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CHAPTER 1

SOMEONE'S GOT TO GIVE

Thus says the Lord, "Stand by the ways and see and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is, and walk in it; and you will find rest for your souls."

JEREMIAH 6:16

Family is changing. Anyone who has lived through the last few decades of American life has watched that change move like a prairie storm across the landscape of our culture — sometimes slowly, sometimes swiftly, but always with steady, inevitable progress. Nothing is quite the same in the wake of a cultural storm's winds and rains. When it hits where you live, change happens. And it's happening now to home and family.

If a movie can be like a parable of Jesus, I'd have to suggest that the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz comes close as a cinematic parable of our current experience. The movie begins in black and white, with young Dorothy Gale living a simple life anchored in the abiding fundamentals of family and faithfulness and surrounded by the unchanging stability of the Kansas prairie. But then a raging cyclone transports her farmhouse — with Dorothy and her little black dog, Toto, inside — to a new and unfamiliar, but very colorful, place. As she wanders along a yellow-bricked path outside her relocated house, taking in the strangeness of all she is seeing in the yet-unnamed Land of Oz, she voices the obvious: "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."

Over the last generation, a storm has blown across our Christian cultural landscape with the ferocity of a Kansas tornado. It picked up our values of home and family and carried them and us to a new place that is strange and unsettling. Like Dorothy, we're wandering along a well-trodden path to the Great and Mighty One, trying to make sense of the new world we see around us. And in our hearts, despite the changes we're experiencing, we still believe, like Dorothy, "There's no place like home."

Change is a reality of life that we can resist but can't avoid. And yet while things are changing all around us, the kinds of changes we see — the big, global changes that we call human progress — remain the same from generation to generation. Solomon, as king of Israel, changed that land like no one before him or since — he built the Temple, enlarged its treasures, made Israel a nation among nations, and transformed Jerusalem into a world-class city. And yet he wrote in Ecclesiastes 1:9, "That which has been is that which will be, and that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun." Solomon was enlarging his domain and influence as countless other kingdoms and governments have done. The details may differ, but we as humans keep doing the same things, in the same ways, with the same good — and bad — intentions and outcomes. That's the paradox, and in part the message of Ecclesiastes: The world changes, but humans remain the same.

We're naturally fascinated by the big, culture-defining changes of the kind that Solomon ushered in for Israel — changes in society, industry, commerce, education, governance, technology, fashion, leisure, and other areas. But most of us, as believers in Jesus and His teachings, don't really change inside when things change around us — we still want the fundamental human values and virtues we believe in to remain the same. Whatever else is changing, we expect foundational biblical truths to stay firm. It's an article of our faith. But now that's being challenged too.

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The cultural changes we're seeing in our current time "under the sun," not just in matters of home and family but also in attitudes toward Christian truth and morality, are of the fundamental kind, the ones we couldn't or didn't want to see coming but that now we cannot avoid — shifting attitudes about sexuality and marriage, the prevalence of divorce and fragmentation of families, conflicting ideas about God, challenges to the Bible's authority, rejection of once widely held Christian standards and beliefs. We're seeing increasingly dramatic confrontations over some of God's foundational "solid rock" truths that provide stability and safety from the storms of life. Even though we as believers are building our homes "on the rock" of Jesus' words, more and more homes built "on the sand" surround us and are vulnerable to the storms (see Matthew 7:24-27). Sandy foundations for many are being eroded and washed away.

David asks in one of his psalms, "If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?" (11:3). It's a good question. What happens when the foundations change? What is our response when our fundamental values are no longer honored? What do we do when the foundations we live by are rejected by those around us, or even by our country? Or when rulers over us do not affirm or protect our cherished ways of life as Christians? As a psalmist of Israel, David's answer was a simple reminder of what followers of God have always known to do — to trust God because He reigns from His temple in heaven and will protect the righteous (see 11:4, 7). As king of Israel, though, David could not foresee what his question perhaps presciently foreshadowed for the future of his country.

About four hundred years after David's reign as God's king over all Israel, the ancient foundations of the Promised Land, already split into two kingdoms, were being further decimated — the northern kingdom of Israel had already been conquered and scattered by Assyria, and the southern kingdom of Judah (the land of Jerusalem and the Temple) was less than a decade from being overthrown and exiled to Babylon for seventy years. In the midst of all that change and many prophecies of coming judgment, God offered an indirect answer to David's Psalm 11:3 question through Jeremiah, a prophet to Judah: "Thus says the LORD, 'Stand by the ways and see and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is, and walk in it; and you will find rest for your souls'" (Jeremiah 6:16).

When the foundations and fundamentals of Christianity that have provided stability for us for so long are rocked by challenge and change, and Kansas seems like a distant memory, the answer is not to panic, or fight, or just give up. The answer is, in fact, to be like Dorothy in Oz — to adjust and adapt, keep going, keep believing, and never give up the vision of home. The biblical answer to David's question, and to ours, is to trust that the God we know is faithful and the ancient paths we know are good. In other words, when things are changing around us, we stay faithful and stay the course. In that path alone we'll find peace in the midst of conflict.

Whatever else we may do in response to the changes happening around us, the one thing we cannot do is neglect our families. The eight heartbeats of lifegiving parenting covered in chapters 2–9 are an attempt to define, at least in part, what "the good way" will be for serious Christian families to walk in as we navigate through our uncertain time "under the sun." It's not just about being a "good Christian family" as a testimony to the world, or about combating the growing decline of the biblical family in our culture. It's about something much more important — it's about bringing your children into contact with the living God whom you serve so they will want to serve Him too. It's about your children finding life in God so they can stay faithful to the faith you pass on to them.

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In the same way that the nation of Israel changed dramatically over its first four hundred years, so have American culture and Christianity. The purpose of this book is not to address those changes, and it is especially not to try to redress them. Instead, I want to speak to Christian families who are committed to building the kind of homes that can withstand the storms of culture blowing in with those changes — the kind of lifegiving homes Jesus said are built on the rock of His Word (see Matthew 7:24-27).

Lifegiving parenting is not about changing the culture we live in but about being a counterculture to it. It's not about creating a comfortable Christian subculture insulated from the surrounding world; rather, it's about being the kind of lifegiving home culture that will stand as a testimony of God's biblical design for family to a lost world whose sandy foundations are washing away. It's not about being a political or social "culture warrior" for the family but about definitively, and maybe even defiantly, building a home where the living God of Creation is undeniably living through the family within it. Lifegiving parenting is about bringing the life of God into your home and family to create, with Him, an outpost of the Kingdom of Heaven in this world. We can call that place a "Christian home," but Christians often have very different ideas of what those words mean.

Throughout the quarter century of what I call our Christian home and parenting ministry, we've met and seen many families with life-affirming and life-infused Christian homes, where the presence of God was unmistakable in the parents' vision for their biblical roles and in the spiritual homelife they were cultivating for their children. However, we've also observed many American Christian families where the parents, though unquestionably believers, seemed minimally engaged in the spiritual life of the home or their children. If asked to give a reason why theirs was a Christian home, they might answer by focusing mostly on what their children were doing — "My kids go to church, Sunday School, Bible club, youth group, and camp; have all the best Christian music, videos, books, and apps; attend a Christian school; go to VBS and Christian activities; and have great Christian friends. Of course they're being raised in a Christian home."

There's no question that exposing children to so many good and godly Christian influences can be a positive thing. However, it can also become a negative thing if Christian consumerism becomes either an unintentional or preferred substitute for the life of God in a family. We need to distinguish between a home that is considered Christian primarily because cultural Christianity happens there and a home that is Christian because Christ is alive and present in perceptible ways. Here's the reality that needs to be affirmed: A distinctively Christian home can never be defined only by what the children are doing; it must be defined by what the parents are doing.

Despite what the pervasive Christian culture many of us live in may lead you to believe, no amount of Christian activities, materials, or media for your children will be able to make your home a Christian home. Those can all be good, edifying, enjoyable, and fun for your family, but they are powerless in themselves to bring the life of God into your home. Only you — parents alive in Christ because of the Holy Spirit within you — have the ability and the power of the Spirit to make your home a Christian home. Engagement with Christian culture does not define a Christian home; engagement with the living Christ does. That understanding is a necessary first step on the path to becoming a lifegiving parent.

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This is where authors often cite statistics to bolster their arguments. However, while statistics can legitimately tell a story that engages our minds and hearts, they can also be misused to portray a crisis that we need to fear. Data can be misinterpreted or misunderstood. For example, during the 2000s, many Christian parents were confronted with shockingly dire statistics about Christian youth abandoning the church and their faith as they entered college and early adulthood. Some youth ministries used those statistics to convince parents of the critical need for their programs. Those "scare-tistics" were sometimes exaggerated and misquoted and were later challenged by better research and data, but there was no way to undo their impact.

But here's a different kind of statistical story, a better one that captures our hearts and minds without fear. For nearly forty years, Vern Bengtson and his colleagues conducted a multigenerational study of religion and family — the largest such study ever done. It followed 350 extended families representing more than 3,500 individuals whose birth dates spanned more than a century. In his book about the study, Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down across Generations, Bengtson's top three conclusions tell a better story: "Religious families are surprisingly successful at transmission. ... Parental influence has not declined since the 1970s. ... Parental warmth is the key to successful transmission."

The real story that parents need to hear in these times is that in spite of the season of epic change in which we find ourselves, the fundamentals of faith transmission and retention within families have not really changed. Even though we're going through yet another generational transition, with new technologies and mobile communication radically reshaping the cultural landscape in which our children and youth will grow up and find their way, the research confirms that faith is still passed along in families the same way as it always has been — through parents. And Bengtson's conclusions are remarkably consistent with a 3,500-year-old biblical model that still works for passing faith from one generation to the next. The story of that "statistic" should engage your heart and mind.

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Perhaps you've heard the term shema, but you don't know where it's from or what it means. You're probably not alone. It's simply the Hebrew word for "hear," but it is the first word of what Jews consider the most important passage of Holy Scripture. The verses are called the Shema and have been recited twice daily (at morning and evening prayers) by pious Jews since they were first spoken by Moses:

Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. DEUTERONOMY 6:4-9

There are other important passages for Jews, and the full Shema includes two additional passages (Deuteronomy 11:13-21 and Numbers 15:37-41), but this initial passage of the Shema Yisra'el ("Hear, O Israel") has given Jews an identity as a people who name the Lord as their God (vv. 4-5), who tell their children about their God (v. 7), and who make their God a part of their lives and homes (vv. 8-9). Throughout the storied history of the Jews, the Shema has held them together.

It helps to remember the stories that lead up to this passage. After the flood of Noah, the story of the people and nation of Israel begins with God's call to Abraham (then called Abram) to leave the land of Ur, and His promise to give him a land and raise up a people from his seed. Abraham's late-in-life son, Isaac, has a son, Jacob, who wrestles with God and is given the name Israel. He has twelve sons who eventually become patriarchs of the twelve tribes of Israel, which are named after them. At age seventeen, the youngest son, Joseph, is sold by his jealous brothers into slavery in Egypt. Joseph rises from prisoner to prominence in Egypt and saves his family from famine by moving them there from Canaan.

Though Joseph saves his family, their move to Egypt results in four hundred years of captivity for the rapidly multiplying Hebrew people, forced to serve as slaves to the Egyptians. Their exile ends when God raises up Moses to free His people from slavery. The Israelites pass through the parted Red Sea and receive at Mount Sinai the Law they would need to become a nation, but then they succumb to fear and unbelief and fail to enter the Promised Land. After wandering for forty years in the wilderness, Moses and the people finally come to the Jordan River and look across into the land God promised their forefather Abraham five hundred years earlier. They are finally about to become a nation.

Now imagine what Moses is thinking. He knows he will not be able to cross the Jordan to enter the Promised Land (see Numbers 20:8-12), and he knows his visionary leadership of the people will pass to his faithful aide, Joshua, a military man of action. On the east side of the river, Moses has gathered all the people together to encourage them and remind them of who they are — not escaped slaves from Egypt but the children of Abraham and the people of God. He wants to remind them of all that God has done to bring them to this point, read the Law that God gave him on Mount Sinai, and prepare them to become a nation.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Life Giving Parent"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Clay Clarkson and Sally Clarkson.
Excerpted by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc..
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