It is harder to lead a family than to rule a nation

• One out of every two marriages ends in divorce.
• In 1996, two out of every 5 households was maintained by a woman with no husband present.
• One million teenage girls will get pregnant out of wedlock this year.
• Sixty percent of all church-involved teenagers are sexually active.
• Sixty-six percent of American high school seniors have used illegal drugs.
• Every seventy-eight seconds, a teenager in America attempts suicide.*

Leading a family through the moral chaos, relativism and decadence of today is like trying to lead a small patrol through enemy territory. There is danger at every turn. The forces trying to break up a man's family and ruin his kids are powerful, ever present and they never sleep. What are we leaders of our families to do? How can we protect our marriages? How can we keep our kids from becoming a statistic? How can we recognize the danger before it's too late and steer our families around it?

First and foremost, you have to become a man of the Word of God. Ps. 119:105 says that God's word is a lamp unto our feet, a light unto our path. Proverbs tells us that God's word brings wisdom for living. God's word protects us by revealing dangerous paths and brings peace by showing us the right way. To attempt to lead a family without the light of God's word is going into enemy territory blind with no intelligence and not even knowing who the enemy is. You have to know where danger lies and how to avoid it if you don't want to become a statistic. A man leads and protects his family first by becoming a man of the Word.

Second, a man leads and protects his family by leading them to base camp, the church. At church, the family gets the support it needs to be able to go out on patrol. God ordained the church to help provide what a family needs to make it through the dangers. Without actively being involved in a healthy local church, a family is own its own. No base camp, no support.

Third, to lead and protect his family, a man needs buddies who have his back and can help him see where the dangers are, a small group. A family leader needs other men he can learn from, who will tell him if he is going down a dangerous path and who will be there to help fight back the enemy. Without a small group, a family leader is on his own in enemy territory with no back up and no other resources. Many men try to be like Rambo, going it alone. Their pride tells them they can handle it. The enemy loves to catch a soldier going it alone. Some can make it, most don't.

*These statistics were published in Steve Farrar's book Point Man.

Young Business Leaders of Jackson

Why Get Married?

Why get married? The typical answers to that question by people today are "Because I love him/her" or "I want to spend the rest of my life with them" or "They are my soulmate", something to that effect. In other words, because it will make me happy and fulfilled. The problem with those answers is that fulfillment is about 4th on the list of God's reasons for two people to get married, not first. Getting married for self fulfillment is not wrong. It just should not be the primary reason for getting married. If it is, then when things go wrong as they inevitablly will and you are not happy anymore in your marriage, you will have a great excuse to bail out. So if happiness is not the primary reason for marriage, what is?

To understand the answer to that question you first have to understand that marriage is created and ordained by God and is a calling. God officiated the first marriage between two human beings in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. God gave Eve to Adam to be his wife not just for their pleasure and fulfillment, but for other reasons as well. This makes the marriage between a man and a woman a calling that God ordains for His purposes. This makes the number one reason for two people to get married to be because God has called them to it. To marry someone without being sure of God's call is a dangerous proposition. See also 1 Cor. 7:20.

The other reasons that God calls two people into marriage are 1) a human marriage is to be a reflection of God's marriage to His bride, the church (Eph. 5:22). A marriage between a man and a woman is a message to the world about God and His committment to His bride. He promises in the scriptures never to divorce his bride, no matter how unfaithful she may be (see the book of Hosea). One reason God hates divorce is that it takes this message about God away and people can't see God through the marriage anymore. 2) God created marriage to put man/woman in relationship. God said that it was not good for Adam to be alone. God uses relationships to shape and mold us, to sanctify us. The marriage relationship is one of the great classrooms that God uses in our lives. 3) God ordained marriage for procreation. The family is the basic building block of society. God designed that people would be conceived by a husband and wife and raised in a family relationship, another great classroom that God uses in our lives to train us up; again relationships. When the family is fractured, the incubator that God planned for children can't work as effectively. These children grow up into broken adults. People who grow up apart from the family God intended are like people who never go to school. 4) God ordained marriage to complete a man and a woman (Gen. 2:20-24). A man and a woman in a marriage ordained by God become one and complete each other. They fill each other's gaps. They balance each other out and together they are better than they are seperately. 5) God ordained marriage for man's/woman's fulfillment and pleasure. If you study the Hebrew in the Gen. 2 passage you see that Adam was pretty pumped when he saw Eve, the perfect woman. And I am pretty sure the feeling was mutual. Fulfillment is a reason to get married. It's just not the only reason nor is it the primary one. Being married is a calling from God. He has several reasons for calling men and women into marriage. And so when we are not happy in our marriage as will be the case in every marriage, that is not a reason to bail. It is a time to walk by faith, to trust God, to address issues in a biblical way as needed. Walking in obedience to God can sometimes be very difficult. You can't be selfish, you have to let go of your agenda. The rewards though are worth it everytime.