Today’s post is a fragment of my partner video, that tells about the purpose and direction of the ministry of Christian Home and Family.  This post in particular is aobut the purpose for the family God has carried out through history. You can read the video text below the video.

God’s purpose for the family

is not clearly seen until you walk through history like this with an eye to see it. It is one of the main ways He’s worked and has intended to work in the world.

Some questions for us to consider:

• Does the way I lead my family correspond to the purpose for the family God intends?
• What can I do to make changes in the right direction?

VIDEO TEXT:

The generational legacy of faith that I’m talking about is vitally important because it is deeply engrained in God’s plans for humanity… Throughout the history of the world, God has been at work… and He’s been at work specifically through the family…

At the very beginning of God’s work, He created two people, Adam and Eve… and He made them what? A family… and through the entrance of sin, their family was corrupted…

To the point that the next major event in history is the flood, where God judges the sin of mankind. But with judgment also comes deliverance… and He brings that deliverance through what? … a faithful family (Noah’s family)

The next major figure in God’s building project is a man named Abraham, who God promises what? A family, a lineage, a line of descendants through whom the entire world will be blessed.

Abraham receives his promised son Isaac… who has a family of his own. One of his sons is Jacob, who God later renames Israel. Israel has a family, 1 daughter and 12 sons, who are the heads of the 12 tribes of Israel. Do you see that the history of the nation of Israel, is the history of a family… with all it’s good and bad points? God was still doing His own building project through the family…

As God begins to establish the family of Israel, one of the very first commands given is to the individual families within the larger family of Israel… He says…”You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”

The point? – The individual families were to be the primary place where devotion to God was the be passed along. It had to begin with the parents, who were to love God with all they were… and they were to pass their vibrant faith to their children, both by example and instruction. It was to be a generational legacy, developed in the home.

Kings were appointed to lead Israel, and their 2^nd and greatest king was David. Though Israel’s greatest king, David failed in his own household, and the results were disastrous for the nation’s history… all because one of the first and most influential families whom God had appointed to lead the nation, lost their way…

In Psalm 78, God reminded Israel of the vital role the family was to play…. “He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children, that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children, so that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep His commandments.”

[pullquote position=”right”]Faithfulness is to be passed down through the generations.[/pullquote] That’s how God builds His people. A generational legacy of faith, passed down through families has been God’s plan all along.

After hundreds of years of family failures, God speaks at the end of the Old Testament, telling what His next prophet’s role will be… “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”

God was going to send a prophet (John the Baptist) to preach in the power of the Holy Spirit, in such a way that the family unit was restored.… so that the intended pattern of generational faithfulness and legacy could be revived.

Then came Jesus… born into what? A family. As His mother, Mary was realizing the greatness of what God was doing, she said, “He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of His mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and his offspring forever.”

Mary recognized that the miracle of her Son’s birth was connected to God’s promise to be merciful to the family of Abraham… Jesus is the offspring through whom all the world is blessed… and He came to us through the family line God built in Abraham…

The New Testament instructs to keep the family at the center of passing along the legacy of true faith. “Fathers do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the LORD.”

And we find ourselves here, today… when families are in trouble all over the globe. God is calling me to help families build their own legacy of faith to be passed on through the generations of their families

[pullquote position=”right”]Because a generational legacy of faith, passed on through the family is THE biblical pattern for spiritual growth and vitality.[/pullquote]

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