Value 1: Apprenticing the Next Generation II

The Nature of the Curse

I’m going to be giving a few specific examples of which there are literally hundreds to choose from. As you read these you might discover that you might fall into one of these groups. I’m not calling these out to heap condemnation or guilt upon you for the choices you’ve made or have had forced upon you. Remember there is no condemnation for those of us who are Christ Jesus. It’s the enemy who would want you to wallow in guilt. He would want you to be paralyzed thinking there is nothing that can be done. The Lord however would call you to think about how you can begin to partner with Him in setting things to right. Believe it or not, God even wants to set to right the areas of our life in which our own personal sin has reaped destruction. God doesn’t want the brokenness to remain; he wants healing, forgiveness, reconciliation, and growth. With that spirit let’s read the two examples I’ve provided.

Think of the epidemic of divorce our culture has experienced over the last generation. So many adults have abdicated their responsibility to protect and nurture their children because they have emotionally detached from the spouse of their youth (I’m not talking about areas of physical abuse, or addiction here). Let’s face it, relationships are hard, and a healthy loving marriage is hard work. To make a marriage work requires great sacrifice by both spouses time and time again. Sometimes people make unwise decisions and marry a jerk. O.K., but does that give us the right to inflict the emotional damage on our children that divorce brings? Adults get over a divorce, the children never do. They always have to live with it, and if the children are young (by that I mean not out of the home and responsible for themselves) a divorce will breed deep seeded issues of abandonment, insecurity, loss of innocence, confusion, anger with God, I could go on and on. Here’s a hard question, “Do you love your kids more than you love yourself?” Do you love them enough to make your marriage work during the hard times, during the times when you don’t feel “in love”? When we don’t, we bring forth a generation of latch-key kids shuffled from home to home confused and disconnected. I promise you, that brings a curse on the land.

Statistically speaking, 33% of all marriages end in divorce. I know many of you who are reading this have gone through divorce. Here are a few things you can do if you’re divorce involved children to help them not feel so disconnected and lost thus lessening the effects of the curse.

First own up to the problem. When my parents got divorced I was very young. One of them had an affair and did not want me to know this. The other parent was very bitter because of the infidelity and did not have much contact with me because it meant they had to have contact with their former spouse. I grew up thinking this parent did not care about me; that wasn’t the case. They simply didn’t know how to process through the anger appropriately. Both of them were embarrassed by what happened and did not know how to talk about it. Now granted, when I was six was not the time for this discussion, but in little ways when I was feeling abandoned or confused about my place in this world, helping me understand in age appropriate manners that it wasn’t about me, it was about them and that there were very understandable if not always justifiable reasons as to why circumstances were what they were. By the time I was a teenager full disclosure needed to happen. It would have helped my emotional growth immensely and eliminated a lot of confusion.

Second maintain a friendship. Unless your spouse was physically abusive to you and you and your children are in physical danger by being near them, you don’t get to hold a grudge. Who loses when your kids are shipped to one house and the next living out of a suitcase? Who loses when you don’t want to be around your ex so you don’t go to a birthday party or to a school event? Who loses when you don’t maintain geographical proximity to one another? Who loses when you make your kids a messenger between the two of you? Who loses when you insinuate that your ex doesn’t really have the appropriate types of character qualities? The children lose. I can’t tell you how stressful it is for a kid to have to deal with those types of issues when they are a child. So forgive. Get over it. Let it go. For the sake of your children you need to become friends with your ex so you can talk and share with one another. Your children need this from you, and frankly it’s your responsibility as their parent.

Depending on Institutions to Raise Our Children brings a curse on the land. Nobody can instill your values, develop character, or impart a genuine love and sense of service towards God like you can. Public/Private school and church programs are not to be substitutes for instilling your values or parenting your kids. These institutions can assist you in developing your kids. One hundred years of Sunday school can never accomplish what a parent that genuinely lives his or her faith, and takes the time to instill those lessons in the life of their children can. Your children will learn far more about God and His character as they see you in small group praying with your friends, they will grow more as you genuinely help them wrestle through their questions about God because you yourself have wrestled through the scriptures and can give them an answer born of experience. Your kids will learn far more about developing a heart for people and a being a servant as you take them with you to serve the poor or help at church.

The same is true for education. You cannot let the school system parent your kids; it was not designed for that. Yet many of us become consumed with our careers and think that the eight or more hours our kids spend at school is time that we can coast. If we are not involved with our schools, volunteering and being a presence there, then guess who parents your kids during that time? It’s not the teachers, it’s their peers. If you don’t take the bull by the horns on this one, the primary influence in the lives of your kids will become their peer group. Peers parenting their peers are the blind leading the blind. Children don’t have the wisdom to give truly good counsel all the time; they simply don’t have the life experience. Think how hard it is for you to navigate this world as an adult. Our children don’t have to try to navigate life without us. We have the ability to help our kids find their way through this tricky world if we take our role seriously. When we relinquish this role to institutions the results are gangs, rampant promiscuity, gross materialism and consumerism, no moral compass, the list could go on and on. Let’s suffice it to say the land experiences a curse.

And lest we think these problems are simply relegated to those with kids let’s think again. This is actually what we are experiencing in Hamilton County, today. According to PSK12.com , a website that helps parents decide what school district they want to live in based on comparative standardized test scores, Hamilton County is cumulatively the lowest ranked school system in the state. It scores at the bottom of the pack in elementary education and in middle school education, and we are ninth from the bottom out of 150+ high school systems in the state. According to a study done by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee as reported in the Chattanooga Times Free Press our county has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the country. We have several zip codes within Hamilton County with higher Infant mortality rates than are in third world countries. Also weekly we hear reported problems with gangs and gang violence disturbing the scenic city. Where do these problems come from? It’s a parental problem, it’s a political problem, it’s an educational problem, it’s a societal problem but you can boil it down to one common denominator. There are groups of adults, parents, politicians, and school council members who are all choosing to put their own wants and desires above what’s best for the emerging generation. This attitude is brining a curse on our land. This curse raises our individual property taxes, it results in the vandalism of our city, It creates a lack of safety on our city streets and in our public parks, it effects businesses hiring decisions.

Each of us knows kids who are in less than great home situations. We can take these kids under our wings and become mentors to them.

When my children were little we lived in a suburban neighborhood in Houston Texas. In the evenings Kellie and I would take a walk through the neighborhood with our children. A few doors down were some neighbors who sat in their driveway, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and listening to heavy metal. I remember thinking, “There is the scourge of the neighborhood.”

One day shortly after Christmas I was on my roof taking down my Christmas lights while my oldest son was riding his new bicycle up and down the street. I noticed the kid of my rough neighbors hiding behind a truck with one of his friends. When my son rode past them they jumped out and attacked him. A fist fight ensued. I yelled at them to stop but the fight didn’t break-up until I was able to get off my roof and get near them. Once the boys saw me coming they bolted across the street into their home.

I asked my son what had happened and he said they just ran out and started hitting him. That didn’t sound right, people just don’t jump out of nowhere and try to beat you up unprovoked. I wanted to get to the bottom of it so we walked over to my neighbor’s house and knocked on the door. The wife who was in her mid-thirties answered. She was dressed like the teenagers in my youth group at the time. She had a corona beer sleeveless t-shirt on and skin-tight jeans with holes in them. A fad at the time was to write on your jeans with a pen; she was fad current. I related to her what had happened between my son and her son and his friend. She went and got the two boys and asked them what had happened. They said, without a clue to the inappropriateness of this comment that they just wanted to see what it was like to beat someone up.

I was horrified. I explained to the kids that we never should do anything like that, and then walked away with my son. I was in shock. In my mind I was hurling all sorts of curses and judgments their way. Then God began to speak to me. He said, “How many times have you walked by those people’s house when they were outside?” I said almost every night. He said, “How many times have you tried to talk to them or build a friendship with them?” I said that hadn’t, not once. He asked me whose fault it was that my kids had been beaten up? Was it the people who were trapped by darkness or was it the one who knew the truth but failed to reach out.

You see I had a responsibility to that family and to that kid to reach out to them with the love of Jesus. I realized then, that those children and their families were my responsibility, and if I didn’t love people and befriend them, I was as much responsible for the curse through my inaction as they were through their action.

We all have a responsibility to the next generation.

So I repented. Repent is a biblical word that simply means to change course, to do a 180. After that experience I went home to my wife Kellie and I told her what happened. We sat down our kids and we told them that they were to consistently invite that little kid over to play. We began to build a friendship with him, to earn the right to be heard and to speak into his life. We began to invest in him. I wish I could give you the rest of the story, we moved about 6 months later so I don’t know his life turned out, but I know for 6 months there was a family that loved him and was teaching him right from wrong.

These are just a couple of examples out of literally hundreds, but the biblical truth is this, if we as adults don’t take an active interest in teaching and modeling for the generation underneath us how to live, and love, and invest ourselves in their lives we will reap a curse upon our land.

The Nature of the Blessing

Now enough with the negativity, because in this passage of scripture is also found a blessing and a promise.

If we turn the scripture around and state it in the positive we get something like this: If the parents will turn their hearts to their children and the children will turn their hearts to their parents I will bless the land. Now that is encouraging. If we will focus on helping our kids become all that they were created to be and if our children will honor our instruction, God will bless the land.

If we think of the overall context of the passage from Malachi we begin to realize that not only will the land be blessed but this action, unlike any other, prepares our hearts for the arrival of the Kingdom of God. There is a reason that this is the last thought that God wanted us left with at the conclusion of the Old Testament. There is something central about the generations loving each other and wanting the best for each other that brings the Kingdom to earth in a unique way. I think in some ways it’s the practical application of the golden rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and the Great Commandment of loving God with all that we are and loving our neighbor as we love ourselves because in a very real sense it is laying down our lives for others.

I think we learn this when we begin to allow God’s dreams for the next generation to be the motivating factor in our lives. When we realize God would like us to leave the a world a better place than we found it, a little more like the coming Kingdom he is bringing, it motivates our actions. When we also understand that leaving the world a better place than we found it means that the generation underneath us has to understand and take that mission to the next level, it focuses us on how and with whom we seek to accomplish that mission. I can’t leave the world a better place if the generation coming up after me does not desire to do the same. When you have multiple generations seeking to leave the world a better place than they found it, then the land is blessed indeed!

There are people who are reading this blog right now who have experienced the truth of this. I will spare the names to save the embarrassment, but I think of a particular Christian counselor in Houston Texas. I fist met him when he was in junior high, and he was an angry young man. His father was an alcoholic and he hated people, but there were several key adults who saw something special in this young man and began to love him to life with the love of Christ. It didn’t take long for his heart to be softened to the love of God. Today instead of hating people he loves people, and is investing his life in helping people find peace in Christ just like he has. What would have been a curse was turned into a blessing because the hearts of the fathers were turned towards the children.

I think of a young lady whose parents went through a rough divorce. She wanted to give up on God, but a group of adults in her church surrounded her and loved on her. It took her a little time to work through her anger but by the time she was in college the love she had experienced gripped her heart in a powerful way. She went on to start a camp that teaches junior high kids how to serve the elderly and indigent. She is leaving the world better than she found it! What could have resulted in a curse has been turned into a major blessing through some adult small group leaders who loved this girl in the name of Jesus and as a result the land is being blessed.

So how do we do this? How do we practically apprentice the generation underneath us?

Apprenticing the Next Generation

Value 1: Apprenticing the Next Generation

I had a really cool moment the other day. I was watching my 17 year old son and some of his best friends lead worship at a Christian high school. Their band HighPoint had been mentored by a young man who had come to our church when he was eighteen. He was a fantastic keyboard player and also had a wonderful mind for finance. He later came on my staff as our business manager but still took the time to teach my son and his friends how to lead a praise and worship team. He taught them how to manage practice sessions, how to run a sound board, how to make a song theirs instead of a reproduction of a studio track, and how to put together a worship set. That morning he and I sat smiling as we watched our kids lead several hundred students in worship. They were great, not only were they musically great but they were sensitive to the Spirit. They listened for God, and ushered those kids into a time where Spirit came and ministered in a very powerful way. These were things that they had learned as they were apprenticed by the generations that had come before them. We were all blessed by this.

As I sat there and watched this I had the satisfaction of knowing another generation had really gotten the heart of the Kingdom. That these young men would take what they had learned from me and the men and women I had mentored and pass it on to the generation underneath them. When I think about that I want to get up and do back flips, because that’s what it’s all about and you know the Bible seems to back me up on that.

In the book of Acts we read about the birth of the church on Pentecost Sunday. The church is the community of the “age to come”, the time when Jesus returns and sets all things to right, as it exists in the midst of this present age. The church plays by a different set of rules than the world does (or at least it should). The church is ruled by the values and characteristics of what the world will be like when everything is set to right. In the church love, mercy, compassion, forgiveness, selflessness, gentleness, and kindness are the daily DNA of life because that is what life will be like in the “age to come”.

On the day the Church was established, the Spirit of God came and empowered each person who had placed his or her faith in Jesus. All heaven literally broke lose at that time. Manifestations of the life of the “age to come” began to break into this present age through God’s empowering presence at work in the followers of Jesus. The gift of tongues went forth reversing the curse of the confounded languages at Babel. The followers of Jesus began to proclaim Jesus as the true Lord of all, their fear of retribution overcome by the courage the Spirit brings. To explain all this Peter says to the crowd that had gathered:

AC 2:14 Peter Addresses the Crowd

…"Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15 Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o'clock in the morning. 16 No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

AC 2:17 'In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.

AC 2:18 Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.

God’s Kingdom was forcefully breaking into the world. What Jesus had set into motion through his death and resurrection was continuing through His people who were empowered by His Spirit. This is what had been promised by the prophets of the Old Testament, a reversal of the way things were, an end to the status quo. This Spirit-empowered people were bearing witness to the world of the complete reversal that Jesus would bring in all of it’s fullness in the “age to come.” Peter, quoting the Prophet Joel, says that one of the major signs of the in breaking of the Kingdom is young and old engaging in Spirit-empowered ministry side by side.

Listen to the language; sons and daughters, young and old, men and women! When the Kingdom comes young and old, male and female will be serving God side by side! Therefore, one of the signs of the “age to come” breaking forward into the present is young people being empowered by their spiritual mothers and fathers to engage in Spirit-led ministry.

This is a reoccurring theme with the Old Testament Prophets. Listen to the last sentence of the Hebrew Scriptures found in the book of Malachi.

MAL 3:16 The Reward of the Faithful

Then those who revered the LORD spoke with one another. The LORD took note and listened, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who revered the LORD and thought on his name. 17 They shall be mine, says the LORD of hosts, my special possession on the day when I act, and I will spare them as parents spare their children who serve them. 18 Then once more you shall see the difference between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him.

MAL 4:1 The Great Day of the LORD

See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the LORD of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. 2 But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. 3 And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the LORD of hosts.

MAL 4:4 Remember the teaching of my servant Moses, the statutes and ordinances that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel.

MAL 4:5 Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the LORD comes. 6 He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse.

Just like the rest of the Old Testament prophets Malachi is looking forward to the Day of the Lord, the day when God will decisively act in setting the world to right. Malachi says part of what prepares our hearts for this event, part of what makes us ready to experience God’s Kingdom in all its fullness, is the hearts of the parents being turned towards their children and the hearts of the children being turned towards their parents. This is an incredible picture, a picture of seasoned adults not being focused on achieving for themselves but their desire is for their children to be all they can be. It’s the children not looking at the older generation with suspicion and rebellion but acknowledging the gift that is being given to them by their mentors. Out of that knowledge is born a love and respect for those who are sacrificially focusing on them.

God says this has to happen so that the land is not struck with a curse. Think about that for a second, when the older generation refuses to invest in the younger generation the land is cursed. I can think of many reasons why the land would be cursed when the older generation refuses to invest in the younger generation because of the things I’ve seen in my quarter century of experience in ministry.

If You Never Try, You’ll Never Know

“And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever draws near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” Hebrews 11:6

John Wimber, the founder of the Association of Vineyard Churches, once said, “Faith is spelled R.I.S.K.”

When I was in my twenties God gave me a vision for a different type of church; a church that was contemporary, one that fostered authentic community, and one that transformed its community into a better place. For seven years I told God why I couldn’t do that. I told him I didn’t know enough, I didn’t have the credentials I needed for that to be a possibility, and I couldn’t afford to take the financial risk with my young family. God was calling me, but I wasn’t following.

I was suffering from a serious lack of faith.

If you were to ask me at the time, I would have said it was a lack of faith in myself. In reality it was a much larger issue than that it was a lack of faith in God. I didn’t believe God was powerful enough to work around my inadequacies. So I told God no, and I experienced a miserable seven years of running from the call of God on my life.

However there came a time shortly after turning 31 that I surrendered to the call and I took the risk. God empowered me to plant a church of over 500 people that has planted six churches out of it in less than a decade that if you were to total them up are running between 1100-1200 people. Because our church reaches so many college students we literally turn over a fifth or sixth of our congregation every year as those students graduate, which means that we have sent out about as many leaders as the size of our church over the last decade. We’ve fed the poor, brought relief to areas of the U.S. that have experienced disaster, waded into the Human Trafficking issue, brought clean water to an area of Uganda, housed the homeless, sent the first medical missions team to the Tepajan Indians, helped establish missions in India and Mexico, and the list could go on. Literally, thousands upon thousands of people’s lives have been touched and changed by the Vineyard Chattanooga.

That all began because a small group of people decided to take a risk. God called, we took a risk, and thousand’s of lives have been changed. Now that’s a little simplistic because there was great sacrifice involved, but I can tell you every sacrifice I’ve had to make so far has been worth it. God has backed up his end and then some. So my question to you is what vision has God placed on your heart? Where is he asking you to step out and take a risk?

What if you fail you may ask, O.K. what if you do? Is it the end of the world? I’ve got a better question, “What if God uses you?” What if he takes that vision he’s placed on your heart and breathes life to it, and it takes off. What could happen because of it? How many lives could be changed? How many people could experience hope? You can sit there and do nothing, you can risk nothing, and never experience the power of really being used or you can step out, risk, and see what God does. You know what the difference between people who see God do incredible things and people who don’t is? The difference is risk. Faith can’t be rewarded where faith is not found. Take a risk.