Experiencing God at Home (2 page)

Rates of Obesity

• One out of three kids are considered overweight or obese.
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Internet Addiction

• Cybersex Addiction—compulsive use of Internet pornography, adult chat rooms, or adult fantasy role-play sites impacting negatively on real-life intimate relationships.
  
• Cyber-Relationship Addiction—addiction to social networking, chat rooms, and messaging to the point where virtual, online friends become more important than real-life relationships with family and friends.
  
• Net Compulsions—such as compulsive online gaming, gambling, stock trading, or compulsive use of online auction sites such as eBay often result in financial and job-related problems.
  
• Information Overload—compulsive web surfing or database searching, leading to lower work productivity and less social interaction with family and friends.
  
• Computer Addiction—obsessive playing of off-line computer games, such as Solitaire or Minesweeper, or obsessive computer programming.
  10
  
• Internet Porn Stats:
  
  • The largest consumer of Internet pornography is the twelve to seventeen age group.
    11
    
  • The average age of first Internet exposure to pornography is eleven years old.
    12
    
  • Twenty-one percent of teens say they have looked at something on the Internet that they wouldn’t want their parents to know about.
    13
    
  • Seventy percent of sexual advances over the Internet happened while youngsters were on a home computer.
    14
    

Sex

• Forty-two percent of high school students admitted to having sex without a condom.
  15
  
• The abstinence education program
  Choosing the Best
  is 47 percent more effective at delaying a teen’s first sexual encounter than condom-promoting sex education programs.
  16
  
• Adolescents who take virginity pledges are less likely to experience teen pregnancy, are less likely to be sexually active while in high school and as young adults, are less likely to give birth as teens or young adults, are less likely to give birth out of wedlock, are less likely to engage in unprotected sex, and will have fewer sexual partners.
  17
  

Understanding This Generation

The statistics are sobering. We don’t need to convince you that the Internet, smartphones, and Wi-Fi are dramatically altering the parenting playing field. Children are growing up being bombarded with Internet messages and advertisements. We know a church youth minister who did an experiment. He randomly texted six teenagers from his youth group at 9:15 a.m. on Monday. That was thirty minutes into their first class period when all cell phones are to be turned off. He received answers from all six students in less than two minutes! Your children are living in a world filled with temptations, pressures, and bullying that you never dreamed of when you were their age.

The problem for our families, however, is not necessarily that society has become technologically saturated. The real issue is that society has grown from being secular to being increasingly anti-Christian. Today, public schools teach curriculum that often mocks Christian beliefs and values. Modern society does not obtain its views of the family, morality, or sexuality from the Bible. Rather, modern society upholds that people are free to do whatever they want—with exceptions, of course. If an artist wants to exhibit a grotesque picture that blasphemes Jesus Christ, it is praised as a work of art. But increasingly, putting out a manger scene at Christmas is being condemned as bigoted and hateful. Today, celebrities are enthusiastically cheered when they promote same-sex marriage, but if a business donates money to support healthy marriages between men and women, they run the risk of being boycotted. Our children are growing up in a society that is becoming increasingly
anti-
Christian. This will have profound consequences for our parenting.

In the midst of the rapid secularization of society, many parents sincerely want to raise their children to love and serve God. Many Christian parents yearn for their children to grow up experiencing God’s blessing on their lives. Though the challenges are many, solutions
are
available. In fact, the blacker the pitch that society reaches, the more determined God is to use Christian families as lights on a hill (Matt. 5:14–16). God is just as interested in working through families today to extend His kingdom as He was with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jesse, Mary, and Joseph.

In the following pages, we will give you tools to help your family be God-centered, God-directed, and God-blessed as you navigate through the many obstacles and challenges your family is facing. As you read the following pages, ask God to open your heart and mind to how He wants to guide and enable you to experience God’s best for your family.

Questions for Reflection/Discussion

1. If you were to rate the current health of your family on a scale of 1 to 10, what number would you give it? Why?

2. Of all the issues identified in this chapter, which one concerns you most for your family?

3. What is one way you are using technology for the benefit of your family?

4. What is one way you find technology detrimental to your family life today?

5. In what ways are the Christian beliefs and values of your family currently being attacked? How might you better prepare your children for what they will be facing in a secular society?

Notes

1. See http://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/famsoc.asp.

2. Susan Jones, “Fewer than Half of American Children Growing Up In Intact Families, Survey Says,” CNS News (December 15, 2012), http://cnsnews.com/news/article/fewer-half-american-children-growing-intact-families-survey-finds.

3. See http://www.separation.ca/pdfs/divorcefacts.pdf.

4. See http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2006001/9198-eng.htm.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. See http://2011bullyingprogram.weebly.com/bullying-statistics.html.

8. See http://www.risk-within-reason.com/2012/03/06/bullying-facts-statistics.

9. See http://kidshealth.org/parent/general/body/overweight_obesity.html.

10. See http://www.helpguide.org/mental/internet_cybersex_addiction.htm.

11. Internet Pornography Statistics. Internet Filter Review, 2004.

12. Ibid.

13. “A World of Their Own,”
Newsweek,
May 8, 2000.

14. “One in Five Kids Has Been Propositioned for Cybersex,”
Legal Facts
, vol. 2, No. 3, 2000.

15. “Teens, Sex, & the Media,”
Media Scope
, 2001.

16. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, November 2004, www.cdc.gov.

17. Robert Rector, Kirk Johnson, and Jennifer Marshall, “Teens Who Make Virginity Pledges Have Substantially Improved Life Outcomes,” The Heritage Foundation, September 21, 2004.

Chapter 2

Biblical Overview

The Greatest Challenge You May Ever Face

Think about the challenges you have faced personally in your life so far. Perhaps you had to overcome a serious illness. Maybe you grew up in a dysfunctional or abusive home. You may have been called upon to face a crisis or to start your own company. Perhaps you have cheered for a perennially losing sports team, and all of your friends make fun of you. . . . Life is filled with challenges. We contend that one of the greatest tasks you can ever undertake is the responsibility of raising up sin-prone, naturally self-centered children in a world filled with destructive allurements and pressures so that they turn out to be godly men and women. Simply put: raising children is one of the most challenging, yet rewarding undertakings on the planet.

Ronald Reagan is considered one of the better American presidents in the last century or so. He took on the Soviet Union in the midst of the Cold War. Through his leadership, the Iron Curtain collapsed. Developing a cordial relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev represented a herculean feat. Yet during that same time, Reagan was stymied by a strained relationship with his daughter, Patti. Reagan could take on his nation’s most dangerous enemy successfully, but no amount of diplomatic skills could seemingly bring reconciliation with his own offspring. Sadly, this is true of many parents.

We conduct spiritual leadership conferences across America.
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During a break at one meeting, a distinguished looking pastor who appeared deeply troubled approached us. We had been discussing how to be a spiritual leader in your home, church, and workplace. He had been a pastor for twenty-five years and was widely recognized as having successfully led some of the largest churches in his denomination. Still, he appeared deeply troubled.

He related to us that, while he had indeed enjoyed a stellar ministerial career, he was brokenhearted over his family. He had four children. He had led them to go to church every Sunday and to be heavily involved in its children’s and youth programs. Yet now, as young adults, not one of them attended church. Two of them had renounced their belief in God altogether. He felt like a failure as a parent and as a leader. How could he continue to provide spiritual leadership to his congregation when he had failed so miserably to guide his own children?

Sadly, this man’s experience is far from unique. Everywhere we go we meet grieving parents and grandparents who suffer daily from the knowledge that their offspring have rejected their most important values and beliefs. Some studies indicate that roughly 70 percent of children who grow up attending church with their family will walk away from church—and often God—when they become teenagers and young adults.
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Churches today are filled with people who suffer regret, remorse, and resignation because of how their children turned out. As in every situation in life, it is always best to begin our understanding of parenting by looking at what Scripture says about the subject.

Parents in the Bible

The Bible is the most popular book ever written, and in terms of sales and readership, no book has sold more widely or been read by more people. There are numerous reasons for this. For one, God is the Author. Talk about a publishing coup, having the Creator of the universe put some of His thoughts down on paper! Second, the Bible is brimming with wisdom that has been tested and proven through the millennia. When you do what it says, you invariably live a blessed life! A third reason is that it is filled with compelling, exciting, and even romantic stories. It has something for everyone! But what makes the book so gripping is that it is brutally honest. It tells it like it is. It doesn’t gloss over the mistakes and failures of its main characters. It shows us the heights to which God can raise people as well as the depths to which sin can plunge them. We know people such as Moses, David, and Peter as great heroes of the faith. But the Bible also concedes that Moses was a murderer, David an adulterer, and Peter a denier. Perhaps that’s what makes the Bible such compelling reading. It tells the stories of ordinary people we can readily relate to. It reminds us that even the greatest saints in the Bible had feet of clay. And, just as God’s grace was sufficient for the fallible humans who lived before us, it is equally capable of helping us overcome our own shortcomings and disappointments.

What is surprising about the Bible is this: despite the obvious importance that God places on the family, it is not as easy to find examples of good parents in the Bible as you might think. It is alarming how even some of the best-known men and women in the Bible fell short in the crucial area of being a good mom or dad. This becomes painfully obvious when we look at some of the parents in the Bible.

God

The first father figure we come across in the Bible is God Himself. Jesus told us to talk to Him by saying: “Our Father in heaven . . .” (Matt. 6:9). The first two people the heavenly Father parented were Adam and Eve. God provided them a delightful environment in which to live (Gen. 2:8–9). He supplied all of their physical needs (Gen. 2:18–22; 3:21). God spent regular quality time with them (Gen. 3:8-9). He offered them wise counsel on how to live an abundant life (Gen. 2:16–17). He also gave them responsibility (Gen. 1:26, 28). No father ever provided as much for his children or was more loving toward them than God was to Adam and Eve. Yet how did they respond? They chose to reject Him and His counsel. They became alienated from Him and even tried to hide from Him (Gen. 3:8). Ultimately their sin caused them to be separated from the beautiful home God had provided for them (Gen. 3:23). The first family in history experienced disaster!

Adam and Eve

Adam and Eve were the only two humans who ever experienced what it was like to be perfect. Unfortunately, by the time they became parents, they had allowed sin into their home. Once sin enters a family, it is insidious in its destructive power. The first parents had walked with God in the garden of Eden! They had perfect bodies that weren’t filled with hereditary diseases and artificial preservatives. They had energy! Yet how did their children turn out? Well, their oldest, Cain, struggled in his relationship with God and with his younger brother Abel. This led Cain to eventually murder his sibling and live the remainder of his life in exile from his family (Gen. 4:1–15). The first children in history experienced disaster.