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In other words, from the Lord’s perspective, the most strategic influence over anyone’s marriage is the condition of his spirit. God points to the core of our being (our highest security command central) and says, “Guard yourself!”
What happens to men or women who don’t rule their own spirit, who allow their spirit to freely roam wherever and whenever it pleases? Proverbs paints a most disturbing picture: “Whoever has no rule over his own spirit is like a city broken down, without walls” (Proverbs 25:28).
Although this may appear overly simplistic, there’s one irrefutable, universal way to never slide down those harmful and self-destructive stages in your marriage, and that is to decide wholeheartedly you will not ever leave the never, never box!
Your answer has to do with your level of emotional loyalty. How can you know if you have crossed that invisible line when competition has won your heart and you’ve become disloyal? I advise spending time thinking, praying, and conducting a brutally honest inventory.
But this is wrong. Biblically speaking, the number-one solution to marital problems is for the individuals to grab their hearts, resolutely move them right back to the First Chair and tie them, nail them, glue them, and even staple them down. I call this practicing spiritual loyalty in marriage.
God demands our physical loyalty to our spouse. Describe a policy for how you’re going to set a course for success in this area, and share it with your spouse. With forethought and a few simple rules, you can both steer clear of a world of hurt. For example, how will you touch someone of the opposite sex? No touches at all? only a hug? Will you close the door if you’re in your office alone with “competition” for your spouse? How about meals and business travel? Again, I urge you to set a course for absolute loyalty.
An unconditional covenant, however, operates on unconditional loyalty—without any contingencies. You state it, “I will … period.” (God’s covenants with Noah and Abraham were unconditional; see Genesis 9 and 15.) In this covenant, one party commits to certain actions irrespective of the attitudes, response, or merit of the other party.
The more you understand and grasp the incredible power of the unconditional covenant you and your life partner have made, the more reason you’ll have to remain in that never, never box forever.
When the time comes that you feel that you are number one to me again and Walk Thru is number two, please tell me. But I will never ask you.”
“Yes, I do,” she said. Then she held my hand and said the words I’d been waiting to hear. “And I know you love me more than anything else in the world.”
How can we pass along our legacy of faith to our children? That, in a nutshell, is the determining question for each of us as Christian parents.
The urgency of making a spiritual breakthrough in your parenting comes from a dismaying fact: every year, sincere, dedicated First Chair Christians are raising kids who will end up compromised Christians, even some who will turn against the Lord.
When you understand clearly what God wants for you as a Christian parent, will you be willing to make whatever change is necessary? Will you take steps to bring your parenting beliefs and behaviors in line with God’s revealed plan?
Did He not make them one? Having a remnant of the Spirit? And why one? He seeks godly offspring. Therefore take heed to your spirit, let none deal treacherously with the wife of his youth. (Malachi 2:15)
Did you catch that? On creation day, God set in place a big idea, a master plan, and He put it in the safekeeping of two people—a father and a mother. He didn’t just put this plan in place for the selfish pleasure of the couple in question either. He wanted something. He was waiting for it, counting on it, and depending on it so that the rest of his plan could work: Through the union of man and woman, He was seeking godly offspring.
Remarkable, isn’t it? I mean, God could have minted godly offspring like bright copper pennies, millions upon millions of them, with no significant job description for Mom and Dad at all. Instead the Lord created an incredible, self-propagating, parent-dependent method of producing an ever-expanding population of men and women who belong to Him.
Success for us as mom and dad isn’t just about how well we run as individuals, but about how well we pass the baton.
This is God’s “big idea” for us as Christian parents, and I believe it is your heart’s desire for your family. Yet even a quick look around reveals batons getting dropped. We see families everywhere sliding into compromise. We meet adult children of Christian parents who reject the faith or spout only resentment and rage about his or her legacy.
If your children grow up in a truly committed Christian home where you as the parents have a close relationship with the Lord and genuinely seek to serve Him, your children will come to know Him as personal Savior 100 percent of the time. After polling hundreds of thousands of people around the world, I have never personally found one exception to that fact.
Yet from here on, I’m sorry to say, the generational evidence starts to lose its luster. As we noted in chapters 2 and 3, too often the children of First Chair parents have only “seen the works of the Lord,” not personally experienced them. This secondhand quality about their faith makes the children of First Chair parents tend to ride along on the parents’ spiritual coattails. When the kids grow up and have to make choices for themselves, they tend to show their true colors. It’s Second Chair all the way.
In trying to pass on a legacy to his sons, Eli had utterly disinherited them.
Our children may be the most objective test of the spiritual state of our walk with God, our marriage, and our family.
But my kids are already grown, and I see areas of serious failure. Is it too late for me?
Friend, the Lord has led you tenderly and firmly to this very place. God is waiting to restore and redeem—His very name is Redeemer (how much Satan must hate that fact!). My encouragement to you is to repent of each sin right now. That’s how cycles of failure are broken. That’s what invites God back into the process of legacy building. Tell the Lord, “I’m sorry, I didn’t do what was right. I did what came easily. I lived for myself. For all these reasons, I did not work at producing godly offspring as you intended for me to do. I really messed up. Please forgive me and show me what to do
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Almost every sociological study that I am familiar with has summarized their research on this topic in the same way: A parent has by far the greatest influence—greater than friends, school, or media—in determining the character and direction of the child. The question isn’t whether you have influence over your child, but what kind of influence you exert and for what ends. God’s plan is that your influence would be so attractive and compelling that your child leaves your home with heaven’s designation of “godly offspring.”
Mom or Dad, my encouragement to you is to take a finish-line mentality—invest every shred of your energy and dedication to seeing your children cross the finish line for God.
How much Darlene and I want our children and grandchildren to be beautiful instruments in the hands of the Master! We want each of our offspring to be “handmade”—shaped intentionally, patiently, and skillfully (as God’s Word guides us) to be all that they can be for God.
We have to be careful in our parenting that what we say we want matches what we’re doing to make what we want happen.
The Christian community is packed with parents who talk and pray and worry and give testimonies about raising godly kids. But if you look past the words to the actions, you see that they don’t really connect.
Let’s put the question in simple terms: “How can I by word and deed actually raise godly, committed First Chair children who will please God, make my heart sing, and—when I’m old and wrinkled up like a prune—make my whole life feel worthwhile?”
God never starts with consequences but with causes. And godly parents cause godly kids.
Personal godliness—for us and our kids—is always rooted in a living, breathing, flourishing relationship. And that kind of relationship never starts with behavior or requirements. It starts in the center of your being.
Powerful teaching is not, ultimately, about the teacher’s techniques; it’s about the teacher’s heart. Nothing will influence a student more immediately and more profoundly than the heart of the teacher.
First, make sure your heart longs for God and God-pleasing behavior,” says Moses. “Make sure that the power is turned on!” Only then does he go on to urge parents to teach this same priority to their children.
if our driving commitment is love of our children instead of love of our Lord, we will fall short of passing on our legacy.
Right after telling Israelite parents they must start by loving God, Moses tells them they must love His truths. Only as God’s commandments are fully applied in their own lives will they succeed in passing godly living on to the next generation:
Yet the real issue isn’t how many Bibles we own, but how much of us the Bible owns. And ownership is nearly impossible to hide.
God has had your mission of raising godly kids in His mind from the beginning of time, and He wants you to succeed even more than you do.
If you’ve personally experienced God’s works, you can stand up and tell anyone, “You gotta hear what God did in my life. It’s changed everything!”
The elder generation grew up seeing and hearing about God’s provisions and power. With the death of the first generation, however, those works became memories, not determining life events.
“When all that generation [of elders] had been gathered to their fathers, another generation arose after them who did not know the LORD nor the work which He had done for Israel” (Judges 2:10).
First Chair parents love Psalm 78 because it so clearly describes how God wants His exploits talked about in families. The whole psalm is a recounting of things:
The pressing reason to preserve this testimonial, the psalmist declares, is that things have gone terribly wrong in the past on this very point: And may not be like their fathers, A stubborn and rebellious generation, A generation that did not set its heart aright.… And forgot His works And His wonders that He had shown them. (Psalm 78:8, 11)
The next step is to span the chasm of time from past to present by never missing an opportunity to tell your children what God is doing in your life, your family, your finances, your heart and mind right now.
It’s clear that God wanted the parents to teach all the time, in one way or another, and to demonstrate that their faith not only was private but also public. As you think of expanding the influence of your own parental teaching, could you add to your verbal or nonverbal communication either through private, personal, or public avenues?
A First Chair parent is being prepared every day by the Holy Spirit to be the host or mediator or go-between for a child who is waiting to meet God personally. And as I mentioned earlier, this nearly always happens before adolescence.
“Ask Jesus to be king of your life every day. Commit to do what He wants. Try to serve Him at home and school. He is always with you to help you and love you.”
Ultimately, the goal of the Father for your children is not only that they come to know Christ as their Savior, not only that they know and believe His mighty works, not only that they know and obey His inspired Word, but that they choose of their own free will to love and serve Him.
We seem to have forgotten that our children have been loaned to us as a gift from the Lord, that our purpose is not to use Christianity to give them a safe and secure life but to spend our opportunity as parents to raise them up as godly, committed, and wholly usable servants for God’s greater purposes.
One of the saddest discoveries I made was how few Christian college students have any kind of understanding or even belief that the Lord has a specific call upon their lives.
