Tell the Next Generation the Glorious Deeds of the Lord

And and then like the room doubled in people after the announcement time.

So just in case you missed it, we did want to say a special welcome to our college students that have come back.

Um it we're really excited for new time, first time, or returning college students.

We're excited you're here.

We love to have you as a part of this body.

We'd love to invite you tonight at five o'clock to come hang out with us at the garage across the street.

That's the name of the building, not an actual garage.

But we serve a meal and have a study and just kind of hang out as a community.

We'd love to see you there.

So, having said that, today, we're gonna look at Psalm 78.

Psalm 78 is the second longest Psalm in the Bible.

It's got 72 verses.

We're not going to read every single verse, just so you can breathe, uh a little easier.

But we are going to look at what the entire psalm's purpose is.

And I believe that we can do that, even though it's 72 verses, we can capsulate it down to a simple phrase of what the purpose of this psalm is.

So having said that, we're going to look first at the first eight verses, because they set the stage for what the theme of this psalm is.

So I'd ask you to read with me.

If you don't have a Bible, there's Bibles in the pew in front of you.

If you don't own a Bible, feel free to take that home.

It's our gift to you.

We really value the Word of God here, and we want that to be in everyone's hands possible.

So, Psalm 78, starting in verse 1.

Abasil of Asaph.

Give ear, O my people, to my teaching.

Incline your ears to the words of my mouth.

I will open my mouth in a parable.

I will utter dark sayings from of old, things that we have heard and known that our fathers have told us.

We will not hide them from their children, but tell them to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, that his might and the wonder and his might and the wonders that he has done.

He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach their children, that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children, so that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments, and that they should not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not steadfast, whose spirit was not faithful to God.

Let's pray.

Lord, we come before you and we thank you for your word.

We thank you for what it reveals of your character, that what it reveals of the history of your people, the lessons that we can learn as a result, and we ask that you would do that in power this morning through your spirit as we hear this word, that you would move our hearts to fall more in line with your will.

We ask you to do this because we know we are incapable of changing our own hearts.

It must be your work.

So we invite your spirit to be with us and teach us.

In Jesus' name, amen.

So here's what I mean: 72 verses.

I believe we can we can summarize.

Here's the short version for those of you on a time crunchy.

This is the mini sermon.

Tell the next generation of the glorious deeds of God.

There you go, sermon's over.

No.

That's what this psalm is all about.

It takes 72 verses to spell out what that looks like, but that is the point of this psalm.

It is a call to God's people to tell the next generation of the glorious deeds of God.

And you may be going, oh great, the youth pastor's gonna guilt us about not telling the next generation of the glorious deeds of God.

This is not an infomercial for our youth and children's ministry.

I just want to say that right away.

This is not an infomercial.

I did not get up here to guilt anyone to signing up to fill.

However, if by the hearing of God's word and the presence of his spirit you feel moved towards getting involved in telling the next generation the glorious deeds of God, feel free to talk to me or Christy after church, and we'll be glad to point you in those areas.

Having said that, let's look at what this is about.

Psalm 78 is the second longest Psalm in the Bible, and these first eight verses of the Psalm set the stage for the rest of the Psalm by prescribing to the people of Israel a command to teach the next generation of the goodness of God.

For us to understand this, we need to note a few things to start.

First, this command was not new.

This was something that was deeply ingrained in Israel through something that the Hebrew people called the Shema.

In Hebrew culture, the Shema was the repetition of some section of scripture, what they called the Torah, we call the book of Deuteronomy.

And Deuteronomy chapter 6, verse 4, you will find where Moses addresses the Israelite people before they enter the promised land.

Deuteronomy 6:4

They have been freed from Egypt, they have wandered in the desert, they have been disobedient, and God has saved them anyway.

And as they are about to take the land because they disobeyed and God made them wander in the desert for 40 years, as they're about to enter the land, Moses stands up and reminds them what they've been through and commands them to tell their children in a way that they will never forget what God has done for the nation of Israel.

And so if you look in Deuteronomy, this is where we first see this.

Shema, by the way, is the Hebrew word for hear or listen.

It's a command to hear.

It's a command to say, give me your ear, listen, take heed, and obey.

It is a very powerful word for the word hear, and it means listen up, people.

And so it starts in Deuteronomy 6, 4, it says, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might, and these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.

You shall teach them diligently to your children.

You shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.

This phrase, and it goes on to tell more and more about how never let the people forget and tell the young ones, make sure they know.

It was so prominently taught in the Hebrew culture, so ingrained, that when Jesus asked what the greatest commandment was, he was quoted from this passage.

Look at Deuteronomy 6.5 says, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

Does that sound familiar?

Look in the New Testament.

And that's what when he says, What is the greatest commandment?

That's what they were answered.

And maybe some of you, the first time, you said, Well, that's not even a commandment at all.

I know the Ten Commandments ago.

No, this was taught above all else in the Hebrew culture.

They recited it when they got gathered together in the synagogues.

They recited it to the people when they gathered for festivals of celebration.

It was ingrained into many facets of the Hebrew life.

And they constantly heard this reminder to tell your children.

It was part of the households of the Hebrew culture.

Many of the households would recite these verses in the morning when they woke up and at bedtime when they went to sleep, because it says right there in Deuteronomy 6, 7, you shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.

So they go, well, let's do it at bedtime and morning time.

We're just gonna remind us of this thing.

The Shema, this, listen up, give me your ear, tell your children the mighty deeds of God, this was not a foreign concept.

So when the psalmist in Psalm 78 says, Give ear, O my people, to my teaching, incline your ears to the words of my mouth, that rings true to them.

And when he says, I will utter my mouth, I will open my mouth in a parable, and I will utter dark sayings of old, things we have heard and known that our fathers have told us.

That's because their fathers were following the same command.

It says, We're not going to hide these things from our children, but tell them to the coming generation.

Tell the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord.

So we need to understand this was a command.

First thing I want you to hear today telling the next generation of the glorious deeds of God is not an option.

It's not an option.

It's not if you're willing.

It's not, oh, I'd really like it if you know.

It's a command.

Look at the words.

It says, He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach their children.

We are asked, and Israel was asked, to tell the next generation of the mighty deeds of God.

Something we need to know.

Second thing, it's helpful here in knowing how to understand this command and that it's not an option, is that this command was given to the collective of God's people.

It was given to the nation of Israel as a unit.

It was not saying, you parents, you individuals, go home and tell your children.

So if you're sitting there going, well, I don't have kids, so I guess I can kind of mentally check out of this sermon.

No.

This was not just to parents, it was to all of the people.

The command was to the entire community of God's people to let the next generation know of his mighty and glorious deeds, the things he had done for his people to save them, to make them his own.

That is on all of us.

The Psalms were basically the hymn book of Israel, and as such were used during the worship of all the people when gathered together.

This included, but was not restricted to parents.

This is not to say that this psalm or today's sermon is not directly applicable to you as parents, or myself for that matter, but we should all seek to understand our role within the people of God and how we are to make known the mighty deeds of God to the next generation.

Which brings me to another point.

This is for us right now.

It was for God's people, it was for the collective of the people, and it's for us as the church today.

See, sometimes we can get into the rich history.

This is going to, this psalm is going to break down rich historical data of the nation of Israel.

And sometimes when looking at the nation of Israel in the Old Testament, we can distance ourselves mentally from it.

We can kind of go, that was them.

God was operating in that way at that time.

This is kind of unique to who Israel was, as you know, his people was a nation, and now it's kind of different.

And so we tune out.

But we can say with real confidence that God intended very much for Psalm 78 to directly apply to us as a church.

See, when Paul recounted Israel's history to the New Testament church in 1 Corinthians, he was recounting some of the same things that are in the 72 verses of this Psalm.

Some of the same history that we see unfolded in the 72 verses of this psalm, which we're going to get to.

And when he did, he said this in 1 Corinthians verse 6.

Now these things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did.

And again in verse 11, he says, Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction on whom the end of the age is come.

Paul takes the direct history of Israel and says that it is meant to be a guiding lesson for the church.

And so we can say with confidence that this isn't just a history lesson about how Israel was commanded to take this message of God's great deeds to the next generation.

This is a lesson right here.

And so all of a sudden I'm interested.

Second point, the first point in case you missed it was telling the next generation of the mighty deeds of God is not an option.

Second point, telling the next generation of the mighty deeds of God involves dealing with our failures.

One of the things that drew me to this psalm is the fact that the psalmist tells of God's kindness to Israel, but in order to do it, he must tell the story of Israel's failure.

After the first eight verses where he says, tell them, the psalmist spends the rest of the psalm actually recounting the greatness of God and specifically how he was faithful to the people of Israel throughout their history.

But he cannot tell how God saved them without telling what he saved them from.

And so you will see if you read, we're not, as I said, don't worry, we're not going to read all 72 verses, but we are going to look at a couple of sections that give us a background of the history, and you will see that it's impossible to tell the story of his great deeds without including the failures of man.

It's impossible to tell the next generation, which is what the Psalm's stated purpose is, they must recount man's failure.

The psalmist recounts time after time after time that Israel turns their backs on, rejects, and tests God.

And yet he also tells of time after time after time that God blesses them anyway, withholds his anger, and keeps his promise.

Let's look specifically at verses 12 through 25 to get an idea of this.

So in Psalm 78, I want to read verses 12 through 25, and and and we can't, you could preach a whole sermon on this section, you could preach five sermons on this section of Israel's history.

We're going to be brief.

In the sight of their fathers, speaking of Israel, he performed wonders in the land of Egypt, in the fields of Zone.

He divided the sea and let them pass through it, and he made the waters stand like a heap.

In the daytime he led them with a cloud, and at night with a fiery light, he split rocks in the wilderness, and gave them drink abundantly as from the deep.

He made streams come out of the rock and caused waters to flow down like rivers.

Yet they sinned still more against him, rebelling against the Most High in the desert.

They tested God in their heart by demanding the food they craved, and they spoke against God, saying, Can God spread a table in the wilderness?

He struck the rock so that water gushed out and streams overflowed.

Can he also give bread or provide meat for his people?

And they start grumbling, Oh, yeah, you saved us that way.

You give us water, where's the food?

And they start grumbling, and it says in 21, therefore, when the Lord heard, he was full of wrath.

A fire was kindled against Jacob, and his anger rose against Israel, because they did not believe in God and did not trust his saving power.

Yet, and that's a big word, yet he commanded the skies above and opened the doors of heaven, and he rained down on them manna to eat, and gave them the grain of heaven.

Man ate of the bread of angels, he sent them food in abundance.

I want you to take a look at the pattern that is laid out in this section of the psalm, and then note that it repeats itself in all the other stories told in the psalm.

One, we're talking about them in Egypt, right?

Israel is captive in slavery in Egypt, and God comes to free his people through Moses, and we refer to it in verse 12, and it says he performed wonders in the land of Egypt, referring to all the plagues and things he sent to make Pharaoh let them go, so he's good to his people.

He makes Pharaoh release them, he leads them to safety by parting the sea, he guides them through the wilderness by appearing in a giant pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, and yet they grumble and complain about not getting enough to eat.

And he gets angry.

It says he gets angry, and his wrath was stirred up, yet, and that is a huge word, despite his anger, it says, yet he commanded the skies above and opened the doors of heaven.

Heaven.

Folks, this is the gospel.

Right here in this little mini history lesson about Israel, you see the gospel.

What do we see?

God's good, he frees them from Israel, right?

He frees them from Egypt.

They are Israel.

He frees them from Egypt, and yet, despite his goodness, they prove themselves to be bad.

He justifiably gets angry, and yet he withholds his anger and blesses them anyway.

That's the gospel.

That's the message of the entire scripture.

That's the message and the purpose for which Jesus Christ came.

God is good, we are bad, he blesses us anyway.

He withholds his wrath when we deserve it, and he blesses us.

It's the story of Egypt, it's the story of Israel, it's a story of every section of God's people.

It's you look at every portion of our history.

And he's good, we're bad, he's justifiably angry, and yet we get blessing instead of wrath.

That's the gospel.

The greatest deed of God, the most glorious act of God is his withholding of the wrath we so rightfully deserve.

This Psalm tells that story in great repetition through all 72 of its verses, but I want to call your attention to verse 38 because it gives a beautiful picture.

I'm going to back up actually a couple of verses to verse 32, and I want you to see that after that great blessing where he withheld his anger and blesses them anyway and gives them manna, it goes on to tell more of what's happened and his good deeds.

And then in verse 32, it says, in spite of all this, in other words, in spite of the glorious deeds of God, they still sinned.

Despite his wonders, they did not believe.

And you see the people failing over and over again, and it goes on to spell out their failure from 32 to verse 37 in more detail, as it's going to continue to do all the way through verse 72.

But in verse 38, it says this, another big yet.

Yet he, being compassionate, atoned for their iniquity and did not destroy them.

He restrained his anger often and did not stir up all his wrath.

The greatest thing God has done for us is withhold his wrath from us.

And despite our failure, he blesses us, and you cannot tell of the greatness of that without looking at our failure.

And Israel had to come to terms with it.

It's why Moses sat them down before they entered the promised land and said, Remember that you turned your back on God and He protected you despite that as you wandered in the desert.

And as you go into this land, never forget your failures.

And that He blesses you anyway.

Israel had to remember that.

And it was a pattern that was set forth for their entire history.

But I want to tell you something, it's true for our lives as well.

Again, this is not just a history lesson.

So I'm going to look at two ways this is true for our lives.

It's true for our lives corporately, as the body of Christ, as a unit, just as the psalmist addressed Israel as a unit, as a group of people, and told them that it was their collective job to tell the next generation.

It's our collective job as a church to tell the next generation.

And just as they could not tell the story of God's greatness without admitting their failure, our job as a church is to remember that we cannot tell the story of God's greatness without looking at our failure.

And as a collective, as Christians throughout history, we've not done this so well.

We whitewash our history and tell a different story.

We love to paint a picture of how glorious yesteryear was, of how much we got it then, and now we're just falling apart.

We rewrite the atrocities of the church in the past and make it sound like just recently, since the internet really, we started falling apart.

And it's just not true.

It's just not true.

We like to say things like, well, when I grew up in church, we knew what respect was.

Or when I grew up in church, we believed the Bible was true.

Or when I grew up in church, we weren't afraid to call a sin a sin.

Or when I grew up, we didn't have all this crazy theology that denies that Jesus is truly the Son of God.

And all these different phrases, and so on and so on, and so on, that acts like heresy's a new thing.

That acts like people have gotten it until just recently.

And it does our children a disservice to not acknowledge the fact that throughout the history of God's people, Israel and the church has constantly proven that they fail.

And it's God that's faithful, not people.

I just want to tell you this thinking that yesteryear the church had it figured out is just a denial of what's happened in our past.

Let me give you a little example, just a little one.

Talk all day about little instances like this, but how many of you have heard of uh little bracelets that say WWJ D on them?

And that that little bracelet says what it means, what would Jesus do, right?

And those are great little bracelets when I was in high school, they were really, really popular and all that stuff.

But but here's what I want to let you that phrase, what would Jesus do?

That phrase is born out of a movement from the early 1900s called the social gospel.

And that movement believed that Jesus was not the Son of God who came to die for our sins, that he did not provide salvation on the cross, that we are not inherently bad beings that need a savior, that movement believed that we are inherently good and we just need to be shown the way.

And that Jesus was our Savior in the fact that not that he gave us eternal salvation from our sins, but that he lived a life that was an example for us to follow.

And that simply by asking what would Jesus do, we within ourselves could come up with the right answers, and it was by just behaving the way he behaved that we would save the world.

Many of us didn't know that.

I hope I'm not causing you to cover up your bracelet right now.

And that's fine if you wore the bracelet, that doesn't mean anything, because if you wore it with good intentions, that's great.

But but we don't really tell the stories that involve things like that because it was a catchy little phrase and it got people thinking about Jesus, but it was a whole movement that tried to deny him as the savior.

And we just leave these stories out about how man constantly walks away from God and how man constantly turns their back on God.

And the church is riddled with that in our past.

I mean, church is a big sea, right?

Like we can talk about our church all we day, all we want to, but but right now I'm just talking about the church as in the body of all believers in Jesus Christ since the day of Pentecost until now, all those who've placed their faith in him.

You ever hear of creeds like the Nicene Creed, the Creed of Chalcedon, the Apostles' Creed, these wonderful ancient church documents that so clearly point out truth?

Every single one of those creeds was written in response to rising heresy that denied truth.

Because within the church itself, within the people of God, people were preaching a message that clearly contradicted Scripture.

And they were trying to deny things like Jesus' divinity.

They were trying to deny that he was truly God.

They were trying to deny that he was born of a virgin, or trying to deny that we are totally sinful and destined for hell without his forgiveness.

And so they came together to make these creeds to try to bring themselves back from the horrible heresy that was slipping into the people of God.

The people of God have always wanted to hear messages that elevate themselves and downplay God.

And just like Israel, we as a church have these things plaguing our history.

Church leaders have turned into power-hungry egomaniacs in an unthinkable, unthinkable amount of time in church history.

And right now, maybe your Facebook feed is littered with accusations against a prominent church leader in our country right now, that they're looking at the fact that he kind of built a church empire and maybe did some things that were just less than proper in the way, and people are calling him out and criticizing him and the megachurch culture, and and and maybe you're going, oh gosh, man, with today and the internet and how these mega churches exist.

Now all of a sudden now we have church leaders doing these power grabs, and it's just horrible.

We never had this in the past.

But what do you think Martin Luther was fighting when he nailed his grievances on that church door all those years ago?

He was calling out a church where the leaders had become power hungry and had twisted the word to their own benefit.

These are not new problems.

And if we tell our kids stories that make them think, well, we did great in church until the internet came about or whatever it is, you know, that we want to blame and act like it's a modern problem, they don't get to see the glorious deeds of God, that he has sustained his bride through all of that.

The church is called the bride of Christ.

And if we act like, well, she used to be real pretty, but in the last few years she's gotten ugly.

Why are our kids gonna love God?

How is that gonna tell the next generation of the mighty deeds of God if they think that his bride has gotten ugly?

But if the story is she's always been ugly and he loved her anyway, maybe there's something attractive in there because they can see it.

We can't whitewash our history.

People are flawed.

People always lean on the wrong things, people always go their own way.

We fail.

And you can't tell the story of the mighty deeds of God without admitting your own failures.

And while that's true for us as a church, it's true for this church, it's true for the church down the street, and it's true for the church in your hometown that you have all those great memories about.

We have to get real.

Church needs to be a safe place to fail.

How do we deal with our failures if we're if we're rewriting our history and trying to deny that we have these bumps and bruises along the way?

Guys, we just gotta deal with it, admit that we're sinful people, and ask God to step in and do a glorious work when we mess up, screw up, and head the wrong direction.

And as much as it's true for the church as an organism, it's true for us as individuals as well.

Sometimes we're tempted to rewrite our own personal history and leave out our biggest failures.

I see this as a parent.

I see parents come to me as a student pastor all the time and talk about struggles they're having with their kids, and they're like, I went through this too, and I just don't want him to go through this.

And I'm like, have you told him?

Well, no.

Well, why?

Well, because he might, if he knows I struggle with it, then he won't listen to me when I tell him to stay away from it.

Because, like, well, you did it, so why shouldn't I?

And I'm afraid that he'll just repeat, you know, and and we in an effort to shield them, we rewrite our own history and don't share our own failures with our kids because we think it takes away our ability to talk to them in authority.

And guys, this is just wrong.

Instead, we should be going, listen, I struggled with this and I saw God's hand bring me back from it.

And I don't want you to have to flirt with those same things because it brought me only destruction, and we should let them learn from our failures instead of pretending they never happened.

First of all, it creates an unrealistic expectation in our kids.

When they fail, and I say when they fail, they will will, they will fail.

When they fail, not if they fail.

They don't come to us because they think, well, my parents won't understand because they've never failed like this.

Because we've whitewashed our history.

We haven't told them about God's mighty deeds through our failures.

And when we do that, we end up writing a story in which we're the hero instead of God.

We don't put his glorious deeds on display.

Can we learn from Israel, folks?

Do you realize that Israel was unique amongst cultures in that portion of the world, in that time of the world, and that they intentionally recorded their failures and defeats?

A lot of cultures at that portion in history only made monuments to recordings of their glorious victories that made them look like the great people.

You know, this sort of concept comes up when people like, well, well, if the exodus happened, if if that many Israelites were freed from Egypt, how come Egypt's history doesn't tell about it?

Because it was embarrassing.

And lots of cultures were like that.

They didn't want to talk about the embarrassing things in them.

Israel wrote all of their embarrassing stuff in their history book.

That's the Old Testament, by the way.

And you could go back and look at that.

Failure after failure after failure.

They're kings having adultery and committing murder, all the all the things that we would rather hide.

They go, no, here it is.

Because they're not telling their story, they're telling his story.

And you can't tell his story without dealing with your failure.

So let's learn from the Israelites.

Last point.

Don't pack up yet because there's a little too the last point.

First point, telling the glorious deeds of God to the next generation is not an option.

Second point, telling the glorious deeds of God to the next generation involves dealing with our own failure.

And the last point is telling the glorious deeds of God to the next generation inspires hope.

You may have been asking, okay, well, Greg, you're talking a lot about failure and a lot about being real about it, and why?

Why should we be motivated to just put our failures out there?

Why should we be motivated to tell the glorious deeds of God in this particular way?

Why this prescription, right?

Well, the Psalm answers it.

Look at verses five through seven.

He, being God, established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach their children, that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children, so that they, in other words, for the purpose of, so that they should set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God.

The reason to tell the next generation of the mighty deeds of God in this way.

Get too excited.

The reason to tell the next generation of the mighty deeds of God in this way is to cause the next generation to set their hope in him.

That they would not be convinced that they could be good little boys and girls, that they would not be convinced that they can just tow the line and be good enough, that they would not be striving for excellence in and of themselves, but they would be relying on him as their only hope of salvation.

That they would see the stories and go, man continually fails, God's continually faithful, and that that would cause them in their weakness and their frailty to run to him with a hope that he will prove himself just as he has every other time a failure has existed within God's people.

And if we leave out the failures, how are they gonna hope in that?

As a student pastor, I'm constantly being told how this current generation is increasingly falling away from God in the church.

I get it in youth pastor publications that talk about the students going off to college and dropping their faith.

I have parents coming to tell me about the swelling tide of temptation that's just sweeping away their students.

I hear how it's the fault of the media, the liberal agenda, the internet, and even the president himself.

Maybe, just maybe, it's the fact that we aren't telling the next generation of the glorious deeds of God in a way that inspires them to set their hope in him.

Maybe it's that we keep telling story after story about the enemy outside of our gate instead of being honest about the fact that we are our own worst enemy.

And that it is not the corruption of the media or the internet that is going to turn our hearts from God, but it's the fact that our hearts naturally become selfish and seek to elevate our own lives above others and above God's glory.

And when we tell them your tendencies will lead you to failure, hope in Him.

We gotta stop worrying about the enemy outside the gate, folks.

Our own hearts are wicked.

And when the psalmist tries to tell Israel about the glorious deeds of God, it is wrapped around an honest look at the human condition.

After years of working with the next generation, I've learned one thing but well.

They smell fake.

When someone is disingenuous, when someone is not real, with them, they can smell it.

We try to paint a picture of God's glory while leaving out the story of our own failure, and it just doesn't ring true.

This is true of us as a church, as a collective, and of us as individuals.

May you leave here today convinced of the need to tell the next generation of the mighty deeds of God.

I pray it affects the way we operate as the body of Christ and the way we handle ourselves in the ins and outs of our daily lives.

Let's pray.

Lord, we come before you thankful.

Thankful that though we fail a thousand times, your mercy remains.

Inspire us to tell that story in grand repetition to everyone that will hear.

Thank you.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.