A Healthy Family

SERMON: 2010-05-23--g0210--a-healthy-family SOURCE DURATION: 00:43:46.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 1.00 APPROVED: false REASON: The recording begins with the main sermon exposition (S[0]). The material concludes with a sustained prayer/benediction sequence (S[475]), which should be included as part of the overall message structure. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:41:22.520-00:43:45.380 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Well, I want to begin this morning by modeling with you what a biblically healthy family looks like. Those of you that have been in this church for a number of years will recall that we first did this about 15 or 16 years ago. It was the launch of about a year and a half of messages on the subject of functional family as opposed to dysfunctional family. A lot of that has been written up subsequently in my book Olive Shoots Around Your Table. Some of you have read it. Those of you that haven't are certainly encouraged and invited to do that. Much of the things that we're going to talk about today in the next couple of weeks are written up in the book in more detail, but I think it's time for a little tune-up, because you know as well as I do that the force of gravity always draws us to the ground. And no matter how good our relationships, no matter how good our families, every so often it's just very helpful to be reminded about what makes for a healthy family as opposed to an unhealthy family. And remember we always do this in the context of God's amazing grace. It's easy to be convicted. It's easy to say, "I have failed." It's easy sometimes perhaps even to feel proud and to say, "Well you know, I did a pretty good job, but we all need Jesus." And no matter how good we are, we can always do better. And no matter how badly we have failed, there's always God's grace to be forgiven, for the cycle to be broken, and for new life to take place. Now before I do the modeling with you, I just want to point out to you that family specialists tell us that there are at least three factors that separate healthy families from unhealthy families. Let me list them for you quickly now, and then later on we'll come back to them and talk about them in more detail. The first factor that distinguishes a healthy family from an unhealthy family is a thing called parental coalition being primary. And what that means is that the relationship between husband and wife, father and mother, is the primary relationship in a marriage. It cannot be divided by grandparents, by children, by friends, work, hobbies, drugs, or alcohol. It is the primary relationship. We'll talk about that more in a moment or two. Second characteristic is that there is a healthy balance between connectedness and independence. That is to say, there is a healthy balance between being properly connected to your family of origin and nevertheless being your own person, being allowed to go your own way. In the psychobabble of our day and age, that is known as the separateness-relatedness dialectic. And we'll talk more about that in a little bit as well. The third characteristic then is the one that we're probably most familiar with, and that is parenting styles. Experts tell us there are three or four primary parenting styles that people resort to in trying to raise their children. There are many factors that go into that, but some of them are far more effective in producing healthy and strong children than others. And I'll be sharing with you, I don't know if we can get to it today, but I'll be sharing with you some very practical statistics that talk about that. Now as Christian believers, I would add a fourth element that is important for a good marriage and a good family, and that of course is our relationship with the living God by faith in Jesus through the power of God's Holy Spirit. So hold on to those. We'll be coming back to them in a moment or two, but let me start with you now by modeling for you what an ideal biblical family looks like. And Sean and Holly and family have graciously volunteered to help out this morning. So this is, guys, the one chance in your life to be the ideal family, so enjoy it while you have the opportunity. So Sean, let's have you over on this side. These two feet you face towards each other, please, and the other two feet you face outward this way. That's good. And now you are going to join your other two hands, and you're going to hold this Bible, and this is going to stretch your arms and test your skills. Okay, so there are in this model six things that I want you to note about this relationship. First of all, the husband and the wife are face to face and heart to heart. That is to say, they have a connection with each other. They are able to communicate with each other, and they can see into each other's lives. Not only that, but these inside feet are facing towards each other, and the reason for that is that not only are they heart to heart and eye to eye and face to face, but they're moving towards each other. They are growing in intimacy. They are growing in their relationship. At the same time, their other two feet are moving outward, and the reason their feet are moving outward is because they are a couple that is on the goal. That is to say, they are moving in a direction, but they're doing it jointly. They're going in a common direction. That direction is determined by scripture because this scripture for these two people in this biblically healthy relationship is a lamp unto their feet and a light unto their path. These are people who have a relationship with God. They are submitted to the authority of Jesus, and individually, they draw their life from God. They share that life with each other, and as a family, they're moving in a particular direction, and so the Bible is the guide to their life. The Lord directs their paths. Now notice that in this relationship, this relationship is not defined by the presence or the absence of children, because their relationship is not based on the fact that they have a child. It is based on the fact that they're husband and wife who are in intimate relationship, one with another, and the fact that their hands are joined here is an indication of the physicality of their relationship, because they are going in the same direction, because they are submitted to the authority of Jesus, because they seek to be filled with the Holy Spirit, and because they seek to serve each other. Their love life expresses the reality of that closeness and that oneness. And so, you will notice then that in this context, the relationship is not defined by their children, but it is a safe place to have children and to nurture them. So, Thierse, if you'll come, meet your parents, child. I need you to duck your head and to enter the circle. Now Thierse, here's what I want you to do. I want you to spin around just a couple of times, like this, yes, very good. Stand right there. Now, there's a couple of things I want you to note about the child in this family. First of all, the child is safely enfolded. She's not only kept safe physically, but emotionally and spiritually. These are praying people. These are people who are in tune with the needs of their child. These are people who just want to grow her up in the Lord and who are vigilant in all the right ways to look after her. They stand up for her rights. They chastise, correct her discipline if need be. The second thing that's really important in this is that as she spins around, and spin around again, Thierse, and when you do that, face your dad, turn around, face your mom, back to the center. You'll notice that she's free to have a relationship with each parent, as we'll see later on when we look again at what a dysfunctional family looks like. One of the characteristics of a dysfunctional family is that the child becomes an object of a tug of war in the relationship, has a relationship with one parent versus the other parent, plays parents off against each other. But in a biblically healthy marriage, fathers and mothers both contribute strength to their children, but in different ways. There is the masculine and there is the feminine. Typically the masculine is more common to the male, of course, the feminine more common to the female. The mother nurtures, carries the child, protects and keeps, and the father encourages her to be strong and to be her own person and to step out eventually out of that relationship. And so as this child is nurtured in the family, there is room for more children. And we bring Josiah in on it, but he's doing camera work today, and so he gets off the hook and he was very happy to get off the hook. But here's the thing now, in this family, there is as much room as they have resources to look after children, for some that's one, for some that's two. Four is the C or C average, I understand, but hey, that depends on a whole lot of factors. But here's the thing now that we get to, as this child grows up and launches into life, she is like an arrow shot by a bow to step into life and to become her own person, eventually to marry perhaps, and then the cycle starts all over again. And that's what the Bible means when it says, "A man shall leave his father and his mother, cling to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." That's a biblically healthy, ideal model of the family. Thank you guys. Give them a hand if you will, please. You may be seated. All right, with that in mind then, let's look more closely at the three main factors that I talked about earlier that distinguish healthy families from unhealthy families. And as we go through that, try to picture how that came to expression in the model that you've just seen. First of all then, the fact that the parental coalition is primary. Genesis 2, 24 puts it this way, "For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh." That little verse contains a pile of wisdom, and in fact is used by the Lord Jesus and by the Apostle Paul in the New Testament to indicate the biblical foundation of marriage. So notice how that particular verse then has three verbs in it, each one being significant in this process of forming a biblically healthy family relationship. The first verb, of course, is the verb leave, for this reason a man will leave his father and mother. The second verb is be united to his wife, and the third verb is they will become one flesh. Let me talk just briefly about each verb, because as I said, each verb is very critical. What is the purpose of marriage from a biblical point of view? Well, it is to become one flesh. The mystery of marriage, God takes two different individuals from two different family backgrounds, two different personalities, two different cultures sometimes, two different ways of thinking, brings them together, and the challenge is to make them one. From now on, they're not only going to go in their own separate direction, they are laying aside their own individual paths to be joined together, going in one direction. And that comes to expression most powerfully then, as we mentioned a few moments ago, in the sex act, where you have two bodies literally becoming one, and you have the potential there of creating new life, which is truly a combination of both the father and the mother, an amazing mystery whereby we enter into God's creative activity. That's the verb becoming one, but in order to become one, for that to happen, we must be united to each other. I like the old fashioned cleave together, because that sort of portrays an image of two individuals who aren't just living under the same roof, even sharing the same bed, but two people who are moving towards each other. Remember in this model that we just saw, they're not only face to face and heart to heart, but their feet are constantly moving towards each other. Because the challenge of marriage, no matter how good your marriage is, is to grow in intimacy, to understand each other better, to love each other more deeply, to sacrifice more deeply for each other. That's what cleaving means, and how successful your marriage is as the years go by is not determined by how big your house is, how big your car is, even how long you've been together. It's determined by do you have an ability to cleave, do you communicate, do you understand each other, do you see into each other's lives, do you cherish each other. So you have to become one. In order to become one, you have to cleave, you have to deliberately move towards one another, but in order to be able to cleave, what do you have to do first? You have to leave, therefore a man will leave his father and his mother, cleave to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So to leave father and mother not only means typically moving out from under their roof and learning to live independently, but it also means that now your primary relationship is no longer with your family of origin, it is with your spouse. And that's why in the traditional wedding ceremony, you have the father giving away the bride and the bride physically moving away from her dad and her mom to be joined to her husband. And in this egalitarian society, there's a lot of people who take offense at that as if she's some sort of piece of property to be exchanged, but such people don't understand the nature of covenant. Up until now, her primary commitment would have been to her family, what her family thinks, what her family feels, what her family experiences. If the relationship is good, it makes a huge difference in her life. But now as she's moving away from her father, coming in union with her husband, now the primary relationship is with her spouse. And because the parental coalition is primary, this relationship has to be deeper and has to be the first loyalty over every other relationship. That includes not only parents, it includes grandparents. It includes friends, as I said earlier. It includes work. It includes your hobby. How well your marriage thrives depends on the primacy of the parental coalition. And as we'll see later on, where that is compromised, you start in motion a whole series of events that ultimately will breed disaster for the offspring. You with me so far? The parental coalition has to be central. There are all kinds of obstacles that you can think of as we're talking about this, even as I can. But we'll leave those for the moment or we'll never get to where we're going this morning. The parental coalition is primary and there has to be a balance between being connected to your family and being allowed to stand on your own two feet and to be your own person. That is known, as I said in the literature, the separateness, relatedness, dialectic. Now that's a bit of a mouthful, but the word dialectic means opposing forces. Don't feel bad I had to look it up, too. Because every child growing up in his or her family of origin has a two-fold pull on his or her life that are at odds with each other. One is the question of relatedness, which is to say connectivity with a family of origin. The other is separateness, that is to say being his or her own person. And in a healthy family, there has to be an ongoing balance between being connected with my parents, sharing their values, knowing their love, listening to them, allowing them to shape my life, and then being allowed to make my own mistakes, discover my own identity, be my own person, and eventually leave home. And the challenge of parenting, as we'll talk about a little bit more later on, is how to do that constant balancing act, because it always changes. It is towards the relatedness when the child is younger. It is towards the separateness when the child becomes older. And I've often said one of the mistakes that I have seen parents make over the years is that they are way too hands-off when the children are younger, and then when the teenagers begin to act out, they try to reign them in, and that is the reverse order. Relatedness is critical in the early years. As they grow up, you need to give them the space to be their own person so that they can leave home and stand on their own two feet. So you have the separateness, relatedness dialectic. You have this constant struggle of who are you going to listen to, how much freedom are you going to give me to be my own person. Now if you listen carefully to what I've said, then you will understand that in this process there is potential for two huge problems. What's the first one? It is failure to bond, that is to say, the child fails to truly connect at a heart level with its nuclear family, particularly its parents. Now again, ideally, here's how the process should work. Mom discovers she's pregnant, she's expecting a baby, and ideally that mother ought to be glad in the fact that she's conceived new life and is going to give birth to a baby. And even if initially she's surprised, perhaps, and perhaps even dismayed, as the baby grows in her tummy, hopefully they begin this process of bonding. We know from research that babies in mother's tummies know not only whether they're wanted or whether they're unwanted, they also know how confused the parents are sometimes. One moment they're wanted, the next moment they're not wanted. It's an amazing science that has developed about that in recent years. Not all pregnancies are ideal pregnancies. Some births are highly traumatic. Some babies refuse to relate to their moms, and some moms refuse to relate to their children. And I told you this story last week from Rosie DiMano's column in the Toronto Star the day before Mother's Day, how her mother only weighed 100 pounds and her baby weighed 10 pounds when she was born. It was a tortuous labor, a forceps-lacerated newborn that was presented to the mom, and the mom was in such a state that she said, "Take it away," didn't want her child, was unable to nurse her child, and so a lactating ant did the nursing. And then you don't have to be surprised that this girl grows up not having a relationship with her mom, despising her mom's femininity and what she perceives of as weakness and embracing instead the strength of the masculine because it's done a number on her. So when babies bond, they develop a thing called basic trust. And basic trust looks like this. It lays in your life the foundation for who you are. Because basic trust means, number one, I know who I am, and it's okay for me to be who I am. I don't have to be something else. And basic trust, number two, means that I can let other people into my life. I can trust they're going to look after me. And out of that then comes this whole foundation out of which flows the rest of life. Erickson's stages of psychosocial development, I talk about it a lot more in Blessings and Curses. If the foundation is laid in my life, then I learn to be my own person. I learn that it's okay for me to have thoughts and to have ideas and to have plans and to step into them. I learn to do things that are uniquely mine. I learn what my gifts and my abilities are, and now I discover who I am. I'm good at this, I'm not good at that. Out of that flows an ability to do intimacy. Out of that flows an ability to pour myself into somebody else's life and good things happen. That is what happens when there is appropriate bonding. But now as I said a moment ago, we live in a fallen world, and in a fallen world not every mother bonds with her child. And some children are unwanted, some pregnancies are very difficult, some bonding simply doesn't take place. And when that happens, instead of producing basic trust, basic distrust happens. And if basic trust means I'm good with who I am, and I can let other people into my life, then basic distrust means the opposite. I don't like who I am. I don't believe that I'm acceptable to my parents, I can't really be me, and I don't really trust that they have my best interests at heart. And so I close off and I go my own way. And again, Rosie's story of how she rejected her mom, all her cousins had a great relationship with her mother, but she had no use for her mom whatsoever because they had not bonded in those early days. So out of that then comes the opposite in terms of how your life unfolds apart from the grace of God. What happens is I become a shame-based person. I don't really think I have a right to be here. I cannot believe that anybody really loves me, and I cannot believe that anybody really cares for me. So now I have my eyes set on the fact that somebody is going to do me in and I just better look after myself and I begin to parent myself. Understand that. Instead of allowing my parents to parent me or allowing other adults to parent me, I now decide for myself what is right and wrong, but I'm only a kid. And so I learn a lot of false notions about how life works. This is known as attachment disorder. It is extremely widespread in today's broken society and it produces people who have unfocused anger, it produces people who can never afford to be wrong, and it produces people who can never truly afford to let somebody else into their lives and they're always desiring to control. And let that go on unchecked. The spiral continues to go down. We not only have shame, but now I feel guilty all the time because I know that I'm screwing up. I got an inferiority complex. A lot of people think that self-esteem is based on looks or on money or how good I am at school or how successful I am at life. That's not true at all. It's determined by how much in peace I am within myself and how I have come to accept both my strengths and my limitations. That's a whole subject in and of itself. I now no longer know who I am. You often read in literature about people traveling the world to discover who they are. Have you ever noticed that? The reason they do that is because if you don't grow up in an environment where you're encouraged to be yourself, where you learn to put on faces and masks and where you think you have to give to the significant caregivers in your lives what they want, even if it's not what you want to give them, then you grow up. You're not in touch with yourself. You don't know who you are, and you learn your identity from everybody all around you, and that produces serious role confusion. A person with role confusion can be in the middle of a crowd, and they'll always feel they don't really belong because they don't know how to do the dance. They always feel misunderstood, and they're always wondering why the whole world is out to do them harm. You'll know some people like that. Perhaps there are times in your own marriage, in your own relationship. That's the criticism your spouse directs towards you. Produces isolation, stagnation, despair. I want you to know the world is full of people who have never been properly mothered or fathered. They have fathered and mothered themselves. They have never learned the basics of connectedness, and they go through life wondering, "Why is life so hard, and why can't I do healthy relationships?" It happens when the relatedness function, the bonding, has been compromised, usually very early in life. The good news is, and we can talk about this more as time goes on, is that the Lord Jesus can walk back in time. He can identify those places in our lives. He can heal us, and He can restore us, and He can bring us back to life. I believe one of the ministries the Lord has entrusted to us as a community is to walk with people in those very broken and those very deep places, and to watch Jesus re-parent. He becomes the Father. He becomes the Mother. He breaks the power of the lie. He restores the heart, and we learn how to do the dance, because you see, if we're going to live in eternity, we've got to love God above all, and we've got to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and so getting ready for eternity means letting the Lord walk out those places in our lives and teaching us how to do it. Wouldn't you agree? That's part of the biblical mandate. So that's one side of the coin. The world is filled with people who have never learned how to bond, and who therefore don't know how to do life. But the other side of the coin is this. There are those who have a failure to individuate, or people who have difficulty separating. If there are some who have difficulty relating, there are others who have difficulty leaving home. I don't know how many of you here have ever seen the movie Failure to Launch. I haven't seen it personally, but I know the summary story, and it's the story of a fellow by the name of Tripp. He's in his 30s, and he is still living with his mom and his dad. These two best friends, who are approximately the same age as he, are also still living with their parents, and they're proud of the fact. But Tripp's parents are not happy at all, and they're fascinated when friends whose adult son has recently moved away from home reveal that they have hired an expert to arrange the matter. And the expert is Paula. She believes that men continue to live at home out of low self-esteem. Her approach is to establish a relationship with a man to build up his confidence and transfer his attachment from his parents to her. Her step-by-step process is deceitful. She allows her subject to fall in love with her, pretending to like what he likes, allowing him to help her through a false crisis, obtaining the approval of his friends, giving him the opportunity to teach her something so that he will then move out to become more independent as the story goes on. And Dr. Leonard Sacks, in his book Boys Adrift, refers to the movie as symptomatic of our day and age because he says, "Why is it that so many young men today are unmotivated to be their own persons, they're unmotivated to move out of the house, they're unmotivated to get a job, they just want to hang around with their friends and play video games?" And then in his book he analyzes five different factors that he believes contribute to this symptom of our day and age. But it's not only men who sometimes fail to individuate or to leave home. Listen to this letter written a number of years ago to one of the newspaper advice columnists -- here's the letter, "I have a wonderful girlfriend, 25 years old, who is just about perfect in every way. We plan to be married next summer. The problem is that Alice's mother insists she wear a pager and carry a cell phone whenever she goes out. She must check in with her mom every hour. I am concerned about what effect this will have on our marriage." Goes on to say, "Her mom is a nice woman and I don't want to alienate her. Do you have any advice for me?" "Yeah, I have some advice for you. Run for the hills, man. You're heading for trouble and big trouble." Why is it that some fail to leave home? Well, ironically enough, it has to do with the first principle that we were talking about that is the primary parental coalition. In a normal family, as we modeled it here, the father and the mother are individual persons in an adult relationship with each other. They have a life apart from their children. They can pour their energy into their child. They can connect with a child, lay the right kind of foundation, teach that child how to live, let the child draw life from them, and then release them so that they can be launched into the world to be their own people. But remember, and we'll look at this in more detail as time goes on, in some relationships, the parental coalition is askew. And this typically happens if either one or the other has not properly differentiated from their own parents. There are some girls who are closer to their moms or to their dads than they are to their husband, or some husbands who are closer to their mom or to their dad than they are to their spouse. When that relationship doesn't click, what happens in some of those relationships is that they will beget a child because they think the child will bring the parents closer together. Have you ever heard that story? And this child now is supposed to solve the problems that exist between the parents, but the child now enters into competition because their primary relationship now is no longer between husband and wife, it is between father and son, or mother and daughter, or mother and son, and father and daughter. And as we'll see later on, this begins to stir all kinds of things which leads to the breakdown of the family. And the point is this, unless you have learned to bond properly, have developed the thing called basic trust out of which all other things in life needs to flow, you cannot leave home properly. And if you can't leave home properly, you can't start a new family properly. And so here's the challenge for parents, and this is true whether you're a Christian or whether you are not a Christian, please understand this. Being a Christian is tremendously advantageous because we have the grace of Jesus, we have the power of Jesus, we have the forgiveness of Jesus, we have the ability of Jesus to break old patterns, but I know an awful lot of Christians who have awfully messy relationships and whose kids are thoroughly screwed up, because you see, belonging to Jesus means you try to do it his way. And if people in the world can tell us about the importance of the parental coalition being primary, and if people in the world can tell us how important it is to get a proper balance between relatedness and separateness, then how much more important is it in the church community for us to avail ourselves of God's grace so that we can have the right balance between belonging and releasing. And let me say it one more time as we bring this to a close this morning, the challenge then for parents is how to build a box of safety around their child that is big enough for the child to learn to be his or her own person, but small enough so he or she does not self-destruct in the process of learning how to do life. And then the really big challenge for parenting is how to increase the size of that box and eventually let down the sides so the kid can step out and all the things that you've been trying to teach, all the values that you've been trying to impart, are now solidly owned on the inside, and because they're solidly owned on the inside, they in turn can stand, they in turn can form meaningful, healthy relationships, and Lord willing, they in turn can become part of a new cycle. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother, cleave to his wife, and the two [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:41:22.520; remove through 00:43:46.000] will [CUT] become one flesh. [music] Lord, we give to you our parents, the ones that gave us life. May we always honor them and seek to do what's right. Where Jesus' love's displayed, where every heart is kept secure, a home of healing grace, will be a family of peace, where war and striving cease, where mercy flows and each one knows that we're a household of faith. Yes, we're a household of faith. Yes, we're a household of faith. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:43:46.000; resume after this marked segment]