Give Heed To Yourself And Keep Your Soul Diligently

So this morning we're going to be returning to the fourth chapter of Deuteronomy. And in this passage, Moses connects two things. Israel's obedience to the law of God with the nearness of God. He says, as you obey God, God will be near to you. It's a very sweet thing that he does. As the Israelites are about to enter into the promised land, Moses gives them this exhortation that they ought to focus on God's law above everything else. That this is important and that they're going to be prone to forget it. And this is a timeless and a timely exhortation for us. All of us, if we were asked, would you like God to be near to you or closer to you, we would all say yes. The way to accomplish that is to focus on obedience to God's law. This is the path to that end of God being near to us, us being near to him. And so my hope this morning is that God will convict us of the ways in which we've set aside God's law and replaced it with our own personal laws or morality or with the world's laws.

We're Christians and we should, as the title of the sermon exhorts us, the sermon title is give heed to ourselves and to keep our souls diligently. My hope is that God will see us, convict us of the ways we've set aside things that he's said in favor of things that we are, our countrymen have said. Do please stand now as we read the word of the Lord from Deuteronomy chapter four, verses six to 10. So keep and do them for that is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes and say, Truly this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what great nation is there that has a God so near to it as is the Lord our God whenever we call on him? Or what great nation is there that has statutes and judgments as righteous as this whole law which I am setting before you today? Only give heed to yourself and keep your soul diligently so that you do not forget the things which your eyes have seen, and they do not depart from your heart all the days of your life. But make them known to your sons,

and your grandsons. Remember the day you stood before the Lord, or your God, at Horeb, when the Lord said to me, assemble the people to me, that I may let them hear my words, so that they may learn to fear me all the days they live on the earth, and that they may teach their children. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Now, there's lots of talk these days about idolatry as regards politics. It's common to say that if you are supportive of Donald Trump, that you have made him your idol, that he is your savior. There's a lot of talk about him from the left, so to speak, about him becoming our savior in the same way that the conservatives said, the same sort of things conservatives said about Obama. We as a nation collectively have a savior complex. We've rejected Jesus as savior, so we're looking for a new one perpetually, and we're looking for them in the state. Now,

Why did I bring that up? What does that have to do with this text? Well, it has to do with the connection of our view of God's law, us as Christians, and the magistrate, the civil government, the authority, the state. How do those things get together? How do those things sync up? And it's different now than it was in the Old Testament at the time when this was written. At the time when this was written, the civil government in Israel was governed by and led by God's law. It was one and the same. God's law was both physical. It told them these are things that are good. These are things that are bad. These are things that are allowable. These are things that are punishable by death or punishable by fine or restitution or cleansing or what have you. It was how their society was governed directly by God.

And they were the people of God. They were the people of God. And so the people of God were governed by the law of God. Well, now we don't have an ethnic, cultural people of God. We can't look and say that's where the people of God are. That's the nation state of God's people like they did here. What we have now is the people of God spread all throughout the world. Congregated together in churches. Which is to say that our binding together now and our governance in the church is separate now from our binding together and our governance in society. That's a big difference between how it worked at this time in Deuteronomy and how it works now. And Christians have had a hard time trying to sort out how to thread that needle. How do we make sense of this as Christians?

How are we as Christians or how are we as the church supposed to interact with the state? There's lots of different answers, lots of different movements or thoughts or opinions concerning this. Some of them might go by the name of, you've heard of theonomy. Now, theonomy is notoriously hard to define, okay? But generally speaking, I think most theonomists would agree with that's the idea that we would take God's law and use that. to a varying degree, as the basis of our civil law. And some would say we need to just transplant it, God's law, straight into our society. And others would say, no, we need to use it as the basis for our laws, that we're not bound by every word and letter, but by the principles that undergird it. Others might say, well, the way that we need to sort this out is we need to have a Christian prince, a Christian king, a Christian national. We need to become Christian nationalists. And depending on whether you

get your definition of Christian nationalism from the media or whether you get your definition of Christian nationalism from a little corner of the reformed world that talks about it very differently than the media does. The idea is that what Christians want is to be ruled by other Christians. I think it's fair to say we want someone whom we can trust, whether that be a monarch or that be a government, we want them to be subject to the word of God. Because we trust that if they are, if our rulers are subject to the word of God, then it will go better for everybody. Some people might approach this issue of church and state and they might come at it and say, you know what? They're completely separate. They have nothing to do with each other.

We shouldn't have any expectations that the world that we live in should bear any resemblance or pay any homage to or conform in any way to what God says. We're Christians and we're governed by that stuff, but the world's free to do as it wants and as it has. And I'm sure there are more places or ideas that Christians have come up with over the years as to how to negotiate this tension. In this passage, though, there's a phrase that comes up three times. And that phrase is, this great nation. This great nation. This great nation. Surely this great nation is wise and understanding. What great nation is there that has a God so near? What great nation is there that has statutes and judgments as righteous as this? This great nation. Apparently this nation has, as it was at that time, was the pinnacle of nations.

And it wasn't even really a nation yet. It didn't have a land. It didn't have a place. It didn't have its own cities. It hadn't set up. They'd been sojourners. But what God is saying is there's going to be this great nation that arises and is going to be sort of the apple of the world's eye as they look at it. If they're not just in rebellion against, outright rebellion against God's word and his truth, they're going to look and say, these people and this nation are something else. completely different than and better than, superior to everything that's come before or since. Is America a great nation? It's a hard question, right? You're like, I think this is a trick. I'm not going to say anything because I don't know what sense in which you mean, is it a great nation? The answer is yes, America is a great nation. Is America this great nation? No. America is not the people of God, okay?

Neither is any other people. Neither is any other nation. It's not like, oh, shucks, we missed out. We were in a tournament to be the great nation and we got second place. There's another great nation out there, a better nation. That's not what I mean to say. What I mean to say is, is America a great nation, a great place to live, a place of freedom and prosperity and happiness? Well, comparatively speaking, meaning compared to other places around, yes. But is it a great nation the way that is described here? What makes this nation great? Say it. The Lord, the nearness of the Lord, and specifically their adherence to and conformity to the law of God. That's what makes them great.

In verse 6, when he says, so keep and do them, we're sort of picking up midstream. He's talking about the law of God and the statutes and the ordinances and all these things that they're supposed to be governed by. So keep and do them for that law is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples. Meaning other people are going to see, if they were to approach it objectively, without an agenda, they would say, these people have something figured out. Their wisdom, you know, love exceeds everyone else's. They are people of understanding. I mean, consider Solomon when the two women come with the baby and they say, it's my baby, the living baby. What would you have done? I mean, we read it and we go, amazing. Look at the wisdom of Solomon. Look at it. Okay, well, we'll just cut the baby in half and you'll each get half, knowing that the love of a mother, of the true mother, would say, no, no, no, let the baby live.

It's not just obvious what's going on here. They were both, you know, the woman that was lying, she was misled by what was going on. He knew something that was deeper and truer and would motivate that decision. And which one of us would have thought of it? We would have said, well, there's got to be due process and there's got to be evidence and there's got to be testimony and there's got to be all of these things. And he simply says, hey, I got a solution right here, right now. Solve the whole thing. That's wise. Because he knew something about what God put in the heart of a mother. Okay?

Just as an example. So what makes this nation great is God's choosing of them. And in choosing them, he revealed himself to them. He said, you're not going to be ignorant. You're not going to be dumb. You're not going to be unaware. I'm going to show you myself. And I'm going to do it at Mount Sinai, or Mount Horeb as it's referred to in this passage. Same mountain. I'm going to reveal myself to you. I'm going to show myself to you. I'm going to commit myself to you, and you're going to commit yourself to me. And that's what's going to make you great. Now, interestingly, the Jews, even still today, will point to this passage and say, see, we're better and smarter than everyone else. Because they attribute the wisdom and the understanding, not to their adherence to God's law, but to their superiority as a people. And we have to be careful not to do this sort of thing. To think that because we're such and such, we're better than them.

The Israelites were not something special. They weren't great because they, as individuals or as a nation collectively, were wiser than those around them. They were great because the Lord made them great. And the way he made them great was by giving them his law. So who could be described today as a great nation? Who should be described as a great nation or great people? Is this just a relic of, you know? A bygone time. There's no more great nation. Let me ask the question another way. Has God revealed himself in his word through his law to anyone? Who? This is not a trick question. To the church. What did you say? To believers. To us. To us. Provided that we are governed by his law. To the extent that we're governed by his law, that's true of his church. To the extent that we've settled side his law.

We've just become conservatives or maybe liberals, depending on how long we've set aside the law. You hear me? Do you remember, what, a month, maybe two months ago, there was a ruling, was it in Alabama or Georgia, some deep south state about bringing the Ten Commandments back into the schools. And Christians were all over the map in their response. Some were like, that's great. And other people were like, that's terrible. Do you know what I wanted to know? How many of the people who had such a strong opinion about that decision could tell you what the Ten Commandments were in order? Because I really don't give a plug nickel for your opinion about whether they belong in schools or not if you don't know them. Do you understand what I'm saying? If you don't know the Ten Commandments in order, you have set aside God's law. And to have an opinion about whether it belongs in school or not is so far behind in importance, it just simply doesn't matter.

It's an interesting thing that we would have a stronger opinion about whether unbelievers should have exposure to God's law than we do about whether we as Christians at church would have exposure to God's law. What do I think about it? Yeah, fine. Whatever. That's what I think about. Honestly, the same thing about the drag queen. There are things that are so much more important for us than those things. And I'm not arguing that we shouldn't care or should disengage or should have no opinion about it, but it's so less important to our lives. What made this nation great was God's law. So I ask you a question. Does the church today respect and reverence and teach God's law? Eric's preaching through it right now, but I wonder how many of us...

if we were called on, could recite the Ten Commandments in order. And I suspect that we would have a better success rate among who? The children than the adults. And then if we said, okay, not just the simple little rundown one that ends up like, you know, on the bullet point card, but like Exodus. You know, instead of like, you shall have no other gods before me, it's I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, like the whole thing. You get to the second commandment, you get to the fourth commandment, and it's like, wow, these are like multiple sentences long. We should know them. We should know them. And that's just the starting off point for the things we as Christians should know pertaining to God's word and his law. If you want to know why the church is in such disrepair, why there's all kinds of conflict and trouble and disagreement and terrible music, it's because God's law has been sitting on a shelf.

It's like in the place where Josiah found it. It's in a scroll rolled up in the corner with a bunch of dust on it. Nobody knows it. Were you excited when I said I was going to preach through Deuteronomy? Did any of you look and be like, how long is the book of Deuteronomy? That's the longest book he's ever preached through. When he preached through Luke, it took five years. And Deuteronomy has like a dozen more chapters than the book of Luke. Are we just going to do this for the next decade and a half? Was anyone excited? Yes. Was anyone like, oh, I thought I turned those fans down slow enough, but apparently not. Did anyone go, well, I won't be able to invite any of my friends to church for the next decade? Because who wants to hear about this? If you're going, yeah, I had some of that. Aren't you saying that going in shame on me? I'm saying shame on me. Do you know how much I want to preach a sermon series on something other than Deuteronomy right now? Like we're in the middle of chapter four. We've got a mere how many more chapters, guys?

32 more chapters. Why did I choose to preach on Deuteronomy? Is it just because I like to do things that make us all miserable at church for a decade or more? I don't think it'll take us a decade. But did I do it because I just thought, well, here's just an opportunity for us to become superior to everybody else and do the hard thing, the hard of the hard. No, I did it because I'm convinced that if we're going to grow, As a church, as individuals, and if we're to recover and produce anything good in our society, it's going to be brought through the recovery of God's law. That's why I chose to preach through Deuteronomy. I need it. You need it. Moses asks two questions referring to this great nation. For what great nation is there that has a God so near to it as is the Lord our God whenever we call upon him? That's the first question.

That's an incredible question. And the reason it's incredible is he's saying all the other nations have their gods and all the other nations call on their gods, but their gods never answer them. Their gods never provide or care for them. Do you remember when Elijah was out with the prophets of Baal and they're having this competition to see whose God is God? What does Elijah do? He says, you first. You can have, the floor is yours. And they're all up there, and they're dancing around, and they're calling down their God, and they're doing all this crazy stuff. They get to the point where they're shedding their own blood, calling down their God. And what's Elijah do? Sit there peacefully like a good Christian and just wait? No, he actually mocks them. Maybe your God's on the toilet, is what he says. Maybe he's leaned up against a tree, relieving himself. Then when Elijah prayed, what did he have them do before he prayed?

We haven't had rain in three and a half years. Go down to the lake. Go down to the sea and bring up a bunch of water. Just soak. Soak this thing so it won't catch on fire. Just stack all the cards against my God. Just make it as impossible as you can imagine making it with the resources that you have. Just let's do that. And then he prays. And what happens? God answers him. For what great nation is there that has a God so near? To it is the Lord our God whenever we call upon him. That's sweet. That's something that nobody else has. That's a particular kindness of God that we ought to delight in and be sobered by. Because he's not inept or impotent like the gods of the nations who are unable to bless or to curse. He's a God who's a living, who's alive, and who is able to both bless and curse. Or what great nation.

This is the second question. What great nation is there that has statutes and judgments as righteous as this whole law which I am setting before you today? If you look back up at verse 6, when he tells us to keep and to do the law of God, he says this is your wisdom, that you keep and do these things, and that when you do these things, it's going to be a sight that the peoples of the world, the nations of the world, are going to hear about these things and say, surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. What I want to say to you about the church and her adherence to the law as individual Christians in a part of that body and as the body collectively is that our only hope of overcoming the world is through our faith in Jesus Christ and our obedience to his law, which means you're going to look different and live different and have different priorities and different things to say and takes on things that are completely foreign to the world.

Meaning when something like the opening ceremonies happens, you're going to have a Christian perspective, not a political perspective. And that's going to be weird. It's going to be strange. Like who else is going to be saying that stuff? Or maybe to make it a little more practical or a little more just, you know, pedestrian or day-to-day. When you see a couple that's struggling with the obedience of their children, you're going to have a Christian perspective on that that's going to include the sinfulness of the child and the necessity of the training of the parents and corporal punishment, which may seem very normal to you as you live in sort of a little bubble, but those are very, very foreign concepts to the world that parents should instruct and discipline and teach their children that they should use corporal punishment, that the child is not inherently good in their desires.

and inclinations you have to realize that's not a normal thing the world doesn't look at kids and make those assumptions that you make and so if you raise your kids with the set of assumptions I've just outlined regarding your children and your responsibility to them and your expectation of their obedience you're going to stand out In simple little ways, like when you're at the park and you don't have to go to your kids and say, honey, we're going to leave in 10 minutes. Honey, we're going to leave in five minutes. Honey, we're going to leave in three minutes. Honey, we'll get some ice cream when we go home. Honey, please come now. It's time to go. And you know the progression. So what happens? The kid then comes happily, right? As many times as not, eventually mom is climbing up the contraption to get the kid both threatening to take away the thing, the ice cream or the whatever, or the fun, and threatening maybe less vocally.

some sort of consequence, and it all results in mom dragging a screaming child back to the car. Does it have to be that way? It really doesn't have to be that way. And it's not magic to keep it from being that way. It's really not. It's just that you would accept God's law and his wisdom concerning the matter of raising children, which is contrary to the wisdom of the world or to your own preferences. Those who've raised children and those who've had to go through this and who've had to spank their children and train their children and withhold discipline or blessings from their children or what have you, they didn't do it because it was easy or fun. Like, I don't enjoy it. My wife doesn't enjoy it. Wendy, do you love it? You just spank them. Just, yes. Can't wait. You know, it's like dessert. If we don't like it, we do it because we believe that this is what God has prescribed. And it's going to make you stand out in a good way.

You just got the good kids. No, I didn't get good kids. Put a lot of work into it. And God's been merciful to us. And praise God for that. That's what we should be saying. That's the way that the wisdom and the judgments and the statutes and the ordinances are going to manifest themselves in your day-to-day life. When you say to the athletic coach, you know, the kids are doing this thing or that thing, and they say, hey, can you, you know, we need to do this thing on Wednesdays or evenings during one, or we need to do this thing on Sundays and during small group, and you say, no, we're, no, we, I mean, you guys can do what you're going to do, but we won't be there. Some people will get upset by it. Some people will be curious by it. One of the ways that we demonstrate the truthfulness of the gospel It's not by miracles and miraculous, these extraordinary things going on. It's by being more and more over time conformed to the image of God, to the wisdom of God, to the law of God, and it becoming apparent that you don't march to the same beat that everyone around you does. And that you don't hate them for it. You're not mad at them for it. But that you have a different set of priorities than they do. I want to come back to a thread I mentioned earlier. I want to pull on it a little bit more. This idea of...

laws and states and Christians and churches. We've sort of gone down the path of the law applying to us as a body of believers, the church. But I want to come back to the point I was trying to make with the question of the Ten Commandments and whether or not they belong in the schools or not. And I want to ask this question. Is it appropriate for us to expect unbelievers to have more regard for and more conformity to the law of god than we do of course the answer to that is well no and so we have to ask them with all of our christian political movements what we're actually driving at because we're trying to govern a nation of unbelievers which i don't mean to be a derogatory comment about our nation i just mean it to be a statement of fact there's actually always been like every nation's been full of unbelievers even this nation have always been full of unbelievers Why would we have a higher priority of them being governed by the laws of God than us? And what I mean is one of the ways you could sort of tease this out in our lives is when God's word says no, and you say, or whatever, I'm going to do what I want to do. But you really, you've got this whole political system built where unbelievers will be constrained by the law of God in some way, and they won't get divorces, and they won't.

have trans kids and they won't get married if they're homosexual. Why is it that we would expect them to submit to the law of God when we ourselves won't? It's kind of backwards, isn't it? Like we shouldn't be saying, you go do that thing. We should be saying, jump in the water. It's way better in here than it is out there. Like we're in here and doing it. You should come in here and do it with us. It's much better. It's wiser. In fact, you yourself can see that. And so I think that we should set aside our political aspirations of somehow diffusing the tension between the law of God and the authority of the state and focus our attention on the church and on our own personal and collective adherence to it. I think that should be our top priority. Before we start worrying about how other people, strangers in far off places, what they should do, we should worry about what we should do.

Otherwise, we run the danger of becoming hypocrites, where our goal is not actually to see someone become a Christian any more than we've become a Christian. Remember Jesus' warning to the Pharisees in Matthew 23. He says, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel around on sea and land to make one proselyte. You've got an idea for him. To make one proselyte, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourself. I guess what I'm saying is, if our aspirations are simply that other people would just become like us as we are now, we're asking them to become hypocrites in some sense. Because none of us are what we should be. None of us have arrived in our adherence to and conformity to and submission to the law of God. And so if we hold ourselves up and our opinions and our way of life as the way of life, we're holding up a broken model. And we're saying, you know what, the work that needs to be done is over there instead of over here.

how you make someone twice the son of hell as you are yourself. So then Moses gives this exhortation, only give heed to yourself and to your soul diligently so that you do not forget the things which your eyes have seen and they do not depart from your heart all the days of your life. But make them known to your sons and your grandsons. We have to keep first things first. First, give heed to yourself and to your own soul and make sure you don't forget what you've seen as we read it here and what we've heard. Because we weren't there at Mount Sinai, right? He goes on and illustrates and says, you remember at Mount Horeb when they came? He's talking to people who were a generation away from that. Some of them had been there. The women had been there, some of them. They had firsthand knowledge. They had seen the mountain. They had felt the tremblings. Make sure you don't forget. This passage is both singular, meaning applying to the individual, and it's also collective.

They are supposed to, as a nation, hold each other accountable to the law of God. That's what a law is, after all, isn't it? A law is simply saying when you fail, you exist and are a part of a system that will hold you accountable to the standard. Meaning other people in places of authority will tell you no or yes, depending on what you're supposed to do. This is not written just to an individual, but to a nation. Give heed to yourself. As a nation, hold one another accountable. The law, which is God's wisdom, is what other people will see, other nations will see and will admire. Every nation has to deal with the sinfulness of its population. And God's law is the best way for it to be dealt with. And so we should pay careful attention to ourselves individually and to the church collectively before we start worrying about done believers.

We should be governed by God's law. We should be submitting ourselves to it. Then we might have hope of getting other people to do it because there will be a particular manifestation of the fruit of obedience, the actual wisdom and understanding that we say we have. We don't have to talk about it. It will be visible. Now, will it be visible to the whole city? I mean, leave aside the country, leave aside the state, to the whole city. No, you don't know that many people that are not going to see it. Will it be visible, though, to the people around you? Yes, it should be. It should lead to questions. Why did you get married at 19? That's really weird and strange. I mean, it's really weird and strange. Do you have an answer for it? Is there any wisdom that caused you to get married at a young age? Yes. You knew that it wasn't good for man to be alone, and you had sexual desires that you didn't want to corrupt you. That's a start.

You'll have everyone's attention if you say that. Won't you? So won't you say it? Why do you even want to get married? Marriage is in decline. It's not good to be married, especially for men, don't you know? Women initiate the vast majority of divorces. Don't you know it's bad to get married? Does a Christian have anything to say about why they want to get married as opposed to just sleep around or get a cat? I mean, it's funny, but you're all laughing because you know it's true. Like, can we open our mouths and say it? Yeah, actually, here's why I want to get married. God put desires in me, and they're real, and I don't like being alone. I don't like doing this thing by myself. So I want to get married. That's what I want. And then I want to have kids. We have to be seeking after the law of God. A very practical place to start, if you're kind of wondering what that means, is you should memorize the Ten Commandments. Not in short form, but in full form.

You should memorize them. And then you should answer this question pertaining without, don't read, okay? I just want you to hear. I want you to answer it here. This is how you learn to think. I want you to say, what does this commandment require? What does this commandment forbid? Okay? Now, where did I get those questions from? The catechism, right? If you were to go into the Westminster. larger or shorter catechism, either one of them, you'll have those questions. What I want you to do is instead of just letting those words in the catechism and all the work of people who have gone before you, before you go read that, I want you to sit down with a paper and a pencil and write out the Ten Commandments and then say, this is what this one requires and this is what this one forbids. This is what I think it means. Okay? And do it for all of them.

Because if I let you do one and then you go look at the catechism, you'll cheat for the next commandment. You'll start looking. So do all of them. Memorize them. Think about it and write it down and then go to the catechism and see what you missed. Then go grade, you know, you can grade your paper. Have your spouse or your kids grade your paper. Do that for family devotions. Say, hey, we all wrote it down. We're all going to pass it one person to the left and we're going to trade out our black pens for red pens and we're going to mark it all up and have a good discussion for the next eight weeks about these things.

Learning the law of God doesn't have to be miserable. That's fun. Your kids will love it, and they'll probably put you to shame. But that's okay. That's just a place to start. You'll become wiser. If you're not married and you don't have kids, you have roommates, you have friends in the church, invite yourself over to someone else's house. Ask for a mentor. Would you work with me to learn God's law? Let's memorize it together. Let's go get coffee and a donut once a week and compare notes. We could all be like, well, it didn't fall right in my lap with the easiest. you know, execution of it, so I'm just not going to do it. No, no, no. No, no, no. If you want to learn God's law, there is nothing keeping you from it. Nothing. No excuses. God tells us that we're supposed to teach these things by going back to the issue of who are we supposed to have opinions about and for. He doesn't say you're supposed to teach these things to the nations or that you're supposed to teach these things to your neighbors or to the strangers. He says you're supposed to teach these things to your sons and to your grandsons. But if anyone else

These are the people that you should want to submit to the law of God, you and your family, both biological and spiritual. This ought to be your first priority. There's really no cost to wanting a stranger to obey God's law. It becomes costly when it's the people that you know and you love. Remember the day that you stood before me, the Lord your God at Horeb, when the Lord said to me, assemble the people to me, that I may let them hear my words, so they may learn to fear me all the days they live on the earth, and that they may teach their children.

The final theme of this passage is that we need to remember the things that God has done. Moses was repeatedly, all through the book of Deuteronomy, here in the beginning, these first four chapters, remember, remember, don't forget, don't forget, remember, remember. It's just this constant theme keeps showing up. Why does he have to keep repeating ourselves? Well, because we need that much hand-holding. We need that much hand-holding. When your little kids are learning to walk, do you mind holding their hands? When they fall down, do you mind picking them up and carrying them a little bit? Wiping their tears and their snotty nose and then putting them back down, holding their hands. Do you mind doing that as a parent? You don't mind doing that. In fact, we might even go so far as to say you enjoy it. That you love it. And that when your kids are beyond those ages and don't need to hold your hands when they walk, you miss it. And then you look forward to getting to do it with your grandkids, right? So when God reminds us time and time again, what you see is his hand coming down to hold yours. To hold ours. To walk alongside of us.

to pick us up and dust us off and wipe our tears and care for us and get us back up because he's a father to us. So don't be the kid who always says, I know, I know, I know when your dad's still talking or your mother's calling you. Remember, remembering leads to fearing in this passage. Remembering God's power leads to fearing God. And if we could say in a nutshell, what is the church of God missing and therefore what is our society missing? It is this one thing, the fear of the Lord. We're not scared of God. There's no fear of God. We're told it's wrong to fear God. But when we say that it's wrong to fear God, we have to deal with a text like this where God himself says, remember that day when they came to Horeb and they stood there so that they remembered a fear. Fear and love are not mutually exclusive. You can both love God and fear God. Many of us don't know that because we haven't had fathers ourselves.

But if you're a Christian, you now have God as your father, and you should both fear and love God. The one you're going to be more likely to neglect, though, is to fear God. And the way you'll come to neglect it is by not remembering anything he's said or done. And then you'll wonder and throw your hands up in the air as life goes on, going, I don't know why my life's going like this. I don't know why this isn't working out the way I wanted. And you'll be tempted to point your finger at your parents, your boss. Your spouse, your kids, your parents, like anybody but here, right? We need to recover the fear of the Lord. It's the beginning of wisdom. And what was this nation going to become? This nation that feared the Lord. What were people going to say they had? Wisdom. And so until we recover this, the fear of the Lord, no amount of effort to recover our society is going to be effective. Okay?

And it's a waste of our time and energy, a misappropriation of our priorities to prioritize our nation over the church, over God's people, and over his truth. This ought to be our priority. This ought to be what gets us up in the morning and leads us to prayer and to confess our sins and to forgive other people their sins and to be able to recite the Ten Commandments and say what they mean and what they don't mean. And to say to our neighbors why we wanted to get married when we were young or why we decided to have kids or why we didn't do this or did do that. This is a Christian life. And to the extent that we live it, it's delightful. And to the extent that we try to mingle it together with loving the world, it's just awful. Sweet in our mouths and bitter in our stomachs. So let's have done with it and live to serve God and to love him and fear him. Let's pray.