The Welfare of Your Children

Would you take your Bibles, please, and turn to the Old Testament, to the prophet Isaiah. We'll be looking at Isaiah chapter 54 this evening, talking about the welfare of your children, because that's what God talks about in this wonderful passage. At the beginning of each school year, we have a convocation, word that means to con, together, and vocare, call, to call together people for a specific purpose. That word is used for assembly of persons who are convoked for some kind of political purpose. It can be used ecclesiastically for a meeting of bishops or clergymen or lay representatives of the Anglican Church. We use it in the academic sense of a ceremonial assembly of members of a college, university, or school at the beginning of their academic pursuits. And each year, we have a tradition of convoking a meeting here, a worship assembly to bless and to pray for, Covenant Day School, our church school. We want to begin to add to that tradition by making this convocation and evening where we bless the students. Not just the students from our school, but from all schools, from T4, from pre-Kindergarten to graduate school, and the university where we lay hands on them and pray for them and give them a blessing, both those who are in our community and in our school, and those who are not but are in the Christian community and at different schools. We see this pattern in the Lord's life. It's been referenced a couple times already up to this point in the service. We're in Matthew, chapter 19. The evangelist says that the children were brought to Christ that he might lay his hands on them and pray. And the disciples rebuked the people, but Jesus said, let these little children come to me and do not hinder them for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven. And he laid his hands on them and blessed them and they went away. Though what Jesus was doing, we believe, was giving them the priestly blessing, the eronic blessing. The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you, the Lord that felt the smiling countenance upon you and give you his peace. He was doing exactly what his father and the Old Testament had commanded the priest to do because he was the priest of all priests, the high priest of the people of God. And one of his fundamental privileges and one of his most important duties was to bless his children in hours. And so it's an important thing, I think, at the beginning of each year to bless the children of the church, both corporately and their schools and individually as they come before the officers of the church. I'm a man who is a pastor. I serve on the school board. I'm a dad of four children and a grand dad of five grandchildren. I'm also a person committed to education. I remember I have like many people pieced together over the years kind of an eclectic education. I began kindergarten in the public school. I can remember falling in love with my kindergarten teacher, Miss Marie O'Brien. She had read here in Green Eyes and I asked her to marry me and she told me that she couldn't wait for me. She was going to marry someone else and I was devastated. It was not a good start to an academic career. But I recovered quickly. I went to a parochial school and then I went to a monastery and studied to be a priest for a long high school. And then I went to the largest Christian school in the world, the Ohio State University. And there I received a bachelor's degree. I went on to two other institutions to study for my master's degree and then to seminary and then to receive a doctor of ministry here at Reformed Theological Seminary. So I'm a person who is committed to education. I have a wife who is a schoolteacher. I met her when she was a brand new schoolteacher at Breyer Cress Baptist Christian School in Memphis, Tennessee. I married a school mom because I needed to be disciplined. And then she went on as we got the children up and grown. She taught in the inner city at the near high school in Jackson, Mississippi and now is privileged to be on the faculty and teach mathematics here at Covenant Day School. She is a third generation graduate of Mississippi State University. Our two daughters are fourth generation Mississippi State graduates. Our two sons were rebellious. So they became rebels from Ole Miss. So when those two teams play, it's always an interesting evening in our household. So we're a family who has benefited from education and we're committed to education. But we're also observant people. And I must say that over the years since my childhood there's something that's happened in the DNA of American people that is not good. It's not that there are any less committed to education. I think Americans are more committed to education now than they've ever been. But they do so in a spirit not a partnership but a comparison and competition. And I believe this began back in the late 60s when we began to bus children from one place to the other and we destroyed the neighborhood school. And parents and communities no longer felt an affinity for and an ownership and investment in their school. And education then became a product. Just a product that we bought and invested in. And we wanted to get the most for the least amount of money and brought with it spirits of divisiveness in our community. I spent 14 years in Jackson, Mississippi before I came here. And I can attest to you that I've never seen a city so divided. And at times so antagonistic towards one another over where their children went to school. We can have this in the form of public versus private school or Christian school versus non-Christian school or home schoolers versus institutional schooling. I don't know if it's rooted in shameful pride or insecurity or just the human spirit to lack unity and to be competitive but brothers and sisters it's not a good thing. And it's probably the only time you'll hear me quote in a positive way Hillary Clinton from this pulpit. But Hillary Clinton said that it takes a village to bring up a child and it does. It takes a corporate effort of all kinds of people to come alongside a mom and a dad and the help those children grow in their corporate responsibility and their personal disciplines and their academic development. And so we want to communicate tonight on behalf of the officers of this church clearly communicate the position that we are here to encourage to support and to be a biblical resource for parental decisions about how they educate their children. We are committed to our church school to the covenant day school. We think we have an excellent program of academic excellence and a biblical world view and an unsurpassed commitment to bring up your children under the grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And we want to make that school as much as possible affordable and accessible to any who would like to use it. We hope to see an end to personal anxiety about where you send your children to school, about interpersonal conflict and an end to any un-Christ-like behavior concerning your schooling choices. We want to bless you and we want to encourage you and be an aid to you in the education of your children. So I hope that in the future as we do this year to year this room will become packed with people not just from covenant day school but our families that send their children to Carmel Baptist Christian school or to Butler High School or to the public schools or to a classical Christian academy or to a charter school or home school. We want to be a blessing and encouragement to all these people. Every morning in my quiet time I pray for my four children and my five grandchildren and I use as the beginning of that prayer time a little poem, a little prayer written by a missionary named Amy Carmichael. She lived from 1867 to 1951. She was a missionary to India. She was a single lady she never married but the children of southern India came to call her Ama which is Tamil their language for mother. She personally rescued over 1,000 children mostly young women from a life of prostitution and enslavement. And she started the dawn of our fellowship that created and staffed and ran a number of orphanages that delivered hundreds of thousands of children from bondage and death and destitution. And she wrote this little prayer that she said every day for the children of India. She called them my children. Father, hear us we are praying. Hear the words our hearts are saying we are praying for our children. Keep from from the power of evil, from the secret hidden peril. Father, hear us for our children. From the whirlpool that would suck them from the treacherous quicksand pluck them. Father, hear us for our children. From the worldlings hollowed gladness, from the sting of faithless sadness. Father, father, keep our children. Through life's troubled waters steer them. Through life's bitter battle cheer them. Father, father, be thou near them. Read the language of our longing. Read the wordless pleading's thronging. Holy Father for our children. And wherever they may abide, lead them home at even tide. My children are all over the world. Some are in Columbus, Ohio, and some are in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and some are in Nashville, and some are in Seville, Spain. They always pray as I go to bed each night. And wherever they may abide, lead them home at even tide. Lead them back to Christ, back to the church, and back to a life with God so that their well-being will be great. Years ago, I came across a little verse in this passage tonight, Isaiah chapter 54 that has within it a great promise. All your children shall be taught by the Lord, and great shall be the peace of your children. In the translation I memorized it in, the New American Senator said, all your sons will be taught of the Lord, and the well-being of your sons will be great. Here's a promise from God that the peace and the well-being of our children will be great because they are the children of the Lord. And I want us to look at this passage tonight. In the Hebrew, it has four little paragraphs, or four different truths that God sets before us. And here's the first one. It has to do with the inheritance of your children. The inheritance of your children versus one to three. Sing O'Baron one who did not bear, break forth into singing and cry aloud, you who have not been in labor. For the children of the rest, what one will be more than the children of who is married says the Lord. And let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out, do not hold back, lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes. For you was spread abroad to the right and to the left, and your offspring will possess the nations and will people the desolate cities. Here God exhorts the people of God, the Old Testament Church Israel to have children, to have many children, to spread out, to broaden the stakes of their tents, their dwelling place, to possess the nations and to inhabit the desolate cities. Why? Well, because they had been under the discipline of the Lord for several hundred years. Isaiah is actually looking forward in the near future in 722 BC when the Assyrians would come and would capture the people of Israel and would take them and their children and disperse them throughout the Assyrian empire, many times dividing mother and father from son and daughter and sending them to different ends of the Assyrian realm. And a hundred years after that would come in 605 the Babylonian captivity where for 70 years men and women the children will be taken away to exile in a foreign land. And he tells them that they have a blessing coming in the future, that God will regather the people and will give them a blessing and the blessing is children. One commentator H.C. Lupold says of this passage during the exile Israel had been greatly reduced in numbers so to speak the curse of sterility had descended upon her, a curse felt more keenly in oriental countries than it is in the West. This curse was to be taken from her. Her children were again to become numerous. From having been her Rachel, she was soon to become Aliyah, rounding out the picture, a bit more fully, her husband nonetheless than God himself had forsaken her. She could have no children. But the promise here runs to the effect that her children will ultimately be more in number than those of a woman not forsaken. All the prophets, many of them, gave the same promise to Israel at this phase of her history. Jeremiah would say to the people, thus says the Lord of hosts the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon, build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their produce, take wives and have sons and daughters, take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage so that they may bear sons and daughters, multiply there and do not decrease. Seek the welfare of that city where I have sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf for in its welfare you will find your welfare. What will be the inheritance of these children? What did they have to look forward to? God said, you will spread abroad to the right and to the left and your offspring will possess the nations and the people will come to the desolate cities. They would go back and reclaim their land and rebuild their cities, a promise that was literally fulfilled in 536 BC and is spiritually being fulfilled as the children of the Church of Jesus Christ spread abroad in the world and into every village town and city they take the message of the kingdom of God. You know it's always true. It's always true of us that when we are in difficult and dangerous times we have fewer children. When we were experiencing the Great Depression, the blood right in the World War II, America's birth rate dropped precipitously down to 19 babies born to every 1,000 adults. That's not a whole lot of people. But after World War II, in the post-war prosperity we had a baby boom and it started in 1946 where we averaged 21 children per 1,000 people that rose all the way in 1965 to 25 children in every 1,000 people. In the 8 million people born, children between 1946 and 1965, phenomenal birth rate, and then in 1965 things began to reverse so much so that last year 13 children were born to every 1,000 Americans, the lowest birth rate of Americans in the history of our nation. Why? Well there are a lot of reasons. People are marrying later, it's taking longer to get through school, women want a career and so they marry later, they have fewer children, a lot of factors. But the primary indication for people when they are asked why are you not having more children, they say why would I want to bring children into such an uncertain world with such a foreboding future. God says, you should not be afraid of this. I have a great plan for your children, a plan for their life, to give them a future and a hope. In fact he says that right after he tells them to seek the welfare of the city in which they dwell. For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, plans for welfare not for evil, to give you both a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you search for me with all of your heart and I will be found by you, declares the Lord. God says, don't be afraid to grow your family for I have a wonderful inheritance store for your children, it's not the American dream. The American dream is in jeopardy. What it is is that he will give them a good and grace filled life among the people of our nation and God will use your children to revive and to restore and to renew the foundations of our land. He would say over in Isaiah 58 and your ancient ruin shall be rebuilt, you shall raise up the foundations of many generations, you shall be called the repair of the breach, the restore of the streets in which to dwell. God has a great plan for our children and that plan is held together by three great sinews, three great cords, tradition and authority and power. Tradition is primarily and has been over the generations been taught by the family assisted by the school. It comes about when parents say, well we don't do those sorts of things or we don't live that way or this is not the American way and that is the purpose of the school to reinforce those things. Authority, the authority of God in our life and the authority of the word comes from the church and from the theology that at one time was taught both in the church and in the school and power of course comes from the state in the power of law. Well, we've seen over the last 50 years that as the American family has began to break apart and as the schools have become less than what were founding fathers intended and as we fragment in ourselves into our little church communities that tradition and authority are gone and all that is left is power. The power of the state, the power of the lawsuit, the power of forcing people to do what God says we should be taught internally to make our personal values and our lifelong convictions. It is a power separated from tradition that gives it moral authority and from the authority of God's word that gives it spiritual certainty. And so the purpose of our school is to reinforce those sin used that have become unraveled in the American motif. The mission of covenant day school is to assist the Christian family by providing an education marked by a biblical worldview, academic excellence and affordability so that students are equipped to assault and light for God's glory. We are very explicit at covenant day school about what our mission is, it's to help parents in their education of their children so that they know the biblical traditions they are under girded with biblical authority and they have a spiritual power in their life that drives them forward as salt and light in our communities. You know something folks, you who send your children to public schools have not so much explicit commitments to that but they are implicit. Larry Curbin of the American Prospect said, tax supported public schools in the United States were not established 150 years ago to ensure jobs for graduates or to replace the family or the church. They were established to make sure that children would grow into literate adults who respected authority and could make reason judgments except differences of opinions and fulfill their civic duty to to participate in the political and social life of their communities for the common good of their fellow Americans. Same sort of principles implicit in all education. The bottom line is that the primary responsibility for installing these traditions and this authority and this understanding of civic order resides in the realm of mom and dad. The school is merely here to come alongside of the church and the church to come alongside parents and preparing children to be Christ-centered citizens which God considers their great and their gracious inheritance. They are the salt of the earth and they are the light of the world and it's our purpose to help you moms and dads to make your children all the more salty and all the more enlightened for their great inheritance. The great privilege they have to inhabit the cities in which state will to repair the age old spiritual and moral foundations of our precious community and our life as Americans and to bring back to the center of things tradition and authority along with power. Now to do that they need help and so God says if this is the inheritance of your children let me introduce you to the one who's going to give it to them the father of your children, verse 4. Fear not for you will not be ashamed be not confounded for you will not be disgraced for you will forget the shame of your youth and the reproach of your widahhood you will remember no more. For your maker is your husband the Lord of host is his name the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer the God of the whole earth he is called for the Lord has called you like a wife deserted and grieved in spirit like a wife of youth when she is cut off says your God for a brief moment I deserted you but with great compassion I will gather you in overflowing anger for a moment I hidden my face from you but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you says the Lord your Redeemer God reminds the Old Testament church and therefore he's reminding the church the bride of Christ the New Testament church of three things one he is her husband therefore she is his wife and by implication her children are his children he tells her here to forget the shame of her youth when she as a young nation when after idols and committed spiritual adultery with other gods like a bride who was unfaithful God separated from his wife for 70 years known as the Babylonian captivity but he did not divorce her he said in overflowing anger for a moment I hid my face from you but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you says the Lord your Redeemer he brought the church back from her idolatry brought her back into a relationship with him and accepted her back into partnership that he had made with her as a people for the benefit of their mutual children I hope not to give offense to anybody but I have to be candid with you we are guilty of idolatry today we have made materialistic pursuits our positions of status and wealth and community esteem the goals of our life perhaps have to say that of all the idols we have the one we serve the most are our children they have become the center of our lives rather than Jesus Christ and covenant day school is determined to teach parents otherwise Christ is the center of life for the first time in our life we're talking about helicopter moms I've used that phrase a couple months ago and someone said no pastor you're always behind the times they're not helicopter moms they're stealth bombers now these well-meaning mothers who are so worried about their children for good reasons who are preoccupied and over engaged and even aggressive about the welfare of their children maybe because they are married in great measure to compliant dads dads who think that their greatest responsibility to wife and children is to make a lot of money they can buy them an education and buy them faith in Christ and buy them the blessings of God preparing for this sermon I ran across the study I want the men to listen in particular here the study conducted from 1994 to 2000 in the country of Switzerland a rather obscure but large and important study conducted by the Swiss government from 1994 and published in 2000 revealed some astonishing facts with regard to the generational transmission of faith and religious values in short the study reveals quote it is the religion and the practice of the father of the family that above all determines the future attendance at or absence from their children at the church he worships in here's what they said if the father and mother are both regular attenders at church then 33% of their children will be regular attenders all of their lives 41% will end up attending in an irregular manner and only one quarter 25% of their children will not end up practicing religion at all this has nothing to do with the relationship Christ this is simply going to church if the father is irregular in his attendance but the mother is regular then only 3% of the children will subsequently become regular themselves while a further 59% will become irregular and 38% will be lost completely if the father is non-practicing not practical he doesn't go to church at all but the mother is regular only 2% of the children will become regular worshipers 37% will attend irregularly and over 60% will be lost completely to the church of their parents why do we have so many children growing up in youth group and walking away from Jesus Christ in college dad you are the answer to that question one way or the other covenant day school is committed to helping parents not just mothers but fathers and mothers come alongside and model at church and at school and in the community a holistic faith that becomes a natural way of living for their children that come after them we have to face three realities here their hard realities but they're true number one our children are not really ours they never have been and they never will be they are gods and you simply loaned them to us so that we could make sure that he was the pattern and the primary focus of their lives number two that as much as we love our children God loves our children infinitely more than we ever could in overflowing anger for a moment I hid my face for you but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you says the Lord your Redeemer and thirdly we do not need to fear what God might do to our children if they gave themselves totally to him he probably would not be as concerned about the American dream as we are but he would bless them beyond any imaginable way that we have planned for them I've talked to Marnie Halverson on a number of occasions when she has talked to parents in our school and parents in our church people from the community who've looked into covenant day school she makes it explicitly clear on the front end that what we are here at covenant day school to do is to make sure that that child comes to know Jesus Christ is academically prepared to serve Christ in whatever way God may call him and to teach and

encourage the child to follow God's calling and that calling from God may not be the parents wonderful plan for their child's life but it's the best plan available because it comes from their only and everlasting father God himself and he gives them this through an agreement a contract a covenant he's made with them that's the third thing that God talks about here the covenant with your children beginning in verse 9 this is like the days of Noah to me as I swore that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth so I have sworn that I will not be angry with you and I will not review you for the mountains made apart and the hills be removed but my steadfast love shall not depart from you and my covenant a peace shall not be removed says the Lord who has compassion on you God reminds them of Noah that story when all of the earth was so antagonistic to God that he said my spirit will not dwell with man forever and he said he was going to send a great flood on the earth but Noah found grace with God and God said to Noah go into the ark you and all your family with you for I've seen that you're righteous before me in this generation no was 600 years old when the flood of the waters came upon the earth and Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons wives with him went into the ark to escape the waters of the flood and God closed the ark after them and delivered them you know the story that after that flood was over God put a rainbow in the sky and he made a covenant with Noah and his family and said this is an everlasting covenant between me and your children after you to a thousand generations I will no longer judge the earth in my anger but will be gracious to you and your children to a thousand generations because of this covenant I have made with Noah God has a covenant with us and with our children to be gracious to us to a thousand generations but will Noah was required as was Abraham after him and Moses after him David and all of the great prophets and the people of the New Testament church to dedicate their children to God in some formal way whether it's through infant baptism as it is in our church or through some dedicated service in their other congregations of Christ family there is a time in which we somehow put the invisible mark upon our children that they belong to Jesus Christ and more importantly Jesus Christ belongs to them. Tonight we're going to ask you a little bit to bring your children forward and as we're praying for your children for algebra for making the ball team for finding new friends in a new school and the things are important to a child's life we're going to be asking you mom and dad if you are willing to give your children back to God to relinquish your ownership of them and to give them back to the God who has made a covenant with them to a thousand generations because lastly it is the welfare of your children that is at stake the welfare of your children in verse 11 oh afflicted one storm tossed and not comforted behold I will set your stones in an enemy and lay your foundations with sapphires I will make your pinnacles of agate your gates of carbuncles to all your walls of precious stones now here's the central promise of this passage all your children shall be taught by the Lord and great shall be the peace of your children in the righteousness you shall be established you should be far from oppression you shall not fear and from terror for shall not come near you if anyone stirs up strife it is not for me whoever stirs up strife with you shall fail because of you who shall fall because of you behold I have created the Smith who blows the fire of coals and produces a weapon for its purpose I've also created the ravager to destroy no weapon that is fashioned against you shall succeed you shall confute every tongue that rises against you in judgment this is the heritage of the servants of the Lord and their vindication from me declares the Lord here's the central purpose of this passage that your children be taught of the Lord and the well being of your sons and daughters shall be great for he says this is the heritage of the servants of the Lord a Christian worldview academic excellence financial affordability an unsurpassed commitment to grace Christ centered biblical education those are our values at covenant day school I think they're the values quite frankly every parent in this room tonight you'll see them on the new logo on the screen you'll see at the very center the shield of our redeemer there and the cross indicating that we are a Christ centered school in church and a Christ centered program of education on either side or two lions both the symbol of the lion of Judah Jesus Christ and of nobility Christ like character and Christ like conduct the products of our education we see from one side to the other the word covenant the covenant that God has made with you and your children to a thousand generations and underneath it three key goals academic excellence as a preparatory education biblical worldview for a Christ centered life unsurpassed that's not a boast that we're doing better than anybody else but we will be unsurpassed in our efforts by God's grace to deliver academic excellence and a Christian worldview so that your children receive welfare from God and are a blessing to the whole world Christ covenant church exists to assist the Christian family by providing an education marked by biblical worldview academic excellence and affordability so that students are equipped to be salt and light for God's glory that's what we would ask you to pray for our church and school and that is what we're going to be praying for you included in this whole package or the four balanced sides of a child's development the spiritual drawing a child into God in Christ the academic developing the mind to be used by Christ in the world to be a relational teaching children how to love and to live and to care for other people and the civic responsibility preparing your child for something that is larger than life greater than self and lasting forever service to the kingdom of God and to their own people and those are the things that were concerned about were committed to whether you've chosen Christian school or private academy or public school or home schooling to classical Christian school or to a charter school, we are not here to judge your choice. We're here to assist you in all four parameters of education, spiritual, academic, relational, and civic, and to help you find the best spiritual product you can for the commitment that you're able to make for your schooling. This is not a tactical sales pitch. I'm not here to make anybody feel superior and feared to anybody else, I'm genuinely asking you to trust this church and its officers to bless you and your children and to pray for you and your children, whatever age and whatever stage of development they're in, so that your children come to know the Lord. They are taught of the Lord and the well-being of your children will be great. I thought about this blessing of the children, this past March, when I was in Germany. My son, my eldest son, is at the University of Seville in Spain. In fact, right now, he's writing up his thesis to be submitted Monday for defense against the faculty of the University of Seville. He wants to get a master's in international studies and relations. So I had some time to spend with him in Germany. And after he left and went on his way back to Seville, I was missing him. And so I stopped by a large church in the middle of Berlin called the Berliner-Dome, the large cathedral of the Lutheran church. And I went there for the evening prayer. And as I went in, I noticed that there were little candles like this that were in the front. And there were signs that looked like German and French and English and other languages, instructing us that these candles were there for people to light and to pray for their children. And beside these candles was a little card in German on one side and in several languages on the other that quoted a scripture verse from Genesis 12 to, I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing to all. So I bought 10 of these candles. They were a euro piece. Four for my children, five for my grandchildren and I brought one home for you and your children. And I prayed for you and for your family that your name would be great and that your children would be a blessing to all the earth. And I said to the Lord that night and that church in Germany, why couldn't we have a time? When we ask you to bless our children and so here we are tonight.

That's exactly what we want to do. Let me pray for us, Father. We love our children but not as much as you do. It is our great concern, the preoccupation of our young lives, to prepare them for service in this world and to educate them. It is even a greater concern of yours that they be taught of the Lord Jesus Christ, that their blessing in the covenant should be complete and full and everlasting, that they be filled with the Holy Spirit, to be salt and light in the world, and that you give them the great inheritance and blessing of serving you and reclaiming the foundations of our societies through their gospel life and witness. Now we pray as we sing and prepare to bless the children that you would be with us this evening as we lay hands on our little ones and dedicate them to you and to your purposes for their life. We ask your favor upon each one of them since they belong to you and have been purchased by the blood of Jesus Christ. Place that blood upon them, save them, sanctify them and prepare them for service we pray in Jesus' name, Amen.