Hello All,
(Just a general disclaimer that I must insert here at the beginning. I am but a lay person, like most of you. And these weekly “thoughts” are but my own. Not the definitive word on this or any topic. Just my own conclusions derived from my own study and faith in God. The greatest hope I have for these weekly “thoughts” is to have them be a springboard for further study on your part. Not to be a weekly treatise to be blindly accepted. So, please read them with this intent, this motive in mind).
This week’s lesson from “The Adult Sabbath School Guide” is titled “Families of Faith”. A good lesson on families and sustaining families through the advancing changes encountered throughout life. Change from within and without. What a challenge! While our children are small, it is relatively easy… mostly. But as our children enter adulthood, sustaining the relevance of traditional family ties become more trying and difficult. Our culture exerts such a pull on our children… and ourselves. More and more the “norm” seems to be lower and lower. As a culture, we have re-defined family, individuality, love, sexuality, morality, success, even re-defined “truth”. A down-hill cascading of principles and standards. Principles and standards that had historically served us well since the beginning of Creation. But now are discarded as antiquated and naïve.
This is not the first time in history that culture has taken civilization into the depths. Think of our own “Roaring Twenties”. A generation following WW1 that rejected the traditional family and embraced materialism, wealth, excess, hedonism and the pursuit of pleasure. It took a world-wide depression to bring us back to our senses and to reality. That depression also prepared us for WW2. Before the Great Depression, people were killing themselves when they lost wealth in the Stock Market Crash of 1929. After 12 years of the Great Depression, people were willing laying-down their lives to stop that German Mad-Man from world domination. The Great Depression prepared us for that self-sacrifice. And prepared a generation to strive after WW2 to know and relate to our Great God. After the “war”, theological seminaries were inundated with students in numbers unthought-of in their history. Students funded by the “GI-bill” and motivated by the desire to help change the human heart by a right-relationship with their Creator God. Bless that generation for their commitment!
I bring this up because we sometimes feel as if we are helpless against the onslaught of our own post-modern culture. A culture that appeals to the latent lusts and desires of us self-centered mortals. And the challenge to us who see this destruction is how to help, how to stop the carnage of human lives… within and without our families. I know of only one way. It is God’s way.
As stated above, this is not the first time in history that culture has taken civilization into the depths. The Bible is full of these accounts. In the written “Word” we read account after account of our world gone wild. And we also read of God’s actions in working with us to bring us back to our true image. We see our God-of-Love resort to all kinds of actions and initiatives to restore us. And in this Bible is where we find the solution to today’s crisis.
God’s solution as recorded in Scripture is not found in one single initiative. In the Bible we read of so many, many ways God has related to us, strived with us to “see”. And the clearest way we see God in action is in the life of His Son. “God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son…” (Hebrews 1: 1-2). Follow me here for a moment. The way Jesus countered the prevailing culture was not so much in what He said but in the way He lived His life… the way His Life “spoke” to those of His day and to us today through the Biblical account. Therefore, the way we are to counter the undertow of our culture is not so much in what we say but as how we live. Today, every day. And this is the way to help instill “faith” in our families, too. And the way we “see” the “faith” we are to live, is in the life of Christ.
There was a popular book several years ago (written in 1897) titled “In His Steps”. In that novel, the author has his characters ask the question “What Would Jesus Do”. As I read this book I realized that what Jesus did in His life on earth was often baffling. He so often did the unexpected. So how was I to know what Jesus would do in any situation? But there was always one undergirding motivation behind all that Jesus did. In a word, “love”. But not the world’s definition of “love”. Christ knew when to be tender and when to be firm. He knew when to act and when to refrain from acting. All with the insight born of true love for others… love born of His Father. This is the tack we are to take, too. But to do this, we must first know God, the author of “love”. And the place to find Him and know Him is in His “Word”... Written and Living. This is the place to see God in action. So each of us must be Bible scholars if we desire to halt our culture in its headlong path to destruction. To create a “family of faith”. But more than mere scholars. We need to practice the love that we see. We need to “be” the change we seek to create. This is the task God has given each. To be “light” in a very dark world. To be “salt” in a world that has lost its savor. To be people of faith.
There is one assumption that all of us Christians make. One that we hold-to with the eyes of faith. The assumption is that the image of God has not been effaced from the people we know. That our lives of selfless love will be valued, respected, desired and even imitated. Will lead others to want the God that we know and Who leads us. This is the assumption. This is the gamble. That real, lived-love and lived-truth will be seen and valued. And will lead others to seek the Author of this love and truth. This is all we have, folks. We are not armed with superior weaponry, clever tactics, or the latest gadgetry. We are armed with the character of our God. We are armed with love and truth. Our children’s behavior is largely formed by watching. By modeling the behavior of those they admire. Let us be those who are admired for our strength of character, for our courageous love, for our unyielding stand for truth in all its varied manifestations, and for our lived-faith and lived-trust in our Heavenly Father. Will our role modeling pay-off? Will it succeed in stemming the tide of our culture? It’s unknown to us. But it is all we have. God’s character lived-out in our lives. Let us be faithful.
With brotherly love,
Jim