The American family is in big trouble!
The Harris Poll did a survey in the late 90’s. They asked college students to agree or disagree on some statements.
97% agreed that having a close knit family is the key to happiness; this is up 15% from 10 years prior regarding family.
Less than 25% of all the families in America are made up of a mom and dad married to each other that have children in the home who come out of that union of marriage.
60% of all the people who eventually get married live together first; People living together has increased steadily the last ten years.
In Western Europe, they are totally dismissing marriage.
The highest predictability for the ten most devastating things happening in our culture today is children who come from a broken home and specifically children who come from a father absent home.
Statistics show children from broken homes have a greater chance of poverty, violence,future felons, depression, teen suicide- ( between the ages of 10-14, suicide is up 120%; African American males is up 300%; White females is up 233%)
As the family is imploding, kids are seeing no hope to live. How sad is that.
The greatest prediction of domestic violence, promiscuity, gang violence, drug use, and sexual abuse is related to coming out of a broken home and fatherless homes. Christians are not immune; divorce in Christian marriages is now higher than in non-Christian marriages according to Barna and Gallup.
Carle Zimmerman, a sociologist from Harvard University studied the rise and fall of every great empire of the world, more specifically the family in each of these empires. He concluded that families go through three stages in his book, “Family and Civilization”.
He lists the characteristics of the family in the final stage.
-marriage lost its sacredness
-alternative forms of marriage were advocated
-feminist movements flourished
-parenting became more difficult
-adultery was celebrated, not punished-( 94% of all sex depicted on
- television is of two people outside of marriage).
-sexual perversion abounded- especially incest and homosexuality.
Dennis Rainy of Family Life writes, “America is certainly one of the greatest empires of history and if Zimmerman’s observations on family sends a shiver down your back as they do mine, your concern might be even more urgent when you realize his book was written in 1947.”
We need to make a definitive declaration and commitment today that we have a crisis on our hands in America and we’re going to do something about it. It starts with us, our church, our communities and cities. Let’s not be politically correct. The politically correct ideology for everyone to say that everything is o.k. doesn’t work. It’s not o.k. We have kids committing suicide, kids killing each other. The number one medication in America is anti-depressants! We have families being torn apart by divorce. When are we going to say it is time to get back to God’s design for marriage? When will our marriages in the church start to reflect and reveal who God is? We need to go back to the drawing board. Go back to the original design. God’s blueprint , His design, the first relationship He established We need to ask God, what does marriage look like, what does a parent look like, what does a husband and wife look like?
How do we move forward? How do we get our marriages and families where 20 years down the road we sit around a table with grown children, with our families still intact? Yes it’s been difficult. There’s been arguments, rebellion, hurts, pain, ups and downs but we’ve been reconciled, restored, share unconditional love through Jesus. We need to hand down a legacy to our children of what a marriage designed by God looks like. That is where we need to go in marriage.
The blueprint for marriage is Ephesians 5:21- 6:4
This is the core, the vortex of New Testament teaching of what the family: Ephesians 5:21-6:4
And be subject to one another in the fear of Christ.Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head (servant provider) of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being Savoir of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved church and gave Himself up for her; that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she should be holy and blameless. So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body.
It tells us when God’s spirit fills us, controls us, we speak truth in love, we’re thankful for all things. When we allow God to fill us we learn to live out mutual submission, mutual love, mutual concern, mutual yielded ness, radical sacrificial love relationships filled with the Holy Spirit. We learn to live under God’s design for marriage, committed to caring, nurturing, mutual concern. He wants to show us, husbands, wives, children how to live in such a way we can have that close knit family. It is not only for our good, but will reflect His glory in our family. How we do family reflects God’s relationship with His people.
He has chosen family to be His metaphor, to be His word picture to the world. When we are not living this way in family, in the way that reflects our relationship with God the Father, we are marring the testimony of who God is.
So, how does it work? It goes back to Jesus’ answer to the Pharisees in Matthew 19:5-6,go back to the original, first marriage, Genesis 2:24, the first commandment. Ephesians 5:31-33 "For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall cleave (join) to his wife; and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church. Nevertheless let each individual among you also love his own wife even as himself; and let the wife see to it that she respect her husband. "
There is something mysterious about God in such a union with his people that there is an inner twining of lives. It is a oneness with us, it is pictured the way a man and a woman comes together to become one.
Marriage is the first application of close knit relationships in mutual submission to one another.
Oneness = Intimacy (transparency), one spirit, one body, one soul
God first, everything else is secondary to our spouse.
Marriage is God’s creation, a gift to us for intimacy, sexual pleasure, offspring, and to reflect His image.
We should be best friends, someone we can enjoy life with, laugh with, talk with, be passionate lovers. Remember its God’s plan. Not ours! The closer we draw to God, the closer we will draw to oneness in our marriages with each other.
In this fallen world we will fail at times, sometimes miserably. Why? So we can learn that there is something bigger than us. Marriage is God’s object lesson to teach us we can’t get there by ourselves, so that we have to be totally dependent on Him. He fills us with His unconditional love so we can give it away to our spouse and family whether we get anything back in return. The most fundamental relationship that will make us like His sons and daughters, if you’re honest, is a deep intimate marriage with all the conflict that occurs as you learn to love someone else who is as imperfect as you are. We have to shift our view of marriage from a contract to a covenant where there is no option out, but only to make it better. This is how marriage works. God’s original design.
Mark Soto
