Generations: Mother's Day

In the room and listening online. Happy Mother's Day to my mom, who I know will be watching from West Tennessee this morning. Best mom I've ever had. I mean it.

I've actually I'll be sharing some of her story today to tell about God's faithfulness in her life that got passed on to me. If we've never met, my name is Josh and I'm glad that you're here today. And. And there's just a few things that I want you to know if you're newer around here. One is you just walked into a room full of normal, broken, everyday people who have baggage in their families just like you and who haven't figured it all out yet.

And so if you are perfect, please just go home now. We're gonna break you. But if you're more like us, we're glad you're here. Second is this we believe. I believe it is no coincidence that you're here today.

I believe that this moment, intersection of our stories today is ordained by God. And I believe that he has something in mind for you today. A challenge, a relationship, a connection, whatever that is. And my hope is that you'll be open to that. And finally, our vision as a church is that we would be a place where anyone with any past, with any baggage, with any level of belief or unbelief can walk into this place and can find hope and care in the healing power of God.

And we believe that hope is best found in community. And so if you have not connected here yet, I want to ask you to do one thing that'll knock over that first domino and that string of dominoes that will bring you into community. And that is to stop by the information desk in the foyer after the service and just introduce yourself to the team there. They would love to help you get connected, help find a place for you to share your gifts in the community, in the body here, or just answer questions that you might have. If you were here last week, then you were deeply blessed by a beautiful service, a beautiful family dedication service.

And we had four families stand on this stage and commit in front of everyone to dedicating their lives, their kids, their families and their future, to raising kids in a home of faithfulness. And you were also blessed by a heartfelt and beautiful and challenging message from Kyler, where he encouraged our whole church, every age and stage, to come alongside these young families and to take part in this work. This work of raising up our kids in faith isn't just for parents or grandparents or caregivers. It's for all of us who are part of this family. One of the primary ways that we accomplish the Great Commission at large is actually by raising up the next generation of kids who know and love Jesus and have dedicated their lives to him.

Because the number one goal of parenting turns out is actually the same as the number one goal of the church and the kingdom, that is to make disciples of Jesus. And a disciple is just normal, everyday people who are growing to become more like Jesus by studying what he did and said and practicing it. And then we help others do the same. That's all a disciple is. And as we continue that call to come alongside others, specifically these families and kids, I want to pick up where Kyler left off and make sure that no one walked away from last week thinking that was a really great message for those people.

The message is for all of us. Now, I've shared this quote from Russell Moore once before, but it is just a powerful and potent quote. He says there is no such thing as a Christian without children. You are part of the church, the household of God, a household into which God brings children. And you either treat those children as part of your responsibility, as part of the body of Christ, or you will treat, treat those children as, at least as far as you are concerned, as orphans.

Something we didn't get to last week was handing out these hands. Handing out the hands. These are at all of the exits, on the tables, on your way out. And these hands, they serve two purposes. First, they're a tool for parents and grandparents and caregivers.

And you notice there are five fingers, just like we all have. And our encouragement is that all of the parents and grandparents and caregivers of kids who have kids in your house is that you sit down with them one on one, and you start to name off five people outside of your family and home who know and love your kids and know and love Jesus, and who are regularly putting time and effort and love and care and discipleship into your kids lives. And if you've done this already, it's a beautiful thing to keep doing it. And you'll notice that those people shift and change over time. And then you put this on your fridge or put it in a window somewhere or somewhere that you can see it.

And you regularly pray for the people who are helping to disciple your kids. And then you let them know that they're an active part of raising up your kids in faith. So that's the first. The second part of this hand is for all the rest of us. Now imagine if Every adult in this room grabbed one of these hands and they had to put down the names of five kids who are not in your home and in your family, who you are investing in and caring for and helping to raise up in faith.

If you had to do that, could you name five names? Could you name one name that could go on this hand of someone, a young person, that you're investing in their lives? This is a community effort. And imagine what it would look like if every kid in our midst had five adults who were investing in them and every adult in this room had five kids. There would be no spiritual orphans anymore.

We would be doing the work that we're called to. This is how we make sure the children of our church are not treated like spiritual orphans. Last week, Kyler talked about Deuteronomy 6. It's where Moses instructs the people to pass on their love and their knowledge of God onto the next generation. And he gives these beautiful promises that if they do that, then God will take care of the rest.

But then if you fast forward to the Book of Judges, in chapter two, we read what happens inside of one generation. This story shows us what's at stake for our generation. Judges chapter 2. Starting in verse 6, when Joshua dismissed the people, Joshua is the one who became the leader. After Moses died, the people of Israel went each to his inheritance to take possession of the land.

And the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, those who had seen all the great work that the Lord had done for Israel. And Joshua, the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of 110 years. And all the generation also were gathered to their fathers. And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. And don't miss this.

And there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel. And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals. These are false gods. And they abandoned the Lord, the God of their fathers who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went after other gods from among the gods of the peoples who were around them and bowed down to them.

And they provoked the Lord to anger, and they abandoned the Lord and served the Baals and the Ashtoreth, who is another detestable God of the pagans around them. This happens in one generation after this Great caution from Moses to make sure when you go into that land that you pass this along. It Shows us that you can lose a generation in the blink of an eye. One generation knows the Lord, the next one doesn't. Why?

Because there's a gap. There's a gap where faith isn't shared. There's a gap where stories aren't told. There's a gap where kids watch their parents do the things, but they never believe that it's actually true. And they assume that God isn't real.

But that's not the only kind of story that the Bible tells. Thank goodness. That's not the only kind of story the Bible tells. Scripture also tells us what happens when the gap is filled, when a generation who didn't follow God turns around. There's a story of King Josiah.

He becomes the king at the age of eight. And his dad and granddad are scumbag kings who are terrible people. They not only don't know God, they're awful people. And he becomes the king. And actually the scripture of the Old Testament, the Torah, the five books of the Bible, the first five books of the Bible, they're actually rotting in a closet somewhere in the temple, covered in dust.

There are temples to other gods inside of God's temple at this point. And during some spring cleaning, it seems when they're cleaning up the temple and it was in disrepair, they find the Bible, they find the scripture, and they bring it to Josiah and he has it read in the assembly of the people. And when he hears what is read from these words, he is cut to the heart and he tears his clothes in agony. And it changes everything. He says, if this is true, this changes everything.

And he tore down all of the false idols, and he tore down the astropholes, and he tore down the altars. Sorry as I choke on my spit. Of all things. He tore them all down and it changed everything. A whole generation and a whole nation in a moment turn their hearts in dedication to God.

This is what's possible. This can go either way. That's why what we do now in this moment matters more than we can even imagine. And so please pick up those hands on your way out today, Pray over them, fill them out so that we are known as a generation who filled the gap, who passed on the torch of our faith. Now, maybe you were here last week and you were thinking, man, I wish I would have done that.

But now it's too late. I didn't know better. I was too preoccupied. I wasn't walking with Jesus back then when my kids were young. And now they're grown and now they're out of the house.

And it feels like I missed my chance. Church, hear me. It is not too late. It is not too late.

Your children may still be in your home. They might live in another home. They might not even like you anymore. But they still need your faith. They need your prayers, they need your voice.

They need your example. And it is never too late to begin to be a spiritual influence in the lives of your children and your grandchildren. It is never too late to start having a new kind of conversation with them. It's never too late to model what it looks like to have faith in God. Even if you stunk at it before.

And whatever is holding you back, especially if it is fear or shame, I can promise you that is not from the Holy Spirit. That is from the enemy. It is a lie that is to keep you trapped in your dark cage and ashamed to to proclaim Christ to the next generation. Do not let him hold this over you and hold you back from the future that God has in mind for your kids and grandkids. Now, today, in honor of Mother's Day, I want to share part of my mother's story.

It's a beautiful story of God's redemption in my mom's life. And I want to tell you this story because it gives us hope that it's never too late. Hers is not a story of generations passing down the torch and filling the gap. Hers is a story of a little girl who had no torch. But by God's grace, through Christian community, her torch was lit.

And because it was, I'm standing here today. I'm proclaiming the gospel today. There is no path from there to here. This is impossible. And it's all because God called her and she stepped into what he was doing.

And it's all because she gave in to a few pivotal moments in her life. My mom's parents were married. Her dad was in the Marines. And the Marines took them to San Francisco, California, where she was born. And when she was four years old and my grandmother was pregnant with my mom's little brother, my grandfather walked out on them.

He left them there, far from home, far from family to fend for themselves. He just left. And there my grandmother is pregnant and a four year old. And they just started to live wherever they could live, wherever they could find a place to. To make just enough to eat and take care of themselves and to deal with all of this.

My grandmother, she would go to parties and she met men and she started to date them. One of them, his name was Doug. And Doug promised to come and Fix the brakes on my grandma's car. And my mom says she remembers that Doug came to fix the brakes on the car, and then he never left. He just moved in.

And it wasn't long before Doug really started to show the signs of alcoholism. And he wasn't a nice or sleepy drunk. He was nasty.

He regularly beat my grandmother and abused the kids. And they had a little girl together, my mom's half sister. My mom recalls a moment that she was crying, and Doug took her and shook her and yelled at her. And these are the nice stories that I can share with you today. You can fill in the gaps of what it would have been like to live in this environment.

My grandma and the kids, they ran away multiple times.

But every time Doug would figure out where they were, they were in need, he'd put on the charm and he'd cry and say, I'll never do this again. And so they'd go back, and the abuse just continued in. This cycle happened over and over. And once they thought they really got away, they found a place to live with some help from a family, from their family. And then over some time, Doug started to come by and visit.

He found them, but he was different. He was different now. Like, he was really nice. And this went on, and trust got built up until he decided to get back at her, that he would kidnap his two daughter, and he took her away. She was gone for six weeks, and my grandmother had to hire an attorney and find her and get her back through the court system.

My grandmother finally divorced Doug. He stayed away, and then she married a third time to a decent guy. But that marriage ended in divorce, too. And for the rest of her life, she was deeply broken and wounded. She suffered from mental illness.

She lived with us growing up a few different times. She carried around this trauma and bitterness and anger. And she had such a deep distaste and distrust for men. So much so that in her later days, when she was in a nursing home, she couldn't have a male nurse because she couldn't stand to be touched by a man.

My mom's little sister grew up. She was married and divorced and remarried. And she moved out to the west coast and just coped with life mostly by staying away. Her little brother was married and divorced many times. He fathered multiple children from multiple different women.

We don't even know how many. And he died at 40.

My mom struggled through high school. She was often in trouble. She turned to whatever it seemed like would fill this giant hole inside of her. And the trauma and the hurt, they just continued to follow her. They followed her through her own decisions and the decisions of others.

And in high school, she began to look at her life and she wanted something more. She didn't like that she had the reputation that she had. She wanted to have a better reputation. And so she started to look around her and she saw that the girls around her who had the best reputation were the girls that went to church. And that was enough for her to, against her mother's wishes, go to this tiny little church in Linton, Indiana.

It's a nowhere, shut down, old coal town. And that is where my mom.

Was introduced to the gospel message that said that Jesus love was for her too.

That changed everything. And somehow this girl who struggled all through high school, she gets into this community of believers there. And the youth pastor convinces her that she should go to Johnson Bible College in Knoxville, Tennessee. And her mother fought her and fought her on this, but finally she relented and my mom went to Johnson Bible College. And that's where her story intersects with my dad's story.

My dad's story is another impossible route to end up at Johnson Bible College, too. You can't get there from where they started, and yet they overlap at their time in Johnson Bible College by two semesters. And they meet each other and they decide they're going to get married. And as they decide they're going to get married, they sit down and they talk about the baggage and brokenness from their past. And they make a decision and they drive a stake in the ground.

And they say, from here forward, man, from here forward. We're unbreaking this. We're breaking this cycle.

They look back on the brokenness, on the wreckage that was left behind from previous generations. And they committed to stand against generational sin, against brokenness. They drove a stake in the ground, like I said, they committed to raising us in a home that was centered on God. And so fast forward, when my siblings and I were all born, we were dedicated to God on a stage just like this one. I was two years old.

We were in Massachusetts in this little tiny church, and my mom and, and my dad dedicated me to God and said, whatever you want with him is what we want with him. They filled the gap. Now, they were not perfect parents. They still had baggage and brokenness from their past that bled into our lives. There was plenty of struggle.

Their marriage wasn't perfect. They made it through some really tough times. They messed up, they sinned, they made lots of mistakes. But at every major crossroads, they dug in when things got sideways, when they were so poor they didn't know what to do next, when they thought about giving up or giving in, when they thought the grass might look greener on the other side with someone else, they dug in with God. They kept choosing to walk with God.

When each of us, predominantly me, did a bunch of dumb stuff that disrupted them, they dug in. When my dad was deployed in the Navy, over and over, and he was gone out to sea for months at a time. And my mom was a single mom with three crazy kids losing her mind at home, she dug in. And because they hung in over and over and taught us to do the same. Not in their strength, in God's strength.

By the grace of God, all three of their kids grew up to have committed lives to Jesus, marrying spouses who are also Christ followers and raising nine grandchildren who are all walking in the faith today.

There is no path from there to here but God, by God's grace. Heidi and I have been married almost 24 years. Our kids get to experience the richness of grandparents who filled the gap, who halted the cycle, who passed on the torch of faith. And while we've lost Heidi's parents in the last few years, my kids got to grow up with two sets of grandparents who were committed to faith in Christ and who stayed married. That's an impossible story.

They lived as serving or sorry. Their lives served as living examples of what it looks like to stay obedient to God. And none of that exists without a stubborn high school girl making a decision to go to church. But don't miss this. My mom's story is not a Mother's Day story.

It is the gospel story. Her story just reminds us that God is in the business of redeeming all things. All of them. All of them yours, too. Whatever it is, whatever your story is, he's in the business of redeeming all things.

And so if you're here today and you're thinking, man, it's too late for me. I've made too many mistakes. My family is too far gone. There is no such thing as too far gone for Jesus. Some of you know that story very well today, don't you?

The same Jesus who reached into the mess of my mom's story is still reaching into messes today. And the same God who planted new roots in a broken family line is still planting today. The same spirit who helped my parents keep digging in is still strengthening and helping and giving fresh starts to tired hearts today. You can't change your past. It's what it is.

But you can change the trajectory of your future and the future of this next generation. So if you're a parent, it's not too late for your kids. It's not too late to reach out. It's not too late to apologize. It's not too late to say, I screwed up, but I want to start over again today.

It's not too late to say what you've been wanting to say. It's not too late to pray, to lead, to start. They still need your faith. If you're a grandparent, you probably have more influence now than you did when you were raising your own kids. Use it.

Use it. If you're single or without kids, this is your family, too. You're called to this next generation, too. Who are you investing in? If you grew up in the gap like my mom did, know this.

Jesus knows the weight you carry. He knows, and he carried it to the cross for you. And as crazy as it might sound, maybe he is calling you, who now have a lit torch to carry it backwards to your parents and your grandparents who just didn't know better.

Some of you need to fill out that hand today and start a conversation that's long overdue. Some of you need to send a text to your adult child before you leave this parking lot today. Some of you need to come and pray with our prayer team. They'll be at the bottom of the ramp here towards the end of the service. They've already been praying for you.

They're praying that you will come. You just need to come and pray. And if you don't know where to begin today, just begin where my mom began with Jesus, with the Gospel. The story is that Jesus hung on the cross to make a way for us. And his sacrifice is not just enough, it is way more than enough.

There is way more grace than you have sinned. Church. There is way more grace than there is baggage. Church. Jesus is the king seated on the throne in the heavenlies, and his grace is more than you can ever burn up.

And you can make a decision today to follow him, to trust him, to start to walk with Him. And if today's the day, and even if you've got some portion of you that's willing to start the conversation while the whole rest of you is scared to death, or the whole rest of you still angry, or the whole rest of you still looking at your baggage from your passing, he can't undo that, or the whole rest of you's got too many questions, just start. Just start today. Come talk to Me come talk to our prayer team. Talk to any of our ministers here, Go to the information desk.

Just start today. My mom's story is a testimony that proves that one decision, one decision made in faith can change the trajectory of multiple generations.

Maybe you're the beginning of a new branch that never existed before today.

My mom's story is a living example of what we read in Psalm 78.

It says we will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord and his might and the wonders that he has done. He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel. That's just saying he's the God of the Bible. He's the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. We know of him in his stories, which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children, that the next generation might know them.

The children, yes, unborn and arise and tell them to their children so that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments. And that they should not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, A generation whose heart was not steadfast, whose spirit was not faithful to God. I love that the Bible does not sugarcoat this. This says that all the jacked up, broken, really messed up baggage, generations of the past don't get the final say. This says that there is hope and that there is a gap that can be filled with the cross.

Today can be the day. So let's be a church and a generation who fills that gap. Let's make sure that our lives light a torch that can be handed to our children and their children and their children. Because the gospel message is that nothing is too broken for Jesus. All of that, yes, all of that was made possible by Jesus who came to this earth, lived a perfect death.

He was tempted in all the ways that we were tempted. And yet he did not sin. He lived a perfect death and became a perfect sacrifice for us. He went to the cross. He died a sinner's death.

He was dead. Dead. They put him in a tomb and three days later he was resurrected from the dead. And he appeared to thousands of people over those days after his resurrection. And he gave the church the calling to go and make disciples.

It is because of his blood, it is because of his body. It is because of his sacrifice that new, new roads can exist for people like me so that people like my mom could step onto a new path.