I Love My Family
Family Day
The family of God really exists because of the absolute dedication of
the Triune God to its flourishing.
No one doubts the significance of family. Many of the most successful television shows have been about the perils and triumphs of family units. We readily identify.
In Canada
Then,
I have been gifted with a loving supportive extended family through the Wilkins/Schmidt
families and the Moberg/Van Eerden families. I can't imagine negotiating the
pleasures and the pains of this life with all its losses and gains without these
people. It is impossible for me to think of my life and identity apart from
them. Truly, they are part of me in a measure that is beyond articulation.
When it
comes to words failing, I come to the family of people called the church. For
many people, the church represents an institution that seems antiquated. It
only hits the news when there is some sort of scandal or aberrant group
protesting something somewhere. It seems odd and cultish to many who view it
from a distance. For some, like their family experiences growing up, it may
bring memories of pain, disappointment and even betrayal. It certainly isn't
perfect... yet.
However,
the church for me is not a distant thing. They are my family. This is a group
of people brought out of the painful scars and wounds and entanglements of a
broken world who are now beginning to learn how to love God's way. It is a
people presently being parented by a Father whose love and power will never
diminish. These people are precious to me. They have faces and names and lives.
They come from every culture. They have been drawn out of every imaginable
circumstance. I can picture many of them with their smiles and tears on faces
of every skin colour known to man.
It may seem
like the most simplistic way to write but let me describe in part why being
part of this family is a gift beyond measure by using an acrostic for the word
"family".
F - Father. This may seem offensively patriarchal to some
today but the truth of the matter is that in the design and purpose of God,
this infinite, holy, and eternal being has extended to us an understanding of
how we can relate to Him which is not merely slavish. God could simply grant to
us a creature-Creator relationship and He would not be unjust. However, John
1:12 reads that through the gift of His Son, he offers to us the rights of
sonship. John writes in the gospel of John 1:12 "But to all who received him (Jesus) and believed in his name, he gave
the right to become the children of God."
The language
of "adoption" is purposefully used in the Scriptures to describe how
God has acted voluntarily and lovingly to grant us all the full rights of
inheritance, access, unending love and protection that many in this world can't
imagine because of how off track we have wandered in the human race. This is
fatherly love. God invites the prodigal home and grants him the full privileges
of a son.
A - Access. I
fear that many of us take this for granted. To have God as your Father opens up
free access to God at any time. You can come to Him twenty-four-seven.
In a world in which most who are religious or
spiritual assume that access to God is a universal right, it may surprise many
that access to God is possible only because of God granting it through the
person of Jesus on account of His death for our sins. The beauty of this, of
course, is that anyone can truly come
to God as Father with his or her real struggles and burdens regardless of
whether or not you are Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female.
Prostitutes and tax collectors were able to dine with Jesus. Lepers touched
him. Any may come.
What bars
access to God is refusal to come by faith alone in His Son. In the gospels, those
who would not accept Jesus, of course, were the religious elite who chose to
access God based on their own racial identity and moral superiority. Religion
has long proved to be a huge barrier to God. It was the most self-righteous of
them all, the apostle Paul, who discovered that he was a deeply frustrated man
because he, like the rest of us, failed to meet the very standards he was
forcing upon others. Outwardly, he was outstanding. Inwardly, he was corrupt .
Comparing himself to others, he was better. Comparing himself to God, he was
filthy: So much for confidence before God!
Yet, Paul
writes to his friends at Ephesus
M - Mediation.
"For there is one God, and there is
one mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ." (1 Timothy
2:5)
A family is meant to be a force for
reconciliation. When there is a disturbance in the "force", everyone
feels it. When siblings or parents or family members are alienated from one
another, the members of the family move to ensure that whatever needs to be
done to restore harmony and love takes place. No one likes brokenness
especially between those who do indeed love each other.
Now, I
could write about the church's role in encouraging reconciliation. That is no
little task. However, the central figure in our family unity is Jesus, Himself.
There was a huge betrayal in the human family. Yet, Jesus alone was able to do
what could only reconcile us to God. In fact, God has appointed Jesus as our
Mediator. God was holy and we had sinned. Jesus, on our behalf, stepped in our
place and paid in full for the offense of our rebellion. God was pleased and
propitiated.
Mediation
seeks to determine what is fair and just between two alienated parties. Jesus
is our mediator. The crucifixion was the settlement. God has appointed and
accepted Him in that role completely and exclusively.
Whenever we
worry about whether or not God can love us or forgive us or be willing to
accept us, we need to keep in mind that our elder brother, Christ Jesus, is our Mediator. Trust Him. God
will not reject you if you come in His name. This was God's will. A favourite
passage for me was written by Jesus close friend and apostle, John. In 1 John
2, he wrote "My little children, I
am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin,
we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous. He is the
propitiation for our sins, and not ours only but also for the sins of the whole
world."
I - Intercession.
When my kids were little, my youngest daughter, Lauren, was incredibly chatty.
The challenge was that she spoke a language completely of her own design. After
a while, we would look at Lauren with bemused and befuddled faces. Then, we
would look to her three year old sister Kathy to translate for us. Thankfully,
Kathy could.
In our lives, the problem isn't that God can't figure us out. The truth is that
often we don't know what to say or what to ask. Especially, in times of great grief
or sorrow, in times of deep decision clouded by perplexity, it is a gift to
know that we have someone who knows both our hearts and God's will. The Bible
teaches that God has given the Holy Spirit as a compassionate Helper to lead us
through the mountains and valleys of life. After describing our groaning as the
children of God in this earthly life, Paul writes in Romans 8:26, "Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our
weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit
Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who
searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit because the Spirit
intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words." I hope you are
beginning to figure out from this that the family of God really exists because
of the absolute dedication of the Triune God to its flourishing.
L - Love. This
might seem like an obvious principle. Isn't every family characterized by love?
Well, of course, not. However, the love that characterizes God's family is
sharply different. I can point you to a myriad of Bible texts which show the
kind of love and the quality of love that God has poured into the hearts of His
people. Yet, for brevity sake, let me simply point you to one principle of love
that was taught and perfectly modelled by Jesus: Love your enemies.
I encourage
you to read a biography called the Son of Hamas. The story recounts the
transformation of a man whose father was a central spiritual leader in the
Hamas organization. At the heart of the Middle East
conflict between the Jews and the Palestinians, Mosah Hassan Yousef was raised
in an atmosphere of deep rooted hostility. His father was a decent respectable
man. However, there was never any doubt who the enemy was. It wasn't until
adulthood that Mosah was confronted and confounded by the teaching of Jesus
"Love your enemies." The concept was so foreign to him that it
arrested his attention and eventually transformed his life.
It may seem
strange to say this but the church expands and the family grows not because we
are some sort of monolithic culture. The true church is the miraculous bonding
of love between people who otherwise would be enemies. The explanation is the
redemptive and reconciling power of the One who gave up His life to extend His
inheritance and privileges to those who crucified Him. Jesus said "Love your enemies and pray for those
who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For
He makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just
and the unjust."
Y - You.
It is appropriate to place the word "you" at the end of family. This
is one of the gifts of being part of God's people. You are never more free than
when you can forget about yourself, put others first, and find your joy in the
happiness, freedom, restoration and glory of others. This is the gift of
belonging to God's family. God makes it clear that you are loved, valued,
accepted, gifted, and secure in His hands, so that you are free to live and to
love God and others freely. This is freedom.
I do want to make this important
point. When you become part of God's family, what you discover is that you
finally have the freedom to be "you". Everyone is trying to find
themselves. In a Facebook world, we are all trying to mark out our unique
identity. What we don't understand is that God does two things when He brings
us into His family. First, He imparts to us over time the likeness of the
family image. We are being conformed into those attributes of God which are
most conducive to a loving community filled with joy and goodness and
other-centeredness. Yet, secondly, we discover along the way that God has
designed and shaped each one of us to be a valuable part of His family, unique
and necessary. You don't lose your personality when you become a Christian. By
God's grace, you simply find that you are being untangled from all the
insecurity, pride, false passions and beliefs that are the least true parts of
your personhood. God makes you new. God makes you truly who He created and
redeemed you to be. That is what a family does. It helps you become the
treasure that God has intended you to be in His family. It frees you from
insecurity and self-concern and self-preoccupation. It empowers you to see that
you are called of God as a valued contributor to a glorious kingdom that is
being built to be inhabited by the sincere praises of a people who love being
free through Christ. As the apostle Peter wrote
"But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a people for God's own
possession that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of
darkness and into his marvellous light. Once
you were not a people, but now you are God's people. Once you had not received
mercy. But now you have received mercy."
I love my family.
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