Seeking First The Kingdom

Well, we saw last week that to seek first the kingdom of God is to seek the rule of God
in every area of life.
And so far, we have looked at the first of four areas that we want to try to consider
together in this sort of mini-series on seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,
and that is our personal liars.
One before we can see the reign of God extended to the world and to the nations of the world,
it has to begin with you and with me.
And it starts, we saw last week, by each one of us individually entering into the kingdom
of God.
That is to say, we repent of our pride, our self-sufficiency, our rebellion, our inability
and our unwillingness to trust God and to obey Him.
And by faith in Jesus, we receive Him not only as our Savior, but we humble ourselves
before Him and allow Him to be the Lord.
He has to drive the car of my life.
And then having entered into the kingdom, I need to learn to leave it out.
That is to say, I need to grow in my trust and faith, and I need to grow in my obedience.
As the old hymn says, "Trust and obey," there is no other way to be happy in Jesus,
but to trust and obey.
Well that brings us this morning, then, to the second broad area that we want to talk
about with reference to the coming of God's kingdom, and that is in our family life.
Not only in our personal life, does the Lord Jesus want to be Lord, but He also wants
our families to come under His authority and to yield to Him.
Now, most of us here this morning, though the Bible well enough to know that marriage
and family are not a human institution.
We didn't have a bunch of love-hungry forebears who decided to get together and to get
hitched and to have kids.
Now, marriage was instituted by God as the form for marriage that we use in this place
says at the very dawn of history.
You recall from Genesis chapter 2, the creation story, God created Adam.
The first thing that He discovered that wasn't good was that Adam was alone.
God said, "I will make him a helper that is suitable for him.
All the animals were paraded past Adam. There wasn't a one that he could really be one
with, and so God put him to sleep and took his rib and fashion.
The woman presented her to Him, and He said, "Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.
He recognized a kindred spirit."
And all through Scripture, then, we're told that that is the foundation of the marriage
relationship.
Genesis 2, 24 quoted many times in the New Testament, especially by Jesus, also by Paul.
For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and
the two will become one flesh.
Why do teenagers, after they so hate a member of the opposite sex for a season?
All of a sudden, change around, and you can't get them off the phone and you can't get them
out of relationship.
The Bible says it's because Adam and Eve were originally one.
Then God separated them into two, and He brought them back together.
And there is something, even in the fallen world, something left to the image of God that
makes us gravitate back to each other, looking for that kind of bonding, even though it
not only is sometimes the place of greatest joy, it can also, by very virtue of that, be
the place of greatest pain.
A man shall leave his father and his mother, says the Scriptures, and he will cleave to
his wife, we seek each other out because we have an attraction for each other.
Now the Bible says there are three purposes to marriage, really, the first is companionship.
Remember, it's not good for the man to be alone.
The second reason is to be able to have and to raise children, God says to Adam and Eve,
be fruitful and multiply, and the third reason is that we conserve the Lord together, subdue
the earth.
God says to Adam and Eve, have dominion over all the birds of the air and the fish of
the sea and all the animals and so on.
And that doesn't mean you can't serve the Lord when you're alone.
In fact, in the New Testament, we're told that sometimes people choose to remain single
because they can serve the Lord better, single than together.
But in many instances, a two-fold cord is not quickly broken.
Sometimes together, we can accomplish things that individually we care not.
That's the created norm.
That's what God had in mind in Genesis 1 and 2.
Genesis 3 comes along, along comes the fall, and wouldn't you know, at the fall, impacts
marriage as our relationship with God is broken, so also our relationship with each other
is broken.
Adam and Eve were suddenly ashamed before that they had been naked, nothing to hide.
Now they're living in their own little world, they have shame.
They turn against each other.
Their children turn against each other, one kills the other, and from that day to this,
no matter how wonderful marriage is, no matter how wonderful family life can be, they
are always that downward pull of sin and that destruction caused by sin in a marital and
a family relationship.
And I believe the further a society moves away from God.
The more they break covenant with God, reject his norms, the more that brokenness becomes
evident and obvious.
Let me show you two statistics, the first is one on singles versus married.
In the 2006 census in this country, for the first time in our known history, the number
of single people 15 years and older exceeds that of married people.
If you look at those statistics, you'll see that married people have dropped from 61%
of the population to about 48% and the singles have increased from 38 to 52.
Now, a lot of you here that are single, you're saying, well, what's wrong with being single?
Nothing.
But that group contains not only the nonmarried folk, but also those who are divorced, those
who are separated and those who are widowed, and particularly the divorced category and
the separated category has increased in our society significantly because we're having
a harder and harder time doing it in the relationship.
Why do a lot of people shack up and live together?
Why are so many people down on marriage?
Not just because they're down on the institution, but because they know they cannot remain faithful
to each other.
They don't know how to do the dance.
Now, that has an impact on society at large, because it also leads to an increasing breakdown
of family life.
Here's another chart.
You see there, the first column is the census of 1986, the second column, the census
of 1996, and then the third column is the census of 2006.
And again, the figures are revealing because what you notice there is that married parents
with children aged 14 and under have declined from 81% in '86 to about 65% in 2006.
At the same time in this country, and this is all from Stats Canada, common law has increased
from 4%, 4.5% to 14.6%, and lone parents have gone from 12.4% to 18.3%.
That last category, particularly as a tricky one, because it used to be that most lone parents
were widows or widowers.
That's no longer the case today.
That's largely a category of single parents.
And you know we honor single parents in this place, and we do everything that we can
to encourage and support each other.
But I think you'll agree with me that life as a single parent is that much tougher, trying
to be both a father and a mother than it is when the nuclear family is intact.
And all over the world, as we see the breakup of the nuclear family, we see restlessness
and brokenness, and multiplying because kids are brought into the world in many cases,
unwanted, unloved, undisciplined, unchallenged, and the societal price that we pay becomes
ever so great.
Now Jesus is Savior as you know, and even as the soldiers in the battlefield give their
lives so that the people of Afghanistan and in earlier wars, you and I and the people
of Europe could experience freedom.
So Jesus ultimately died in the cross, so that we could be delivered from Satan's power
and Satan's dominion, and we could be restored to the purposes of God.
And so therefore to seek the Kingdom of God in my family is to try to bring my family
relationships back under the authority of Jesus.
If Jesus is your Lord as well as your Savior, then He has something to say to you about
how you structure your family, how you live out relationships, and how you do life together.
And while there are many places in Scripture that talk about that, I think one of the
clearest is Ephesians chapter 5, the verses 22 to 33.
It's a bit of a lengthy passage, but let me read it quickly with you and then do some
reflecting on it because it is as significant as it is profound.
"Wives submit to your husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife,
as Christ is the head of the church, his body of which he is the Savior.
Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in
everything, so far men, so good."
But we get our turn.
Christians love your wires, as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her to make
her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her
to Himself as a radiant church without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish but holy
and blameless.
In this same way husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies.
You know what a man is like when he's sick, well, that ought to give you a clue.
He who loves His wife loves Himself.
After all, no one ever hated His own body, but He feeds and cares for it just as Christ
does the church for we are members of His body.
Now back to Genesis 2.24, "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and
be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh."
Now listen carefully, this is a profound mystery, but I'm talking about Christ in the church.
However, each one of you must also love His wife as He loves Himself and the wife must
respect her husband.
Now here's the fascinating thing about Paul's teaching on marriage in this passage.
He says marriage is to be a reflection of the relationship of Christ with the church.
Now, have you ever wondered, what does the Bible say that in the new creation there will
no longer be any marriage?
Some people look at that, they've had a good marriage and they say, "Oh, my goodness,
I've got to go through eternity without my good spouse at my side."
That's hardly heaven.
And then there's other people who've had a bad marriage.
And they say, "Yup, we do.
I'll finally be delivered, praise God, heaven will be heaven indeed."
Why?
I believe it's because marriage will have served its purpose, because what's the purpose
of marriage?
It's to reflect the relationship of Christ to the church, Paul says it's a mystery.
He quotes the institution of marriage from Genesis 2, verse 27 and he says, "This applies
to Christ and the church."
And what he is saying is that Adam and Eve originally, in all of us, in her marital relationships
are to be an earthly reflection of God's covenant relationship in Christ with His people.
Now, what's that relationship like?
Well, it is, as I said, a covenant relationship.
That is to say you have two parties who are both committed to each other and each of which
promises to fulfill certain roles.
And so here's the Lord Jesus.
He loves the church.
How does he demonstrate his love?
Not by bossing her around, not by pulling rank, not by using his authority, which surely
he could, no, but by laying down his life on the cross.
He washes her with water and the word, the water of baptism, and then the speaking of truth
into her life, why?
So that he can present the bride of Christ without spot or wrinkle or any such thing.
That's how Christ loves the church.
And then he says, "The church submits to Christ."
Because you see when you receive that kind of love from Jesus, it's not hard to try
to trust him, it's not hard to honor him, it's not hard to obey him.
Now the Bible says, "Even as that is the relationship between Christ and the church."
So for those of us who are privileged to be married and who are in Christ, our marital
relationships are to reflect this covenant relationship between Jesus and His people.
And that gets devastatingly practical as Paul points out in this particular passage.
It means, first of all, that we are to, as husbands, love our wives, even as we love our own
bodies.
Verse 25, "Husbands, love your wives," as Christ loved the church, "and gave himself
up for her." And then verse 28, "In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives
as their own bodies."
Can you imagine how the atmosphere of most of our homes would change?
The more a husband, by faith in Jesus, could demonstrate that kind of sympathy, that kind
of understanding, that kind of care towards his wife.
In my book, "To Have and to Hold," I developed this in much more detail, and I quote from
Willard Harley's book, "His Needs, Herdeeds," and he says, "That a woman's needs are as
follows."
Number one, affection.
Number two, conversation.
Number three, honesty and trust.
Number four, minimal financial well-being or security.
Number five, the husband's commitment to the family.
Again, how our lives would be different if as husbands and his fathers, we can live that
kind of life.
The husband is to love the wife, and the wife in turn is to submit to her husband.
Wives submit to your husbands as to the Lord, now as the church submits to Christ.
Also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
Now I know that's often a bone of contention, and I know all about abusive relationships,
and I know all about the difficulty of how do you put that into practice, but leave it
all aside for a moment.
Look at your own natural heart and recognize what the Lord is inviting wives to do in this
relationship, is to honor their husbands and to respect their leadership and to allow
him to set the tone and the direction of the marriage.
Willard in his book was on to say that men look for these things from their wives.
Number one, sexual fulfillment.
Some of you wives are saying, "How come I already knew that?"
No companionship.
As spouse that is attractive to them.
Number four, domestic support.
And number five, don't ever underestimate admiration from his wife.
Again think of how different would be the atmosphere of our homes.
If husbands could not only love their wives as Christ loves the church, but if wives could
give up their independence and yield to their husbands' authority.
Now, I want you to know in this that what Paul is doing, he is going counter culture.
He is going counter to the natural sinfulness of the human heart, because what is natural
or typical for a husband?
Well, it's to use his strength, it's to use his authority.
It's to dominate his life, it's to dominate his family.
It's one to be the boss.
It's wanting to have all the privileges but none of the responsibilities.
And Paul says, "Listen, in Christ you've died to all of that, if you're going to be a
man, then learn to love your wife as you love your own body.
It is counterintuitive, and it needs us, we'll see later the grace of Jesus, similarly
with wives.
That is a woman's natural tendency in a fallen and a broken world.
Well, it's to be independent, it's to be manipulative, it's to be distrustful, it's
to have her own way.
It is, you know, that caught between a rock and a hard place where she wants her husband
to see her and she wants to be in relationship with her husband, but at the same time she
wants him to be the boss, but she wants him to be the boss typically on her terms.
You do it my way and then you'll be a good husband to me and women that are married will have
discovered by now that there's something about the male psyche that is incredibly resistant
to being told how to lead.
Somebody who said if the man is the head of the house, the woman is the neck upon which
the man turns, unfortunately it's all too true.
So when Paul says submit yourself to your husband, when Peter later on talks about even submitting
to husbands who aren't the ideal picture of perfection, then you know that's counter-culture
and it takes the grace of Jesus to live that way.
That's why he points us to Jesus and the relationship between the church and himself.
The husbands of the other wives, he says, wives are to submit to their husbands and then
of course if the Lord blesses us with children, we are to raise them in the fear and the admonition
of the Lord.
Fathers do not exasperate your children, instead bring them up in the trading and instruction
of the Lord.
To exasperate them is to demand of them things that they can not accomplish and to bring
them up in the instruction and the training of the Lord is to lead them to Christ, it's
to help them to learn to trust him and to obey him, it's to learn to identify what their
gifts are and what their needs are and to help them to put the death in Christ those things
that are not good but the cause things that are good to flourish in them, all with
the view to setting them free and becoming what the Lord is inviting them to be.
I was so struck last night watching CTV News, they had a segment on this family from Saskatchewan
and if my memory serves me correctly, five kids in the family, a father and a mother,
they all work in the farm, these kids range I believe in age from 14 to 27, they are all
incredibly gifted hockey players to the point that some of them were in line for NHL type
level hockey playing but they're Christian people and they sing together Southern Gospel
and a bunch of these kids have laid aside their hockey careers to do this together and
they had them on the news and I was thinking boy this is either an incredibly dysfunctional
family, the way they do all this stuff together, or my land, this is a good and healthy family
that can demonstrate in remarkable ways the goodness and the glory of God.
The purpose of raising children is to set them free to pursue God's calling upon their
lives, it's not an extension simply of our own life.
To raise the children and of course children in turn are to honor their parents, Paul goes
on to say in Ephesians 6, 1, 2, and 3, "Children obey your parents and the Lord for this is right.
Honor your father and mother which is the first commandment with a promise that it may
go well with you that you may enjoy long life on earth."
Here's a question for you, why does God give parents to children?
Somebody has said to me, "Grand children are God's reward for not killing your own children
when you felt like a."
Why do children have parents?
Because parents have lived longer than children have and if children are to use their own
judgment and to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and figure out for themselves
what is right and what is wrong, they'll be dead by the time they've got it figured
out.
If your kid has got to figure out that car on the road is going to kill him by trial
and error he's going to either be dead or badly injured before he's finally learned
his lesson.
One of the tragedies of the modern generation is what the rise in technology, the high priests
of our age become not the older people with the wisdom accumulated by years of living.
Now it's in the hands of a younger generation whose wisdom has not yet matured and who
are still in the process of learning by trial and error.
Why does Paul say, " Honor your father and your mother and you live long because even
the worst of parents have some wisdom to impart to the children."
You honor them and listen to them and you learn to avoid a lot of pitfalls.
You don't have to learn everything by trial and error.
You can let previous generations make the mistakes learn from them and live in the way
that God wants you to live.
So husbands ought to love their wives, wives are to submit to their husbands, parents
are to raise their children and children in turn are to honor their parents.
And again, this whole category is a reversal of the fall because what's the natural inclination
of parents, it's to dominate, it's to control sometimes, it's to bully, it's to use my
kids as an extension of myself, that's why so many kids are in rebellion and for kids
tasting that kind of control, dominion, thinking they're smarter than their forebears, they
want to go their own way and so Paul comes along and he says, "You've got to put to death
that naturally impulse that says, 'I know better.'"
That natural impulse that says, "I want my kid to be the fulfillment of my dreams."
That natural impulse that says, "I want to live the way that I want to live."
And the Lord says to parents, "You raise them up in the fear of the Lord and you let them
become whatever God wants them to be, and kids honor your father and your mother because
you'll avoid a lot of pitfalls and you'll save yourself a lot of grief."
So to seek the kingdom of God in my family life, and I listen carefully, is to try to bring
my family life under God's authority, if God designed this and if He put the whole universe
together, who better at giving us instructions how to operate it than God Himself?
I mean, one of the terrible conceits of the human race is when we throw away generations
of accumulated wisdom to try to figure out by trial and error we reinvent life, we reinvent
society and we don't realize that none of us have ever lived long enough to know what
the outcome of the decisions that we're making are going to be 10, 20, 30, 40 years down
the line.
That's why you've got to be wise and that's why you've got to be careful.
So question then, of course, is how do I do this?
Is most of us who go to church and most of us who know scripture, we try, but with varying
degrees of six, how do you get there?
Well as we get ready for communion now, three very quick but really powerful simple instructions.
Number one, we need to submit ourselves to the authority of Jesus and we need to submit
our homes to the authority of Jesus.
I can tell you how many people I have encountered over the years, who read these biblical instructions
about husbands love your wives or wives submit to your husbands or raise your kids this way
or honor your parents.
And they have just outright said to me, "I know that's what the Bible says, but I'm not
going to do it."
Well if you're a follower of Christ, have entered the kingdom, then you've already given
up the right to run your own life.
You have already submitted to his authority, don't just say, "Lord, Lord, and ignore him."
And no matter how difficult it may be to put it into practice in all of our lives, at least
have the honesty and the integrity to say, "Lord, I don't like this.
I don't know how to get there, but I know you're the boss, you're the wise one.
So please help me.
I cannot do it on my own."
It begins with an individual surrender.
And then I have to do my part, even if my partner doesn't do his or her part.
That's where the rubber hits the road, you see, because a lot of us say, "I'll do what
I'm supposed to do if he or she does what he or she is supposed to do."
The problem is you can control what your partner does.
And if you go by what your partner does or doesn't do, you will always have an excuse
to not do what you want to be doing.
And a lot of people say to me, "You don't know what my spouse is like."
Listen, I've been in ministry almost 35 years.
I have seen the insights of more marriages and most of us can shake a stick out.
I live under no illusions about the fallenness of human nature and the crud that lives in
the human heart, but I also know Jesus is better.
And I can tell you that no matter how bad a relationship is and how hard you struggle,
but if you will submit to Jesus and let Jesus do in your heart the work that needs to
be done for healing and for restoration and then make up your mind that as God gives
you grace, you're going to obey Him.
Things will change nine times at a time.
And I sometimes say to people, "Listen, put yourself on trial.
For 30 days do nothing but speak good about your husband.
For 30 days honor his leadership even when you want to second-guess them all the time."
And I say to husbands, "For 30 days, quit talking about yourself and feeling sorry for
yourself and listen to your spouse, enter into her world and love her in the way that
she needs to be loved and see if it doesn't make a difference.
Even if it doesn't make a difference, then you do it not just to win her back or to
win him back, but because you're a disciple of Jesus and you want to honor him and you
want to obey him.
We've got to submit ourselves to Christ, we've got to do our part and then we need to trust
the Lord because you say, "Our fear is, if I give in, I will lose my life.
If I don't hold on to this little corner of my own life, people are going to walk all
over me.
I'll be a non-intety and I will be going and worldly notions of submission indeed lead
to that, but not a biblical notion of submission because if your eyes on Jesus, he doesn't call
you to be that kind of doormat that causes you to lose your soul because you must always
love the Lord more than you love your spouse.
But what you discover will happen is that he meets you and in many cases he will meet
your spouse.
And instead of this negative cycle where we beat each other up and it just spirals out
of control, we discover that Jesus enters into that situation and he begins to restore
and empower.
Peter talks about that extensively in one Peter chapter 3, "If we had more time, I'd
read it to you, wives, trust the Lord, even when you're deeply fearful, husbands, treat
your wife with consideration.
If we had more time, I'd talk about those of you that are single and maybe Lord willing
will come back to that, how does that impact you?"
But now as we wind up, there's three things that I want each of us to do, married or
single.
First of all, reflect on your family of origin and if you have one your present family
and ask the Lord to show you everything there, that was good.
Oh, I know you can fight all kinds of things that were bad and I'd be the first to say
some pretty awful things happen, disgraceful things, hurtful things, but even in the worst
of families there are certain things that God has granted that are good.
We always remember the bad far better than we remember the good.
Ask Him to show you what was good and then thank Him for that.
Ask Him to show you what's good in your life and in your marriage today and concentrate
on that.
Then secondly, ask Him to show you where you yourself over the years have fallen short
of God's standard for your life, where you haven't honored your father or your mother.
A young mom was telling me just the other day she's having trouble with her young child
and they're having some bonding issues and she said to me with tears in her eyes, now
I finally understand how much trouble I caused my mother when I was growing up.
Ask Him, where am I missing it with my spouse?
Where am I missing it with my kids?
Lord help me to repent, help me to own it before you and before them.
And then thirdly, Lord give me the grace to learn how to obey you in these areas of
my life.
Oh I'm under no illusion that that's a quick and an easy fix, but I'm also under no illusion
that Jesus died on the cross, rose from the dead to give us life and to give it to us
abundantly.
And if we will but humble ourselves and seek Him, there isn't a one of us that He will
not extend grace to and when He extends grace to us and the broken patterns get restored
and healed and filled with His life, we've got a message to give to the world because
don't ever underestimate that in a world that is so incredibly broken, where people can
no longer celebrate anniversaries or celebrate long-term relationships because they don't
know how to do it.
For those of us who manage to survive, those of us who manage to work our way through
the difficulties and who can learn and mature in that process, that's an incredible testament
of faith and opens the door for other people to come to Jesus and to ask Him to do for
them what He's done for us.
May our hearts fill with dancing, may our streets be filled with joy, may our justice
be filled with joy, may our hearts fill with joy, may our hearts fill with joy, may our
praises rise to Him from the heavens to the nations, hear our singing for the end.
May our life shine in the darkness, as we walk before the cross, may our glory fill the
whole earth as the water of the sea from our mountain to the valley, hear our praises
rise to Him from the heavens to the nations, hear our singing for the end.
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah,
hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah,
from the mountains to the valley, hear our praises rise to Him from the heavens to the
nations, hear our singing for the end, hear our praises rise to Him from the heavens to
the nations, hear our singing for the end.