The Importance of Family
The health of your family will have consequences for generations to come. Dysfunctional families produce dysfunctional kids who grow up to be dysfunctional adults who create their own dysfunctional families, and the cycle continues. At the Life Center we want to support and educate parents so that this cycle will stop in its tracks.
God designed the family unit, so He knows how it works best. The further we get from His design the more broken our family becomes. It’s like buying a piece of furniture and not looking at the instructions to assemble it. You are probably going to do something wrong or skip a step and your piece of furniture won’t be as sturdy as it could have been. God gives us instructions on how a family should operate in the Bible.
A healthy family starts with a healthy marriage. This is the part that we so often get wrong. While children can still grow up well in a family where their parents are not married or have a broken marriage, it will still negatively affect them. Children learn by what they see and experience much more than what they are told. A child who grows up seeing a strong healthy marriage learns how to communicate, how to take care of a family, how to love and receive love. They carry those lessons with them through their whole life and will implement them in their own families one day.
What does a healthy marriage look like? God gives us the instructions on marriage in Ephesians 5:22-33. The passage ends with this, “Let each one of you love his wife as himself and let the wife see that she respects her husband.” According to God, a healthy marriage is one of mutual love, respect and service. Husbands should love and protect their wives and wives should respect and serve their husbands. When both husband and wife are doing their best to take care of the other the marriage thrives.
When a marriage thrives the children of that marriage thrive. What about the relationship between parents and children? What are God’s instructions on that? Ephesians 6:4 says “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” Parents are blessed with the great responsibility of molding the next generation. Your children may be little now but one day they will be adults. It is your job to teach them right from wrong, to be responsible, hardworking, kind and loving. It is your job to steer them away from bad behavior and bad habits with loving but firm discipline.
Forming a healthy family, especially if you were not raised in one, is hard work. It requires dedication and sacrifice. But it is so worth it to break the cycle of dysfunction.
The good news is you don’t have to do it on your own. The Life Center is here with classes on marriage and parenting, as well as biblically based peer counseling to support you and your family on this journey.
