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Ancient Wisdom That Heals The Modern Family · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  Can we admit that we have a ruling crisis in our culture? Like we need better rulers. And I think part of the reason is we need better families. You want people that are part of these multi-generational families who know who they are, who cannot be influenced by corruption because they have this sense of who they are as a family. They know who they are. They know whose they are. And therefore, they can rule in righteousness. And this requires you to have a deep root structure in your own family.
• 0:27
  Hey guys, welcome to the Family Teams podcast. This is a little bit different episode today. This is actually a talk that I gave recently at a church in Atlanta, Georgia, the Linked Up Church. Amazing congregation, had a great time on Father's Day. And so I went down there with my dad and my son
• 0:43
  And we did some sessions on Saturday and then gave this talk on Sunday. I wanted you guys to hear this because this is really kind of the big picture idea behind family teams, where this idea came from, where in the Bible, we find this idea and how this is contrasted the way most of people in the Western culture, at least think about family. So this is a great introduction to family teams. This is a great thing to share out. So excited to share this one with you guys today.
• 1:09
  Hi, welcome to the Family Teams podcast. Our goal here is to help your family become a multi-generational team on mission by providing you with biblically rooted concepts, tools, and rhythms. Your hosts are Jeremy Pryor and Jefferson Bethke, and we can't wait to chat about all things family. All right. Good morning. You guys have a seat. Excited to be here this morning. Thank you.
• 1:33
  Happy Father's Day. This is one of my favorite days of the year. I have been completely transformed by the biblical idea of fatherhood. I'm gonna tell you guys a little bit about my journey, but I also bring you greetings from the lovely city of Cincinnati and from my family. So we're gonna talk about how ancient wisdom
• 1:54
  can heal the modern family. We're going to go way back, not 100 years or back into the 1950s. We're going to go way back thousands of years and try to understand what was in God's heart as a father when he first came up with this idea of family. Do you know that we didn't come up with this idea?
• 2:12
  God himself was the one who decided that he wanted the world to be ordered by this thing called a family and led by this other thing called a father. So we want to talk about how that works and what was in God's heart. A little bit more about our family. So this is us. This is at my son Jackson's wedding. We got two of our kids married. This is a really proud moment for us. We had our first grandson together.
• 2:35
  And we're expecting two more grandchildren. So I'm also a grandfather on this Father's Day, which is even more exciting to me in some ways than when I became a father. So my son, my son, Jax is here to wave. And my dad, Jerry Fryer.
• 2:53
  One of the really fun experiences that we got to have yesterday was that we got to just minister and be with fathers as fathers. So my son's about to become a father for the first time. Their baby's due in December. My dad being here are all three generations. And this is how we like to do life, right? This is how God intended us to do life.
• 3:12
  This is what the enemy is trying to take away from us, but this is what we want to try to bring back and experience again. So I want to talk through like how that works. Also, my lovely wife, April. Now, we have a weird distinction of being probably the only couple that I know that have a picture of us before we knew each other of just the two of us. See, Liz, you look at this picture. We didn't know each other.
• 3:34
  How did that happen? Well, we were students in Jerusalem. We hadn't really met, but we were at a Trappist monastery and the monks there were making wine. And so I was there with some friends, she was there with some friends, and we were at this wine tasting and I had never tasted wine before in my life. I grew up in a nice Christian family. We didn't do that kind of thing. So, but I was like, this is being blessed by the monks. And so maybe I should give it a taste. So I tasted wine for the first time and I said that to my friends. I'd never had wine before. They're like,
• 4:01
  really, that's really interesting. And then April, she was with her friends, and she was telling them the same story. Well, somebody overheard that she was saying that and that I was saying that, like, hey, you two, you've never tasted wine. We've got to get a picture of you two. So we just kind of awkwardly got close to each other, click, and we kind of awkwardly walked away. And a few weeks later, we got to know each other, and the rest is history. So that's our story.
• 4:28
  So we're here this morning to ask a really unusual question. One that I don't think that, I don't know how many of you guys have ever tried to answer or asked this question. What is family? Now, when you think about what has gone wrong with the family, oftentimes we don't realize, we think we know what the answer to this is.
• 4:46
  And it's really difficult to answer a question that you refuse to ask. And I think we need to ask this question. We think, okay, we've all grown up in families. We've done our 10,000 hours in the family. We're raising families. We've seen families. We know what family is. It's so easy. It's so obvious. I'm here to tell you guys, it's not that obvious.
• 5:06
  This is how powerful sometimes the enemy's ideologies, they come against us and they can actually redefine reality. And then our minds start to shift and then we lose connection with what was in God's heart when he's using this word. And when people use this word family, we're like, maybe we don't really know what the family is. And why do I say that? Well, because we know that in the West, at least,
• 5:27
  The family's in crisis. We've never seen a crisis, the extent to which we have seen in families in this culture. And it's getting worse and worse. And so we have to ask some really foundational questions about what this thing is that God created. Now, one of the problems that you bump into immediately when you start talking about family is you start to feel possibly this really difficult emotion of shame.
• 5:53
  I want to talk about that before we talk about the family, because it's really important to know that we all have done things or experienced things within families that have caused or experienced a level of brokenness. And so oftentimes, in order to avoid that feeling, we don't want to talk about this topic.
• 6:12
  And so I just want to encourage you guys that one of the things that is true about being believers in Jesus is that we have a unique experience of how to overcome shame through the power of the gospel. And so I want to just encourage you, as we talk about family, don't sit in any, don't take one moment to sit in shame. Like experience the fact that when Jesus died on the cross, his family,
• 6:37
  righteousness came upon me and my record is on Jesus, not on what I've done. And that gives me a unique ability to talk about really hard subjects where I've made major mistakes in my life and face them head on and try to understand what this truth is all about.
• 6:53
  And so when you start feeling any shame, there's a few options that people often experience. There is honor-shame culture, and oftentimes the way that they handle shame is they hide from this ideal. So we start talking about family. I'm gonna tell you guys what I believe God designed family to be. And my family does not perfectly reflect this picture at all. But I believe we need an ideal
• 7:14
  to aim at. And I'm aiming at this ideal. And I'm going to encourage you to, with me, look at the Bible and aim at this ideal. If we don't have something to aim at, then we're not going to know how to get from where we're at now in this crisis moment to where God wants us to be. So we do not want to hide from the ideal, but that will help. That's one way of overcoming shame. We're like, let's just hide from it. Let's just live double lives.
• 7:36
  And now in our culture, what we try to do more these days is destroy the ideal. There is no ideal. There is no ideal family. There is no blueprint that God has created when it comes to the family. It's just whatever you want it to be. And this destruction of the ideal, this endlessly playing with things that God has created and given to us as a gift, this is really causing us to get confused as a culture.
• 7:58
  And so what we want to do is really take the third option, which is to repent and believe the gospel. If you hear and see the way God has made something, then what we do, how we overcome shame, is we don't say, well, I don't want to go there. I'm going to go ahead and say, I want God whatever you want in this area. I want my family to reflect your design. And so I'm going to repent of the beliefs and start from here.
• 8:20
  And whether you're a grandparent here or whether you're just starting a family or you're a child in a family, you can, if your ideas about family have been corrupted by the culture, you can at any moment repent and believe the gospel and not have to feel that shame. That's where we want to head. The scriptures say this, for godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret.
• 8:41
  Whereas worldly grief produces death. There is a godly grief that when you experience repentance, you do not experience regret. That is the power of the gospel. Now, why do we even care about trying to understand what God's design for the family is? Because there is so much at stake in this conversation with regards to the gospel. Do you know that when God communicates to human beings his truth of the gospel, he does it in family language?
• 9:08
  And if the culture or if there are forces, if the enemy can somehow corrupt that language, then we may not be able to understand the truth of the gospel, right? When Jesus came, he came to reveal God as Father. And so if we let this idea of Father get corrupted and you tell someone, hey, there's good news. God is like a father. What happens?
• 9:32
  to their heart. It corrupts their ability to receive the gospel because when they think about that, they picture something that created all kinds of problems in their life. This is the enemy's plan for us. Or when Jesus came, his favorite title for himself was son. I am a son, I'm the son of man, I'm the son of God. He uses the word son more than any other word to refer to himself.
• 9:54
  When he reveals to us his plan of bringing together a new entity, the church, he says it's like a family and everyone in the church are like brothers and sisters. So we have to defend this thing. We cannot let the enemy have it.
• 10:10
  because the gospel is at stake. It's not just our families, although that certainly would be enough, but everything is at stake. So we must understand what was in God's heart, and then we must try to restore that to our own understanding first, to our families, and then to our whole culture.
• 10:27
  So we are really struggling, like I said. It's not controversial to say the family's in crisis. But the question is, what do you do? What do you do when you've been wandering down a path and you find that you're lost? You just keep plowing ahead? Well, there is an answer. And I believe that in Scripture, one of the things you need to do if you are on a path and you discovered you're really going the wrong direction, you have to turn around. That is the definition of the word repent. And in Jeremiah 6, we read this.
• 10:55
  This is what the Lord says. Stand at the crossroads and look. Ask for the ancient paths.
• 11:02
  Ask where the good way is and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. We need to find an ancient path. I believe that the solution to understanding what happened to the family is in the past, in the ancient past. And so we're going to go into the ancient past and talk about some really, really old stuff. This is where I believe we're going to begin to find this blueprint and where we've really left the path. Now, I've had this experience personally. I'll just tell you guys a little bit about my story.
• 11:32
  When I was 23 years old, I was growing up in the Seattle area, and this is a place where families are really in crisis in remarkable ways. I was a youth pastor, and I was working a lot with public school kids, and man, it looked like family was just an experiment that had just failed.
• 11:48
  And my friends were opting out of family left and right. Seattle was the first city in the country to have more dogs than children because they were like, this is not working. Let's just find some other way to get this nurturing desire met besides having children. And so this is what I was seeing. And I related to it. I'm like, yeah, what is the big deal? Why do we need to have kids? Why do I need to be a father?
• 12:08
  And so this was the way of my thinking. When I was plucked out of Seattle and I was doing a semester abroad in Jerusalem and I was there to study Hebrew, I've always been very interested in the Old Testament. I wanted to really get there at the roots. And I wasn't there to have a cultural experience, but I was sort of forced to. I was immersed in a completely unusual culture. And one of the things I kept noticing in this culture was fathers and children.
• 12:31
  It was in a way that I had never seen in the Seattle area. And so I just kept noticing everywhere I went. And there was one day when it really hit me, I was sitting on a bench in the city of Jerusalem by the old city. And there in front of me was a bunch of fathers, three or four fathers were all, and each of them were pushing strollers with all of these little kids in tow. And they were just walked right in front of me and I watched them and I was like, that is really weird.
• 12:59
  I've never seen anything like that before in my life. I've seen mommy brigades before, but I've never seen a daddy brigade. And so I started to, you know, I assumed that, of course, I knew the truth about family and fatherhood that, you know, I know kids are annoying. I know it doesn't make a lot of sense as a man to want to have children. But these guys, they haven't figured it out yet. But I am in another culture, and maybe I should take a minute
• 13:24
  and just consider that perhaps they know something I don't know. I don't. It's highly unlikely, but it's possible. Now, given the fact that there's such a crisis of family in my culture, maybe that's a good idea. And so I began to consider this.
• 13:39
  By the way, this is a picture, a literal picture, a street sign in Jerusalem. It's so common to have fathers pushing strollers that they actually made a street sign out of it. And so there's something unusual going on in this culture. So I started to ask various Jewish and Arab dads that I was meeting in the city. Like, they all wanted to talk about their kids. They all were so interested in their families. They all saw themselves, almost primarily their identity as father. They saw the world through that identity. And I was like, that's really strange.
• 14:05
  Can you tell me about that? And so when I was asking, particularly some of the Jewish fathers, they would say, well, I say, where did this come from? I just keep seeing this experience, these dads and kids everywhere. Where did that come from? And they'd say, well, it came from our Bible. And I was like, well, that's interesting because your Bible is actually just a section of my Bible. And so whatever you got in your Bible, I got in my Bible. So like, what kinds of things do you have in your Bible that really have led to this kind of culture? There's a, and so I started bumping into verses like this, children are a gift from the Lord.
• 14:33
  They are reward from him. Children born to a young man are like arrows in a warrior's hand. How joyful is the man whose quiver is full of them. I was like, huh, that's interesting. Children are a gift. They're like a reward. And children born to a young man
• 14:49
  A young man, like when I think about a young man who with lots of kids, like joyful is the man is not the word that comes to mind. I think a young man with a bunch of kids, it's like, you know, exhausted is the man, his quiver is full of them or broke is the man, but joyful is the man. Why is scripture saying this? Now, you know, when you encounter a verse in scripture and it doesn't at all comport with what you believe, what do you do?
• 15:18
  And so I had to like, this is the, this is like a repentance moment. Maybe there's something again, maybe something I don't know. And so as I started to ask this question with different families, different fathers in particular, I kept hearing one word more than any other word. When I said, tell me about where this culture came from. They constantly use this one word. They said, Abraham, Abraham.
• 15:38
  Everywhere, the Arab dad's Abraham, the Jewish father's Abraham. I was like, huh, that's interesting, Abraham. And one of the reasons why that particularly struck me was I had actually spent the entire semester before studying Abraham under the arguably the greatest Abrahamic scholar in the evangelical Christian world at a seminary. I was in this intensive course where every single week we would sit with only eight of us and we would study the scriptures through the lens of Abraham, but not once.
• 16:07
  did we talk about Abraham as a father? He talked about his, a man of faith, and his connection to the gospel. But in these cultures, they thought about Abraham as a father. Now, I knew Abraham was really obsessed with his multi-generational family. He was crying out to God, make my descendants like the stars in the sky. Make them like the sand.
• 16:28
  And I was like, I'd never prayed that. That was just a primitive way that Abraham thought, right? I mean, Abraham sold camels when he was, I don't, you know, that was just a part of his culture. You know, I don't need to sell camels. Abraham was obsessed with a multi-generational family. I don't need to worry about that. That's a cultural thing. That's an old thing. That's something we've gotten past. But here I was in a modern culture where people that had thriving families and fathers loved their children in ways I had never seen.
• 16:55
  They were using Abraham's obsession with multi-generational family as the fuel for their fatherhood. I've never seen that before. So is that, is it possible we've lost that? Is it possible that that is a clue back to an ancient path for why the family is in such crisis in our culture? So what is a family? Where do we go to find an answer to this question? And God himself talks about going back to Abraham. We read in Isaiah 51, listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, you who seek the Lord.
• 17:23
  Look to this father. Jesus even, when he referred to Abraham in the parable of the rich man of Lazarus, calls him Father Abraham. Father.
• 17:45
  Father Abraham. Part of the reason why I think in English we struggle with the connection with Abraham and fatherhood is because in Hebrew, you actually hear it in the language. The word Avram, that's the way the Hebrew pronunciation of his first name, Avram, means exalted father.
• 18:02
  Av is father in Hebrew. And so every single time a Jewish person reads Abraham, they read the word father over and over and over again. Abraham means father of many nations. And so if Abraham, if Avram, Abram is a exalted father,
• 18:19
  Maybe that's a clue that we were supposed to look and understand fatherhood through the exalted father. This exalted father, metafather, the father, not the perfect father. Abraham was a broken man. He made lots of mistakes. He was sinful. But I believe that we have in the scriptures, in Abraham as a person, the perfect example of how God interacts with the concept of fatherhood. And it's really right there in his name.
• 18:41
  And so what would it look like to imagine thinking about family the way Abraham thought about family? It's really difficult to talk to Western people about this because the difference is enormous. The way Abraham saw family and the way you and I see family today are probably very different, especially just the way Western culture in general. So I've created a little animation for you guys to try to tease out the difference between
• 19:03
  between the way Abraham might have saw family and the way that we typically in the West think about family. So trying to answer this question for what is the family? So let's start with a Western family. The way, again, most typically we think about family in the Western culture. This is most Western countries. The way we think about a family is it starts when a mom and a dad come together. And every time that happens, we got poof, a new family, right? So boy meets girl, get married.
• 19:31
  Congratulations, new family. Now, what is the goal of that family? The goal of a really good family in a Western context is to springboard the kids and launch them out. So you got a couple of kids, you wanna launch them out and then bam, they go. And so you're pushing them out and your hope is that they would start their own family someday. And the whole process starts over. So one of the features of the Western family that thinks this way is that has about an 80 year memory.
• 20:00
  That's about long. So if I were to take a poll here or anywhere in the Western culture and I were to ask the question, I need you guys to list to me the names of your great grandparents. Y'all had eight of them. So what are their names? And most of us wouldn't be able to do that.
• 20:17
  Why? Because they're not relevant to our lives. We started over. What do they have to do with me? I didn't even meet most of them or maybe any of them, right? So that's the way we think. We think that this is the way family is designed. We think it starts over every generation. So we don't need to know about our past. We don't need to understand our roots. We don't need to know where we came from. And so this is the way we think. And this is a very different way to think about family.
• 20:41
  Oh yeah, one more feature. The dad left. What happened to him? All of a sudden, one of the two stools of the family. So one of the things that I think is important to point out is that there's something unique about this particular idea of family that is really hard for men.
• 20:55
  So one of the weird things I'm going to present to you guys, or I'm going to suggest, is that one of the reasons why fathers struggle so much with fatherhood in our culture is because of this definition of family. There's something about this definition of family that does not resonate deeply with men.
• 21:12
  Sometimes the answer isn't just to say, love your kids more, do your duty more. Sometimes our whole idea, our whole mindset is somehow corrupted, and this is causing the problem. Now, let's contrast this idea with the way that Abraham would have saw family. This is a classical family. Now, the way that Abraham saw family was the way that most cultures in history thought about family.
• 21:30
  And so we're going to look at this. This is also the way that family is described in every single book of the Bible, both Old and New Testament. What does it look like? Well, a family starts in this idea when a patriarch casts a vision. This is a particular father who sees something different into the future and says, I want to take my family somewhere new.
• 21:49
  And so you are saying, we're going to start this business. We're going to move to this new land, right? We're going to worship this God. This is how Abraham's family started. Abraham's father was an idol worshiper. His name was Terah. We don't worship the God of Terah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You know why? Because he left that father. He started a new family line. The family and the guy, he worshiped the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
• 22:13
  And so this is who we worship. And so what happens after this patriarch casts a vision? You have a multi-generational attempt to achieve the vision. So from one generation to the next, we're trying to work on this vision. We're trying to establish this kind of a family. And if this occurs, we have this really unusual kind of family, at least in our culture. This is a family legacy.
• 22:35
  A legacy is when the multi-generational family has achieved that vision, that that patriarch and matriarch began to set off on. And by the way, of course, the word patriarch is under hard times. I know that in these days. But part of what we want to be really careful, especially here on Father's Day, is to understand that a patriarch is simply the expression of a father who is leading his family in a visionary way. That's what its original meaning was.
• 23:01
  And so we want to make sure that we don't let the enemy corrupt this word. And the Bible uses this word in a very positive light. We need to understand it also in a very positive light. Now, if you have a family like this, what happens? You get about a thousand year memory. Families like this have about a thousand year memory. And so this is why you have so many genealogies in the Bible, because they really care about their root structure. They really care about where they came from.
• 23:25
  I was having a conversation with a friend once about this, and he's like, you know, I know somebody who thinks this way. He's a friend of mine. He's from Korea. Can I put you guys together? This is during COVID, so we just, like, connected over Zoom. And so I'm having this Zoom call with this man, this man from this Korean man. He lives now in Texas. And I was saying, okay, I heard about you have this multi-generational family. Tell me all about it. And he's like...
• 23:46
  Like, you want to talk about business? No, no, I want to talk about your family. You want to, it literally took him about 20 minutes just to get him to talk about it. He's not used to talking about his family. He's a very successful businessman. But I was like, no, I want to know about your family. I heard that you have a multi-generational family. Tell me about how that works. He's like, oh, yes. Well, I'm the 30th generation in my family. My first name actually means the 30th. My son's name means the 31st. I was like, well, tell me about that. He's like, yeah, a thousand years ago, there was a member of our family who was a general and he was able to.
• 24:16
  do some great things for the king of South Korea. And so we were given this multi-generational land. And now there are tens of thousands of us that gather on that land every single year. And I know as a 30th member of my family that I memorized the names of every single one of my descendants all the way back to this thousand years before. And in fact, he got so excited, so animated. He like runs over, grabs this enormous book from his bookshelf, opens it up. He said, here's my family tree from a thousand years.
• 24:42
  I was like, oh my gosh, this exists today. And so this is a different kind of family. You can create this kind of family. You can decide to do this. You don't have to do the kind of family that we're building in our Western culture. There's something broken about this kind of family. So, but is this biblical? Biblical?
• 24:58
  Like, is this really what the scripture? Is this really what was in God's heart when he began to create the family? Well, fortunately, because we have scripture, we actually know why God created the first family. We have it right in the first page of the Bible in Genesis. So let's look at exactly what God was thinking when he created this thing called the family. Again, this is not our idea. This was his idea. So let's try to understand what was in his heart. So this is what we read in Genesis. It says,
• 25:25
  So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. And God blessed them and said, Amen.
• 25:45
  So if you think about what is happening here, when you look at this, you're asking yourself, what is this thing called the family? Now, if you look at that definition in verse 28,
• 26:05
  A family is an entity designed to be fruitful, to multiply, to fill, to subdue, and to rule. If you look at that definition, you cannot get the modern idea of family. What you get is a completely different idea of family, one that is multi-generational. You can see it right there. They have to multiply.
• 26:23
  One that is a team. This was not, this mission was not given to one person or one generation. It was given to the multi-generational family. So it's a multi-generational team. And then they were given a mission to fulfill, subdue, and rule. So they were given a mission. So these are the ways we think about family. So I'm going to give you guys a really cohesive definition of both of these ideas. What is a modern family?
• 26:44
  what's the easiest way to understand the way that we think about family in Western culture? And I would say in a phrase, we think of family as a springboard for individual success. That's a good family. I wanna launch my kids out and I want them to individually be successful,
• 27:00
  Forget about me, their grandparents, and then start over again. That's our vision for the good family. I was having a conversation with a Christian leader of a family ministry. And I said, look, I need to explain to you that there's a couple of different ways to think about family. Now, first of all, there's the kind of a family that where the goal is to launch our kids as individuals in the most independent way possible. He's like, 100% yes. Our entire ministry is dedicated to that kind of family. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. There's another kind of family.
• 27:29
  Like I was actually trying to, you know, explain to him a contrasting idea, but he had just said, yeah, that is what we believe. As a Christian family ministry, that's our attempt. Now this idea, what he was describing, is I think part of the problem. It's broken. So...
• 27:45
  If I were to describe what is a biblical family in very simple terms, what will you see there in Genesis 1, what God had in his heart and his mind when he created the family, I would say it's a multi-generational team on mission. A multi-generational team on mission. Do you guys see how different these are? The springboard for individual success versus a multi-generational team on mission. Let me make it even more simple for you. I'll break it down to two words. The word for the Western family and a word for the biblical family.
• 28:15
  When we are raising a family and they are launched out, what do you call the couple after their kids have left? Empty nesters. Okay. So the Western idea of family is the nest. The biblical idea of family is a team. Okay.
• 28:37
  I don't believe God ever intended for us to build nests, that this is not a great analogy for a family. I'm not building a nest. That's not my intention as a father and as a grandfather. I want to build a multi-generational team on mission. I want to build a family that's fruitful, that multiplies, that fills and subdues and rules. That is a different idea.
• 28:57
  So you can always tell what people believe by what analogy most resonates with them when they think about that concept. And the fact that the analogy that most resonates with us is the nest tells me everything I need to know about the way we think about family in the West. And you can understand why fathers also struggle really being excited about building nests.
• 29:17
  This is not a particularly exciting idea for men. But if you think about, men are designed to build and lead teams. And this is why so many fathers will go and follow other teams. They'll join teams at work. They'll follow teams in sports.
• 29:35
  They are obsessed with the idea of leading or somehow vicariously experiencing the teamness. They love teams. They never knew that their family was a team. If somebody would have told them that they're actually building a team as a family, I think this would completely change the way they saw their family.
• 29:54
  So this is why I think this is at the root of the problem. If you were to somehow just erase from the mind of a father, his idea of fatherhood, and just put coach right in that spot, I think you would see a 10x increase in the kind of fatherhood. In fact, if a mother were to sign her children up for a sport this season, she will expect more intentionality, more investment from that child's coach than from that child's father. Right?
• 30:21
  Why is that? Well, because we understand coaching. We understand that a coach has to look at a player and figure out how to lead them, how to invest in them. But we don't know what fatherhood is because we think we're building nests. So this is the problem. And so it's a part of what we're working through and trying to transition.
• 30:39
  from this mentality that we're building these nests versus we're actually building a multi-generational team on mission is that you might be, and you might be thinking to yourself, well, I don't know. When I think about this multi-generational, there's a lot of pain upstream. Like my connection with my parents is not great. Are you telling me today that I need to somehow like...
• 30:59
  like reunite with them. And of course, that's something I think everyone should consider. But for many of us, Abraham was told expressly not to do that. Abraham was told to leave your father's house and go to a new land. Why? Because God doesn't like family? Because God wants to hit the reset button? No, Isaac was not told to do that.
• 31:16
  Isaac was told to stay with his father and work on the legacy that it was being created by the first patriarch. So what's the difference? And so this is why it's important to understand, are you an Abraham and Sarah generation or an Isaac and Rebecca generation? Because the action steps from what I'm describing are very different, depending on which, which of these you are. If you're the first generation to follow Jesus,
• 31:37
  Then oftentimes the answer is you are an Abraham and Sarah generation. And most of what you're going to do is going to go downstream. It's okay. That's Abraham. He had to leave his father. And so there are times where that is necessary. But praise God if your parents were faithful and taught you how to follow Jesus. And you're really continuing in their legacy because you're now an Isaac and Rebecca generation. And the action steps for you are going to look quite different.
• 32:02
  Now I want to break down these words that are given to us in the mission given to the family, just to give us a little more clarity. God said to them, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, rule. So we have five steps. The family is given a five-part mission.
• 32:18
  And so each of these parts of these mission, each element is critical. The first, of course, is to be fruitful, which in one sense is just have children, right? That's the most basic understanding. You can be fruitful in every other part of your life, whatever your career is or how you work. These are all also critical parts. But we have a crisis because of our idea family. This is actually at risk in every single Western country except for one.
• 32:44
  that we are now below replacement rate. Did you know that? We are facing, demographers are sounding the alarm everywhere that we're going to face a population collapse because of our idea of family. It's so bankrupt because the church, we've not been able to preserve this definition in the culture. There's only one country in the entire developed world that is still above replacement rate. Do you guys know what that country is? It's Israel.
• 33:08
  the place that still honors the Abrahamic foundation of family. If we did this, I think this would change the way we think about having children, why to have children. So we want to say the part of our mission as a family is to be fruitful. Now, the second part of this, this mission is to multiply. This is the mission to have grandchildren. Now you might think, well, what do I have to do with whether or not I have grandchildren? I mean, I, that's my, that's my kid's responsibility. Of course, yes, it's primarily their responsibility. But if I had one parenting tip,
• 33:38
  to give you on this Father's Day. This is the one thing I would say. In our Western culture, part of the nest idea has caused us to think that the aim of parenting is our children's happiness, right? I want to make my kids happy. I hear that all the time. I just hope my kids are happy. That is not the aim of parenting. The aim of parenting is to ensure that your grandchildren are someday happy, right?
• 34:02
  You got to aim at the next generation. If you aim at your own children's happiness, you will create inadvertently in a terminal generation and within your own family line. If you want to create a multi-generational family, what you have to do is raise your children to have children. That's how you do it. That's how you multiply. And so what I'm focused on as a father is I am constantly disciplining and training and working with my kids and lifting up the idea of fatherhood to my son, lifting up the idea of motherhood to my four daughters. And my kids cannot wait to have children.
• 34:31
  Because we are given this mission to multiply. And this changes the whole aim of parenting. And it makes it so much clearer what we're aiming at. In fact, all of our different business efforts, oftentimes we have a real estate business. And it's called Third Generation Properties. The reason why we call it that is because me and my son, I'm Gen 1, he's Gen 2. We're building this legacy business for the grandchildren, for his children that have not yet been born. Right?
• 34:58
  Like I'm focused my life on multiplication because I was told to do this in the first page of the Bible. Okay. The next, the next thing we're told to do is fill. Okay. This has to do with saturating a region with your descendants. So part of the way that God intended for Adam and Eve to begin to populate the earth, the, the mission is, okay, I'm going to give you this prototypical garden in Eden. And I want you to expand this through having children and through good stewardship. And so part of what we want to be thoughtful about is, is what is, where has God called us to?
• 35:28
  And so I want to fill Cincinnati with my great, great grandchildren. I want to fill our region and transform play. Now there are, there may be branches of the family that are called to other places, but we want to create a powerful hub center where we want to be constantly experiencing and supporting each other, supporting each other's efforts, each other's education, each other's business efforts, and especially each other's multiplication efforts. It's hard to raise a family. It's hard to have kids. We weren't designed to do this alone.
• 35:56
  We weren't designed to do this without the support of extended family members. And so if you want your children to multiply, you got to prepare yourself, prepare yourself to be there for your kids when they start having kids. And so we want to do that through filling a particular region. Okay. The fourth part of this mission is to subdue. This is maximizing our influence over that area. And so part of what we have as a vision, my wife and I, is that we want to make sure that our kids are getting in positions of influence within our community, that our grandchildren are being provided for in such a way that they can get in positions of influence.
• 36:24
  This involves lots of elements. We're thinking about our area and thinking about what are the businesses that we can acquire, we can start. What are the ministries that we need to support and that we need to be a part of, that we need to encourage, that we need to begin? Like we're thinking about this as a family. Because again, what's really weird is that when God had a mission, he was a family that
• 36:43
  He decided that the best entity to fulfill this mission is the family. If you and I were given this mission, I think we would say, you know what? You know, that mission, what that needs is a business or a nonprofit. Like God said, I have this incredible mission that's going to take thousands of years to accomplish. It's going to require all these kids, all this intentionality, all this vision, all this strategy. And you know what I need to fulfill this mission? A family.
• 37:08
  We don't think that way. We think of family as sort of a retreat center, something that we kind of collapse back to after we've had an exhausting day and we need to like have a little recoup. And then we all launch back off into our individual lives. That is not the way that God designed the family. God designed the family to work together. But because we have capitulated to this idea of family that our culture has given us, we have really lost what God designed this to be.
• 37:31
  Now, final, where we're headed is that God said the family's designed to rule, a ruling family, right? And this is really important. Like, part of what we're designing, part of what we're working on, part of what our generation— I don't know how this is going to work. I don't know what kind of ruling. But, man, can we admit that we have a ruling crisis in our culture? Like, we need better rulers. And I think part of the reason is we need better families. We need to—and this, you want—
• 37:57
  people that are part of these multi-generational families who know who they are, who cannot be influenced by corruption because they have this sense of who they are as a family. They know who they are, they know whose they are, and therefore they can rule in righteousness. And this requires you to have a deep root structure in your own family.
• 38:18
  So my wife and I have really established for our family a five generation strategy for a ruling household. This is where we're headed. So we're, you know, Gen 1, we had five kids. We're trying to be fruitful. It was exhausting, it was tough. We got them all out, five C-sections. Man, it was rough, okay? So, but we did it.
• 38:36
  We got five kids in our generation. Gen two, now we're telling our kids, we expect we're gonna be here for you. We're gonna invest in you. We're gonna do everything we can to help you have as many kids as God could possibly bless you with. So we're hoping maybe they'll have an average of five kids as well. And I'll give us 25 grandchildren. That'd be awesome. We'll see, you know, we're a team. We'll work on that. But if they continue to do that,
• 38:56
  Gen 3, there'll be 125 great-grandchildren that'll exist in our area. You know, and if they keep going, they'll have 625 to subdue the area that we live in. And of course, where we'll end up is 3,125 ruling descendants. And this only takes five generations. This is our five-generation strategy. God willing, I don't know what'll happen.
• 39:19
  This is our hope. And you can see how incredibly transformational. Imagine if everyone in the kingdom of God thought this way. What would happen to our country? What would happen to this world? This is why the enemy hates this message. This is why the enemy hates fatherhood. Is he always trying to come against it? Because he's afraid of this. So we got to let him have it.
• 39:40
  All right, before we're done, I want to say one thing. Now, a lot of you guys, I'm sure people are sitting here, I'm single, maybe I'm divorced, and I'm not really building a family team in this season of my life. I'm a grandparent, and I encourage you as well to certainly invest downstream. But I also want to just speak directly to the fact that
• 39:55
  Genesis 1 wasn't the end of the story. A lot of things happened. The fall happens in Genesis 3, and this impacts us. So a lot of us have been broken by the fall, and we have fragments of families that we're stewarding, and this is really hard. And so I don't want you to think that you can't, and that this is not, that mothering and fathering multi-generationally is not a part of your destiny.
• 40:17
  Part of what we need to understand is that when Jesus came, and I want to, there's a very incredibly important connection between this commission, the great commission, as we call it, and the first commission given to the family in Genesis one. So we read in Matthew 28, Jesus came and said to them, all authority in heaven on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the father and of the son of the Holy spirit, teaching them to observe all that I've commanded you. And behold, I'm with you always to the end of the age. Now this is the same commission here.
• 40:46
  that we're given in Genesis one. What Jesus is saying is, look, the enemy has done incredible work of destruction. I have all authority now that I've risen from the dead. And now what I want you to do is I want you to be fruitful. I want you to go out and make disciples, not just disciples. I want you to multiply. I want you to make disciples who make disciples. I want you to make disciples who make disciples.
• 41:03
  And when they do that, I want you to do this in such a way that you're filling the earth. I want you to go to all the nations. I want that to be a subduing mission because I ultimately am coming back and I want to rule. And so we are given the exact same mission as disciples of Jesus in Matthew 28, as we're given in Genesis 1. So if you struggle with this vision, please consider that we are still given the same vision.
• 41:27
  We still have the same multi-generational strategy. My wife and I, we make six disciples a year. We're committed to that. This is our, we have two groups of three. I'll do one, I'll do a group for three, five months. My wife does it. And we are committed to having multi-generational discipleship. Now, if you just did one group and we, in our community, we make it a requirement that everyone who's a follower of Jesus obeys this command by making three disciples a year. You could just imagine what happens.
• 41:51
  A lot faster than what happens within a physical family. Because year one, you have three disciples, which is great, because now you have three disciples. Of course, if you're three disciples, make three disciples, you have nine disciples. By the third year, if they keep going, you have 27. And by the fourth year, you have 81, just from this one person who's only being faithful to make one group a year of three disciples. And of course, by year six, you have 729. And by year seven, you have two. We are, this is called a disciple-making movement.
• 42:19
  And this is the same, this kind of multiplication, this kind of fruitfulness, we're called to no matter what is happening within our own families. And I don't know if you guys know this, but there are over a thousand rapid disciple-making movements around the world right now. I study these, I'm fascinated by them, but there's not a single one in the West.
• 42:38
  They're all in non-Western countries. I've studied this. It's so difficult to understand. I've looked for the last decade for a single movement within the United States that is getting to the fourth generation. A disciple who's made a disciple who's made a disciple who made a disciple. It is almost impossible to find a single disciple making movement in this country that has made it to the fourth generation. So whatever is happening to sterilize our families is sterilizing our own discipleship as well.
• 43:06
  And this is a very serious problem. So as I mentioned, and as we close, this is given to all of us. Everyone is a mother or father. If you are a mother or father of a physical family, please be faithful to do that. If you're the mother and father of a spiritual family, then this is what you're called to do. And this was prophesied over us. We've been prophesied that this is going to be the way that we are to look and to live as disciple makers of Jesus.
• 43:32
  It was prophesied in Isaiah 54. I love this passage because what, you guys know Isaiah 53, right? This is one of the most famous passages in all the Bible. It's the passage about Jesus dying on the cross in the Old Testament. And it says, by his stripes, we are healed. So we're given the gospel in Isaiah 53. But then Isaiah looks past the gospel and says, what's going to happen after the gospel comes? What's it going to look like after that? And then he sees Isaiah 54. And this is what he sees. He says, sing, oh childless woman,
• 44:02
  you have never given birth. Break into loud and joyful song, O Jerusalem, you who have never been in labor. For the desolate woman now has more children than the woman who lives with her husband, says the Lord. Enlarge your house, build an addition, spread out your home and spare no expense, for you will soon be bursting at the seams. Your descendants will occupy other nations and resettled the ruined cities. What Isaiah saw was,
• 44:31
  was a woman who had no husband, having more children than women who have a husband. How did that happen? He saw the Matthew 28 commission being fulfilled. Everyone is called to be a father or mother. We're all called to this. Fatherhood and motherhood are just a basic part of what God has woven into the fabric of creation physically. But when Jesus came, he was a single man and he had a lot of descendants. We're all descendants of his ministry.
• 45:00
  We're all descendants of what the disciples, the 12 disciples that after him. So none of us are going to be abdicated from this mission to go and make disciples. So what all this is saying to us is this.
• 45:14
  Malachi 2.15. And what was the one God seeking? I love this verse. Godly offspring. That's my message to you guys. It's amazing. This is our mission. Like our lives may be dedicated to both the physical and to the spiritual creation of Godly offspring. So we have to lift up fatherhood, lift up motherhood in our culture in order for us to fulfill the desire of God.
• 45:41
  Thank you for listening to the Family Teams podcast. If you're enjoying this content or have learned something new, please make sure to leave a rating and review and share with a friend. To stay up to date with our events, new content, and products, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Family Teams.