From The Desk of a Geek: Life Is Not a Family Sitcom

From The Desk of a Geek:

Life Is Not A Family Sitcom 

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to find an example of what we would call

a “healthy family” in the Bible? 

It’s a lot easier to find families with a lot of sin and a lot of pain than to find families with a lot of harmony. For example, here’s just a sampling from Genesis:

* The first recorded husband and wife disobey God.

* Isaac and Rebecca play favorites with their twin boys, whose sibling rivalry becomes one of the worst in history.

* Sarah’s grief over infertility moves her to give her servant, Hagar, to Abraham as a concubine to bear a surrogate child and when it happens, Sarah abuses Hagar in jealous anger. 

Why is the Bible loud on sinfully dysfunctional families and quiet on harmonious families?

Well, for one thing, most families aren’t harmonious. Humanity is not harmonious. 

We are alienated from God through sin. So put alienated, selfish sinners together in a home, sharing possessions and the most intimate aspects of life, having different personalities and interests, and a disparate distribution of power, abilities, and opportunities, and you have a recipe for a sin-mess.

But there’s a deeper purpose at work in this mess. The Bible’s main theme is God’s gracious plan to redeem needy sinners. It teaches us that what God wants most for us is that we: 

* Become aware of our sinfulness and

our powerlessness to save ourselves. 

* Believe and love his Son and the gospel he preached.

* Graciously love one another. 

You know what, it turns out that the family is an ideal place for all of these to occur.

But what we often fail to remember is that the mess is usually required for these things to occur. Sin must be seen and powerlessness must be experienced before we really turn to 

Jesus and embrace his gospel. 

And offenses must be committed if gracious love is to be demonstrated. So if we’re praying for our family members to experience these things, we should expect trouble.

Family harmony is a good desire and something to work toward. But in God’s plan, it may not be what is most needed. 

What may be most needed is for our family to be a crucible of grace, a place where the heat of pressure forces sin to surface providing opportunities for the gospel to be understood and applied. And when this happens the MESSES become MERCIES.

My point is this, if your (AND MINE) family is not the epitome of harmony, take heart. God specializes in redeeming messes. See yours as an opportunity for God’s grace to become visible to your loved ones and pray hard that God will make it happen.

Trusting Jesus is hard. It requires following the unseen into an unknown, and believing Jesus’s words over and against the threats we see or the fears we feel.

Lonnie....