The Family of God

This morning, we have a little pause in our series on Esther as we look and reflect on baptism. We're not a big church, so we don't have baptisms come up every week or second week. So we're taking a time to pause and reflect on what is happening in this, only the second sacrament that we have, one of two that our church has, the sacrament of baptism, a sacred rite that God has given the church to administer to His people. So we're going to reflect on that before we eventually get two girls up here. And this morning, we're going to not simply look at the significance or the theological impact or meaning of baptism.

We'll talk a little bit about that, but an aspect that I love about baptism and why it needs to happen in a church community rather than in a bathtub somewhere or a pool somewhere privately: baptism happens in the family of God because it involves commitment of the family. And we sort of understand a little bit about that, this life of discipleship that we are instructed to give to these two girls as they get baptised this morning. We're gonna hear of God's heart for that by turning to Deuteronomy chapter six this morning, and I'm gonna ask two of our young people, Alejandra and Loxton, to come and read for us those words. So first, Loxton is gonna read from verse one to verse six, I believe, and then Alejandro from verse seven to fifteen.

These are the commands, decrees and laws the Lord your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess, so that you, your children, and their children after them may fear the Lord your God as long as you live by keeping all His decrees and commands that I give you, and so that you may enjoy long life. Hear, O Israel, and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the Lord, the God of your fathers promised you. 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 and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the door frames of your houses and on your gates. When the Lord your God brings you into the land He swore to your fathers, to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, to give you, a land with large flourishing cities you did not build, houses with all kinds of good things you did not provide, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant.

And when you eat and are satisfied, be careful that you do not forget the Lord who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. Fear the Lord your God, serve Him only and take your oaths in His name. Do not follow other gods, the gods of the people around you, for the Lord your God who is among you is a jealous God, and His anger will burn against you, and He will destroy you from the face of the land. When we come to the book of Deuteronomy, this part especially, we find the people of God, Israel, at the border to the promised land. For forty years, they've been wandering in the desert.

They're about to cross the Jordan into this new land, the land of peace, a land of freedom, having escaped the land of Egypt, the house of slavery. And we find them at the threshold of this new promise that they are about to enter into, and God tells Moses to give the Israelites one final sermon before they enter the land. Moses tells Israel that God wants them to remember everything that they had been taught over those forty years in the wilderness. God wants His people to remember His character, to remember that He is their God and He wants them to be His people. They are commanded to remember the promise that God had made to their forefather Abraham, that He wanted to be their God, that He wanted Abraham's people to be His people.

This morning, we read as the rules for our living, chapter five, the ten commandments given to us, where Moses again re-explains the ten commandments. You'll remember that Exodus 20 has another set of the ten commandments. That is the earlier original time where God spoke to Israel and gave them the ten commandments. Now, here in chapter six that we've just read, Moses says that these laws have been given to Israel so that Israel may have a great legacy. Verse two, have a look.

That you may fear the Lord, you and your son and your son's son, by keeping all His statutes and His commandments so that your days may be long. So that your days may be long, that they may be prosperous. Verse five in the passage we read gives the summary statement for why you would choose to keep these laws. And that is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. That's the essence of the law.

If you love God with everything you have, your actions, you will love God and you will prosper. You will live long. But how will God make sure that His people who had learned so much about Him in those forty years, how will they continue in their walk with Him in the next generation, in a new context, in a place where they have great cities with cisterns that they didn't have to dig and so forth? And the answer is given to us in the following verses that we will explore this morning. Essentially, God tells Israel that His people will continue walking in His ways by sharing that faith, sharing that knowledge between themselves over and over and over again.

But notice the context. Notice how that sharing happens. It is a husband sharing it with his wife, a wife sharing it with her husband, mum and dad sharing that with their kids.

In other words, the discipleship of God happens within the family. Christian parents are increasingly nervous about raising children in a world that is quickly becoming very complicated, very deluded, and I dare say aggressively anti-Christian. And so, as I was thinking about today's baptism, as Marie and Annalise, Desiree and I receive new life into a family, I thought the words of Deuteronomy six will be very comforting and instructive for us as a family, and I think us as a church family as well. Because essentially, it says that the home is still the number one influence in the life of our family. Your home is still the number one influence on your child.

Logically, that makes sense because think of the percentages of time that you have available compared to the other forms of influence on your child. The church, you know, we hope to think that it has a lot of influence. The church has one to two per cent of your child's time. Schools have something like twenty-five to thirty per cent of your child's time. But the other seventy per cent belongs to the family.

Study after study shows that what happens in the family determines the outcome of that child's future. And our passage today tells us that the knowledge of God, the knowledge of the life of godliness starts in exactly that spot, your family. It starts at home. So let's have a look specifically at those verses, six through to verse nine, and we'll pick up a few of the points being made there. Firstly, we see that the knowledge of God is not something that rests in the mind.

It is something that has to permeate the heart. It has to come down into the heart. Moses tells Israel in this great sermon before they enter the new land. He says, the words that I command you today shall be on your hearts. We know, don't we, that there is a major shift that happens when knowing something, knowing something becomes so internalised, becomes so intuitive that it feels like it's just a part of us.

That is what is being spoken of here. The words that Moses is referring to here is the law of God, the knowledge of God and His character. And taking these words to heart means that knowing God impacts the way, not only of how we think, but of how we feel and behave. We know, don't we, the greatest conversation killer when it comes to faith revolves around the opposite of taking the knowledge of God to heart. Hypocrisy is the great evangelism killer, isn't it?

Why? Well, if a mum or a dad says to their son, love the Lord with all your heart, soul and strength, but then lives a life very far from that statement, those words carry no weight with that child. A friend who tells another friend, do what I say, not as I do, that friend is ignored. But here is saying the flip side of that statement: someone who truly loves the Lord, who gets the very humble, very basic things about their faith right, there is a good chance that they have taken God's word to heart. We need to hear that message again and again and again in our Christian walk.

Christianity is a faith about doing the small things right. So it doesn't help if you can quote the Bible perfectly and have great knowledge. We must set our hearts on being changed by that knowledge. And so that's the first thing we see. God tells us that knowing Him and His will is a matter of the heart.

We are to know God's word in such an internalised way that we experience that knowledge as being part of us. Secondly, these words of instruction are to be taught diligently. Notice the location of where this teaching takes place. Nowhere here is the temple mentioned. Nowhere here is the Levitical priesthood mentioned, even though for forty years, God has been unfolding this new priesthood, this way to worship Him.

But it is not mentioned here at all in the core central aspects of knowing and loving God. Instead, diligent teaching happens in the context of the family. You shall teach God's word diligently to your children. If you think about it for a little bit, you realise how counter-cultural that thinking is right now. Right now, in modern Australia, we tend to palm off responsibilities.

We tell the schools that they are to raise our kids. We go to the state to protect our kids. We ask the media to entertain them. And so naturally, we think that the church is the one who must disciple my children. Along with all the other institutions, we think that it is the work of the pastor or the Sunday school teachers or the catechism teachers that will sort out my family's knowledge of God.

But here, the responsibility is placed squarely on mums and dads, grandparents, aunties, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters. Now, of course, there's huge importance that churches should make sure that they have excellent teachers and preachers to give as much opportunity to the mums and the dads and the uncles and aunties to receive good teaching that they can share with their kids. But God is saying to His people, the knowledge about My words that are internalised to the heart, that happens in the family. That transformation comes through the family. It starts organically and it comes from the ground up.

And this teaching is a consistent, continuous, unbroken pursuit. It is done diligently. It means teaching our family about God. That teaching doesn't come in fits and starts. It's not something that we have a New Year's resolution about and go, I wanna be more spiritual this year.

And if I remember, I'll tell my kids about God and Jesus. To be diligent about something means that we discipline ourselves in that pursuit. How does that look like for us? Well, we need to grow in our own personal knowledge of God, and we do that by reading good books and listening to good sermons and podcasts. We get that through attending church services, worship services regularly.

And then, while we learn, we teach, which leads to our third point. So secondly, God's word needs to be taught diligently in a disciplined, intentional way. But then thirdly, the words of instruction are to permeate all of life. Verse seven famously says that the words of God being shared and talked about are to be done when you rise up in the morning, when you go to bed at night, when you sit in your house, when you walk along the road. They are to be done in such a way that that thought of God is with you in the morning when you wake up, and He is the last thought when you go to bed.

Now, we may think that it is a stretch to talk about God or theology at all times like this. I mean, that would just be worrisome. That would be a burden. But again, we don't realise that we already talk this deeply all the time to our kids, to our family members. You and I communicate our world view, our philosophy, our theology all the time.

You share with your family how you view the world, how you view the purpose of life, when you debate politics, when you talk to someone about how they should be treated at school. Your world view comes out when you describe what is wrong with the world. Your world view, your theology comes out when you think about how we are saved from what is wrong in the world. Is it the government that will bail us out? Is it education and knowledge that will save us?

Is it administrative power that is our saviour? Or is it individual hard work and grit and determination and discipline that will pull us up out of the muck and the mire we find ourselves in? You see, in all these ways, communicated to our family members all the time, you are actually talking theology. You're talking about a transcendent truth that must exist and that should save us. So we give words of instruction like this all the time.

God is simply saying, be mindful of what that instruction holds. If you were to really dig down into the layers, even the most mundane conversations are reflections of theological views. The question is, which theology do you promote? And then the next question is, will you seize those opportunities even in the most mundane routines of life? In a school run, in a Maccas pit stop, when you sit around the kitchen table and talk about your day, will you seize the opportunity to talk about the ways of the Lord?

Can you see how essential it is that if you want to talk about God this naturally, the knowledge of God has to be a part of your heart. The words about God are to permeate all the activities of our life, and there are opportunities everywhere if we are willing to take them. Fourth point is that the words of God are to influence our thoughts and our actions. Very quickly, verse eight, we see Moses saying, you shall bind these words as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes, or you shall bind them on your foreheads. Now, even today, if you watch traditional Orthodox Jews, when they go and pray, they will bind these little boxes on their hands and on their foreheads as they pray.

These little boxes contain words of scripture, and they have taken very literally these words in Deuteronomy six. Now, that is probably not what God is asking for here. What is being symbolised is that God's word informs our actions and our thoughts. In other words, as you live your life out in the family of God, you need to weigh up how you behave according to scripture. When situations arise, we ask what would God have me do here?

That is where the word of God needs to be tied to our actions, to our thoughts. And then finally, just like the words are to be on our hands and our heads, they are also to be written on the doorpost and on the front gates of the house. That's where Moses says in verse nine, that the words of God are to be written on these places of entrance into the family. Now, once again, there are Jews and people that have little scriptures and so on carved into doorposts and whatnot. So there's this sort of idea of a blessing as they enter those houses, but it purely is this idea of metaphor implying that God's instruction is a constant testimony to those who will interact with this family.

As they come into the family space, they will know that this family is guided by the will of God. This is perhaps where the family unit turns its focus a little bit away from what's happening within the family unit and starts looking out. It affects those on the outside of the family who will come through those gates, who will come through those doors. It represents the truth that the family is also an influencer in itself. The culture of our family speaks to those who enter into it.

Your conversations, your actions are seasoned by the influence of God's word. So can you see in these instructions, again, for the nation of God that are about to enter the new land, that are gonna live among people that believe different things, can you see the wisdom of God here? God holds out this powerful truth that there is a legacy for the family. There's a power in the family. What happens matters in that family.

The results of how a family works will bear fruit in one way or another in the future. Coming now to baptism. How does that all relate? Well, we find God, at this point in time, retelling Israel all the things that they have gotten to know about Him in those forty years. They are about to enter that promised land.

They are reconfirming with God the covenant that was made with Him forty years earlier. Here, God gives them the promise again. He says to them, love Me because I have loved you. I have saved you and I'm holding out this land of rest for you to enter into as a sign of My love to you. In today's baptism, we witness God making that exact promise to these two little girls.

Love Me because I have loved you. I've saved you through Jesus Christ. I will walk with you through the wilderness. I will give you a land of rest and peace at My side for ever. Love Me and your days will be long.

Your life eternal. You see, baptism is the first word of grace spoken over us by God. The first word of grace spoken over us by God. Whilst our church gladly baptises adults as new believers coming into the covenant with God, we baptised Maddie and Kirsty last year and it was a wonderful event. As adults, they entered into this covenant family, but we gladly baptise the infants of believing parents.

Why? Because baptism is not a sign of our response to God. It is a sign from God to us. And what is that sign? That we are part of His family.

We are part of His family. Remember the words of Jesus when He instituted that the church will baptise people. It comes from Matthew 28:19 where He said, you shall baptise them, the nations, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Now, we are about to baptise little Sian and Elida into that name. And what does it mean to be baptised into that name?

It means that they take the family name of God on them. One of the earliest memories I have of church was seeing a baby being baptised and asking my mum what was happening in that moment. Well, it was one of those teach them by the sides of the road moments, because I don't know how much thought mum had or how much time mum had to explain the theology behind what was happening. But she explained very concisely that a mark was being placed on that baby's head that set them apart for God. A special invisible mark that said to Satan and the world, this child belongs to God.

And then I was surprised to hear my mum say that this was a mark I had on my forehead as well because I had been baptised too. I remember spending the whole day touching my forehead to see if I could feel that mark. That is why we say that baptism is a sign of the covenant. It places a mark on someone's life that their life is tied inseparably to God, and it is tied to God's promise. What is that promise?

It is the promise of God's unconditional love. That is why baptism is not a response. We can't come to God to claim anything in our baptism. Baptism is a promise from God of His unconditional love. It is a promise that is full of eternal knowledge of Him that is available to all who will simply receive Him as their father.

Where our sinfulness, where the sinfulness of little Sian and Alida will inevitably enter into their lives, where sinfulness seeks to emancipate us from the family of God, to break free from the shackles of the family, like the prodigal son that Jesus talked about in His parable, like the son trying to rid himself of his dad, wanting all the gifts of his father without the father. So the mark of baptism speaks anew at moments like these, when we are reminded that God is saying to all of us who have that sign, you are Mine. You are Mine.

I am your father. And so even now, whether we know Him or not, or whether Sian or Alida can even comprehend who He is or not, the message still is, you are Mine. And so the baptism of these two girls is so powerful because it says that before we can even cognitively understand the story of Christ, and I mean, even as adults, who of us can say we understand the story of Christ? But before they can even affirm a creed, before they can sit up or speak or use the bathroom, before they can contribute in any meaningful way to the church, grace is spoken over them and they are counted as God's family before they have anything to show for themselves.

Baptism is a promise of God's unconditional love. And so, as we come into this time of baptism, we see a proclamation being made saying that before you knew it, before you are able to believe it or even doubt it, before all of that, you are loved by God and you have done nothing to earn that love. It is not yours to decipher, yours to validate, yours to explain. You are loved by God because He is gracious first. And because God is gracious and because these girls have been born graciously into a family that know God, we are reminded by the words of Deuteronomy six, to live as a family reminding one another of what it means to know the Lord, to be His people.

Because God is gracious, because He has placed His name on our heads, we can also have the confidence this morning that we don't need to be on the side of doubt, that these girls will be given the faith by God alone to believe in Him. They may, in fact, walk many miles from Him, yet we can have the significant confidence that He has promised to be their father, to be their shepherd and therefore He is the one who leads them home. On that one particular day, as Israel stand on the banks of the Jordan about to enter the promised land, the land of rest, God said to them, fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your son's son, by keeping all His statutes and commandments all the days of your life so that your days may be long in the land I'm giving you. As we invite these girls up here, may they know alongside all of us what it is to fear the Lord as our God, what it means to keep His commandments and instructions, and to know the land of rest which has been won for us through Jesus Christ.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this significant moment in the life of these two girls, but also in the moment of remembering our own baptism. We pray, Lord, that this will be a moment of confidence, of humble gratitude for what you are promising us in your unconditional love. And we pray, Lord, that we will know this not only with our head, but deeply in our heart, that it will become a part of us and that we will be able to do nothing but talk about our loving Lord when we wake up in the morning and when we go to bed at night. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.