One Generation shall Praise your Works to Another
“I will extol You, my God, O King; And I will bless Your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless You, and I will praise Your name forever and ever. Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; and His greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall praise Your works to another, and shall declare Your mighty acts. I will meditate on the glorious splendor of Your majesty, and on Your wondrous works. Men shall speak of the might of Your awesome acts, and I will declare Your greatness. They shall utter the memory of Your great goodness, and shall sing of Your righteousness. The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, Slow to anger and great in mercy.”
If we're going to worship God as He wants to be worshiped, if we're going to praise Him as He deserves to be praised, what are we to do? Psalm 145 answers that. There is nothing in this psalm about specific acts of God. This psalm is applied to anything and everything for which we should praise God, and for us the supreme thing is the sacrifice of Christ.
In the early section of the Psalms there are many psalms of sadness, psalms of lament, psalms of suffering and pain and sorrow and trouble. But as you begin to move through the Psalms, the psalms of lament begin to give way to psalms of joy and thanksgiving and praise and exhilaration. And the closer you get to the final psalm, the more there is an increase in praise and thanksgiving and the rejoicing gets louder. How does this psalm direct us to praise God? Well, Psalm 145:4 tells us that.
It is the Biblical duty of every generation of Christians to see to it that the next generation hears about the mighty acts of God. The older generation should teach the newer generation to read, think, trust, obey and rejoice. It's true that God draws near personally to every new generation of believers, but He does so through the Biblical truth that they learn from the preceding generation.
But there is another reason that Psalm 145 is so relevant today. Not only does it speak of the imparting of truth from one generation to another, it speaks of a certain kind of imparting. Notice the words. It does not say, "One generation shall merely teach Your works to another." It says, "One generation shall praise Your works to another." The education of the next generation must not only aim at teaching, it must involve praising.
Teachers and parents who do not exult over God in their teaching will not bring about exultation in God. Dry, unemotional, indifferent teaching about God - whether at home or at church - is a half-truth, at best. It says one thing about God and portrays another thing. It says that God is great, but teaches as if God is not so great. Let praises carry the truth to the next generation.
Now our aim should be to grow children and young people here at our church, who are radically surrendered to Jesus and radically committed to His cause of world evangelization. We mean that they are so deeply committed that no price is too high to pay to follow Jesus wherever he leads, no matter how distant or how dangerous.
Let me read you a quote from Jim Elliot's journals to underscore this aim. At age 22, Jim Elliot had a promising ministry in the United States. He probably would have been a very successful pastor or evangelist or teacher. His parents were not very excited about his call to go to the Quichuas in South America. They wrote and told him so.
He answered them this way on August 8, “I do not wonder that you were saddened at the word of my going to South America. This is nothing else than what the Lord Jesus warned us of when He told the disciples that they must become so infatuated with the kingdom and following Him that all other allegiances must become as though they were not. And He never excluded the family tie. In fact, those loves that we regard as closest, must become as hate in comparison with our desires to uphold His cause.”
“Grieve not, then, if your sons seem to desert you, but rejoice, rather, seeing the will of God done gladly. Remember how God described children in Psalm 127? He said that they were as an heritage from the Lord, and that every man should be happy who had his quiver full of them. And what is a quiver full of but arrows? And what are arrows for but to shoot? So, with the strong arms of prayer, draw the bowstring back and let the arrows fly - all of them, straight at the Enemy's hosts.”
"Give of your sons to bear the message glorious, give of your wealth to speed them on their way, pour out your soul for them in prayer victorious, and all you will spend, Jesus will repay” (Elisabeth Elliot, Shadow of the Almighty, p. 132; hymn quote from "Oh, Zion Haste"). That's what education for exultation in the next generation is all about: to grow that kind of child and teenager and young adult.
Where do they come from? The answer is that they come from God. God makes hearts like that. And He is sovereign: He can make such a heart in a dysfunctional family and a failing church. But that is not His ordinary way, and it is not the way He commands. His ordinary way is to create hearts like that in God-exalting families and in churches where “One generation shall praise Your works to another.”
Notice one key word in Jim Elliot's explanation to his parents. He said, "[Jesus] told the disciples that they must become so infatuated with the kingdom and following Him that all other allegiances must become as though they were not." Why use the word "infatuated"? Because Christianity is more than right thinking, it is also right feeling about the kingdom. It is not just education about following Jesus; it is exultation in following Jesus.
That's the link with Psalm 145:4, "One generation shall praise Your works to another, and declare your mighty acts." What we want from the next generation is not just heads full of right facts about the works of God; we want heads full of right facts and hearts that burn with the fire of love for the God of those facts - hearts that will sell everything to follow Jesus into the hardest places of the world.
Convictions that shape the Way we educate. So how shall we do this? How shall we do education and exultation for the next generation? I will mention three convictions or principles that will shape the way we aim to shape children and teenagers. Psalm 145:4 gives us the overarching aim: "One generation shall praise Your works to another."
How? Parents have to educate their Children. Foundational to all our ministry to children and teenagers is that God's ordinary way of shaping children into radically committed, risk-taking, countercultural, wise, thinking, loving, mature, world Christians is through parents who teach and model a God-centered, Bible-saturated worldview to their children.
Because Deuteronomy 6:4-7 says, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! 5 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. 6 “And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.”
Centuries later, Asaph says in Psalm 78:5-7, “For He established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, which He commanded our fathers, that they should make them known to their children; 6 That the generation to come might know them, the children who would be born, that they may arise and declare them to their children, 7 That they may set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep His commandments.”
And in the New Testament, Ephesians 6:1-4 says, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 2 “Honor your father and mother,” which is the first commandment with promise: 3 “that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth.” 4 And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord.”
The Biblical pattern is for parents, especially fathers, not to relinquish their role as the primary teachers and shapers of their children's mind and heart - not even to the church. The Biblical pattern is for parents to continually impart to their children a God-centered, Bible-saturated vision for all of life. Education for Exultation is primarily to restore parents to their God-ordained role: Parents educate their children.
The Church is in partnership with the parents in educating the children. There are lots of reasons why this is important. Practical ones include the facts that 1) some children don't have believing parents; 2) some single parent homes are so stressed and overworked that they need all the help they can get; 3) there is a whole range of competencies in moms and dads that may need supplementing in this world; 4) even the best home-teaching will benefit from reinforcement in a church setting; and 5) some aspects of God's character may be taught better in a larger church setting than at home.
Consider Deuteronomy 31:10-13, “At the end of every seven years, at the appointed time in the year of release, at the Feast of Tabernacles, 11 when all Israel comes to appear before the Lord your God in the place which He chooses, you shall read this law before all Israel in their hearing. 12 Gather the people together, men and women and little ones, and the stranger who is within your gates, that they may hear and that they may learn to fear the Lord your God and carefully observe all the words of this law, 13 and that their children, who have not known it, may hear and learn to fear the Lord your God as long as you live in the land which you cross the Jordan to possess.”
Notice those words in verse 13, "Their children who have not known . . ." Does this mean that Moses assumes that fathers will be delinquent, and a gathering every seven years will make up the difference? Probably not. Rather, it means that there are some things that are going to be picked up and seen and felt in this kind of gathering that would not ordinarily be picked up at home.
The function of a church gathering would be educational. The younger generation would learn for the first time the full meaning of the covenant. Although they would know about it beforehand, its significance would dawn on them fully only as they left their homes and heard the public reading of the law in the presence of others. (Peter C. Craigie, The Book of Deuteronomy, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1976, p.371)
One lesson to draw from this is that church education can be an important supplement and reinforcement to what parents do at home. Therefore partnership between parents and church is important. There is advice in the New Testament that the Jewish people in home teaching should not rule out the supplementing of education from others who have special spiritual expertise.
In Acts 22:3, Paul was making his defense before the Jews, and said, "I am a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city, educated under Gamaliel, strictly according to the law of our fathers, being zealous for God just as you all are today." Notice the reference "educated under Gamaliel" - literally "at the feet of Gamaliel."
This was the usual place for the younger students of a gifted rabbi to sit as they were instructed. This does not mean that the parents were delinquent. It means that when we say parents have primary responsibility to shape their children's mind and heart, but they should avail themselves of gifted teachers to supplement their own efforts.
So principle #1 is: Parents educate their children. Principle #2 is: The Church is a partner with the parents in educating the children. And now principle #3 is that the Church helps equip the Parents to educate the Children. When children grow up and become adults, they don't cease to learn and grow. And as some of them move toward parenting and teaching children, they must continue to be taught and shaped Biblically, and the church has a high calling to see this happen.
Moses says in Deuteronomy 4:9, “Only take heed to yourself, and diligently keep yourself, lest you forget the things your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. And teach them to your children and your grandchildren.” First, Moses must minister to the people and they must give heed to themselves and their own souls. Only then will they be able to teach their children.
So Paul says in Ephesians 4:11-12, “And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, 12 for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” Pastors and teachers need to equip parents in the ministry of teaching Scripture and other ways to nurture their families and others.
The church that educates only children with Biblical truth will get shallower. To keep the reservoir of truth and doctrine full and deep - for all ages - is the aim of education for exultation in the next generation. Ephesians 4:15-16 says, “but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Christ 16 from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.”
I hope and pray that you all will become a part of this. I see people willing to lead our Bible study groups that includes children, but God wants all of us to become involved. We all have different gifts that God wants to use to equip the body of Christ. God knows each one of our potential, but we all have to step up and be courageous and do what He says, Amen? Let us pray.