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Well, this is our third week in our series articulating our core values as a church.
Thus far, we have seen that our goal is love for God and others in our family, church, community, and world.
We defined that love as a sacrificial response to and concern for another individual.
We also said that our love is only a reaction and response to the love God has for us.
Loving God involves everything we are and everything we have, as we see that we are called to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Last week, we shifted gears and moved our focus from our vertical relationship to God and towards our horizontal relationship with others.
We saw that loving others in our family, church, community and world meant that we notice their needs, care about seeing them met, and then investing our time, money, reputation, and whatever else to demonstrate love to them.
This morning, we are building on that and narrowing the focus to a specific aspect of life.
That love we have for God has to spill over into every relationship, but that starts with those closest to us: our families.
I want you to know as we begin that there is a very specific reason we start talking about loving others at the home.
How many times have you heard someone say, “Well, my dad was a deacon and a Sunday School teacher, but you should have seen him when he got home.
The way he treated us made me hate everything he said he stood for.”
Although we know it shouldn’t be this way, the people closest to us are often the most difficult to love!
We can put on a front and fake it at church or at work or in the organization where we volunteer, but if we don’t have genuine love, it will show when we get home.
How much harsher are we with our spouses than we would be with anyone else?
How short-fused do we get with our kids or are parents because we know we can get away with it?
How loving is your home, really?
If I brought your spouse or your kids up here, gave them a truth serum, and asked them to tell us exactly how they feel about the love you show them, how would they respond?
I want to suggest something to you this morning: If we fail to love our family, then we fail to love anyone else.
So, what does loving your family look like?
We are going to be looking primarily at Deuteronomy 6:6-9 to try to answer this question this morning.
If you have our core values sheet, you notice that we have made four points under loving our families:
We model vibrant relationships with Christ to our family.
We encourage all our family members to love Christ.
We seek the physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being of family members.
We participate in church life together.
Of those four, I imagine the one we most readily agree on is that third one – I cannot say I am loving my family unless I am fulfilling my role to meet the physical and emotional needs of my family, whatever that role looks like for me.
It varies from person to person and family to family.
However, some question the inclusion of the other points.
Some feel that religion is a personal and private issue and that we should let our children and families decide for themselves what is best.
This morning’s passage goes completely contrary to that idea, and it forms the basis for the other three points.
Your relationship with Christ is personal, true, in that there are unique aspects of your relationship that makes it different than others.
Some find it easier to pray, others find it easier to read their Bibles.
Some can share the Gospel easily with strangers, and with others, it takes more work.
Although each member of the family has a unique, personal relationship with Christ, that personal relationship is not private.
Therefore, we believe that if you are not living your faith out at home, you are not loving your family.
In fact, if you catch nothing else this morning, I would challenge you with this: Show God to your family.
Show that he loves them and show that you love him.
Show God to your family.
Let’s look at the text…
Coming right off the heels of the admonition to love God with all our heart, soul, and strength, we are confronted with the necessity of keeping the Word of God central to our life as a family.
Let’s make three observations about what my family needs from me.
These help us truly learn to love our family as God intends.
None of them are likely to be earth-shattering revelations, but sometimes the familiar truths are the easiest to overlook.
1) My faith must be genuine.
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Look at verse 6 again.
The words, about loving God with everything we have and everything we are, must be engraved on our hearts.
Remember what we have said thus far: the Bible uses the term “heart” to refer to the very core of our being.
When God says these words must be in our hearts, that means they must be central to who we are.
The first step to loving your family well is to make sure you have a right relationship with God that is genuine.
It is like an airplane.
When you fly, during that part you always ignore, the flight attendant tells you that, in case of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will drop from the ceiling.
What do they tell you to do?
If you are traveling with children or someone who needs assistance, put your own mask on first before assisting them.
The same is true here.
You cannot love your family and help them find a relationship with Christ if you don’t have one!
Not only that, but we mentioned last week that we can’t love them with our love, because that love will always run out.
If you don’t have a relationship with Christ, you won’t be able to pour the love of Christ out to others without eventually burning out.
Additionally, our love is selfish, where God’s love is completely selfless.
Apart from a personal, vibrant, growing love relationship with Christ, you cannot love your own family with the quality or quantity of love that God expects.
This isn’t just for those here who have the traditional, “Leave It To Beaver” kind of family with a mom and a dad and some cute and perfect kids.
That’s a good thing, because none of us really have that kind of family!
You have a personal responsibility to live this now, even if you don’t have a family of your own.
Whether you are a mom or a dad or a step-parent or a foster parent or a child or a grandparent or a single adult with cousins and brothers, you cannot love your family as you should without first having a genuine love for Christ.
You start living this out now, whatever situation you find yourself in, and you let God sort out how it works from there.
Get in right relationship with God so you can love the family God gives you the way that God needs you to love them.
Here’s the great part of this: if I have a genuine relationship with Christ, then He can love my family through me!
He can equip me to deal with all the squabbles and bickering that comes with living with each other and knowing each other as well as we do those in our own families.
There is more that we can learn from this passage about loving our families, though.
If I am going to love my family…
2) I must talk about my faith with my family.
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This is the key part of this passage, and it takes us back to what we covered initially.
Your faith is not private!
You have a responsibility, especially if you are a parent, to be continually talking about the things of God with your kids.
Men, you have to take the lead in this with your wife and with your children and with anyone else in your family.
It isn’t always comfortable, but it’s what you are called to do!
This may be controversial, but this passage tells us that it is not the church’s responsibility to teach your children the Bible.
The primary role for teaching your family to love Jesus belongs with you, Dad.
Mom, it is your job to help as well.
Did you hear how comprehensive this is?
Go back and read verse 7 again...
God doesn’t say, “Hey, every once in a while, on a special occasion, you ought to mention God.”
No, it commands you to repeat the truths of God’s word to your children.
As your children grow, they will face different challenges.
How are you helping them face those?
Do you bring those conversations back to Jesus, or do you just encourage them to buckle down and get over it?
Loving your family means teaching them about Jesus!
I think it is interesting that the Bible says we should repeat the words and we should talk about it.
There should be times when we sit down and teach them direct lessons from Scripture, but the things of God should always be on our lips.
Look again at verse 7 to see when we should talk about God.
He is not saying these are the only times; God is teaching us here that whenever and wherever, we should be pointing each other to Christ!
By the way, you can easily expand this out to spouses.
We should talk about what God is teaching us in our quiet times or how we saw Him at work that day.
We should pray about decisions together as a family.
When is the last time you prayed with your wife, guys?
What did you pray about?
When is the last time you prayed with your kids and it wasn’t over a meal?
If the only true satisfaction, lasting peace, and ultimate purpose in life is found within a right relationship with God, then why aren’t we talking about Him with our family?
If I love my kids and my wife, shouldn’t I want them to know who God calls them to be?
Yes, we want our kids to be happy and healthy and live satisfying, productive lives.
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