THEY PUT THE “DYS-” IN DYSFUNCTIONAL

This my my number 1 photo I hang in my war room

i fight on my knees for these guys.

“My Family”

“One day Cain suggested to his brother, “Let’s go out into the fields.”  And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother, Abel, and killed him.  Afterward the LORD asked Cain, “Where is your brother? where is Abel?”  “Don’t know,”  Cain responded.  “Am I my brother’s guardian?”  But the LORD said, “What have you done?  Listen!  Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground!  Now you are cursed and banished from the ground, which has swallowed you brother’s blood.  No longer will the ground yield good crops for you, no matter how hard you work!  From now on you will be a homeless wanderer on the earth.”  Cain replied to the LORD, “my punishment is too great for me to bear!  You have finished me from the land and from you presence; you have made me a homeless wanderer.  Anyone who finds me will kill me!:  The LORD replied, “No, for I will give a sevenfold punishment to anyone who kills you.”  Then the LORD put a mark on Cain to warn anyone who might try to kill him.  So Cain left the LORD’S presence and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.”

Dysfunctional.  The buzz word in the psychological field these days.  Dr. Phil, Jerry Springer and other day time talk show hosts are making a very good living off the pain of dysfunctional families.  These talk shows air dirty laundry, and secrets, and private pain before millions of viewers every weekday.  Dr. Phil may in his own way be helping some families, but still for me it is excruciating to watch the demise of the family unit imploding on national television.  I go to my bible and look at the stories of my faith, and you know what I have discovered; God’s Word is full of dysfunctional families.  Our current generations aren’t writing a new book.  We have just given it a new title, dysfunctional.  I challenge you.  Go ahead and see if you can find one family in the bible that could not be categorized as dysfunctional.  You might challenge back:  What about Jesus’ earthly family?  How about the relationships Jesus had with his parents and siblings.  Beth Moore in her bible study “Breaking Free” says this of Jesus’ family, “how would you like to be the sibling of a brother who never sinned?”  There was only One perfect child in that family and He is the Son of God.  He was the only One in His family who knew how to love perfectly, all the others were human and fallible in every relationship.

I wonder what Dr. Phil would say about the first family?  (And I am not talking about the O’Bama’s.)  I am talking about the first, the original family:  Adam and Eve and their offsprings.  Now that’s some dysfunction right there, I’m telling you.

How Eve’s heart must have broke the day of the first murder of mankind.  She lost two sons in a single day.  One to death and the other to banishment.  For a mother to learn that her oldest murdered and slew her youngest.  I would have dropped to my knees.  I can only imagine.  She probably felt as if she had been punched in the stomach with all the air sucked out of her.  How did she ever go on?  How did she wake up the next morning?  How could she handle the silence of her house without her children coming from their rooms?  This scenario has been replayed thousands of time throughout the centuries.  Still I ask the question, “how do people, especially mothers move on?”  How did Eve get up the next morning and put one foot in front of the other?  How did she go on and take care of her man?  Adam had to have been devastated also.  One day he had two sons helping him in the fields; today he had no son to work along side of.

How do we go on when our own families are suffering through all sorts of trials?  When father’s get cancer, when three year olds get neuroblastoma, or when children move away to begin lives as adults?  My answer to all life’s questions:  We carry on by the grace of God.  When our hearts are breaking because sin entered this world and our enemy attacks our families, we carry on because God holds us in His everlasting arms.  When sons and daughters go off to fight a war to keep our homeland safe from terrorism, we fall to our knees before Almighty God and place our soldiers in His Mighty Hands.  And when our enemy, the devil, comes to kill, steal and destroy our families, we fight on our knees; we put on the Full Armor of God, and we go into our war room and we kick satan out of all our relationships.  We carry on and we fight because Our God is a God of redemption.  We battle for our families because we know we are fighting from a place of victory.  Our victory was secured the day Jesus rose from the grave.  His blood shed on the cross is our greatest weapon against our condemnation.

The bible is full of stories of dysfunction.  Jerry Springer could have a hey day with some of their stories.  I believe God immortalized stories of sibling rivalries and murder to show us there is always a “But God.”  There is always a story of redemption on the backside of dysfunction because… Wait for it… “God is in the business of redeeming families.”

“Adam had sexual relations with his wife agin, and she gave birth to another son.  She named him Seth, for she said, “God has granted me another son n place of Abel, whom Cain killed.”  Genesis 4:25