That the Generation to Come Might Know

REFLECTION QUOTES

“Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grand-children are once more slaves.”

~D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)


“To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave.”

~Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), famed American social reformer

“It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.”

~David Hume (1711-1776), famed Scottish philosopher

“Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.”

~Edmund Burke (1729-1797), political theorist and philosopher

“What is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee.”

~Marcus Aurelius (121-180), Roman Emperor

“In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the [ancient] Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.”

~Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), English historian

“And people who do not know the Lord ask why in the world we waste our lives as missionaries. They forget that they too are expending their lives…and when the bubble has burst they will have nothing of eternal significance to show for the years they have wasted.”

~Nate Saint (1923-1956), American-born missionary
who was killed while trying to bring the gospel
to the Waodani people of Ecuador

SERMON PASSAGE


Psalm 78:1-8, 65-72 (NASB)

1Listen, O my people, to my instruction;
Incline your ears to the words of my mouth.
2 I will open my mouth in a parable;
I will utter dark sayings of old,
3 Which we have heard and known,
And our fathers have told us.
4 We will not conceal them from their children,
But tell to the generation to come the praises of the Lord,
And His strength and His wondrous works that He has done.

5 For He established a testimony in Jacob
And appointed a law in Israel,
Which He commanded our fathers
That they should teach them to their children,
6 That the generation to come might know, even the children yet to be born,
That they may arise and tell them to their children,
7 That they should put their confidence in God
And not forget the works of God,
But keep His commandments,
8 And not be like their fathers,
A stubborn and rebellious generation,
A generation that did not prepare its heart
And whose spirit was not faithful to God.

65 Then the Lord awoke as if from sleep,
Like a warrior overcome by wine.
66 He drove His adversaries backward;
He put on them an everlasting reproach.
67 He also rejected the tent of Joseph,
And did not choose the tribe of Ephraim,
68 But chose the tribe of Judah,
Mount Zion which He loved.
69 And He built His sanctuary like the heights,
Like the earth which He has founded forever.
70 He also chose David His servant
And took him from the sheepfolds;
71 From the care of the ewes with suckling lambs He brought him
To shepherd Jacob His people,
And Israel His inheritance.
72 So he shepherded them according to the integrity of his heart,
And guided them with his skillful hands.