FAMILY: THE GIVENS AND THE CHOICES
1. If you were to ask me the question how I am feeling today, I would have to respond that I am feeling totally “familied out” – at least for the immediate future. I need a vacation from family!
2. Now that may seem like a harsh and hard comment coming from your pastor – especially following a truly delightful wedding of my oldest daughter last Saturday morning - but that is an honest acknowledgment that I have as much a frail humanity in me as each and every one of you.
3. It’s tough adjusting from living in a condo where it is just you and your spouse to consider to having to spend at least a two full days with around twenty five previous strangers and now suddenly new family members from Bothel, Puyallup, Spokane, Pokatello Idaho, Salt Lake City Utah, and Lander Wyoming, plus two cats and a dog crammed into one house with just two bathrooms and no space to get away and just be on your own for a few minutes.
4. Once the huge crowd had left and we were left with just the three grandkids (ages 7, 8, and 9) to look after for a week, what I had vainly imagined would be a nice break turned into a 16 hour a day, non-stop activity, noise and crisis management exercise!
5. It is no wonder that God gave the command in Genesis that “For this reason a man shall LEAVE his father and mother and be joined to his wife…” That requirement was partially to protect the sanity of the grandparents! Short visits are one thing, but having to be the cook, the activities director, the referee, the janitor, the sound and stage manager, the ER doctor, the customer service and complaints department, the comforter and the judge all rolled into one for an entire week is a task I am not ready to volunteer for again in quite a while.
6. Does anyone out there understand what I am talking about?
7. Having said that, let me make it very clear that I dearly love my family – the one I was born into, the one that has come out of Anne’s and my marriage, and those that have been joined to us now through the marriages of our children. We are an incredibly rich and mixed bag of characters and personalities and skills and talents and stories and heritage. We have many wonderful strengths and an equal share of weaknesses.
8. There are many points and perspectives we can examine on the topic of families – but I want us to just briefly touch on three this morning:
A. THE FAMILY WAS GOD’S IDEA
B. THE FAMILY IS YOUR TRAINING GROUND FOR CHURCH MINISTRY
C. THE FAMILY IS THE BEST TOOL FOR EVANGELISM
A. THE FAMILY WAS GOD’S IDEA
1. That’s a given. It was not some human sociological invention that evolved over time.
2. In the Scripture we read from Ephesians 3:14, 15 Paul writes: “For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name.” God is the author and creator of the family.
3. It was God who in the beginning saw that it was not good for the man to be alone and so provided a helper, a woman, to be at his side. It was God who told them to be fruitful and multiply.
4. It was God who stated that “A man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh – and what God has joined together, no one shall separate.” Divorce was not planned to be on the agenda. There’s another given.
5. And within that committed union children were to be produced and raised and nurtured in safety and security. The family was never to be a hazardous or dangerous place for any child. Another given.
6. It was God, who in Psalm 68 that we read as our Call to Worship, is described as “A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, who sets the lonely in families”.
7. The family is God’s idea and was designed to be a distinct and unique unit of committed relationships – father and mother, brothers and sisters, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins.
8. And within that family unit the members would learn to take care of one another, share with one another, be accountable to and for one another – remember when God asked Cain where his brother Abel was, Cain replied “I don’t know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” Though it is not stated, God’s answer to that question would have been a clear-cut YES! That is another given – it is not a choice.
9. It is within the family that God wants to teach us by word and example how to show love and kindness and faithfulness and mercy and exercise patience and learn gratitude and generosity and responsibility and honesty and integrity.
10. The family is the place where it is difficult to pretend or hide. It is where we get to be known and hopefully accepted and appreciated for who we are.
11. We don’t generally get to choose our family – they are another given. I didn’t get to choose my parents and neither did they as such get to choose me. They only know I was a boy the moment most of me surfaced into the outside world. I didn’t get to choose my sister and she didn’t get to choose me. I had already been there 2 ½ years when she arrived on the scene and we just had to learn how to love and accept one another.
12. There was a period in our relationship – a number of years in fact – when she wanted nothing whatsoever to do with me and I was banished from her home and family. That didn’t stop me loving her and praying for her until God mercifully brought her to repentance and salvation. But for those years she made a choice to exclude me from her family.
13. So we have givens in the family and we also have choices. We do get to choose with which of our family members we prefer to spend more time. And at this stage of my life the family member with whom I choose to spend the most time is my wife. I love to be close to her and spend as many moments of every day with her.
14. I love my children and grandchildren and I enjoy getting to see them as often as I can but they now have their own families and need to have their own space.
15. And the further a field we move in the family circle to cousins and second cousins and relatives by marriage so the need for regular closeness diminishes. Perhaps the annual family get-together is adequate to maintain those ties of connectedness and belonging.
16. I have no idea how much I might find in common with all or some of the people who have suddenly become part of the Neethling-Henderson clan. The ones who are obviously the prime focus of my attention are Maria and Kelly and the 3 grandchildren, but as I get to know others in the wider circle I may choose to strengthen the bond through closer and more frequent interaction.
B. THE FAMILY IS YOUR TRAINING GROUND FOR CHURCH MINISTRY
1. So what’s the connection between your family and church?
2. Well, in Paul’s first letter to Timothy he spells out the strong connection very clearly. In fact he makes it clear that any position of leadership in the church needs to be based on a person’s example of leadership in the home. In chapter 3 he writes: “A leader must manage his own family well and see that his children are obedient and respectful. If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?”
3. As a pastor and father of three girls I know only too well the battles we sometimes had to go through of saying a firm NO to some activities and entertainment that other parents readily permitted their children. I guess it wasn’t always easy being P.K.’s but they all three seem to have benefited from the experience and will now tell you that they want to create the same kind of environment for their children as the one in which they were raised.
4. To further underscore his point, in 1 Timothy 5 Paul writes that “if a widow has children or grandchildren, these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and so repaying their parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God.” In fact he is so intent on making the connection between our religious or spiritual life and what goes on in the home and family that he writes further on, “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”
5. So being there for your spouse, your children, your grandchildren and relatives is one of God’s givens for you – it is not a choice. But that doesn’t mean I have to always and forever do everything for them. I get to choose the areas and the ways in which I am there for them. Also, my degree of responsibility is largely determined by my relational and physical proximity to the relatives. The closer I am to them relationally and physically, the greater is my responsibility to them.
6. When our children were younger we fed them, clothed them, changed their diapers, brushed their teeth, picked up after them. But now that they are grown, I choose no longer to do those things for them and they manage very well without me in those things, for which I am very grateful. I didn’t have the same degree of responsibility for my sister’s children and so chose to let her handle those matters herself unless my assistance was requested.
7. In the weeks immediately following my wife’s major surgery there were a number of things I had to do for her that normally she would have managed very well to take care of on her own – but under these circumstances I now chose to help her do them.
8. The same conditions apply within the church. We are family together with all Christian believers everywhere on planet earth. Did you know that Mvume Mhlope in the Methodist Church in Soweto, South Africa is your brother? You don’t even know him and probably never will meet him because I just made up that name to make a point - which is that you and I have a far more immediate responsibility and commitment to this local expression of that family here at Morton United Methodist Church. This is where God has given you and me the privilege and responsibility of being His family with one another. This is where we have to work with the givens of acceptance of one another, consideration for one another, care for one another, building up one another – just as you didn’t get to choose your other blood family – so you don’t get to choose the family that has become yours through the more important blood of Jesus Christ.
9. Just as it is within your other family, some of us are easier to get on with than others and so we generally choose to spend more time with those who are warm, friendly, considerate and know how to reciprocate with kindness.
10. But we cannot just ignore the difficult ones and may have to work that bit harder at finding the best and most effective ways to help them grow up spiritually and come to take their place in the regular life of the church family.
C. THE FAMILY IS THE BEST TOOL FOR EVANGELISM
1. It is in the home that God intends for children to first hear and learn about God. The command to the Israelites back in Deuteronomy 6 was to the fathers to talk to their children about God from morning till night – not by ramming religion down their throats – but helping them come to have a healthy "God-perspective" on life – to look at all of life from God’s point of view.
2. It was in homes and with families that the church began and grew by leaps and bounds – the New Testament letters have many references to “the church in someone’s home”(eg. Priscilla & Aquilla).
3. And the home or family has always been the most natural, comfortable, and easy place for new people to come to know and love God.
4. It’s in our homes that we entertain people, have them over for a meal. It’s with our families that we get to meet our neighbors, share recipes, a cup of coffee, offer assistance, and go together to a ball game or a movie. It’s where we share our life with others.
5. Folks generally know how to behave in a home and so their fears and suspicions are reduced and they can just relax and be themselves.
6. As they watch you live your life and observe the way your relationship with God makes a real difference in your behavior, so they are more inclined to start asking the important questions and looking for the answers you have found.
7. The Care Circles we started encouraging a few months ago are intended to help us accomplish this objective of making our homes and families one of God’s choice instruments for drawing others to Himself.
8. There is a limit on what one pastor, however effective he or she may be, can do on their own to attract new people to the Lord and keep them coming. People generally come to a church and keep coming to a church because of the close relationships they have developed with specific families in that congregation.
9. If you have not yet considered joining a Care Circle or even starting one from your own home, I trust that you will seriously give it another thought. In a real sense, the future of this church depends on your decision.
AMEN.
