When Families Hurt

SERMON: 2010-07-18--g0410--when-families-hurt SOURCE DURATION: 00:46:10.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: The recording begins with the sermon exposition (modeling family life). The core message concludes in segment [490]. Segments following this are sustained acoustic music/hymn material and should be excluded from the main sermon body. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:42:23.000-00:46:09.780 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 --- But what we're going to do in a moment is model for you what a family looks like when it hurts or is broken. But before I do that, let me just briefly review with you now three characteristics that distinguish healthy families from unhealthy families. We covered these in the two weeks prior to my trip to China. So just to refresh our memory, healthy families are distinguished from unhealthy families by these three qualities. Number one, a healthy family has the parental coalition as the primary coalition. And what that means is that in a healthy family, the relationship between husband and wife is simply the most important relationship, and it cannot be broken by children, by in-laws, by grandparents, by jobs, hobbies, or any of the things that would drive husbands and wives apart. As we modeled a number of weeks ago, in a biblically ideal family, husband and wife are face-to-face, they're heart-to-heart, and they're moving towards each other by the grace of God. Secondly, there is a healthy balance then between being connected to the family of origin and being your own person. This is known as the separateness, relatedness, dialectic in cycle babble. And it means that every child growing up in a family is automatically exposed to two opposing forces. One force is to belong to your family of origin and to be connected to them, and the other force is to grow up and to move away from that and to become your own person. That's what the Bible means, of course, in Genesis 2.24, when it says a man will leave his father and his mother, be united or cleaved to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. And then the third is that the parenting style has to be authoritative, and an authoritative parenting style is firm on rules but high on relationship. And it's the authoritative parenting style that is taught to us repeatedly in Scripture, including that passage that we read a few moments ago, "Children, obey your parents and the Lord for this is right. Honor your father and your mother, which is the first commandment with a promise, that it may go well with you, that you may enjoy long life on the earth. Parents do not exasperate your children, instead bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord." And again, notice that balance, "Children, honor your parents, obey them in the Lord." They are God's way of guiding you. But parents, don't take advantage of your power or your authority. This is not about you. This is about your children and what is good for your children. And so, those three elements in varying degrees need to be present in our marriages and in our families for our families to be healthy and for our children to grow up in a healthy fashion. Now, it stands to reason then, that if these are three characteristics of healthy families, that when families hurt or when families are broken, one or more of these principles is compromised to one degree or another. And so, what we're going to do now and the time that we have is try to model for you what that looks like in terms of a broken family. And Errand and Sue, we already had the unfortunate opportunity of being present with me at a family birthday do earlier this week. And so, they got volunteered with their family to help me this morning. So, Sue and Errand, if you'll come on up, we will repeat what we did many years ago. Some of you will recall my favorite little stool because it's an important part of what it is that we're about to do. So, Errand, we're going to have you climb up here without breaking your neck. So, be careful, yes. You can do it. Okay. You have your back to him, however. This is a bad day in the marriage, remember. All right. First of all, the husband here, this is a hurting family. And in this hurting family, the husband, you will notice, is elevated and he will be elevated not only above his wife, but above all his children. And the reason for that is that the family's life revolves around this person's brokenness. Now, in this particular model, we can make him any number of things that we want. Let's make him a person with a drinking problem. This person is coping with life by drawing on the power of alcohol. And because he has a drinking problem, life in the family revolves around his disposition. When the kids come home from school, one of the first questions they ask is, "What kind of place or shape is daddy in?" If he's in a good place, then the kids are in a good place and they go off and they do their own thing. But if he's in a bad place, they go hide in their corners, they run off to be with their friends because this is not a safe place. Not only that, but he is very unstable because if we give him a little push, he'll go flying. And what that represents is the fact that his alcohol not only makes him unsteady in his drinking bouts, but the drinking is a cover-up for deeper things. Because he drinks because there is pain, or there is brokenness, or there is shame in his life. Webe and I, as we were traveling throughout China, we had a very interesting conversation because Webe is one of these go-getters. I thought that with his bum hip, I would have no trouble keeping up with him. But at every airport and every train station, my big fear was that I would lose sight of Webe because he goes like a banshee. And here I am with all my suitcases trying to keep up with him. But in the Great Wall of China, it goes all the way up in a mountain and he was bound and determined to climb up there. As a matter of fact, he was bound and determined that we would take steps leading up, up to the Great Wall to begin with, instead of taking the cable cars. But I soon persuaded them that I would be dead before I'd get up there. So we settled for the cable cars instead. But he climbed all the way up there and then came down almost with sunstroke up there and had to be held down. And he says it was nothing but all his friends who were with him tell me that they were quite worried about him. But so we're doing these seminars all over the place and we're talking about family hurts. And all of a sudden, Webe has this little revelation that his determination to climb to the top is, is in part his entrepreneurial exploratory drive. And he's amazing that way. But it's also in part a coping mechanism he discovered because when he was growing up and he talks about this fairly freely, so I feel free to share this with you. His relationship with his dad was not very good. And his dad would get very frustrated with him by times as he was growing up. And then he would say to him, "You can't do anything." And so he grew up unbeknownst to himself trying to prove to himself that he could indeed do something. And he used to joke with him about his luggage because I have no trouble letting somebody else carry my luggage, I want you to know, especially when it's really heavy. But not Webe. Nobody touches his luggage. He's got to show that he can do it himself. So this guy is unsteady and he drinks because inside there is a place of brokenness that says I need to be able to prove that I'm okay. So he needs help to do life. And that help comes from his dear, kind, long-suffering wife. Notice two things about the wife in this model. First of all, she has her back to her husband. That is to say, they are not face to face, they're not heart to heart, they're not moving towards each other, they're moving away from each other. The reason for that is that his love affair is not with his wife, it is with his dysfunction, it's with his bottle. And this woman has been so often disappointed in the relationship. She has experienced so many broken promises. She has opened up her heart so many times only to have it trampled upon that she has closed off her heart and now they are like two ships sailing by each other in the middle of the night. They live in the same household, superficially everything may seem to be okay, but they're moving apart, probably only held together by the children. So there's a lot of pressure on this woman, this woman needs help, and so we're going to bring in her first born child, and in this case your mother's helper is going to be Melanie. So give her a hand folks, this is a stretch. You are your mother's favorite daughter today. You're going to hold your mother's hand and you're going to put your other hand on your mother's shoulder, okay? Three things I want us to note about this particular arrangement here. First of all, mother and daughter are face to face and heart to heart, and what that means is that the emotional disconnect that she experiences with her husband is now superimposed on her relationship with her daughter. They understand each other, as the child gets older she confides in her daughter and their relationship becomes emotionally very close. Not only that, but their hands are joined and her hand is upon her shoulder and that symbolizes that in this relationship this daughter recognizes her mother's pain and steps in to the situation, so she will help perhaps with the younger children when dad is having a bad day, she comes to mother's aid and she is a lovely and wonderful child to have around. Third thing to note is that the relationship between father and daughter is an indirect relationship, in fact they have little relationship at all, and the reason for that is that on the one hand she resents her father because of the hurt that she sees her mother experiencing, and the father resents the daughter because he senses a closeness between the two that somehow or another he's not able to step into. So this family is now beginning to develop some considerable tension. Father and mother are often upset with each other. Mother is the long, suffering, patient one, and the daughter captures that agony and tensions exist between father and daughter, so it's time to bring in a second child into the family, and that's known as the family rebel, and I think Natalie has been volunteered for that as I recollect, so wherever she be, there she be. We warned her about this ahead of time. You're good with this? Yep. All right, we need you over here, and you are adopting your most rebellious pose to this family, so you got something like you are angry with this whole family, yes. The family rebel is the one who acts out the family's pain. She is probably the most honest person in this family. She finds her identity over against her good sister. She knows that she can never be that good. She's given up trying to be that good, and so she's the first one to dye her hair 77 shades of whatever, multiple piercings in various parts of her body, probably some tattoos, gets in trouble with the law, runs around with boyfriends maybe, drinks, and a few other unsavory types of actions, and she does this for two reasons. She does this, first of all, because she is acting out the family pain. The rest of these people are all in denial. They're just pretending life is perfectly good and normal, and she is the one who is the crazy one. She acts out the family pain, and the family has a purpose in that because it makes them look normal, and she's the one that's got the problem, and the second reason for that is that in acting out the pain, she's the one who is crying out for help. She may not know that. She may not be doing that consciously, but subconsciously there's this cry on the inside that says won't somebody please look past my outward appearance and my outward behavior. Won't somebody love me, and won't somebody talk to me and get me talking about the secrets in this family that are causing so much pain and so much trouble. She's usually the first one to come into counseling and the first one to receive the grace of God, and when she does so, her family will turn against her, interestingly enough, because now they have to start looking at their own lives rather than just being able to blame her for all their trouble. So again, this family is torn with conflict. There's trouble between father and mother. There's trouble between father and the first daughter. There's trouble between all three of them and the second daughter. We need some comic relief. And so we need a third child who is the family clown, and I believe Ben has been volunteered for this. Let's give him a hand. So Ben, you're going to stand right in front of this whole shoot and match. Face your family. I know that's hard. Your job, yeah, don't fall off the stage. Your job is to cut through the tensions in this household. So when conversations at the dinner get pretty tense about rebellious's daughter staying out too late, or the clothes that she's wearing, or the way that she's behaving, and everybody's mad at everybody, it's your job to divert attention away from the problem. So you're the cute one. You're the one who knows how to tell the jokes. You're the one who knows how to bleed off the pressure, and you're the one who tries to keep the whole system functioning. And he does that for two reasons. Number one, because he gets rewarded by his family for being the happy child. When they present his face to the world, they try to show the world that their whole family is not crazy. It's just this one miserable daughter that they have over here who's causing all the trouble. Look, here we have this great, handsome, intelligent, pleasant child, and it's not our problem. And number two, he's the family clown because he uses humor to hide his pain. How many people don't you know who, when things get too close to home, they shut off their hearts and they try to laugh away with jokes or the pain? Well, that's his job. And so his job is to ease the tension in the family. All right, we're going to add one more child, which is a lost child. And Garrett, you're adopted into the We Are The Clan for today. Give him a hand, people. He's what? He really is family. He's probably not the best one to play this role, but for today, he is the lost child. The lost child in this model is the child who, before he is even born, knows that this family is crazy. There's really no room for more people in here because it is just your very existence causes trouble. And so he's the one who goes and hides in his room. He's the one who is always listening to his own music, getting lost in his video games. He is the one that nobody knows exists even or has any problems. He's also the one who is most likely to commit suicide. And when he commits suicide, everybody goes, "Oh, my goodness. We didn't even know he had a problem. He was such a nice child." Ladies and gentlemen, the alcoholically broken dysfunctional family, give them all a hand, will you please? Thanks so much. We've done this workshop in a number of places in our journey in China. And when we do it in China, we give it a Chinese twist because Chinese culture is very different. China, of course, has a one-child policy, so many families in China only have one child. Although I'm always surprised in my travels to discover how many children some families in fact did have because there are ways around it if you know what you're doing. So when we do this model in China, we reduce the number of children. And I point out that any given child can rotate through any one of sort of these classic positions in the dysfunctional family. But more than that, China is based on the Confucian ideal of extended family relationships. And so when we do this in China, I bring in a grandfather and a grandmother, parents of the person who is standing up, and they hold arms around him because one of the difficulties in China is leaving and cleaving. And one of the reasons the rate of divorce among young couples is skyrocketing is that very often the grandparents live in with the parents, and there is often considerable tension between the in-laws and the wife, if that is the situation, because they don't really become a new family unit. She just joins her husband's family unit in many cases. And so there are unique dynamics that are established where the gospel has to do a deep cutting work so that there is a healthy balance between relatedness and being able to be your own person. Well, so far in this little model that we've done then, we've covered three out of four characteristics of families that hurt. And please understand that in a broken world, we all have some pieces that are good, we all have some pieces that are bad, and we all need Jesus. But it really helps to understand what are the principles that are important for healthy relationships and for healthy families, and why sometimes brokenness manifests itself. So in this particular model, what you have noticed is we had the father standing up because of his brokenness, the family revolves around his need. In other words, the husband-wife coalition is not primary. His primary relationship is not with his wife, it is with his bottle. And the bottle is only one example. It can also be his work. In China, there is such pressure on people succeeding economically. The joke is you've got to have your car, your condo, and your career before you can get married. That the pressure is intense to succeed in that area, often at the expense of being able to do relationships. It can be somebody in the family who is chronically ill. If you've ever had a chronically ill person, you know that all the attention revolves around that person. It can be somebody who is rigid judgmental. If you have somebody that's come through World War II, been to a concentration camp, never dealt with his issues, then you know the whole family walks on tippy toes around that person's particular mood. It can be another kind of addiction. It can be addiction to any kind of drug. It can be addiction to television. It can be addiction to video games. In China, when kids get through high school into university, they often spend the first year or so free from the restraints of their family life, and they throw themselves with a vengeance into video gaming. In fact, in one city that we were staying in, our hotel did not have internet connection, so we had to go to an internet cafe down the street a little bit in order to communicate. There were over a hundred computers in that internet cafe. Couldn't believe it. And we were there two days in a row. The first day that we were there, here is this girl sitting in this particular chair playing her video game. The next day we came back, and she was still sitting in the same chair playing a video game. Now, I don't know if she was there all that time in between or not, but it is sort of typical of what happens when people have addictive behavior. So the point here is this. What distinguishes an unhealthy family from a healthy one is that in an unhealthy family, one or more of the parents has unresolved needs in his or her own life, and so is not only not able to be there for the children, but uses the children for their own purposes. In times that's unavoidable, in times of illness, in times of job loss, in times of moments of depression, a family is resilient can often handle a lot. But if this goes on long term and is not dealt with, it sets in motion a series of events that we are describing now where there is a lot of pain that as we'll see in a few moments goes from generation to generation. So that's the first principle that we're talking about, the parental coalition here is not in order. Second thing that we will have noticed in this little modeling that we've done is that the connectedness and being able to be your own person in the family is not in proper balance. In other words, these children are not free to grow up, leave home, and be themselves. In this family, the children are forced into roles. That is to say, they exist for the purpose of keeping the family functioning. One of the very interesting discoveries we made as we traveled in China is the incredible pressure families put on their children for the family well-being. That's part of the Confucian ideal. Your parents raise you, and so now you have a lifelong obligation to your parents. There's something very good about it, but it can really get abused. And often in China it is because your children, especially your one child, becomes your retirement security. And so the pressure is on for education, the pressure is on to perform, the pressure is on to succeed. And you can appreciate that when you come out of elementary school, you've got to pass board exams to get into high school, and once you graduate from high school, you've got to pass college entrance examinations. Only the best of the best succeed, and so the pressure is on. You must succeed no matter what is the cost. And in China there's a huge emphasis in the circles that we were moving in, which was largely university and post-university students, huge emphasis on going abroad, going to a highly esteemed institution so that when you can get back home, you can get a prestigious job, your parents can be proud of you, and you can be sure to provide for your parents. All sounds very good, but it means that we're often forced into careers and into positions for which we're not really suited, and leads to huge relational issues as time goes on, particularly it leads to broken relationships, because by the time you get your car, your condo and your career, you haven't had much skill or exercise at getting to know the opposite sex, and so things that we may take for granted in terms of how guy-girl relationships work are totally foreign to many of the people that we've met. So there's the second principle in an unhealthy family system. You're not free to be yourself before God, no, you get slotted into roles, and in this family, a willing person becomes mother helper, a person who isn't willing to bow to the family system becomes the family rebel, and a person who has got a pleasant disposition becomes the family clown. And I'm always astonished when we do this in audiences, how many people there are who identify to one degree or another with those roles. Third thing then that you'll have noticed in this model, parenting styles are highly inconsistent in hurting families. You may remember from a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about the early child report, the government put out a number of years ago, that ongoing study about Canadian families, they said that inconsistency in parenting style was as detrimental to the life of children as having the wrong parenting style. The right parenting style research shows, as we said earlier, is authoritative rules and regulations when the child is young that gradually get loosened as the child gets older, always based on a close loving relationship that seeks what is best for the child and not so much first and foremost what's best for the parent. Well, in this kind of household, consistency is a rare virtue, because how the kids get treated or how the kids get disciplined or how the kids get overlooked is more a function of how troubled the father is and how weary the mother. And so when he's in a good space, the kids can do no wrong. He allows them to stay up till all hours of the night. He laughs at their antics and everything is all right. But catch him on a bad day, things that were okay yesterday all of a sudden are no good today and the kid gets walloped inconsistently. And the mom, well, when she's having a good day, she may step into the lives of her children to engage them and help them and to encourage them and move them forward, but half the time she's so wiped and she is so emotionally dead because she's got to be the emotional center of this household. She's not there for her kids and her behavior towards her children is irrational. And so in that kind of a household, what do you think a child learns? Well, I can tell you what they don't learn. They don't learn moral absolutes. They don't learn there are certain things that are right and certain things that are wrong simply because that is reality. No, no. What they learn is certain things are right for certain people in certain days, but they're wrong for the same people on other days. And so they learn to become chameleons. They learn how to lie. They learn how to hide. They learn that it isn't safe to be themselves. It isn't safe to stand up for something. No, you're always looking which way the wind is going to blow. And so their character is severely damaged. And so inconsistent parenting is that irrationally permissive environment that we talked about earlier, an environment that produces very troubled children with an incredible frequency. If you remember the statistics, 45% of kids raised in that kind of a household develop significant acting out issues as time goes on. They are just emotionally a mess. Which brings us then to the fourth principle that we need to understand about this kind of family relationship. It sets in motion a pattern of generational brokenness that repeats itself from generation to generation. Scripture says, "I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments." There are some of us sitting here this morning, whenever we talk about this sort of stuff, you say to yourself, "I don't identify with any of this. This has not been my life. It has not been my journey." And if you're among that category, you can praise God and you can thank your forebears. Because each of us is standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. And those of us who have been privileged to have parents who serve the Lord and who honored Him and who took His commandments seriously with humility, they will not have been perfect parents but they will have owned their stuff and they have provided for us an environment that has left us a legacy of grace on which we stand and we live today. And that is no credit to ourselves, it has been a gift that we have received. But even as I say that, I have been around long enough to know that that is the exception rather than the rule. And that very often and even in the best of families, there are elements of this brokenness that come through and to the degree to which these broken principles are part of our lives, we set in motion apart from God's grace a series of events that produce a pattern of brokenness that travels from generation to generation. I always say by God's grace only to the third or fourth generation because by that time either it completely falls apart and God judges it and destroys it or He reaches in with His grace and He transforms it. And just to show you the power of that, because often when I talk about this people don't really believe it, but just to show you the power of that, let me show you a slide that is a reproduction of one of the illustrations in my book, Blessings and Curses, a family history of people that I call Sonia and Brian. Those names are fictional, but the couple is one of our couples in this congregation. And I know them well and I know their history well. And if you look at that chart up there, it is sobering to realize that every red box represents a divorced relationship in this family. Let me just take a moment or two and walk you through it. Over here you have the maternal or the mother side of the family and here is the great-grandfather and the great-grandmother. So in this relationship, the great-grandmother and the great-grandfather divorced. Out of that union came grandfather who married grandmother. That relationship got divorced. Grandfather married two, three, four times, five times more and marriages two, three, and four all ended up in divorce, marriage number five did not. Out of the union of grandfather and these wives came one uncle and two aunts, all of whom divorced. And out of the union between grandfather and grandmother came Sonia's mom and one aunt. The aunt had two children. This child is divorced. This child is living common law as I understand it. Grandfather and father are divorced. And so they had three children and all of their relationships, if I remember correctly, are intact to varying degrees. So over here then is Sonia's paternal genealogy, if you will. Grandfather and grandmother not divorced, but grandmother killed herself. Grandfather married wife number two, that ended up in divorce. Out of the union between grandfather and grandmother, these one, two, three, four, five, six, seven children were born. One girl died in infancy. One uncle went through trouble in his marriage, but they are back together. And one, two, three, four, five, all are divorced, including Sonia's father. So now here is Brian and he comes out of a family where mother and father are also divorced. Is it any wonder that at some time into their marriage, their marriage ran into trouble and they were separated for a period of time and they continue to this day on and off having struggles in their marriage. And were it not for the grace of Jesus and the help of this community, that marriage would have long gone down the tube. And you look at that and you say, "Well, that's an extreme case," and yes it is. But extreme cases illustrate the reality of what sin does. And when we violate biblical principles that God has established, then we set in motion a series of events that produce patterns of behavior that we hardly understand or know how to deal with, but we encounter the problem in intimate relationships and it drives us batty to the point where often relationships begin to fall apart. And as I said, in China, the rate of divorce among young marrieds now is going through the roof. And the reason that it's going through the roof is that they're so focused on material things and on trying to get ahead in life that they have not learned the essentials of male-female relationships and things that you and I may take for granted, things that you and I learn in our teenage years aren't completely foreign to their thinking. And the more our own society moves away from a biblical base, the more we produce a brokenness that goes from generation to generation until after a while already in North American society, the number of single or divorced people outweighs the number of marrieds by a significant factor. And the pain and the economic cost and the heartache for any of you that have gone through that are immense. And of course, the good news of the gospel is that no matter how messed up we are or how messed up our relationships are, I am so firmly convinced that if we will humble ourselves before God and if we will learn from Him what we need to learn and allow Him to deal with the deep core places of our hearts, He not only can but He will transform our lives and our relationships are worth fighting for. Because if anything has been shown by research, it is that for the kids who are the products of divorce, life does not get easier as the years go by. The pain increases, the problems multiply, and pretty soon you have a whole harvest of disaster because we end up reaping what we have sown. Well, that's where we're going to stop. And next time, Lord willing, when we can come back to this, we're going to talk then in more detail about how Jesus comes into these places, how He can touch us in places where we do not believe that we can be touched, and where He takes even our brokennesses, our woundings and our hurts. And He restores to us the years the locusts have eaten. And that doesn't mean every marriage is going to be restored, doesn't mean that every lost child is going to find its way home, but it means that even in the midst of all of that, we will know God's peace and God's presence and God's direction and He will teach and He will show us increasingly how to do life and how to do it abundantly. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:42:23.000; remove through 00:46:10.000] May our homes be filled with dancing, may our streets be filled with joy. May injustice bow to Jesus as the people turn and pray. From the mountains to the valleys, hear our praises rise to you. From the heavens to the nations, hear our singing fill the air. May our light shine in the darkness as we walk before the cross. May your glory fill the whole earth as the water or the sea. From the mountains to the valleys, hear our praises rise to you. From the heavens to the nations, hear our singing fill the air. Alleluia, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah. Alleluia, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah. From the mountains to the valleys, hear our praises rise to you. From the heavens to the nations, hear our singing fill the air. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:46:10.000; resume after this marked segment]