Sermon preached on Sunday, July 8, 2012 at Garden Valley Chapel during our morning worship service based on Psalm 78:1-8.

Turn in your Bible, if you will, to the seventy-eighth chapter of the book of Psalms - Psalms seventy-eight.

I invite you to stand in the reading of God´s Word. Read Psalm 78:1-8.

This probing psalm is known as an instructive psalm. It tells a story with its various flashbacks into Israel´s history, and all along its aim is to instruct the people of God - thus an instructive psalm.

That is just the nature of history; it is meant to instruct. It is also called a teaching psalm. It´s didactic in nature.

There is much to learn from this psalm and I believe it will probe all of us gathered here today.

I also believe this psalm to be pivotal to our church´s history. That is to say we are at the brink of a new season in this church´s history and I believe it is important to remind us all of what we are to pass on to the next generation. This is both our privilege and responsibility to be carried out.

Our prayer is that far better men will arise in the next generation who will "tell to the generation to come the praises of the LORD, and His strength and His wondrous works that He has done" (v. 4).

Men can you taste it? If the Lord allows, for us to see our children teach these things to their children "that the generation to come might know, even the children yet to be born" (v. 5). Oh for such a day! I want to see such a day. God grant us days that we may see such wondrous fruit!

As Spurgeon wrote -

"God pays back with interest in the next generation. Where the children of the righteous are not godly, there must be some reason for it in parental neglect, or some other guilty cause."

May the Lord keep us from any parental neglect and cause us to remember our duty, our task, our calling as parents.