The 21st Century Family!
Rip van Winkle:
Fall asleep in the mid 60's
Life is good, not perfect, but good.
Turmoil of the Kennedy assassinations has passed.
Lyndon Johnson is president.
All’s quiet in Cuba and the Soviet Union.
There is that little problem in Southeast Asia.
You’re concerned a little about your kids listening to the Beach Boys.
Maybe a little more worried about them listening to that hip swinging Elvis.
On TV the Smothers Brothers are a little edgy and Laugh-In is using some off color humor.
But then there is always Lawrence Welk on Saturday night and
Bonanza every Sunday evening.
Weed is what keeps you working in your flower bed.
Pot is where your grow your indoor plants.
Mouse is a pesky rodent.
Coke is a soft drink.
Gay means you’re happy.
Abortion, incest, homosexuality and condom are words you never hear on TV or even in general conversations.
Beatniks have become Hippies, but you never see them except on TV.
For the most part, your enjoy your home and your quiet life.
It’s safe for your kids to ride their bikes around the neighborhood, as all the parents kind of watch out for each others kids.
Life is good. Not perfect, but good.
Then you wake up and it’s 40 years later:
Your children have children and you are divorced.
Something in your study, called a computer, has pornography on it.
Your TV has dozens of channels and each seems filled with four letter words.
You used to roll your eyes because married couples on TV slept in separate beds.
Now the character go through multiple partners in a single episode and very little if anything is left to the imagination.
Prayer is increasingly illegal while abortion is encouraged.
Speak up about God and the church and you are labeled intolerant or accused of hate speech.
Children are taught to be tolerant of sexual deviants and intolerant of any alternative to evolution.
Children are fed a constant diet of sex and violence, while sociologists marvel at the rise of blood shed and teenage sex at school.
Their solution: pass them through metal detectors and hand them a condom.
To say that things have changed, is an understatement.
As Charles Swindoll says: This is not your grandfather’s family!
1. A Realistic Perspective!
The last 40 years have had a tremendous effect on the family.
The role of the father and mother has been blurred.
In fact, more homes than not, don’t even have a father.
Men are afraid to be men and women are ashamed to be women.
Children are not sure who’s in charge of the home, if anyone.
For many, homes have become battlegrounds.
Now, let me say that I have no interest in returning to yesteryear.
I believe that in many ways we are living in a wonderful time.
I love the conveniences and delights of today.
I wouldn’t go back if I could.
And that is part of being realistic, we can’t go back to the way it was.
Things have changed, and they are going to keep changing.
We have to learn to deal with it.
That’s no big revelation, but it does help us to realize three important facts:
A. We can never return to the past.
B. We are changing as our culture changes.
C. We must learn to look for something that is permanent, unchanging.
Realistically, we must face the future.
Tomorrow is coming and we can’t stop it.
But we can face it in faith.
We can trust that God will help us to deal with tomorrow no matter what it brings.
And that God can help us to do what needs to be done today to make tomorrow better than today.
And we need to Examine our self.
All of us have changed our way of thinking over the years, whether we want to admit it or not.
Things that we used to react to with shock and outrage, we hardly even notice anymore.
When we first heard of the mother that drowned her kids in a bathtub, we are stunned.
We couldn’t believe someone, especially a mother, could do such a thing!
Our hearts raced as we heard the news and we became incensed.
Over time we have heard of several other such cases, and each time we become a little more detached.
We have moved from shock to detachment, to indifference, to apathy.
Now when we hear such a horrible story, we are saddened,
but rarely shocked or horrified or outraged.
Over the years we have become desensitized.
Perhaps you even find yourself rethinking some truths that you know are in the Bible,
but wonder if they are relevant today.
Beware!
You’re feeling the tug of gravity.
That helpless slide into moral compromise.
To one degree or another, we all experience it.
No one is immune.
2. Unchanging Truth!
With everything around us changing, even including ourselves, we need to look for some constant that we can hold on too.
A. The human heart hasn’t changed.
All of us are by nature inwardly depraved and corrupt!
That is not to say that there is no good in us, but we are all tainted with evil.
It touches every aspect of life.
Without the redeeming power of Jesus Christ, we can not keep from sliding down the slippery slope of sin.
B. God’s desire for His people hasn’t changed.
God is holy and pure, 100%!
God expects us to be the same, holy, just and pure.
God says that we are not to be immoral and sinful.
We may think that is impossible, but God has made it possible by His Holy Spirit.
God has the power to transform us.
C. God is faithful & compassionate and He wants us to be faithful and compassionate.
We can stand against what is wrong in our world,
and still love those who live their lives contrary to God’s will.
But don’t expect to be rewarded by the world for doing so,
instead realize that you will be put down for being intolerant.
But if we show compassion with truth, lives will be impacted for God.
D. God’s truth remains unchanged, as revealed in scripture.
The media of today is constantly challenging the truth of God’s Word,
telling us that there are no absolutes, no absolute truth.
However, we know better.
We know the validity of God’s Word.
We know the reality of God’s Truth.
We know that we can stand on that solid rock.
Yes, the world has changed and it continues to do so.
But God never changes and we are safe when we cling to God and His Truth.
3. Lessons of History!
We can’t recover some bygone era, but we can learn to be current and relevant to the needs of the family today, without compromising the truth of God’s Word.
Moses knew the truth of that statement.
When Moses lead the people of Israel out of Egypt,
the experienced some pretty dramatic changes in their lives.
However, while they were camped on the edge of the Promised Land, they failed to trust God.
They became afraid as they faced the challenge of taking the Promised Land.
To punish their unbelief, God forced His people to wonder in the dessert for 40 years.
At the time Moses wrote the book of Deuteronomy, a new generation was ready to enter the Promised Land.
This would be blessing that would present a whole new set of challenges for them.
Change always brings challenges.
To prepare the people for what they were going to face, Moses shared with them, once again, the Law of God, beginning with the supreme commandment.
Deuteronomy 6:4 “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one!”
This begins the passage the Jewish people call the SHEMA.
It means “hear” and it’s a command.
Listen! Listen to this fundamental truth:
God is your master, and He is your only master.
He is absolutely unique and no other God exists.
And this fundamental truth leads to the most important commandment.
Deuteronomy 6:5 “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”
Hold nothing back, love Him with everything you are and everything you have!
Each person is to have a personal relationship with God.
And they are to pass that truth and that relationship on to their spouse and family.
Deuteronomy 6:7 “You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you life down and when you rise up.”
A passionate devotion to God was to permeate every aspect of the home,
starting with the parents and flowing into the lives of the children.
Moses knew that for his people to survive, to conquer and posses the Promised Land, that these truths had to permeate their lives.
When an expert in the Law of Moses, asked Jesus which commandment was the greatest, Jesus answered:
Mark 12:29-30 “The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' 31 The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these.”
In an ever-changing world, this truth remains permanent.
As we feel the tug of immorality pulling us toward an inescapable moral slide into sin,
we can hold on to this truth.
Our relationship with God is not only good, it’s essential for our personal survival,
the survival of our marriage and our family..
4. Hope for Today!
All of this leads us to some timeless truths.
The prosperity and influence of our society, will do little to strengthen our marriages or homes.
On the other hand, worshiping the Lord and allowing His Word to permeate every aspect of our home life, will cause our marriages to go from painful to wonderful.
This involves four specific actions that we must constantly apply.
A. Wake Up!
Complacency blinds us to reality.
When times are good, we are less likely to question our motives and our values.
And we may not realize how far our culture has taken us from God’s standards.
How easy it is to become indifferent to wrong, to begin to tolerate it, and then to accept it.
We may even begin to tolerate changes in our marriage and family
that we once thought unthinkable.
This is no time to take a nap!
We need to look around and see if our marriage, our family is what God intends it to be.
We need to make sure we are treating our spouse, our children the way God intends us too.
We need to make sure that we are loving our spouse, our children the way God intends us too.
We need to make sure that we are looking to God to teach us about marriage and family and not the world.
Which brings us to the second action we need to take:
B. Listen Up!
It’s true, knowledge sets us free.
Jesus said in John 8:31-32 (NIV) “...If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
God is the source of all truth, including the truth about marriage and family.
If we want to know how to have a great marriage or family,
that is not something we are going to learn at the local bar,
social club or even in school.
We will only learn how to have a great marriage and family from God’s Word!
Satan wants us to be ignorant.
I remember a young lady in Florida that was having problems with her marriage.
She worked at the local hospital and she was asking her co-workers for advice.
It turned out that the co-workers she was talking to were multiple divorcee’s!
They obviously didn’t have a clue as to what it took to have a great marriage or family!
Satan loves it when we look to the world for advice for the answers we need.
Why? Because he knows that their advice, for the most part, will be wrong.
It’s only God’s Word that equips you to clearly understand marriage and family.
And helps you to take your marriage and family from painful to wonderful.
We have to learn to listen to what God says in His Word and then to apply it to our life.
C. Speak Up!
Let’s face it, the traditional roles of husband and wife are not very popular today.
They have been called everything from oppressive to barbarian.
It’s time for us to speak up and help people to understand, the God given relationships within marriage and the family.
We need to share with others, the truth of God’s Word about marriage:
That marriage is a union between a man and a woman:
Genesis 2:24 “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.”
We need to speak up about the relationship of the husband and wife in marriage.
About submission, love and sacrifice.
Ephesians 5:22-33 Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. [23] For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. [24] Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. [25] Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her [26] to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, [27] and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. [28] In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. [29] After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church-- [30] for we are members of his body. [31] “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” [32] This is a profound mystery--but I am talking about Christ and the church. [33] However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
Not only for the sake of our marriage and family, but for the sake of those around us as well, we need to speak up.
We need to share the truth of God’s Word with others.
In this case, silence is not golden, it’s devastating!
D. Look Up!
God loves us unconditionally
That’s great news and we need to be reminded of it often.
What ever your situation, whatever challenges you are facing in your marriage and family, God loves you unconditionally.
He wants your marriage and family to be wonderful.
An inherent danger, lurks in even the best books on marriage and family.
They can leave you with the impression that success is your responsibility.
Do this, do that, and then your marriage will be great.
Now, we do have a great part to play in the quality of our marriage and family.
And what we do and or don’t do will have a great effect.
However, the Lord wants your marriage to be a relationship of joy, and bring Him glory.
And He will work supernaturally to take it from painful to wonderful.
In Hebrews 13:20-21 we read: “20 May the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, 21 equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.”
If we will “Look Up” God is willing, ready, and more than able,
to give us all that we need to have a great marriage and family.
Spending time in God’s Word will change your life
and take your marriage from painful to wonderful.
Go to next slide:
One of the most dramatic examples of the Bible’s divine ability to transform men and women, involved the famous mutiny on the “Bounty.”
Following their rebellion against the notorious Captain Bligh,
nine mutineers, along with the Tahatian men and women who accompanied them,
found their way to Pitcairn Island.
Ten years later, drunkenness and fighting had left only one man alive—John Adams.
Eleven women and 23 children made up the rest of the
Island’s population.
So far this is the familiar story made famous in the book and motion picture.
But the rest of the story is even more remarkable.
About this time, Adams came across the “Bounty’s” Bible in the bottom of an old chest.
He began to read it, and the divine power of God’s Word
reached into the heart of that hardened murderer, and changed his life forever.
The peace and love that Adams found in the Bible,
entirely replaced the old life of drunkenness, anger, hatred, and fighting..
He began to teach the children from the Bible, until every person on the island had experienced the same amazing change that he had found.
Today, with a population of slightly less than 100, nearly every person on Pitcairn Island is a Christian.
What God did with John Adams, He can do for you, your marriage and your family.
If we will Wake Up, to the reality of our problems.
If we will Listen Up, to the wisdom of God’s Word.
If we will Speak Up, and share God’s truth.
If we will Look Up, realizing God’s unconditional love for us
and His willingness and ability to chance our lives, our marriages, our families.
Then we can go from painful to wonderful!
We can have a 21st century marriage and family that is pleasing to God and to us.