1. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Heavenly
Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
The message from God’s Word this Christian Education Sunday is taken
from Deuteronomy 6:1-9 (READ TEXT). It’s
entitled, “The Greatest Gift You Can Give,”
dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. At one time or another, every parent here today has
wondered: “What is the greatest gift I
can give my child?” Think about it! What might that gift be? Is it a “well-rounded education”? If so, special
effort would be made to live in a community with good schools, to provide piano
and dance lessons, to encourage sports activities, and so on. Is it a “happy and pleasant childhood”? If so,
special effort would be made to spend quality time with your children, to
provide a home life with minimal stress and conflict, and to plan exciting
family activities and vacations.
3. What’s the greatest gift you can give your child? I
suggest it’s more than a well-rounded education and a happy and pleasant
childhood—important as these are I suggest the greatest gift you can give your
child is the gift of Jesus. Let God’s Word of forgiveness in Jesus Christ be,
as our text says in Deuteronomy 6, upon your heart as a parent so you may
impress that Gospel upon your children.
4. Education Isn’t Inoculation. The problem is
that often parents fail to recognize the ongoing nature of this task. Do you
ever think of religious education as a kind of “inoculation”—a onetime or short-term event that “exposes” your children to Christianity
in the same way he or she may be exposed to chicken pox—to get it out of the
way at an early age. Once he’s been exposed, we figure, then he’s had his
lifelong dosage and we’ve done our job as parents.
5. The newspapers ran a story of a school bus driver who
got lost driving a group of gifted children on an unfamiliar route. In
frustration, she returned to the school, dropped the children off at the front
steps, and told them, “You’re gifted—you
figure out how to get home.” Fortunately, a woman living across the street
invited the stranded children inside to call their parents. “The kids were just floating around out
there in the cold afternoon,” she said “I
couldn’t just leave them alone out there like that.” Needless to say, these
children didn’t want to ride the bus again.
6. The same thing happens to children whose parents
attempt “religious inoculation”—they
are left stranded in the cold. These children are offered a short-term solution
that delivers only short-term results. Once they grow up, needless to say, they
don’t want to ride the religious bus anymore. What’s the greatest gift you
could ever give your child? It’s not a religious inoculation but a Christian
education! And a Christian education is found only through the teaching of
God’s love for us in Jesus Christ.
7. This is the education God wanted for his people when
they came to the Promised Land. Our text is what God told Moses to tell the
people. Note the ways in which they are to keep the commandments on their
hearts: “Impress them on your children.
Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you
lie down and when you get up.” And two things Jewish people still do: “Tie them
as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the
doorframes of your houses and on your gates” (vv 7–9). Teaching children to
“love the Lord your God with all your
heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (v 5) is not an
inoculation but an ongoing education.
8. Ken Precht, a Lutheran school teacher and principal,
testifies to how the Lord used his first-grade teacher in the Lutheran day
school he attended. He remembers well the important role she played in his
spiritual formation as a youngster. Nearly 40 years later, Precht attended a
teachers convention where the speaker asked each person to think of a Lutheran
school teacher or Sunday school teacher who had taught them the faith as a
child. Participants then were asked to sing “Jesus Loves Me,” substituting that teacher’s name for “the Bible” in the phrase “the Bible tells me so.” Who do you
suppose was at that convention seated next to Precht? Yes, his first-grade
teacher, now retired but still actively teaching the faith!
9. The love that every parent and every teacher of the
faith throughout countless generations have told “their” children about is the
Savior’s love that has no bounds. It is the love of a God who cares so much for
you and me that he sent his only-begotten Son to a cross, that whoever believes
in him will not perish but have eternal life. In Christ Jesus, your sins are no
more, and his forgiveness is yours forever. That is God’s love for you and that
is the joyful Good News he has given you to teach to your children.
10. From one generation to the next, God’s salvation in
Christ Jesus is passed from parent to child and from teacher to student. Again
and again the story of God’s love for us in Christ Jesus is spoken. In this
“repetition” we see the continuous and ongoing nature of our Lord’s love for us.
He doesn’t just inoculate us. Rather, he sticks with his people until the end
of time. And so, also, we begin to see the nature of our task as Christian
parents and teachers—not to inoculate our children with Christianity but to
provide for their continuous and ongoing nurture in the Christian faith.
11. Recently, Dr. James Dobson, noted Christian
psychologist, was asked why we put children through the agony of learning when
the human mind forgets some 80 percent of whatever it has learned within a few
months. He listed four reasons: first, because it provides the basic
self-discipline and self-control needed to function in adult life; second, that
even if a person can’t recall the exact material needed at least he knows where
to look for it; third, we don’t forget 100 percent of what we learn since the
most important facts do find a place in our permanent memory; then he concludes
with perhaps the most significant reason that learning is important because we
are changed by what we learn. He writes: “Learning
produces alterations in values, attitudes, and concepts that do not fade in
time.”
12. Ongoing Christian learning produces changes in values,
attitudes, and concepts that won’t fade in time either. That’s why our text
says we are to impress the Lord’s words on our children. The word impress is
sometimes translated as “teach diligently.”
It has an urgent and ongoing sense to it. In fact, ‘in the original Hebrew,
impress is related to the word for repetition. We impress the Lord’s Word on
our children by repetition—by telling of God’s love for them in Christ Jesus
again and again and again from Baptism to adulthood.
13. “Teaching
diligently” begins in the home as we teach our children how to pray at
bedtime and before meals, as we read them Bible stories from a children’s Bible
or storybook again and again, and as we conduct family worship. Then, the
church is enlisted in the process—through Sunday school, midweek school,
confirmation instruction—and, most effectively, through a Lutheran day school
such as the Lord has given us here. Through these means, Christian parents can
teach their children of Jesus Christ and his precious love and forgiveness so
these beloved children will remain firm in the Christian faith for the rest of
their lives.
14. And what a glorious thing it is to witness the faith
life of a child whose parents have raised him in God’s Word and have themselves
believed and taught it. St. Paul charges the young preacher Timothy to stick
with what he learned long ago as a little child. “But as for you,” Paul says, “continue in what you have learned and have
become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how
from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures” (2 Tim 3:14–15).
15. Maybe your child is well beyond the infant stage.
Perhaps you feel it is too late to start training him or her in the faith. It’s
never too late, my friends. As long as the Lord has given you that child’s body
and mind to love and care for, he has also given you that child’s soul to
nurture and strengthen in the faith. Today is the day to begin. “Now is the time of God’s favor,” says St.
Paul. “Now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor 6:2). The Word of God that you
teach your children today, dear parents, is the one thing in their lives that
will truly last forever. As Isaiah declares: “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God
endures forever” (Is 40:8).
16. Long after you and I are gone and our children have
raised their children and have seen their children’s children come also to the
baptismal font of life, nothing else will matter but that we here today taught
our young ones to know Jesus Christ as their Savior from sin. Nothing else will
matter—certainly not the money we saved, the businesses we ran, the houses we
lived in, or even the friends and memories we shared—none of that will matter.
The only thing that will matter will be the Gospel—the saving Gospel of Jesus
Christ, which has brought life to us and to our children. The only thing that we can bring to heaven is
our children. That’s the greatest gift you can give your child—the gift of eternal
life, real life, in Jesus Christ. Amen. Now the
peace that passes all human understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ
Jesus until life everlasting. Amen.
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