Sounds Like A Plan III, For Your Family

And let's look at the word today. I'll be referring to a number of scriptures today, and I always encourage you to turn there in your Bibles, but if you don't have a Bible with you, then most of the scriptures are on your outlines to help you let those verses have impact in your life. You know, as I was just getting settled here, I was thinking, wouldn't it be great if we just... so many good things have been shared, and the kids special, and the insights of love that many of you shared, and the worship time. We could just reaffirm the role of moms in the family and give everyone a flower and all go home feeling good about how well families are doing in America today. But what would be wrong with that picture? Well, things just aren't that simple anymore. Let me give you an illustration. I've been doing weddings for 26 years. I did my first wedding 26 years ago. And it was a pretty straightforward event. Weddings, usually, this is the groom's side, and this is the bride's side, and it's just a pretty simple ceremony, and everything gets done, and everyone's happy. Weddings now are a whole new deal. It is not uncommon for a bride or groom's parents to be remarried, in some cases both of them. Then you have to figure out who sits next to who, who walks who down the aisle and how far before they lateral off, who gives whom away, how many grandparents there are going to be and where they sit, who needs to be kept away from whom at all costs. I mean, it's quite an ordeal. I've thought about giving our wedding coordinators combat pay, but they've gotten exceedingly complex over the last 10 to 15 years because families have gotten exceedingly complex. Things are really changing in families, and I want to underscore that families are important to God. In His mind, He was the one that thought about creating a man and a woman and then coming together, and then they would leave their father and mother and create a new family. When I grew up, most all the people in my family, both sides of my family, lived in the greater Pittsburgh area, and I remember distinctly that we would travel all over the city every Sunday after church. Mom would drag us to church, and then we'd pile in the car, and we'd go all over Pittsburgh visiting relatives. And I remember distinctly because I remember driving home at 8 or 9 o'clock every Sunday night listening to Billy Graham on the radio. My mom was making sure every possible base was covered. But it was what we did. We hung out with family. My dad lived in one house from the time of his birth until he went off to World War II and then to college. Now the average American family moves every 2 1⁄2 to 3 years and knows very little about their neighbors or even their extended family. The networks and systems that undergirded and supported the family have been greatly eroded in most settings. In 1940, for example, 60 to 70% of all households had one grandparent living in the home who could give advice and help and tell some of the history of the family and keep the family campfire kind of going and tell the kids the truth about their parents now and then. And now in the year 2000, it's guesstimated that about 2% have their grandparents living even nearby. And if I'm not mistaken, the Supreme Court recently decided that grandparents did not have a right to see their grandkids. Wasn't that a case? I know it was in front of the court. I think that's what was decided. And there's lots of other statistics. I mean, cohabitating couples, couples that are living together outside of marriage from 1972 to 1994 has increased 700%. Seven times over. And a lot of younger people are nodding, looking and saying, yeah, that's what my friends are doing. And this one shocks me, but it's true. One out of three children born in America this week will be born out of wedlock. That adorable little baby doesn't have a mom and dad that are married. U.S. News and World Report in 1999 of November's issue said that this whole confusing kind of different stages and descriptions of the family is creating all kinds of problems. And we're not really sure what a family is. In fact, in California, there was a vote just recently in, I believe it was March, Proposition 22 was defeated, which would have approved homosexual marriages as a family unit. But it was on the ballot and was bitterly fought. Sixty percent, it is estimated, of families today have some form of step thing going. You know, stepfather, stepmother, stepdaughter, stepson. Sixty percent. And I can tell you, we and our church staff work really hard at trying to understand the dynamics that used to be very predictable. They're not anymore. Things are much more complex. When it comes to kids' ministry, who can sign whose kid out of the kids' ministry is not always that easy to know. Hallmark, the card company, famous for always having just the right thing to say, created a new line of cards recently for these kinds of step families. One of the cards, when you open it up, reads, thrown together without being asked, no chance of escape. It's a happy little message. Actually, that's true of a lot of our regular biological families, too, I suppose. Think about houses. How many of you grew up in a house, a house that was built about 50 years ago or more, that had a porch in the front? And what did you do? You'd sit on that porch oftentimes and you'd watch the neighbors walk by and you'd wave and say hello. Now, go check out all the new houses that are being built. Where are the porches? Yeah, they're in the back, and we call them decks. And if we're really, really blessed, then we get to live in a gated community so no one can even see us in the back in our little deck. I mean, we want to be kept away from those kinds of intrusions. I remember growing up, being just sent off by my mom for hours and hours and hours to play sandlot baseball, football. She'd just send me out in the morning and summertime I'd come back. At dinnertime, we got all day long. Just being with my friends and getting into things and having fun and learning the games and so on. And now, these games have become this intense, competitive thing. I mean, it's a big deal now. You have to sign up three months in advance to get into the league. Moms and dads are on cell phones in their SUVs and vans communicating about who's picking who up in what league at what time. They're selling candy and subs that nobody wants. They buy uniforms that the kids have to wear. And all that kind of stuff. It's this big, intense deal now. But it used to be just fun. Dining rooms and kitchens were places where we had dinner together and talked about the day. Oftentimes today, families pick up their dinner and go on into the TV room and just sit silently and watch TV. Home was once a stress protector, a shelter in the storm of life. And now for many, home has become a stress producer, a place where they don't really want to go. And then there's the fear factor that's kind of creeping into our neighborhoods and certainly, it's in the lives of our children. And I have experienced this personally from some kids even here in our environment. I read recently an article, what to do when a stranger says hello. Now think about that. 20, 30, 40 years ago, what to do when a stranger says hello. What would you tell your kid to do? Yes, say hello back. Not now. Now it's like, you know, grab the pepper spray, just in case, you know. I mean, so this is starting to get ingrained into our... It's a very protective thing. Families have never been perfect. I'm candidly admitting that. And in some ways, things are a little better than they were 30 or 40 years ago. I sense there's less discrimination in the minds of kids. There's more opportunities and so on. Love can happen, but you know what? As we've already said this morning, there's also been a lot of disappointment and a lot of hurt in families. And one thing I can say with certainty, if you want to fill this in in your outline, families face challenges and change at an unprecedented rate and are breaking up and falling apart as never before in our society. And friends, that is a simple fact. And on this Mother's Day, I was very tuned in to this one thing. I'd like your attention on this. I know there's a number of you who didn't want to come to church today because it was Mother's Day, because it's a bad memory for you. There's others of you that didn't want to come today because you really want to be a mother and you haven't been able to have that longing fulfilled in your heart. There's some of you today that are bearing shame because you could have been a mother and you had an abortion and you were afraid you'd feel condemned today. And I hope that all of those emotions find a lower place than the reality of what we want to say today to you. And that is that God loves you just as you are. He cares about you. And I've asked Jeff Conway to come and sing this song. If you don't get anything else today, get this. There's someone who cares about you. Whatever you've been through, whatever you're going through, there's someone who cares. Somebody cares. Thanks, Jeff. So whatever struggle you face, remember that today. What I'd like to do in the remaining moments is to share with you what we might do wherever we are in this journey of raising healthy families to maybe do a preemptive strike so that some of the pain and some of the hurt and some of the sorrow and hardship could be avoided. Let me share with you some things that I believe Scripture teaches that can help you to facilitate better family communication. That's what I want to share is three keys to better family communication. Here we go. Here's the first one and these are very simple but I think you'll find them challenging to do. The first one is simply to watch your words. Would you agree with me that what is spoken around the home is enormously important? Would you agree? I mean, what is this talked about? Look at the Scripture on your outline. Dear friends, be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry. Effective families learn how to be great listeners to one another. When you listen, engage fully in the other person, eyes focused, you send a message that that person is important, that they matter, and that what's going on between you matters a lot to you as well. That's a powerful thing. Ineffective families become extremely confused in their words and communication and they begin to even start saying things and doing things they're not even aware of and sometimes the airwaves get really garbled and it isn't long before we have a communications meltdown. Stephen Glenn, in his book Positive Discipline A to Z, says that he viewed a clinic in poor family communications at a local mall recently. A mom walked up to her child and said, How many times do I have to tell you not to touch the toys? The child looked at her and answered, 11. Well, the mom lost it. What does 11 have to do with anything? And on and on she went and the child said, I don't know. But you see, she was safe because she'd learned that the last thing her mom really wanted was a thoughtful response to her question. What her mom really wanted to do was to make her feel dumb and inadequate and childish because she was doing something that the mom didn't want her to do and didn't know how to stop her from doing. Be slow to speak and slow to anger, the scripture says, and quick to listen. He goes on to say, I left the toy department and approached the checkout stand where I saw a 13-year-old who had obviously started puberty but hadn't gotten anywhere with it. As I got there, the parents said to him, why are you angry? Well, I wanted to drop to my knees and give them an honest answer. Because the frontal system passing through has upset the pressure gradient in ways that are producing subtle changes in my lymphic system, that together with the overabundance of highly processed starch, sugar, fats, and carbohydrates that they saturated me with at the lunch line because they were cheap, along with the overwhelming frustration of trying to contain all those ambient calories without moving, wiggling, or fidgeting in the next three hours of required classes, create a lot of pent-up energy and frustration that I carry out in the school bus where they say, sit down, shut up, close the window, pipe down, I'm telling your parents. And then I step off the bus with all that going on and added a dose of caffeine and sugar from a Pepsi plus theobromine from a brownie and that went roaring up through my inherited instability of my hypothalamus from three generations of alcoholics in my pedigree, not to mention the normal instability due to adolescence. All this turbulence then bounced off a massive dose of testosterone roaring through me to get me ready for puberty, which greatly magnified the frustrations of trying to meet my adult expectations all day long. So it was just more than I could handle. But that statement was a little difficult for a 13-year-old to try to articulate, so he just said, because. I'm just angry because. You see, there are reasons why things happen in our kids. But if we're quick to speak and quick to get angry and slow to listen, we miss it. When you love, over time, you tend to fall back on the easiest way of doing things in families. Patterns of relating, which are perhaps the least challenging, tend to rise because instead of giving our best, we give what's left over. And then we find that over time nobody's really listening anymore. Look at the next verse in your outline. It says, Let your conversations be always full of grace, seasoned with salt. It's ironic to me that this seems to be violated more at home than any other place with the people that we say we love more than anybody else. Are our conversations at home full of grace? How are you doing with this one? What's the general tenor of the conversations in your household? Is there grace woven through how you speak to each other? I know there's a propensity to allow things to start to develop, especially as the kids get a little older, the sarcasm level rises, the poking, the jabbing, the criticalness, the fault finding, even hostility. Hurtful words fly around home as if they really didn't matter. And then things that you wouldn't even dream of saying to a stranger you say to somebody you love. I know our kids somewhere along the line started to pick up names, names they'd hear in the school and they'd start calling one another those names at home. Loser, jerk, so on, so on, so on. And I remember intervening one day and saying, you know what, in our home we're not going to use those names. We're not going to call each other those things. And we put a stop to it. Because parents, if you don't, you'll destroy the one place where your children need to feel valued. Your outline says, words are weapons or words work wonders. They can be a great blessing. A word of encouragement does wonders when used correctly. But if you use them as weapons over a period of time, you're going to find that your kids are going to withdraw. Parents, here's a little clue. When you find your kids aren't coming around your house much anymore, it could be because they don't want to bring their kids, their friends rather, into your household. They don't like the environment that's there. And you need to pick up on that. I know one family that just began to be aware of how much of this was going on and they initiated what they called a Sabbath of criticism. And they took the Lord's Day. They took Sunday and they went to church together and they agreed that that day they would willfully, consciously cease all criticism, all negativity, and all fault finding in their home. And what they found over the next month was quite interesting that a number of their friends started coming around later on that day and just hung out in that household throughout the balance of the day because they liked being in an environment where people weren't picking each other apart. Let your conversations, Paul writes, be full of graves. I think what happens for many of us is the kids just wear us out sometimes. They keep knocking away at us until we have enough and then we just snap. But that's just the sign of being overextended when a seven or eight year old causes you to lose control. Something's out of balance. Now, how are you doing on this one of communicating with your words? I put a little scale down there. I know it's simple. But just be honest as parents this morning, would you? Or just husband and wife? How are the words going in your family? If you're doing really well, give yourself a high mark, an eight, a nine, or a ten. If you need some improvement, give yourself a medium mark. And if things aren't going well at all, be honest enough to say, Hey, honey, I've got to give us a two or three here. There's just a lot of stuff we've got to clean up in our household. But be honest. Number two thing on your outline is this. The second key to family communication is to develop wisdom. Every home should be a place of teaching, a teaching or learning center, not just a place of lounging, but a place of learning. And families need to take this very, very seriously. It flows out of scripture. Moses, in the book of Deuteronomy, is summarizing things that he had told the children of Israel they needed to do to live life effectively. And then he says this. He turns and says to parents, You must teach these commandments to your children. Who? Who should teach them? Pastor Jeff, right? No, you. And you should talk about them when you're at home or out for a walk or at bedtime. And the first thing in the morning. In other words, all the time, you should be looking for what we call in real families, those teachable moments when you can impart something of God's wisdom for how to live life. Because the lines between right and wrong are greatly blurred, would you agree, in our culture. And they get fuzzier all the time. I don't know. I mean, a lot of you have too much responsibility to watch much TV. But let me just tell you, if you allow your kids to decide right and wrong based on the television they're watching, the sitcoms, the evening soaps that are out there, even the cartoons that are out there, I want you to know, if that's what your kids are basing their behavioral plan on, you're in trouble. And you're going to find things developing in your kids. Where did that come from? That's where it came from. The media is saturating our kids with lots of things that we would not agree with. And I'll tell you, kids don't always get this. I mean, especially when they're younger. We think that they should understand, but they don't get it. John Piaget, who was a famous developmental psychologist did a lot of study of how kids learn. And when they're little, they learn things in unusual ways. A little test that he gave, one of his most common asked questions, was this. He asked this of a little child. He said, now, who's the naughtier of these two children? Child A, who sneaks into the cookie jar when he's not supposed to and then breaks it. Or child B, who's helping his parents to set the table and accidentally breaks four glasses. Which of the two is naughtiest? Well, take a wild guess. I mean, if we're asking children, the right answer is A. Very good. I have more sympathy for you now, Dr. Dave. Little children almost always answer B. And apparently, a lot of not fully informed adults as well wouldn't pick that one. I'm not sure what that's about. Why would they pick B, though? Because they broke more glasses. That's right. And so, for a kid, well, that was more damage meant that that was a naughtier kid. And that's how they think. Parents, let me ask you a question. Have you ever had your child accidentally do something that messed up your schedule and you just got all flustered and frustrated and angry about it? You know what I mean? It was an accident. They spilled their Kool-Aid in the car when you're getting ready to leave to go to your meeting and you had to go clean it up and you were ten minutes late. And you had that and you blow it. But then, the child maybe does something that's morally not right. Maybe they tell a lie or maybe they put a little something that's not theirs into their basket. But it does an inconvenience to any and you just kind of let it slide because, well, all right, they're just being a kid. And you see, those kind of subtle things begin to get in and the kid's value systems become very strained. We end up many times disciplining based on convenience and not principle. Remember this. Every beautiful, wonderful, little child enters the world the same way. Adorable on the outside and little sinners on the inside. And you've got to help them get this worked out. You have to help set their moral compass. You have to help them to love and prize and cherish those things which are noble and right and pure because they don't automatically do it. And it's what's at the core of helping them to become a mature, responsible, successful adult. Three things that every kid needs to learn at home. Number one is responsibility. Whether we like it or not, loved ones, our children are going to have to give an account for their lives. Is that not true? So are you. Every one of us will stand before a holy God one day and have to give an account for our lives. They're not going to stand and have me stand for them or mom or anyone else. So they need to learn how to take responsibility for life and its experiences. Some parents go way out. And I have to say what I observe is that the more the pace of the culture picks up, the more occupied parents are in trying to raise income and so on. I sense the more guilt in this that drives them to somehow do their best to cover all the responsibilities they can for their kids. And so when their little one says something like the lament of the culture of the year 2000 is, I'm bored. I see moms and dads just knocking themselves out to try to fix that. And so they'll say things like, well you ought to go ride your egg. It's a beautiful day. No. Well, how about calling so-and-so and have him come over to the house? No. How about playing a game? No. How about reading a book? No. And you go on down the list until you find something expensive enough and interesting enough that they might say, okay, well, let's look at that because you're going to provide it for them. What's the correct response when your child should say to you, mommy and daddy, I'm bored. What should you say? Not too bad. Don't say that. Don't say that. But what? Now, you could say something like, well, you know, honey, that is a problem. But you're a bright young lady or a bright young man and God's given you all kinds of gifts and I'm sure you can take yourself right out of here and find something really fun to do. Goodbye. And walk away. And I don't mean that. I mean, I'm being totally sincere. You should put the responsibility back on them to take care of themselves, to find a way And that's something a lot of parents just want. I mean, you see, in essence, it's the principle in Scripture. You reap what you sow. A child needs to learn that they're going to reap what they sow. And parents, you can't always be bailing them out. The other day, I read this by a media writer in a column to parents. He said this, the other day, a friend of mine told me how her over-scheduled son accused her of being careless about getting home in time to take him to a soccer practice. You're late for my practice, he said. Mom stopped a minute and said, no wait, you're late for your practice. If you expect me to get you where you need to be on my time schedule, then you're going to have to wait. Otherwise, you can walk. He didn't like that. She went on to write, one of my children wrote, dust me on top of the television set. And this was a signal that he was old enough to take on the responsibility of dusting the entire living room after that on a daily basis. Now, what was especially striking, she writes in this, was the letters that she got back from many parents, especially moms who resisted having their kids take responsibility. One woman wrote these words, it's women like you who ruin the image of motherhood for women like me. I like to think of myself as a magic carpet on which my family treads. Really? Really? You know, I'll tell you something, if you'd like to see yourself that way, they'll be happy to oblige you. They'll walk all over you. Don't do that. Help your children to take responsibility. this is where the core value of reality discipline that Dr. K has made so popular in America, that's the core value. If you're patient enough to allow consequences, some call it the law of natural consequences, to allow the consequences to teach your children, it's the best way for them to learn. Discipline isn't something you apply, it's something that happens because you've allowed the consequences to play out. So, for example, if your 7th grader hacks around all night on the computer or watches TV or goes out with their friends and then the next morning wakes up and says, Oh, Mom or Dad, I have a project to do this morning and I forgot about it and can I just go in late so I can get the project done? You say, Gee, I'm really sorry that you didn't get your project done and next time you'll plan the evening before a little bit better. And they whine and carry on and call you names that probably they shouldn't even think about like, What a terrible Mom or Dad you are. But they're going to learn. Next time they'll be prepared. In our house, and I suppose it's true in yours, lots of times our kids weren't always the best in picking up their stuff after themselves. And we'd let it go on for quite a while and then Carol would finally say, I've had enough and she'd walk into one of the rooms and pile up all their stuff that was laying on the floor and put it in the corner and just say, You know what? This is the time-out basket. You can't use this stuff for a while since you didn't need it anyhow. And they'd go fussing and fuming and so on but they had to learn that there was some responsibility. Now, when one of the adults in our family who tends to leave things laying around now and then would have that problem, the other adult ought to practice the spiritual discipline of servanthood with a gracious spirit without whining or complaining. That's true of adults but the kids need to learn the natural consequences. We agreed on that one. Another thing that every family needs to teach their children is character. Bill Heibel's definition of character is who we are when no one is looking. I think it's an accurate one. Truth-telling, perseverance, courtesy, thankfulness, hard work. It's the sum total of your choices and habits. And in our homes we also need to teach spiritual values. I want to ask you this, parents. How many of you wish that you had started earlier to impart into your kids a sense of what's really important spiritually and how to get there? So many of our kids don't learn about God from their parents. They send them off to church or off to camp or off somewhere to hope that someone else will do their job. I want you to know we have a great kids ministry. I think we have one of the best kids ministries anywhere and it's getting better all the time. And I've seen our kids, my family, and I've noticed many, many other families have watched their kids benefit from the kids ministry but they're a partner with you. Do you know who your kid's small group leader is? Do you know what... Child, have you taken some time to invest a little bit of interest in what's going on back there? Teaching the children is not the job of Eden Christian Academy or some other Christian school or North Way's kids ministry or Pioneer Clubs. It's your job, friends. And it's something that each one of us need to take very seriously. How are we doing on that? One generation makes knowing your faithfulness to the next. It's our job. Rate yourself. Is your home a place where kids are learning responsibility, and character, and spiritual values? Are your teenagers exchanging with you at an honest level about their struggles with faith? That's a great indicator. Just go ahead and mark it down there. Go ahead, spouses. Talk it over. We're doing pretty well there, honey. Give ourselves an 8 or 9 or 10. Gee, we need to improve some. Give yourself a 4, 5, or 6. We're not doing much at all. Give yourself a 2 or 3. We need to get to work on that. And the final thing I want to suggest to you today, a final key to successful family communications is communicating the worth of our kids. And this final one may seem obvious, and I want you to know that I'm probably tuned in enough to recognize that few of you out here this morning wouldn't say to your kids something like you're the best. I mean, you're the only... As far as I'm concerned, you're the best son or daughter a parent could have. And we'd be really... We'd go out of our way to talk about that. You know, you're an awesome dude or doodad or whatever the case may be. But I've also noticed that over the years many parents make the mistake of building that affirmation based on the performance of the child. So you bring home all A's and wow, you're a great kid. Or, you know, you're the t-ball hitting champion. Wow! Man! Awesome! You're great. And this little nuance was lost on me for a while. It's the difference between praise and encouragement. We don't praise our kids for their achievements because that would fly in the face of what we believe as a people. We believe that we are worth something, that we are accepted, that we are valued because of what? Grace. That's right. Undeserved favor. And our children need to be affirmed and blessed and appreciated not because of what they've done but simply because of who they are. And that gets lost at times, friends, especially as it gets more and more competitive. And then the lack of security. And this is an epidemic. Understand what I'm saying. Those of you who have kids going into adolescence, this is an epidemic. Kids are under intense pressure to compete with their friends and their peer group and their schools. And if they come home and they sense their acceptance is somehow based on how they're doing, it leads to some horrible things in some families. And then it's worse things than some experts believe. Things like anorexia and drug addictions and so on are linked to kids who just couldn't perform well enough to please anybody. I know one young 16-year-old who checked out of school and is now working for a lawn care service because he was making mostly Fs and a couple of Ds even though he had an IQ of about 140 because his parents said he just wasn't reaching his potential. Early on we begin to send messages to our kids that they're valuable and important. That they're never going to be alone because they're part of us. And each day that message needs to be built upon. You see, the problem is, again, what I see is, you may hear me now and say, you know what, this is good, I agree, I needed to hear this, and walk out and by Thursday you experience what one writer calls sunset fatigue. Lewis Grant says sunset fatigue is simply the experience of being so tired at the end of the day that you are too drained, too preoccupied or fatigued to devote the energy or love to those you most want and ought to give it to. A person who's suffering from sunset fatigue is always in a hurry, always hurrying to try to make it, this urgency is always there. There's not time to really unwind or relax. There's an increased sense of irritability. There's marital tension. There's fighting and quarreling going on. There's always combating frustration inside. And there's always a sense that something's going on in the kids that I'm going to miss it and I don't know what to do about it because I feel all this pressure coming down on me. And you know what? The kids really pick that up. In a recent book called Ask the Children, What America's Children Really Think About Working Parents, the author interviewed hundreds of kids and adults and asked a lot of questions about family life and parenting and work. One of the questions was this. He asked this to the kids. If you could be granted one wish to change the way your mother or father's work affects your life, what would it be? If you could choose or be granted one wish to change the way your mother or father's work affects your life, what would it be? And what do you