Living Stones: A Heritage From the Lord

Chapter 2, verses 4 through 12, as you come to him, the living stone,

rejected by humans, but chosen by God and precious to him, you also,

like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood,

offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

For in scripture it says, see, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious

his cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.

Now to you who believe this stone is precious, but to those who do not believe,

the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone, and a stone that

causes people to stumble on a rock that makes them fall.

In other words, the stone that either you break on or, come on, you rest on.

They stumble because they disobey the message, which is also what they were destined for.

In other words, they were also destined for this message, but they refuse it, they reject it.

But you, those of you who have chosen and put your trust in this living stone

and now become living stones, it says, but you are a chosen people,

a royal priesthood, a holy nation,

God's special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called

you out of darkness into his wonderful light.

Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God.

Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Dear friends, I urge you as foreigners and exiles to abstain from sinful desires

which wage war against your soul.

Live such good lives among the pagans that though they accuse you of doing wrong,

they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.

Each of us is carving a stone, erecting a column, or cutting a piece of stained

glass in the construction of something much bigger than ourselves.

You know, the intersection of the heavens and the earth has always been the

overarching story of the Bible.

I've said this before. I've said it over and over again. The theme of the scriptures

is not that we can find Jesus and then someday go to heaven.

It was that Jesus restored the reality that we were created for to live in this

intersection where the realm of the heavens and the realm of earth intersect

because we were created as God's image bearers.

And you see this theme all throughout the scripture, starting in the garden,

as we talked about a few weeks ago,

which is supposed to give us a picture of a temple, the place where God dwells

on the earth, and earth and the heavens intersect, and God's goodness through

mankind is extended through the rest of the world.

We see it in the tabernacle after God began to begin his restoration process

of bringing this back into place.

We see in the temple in Jerusalem, the place where heaven and earth intersected,

and then we see it in Jesus, as fully man and fully divine.

And we see it as Christians and we see it as the church.

Because you see in Christ that we are united with God's space as temples of the Holy Spirit.

I'm not going to dig into that topic today, but that is the theme of scriptures.

We are not being saved to heaven. We are being saved to once again be the people

where God's presence dwells, the place, come on, where God intersects with the world.

And this is our reality as believers. Not a future hope, but a present reality

that today, right now, we exist as the place.

Come on, where God interacts with a broken and hungry world.

Our manifest world overlapping with the heavenly realm.

We see it all through you in the New Testament, even in the prayer that Jesus gave us to pray.

Let your kingdom come. Let your will be done here on the ground as it is in the heavens.

And today, though we started in the New Testament for Davey,

I want to dig into this particular psalm as we spend this day really kind of

revolving around this beautiful time of baby dedications that we're going to

have immediately following.

Because the psalms are one of the greatest gifts that we have been given.

And as growing up, the psalms were just kind of that weird part of the Bible,

some weird songs that didn't make a lot of sense, and some weird prayers.

But that's not how it was intended to be. this, not how the Hebrews,

how the Jewish nation, how the Christians, as they began to live these songs

and sing these songs, it was, the Psalms are full of both humanity and divinity.

It is the intersection of the heavens and the earth, completely unfiltered in its humanity.

I mean, David never, never ceases to bring God his complaints.

There's more laments in the Psalms than there are celebrations.

A lament is where we're honest about the pain.

We're honest about the situation and we bring it to God rather than throw it

against God. Why did you let this happen?

We bring it to God and the Psalms are one of the greatest gifts because they help us learn.

Help me, Jesus. There's something coming for me.

They help us learn to live in this reality where the prayers and the songs teach

us how to hold our emotions in God's presence.

And the early church used them as their prayers, used them as their songs,

often reimagined through the lens of Jesus.

N.T. Wright says it like this, my favorite, the goat. He says,

to recognize that the Psalms call us to pray and sing at the intersection of

the times, of our time and God's time, of the then and the now and the not yet,

is to understand how those emotions are to be held within the rhythm of a life

lived in God's presence.

We are not someday going to make it to God's presence.

Come on, as believers, as followers of Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit,

we are the place of God's presence.

In the Psalms, and reading them, and singing them, and praying them,

they create for us an island in the middle of chaos at this intersection.

Because you see, the promise of the scriptures is that someday all chaos,

all brokenness, all the things that are wrong with the world will be corrected.

But today we get to have the peace of that future today, but we still live in a world full of chaos.

In the Psalms, as I've learned over the last two years to pray them,

I pray Psalms 23 every single day, sometimes three times a day, because it helps me.

It becomes for me like a shore, the shore of the ocean.

You ever been to the ocean? And there's a part of the ocean at the shore.

And in ancient mythology, this was always considered to be the kind of the in-between

place, like between two worlds.

And it's really a beautiful picture because we are living in two worlds.

And if you look at the shore of the ocean, there's the raging waters.

If you've ever been to a, I love going into the waters where the waves are just knocking you down.

I look like a five-year-old out there or a 10-year-old and it's ridiculous,

but I just love it. I'm getting beat up.

I'm like, yeah, I'm jumping into the waves.

And these waves, they kind of represent the human experience.

But the good thing about the shore is that even though it feels like chaos and

it feels like it's unending, If you just simply put your feet down,

there's something to stand on.

And the land under our feet, we can see that as the unseen realm of the heaven

space that we are intersecting with now as believers.

In the Psalms, they're not bringing us to a place of intersection.

We live there, but they rather help us to bring ourselves in tune to the reality.

That though the world, though the seas are crashing around me,

come on, there is something that I maybe can't see with my eyes,

but that I know is real. Come on, somebody.

Craig Williamson says, In every situation, there's always two stories,

the story you see and the story that God sees.

And I love Eugene Peterson and the late, great Eugene Peterson and his translation

of the Bible, and then in one of his books on the Psalms, he says this about

David, one of the greatest writers, the prominent writer of the Psalms.

He says, David's isn't an ideal life, but an actual life.

Christianity isn't about someday going somewhere. It isn't about perfection.

It is about finding the presence of God in our actual lives and learning how

to live in that reality today,

right now, and finding that reality in the actual contours of our real lives,

not our ideal lives, not the lives that what I hate sometimes about even spiritual

formation and growing is we get this mentality that we're supposed to be at a certain place.

We are where we are, and God has never blessed anyone anywhere except where

they are, but where we are when we come to this reality that our lives, come on,

exist as the place where God's presence is manifested into the world.

And it helps us live in tune with this reality, even in chaos,

even in fear, even in the unknowns, even in disappointment.

All I must do is put my feet down and say, Father, you are my shepherd.

I shall not want. Come on.

You make me lie down in green pastures. You lead me beside quiet waters and

you restore my soul. This is my reality.

Yes, the waters are crashing around me, but my life is wrapped up in your presence.

Today, briefly, I just want to dig into one psalm.

We'll read it from a couple others, but our main text is going to be Psalm 127.

It's in the middle of the last section. The psalms is broken up into five sections,

and it's 15 chapters intentionally grouped together, and they're all beginning

with this phrase, a song of ascents, or a song of degrees,

or steps or literally a journey to a higher place.

And they were sometimes called the pilgrim songs for they were to be sung on

the ritual pilgrimage to Jerusalem, particularly during the dispersion,

during the exile when Israel is no longer a nation and they've been sent into

slavery, into Assyria and then Babylon, and then slowly coming back.

And as they're living away from Jerusalem, they would sing these songs as three

times a year, they would pilgrimage to Jerusalem as an act of worship to remember

who they were as God's people.

And it says that they would sing these 15 songs on the way.

It's placed in the post-exilic, as I said, section, but it also for them symbolizes a coming back.

Because you see, they always had this hope that someday we will come back to

the place where we dwell in God's presence again like we used to.

And of course, we know that in Jesus, that reality, that promise was fulfilled,

not the way perhaps they thought he didn't restore the kingdom,

but instead he brought God's presence to his believers.

And he said, we are now the place where God dwells. We are the temple.

And for us, through the lens of the work of Christ, I love, we can read the Psalms.

They're not just Old Testament, Old Covenant, because we can read them through

the lens of Jesus, because this is all one story.

And for us, it's no longer a trip to Jerusalem. For us now, it begins to represent

the ever upward journey of following Jesus in this life, in this human experience,

as we move from one place of experience to the next,

ever growing, as it says in the New Testament, ever going from one image of

glory to the the next, always until we are transformed into the image of Christ.

I love these psalms when you read them in that context.

But right here in the middle of these 15 psalms is Psalm 127,

the only one written by Solomon, who is the archetype for the Hebrews of wisdom.

And he says this, unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain.

Unless the Lord watches over the city, the guards stand watch in vain.

In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat,

for he grants sleep to those he loves.

Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him.

Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one's youth.

Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame

when they contend with their opponents in court.

I think this psalm is one of the

most beautiful expressions of the human experience, building our lives.

And even as we launch off of this original New Testament scripture from the

beginning of we are now living stones, we are building something.

As Christians, we don't just get to have God as a hopeful feature in our lives.

We get to now be reconnected to our original vocation, to extending God's goodness

into the earth, to building for the kingdom.

And we can certainly apply this scripture and people have, and I even have,

to building God's church.

But I think this is really more of a picture of the human experience.

And within the human experience, we are part of the building and creating process for the kingdom.

For those of us that have put our faith and trust in Jesus, we've been given

this restored vocation of building for his kingdom, of extending his goodness.

This does not just mean kingdom work alongside human work.

I think sometimes even as Christians, we kind of live in this false dichotomy

that there's this side of my life and then this side of my life.

I have my faith, but this is my life. They don't often intersect.

Once in a while they do, but that was never the intention.

That was never, if you look at the early church, that was not their reality.

It's not I'm this and I'm also a Christian. No, this is who I am.

I now exist in everything that I do.

Our human work and all of our human endeavors, they're all wrapped up in our kingdom work.

In fact, The Hebrew word ahava, which means it's the word often used for worship.

It is one of the primary words for worship.

It is actually also the primary word for work. It means service.

It means labor. And it means worship.

In the scriptures, it refers to farming, to crafting, to parenting,

to marriage, to priestly ministries.

Even the Israelite slavery in Egypt, this word was used.

But here's what's remarkable. The same word used for ordinary work is also used for sacred worship.

God sees no division between the two.

It's not my work, and then there's my worship. My worship is when I come to

church, when I can make it, and I sing a couple songs, that's my worship.

No, our lives, come on, as the people, created is God's image to represent Him,

to bring and extend His faithfulness, His goodness to the world. That is our worship.

Our marriages, our relationships, our jobs, our friendships,

our careers, they all become intertwined with the vocation of building for the kingdom.

And raising our children is one of the greatest and most important realities

of being God's image bearers on the earth.

And with this understanding and this tuning to the intersection that we are

made of the reality that our building is partnered and led by God.

We're not just asked to do something we are partnering with the one who can

do what we can't do parents you need to get that because parenting is hard sometimes it is the worst.

Raising adult children is harder than raising young kids sometimes because you

have no control over the dumb things they do and my kids know never do dumb

things don't get me wrong but some of your kids do.

But as we attune to this reality of this intersection, we're not just giving

a job, we are given a partnership.

And this Psalm tells us, come on, that we are not asked to do something on our own.

You see, if God is just a character that floats in and out of our lives to bless

or not bless, what we build then, the greatest responsibility of it,

the success of it, is all on us.

But what does it say in this psalm? If God does not build the house,

the labor is labor in vain.

If it's just on you to raise your children, if it's just on you to be a successful

husband, a successful wife, yes, we've got a part to play. We are partners with God.

But thank God he doesn't ask us to do it without him.

Eugene Peterson, when he translated this psalm, he said, if God doesn't build

the house, the builders only build shacks.

God says, I've called you to be my image bearers. I have called you to extend

my faithfulness, my goodness, through the raising of your children,

to demonstrate to all those who watch you how faithful I am by the way you are

faithful to me and to your children,

the way you love your kids as an extension of me.

Come on, that demonstrates who I am, but I haven't asked you to do it alone.

And not only are we tuned to the reality that God's hand in the building,

that he's there giving, doing what we cannot do.

We also are promised the presence and the power of his guarding.

Not just that he's there, I'm going to help you put a few bricks down.

No, he's right there. He's holding our hands.

He's putting things where we can't see, and he is watching over the whole thing.

Again, Eugene Peterson says, if God doesn't guard the city, the night watchman might as well nap.

If it's just on you to protect your kids, you might as well take a nap because

some way something's getting in that you can't see some stupid boy conniving

manipulating boy or some enticing girl whatever whatever you want.

We can't guard them all the time. We have a responsibility. And we most definitely

must be intentional about how we guard our children.

I think we have lost it. The age that we live in, we've rung this bell that we can't unring.

Well, everybody has a phone. They should have a phone. Okay.

Everybody has their own computer.

Everybody can do what they want. Everybody has it. Everybody does it.

Everybody does it. Everybody does it.

Everybody does it. Everybody does it. And we've kind of dropped the ball in

some of our guarding because this bell has been rung and we don't know how to

unring it. My friends, we can unring it.

We have a responsibility, but here's the good news.

We're limited in what we see and know, but God is not.

And he guards what he is building. That to me is such a comfort because I have

dropped the ball on some of my gardening at times. I'm a human being.

I can remember an instance with one of my children, my daughter Jillian,

who doesn't live here anymore.

And we have our relationships been restored. But when I took her to the airport

to leave, it was heartbreaking. And I cried all the way there.

And I thought I would be a wreck when I left to come home.

You know, I dropped her off. I hugged her. I kissed her. I love you.

And then I got in the car and there was just a peace that overwhelmed me because

she was out of my hands, but she was fixed securely in God's.

Listen, she'll still make her decisions.

God's not there manipulating her, but he is guarding. He guards what he builds.

In vain, it says in verse 2, you rise early and you stay up late,

toiling for food to eat, for he grants sleep to those he loves.

This is speaking to anxiety and sleeplessness, which is fear out of control.

We've all experienced anxiety. Maybe you're that one person who's here today

who's never experienced it.

God love you. You're just oblivious.

You're just not really aware.

I've experienced it. It's not a sin. You know, I kind of grew up in a culture

at times that fear is the opposite of faith. If you have fear,

you are not trusting God.

No, the Psalms are full of fear.

Fear is a natural human response to unknown. But here's the good news.

We are not, we do not have to live in our intersection in anxiety.

Fear out of control. It's a result of trying to manage unknowns and what ifs.

And we always, even when we pray, we're eliminating God from the equation,

whether we realize it or not.

It's like, yes, I pray God help them. But what if they don't?

What if you don't help them?

What if they say no to your help? What if this happens? What if I lose my job?

What if they find the wrong person? What if somebody gives them something that

they shouldn't have and it sends them down a path of addiction?

What if this happens? What that that happens.

And we live in this crippling fear and anxiety.

It's trying to stay above water as we talked a moment ago, and the chaos,

and we're trying to swim, and we're, these things swimming around us,

and we don't know what to do, and what happened, what will happen.

The rays crashing, and all we need to do is reach out with our feet and let

the solidity of land maybe not take away all the fear, but give us balance in the middle of fear.

Because when we're close to the shore, as we already just said,

God is not just building, but God is guarding.

You know, there's a reality to going to most beaches is that not only can you

swim close to the shore, but there's people watching that see things that you can't see.

My wife and I like to go to Myrtle Beach once in a while. We were just there.

And I can remember the last time we went, I'm out there and my wife's sitting

on the beach watching me You act like a fool in the ocean.

When I come back in, she's like, there were sharks swimming around you. No, there wasn't.

Sharks. Next couple seconds later, here comes this thing running down,

you know, a little buggy driving down whistle and got out of the water.

Sharks in the water because they could see what I couldn't see.

All I saw was the waves and the crashing.

It's not a sin to fear. There's nothing in life that can inspire anxiety like

the unknown when it comes to our children. And I know I'm not alone.

And my collection of sleepless nights and anxious days spent worrying about my kids.

It hasn't ended. My kids are all adults. And perhaps I have more sometimes than

I did before, worrying about their future, worrying about what is happening

in their lives right now, afraid that I failed them.

These natural concerns become anxiety when I remove God from the equation,

when the building was all on me, when the garden was all on me.

Here's also the thing about anxiety is not only in worrying about these things constantly,

not only does it cause us to live in this place of irrational fear,

it also steals our presence from the moments that we have as we toil to work

extra hours because what if they don't have enough money for college?

I got to work more. I got to work more. I got to make sure I provide for my kids.

That's fueled by fear. What if I don't get them in the right sports?

I got to get them in sports.

I got to get them in this thing. Because what if they're not developed as they

get into their adult lives? What if they don't have the right education?

We fear. I felt that way. I remember when we started homeschooling our kids

because I refused to put them into the system in middle school.

They went back in high school.

And I remember thinking, oh, my gosh, what if we messed them all up?

I didn't give them good enough education.

I don't even know how to add. I don't know. I don't know algebra.

And forget geometry. and it

would steal the presence of the moment as I lived in this place of fear.

But here the scripture tells us he gives rest to those he loves.

If God does not build and watch, then it is all in vain. But here's the good news, he does.

So we can be present in peace, not abandoning our responsibilities, not quitting our jobs.

The pastor told me to quit my job, to be present. No, we do what we gotta do.

In confident trust that God is doing what we cannot do.

Not abandoning our responsibilities, but in them, resting in the reality of

his presence, his building, and his guarding what we can't.

Then it goes on to say, children are a heritage from the Lord,

offspring a reward from him.

Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one's youth.

Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame

when they contend with their opponents in court. It's kind of a weird,

if you're just hearing this and you don't understand the context.

Talking about the reality that children are more than just a blessing as we

watch them as little kids.

And they're fun, like Dawson loves his poppy and lolly, loves his grandma and

grandpa, loves all of his family.

He's so happy, the happiest baby I ever saw.

That's beautiful. That's going to end though.

And you see, children are not

just a burden that we carry, but they're a manifestation of God's favor.

Again, not just in these fun moments, They're part of it. I would never trade one moment.

I would never even trade one bad financial decision to take my kids out for

a good night because it gave us a moment to celebrate. I would never trade any of it.

And sometimes in this broken kind of word, it's easy for children to become something burdensome.

But even in a broken world, for us at the intersection of God's space,

we can rest and experience a state of blessing as we raise our kids because

our children are more than just fun.

They are a heritage from the Lord.

In this whole imagery, they become like weapons, a quiver.

It's talking about there's going to be a day when they'll cease to be the little

kids that I bounce on my knee, and they'll be the ones that surround me,

hold up my arms as I hold up theirs, extending who I am into places that I couldn't.

God didn't create humanity just so he can have fun with them.

He created them to extend who he was into the rest of the world.

We don't have children just to say that we did it, just to have some fun and

to have some horrible anxious moments.

We did so so that we could extend God's faithfulness to places that we can't.

Our children become our weapons. friends my adult

kids they've become the greatest

friends that i've ever had you know growing up

and kind of our culture is like your kids can't be your friends i'm just not

that kind of a person and now my children are my best friends my son-in-law

every time anybody asks me who my best friend is i think it's tyler like okay

that's kind of weird it's tyler he's my best friend I mean, I didn't just get a friend.

I can rest. You know, I have had some fears about my future at times because

I don't always know what's going to be next after this.

But I have this confident peace that as I've cared for my kids,

I know that they're not going to abandon me because they're the heritage from the Lord.

They're the arrows in my quiver. They're going to go places that I could never go.

They, as they now live in God's faithfulness, will extend that faithfulness

to places that I will never see.

That, my friends, is a beautiful picture of being an image bearer of God.

Psalms 100 verse 5, for the Lord is good and his love endures forever.

Psalms 100:5

His faithfulness continues through all generations.

Psalm 103. I'm going to read a few more Psalms. I'm almost done.

As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him.

For he knows how we are formed. He remembers that we are dust.

God is not unaware. God's never taken by surprise when we act like humans. What the freak?

He remembers who he knows us. The life of mortals is like grass.

They flourish like a flower of the field.

And then the remembers it no more.

Or the wind blows over and it is gone and its place remembers it no more.

But from everlasting to everlasting, the Lord's love is with those who fear

him and his righteousness, or he will do right by their children's children.

With those who keep his covenant and remember to obey his precepts,

the Lord has established his throne in heaven and his kingdom rules over.

Here's the good news. Our faithfulness towards our children,

or I'm sorry, God's faithfulness towards our children is established and completely

based on who he is and his faithfulness, not ours.

If God's faithfulness only extends as far as my faithfulness, then it is limited.

But his faithfulness to us and to our children and our children's children is

based on his merit, and His faithfulness never ends.

Before they were ours, and long after we have any say in their lives,

God has been and will be on His throne,

building and guarding and surrounding with His righteousness and steadfast love and faithfulness.

His faithfulness to them extends way beyond ours.

One more psalm. It's the following psalm that is the companion of Psalm 127 and 128.

It says, Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in obedience to him.

You will eat the fruit of your labor.

Blessings and prosperity will be yours. Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within the house.

Your children will be like olive shoots around the table.

Yes, this will be the blessing for the man who fears the Lord.

May the Lord bless you from Zion. May you see the prosperity of Jerusalem all the days of your life.

May you live to see your children's children.

Israel. And again, as we read these psalms through the filter of Jesus,

the lens of the cross, we realize he's no longer talking about a nation,

but the descendants of what that nation stood for.

Now we are the seed of Abraham. Now we are, come on, the joint heirs with Christ.

We are the children of God.

And these blessings, even in the middle of chaos, belong to us.

And it's disingenuous to say that there's no statutes or patterns of living

that come with walking in his ways. That's just not in the scripture.

There is a way to be God's people. That's what it means to fear him.

But our ability to walk upright is not the deciding factor to whether or not God will be faithful.

His faithfulness is not dependent upon ours. But when we bring our faithfulness to his faithfulness.

When we live in the fear of the Lord, which simply means reverence,

that we place him in high place in our lives, the highest place in our lives.

We hold that in reverence and

acknowledge him as God. We keep him in that proper place and perspective.

There's something in our lives that is manifested.

You know, Proverbs 22, 6, which is always the scripture you read for these kind of things.

Start children off on the way that they should go. And even when they are old,

they will not turn from it.

Raise your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

Here's the bad news about the Proverbs.

They are wisdom, and they give us a rhythm of life that is intersecting,

is the way that God intersects with the world. But they're not an equation.

There are plenty of people who have started their kids off wrong,

but the kids have to make their own decisions.

It's a wise saying. It is wisdom. And here's the truth. As parents,

there is a season where we do choose for our kids.

Get it out of your mind that just because they're 15, 16, that you don't get

to choose for them anymore.

It is your responsibility to make choices. Yes, they gotta make choices.

They gotta choose what they're gonna obey. But I chose for my kids that this

is what we do. This is who we are.

Me and my household, we will serve the Lord. We will honor him.

We will place him in high esteem.

As long as you live in my house, this is what we do. You can choose in your heart not to do it.

And there is a time where we do choose for them, but eventually they will choose for themselves.

And unfortunately it doesn't mean that they'll choose the same things especially

in the world we live in but but if we show them if we show them what it looks like.

Showing them to revere and honor God, if we show them faithfulness to God connects

us to his faithfulness, that even if they choose themselves as Lord,

even if they choose to go their own way, even if they say, I am my own God,

they will remember, they'll never forget the godly fear.

When the time comes where self-pursuits reveal what they are as a way ending

to death, there'll be a remembrance.

But I do remember what it looked like.

I remember the peace of God's presence.

If you show them reverence, if you show them that God is more than a feature,

not regulations. I'm not saying there are no regulations. Give the kids rules.

Them little animals need rules.

But first and foremost, show them reverence.

God is first in our lives because he has been so good. I love him because he first loved me.

Show them reverence and you will show them faithfulness. And your faithfulness

will reveal to them God's faithfulness.

And showing them faithfulness is showing them that God and who he is in our

lives is not just an option, not just a feature. That's just something that we try.

This is who I am. This is who I was created to be.

I said this a couple of years ago, and I don't mean it as to hurt anyone's feelings,

but there's a very small chance that your kids are going to be professional athletes.

There's a very small chance they're going to perform on Broadway.

It's a very small chance they're going to be a movie star, but there's a 100%

chance that they will answer to God for the decisions that they make in their

lives. They will have to make them.

Our responsibility is not to make sure they make the right ones.

It is to show them what it looks like to live in God's faithfulness.

To that Psalm 128. May the Lord bless you from Zion.

May you see the prosperity of Jerusalem all the days of your life.

May you live to see your children's children.

Peace be on you.

God's favor and his blessing, they come from him, from Zion,

it says here, which simply is a representation of where he dwells,

from him and him alone, not from our position, but from his.

And we as humans, we get to live in this intersection where our space meets

his space, where our faithfulness meets his faithfulness,

where our work becomes worship, extending who he is, even at our jobs, even in our schools,

even in our families, in our friendships, everything that we do becomes wrapped up in his faithfulness.

And it extends when we live according to that faithfulness, we extend who he

is and we reveal who he is.

As we read in 1 Peter, just at the beginning of this message.

Live such lives that as they look at you, even when they try to accuse you,

they'll see your life and they'll have to give glory to God.

They'll see your marriage and they'll have to say, I don't really like him,

but I can't argue with the fruit of their lives.

They'll see your forgiveness. They'll see your compassion.

Come on. They'll see the way you love your children. God is building God is

guarding God is faithful from generation to generation.