Quality Time:
Building Bonds That Don’t Break
(Part 3, Building a Stronger Family)
We have looked at some important things this month that dealt with building stronger family lives. We have laughed a lot, maybe some have cried, (especially when relating to the washing of Styrofoam plates), but in all of this, there is a serious side of the family life. It is not so outspoken as say, communication issues or finances. It deals with the harder side of reality; with what you will prepare your family for in the future; what routines become traditions and rituals, and what you do today with your family will be remembered tomorrow with either good thoughts or bad thoughts. I’m talking about the bonds that you build within your family today, that are unbreakable. Do you have those kinds of bonding moments with your family members?
What is the most recent memorable thing your family did together? (get response)
With whom, or what are you spending most of your valuable time? This makes a difference in the kind of bonds you build within your family and the family of God.
In a lifetime the average American will spend:
Six months sitting at stoplights
Eight months opening junk mail
One year looking for misplaced objects
2 years unsuccessfully returning phone calls
4 years doing housework
5 years waiting in line
6 years eating
Can you say that your time is equally, if not more than, spent with the Lord? We need to look at the time we are spending, bonds we are making, or not making, in this family building foundation of Quality-Time. The first cornerstone we will look at today for building this foundation is…
Cornerstone 1: The Bond of Righteousness
Do you spend quality time with the Lord?
I Peter 4:1-11 (pg. 859)
Pay attention to verse 3 there, We have spent enough time doing the things of the world, our quality time has been spent elsewhere in the past. We have to make an effort to spend time with the Lord. I cannot make the emphasis on this harder without screaming or something. As people in the church, as people seeking a way out of this past way of living, as people who are troubled by what is happening in the world today, as people who have been faithful to Christ for as long as they can remember, the answer to what ails you is Quality Time spent with God.
Today, in America, there is a significant change happening right in front of your eyes. You may have noticed it if you are an observer of the culture and the modern movements of the culture, but in the world today, what was perceived as being unconstitutional, religiously biased, politically incorrect, is now being given a second glance.
1. Prayer in schools is now being looked at as a viable option.
2. Parents are now looking for the kind of values in their lives that teach their children what is right and wrong.
3. People have a new attitude for truth and its meaning.
4. They are realizing that “In God We Trust” and “one Nation under God” are not just phrases made popular by some over-zealous bigots with just the white-man in mind, but they are truths that have been too long forgotten.
We need to see that the church in America has a new point of attack. It is to be in the forefront of evangelistic efforts to bring to a questioning world the answer for what ails them. The church needs to spend quality time with God. This is a wake-up call, not to America, but to the church of God. God is asking you; His church; His bride; His children; to spend time with Him.
It is time for the church in America to become alert, it is time for the church, you and I, the person sitting next to you and yourself, to be a watchman on a hill, to be a lighthouse for those lost, to be a foundation for those who need to stand, to be catalyst that combines the members of the church into a strong family of God. This will happen when we turn to God and seek his face. God expects His children to spend quality-time with Him. Spending time with the Lord is a cornerstone that the church family needs to build its foundation upon. The risks are too high, and the consequences too heavy to neglect this part of our daily lives.
Martin Luther once said, “I have so much to do today that I shall spend the first 3 hours in prayer.”
Colossians 3:14-17 and 4:2 (pg.834)
We would become the church God wanted if this were the standard in the church today. What is holding you back from making God’s church the place most sought after regardless of the circumstances we live in? Are you spending quality-time with God?
Let’s turn the page here and move on to the individual family. There can be so much more said about our time with God, and how it should be spent, but God also instructs us on the matters of the home, as we have already seen these past two weeks. What does God say about the home and the way we interact with each other there? Let’s look at the head of the home and the wife, and the bond between them both. This is another important cornerstone in the building of a strong family. Let’s look at…
Cornerstone 2: The Bond of Cleaving
Do you spend quality time with your spouse?
Genesis 2:24 and Matthew 19:4-6
“Haven’t you read, he replied, that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female, and said, For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no man separate.”
The bond of cleaving; being united to each other, this is the pattern in marriage that God wants husband and wife to show. There are so many important times in your lives that will go by if you don’t take the time to sit down and cherish them with each other.
Just the other night, I had been busy all week with coaching and working that I had been gone from the house more than usual. I came home this particular evening and saw that Tanya had our neighbors children over because she was baby-sitting them. Imagine what my house is like with two preschoolers, two toddlers, and an infant all wanting attention at the same time, is like. She’s good, she’s really good. So after greeting the boys and Tanya I sat down at my computer to check my e-mail and work on my sermon and so on. Tanya was working in the kitchen when I came home and now she was standing behind me and sitting down on the bed and asking me some nonspecific questions…you get the idea. Then she said it. she said, “I’m sorry if I am bothering you, I am just lingering around you. But I just want to be near you for a while.” So I had to stop what I was doing and we spent some time together.
We needed some quality-time together to build that bond of cleaving, of unity.
I Corinthians 7:3-5 (pg. 809)
Paul explains this as his recommendation. It is a solution for a marriage that wants to stay together for the long haul. Paul urges the husband and the wife to submit to each other their bodies, not only as a prevention of temptation but as a building block for intimacy, and as a way to become united to each other in such closeness that no man could separate. Only if by mutual consent, should the husband and wife neglect each other, specifically for fasting.
(Keep in mind that Paul, understands that fasting is a normal part of a relationship with God.)
Marriage is a team sport. Think of a basketball team: The coach must spend hours scouting, preparing offensive and defensive strategies, finding out the strengths and weaknesses of his own players, and making a game plan in order to take his players to a game, but unless the players submit to his leadership, they will not win. Neither the coach nor the players can be done without, but neither is more or less important than the other- they are a team. And such is the case with marriage.
This time spent in playing the game together builds the bond between a man and his wife the way God intended in a right marriage. This cornerstone, the bond of cleaving, or being united, through quality-time, will help to build the foundation of a stronger family.
Let’s look at the third cornerstone today…
Cornerstone 3: The Bond of the Parents/Family
Do you spend quality time with your children?
In America every 24 hours:
3,000 children see their parents divorced.
1,629 children are put in adult jail.
3,228 children run away from home.
1,512 children drop out of school.
7,742 teens become sexually active.
How often do you make specific time to spend with your children? Where was your teenager last night? These are questions that bring the heart of the family to the test. The amount of quality-time we spend with our children is going to reflect in the attitude of each of them. Now more than ever, the family is the place to turn to for help. The resources of the nation are going to come out of the time you spend with your children. God’s word says to bring a child up in the way he should go, and he will not depart from it. God’s word also speaks to fathers in this way, that they should not exasperate their children. These are times when children, teenagers, and even college students are going to rely or not rely on the values they learned or are learning in their homes.
Parent’s, we have a responsibility to be God’s agent to our children. It is your responsibility to give your child every opportunity to see Christ in who you are. It is through passive and just poor parenting that children today are becoming statistics that you read about in newspapers.
Television shows like Jenny Jones, Ricki Lake, and now even Sally Jesse Raphael, are exploiting the negligence of the parents in the lives of their children. How funny is it, really, to see a thirteen year old girl, display her body in a lewd manner, proud of the fact that she flashes men and is sexually active with more than three of four partners. And then turn to her mother sitting next to her, not embarrassed by this but, making excuses for her daughter’s behavior, and say that it’s none of her business what she does.
Is this the family that God wants to see in us? This generation of children coming, these teenagers, 17, 18, 19 year olds, are making decisions today without their parents involved and without being given a reason for choosing what is right over what is wrong. They are doing this because their parents are too lazy to put the time into their lives needed to bring them up in the way they should go.
I don’t have to tell you that single parent homes currently are overtaking the traditional family mold, and more grandmothers are raising their daughters children than ever seen in this country before.
It’s time to bring our homes under the authority of God and put quality-time into the family. Your children desperately need it. The country in which we live deserves it. The God whom you serve demands it. A bond between you and your children is needed for the family to survive. We need to return to the family as the source for identity, for the place in which we find peace, for the place in which we find support.
Conclusion:
The same can be said of God’s family. America is searching for answers. They are looking for a place to find identity, they want a place for support and hope. God is waiting and calling us to return to Him for these things. As a boy, I had the privilege of growing up in a Christian family.
I know where my belief system comes from, I know where my support and hope comes from.
But what about those who have not been in the church? What about those families who live next door to this building? God wants them to know the same things as I do, the same things as you do. The church is the family that God wants everyone to be a part of. What is it about a close Christian family that causes us to see something great? It is because the Lord has become the center of that family unit and they are living to please Him. Our families are to be places of nurture, faith, love, happiness, etc. All these things make a family the place where we find our values, the truths that make us who we are. God’s family is the same way. If we, as his family do not show those outside of God’s family what it means to be an intricate part, we dishonor God. Becoming a Christian, builds a bond that Jesus Christ will never break.
If you are not a Christian, if you have not been baptized, with a knowledgeable decision on your part, not as an infant, not because everyone else was doing it, not sprinkled on, poured on, or otherwise, but as the Bible teaches in Mark 16:16, to be completely immersed in water for the forgiveness of sins, then you need to make that decision and be welcomed into God’s family today. If you are not a member of this church, some of you have been coming for quite a long time now, you may be wrestling with this decision, what does it mean to be a member, what is required of me? All you have to do is come, become a Christian, and belong to the people around you in God’s family. You need to start by spending quality-time with God. He, as your heavenly Father, wants you, His lost and needing child, to come and be welcomed into His family.
