How Life Works: Wisdom Living from Proverbs
03/18/2001 - Build Strong Families
Television hasn't been the same since the Survivor series hit this past summer. The show took reality television to another level. It was a surprising success, capturing huge television audiences, breaking all kinds of viewer records during the normally slow summer months. And the winner, Richard Hatch, the survivor himself, walked away with a cool million dollars in tucked away in his loincloth. The show was so successful that CBS ran the reruns again in the fall and now is in the midst of a sequel from Australia called Survivor Outback. And in May the winner of that show will be announced.
But did you hear about the next Survivor series? The network is already working on it. Apparently six men are going to be dropped off on a desert island with one van apiece and 4 kids each for six weeks. Each child plays two sports and either takes music or dance lessons. Each man must take care of his four children, keep his assigned hut perfectly clean, correct all the homework, complete all the science projects, settle all the arguments, do all the cooking and all the laundry, and tuck the kids into bed every night. There's no access to babysitters or fast food.
They have only one television set between them and there is no remote. The men must shave their legs and wear makeup every day, which they have to apply themselves either while driving in the van or while making four lunches. They have to attend weekly PTO meetings, clean up after their sick children at 3:00 a.m., make an Indian hut model with six toothpicks, a tortilla and one magic marker, and get a 4 year-old to eat a serving of peas. The kids vote the men off the island based on their performance. And the winner gets to go back to his job!
Sound like a family you know? Today we're continuing our series in the book of Proverbs called "How Life Works." And we're going to look at what it takes to build strong families, not just to survive as a parent, but to thrive as a parent. I thought this would be a great day to talk about families especially with the family dedications we had just a few minutes ago.
There's a lot of discussion these days on what exactly is a family. Do a husband and a wife without children make up a family? I think they do. But some would say that their family really begins when they have kids? Or how 'bout a single mom and her children, that's a family right? Or a single dad and his kids? What about a man and a woman who aren't married, but living together with their children? Is that a family? Or two gay men living together with or without children? Or two lesbian women living together with or without kids is that a family? What is a family anyway?
Last week, 20/20 ran a segment called "Gaybe Boom" in which they investigated a wave of gay and lesbian couples who've decided to have kids together. And they asked the children all kinds of questions about what it's like growing up with gay parents. And we're going to hear a lot more about those kind of relationships as the gay movement and the media push that agenda and try to mainstream that understanding of the family as socially acceptable. And you know what, it may eventually become socially acceptable in our country. I wouldn't be surprised if it does. And as much as we might have trouble with that, we need to remember that God loves people who choose those kinds of relationships. He really does. They matter to God. And Jesus died for them too.
But that's not the way God intended families to work. So for our purposes today I went to Webster's New Riverside Dictionary and looked up the word "family." And Webster's time honored definition of a family is "a social unit consisting especially of a man and a woman and their offspring." And so today as I talk about building strong families I want to talk about a man and a woman and their offspring. Now let me quickly add that I realize not every family has a man and a woman, or a husband and a wife who are living together. In fact, this week I discovered that about half of all children growing up in America are being raised in homes without their fathers. And that number continues to rise, so I want to talk about single parenting as well because it's so widespread today. But when you dig through the wisdom of Proverbs the kinds of families that the writer addresses are made up of a husband and a wife and their offspring.
When you get into a subject like building strong families the literature out there is enormous. You can quickly get buried under an avalanche of information, mountains of studies that have been done and countless of books that have been written on the subject. I went to my file on "Family" this week and almost wish I hadn't. It was jammed full of articles and pamphlets and notes and quotes and all kinds of stuff that I'd filed over the years.
So I gave up on that approach and decided to start with a blank sheet of paper and the wisdom of God found in Proverbs. And when you shrink-wrap everything that the author says in this book about the family you come down to two building blocks that are necessary to build a strong family. Just two. And at the risk of oversimplifying the subject I'd like to give you those two today. The first is found in Proverbs 5.
In Proverbs 5:15-19, in a section called "Warning Against Adultery," Solomon writes poetically about the importance of keeping love alive in your marriage. Proverbs 5:15-19 says, Drink water from your own cistern, running water from your own well. 16 Should your springs overflow in the streets, your streams of water in the public squares? 17 Let them be yours alone, never to be shared with strangers. 18 May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. 19 A loving doe, a graceful deer-may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love.
A marriage filled with love, Solomon says, is like a refreshing spring of water. And like water in a well, that love is only meant to be shared with each other. This is one case where God commands us to be very selfish. So he says in verse 20, Why be captivated, my son, by an adulteress? Why embrace the bosom of another man's wife? The first building block for a strong family is a strong marriage. I firmly believe that the best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother. And the best a mother can do for her children is to love their father. A strong marriage offers children tremendous security. That's why in our family dedication today we asked each couple to recommit themselves, publicly, to grow together, to strengthen their relationship, so that their children will have the love and security they need to mature into healthy adults.
I think the writer of Proverbs would read all the literature today on the family, watch all the specials on 20/20, listen to all the rhetoric on gay and lesbian relationships, catch all the Jerry Springer stuff on spouse swapping and steamy affairs and children who marry their parents and when all the chatter died down he would say, "rejoice in the spouse of your youth." Build a solid marriage. When you get married stay together, work on your relationship together, make compromises together, get help when you need it, fast and pray and try and try and try again. Make the most of your marriage because strong families flow out of strong, solid "till death do us part" marriage relationships. They just do.
And whatever you do, don't get tangled up in an affair. Don't embrace the bosom of another man's wife or another woman's husband. Look at verse 21, For your ways are in full view of the Lord, and he examines all your paths. 22 The evil deeds of the wicked ensnare them; the cords of their sins hold them fast. 23 They will die for lack of discipline, led astray by their own great folly.
I don't always read Ann Landers. But just a few weeks ago a letter caught my eye, it was written by a man who referred to himself as "Recovering in Washington, D.C." This is what he wrote. "Dear Ann Landers, Three years ago, my wife had an affair with a coworker. It not only ended our marriage, it ruined the dream of sharing our lives together. The fallout from this experience shook me to the core. Please tell your readers who may be considering an extramarital affair to understand the reality of their actions. Because of a few passionate hours, your family will never be the same. You will bring dishonor and pain to your spouse, your children, your parents and yourself. You may contract a venereal disease, which you could pass on to your spouse. Your children will suffer from the fighting, yelling and devastation that follow the discovery of an affair. The money you worked so hard to save for your children's education will be lost to legal fees and the cost of supporting two households. In short, you will seriously traumatize those you profess to love the most, and you will do it for fleeting, selfish reasons. If your marriage isn't working, please, for the sake of all concerned, get help from trained counselors. If the marriage can't be saved, do your best to end it in a manner that shows respect and dignity. To do otherwise is to suffer wounds that never heal."
That letter's another way of saying the evil deeds of the wicked ensnare them. Nothing's changed in 3,000 years. Adultery is a wicked thing. Don't fall for the glamorization of Hollywood or daytime television on this one. Some of you know how wicked it is from experience. And you'd be the first to say, "Take adultery off the list of your marriage options." If you're marriage is struggling, get help. Do it for yourself. Do it for your spouse. Do it for your kids. The cost of a good counselor is a whole lot less than the cost of a broken marriage. I'm talking to us men, because often it's the woman who wants help, but the man who needs it.
Jennifer and I have had a number of heavy-duty talks recently about upping our commitment to our marriage. We want to stand shoulder to shoulder and fight for our marriage together. We both recognize how easy it is for us to give our lives away to everyone else and everything else and leave the crumbs for ourselves. And that's not the recipe for a strong marriage. And we're talking a lot about what changes we need to make and what those changes will look like. We're making some mid course corrections. And we'll talk more about marriage in a few weeks when we look at what the Proverbs teach about marrying well.
Now if you're a single parent today, raising your children without their father or their mother due to a divorce, please don't despair. You can do a phenomenal job raising your children with God's help. Loving the father of your children or the mother of your children who is now your ex first of all means that you extend forgiveness to them for the hurts of the past. You chose to release them from the need to hurt them back. Forgiveness doesn't mean you forget the hurts they've caused you or continue to cause you or don't feel the hurts anymore or that you excuse the wrong they've done. Forgiveness means that you give up the right to punish them back. Because if you don't you end up building a prison of bitterness, later to discover there's only one inmate...you.
But when your children see the love and forgiveness you can have for your ex, who is their mom or who is their dad it will make a powerful, indelible impression on them. And will teach them more about the love and forgiveness of God than a pile of sermons ever could on that subject.
Now before we move on to the second ingredient let me remind you that at core of our faith is a God who's full of grace and mercy and offers second chances to moral failures like you and like me. A God who says to those who have committed adultery or who have gone through the pain of a divorce or who haven't been paying attention to their marriage, "Listen. I know you've mucked up your life. I know you crossed over the foul lines and made some big mistakes. But there's grace and forgiveness for you at the cross. Take my hand and together we can put those things behind us and walk towards purity and trust and obedience. Accept what my Son did on the cross for you and we can start fresh today." Jesus didn't come into the world to condemn the world, but to save it. God wants to help us move past the past. Take him up on his offer!
The first building block for a strong family is a strong marriage. The second building block is parenting skill.
In the book of Proverbs, parenting your children well or skillfully means three things both for two parent families as well as for single parent families. First, it means love your children. I like the way Solomon's father, King David, put it in Psalm 127:3, Children are a gift from the Lord, offspring are a reward from him. Children are gifts, expensive little gifts, but gifts to us, treasures from God and should be treated that way. They should be prized and cherished. They were given to make us glad.
Proverbs 23:25 says, May your father and mother be glad, may she who gave you birth rejoice! There's nothing like the joy of a baby. I've been in the delivery room for all three of our kid's births, coaching Jennifer, getting yelled at by Jennifer. And there's nothing in the world that can compare with taking that newborn, fresh from God, still slimy and screaming and holding it in your arms. What a gift! What a blessing! What a responsibility! We saw that same joy on the faces of the parents who were up here today. Children make their parents glad.
So we need to tell them that. Our kid's need to hear thousands of times that we love them, that we're crazy about them. They need to touched and hugged and wrestled with, to be talked to and listened to. They need to have our time. Children spell love T-I-M-E! And in our fast paced culture spending time with our kids might just be our greatest challenge. One study I did read this week surveyed 1,000 businessmen in Chicago on how much time they spend with their children. And the survey said that the average father spent 6 minutes a week with his kids outside of eating and sleeping in the same house. Six minutes a week isn't going to cut it!
A child development expert concluded that well-adjusted adults have at least one parent who loved them irrationally. Every human being, just to be normal, has to be loved abnormally, irrationally. It's what all of us need. To build a strong family we need to pour massive amounts of love and time and energy into our children.
But kids need more than love. And these parents who were up here are going to find out, if they haven't already, that there's a dark side to their little angels. And because of that, children need limits. Parenting skill means setting limits for your children.
Proverbs 22:15, Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline will drive it far away. The Bible knows nothing of the clean slate theory. The theory that says kids are born morally neutral, neither good nor bad. According to God, children are born with a magnetic pull towards mischief. The Bible calls it sin and it's found in every one of us from birth. We don't become sinners the first time we say "no" to our parents, we say to "no" to our parents because we are sinners. Not only is that what the Bible teaches when it talks about human depravity, but that's what experience teaches us everyday. In our home we say, "You don't have to teach kids how to be bad, they know how to be bad. You have to teach them how to be good." And you spend the best years of your life as a parent doing that.
One of the best things that we can teach our children is that they aren't the center of the universe. The world doesn't revolve around them. As much as they think it does. They don't get everything they want. That's the quickest way to ruin a child.
A number of years ago the Minnesota Crime Commission released a report in which they said, "Every baby starts life as a little savage, completely selfish and self-centered. He wants what he wants when he wants it: his bottle, his mother's attention, his playmate's toy, his uncle's watch. Deny these and he seethes with rage and aggressiveness that would be murderous were he not so helpless. This means that all children, not just certain children, are born delinquent. If permitted to continue in the self-centered world of infancy, given free reign to his impulsive actions, every child would grow up a criminal, a thief, a killer, a rapist."
Sounds scary, doesn't it? Not my kid, right? Anyone of our kids. Kids need boundaries. They need limits. And whether we choose to enforce them with spankings or time outs or some other form of discipline they need to know that there are consequences for their actions. Kids need love and kids need limits. And the challenge of parenting is balancing love and discipline. It's what keeps a parent praying and asking for God's wisdom and help.
Love your kids. Set limits for your kids. And third, learn about your children.
Proverbs 22:6, Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it. Over the years there's been a lot of discussion about the meaning of this proverb. Some have taken it almost as a guarantee that good parenting will pay off every time. That kids raised with lots of love and proper amounts discipline will never go off track. I don't believe that. There are no guarantees as long as children have a mind and a heart of their own. There is no airtight, can't miss, magic formula to raising kids.
Instead, I think this passage has two layers of meaning. First, I think it's a general truth about child rearing. Most of the patterns that are set in a child's life early on will eventually take root and be owned by them later in life, when they are old they will not turn from it. Things like right and wrong, truth telling, responsibility, respect, kindness will eventually become their own over time. It may take a season of rebellion to get there, but in most cases they'll return to it.
But there's a second layer of meaning here. The verse can also be translated, Train up a child according to his way, and when he is old he will not turn from it. Translated that way the verse means pay attention to your kids. Learn about them. They're all different. You can't parent each one exactly the same. A child must be trained according to his way or her way, not our way. We need to learn the way each one of our kids is wired, some are outgoing, some are shy, some are verbal, some are quiet, some are fearful, some are risk takers, some are athletic, some are artsy, some are musical. That's his way or her way and we need to honor that when we parent them. Two of the greatest mistakes we can make in raising our kids is to treat them exactly the same way and to compare them to each other.
Wise parents take time to learn their children, to observe their children, to help their children understand who they are and to encourage their children to pursue the things that their good at. Children want that guidance from us. They need it.
Building strong families is the most challenging and rewarding job in the world. It takes a strong marriage, lots of love, careful discipline, and wise insight into each one. And to do it right we desperately need God's help. He wants to give us the wisdom to do it and it's ours for the asking. And so as we close today, I want to give us all a chance to ask God for help. I'm confident that God has given each one of us today who's married or who's a parent or maybe even grandparent some ideas for a next step. So let's just take a moment to ask him to help us with that step.