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Over the past couple of weeks I’ve shared a few articles dealing with family from a Christian perspective. We have seen along the way that family plays a very important role in God’s plan for God’s world. He created the family so it’s his to define. And he created the family for two great reasons: to carry out his will and to picture his truth. Today I just want to add this to the mix: If family truly comes from …
I’ve put together a little mini-series on family, and have shown first that God created family and second that God created family as a means of carrying out his will. In today’s article I want to show that God also created family to picture his truth. Here is what I mean: God uses family as a means of providing pictures that can teach crucial truths to humanity. There are things we cannot easily understand if we do not understand family. …
In the last article on family I wanted to show that God created family and therefore it his to define. Now, I need to address the “why” question: Why did God create the family? I will answer this in two ways through two articles. The first provides this answer: God created family to carry out his will. Before we get there, I want to acknowledge that family is a difficult issue for many people. Almost all of us have certain …
We are at an interesting and perhaps unprecedented time in history when our understanding of family is being confronted and our definition of family is being rewritten. The social norms of Western society and the laws of Canada are changing fast. Things that only a generation ago were considered inadvisable, immoral, or just plain evil are now considered good, normal, and worthy of celebration. Things that not long ago were considered the mark of a crumbling society are now considered …
Living in a multicultural city and serving in a multicultural church has given me a wide view of some of the ways different generations of a family can relate to one another. As a young generation begins to pair up and to marry, forming new families, they need to learn to relate to the generation or generations that came before. This can take many different forms and I’ve long observed that the most significant determining factor is usually culture. We …
What is a family? It’s a simple question, but one that is surprisingly difficult to answer. I suppose it may be easy enough if you ask it in only one place and to only one kind of people, but I live in Toronto, the most diverse city in the world. One Sunday I went around my church asking, “What is a family?” I spoke to people who have immigrated from several different countries across several different continents and the answers …
“Love is a many splendored thing,” says the old song. Love has many hues, many shades, many facets. Love has many features to observe, many marvels to behold. There is so much to love that none of us can ever experience it in all its forms. Not even close. Yet while none of us can ever experience it in all its forms, we really do have the pleasure of experiencing it in many of its forms. Do you ever pause …
What’s the purpose of family devotions? Probably no habit or discipline is so lauded, recommended, or even commanded among Christian families than this. But what’s the point of it? What is it meant to accomplish? Over many years of leading family devotions, I have been surprised to learn that it’s both more and less than I had expected. As Aileen and I began building the habit of family devotions, first as something that followed dinner and later as something that …
A new year is just about upon us, and as it dawns, we have a new opportunity to lead our families in devotions. Whether you’ve been utterly consistent or mightily struggling, here are 10 ideas and 10 tips that may help as you consider the year to come. Ten Ideas for Family Devotions Just Read the Bible. This is the simplest suggestion of all: Just read the Bible a book at a time. Younger children tend to do best reading …
Two of our children are still in the public school system, yet our son is attending a Christian college. A reader wrote and asked us about that decision. Here is my answer. Transcript As you know, I get lots of questions in and love to answer some of the ones that come from people who read my articles or who watch my videos. I got one recently I thought was actually quite interesting. Someone was saying, why is it …