Home Improvements I, Why Families Last

Well, take your North Way notes out, please, and get your little teaching outline out, because we're going to be looking at that. Home group leaders, in case you missed it, there are questions from today's message available to you out in the information center. The text from which we're going to begin today, let's read it together, Philippians 2.2. If there's any place this should be true, it's in our homes. Philippians 2.2, let's read it. Live together in harmony and love, as though you only had one mind and spirit between you. Sounds easy, doesn't it? While it was a fisherman's paradise, the salmon were knocking each other out, trying to get onto the hooks of those four anglers that had flown into a remote Alaskan bay. Hoping for the best, they had hit the jackpot. Early the next morning, the four of them loaded all their gear into the seaplane, and they gunned the engine for what they thought was going to be a routine takeoff. It was anything but routine. Nearing the point of liftoff, the pilot realized that one of the plane's pontoons had filled with water. Shortly after he managed to get the plane in the air, the weight of the water in the one pontoon pulled him into a dangerous turn that resulted in the plane crashing into the water. Miraculously, all four of the men survived the crash and managed to crawl out of the plane into the icy Alaskan waters. But they were a long way from shore, and they were swimming against a fierce current in frigid waters. Two of the men swam furiously and made incremental progress for the shoreline. The other two fishermen were Dr. Phil Littleford and his 12-year-old son, Mark. They were both adequate swimmers, but 12-year-old Mark wasn't physically strong enough to overcome the power of the current, no matter how hard he tried. When the other two men finally made it to the shore, absolutely exhausted, they turned around and saw a sight that would mark them for the rest of their lives. Dr. Littleford, fully capable of having struggled his way to shore alone, chose rather to stay with his 12-year-old son, who couldn't make it because of the current. The two of them drifted slowly out to open icy seas, and they died in each other's arms together. It's a true story. It's recorded in Pat Morley's book, The Man in the Mirror. And I don't know about you, but the first time that I read that book, I'm not ashamed to tell you that I read that article and I choked up a bit. Because I'd like to think I'd make the same decision if I were in a similar situation with my Amy or David or Jonathan. I bet the rest of you dads would hope you'd make that same decision, and moms as well. And it's not because we're the hero types or we have some burst of courage, but it's because of this thing called family, unique and biblically inspired cells of life called family, where hearts are knit together in nearly unexplainable ways, father to son and mother to daughter and father to daughter and mother to son. Just mention the word family, and some think back to the most warm and wonderful years of your lives, where your family was a great place to be. Others were somewhere in the middle, and quite a number of us probably grew up in families where there was a lot of pain and disappointment. Some of you look at the family you're in right now, the one you're trying to build, and there are great days for some of us. Others of us are kind of going back and forth, and some are in deep weeds in your current family situation. It's very painful. My family just celebrated Easter with my dad and mom, my three children, Amy's 19, David's 17, and Jonathan's 16. It was a really wonderful day. We celebrated here at North Way, and then we went over there together. We laughed, and we teased, and told stories, and we ate, and then we told some stories and ate again. I remember one time along the course of the afternoon I'm just lifting my head to the Lord and saying, Thank you, Lord, for my family. It's wonderful. And I admit that there were times 15 years ago when they were four, two, and one, that I'd lift my head to the Lord and say, God, help, family, what's this all about? But we're in really good days right now as a family. Things can change, however, overnight, can't they, in a family situation? And I want to take some time over the next several weeks to talk about how we might glean the best of the years that we spend with our families. I've entitled this series Home Improvements because it's something that will shape every single one of the places that we live. In case you haven't noticed, folks, families are having a difficult time in this culture. A difficult time facing the challenges that society brings against it day after day. A difficult time facing the demands that are put on the family bonds that are there. Yet at the same time, it's interesting to me that the family is being heralded as the only viable solution to the problems that society itself has. The crime, the drug and alcohol abuse, the teenage pregnancies, the sexually transmitted diseases, even suicide. Do you see the strange tension that exists there? I mean, the culture, on the one hand, is tearing the family apart, literally. The casualty rate in families is unbelievable. They're barely surviving. And at the same time, we're being told by authorities that it's the family that's going to save our culture. Not the government, not education, not business, but the family. I was intrigued by an article in this Tuesday's Wall Street Journal on the editorial page entitled Married with Children. It says this. A slim report just out from the Council on Families in America contains one of the most radical ideas that will be published this year. American society would be better off if more people got married and stayed married. Say hey! In some sense, this bipartisan committee spent two years reinventing the wheel. No other social institution than marriage has proved as successful in caring for human needs. But it's an institution that's come under a lot of pressure in recent years, and no one has suffered from this more than children, from whose perspective this report is. It's a powerful report. It impacted me so much I made copies of it, and they're available to you. We gave them all away after the first service. You may want to get one after this service. You see, survival is not too strong a word. I'm not being melodramatic when I say that the family is barely surviving. Did you know that since 1960, the divorce rate, the rate of divorce, has doubled? That the number of single-parent households has tripled? That the number of couples living together before marriage, or outside of marriage, I should say, has quadrupled? That the number of cases of reported domestic violence has quadrupled? That the number of teenage pregnancies is the highest of any other Western civilized culture? And the statistics on sexual abuse are changing so rapidly that you can't even predict how high they're going to go. We're a long way from Walton Mountain, aren't we? By any measurement. Now, there's a curious fact that surfaces when you study the charts and the graphs related to these matters, because things changed really dramatically right around the 1960s and beyond. Prior to that, throughout this century, everything was quite flat and predictable and only reflected population growth. But in the mid-60s, things just began to go haywire. How'd this happen? Well, one of the inescapable conclusions that I've arrived at is that there's a direct link to the demise of the family and the social values as we've known them, and the removal of prayer and Bible reading from our schools. And this information is powerfully presented in a little book that I have here today called America, To Pray or Not to Pray by David Barton. I'm just going to give you a little sneak peek at what's going on in here. Let's put up a few of those charts, please, Donna. This is to give you a perspective. The broken line graph just to the left, and I know this should be in Kinko's copy color, but you'll just have to deal with me here. The little broken line on the left is 1963. And just lift it up a little bit, please. This is the number of teenage pregnancies after 1963. Look at the top line. Now slide it back up, please. Look at the rate of that growth. All right, put up another one. This is sexually transmitted diseases. Slide it up again. 1963. Look at that. It's perfectly flat from 55 and prior to that, and then look after 1963. And another one, please. This is the number of girls sexually active age 16. Look at the 10 years before 1963. Perfectly flat. After 1963, little jump, then a little dip, and then it took off. Next one, please. Let's move along into areas like crime. Look at this. Prior to 1963, the number of incidences of violent crime. Slide it all the way up, please. 127 per 100,000. Look at the rate after 1963. Look at it. Eight times as severe over the next 12 years. Another one. This is the number of single-parent households, as I already mentioned. Look at it prior to. Just growing with the population prior to it. Look at it afterwards. Skyrocketing. And on the other side of the equation, look at this. The results coming out of the schools. This is the SAT score records following 1963. To pray or not to pray. I never did understand why it was such an important thing that we change 200 years of history and get prayer out of the schools. Never did figure that out. But I'm sure that some of us here today are a little cynical about, well, that's just too simplistic. And I'm sure it is. You'll have to draw your own conclusions. But I want to talk about a little broader sort of view of what maybe happened in the 60s and maybe late 50s that created such social upheaval. Because there's some other things that caused it. And if we can look at the cause, maybe we can find the cure. It's the basic premise of scientific study. Figure out the cause, you can find the cure. And my reading and personal recollection, because I was growing up then, point to one monumental misjudgment about the nature of the family that took place in the late 50s and early 60s. About how resilient the family was. About how many hits it could take. About how much neglect it could endure. How many attacks from the outside it could fend off. How often it could be redefined according to different sociological parameters. And how far it could drift from God before it would start to weaken and then break up and eventually fall apart. What experiments, what changes in approach occurred in the 50s and 60s that led to this? The premise you see all along, up until that point, was that families needed attention and care. But someone in the 60s started to say, wait a minute, families are rugged. Families are, I mean, the kids are resilient. Parents are tough. They can survive things a lot easier than we think. We can go ahead and just try some new frames of reference for the family. In a sense, the family became the bank account from which everyone began to draw almost indefinitely, almost inexhaustibly. We were told, just keep going out there and spending yourself and come back to the family and it'll be fine. They can keep on going. And this social experimentation had three distinct prongs. Let me just touch on them. The first one was this. The divorce would do minimal damage to the family unit. The second prong was that the parental substitutes had the same nurturing effect on children as parents themselves. And third, that value-free education and child-rearing is the best for the kids themselves. And I want to unpack each of these for just a couple moments and look at them. From a biblical perspective, what would God say as the only way to secure the possibility that our families will last into the 1990s and 2000 and beyond? I want to make two comments. Even if you're not in this stage of life, if you're a grandparent or you're a single person, may I just plead with you to tune in for the next few moments because what I'm going to share will certainly relate to someone that you care about, if not to you personally. Hang in there for just a little bit. You know, every week in this church, every week we hear of another couple, another family going down the tubes. Every week. And you certainly know some. You can be an encouragement. And number two, in this message today, I'm going to be a little bit like Jeremiah in the beginning of his book when he begins to just look in the landscape and say, this is what's going on. And in succeeding weeks, I'm going to be giving us the antidote to the problem that we face. So bear with me in that. So the first hypothesis was simply this. That divorce is not as bad, number one on your outline, as we were led to believe, that we need to ease up a bit, that families will be fine. God would say we need to eliminate divorce. We need to eliminate it. You know, before the 60s, laws were written so that divorce was discouraged. Isn't that true? I mean, if you wanted a divorce before the 60s, it meant a long court battle. It meant public testimony. It meant that a pronouncement would be made that one partner was unfit, unfaithful, unstable, cruel, or in some way, not appropriate for marriage. And it became part of the public record. Even though it was a bit difficult and cumbersome and backed up the courts a lot, that simple process restrained a lot of couples and made them work at reconciling in their marriage before they wound up in divorce court. As I grew up in the 60s, I don't remember many of my buddies growing up with one parent. I mean, I can't remember any, to be honest with you. I remember one kid whose parents had been divorced. It was the rare exception. But late in the 60s, in fact, 1970, in California, nowhere else, no-fault divorce gained popularity. And soon debates began to rage, how would it affect the family unit? How would the kids survive? It was decided by the experts, families, they'll last. I mean, they're rugged. Kids are resilient. They'll bounce back. But nearly 30 years later now, the evaluations are pouring in. There's been an unprecedented number of divorces based on this no-fault approach. A record number of kids in single-parent homes. And the results of all this are not good. Experts are now saying, oops, you know, maybe families aren't quite as resilient as we thought. Maybe partners don't bounce back into life just as easily as we had hoped. Maybe kids don't just get over it as we've been led to believe. Listen to this rather sobering evaluation by a couple of highly recognized experts in the field. The toll exacted on children of divorce is often devastating. After the first five years after the divorce, more than one-third of those children, most of whom spent the entire time in a single-parent home, were significantly worse off from the experience. They were clinically depressed. They performed worse in school, had trouble establishing meaningful relationships, exhibited chronic responses to the resulting loneliness and feelings of rejection, and had unrealistic hopes of parental reconciliation. Another study concluded that children from single-parent homes were consistently shown to be at disadvantage. They were more prone to suffer from financial hardships, to lack in socialization skills, both within and outside the home, within the community and in relationships in the extended family, and to have more difficulty recalling and using information about their world effectively. This same expert goes on to say, I think we are just beginning to see the results of the devastation we sowed over the last 25 years. The deep scars placed on our children as a consequence of a narcissistic, driven way of life that cannot be ignored or downplayed. For years to come, he says, you will see the ramifications of a divorce-happy, single-parent society when you look at suicide rates, crime statistics, relational crises, moral ambiguity, and the widespread problems of self-esteem that manifest themselves in a myriad of public and private ways. That's really heavy, isn't it? And I want to say, right on the heels of that, that if you're either going through or recovering from a divorce in your family, there's not a single ounce of judgment in my spirit, there's not one measure of condemnation from this church toward you, but there's a lot of compassion for the pain and the anguish that many of you have suffered as a result. When God says in Malachi 2.16 that he hates divorce, notice it doesn't say, if you look in your outline, it doesn't say he hates divorced people. He hates divorce. He hates what divorce does to families and to children. He hates what happens when they exercise, when the option of divorce is exercised in a cavalier and sort of careless way, particularly when it's done with the sort of, well, I've got to do what's best for me attitude. See, God knew all along what the social theorists couldn't or wouldn't acknowledge, that families are fragile, they're not rugged and tough as we were told, that kids are tender and it doesn't take much to break their hearts and to shatter their trust and to ruin their self-esteem and to affect their ability to relate in love. And he knew that divorce packed more than enough punch to shatter the souls of the people involved and to do damage that wouldn't be repaired anytime soon. Families rarely just get over it. And I've ministered, now listen, long enough, I've seen it long enough to know that there are times when at the end of one's personal rope, the only option seems to be, in order to survive, divorce. That's why Jesus wrote, again on your outline, I referenced it, there are times when divorce happens, regrettably, terribly, but it happens. My problem is, though, that far too many people consider very little of the cost of divorce before they just jump into it. Secular author Sam Kean has written in a powerful little book called Fire in the Belly about his experience of coming face to face with the consequences of divorce. One time he was traveling, driving down a highway, and he saw a billboard, and the words on the billboard said, nothing makes up for failure in the family. Now, he had just gone through a divorce himself, and he tells in his book how he argued with the words on the sign. He spewed out all the popular rationalizations. You know them. Divorce is always better for everybody than staying in a struggling marriage. Or, I'll make it up to my kids someday. They're resilient. They'll bounce back. They can take a licking and keep on ticking. But then he writes in his book, it's been 12 years since I saw that billboard. My daughter and my son from my first marriage are grown and lovely, and I'm remarried, and I have a 10-year-old daughter. After considerable meditation on the matter, I have come to believe that the message on the billboard is both true and prophetic. In watching my children struggle with the hurts and discontinuities that are the inevitable result of the irreconcilable differences between their parents, I have learned what many men learn only after divorce, that there's nothing more precious in life than our children. And in the quiet hours of the night when I add up the accomplishments of my life, in which I take justifiable pride, a dozen books, a thousand lectures, seminars, a farm built by hand, a prize here and an honor there, I know that three rank above all others, and they are my three children. In the degree to which I have loved, nurtured, and enjoyed them, I honor myself. And in the degree to which I have injured them by being unavailable to them, or because of my obsessive preoccupations with myself, or my profession, or my way, or my needs, I have failed as a father and as a man. What must we do if families are to last through the end of this millennia? We have to do what God says. We have to eliminate divorce. We have to commit ourselves to the process of working through our differences no matter what the cost. And sometimes, hey, the cost is steep, isn't it? Sometimes it's the last thing that we want to do, but we've got to choose to do it. Men, we have to learn to become men of our word. It wasn't that long ago that when a man gave his word, it was his bond. In the Bible, a man's greatest strength, Stu Weber writes in his book, Tender Warrior, a man's greatest strength is his capacity to stay by the stuff of his word, to make and keep promises. A man's word connects. A man's word stays. Stand by your promises. Never, never let them go no matter what. When your marriage isn't fun, stay in it. When parenting is over your head, stay at it. When work is crushing your spirit, don't let it beat you. When the local church is overwhelmed with pettiness, stay by it. When your children let you down, pick them up. When your wife goes through a six-month mood swing, live with it. And when it's fourth and fourteen with no time on the clock, throw another pass. You've got to stay in there. We have to educate ourselves as to how we can serve our spouse and build a strong family bond. Again, I want to say to those of you who've suffered through this, I think you'd cheer me on to tell the rest of the people here that I'm right. And I don't condemn those of you who've been there. You know that. You know my heart's with you. But I say again, with reference to that Wall Street Journal article, the social revolution of the past three decades has brought good for our society, including better opportunities for women and more choices for both sexes. But it's by now obvious that it also created problems no one anticipated at the time. Liberated single moms with family burdens that are too heavy to shoulder alone. Men estranged from their families and too many neglected children. The second part of this social experiment of the past three decades was to introduce the idea that parental substitutes have the same nurturing effect on children as parents. The Bible would say that we need to elevate, Roman numeral II, elevate parental nurturing. We need to celebrate it. We need to commend it when we see it. I just want to touch on this point. It's about the unforeseen ramifications of the movement of women into the workforce over the last three decades. You know, when women said as part of the beginning of the women's lib movement, hey, it's our turn to get out and experience all of life. And you know, they were right. And I'm an advocate of that. The only problem was no one really considered what would happen to the kids as a result. And men weren't about to change their work habits. So families were often left scrambling to try to solve, now listen, their child care crises. That wasn't a term that I grew up with. How about you? I mean, it introduced a whole new industry out there of preschool and daycare centers where millions of kids would spend eight or ten hours every single day, five days a week, week after week, month after month, year after year. And a few people on the sidelines stood and asked the question, hey, is it a good idea to have kids and bring them into the world and then hand them off to someone else who's going to care for them day in and day out? But they were quickly reminded, hey, wait a minute, no problem. Families are strong and kids are resilient. Just give them some quality time in the evening and everything will be just fine. And so off the parents went pursuing individual careers, recreating and socializing while somebody else was there for their little ones to hear them and to help them and to hug them. And I don't need to relate how significantly the studies have concluded that parental substitutes are not the same as the parent when it comes to nurturing kids and loving them. That kids are not as resilient as we thought. That there's serious implications in their development as a result of absenteeism. And that's why Scripture teaches so clearly that we are to treasure our children. Again, I want you to refer to that little text on your outline there. I can't put my hand in mine, but look at it. It says, our children are a gift from God under Roman numeral two. Circle the word gift. It's the word treasure. There's something that God gives to us for a season in our lives that we have to hold close and dear to us. Now, how many of you know that I'm not saying never leave your kids with babysitters? I mean, sometimes that's absolutely essential. It's sometimes important that you just get away from the kids for a while. I mean, there are times when you're climbing the walls. Am I right? You just need to get away. And dads, if you're wise, you'll provide for them. Parents, you need time alone. But I'm trying to expose the 30-year lie that basically said, hey, parental substitutes, no problem. They can do the job. It's just not true. And so we need to celebrate those who make the tough choice to commit themselves to the family, even if it means a lower standard of living for a season. And I know, I know the competing emotions of all that. It's a time when you really need money the most, and you need resources to be available, and all that kind of stuff. And yet, if parents are gone, I want to say, what could be worth losing your kids? The third thing that I want to point to, the third part of this social experiment, kind of exploded on the family landscape. It was the idea of a value-free approach to child rearing and education. Families that last, however, the Bible would say, educate their children in faith and in character. You know, thousands of years ago, God said in His Word, He instructed parents that they needed to be both proactive and persistent in the raising of their kids, and in the imparting of faith and character into their lives. Look at Deuteronomy 6, 6 and 7 on your outline. You know, take these commandments and tie them to your children, and tell them about them when you're getting up, and when you're laying down, and when you're walking, and when you're sitting. Parents, we need to be persistent and proactive about this. We need to set some goals as parents, and I just want to commend you to this one possibility. In Luke 2, 52, this isn't in your outline, but you might want to write this down. The Bible says that Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and with man. And I see four goals of parenting there. Jot these down on the side of your outline. Jesus grew in wisdom, that's intellectual growth. Number two, he grew in stature, that's physically. Number three, in favor with God, that's spiritually. And number four, in relation with man, that's relational growth. Parents, I couldn't, I just couldn't give you a better outline of what the objective of good parenting is about. And notice, this occurred when Jesus was with his parents. That's what parents are to do. Those are the values that parents are to impart. But you see, in the 60's, we began to hear things like this. Parents were warned of dangers of, listen, indoctrinating their children with their own faith. How many of you ever hear that? You don't want to indoctrinate your kids with your faith. You want them to discover their own faith. You want it to be theirs and not yours. And it's all sounded so right, you know? I mean, you want your child to kind of sort through all the list of options out there and arrive at their own well-reasoned faith. The only problem with that was, the options overwhelmed the kids. And I have one word to describe the idea that kids can just sort of wade through it all and come up with their own idea. You know what that theological word is? Baloney. Parents who washed their hands of the task of forming faith and character in their children began to reap a terrible harvest of rebellion in their kids. And it wasn't until long after college years that some kids finally began to search for God in a way that their families had once had. See, the difficulty was at the same time that parents abandoned all this training and spiritual and value character formation, schools backed off. Schools got out of the process as well. And we got the Bible out because, you know, it was subversive. And we got prayer out because it was twisting their minds. It had worked for 200 years prior to that, but, oh, 1963, it was really a problem. And then we also backed off from just teaching even simple morality in schools. And we adopted what's known as the value-free educational method. And what a catastrophe that's proven to be. In his book, Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong, William T. Patrick says this, the shift from character-based education to a value-free education was done with the best of intentions. The thought was that rather than telling students what was right and wrong and modeling it and enforcing it into schools, maybe it would be better just to discuss certain moral issues with the students and allow them to come to their own convictions as to the appropriate course of moral action to be taken in each situation. It was called, by the way, situational ethics. And it sounded good and liberating and sophisticated. But now, after 30 years of the value-free approach, T. Patrick and scores of others are saying, wait a minute, time out. This isn't working at all. It's leading students in a moral vacuum. What we have now are a whole generation of young people who aren't very clear about what's wrong and what's right. They didn't get it at home. They don't get it at the schools. No one showed them the way. No one gave them a moral compass with which to navigate through life. And so, they end up making moral decisions on their best gut feeling of the moment. Your morality, my morality, her morality, anyone's morality, it just depends. It just depends. And folks, we can't, we should not be surprised that there's such horrific things going on these days with kids over their head in drug and alcohol abuse, with sexual promiscuity. The only thing I contend, the only thing that's holding it back is the fear of sexually transmitted disease. And you take it into the city and there are so many implications with gang violence and all the rest. The only place that most kids get any sense of moral direction is from the television. The average kid, and statistics vary, the average kid watches 20 hours a week of TV. That's a thousand hours a year. That's about 18,000 hours by the time they graduate from high school. If they watch that same amount at age 65, they spend 9 1⁄2 years solid, round the clock of their life in front of the tube. Contrast that with an hour of Sunday school a week, 50 hours a year, 900 hours before they graduate from high school. At the age of 65 they have 4 months total. Where do you think they're going to get their values? And need I add what is happening on the television? What kind of values are they going to get? I mean, I was at Grove City yesterday as part of the spring court celebration thing. They had a little walk back memory lane on prime time television. And they talked about things there, different shows, you know, Captain Kangaroo, Mr. Green Jeans, and the Jetsons, and the Flintstones. Try watching a little Beavis and the Butthead today. The morality that's being pumped through the television to our kids is unbelievable. In fact, I heard up in Greenville, PA, there's a petition circulating in the town to get it off. And, of course, the civil libertarians say, no, it's the parents responsibility. It is the parents, but it's also our responsibility to protect our society from garbage. And all this happened because the lie was brought into, hey, wait a minute, you know, kids, they don't need us to tell them what's right and what's wrong. They'll figure it out for themselves. They're rugged. They'll come back. Character can be formed sort of on its own. And, folks, it's not true. And a different issue that I feel strongly about that's related to this, however, is the sense of purposelessness that I see in so many teenagers today. Not having any idea that God loves them, that there's a plan or purpose for their lives, that there's a destiny with their name on it, that God has laid it from the foundation of the earth, that He wants them to enjoy life. I don't see kids getting that message. Instead, I see them kind of casting off into the sea of life with no idea how to get to the other shore. They haven't been taught about the love of God. And when they're robbed of this piece of their lives, they desperately search for it for a while and eventually give up hope that it even exists. And I want to say right here that nothing less than a full partnership of the