Psalm 78:7 Then they would put their trust in God
    and would not forget his deeds
    but would keep his commands.

Here we have the objective of communicating faith history to succeeding generations. It’s not just to maintain tradition, it is so that those succeeding generations would trust God and be obedient to Him. Failures in this pattern are recorded repeatedly in the Old Testament, where people didn’t trust Yahweh and so turned to other gods, or to strictly human alliances, and so were explicitly disobedient to what He had commanded for their good. The Bible doesn’t just give us good examples to follow, it gives us bad examples to avoid, as well. And that comes back to the most fundamental venue for transmitting such things: the family. Particularly for the past hundred years, we have tended to entrust religious education and training to institutions of one sort or another, rather than grounding them in parent/child interactions. It’s not that schools, either secular or religious, are bad, it’s that they aren’t enough. And now, just in the past very few years, things are shifting even further, with some young people turning to AI before turning to real people. That’s a sure recipe for disaster! The AI debate is heated at the moment, but we need to come back to that most fundamental connection of parents and children. Society today tends to tell parents they aren’t “qualified” to teach their children, because they don’t have all the information. The thing is nobody has all the information, and this kind of transmission is far more than simply information anyway. This is about establishing a firm foundation for life. Some translations say “hope” here, and some say “trust,” and I’m sure there are other variations, but the point is establishing God as the ground, the base, of everything, and that is better done by parents than any other way. The thing is, such attitudes are caught at least as much as they are taught. That is, the parents need to live their lives on the foundation of trusting and obeying God, or their words will be hollow and hypocritical. This is what integrity is all about. The Japanese term for integrity is literally, “agreement of words and actions.” If parents live out their commitment to Christ, the probability of their children following suit increases exponentially. And here we run into human fallibility. No parent, no person, gets it right all the time. We need humility, but we don’t need a false humility that says God can’t use us to get the job done.

As a parent, grandparent, and great-grandparent, this hits close to home. I had excellent parents in this regard, but God is the judge of how well I’ve done with my own descendants. Since at this point they all live on the other side of the Pacific Ocean from me, interaction is limited. However, I have quantities of spiritual children right here close to me, and I need to transmit God’s truth to them as well. “Succeeding generations” can have multiple meanings! I am to be especially careful of my integrity, living out the things God says through me. The letter of James is certainly applicable! I am not to draw back from speaking God’s truth, but I must always do so in love, so as not to distort the image of Christ in me. I am to be a good spiritual father so that as many as possible may enter a right relationship with their heavenly Father, for their salvation and His glory.

Father, thank You for this reminder. Thank You for the privilege of communicating Your Word. May I do so faithfully and effectively, in my life as well as my words, for the blessing of many and for Your glory. Thank You. Praise God!