The Family of God

The Fulfilled Family The Source of the Attack on the Family

1. God’s plan

When God originally called out Israel as a people, He established that they be His witnesses. The nation of Israel was not an end in itself; it was a means to an end. God did not call Israel to be a bucket to receive all of His blessings, but a channel through which He could pass His blessings to the world. Israel was to communicate the truth about God to the world.

a) The message of God

(1) The theology

“Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord” (Deut. 6:4). This was the standard message, the basic heart of God’s truth—the great statement that there is only one God. And it was to be passed on to the world.

(2) The response

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might” (v. 5). That is to be the human response to the reality of God.

b) The mechanics for passing it on

(1) Personal commitment

“These words, which I command thee this day, Shall be in thine heart” (v. 6). The first key to passing on God’s message to the world was that they had to make a personal commitment to love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, and might. Once they made that commitment, there was a second step.

(2) Parental communication

“Thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children” (v. 7). That is God’s plan for passing on the truth about Himself—from parent to child. As a child matures, he becomes a parent to the next generation, and so on. How are God’s truths to be communicated?

(a) In speech

“And shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up” (v. 7). Godly words were to be flowing out of their mouths. They were to be constantly speaking about the things of God.

(b) In symbols

“Thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes” (v. 8). Even when there was silence, there was to be a visible commitment to the law of God. Here it was symbolized in what they wore.

(c) In surroundings

“Thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates” (v. 9). Even when the parents weren’t home, their children were to see the law of God written all over the house.

The children were to see God’s Word throughout the house in their parents’ absence; they were to see it symbolized in what their parents wore; and they were to hear it when their parents opened their mouths. The law of God was to be passed on so that godliness and righteousness could move from one generation to the next.

2. Satan’s resistance

From the beginning, Satan has tried to upset the plan of God. To accomplish that, he plans to undermine the righteous seed. He wants to destroy the family by disrupting it, removing the children, and creating quarrels so that family life becomes chaotic. He uses divorces, separations, adulteries, fornications, and whatever else he can to fracture the family so it cannot do what God intends it to do.

B. The Strategy of the Attack on the Family

1. Fathers attacked

In many cases, fathers have abandoned their God-given role. A leading secular psychologist from the Menninger Clinic, Harold Voth, has written a provocative book called The Castrated Family. He presents the thesis that if the father is not the head of the family, there can be nothing but chaos. He says that the father is responsible for structure and form and for establishing the family standards, character, direction, and strength. And if he doesn’t do that, it castrates the family.

We know that fathers are being attacked. They’re being attacked when they’re diverted from their wives and children to fulfill their own desires, to be the macho man, and to be self-satisfied. They lose their concentration on loving the family, providing for the family, caring for the family, and offering them strength, stability, character, leadership, and sound teaching—bringing them up in the things of God. Now, apart from Christ, we know that those things are impossible. But it’s sad to see that so many Christian fathers have become preoccupied with the television set, their businesses, making money, accumulating material things, lusting after other women, and other things that tend to overthrow their priorities.

2. Mothers attacked

Mothers are being forced out of the home. By 1990, perhaps 45 percent of the United States’ work force will be women. Already 6 million children under the age of six have working mothers. Nearly half of all children under the age of eighteen have working mothers. Women are intimidated into leaving the home. They’re told, “Don’t let yourself settle for being a homemaker. You’re too good for that. Push yourself out into the world.” They become exposed to the temptations of other men, material things, worldly philosophies, and worldly lifestyles. I believe this failure of mothers is a result of the failure of fathers to give spiritual strength and character to their families.

3. Children attacked

a) Abandoned at home

According to David Elkind in an article in Psychology Today, “One major change is the form of middle-class mothering. For a mother to work voluntarily while her children were young was once seen as a sign of bad parenting, a rejection of the maternal role. But today, going to work and placing a child with a caretaker or in a day-care center [or at a preschool] is accepted practice. For many children, that means coming home to empty houses after school and tending to their own meals, clothing, hygiene” (“Growing Up Faster” [Feb. 1979]: 41). And, as one woman added, it also includes locking doors on school holidays and having the children sit in front of the TV.

b) Influenced by TV

(1) Violent role models

Dr. Walter Menninger, a psychiatrist connected with Topeka State Hospital, said we are raising a generation of violently aggressive women who are being formed through children’s exposure to TV’s fantasy female super-heroes (“Effects of TV Aggression on Girls Worry Expert,” Los Angeles Times, 22 Feb. 1979). Some TV shows are shoving girls outside a normal understanding and comprehension of God’s role for women.

(2) Godless morality

(a) According to Ben Stein in The View from Sunset Boulevard, interviews with the forces behind television (executives, producers, writers) reveal that they are systematically attempting to overthrow traditional American values (New York: Basic Books, 1979). That is accomplished primarily through the situation comedy: you can get people to buy a whole new philosophy if you can get them to laugh with it.

(b) TV characters consume ten times more alcohol than coffee.

(c) According to the National Federation of Decency (Fall 1978), 88 percent of all sex depicted on TV is outside marriage.

(3) Stifled communication

In many cases, parents don’t talk to their children because they’re too busy watching TV.

c) Raised by day-care centers

The Denver Post ran an article about a group of daycare workers who were trying to start a union to protect themselves from abusive children (Marice Doll, “Day-Care Mothers Air Gripes, ‘Pain,’ ” 5 Feb. 1979). The article said children arrived “with runny noses, chicken pox, and bad manners.” The day-care workers had to teach potty training, table manners, respect, and just about everything else—all at about a fifty-to-one ratio. These day-care workers were so frustrated they hoped to form a union to get some help.

What is a family?

Each one is developing. Each one is in relationship to the others. Each one is developing socially, intellectually, physically, and spiritually. Every person in the family has an effect upon the other members in all these areas. Over a period of years these fragile strings strengthen into strong, invisible steel that holds great weight but is also capable of an enormous amount of freedom.

Families can be dysfunctional. Many are. In fact, all of us, to one extent or another, are dysfunctional persons coming from dysfunctional families who, in turn, will create some degree of dysfunction in the families we establish. I’ll have more to say about this later.

In its most positive form, the family can be a place of increased individual and corporate wholeness. Whether it is a nuclear family or an extended family, it is individuals, created with unique potential in the image of God, living in relationship with each other.

This means that there is a place for you no matter how old you are or how young you are, no matter what is your status of life.

The New King James Version of the Bible translates Psalm 68:6a in this way: ‘God sets the solitary in families.’ This means that God is the security of all.

He is the protector of the defenceless.

He gives you a home.

He offers you a family.

You don’t have to go it alone!

The family has three specific functions.

1. First, the family has a coping function.

It is protective. We see this most particularly in relationship to children. A family shelters, teaches, and launches a person. A family helps the individual, both child and adult, become more competent to deal with social realities. The very way we are held, fed by bottle or breast, talked to, prayed for, nurtured or not nurtured has a profound future impact on how we view ourselves and others. Healthy parenting provides a secure base of acceptance. It provides a secure base of acceptance from which an individual can move out into the world. We achieve competence. We become better able to reach out.

Look at the most basic coping functions a family provides in relationship to a little baby. Look at how we protect that baby. The family hovers around the infant. It tries to meet that child’s every need. It does for a one-year-old what it wouldn’t consider doing for an eight-year-old.

The same is true in the church.

A new-born person in Jesus Christ must be protected by the family.

We help that person grow. We urge that one on in his or her development.

We change the dirty diapers.

We teach them how to eat the Bread of Life.

All this is done within this caring community called the family of God.

We protect each other.

That is why God sets the lonely in families.

We need to protect each other.

In the healthy, nuclear family, the physical provisions of food, shelter, and clothing are made. These are undergirded by the additional emotional and spiritual encouragements that help us survive as social persons.

A healthy church becomes the family of God to us, supplementing and complementing contributions of a good home and helping us to make good the deficiencies of a poor home. They help us cope with life, enabling us to live in community.

2. There is a second function called modeling (follow me as I follow Christ, said Paul. Not copy me).

You cannot simply be protective, sheltering a person forever. We learn from watching other persons.

Both in the nuclear and extended families, those who are more mature serve as models to help the younger ones learn how to live.

Give a person the wrong model, and you are in trouble.

An indolent mother or alcoholic father sets a pattern for a young person that is difficult to break (Genogram)

A church filled with bickering people teaches young Christians how to be brittle, offensive, defensive, hard in their Christian life.

If your role model is hostile, you may pick up some of those hostility patterns yourself.

If your role model is loving, you will see that as an ideal to be emulated.

However, there is one big problem. If we see family relationships built primarily on the basis of modeling, we can end up being the carbon copy of someone else.

Unfortunately, I have seen this happen in too many situations. We as ministers can be the most guilty of trying to mold others into exact replicas of ourselves. Instead of producing maturity in others within the family relationship, we can actually destroy a person’s ability to stand on his own two feet. Carry a baby everywhere, never encouraging that baby to exercise and to begin to get a sense of balance, and you will delay the child’s ability to walk.

3. This brings us to a third function, the developmental function.

The family must protect the coping function.

The family must model.

However, the family must move beyond being the protective cocoon and the arbitrary inculcation that tells another person what to do in all situations. We need to encourage people in their own developmental maturity.

How sad it is to see a person who has been programmed to think and respond in particular ways that might work in some settings. However, place that person in a different environment and their mechanically learned ways of doing things can backfire. The mother, the father, the pastor, the teacher is no longer there to help them process the many options and even temptations. They’ve not been encouraged to understand their own individuality and appreciate their own unique gifts. They’ve been programmed to respond in memorized ways that, in some settings, work very well. In other settings, some of these memorized routines might backfire.

A mature person is someone who understands why they are acting in certain ways, understanding the negative or positive long-range consequences of behaviors or attitudes.

Some of us are spiritually challenged because of our family of origin.

We find it extremely difficult to be highly differentiated from our parents. Particularly if they were church attending parents.

In some family of origins, God was portrayed as an arbitrary, judgmental, unloving parental figure who wanted to squeeze all the fun and joy out of life.

Church is not a place of fun and you go to sit down, shut up and speak when you are spoken to.

Your place is in some room away from the action. To not be seen or heard.

Children were not important

Joining the family meant you had to sit it out, learn your lessons and wait your turn.

So now, as hard as we tries, we dont seem to ever quite recovered from this negative approach to the Christian faith.

We never been able to see Jesus Christ in a context larger than the harshly defined negativity

Some families fail to render this developmental function. In such situations, it might take years of therapy, emotional and spiritual, to undo the damage of a well-meaning family that has provided adequate coping and modeling mechanisms but has failed to teach a growing child of God how to function without the arbitrary, artificial support of mother and father and other parental figures in the church.

What I am trying to say is this: whether it is in the nuclear family or the extended family, we can produce automatons.

We can create mechanical men and women who live their lives in protective wombs.

We can tell people what to do, making their decisions for them and failing to encourage them into mature lifestyles.

There are rules. The Bible specifies certain conduct that is appropriate and inappropriate for the believer.

Moses outlines specifically how we are to live a life in relationship with God, modeling it for our families.

Moses wrote in Deuteronomy 6:6–9:

These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the door frames of your houses and on your gates.

The Apostle Paul kept calling for maturity. He urges us as follows in Ephesians 4:12–14:

… to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming.

The Family You Want: How to Build an Authentic, Loving Home Chapter 1: Just What is Family?

We need to learn from nature. Picture that mother bird who so carefully prepared a soft, cushioned nest. Picture those eggs kept warm by her body. See those eggs at the appropriate time begin to break forth and tiny little birds emerging. Observe the mother as she tenderly cares for their every need, providing food, liquid, protection. Then what is observed? The moment comes, that moment of disequilibration in which the mother instinctively knows that the nestlings cannot live forever dependent upon her. Finally she pushes them out of the nest, urging them to feel their own wings so that finally they can fly.

Too often, as both mothers and fathers in the home and leaders in the church, we negate the personhood of others. We can meet our own neurotic needs by encouraging dependency relationships. We can try to subjugate others to us instead of encouraging them to move beyond us into the exciting dynamics of what God is doing through his Holy Spirit.

God has set us in families. He has given us the privilege to function in that mobile of independent interrelatedness. He wants us to be protectors, modelers, encouragers. That’s what a family is. That’s why we have families. God help us fulfill these privileged responsibilities in a world that needs men and women who are not scripted to simply parent others or be perpetual children but to be adults who have learned to spread our wings and fly, while continuing to live in healthy interrelationship with each other.

The Fulfilled Family The Source of the Attack on the Family

The Source of the Attack on the Family

Satan is attacking the family. We have already seen some of the ways he attacks the husband-wife relationship. In the aftermath of that attack, the family pays a tremendous price