¶ Intro / Opening
Can we admit that we have a ruling crisis in our culture, like we need better rulers. And I think part of the reason is we need better families. You want people that are part of these multi generational families who know who they are, who cannot be influenced by corruption because they have this sense of who they are as a family.
Uh, so we're going to talk about how ancient wisdom can heal the modern family. We're going to go way back, not a hundred years or back into the 1950s. We're going to go way back thousands of years and try to understand what was in God's heart as a father. When he first came up with this idea of family, do you know that we didn't come up with this idea?
one of the really fun experiences that we got to have yesterday was that we got to Uh, just minister and be with fathers as fathers. So my son's about to become a father for the first time, their baby's due in December. My dad being here are all three generations. And this is how we like to do life, right?
I grew up in a nice, uh, Christian family, we didn't do that kind of thing. So, but I was like, this is being blessed by the monks, and so I, maybe I should give it a taste. So I tasted wine for the first time, and, and, uh, I said that to my friends, I'd never had wine before. They're like, really? That's really interesting.
And it's really difficult to answer a question that you refuse to answer. And I think we need to ask this question. We think, okay, we've all grown up in families. We've done our 10, 000 hours in the family. We we've, we were raising families. We've seen families. We know what family is. It's, it's, it's, it's so easy.
Now, one of the problems that you bump into immediately when you start talking about family is you start to feel possibly this really difficult emotion of shame. I want to talk about that before we talk about the family, because it's really important to know that we all have done things or experienced things within families.
And so when you start feeling any shame, there's, there's a few options that people often experience. There's honor shame culture. And oftentimes the way that they handle shame is they hide from this ideal. So we started talking about family. I'm going to tell you guys what I believe God designed family to be.
And this destruction of the ideal, this, this endlessly playing with, with things that God has created and given to us as a gift, this is really causing us to get confused as a culture. And so what we want to do is really take the third option, which is to repent and believe the gospel. If you hear and see the way God has made something, then what we do, how we overcome shame.
Because there is so much at stake in this conversation with regards to the gospel. Do you know that when God communicates to human beings? his truth of the gospel, he does it in family language. And if the culture or if there are forces, if the enemy can somehow corrupt that language, then we may not be able to understand the truth of the gospel.
This is, this is the enemy's plan for us. Or when Jesus came, he, his favorite title for himself was son. I am a son. I'm the son of man. I'm the son of God. He uses the word son more than any other word to refer to himself. When we, when he reveals to us his plan, of bringing together a new, uh, a new entity, the church.
Stand at the crossroads and look. Ask for the ancient paths. Ask where the good way is and walk in it and you will find rest for your souls. We need to find an ancient path. I do, I believe that the solution to understanding what happened to the family is in the past. In the ancient past. And so we're gonna go into the ancient past and talk about some really, really old stuff.
Let's just find some other way to get this nurturing desire met besides having children. And so this is what I was seeing. And I was, I related to it. I'm like, yeah, what, what is the big deal? Why do we need to have kids? Why do I need to be a father? And so this is, this was the way of my thinking when I was plucked out of Seattle and I was doing a semester abroad in Jerusalem and I was there to study Hebrew.
And I was like, That is really weird. I've never seen anything like that before in my life. I've seen, I've seen mommy brigades before, but I've never seen a daddy brigade. Uh, and so I started to, you know, I, I assumed that of course I knew the truth about, uh, family and fatherhood that, you know, I know kids are annoying.
Um, and so there's something unusual going on in this culture. So I started to ask various Jewish and Arab dads that I was meeting in the city. Like they all want to talk about their kids. They all were so interested in their families. They all saw themselves almost primarily their identity as father.
They're like a reward. And children born to a young man, a young man, like when I think about a young man who without lots of kids, Like, joyful is the man, is not the word that comes to mind. I think, uh, a young man with a bunch of kids, it's like, you know, exhausted is the man whose quiver is full of them, or broke is the man, um, but joyful is the man.
I, I was in this intensive course where every single week we would sit with only eight of us and we would study the scriptures through the lens of Abraham, but not once Did we talk about Abraham as a father? Talked about his, a man of faith and his connection to the gospel. But in these cultures, they, they, they thought about Abraham as a father.
They were using Abraham's obsession with multi generational family as the fuel for their fatherhood. I've never seen that before. So is that, is it possible we've lost that? Is it possible That, that is a clue back to an ancient path for why the family's in such crisis in our culture. So what is a family?
The word Avram, that's the way the Hebrew pronunciation of his first name Avram means his exalted father. Av is father in Hebrew. And so every single time a Jewish person reads Abraham, they read the word father over and over and over again. Abraham means father of many nations. And so if Abraham, if Avram, Abram is a exalted father, maybe that's a clue that we were supposed to look and understand fatherhood through the exalted father.
So I've created a little, a little animation for you guys to try to tease out the difference between the way Abraham might've saw a family and the way that we typically in the West think about family. So trying to answer this question for what is the family. So let's start with a Western family. The way, again, most typically we think about family in the West.
and launch them out. So you got a couple of kids, you want to launch them out and then bam, they go. And so you're pushing them out and your hope is that they would start their own family someday. And the whole process starts over. So one of the, one of the features of the Western family that thinks this way is that has about an 80 year memory.
So, one of the weird, uh, things I'm gonna present to you guys, or, or, or I'm gonna suggest, is that one of the reasons why fathers struggle so much with fatherhood in our culture is because of this definition of family. There's something about this definition of family does not resonate deeply with men.
And so you are saying we're going to start this business. We're going to move to this new land, right? We're going to worship this God. This is how Abraham's family started. Abraham's father was an idol worshiper. His name was Terah. We don't worship the God of Terah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Do you know why?
I know that in these days. Um, but part of what we want to be really careful, especially here on Father's Day, is to understand that a patriarch is simply the expression of a father who's leading his family in a visionary way. That's what its original meaning was. And so we want to make sure that we don't let the enemy corrupt this word.
No, no, I want to talk about your family. You want to, it literally took him about 20 minutes just to get him to talk about, he's not used to talking about his family. He's a very successful businessman. But I was like, no, I want, I want to know about your family. I heard that you have a multi generational family.
You don't have to do the kind of family that we're building in our Western culture. There's something broken about this kind of family. So, but is this biblical? Like, is this really what's a scripture? Is this really what was in God's heart when he began to create the family? Well, fortunately, because we have scripture, we actually know why God created the first family.
So if you think about what is happening here, when you look at this, you're asking yourself, what is this thing called the family? Now, if you look at that definition in verse 28. A family is an entity designed to be fruitful, to multiply, to fill, to subdue, and to rule. If you look at that definition, you cannot get the modern idea of family.
And I would say in a phrase, we think of family as a springboard for individual success. That's a good family. I want to launch my kids out and I want them to individually be successful. Forget about me, their grandparents, and then start over again. That's our vision for the good family. I was having a conversation with a a Christian leader of a family ministry, and I said, look, I need to explain to you that there's a couple of different ways to think about family.
a multi generational team on mission. Do you guys see how different these are? The springboard for individual success versus a multi generational team on mission. Let me make it even more simple for you. I'll break it down to two words, the word for the Western family and a word for the biblical family.
I'm not building a nest. That's not my intention as a father and as a grandfather. I want to build a multi generational team on mission. I want to build a family that's fruitful, that multiplies, that fills and subdues and rules, that is a different idea. So you can always tell what people believe by what analogy most resonates with them when they think about that concept.
This is, so this is why I think this is at the root of the problem. If you were to somehow just erase from the mind of a father, his idea of fatherhood and just put coach right in that spot, I think you would see a 10 X increase in the kind of fatherhood. In fact, if a mother were to sign her children up for a sport this season, she will expect more intentionality.
Like, my connection with my parents is not great. Are you telling me today that I need to somehow like, like reunite with them? And of course that's something I think everyone should consider. But for many of us, Abraham was not, was told expressly not to do that. Abraham was told to leave your father's house.
That's Abraham He has he had to leave his father and so there are times where that is necessary but praise God if you your parents were faithful and taught you how to follow Jesus and you're really Continuing in their legacy because you're now an Isaac and Rebecca generation and the action steps for you are gonna look quite different Now I want to break down these words You that are given to us in the mission given to the family.
Did you know that? We are facing a demographers are sounding the alarm everywhere that we're going to face a population collapse because of our idea of family. It's so bankrupt because the church, we've not been able to preserve this definition in the culture. There's only one country in the entire developed world that is still above replacement rate.
I want to make my kids happy. I hear that all the time. I just hope my kids are happy. That is not the aim of parenting. The aim of parenting is to, is to ensure that your grandchildren are someday happy. , you gotta aim at the next generation. If you aim at your own children's happiness, you will create inadvertently in a terminal generation and within your own family line.
Like I've focused my life on multiplication because I was told to do this in the first page of the Bible. Okay, the next, the next thing we're told to do is fill. Okay, this has to do with saturating a region with your descendants. So part of the way that God intended for Adam and Eve to begin to populate the earth, the, the mission is, okay, I'm going to give you this prototypical garden in Eden, and I want you to expand this through having children and through good stewardship.
Each other's business efforts and especially each other's multiplication efforts. It's hard to raise a family. It's hard to have kids. We weren't designed to do this alone. We weren't designed to do this without the support of extended family members. And so if you want your children to multiply, you got to prepare yourself.
Like God said, I have this incredible mission that's gonna take thousands of years to accomplish. It's gonna require all these kids, all this intentionality, all this vision, all this strategy, and you know what I need to fulfill this mission? A family. We don't think that way. We think of family as sort of a retreat center, something that we kind of collapse back to after we've had an exhausting day and, We need to like have a little recoup and then we all launch back off into our individual lives.
And I think part of the reason is we need better families. We need to, and this, you want people that are part of these multi generational families who know who they are, who cannot be influenced by corruption because they have this sense of who they are as a family. They know, they know who they are, they know whose they are, and therefore they can rule in righteousness.
That'd be awesome. We'll see. You know, we're a team. We'll work on that. But if they continue to do that, gen three, there'll be 125 great grandchildren that'll exist in our area. You know, and if they keep going, they will have 625. to subdue the area that we live in. And of course, we'll end up as 3, 125 ruling descendants.
But I also want to just speak directly to the fact that. Genesis 1 wasn't the end of the story. A lot of things happened. The fall happens in Genesis 3, and this impacts us. So a lot of us have been broken by the fall, and we have fragments of families that we're stewarding, and this is really hard. And so I don't want you to think that you can't, and that this is not, that mothering and fathering multi generationally is not a part of your destiny.
of destruction. I have all authority now that I've risen from the dead. And now what I want you to do is I want you to be fruitful. I want you to go out and make disciples, not just disciples. I want you to multiply. I want you to make disciples who make disciples. And when they do that, I want you to do this in such a way that you're filling the earth.
Of course, if your three disciples make three disciples, you have nine disciples. By the third year, if they keep going, you have 27. And by the fourth year, you have 81, just from this one person who's only being faithful to make one group a year of three disciples. And of course, by year six, you have 729, and by year seven, you have two, we, we are, this is, this is called a disciple making movement.
It is almost impossible. to find a single disciple making movement in this country that has made it to the fourth generation. So whatever is happening to sterilize our families is sterilizing our own, uh, discipleship as well. Um, and this is a very serious problem. So as I mentioned, and as we close, this is, this is given to all of us.
What's it going to look like after that? And then he sees Isaiah 54 and this is what he sees. He says, sing, Oh, childless woman, you have never given birth break into loud and joyful song, O Jerusalem. You who have never been in labor. For the desolate woman now has more children than the woman who lives with her husband, says the Lord.
We're all descendants of what, of his ministry. We're all descendants of what the disciples, the 12 disciples did after him. So none of us are, are, are going to, uh, be abdicated from this, this mission to go and make disciples. So what, what all this is saying to us is this, Malachi 2. 15, and what, what was the one God seeking?