Storms of Life - What's the Family for?

We’ve been in series, ‘Storms of Life’ - review
Amidst the crisis - whatever storm we’re facing, What’s the Family for? What’s the role of the family, what’s the purpose of the family? We are all a part of a family, immediate, extended, we are all a part of family. Today let’s look at the families role in the storms of life.
This morning I thought we'd look at the purposes God intends for your family.

1. THE FAMILY IS A SHELTER FROM STORMS

A lot of people think the family is just a bed and breakfast place.
A tax deduction. But the Bible says far more than that. First it's a shelter from storm. We all have tough days. We all get rained on. We all get dumped on. We all go through bad weather. There are days when things don't work out right. And we all need a place of protection, a place of peace, a refuge where we can just let down from the storms of life and find protection.

The Bible says in Proverbs 14:26 "Reverence for the Lord gives a man deep strength. His children have a place of refuge and
security." Circle those two things. The family is meant to be a place of refuge and security.

There are many kinds of storms. Emotional, physical, relational, financial. Three storms that rock your life that you need a family to help make it through:

1) Change.
We live in an era of rapid change. new restaurants, stores, 4 or 5 new workout gyms up or being built in Katy in just the past couple of months - New subdividions, homes, construction of all kinds. It's amazing the change!

Any change for good or for bad, positive or negative, causes stress. They even have a home stress scale that says the more change you have in your life, the more stressed out you get. We need a place of stability, a base, some place that's predictable, that you can count on. Alvin Toffler calls them "Islands of security in an age of Future Shock". So we need places of stability when storms of change come.

2) Failure.
Nobody wins all the time. We all make mistakes. We all stumble. Sometime you fail the test. Sometimes you get fired. Sometimes you get passed over for the promotion. Sometimes you go bankrupt. Nobody wins all the time in life. Failure is a whole lot easier to handle when you come home to hugs and there's somebody there to put their arms around you and say, "We're going to make it!" (Ecc. 4:9-10) "Two are better than one... if one of them falls down, the other can help him up. But if someone is alone and falls, it's just too bad, because there is no one to help him.

3) Rejection.
Probably the most difficult of all is rejection. The storm of rejection. That's the toughest one to
handle. It hurts to be criticized. It hurts to be attacked. Some of the most damaging attacks you had occurred when you were a child and you can even still remember them today. Just the thought of that childhood, brings back the fears, the guilt, the shame, the hurt, the sense of feeling rejected
Would you agree that kids can be ruthless with other kids? If you don't believe in the sin nature, become a grade school teacher. Kids say the worst things to each other. Little kids don't have the sense to know what to accept and what to reject. If they don't have any positive reinforcement at home, they're going to tend to believe what all those kids say about them. It isn't true, but they're going to accept and they're going to go through life with emotional wounds. When you become a teenager you go through that difficult stage of acceptance and rejection. Remember the heartbreak of breaking up? Before I re-committed my life to Christ @ 20 - I wasn't always real sensitive. The way I
related to girls before that re-commitment was, rush 'em, mush 'em, crush 'em, then flush 'em.

However, intentionally or unintentionally we get our hearts broken in life. The fact is life is tough and rejection's hard.

Ecclesiastes 4:12, "One standing alone can be attacked and defeated. But two can stand back to back and conquer" We need shelters from storms and two can handle what one cannot handle. The goal of most games is to get home (hide-n-seek; baseball) When you're home you're safe.
That's what the home is supposed to be, a shelter from storms.

How do you turn a home into a shelter? Four words: Hear, Hug, Hope, and Help.

First you HEAR. You need a listening ear if you're going to build a shelter from storms. You've got to listen when your
family hurts and not turn a deaf ear. Listen through the ears. Hear.

Then you've got to HUG. You need to give physical
affection in your family. Lots of it. Pats on the back. Hugs,
embraces, kisses. Physically show your affection for your family.

HELP. You need to give people what they need. When you can help them, you help them out in a practical way. That's what families are for. We help each other.

Then you need to give HOPE. You build each other up rather than tear each other down. You give more strokes than you give pokes. You lift people up, you don't tear them down and
criticize them all the time.

In each of these four purposes of the family I'd like for you
evaluate your own family. Rate yourself 1 to 10. If you'd say "We are always affirming. We are always supportive. We are always encouraging." Give yourself a 10. (And I'm moving in with you!) On the other hand if you'd say we always put down more than we build up give yourself a 1.
The family is to be a shelter from storms.


2. THE FAMILY IS TO BE A LEARNING CENTER
FOR LIFE.

You learn things in your family you'd never learn anywhere else. It's a learning center.


In the family, you learn the most basic skills of life. You learn how to walk, how to talk, how to eat, how to use a TV remote -- basic skills that you have to have in life. You learn those things with your family. God wants your family to be a learning center.

Psalm 144:12 "May our sons in their youth be like plants that grow up strong." The Bible calls the family a garden. It's a garden for growing people. You grow and the rest of the family grows

too. Ephesians 6:4 "Fathers, do not exasperate your children;
instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord." Circle "training" and "instruction".

A lot of training is simply knowing which end of the child to pat. The head or the rear. But you want to move your kids through three stages. You want to move them from parent control to self control to God's control. That's your goal. You move them from parent control where you have to tell them what to do, to self
control -- they know what to do, to God control where they're
asking "Father, what do You want me to do with my life?" That's what training is all about.

Luke 2:52 "Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and with man." This is an important verse not only for
parenting but also for personal growth. In this passage it says that you grow, you develop as a person four ways:
Jesus grew in wisdom, that means He grew intellectually. He grew in stature, physical development. He grew in favor with God, that's spiritual development. And He grew in favor with man -- that's social development. As a parent you want to help your child develop balanced growth in all four of these areas. As a person, you want to individually develop growth in all four of these areas. You need to grow physically, spiritually, intellectually and socially. And develop in all four of these areas. If you do, you have
balance.

There are three areas in your life that you don't leave home
without. As parents we need to be especially concerned about teaching these three areas.

What you learn from your family:
1. We learn relationships from our family.
Right or wrong, good or bad, you learned how to relate to people from your family. Many of you had to relearn certain things later on in life because you learned how to relate in a dysfunctional way. (I have been retrained in a # of areas thanx to my wife) If you don't learn the right way of relating, you're going to learn the wrong way of relating in families. Your happiness in life to a large degree is determined by how you get along with people. If you can't get along with people, you're going to be miserable in life.

One of the things as parents we must be interested in doing is teaching our kids how to relate. We need to model for them good relationships -- that it takes honesty to make a relationship work, that it takes vulnerability to make a relationship work, that relationships don't just happen, it takes energy and effort and that you've got to have a lot of forgiveness if you're going to make a relationship work. Are you teaching those things to your kids? Are you teaching them how to respond to other people? Are you teaching them how to get along with people that are different from them? Are you modeling for them how to resolve conflict? (Alli) Or do you just hide it and deny it and pretend it just doesn't exist? We learn relationships in the family.

2. We learn character in the family.
Character is more caught than it is taught. you can't help but be influenced by your parents, whether you want to or not. I've heard people say, "I'm not going to be like my mom if it's the last thing I do!" And you know what happens! We pick up their character.
My kids are going to pick up good character from me or they're going to pick up bad character. I make a difference, the choices I make, the attitude I have, my reactions impact my children.
And the same for you.

3. We learn values.
We learn what's really important in life. Growing up in your family for right or wrong, good or bad, you learned about the value of money, sex, relationships, failure, success. You learned either how to tackle problems head on or how to run from them in denial. You learned how to either face life or flee from life. We pick up values from those around us. It's important that we teach the right values. You're teaching values either intentionally or unintentionally in your family.

Isaiah 38 "One generation makes known your faithfulness to the next." Your family is a relay of values from one generation to the next. You are just a link in a long, long chain. You, the person that you are, was influenced by the way your parents were raised, by their parents, by their parents...

It goes the other way too. And that helps me remember that when I'm training my kids, I'm not just raising my own kids, I'm
influencing future generations. The way I train my kids is going to influence the way they train their's and that will impact the way they train their's...

Your training in your own family isn't affecting just your own
family. It's going to affect generations as you have been affected by generations.

This is my legacy that I have to build on.

I'm not interested so much in the legacy that you've had or that I've had. But what kind of legacy are you leaving for your kids? I would say to you that you should determine in your life, regardless of my past -- it may be a bad past, a past of alcoholism and divorce and abuse -- and you say, "I'm going to break the chain! I'm starting a new legacy."
Some of you became believers in the last year and you say, "From now on our family is going to be an
influence for good and I'm going to leave my kids not with wealth, not with a big bank account but with spiritual riches and a spiritual heritage that they can pull on that when they go through storms they know that other generations before them went through the same storms and they can handle it because God is with them.

You choose your legacy you're going to leave for your kids and their kids and their kids. If you aren't thinking about it you're
leaving it up to chance. I have heard many people say this phrase. It always irritates me. "I'm not going to impose my spiritual values on my kids. I'm going to just let them make their own decision." Have you ever heard that line? What they're saying -- the translation is, "I'm abdicating my role as a parent to the television." Because your kids are going to pick up values either good ones from you or bad ones from the world and it's your choice. When a person says "I'm not going to force my kids to come to church," or "I'm not going to impose my spiritual values on my children," what they're basically saying is that God is an option. And He is not! He's not an option. The Bible says that one day as parents we will be judged for how well we did at transmitting values.

"These commandments, impress them That means take action, take the initiative! upon your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up." Teaching values is a part of our job description as parents.

If you evaluated yourself -- one to ten -- a learning center. What's being taught in your home? What are you unintentionally teaching about money? What are you unintentionally teaching about sex? What are you unintentionally teaching about what's important in life and the priorities of life? What values do you want to catch? Make a list and then start teaching them.