Spotting A False Prophet

Well, let me begin this morning by sharing with you some statistics that I personally find
somewhat troubling.
Research in recent years indicates that out of every ten young people who grow up going
to church through their high school years, seven out of those ten drop out by age 23.
And of that group, 34% never return to church or in many cases to the faith of their parents.
34% of 70% is close to 24%, 25%.
And that means if you have a youth group of, let's say, about 80 kids, 20 of those are
going to fall away from the faith, fall away from participating in the life of Christian
community, never to return.
I don't know about you, but I find that a startling statistic.
Not only do we have trouble reaching out to the world and bringing them to faith, many
times we can't even hold on to our own kids.
And when it's been a little time, then, this morning pondering, why is that?
And of course you can think of many reasons why our youth drop out.
But certainly one reason is that oftentimes they haven't been sufficiently equipped to
recognize the false prophets of our day.
They haven't been sufficiently equipped to resist the pied piper.
They haven't been taught how to discern the voices of our age, let alone been equipped
to resist it.
And so what we want to do this morning then is we revisit the subject of false prophets.
We want to talk a little bit about what can you and I's parents and sometimes as grandparents
do then to try to equip our children and our grandchildren so that they can only recognize
the false voices of our day and age, but also have the power to resist it.
The Apostle Paul said, "See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive
philosophy."
And I want to do that with you this morning on the basis of an Old Testament passage that
is perhaps one of the most common and often recited passages, certainly among Jewish people,
the Deuteronomy chapter six, the verses four through nine.
This passage is known as the Shema.
It is part of a series of passages that in Orthodox Jewish traditions gets recited morning
and night, sometimes more often, you'll recognize it almost immediately as we read it together.
Hero is role.
The Lord, our God, the Lord is one.
Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength.
These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your 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, tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them
on your foreheads, write them on the door frames of your houses and on your gates.
That's known, as I said, the Shema.
And Shema is Hebrew for that first word of that passage here is wrote, the Lord is one.
Now as we take a look at these verses together then, there are two things that I want to point
out this morning.
First is this, passing on faith to a subsequent generation always begins with the parents.
Notice again how the passage begins with the Shema.
Here always role the Lord, our God, the Lord is one.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.
Notice with me two things there.
The first is this, as parents and as grandparents, we ourselves need to have a correct view of God.
We need to understand God for who He truly is.
Hero Israel, the Lord, our God, the Lord is one.
It's a very complex statement, it's been subject to many different interpretations, but
surely it means this.
In a world where many people have many different gods, there is really only one true God and
that is the Lord God of Israel.
He is the great Ahem.
He is from everlasting to everlasting, everything that exists in the universe comes from His
hand, and we therefore are to walk in relationship with Him and we need to get to know Him.
God is a living person with a living character and it's important for us not only to know
who He is, but also to be able to communicate that as we'll see it a few moments to our children.
As wrong views of God have a way of multiplying, of course, as the years go by, if you're
a parent and you think of God primarily as an angry God who is waiting to punish somebody,
or you lean to the other extreme and you think of God as somebody who is all gracious and
forgiving and always winks at sin, or if you're the kind of parent who thinks God is distant
out there, is it interested or involved in the particulars of the here and now.
If you have a view of God that says, well, God put the universe in motion, but God helps
also help themselves, then that's going to color the kind of picture that you give to
your children, and that in turn is going to open them up for false prophets.
The siren call of a day and age, people who will tell them of the lie and who will lead
them away from the true and the living God and lead them astray.
So it starts with parents and parents need to have a correct view of God not only, but
in addition to having a correct view of God as parents, we need to love God passionately
and demonstrate that to our children, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with
all your soul, and with all your strength.
To love God, of course, means first and foremost that you recognize that God is, that he has
made you, that you owe him reverence, our Father who art in heaven, said Jesus, hallowed
be your name, that you seek to know his will, please him, live in such a way as to honor
him, you lay before him your needs not only, but you also give him those places where you
are filled with thanksgiving and with excitement and you're long for his agenda to be accomplished
on what is his agenda, that his will be done on earth as it is at heaven.
We often think that loving God means feeling in a certain way about God and it's wonderful
to feel God near and it's wonderful to feel excited about God, but loving God is more
than that.
Loving God is keeping his commandments, it's honoring him as God.
And all your heart and all your soul and all your strength, that's a Hebrew way of saying
the sum totality of who you are because the heart, of course, is what?
It's the seed of our affection, it's the seed of our emotion, the soul, the seed of personality,
our will, our passion, our desire, our mind.
Earth refers to the sum total of who we are physically, in fact, Hebrew rabbis included
under that as I understand, our material good.
So the picture here is that a person is to be sold out in every part of his or her being,
loving the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, strength, the field read, the New Testament
version of this, they always include the word mind which I find interesting in part because
the word mind is included in the Hebrew concepts of soul and heart, the tendency, and you'll
know this to be true about your own life as I know it is to be true about mine.
It's for us to be half-hearted in our service to God.
That is to say God has a corner of my heart.
He is a corner of my passion, he has a corner of my strength, he has a corner of my possession,
but other places I keep for myself or I dedicate to other things and to other persons.
And so our love is often a love for God, plus a love for my wife or my husband or my
children, or love for my career or love for my hopes, love for my dreams, my strength,
my passion, my resources are often squandered in a thousand different directions and we
think that's perfectly normal and natural because in a fallen world that's how we all
leave.
But God says, "Don't ever misunderstand what my intention is for my people."
Because in the New Testament when Jesus then was asked by that teacher of the law, what
is the great commandment, here is where he begins, "You shall love the Lord your God with
all of your heart, with all of your soul and with all of your mind."
And if we want to false, profit, proof our children and our grandchildren, besides having
the right understanding of God as he reveals himself in nature and in scripture and in
the person of Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, in addition to all of that,
we need to be able to live that out with integrity and with passion.
We need to embody the values that we profess.
Why is that important?
Because kids have hypocrisy detectors and faith is more caught than taught, and surveys
among these young people who grow up going to church and then wander away from the faith
never to return, indicate to us that the top three reasons for their failure to embrace
the faith of their parents are hypocrisy, insincereity, and judgmentalism.
It doesn't mean that parents have to be perfect, none of us is ever going to be, but when
they look at you and when they look at me, do they see hearts that are set towards God?
Do they see in our lives a passion to love God above all and that passion of loving God
above all does a translate into how we live our daily lives?
Can they tell when nobody is watching that we're met and women of faith, when nobody is
watching that our values are being shaped by scripture?
When nobody is watching, are we who we say that we all are?
And when we're not, and when we're corrected and when we're challenged, are we humble,
are we willing to have the same measure applied to our lives that we apply to other people's
lives?
You see, that's the reality of what faith is about, and I've told you this story before.
My father was far from perfect, but I'll never forget.
I have never, ever doubted when I looked at his life that he was passionately devoted
to the Lord and that nothing was going to draw him away from that.
I remember he and my mother always reading a chapter of scripture before they went
to bed at night.
I remember that he would stand on biblical principles when the temptation was there to
compromise.
And I remember, and I've told you this story before, we used to back in my early PEI days,
we had one of these cranked telephones.
Do you remember those?
Longing me for the days of dial.
It wasn't one of these little two-piece ones.
It was actually had a receiver, but it was a party line, and all your neighbors were
doing on the party line, of course, and our ring was 14, which meant one long one and four
short ones.
And my father was the kind of person who could never keep track of that and always wanted
the phone to be answered.
Even when it was the neighbors, he said, pick it up just in case it's for us.
I'll never forget a numerous occasions.
He'd be praying over the dinner table, and the phone would ring.
Now you know how rude telephones are, and how insistent they are in demanding attention.
This is all long before answering machines and all the good things that we have today.
And I remember so being struck that as he was praying the prayer for the dinner table,
he wouldn't miss a beat.
Wouldn't speed up, wouldn't slow down, the phone could ring, all that it wanted to ring.
He was going to pray and finish his prayer.
And that may not mean much to you, but I remember as a youngster sitting there being struck
by the integrity of that prayer and the integrity of his face.
I got to tell you, when years later I went to Calvin and would periodically call home,
that was a real challenge.
Because I'd get the operator on the line in Grand Rapids, and I said, I want to call my
parents back home, and their number is CREPO 814.
Well, poor operator didn't know what to do with that.
So I said, well, you got to get hold of Charlottown, and tell the operator in Charlottown what
the number is, and after a while I got to listening to all that chatter back and forth, and
I got the routing codes.
And then I would just say to the operator when I got her on the phone, here's what you
need to do to get this particular number.
And that's how I would connect back home with my parents.
So as parents, we have to have the right view of God, and we need to love him passionately.
And then of course, the scripture goes on to say, we need to teach them God's ways.
Notice the rest of the passage, 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, tie them as symbols on your hands, and bind them on your foreheads,
write them on the door frames of your houses, and on your gates.
And again, in those couple of verses, two things I want us to note, the first is this.
It is our responsibility as parents, and I can ask Ed Grant parents to pass the faith
on to our children; scripture says, "Impress them on your children."
The word "impress" means to teach diligently.
As somebody has said, children are like what cement, whatever falls on them makes an impression.
If God is who He says that He is, then one of the most important things is that we should
teach Him that reality.
And here is where statistics get really troubling.
George Barna, as you may know, has done extensive surveying across North America of the beliefs
and the practices of Christian community.
And here is what He has discovered, only three out of ten parents who profess to be born
again place any significant emphasis on the need for their children to make a personal
faith commitment to Jesus Christ.
I want you to think that through with me for a minute.
Three out of ten people who themselves say they are born again, only three out of ten take
seriously the mandate to lead their children to a living faith in a living Christ.
It's no wonder then that we lose subsequent generations.
He goes on to say, for years we have reported research finding showing that born again adults
think and behave very much like everyone else.
It often seems that their faith makes very little difference in their lives.
This new study helps explain why that is, believers do not train their children to think
or to act differently.
When our kids are exposed to the same influences without much supervision and are generally
not guided to interpret their circumstances and opportunities in light of biblical principles,
it's no wonder that they grow up to be just as involved in gambling, adultery, divorce,
cohabitation, excessive drinking and other unbiblical behaviors as everyone else.
What we build into a child's life prior to the age of 13 represents the moral and spiritual
foundation that defines them as individuals and directs their choices for the remainder
of their life.
Now I'd like to think that people of reform persuasion with our emphasis on Christian education
at every level probably do better statistically than maybe the average evangelical in terms
of teaching an integrated world in life here, but the fact remains as parents it's our
job to try to pass our faith on to our children.
How do we do that?
Well we teach them Scripture.
Time was when most households at least at one or more meals would sit around the table
and read through the pages of Scripture.
I dare say to a large degree that has gone partly because everybody is too busy and partly
because everything is instant these days, but the result is this.
Many people grow up knowing very little about Scripture.
When I grew up and those of you of my age and generation here have had similar experiences,
we read the Bible at practically every meal.
And I got to tell you that as a youngster I didn't necessarily appreciate that a great
deal and I'm sure I did a great deal of daydreaming as our kids do today.
But you know we often underestimate our kids' ability to absorb things and I say there's
not to boast, but by the time I got the seminary and we had to do the Bible knowledge test,
I scored if not at the top of my class probably very close to it simply because by the process
of us moses, I had absorbed the Scriptures, I mean my father read everything, including
the genealogies upon occasion.
And I bet you I'm the only one here who can tell you today that hidden among those genealogies
are the names of three daughters of Solomon.
I bet you you didn't know that, but I learned that from my father.
Sometimes I've changed and teaching methods have changed, but there is no substitute for
being familiar with the story of Scripture.
A lot of people would not be led astray as readily as they are, if they in fact knew what
Scripture says instead of what a lot of people say that Scripture says.
So take that seriously, you know start with a children's story by ball, but expand beyond
that into reading Scripture sequentially, there's lots of translations these days that are
down to earth, simple, readily available, but very important to build that kind of basis
of faith.
And then illustrate from your own life and from your own experience and if you can't illustrate
from your own life and from your own experience, then tell the great stories of faith as they
have come down, the generations, the stories of men and women who loved God passionately
and who served him passionately and who in many cases died for him passionately.
You never know what will stir faith in the hearts of your children.
Help them to experience God.
One of the weaknesses, as you've often heard me say, of our own tradition even as we've
had strengths, is that we've often taken personal faith for granted.
And we have thought that if only we tell the Bible stories and teach them catechism and
teach them doctrine that somehow or another, it would take, but it doesn't take unless
we bend the knee and give our own hearts and our lives to Jesus.
And so our kids need to experience the reality of Jesus in the practical situations of life,
a difficult test that I face, a problem that I experienced with my friends at school,
a health issue that we face as a family, problems in the world that we know are huge.
Great opportunities to sit down together and say, "Let's talk to our Father in heaven
about these things and let us see what He will do you."
Because if you want to see prayers answered, then listen to the prayers of your children
and you're often amazed at the generosity of God in response to childlike faith and
courage them to hang around with friends who will help them on their journey with God.
Once kids hit teenage years, and this is a well-known truth, the influence of friends very
quickly exceeds the influence of parents in part because they're learning independence
and in order to break away from the influence of parents, they need to have the support
group of friends.
The kind of friends your kids hang around with will almost for sure determine how they
do their life and what values they end up embracing.
And a lot of kids who have good Christian friends can get through the tumult of the teenage
years with their faith intact instead of having been washed out to sea and dragged into
a lot of behaviors that are highly destructive.
Now, we can't always dictate who the friends are going to be, but we can try to set up situations
where we encourage them to hang around with good and godly friends.
It'll make a huge difference.
And then we need to teach them in this day and age a thing called apologetics and that
sounds like you're always apologizing for the faith, but apologetics is the defense of
the faith.
Kids grow up believing what you teach them.
They get out into the world and they'll hear a lot of stuff that disagrees with everything
you've ever taught them.
And if you grow them up in a bubble where they're all protected and their faith has never
been challenged by the time they hit university and they hear the stuff that's going on out
there.
Sophisticated arguments presented by wise and respectable individuals, their faith will
be tested to the core.
And one of the ways in which you and I can prepare them for that is to help them think
through those arguments as they present themselves in the course of living.
I went to a public high school when I grew up, there wasn't any Christian school there.
And every so often one of our teachers in particular would come up with all kinds of stuff
that was far removed from biblical reality.
And I remember coming home sitting around the dinner table talking about these kinds
of things and getting my parents input and learning the values and the responses to the kind
of issues that were being raised in our day and age.
You know that's a few years ago, much worse today, much worse today.
And it doesn't help to stick our heads in the sand and it doesn't help to say, well I'm
going to send my kid to the Christian school and therefore they'll be kept safe with
mass media being what it is, nobody is safe.
And it's got to be built in from the inside out.
And so parents have a huge responsibility before God to take these issues seriously and
to do it.
We can't have passed faith on to our kids, not only that, but this process of impression
is best done in the routine of life.
For notice again, how the passage puts it, talk about them when you sit at home and when
you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up, tie them as symbols on
your hands and bind them on your foreheads, write them on the door frames of your houses
and on your gates.
Notice you have there three different methods of communication.
You talk about them.
You tie them as symbols on your hands and you write them on the door frames of your houses.
That is to say you use every method of communication that you can to impress upon the next generation
of the importance of serving God and walking with him through faith in Jesus Christ.
That doesn't mean that you're always pounding religion down their throats.
It doesn't mean that you're one of these religious fanatics because all you do then is
produce kids who, as soon as they get out of the house, they're going to rebel against
you anyway.
No, no.
What you do is you look for teachable moments.
Those times when the hunger in a child's life matches up to the answers that you know
that you have and you can in the ordinary events of life talk about who God is and what
his values are.
You know, it was in the cow stable.
Milk and cows with my father that I first told him at the age of 13 or 14, I think, that
I felt called to be a preacher.
That was a very holy moment and it was very serendipitous.
It just happened.
And it's in serendipitous moments like that that you receive the teaching about how to
do life.
It was in conversations around the table that my father would teach us about the opposite
sex, about whom to marry are more particularly whom not to marry since his brother had married
a woman not the whole family lived to regret.
He was very particularly concerned that we would marry properly.
We know those moments and to seize those moments you need to be in tune with your kids and
you need to know how much to say and how much not to say.
And if the Lord calls you to be a parent, if He calls you to be a grandparent, that He's
also equipped you with the ability to do that.
You know, it doesn't take a rocked scientist to pull that off.
It just takes somebody who is connected and who, out of the richness of his, her own heart
and faith can pass this on to the next generation.
Very quickly, then it begins with parents.
We need to teach them God's ways and then I want to add this.
It's not in this particular passage, but it's certainly implied.
We need to entrust our children to the Lord.
Part of the reasons in this place that we baptize and dedicate infants to the Lord is because
we believe the Lord enters into covenant not only with parents, but also with children.
And the covenant that He makes with us is that if we seek to take seriously His command
to know God and to live out a relationship with him with passion and impress these things
upon our children in the practical realities of life and standing, up and sitting down
and going out and coming in.
And God Himself will honor that reality, and He will use those means of grace to reveal
Himself to our children so that they enter and come to know God as more than the God
of their parents but as their own God and their own Savior through faith in Jesus Christ.
And the statistics in that regard are also sobering.
A good many years ago, I preach here by the name of Horatius Bonar as 253 Christian friends
at what ages they had come to know the Lord Jesus and here is the answer.
Under the age of 20 out of 253, 138 had come to know the Lord.
And the ages of 20 and 30, 85, between 30 and 40, 22, between 40 and 54, between 50 and 63,
between 60 and 71 and over 70, nobody.
More than half of people who come to know the Lord come to know the Lord as children.
And I have found often when we listen to testimonies and to stories here of people who come back
to the Lord and come back to faith, it's often because they are returning to the faith
of their childhood.
And when Scripture says, "Teach up a child in the way that he should go," and when he
is old, he will not depart from it, it is talking about an observation of life that is so
often so true.
So what do we do?
We do what we can.
We lift them before going.
We try to walk it out with as much integrity as we can do.
When all is said and done, you lay them on the altar and you say, "God, I cannot reach
into their hearts.
I cannot reach into their lives.
I can't throw the switch to make faith happen."
But oh, Lord God, see fit to reveal yourself to them because when all has been said and
done.
100 years from now, it won't matter if they married rich, or world famous, lived their
whole life in great health and great fortune.
What will matter is will they have known Jesus and will they be part of God's everlasting
and eternal kingdom?
When Jesus loves to save, when every heart he steps in and cures, upon the healing grace
to be a family of peace, and always striving to ease.
The mercy flows and he's found known, but we're a household of faith.
There's we're a household of faith.
Lord, we give to you our children, each one we care from you.
May we raise them in your love and train them in your sweat, will we give to you our
parents, the ones who gave us life?
May we always honor them and sing to do what's right, when we have household of faith.
Jesus loves to save, when every heart is cancer cured, our home of healing grace,
to be a family of peace, and always striving to ease.
The mercy flows and each one knows that we're a household of faith.
There's we're a household of faith.