Training the Next Generation
The psalmist who wrote Psalm 71 looks back on his life and remembers God’s faithfulness.
For You are my hope;
O Lord God, You are my confidence from my youth.
By You I have been sustained from my birth;
You are He who took me from my mother’s womb;
My praise is continually of You.
Psalm 71:5-6
The psalmist is in some kind of trouble. He writes about those who want to hurt him and those who have spoken against him. He pleads with God to rescue him from the wicked, the wrongdoer, and the ruthless.
In the midst of his own troubles, he states his commitment to tell other people about God . . .
My mouth shall tell of Your righteousness
And of Your salvation all day long;
For I do not know the sum of them.
I will come with the mighty deeds of the Lord God;
I will make mention of Your righteousness, Yours alone.
Psalm 71:15-16
. . . and he looks ahead to those who will come after him.
O God, You have taught me from my youth,
And I still declare Your wondrous deeds.
And even when I am old and gray, O God, do not forsake me,
Until I declare Your strength to this generation,
Your power to all who are to come.
Psalm 71:17-18
What the psalmist wants to do is crucial because it is easy for the next generation to lose what their parents knew. This happened in Judges:
All that generation also were gathered to their fathers;
and there arose another generation after them
who did not know the Lord,
nor yet the work which He had done for Israel.
Judges 2:10
You and I want every generation of our families to be like those in Psalm 24:
This is the generation of those who seek Him,
Who seek Your face . . .
Psalm 24:6
Researchers and the media use specific terms to label various generations: The Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, etc. In Philippians 2:15, Paul encourages Christians to be: “blameless and innocent, children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation . . . .” We certainly don’t want our children to be part of a generation like that. Paul says that those blameless and innocent children of God “appear as lights in the world.”
Ah, that’s what we want — lights in the world. And that’s why we do what the psalmist who wrote Psalm 71 did. We train the next generation. We don’t let any concerns or troubles of our own keep us from doing that. In fact, we even allow those concerns and troubles to make us more diligent. Those future generations need us to train them to handle the good times and the bad.
Now to Him who is able to do
far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think,
according to the power that works within us,
to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus
to all generations forever and ever. Amen.
Ephesians 3:20-21
Here’s a reminder about Miracles in the Camp, playing tonight, Friday morning and evening, and Saturday afternoon and evening at the Cookeville Performing Arts Center.
