Generations: Family Dedication

We had three families who dedicated during the first service and this fourth family in this service. And it's just a beautiful thing to be a part of, isn't it? I love that we are this countercultural community of believers who are doing what we can to not only raise our children in a home that centers on Christ, but to help come alongside others who are doing the same. And so our hope is that you will truly step into that. You'll be praying for these families, encouraging these families, and connecting with them.

You know, of all of the metaphors that God could have used in the Bible to describe to us what it's most like for him to love us and us to love him and him to care for us and us to pursue him, he chose the family. This is the one picture that he decided to give for himself. He chose the Father, that we're his children, that Jesus is His son. And there's a beautiful metaphor at play all through Scripture that we all get to be a part of it. Some of us came from very broken families.

Some of us came from beautiful families. Some of us haven't started families. Others are right in the middle of it. And wherever you are, we want you to know that you're welcome here, and we want you to be a part of this community here. There's incredible community here.

I was just talking to someone today who is pretty fresh around here, and they said, I've never felt so connected and so cared for by a church before. And to that, I can just go home like, we're done. We did it right. So this morning, I'm so thrilled to get to introduce someone to come and speak this this morning. He's one of our elders.

I half jokingly said in the last service that in a lot of churches, I've been a part of the very last people that you want to hand a microphone to and have them come talk up here is elders, because they're old and boring.

Not here, okay? Not here. We have an incredible group of elders, but Kyler is a dear friend of mine. We've gotten to grow in relationship over the last year. And this is a man who is raising his family in the faith.

He's got four young ones at home. They're serving every week here in Harbortown, kids. And it's a beautiful thing. And so, Kyler, will you come up? This is Kyler Gray, and Kyler is perfect to speak about this message today that's all about dedicating our families to God, because he's living it out right now.

And so Kyler, he's not old and boring. That's definitely one of the other guys at a different church, right? Yeah. Well, let me pray for you real quick. Father, thank you for this man, my friend.

Thank you that he and his family serve our church so beautifully. I pray your blessing over his message today. Help him to pour himself out and help us to soak it all up and learn and be convicted. So, spirit, come and do your work today. In Jesus name, amen.

Good morning, everyone. It's so good to be with you all here today. As Josh said, I have the privilege of serving as one of the elders here at Whitewater. And my family and I have considered this church our home since we moved here 13 years ago. And it's just so great to come with you week after week and worship with you and serve with you.

A quick word of forewarning before I get into my message. I'm used to teaching three, four and five year olds back in Whitewater, kids. So maybe for some of you, like, this is right at your level. Okay? But for those of you who are not, you know, usually I bring them in and I hook them back there with Play DOH right at the beginning.

Right. Especially those kids who are like, reluctant to come in. Right. I got Play DOH to hook them at the beginning. And then I teach a Bible story and maybe do a craft and read right when I'm losing about half the class and their attention.

Snack time. Okay, Animal crackers come out. Maybe some pretzels too. I'm sorry to inform you, I have neither Play DOH nor pretzels or animal crackers today, but I hope you'll hang with me for the next 20 minutes or so. And today's one of my favorite Sundays of the year.

Child Dedication Sunday. What an amazing opportunity to come behind these families church. Don't miss this. It's about them dedicating their families, but it's also about us as a church coming alongside through them as they navigate parenthood, which is not easy. So I ask you just to pray and encourage them.

I have such great memories of child dedications for my own family at this sanctuary, at the old sanctuary. Three of my four children were dedicated right here at Whitewater. And the fourth child, well, she was a middle child. No, I'm just kidding. She was dedicated.

But we moved out of state for a couple years to South Carolina and she was dedicated at a great church there. But it's this amazing moment and this commitment, but also it's joyful and somber at the same Time to realize the weight that we have as parents and the commitment that we're making before you all and before God. And if you guys have been around young children for more than a minute, you know that they ask the best questions, right? Anytime, any place. No filter.

Here's a couple I've had to field recently. Daddy, what does my belly button do? Daddy, why is the sun yellow? Shouldn't it be blue like the rest of the sky? Dad.

Just a couple months ago, my son asked me, he said, dad, what would fire look like if there were no gravity? I mean, what kind of question is that? How do you even begin to process and come up with an answer in the moment? Spoiler alert. I have no idea.

And I didn't even try to expl. If one of you knows and would, you know, is a master in physics, I would love to be enlightened. After service, please come talk to me, right? But these questions, they come all the time, and they're not just always the fun questions or they're not just about everyday life. They've got questions about God, questions that are difficult, about situations that they're coming across in their life.

Here's a couple of questions that I've had to field recently. Dad, what does God look like? Dad, Adam and Eve were naked. That's weird, dad. So you're telling me that Satan was in heaven and an angel and then God threw him out?

That's interesting. You know, just a couple weeks, we had Good Friday service here and it's one of my favorite services of the year. We do it as a family and it's a somber reflection of Jesus sacrifice for all of us. And so I've got my family with me and I've got my two year old, and we're getting ready to come into a time of communion and she's got all the questions, right? And I'm trying to explain to her the best I can, right?

She's usually back there. So we had her with us. And after we're, you know, as soon as we're getting ready to take the bread, she looks at me dead in the eyes and she says, daddy, is Jesus coming back right now? And, you know, I don't know if she was being prophetic in the moment. That's a, you know, something you can never say no to in the moment, right?

Well, the day and the hour are unknown and we don't yet. It's complicated, right? But these are the questions that we get from our children and church. It's our job to tell them the truth, The reality is they're growing up in a world that's feeding them lies, lies about who they are, what they are, whose they are, what their purpose is.

And if we don't give them answers to the questions that they have, they're going to try to find those answers in the world around them.

Not my kids.

Gosh, this is hard. I love you all. So we're going to talk about a few instances in the Bible where Jesus or God actually talks about kids asking questions and what our response and what posture should be, right. Believe it or not, the Bible covers a lot of topics. Questions from kids happens to be one of them.

And to give a little bit of context, the Israelites were slaves in Egypt for 400 years. And after those 400 years of slavery, God raised up a man named Moses whose purpose it was to deliver the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt into the Promised land. And Moses was able to accomplish that through God's miraculous signs and wonders. And what should have been a short journey from Egypt over to Israel, the promised land ended up being 40 years because of their disobedience and because of their disbelief. And God raises up an entirely new generation who wasn't there for the Exodus.

And he appoints a new person to lead them, a man named Joshua. And as Joshua is knocking on the front door of the Promised Land, he's got across yet another body of water, the Jordan river, the same river Jesus would be baptized in later. And God performs another miraculous sign. He stops up the river, and the people were able to walk across on dry ground onto their next destination of Jericho. And Joshua realizes the significance of this moment, and he wants to create a memory, a way to pass on to the next generation what God did for them and how God delivered them.

And so he asks 12 men from the 12 tribes of Israel to go to the bottom of the river that was dry. Now grab 12 large stones and bring them up to set up a sort of stone memorial of sorts to remember the occasion. And we'll pick it up right there in Joshua 4, he Joshua said to the Israelites, in the future, when your descendants ask their fathers, what do these stones mean? Tell them Israel crossed the Jordan on dry ground. For the Lord your God dried up the Jordan before you until you had crossed over.

The Lord your God did to the Jordan just what he had done to the Red Sea when he dried it up before us until we had crossed over. He did this so that all the peoples of the earth might know that the hand of the Lord is Powerful and so that you might always fear the Lord your God. Did you catch that question in there? Daddy, what are these stones for? Any kid walking by would have seen these 12 stones and known that they were out of place, they were unnatural.

Clearly someone put them there. In the same way that you're driving through a new city and you come across landmarks, right? And the kids have all these questions about what they're there for, and it would immediately raise the question for them. And this is a question, another one of those questions that would be easy to dismiss, right? It's easy when kids ask questions to be dismissive or to give a incomplete answer.

Or my favorite, guilty as charged. We'll talk about it later, right? When the reality is. I don't want to talk about it later. In fact, I'd prefer if you don't ask me the question, right?

But Joshua recognizes that this question's going to come, and so he says, no, no, no. When they ask you about it, tell them. Tell them about how God delivered you from slavery in Egypt. Tell them about how he dried this river up and you crossed over. Tell them about the promise that he made for you, how you would return here 400 years later.

Tell them about God's goodness. You see, that stone memorial was a physical representation of what God did for them and a way for the older generation to intentionally pass on to the next generation the goodness of God's deliverance. What physical symbols do we have in our own lives that point us and our children or the next generation back to God? For me and my family, the most evident one is the physical creation, right? It's walking out the door, it's going on a hike, it's going to the zoo.

And just seeing the amazing, abundant, diverse life that God has created. What a blessing. Created for us to enjoy and for his glory. And it's going out on a clear night and seeing the beautiful sky and all the stars right in their vast array and getting all the questions from the kids. Dad, what's that constellation?

Dad, why is that star this color? Dad, how long would it take to get there, Right? All these questions, I don't know all the answers, but it's a time where I point them back to their creator, an amazing creator God who spoke all this into existence. And the same God that created the entire vast universe that's ever expanding is the same God that created them. Same God that has a purpose for their life, the same God that Jesus sent his son to die for.

You see these physical symbols? They can surround us everywhere. But sometimes it takes the humble question of a child for us to talk about it with them. And in the same way that there were physical symbols like the stone memorials, there were also ceremonies and celebrations that the Israelites had. Russ did a great job talking about this last week, if you were here.

All of these festivals that they celebrated, and a lot of those involved food. And this all kind of culminated in one that was called the Passover. And the Passover was a time where the Israelite people again remembered this deliverance out of the land of Egypt. And in that ceremony, there was a very specific meal that they were to eat. And this was a way for the older generations again to speak truth into who God was, into the next generation.

So we'll pick up in Exodus, Obey these instructions, talking about the Passover. Obey these instructions as a lasting ordinance for you and your descendants. When you enter the land that the Lord will give you as he promised, observe the ceremony. And when your children ask you what does this ceremony mean to you, then tell them it is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians. You see, similar to the physical stones, this meal would have raised a lot of questions from kids, right?

Every single part about this meal was unique and served a purpose. There was unleavened bread, there was a year old lamb. Without the fact that they were to eat. There were the bitter herbs. I mean, I can only imagine trying to feed my kids who are already picky, trying to feed them bitter herbs to eat, right?

And the questions that they would ask me, it's like I vividly remember giving them each one of them a lemon at a restaurant for the first time, right? They're, you know, maybe a year old. They're just starting to discover the joy of food and flavors, right? And you hand them a lemon and you see that look in their eye like, oh, this looks like a fruit. This is gonna be great.

It's gonna be sweet. Wow. My dad loves me. He's giving me this fruit. And then you give them the fruit and they taste it and there's like a half second delay.

And immediately their face turns to bitterness and disgust and betrayal. And daddy hates me. And it's even funner when you have older kids who are kind of encouraging and egging it on. Oh, it's gonna taste so good. Trust me, you'll love it.

But it's kind of like that, right? Your kid has questions about, why would you feed me bitter herbs, right? But it was to represent the harshness of the slavery that they experienced under the Egyptians. And not only the food that they ate, but also how they ate the meal. It says that they were to eat it with their robe tucked into their belt and with sandals on their feet and a staff in their hand.

I mean, I've had my fair share of meals with sandals on my feet, but I can't imagine showing up to dinner with a staff in my hand. I would get a lot of questions. But again, it was a way for them to symbolize and talk about the haste and the hurriedness with which they would have to escape Egypt after the Passover occurred. See, each single element was distinctly designed by God to have a conversation, a conversation year after year, generation after generation, for thousands of years, about God's goodness, His faithfulness, his deliverance, his promise.

And so what ceremonies and celebrations do we have in our own lives that point back to God? Let's think back to just Easter a couple weeks ago. What an amazing time that was in a worship service here. But did everything in your life on Easter, all leading up to that, did it all culminate in center around the death, burial, and resurrection of King Jesus and the gift of eternal life that we have through that? Or were we caught up in the rest of the things or think to Christmas, right?

Do you use Christmas as a way to really center everything you do around God's incredible plan and design to have an infant king come to save and redeem us? Or do we get caught up and the commercialism and the distraction of it all? I mean, Christmas, that's a time of core memory creation for kids, right? For me, it's running down the stairs and trying to beat my other three siblings, right? And getting down there and seeing a pile of gifts with my embroidered stocking with my name on it, ready to tear in.

But what I remember the most is my dad grabbing the family Bible.

This gets harder as you get old, by the way. Whew. It's my dad grabbing the family Bible before we could even touch the presents. Opening it up to Luke 2, verse by verse, reading me the Christmas story.

What a gift. A gift that I want to pass on to my own family.

He's here today. That makes it really hard. Blame him.

But it's these things that we want to use every moment to pass on to our own children, right along with these physical symbols and these celebrations like Easter and Christmas and Passover. Also, just the way that we live our lives on a daily basis should raise questions. It should raise questions because it's different than what our children are seeing everywhere in the world around them. Deuteronomy 6 talks about kids asking questions again. It talks about what's the meaning of all these laws and these decrees and these stipulations that you're giving us.

And Moses uses that as a moment to point them back again to their deliverance. But it's much deeper than that. It's about them and us being set apart from the rest of the world. It's about us not being conformed to the pattern of this world, but being transformed by the renewing of our mind. It's about the fruit of the Spirit being evident in our lives to the people around us, when the acts of the flesh are so easy and everywhere and accessible.

In today's world, it's about throwing off our old self and putting on our new one, wrapped in the robes of Christ's righteousness. You see, being obedient to God is going to raise questions. It's different. Our kids are growing up in a depraved world, far from God, a world in which self interest is the ultimate virtue. And living the Christian life is totally opposite.

That Jesus call is to pick up our cross and follow Him. It doesn't get more countercultural than that. And so are you. Am I living a questionable life? Okay, some of us might be living a questionable life.

Not questionable in that way, but in a way that raises questions. Because we're different. We're set apart. That our kids or whoever we're around is gonna notice something different about how we live our life. And it's a chance to reflect and point them back to the light that's in Jesus.

And not just us loving God, but us loving the people around us. So, yes, children are going to ask questions, but every question is an opportunity to point them back to God, to point them back to his faithfulness, his deliverance, not only in our life, but in the life of the people around us and in the life of our ancestors and church. We each have a role to play in this, in passing this along to the next generation. This isn't just about parents and their families. It's about the family of God.

And so first, I want to talk to you seasoned people in the room. These are the people who've seen a lot of life. Okay, I've heard just some of your stories of God's incredible faithfulness since you were a little kid, your walk with God. Or I've heard about some of you who have been in the middle of your Life, God grabbed the steering wheel, did a hard right, and completely change the trajectory in the history of your life and your family. Don't underestimate the power of your testimony and don't underestimate the power of your example that you set for people like me.

The reality is we need examples like that in our life to sturdy up the foundation of our own life so that we can pass it on and build the foundation and our kids who are coming after us. You guys have been there, done that. You've overcome the struggle. You've done incredible work for God's kingdom. Just another way that you show the love of Christ and love for each other is how you guys just surround each other as a community.

You guys are going through a lot of things in life with older kids or with health issues, but this church and this body, you guys surround each other with love and with care in a way that I've never experienced, but I want to be part of it one day. Keep doing that. Praise God for you all.

We can clap.

And parents, I want to encourage each of you. Just the fact that you're hearing my voice today is a testament to your desire to follow Christ more closely and to put that example in your children. But it's not hard. It's not easy. It's really hard.

Okay? Your time's not your own. Your space is not your own. Just ask any mother of a two year old who's trying to use the bathroom, okay? There's no privacy.

They're gonna Chuck Norris that door down. They're coming in. All right? It's not your space, it's not your time. And you might hear me and you might think, oh, my gosh, like, I need these monumental moments in my life to teach my children about God.

Or, oh, I have to have this super deep theology. I don't know enough to pass it on to my kids. But I tell you, church and parents, it's in the everyday walk with God. It's in the small conversations. That's what builds the foundation.

Deuteronomy 6 tells us, Hear, O Israel, 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. 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, bind them on your foreheads, write them on the doorframes of your Houses and on your gates.

You see, every single day has moments where we can reflect Christ to our children and to the next generation. It's those small conversations. It's walking alongside them and explaining to them something when they're going through something difficult or when they have a genuine question. It's loving them, sacrificially encouraging them, surrounding them with other Christian families and believers, not just here on Sunday mornings, but every day outside of church. Being intentional about that.

And you guys might feel, parents, that you're not doing enough ministry. I hear a lot about making disciples, but how am I supposed to make disciples when I got a family to raise? But hear this. Your family is your primary ministry. Parenthood is just as important of a mission field as any other mission field, local or global.

The reality is you have in your care these children, and you can make disciples in your own home for God's glory, so that the kingdom of God gets closer. Teens and young adults, you might have been tuning me out for the past 15 minutes, but this applies to you, too. I want you to understand the vital role that you play in this church body, man. You guys have passion like none of us have, right? Never lose that.

And let's be honest, you're the cool kids. I think I'm cool. Right, kids. But like my dad jokes are, they're kind of over it. Okay?

But our kids, man, they look up to you. Be the example. Pay it forward to the kids coming behind you.

Children are incredible imitators, right? It's awesome when you're, like, teaching them baseball and how to pitch. It's completely terrifying when you see their friends and the people that they're seeing outside of school and the world that's around them. Right? Be that example that we want our kids to grow into.

You have no idea the impact that it has on my family, the impact that it has on other families just by you paying it forward. They look up to you. Don't waste that opportunity. Singles and couples without children, you're just as critical a part of this intergenerational family of God as any other part. You're loved and valued.

You've got so many gifts that I see you use daily or weekly when you're here. Keep it up. Be a friendly face to a family. Invest in a child to mentor or simply be present. Thank God for all of you.

And so I've got a challenge for all of us today. I've got three challenges as I wrap up here. Number one, get to know the family that was up here today and Actually pray for them, get to know their name. There was another few families in the first service. Right.

But this is our opportunity, don't miss this. To love and encourage those families. It starts by knowing their names, actually know their names so that you can have a conversation with them.

And this may surprise you, right. I found this out, but not everybody has 50 cousins living on the west side down the road from them. Okay. I know it's the west side of Cincinnati, but you might be the only family they have here.

Thank you for making this feel like home to me.

Second volunteer in Whitewater Kids. Yes, I'm totally biased, all my cards on the table, conflict of interest. I've got four kids back there every week. Right. And you have no idea the impact you can have.

Whether you're in the nursery, whether you're teaching preschoolers, whether you're teaching elementary age kids. You can change the trajectory of those kids lives. Just talk to anybody who's been serving back there for a week or a month about the stories they have, the joy that they get from serving. It's not always easy, but there's those incredible moments that you have with kids. And it's not just serving the kids, it's serving people like me, the parents, right?

Parents who can go and drop their kids off for an hour knowing that they're going to learn about Jesus from someone else. They're going to get reinforced what we're trying to teach them at home. And they can come in here as parents, not worried and truly worship God, open handed for what the pastor has to say or how the music moves them. It's a service to the parents as well. And so if you want to take a next step and serve, talk to me, talk to Josh, talk to Megan, talk to anybody.

We need your help. It takes a village, as Megan said. And I want to personally thank each of you who has done that for my family, who has invested in my kids. I've gotten so many great friends and relationships and I just want to thank all of you for investing in my family.

And third last embrace the baby cries, the toddler outbursts, the stains on the floor. That might happen, guys. We are so blessed to have a church with so many young families, so many children. What a blessing it is. And I don't want to be done.

I want another hundred young families here in the next one to two years. But we need to make it feel like home here. You guys do a great job of that. Keep it up. And it's not always going to be neat and tidy.

You think Jesus life was neat and tidy with the people that he hung up with. He didn't wait for them to grow up spiritually. He got right in the middle of their mess, be like that. That's the church we want to be to these young families and these kids. What a gift we have to help raise them up in the Lord.

And I know I've talked a lot about kids and their questions, and just a few weeks ago, my first grader, Daniel, actually, it's his birthday today. Daniel, happy birthday. Yeah, it's May 4th. It's Star wars day. Don't bring that up to my wife, okay?

Hate Star Wars. But it's his birthday today. And he asked me a little bit ago, he said, dad, why do people wear cross necklaces? Like, I see a lot of cross necklaces, what that's all about, you know, maybe it's baseball players or others. And, you know, I was kind of put back by his question.

I mean, he's been going here since he was a baby, right? He knows what a cross is. He knows the gospel story. But as I pressed a bit further, it was a deeper question. It was, wow, that's like, what Jesus died on.

Like, that's horrific. That's cruel. That's gruesome. Why would people want to. Want to show that?

And my answer in the moment to him, which is true, my answer to him was, well, people wear that so that they can display to everyone what the priority of their life is and to remind themselves daily, hourly, when they look in the mirror or when they get up the morning, what the priority in their own life is. But church, it's so much deeper than that. The cross is a physical symbol that reminds us of God's faithfulness and his incredible act of sacrificial love by sending his son Jesus to die in our place so that we could be forgiven and so that we could experience eternal life. And that's crazy to the world around us. The cross is crazy.

If you look at what Paul tells us in First Corinthians, he says this, for the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. You see, it might seem odd to the world, showcasing an instrument of death on our chest or a tattoo or wherever we might have a cross that might seem crazy to the world, but that's the exact same thing, church, that enables us to overcome sin, death and evil and receive God's gift of salvation. And as we enter into a time of communion. I want you just to spend a minute thinking about that upside down, radical, countercultural love of Jesus and what he did for us by dying on the cross.