A Failing Generation - By Wayne Weaver

Let's establish one thing first. You know that in all my years’ ministry, I have always preached the central truth that salvation is in Christ alone. There is no other name whereby men might be saved. Don't misconstrue from this lesson that our salvation depends on our good works. My subject here is not salvation but living out our faith on this earth.

A man from Louisiana called me several times recently. His heart is heavy for his church there. "We love the Lord and we come together Sunday mornings and praise and worship the Lord, but all of our children are turning to the world," he said. He has four children, and he is burdened that his church is not providing a foundation for the children. "We have Jesus, we have the power of the Holy Spirit, and that's fine. But there are some other teachings that need to be put in place for our children to build on down through generations to come."

While it's wonderful that we have learned to rely on the Word and live in the power of the Holy Spirit, if we lose the strong values that we learned as children--the values of hard work and responsibility--then we have lost everything. We cannot focus on the spiritual to the exclusion of our physical lives. Faith without works is dead.

In a familiar parable found in Matthew 21, we find a father asking his two sons to work in his vineyard. The first said he wouldn't work but later repented and reported for duty. The second said, "Yes Sir, I'll do it," but never got around to it. Most of us are like that second son. Often we are a negligent people, procrastinating and irresponsible.

Some of us are heading for trouble in our old age. We have opted out of Social Security, but we are accumulating nothing to supply for our future. We may no longer be part of a government program, but we still think like those relying on government--we're afraid of hard work and expect easy money to come along somehow.

Worse yet, we're imparting those same values to our children, and they expect more and more for less and less work. Why are we afraid to teach our children what we were taught? They need the same strong foundation. They must learn to be hard workers, not afraid of a little sweat. They need to be good managers, responsible for holding a job. We need to establish fertile fields for our children. Some of you in the past have looked down on your heritage, but you still can't get away from old-fashioned mashed potatoes and homemade bread, can you? That's the kind of fertile fields we must establish for our children, the strong values and firm traditions of hard work and patient endurance that come from working a field year after year after year.

Yes, there are faults in our heritage. Too many of our traditional beliefs center on works and not on faith. But in moving away from faulty beliefs, be careful not to lose the wonderful and Godly values that we inherited as well. There is nothing more beautiful than to come to church on Sunday morning and hear the people rejoicing in the Lord and know that this day of rest follows a week of very hard work and a week of teaching our children to work hard.

Some men are content to be nothing, to have no affect on another's life, to do nothing that makes a difference. The world has told us to be wimps, to get along as best we can and live as easy a life as possible. That kind of attitude is contrary to God's expectations. God is looking to us to be men, to make a difference in our church and in our world. He doesn't want the easy lip service that the second son gave. He wants us to work hard in his vineyard.

A successful man isn't one who pushes the right buttons and finds everything runs smoothly. A successful man is one who, when bumped off the horse and down in the dust with the horse running all around him, still gets up and goes after that horse.

I was working with some people in New York City some years ago, and I admired them because of their great faith. They could speak with swelling words of faith about God and his miracles. But when I learned to know them, they had no faith at all. They were like the second son, promising much but delivering nothing. They didn't act on the faith they professed.

I appreciate our heritage that when a barn burns down the whole community gets together and works to rebuild that barn. There is not a lot of spirituality in that, but combine it with the richness of the spiritual life, and you've got some fertile ground to pass on to your children. We're here to help each other, not just at the altar but also in raising barns and working on one another's homes and so on. We think it is being less spiritual if no one is crying or repenting, but the life of a servant is one of meeting very practical needs as well as spiritual needs.

Of course there are people out there who never established a strong foundation of hard work and who always have their hand out for easy help. We need to discern the motives of such people and deal with them accordingly, but don't point to them as an excuse not to help others in times of need.

When you sign the papers for the Social Security exemption, you are signing a pledge to provide for yourself and to take care of others when they are old. You are promising to take care of your mom and dad and others in need in the church. Are you willing to make such a commitment? If not, you were wrong to sign the Social Security exemption.

The lesson of hard work and service to others is one of the most important we can teach our children, because their generation has so utterly rejected that lesson. The dream of light work and easy money tempts the young at every turn, so at home they must learn a much different lesson, the lesson we learned from our parents of a very different generation.

Parents, we need to teach our children how to work hard helping others, how to care for our old people and look out for the sick and shut-ins, how to cook and bake and care for the home. Such good things won't take them to heaven, but they are what our heavenly Father commands. And they are the things that our heritage has taught us so well.

We need to be examples of compassion and endurance, of strength and forthrightness. We get the notion that meekness requires weakness, but in fact the opposite is true. Meekness is extreme strength in moderation. Meekness in a man implies a strength under control, an ability to stand firm in the midst of shifting winds. Moses was a man of meekness; look at all the things that came against him, but he continued to walk right on without pandering to selfish fears and desires. We need to be men like Moses, and we must teach our sons to be like Moses, strong and faithful in good works.

Some of the business people I meet are almost desperate because they can't get good employees any more. Nobody wants to work. I had one man tell me he was offered $22 an hour to do dry walling up at Jacob's Field in Cleveland, and he was one of a very few to accept the offer. The firm had to hire another company to help. The man was a union worker and said other union workers didn't want to do it because the work was too hard. At $22 an hour they turned down the work because they didn't like it. "Oh, we don't like dry walling, so we don't dry wall." Such attitudes have no place in the Christian life. We need to be disciplined, willing to endure with patience and a good attitude.

I myself have heard people in dire financial straits say, "I don't like this job. I'd rather not do that." I cannot understand that mentality. I have learned to like everything I do, even if it's hauling manure. Someone came and laid ceramic tile in our entranceway, and when I saw them I said, "That's something I'd like to do." I learned what I could and took some marble I had and laid it down in the entranceway to my office. It looks great. I'd love to be a marble layer. For that matter, I'd like to be a painter. After I paint walls I stand back in admiration, loving the new and fresh look. We need to enjoy the work set before us and jump into it with excitement and a Godly attitude.

Titus 3:8 tells us that believers in God are careful to maintain good works. "These things are good and profitable unto men." God has ordained for us to work hard, and there are no shortcuts. People fall for scheme after scheme trying to get around work, but true and Godly profitability is found only in hard work. We receive so many phone calls from marketing people who won't even say their name, and now Amway hides under another title. Why? People trying to make easy money are never up front about it. But there is nothing slick or underhanded in hard, honest work.

Titus goes on to say in 3:14: "And let ours also learn to maintain good works for necessary uses, that they be not unfruitful." James makes the case even stronger in James 2:18: "Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works." How many people, like those I met in New York, go out and speak the words of faith but have nothing to back up those words? Like the second son in the parable, we have Christians who live lives of hypocrisy and who don't back up their words with discipline and endurance and good works. They bring shame on the name of Christ.

Perhaps our own traditions have been effective because we stress work more than education. I have always told people in the store that what we can't do with our heads we do with our hands. President Clinton says we need to educate our people and we'll have less unemployment. I would some day like to be on nationwide TV and tell the world, "You just need to work hard. You can have all the education you want, but if you don't like to work you'll never get anywhere."

Along with hard work goes responsibility. We must take responsibility for our own selves, our own families, our own communities, and our own futures, and not give up that responsibility to the government. As children of God we are children of responsibility, for God has given responsibility to all his children. We must be willing to figure out what we need, set it aside in discipline, and not wait for Uncle Sam to do it for us. Then we will be free to pursue our spiritual obligations as well.

One government program for farmers is known as a set-aside program. The government will actually pay you money to set aside land and not farm it, because we have too much grain already and they want to control the prices. So every year I get a letter asking me to consider going on the set-aside program, but I have never allowed myself to be part of that. I don't believe people should keep looking to the government for the answer to their problems.

Christians need to take responsibility for their own solutions--and for the problems themselves. We all know people who cast blame every time something goes wrong. Everybody else is the problem. I know one company that will fire workers as soon as an attitude problem develops, knowing where such attitudes will lead. "The boss is too hard on me. The policy isn't fair." You've heard all the excuses. This is another area of temptation for our children, because the world tells them they don't have to be responsible for themselves. But the message we give them must be different.

If we are grounded in the Word, we will stand firm against the spirit of laziness that runs rampant in this world. One Sunday I was on my way up to the church in Meadville, and up ahead I saw a pile of something beside the interstate. It looked like a huge shrub or something, but I couldn't make out what it was. As I got closer, I realized it was an uprooted tree with the roots still intact. Let me tell you something. That tree had a wonderful root system, but it had been rooted in bad ground, and when the wind came the ground gave way. There were little rocks sticking in those roots; the tree had latched tight on to those rocks, but the rocks themselves were not a fitting foundation. The Bible talks about the seed that falls on stony ground, and a heart of laziness and selfish concern is a stony ground that will never hold in the storm. You can read the Word and quote the Word and show impressive roots, but if the ground itself is faulty, those roots will never hold. Ephesians 3:17 says, "That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith that ye being rooted and grounded in love." We must give our children a fertile field to grow their roots into, a grounding that will hold firm.

The scriptures say we are different. We have been born again into new ways of thinking and behaving. Let the unbelievers be lazy and slothful and discontent and dishonest and complainers, but let the redeemed stand firm and upright. Joshua and Caleb looked across the hills of the promised land and said, "Yes, in God's strength we can take it." But the other spies said, "Oh, no, that looks far too hard." We must be like Joshua and Caleb and give our generation, now wandering in the wilderness, some hope and incentive to work hard and to care for others, to take the burdens of their community upon themselves