1. Please pray with me. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock, and our Redeemer. Amen. The message from God’s Word as we observe Christian Education Sunday is taken from Deuteronomy 6:1-9. It’s entitled, “The Greatest Gift You Can Give,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. At one time or another, every parent has probably 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 is the greatest gift you can give your child? I suggest it’s more than a well-rounded education and a happy and pleasant childhood—now, 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, upon your heart as a parent so you may impress that Gospel upon your children.
4. But, 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 or vaccination”—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 with a vaccine—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, 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). Devout Jews wear small leather packets called phylacteries or tefillin with Scripture in them on their forehead and arm when they pray and put small boxes with Scripture on their doorjamb so they can touch it when they come and go. 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. 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 will not 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, the word שִׁנַּנְתּ (shinant) impress is related to the word for “repetition or to speak, or to recite again and again”. 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. Many of you wonder how I have such a good memory. I probably got some of that through the repetition of my confirmation and Bible memory work from my mom growing up.
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, confirmation instruction—and, most effectively, through a Lutheran day school & Early Childhood Center, 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 pastor 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. Maybe you feel it is too late to start training him or her in the faith. It is 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 eternal life to us and to our children. That is the greatest gift you can give your child—the gift of life, real life, in Jesus Christ. Amen. Now the peace of God that passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus until life everlasting. Amen.
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