Family

 



Proverbs 4:1-2 “Hear, my children, the instruction of a father, and give attention to know understanding; For I give you good doctrine: Do not forsake my law.

While on vacation last summer at the Iowa Great Lakes, we stopped into a shop and I snap a shot of these sign that really stated a serious problem in our culture today. Being around for decades, there is an advantage of remembering how things used to be compared to today. It has been well researched and documented that the family unit in society has been in decline for a long time and as a result “friends” and “busyness” have filled the gaps and voids left when the natural order of family relations, loving family relationships and interaction was vacated. Christian organizations like the American Family Association, Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, and many others have been voicing their concerns on this subject for a long time. People are starving for true, godly “family relations”. This sign is the radical counter-culture rejection and mocking of “the family” that result from the neglect of the family order people are hard-wired to need. You see this being acted out on television and in our movies also. The consequential results of the lack of social lines are being reaped by our society today and it is not “progress” or “improvement”. Where is honor, respect and manners these days? I remember the days when if me or anyone else crossed those lines, a family member (my grandparents, my parents, my uncles or aunts, my siblings or cousins), would straighten me out immediately. Friends are good, but not family. People need boundaries of godly life order and a family to maintain them for comfort, contentment and security, without which is chaotic, looking for family love and care in all the wrong places, while becoming a dog-eat-dogs, survival- of-the-fittest culture. Look at the fowl language being used today as swear words that used to get your mouth washed-out with a bar of soap by mom in the past, are now sadly common.

Ephesians 3:14-16  “For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named,  that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man.”

The old saying goes: “Blood is thicker than water”, meaning that family ties are always more important than the ties you make among friends. A family is not just a group of individuals living under the same physical roof. God ordained and created the family as the central unit of human kinship, a household under the head of parents in fellowship with a common lineage of descendants on a branch of a genealogy tree of ancestors. It’s us that mess up and pervert that original design and intent of God. If families are not doing their job, per the job description written by our heavenly Father, then someone else will and it will be wrong. God, Himself is called, “our Father”. Leaving God and the God designed family out of the equation is never right. Many families have maintained God design and they are strong.

1 John 3:1 “Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! Therefore the world does not know us, because it did not know Him.

I see a healthy rejection of the counter-culture manifesto, and surprising by the younger generation that has been cheated and deprived by the hijacking of the God-designed family with all its natural benefits in life, and returning to their roots of the family model. It’s encouraging, but those days of calling out the disrespect, dishonoring behavior and the demanding the standards of good manners and social decency need to return. Repent means that when we find ourself on the wrong road of lawless unrighteousness, to literally make a U-turn and go back to the right road to godly righteousness, back to God and His design for our life … back to the family by God and back to the family of God.

In Christ, Brian