Who is your family?

 

In my last article, I talked about the goodness of family, and that we as Christians should promote and support families. But many people do not have great families, and because of that they lack the natural support that is supposed to come from a Dad, Mom, siblings, and extended family. In our current culture we do see more brokenness in families than in previous generations, it is not a new problem in the world. Scripture tells us on a number of occasions to look after widows and orphans (see James 1:27; Psalm 146:9), so we know that throughout time people have been without good families.

The biblical solution is not just to set up a program to minister to the needs of people “out there” who need help, but rather to become a new family. When questioned about His family Jesus did this: “And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother”” (Matthew 12:49-50). In other words, Jesus was intentionally setting up the church to be a new kind of family. We see the early church live this out when they started to meet in the homes of members and treat one another like a big extended family (Acts 2:42-47). 

This new eternal family will last longer than our earthly families. For those who follow Jesus, God is our Father because we are adopted into His family (Galatians 4:5, Romans 8:15) and Jesus is our older brother (Hebrews 2:11, Romans 8:29). In light of this in the early church they called one another brothers and sisters. In that culture, family was the source of your identity, so for the early church to welcome outsiders as family was a very big deal. The gospel is open to anyone who follows Jesus, so this new family included people of all kinds of ethnic and economic backgrounds. 

Now if Christians really live like family, we are going to get uncomfortable. People who are different than us can be part of this family. They might have different customs, and they might even have shady backgrounds. They might not know how to behave properly in church society, especially if they have had the blessing of a good earthly family. And frankly, we might be that person for someone else. They might look at us and think, I do not want that person in my family! But just like with human families, the kids don’t get to choose. It is the Father who draws people into the family and adopts them. If we do not accept those who He accepts, then we are dishonoring our heavenly Father, and we will miss out on the blessings of God’s family where love, grace, and mercy reign. Just like we receive those from Him, we have the opportunity to show that kind of family love to people who might not have experienced it before.

In practice this means being willing to have people in your home for meals or even providing shelter when necessary. It means taking time to listen and be a friend. It means going into places, homes, and communities where they live to show that you care about them on their own turf. Obedience to God is challenging because He wants us to become like Him and welcome those He welcomes. But take heart, He is a good Father and He wants good for you too. Helping to welcome the single person, the widow, the orphan, and the disconnected, into the family will be a blessing to you and the rest of the family.

The Goodness of Family

Have you ever taken someone for granted and not understood their importance until they were gone? Sometimes the good things in our lives are like background music that we don’t even know is playing. A few years ago, I was listening to a news report about how to fix some of the societal problems in depressed areas, and various solutions were offered such as better education, better healthcare, counseling, and more social services in general. I was fascinated that at no point did any of the reporters mention the word family or talk in any way about how to restore and/or strengthen families. Yet, I can show you in study after study that family breakdown precedes larger societal breakdown. Family is so fundamental to our well-being that we sometimes take it for granted and only feel its lack when we see so many people hurt by not having it.

Even Christian ministries can get so focused on doing social good and sharing the good news about Jesus that we can take family for granted. I was reading 1 Timothy 5 the other day where Paul is instructing Timothy and the church about how to take care of widows who would otherwise be destitute. In the midst of encouraging the church to this good social work, Paul makes this comment in verse 8, “But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” The family was so central in society that Paul assumes that even non-Christians would take care of their relatives, and that the church should only have to come along and help those who have no family to take care of them.

The Bible story is a family story from the creation account of the first family to the Old Testament history which follows family lines, and into the New Testament where Christ comes to adopt people into a new eternal family. While the church should be a family, it is clear from Paul’s admonition that it does not replace the physical family. We were created to function best in families. Most men and women have a natural and God-given desire to have a mate and so should seek to get married. Marriage is one of the good things God has given us, and we should show and tell young people about its goodness. Further, kids were meant to be raised with their Dad and Mom in a secure marriage, and on average have much better outcomes when they are.

Even as we age, having family is the best social security that you can have. Just like in Paul’s day, it is still much better to have family to rely upon than an impersonal government program. The other day, I got to take a 4 generation picture with my dad, my son, and my granddaughter, and later this week, our family will celebrate my wife’s parent’s 50th anniversary. It is great being part of a legacy of faith and family that runs for generations. While none of us is perfect and our families are not perfect, our parents have given us a firm foundation upon which to continue building no matter what happens in the wider society around us.

Furthermore, families built on the solid foundation of Jesus have the physical and emotional resources to reach out in love to those in society that do not have that foundation. In my next article I want to highlight how the church can and should be a welcoming family to those who do not have that legacy of faith and family, so that their lives can be changed and solid families can be built that create new legacies.

Celebrate Jesus

 

As anyone with a TV or internet knows, the summer Olympics are going on in Paris right now. There was quite a controversy caused by the part of the opening ceremonies that featured what looked to many like a mockery of a famous painting of the Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci. The part of the ceremony featured a celebration of various sexualized behaviors and identities, with men in drag, several nearly naked individuals, and some children there as well.

The creator of this part of the ceremony, Thomas Jolly, said that he did intend to offend and wanted the production to “celebrate community tolerance,” and I believe that was his intent. What the controversy shows is the wide divide between what various people think should be celebrated. The producers of the show are likely far enough removed from people with traditional religious views that they likely do not understand that rather than a celebration of various identities it looks like an intentional mockery of traditional Christian values and beliefs. 

But in their desire to celebrate tolerance, we do see an expression of the universal need to belong and be accepted. We all ground our understanding of ourselves in something. When we do not have a stable grounding for our identity outside ourselves, we look inward to create our own identities. This happens for many people in the western world because of the loss of faith in the external things which used to ground our identities. Many people have lost their trust in God, their families have broken down, and they’ve also lost trust in many other societal institutions. Unfortunately for us, we, in ourselves, are not a stable enough foundation upon which to build an identity. That is why people who seek to create their own identities crave affirmations from others. They want and need to be celebrated by others because they are not okay simply by themselves.

Jesus says in Matthew 7:24-27 that we should build our lives upon His words. When we follow Him as our Lord, we will stand firm on the rock of Jesus in the midst of the storms of life. Everyone will face the storms of life, such as illness, financial insecurity, and interpersonal conflict, so it makes a difference what we use as a foundation. If we build on anything in this world, including money, friends, family, country, or our own self-concept, these will eventually prove to be sand and cause our lives to crumble when the trials come. Jesus is the risen again Savior, who has even defeated death. He is the Lord of the whole world, and He wants us to recognize our need for Him. If we build our lives upon who Jesus is and what He has done, then we will not need any other source to celebrate us to make us feel valuable.

 When we humble ourselves before Him, He will lift us up (James 4:10). So, by celebrating Jesus and making Him the foundation of our lives, we ground our own identity on the strongest rock possible. Then whether we are at the pinnacle of the sporting world in Paris or living a simple life in NE Nebraska, we will not be shaken by any of the storms that will inevitably come. 

Is Your Love Bank Full?

 

I am currently rereading a book called, Love is a Choice, by three professional Christian counselors, and it is about the condition that they term, “codependency,” which they say many people have. The main issue with this condition is that people become unhealthily dependent on people or things, such as drugs, work, sex, anger, food, and bad relationships. Most of these unhealthy dependencies started in their childhood because they did not get the love that they needed and then sought to fill their internal love tank with things or people that could not give them true love. These things or people cannot truly make them whole again when they have such a love deficit and so they go deeper and deeper into an addictive cycle.

We are created to love and be loved. The greatest commandments are first to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and the second is to love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37-39). The most famous verse in the Bible is about God’s love for us through giving His son so that we could have eternal life (John 3:16). So it should not surprise us that when we face a lack of love and/or abuse, especially in our early, formative years, that we end up being wounded and seeking to make up for what we did not get. Unfortunately, when we do not know good love, we do not know how to give good love. Our addictions and sinful patterns perpetuate the problem to the people around us, especially if we have kids of our own. They end up not getting the appropriate love that we should be giving them, and thus the cycle continues on and on until someone intentionally seeks to break the cycle.

Some of these addictions, such as drugs or alcohol, have more immediate outward effects that others can see and lead to lives collapsing more quickly. If you go to jail for a DUI or your kids are taken away because of your drug addition, you are forced to at least consider what has gone wrong in your life. But other patterns are more subtle and sometimes are even encouraged by the society around you. Many of the examples given by the counselors in the book are of people who are externally very successful, but who are miserable in their marriages and personal lives. They highlight multi millionaires and starlets who have “made it” in worldly terms. Their clients even include “good Christians”  who put on a mask of happiness in public, but who hate each other in private.
Are you one of these people? We live in a fallen world where each of us has experienced some love deficit or abuse in our lives, so almost certainly you and I have sought out wrong ways of making up for that. Have you ever taken the time and energy to examine how you have been impacted by your past and what patterns have developed as a result? If you are living in pain right now, even private pain that you hardly even admit to yourself, God does not want you to stay there. Jesus came to give us an abundant life (John 10:10), but before we can love well and even be loved, we have to be willing to let God examine our hearts (Psalm 139:23-24). Then we can understand how we have run to the wrong things to find love and let God’s true love heal us. This is not just a one and done process, but rather a lifetime of learning to examine ourselves and then letting God change us into the person He created us to be!