July 22

Passing the Baton

I am back from vacation and excited to connect with you again. I hope you have been faithfully keeping up your daily Bible reading. Summer schedules and vacations can seriously affect our spiritual disciplines. If you fall behind, just mark the dates you missed and read the current day.

Today we run into a very familiar theme with the book of Nahum. It is the danger of not passing the baton of faith to the next generation and reaping terrible consequences because of it. This is a theme close to my heart because this is one of the core values of our church.

The significance of the book of Nahum is found in the dating and the location. The prophet is writing to the same city Jonah preached to, 110 years later. It is now 663 BC and Nahum preaches this sermon warning the great grandchildren of the revival that their wickedness is so great that God is required to judge them. How can a culture fall away from the Lord that quickly? 4 reasons....

1. They forgot the TRUTH about God. God is a holy God and he will not allow any sin or wickedness to go unpunished. 1:2-6 The people have misunderstood the patience of God as weakness. They seriously miscalculated the truth of God’s character. God’s holiness is not some thing you want to mess with.

2. They forgot the truth about sin. Sin is missing the mark of God’s standard. This city stood against God, they were party animals only concerned with their own entertainment. They did not worship the true God but idols. They were filled with pride. They were violent and finally they were into the occult and New Age practices. These are the sins they turned from a 100 years earlier, but now they have gone back to their old ways. No one was reading their Bibles anymore.

3. They forgot the Consequences of sin. 3:5-7 There is always a payday for sin!!! Numbers 32:23 You may be sure that your sins will find you out. The wages of sin is death, Romans 3:23 The TRUTH about God is that God hates sin and will eventually punish it. This is not something you will hear on Oprah or Jerry Springer today. But one day God’s patience will run out. There is always a payday for sin. This applies to individuals as well as nations.

4. Finally, they forgot to make time to pass the baton of faith to the next generation. It is easy to become prosperous and forget the mission. The mission is to make disciples of all nations. That is the heart of God. Somewhere in the city of Nineveh, a group of believers thought that disciplemaking was someone else’s responsibility. Every believer needs to have a strategy for passing the baton of faith to the next generation.

Any correlation between what happened in this book and the USA is strictly intentional. You could substitute the letters USA for Nineveh. We are living through the greatest decline in culture in the history of our nation. We are on the exact same pathway as Nineveh was. We have lost the culture wars and we are losing our children to the culture in alarming numbers. The impact that we are having on the next generation is non-existent.

So where is the hope in the book of Nahum?
Nahum 1:7 The Lord is good, a refuge in times of trouble. He cares for those who trust in him,
Make God your refuge; trust in him, trust in his word, trust in his promises.
Once you have made God your refuge, then teach the next generation how to make God their refuge.
Pray for someone you can take through this Bible reading journey next year.