Pastor of My Home

I gave the lesson this morning in my Sunday School class (adults, not a class I work in for kids).

We're going through the Psalms, and our regular leader Darryl asked each man in the class to take one Psalm and give the lesson on it that Sunday.  I ended up picking Psalm 90.

I'm ashamed to admit I procrastinated a lot in preparing for this lesson.  I read through the Psalm several times in the weeks leading up to today, but I didn't start looking up commentaries until last night.

Psalm 90 is the oldest Psalm of all 150, and the only one written by Moses.  It contrasts God and His infallible, omnipotent, permanent nature with our existence being only to serve Him.  One commentator I read, Matthew Henry, proposed that Moses wrote this Psalm right after the nation of Israel had been sentenced to wander the desert for 40 years.  It puts a different spin on to think of hearing this after you've been told you've messed up one too many times, and you've now lost out on a dream you've been eagerly anticipating.

I picked this Psalm because of verse 12.  How ironic that I procrastinated on a lesson on Scripture that challenges us to maintain good time management.

I took a little bit of class time to also share the memory verse system that my youth pastor Ron shared with me back in high school.  Our Sunday School class has been talking about the importance of memorizing Scripture, so I wanted to share this method that worked so well for me.  Granted, I fell off the wagon with it due to all my traveling at D&T, but I had over 300 verses memorized at one point.  I need to do better at this now that I'm consistently at home every night.

I was frustrated that I ran out of time and that we as a class didn't get to fully discuss the Psalm, but I heard once that it was better to just wrap it up when time is exhausted.  Better to leave your audience wishing you had had time to say more than wishing you had stopped earlier (and probably missing the point of your message in the process).  We had our annual Ministry Fair in between services this morning, so both services were sliced a little to accommodate it.

I spoke to Darryl briefly after class.  He thanked me for speaking and gave me some insight on why he had the men in the class each take a class session.  I had thought it was him just wanting a break since finishing Colossians.  He said that at some point, when you have a family, every man becomes a pastor of his own home.  He felt this was a good practice environment for all of us.  That really struck me.  I know that if God is calling me to marry and have kids, I need to be a spiritual leader and lead family devotions, etc.  But I hadn't actively connected it into doing advance prep when I do those things.  It shouldn't be me looking at our family devotions at the same time as I share them, I will need to put in the extra time to familiarize myself with the lesson ahead of time.  That's how important the dad job is.