The Source Of Family Wisdom Series

1. Wisdom is Needed for Family Life

Proverbs is a great book that gives us wisdom in all sorts of areas in our life and we need wisdom in every area. There's probably not an area that you look at and say I'm good on this area. We really need wisdom when it comes to all of our life. And like you, I love my family. And my family is where most of my pain has come from in my life.

Whether that's parents, marriage, kids, brothers. My family is the place where most of my joy has come from in my life. Being married, having kids, love it just when I was on vacation, hung out with my brothers and their wives. Our family is often the place where our deepest weaknesses come out. Often the place where our deepest strengths come out.

It's often the place where we have the best memories and maybe the worst memories and that's not 100% extensively true. You might have a really bad memory that is just from a neighbor or something like that but a lot of times our family is where the greatest joys and the greatest pains are. Again, when I say family I mean with your kids and with your spouse and with your parents and with your extended family, all of that our family we love and have the greatest highs and often the greatest lows. And it is the context where much of our life gets lived if you're to add up most of the time blocks of your life if you were to add up a lot of your thoughts and your energy and your plans and your goals. The context of much of our life is lived within our marriages and with our kids and with our parents and with our extended family.

Much of our life the context of just who we are and what happens is lived within our family. A lot of life is played out in our family and a lot of life flows out of our family meaning you make decisions together and life flows from there. Meaning that that is what shapes you. That then leads to other things. Much of our life flows out of our relationship with our family and your family is the place marriage, parents, kids, extended.

Your family is the place where you will be most shaped and where you will most shape others. It is the place where you will most have opportunity to grow with God. It's the opportunity. It's a place where you will most have opportunity to live out your faith and the different things that we are called to your family. All those different relationships will be the primary context for much of your life.

And who you are is who you are with your family. Who you are is who you are with your kids. Who you are is who you are with your spouse. Who you are is never disconnected from the family that you are in that you have. You're not one person over here and then with your family, someone completely different.

Who you are in your family is who you are. And we want to build our lives with God's wisdom. We want to, many of us want to and are starting families, want to build strong families as we raise kids. Many of you are starting marriages or have been married for a while and want to build strong marriages. We have parents and we want to build strong relationships with our parents whether we are younger or as they age.

Maybe you have grandkids and want to build strong relationships there. We want God's wisdom in our families. We need God's wisdom. There's a lot of false wisdom when it comes to family, when it comes to parenting and marriage and all sorts of other things. There's a lot of information that we can hear that won't actually help us, that won't actually lead to what it is that we need to have God's wisdom and thriving and joy that he desires for us.

So we need something better. We need to see how God speaks into our family. When we look at the Book of Proverbs there's all sorts of things that we could talk about. But we're just going to focus on marriage and parenting and see how God speaks into those.

2. The Foundational Principle of Family Wisdom

So let's start with this, which is what is the foundational principle of wisdom that we need for family? I was talking with a guy recently that said he was kind of lamenting that the Bible doesn't speak a lot about parenting.

And he was kind of like, man, you know, parenting is hard and there's a lot of things we have to make, a lot of decisions we have to make, a lot of things we have to decide. And it's unfortunate that the Bible doesn't talk a lot about parenting. And you might feel that with all sorts of things in the Bible. It's unfortunate Bible doesn't talk a lot about my job. Or it's unfortunate Bible doesn't talk a lot about marriage.