Dennis Tuuri

This is the beginning of the section of Deuteronomy dealing with the fourth commandment. So Deuteronomy is a series of 10 sermons we could say about the ten commandments and this is the beginning of the fourth commandment. Please stand. Deuteronomy 14 beginning at verse 21.

You shall not eat any anything that dies of itself, you may give it to the alien who is within your gates, that he may eat it, or you may sell it to a foreigner, for you are a holy people to the Lord your God. You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk. You shall truly tithe all the increase of your grain that the field produces year by year, and you shall eat before the Lord your God in the place where he chooses to make his name abide, the tithe of your grain and your new wine and your oil, the firstborn of your herds and your flocks, that you may learn to fear the Lord your God always. But if the journey is too long for you, so that you are not able to carry the tithe, or if the place where the Lord your God chooses to put his name is too far from you.

When the Lord your God has blessed you, then you shall exchange it for money. Take the money in your hand and go to the place which the Lord your God chooses. And you shall spend that money for whatever your heart desires, for oxen or sheep, for wine or similar drink, for whatever your heart desires. You shall eat there before the Lord your God and you shall rejoice, you and your household. You shall not forsake the Levite who is with you in your gates, for he has no portion or inheritance with you.

At the end of every third year, you shall bring out the tithe of your produce of the year and store it up in your gates. And the Levite, because he has no portion or inheritance with you, and the stranger and the fatherless and the widow who are within your gates may come and eat and be satisfied that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hand which you do.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this text. Help us Lord God to understand it and specifically its relevance to us today. This side of the cross of Jesus Christ, help us to see the riches of Jesus in this text before us. Help prepare those who are going to go to RCC’s family camp in just a month and a half or so to understand what we do when we go to that place and put it in the context of this teaching from Moses from you Lord God on the fourth word.

We pray you would bless us father with a consideration of this text and the many blessings that are peppered throughout it. All of them reflecting the riches of our savior. In his name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated.

So I love this text. I have great joy whenever I read this text. It’s a wonderful set of blessings. If you notice the words that are spread throughout that text, words like be satisfied, so we have satisfaction. Words commanding us to rejoice. God’s affirmation of the physicality of who we are by telling us to use a portion of the tithe that belongs to him specifically to eat and drink good things. So there are so many things that are found in this—the exercise of community together of course underlies the whole thing particularly when it starts talking about the fatherless and the widows and the strangers.

So community is a major aspect of this text as well. And the text affirms the use of alcohol when it tells us that we can drink whatever our heart desires. And then it goes on to say wine or strong drink. Strong drink means beer. Now why don’t we know about these blessings? Why does the church of Jesus Christ still largely or at least significantly eschew all forms of alcohol, eschew all forms of you know a kind of rejoicing in the Lord with good things that he has provided to us?

Why does the church see the tithe largely as kind of a burden that we have to do, that we have to pay? Why do we reject the fourth commandment nearly totally? Why don’t we affirm the truth of the fourth commandment as it relates to us today. The fourth commandment is that remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. It’s a positive command and it has great blessings assigned to it. Well, why don’t we know these things and why don’t we rejoice in them and why don’t we see all the rich blessings that God has in the verses?

Well, it’s because we have this grace-law distinction that’s been foisted upon the church. We have this Judeo-Christian thing that keeps being spread about. You know, as I understand it, the term Judeo-Christian came from German theologians who were trying to split off the Old Testament from New Testament Christians. The idea was to take away all these laws such as the one we just read because of course, law is not grace. It’s opposed to it. And nothing could be further from the truth. God’s word, as R.J. Rushdoony used to always say, is a grace word and it is a law word. It’s good to know what you’re supposed to do for blessing. And to split off the Old Testament from the New Testament leaves us with the New Testament which has an assumption that we know about the fulfillment in Christ of all the things that are prefigured in the Old Testament and so that we can understand our New Testament.

So the whole Judeo-Christian thing has had the long-term effect of having people complain about sermons on the Old Testament when you cannot understand the New Testament apart from what the Old Testament says. Supposed Old Testament and grace and law—you know, to take those things away from each other has had disastrous and devastating effects on the church of Jesus Christ. And I think in some ways, you know, God is now, kind of recreating the church in America and will bring about a renewed church that’ll be more faithful based upon the whole of scripture.

I mean, the text here, for instance, stresses this coming together. And if we were to look at these festivals that God had ordained in the Old Testament or actually in the Mosaic law, we see that the Bible is right at the heart of it. That’s why we have a Bible talk, you know, at our family camp. That’s why most churches historically do this. They go away for a week or weekend or something. They have Bible talks. They have a good time together, you know, and that’s because they have these vague residual memories of what the people of God have always done under the interpretation of what we have here. So, you know, as a result, this text that talks about tithe and Sabbath—when tithe and Sabbath are done away with, well, we lose the blessings that are taught to us here. Or if tithe and Sabbath are observed but are not observed according to the instruction of God’s word, we again lose the blessing.

We lose joy, which is at the heart of this whole instruction to us here at the beginning of the Sabbath section. I should mention, by the way, I probably shouldn’t have read the first half of verse 21. That really belongs to the third word section. And I think the beginning of the fourth word section is that strange command not to boil a calf or a goat and its mother’s milk. Now, that’s a header to the fourth commandment because we’re prone to look at the fourth commandment and its implications, including the use of the tithe, as burdensome things.

And when we do that, we take the very source of lifegiving, joyous instruction from God and we turn it into a burdensome thing. And you know, it is true in the history of the church this has happened. And so this first part of this fourth commandment section dealing with be careful not to take what I’m going to give you here which is nourishment to your family. Nourishment specifically to your kids and don’t administer it in a way that’ll cause your kids to hate the Sabbath, to hate the provisions of tithe because it’s supposed to be the very opposite as this text instructs us.

If it’s full of rich blessings for us that we miss when we ignore the Old Testament or think that law and grace are somehow opposed to each other, when we think that Judeo-Christian the new Testament really is our book. All those things are just disastrous. They’ve been devastating for the church of Jesus Christ. Now I’ve been asked to preach a sermon relative to family camp. Again, I’ve done this a couple times over the last few years. And that’s what this sermon is. This is why you’re hearing it now. Probably should have done it a little earlier because these really these instructions here help us to understand get ourselves ready. Those of you going with the right attitude about what family camp is. And some of you may, you know, not be sure if you’re going to go or not or already decided not to go. That’s okay because this is one aspect of, you know, what we could say is Christian Sabbathkeeping.

Let me explain that. So, you know, you’ve heard this before, but the way Mosaic law works, and that’s what we’re in here. This is during the Mosaic period, Mosaic Covenant. The Mosaic covenant serves as a prism to list the riches of Jesus by articulating various aspects of the tithe and the Sabbath. So, the tithe, right, the tithe begins as a single 10%—single purpose—to give to God through his representative Melchizedek in the case of the first mention of it with Abraham and then in Mosaic legislation there’s a number of uses for the tithe. Here in this text the part of the tithe is used for rejoicing before God at the place where he’ll put his name where Jesus is we can say, right, and in that context a part of the tithe is explicitly tied to rejoicing. We’re supposed to use part of it to rejoice.

That’s why at this church we encourage people to use a portion of their tithe for funding your contribution to the agape meal, the common feast we have together. And this text informs the agape as well or common feast. What is it about? Well, it’s about, you know, a day set in the context of the hearing of God’s word. It’s a meal rather of rejoicing together in community, right? It’s a day when the when people who are alienated from community through whatever condition are brought into the community of that meal.

Much more could be said but this text informs us. And so in the Mosaic covenant we have explicitly identified several means or several uses rather of the tithe. And one is to fund rejoicing together in community. Another contained in the verses here is to care for and explicitly help people that are less fortunate need help financially who don’t get satisfied apart from what they enter into in this meal.

So what could be called the benevolent or grace aspect of the tithe is taught here. So there are several things now—the main function of the tithe is support the levitical ministers, the elders and pastors. That’s the main deal. But there are other aspects and so the Mosaic law if we forget about it. If we don’t read it, if we think it’s not for us, we no longer know that part of the tithe is to use to cause us to rejoice.

God gives us back that money. He says, you know, use it for what you really like because he wants us to rejoice with him. We lose that if we lose the Old Testament and we lose the idea, although it’s sort of referred to in Corinthians, but we lose the idea that there are specific sets of people that we’re supposed to cause to come to satisfaction and to rejoice in community with us.

Now when I read the text, you noticed that there are the third year, the sixth year. Again, that’s Mosaic legislation. And while it’s not law to us in the sense of commands that we observe because the New Testament tells us don’t observe years and months, but it informs us again. And so, you know, because of that designation, it helps us to see these other purposes or uses for the single tithe and really what the riches of Jesus are. What the riches of Jesus are.

You might have noticed, maybe you didn’t. It’s a small thing, but as it’s ending this section, this opening section of the fourth word sermon, it says that God may bless you in all your work. It would have been completely legitimate to have done a sermon during our vocation series on this text. Vocation requires—I mean to be successful in your vocation requires the blessings of God and one way to enhance your vocation either in your selection of it or your performance of it to get God’s blessing on your work which occupies most of the men’s time usually and also a lot of women’s time and the way to accomplish that is to obey the commandments relative to the tithe and to the Lord’s day. If you do that if you do this thing if you rejoice if you think of others if you bring people to satisfaction which is difficult thing in particular cases well then it says that God will bless your work so it’s a very important text and we lose all of these things if we don’t have a correct attitude to the law of God.

Here let me catch up to myself again so I wanted to begin just by sort of stating the obvious and already alluding to these things and that is our correct attitude to the law of God. And so the church has largely abandoned I think the correct attitude toward God’s law and as a result have lost all these benefits. Here’s what Psalm 119:97 says, and this was part of RCC’s original communion liturgies early on. We alluded to this frequently: “Oh how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day. Oh, how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day.”

So the question for you, the question for your children is, do they love the law of God? Is it their meditation all the day? And if it isn’t, I’d say we don’t have the heart of David or we don’t really have the heart of Jesus. You know, the law isn’t just, you know, it doesn’t it doesn’t mean just the Mosaic law. It means God’s commandments throughout the whole Bible. And the law is essentially giving God’s image bearers what he’s like. It reflects his character. Today’s law, as we meditate upon it, we find out that God has created us to have tremendous joy and we’ll have joy as we go about fulfilling the rejoicing aspect using a portion of our tithe to fund joy in our households and joy in the community.

So the law is a transcription we could say of God’s character. Now if you understand that then it’s pretty easy to say yes I do love God’s law. Okay, because I love Jesus and the law is a transcription of his character. Now, these things, you know, in days gone by were rather obvious, but because we live in times today when people pit law and grace against one another and etc., it’s gone. I pray that your attitude today is, “Oh, how I love his law.” And then the second part is it is my meditation night and day.

Oh. That’s what we’re doing today is just meditating on a little portion, a little section of God’s law. And as we meditate upon it and look at the specifics in it, we find out things about God’s purpose for us and how we attain that purpose. Right? He wants us to be joyful and we’ll attain joy as we honor him with giving him two central aspects of our life in Christ. That is the tithe and the Lord’s day.

If we honor those things and if we obey him, this text tells us through meditation on it that will be our joy which the implications of which is if you refuse to do those things and see your money as your own and your time as your own then you’re not going to be joyful in the biblical sense of the term. So a meditation on this text is what we’re engaged in today and a meditation that wants us to you know tease things out so to speak although they’re right there they’re plainly put there’s nothing that needs to be somehow with lots of convolutions of thought to come to these things.

They’re plainly stated. And as we meditate upon this section of Deuteronomy 14, then what we find is that if our work isn’t satisfying and blessing to us, maybe we should check in on how our attitude is toward the law of God. And the law, meditation upon the law, shows us that the proper use of our money, beginning with the 10% that God requires us to pay in various ways or a denial of Lord’s day and to keep it the way Christ wants us to keep it.

If we don’t ask what would Jesus do with his income and with his tithe by meditating upon Jesus’s words here, then we’re not going to be blessed in our vocations. Okay? We may get a lot of money, but it’ll turn to dust in our mouths. I was amazed. I watched Jersey Boys four seasons. I’ve seen I don’t know how many of these sorts of movies where people achieve financial success in their vocations and it turns to dust in their mouth. Just, you know, great difficulties. Don’t pray that you get rich. It seems to be something God knows that many of us just couldn’t handle well. But anyway, the key to success in vocation is meditating on texts like the one in front of us. “Oh, how I love your law. The psalmist says it’s my meditation all the day because I need to know what to do to honor God and what to do that’ll bring me success and blessing in the context of my life.”

Galatians 5:14 Paul said the law is fulfilled in one word even in this: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Now what we do with that today in the modern church that believes in Judeo-Christian Old Testament New Testament grace versus law. What we do with that is say, “See, I don’t really need these instructions here about what God’s money and the use of it and our time, what we’re supposed to do. How does that inform the use of our money today and our and the use of our time? We don’t need that. We don’t need the law. All we need to be is loving toward our neighbor.” But what does that mean? What does it mean when the Bible tells us that the tender mercies of the ungodly are bad things, right? They’re hurting us. The illustration, you know, used frequently is goldfish. I’m going to love my goldfish by giving him all the food he’ll eat. Give him more food, more food, more food, he blows up. Yeah.

So, how do we love our neighbor? Yeah, sure. Everybody would agree all we need is love. But what is love? And the text here tells us that the law is the demonstration. It’s the directions from God. how we’re supposed to love our neighbor. So, the law is very important. I could go on, but you know, throughout the New Testament, the law is viewed as a law of liberty in James, right? As the royal law, the representation of the King Jesus, and it actually is freeing to us. And yet, you know, of course, we can use the law in a way that enslaves people. But the law used properly is a method of liberty. And in today’s text, it’s a method of telling us how to rejoice, how to exercise community, how to reach satisfaction, and how to essentially fear the Lord as we’ll see again in just a minute.

So, you know, this is a text that is important and significant. You take these six or seven verses out of here and we lose tremendous instruction from God on what we’re to be doing and how we achieve the sort of blessing that comes to us in Christ. And that’s the final point before we actually look at the text briefly is that to love the law of God is to love Jesus. Jesus is reflected throughout this text, right?

I mean it talks about the offerings firstborn. Well, who’s the firstborn? It’s Jesus. What that means then is what’s the source of our joy? It’s Jesus that in this text. You could just use this text to demonstrate that, right? Jesus is portrayed in the bread, the grain rather, and the wine and the oil that’s listed here specifically as things that we bring to God. Jesus, he’s the relationship where God puts his name in this period of time. That was Jerusalem where God would establish his name. But the temple in Jerusalem or really just pictures again of Jesus Christ. Jesus is our peace. Jerusalem, the city of peace. Jesus is the temple. He makes that very clear. We said a couple of weeks ago, “Tear this temple down and I’ll rebuild it in three days.” By which he was referring to his body. So the text is just filled with references to Jesus Christ.

And so as we meditate upon these texts, what we’re doing is meditating on the riches of Jesus Christ. We’re meditating on him in the context of the triune God who’s the source of all blessing. So that’s what this text shows us and that’s what we lose when we don’t look at these kind of texts, meditate on them and let them instruct our life. Okay. So let’s just read the text again and I’ll make comments as we go through it now.

Okay, let’s do that. So as I say I think the section begins with “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.” So that’s a picture that you approach your use of the tithe your money and your use of the Lord’s day this side of the cross in a way that brings joy to your children. Okay? So you don’t want to use it in a way that doesn’t bring joy. So it gives us instructions. Well, how do we do that to bring joy to our children and to use it to nourish them?

And it says you shall surely try or you shall truly or surely tithe. Tithing you shall tithe. So it places an emphasis on the tithe. We wouldn’t know that, right? how do we bring joy and nourishment to ourselves and our families? Our first instinct wouldn’t be, well, you should tithe. But that’s what God says. He gives us this instruction manual on how this stuff works. And it’s to acknowledge God, to have his thoughts with us in all of our transactions with money, commerce, because the tithe is the part for the whole. It represents all of these things. So you shall surely tithe, he tells us. Then he says, “You shall eat before the Lord your God.” Now that’s, you know, you see that and you think, well, it’s a geographical marker. But remember, this is a text that has implications throughout time, throughout history. And so where does God place his name today? What city is it? Well, it’s not a city. It’s where people, God’s people congregate together in a heightened sense of his presence with us.

This service every Lord’s day is the place where God has placed his name. That’s where Jesus is. What would Jesus do on the Lord’s day? You’d go to church. You go to temple. And so this is where the presence of Christ is. Now, the significance of that is that we’re prone to wander. Lord, I feel it. Right? and so when God says, “Well, do this and rejoice or do this and be satisfied or do this and build community, do this and get a blessing on your vocation.”

We’re tempted just to sort of say, okay, the mechanical thing of doing this thing, going to church today, going to camp if that’s what you’d like to do as part of your observance of an application of this text. It’s certainly not a commandment or requirement today. It’s an extension of the Lord’s day, but because it’s kind of an extension the Lord’s day. It’s an extension of having a heightened sense of the awareness of Jesus with us.

I walk up the aisle at the beginning of the service. Whoever brings the word walks up the aisle representing the congregation ascending into heaven. We worship in heaven. That’s where we’re at now. Okay? And in that heavenly worship, we are in the in the very heightened we have a very heightened sense. We’re in the throne room of God. So, places everything else here, the things that we do, and it places family camp, certainly the Lord’s service in a heightened sense that we’re in the presence of God.

We don’t want, you know, decorum because decorum is a cool virtue somehow. We want to have a sense of the presence of God. And so at camp, we have this heightened sense of the presence of God. If it’s a camp that represents what Deuteronomy 14 is talking about, as we meditate upon it. Okay, so it’s in the place. He says this a couple of times and the first thing he tells us that the purpose of this is to learn to fear the Lord your God always.

So he gives us the goal of the whole thing of our proper use of the tithe and the Lord’s day and the goal is that we might understand advance an understanding of the fear of God. So again there has to be this sense of the presence God in a heightened way to us according to this these verses. And that’s key to everything else. And then he says, okay, so you take your tithe to the place where God puts his name. You’re going to fear the Lord. And what does it mean to fear the Lord? And he says in verse 26 rather, that you can then take the money, the tithe. Back then it was agricultural. So you turn it into money. And then you would in this time this rejoicing feast at the end of the calendar—the seven calendar events listed in Leviticus 23 feast of booths rejoicing for the young gathering that all nations will be discipled you know you’d hear the word preached and stuff well the other part of the context is whatever your heart desires you can buy that wine strong drink beer in other words whatever your heart desires you can repeat it twice for emphasis you know give stuff you like to bring to the agape or to have in your cabin at family camp.

“You shall rejoice you and your household.”

Now, that’s really cool. I really like this text. Well, how could I not like the text of God’s word? But this one brings in things that are so corrective to our culture. And the first thing we see here is if the purpose is the fear of God and you’re going to do that by rejoicing. That tells us something about the fear of God, right? We again like law and grace, we would tend to separate those things.

But the greatest joy is the presence of Christ with us through the Holy Spirit manifesting the Father. So it says, well, you got these notions of fear and joy that there’s somehow in opposition, but I’m causing you, I’m commanding you to rejoice because I know that the end result of that will be a higher fear of me, a proper fear of me. It’ll inform that fear and you’ll be blessed. The text commands us to rejoice.

It’s commanded rejoicing. That’s really good for us to hear. It’s really good, you know, that God tells us every Lord’s day, go where Jesus is. Go where his body is, including his people, and sing songs of joy and praise. It doesn’t say go there and feel joyous and praising. It says go sing songs. We engage in liturgical ritual actions, commanded actions because God knows that’s what’s going to help us actually end up very thankful and joyous.

We sing unto thanksgiving. We sing unto joy. We don’t sing because we’re joyful. I mean, certainly we do that, too. But if we’re not feeling particularly joyful, it is good to go and praise God and to put things in proper perspective. Okay. So the text brings together the fear of the Lord and rejoicing and he commands us to rejoice together. So right away if you’re thinking if you’re going to go to camp this year or you’re thinking about your attitude when you come to church, those are two things to teach your kids.

Remember this is about how to nourish your children as well as what we do. And what we’re to teach our children is to have a heightened sense of the presence of God where we’re at. Right? Some of us do that with clothes. Some of us do it different ways. A heightened sense of the presence of the king. We go into heaven to worship him. Your kids should know that. And then secondly, it’s not a time to quake in the sense of being fearful of a blow upon us from an ungracious king.

It’s a time to rejoice. Even though we don’t feel like rejoicing, God has commanded us to rejoice. His love for us is inestimable. The riches of Christ are that he brings us joy even in the midst of our deepest sorrows and troubles. So that’s what the text says. You’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to rejoice. It’s legitimate to have wine, no problem. Beer, no problem. No, we can’t do it at the camp we’re at there, but we can do it here.

And people do it here. Doesn’t mean you have to do that. It’s what your heart desires. And of course, the prohibitions against drunkenness are assumed. So, so you know, we have the fear of God is the is the purpose here. And then, joy is what we’re to see as the result of us using a portion of our tithe. to finance good food, good drink, etc. at camp.

The third thing I’d like to point out is down in verse 29, another aspect of the tithe what you could call the benevolent section. You know, you meet with the widows within your gates and the fatherless and the stranger that they may come and eat and be satisfied. So the third thing that happens here is satisfaction is brought about to people whose lives are difficult. Satisfaction. So God tells us that one of the ways that satisfaction in our lives is supposed to be obtained is by us doing the things that many Christians find is, you know, bad, Old Testament, Jewish, whatever it is.

And we’re to do those things, use our time and our money in relationship to God and his special presence and Lord’s day worship. to extend that out into our meal and then our time at camp. If you go to camp, it says that this is how satisfaction is reached ultimately. We need to know that we need to know how we everybody wants to be satisfied. Satisfaction is what you know we all would like. We all would like joy.

And God says he commands you to go do it doing joy in a particular way and we do it. And he tells us that when you live in community with other people both and you will have greater satisfaction. That’s the other thing going on here. It’s all about community. It says that our life in order to obtain joy, the fear of the Lord, to achieve satisfaction is to live in community together, right? None of this happens in somebody’s private closet, you know, devotional time.

It’s great that people do that. But these things are stressing the significance of the corporate body of Christ, the church, the people, community. And these events we can assume then are community building. And of course they are. We had an instruction yesterday from Kristen Silva, the fourth and final training in biblical counseling for community group leaders. And it was specifically on depression.

You know, how you can sort of spot it, what to do to help people through it. and one of the biggest things to spot it is people stop hanging out with. They stopped coming to community group. they stopped coming to the common meal we have to go to the Lord’s day. Now, lots of reasons for not coming to the meal on the Lord’s day. Lots of reasons to miss family camp. But isolation from community is a is a big picture that whoever has care for people, your community group leader, your other community group participants, if you see people moving into isolation on a regular pattern, you know that’s a that’s a sign that all is not well.

So community is talked about in this text and so community is the source of satisfaction, joy and the fear of the Lord. So that’s talked about in the text as well. And then finally the last verse, the Lord your God then may bless you in all the work of your hand which you do. So the proper observance and use of this aspect of your tithe and this aspect of your time, okay, your what you do in Lord’s day, for Lord’s day, instead of going off on your own, meditating, you get in community, you have good food, good drink, you affirm the goodness of God’s created bodies, you rejoice together, you hang out outside, all in the sense with the sense of knowing that we’re in the presence of God.

This is what eternal life is like, right? That’s what it’s going to be like after the resurrection. And our bodies are renewed and Jesus comes back to earth. It’s going to be like that. Okay. So, so blessing in vocation is obtained by obedience to these commandments. And it’s not obvious how all that happens. You can think about it. Well, yeah, if you take a day off, it’s kind of refreshing to your body. Maybe more importantly, it reorients you to the kingdom of God so that you enter back into vocation, seeking God first and his kingdom in your vocation.

And as a result, your vocation is blessed. And you can’t leave out the personal interaction of God through the Holy Spirit blessing our vocations. When we understand that the Christian faith is a proper fear of God that results in joy and community and satisfaction, that certainly fuels us and reorients us on our vocation. And of course, it’s also good on the Lord’s day or a week at camp, you know, times you can reflect on your vocation and you know how to line it up again with having God as the focus.

It’s interesting too that the text ends with this blessing of God at your vocation and going back in the original couple of verses it says that you take these things you take your tithe the things that God has blessed you with. So the whole section begins with the blessing of God on your vocation tells you how to use the fruit of that and then ends with an assurance that God will bless your vocation.

God knows the significance of our work and so he tells this is what drives thing is his grace in giving us blessing and what God then graciously causes our vocation to prosper as we love Jesus and Jesus said if you love me do what I command. So this text has is brings us a great source of blessing and instructs us in how to go about doing church and how to go about, you know, doing extended time together away from our normal places. We are go to, you know, camp-like structures, hear the word of God, and all informed by Deuteronomy 14.

I just love the text because it affirms so much of what the proper sense of being a Christian is all about and fights against so many of the doctrines that the modern church has embraced that are completely against the word of God. So that’s what this thing is all about is telling us, you know, how we act as Christians in the midst of our world.

Let me just mention briefly and then we’ll conclude. Toby Sumpter is our speaker at camp this year. Let me just tease you a little bit on what he’ll be bringing us, what kind of Bible teaching he’ll be bringing us at camp. The title for the whole set of talks is “The Gospel According to the Trees: Seeing Jesus Everywhere.” Talk number one: “Typology of Systematic Theology: The Gospel According to Dragons.” So we’re going to hear from Toby who’s quite a dynamic speaker on how the Bible encourages us to see the good news according to the trees. Second, “The Good News According to Dragons.”

His next talk is “The Gospel According to Animals: Stories as Catechism.” His next talk will be “The Gospel According to Clothing: Parables as Warfare.” And then “The Gospel According to Song: Poetry and Antithesis.” And finally, “The Gospel According to Fire: The Bible is Food.” So very intriguing. Hopefully it peaks your curiosity. And I think what he’s going to do is give us the results of what we’re called to do when we say, “Oh, how I love your law. I meditate on it day and night. It’s my meditation.” He’s meditated on the gospels, how the life of Jesus is reflected in the world in which we live and how these various themes pull out the meaning of the good news, the proclamation of the savior, king, and his ascension to the right hand of the father. I’m looking forward to it anxiously. Hopefully, you are, too.

Well, may the Lord give us his blessing then as we enter into the rest of this day. May we be informed here and at camp of the context that surrounds us here and what we’re going to be doing in those times as we’ve meditated upon them according to Deuteronomy 14.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the nourishment of your word. We thank you, Lord God, that as we see these truths, we are nourished. We’re built up. We see the riches of the Lord Jesus Christ reflected in this text. And we thank you, Father, for him and for his great love for us and your great love for us.

We thank you for the work of the Holy Spirit both in Lord’s day worship and also in times like our upcoming family camp when we meet together. Restore and reflect community and rejoice in your presence. Bless us, Father, then throughout the rest of this day as we fellowship and then particularly as well in our preparations for camp. In Jesus name we pray. Right. Amen.