Well, good morning. It’s a pleasure to be with you. If you are visiting with us, on screen, my name is Derek Wells and I’m the Pastor of Shepherding and Discipleship here at Christ Covenant. It’s a privilege to be with you this morning. I guess the first thing that I should say is Happy Mother’s Day. If you’re a mom out there, I hope you feel loved and appreciated and celebrated already this morning.

We are nearing the end of a long series in the Gospel of John. It’s been a great, insightful series and this Sunday we’re going to actually take a break and do a topical sermon from Deuteronomy chapter 6. Keven originally planned to be traveling during this time and with COVID it’s kind of altered things, but we’ll be back in the Gospel of John next Sunday.

The title of this sermon is “The Hero of the Home.” Now, I didn’t calculate that it would be Mother’s Day when I gave it this title. Neither did I calculate that the spotlight would be on the life of our home as much as it’s been the last few months. And you may feel like this, Derek, the hero of the home, I don’t know if hero and home is something that I would put together. In fact, it seems like the life of my home has revealed more villains than heroes of late. Well, if that’s true, hopefully this sermon will be for you.

There will be some take-aways for the family, but you know, as I studied, the net kind of got wider and I began to think of not just “the family” but the covenant family of God. And so hopefully you will see some broader application for all of us as well as we move into this sermon. In fact, they’ll be much in keeping with what we’ve been hearing in the book of Nehemiah in our Sunday night series. You know, on the centrality and the presence of God’s Word in the life of His people, and so I want us to think about God’s Word, particularly in light of the mundane.

You know, the mundane parts of your life, the ordinary parts of your life. How does God’s Word converge with the ordinary parts of your life? Your Monday through Saturday. And to that end, I want to give you three convergences to think through that form our outline this morning, is one our hope, two our heart, and three our habits. Our hope, our heart, our habits.

The book of Deuteronomy is at least in part a summary sermon to the nation of Israel from Moses. In the first few chapters, Moses is recounting the history of the nation of Israel, but it’s not just a recitation, it’s not just a history lecture or a history lesson. He’s not just laying out one even and then this event happened and that event happened, not just sharing information, but it’s more, the book is more a theological reflection. And even more so, a pastoral reflection for a people, to a generation, whose about to enter the Promised Land.

And with that is a plea from a pastor. We can look at Moses’ sermon in chapters 1 through 11 as something of a plea before a people who are about to enter the Promised Land, and he lays before them ultimately in the book, the way of obedience and blessing and the way of disobedience and cursing.

And at the heart of this is one of the most famous passages in the Old Testament, and that’s Deuteronomy chapter 6 and verses 4 through 9. So please follow along with me as I read in God’s Word.

Hear the word of the Lord.

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, walk by the way and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand,