Heaven Help My Home!

If your home is anything like mine, see if this sounds familiar. You have more expenses than money. Your house isn’t anywhere near as clean as you would like it. You’re embarrassed by the messiness of your garage. You have not won “yard of the month” in a long, long time. There is more arguing than you’d like to admit and it is so easy to be frustrated with annoying habits of your family members. It seems everyone has more of a hair-trigger and nerves are on a raw edge at times. There’s more homework than is possible to deal with. You cannot remember the last time your husband and you went on a date together. The daily menial tasks of parenting grind you up. Running kids to practice, ensuring their homework is finished, and worrying if you are messing up their future, you have little time to consider what you are working for. In time, a parent can easily forget what the big picture is you are working for.

In the moments to come I want to help you regain the “big picture” of parenting.

Everyone needs this sermon this morning. No matter if you have small children at home or you not. And here’s one big reason why: Our culture places a lot of emphasis on understanding your relationship with your parents in order to understand yourself. So much of our “cultural experts” trace our relationship with our parents as the reason we do what we do. People think, “I have to understand my relationship with my mother! I have to understand my relationship with my father!” At some level, this is true. Plato himself said on the scale of human decencies, honor of parents is second only to honoring God. It makes sense, because next to your relationship with God, it’s your relationship with your parents that really has had and will have the biggest impact on yourself and who you are.

Keep your Bibles open to Ephesians 6 if you will. We continue our yearlong study of Ephesians.

Today’s Scripture

“Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 2 “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), 3 “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.” 4 Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:1-4).

My Family

I know a number of you don’t know me well at the second campus. So I thought I would briefly share a picture of my family taken during the opening of this building a couple of years ago. I mighty proud of them. Starting from the left is Miles, who is now twenty-two years old. Then his brother Matthew, who is seventeen years old. My wife, Traci, and I would be in big trouble if I shared her age ?. And lastly, my daughter, Macaul, who is twenty-one years old.

My family isn’t perfect. Traci and I have been parents for over twenty two years now. We have had a some really challenging moments and some great moments with our children.

Personal Story

I could tell about the time that my youngest son was chased by a bear for a few scary moments when we were all in New Mexico. But one story that brings a smile to my face and sort of introduced us to being parents. We were living in south Fort Worth and barely scrapping by at the time. We have a little house and our oldest two were toddlers. The old refrigerator that came with the house stopped working all of sudden. I prepared myself to purchase a new frig even though I had no idea where we would get the money. Traci said we should call a repairman to come look it over. I indicated that this would be a waste of time and money. It’s old frig and we need to move on. But she said that her grandfather had taught her the importance of having a repairman look it over. So several days passed by and the repairman comes to the house. I am still thinking that this is going to be a waste of seventy-five dollars for him to tell us that the frig is gone. He comes into the kitchen, opens the door, looks around for a moment, and then says, “How long have you flipped the switch off in the back?” To our shock, our old frig had a switch of some kind that powered it down toward the back of the insider of the refrigerator. Miles was just walking and he was just tall enough to reach that switch way in the back of the refrigerator! As a dad, I am thinking I just spent seventy-five dollars to tell us the switch was off. But thank God I listened to my wife or I would have spent far more than this ?.