CWW Week 15 - Day 2 - God In The Family
|
Scripture.
Joshua 24:15
‘As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.’
This bible verse in it’s abbreviated form will be our verse for the week. It is timely to reflect on the message from week fifteen where we discussed the “Resolution” document from the movie Courageous.
I want to personalise this journey through Resolution from my own broken perspective. I would have been so pleased to have come into my adult life with these principles locked into my methods and motives, but alas, I am a broken man and I am not alone on that journey.
In the first paragraph it states, “I do solemnly resolve before God to take full responsibility for myself, my wife and my children.”
When I was first married I was but a twenty one year old boy. I knew nothing other than I wanted to live in a family that wasn’t dysfunctional. As my own childhood was fractured in the dysfunction of my parents, I had no way of knowing that they had modelled marriage to me in such a way as to set my attempts at family on the same perilous pathway. I was well skilled in the way they did marriage so in my feeble attempts to create a better family than the one I grew up in, I was doomed to create an almost carbon copy of it.
Am I blaming my own parents? What’s the point of that? Were they not caught on the same treadmill as I was? My fathers father was alive only for the first fourteen years of my Dads life. He spent seven of those fourteen years in prison for bigamy. He divorced my grandmother as a result and then after he served his time in the USA, came back and remarried her only to suicide when my dad was fourteen. All this happened during the hardships of the great depression.
My mother was one of twin girls who emigrated with their parents to Australia where she lived a gypsy lifestyle as her father was a drunk and abusive itinerant cane cutter. Both my parents had a dreadful time of it and were married at the start of WW2 only to try to restart their lives after Dad returned from five years at war.
Alcohol abuse and extra marital affairs punctuated their lives as they struggled to carry the baggage of their past.
In the Bible it says in Exodus 34:7: “keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.”
We know that God forgives sin that has been repented of (read; accepted responsibility for) then clearing the guilty, but does God punish our children as a means of punishing us? That does not fit into the frame of Him being a loving and forgiving Father who wants the best for His children. No, I believe God is telling us that it will take three or four generations to break the chain of sin as one family models a lifestyle to the next and the next until someone stands and says “enough is enough.”
We must, as a first step to healing and family building, take full responsibility for ourselves. If we are to be the rock, as men, of God’s church and that being the flock He has given us, our family, then the footings must be firm and rooted in self assessment and a ruthless moral inventory of ourselves.
As we journey this pathway of character development we can only do that with on the job experience. If we wait until we are perfect we will be in a holding pattern for the rest of our lives.
As we establish a loving working and growing relationship with God we can shepherd and therefore accept full responsibility for our spouse and our children. As the spiritual leaders of our home, the buck stops with us.
In Resolving or promising to do this before God we are doubly accountable to ourselves and Him. This is not a step that one should take lightly. Love and compassion, honour and respect demand it of us as we walk close in behind Jesus.
What alternatives do we have? We can live a life of human mediocrity as we pollute the climate of our children’s lives, or we can live a life that explodes with relevance as we become stewards of those we love.
Thats why I say….. “Choose today whom you will serve, but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Joshua 24:15.
Questions
- If the journey of life responsibility starts with forgiveness; then who do you need to forgive and why?
- What can you do to equip yourself now to step into the breach for your family?
- If you feel powerless to take on the responsibility, know that you have an ally in Jesus. Are you prepared to invite Him into your responsibilities?
Prayer.
Dear Lord, Papa God.
I stand ready to accept the responsibilities of life but I cannot do it on my own. I need you Papa to set my path and walk with me. Help me to hear your still, sweet and small voice as I seek your guiding hand. Examine my heart and know me that I may know you as we take this journey of life together. This I pray in the name above all others, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Graham Hood.
