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Family Teams Ep 3: Why Did God Invent Family? · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  So why did God invent the family?
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  Now, have you guys ever thought about this was never our idea?
• 0:04
  This was obviously God's idea.
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  He created this thing called family.
• 0:07
  But one of the things that we struggle with a lot as humans is we like to take the good gifts God gives us and we like to redefine them in ways that God never intended.
• 0:16
  We like to take sex and just redefine it from being this productive thing done in marriage to strengthen a marriage as just another part of pleasure that we can indulge in with whoever, whenever, however we want.
• 0:27
  We like to take
• 0:28
  a gift like marriage and say, hey, same-sex unions are the same, even though they can't be productive, even though oftentimes those who are participating in what they are calling marriage, they have no intention of being monogamous.
• 0:41
  We call it the same thing, and we just dilute these incredibly important God-given things.
• 0:45
  Now, a lot of Christians, they would agree, hey, there is something wrong with the way we're culturally thinking about sex.
• 0:51
  There's something wrong with the way we're thinking about marriage.
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  marriage, but where oftentimes I've discovered 95 plus percent of Christians, they don't realize we've done the same thing to another institution, another thing that God created, and that is the family.
• 1:02
  We have fully participated as Christians in the redefinition of family in a way that has caused it to be dysfunctional, and most of us don't even realize that this has happened to us.
• 1:11
  Now, most Christians...
• 1:12
  When I had this conversation with them about what is the family, they don't even know what I'm talking about.
• 1:18
  We have seen this redefinition.
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  It's been so complete and it's happened so long ago, long before many of us were even born, that we're not aware that there are other ways of viewing family.
• 1:28
  I was having a conversation over coffee with,
• 1:30
  a friend who is the leader of a major Christian family ministry.
• 1:34
  And I said, look, there are a couple ways you can view the family.
• 1:37
  One is that you can think about it as a springboard to individual success, where the goal of every family is to launch each child out to the kind of individual life that is going to maximize their individual fulfillment, their individual happiness.
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  And he's like, yes, Jeremy, that's 100%.
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  Our entire Christian ministry is designed to help families do just that.
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  And I'm like, whoa, all right, that's a definition of family.
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  That's how it's been redefined.
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  But there actually is a different definition than we have in the Bible.
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  And it's just shocking how few Christians even are aware of how different the description of what the family is in the Bible is so different than the way our culture thinks about family.
• 2:12
  As Protestants in particular, we have just adopted the secular vision of family as the right one.
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  And it's not like the fruit is so amazing that it's like, look at how functional, look at how thriving the modern secular Western family is.
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  Let's adopt their idea of family as well.
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  Obviously, it isn't functional.
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  It's got some kind of deep fatal flaws to it.
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  But instead of going back to the Bible and really rediscovering how the Bible describes family, we have just doubled and tripled down on the way that our modern Western culture thinks about family.
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  So where's the first place you can go in the Bible to discover what the family was designed to originally be?
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  What's interesting is theologians have a principle they call the principle of first mention, which is that oftentimes when the Bible describes a new concept for the first time, when this is being unpacked in the Bible, its basic essence or design or theology is founded on principles that are being described there.
• 3:02
  And I think this is true with the family.
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  The first verse we have really describing the family is in Genesis 1, the very first page of the Bible, because this is when God created this thing called the family.
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  Male and female, it says in Genesis 127, right when he was creating humans, male and female, he created them, made them in his image.
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  And then in verse 28, we get the first mission statement for why God designed this thing called the family.
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  And it's so foundational and so important to understand and dive deep.
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  And I noticed that there's not a lot of discussion around whether or not this still applies today, how to think about Genesis 128.
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  And so I want to go deep into this thought experiment.
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  What would happen?
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  if the church took seriously Genesis 128.
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  We're going to look and unpack the five words that it describes is the mission of the family or the purpose of the family.
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  And this is so helpful.
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  Now, nobody disputes that Genesis 127, the verse just before, is still active, is still important.
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  We see that when God says in Genesis 127 that he created us in his image, wow, we're constantly talking about the truth that you have here.
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  The most...
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  deep grounding in all of human history for our understanding of human rights, that every human is made in the image of God.
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  And it says male and female, he created them.
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  And so both men and women are equally sharers and bearers of this image.
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  And this image is what creates human value.
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  So this idea that, wow, we have
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  In Genesis 127, the best grounding in all of human history for the value of every human life.
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  This is such an incredible advantage for Christianity that we can go back any time to that verse and see that that principle is just part of the very foundation of the way we think about the sanctity of human life.
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  We don't do that with the family.
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  We don't give the very next verse nearly that kind of universal hearing.
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  And what does that verse say?
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  Well, Genesis 128, it says, God blessed them and he said to them, be fruitful and be fruitful.
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  and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, rule over my creation.
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  He describes ruling over all of the created order.
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  Five words there, be fruitful, multiply, fill, subdue, and rule.
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  Those five words give us the complete picture of the purpose of marriage, the mission of marriage, but also embedded in that five-part description is the definition of family, a definition that we no longer believe.
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  As Christians, we have denied this definition, and we've really replaced it with a very different and modern idea of what we think the family really is.
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  So the first thing we learned about the purpose of why God created the family was to be fruitful.
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  And of course, that means, first and foremost, having children.
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  That can mean other things as well.
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  But wow, it is a part of the mission of the family to have children.
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  And I often hear from a lot of Christians today that we think about children identically to the way that the world does.
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  Do you wanna have kids?
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  How many kids to have?
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  It's a lifestyle choice, really.
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  It's not a mission.
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  It's not a basic part of the way God designed us as families.
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  Kids are not always a reward or a blessing.
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  Like it says in Psalm 27, they're a part of your sort of individual choices about how you prefer to live the kind of lifestyle, economically, or just in terms of your own personal preferences or freedoms that you desire to have for yourself.
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  And so we take the gift of marriage and this amazing thing called the family, and we disentangle it from its mission.
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  to have and raise children, to be maximally fruitful.
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  There's something basic about the desire to have kids.
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  Now there's a lot of folks in more ancient traditions of the church that have held on to this idea that the Bible is teaching us that children are a gift and that marriage is designed to be productive.
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  It doesn't mean there aren't special circumstances for medical reasons where preventing pregnancy might be the right thing to do.
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  It's the default now in the Christian Protestant world to think about children as a lifestyle choice.
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  You can see that our birth rates are similar to those of the world.
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  And this is a basic idea that we think family is something that exists for our individual preferences and not necessarily to maximize the mission that God gave the family.
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  And so do you believe that the command to be fruitful, the blessing that it is to get to be a part of a union that is designed to be fruitful, that children are an incredible gift, that being able to participate in the reproduction of the human species and to extend our families and to extend the kingdom by raising godly children?
• 7:09
  Is this a basic part of the mission of the family?
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  Or are we really shy about talking about that directly today because it might offend the lifestyle choices of certain Christians?
• 7:17
  Next command we see there is to multiply.
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  Man, what is that?
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  That's the command to raise the kind of family that maximizes the number of grandchildren, to make sure that you are doing everything you can to help your kids have kids.
• 7:29
  We see that as very similarly to the world in that like, hey, when our kids turn 18, that's up to them.
• 7:34
  They might decide to have kids, they might decide not to have kids.
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  And if they decide to have kids, it's totally on them.
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  We no longer have any responsibility for them.
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  We've really adopted an idea of family that basically says, we're all individuals,
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  and our kids become individual adults when they turn 18.
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  And we're no longer part of the same family.
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  We're not a part of the same mission.
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  And therefore, their decision to be fruitful themselves and fulfill that part of the mission or our part of the mission, which is to multiply.
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  to help raise our kids to desire to be fathers and mothers, to help our children have kids early and often after they get married, that's all completely off of our plates.
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  That's not a responsibility that we shoulder.
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  That's not a privilege that we participate in.
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  Again, we think about the family, not as this multi-generational team, but as a group of individuals that immediately breaks apart into its constituent pieces as soon as our kids turn around 18 years old.
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  Wow.
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  That is a very, very unusual modern idea that really violates this second part of the whole purpose of family, to multiply and not simply to think about your family from the perspective of one generation, but to be thinking two or three generations down the line.
• 8:44
  Is my family turning into...
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  an inverted pyramid where we're shrinking more and more and more or is it really expanding and and becoming larger over the generations then god blesses us to fill the earth man again imagine you can't fill the earth in one generation or two generations when he's describing the mission given to the family to this first husband and wife he's giving it to them that's why it starts with and he blessed them and said to them be fruitful multiply fill subduing rule the part of the mandate to fill the earth
• 9:12
  is a mandate to think about our family from a geographical perspective, right?
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  This was being violated by the families that, during the time of the Tower of Babel, refused to spread out across the earth.
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  This was potentially being violated even in the early church by not really trying to go out and fill the earth with the gospel.
• 9:32
  and spread out.
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  And so part of what we want to be thinking about is how are we raising families that are designed to fill?
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  And this is why quantity actually matters because there's a lot of places that we need to get to.
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  The gospel needs to go out into all the world.
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  And so part of our responsibility is to think about our region.
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  How are we filling and saturating our areas with those who are being raised up by our families?
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  But also how are we targeting our
• 9:54
  other places around the world that haven't heard the gospel and that need more.
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  And our family is really called to think about this mission, to be fruitful, multiply, but also to fill and to participate in what God really wants.
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  And that's the extension of his kingdom.
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  He wanted Adam and
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  the boundaries of the Garden of Eden, to begin to fill more and more of the earth with his presence, his goodness, his order.
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  And now we're given that same mission through Jesus and the Great Commission to go into all nations and to make disciples.
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  And so this is a basic part of what it means to fulfill our God-given mission as families.
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  And God gave us the mission to subdue.
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  And this is the call to really take more and more dominion over the earth, over the things that influence human flourishing.
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  And so when I think about subduing a region or an area, that does start with cultivating a garden.
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  That starts with caring for livestock.
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  That is about trying to actually care about the way that we're treating the earth and cultivating all of God's creation.
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  And I think it also...
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  means to subdue all of the things that are under our control in a way that is according to its design.
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  Like this is part of what it means to really steward the earth, to steward creation, to steward businesses, to steward art, to steward the talents God's given each of us.
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  To subdue means to increase our influence, to become families of maximum influence in the regions that we're in, to build businesses, to really think about what it means for us to extend that order, the goodness, the character, the values of the kingdom.
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  over more and more of those elements.
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  People will be ruled, people will be subdued by something, and we need to both be increasing the quality of how we're subduing things so that according to kingdom principles that they are aligned with what Jesus would have us do, but also we want to increase the scope of that subduing.
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  We want to see our influence
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  in greater and greater ways, in places where we can bring God's goodness, God's values, and the kingdom of God into those areas.
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  And this is a mission of the family.
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  We need ruling families.
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  We need subduing families.
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  And so that fifth word, to rule, I think, when you think about what it means in this part of the story, in the new covenant, where Jesus has sent us out to rule,
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  make disciples.
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  He says at the beginning, of course, that commission, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me, and that I am king of kings and lord of lords, and that when we say Jesus is lord, we're coming into his kingdom.
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  And so what it means to be a ruling family is to extend the kingdom of God.
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  It's to bring and seek the kingdom for more and more of our city, for our region, to bring the lordship of Christ.
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  And we do that through not dominating people, not by physically forcing them into the kingdom.
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  We do that through the making of disciples, by raising families that are
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  reflecting these values that are part of the kingdom and beginning to extend the rulership, the lordship of Christ.
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  And so that's why he says at the end of the Great Commission, teach them to obey everything I've commanded you, because as people begin to follow Christ, as they are obeying his ways, they are increasingly under his lordship.
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  They are submitting to his lordship, and we desperately need that.
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  This is what our world needs more than anything else.
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  So I ask you guys to really, you know, think about this thought experiment.
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  What would happen if every Christian, every evangelical Christian, that's mostly who we talk to, adopted a biblical way of thinking about family from Genesis 128?
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  If they all saw themselves on this mission to be fruitful, to multiply, to fill, subdue, and to rule, what would happen if they were to be fruitful?
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  What would happen to our areas?
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  What would happen to the kingdom, to the church?
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  What have we lost?
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  What does it cost us to adopt a secular vision of the family as a springboard for individual success instead of a multi-generational team on mission?
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  Part of what we're trying to do here at Family Teams is just express, guys, there's a different definition of family in the Bible.
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  It assumes that family is a team.
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  It says that this mandate is not given to an individual, but to them, to this first family.
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  And every family,
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  has this mission.
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  Of course, only families can be fruitful in the way that Genesis 1.28 is describing.
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  That's a mission given to the family.
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  And so we want to understand that families were designed to work together as teams, but not just in one generation.
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  It takes a lot of work to raise children, to raise grandchildren, to fill, subdue, and rule.
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  And often by hitting the reset button every generation, by giving into the secular idea that we're just individuals and we don't work together and we don't work across generations, that the nuclear family is the biblical ideal,
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  so much of what we could see in terms of kingdom fruit.
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  And so part of what we want to advocate for you guys is really think about family differently.
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  And if you've been listening to this and like, wow, this is kind of a different way of thinking about family than I've ever seen before, you can go to familyteams.com slash transform and we have a little...
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  email series there that kind of walks you through kind of a set of ideas.
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  The foundational paradigm shifts that cause somebody to begin to think differently about family and also begins to introduce you guys to the tools that will help you see a transformation happen in your family.
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  So, familyteams.com slash transform.
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  We're on a mission to just spread the word that the Bible has an incredibly beautiful depiction of God's design for the family that's largely been ignored, not only by the culture, but also by the Christian world, and that we need to take that back.
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  And so we encourage you guys to dive in, really understand, man, family's beautiful.
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  It's not ours.
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  We're stewarding it.
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  This is God's design and we need to rediscover it.