Our scripture reading this morning comes from Deuteronomy chapter 8, Deuteronomy chapter 8, we'll read the whole chapter together, the fifth of the five books of Moses at the beginning of our Bible, a book reflecting on God's ways with and instruction for his people. And so we take up the reading, Deuteronomy chapter 8 at verse 1. Let us hear God's own word. The whole commandment that I command you today you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply and go in and possess the land that the Lord swore to your fathers. And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these 40 years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. Your clothing did not wear out on you, and your foot did not swell these forty years. Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you. So you shall keep the commandments of the Lord your God by walking in his ways and by fearing him. For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing out in the valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive oil, of olive trees and honey, a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and out of whose hills you can dig copper. And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you. Take care lest you forget the Lord by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes which I command you today. Lest when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied then your heart be lifted up and you forget the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrifying wilderness with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water, who brought you water out of the flinty rock, who led you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know, that he might humble you and test you to do you good in the end. Beware, lest you say in your heart, My power and might of my hand have gotten me this wealth. You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers as it is this day. And if you forget the Lord your God and go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish. Like the nations that the Lord makes to perish before you, so shall you perish, because you would not obey the voice of the Lord your God. So far the reading of God's word. If this sermon does not go well, I intend to blame Pastor Gordon, and I feel fine saying that since he's out of town, but I've been mulling over the possibility of a sermon for some time, and it sort of crystallized for me a few weeks ago when Pastor Gordon preached from Psalm 71, and particularly verse 18 stuck with me. Psalm 71 verse 18 says, So even to old age and gray hairs, O Lord, do not forsake me until I proclaim your might to another generation. Your power to all those to come. And I suddenly thought, although my hair isn't entirely gray yet, I sort of fit this profile. I came to Escondido a little over 30 years ago and was a young man and have discovered this is a dangerous place to live because if you live here long enough, you get old. So beware. You've been warned now. But this psalm reminds us of one of the fundamental obligations of the Christian life, which is to try to ensure that the faith is passed on from intact from one generation to another. And that the great responsibility of those who get older is not primarily to nag or primarily to talk about the good old days, but it is to bear witness to the faith that they have known and the faith that they have believed and the faith that the Lord has blessed. And so today, I'm trying to fulfill that in a little way under the title Reformed Today. We are a Reformed congregation. Some of us were privileged to be born into the Reformed Church and have really never known much else. Others of us, including me, were not born in the Reformed Church and came at some later point in our lives to discover and to embrace Reformed Christianity, not for ethnic reasons or for cultural reasons or for social reasons, but for, I trust, all of us, biblical reasons. We are reformed, or at least we ought to be reformed, because we are persuaded thoroughly that reformed Christianity is simply biblical Christianity. We should be reformed for one reason alone, that is that we believe the Bible teaches what reformed Christianity has embraced. We do not set out to be a creative people. That's a good thing. As I look around here, there's not a lot of creativity. In the history of religion, creativity has almost always been a bad thing. We set out to be a faithful people. A faithful people. And I wanted to preach this sermon because it's hard to be reformed. It's demanding. It's sort of unrelenting. There's no time out. As the news has been full of the election of a new pope in the last couple of weeks, one of the things that I've reflected on is that, at least for some people, it's easy to be a Roman Catholic. You participate just as much or as little as you want, you're still a Roman Catholic. You go to Mass or you don't go to Mass, you're still a Roman Catholic. But the Reformed have always said, no, it doesn't work that way. The Lord places a call upon our lives to be faithful. And although we recognize we are not faithful as we ought to be, we recognize the more holy we become, how sinful we still are. Still, we recognize the call on the Lord that we be faithful to him, that we respond to him. It's hard to be reformed. And it's particularly, it seems to me, you know I'd get to history sooner or later, it seems to me particularly hard to be reformed in America. America has become a land where religion is primarily seen as a matter of experience and feeling. And you know we as Reformed people are opposed to feeling in principle. Well, that's not quite true. But we are committed to the principle that feeling should flow out of truth. That experience must be founded on truth. And no matter how exalted feelings may be, if they're not related to truth, they ultimately don't matter. But we are awash in a country where feeling and often sentimentality becomes the key religion. And Reformed Christianity is not sentimental. It's tough, which is a good thing, because life is tough. There are moments when you can get away with being sentimental about life. But you can't be that for very long. It catches up with you. It's hard to be reformed in America, and that's why it's good from time to time to pause and to be renewed in a commitment to being reformed. Now, in doing that, I don't want us to become arrogant or triumphalist. I don't want us to romanticize our past. Things were not always perfect in the past. And if the older people with their gray hair or their small amount of hair or whatever kind of hair they're left with get too romantic about the past, we have to oppose them. Things were not always perfect in the past. Things haven't been perfect in the past since the Garden of Eden. And there are plenty of faults in our past. But there's also a great heritage to be remembered and to be preserved and that needs to be passed on from generation to generation and it doesn't happen automatically and it doesn't happen easily because it's hard to be reformed in America. And it will only happen if we're self-conscious about it. It'll only happen if we're determined about it. It will only happen if we're reflective about it. And as I've been here amongst you privileged to be part of this congregation for over 30 years, I realized that some of that non-reformed way of thinking can seep even into us. So I want to think with you briefly, never believe a preacher when he says that, briefly about what it means to be reformed today. We can't say everything. We can hardly get started in a lot of ways. But I want to do, I hope, a kind of quick overview of some of the critical things that we have to work to preserve among us to be a Reformed people, Reformed according to the Word of God. You know that every time we talk about being Reformed, that's an abbreviated way of speaking. It's an abbreviation of the phrase, Reformed according to the Word of God. That's what we want to be individually and as families, as a congregation, as a denomination. We want to be people whose lives and thought patterns have been reformed and reshaped by the Word of God. And so I have for you, after this longish introduction, only five points. But I'm going to move right along. Five points. First of all, we're reformed because of what we believe about scripture. We're people of the book. Did you notice how that was given expression in Deuteronomy as we read it this morning? The whole commandment that I command you today, Deuteronomy 8 verse 1, you shall be careful to do. When God speaks to his people, whether it's his old covenant people or his new covenant people, he gives them a revelation, and he says, I want you to pay attention to the whole of this. Not part of it. Not the parts you like. Not the parts that are inspiring. Not the parts that feel right. I want you to listen to my whole word. I haven't put anything extraneous in here. I haven't put anything in here that you have a right to put out of it. I have not given you a book so you can go through with a magic marker and cross out the parts that you'd prefer not to hear. I have commanded you the whole commandment that you shall be careful to do it. And that's a big responsibility, isn't it? It's a big book. But our response as Reformed people has always been and must always be, and I say to this to you children especially, a desire to know the whole Bible, to know what God has said to us in this book, and to say, speak, Lord, and we listen, because we know you know the truth, and therefore our desire is that we would listen to you, that we might know the truth. And just as this portion of Scripture in Deuteronomy chapter 8 calls us to embrace the whole Bible, it calls us also to embrace every part of it. Verse 3 of Deuteronomy 8, And he humbled you, and he let you hunger, and then he fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. We need to know the whole Bible, and we have to know every part of the Bible. We even have to know Deuteronomy 8. Deuteronomy is never on the top five list of favorite Bible books. If you read through the Bible, you get to Numbers and to Leviticus and to Deuteronomy, and you sort of are tempted to groan. There seems to be a lot of stuff in there that seems kind of strange and obscure and questionable. I should have your preacher help you about that. Not me, but Pastor Gordon. but then you come to these gems, you see. Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Every word. Even Deuteronomy 8, verse 3, a verse that proved to be wonderfully helpful to whom? To our Lord Jesus in the wilderness when the devil came and tempted him, tried to force him to perform miracles that were unnecessary. And Jesus, who had embraced the whole word and knew every part of the word, was able to quote in the devil's face Deuteronomy 8, verse 3, and say, no, man shall live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. That's where my life is. My life flows out of the scripture. And we need to be recommitted as a people to the truth of the Bible and to the importance of the Bible, the centrality of the Bible in our lives. That's why we have sermons. It's not just because we can't figure out any other way to fill up the hour or so. It's because this is the living Word of God that, by the blessing of the Holy Spirit, breathes life into God's people, and we need it. And that's why we're to listen to it carefully. Two or three times in chapter 8, we're told about the need to be careful in the listening to the Bible. We're told even in verse 6 to be fearful. This is a solemn undertaking. I don't know how other preachers feel, but in preparing a sermon, I find it a fearful responsibility. That's why I go across the street to Sunday school and be funny. My wife always says, why aren't you funnier in the pulpit? And my real reaction is because this is a fearful undertaking. To open God's word, to proclaim God's word, to teach God's word. And so we have to be committed as a reformed people to holding on to the Bible as the center of our life. And in a world where increasingly knowledge and knowing things and truth is despised, it's going to be all the harder for us to hold to that central commitment to the Word of God. But we have to do it, and we have to pass it on from generation to generation. Secondly, as Reformed people, we believe in the sovereignty of God. God is the Scripture-giving God. He is also the sovereign God. This undergirds our life. It's a word we use fairly frequently in our circles, but we have to be recommitted to it because it really is the foundation on which we live. God is in charge. That's what we believe. God is in charge. And that's what this text says. God led you out of the land of Egypt. It wasn't Pharaoh that led you out. It wasn't even Moses that led you out. It was God who led you out. It was God who fed you day by day in the wilderness. It was God who provided water even when there wasn't any water in the wilderness. God kept your clothes from wearing out for 40 years in the wilderness. He kept your feet from swelling. Now, you young people aren't impressed by that. But as you get older, you become more and more impressed by a God who can keep your feet from swelling. God is in control. You see, this passage is saying he's in control of everything. He's powerful and he's personal. His power is never arbitrary, but his power is always directed, this text tells us, to testing us, to humbling us, to providing us with good. His power is linked to his love. His personal love and care for us, His people. And that's one of the things that gives us our unique and vital perspective on how we live. Nothing happens by chance in this world. We are not the subjects of luck or of fortune. That's why, as a good reform minister, I cringe when people say good luck. nothing is a matter of luck or of chance in this world. It's all coming from the hand of God. And of course, when good things come, it's easy to say it comes from the hand of God. But our confession of the sovereignty of God is that it's also when bad things happen, they come from the hand of God. And he has a purpose. He has a plan. One of my most vivid memories of being in Escondido was a young minister, is going to visit Cheryl Cock. Remember Cheryl Cock? You have to have been here a long time now. A young mother in her early 30s who was dying of cancer. It was terrible. And yet going to visit her was so encouraging because she said, I couldn't go through this, especially the prospect of losing her children. I couldn't go through this unless I knew God had a purpose. And I do. That's belief in sovereignty in action. God is powerful, and God is good, and God is loving, and everything he does in our lives has a purpose. And that produces a tough religion for tough times. But it's biblical religion. Because Deuteronomy 8 talks about a God who's in charge of everything. We believe in a scriptural religion. We believe in a sovereign God. And we believe in a saving God. At the heart of so much of what happens in this church is an effort to be sure that people understand clearly what it means that God is a saving God. And in Deuteronomy 8, we find all sorts of references to that. God is providing salvation for Israel in Deuteronomy chapter 8 because He promised He'd do that. He promised that to Abraham. And God is a God who fulfills His promises. And God wants us to know that. God wants every one of us to know that He has made promises of salvation and he will fulfill them. And he's made those promises, we're told, because of his electing purpose. See, that's not a reformed idea. That's a biblical idea. Listen to what God says to these people in Deuteronomy 7, verses 6 and 7. Deuteronomy 7, verses 6 and 7. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. 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. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of people. But it is because the Lord loves you. The Lord chose you not because you were better, but simply because he loves you. And that's so crucial because it reminds us that at the end of the day, salvation is not about us, it's about God. Salvation is not about what we do, it's about what God does. It's his purpose to save us. And the glory is he accomplishes his purpose. And that should thrill us, that should fill us with joy. Israel didn't rescue herself from Egypt, God rescued her. Egypt would have remained forever in slavery in Egypt if God hadn't acted. And that's a picture of the salvation of each of us individually. If God hadn't acted for us, we would not be saved. But he did act for us in Jesus Christ. He provided a substitute. He provided a Savior. And he provided in each of our lives that experience that has led us to be here this morning. Has provided in each of our lives a knowledge of Jesus Christ. Has sent his spirit into the heart of everyone who believes. So that we might know the truth. So that we might be built up in the faith. And although our lives have had trials, look at verse 16 again of chapter 8. God is the one who fed you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know, that he might humble you and test you to do you good in the end. So that all those trials, all those difficulties, imagine every day, is there going to be manna today? There was manna yesterday, there was a manna the day before yesterday. There was manna the day before that, but will there be manna today? For 40 years. And there was manna six days a week. On Saturdays, twice as much. And of course, in the great gratitude of the human heart, they soon said, what, manna again? There's nothing but manna? But God provided. He humbled, he confronted, he tested. But what was it all about? It was for their good in the end. And that's what the scripture says. That's what we as Reformed Christians believe. God is saving us for good in the end. And the great end is a promised land. Not this world with all its struggles. But at last a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. That's the promise of what God is doing for us in Jesus Christ. And he's working that out in every moment of our lives. And he's going to do it all. But one of the ways in which he does it is also by warning us. Think of that solemn warning at the end of Deuteronomy 8. And if you forget the Lord your God, And go after other gods and serve them and worship them. I solemnly warn you that you shall surely perish. God calls us to faith. And he'll give us the gift of faith. But he calls us to faith and to faithfulness. And he says this salvation that I'm giving to you is a relationship between you and me. It's nothing mechanical. You need to be my people and I will be your God. and so it is incumbent upon you to exercise faith in the promises that I have given you. It's incumbent upon you to respond to the covenant with which I have blessed you. Now, that doesn't turn this back into a man-centered religion, but it says we have to be a people of faith, a people of trust, a people of reliance on the Lord. That's what he's working in us. That's what he's humbling us to be. That's what he's testing, to be sure, is in our hearts. That's the great salvation that he's given us, that he's building us up with, why we gather to worship, that we might be built up in this confidence in him, that our faith will be strengthened. So being reformed is a notion about the scripture, a notion about sovereignty, a notion about salvation, and a notion about the Sabbath. Deuteronomy chapter 8 begins, The whole commandment that I command you today you should be careful to do. And then just a couple of chapters earlier, one of the commandments he gave was observe the Sabbath day to keep it holy. I think there's no part of our Reformed heritage more under assault in our time than that. And what's important, particularly in the way in which the commandment is given us in Deuteronomy 5, It's interesting. It begins with the words, observe the Sabbath day. We're more familiar with Exodus chapter 20, where we're told to remember the Sabbath day. But it's interesting, here in Deuteronomy, the remembering we're called to in verse 15 of Deuteronomy 5 is, You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. We remember the Sabbath so that we write, remember who we are and who God is. The Sabbath isn't an end in itself, it's a means to an end. We remember the Sabbath to remember who we were, slaves, and to remember who God is for us, the Deliverer, and we need time for that. We need time to remember, to think back, to reflect on who God is and what he's done for us. And God has given us time. He's called us to give him a day a week in which we can focus upon him and upon his truth and upon his work so that we might be renewed and we might not be a forgetful people. At least three times in this one chapter, we're told, don't forget, don't forget, don't forget, because it's so easy to forget. It's so easy to take for granted. Israel settled into that fine land that the Lord gave them, and pretty soon they were saying, well, this is what we deserve. This is our right. We've done this. We sowed the fields. We picked the olives. We're pretty good. And the Lord says, no, you're not. I gave you what you have. And you keep forgetting that. So take time to remember. Take time to reflect. Take time to be renewed in this wonderful truth that what we have is what the Lord gave to us. And we need the Sabbath day. we need the Sabbath day for that to happen. So we've talked a little bit about the scriptures, about sovereignty, about salvation, about the Sabbath. Point five is about schools. One of the things that has most marked our heritage is a commitment to Christian schools. And I think we need to talk briefly about that. I think we need to talk briefly about that because I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about our commitment to Christian schools. I don't know if some of you have heard the people talk about how we're committed to a three-legged stool. And the three legs are the family, the church, and the school. Well, that's a nice image, but I think it's fundamentally wrong. We're committed to a two-legged school. As I read it, that makes the stool a little less stable. But that might have the positive effect of keeping us on our toes. The two legs of the stool are the church and the family. Those are the two institutions that God has instituted. But in our heritage, we have rightly said, One of the great responsibilities of families is to see that the faith is taught to children. And in the scripture, that responsibility is given in the first place to parents. Deuteronomy 6, verse 7, You shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall talk of them, that is, commandments of the Lord. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall talk of them when you sit in your house, And when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up, you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. The scripture was supposed to be part of family life all the time. As you walked into your house, you saw the scriptures. As you walked out of the house, you saw the scripture. When you looked at your father, he had a little box with a scripture on his forehead. Pious Orthodox Jews still do that. When you look down at your hand, Scripture was bound on the hand. When you woke up in the morning, you talked about the Bible. When you went to bed at night, you talked about the Bible. When you sat at the table, you talked about the Bible. The parents' responsibility was to see that the truth of God's covenant was passed on faithfully to the next generation. Parents can't change hearts, but they can fill minds. That's the responsibility. And in our heritage, we concluded that parents sometimes needed help in that work. And that was where the idea of Christian schools came from. Christian schools are not an institution, a divine institution in and of themselves. They are an extension of the family, for families that need help in fulfilling this covenant responsibility. And I think that's a glorious part of our heritage. To provide schools to help parents fulfill their responsibility before the Lord to see that children know the Word of God. And that's why we're not committed to any old school that calls itself Christian. We're committed to schools that teach the truth about the Bible and help parents fulfill their responsibility. And I think that's a precious part of our heritage. And it's also a part that doesn't come automatically. It doesn't come easily. And it isn't preserved without effort. Calvin Christian School was established in this community to help parents teach Reformed Christianity and other necessary educational skills to their children. It was established to be a reformed school to help reformed parents, and that needs to continue to be its mission, to help reformed parents teach reformed truth to their children. If other kids want to be there, that's great. But they ought to come with the understanding that this school is a reformed school to help parents who are reformed fulfill their responsibility. Well, this sermon has been too long. but ministers never change their ways. But then neither do people. So it's okay. It's a kind of symbiotic relationship. And we have said too little. There's so much more that ought to be said. But these things ought to be on our minds as we seek to avoid the pressures to be unreformed in America. And at the same moment that we say it's hard to be reformed, we should be sure to say it's great to be reformed. Because it means we know the truth of God's word. And we have a realistic faith that will help us in good times and in hard times. And it draws us close to God who is a God of all power but also of all mercy. And so from an old man don't give up on being reformed because it's being biblical don't be wiser than God but do it his way may God grant that many generations in this church and throughout this land and throughout the world will continue to rejoice in biblical Christianity amen let us pray oh Lord it's so hard to remember and so easy to forget it's so hard to be disciplined and so easy to drift. And we pray, O Lord, that by the power of your Holy Spirit, the great heritage that has been handed to us might be faithfully handed on to generations yet to come. That Jesus Christ might be exalted in all of his glory, in all of his beauty, in all of his saving love, in all of his truth teaching. So encourage us, O Lord, build us up in the faith, make us faithful that we may give honor to your name and that the light of Christ might shine ever more briefly, ever more brightly in this place. For we pray in Jesus' name, amen.