
and they all kind of run in succession.
So if you're following in your pew Bible, then you'll want to start on page 72.
So we're down to the double digits here, where Exodus chapter 20 is the first one.
And I'll just guide you through. If you're following in any Bible,
(00:29):
just start with Exodus 20. we'll read verse 5 and 6, and then we're going to
jump ahead to Exodus 34 and Numbers 14 and eventually Deuteronomy 5.
And if you want to follow along, that's where you'll find those.
These are the passages. Exodus 20, starting at verse 5, says,
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You shall not bow down to them or serve them.
For I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God,
visiting the iniquity of the fathers of the children to their third and fourth
generation of those who hate me,
but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
(01:14):
And if you flip ahead a few pages to Exodus 34, that's page 87 in your pew Bible, 87, Exodus 34.
Starting at verse 6, it says, The Lord passed before him and proclaimed,
The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding
in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands,
(01:39):
forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear
the guilty visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's
children to the third and the fourth generation.
Now flip ahead to Numbers 14. That's on page 144 in your pew Bible.
(02:00):
Numbers 14, starting at verse 18. I bet you know what it's going to say.
The Lord is slow to anger, to bounding and steadfast love, forgiving iniquity
and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty visiting the iniquity
of the fathers of the children and the third and the fourth generation.
And finally, Deuteronomy chapter 5, that's page 177.
(02:26):
Deuteronomy chapter 5, verse 9 says.
You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I, the Lord your God,
am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the
third and the fourth generations of those who hate me.
These are words from the Bible, words of God, and we have a dilemma,
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to say the least, now to unpack,
and I'm hoping that by the time we're done, this will be rich and empowering.
You see, the Bible is obviously explicit.
I mean, having said it four times in no uncertain terms,
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God is saying to the people, look, if you mess up and you divert from the right
kind of relationship with me,
it's going to trickle down through your family line and generations will suffer the consequences.
And if you're someone, see, I know from life experience of my own and just being
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around so many different people over the years, that we all kind of have a story
that involves a certain family curse.
You know, there's just some family thing that, you know, like in my family,
I've heard this more often since we moved back to Jasper, than anywhere else I've lived,
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but in my family, there's this thing where somebody will say something nice
about you to someone else, but they wouldn't say it to you because they wouldn't
want you to get a pig head, right?
You ever heard that one? I hear it more around here, you know?
I don't know if it's a German thing, you know, but they're these sort of fascinating fascinating,
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sort of genetic and social-cultural sort of things that transition through families.
And so you can have someone, you know, a child, let's say, who has all the characteristics
of a great uncle that they never knew, and yet they'll represent that person really well.
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And when they never even knew each other. They're just these things that pass
through our family line.
And that's why in communities not all that different from, say, Jasper,
you have, you know, sort of a family's culture within the community where there
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are several prominent families and all the people are descended from these families.
And so there's a culture that becomes the community culture.
And it's because of this family connection. And so it turns out that this is not so much of a threat.
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And I really took it this way. When I was a young person, when I was a teenager
who was into the Bible, I read this passage because when I was a teenager,
I read the Bible all the way through before B90 was the thing.
You're going to have to excuse me. I mean, I've been ill and I keep getting
cotton mouth whenever I start talking.
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I beg your pardon. So I read this passage as a teenager and thought, well, thanks, God.
This is great news. You know, my father told me stories about his father that weren't flattering.
And, you know, I often ask myself, is this, you know, is this your way of saying this is how it is?
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You know, get over it, get used to it, whatever. And then I hear the Bible telling
me that the sins of the father are going to be visited on the third and the fourth generation.
What's up with that? And I'm really not happy with what I'm reading.
And it seems like God is being grossly unfair.
It seems like God is saying, I'm going to punish the children and the grandchildren
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and the great-grandchildren of this guy because he, you know, disrespected me.
And that's the way it reads, and that's the way a lot of people read the Old Testament.
And yet, if you really read carefully in the Old Testament,
it becomes clear that God is certainly not, you know, incapable of punishing
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and allowing consequences to run their course.
But God's not mean-spirited. God's just sort of a cause and effect agent.
You know, God says, look, it's simple.
You know, like sometimes some of you are going to be reading in the Bible in
90 days as you go through this.
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You should be right about some of the more, you know, if you're reading B90
right now, then you're probably getting close to some of that stuff that everybody
kind of just plows through as hard as they can because it's like,
you know, how much Leviticus can one person take in a single dose, you know?
And if you're giggling, it's probably because you're about there.
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And but but if you read carefully in
leviticus and now some of you are going through this again and i
want to really point this out to you if you read carefully in leviticus you
begin to recognize that god is simply teaching an ignorant group of people a
lot of simple truths that they need to know about cause and effect and and i
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always get laughs for saying it
this way but leviticus basically tells the Israelites, don't eat roadkill.
That stuff will make you sick. And we all laugh, but, you know, they didn't know.
They didn't know. And God did. And so God said, tell the people,
don't eat dead things they fight
on the side of the road because it'll be diseased and make them sick.
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You know, and so God is, in the Old Testament, is this God of cause and effect.
And he is basically saying, look, if, if dad gives poor leadership to his family,
and in this case, he means with regard to God's relationship with dad,
you know, so the Bible's telling us that if, if, because you remember,
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there's a couple of those passages I read where it says, you know,
that, that if, if they love me, I'm going to love them back, you know?
So, So God is saying, basically, if dad will stay in a faithful relationship
with me, then there will be faithfulness that translates through generations.
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But if dad is unfaithful, then it's going to be consequential for multiple generations.
Now, how many of us really have to be told that? Let's think about it in the
same terms as the roadkill analogy.
If dad is cruel and vindictive to his children and to his wife,
and if dad is a reprobate and dad doesn't maintain employment,
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doesn't take care of his responsibilities,
what happens to the family, right?
The poor leadership in a household leads to the breakdown of the entire family.
And, you know, I know people very personally who deal with the consequences
of poor leadership in households every day.
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And so what is God saying in these observations? He's not saying that I'm going
to punish you by punishing your children and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren.
What he's saying is you can guarantee that if you don't stay in the right relationship
with me, there will be consequences for those generations.
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So that's the Old Testament view of this.
And God, I think, in the Old Testament is often misunderstood as having,
like, you know, from Old Testament to New Testament, having some sort of schizophrenic
complete shift in his nature.
But he hasn't really changed in his nature.
He's changed the nature of his relationship with the people.
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And the nature of the relationship with the people is the thing.
And it has all kinds of connections to how Christ opens the way for us to be
uniquely linked to the Father by the Holy Spirit.
But before we get to that, let's take a look at a perfect prime example from the Bible.
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And I thought about reading a lot of texts from this section of the Bible to explain this.
But if you just think with me about King David, and I know some of you have
been reading, young people, the youth have been reading the chronological Bible
and stuff. So you've read about David.
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King David was Israel's greatest king. In theory, today, Israel is still waiting
for the return of that kind of king.
They want a Messiah who is the embodiment of the great King David.
They revere King David as their great leader.
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Now, remember that King David was the second king after the first king they
had that they were advised not to get one.
You know, the people were advised by the prophets, don't get a king.
You don't need one of those. Just, you know, somehow you think you're going
to be better off with a king, but I promise you, you'll just be worse off with a king.
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And then David comes along and he's so good at loving the Lord that even the
Bible references him as a man after God's own heart.
So if you started with this high view of David as Israel's greatest king and
the time of Israel's greatest glory as a kingdom, and you add to that that he
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was known as a man after God's own heart, then you're going,
well, shoot, what a guy.
Why isn't Israel still thriving today?
And here's why. Because it turns out that his heart was right with God,
but his flesh was still very, very vulnerable to sin.
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And it turns out that for all the good that David did in putting the one true
God ahead of all the other entities that were present in those days and still powerful in those days.
So, I mean, he was God's instrument of putting—the Old Testament is this road
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to the arrival of the Messiah,
and David is this instrumental person in making the arrival of the Messiah possible.
In fact, Jesus is a descendant of David.
He's born in the city of David.
But David, the man, is messed up. He has done some really terrible things.
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And for the most part, he knows that he's done terrible things.
And he's very aware. And the reason we know this is because we can read his
own words about it. Read the Psalms.
And you read about his constant anguish, this never-ending tension that David
feels between his good nature and his bad nature,
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his consequences and how much he regrets the consequences and he wishes that
he didn't have to suffer the consequences,
but at the same time acknowledging he got the consequences honest because he
did stupid things and there were consequences, you know.
So simple example for those of you who aren't as familiar is David, David, for example,
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is notorious for essentially taking a teenage girl who was betrothed to one
of his soldiers, one of his really, you know, special leaders in the military,
and, you know, having his way with her, and then orchestrating the death of
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her betrothed so that it would all, you know, work out.
And I'm really soft-selling that.
Like, it's an ugly, ugly story. It's ugly.
What David did was, it wasn't just a little thing. It was a really, really ugly thing.
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But consequently, that girl who becomes Bathsheba, who is Bathsheba,
but who becomes the mother of Solomon, for example,
and Solomon becomes the next great king after David, and who was for a time
one of the great kings and one who was considered the wisest of all.
But as the family of David breaks down, because David gave in to the flesh,
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he was comfortable with his role as a king.
And, you know, remember when I said that God told them they didn't want kings?
And he gave them a whole list of reasons why they didn't want kings.
But when David got pretty comfortable with being king, he thought,
well, hey, I'm king. I can do whatever I want.
I can have whatever I want. In fact.
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I think I'll have that. And this is what he did all the time.
And pretty soon when people said to him, well, you know, all the kings in the
other world, see, here's where it gets bad, right?
Because all the kings of the other, this is what the rest of us guys are doing.
You know, they went to the bar with all the other kings, right?
And after work on Thursday and they're sitting around drinking beers and the
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kings are all talking and they go, what do you mean you only have two wives?
You should have at least 40 and a whole bunch of concubines.
And so it's just like David is constantly a man after God's own heart and a man after his own flesh.
And he's living out the prophecy that said kings are a bad idea, right?
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Now, to bring this back home, to say that David's legacy ultimately as a father is awful.
And the problem is, is he's a father and a king.
And, you know, it turns out, dads, that we are all fathers and kings.
See, we're not just fathers in our households, but we're also kings.
We also have these roles that we play.
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Some of us are pastors, but some of us have other duties and other responsibilities.
Some of us are kings in that we are sort of sage elders now.
But we still have these kingly responsibilities of not only leaving a legacy
of faith and love for our children.
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But for all the people we affect.
And this is exactly what happened with David, because he not only left the legacy
of a very messed up family.
And when you all get to this in your B90, this will be in the Chronicles and Samuel.
And when you start reading about the Israel after Solomon and just look at the
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complete depravity of the people and the nation and realized that it basically
stemmed from the fact that David was a man after God's own heart,
but he was also a man who never stopped pursuing his flesh.
And the consequences, they don't go away.
And so everything God said about how the sins of the Father would be visited
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on the third and the fourth generation, it came to pass.
And you could say it was a curse, but you could just as easily say it was a
matter of cause and effect. So it's an old problem, and it's just the way things
are until we get to the New Testament and we get to the New Covenant.
Because under the New Covenant, cause and effect can be completely undone.
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Now, I don't mean literally that every time, you know, listen,
I was pretty ill this week, and there were plenty of times when I asked the
Lord to just take it away so I could jump out of bed and get right back to work.
But, you know, he doesn't operate that way, apparently, because it's taken me
several days, and I'm still not 100%.
So you can ask God to, you know, instantaneously, you know, turn your water
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into wine and stuff like that.
That doesn't mean he's going to do it. But when we talk about things like these
generational curses and we talk about these long-term things,
because God's all about the long-term, and that's because there is no long-term with God, right?
Like, that's one of the things we always have to remember, even though we might
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be 99 and, you know, fixing to die any day now,
we still have to think long-term because the Lord doesn't think in terms of time.
And therefore, when God says, I will definitely come alongside you if you're
ready to get involved in a long-range plan.
And I'll tell you where I'm going with this.
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See, under the New Testament covenant, the new covenant, we have through Jesus
Christ, a Redeemer who has set right our personal spiritual relationship with
God so that we can now have a spiritual connection with God.
Literally, we can be changed in our nature to sons and daughters of God through Jesus Christ.
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That means that the Holy Spirit is at work in us. And it means then that generational
things don't really matter because you're no longer generationally connected
to your sinful fathers and forefathers.
And in this case, we can be talking about women and men, right?
In other words, being born again means that you're not tied to a system in the
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same way that brought you this sequence of consequences.
And to be clear, that only happens when you invite and allow that intervention.
Intervention you know so so you have that resource within you but if you do nothing,
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cause and effect will just do what cause and effect does you'll just suffer
and you'll say why am i you know carrying on the family tradition sounds like
a country song i think well you know You know,
I remember which one now just came to me. Good old Hank.
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But it is different under the new covenant because here's what you do under the new covenant.
And I can promise you, I know where from which I speak.
You can do like an arborist would do. if there was a tree that was particularly
prized and it was dying down at the root and dying at the core,
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but it had good branches growing out of it that still had promise.
And so an arborist would take those and carefully cut them away using special
techniques and take those good branches and then graft them to a healthy root, to a healthy core.
And in the process of grafting, obviously there's pain because to cut something away causes it pain.
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And to merge it to something that it is not naturally adjoined to is going to
have a certain effect that leaves a sort of a ball.
Like if you've looked at a tree, you know, you've seen these and this ball is like a scar.
And so what I've realized is that this is the New Testament way of reconciling
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the sins of the Father proclamation,
is that at any point a person can say, it ends with me.
And I have the power of the Holy Spirit. I have the authority of Jesus Christ.
I can declare it ends with me. And here's how it ends.
I will not pursue the, you know, I will not participate in or be connected to
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this poisonous, noxious past anymore.
It's a decision you make. And it's as though you're cutting yourself away from
something unhealthy and grafting yourself to something healthy.
Now, you can take these ideas and you can apply them in all different kinds of ways.
But ultimately, what you're doing is living not only your own legacy from the
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Holy Spirit in new life in Christ,
but you are producing an entire descendancy of.
In other words, you can always think about the pain and the suffering and the
difficulty that you had to endure because you've chosen a better way and you've had to work.
And remember I said how the Lord works long term?
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These things take decades.
It's not going to happen overnight.
These are decisions you're going to have to keep reminding yourself of,
and they're going to be pursuits that you continue for decades.
And you're going to occasionally count the progress. You're going to occasionally
look back and say, yes, I see how far I've come.
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Thank you, Lord. And this consistent, steady determination to birth a new legacy
only by the power of the Holy Spirit.
And then what you get to do is eventually see all of this new life,
these children of yours, these grandchildren of yours, this legacy of love that
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lasts for four and five and six generations.
So here's some really practical applications that I want to leave you with.
And that's really the point in this whole series is to give you some practical
wisdom for having, you know, good family life.
But I also want to remind you that even if you are not rearing children right
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now, I call you elders and I call you to account too.
So first of all, for Christian parenting, focus on nurturing faith.
Maybe you're a parent who has chosen a new way for yourself, and you're thinking,
yeah, but I mean, you know, my kids keep getting older, I keep getting older,
and I'm still not done, you know, kind of correcting this thing and choosing a better way.
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What if I'm not setting a great example, and even though I really mean to,
and even though I'm really trying?
Well, for one thing, as we said last week, the kids are pretty perceptive.
They know when you're trying. They really do.
And they know when you're just giving it lip service. But the other thing is,
is that what you can do is you can encourage in them a legacy of faith.
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Like this is, this is, parents, write this down.
There's a reason why you should be bringing your kids to church,
a good church, a Bible preaching church, a Bible teaching church,
a church full of elders in the faith.
Faith, but if you can find such a place, you nurture your children's faith because
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their own faith will be their strongest weapon against you.
Now, please don't be offended by that. I don't mean it that way.
I'm saying if you doubt yourself, as I often do, about whether you set a good
example or not, when you're ashamed of yourself because there's still things
that you do and say that you wish you didn't do and say,
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and you really don't want to bear witness like that to your children,
then at least counterbalance it by urging them to grow in the faith and God
bless them if they turn out to be holier than you. It's okay.
I would love to have children who are far better Christian believers than I am at an earlier age.
And so far, it's looking pretty good. My kids seem to be far better people at
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their respective ages than I ever was when I was their age.
So we must be doing something right.
And I would say that it's the faith in Christ that we nurtured in them that
made all the difference.
You break these generational cycles by stating plainly that these are cycles
we're not going to repeat. you make it a clear family mission.
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You practice grace and forgiveness first for yourself and then regularly with your children.
And you commit yourself to leaving a legacy of love.
And for the elders, the piece of advice that I would give you is you can be
the source of wisdom and guidance for these processes.
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And you don't have to be directly related. Remember, we would be,
you know, go back to the thing about having a legacy faith.
You know, if you get the people, if you get your kids in a faith community,
and this is why we really committed to doing baptisms in public,
is because we want to say to all of you that you are all sharing in the responsibility
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of being faith representatives to this baby.
You know, this is a child or this is a young person and we're going to raise
in the faith in this church.
And that means all of us have an elder sort of responsibility to them.
So those of you who greet them in the hallway or teach them in a class or meet
them in the pews, you know, it doesn't matter whether you're related to them or not.
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You have a legacy that you can, you know, this is where the dads are kings,
right? And the moms are queens.
You have this responsibility of being an exemplar because you're helping the
family nurture their child in the faith that will strengthen them against the
sin legacy that is natural to humanity.
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So the other thing we do as elders is we equip the next generation.
This is why, as hard as it is sometimes, because older people,
we tend to think that we're being overlooked or taken for granted because the
church is always talking about children and youth.
But that's because it's our primary purpose to leave a legacy.
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It's our primary purpose to equip the church for the sake of people who aren't
here yet or who are becoming the next generation.
And so we have to put children and families first in order to fulfill this incredibly
important legacy buster to
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end this pattern for everybody so that we become not only a family of God,
but we've become a family of God that's giving new life and new faith in dramatic ways,
whether we're directly involved or not.
Let's pray. Thank you, God, for your word.
Burn it upon our hearts. Change our natures. Give us the power and authority
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that we've just talked about, to equip our kids, ourselves,
even our eldership, to serve you and represent you so that we can be legacy busters.
We pray for this in Christ's name. Amen.
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Music.
Music.
(00:08):
The readings, there are four of them. They're all fairly brief,
and they all kind of run in succession.
So if you're following in your pew Bible, then you'll want to start on page 72.
So we're down to the double digits here, where Exodus chapter 20 is the first one.
And I'll just guide you through. If you're following in any Bible,
(00:29):
just start with Exodus 20. we'll read verse 5 and 6, and then we're going to
jump ahead to Exodus 34 and Numbers 14 and eventually Deuteronomy 5.
And if you want to follow along, that's where you'll find those.
These are the passages. Exodus 20, starting at verse 5, says,
(00:51):
You shall not bow down to them or serve them.
For I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God,
visiting the iniquity of the fathers of the children to their third and fourth
generation of those who hate me,
but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
(01:14):
And if you flip ahead a few pages to Exodus 34, that's page 87 in your pew Bible, 87, Exodus 34.
Starting at verse 6, it says, The Lord passed before him and proclaimed,
The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding
in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands,
(01:39):
forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear
the guilty visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's
children to the third and the fourth generation.
Now flip ahead to Numbers 14. That's on page 144 in your pew Bible.
(02:00):
Numbers 14, starting at verse 18. I bet you know what it's going to say.
The Lord is slow to anger, to bounding and steadfast love, forgiving iniquity
and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty visiting the iniquity
of the fathers of the children and the third and the fourth generation.
And finally, Deuteronomy chapter 5, that's page 177.
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Deuteronomy chapter 5, verse 9 says.
You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I, the Lord your God,
am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the
third and the fourth generations of those who hate me.
These are words from the Bible, words of God, and we have a dilemma,
(02:52):
to say the least, now to unpack,
and I'm hoping that by the time we're done, this will be rich and empowering.
You see, the Bible is obviously explicit.
I mean, having said it four times in no uncertain terms,
(03:12):
God is saying to the people, look, if you mess up and you divert from the right
kind of relationship with me,
it's going to trickle down through your family line and generations will suffer the consequences.
And if you're someone, see, I know from life experience of my own and just being
(03:36):
around so many different people over the years, that we all kind of have a story
that involves a certain family curse.
You know, there's just some family thing that, you know, like in my family,
I've heard this more often since we moved back to Jasper, than anywhere else I've lived,
(03:57):
but in my family, there's this thing where somebody will say something nice
about you to someone else, but they wouldn't say it to you because they wouldn't
want you to get a pig head, right?
You ever heard that one? I hear it more around here, you know?
I don't know if it's a German thing, you know, but they're these sort of fascinating fascinating,
(04:19):
sort of genetic and social-cultural sort of things that transition through families.
And so you can have someone, you know, a child, let's say, who has all the characteristics
of a great uncle that they never knew, and yet they'll represent that person really well.
(04:48):
And when they never even knew each other. They're just these things that pass
through our family line.
And that's why in communities not all that different from, say, Jasper,
you have, you know, sort of a family's culture within the community where there
(05:09):
are several prominent families and all the people are descended from these families.
And so there's a culture that becomes the community culture.
And it's because of this family connection. And so it turns out that this is not so much of a threat.
(05:30):
And I really took it this way. When I was a young person, when I was a teenager
who was into the Bible, I read this passage because when I was a teenager,
I read the Bible all the way through before B90 was the thing.
You're going to have to excuse me. I mean, I've been ill and I keep getting
cotton mouth whenever I start talking.
(05:51):
I beg your pardon. So I read this passage as a teenager and thought, well, thanks, God.
This is great news. You know, my father told me stories about his father that weren't flattering.
And, you know, I often ask myself, is this, you know, is this your way of saying this is how it is?
(06:13):
You know, get over it, get used to it, whatever. And then I hear the Bible telling
me that the sins of the father are going to be visited on the third and the fourth generation.
What's up with that? And I'm really not happy with what I'm reading.
And it seems like God is being grossly unfair.
It seems like God is saying, I'm going to punish the children and the grandchildren
(06:37):
and the great-grandchildren of this guy because he, you know, disrespected me.
And that's the way it reads, and that's the way a lot of people read the Old Testament.
And yet, if you really read carefully in the Old Testament,
it becomes clear that God is certainly not, you know, incapable of punishing
(06:58):
and allowing consequences to run their course.
But God's not mean-spirited. God's just sort of a cause and effect agent.
You know, God says, look, it's simple.
You know, like sometimes some of you are going to be reading in the Bible in
90 days as you go through this.
(07:19):
You should be right about some of the more, you know, if you're reading B90
right now, then you're probably getting close to some of that stuff that everybody
kind of just plows through as hard as they can because it's like,
you know, how much Leviticus can one person take in a single dose, you know?
And if you're giggling, it's probably because you're about there.
(07:40):
And but but if you read carefully in
leviticus and now some of you are going through this again and i
want to really point this out to you if you read carefully in leviticus you
begin to recognize that god is simply teaching an ignorant group of people a
lot of simple truths that they need to know about cause and effect and and i
(08:00):
always get laughs for saying it
this way but leviticus basically tells the Israelites, don't eat roadkill.
That stuff will make you sick. And we all laugh, but, you know, they didn't know.
They didn't know. And God did. And so God said, tell the people,
don't eat dead things they fight
on the side of the road because it'll be diseased and make them sick.
(08:22):
You know, and so God is, in the Old Testament, is this God of cause and effect.
And he is basically saying, look, if, if dad gives poor leadership to his family,
and in this case, he means with regard to God's relationship with dad,
you know, so the Bible's telling us that if, if, because you remember,
(08:45):
there's a couple of those passages I read where it says, you know,
that, that if, if they love me, I'm going to love them back, you know?
So, So God is saying, basically, if dad will stay in a faithful relationship
with me, then there will be faithfulness that translates through generations.
(09:07):
But if dad is unfaithful, then it's going to be consequential for multiple generations.
Now, how many of us really have to be told that? Let's think about it in the
same terms as the roadkill analogy.
If dad is cruel and vindictive to his children and to his wife,
and if dad is a reprobate and dad doesn't maintain employment,
(09:31):
doesn't take care of his responsibilities,
what happens to the family, right?
The poor leadership in a household leads to the breakdown of the entire family.
And, you know, I know people very personally who deal with the consequences
of poor leadership in households every day.
(09:52):
And so what is God saying in these observations? He's not saying that I'm going
to punish you by punishing your children and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren.
What he's saying is you can guarantee that if you don't stay in the right relationship
with me, there will be consequences for those generations.
(10:12):
So that's the Old Testament view of this.
And God, I think, in the Old Testament is often misunderstood as having,
like, you know, from Old Testament to New Testament, having some sort of schizophrenic
complete shift in his nature.
But he hasn't really changed in his nature.
He's changed the nature of his relationship with the people.
(10:36):
And the nature of the relationship with the people is the thing.
And it has all kinds of connections to how Christ opens the way for us to be
uniquely linked to the Father by the Holy Spirit.
But before we get to that, let's take a look at a perfect prime example from the Bible.
(11:01):
And I thought about reading a lot of texts from this section of the Bible to explain this.
But if you just think with me about King David, and I know some of you have
been reading, young people, the youth have been reading the chronological Bible
and stuff. So you've read about David.
(11:22):
King David was Israel's greatest king. In theory, today, Israel is still waiting
for the return of that kind of king.
They want a Messiah who is the embodiment of the great King David.
They revere King David as their great leader.
(11:43):
Now, remember that King David was the second king after the first king they
had that they were advised not to get one.
You know, the people were advised by the prophets, don't get a king.
You don't need one of those. Just, you know, somehow you think you're going
to be better off with a king, but I promise you, you'll just be worse off with a king.
(12:05):
And then David comes along and he's so good at loving the Lord that even the
Bible references him as a man after God's own heart.
So if you started with this high view of David as Israel's greatest king and
the time of Israel's greatest glory as a kingdom, and you add to that that he
(12:27):
was known as a man after God's own heart, then you're going,
well, shoot, what a guy.
Why isn't Israel still thriving today?
And here's why. Because it turns out that his heart was right with God,
but his flesh was still very, very vulnerable to sin.
(12:48):
And it turns out that for all the good that David did in putting the one true
God ahead of all the other entities that were present in those days and still powerful in those days.
So, I mean, he was God's instrument of putting—the Old Testament is this road
(13:11):
to the arrival of the Messiah,
and David is this instrumental person in making the arrival of the Messiah possible.
In fact, Jesus is a descendant of David.
He's born in the city of David.
But David, the man, is messed up. He has done some really terrible things.
(13:37):
And for the most part, he knows that he's done terrible things.
And he's very aware. And the reason we know this is because we can read his
own words about it. Read the Psalms.
And you read about his constant anguish, this never-ending tension that David
feels between his good nature and his bad nature,
(13:58):
his consequences and how much he regrets the consequences and he wishes that
he didn't have to suffer the consequences,
but at the same time acknowledging he got the consequences honest because he
did stupid things and there were consequences, you know.
So simple example for those of you who aren't as familiar is David, David, for example,
(14:21):
is notorious for essentially taking a teenage girl who was betrothed to one
of his soldiers, one of his really, you know, special leaders in the military,
and, you know, having his way with her, and then orchestrating the death of
(14:43):
her betrothed so that it would all, you know, work out.
And I'm really soft-selling that.
Like, it's an ugly, ugly story. It's ugly.
What David did was, it wasn't just a little thing. It was a really, really ugly thing.
(15:03):
But consequently, that girl who becomes Bathsheba, who is Bathsheba,
but who becomes the mother of Solomon, for example,
and Solomon becomes the next great king after David, and who was for a time
one of the great kings and one who was considered the wisest of all.
But as the family of David breaks down, because David gave in to the flesh,
(15:28):
he was comfortable with his role as a king.
And, you know, remember when I said that God told them they didn't want kings?
And he gave them a whole list of reasons why they didn't want kings.
But when David got pretty comfortable with being king, he thought,
well, hey, I'm king. I can do whatever I want.
I can have whatever I want. In fact.
(15:50):
I think I'll have that. And this is what he did all the time.
And pretty soon when people said to him, well, you know, all the kings in the
other world, see, here's where it gets bad, right?
Because all the kings of the other, this is what the rest of us guys are doing.
You know, they went to the bar with all the other kings, right?
And after work on Thursday and they're sitting around drinking beers and the
(16:12):
kings are all talking and they go, what do you mean you only have two wives?
You should have at least 40 and a whole bunch of concubines.
And so it's just like David is constantly a man after God's own heart and a man after his own flesh.
And he's living out the prophecy that said kings are a bad idea, right?
(16:33):
Now, to bring this back home, to say that David's legacy ultimately as a father is awful.
And the problem is, is he's a father and a king.
And, you know, it turns out, dads, that we are all fathers and kings.
See, we're not just fathers in our households, but we're also kings.
We also have these roles that we play.
(16:54):
Some of us are pastors, but some of us have other duties and other responsibilities.
Some of us are kings in that we are sort of sage elders now.
But we still have these kingly responsibilities of not only leaving a legacy
of faith and love for our children.
(17:17):
But for all the people we affect.
And this is exactly what happened with David, because he not only left the legacy
of a very messed up family.
And when you all get to this in your B90, this will be in the Chronicles and Samuel.
And when you start reading about the Israel after Solomon and just look at the
(17:38):
complete depravity of the people and the nation and realized that it basically
stemmed from the fact that David was a man after God's own heart,
but he was also a man who never stopped pursuing his flesh.
And the consequences, they don't go away.
And so everything God said about how the sins of the Father would be visited
(18:02):
on the third and the fourth generation, it came to pass.
And you could say it was a curse, but you could just as easily say it was a
matter of cause and effect. So it's an old problem, and it's just the way things
are until we get to the New Testament and we get to the New Covenant.
Because under the New Covenant, cause and effect can be completely undone.
(18:29):
Now, I don't mean literally that every time, you know, listen,
I was pretty ill this week, and there were plenty of times when I asked the
Lord to just take it away so I could jump out of bed and get right back to work.
But, you know, he doesn't operate that way, apparently, because it's taken me
several days, and I'm still not 100%.
So you can ask God to, you know, instantaneously, you know, turn your water
(18:54):
into wine and stuff like that.
That doesn't mean he's going to do it. But when we talk about things like these
generational curses and we talk about these long-term things,
because God's all about the long-term, and that's because there is no long-term with God, right?
Like, that's one of the things we always have to remember, even though we might
(19:16):
be 99 and, you know, fixing to die any day now,
we still have to think long-term because the Lord doesn't think in terms of time.
And therefore, when God says, I will definitely come alongside you if you're
ready to get involved in a long-range plan.
And I'll tell you where I'm going with this.
(19:37):
See, under the New Testament covenant, the new covenant, we have through Jesus
Christ, a Redeemer who has set right our personal spiritual relationship with
God so that we can now have a spiritual connection with God.
Literally, we can be changed in our nature to sons and daughters of God through Jesus Christ.
(19:58):
That means that the Holy Spirit is at work in us. And it means then that generational
things don't really matter because you're no longer generationally connected
to your sinful fathers and forefathers.
And in this case, we can be talking about women and men, right?
In other words, being born again means that you're not tied to a system in the
(20:24):
same way that brought you this sequence of consequences.
And to be clear, that only happens when you invite and allow that intervention.
Intervention you know so so you have that resource within you but if you do nothing,
(20:45):
cause and effect will just do what cause and effect does you'll just suffer
and you'll say why am i you know carrying on the family tradition sounds like
a country song i think well you know You know,
I remember which one now just came to me. Good old Hank.
(21:07):
But it is different under the new covenant because here's what you do under the new covenant.
And I can promise you, I know where from which I speak.
You can do like an arborist would do. if there was a tree that was particularly
prized and it was dying down at the root and dying at the core,
(21:31):
but it had good branches growing out of it that still had promise.
And so an arborist would take those and carefully cut them away using special
techniques and take those good branches and then graft them to a healthy root, to a healthy core.
And in the process of grafting, obviously there's pain because to cut something away causes it pain.
(21:56):
And to merge it to something that it is not naturally adjoined to is going to
have a certain effect that leaves a sort of a ball.
Like if you've looked at a tree, you know, you've seen these and this ball is like a scar.
And so what I've realized is that this is the New Testament way of reconciling
(22:18):
the sins of the Father proclamation,
is that at any point a person can say, it ends with me.
And I have the power of the Holy Spirit. I have the authority of Jesus Christ.
I can declare it ends with me. And here's how it ends.
I will not pursue the, you know, I will not participate in or be connected to
(22:44):
this poisonous, noxious past anymore.
It's a decision you make. And it's as though you're cutting yourself away from
something unhealthy and grafting yourself to something healthy.
Now, you can take these ideas and you can apply them in all different kinds of ways.
But ultimately, what you're doing is living not only your own legacy from the
(23:13):
Holy Spirit in new life in Christ,
but you are producing an entire descendancy of.
In other words, you can always think about the pain and the suffering and the
difficulty that you had to endure because you've chosen a better way and you've had to work.
And remember I said how the Lord works long term?
(23:35):
These things take decades.
It's not going to happen overnight.
These are decisions you're going to have to keep reminding yourself of,
and they're going to be pursuits that you continue for decades.
And you're going to occasionally count the progress. You're going to occasionally
look back and say, yes, I see how far I've come.
(23:57):
Thank you, Lord. And this consistent, steady determination to birth a new legacy
only by the power of the Holy Spirit.
And then what you get to do is eventually see all of this new life,
these children of yours, these grandchildren of yours, this legacy of love that
(24:19):
lasts for four and five and six generations.
So here's some really practical applications that I want to leave you with.
And that's really the point in this whole series is to give you some practical
wisdom for having, you know, good family life.
But I also want to remind you that even if you are not rearing children right
(24:40):
now, I call you elders and I call you to account too.
So first of all, for Christian parenting, focus on nurturing faith.
Maybe you're a parent who has chosen a new way for yourself, and you're thinking,
yeah, but I mean, you know, my kids keep getting older, I keep getting older,
and I'm still not done, you know, kind of correcting this thing and choosing a better way.
(25:04):
What if I'm not setting a great example, and even though I really mean to,
and even though I'm really trying?
Well, for one thing, as we said last week, the kids are pretty perceptive.
They know when you're trying. They really do.
And they know when you're just giving it lip service. But the other thing is,
is that what you can do is you can encourage in them a legacy of faith.
(25:27):
Like this is, this is, parents, write this down.
There's a reason why you should be bringing your kids to church,
a good church, a Bible preaching church, a Bible teaching church,
a church full of elders in the faith.
Faith, but if you can find such a place, you nurture your children's faith because
(25:47):
their own faith will be their strongest weapon against you.
Now, please don't be offended by that. I don't mean it that way.
I'm saying if you doubt yourself, as I often do, about whether you set a good
example or not, when you're ashamed of yourself because there's still things
that you do and say that you wish you didn't do and say,
(26:07):
and you really don't want to bear witness like that to your children,
then at least counterbalance it by urging them to grow in the faith and God
bless them if they turn out to be holier than you. It's okay.
I would love to have children who are far better Christian believers than I am at an earlier age.
And so far, it's looking pretty good. My kids seem to be far better people at
(26:31):
their respective ages than I ever was when I was their age.
So we must be doing something right.
And I would say that it's the faith in Christ that we nurtured in them that
made all the difference.
You break these generational cycles by stating plainly that these are cycles
we're not going to repeat. you make it a clear family mission.
(26:54):
You practice grace and forgiveness first for yourself and then regularly with your children.
And you commit yourself to leaving a legacy of love.
And for the elders, the piece of advice that I would give you is you can be
the source of wisdom and guidance for these processes.
(27:18):
And you don't have to be directly related. Remember, we would be,
you know, go back to the thing about having a legacy faith.
You know, if you get the people, if you get your kids in a faith community,
and this is why we really committed to doing baptisms in public,
is because we want to say to all of you that you are all sharing in the responsibility
(27:39):
of being faith representatives to this baby.
You know, this is a child or this is a young person and we're going to raise
in the faith in this church.
And that means all of us have an elder sort of responsibility to them.
So those of you who greet them in the hallway or teach them in a class or meet
them in the pews, you know, it doesn't matter whether you're related to them or not.
(27:59):
You have a legacy that you can, you know, this is where the dads are kings,
right? And the moms are queens.
You have this responsibility of being an exemplar because you're helping the
family nurture their child in the faith that will strengthen them against the
sin legacy that is natural to humanity.
(28:19):
So the other thing we do as elders is we equip the next generation.
This is why, as hard as it is sometimes, because older people,
we tend to think that we're being overlooked or taken for granted because the
church is always talking about children and youth.
But that's because it's our primary purpose to leave a legacy.
(28:41):
It's our primary purpose to equip the church for the sake of people who aren't
here yet or who are becoming the next generation.
And so we have to put children and families first in order to fulfill this incredibly
important legacy buster to
(29:02):
end this pattern for everybody so that we become not only a family of God,
but we've become a family of God that's giving new life and new faith in dramatic ways,
whether we're directly involved or not.
Let's pray. Thank you, God, for your word.
Burn it upon our hearts. Change our natures. Give us the power and authority
(29:26):
that we've just talked about, to equip our kids, ourselves,
even our eldership, to serve you and represent you so that we can be legacy busters.
We pray for this in Christ's name. Amen.
(29:47):
Music.
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