"Be strong, and let us show ourselves courageous for the sake of our people. "
2 Samuel 10:12 FAMILY SANCTITY
Read It: Nehemiah 4:14; Jeremiah 29:6 Today we come to a third principle from God's Word for changing a pagan society. Society is transformed when we recapture family sanctity. tity. God told the Israelite exiles through Jeremiah, "Do not decrease." Wait a minute. Do you mean God wanted His people to bring children into the world in that wicked society? Yes, and the more the merrier. We saw earlier that the purpose of children is to stamp the image of God on future generations. Why worry about that? Because we just might be here for a while. But people today say, "Kids are an inconvenience." No, kids are the greatest investment we can make, because with children we secure the future. You see, in biblical times there was no Social Security or other "net" to catch people and hold them up when they got old.
The responsibility for caring for aging parents fell to the children. So one benefit of raising a family was that it ensured the care of the parents. They would always have a place to live as long as they had children to take them in. Another benefit of raising children was to see them grow up to love and serve the God their parents loved and served. This is the idea of children dren being a crown to their parents. There was nothing more satisfying for an Israelite parent than to see his children walk in the Lord's ways. Being in exile didn't change these realities, so God told the Jews to be fruitful ful and multiply. And in some cases, it would be their children who would return to Israel someday and rebuild it. But today we've messed up the concept of family sanctity, and it's messing ing up our culture. Kids need families so bad they will join a substitute family known as a gang. Why? Because Dad doesn't have guts enough to stay home, and Mother doesn't have dedication enough to place the kids above her career. So the children go out into the streets. Satan knows that God's long-term goal is to bless a society through its families. But we live for the now, today. We become slaves to our desires, we lose our families, and we deteriorate. How goes it in your family today? Think About It Satan wants our families because he wants the future.
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