Importance of Family

“looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus, who gave Himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed, and to purify for Himself a people of His own possession, zealous for good deeds.” ~ Titus 2:13-14

“As Christians we are not here for our own purpose at all—we are here for the purpose of God, and the two are not the same” ~ Oswald Chambers

Society and culture are a reflection of our family influence.  The breakdown of society can be traced back to a break down in our family units.  Where there is disfunction in society there is first disfunction in our families, and more so disfunction in us as individuals.  If we are not happy with the way society and culture are currently, we need to ask ourselves some hard questions, like how did we get here? What have we allowed that has produced the fruit we are seeing? What lies have we believed?  What do we need to do practically to make it better?  First, we must realize we just didn’t wake up one day and get to where we are as a society, it was a gradual process of seeds sown in the field of belief that have matured and produced this crop.  Simple reality is we reap what we sow.

Let’s take a trip back to the original family, Adam and Eve.  When God created man and woman, He said it was very good.  They were the perfect model of relationship with each other and with God before they had any knowledge of good or evil.  However, after they chose to sin against God, they broke that perfect fellowship with God and with each other, then sin and decay had rights to come in and create havoc.  Man’s and woman’s relationship with each other was forever changed, both try to vie for positions of authority and worthiness. Instead of seeing each other as equals in God, they now try to one up each other.  This cancerous attempt for power and self-preservation is then passed through the ages.  When you have 7 billion people serving el numero uno (self), a lot can go wrong.  This is why Jesus focused a lot on serving others and dying to self.  Only when we die to self, do we have any hope of restoring the natural balance of things back to the way God intended it to be.  We do need to understand though it will be an uphill battle and there is a force of resistance to our desire to restore the nuclear family.

We see this through the attempts of media, arts & entertainment, education, and all other facets of influence in our culture trying to diminish and pervert the family unit.  Husband and wife are designed to be a reflection of who God is.  We are His image bearers.  When that image is perverted or destroyed others cannot see the one True God.  Now let’s pause right here for a moment; no family will be perfect in representing God as we should. Families will fail and faulter because individuals fail and faulter, but the idea is to continually be progressing toward what God wants of us and not what we want of ourselves.  We should always be conforming into the image of God and not molding God into an image we desire.  Now back to the mountains of influence in society, we see a deliberate attempt to destroy this image we are supposed to bear.

Through movies and internet, we see major agendas to destroy the family.  Porn being the biggest, it has devalued women to make them think they have to look and act a certain way to get and keep a man.  For men, it has become a cancer in the soul to replace reality with fantasy.  This fantasy becomes an escape which then destroys true relationships and could permanently damage them.  It creates insecurity in the entirety of the home from husband and wife to the children, everything becomes like a foundation of sand never knowing when it could possibly wash out from under us.  We see it through kids programming especially with Disney.  They continue to push a gay agenda which again takes away and perverts this image of God, because God created male AND female.  That is His Truth, it is His reality, and as I stated before we should be conforming to His reality not our own.

We also see it with education.  It is not hidden any more, they want to sexualize and pervert our children as young as four with transgenderism and garbage they are claiming is “sex ed”.  I remember a day when parents were able to pull their kids out of classes if they didn’t agree with what was being taught or didn’t think it was age appropriate.  Now if they can’t hide it from parents, they just shut parents’ voices down by not allowing them to speak their concerns at the school board meetings.  They have basically deemed themselves as the sole authority in children’s lives for those eight plus hours.  We can go on for pages on the different sectors of society that have contributed to the decline of nuclear family but if we see the problem, we need to see how to fix it.

Our first step has to be to stand up and say enough is enough.  We have to resolve to fight. To say you will not take my children, my marriage, my community.  Next, we need to do everything to be empowered by God to repair and restore broken relationships within our immediate family.  As I stated earlier, we are individuals with a sin and brokenness problem and it spreads from there, so the opposite can be true that if we begin to allow healing within ourselves and our families it will spread good through our communities and eventually through the sectors of society that have been used to dismantle us.  As we restore our families we teach and train our children how to do the same.  We have so allowed the wedges of busyness and technology to separate us.  It is time to reunite some good old fashion quality family time.  It is time to take back what is ours.  Our time and our family. More so us men have to set the example, to humble ourselves and admit we may have dropped the ball in being the leaders God created us to be and repent for our short comings and move toward restoration and healing.