We don’t have to look very far to see that, in society today, families are becoming more and more dysfunctional. It doesn’t matter where we live, how wealthy, how poor. In the wealthy west, you know, teenagers have less and less contact with their parents. They use the internet and cable TV and their friends to tell them who they are and how they should dress.

In poorer nations, well actually I think that people in poorer nations do much better than in the west. Families are a matter of survival for many. But even there, I mean kids get AIDS. They’re sold into slavery. They’re orphans. All sorts of bad things happen there too.

But here’s the thing. We know that there are a lot of dysfunctional families out there but somehow we imagine that, well, there’s this perfect family out there. In fact, the perfect family is the norm and the dysfunction we see in our own families, well we must be the only ones. It’s our fault. We’ve botched it. You know, we’re just stuck with this.

The teenager who doesn’t respect his parents; the adults in our extended families, they’ve been feuding and haven’t talked for ages because eight years ago they argued over the distribution of assets from their parents will. No, no, it’s just my family that’s a mess. And that’s the thing, it’s the hand I’ve been dealt and there’s nothing, nothing I can do about it. That’s it! What’s the point?

Well if that’s sort of thoughts been rattling around in your head, then today, today I have some great news for you.

It’s true, isn’t it? Family is sometimes like living out a guerrilla war. It’s so ‘in your face’. Every time you come home, every time you walk to the door the whole ‘family’ thing greets you. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that every family is a basket case. Hopefully yours isn’t. But sometimes we’re so close to it. Sometimes the pressure is so constant, it can feel like it is a basket case because we get things all out of perspective.

You know, the young mother with a baby that’s teething and she’s up half the night. And the parents, you know, they’re so different, they feel their lives are heading in different directions. And the teenage son who’s being the rebel, talks down to his parents and treats his mother like a servant. The grandparents, the grandparents who visit and all they ever seem to do is to judge and to criticize and to tell you what you’re doing wrong with your kids.

And in the middle of this, this constant family relationship tension, you get the feeling like, “Oh God, what is going on here? I mean, I love You, I honour you but why is it like this? Why can’t I have a normal family like the people next door?”

And you know, for me, one of the things that make it worse. There’s this minister I knew once. He seemed to have the perfect family. His young adult children, they were so well adjusted. He’d been brought up by Godly parents and he spoke about family from a position, well it seemed to me, a position of almost having that perfect family we all desire.

And then you compare your own family to that and you think, “boy, I’ve made a mess. What’s the matter with me? There’s no hope for my family.” Well let me tell you this. I’m not talking about the whole family thing from that place I can tell you. I haven’t been a perfect husband or a perfect father. In fact, before I gave my life over to Jesus a decade and a half ago, I made some huge blunders that changed the very course of my life. And since then God’s been teaching me a new way. I’m still learning.

So I’m at a certain place in my journey; you’re at a certain place in your journey so let’s just get over this comparing and judging nonsense. There’s only one issue – where do we take our families from here? And I, for one, what I’m about is building a Godly family because there is such a reward in that; such a harvest, and not just one day in the future but along the way, now – the joy of investing and sacrificing to make a difference in the lives of those whom we love.

We’re going to talk more about that whole ‘sacrifice’ thing over these coming weeks but today, today I just want to give us some comfort that God knows all about dysfunctional families.

Let me take you to the very first human family, Adam, Eve, their two sons Cain and Abel. Now maybe you know the story of Adam and Eve pretty well. You know, they were in the Garden of Eden, it was all wonderful. They ate that apple off the tree, they sinned, God kicked them out and they had a couple of sons.

I want to show you something about this family. The interactions between the people that might really make you sit up and take a look. We often hear people talking about the “Adam and Eve” story and the snake and all that stuff from a theological perspective. That’s great but what about from a family perspective?

Okay. Adam and Eve, they’ve sinned. They ate from that one tree God told them not to. God comes looking for them. They’re hiding in the garden, that’s clever isn’t it? And God brings Adam to account. He says:

Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” And the man said, “The woman who you gave me, she gave me the fruit and I ate it.” Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” And the woman said, “The serpent, the serpent tricked me and then I ate.” And the Lord said to the serpent, “Because you have done this cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures.

Upon your belly you shall go and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers. He will strike your head and you will strike his heel. (Genesis chapter 3, verses 11 to 15)

There it is. See Adam rebels against God and Eve rebels against God. Okay, they can blame the serpent and maybe the serpent didn’t have a leg to stand on, but they were the ones that rebelled against God. And the very first thing that Adam does is he blames Eve. And the very first thing she does is to blame the serpent. See, they’ve gone from perfect harmony to dysfunction. God tells them that that is going to be the norm from now on and amongst their children to. Have a listen to the rest of it:

The two sons, Cain and Abel: Abel kept sheep and Cain tilled the ground. In the course of time, Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground and Abel, for his part, brought the firstborn of his flock. They were fat portions and the Lord had regard for Abel and his offspring but for Cain and his offspring, he had no regard. And so Cain was very angry and his countenance fell.

But the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well sin is lurking at the door, its desire is for you but you must master it.” Cain said to his brother, “Let’s go out into the field.” And when they were out there in the field Cain rose up against his brother, Abel, and killed him. (Genesis chapter 4)

Here we have it, the very first family. They rebel against God; husband turns on wife; brother kills brother. It’s the absolute natural state of a family that turns against God. But listen to the good news because God is one who forgives. Deuteronomy chapter 5, verse 8. He said:

You won’t put anything ahead of me. No idols don’t make any idols, don’t worship them because I am a jealous God and I will punish children for the sin of their parents to the third and fourth generations of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

In other words, when we put God at the head of our families, He will show us His steadfast, unwavering love. Not just to us but to a thousand generations. You know what that means? It doesn’t matter how bad things have become in our families, when we honour God, He in turn will honour us.

I’m excited because this week we’re kicking off a few weeks looking at what it means to build a Godly family. That’s why I’m so excited. Because I’ve been praying, praying that of the millions of people that will listen to these programs this week, God will transform countless families. Think about it, the family is God’s smallest, fighting formation. In the battle of life, He uses the family to protect and to nurture, to teach and to mature one another.

Over the last couple of days we’ve been chatting about the realities of family life. Today, so often, we can be so dysfunctional in our family relationships. But that’s nothing new. Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, they had exactly the same problem. It’s what happens when we turn our backs on God. Husband blames wife, brother turns on brother.

Look back over the history of our families, past and present and we can probably point to quite a number of dysfunctions; the rifts, the strife; the relationship breakdowns; the tensions. But truly I believe that when we get back into a relationship with the Lord our God one of the things that He wants to do is to restore those family relationships; to make our families the blessing He always intended them to be.

The problem I have is convincing people that this is, in fact, the case. “Look at the mess I’m in”, is so often the attitude I encounter. “God couldn’t possibly, possibly set things right in my family.” Well, maybe some of the things we’re reaping, from the mistakes in the past, are here to stay. Divorce is divorce – that’s it.

But I’m an optimist and I’ll tell you why. Because God is all about hope and that hope is meant to shine a light in every nook and cranny, every dark crevasse, every hurt and loss and pain that we try not to think about. God’s light of hope shines there. Have a listen to what Paul writes in Romans chapter 5:

Since we are justified by our faith, we have peace with God through Jesus. Through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we now stand and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.

Not only that but we also boast in our suffering because we know that suffering produces endurance. Endurance produces character. Character produces hope and that hope doesn’t disappoint us because Gods love has been poured into our hearts through His Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

For a while we were still weak but at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans chapter 5, verses 1 to 8).

There are a few things in that. Let me just pull three of them out. The first thing is he talks about the fact that, when we believe in Jesus, we have peace with God through Jesus. And that’s why we can stand in the grace in which we now stand. That’s the effect of putting our faith in Jesus. Peace and Gods grace.

But then he goes on and says, “well, it’s great, we’ve got peace and grace but you know something, we’re also going to suffer. And that’s okay because suffering gives us endurance. Endurance builds our characters. And once our character’s been built, we can look beyond all suffering and all whinging and complaining and we can see that God has given us hope. Hope because He’s written His love on our hearts by His very Spirit.” And all of that, all of that is based on sacrifice. God proves His love for us in that, while we were still sinners, Jesus died for us.

How often do we want to grumble about family? “Agh, they’re so difficult, it’s also tense, grumble, grumble, grumble, grumble, suffering.” Paul says, “No, no, no. Boast in your suffering because something good is going on here; because through it God is refining us and building us and leading us into a place of real hope.”

Let me tell you something. God loves to refine us through suffering. He deals with some of the worst things in us through suffering – selfishness, deceit, pride – but only when we co-operate with Him. That’s why Paul says that he boasts instead of grumbles, because God’s up to something good.

God put us in family for reasons and look at the end of this passage, it’s all based on sacrifice. We’re going to talk a lot more on this ‘sacrifice’ thing over coming weeks in family, because it’s important. But right now, I just want to paint a picture in our hearts.

If you were going to build a godly family, get over all this suffering, all this pain, all this whinging. Let’s just get our eyes focused on the end game. If you were going to build a godly family, I mean a family that, I don’t know, is a blessing; a family that sticks together; a family that learns; a family that knows how to give and to take and to bless. What would it look like? I don’t know. It’s hard sometimes because we look at our families and think, ‘augh, it could never happen.’ I’m going to tell you. God wants us to build a godly family.

Well here’s my picture of what a godly family looks like for me. I’m going to ask you to invest some time over this next day or so to figure out what does a godly family look like for you? The first thing in my godly family is that each person, in that family, is living out a dynamic relationship with Jesus Christ; growing in their knowledge and their love for Jesus. That’s the first and foremost thing. If you want a godly family the people have to be godly and the first and greatest commandment is to:

Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.

So if you want a godly family, people have to be close to Jesus.

The second thing is that each person, in my godly family, is actually living out that relationship. Okay, we’re all different but each one is living out the love that they have for Jesus in how they treat others. It’s the second commandment. It’s similar to the first.

Love your neighbour as yourself.

The third thing is very family specific. That mum and dad, husband and wife have a close and intimate relationship; a strong, loving, leadership team; the wife honours her husband; the husband cherishes his wife.

The fourth thing is that the parents are honoured. Have you noticed, in the Ten Commandments, the first four commandments are about us and God? The very next commandment, the fifth commandment is:

Honour your father and your mother so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord, your God, has given to you. (Exodus chapter 20, verse 12)

Now, if I had been God, my hunch is I wouldn’t have even put in a commandment about loving your parents. God does, and it’s important that children learn to love and to honour their parents. So that’s the fourth thing in my godly family. This family is one where the children know what it is to honour their parents.

The fifth thing is that each person develops an understanding of the differences between one another – the different roles, the different personality types – and learns to cherish those differences.

And finally, the sixth thing is that this Godly family is a family from which blessing flows outwards. whether it’s hospitality or providing a safe port in a storm for one of our teenage daughter’s friends going through a tough time. Whatever it is, that blessing flows out through the family.

That’s what a Godly family looks like for me. And I guess, in a sense, those are things we’re going to be looking at over the next few weeks. Here’s my question though – if you were to build a Godly family, what would it look like for you? Because unless we know what we’re shooting for how do we know which direction to set off in? How do we know when we’ve arrived?

One of the things that brings so much dysfunction into families is, well … things from the past; things that have been handed down genetically, emotionally and spiritually. It seems such an incredible paradox to me that the people who are most likely to sexually abuse a child are those who were themselves, abused when they were young. Doesn’t that seem totally against the way it should be? Wouldn’t you think that someone who was abused as a child, well the last thing they’d want to do would be inflict that on their own children?

And yet, what happens is this powerful kind of template or imprinting. Our parents hand so many things down to us: their genes, their strengths, their weaknesses. People say that I look like my Dad, I even walk like him. But it wasn’t until I saw myself on a TV interview, I was shocked to realise that even my mannerisms were so much like my father’s. Pretty scary!

And so alcohol addiction, bad temper, a tendency to whinge and complain, all sorts of things end up being handed down from generation to generation. Dysfunctional families are much more likely to produce children that grow up to have their own dysfunctional families.

Where does it end? Well, I have a simple answer for that. It ends today. Here and now, this very minute. That’s when it ends. Let me explain.

See it’s so easy to blame our parents for things, for the bad things happening; if abuse happened when you were a child. You had a father with a bad temper or your parents smoked, whatever, and then they handed those things down to you.

I don’t know about your parents but mine, I had good parents. Neither of them would ever have claimed to have been perfect. I mean, who is? But they worked hard to provide for myself and my sister. I’m sure they’d look back on their lives and see the mistakes and their weaknesses but I think we need to get this all into perspective.

It’s so easy to blame the past, to blame our upbringing, to blame our parents. Things get handed down from generation to generation. Some of them are good. Others aren’t.

When you go see your Doctor, one of the very first things he tends to ask you is about your family history. Do you have a family history of high blood pressure or diabetes or heart disease or mental health issues or breast cancer?

Family history has a lot to do with our physical well being. My father had Type 2 diabetes. It took his life in the end. My mother has high blood pressure, and so I can just sit here and not exercise and eat whatever I want and then complain about the fact that they gave me diabetes or high blood pressure. Or, or I can do something about it. I can get off my backside and go and exercise and eat properly.

There are clear alternatives. I mean most sicknesses – diabetes, cancer, there are things we can do in our lifestyle to mitigate them happening in our lives. And it’s the same with emotional and spiritual things that get handed down to us.

Maybe, I don’t know, maybe you had parents who were into the occult. Maybe you had parents who fought like cat and dog. Maybe you had parents who got divorced. Maybe you had parents who knew about God but simply never honoured God with their lives. And some of that stuff gets dumped down into who you are.

Well, we have two choices. We can sit here and complain about it or we can go and do something about it. Have a listen to what happens when we put other things before God; when we accept that as the way of living that’s been handed down from our parents and from their parents. Deuteronomy chapter 5, verse 8:

You shall not make for yourself an idol (That’s something that you worship other than God) whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above or that’s on the earth beneath or that’s in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing children for the inequity of their parents to the third and fourth generation of those who reject Me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

That’s pretty straight forward. When parents turn away from God and chase after other things and put those things first, it’s going to have an impact to the third and the fourth generation. That’s obvious, we’ve seen it. A child brought up by an alcoholic father is going to suffer from the consequences of that, in all likelihood, into their adulthood. And there’s every chance that the impact will passed down to their children as well.

Not rocket science. We’ve seen that but look at the alternative that God talks about. He talks about, “Showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.”

Now, what’s a thousand generations? Well, a new generation roughly every 25 years. That’s 25 thousand years. I mean only a fraction of that has passed away since this passage in Deuteronomy is written a few thousand years before Christ.

Do you get it? God’s blessing to us and our families when we honour Him is massive. The flow on affect in our families is massive. And I’ve seen that in so many godly families, this dynasty of blessing that flows down from generation to generation.

Maybe, maybe there are things in your past, emotional, spiritual, behavioural, that are still impacting your life. Today is the day that we can choose to break the chain; today is the day that we can choose to break free from the power of the past. The prophet Nehemiah saw God’s people suffering. Listen to the prayer he prayed:

O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love Him and keep His commandments: let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for your servants, the people of Israel confessing the sins of the people of Israel which we have sinned against you. Both I and my family have sinned. We have offended you deeply failing to keep the commandments, the statutes and the ordinances that you commanded your servant Moses. 

Remember the word that you commanded your servant Moses? “If you are unfaithful I will scatter you among the peoples but if you return to me and you keep my commandments and do them, though you are outcast or under the farthest skies, I will gather them from there and bring them back to a place in which I have chosen to establish my name. (Nehemiah chapter 1, verses 5 to 9)

It is such a simple prayer. It’s a prayer saying, “God, I have sinned. My family has sinned. We’ve sinned down through the generations. Right now, here and now, we take a stand and we turn away from that. Because we know that you are a God who forgives. We’ve all sinned but you will forgive and you will bring back”. And he says, “This is what breaks the power of the past.”

God’s people, at this point, were living out in exile because of their sin and Nehemiah prays a prayer that gets forgiveness happening that brings Gods people back. The apostle Paul puts it this way, in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 17:

If anyone is in Christ Jesus he is a new creation. Old things have passed away and behold, all things are new.

It may take you back to some of the things that maybe have been handed down to you – addictions, anger, bad behaviour, whatever it is – we can receive freedom from those things simply by praying and believing. God will work out His answer to our prayers, in our lives, in His good time.

Meanwhile, we can take stock of those things and decide to start doing something about them, not in our own fancy strength but through a relationship with Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God who transforms us from the inside out. It is time … it is time to end the cycle of sin that’s been handed down from generation to generation. The buck stops here with you and me. How about it?

This week we’ve been talking about building a godly family on the program. The whole gist of it has been this – it doesn’t matter how dysfunctional a family ours is at the moment, all it takes is one member of that family to turn back to God. To honour God and God can and will make some awesome and mighty changes.

It will probably take time. Maybe longer than you or I would prefer. But God’s timing is perfect. He’s a God of grace. His heart is to bless our family to a thousand generations. All He’s looking for is one Godly man, one Godly woman, one Godly child to take a stand and say, “enough of this! It is time for me to build a Godly family.” 1 Corinthians chapter 4, verse 20, in the message translation says this:

God’s way is not a matter of mere talk, it’s an empowered life.

That’s why the ministry I’m involved in is called Christianityworks, because actually, it does. Christianity does work. So today, today we’re going to chat about making that happen, an empowered life that sets about building a godly family.

You know what I’ve noticed, we can talk about a lot of stuff but most times nothing changes unless we actually do something. It’s true at work. It’s true at home. I mean how often have I been in a meeting at work and people talk about this and that and a whole bunch of stuff – We’ll do this; we’ll do that – but then, after the meeting everyone goes back to their work and their office. No-one does anything and guess what, nothing happens. I mean, nothing changes.

We’re talking this week and again over the next few weeks, about building a godly family and it’s important because our families, truly, our families really matter to us. These are people we love. These are the people who, most often, we live with. And yet, because we come home tired and we need a rest and we ignore things like, like the badly behaved child for example. We actually don’t invest anything in building up the family.

There’s a great proverb, Proverbs chapter 29, verse 17, says this:

Discipline your children and they will give you rest. They will give delight to your heart.

Now you and I have seen this down at the local supermarket. There’s a mother with a young child, a seven year old kid, and this kid is just grinding her down with bad behaviour. But, well, she’s tired. She’s too tired and exhausted to do anything about it. So she lets this kid run riot. He causes her grief. He causes everybody else grief too.

Why does that happen? I’ll tell you why, probably because dad is too tired when he comes home at night to discipline the child. So this kid walks all over his mother. She’s exhausted and he’s only seven. I mean, wait ’til the little terror becomes a teenager. I mean, just wait.

There is fruit in building a godly family, tremendous fruit. “Discipline your children” says the proverb. What do you get? Peace and a delighted heart. You sow what you reap. The problem is the sowing is such hard work sometimes. And reaping seems such a long way off doesn’t it?

Let me tell you something. We’ve been talking about building this godly family but it ain’t going to happen unless we step out in faith and start making it happen. Sure, it’s about God blessing our efforts but if He’s got nothing to bless then He’s got nothing to bless.

I mean, imagine I’m 20 kilos overweight (40 pounds) and I decide I want to be trim and taught and terrific. Now I pray and pray and pray and pray and believe and believe and believe and believe that God will give me a breakthrough. But I keep eating and drinking the same old rubbish. I don’t exercise.

Let me ask you, is God going to zap me out of the sky while I’m lazing on the sofa and miraculously remove my excess weight? Well, He could and with God I’d never rule anything out but I’ve never quite seen it happen that way, have you?

Why would we think it’s any different in building a godly family? We behave our families into a bad place by what we say, what we do, what we fail to do, what we fail to say. We behave ourselves into that bad place. And yes, we should pray but God expects us to start behaving ourselves out of that place. He’s going to bless that but we have to do our part.

So, do you want a godly family; a family where each family member is living out a dynamic relationship with Jesus Christ; where each one is actually living that out into their lives; where the husband and the wife have a warm, intimate relationship; where the kids are honouring their parents; where each family member respects and honours and understands one another; where there’s real blessing, Gods blessing, flowing out of our families into the lives of others? Is that the sort of family that we really, really want?

Well if it is, we’re going to have to decide that it is what we want and plan it and start doing it and start living it. We’re going to have to decide that some changes have to be made, and you know, changes are never easy. This easy, comfortable, lollipop type of existence has to change. Discipline is painful. Kids don’t like discipline much. They don’t like being told, “No, you can’t watch television because you have to study. No, you have to clean up after yourself. No, you have to dry the dishes.” They don’t like that.

It takes strength, it takes perseverance but it pays dividends. So let me ask you, how much do you want to have a Godly family? And if the answer is, “YES, YES, I do!” then some tough decisions have to be made. If you’re family is one with a husband and wife, then it’s up to both of you. If it’s a single parent family, it’s just up to you to think and talk and dream and decide what’s important; to set priorities; to figure out how to do this; what steps to take first and so on.

Mum, Dad, you are the leaders and I happen to believe that, ultimately dad, you’re responsible for the spiritual growth and nourishment and development of your family.

The buck stops with you Dad. This isn’t a sexist thing. So many women would give their eye teeth to see their husbands step up to the plate and take on that leadership role. So many kids would love to have parents who are interested in them, who spend time and effort setting boundaries, enforcing those boundaries, nurturing them within those boundaries.

I have to tell you, as a person I’m naturally an isolationist. I prefer my own company, oft times to the company of others. I really enjoy retreating to my own space after a hard day at the office. So for me, given who I am, getting involved with the family and the kids and listening to what happened to them at school and at work, it’s not a natural gig but, we have to start somewhere. You can’t build a godly family if there’s no relationship and there’s no interaction.

We’re going to talk about how some of that happens later on in the next few weeks. In fact, one of the godliest family’s I know, there are some friends of mine who live in Lincoln, Nebraska. Just between Lincoln and Omaha. Mum, Dad and 9 children. They’ve given me some of their pointers, both the parents and the kids. So we’re going to have some fun and look at that.

But right now we have to decide, each one of us, do we actually want to have a godly family? Well, do we? And if we do, what are we going to do about it? Maybe that’s something that you can pray about and think about and talk about over the weekend. We’re going to talk about it some more next week on the program – this whole thing of building a godly family.