I also want you to pay special attention to special friends that might come into your life. The boyfriend, the girl. I love how parents, you know, parents kind of freak out when their kids first get a boyfriend or a girlfriend. They don't want to use the word boyfriend or girlfriend. So how's your special friend doing? Because we don't, we just get too creeped out by it too soon. But that's all right, but boy, you gotta pay so much attention to this. Once you cross that phase of getting serious with a boy or a girl romantically, you absolutely have to make sure that this person is spiritually vibrant, spiritually alive, spiritually active, that it is easy to talk about Jesus with them. It is easy to talk about prayer requests with them. It is easy to say, Hey, what's God teaching you these days? It's easy to say what you know.

How did you, what impact did that sermon have in your life? Something like that. If, if you're not connecting with someone, when you get to that stage of your life, when you're starting romantic relationships where you can connect easily about spiritual things, where you admire this person spiritually, when you spend time with them, like you want to be a more faithful Christian, then that is not a relationship at that point that you want to make special. Probably just a friend at that point. But once you cross that line into being serious about preparing for marriage and dating with someone, that is someone that is absolutely critical that they are walking with the Lord. One thing that I've heard about on this, this, this need to have Christian friendships, not just Christian friends, but Christian friendships. I've had some students tell me they're getting ready to go off to university of Alabama or whatever, you know, and they say, well look, you know, Jesus spent all his time with sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors.

So, uh, you know, I'm going to go, you know, it'd be very missional at a this big school and you know, I'll be at all the parties and all that stuff and shining for Christ. Okay, I get it. I appreciate it. But the premise of your statement's wrong. You hear the ice thought. I saw a meme the other day, you know, Jesus spent all his time with sinners. We should do. She said it didn't spend all this time with sinners. He spent 91% of his life with his family. That's age zero to 30 and then during his ministry years, who do you spend most of his time with? With his disciples. Okay. Other people that were bumbling along seeking to follow him. And did he spend time with sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors? Absolutely. He was on mission, but his primary group. Okay. Was this family first and then secondly, those who believed in him.

I'm going to close us in just a second with action 0.5 but I want to take this window right now to do some Q and a questions, comments, thoughts, disagreements. Maybe you had a question about something we've already covered some that we're not talking about. What would you like to ask? How do you know your kids are going to church every Sunday when you're away? Cause they always tell you the truth, Kristen. That's why always parents listen, none of us ever lied to our parents about anything, right? So none of our children would ever consider doing no. Um, I, I think obviously you're going to be asking straight forward questions. You're hoping for straightforward responses. And I think that over time our kids' spiritual trajectory becomes pretty plain. Um, and so over the course of a semester, if every now and then once a month, Hey, how's church going for you?

Uh, you know, what do you like about this church? What's God's teaching you over time, if they are spinning things a little bit, that'll, that'll become obvious. And I'm not, I am not checking up with my two college kids on like weekly church attendance. Okay. This is a goal. Something that we talk about. They both affirm it. I just sort of noticed that it comes up in conversation with them. I, I with Lizzie in particular, she'll say, Oh I, the women's ministry did this thing the other day and I decided to go cause some college girls were going like I didn't so are you involved with women's ministry? She just volunteered that and I don't think she's so devious to be like she has a calendar. I have to plant a few lies with dad along the semester to make sure. Yeah, hopefully that's not happening.

It's a good question. Somebody else. Okay. The question is we're talking about a lot of us when we appear to experience pain, suffering or we see pain suffering in the lives of people that we love. Real crisis of faith. Who has God has God there, has got good, has got powerful. We talked about wanting to create an open environment. How do we do that in the house? Um, one thing is by being vulnerable with your kids, especially as they're older about your own story and your own journey. I think it's very helpful when we're talking with our teenagers or college students to have some of these, you know, what, when I was your age, here is something that I was really struggling with and then fill in the blank, whatever it was, uh, cause it communicates to them that it's normal to struggle. It's okay to talk about it.

You know, I've done in previous seminars, I've put a graph up here, um, and the graph is on the ages of 10 to 20, and the graph is on, uh, uh, spiritual emotional health. Okay. And I have this line, it just goes straight up age 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. In other words, this is my expectation of my child between the ages of 10 and 20. Every year they're going to be a little more mature, a little more godly, a little more responsible, a little more adultish. And then I asked the adults, how many of you between the ages of 10 and 20 had that graph, right? Just every year. Yeah. Just better and better all the time. That's my life. Okay. And obviously none of us have that experience. All of us. And so then I put another graph up, which is real jagged but but slowly it Jags its way up.

And what's the great thing about that graph going up? Trajectory wise, going up now one year over the next year, one month over the next month things may be very, very Rocky. So as parents we're paying attention to trajectory. When I'm doing family counseling I'll always ask that question. Parents come, they want to talk about a teenager. I'll always say, okay talk to me about a year ago, two years ago, three years ago. Would you say over that time you're generally seeing growth emotionally, spiritually, relationally, more honoring with you, all of that. And if they say, yeah actually I think I am big picture wise then a lot of our conversations going to be, okay let's hold the course, let's keep praying. Let's see. Now a lot of times parents say, you know what? No, I think when they were freshmen I think I was seeing a lot more soft heartedness toward the Lord and toward me and I'm seeing more hardheartedness right now.

So that's an encouragement. The point of that graph is not, Oh, it's going to be fine. Big picture trajectory, don't worry about it. But to pay attention to that longterm growth chart. So being open and honest, understanding that there's going to be a lot of ups and downs and when they do nibble around the edges, Hey, I am really sad about this happening. I am really angry about this happening. Lots of, Hey, tell me more about that. Lots of, do you remember the, um, kids you don't remember? Well, you have examples. Parents growing up, the little toys, you pull the string on the toy and it says like the same two phrases over and over. So kids, you've got buttons, toys, you know when you were a kid, you push the button and it says little things. So parents you've got to get rid of.

There's a few phrases that are just on your pull string. Okay? And you just say him a lot, which is, boy, thanks for telling me that. Tell me more. You know, if I were in your shoes, I'd probably feel the exact same way. Can you tell me more about that? Hey, you know what, that makes total sense to me. I had experienced just like that, right? Just, just affirming, affirming. Tell me more. Tell me more. You're not crazy for having that feeling. You're not crazy for having that thought. Let's share it. One more question. Yeah. The one I mentioned before for college students I think is the best truth for life. There's so many good ones out there that if there is a, uh, a ministry, a Bible teacher, uh, somebody that your family or your son or daughter resonates with subscribing to their podcast, subscribing to their YouTube channel, you know, they probably have something like that.

By the way, parents, we have a podcast and YouTube channel, visionary family ministries. If you want to do more like parent training, family training, we'd love to connect with you there. So, you know, you may have to poke around a little bit to find the church or the ministry or the Bible teacher that they connect with or resonate with. And then if they, if there is one, put it on your phone too and be listening to what's going on and you're able to say, Amy does that a lot. She'll, she'll listen to some she knows that the kids have on their phones. Oh, I just listen to this new podcast today. It was really encouraging for me in this way and it's not, I hope you listen to it too and get back to me and tell me what you think. It's a guilt free. Like, Hey, I'm growing. Um, and if you want to talk more we can. Alright, last action point and I'm gonna close in prayer for us. Action point number five, choose today who you will serve. I have talked with a lot of students over the years and they tell me something like this. I'm going to start taking God seriously when I become an adult.

Heard that lots and lots of times, I've heard a lot of adults tell me, I'm gonna figure this God thing out when I'm old. I'm too busy right now. You know, my dad was, was not a Christian his whole life. He three weeks before he died at the age of 90, God worked a miracle and his life brought him to repentance of sins and faith in Christ. But he was an atheist. He was a secularist. He was very hard-hearted. He was um, 85 years old. And I said, dad, what do you think is waiting for you after this life? He's a guy, I don't know, you know, maybe there's probably, you know, probably a good place or something like that. I said, well dad, what does it take to get to the good place? He said, well on my deathbed I'll call a priest. The priest will pray something good and I'll go to a good place.

I'll say, dad, I said, is that really the way you think it works? Like just some guy comes in like said something like, and you go to some good place. And I appreciated his honesty here. He did say to me, well I guess maybe that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. You know, I don't know how it works. And then he changed, changed the subject. You know, I think about my father, cause I want to go back to your comment about me expanding on this a little bit. I've talked to a lot of students, 20 somethings, 30 somethings. They used to be Christians. They used to, but they're not anymore. They tell me, well, I learned about evolution or I learned about philosophy in almost every one of those situations. As I talked to them, it went back to a hurt. It went back to a wound.

It went back to something that happened in their spirit, not in their brain. I remember with my dad, my dad, um, his mother died in childbirth with him in 1918 and his father already had two sons and didn't want my dad or couldn't care for my dad. We don't exactly know what happened. So his mom died and his dad didn't take him. And he was a preemie baby, born at seven and a half months. And in 1918 that was major life-threatening. He spent a year in the hospital at the university of Iowa. No mom, no dad, nurses praise God for the nurses. But that's not what a little baby's supposed to have. You're not supposed to have a nurse for a year. It's worse to have a mom just to have a dad, right? He gets adopted by his aunt and his uncle who were brother and sister.

They weren't, it wasn't weird. It was a single man and a single woman who lived together. They were brother and sister. They never got married, so we never saw a marriage, never saw a family. His dad was an atheist. His adopted dad, his adopted, told him over and over again. Jesus is just a man. Don't believe in Jesus. Jesus is just a man. Don't believe in Jesus. My dad spends his whole life looking for women to love him. My mother was his fourth wife, had four divorces after being divorced from my mom at other mistresses, women he lived with, spend his whole life looking to fill his mother wound, died with a picture of his mom and his dresser, 90 years old. Picture of his mom and his dresser. I asked him, I'm 88 years old, were out to breakfast. I say, dad, I wonder if you're angry with God for letting your mom die when you were born.

I didn't even finish the sentence. And a tear comes down as cheek 88 years old, wipes it away. I don't want to talk about that hemorrhaging spiritually because of a wound from like literally from birth. Does this make sense? And we've got so many people that are in deep doubt, anger, struggle, hatred for God, whatever it is because of deep wounds that have happened and there weren't people around them to help guide them through, through those struggles. Okay. Um, I asked my son, I told you we were out to lunch two days ago. I asked him, JD, why do you think so many students fall away in college? First thing he said was that they never learned to eat spiritual food by themselves. They're just that little bird with, with their open mouth. And the other thing you said was pretty, I thought, pretty blunt.

He said, I think a lot of those kids who fall away from faith in college and in their twenties, in reality, they really even weren't, weren't walking with God in high school and junior high. So it's not like they're just on fire for the Lord in high school. And then all of a sudden things, things change. Um, and so that's what this action point is all about. And so students, I just want your full and undivided attention here. Choose today. It's not choosing college who you'll serve. It's not choose when you're 25 who you serve. Choose today who you'll serve. Think of it this way. If you're here today, you've got a Christian parent, your Christian parent probably dragged you here. If you grow up in a Christian House, you go to Christian Church, you go to Christian school, the Christian parent puts a shirt on you.

They put a Christian shirt on you. Like when you're really little. Some of you teenagers might buy your own clothes, probably not. Your parents still probably buy your clothes. Um, and they provide your clothes for you. So whatever you wear is what your parents give you to wear. Okay? So if you grow up in a Christian House, get a Christian shirt, your parents come and put a Christian shirt on you and everybody who looks at you and says, Oh well faith the Christian cause she goes to Christian Church. Okay, and she has a Christian family and they talk about Christian stuff. But when you leave your house, the world rips off the shirt the parents put on you. That's okay. It's part of being an adult. It's part of leaving the house. The question is do you have your own shirt underneath? Like I'm a Christian, I'm a follower of God.

This isn't my parents shirt anymore. This is my shirt and I want people to that I'm a follower of God. This closing verse and that I'm going to, I'm going to pray. It's from Joshua 24 maybe a verse you've heard before. It says, the people of Israel, they've come out of Egypt, they've come through the wilderness, they've come into the promised land that they came out of a land in Egypt of idol worshipers. And unfortunately a lot of the Israelites brought some of those idols with them. They weren't faithful to God out in the wilderness, and now they've moved into the land of Canaan, also filled with a bunch of idol worshipers. So this is what Joshua says to the people. He says, choose when this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the river. In other words, the idols that they brought with them from Egypt or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell.

And then Joshua makes this proclamation. He says, as for me in my house, we will serve the Lord and his command there is challenged. Choose you this day, and this is the point students that I want to stick with you here before I pray. It's your spiritual commitment now is the key to your spiritual commitment in the future. Your spiritual commitment now is the key to your spiritual commitment in the future, and this is not, thou shalt be a perfect Christian now, so thou can be a perfect Christian in the future. There's none of that, but right now, if it's the decision of your heart, I want to follow Jesus. I want to run the race. I'm going to Bumble and stumble every day. Jesus is going to pick me back up, put me back on track. I want to follow Jesus in this life and I bought to be with him in eternity forever. Let's pray together.

God, I thank you for waking us up this morning. I want to thank you for every student that's here. Every parent that's here, maybe their student couldn't be with them, and that this conversation today is going to spark some conversations at home. But God, would you just please help all of us, all of us, just to be able to say that, that we fought the good fight, that we finished the race, that we kept the faith, that we pursued what you have for us, that crown of righteousness that you promise to, to award to us and God, we also, um, as we think about this, this like Baton pass and Olympic torch run, we know your word says that, that we're not doing this by ourselves. We're surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses and that you tell us to put aside every weight and the sin that that clings to us and God, I want to pray.

You'd help us run with endurance the race that you've set before us and that we would look to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. So God, the only way that any of us or even your children is because the work of grace brought us to you. And the only way we're going to continue to walk to you is if you continue to give us your grace and give us your mercy that you drew us to yourself, and that you promise you're going to keep us with you. And we ask that you would do that. And we pray all this in Jesus name. Amen.

facebook.com/visionaryfam instagram.com/visionaryfamilyministries twitter.com/visionaryfam

Resources:

shop.visionaryfam.com visionaryfam.com/parenting visionaryfam.com/marriage visionaryfam.com/nevertoolate

family

parenting

marriage

visionaryfamily

visionaryparenting

visionarymarriage

nevertoolate

notsoperfectmom

@amyvfm @d6family

View Details

So another action step on this and this one is huge students. Give me your full attention. Parents to get into a local church that teaches the Bible from the Bible, get into a local church that teaches the Bible from the Bible. When I was at Wheaton, lots of students stopped going to a local church. Chapel is not church. Maybe you're going to a Christian school. Chapel is a big community worship time and Bible study. That's great. Love it, but it's not a local church. Look at this scripture from Hebrews 10 is that as I was working on this message this week, lots of the scriptures I'm sharing with you are actually from from the book of Hebrews, but look at it says Hebrews 10 24 and 25 let us consider how to stir one another up to love and good works. Not neglecting to meet together as is the habit of some but encouraging one another and all the more as you see the day drawing near, look there at verse 25 let's not neglect meeting together and that is talking about the weekly corporate worship gathering of the church.

It says as is the habit of some. In other words, there are some Christians who fall out of the habit of being in church. So God says, don't neglect it. Don't fall out of the habit of it all the more, as you see the day approaching. So Jesus is coming back, let's be ready for him. Full steam ahead. Parents for my two in college. So I've got two away at college. I make regular Sunday church attendance. A requirement if I'm helping to pay for school, doesn't mean yet. Like, you know, you missed a Sunday. I'm not paying, I'm not just talking about regular faithful church attendance. So if you are an independent adult, which means I don't pay for anything in your life, if you're an independent adult, you can do whatever you want. Okay? But if you're still on my dime, I get some say so I'm not willing to send you off to school if you're going to spiritually starve yourself, just not willing to do that.

So first weekend you get to college, go to a church, get a ride, get an Uber, ride your bike. Find out what churches have buses or w yeah, college buses that'll pick you up. If you go and the church worships Jesus with authenticity and the preacher gets up and opens a book the Bible specifically and preaches from it, then go back to that church and try again next week or try another church. Okay. I believe in church shopping church shopping's awesome. But I also believe in church buying. So shop shop, shop, shop and then buy. Exactly. Um, one of the way I tell my kids, say by the end of first semester you should have found a church to buy for those next three plus years. Um, one more point on this before I turn to you to talk to each other. You know, for a lot of Christians we struggle when it comes to church or personal devotions cause we just don't feel like doing it.

Okay. Talking about time with God in the morning when I wake up, what I feel like doing is checking my phone, scroll, scroll, scroll, check, check, check. That's kind of what I feel like doing. Or Sunday morning, man, especially in college, want to sleep in. Sometimes if we're honest, like we don't have a, you know, we're talking about eating good stuff. Sometimes we just don't have a hunger for God's word. So if you're not hungry for God's word, you might not be too inclined to go eat it. So now if a person loses their appetite physically, let's just say a person loses their appetite. All right, nurse Melissa person loses their appetite. They don't want to eat anymore. What is that a sign of? Generally speaking, not, don't give me a diagnosis, just layman's terms please. Anxiety, depression. Does it mean, is it a sign of wellness or sickness?

Yeah, it's a sign of sickness. If you lose your appetite, something's wrong. Something's going on. Um, and what does the doctor say? Well, I know you're not hungry, so don't bother eating. Doctor says, no, I know you're not hungry, but you need to. You need to eat right. Your body needs the nourishment. Your body needs the strength. So Christians, we have to keep eating whether we're hungry or not. And in fact, like the, um, I just had a dear friend who passed away over Christmas. Uh, he was 75 and he was in hospice and when he stopped wanting to eat and drink, right, he just wouldn't eat and drink anymore. That's when they said, you know, he's probably only got a few days left, so he's not hungry. He won't eat. That's danger. Danger, danger, like we're really close. So whether you're hungry or not, we got to eat spiritually.

All right. Questions for you to talk to each other. Parents, tell your student about your spiritual habits, your spiritual eating when you are 18 to 22 students, tell your parent one way you think you could improve or grow when it comes to increasing your spiritual food. Go. All right, let me pull you back together. I'm trying. Hopefully I'm making your conversations shorter rather than awkwardly longer. The goal is that you're actually allowed to talk about spiritual things at home and in the car, not just here. So part of my job today is to kickstart some of those conversations. All right, action point number three. Action point number three, never fake it. Never fake it. If you want to thrive in your faith through college, never fake it no matter what. Be honest with God. Be honest with your parents. Be honest with your trusted friends.

Look at this scripture also. We're back in Hebrews now. Hebrews 1920 and then to 22 therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us, let us draw near to God with a true heart. So this scripture says Jesus has suffered and died and Rose again to bring you to the father. So verse 22 let us draw near to God with a true heart. Other translations say with a sincere heart, with an honest heart. So the Christian life, not easy. There's doubts, anger, struggle with discouragement. You can be honest with God about all of it. You can be honest with God about all of it. Something that, um, I have seen in a lot of young people, they're now in their twenties, they're now in their thirties who have fallen away in their faith.

Is that something really painful happened in their life? Junior high, high school, a friend's suicide. Um, for me, I was 15 years old. My parents got divorced and spiritually for them it was like, God, how could you allow that to happen if he either you're not good and you let it happen, or maybe you are good, but you don't have any power that had happened. You didn't want it to or whatever. But they're, they're hurt and they're angry and they never talked about it. They didn't go to God and yell at him. He's a big boy, by the way. If you want to yell at God, he can take it. All right, that's no problem. Uh, they didn't go to their parents and say, I don't understand this. I am angry at God. Maybe God's not even there. They didn't go to their friends. A switch flips inside with, with this anger and bitterness or these doubts or questions.

And then they go to an evolution class and they're like, Oh, okay, well that's a way out. I don't have to believe in God anymore. They go to a philosophy class. Well, that's the way out. I don't have to believe in God anymore. So what I want to encourage you, especially with suffering, pain, doubts, discouragement, you name it. Honest, honest, honest, never fake it. Go to God. Be honest. Go to your parents. Be honest. Don't pretend with your parents. Don't pretend with your spiritual life. If you're having doubts, say so. If you're not sure what you believe, be honest. If you go to college and you don't want to live the Christian life, you don't want to live the Christian life. Tell your parents that. Say, I know you raised me to be a Christian, but I don't want to be a Christian. Look them in the eye. I'm not saying it's a good thing to that. That's the track you're on. I be, I'm concerned for you, but I want you to be honest. I want you to tell the truth. If you're away at school and you want to drink and go to parties or you want to mess around sexually, tell your parents, Hey, just so you know, I'm not going to fake it. I'm drinking every weekend. How much are you drinking? A lot. Be honest. Be a big boy, be a big girl. I'm not saying what you're doing is good, healthy, or anything like that, but stand up. Tell the truth. Now parents, let's say you talk to your kids about this. Let you go home and you say, you know what Rob said today about being honest. That's really important. I do want you to be able to tell me anything that's going on in your life.

Fine. Then we've got to prepare ourselves for how we respond when our kids are honest. I think about our w let's say he's a senior in college. Let's say he comes home, uh, at the next break or whatever. He's getting ready to graduate and he says, all right dad, I gotta have a tough conversation with you. I know you raised me to be a Christian. No, you raised me in the church. I know you sent me to a Christian school. I know you've visionary family ministries and all this stuff, but, uh, I just gotta be honest with you. I'm not there. You know, I'm not sure what I think about God. I, I, I'm not planning on being a part of a church after I leave college and become an adult. Um, I, I'm just not sure where I'm at and uh, so you needed to know that. Well, as for me in my house, we will serve the Lord. Uh, all right. I'm freaking out basically. All right. This is like [inaudible] no, it's Def con five nuclear blast and I think, you know, if that happens freaking out, it's appropriate, but I need to freak out in private, like not freak out like with with him right there. What I would pray, first of all, do you think that if, if our w were to come and say that to me, that he would know that he's like taking a risk?

Absolutely. He would know he's taken a risk. He knows is going to be a very difficult conversation and he wouldn't have to do that. He could just continue to play Christian and just not tell dad what he's doing. He could keep, you know, visiting church with us when he's home and keep giving kind of vague answers. Well, yeah, me and my wife would just moved this area. Still haven't found a church yet. He could continue to play the game. Now, if he came to me and said all that, there's difficult things going on in his heart, dark things going on in his heart, but one good thing happened. What's the one good thing that happened? He was honest. He gave me his heart. He opened up. I now know better how to pray for him. I now know better how to talk to him and what I would ask God to help me in that, uh, situation is for me to be able to say something like, okay, all right.

Dubs that would say a big kind of bomb. He just dropped on me there. It's going to take me a while to process it, but before we talk about it, just thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being honest. Thank you for telling me the truth. Thankful you for respecting our relationship enough to talk to me. Now here's what I'd love for you to do. Can you just take like 10 minutes and just go on a rant. Go on a ramble, just stream of consciousness. Just kind of help me understand. Just cause you didn't decide this yesterday. This is obviously been grown, right? Yeah, it's been grown. Okay. You just talk, just help me understand and when you're done talking we'll, we'll take a break. I'm not going to interrogate your anything. I just want to hear more. You see, he took a little risk right in, in being honest about the nugget. Now I want more, I want more honesty so I know how to pray and I know how, uh, how to help. One of the reasons why students, honesty with your parents about personal things is so important. Member of the beginning, I gave you the illustration of the relay race with the Baton. One runners running, they passed the Baton. Next runner takes and keeps running. It's kind of a flawed illustration. Okay. Any Bible illustration breaks down at some point. Okay. It helps for a little while, but if you overthink it, the reason why that one breaks down is that the Christian race is not an individual race. It's not like parents are running and we pass the Baton to the kids and then they run it. We stop. Okay. It's better. Illustration is the running of the Olympic torch. You ever seen the running of the Olympic torch? One person starts running, they get to the next point and they handle the torch to the next runner and what do they do then the two of them are running and then they handle the next runner and then three of them are running and by that they pick up more and more people as they, the torch progresses to the Olympic stadium or wherever it is. And so that's a better picture of the relay race of the Christian faith that parents keep running and we run with our kids and we run with our grandkids and then God takes us home to heaven. And so it's not an infinite number of people that keep growing, but that we run together generationally. Okay. Interaction time for you parents and actually wanting to have you stand up for this one since you've been sitting for awhile, stand up and talk about these questions.

Parents on a scale of one to 10 when you were a teenager, how open were you with your parents when it came to spiritual, personal things? 10 is the highest. And why students, on a scale of one to 10, how comfortable do you feel talking with your parents about spiritual personal things? One to 10 be honest. Why go? I've used this, this second question, students, I know I kinda throw you to the wolves a little bit on this one. You know, how on a scale of one to 10, how comfortable do you feel talk with your parents? We've had a few situations over the years where a girl say to her mom, you know, like you're in the group. You know, maybe she'll say, you know, I don't know, three or four, maybe something like that. And the mom will be crying. I can't believe you said three or four.

You know, I told you your whole life, you can talk to your mother about anything and you'd say three or four. It's very hurtful to your mother and they're having this big, huge blow up. I would try to avoid that, but just, uh, I told the mom, I'm like, well, maybe that's why it's a three or four. Your whole little deal you just did there. Okay, so feedback for parents. Let's say your trial does say three or four, one or two, okay? That would be your cue. Not to freak out, but your cue to say thank you for being honest. Tell me more. Help me understand. Very good. Okay. You're doing great. All right. Action point number four. We're cranking along here. Action point number four. You want to keep your faith through college, invest in Christian friendships, invest in Christian friendships. How many of you have ever heard this encouragement students?

Now it's a question for you. How many of you have ever heard your parents or somebody at school tell you, you need to have Christian friends? Raise your hand if you've heard this. You need to have Christian friends. Okay. I want to tell you that that's not necessarily true. You don't necessarily need to have Christian friends. You need to have Christian friendships with your Christian friends. Here's what happened in my life, and I see it all the time with students today, is that we have a lot of friends who are Christians, but there's nothing Christian about the friendship. There's no prayer for each other. There's no talking about Jesus. There's no talking about the Bible talking about their faith. There's no challenge spiritually. There's no accountability. There's no like uplift. If you watched these two friends who are Christians and these two friends who are atheists and you watch their behavior, you watch their friendship, you'd see hardly any difference.

Okay, well maybe these kids behave a little better or make different choices with whatever, I don't know. But when it comes to how they relate to each other, they're practically identical. So you don't need Christian friends. You need Christian. What friendships? Look at this passage back in Hebrews chapter three verse 13 but exhort one another every day as long as it is called today that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. Exhort one another. What does that mean? It just means you challenge one another. Encourage each other, pushes you, push each other. And then there's this weird phrase as long as it's called today, okay, what? These are not trick questions. What is today called? What do we call it? Not a trick question. Today we call today, today, tomorrow. What are we going to call tomorrow? And we get there today.

Exactly. So as long as today is called today, how long is that? That's like for like forever. Today's always going to be called today. Every day is called today. That's what he's trying to say. What are we supposed to do? We're supposed to encourage each other. We're supposed to encourage each other in our faith. Now, why is it such a big deal? There's like a a, why do we need this? That none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. So sin is going to deceive you so that it hardens you sins, going to lie to you so that your heart gets hard. And we can go through the list of all sorts of different illustrations or examples where this happens. Okay? You can think about a movie choices or music choices. You see enough sexual garbage on the screen. Pretty soon your conscience gets hardened to seeing the sexual garbage on the screen and you're just kind of like, yeah, whatever.

Or you see enough blood and Gore and horror, your heart gets hardened, your conscience gets beaten into submission. Maybe the first time you see it you say, Oh, maybe I shouldn't see in that. You watch it, you watch it, you watch it, you beat your conscience down into submission. Your conscience gets seared, okay, or scarred, so you keep right. Finally you get a scar there and the nerve endings just aren't working anymore. That's the way a conscience can get seared or beaten down. Same thing happens with drugs and alcohol. Okay? One little drink turns into extra drinks pretty soon, getting drunk on weekends and parties and all this kind of stuff. And you ask that person, maybe they go to church or they say they're a Christian. How do you feel about all that? Ah, it's no big deal. Come on. What's the problem there?

Their heart, their conscience has been hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. So when you're in your dorm room and you choose something on Netflix, you know you, by the way, you're like, man, what should we watch tonight? Let's go Netflix, scroll, scroll, scroll. Generally speaking, the deeper you scroll into Netflix, you're not going up the virtue and goodness ladder. I've found that just that you're, you're going more into the bowels of what exists out there, but okay, you pick something, you put it on and five minutes in there's some sex scene. Who's going to say in that room, Hey guys, let's pick something else. Let's pick something else. Or if they don't want to pick someone else, who's going to say, Hey, you know what? I got this test tomorrow. I'm going to, I'm going to go study. You don't have to make some big deal out of it.

Exhort one another every day as long as it's called today that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. So the, the, the, the demons want to dial down the voice of God in your life. That's the good stuff. And they want to dial up the voices of the world. Now I want to give you what I've found to be the key ingredient. You're like, all right, okay. I'm not supposed to have Christian friends with the Christian friendships. Uh, I want to give you the key ingredient, the simple key ingredient that will turn a Christian friend into having a Christian friend ship. And here's what you do. You say this to them. Is there any way I can pray for you today?

You can text it all right with me and my kids. This is the text. Okay, I've got these college kids off at school. Is there any I can print any way I can pray for you today. All right. And I'm not waiting for the bubbles. Come on. You respond. Tell me, tell me. Tell me. Okay. Maybe they respond. Maybe they don't. But nine times out of 10, within a few hours, I get a text back. Yeah. Here's how you can pray for me today. And then because they are now soon to be adults, what I get back from them, praise the Lord. How can I pray for you today, dad? So now we're starting to have like a brother and brother in Christ relationship, brother and sister in Christ relationship. So this, this key ingredient in what it does when you send this text to somebody, it shows them your spiritual care, your spiritual interest.

So I'm going to challenge you to do it with your friends. Do it with your parents and Ellison. Do it with your siblings. Do it with your siblings. How can I pray for you today? How can I pray for you today? Either verbally or through text and you're like, man, that's weird. It's like dorky. I don't want to go all Jesus freak on my friends. I agree with you. It's weird. Okay? It's godly weird. It's not the way the world works. And I'll push you. Students, give me your attention on this. If you can't ask a Christian parent or a Christian sibling or one or two, have your close, trusted Christian friends. If you can't ask them, Hey, how can I pray for you? Or if you can't ask them, Hey, could you pray for me? I've got this thing going on. I just want to suggest to you that that you may be kind of in a dangerous place spiritually because this is the key ingredient. This is like the essential piece of a true Christian friendship.

facebook.com/visionaryfam instagram.com/visionaryfamilyministries twitter.com/visionaryfam

Resources:

shop.visionaryfam.com visionaryfam.com/parenting visionaryfam.com/marriage visionaryfam.com/nevertoolate

family

parenting

marriage

visionaryfamily

visionaryparenting

visionarymarriage

nevertoolate

notsoperfectmom

@amyvfm @d6family

View Details

The most important issue for us as we go into adulthood isn't a, do we have a good college or do we have a good job or what kind of money are we going to make? But the question is, are we going to walk with you? Are we gonna follow you throughout our lives and into eternity? So I pray you'd help us with this conversation. Pray you'd help me give me the words to say and um, as we're talking in a turning to each other at different times, Lord, I pray that the conversations would be open and honest and helpful and I pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.

All right. Thriving in your faith through college. Let me tell you why this subject is so critical. Every study that you could find every bit of research that you could find on what happens to teenagers that are raised in a Christian Church. Go to a Christian school, raised in a Christian family. What happens to them when they leave the house? 18 to 22 every single study you could find says that a very high percentage of them walk away from their faith, decline in their faith, slip in their faith. Some studies it's 50% 60% 70% 80% I won't bore you with with the details, but you can easily find them on their own and students, this window of your life that's coming up 18 to 22 is an incredibly important, uh, important window, incredibly important years. Let me give you an illustration that that might help.

When it comes to faith in Jesus, faith is passed from one generation to the next. It's kind of like a Baton pass during the relay race. So parents, God willing are bumbling and stumbling along on the track, trying to follow God. All of you teenagers, all of us parents wish that we were setting a better example for you when it came to faith, but you've got what you've got. None of you are being raised by Jesus. We're all pretty messed up so we are all bumbling and stumbling along. But if you've got a parent in this room, I guarantee you that they are asking God for grace and mercy every day to run the race for Christ. They want to be faithful to him and they're falling short, but they're trying. And so what moms and dads want to do is they want to pass the Baton of faith to their sons and daughters and they want their sons and daughters to take the Baton and to run for Jesus in the next generation.

Are there any track runners here? Anybody? One sorta kind of former track runner? All right. In a relay race, if things are going to go bad, when do they go? Bad? Baton pass. Okay. If you've just got the Baton and you're running by yourself, so far so good, but at a Baton pass, the first renter's gotta be running. They've got to hold out the Baton. The second runner has got to reach back for the Baton, grab the Baton, take the Baton, and then they've got to run on their own. These [inaudible], these four years, 18 to 22 this is the handoff. This is the full transition for you students between childhood and adulthood. And so these four years, this is like your spiritual trajectory going into your adult life. So what we're going to do this morning is I'm going to talk to you about five things that you can do to thrive in your faith during these critical years.

And I'm going to do it by spending most of my time talking to students. Okay? So you might've thought that you're gonna sit here and I'm going to talk to your parents for a little while and you can check out. I'm going to spend most of my time talking to students. Now, a few of you are here and you don't have your son or daughter with you. That's all good because what I want to do this morning is kind of equip you with some conversations you can have with your son or daughter. I know I've got Joyce's here. Our kids are, JD and Keenan are on a mission trip to Peru right now. Uh, Sturman says you get, you just sent off Tyler to the dr. So, um, you may not be here with your student, but that's okay. You're going to get equipped with some conversations for home.

We'll also put this on our podcast. So for some of you you could even go home and say, Hey, you missed this thing. Let's listen to the weird seminar with Rob and talk about it. And I'm sure your teenager will love that. And this is not going to be 90 minutes of lecture as we go through these five things at the end of each one. So they're going to be short. I'm going to talk for about 10 minutes and then I'm going to turn you to your family members or friends that are sitting next to you for some conversation between, uh, between the two of you. And a matter of fact, I'm going to start you off right away. Uh, parents, I want you to talk to your son or daughter or whoever's with you. And if you don't have kids with you, you can turn and talk to a friend.

I want you to describe your faith and relationship with God when you were between the ages of 18 to 22 and you can do the good, the bad and the ugly. I'm gonna give you about two minutes. Go. All right, let me pull you back together. I'm gonna move really quick this morning through these five action points. These five things that I'm going to share with you. If you were to interview these millions of young people, they grew up in a Christian home. They grew up in a Christian Church by the time they're 25 they don't call themselves Christians. If you were to interview them, I bet you in the research would show that you would be hard pressed to find any of these five things in their life from the ages of 18 to 22 and if you interviewed those young people that continued to follow Jesus into adulthood, you would find one, two, three, four, or five of these things that I'm going to share with you.

So these are, they're powerful, they're practical, they're specific, and if you can latch onto them, it can make a huge, huge difference in your life. First one is this action point. We're doing five action points today. First one is this, define the goal and keep talking about it to find the goal and keep talking about it. All right? Personal question you can answer honestly. How many of you are Christians? You say, I'm a follower of Jesus. I fall short every day, but I'm a follower of Jesus. Okay? Lots of hands. If you raised your hand, I have a second question for you. How many of you, those of you that raised your hands would still like to be a Christian and a follower of Jesus 10 years from now? All right. I think based on my quick survey, that 100% of you that raised your hand and some of you maybe didn't and that's okay.

I'm glad you're here, but if you raise your hand and you said, yeah, I'm a Christian. I want to follow God falling short, struggling, but I want to follow him. I think 100% of you say, yeah, I think I still want to be a Christian in 10 years. I think I still want to be growing in God's grace and in God's mercy, so this is a powerful thing to tell yourself. I want to keep following God. It's powerful to tell your family. It's powerful to tell God that I want to be a Christian and follow Christ for my whole life. I know I'm going to struggle. I know I'm going to have doubts. I don't want to be a statistic of somebody who falls away. That's what I mean by defining the goal. The goal is telling yourself, telling people around you, I want to be a Christian now.

Maybe you're here and that's not your goal. You're excited to get out of the house so you can leave all this Jesus freak stuff behind you. We will talk about that in in just a minute. Parents, if your son or daughter is in that mode, they are just in a spiritually dark place right now. A very apathetic, whatever bristly in any kind of spiritual conversation. Sometimes we, some of our seminars we do here at Wheaton Academy focus particularly on that. I'm not digging in too much on that today. We'll spend a little time talking about it, but the resource back at our table that you want to make sure you leave with is called five reasons for spiritual apathy in teens. Okay, so you've got a teenager that's just sort of flat, blah, whatever with spiritual things. That's the, that's the resource you definitely want to want to leave with.

So imagine I got this. JD is a senior. Okay, so in just a few months, eight months, he's going to be heading off to school. Imagine that he looks me in the eye before he leaves and says, dad, I want to keep my faith. I want to come out of college closer to God than I am now. So he's got a goal, he's defined his goal and he's talking about it. He's speaking it and I'm able to say to him then, amen. Praise God. Listen son, I want to be closer to God in four years than I am now. You and I are on the exact same page like we are going the same direction so we can help each other. Let's keep talking about this. Then he comes home for Thanksgiving break. Maybe we've had small conversations, you know, along the way that first semester we can sit down and Thanksgiving and I can say to him, Hey, how are things going in your walk with God?

What's going good? Where are you struggling? Is it still your goal to follow Christ? Well, dad, I've been struggling with this and struggled with this, but yeah, it's still my goal to follow Christ. Can you see how powerful just those conversations are? Identifying a goal and talking about it. Think of it like this. Any rock climbers out there? Anybody done any rock climbing in your life? Come on. I had one track person. All right, faith three. You go. If you're climbing a real long pitch and you're not getting belayed from the top, which means just somebody throws you a rope down. Let's say you're climbing with two people up a cliff. You climb up 10 15 feet and you put a P, it's called the [inaudible]. You put a metal stake into the rock and you clip your rope through that metal stake, and then you climb another 10 feet up.

So now you're 10 feet above where you're tied into. So if you fall, how far are you going to fall? Math experts? 20 feet. You're going to fall 10 down to your last PTEN and 10 feet below. But as you climb every 10 15 feet, you put another ton in, another PTEN in. So your fall, wherever you fall from is just that next 20 feet down. So this is what I mean by talking about your faith goal over and over again to yourself, to God, to your family. Each time you do that. Each time you say, yeah, I want to follow God. You're putting another pizza on into the rock and then you're going to climb. You may fall. You fall back down and that last affirmation catches you. The apostle Paul talks about this. Philippians chapter three look at the way he talks about his own faith.

He says, not that I've already obtained this or I'm already perfect. In other words, I am still struggling as a Christian. I'm still falling short. He says, but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own brothers. I don't consider that I've made it my own, but one thing I do, I forget what lies behind. I'm straining toward straining forward to what lies ahead. I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Just look at how he's talking about his own walk with God. He's not getting bogged down in his struggles and his falling short says he's straining toward what is ahead. I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God. In Christ Jesus. Now read saying my goal, Paul, my goal is to walk with Christ now and forever and his ultimate goal, what is the upward call of God in Christ Jesus?

What does he mean by that? The ultimate destination of the Christian, right? Heaven and eternal life. So he's got a spiritual goal. He's got the desire of his heart and he's talking about it. In this case, he's writing about it. So this is just like the opposite of being spiritually passive or being spiritually adrift. Eat good stuff. How many you've ever heard of the freshman? 15 freshmen? 15 RI. Basically what that is a little bit of a joke, but kind of not really that a lot of college students leave home, they go off to freshman year and a lot of them put on some weight cause they say 15 pounds is the average or whatever. I actually checked the research this week. The average is actually 11 pounds, but they rounded up to F and F freshman 15 make it sound good. Maybe that's like growth stage or hormones.

It could be pizza five nights a week. We don't exactly know what it is. Quick story. So freshman year of college I had this health class and part of what they wanted to do for health class was to keep track of everything you're eating and track all your calories just to learn about your diet and you know what you're eating, all this other stuff. Okay. And simultaneously to that, I said I want, I do want to get healthy so I'm going to cut sugar out of my life. Okay? I'm going to no more sugar. And so I do this simultaneously, cut sugar out of my life and start counting my calories and adding up all my food. And I'm counting week after week, I'm eating 5,000 calories a day, 6,000 calories a day. I'm like, wow, how is this possible? I'm not having any more Coke.

I'm not having desserts. What is this? Well, it turns out that if you put a whole stick of butter on a bagel, that that's a lot of calories. Or if you have one part cream cheese, one part bagel, that's a lot of calories through. So I had no sugar involved in my life whatsoever, but I was, I was packing away the calories just fine. So here's the point with this one, okay? If you want to be physically fit, okay? You got to pay attention to what you're putting in your body. If you want to be spiritually fit, you gotta be paying attention to what you're putting in your mind and what you're putting in your heart. So when it comes to spiritual food, there's three meals, three spiritual meals that Christians need. Jesus talked about this spiritual eating. He talked about it in Matthew chapter four verse four he said, man shall not live by bread alone.

Meaning you need more than physical food. But every word that comes from the mouth of God, just like you can't live physically without physical food, you can't live spiritually without spiritual food. And there's three meals spiritually that the Bible says that every Christian needs, if you're going to be healthy, you got to have three spiritual meals. Here they are. The first one is personal prayer, word and worship. Spending time all by yourself with God is a spiritual meal. The other second meal that every Christian needs is family, prayer, word and worship. This is Deuteronomy six and Psalm 78. Uh, some of the seminars we've done at Wheaton Academy before are kind of, you know, how do we do this at home? How do we have more prayer and Bible in the home like without killing each other? Okay. And then the third meal is church with our brothers and sisters in Christ, the corporate worship service of the church, prayer together, word and worship.

So three spiritual meals, every single Christian needs in order to be healthy. Now when you go off to college, let's say you do go to college between 18 and 22, which one of these meals is in a little bit of jeopardy? Yeah, the family one, right? You may be moving out of the house. Uh, you're not living at home. You don't have perhaps family, prayer, family worship, family devotions. And so what that means is that during that window of your life, the other two meals have got to increase. The other two meals have got to increase. I was talking to J D we were out to lunch just right before his, his mission trip to Peru. And uh, I said, okay, I'm doing this seminar Saturday on, on thriving in your faith and how many teenagers leave the faith? And I asked him, I said, why do you think so many young people decline in faith during college?

And the first thing he said was, I think it's because a lot of teenagers when it comes to spiritual food have just been being fed by their parents. Okay. And their parents take them to church, their parents talk to them about God, their parents pray with them, and they're getting fed by their parents. And all of a sudden off they go to school and there's no one there to feed them. So the illustration that we talked about was this, right? The little baby chick in the nest, you've seen these pictures, it's just got his neck crank back with his mouth open and mommy's going to cram the worms down the throat. And if mommy doesn't do it, the chick's not getting anything. But once, imagine you look went out into the yard and you see birds hopping around in the grass. Imagine you saw a bird just out in the grass like this, waiting for some other bird to come put a worm in their mouth.

That ain't going to happen. Okay? Once you leave the nest, you got to go do the work. You got to dig for the worms. You got to eat on your own. And sometimes, and this is a, I don't want to say especially true, this can be especially true for parents who've got their kids in Christian education. In other words, we're putting our kids in a place where other people are going to feed them. Okay? And yeah, we're feeding them and other people that we're just, we're driving the minivan and dropping him off at all the big birds that are going to feed them. And all they have to do is open their mouth and somebody who's going to cram something in. So what happens students is that a lot of young people think that when it comes to spiritual feeding, they say, well, that's not my job.

It's not my job to do spiritual feeding. It's other people's job to spiritually feed me. Here's one of my favorite, not my job pictures that I found and if you can see this or not, but there's guys out that are painting the roads and they come to the possum and they said, that's not my job. You know, I don't pick up possums. I paint roads. So they just paint right over. I'm not, I'm not messing with that thing. Okay, so obviously you got to make the, you got to make the transition from other people feeding you to starting to feed your self. So what does this, what does this look like? All right. It means being more intentional. I'm going to talk to you about these two meals. Okay? Your personal time with God and your time in church. It means being more intentional than ever before about your one on one time with God. And I know it is a battle and it's a struggle. I don't think I've ever met a Christian. Sometimes Christians talk about their spiritual life with each other. Sometimes they'll say, Hey, how's your devotional time going? I don't know if I've heard anybody ever say to me, it's awesome. I am actually, I think I'm spending too much time with God. Honestly, I feel like I'm just overflowing with prayer, overflowing with time and God's word. Now. I'm sure there's people out there like that. I just, I just haven't met him. So it's a struggle for me. It's a struggle for my kids. So you have to keep pressing, keep pushing. If you fall off, a few days go by, you haven't spent any time in prayer and scripture. You just get back on track. Okay? Satan and the demons make this such a high priority. Okay? They do not want you getting this personal time with God.

They don't want you being fed from his word. So here's some things just in my life that I'm asking God to do for me. Um, first thing is I'm asking God to help me when my alarm goes off in the morning to, to prompt me to swing my knees off the bed, put my knees on the floor and just talk to God for 10 seconds, 30 seconds, one minute, whatever it is. Instead of grabbing my phone, right? And scroll, scroll, scroll, check, check, check, whatever it is. Remember what Jesus says. Jesus says, come to me. All of you who have everything figured out and are doing great and can pray flowery prayers is that, Hey, no, come to me, all of you who are heavy Laden in a weary right. And I will give you rest. I think God, God loves, um, I call him just needy, honest prayers.

Just Lord, I just humble myself before you. I'm a mess and I need you in my life this hour. I need you in my life today. Um, something else, just by way of personal devotion students, I want to encourage you to do this. You've got an app on your phone called podcasts. I'd encourage you to get some great Christian podcasts on your phone while you're away. You're going to need to be feeding yourself the one I listened to the most called truth for life. Okay? Truth for life. It's a free podcast and just a phenomenal, phenomenal Bible teaching that encourages me.

facebook.com/visionaryfam instagram.com/visionaryfamilyministries twitter.com/visionaryfam

Resources:

shop.visionaryfam.com visionaryfam.com/parenting visionaryfam.com/marriage visionaryfam.com/nevertoolate

family

parenting

marriage

visionaryfamily

visionaryparenting

visionarymarriage

nevertoolate

notsoperfectmom

@amyvfm @d6family

View Details

Men, these are difficult times for our nation and our families. In these moments, our families need our love and leadership more than ever before. Rob Rienow shares Scriptures that are encouraging him during these times and offer practical ways for all fathers to grow in love and leadership.

Visionaryfam.com/parenting Visionaryfam.com/notsoperfectmom

https://www.facebook.com/visionaryfam/ https://www.instagram.com/visionaryfamilyministries/ https://twitter.com/visionaryfam

View Details

During these unusual times, siblings are spending a lot of time together - for better or worse. Amy Rienow shares biblical and practical approaches for helping your kids work through conflicts and deepen their friendships.

Visionaryfam.com/parenting Visionaryfam.com/notsoperfectmom

https://www.facebook.com/visionaryfam/ https://www.instagram.com/visionaryfamilyministries/ https://twitter.com/visionaryfam

View Details

Amy Rienow encourages moms to build stronger family relationships through laughter. Even in times of stress and sadness, God can use laughter to lighten our hearts and draw us closer to one another. Amy reminds moms to laugh at themselves and look for fun ways to connect with their children.

Visionaryfam.com/parenting Visionaryfam.com/notsoperfectmom

https://www.facebook.com/visionaryfam/ https://www.instagram.com/visionaryfamilyministries/ https://twitter.com/visionaryfam

View Details

How can we make the most of this extra time at home? This is an important time to WORK with your children. Amy Rienow shares practical approaches to help your family build heart connections with one another through working and serving together.

View Details

This is an important time to PRAY with your your children. Amy Rienow shares biblical principles and practical approaches to help your family experience the power of prayer.

View Details

Open your Bibles to 1 Corinthians chapter 13, this is part two of our seven week series on an essential ingredient for the Christian life. You know what an essential ingredient is, right? It's like a necessary ingredient, so chocolate chip cookies, an essential ingredient is what? Chocolate chips. If someone comes to you and offers you a plate of chocolate chip cookies and it looks like this, you say very politely and very lovingly, you're a little confused. You thought you were being offered chocolate chip cookies because if there's no chocolate chips, it's not a chocolate chip cookie. This series is about an essential ingredient in the Christian life. If we don't have it, we don't have a Christian life. In fact, if we don't have it, the Bible goes so far as to say we don't know God. What is this essential ingredient we're talking about? Love. It is love.

Look with me at 1 Corinthians chapter 13 beginning in verse one. It says, "if I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I'm a noisy gong or a clanging symbol." In other words, if I speak with all the eloquence in the world, but I don't have love, I'm a noisemaker. Verse two, "if I have prophetic powers and can understand all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I'm nothing." So if you have all the smarts, all the genius, you know the Bible backwards and forwards, you're a person of great faith, but you don't have love, what are you according to this verse? Nothing. Verse three, "if I give away all I have, if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing." Love is an essential ingredient. It's a, if I don't have it, I don't have anything ingredient.

And now in the next four verses, God tells us what love is. Last week we got through three words. Love is what? What'd we do last week? Love is patient. This week we'll go two more words and we're going to talk about how love is kind. Love is kind. And each week that I'm with you, I'm going to do three basic sections to each sermon. The first section is we're going to talk about God. The Bible says God is love, therefore God is kind. We're gonna talk about what does that mean. Then Jesus says the most important commandment in the whole Bible is that we are to love God. So that means we are to be kind to God. What does that mean? How am I supposed to be kind to God? And then Jesus says the second commandment is that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, which means God calls us to be kind to one another. So that's the plan, let's dive in.

Part one, God is love, therefore God is kind. If I were to ask you to describe God, give me words that describe Him. You might say Creator, you might say all powerful, you might say loving. The list would go on and on, but a great one to put on that list would be God is kind. He's a perfectly kindhearted Father. Older English translations of the Bible like the King James Version, it was written almost five hundred years ago, they used a word "lovingkindness" to describe God. They took loving and kind and whipped it together in this awesome word, "lovingkindness." So Psalm 36:7 says, "how excellent is Thy lovingkindness? Psalm 69:16, "hear me, O Lord, for Thy lovingkindness is good. Turn to me, according to the multitude of Thy tender mercies." It's like, God, I know I can talk to You. I know I can pray to You because You're kind and I know You'll listen to me. Now perhaps the most amazing thing about God's kindness is that He continues to be kind to us even when we are unkind to Him.

The Bible's filled with real life examples of this with exhibit A perhaps being the Israelites as God brings them out of slavery from Egypt. So the Israelites were slaves in Egypt for four hundred years, God raises up Moses, Moses comes, says, "Pharaoh let my people go". Pharaoh says, "no." God sends ten plagues against Pharaoh and the Egyptians. The final plague, the Angel of Death goes over the land of Egypt, taking the firstborn son of every home, but spares the homes of the Israelites because they have the blood of the lamb on the doorposts and the angel passes over. After that plague, Pharaoh relents and he lets the people go.

So God gives the people a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to lead them and God leads them to the shores of the Red Sea. At this point, Pharaoh says, "what have I done? I need these slaves back" so he sends his army to get them and the people then, they see the Egyptian army coming and they say to Moses, "why'd you bring us out here to die? It'd be better if we died in Egypt." So Moses says, "fine, pack up. I'll take you back." You're like I don't remember that part. No, he didn't say that. He says, "fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord, the pillar of cloud and fire move from in front of the Israelites to behind them to separate them from the Egyptian army. Moses raises his staff over the Red Sea, the waters part all night long.

The people of Israel walk through on dry ground with a wall of water on the right and a wall of water on the left. They get to the other side, the pillar of cloud then comes back before them. The Egyptian army rushes into the Red Sea, God brings the waters back over again, not a single one of them survive. Now I want you to imagine if you had seen all these things, how would it affect your faith? How would it affect your love for God? People say all the time, "well, if only I had proof that God was there. If only I could see a real miracle." I'm going to go out on a limb and say these folks just saw proof. Is that fair? They just saw like real miracles. God is there, He's powerful, and He loves them. How long will their faith last? Three days.

The Bible tells us three days after this moment, they can't find water. So they mumble, they grumble and what does God do? He turns the bitter water sweet for them. A little while later, they're hungry. They say to Moses, "you should have left us to die in Egypt." Where's their love for God? Where is their kindness toward God after what He's done for them? So what does God do as they mumble and complain about being hungry? He rains down bread from the sky, every morning, enough for them to eat their full everyday. He rains down double on the sixth days so that they can have a day of rest and worship. Is that proof enough? Are they gonna love Him now? Well, they make their way to Mount Sinai. God calls Moses up onto the mountain. Moses is gone a long time, forty days and forty nights. So the people come to Aaron, they bring him their gold. They say to him, "who knows what happened to the Moses guy. Make us a golden cow so we can worship it as our god." Aaron does it. Now look at this scripture, Exodus 32:4, "and he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf and they said, 'these are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt' " Can you imagine such a thing? Now God rightly brought judgment against three thousand of the ringleaders that day because as I'll talk with you about in a few minutes, God's kindness does not cancel out His justice, but He continues to love and lead His people through the wilderness. Right after this event with the golden calf in Exodus 34:6, we find one of the great descriptions of Who God is. Look at this, "the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love" that's lovingkindness, that's that old English word, "abounding in steadfast love, in lovingkindness and faithfulness." So what's the point? Well, we might say, "well Rob, hey, if I saw God do all that stuff, I'd never lose my faith. I'd never complain. I'd never invent my own God." Well that's where we're wrong. See the Israelites are us and we are the Israelites. How many days go by where I don't sin? I don't think I have any of those and He still loves me, He's still kind to me.

Now we could go on and on about God's kindness to us in the spiritual realm, His kindness to us and forgiveness, His kindness to us in mercy and eternal life, but let me talk with you a little bit about God's kindness to us in everyday practical life. How many of you enjoyed, at least once this last week, some good food? Put your hand up for me. You're like, "oh, I even remember it right now." You know what that was? That was the kindness of God. How many of you enjoyed being with another person God made? He made another person unique. Maybe it's a brother, it's a spouse, it's a friend, it's a coworker. How many of you enjoyed being with one other person this week? That's the kindness of God. Did you get outside? Did you take a walk? Did you catch a fish? Did you look at the blue sky? All those things, the kindness of God. People always want to talk about, "well, if you believe in God, how do you explain evil and suffering in the world?" That's a good question and there are good answers to that good question, but you know an equally good question is if you don't believe in God, how do you explain all the joy and happiness in the world? Evolution has no answer for joy. It's not random synapses and neurons putting dopamine in your brain. It's the kindness of God. In all the pleasures we experience here, we even experience them in the midst of suffering. I've had this experience many times and it always strikes me, have you ever been to a funeral service, a funeral reception, and you're there to grieve, but even in the midst of that, people are laughing. They're remembering a story, they're remembering a special time, they're remembering something that happened with this person that they're there to remember. Even in the midst of some of our saddest times, there's the kindness of God.

Let's move to the second part. God calls us to love Him therefore, God wants us to be kind to Him. Now it's strange to use those words. God calls us to be kind to Him. It's not that God has fragile feelings, "please be kind to Me. Please don't hurt My feelings," but rather that kindness is a part of love. Now one way we can be kind to God is by receiving and enjoying the blessings that we just talked about. Let me illustrate it for you. Let's say that one of you dads builds an amazing play set in the backyard. Triple decker, tree house, the ziplines, the swings, the tunnels, the pulley system to deliver food back and forth from the house, the hot chocolate spigot, which is always available. You can feel the coveting of the neighbors and you get this thing done and you say, "alright kids, it's done! Go play!" And the kids said, "but dad, we're not done with our chores." "Forget the chores, we'll do 'em later, go play!" "Well, we'd really rather finish working." Now, the father appreciates the hardworking spirit, correct, but he's not happy with this. The father receives pleasure when the children enjoy the gifts. The whole creation is the kindness of God and He loves it when we enjoy it. So you take that walk, you watch that sunset, you catch that fish, you eat that ice cream, every now and then, you enjoy the person that God created that you like to be with. You'll hear people say, when they take time to rest, when they take time to enjoy, when they take time for pleasure, you'll hear Christians say this all the time, "I just feel so guilty, just feel so guilty. There's so much I should be doing" and I don't want to overstate it here, so bear with me, but I wonder if our bad feelings actually should be reversed. I wonder if we should feel bad when we're not taking time to enjoy the Father's gifts, but the key ingredient folks, is giving God credit for it all. Telling Him how much you appreciate it.

We hope that this message on love has encouraged you. You can find more resources for your family at our website, www.visionaryfam.com. This podcast was brought to you free of charge because of financial support from listeners like you. You can help us reach more families around the world. Please visit visionaryfam.com/donate to make a tax deductible gift. God bless you.

View Details

Hi, my name is Laynie Rienow. Thanks for listening to the "Visionary Family Ministries" podcast. You are about to listen to a message from my dad, Dr. Rob Rienow from his teaching series "Love Is." We hope that this study through first 1 Corinthians 13 will help you discover how much God loves you and help you grow in your love for God and to others.

Now let me tell you another area where I have a lot of struggle and being patient with God and that is His tardiness in sanctifying those around me. I have, you know, I have a front row seat to a lot of people. You know, at home, I've got my wife and seven children and they're all sinners. It makes life very difficult for me to be in this house with eight sinful people and you know, technically there's nine sinners with me as sinner in chief, but I prefer to focus on their problems. Amen? Amen. You see, whenever you get two people who sin in a relationship together, person who sins plus person who sins, it equals what? Sin. Yeah, so let's stop being shocked when people sin.

You know, as a parent, this dawned on me, I tell my kids, I look my children in the eye and I tell them with a whole loving heart, I'd say this to them, I say, "I don't expect you to be perfect." I say that to my kids. Isn't that a wonderful thing for a father to say, I don't expect you to be perfect, but you know what recently dawned on me, I do and you know why I learned this about myself is because when my kids make mistakes, I'm shocked. I can't believe you did that! Couple of years ago, Rush, I showed you his picture before, he's two years old. He's in the grocery store and he's walking down the grocery store aisle and he's systematically knocking products off the shelf and Amy's there with Rush and my older daughter and Amy says to Rush, "we don't do that. No we don't." And my daughter says, well apparently we do. Listen, if you want to get rid of people's problems in your life, just stop hanging out with people. That's the only, that's the only real solution.

Now listen, it's right and it's good to pray for God to work in the hearts of the people around you. It's right and it's good to pray for that friend or that family member who's struggling with anger and temper. It's good to pray for the people in your life that are struggling with bondage and addictions. It's good to pray for that, dear brother or dear sister in the Lord who's just driving you nuts and to ask to work in their life, but here's the deal, we get impatient with God because He's not cleaning up people according to our schedule and one of the vital truths that we have to preach to ourselves when that happens is that this person is not our project. Hear me, we are not sanctifying the people around us by our Holy Spirit. God is sanctifying the believers around us through His Holy Spirit, okay? God is love, that means He's patient with us. We are called to love God, that means we need to be patient with Him, but God also says to love one another.

Let's talk about God calling us to be patient with others. Now, I already told you that patience is not a strong suit for me, but we've got a group in the room right now that God has sprinkled extra patience on and that's all the moms and grandmas. If God gives you a baby, He gives you an extra sprinkle of patience so that you survive. Can we just applaud the moms and grandmas for their patience with us?Now we face patience challenges throughout our day. We're running late, maybe to church this morning, some guy in front of us is driving 10 miles. No, they're driving the speed limit and they got a fish, a Christian fish, on the back of their car. I'm like, "I love Jesus too, push the pedal on the right!"

Now here's something I learned about myself in spending hours on three words, love is patient, getting ready for this morning. Just because I can hide my unloving impatience doesn't mean I didn't break God's command to love, let me say that again, just cause I can hide my unloving impatience doesn't mean I didn't break God's command to love. I was in Panera the other day with a couple of my kids. I'm in the checkout line, person says, "can I help you?" I'm like, "yeah, I need two croissants, two muffins and a large coffee." Two croi-ssants, two mu-ffuns, large co-ffee. I'm like, is coffee really two buttons? Is it co-ffee or is it just one button? And we get done, "can I read your order back to you, sir?" No, you have got it. I trust your work first time implicitly. You were very, very deliberate with that, thank you. No, I was calm and cool, I was like the model of politeness and I get our stuff and out the door and I'm walking out the door of the restaurant, I say to my kids, "that was unbelievable. Did you see that?" Now look, let's just say that my veneer of politeness fooled the person behind the register. Let's just say they weren't offended and didn't sense my impatience. Well, I certainly didn't fool my kids and I certainly didn't fool God. Love is patient, not love looks patient. It's actually a heart commandment. It's not just an action, it's a heart command. And to that I say, "Lord, forgive me and Lord help me."

One of the key action steps, and we'll pray about this in just a few minutes, is to ask God to change our hearts. God, give me a heart of love for the people that are around me, beginning with the people that I live with. You've got to give me a heart of patience cause, I don't know about you, it's not naturally built in here and I think about this too with my relationship with Amy. My sinful, unloving impatience comes out in our marriage relationship and ends up damaging our relationship. So Amy's talking to me about something and as soon as I think I know what she's trying to say, that's my cue to start talking. Even if she's still talking,

"I got it, dadadada." And if she decides to continue to keep talking, that's my cue to take out my phone and go onto "yeah, uh huh, yeah, uh huh, uh huh yeah" mode with her until she's done. Amy had to say to me, this was a few months ago, she said, "Rob, I'd like to talk to you about something and I'd like to ask you to not interrupt me." I'm like, "honey, you don't have to like ask me not to interrupt you. I mean, of course I'm not going to interrupt you. I love you, you're my wife. You can talk about whatever you want. I'll just give you my full undivided attention." Okay, so she starts talking and thirty seconds into what she's talking about, I'm feeling, and it dawned on me, she had to ask me not to interrupt her because apparently I interrupt her. That's that spirit of of impatience. It's a lack of love in my heart, which I need to ask God to change. All right? Kids, teenagers sit up a little straighter. Give me your attention right now. Give me your eyeballs. Let me talk to you for a minute. How many of you kids or teenagers have ever experienced a mother or a father or a grandmother or grandfather being patient with you. Have you ever had a mom or dad, grandma and grandpa, be patient with you before? I bet you have. You know when your parents are patient with you, it's a way they're showing they love you. When they're helping you with the homework problem that you just can't seem to get, when they're waiting outside school or church for the event that you're in, which is going long, it's a way they're showing you that they love you. Trying to talk to you about the same thing for the 10th time or the 20th time. That's a parent being patient and loving. Now, my challenge for you kids and you teenagers, God wants you to love your parents. That means God wants you to be patient with your parents. He wants you to be patient with your mom, patient with your dad, with your grandma, with your grandpa, so it's not, "hey mom, mom, hey, hey, hey, mom, mom, mom." Maybe it's just one, "hey mom, can I ask you something" and then wait patiently for mom to finish her conversation or phone call or whatever it might be because that's the way you can show love to your parents, by being patient with them. Or maybe you are a child on the other end of the age spectrum. Maybe you are now caring for aging parents or caring for aging grandparents. How can you show love to older parents? By being, starts with a P, patient with them. So you've got to ask God for that heart. Oh, I just saw some people elbow. I just saw some grandparents say, "hey, listen to the kid. That's really good stuff. Be patient with the old man." It's a prayer from us to God saying, God, give me a patient heart toward my father. Give me a patient heart toward my mother.

A lot more we can talk about here, but as we conclude, I want to turn our attention back to the vertical, back to our relationship with God. Maybe you're here or you're watching online and you're not a Christian. Somebody dragged you here. Sometimes on mother's day we get extra church guests because a mother says, "just this once, please come to church with your dear mother" and you were loving enough to say yes to your mom and being in church today. Some people are here, you know, and you're just putting your toe in the water. You're looking for something else in life, trying to fill a hole or meet a need or find some meaning and got desperate enough to go to church.

Well, I'm really glad you're here and I want you to know this message from this portion of Scripture today is that God loves you and one of the ways He demonstrates His love to you is by being patient with you. You may have heard of the apostle Paul, the apostle Paul, he hated Christians, hated Christianity. It was his job to hunt down Christians, imprison them, supervise their executions. Paul wrote this in 1 Timothy chapter one, verse 15, he said, "the saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the foremost, but I received mercy for this reason, that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display His perfect patience as an example to those who are to believe in Him for eternal life." And maybe this isn't you today, but there's a lot of people out there that they are just shaking their fist at God. God, I can't believe, if You're there, I can't believe You did this, I can't believe You did that. There's so many people with internal and external hatred for God, hatred for the church, hatred for His Book. Why doesn't God just snuff them out? Why doesn't God bring righteous judgment against them? What's He waiting for? Well, God is love and therefore God is patient. The Bible says He's long suffering. What does that mean? He puts up with stuff for a really, really long time. Why? Because He wants you to repent. He wants you to humble yourself before Him. He wants you to stop trusting in yourself and trust in Christ to save you and there is some urgency to this. I don't want you to walk away saying, "oh boy, that's good news, God's patient and so I'm just going to keep on trucking and not worry about this stuff." God is patient. God is long suffering, but His patients is not endless. Hebrews 9:27 says, "it's appointed for man once to die and then to face judgment." Right now, it may be that the Holy Spirit is working in your heart, drawing you to God, giving you a spirit of repentance and faith and today's the day you stop running and receive the love of God expressed to you through Christ.

I'd like to wrap up our service with a time of prayer, so if you would bow your heads, close your eyes with me, I'd like to lead us in a few repeat after me prayers. Now you should only pray this if you want to, but the first prayer is this, "God, thank you for being patient with me." If you want to pray that to God, whisper it to Him right now, "God, thank you for being patient with me." The next prayer, "God, help me love You more and be patient with You." Whisper that prayer if it's the desire of your heart, "God, help me love You more and be patient with You." Third prayer, "God, help me love and be patient with the people around me. God, help me love and be patient with the people around me." Take a moment and talk to God right now in your heart. You may be the one this morning that God worked in your heart this morning and He gave you the calling of repentance and faith. Just tell Him that, say, "God, I'm done running. Thank You for being so patient with me. I want to trust Christ today." For others of you, maybe there's someone in your life that it's just extra hard to be patient with. Would you specifically pray and ask God to give you His heart toward that person right now?

God, I thank You for Your patience. Help us to love You and be patient with You, especially when we're in those seasons of our life where we're just wondering where You are and what You're doing. Wondering even if maybe You've forgotten about us. Help us Lord, to judge You not by the middle of the story, but by the end and Your promises that are sure and then God, we need You to do some big time work in our hearts to have a heart of patience for the people around us and I want to ask that You would do that heart work in each one of us today and I pray this in the Name of Jesus, amen.

View Details

Hi, my name is Laynie Rienow. Thanks for listening to the Visionary Family Ministries podcast. You are about to listen to a message from my dad, Dr. Rob Rienow, from his teaching series "Love Is." We hope that this study through first 1 Corinthians 13 will help you discover how much God loves you and help you grow in your love for God and to others.

Good morning everyone, it's great to be back with you. As you know, if you've been with me here before at Grace, I always bring one of my kids with me. Amy and I have been blessed with seven children, but it is mother's day, so rather than bring one of my kids, I brought my mom. My mom, Angie, stand up, mom, give a wave to everybody down there. My mom led me to Jesus when I was a little boy. It's a special mother's day for me to have you here. Mom, I love you, just want to honor you today. Thank you for being with me on this important weekend together.

Well, I want to dive right in as we launch a seven week series together. Want to give you a little quiz, a little test. I know it's not a school day, but I've got some fill in the blank challenges for you. We're going to start off with kind of an easier one. I hope to get you limbered up. I need you to fill in the blank for me. For God so blank the world that He gave His One and only Son. Help me here, for God so loved the world. Good, number two, give thanks to the God of heaven for His steadfast what endures forever?

What is it? Love. Give thanks to the God of heaven for His steadfast love endures forever. All right, number three. This is something Jesus said, Matthew chapter five, blank your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. What is it? Love. Some of us would prefer a blankety blank and that blank, but that's what Jesus said, love. Now one more. 1 John 4, you are sensing a trend now, I have a lot of confidence in you. Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love. We're going to spend seven weeks talking about this thing called love. It's at the center of Who God is. It's at the center of what Christ came to do for us and it's at the center of what God calls His people to be.

I want you to consider what Jesus said about this in Matthew chapter 22 verses 35 to 40, it says, "and one of them, a lawyer, asked Him," Jesus, "a question to test Him, Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law." In other words, Jesus, if You had to boil down the commands of God, now we would have been talking about the Old Testament at this point, if You had to boil down the Word of God into just one thing, what would it be? Well, Jesus answers in verse 37 and He said to him, "you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment and a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets." This is pretty incredible. Jesus says the first and the greatest commandment is that you are to love God with everything you have and a second is like it, to love your neighbor as yourself and then He makes this incredible statement that the rest of scripture, the rest of God's instructions for us, everything else comes under the umbrella of these two commandments, to love God and to love others.

Well if love is such a big deal, then we had better understand what it is. Now thankfully we don't have to come up with our own definitions. This is not going to be Rob's good ideas about relationships, we don't need Disney, we don't need Hollywood. There's a portion of scripture where God goes point by point to tell us exactly what love is and it's in the book of 1 Corinthians chapter 13 and that's where I want you to turn with me, 1 Corinthians chapter 13. We're going to spend seven weeks on four verses. This morning is just going to be three words and there's going to be three parts, three big parts, to each message that I want to share with you. We're going to start off in verse four today where we're going to learn the first definition of love, which is love is patient.

So the first thing we're going to talk about today, well, if God is love, then that means God is patient. He's patient with us. Let's talk about that. Well then, the first commandment is that we are to love God. Well, that means God wants us to be patient with Him. What does that mean? Well, we'll unpack it and then the horizontal component, God commands us to love our neighbor. Well, that means God commands us to be patient with the people around us and we'll talk about what that might look like. Are you ready to do this? Beautiful, let's go.

Let's read all of four through seven and then we'll come back to our first portion. "Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast. It's not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It's not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."

All right, today we're starting right at the beginning. Love is what? Patient. I don't know why God put this first in the list because it is not one of my strong suits. I spent many years as a youth pastor and one of my patterns at the end of the youth ministry year was to give my volunteer team, maybe fifty or so volunteers in our ministry, give our volunteer team a year end evaluation to evaluate the ministry, but particularly to evaluate me as the youth pastor and one of the things that I put on these evaluations was I want you to evaluate how much of the fruit of the Spirit do you see in my life. Book of Galatians, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. Give me a one through ten on how much you see the fruits of the Spirit in my life. So I did this for like four or five years and every year the least fruit of the Spirit apparently that I displayed was what patience. So I'm like, why am I going to continue to do this survey if I know you're going to tell me impatient? I'm just skipping the survey and moving on. So I scrapped the whole thing.

So here we are in week one and I've got to talk to you about something that God is having to do continual major league work in my life on and maybe the case is for you too and I want you to know that as we go through this series, this is not a good series to do the elbow to the person next to you. Perhaps even this morning when we talked, today's about patience, I am really glad that the Lord brought you for this, you listen to Him, you could really use this message today, it's a God appointment, trust me. Let's try to avoid that as best we can and to have the Word of God speak to us and let the Word of God speak to your neighbor. Fair deal? Okay, well let's start off with God is love, therefore, God is patient.

One of the ways God shows His love to us is by being patient with us. I would've given up on me a long time ago, I don't know about you. Do you have somebody in your life just seems like they're never going to change? Like they just won't grow up, they won't stop doing stupid stuff, they tell you they're going to stop doing stupid stuff, but they keep doing it or they've got a personality pattern, just drives you bongos. How many of us just, we get fed up, we get sick of it, how many of us? Now maybe we don't show it. Maybe we finish the phone call or we walk away from seeing them and in our heart we even say like, I am just so done with you.

Did you know God never thinks that way about His children? He's a Heavenly Father with perfect patience toward His kids. Even when He disciplines us, He does so with a spirit of patience. How many times have we committed the same sin? How many times have we gone back to God to confess that sin? How many times have we asked God to help us not do the same thing again? How many times have we even said, "God, I promise I'll never do it again" and what happens all too often is here we go again. And you'd think at some point, God might just get fed up with it all. I would, but He doesn't. He never gives up. He's never gonna quit caring about you. He's never going to quit loving you. He's never going to give up on you because He loves you and love is what? Patient.

All right. Well, the first commandment is that God wants us to love Him, which means that God calls us to be patient with Him. Part of loving God is being patient with God. Look at a couple of these scriptures. Psalm 37:7, "be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him." James 5:8, "you also be patient. Establish your hearts for the coming of the Lord is at hand."

I think an area where almost every Christian struggles with this is this whole area of unanswered prayer or what feels like unanswered prayer, where you pray for weeks, months, years, and where's God? What's He doing? A few weeks ago, my four year old boy, Rush, said to me, "daddy, I don't like after." What'd you say buddy? "I don't like after." I'm sorry, Rush, what do you mean? "Well, I don't like after. Dessert comes after dinner. Video games come after school. I don't like after." I can relate to that. I don't like after either. I like now, but no good parent gives their child everything they ask for. Now, sometimes parents say wait, sometimes parents say no.

Part of what it means to love God is to be patient with Him, but there's a key ingredient to having this sort of love for God is that we have to trust Him. Now that's not some like religious phrase. I'm talking about literally trusting Him that He loves me, He knows my future, He's never out of control and because God's never out of control and because He loves me, I don't want to stop trusting Him even when I'm in a seemingly humanly hopeless situation.

So when we're in that seemingly hopeless financial situation or that seemingly hopeless family relationship or medical crisis, see, we have to judge God, not based on our questions of what He's doing now, but with our confidence, with what He's done and what He promises He's going to do. So what do we know for sure? Well, we know for sure is that God loves us and He proved His love for us by becoming a Man in Jesus and Jesus took all of our sin when all of our sin was placed on Him. He suffered and died the death we were supposed to pay, but He didn't stay dead, rose again from the dead on the third day, and then He promises that He's coming back. In the meantime, He's given us His Holy spirit in our hearts. He's going to come back. He's gonna make a new heaven and a new earth. We're going to live together with brand new bodies that never get sick, no more tears, no more crying, no more pain, and we're going to live in perfect relationships with the family of God forever. Those are the facts and that's exactly what God's going to do.

So from those facts, we turn our attention to our current struggles. We turn our attention to our current questions and our current sufferings. See, it's so easy, even people that have known God for a long time, to just, to shake our fist at God and accuse Him of not caring. We want to judge God by the end of the story, not the middle of the story. So let me give you a couple examples of this in history. Let me tell you about something in the life of Moses in the Bible and this is a really sad story, true history. There was this time where God told Moses to take his hand and to put his hand in his cloak and when Moses took his hand out, he had leprosy. God gave him leprosy. What kind of a God would do that? What a sad story. Anybody want to add anything? You're like, well Rob, keep going, tell them what happens next! Well, God tells him to put his hand in his cloak and he pulls it out again and he's healed! Rob, this is really cool! This is awesome!

Alright let me try this again, how about Joseph? Horrible Joseph's brothers attack him, strip naked, throw him in a well, sell him into slavery. He spends years in prison as an innocent man. How could God send an innocent person to prison for years and years? Just a horrible event in the Bible. You keep going. Don't stop there Rob, what happens next? Well, you see God reveals the dreams of Pharaoh to him and he becomes second in command in Egypt and he saves Egypt and his whole family from the famine and there he and his brothers get reconciled and forgive each other and his dad moves down and it's awesome! It's like the best!

Alright, how about another one? God sends His Son, His perfect Son, sins of the world are put on Him. He's tortured and He dies on a cross. What kind of a God would ever do that? What kind of a God would ever allow that. Keep going, Rob, don't stop at Friday! Get to Sunday! He didn't die and stay dead, He rose again from the dead! So much so that you know what we call that Friday now? We call it good Friday. Yeah! What am I trying to say? You don't judge God by the middle of the story. You judge Him by the end of the story. We can have full confidence because of what God's promised Him to do. That the end, Romans 8:28, "is all good." It's all good.

Learn more about Visionary Family Ministries at: Visionaryfam.com

View Details

How many hours a day is your teen staring at a screen? How much of their social life is connected to social media? Tech is a huge part of our teens’ lives and it needs to be a huge part of our parenting. In this seminar, Dr. Rienow (www.VisionaryFam.com) will walk through essential biblical principles related to life online, social media, cyber bullying, and the latest ways to protect your family from the destructive aspects of the internet. You will come away better equipped to connect with your teen and lead your family toward Christ!

View Details

facebook.com/visionaryfam instagram.com/visionaryfamilyministries twitter.com/visionaryfam

Resources:

shop.visionaryfam.com visionaryfam.com/parenting visionaryfam.com/marriage visionaryfam.com/nevertoolate

Visionary Family with Dr. Rob Rienow: Recent Episodes

Dr. Rob Rienow

family

parenting

marriage

visionaryfamily

visionaryparenting

visionarymarriage

nevertoolate

notsoperfectmom

family

parenting

marriage

visionaryfamily

visionaryparenting

visionarymarriage

nevertoolate

notsoperfectmom

family

parenting

marriage

visionaryfamily

visionaryparenting

visionarymarriage

nevertoolate

notsoperfectmom

family

parenting

marriage

visionaryfamily

visionaryparenting

visionarymarriage

nevertoolate

notsoperfectmom