Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Hello everyone.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: This is Pastor Benjamin.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You're listening to Sermon Audio from New City, Orlando.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: At New City, we long to see our Father answer the Lord's Prayer.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: For more resources, visit our website at Newcity Orlando.com.
Raquel West: Please stand and pray this prayer with me.
Raquel West: Holy Spirit, open our hearts to hear your word, and through your word, create in our hearts a home for your presence, that we might live for the glory of the Father and the kingdom of his beloved Son.
Raquel West: Through Jesus Christ we pray.
Raquel West: Amen.
Raquel West: Today's scripture comes from Deuteronomy 6.
Raquel West: Now, this is the commandment, the statutes and the rules that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over to possess it, that you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your son's son, by keeping all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you all the days of your life, and that your days may be may be long.
Raquel West: Hear, therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them, that it may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has promised you in the land flowing with milk and honey.
Raquel West: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.
Raquel West: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
Raquel West: And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.
Raquel West: You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.
Raquel West: You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
Raquel West: This is God's word.
Raquel West: You may be seated.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I grew up in the late 1900s in suburban Detroit.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And we had some shows that were family favorites.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: One was Home Improvement, one of which was because one of the reasons why we liked it so much is because it was also set in suburban Detroit.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Another reason was my dad was a real-life Tim the Tool man tailor.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Another show that we liked, maybe our favorite, was a show called Friends.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And Friends is this story about six people who live in Manhattan.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Some of them are related, some of them aren't, but but really I think the underlying theme of the show is these six people are trying to rebuild a sense of community, maybe even a new family out of the wreckage of their families of origin.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Like if you just look through some of the characters, Ross and Monica, their brother and sister.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Ross is the favorite.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Monica never can never really live up to him.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: If you go on, you got Chandler's parents who announced their divorce to him on Thanksgiving, so he doesn't celebrate that holiday anymore.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Phoebe grew up without a father and her mom died when she was a teenager.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Only later does she find out that the woman who raised her is not actually her mom.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The reason why I share all that is because really all six of these friends they meet in 1994 and they they come into this friendship with one another, carrying the scars and the wounds from their dysfunctional families.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And over the course of 10 seasons, they begin to recreate a new kind of extended family together.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And Friends has this picture of the failure of the nuclear family and a rebuilding of something else that's kind of a cobbled together new extended family, if you will.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: This show is so resonant with American culture that it fast became one of the most popular shows and actually even had a resurgence recently among Gen Z.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: What is it about home improvement or friends or modern family or this is us?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: What is it that all of these shows are wrestling with?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: They're wrestling with a question which is what makes a family?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: What is a community?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And the reason why that's a unique problem that we're facing right now is because we live in a society that's been described as defined, characterized by expressive individualism.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And what that does societally is it makes you and me basically a bunch of disconnected BBs in a beanbag, if you will.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: There's nothing that really holds us together, no family bonds, no shared values, nothing like the word covenant that's in scripture.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And so if we're a bunch of little babies in a beanbag, then the beanbag actually is probably the state, which is one of the reasons why politics has become a religion in our cultural moment.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: What else is going to hold us together?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And so, in light of that, um, I don't think we want to look to the late 1900s America.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I think we want to look to the early 400s Africa to get a better definition of what it means to be a community.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I'm thinking of the North African bishop Augustine of Hippo.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: In his Magnum opus, City of God, he has my favorite definition of a community.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: This is what it is.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: A people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You hear that language?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Now, the brilliance of this is Augustine's not just giving us a definition, he's giving us a diagnostic.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He goes on to say that you can discover the character of any people by just looking at, noticing, paying attention to what do they love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: If it's a higher order love, it'll be a superior people.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: If it's a lower order love, it'll be an inferior people.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So let me just make that plain in our current cultural moment.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Whether it's the LGBTQ community or the NRA, the Republican or the Democratic Party, or SEC football fans, what all of them have in common is they are bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Love holds them together.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Now you decide whether or not it's a higher order love or a lower order love, but some of you in this room right now are beginning to say to me, Well, bring me a higher love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Where's that higher love that I keep thinking of?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And you, I'm telling you, you are getting to the heart of this sermon.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: My aim today is I want new city, the communities and the families in this room.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I want us to be characterized by a higher love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That is the love of God with all of ourselves and the love of our neighbors as ourselves.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So last week we looked at verse four.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: If you have a Bible, a device, the worship of God, get Deuteronomy 6, verse 4 in front of you.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It says this Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We really focus on just those two verses, and last week I pointed out that we have been called into a communion of love with God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And in order to do that, we have four capacities of love our heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And we have four stages of love that I drew from Bernard of Clairvaux.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You can go back and listen if you missed it.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But this week, I want to talk about how we are formed as a community of love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Formed as a community of love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And I've got four reasons and four rituals, okay?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So bear with me.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The four reasons are land, lineage, longevity, and the Lord.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And so if you have a Bible or device, go ahead and get Deuteronomy 6, verse 1 in front of you.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Let's look at the first reason for love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The reason I'm starting with why is because Simon Sinek told me to.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And we want to see that there's motivation in the text.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Really, what bookends the command to love God with all of yourself is really interesting.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Four reasons and then four rituals.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Let's look at verse one together.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Now, this is the commandment.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Notice real quick, that's a singular, the commandment.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's to love God with all of yourself.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's the commandment.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But then it goes on and says, Now, this is the commandment, the statutes and the rules.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: One way to understand all of the commands in scripture is it's simply a working out into all of life, this double love command of loving God with all of yourself and your neighbor as yourself.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So Moses says, Now this is the commandment and the statutes and the rules that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Now, I'm gonna have you underline the word that whenever it's showing up.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So here's the first time that you may do them in the land to which you are going over to possess it.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Now look down at verse 3, it says this as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has promised you in a land flowing with milk and honey.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Now, flowing with milk and honey is why I drink honey vanilla lattes.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's not because I'm basic, it's because it's biblical, okay?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's the promised land flowing with milk and honey.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's I just want a foretaste here and now, a lineage, okay?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Now, this is what I'm saying.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The Lord promises a land.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Why?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Because the people who are lovers of Yahweh with all of themselves, they need a place.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: They need a place to dwell.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But listen, whenever you read the Old Testament, it's really important that every promise, every prophecy, you recognize that they often have a threefold fulfillment.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: What I mean by that is there's an immediate fulfillment, an intermediate fulfillment, and then an ultimate fulfillment.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: This is really important for reading the Bible well.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So the key to understanding that is that all of those fulfillments are pointing towards and bound up in Jesus Christ.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: If you read the Bible, apart from Jesus, you will misinterpret the Bible.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I get this from all over the place, but 2 Corinthians verse 1, verse 20 says this for all the promises of God, nothing excluded, including the promised land.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: All the promises of God find their yes in Jesus.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So if that's true, we will misinterpret the promised land that we're talking about here in the text if we don't read it in Christ.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: What do I mean by that?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Let me make it plain.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The immediate fulfillment of the promised land here and now for the people of Israel, on the brink of entering into the land of Canaan, is that God is giving them a real land with actual boundaries, geography for them to dwell in.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But even in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament, it's interesting, the boundaries for that promised land are given about five times.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And if if you study those boundaries, they're actually different, a little bit different every time, which I think is a little bit of a hint that the promised land is more flexible than a simple geographical boundary on a map.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Because not only is the immediate fulfillment in mind, but the intermediate fulfillment is in mind as well.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And I believe the intermediate fulfillment is that we are to be found in Christ.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Jesus Christ Himself is the promised land.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's why the Bible regularly is saying to find ourselves in Christ as if we could be located in him.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We can.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We must.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Jesus is talked about in Ephesians 1, it says, In Jesus we have obtained an inheritance.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Throughout the storyline of Scripture, that inheritance is the promised land.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But not only is there an immediate and intermediate, but there's an ultimate fulfillment of the promised land.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And we hear of it from the very lips of Jesus himself.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He says this in Matthew 5: Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: This is a big deal.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's a big deal to understand the scope of the promised land.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And to make that really plain, even Father Abraham knew this.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He knew what a lot of modern American evangelicals miss, and that is that the promised land is not merely a strip of land on the eastern Mediterranean.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's far more than that.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's way grander than that.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: In fact, in Hebrews 11, verse 9, it says this by faith Abraham went to live in the land of promise.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: For he was looking forward to the city.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Some might call it a new city, looking forward to a city that has foundations whose designer and builder is God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: What does that mean for us?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It means for us that all of our attempts, all of our attempts here and now, all of the ache that we find within us for to live among a community that is characterized by love will be ultimately fulfilled.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Said differently, heaven, the new heavens and new earth is a world of love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Which means our attempts here and now to live in love as a community of love are not in vain.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We're living out a dress rehearsal here and now for what is to come there and then when we live in a world, a land characterized by love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But it's not only the land, it's also a lineage.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look with me at verse 2.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Verse 2 says this that you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your son's sons.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look at verse 3.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And that, underline it again, and that you may multiply greatly.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: If you look at the last verse on your scripture reading there, uh if you have the worship God, it ends with this phrase, to a thousand generations.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You see, since Genesis 12, God's rescue plan for the world was to call a father, to call a man and make him a father.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: His name's Abram, becomes Abraham, because he has a rescue plan for the world, and it is through a family.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But interesting, this is a place of conflict with our modern cultural moment.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Our current culture doesn't believe that there's rescue through a family.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: In fact, it probably believes we need to be rescued from the family.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: David Brooks, writing, kind of summarizing the changes in family structure over the past century, said it like this.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We've made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We've made life better for adults but worse for children.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We've moved from big, interconnected and extended families, which helps protect the most vulnerable people in society.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We move from that to smaller, detached nuclear families, a married couple and their children, which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: What I'm getting at here is because of the sexual revolution in the 1960s and the feminist movement before that, and the LGBTQ plus movement after that, all of them have been kind of conspiring together, if you will, to deconstruct the family.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And listen, before we challenge that, let's just start here.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Who among us has emerged from our family of origin unscathed?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Who in this room has not been wounded in family?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And so we get a sense of why people might want to say this this is actually a broken concept.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: One family therapist named Terry Real says it like this Family dysfunction rolls down from generation to generation like a fire in the woods, taking down everything in its path until one person in one generation has the courage to turn and face the flames.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That person brings peace to their ancestors and spares the children that follow.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Breaking this cycle requires courage, the courage to confront the flames, to face the dysfunctions, and to say, This ends with me.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Christians should be the most bold in their unwillingness to perpetuate family dysfunction across the generations.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Why?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Because God has given us a promise.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The text says right here, a promise for great intergenerational families.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It says that you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your son's son, so on and so forth.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: This is why one pastor said, No family of origin is healthy enough to transform us into the kind of love we see in Jesus.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And no family is dysfunctional enough to keep us from becoming the kind of people of love we find in Jesus.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Listen, the nuclear family is not enough.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It never was.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We need the extended family of Jesus, what the New Testament calls the household of God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's the hope of the world.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's God's rescue plan, not the nuclear family, the extended family, all the brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ who call God their Father who are filled with the Holy Spirit.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's God's rescue plan for the world.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And so we have not only lineage, we also have longevity.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: This is the third one.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look at verse 2.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It says this, all the days of your life.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And here's the word again, and that your days may be long.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look at verse 3.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Hear therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them that it may go well with you.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Listen, whoever you are, however you find yourself here in the room this morning, every single one of us wants it to go well with us.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We've got a deep desire for that.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's that's showing up in the influencers you f you follow, the supplements you buy, the podcasts you listen to, all of those are a way that we're seeking.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I just want it to go well with me.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But the last place we often look is obedience to commandments, statutes, and rules for it to go well with us.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Obey is a four-letter word for a reason.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Now, when we get to the text here, what it's implying is you are no more free outside the boundaries of God's good commands than a fish is if it thinks it's liberated from leaping out of the lake onto a dock.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Said differently, uh a flower that's uprooted from its soil is not liberated, it's not free, it's traumatized and will die if it's not repotted in healthy soil.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The healthy boundaries, the flourishing soil of God's good commands are the only place, the only place where it will go well with you.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And God wants that for us.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's why He's promising this sense of well-being and longevity here in the text.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But it's not just lineage, it's not just longevity, it's also the fourth and final reason, which is the Lord Himself.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look again at verse 1, it says this.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Now, this is the commandment, the statutes and the rules that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The your ness of the Lord your God is a big deal.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: This is a confession of a deeply felt reality.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's a conviction that that was born in experience of Yahweh's living and active presence in their midst.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: There's a commentator named O.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Palmer Robertson.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He says, he calls this the Emmanuel principle.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's it's the defining theme that runs through the whole Bible.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It goes like this I will be your God and you will be my people.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Everything in scripture is up unto that, from Genesis to Revelation.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And so, if that's true, then this phrase, I will be your God and you shall be my people, it's not a religious philosophy.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's not a sociopolitical analysis on Israel's nation state.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's not a cold, abstract concept.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: In fact, it's alive with an experience and a knowledge of the living God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The reason why this matters is Herman Bobbing says God was a living personal force, a reality infinitely more real than the world around them.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: They reckoned with him in their lives, they walked as if he was always before them, and they worshiped him in his sanctuary.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: In light of those four reasons land, lineage, longevity, and the Lord, here are four rituals that will cultivate us into a community of love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look with me at verse seven.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You shall teach them and shall talk of them.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Verse eight, you shall bind them, verse nine, you shall write them.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Teach talk.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Bind write.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Now, my definition of a ritual is a ritual is a repeated practice that shapes what we love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And just like a diet, a financial plan, a sleep schedule, and exercise habits, we all have rituals.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The question is, are your rituals forming or deforming your loves?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's the question.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Now, if you're in the room and you're getting a little nervous because the word ritual just doesn't, it's kind of hard to swallow.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I get it.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: In fact, Jesus, the scriptures get it too.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Because there's few things more deadly to vital faith than ritualism.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And and even God knows the danger of ritualism.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's why he starts with the heart.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look at verse 6.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It says this, and these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Notice how that comes prior to these rituals that he gives in a moment.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Starts with the heart.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Because when there are external demands without an inward reality, our lives just become a show.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We become what Jesus frequently calls hypocrites.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And he's got some really vivid illustrations.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He's like, you're you're like a you're like you dishwashing and you just clean the outside of the cup, but then inside the cup, there's a bunch of food that's just caked and hardened on the inside of the bowl.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You're gonna eat out of that?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's gross.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Or you're like a tomb that on the surface is like white and clean, it's got like etched in the names and the dates, and it's it looks great, but inside are dead people.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Or Jesus, quoting the prophet Isaiah, says it like this: These people honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: God can't stand any of that.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Ritualism is a deep danger.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's a deep danger in our relationship with God, but also in passing on the faith to the next generation.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: In fact, Michael Goheen, a mystiologist.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Says that in the book of Deuteronomy, there are two threats, two primary threats.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The first one, I think you'll guess, which is idolatry.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The second one might be surprising.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The second thing that we must do to be the people of God in the book of Deuteronomy is to pass on the faith to the next generation.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Listen, almost nothing's more threatening to passing on the faith to the next generation than hypocrisy.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Children might be easy to convince, but they are hard to fool.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: If your life is coated with Christian wallpaper, but the architecture of your life is just like anybody else, your kids will see through it.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Said differently, if they, if you say that you're following Jesus, but they know that your life is just keeping up with the Joneses, they will know.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: They will know.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So listen, if God doesn't have your heart, your love is heartless.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But if that love doesn't get worked out into all of life, your love is useless.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And in order to have that happen, Christianity must start with the heart, but it cannot stay there.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's meant to go to the ends of the earth in all of life.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And so in order to do that, we need rituals.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So let's look at these rituals in turn.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The first one is to teach.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look at verse 7.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You shall teach them diligently to your children.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That first word is important.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You, mom and dad.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Not the church, not the government, not the school, public, private, homeschool, co-op, whatever.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Not your youth pastor.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You shall teach them diligently to their children.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You see, it starts here.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It starts with us.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But while mom and dad are necessary, they are actually insufficient.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: They're insufficient to pass on the faith because for that we need the communion of saints, the household of God, bigger than the family, bigger than the nuclear family.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's why whenever we baptize babies up here, which is wonderful, we have the members of New City stand and take this vow.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Do you, as a congregation, undertake the responsibility of assisting the parents in the Christian nurture of this child?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Assisting, coming alongside.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: If anybody's got a city kid shirt on today, say thank you.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Thank you so much for assisting the parents of New City in the nurture and instruction and discipleship of the children here.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The next generations matter to the thousands generation.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look at verse 7 again.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It says this you shall teach them diligently to your children.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That verb, teach them diligently, is translated in Deuteronomy 32, 41, like this.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Sharpen my sword.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: What kind of a word picture is that?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I think what's in mind here is that teaching the command to love God to our children is it's less like a lecture and it's more like sharpening a blade through repeated strokes.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Why?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So that the love of God might pierce into their hearts and they might know the love of God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Maybe my favorite book on this topic is Justin Early's book, Habits of the Household.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He says it like this.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The most Christian way to think about our household is that they are little schools of love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Places where we have one vocation, one calling, and that is to form all who live here into lovers of God and neighbor.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So let me just ask you: who or what is teaching your children diligently?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And what are they learning to love as a result?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The second ritual here is to talk.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: To talk.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look at verse 7.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: To sit in your house, that's private life.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: To walk by the way, that's public life.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The book of Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 6, the whole book, the whole Bible wants to tear down a dividing wall between public and private when it comes to your love of God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Let me just share a quick story with you.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: On Monday, so after last Sunday, where I preached about Bernard of Clairvaux's four stages of love, I got a picture from somebody who works for a construction company, and it was a whiteboard and it had the four stages of love written on it.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And they said, My boss began our staff meeting this morning like this, basically, thanks to you, Ben.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And I loved it.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I was so, I mean, that brought so much joy to my little heart.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I was so pleased.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But some of you in here are like, does that belong in the secular workforce?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's a question that would be foreign to the Bible, by the way.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Instead, the the scriptures, Deuteronomy 6's worldview, if you will, would probably ask it like this.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Well, you gotta love somebody in your workplace.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Who's it gonna be?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It's either gonna be the Almighty God or the Almighty Dollar.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Who's gonna rule at your workplace?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Especially if you have the kind of authority and influence like being the boss.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: There's no neutrality here.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's why it's saying whether you are in your house or walking by the way, your public life, your private life, but also it goes on and it says, when you lie down and when you rise.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: In biblical literature, this is called a marism, which is when the bookends stand for the whole.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: In the biblical view of the day, the day ends when you lie down and it begins when you rise.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: There's this, there's the beginning and ending like that.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So everything in between, all of life, is to be permeated with the word of God, according to the love of God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Now, this is one of the reasons we need communities and circles here at New City.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We need an environment where people are asking and answering alongside us the questions, Lord, what are you saying and doing?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And given who I am, how will I respond?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: What does it look like to love God in all of life?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So a question I would just ask simply is what kind of talk fills your life?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: What kind of talk fills your life?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The third ritual here is to bind it.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look at verse 8.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Your hands in Scripture are what you do, your actions, your effects in the world.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Your eyes stand for how you see, your vision and imagination.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And this is relevant because your attention will follow your interests, and wherever attention goes, awareness grows.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Let me just give you some illustrations.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: When I was a skater, everywhere was a skate spot.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: When I was a boxer, everyone I'd be sizing up.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: When I became a counselor, I psychoanalyzed everyone.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You can't help it.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Whatever your interests are going to shape your attention, what do you attend to in those moments?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: This is why one rabbi said it like this we do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And you are what you love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So if your vision is captivated by the love of God in all of life, you will see things differently.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The Puritans had a name for this.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: They called it occasional meditation, and it was this practice of wherever they would go, they would just be paying attention to how their imaginations were baptized in a world that was just filled with the glory of God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: In my own practice, it's looked like this.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I'll go for a run in Orlando in August, and I'll run under a tree, and I'll feel the shade and the coolness, and I'll think of Psalm 121.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The Lord is my keeper, he's the shade on my right hand.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Or when it's pouring down rain like it is about now, uh, I will I will talk to my kids about how the plants are thirsty and God's just giving them drink.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That comes from Psalm 104.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Or when one of my kids hears a huge thunderstorm and the boom shakes the house, they look at me, it's adorable, they go, Jesus thunder.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Because I've taught them from a little, little, little age, I've taught them, don't be afraid of the thunder.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Jesus' thunder.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Psalm 29 says that the voice of the Lord thunders.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You see, this is a whole of life that's lived charged with an imagination that sees the grandeur of God everywhere.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Now, some of you, honestly, you might be going, isn't that a little childish?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: If it is, I don't want to grow up.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I don't want to grow up.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I want to always see the life, all of life, haunted with the presence of God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: In the Chronicles of Narnia, there's a character named Eustace Scrub.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He represents the modern, secular, self-absorbed skeptic who relies on cold intellect and pessimism and scientism to make sense of the world.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And he was raised by progressive parents, and they scorn imagination and faith, and he always thinks of himself as being right.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And there's this moment in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader where he meets a retired star.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And Eustace says, In our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: How sophisticated.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: To which the star replied, Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Psalm 19 says, The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies above, proclaim his handiwork.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: What does that mean?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It means the sun is more likely an ancient preacher that just can't help but tell you about who God is.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Life-giving and warming and brilliant.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's what a star does.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's what a star is.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And so listen, it's called a worldview for a reason.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Our imagination shapes how we see the world.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And our worldview is to love God with all of ourselves and our neighbors as ourselves.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And so what shapes your imagination?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The last one here is that we are called to write it.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look at verse 9.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It says, You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I wish I had time to unpack this more, but just in summary, your doorposts represent your home.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The gates are the gates of the city.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It means that it is insufficient if the love kind of stays in heart and home.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Love of God with all of ourselves has to extend to all of life, where you live, where you learn, where you work, where you play.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We are captivated by a vision that the love of the true and living God would permeate our world.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And so I'm gonna end where I began, which is from this quote from St.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Augustine.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He said, A people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's true.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But this people, this community, the people of God, is unlike any other people on planet Earth today or through all of history, because only this people is actually bound together, not primarily by God as our object of love, but by being the objects of God's love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Look with me at Deuteronomy 7.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Deuteronomy 7, verse 6 says this for you are a people holy to the Lord your God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fused of all the peoples.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the fair the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: According to this text, why does the Lord love Israel?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Was it because of their population demographics?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: No, they were the fewest of the peoples.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Was it because of their military prowess?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He found them as slaves.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Was it because he needed workers?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He created the cosmos with the word of his mouth.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: He didn't need anybody to do anything.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Why does the Lord love Israel?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Well, the answer in verses 7 and 8 is staggering.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The Lord says, I loved you because I loved you.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: I love you because I love you.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's why.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And that's good enough.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Not because I looked down the corridors of time and saw that you would have faith in Jesus one day, so I chose you and made my mind.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That's what it says.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Electing love, chosen, chosen by the Lord to set my love on you because I love you.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: God doesn't find the love he wants to see in your life, he creates the love he wants to see in your life by going first, by his love always being prior to your love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Your love is only ever always simply saying, I love you too.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You don't go first, he does.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: This is picked up in Ephesians 1 where Paul writes this: God the Father chose us, same language, chose us in Jesus before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: In love, he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Listen, God the Father is making a new humanity, and he's doing it by calling together a new family.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And that family is diverse, but it is unified around this.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: It is marked by the love of God in Jesus Christ.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So Augustine of Hippo in the city of God not only has that great definition I shared earlier, but also he says that they are really in the history of humanity, there's only two cities, two communities, if you will, and they're formed by two different loves.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The old one, the earthly, the old city, is formed, characterized by the love of self and the contempt of God.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But the new city, the heavenly city, is characterized by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Let me say that differently.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: The default is that we would be bound together by a love of me before you.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: But the church is a people who's bound together by a love that says, me for you.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And the only way we can love like that is if we've been loved like that.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Let me share your story as we close to illustrate that.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: There's a woman named Lisa Fitzpatrick who was a healthcare executive in New Orleans.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: One day she was sitting in the passenger seat of a car when she noticed two young boys around 10 or 11 years old, and they were lifting up something heavy.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: She realized it was a gun, and before it was too late, they shot her in the face with it.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You see, it was a gang initiation ritual, and miraculously she recovered from her wounds, and she realized that she was just collateral damage.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: She was actually not the victim.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Instead, she believed the real victims were these young boys who had to shoot someone to get a family, their gang.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: So she quit her job and she began working with these gang members.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: She opened her home to young kids who might otherwise join gangs.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And one Saturday afternoon, she had about 35 kids that were hanging around her house, and she simply asked the question, Why do you like to spend your day in this house with this middle-aged woman?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: To which they replied, You were the first person who ever opened the door.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: You see, the only way that we can have a love that's not me before you, but me for you, is if we've been loved like that.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Jesus didn't just open the door, Jesus is the door.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And he died and rose to call together a new family, a new humanity, a people of love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: And so he's inviting us, he's beckoning us now to come back to the Father through him.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Let's pray.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Father, we thank you that we can call you Father.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: That you have called us into your family, adopted us as sons and daughters in the Son, Jesus Christ.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Jesus, we praise you as the one who opened the door, who makes a way for us to come back home, to be reformed as a community of love.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Holy Spirit, would you do that work in us?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Would you exalt the love of God in this people, in this church, in these communities, in these families, such that we would be characterized by this first commandment like that?
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: We pray it in Jesus' name.
Rev. Benjamin Kandt: Amen.