Onward Session 5: Family Stability

Our Soul Care Groups are going through the Onward series this fall. Different groups are on different schedules but over the last four Thursdays there have been topical posts at www.emmanuelbaptist.com/tag/onward
This post is taken from the Onward resource page.
There’s no such thing as the good old days. That reality is difficult for us to stomach because we tend to look at the past through rose-colored glasses. The bad times we experienced, from hindsight, weren’t all that bad, and the good times were exponentially better when viewed in the rearview mirror. This is as true of our picture of the family as other areas of life.
We might look to significant points in history, such as the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the introduction of abortion, or the relative ease of obtaining a divorce, as pivotal moments when the family came under attack. The truth, though, is that the crisis in the family isn’t downstream from Woodstock or the pill. Instead, it’s downstream from the wreckage of the fall in Eden. The family is and has been under assault in every generation of human history though sometimes in less visible and more subtle ways.
We must understand that the family isn’t an end in itself. Issues of family stability are important, both inside the church and in the culture of the rest of the world. But we become derailed when we begin to treat temporal issues as eternal. When we’re armed with an understanding of the kingdom, however, we can rightly confront these issues not only for the sake of the family but also for the greater purposes of the kingdom.
It’s only through Jesus that we can rightly interpret the rest of the created order. That leads us to one of the core truths of the kingdom: God is creating everything around Jesus Christ as part of an inheritance for Him, including marriage, family, sexuality, gender, and everything else in creation.
Apart from this foundational starting point, no matter what our outward commitment to a particular issue might appear to be, we’ll be the kind of people Paul described in Romans 1:18-32 when he noted that those who refuse to give thanks as creatures ultimately turn to the creation itself with their worship. We mustn’t do that. We must see family stability in light of the centrality of Jesus Christ. Otherwise, we become family idolaters in spite of our efforts to become family advocates.
Remember that our earthly constructs are meant to point to spiritual realities. The best example of God that children could have is their own father. This is a sobering thought for us in our families. It should take our breath away to think that our relationships are meant to model and point to heavenly realities and that both our marriages and our parenting point onlookers to the nature and characteristics of the kingdom. Let’s not, then, take a merely pragmatic approach to family stability. Let’s instead embrace the much weightier purpose God has in mind for us and understand that our families are meant to reflect relationships in His kingdom.
From Russell Moore's Onward