Last week, I had a chance to watch the Truth Behind Hip Hop Part 6 – the second to last installment in a series from EX Ministries on the influence hip hop has on the church and the world. In the presentation, he discussed Satan’s systematic attack on the family through popular trends including the legalization of abortion and gay marriage, along with the various factors contributing to record high divorce rates around the world. Acknowledging these trends and the impact they are having on this and subsequent generations, it makes you wonder why is Satan going through such lengths to destroy the family, and the notion of family? Why are less and less marriages lasting? Why are the number of kids put up for adoption increasing, at the same time and rate as the number of abortions are occurring? Why does our culture advocate sex outside of marriage, which leads to kids being born out of wedlock, with no one to raise them?

To answer these questions and gain a better understanding on why Satan is waging the strongest war on the family, I began to look at why God created the family, and how the family God has given me has been the most instrumental factor in helping me understand His heart. Here are some of the observations I’ve made.

Some benefits of putting family first

The role of spouse and parent are the two single-most important jobs of this age. When God enables us to be a spouse through the gift of marriage, it teaches us how to allow Jesus to minister to us, therefore teaching us how to minister to others. When God enables us to be a parent through the gift of childbirth or adoption, observing that child teaches us how to depend on Jesus.

The fact that marriage is only for this age, and won’t occur in the resurrection (Matthew 22:30) is proof that the importance of marriage is to help us prepare for our marriage to Jesus the Bridegroom in the age to come. While I could write an entire book on the importance of marriage, suffice it to say that the time spouses have with each other is primarily to learn how to serve one another, and to learn how to allow the other to serve them. By learning how to let our spouse serve us, it requires that we get rid of our pride. This process is identical to what we must go through with Jesus.

As we learn to let Jesus to “wash our feet”, two milestone events take place. On one hand, through allowing Jesus to wash us, we can now enter into a relationship with Him (John 13:12-17), by first practicing on our spouse. To confirm this, Paul emphasizes the importance of our role as spouse and parent when describing the traits of an overseer. According to Paul, to oversee God’s people you must be a husband to one wife (i.e. no polygamy, adultery or divorce) (1 Timothy 3:2), while also managing your children well (1 Timothy 3:4). While most of us won’t be overseers of God’s people, these are sound guidelines to live by.

Some consequences of not putting family first

We cannot continue to place the roles of spouse and parent to the backseat of other roles we have to take on, including career or church ministry. The Bible is clear that the importance of your relationship with your spouse and children far outweigh how much money you make, what you do with that money, or how many people you impact through ministry (i.e. family first)

In today’s world of megachurch ministry, YouTube producers and reality TV, its natural for a Christian to focus their energies on what the most people can see. However, there’s many problems with this. First and foremost, we have to distinguish between the relationships God placed into our life (i.e. parents, spouses, children, co-workers, etc…) and the relationships we’ve placed into our life (i.e. Facebook friends, Twitter followers, YouTube viewers, and even church acquaintances). There is a reason why God places people in our life, a reason that He will measure us on and hold us accountable for. The people we add into our life by making personal decisions to spend time on Facebook, or taking a skills assessment at church to get assigned to a ministry most oftentimes take time away from the people God Himself placed into our lives. Now, I’m not saying that the Lord can’t use social networks or church to put people into our lives. He’s given me a few really strong relationships through both social networking and church. But there’s an order to this that most of us tend to ignore.

I got to a point on Facebook (for instance), where I could tell you more information about people’s lives that I’ve never met than I could about my brother. Since I didn’t understand the order God wants us to operate in regarding our relationships with family and non-family, I found myself more consumed with the needs of people that I can’t say 100% that God put them in my life, whereas the needs of a person God undoubtedly place in my life were going unmet, not prayed for, and ignored. This is happening within marriages and households, where men build a righteous persona among people who aren’t aware of their personal issues, while choosing to ignore the issues they are facing within their home, and even more importantly, within themselves.

To close, I’d like to study the Parable of the Talents, where the lord in the parable told his faithful servants, “well done, you were faithful over a few things, now I will make you ruler over many.” (Matthew 25:21). One of our biggest mistakes is to assume that we are capable of taking on the many, without hearing from the Lord that we were faithful over the few he gave to us. Facebook, Twitter, the wide range of ministry opportunities available to us make it far more complex than the Bible days in terms of us knowing what God assigned to us, versus what we assigned to ourselves. Its very easy today to find ourselves working on a bunch of things God never told us to, and neglecting the things He’s given to us.

To err on the side of caution, be sure that your house is in order, and that you are doing all that you can to make sure your family is pursuing Jesus before taking on other responsibilities. This way we can’t go wrong.