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As a Christian, I believe fervently that my faith in the
Lord Jesus Christ should impact every area of my life. Consequently, my new life
in Christ should impact how I function as a husband, father, son, brother,
church member, and citizen.
As a husband, I am commanded to love my wife “even as
Christ also loved the church and gave himself for it” (Eph.5:25). A husband who
is following this divine mandate will always put his wife’s needs above his own.
The wife is commanded to put herself under the authority of her own husband “as
unto the Lord” (Eph. 5:22).
God designed the home with the husband and wife becoming
“one flesh” through God’s gift of sex (Gen.2:18-25). Jesus reaffirmed God’s
design for the home, emphasizing that this union was to be permanent. “What
therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matt. 19:6).
It is in the permanence and safety of such a home that God
intended for children of the husband and the wife to be raised by a mother and a
father who rear them “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph 6:4).
The Southern Baptists confessional statement, The
Baptist Faith & Message, defines the spiritual nature of the biblical,
Christ-centered family succinctly:
God has ordained the family as the foundational
institution of human society. It is composed of persons related to one another
by marriage, blood, or adoption.
Marriage is the uniting of one man and one woman in
covenant commitment for a lifetime. It is God's unique gift to reveal the union
between Christ and His church and to provide for the man and the woman in
marriage the framework for intimate companionship, the channel of sexual
expression according to biblical standards, and the means for procreation of the
human race.
The husband and wife are of equal worth before God,
since both are created in God's image. The marriage relationship models the way
God relates to His people. A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the
church. He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to
lead his family. A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant
leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship
of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to
him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his
helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation.
Children, from the moment of conception, are a
blessing and heritage from the Lord. Parents are to demonstrate to their
children God's pattern for marriage. Parents are to teach their children
spiritual and moral values and to lead them, through consistent lifestyle
example and loving discipline, to make choices based on biblical truth. Children
are to honor and obey their parents.
Genesis 1:26-28; 2:15-25; 3:1-20; Exodus 20:12;
Deuteronomy 6:4-9; Joshua 24:15; 1 Samuel 1:26-28; Psalms 51:5; 78:1-8; 127;
128; 139:13-16; Proverbs 1:8; 5:15-20; 6:20-22; 12:4; 13:24; 14:1; 17:6; 18:22;
22:6,15; 23:13-14; 24:3; 29:15,17; 31:10-31; Ecclesiastes 4:9-12; 9:9; Malachi
2:14-16; Matthew 5:31-32; 18:2-5; 19:3-9; Mark 10:6-12; Romans 1:18-32; 1
Corinthians 7:1-16; Ephesians 5:21-33; 6:1-4; Colossians 3:18-21; 1 Timothy
5:8,14; 2 Timothy 1:3-5; Titus 2:3-5; Hebrews 13:4; 1 Peter 3:1-7. (Baptist
Faith & Message, 2000)
The local church, a committed group of Jesus’ disciples,
should follow His admonitions concerning marriage and family life. When they do,
the husband and wife are devoted to each other and to fulfilling their God-given
duties as parents. Such parents will disciple their children in the faith and
live before them a personal example of what a Christian man, husband, and father
and a Christian woman, wife, and mother should be.
In seeking to fulfill their divinely mandated
responsibilities to God, to each other, and to their children, they will lead
them into the full life of the local church. All believers are admonished to
regularly assemble themselves together, “exhorting one another” in the Lord
(Heb. 10:25). The Apostle Paul explains that believers need to be in regular
fellowship and worship together because God gifts different parts of the His
body, the church, with different gifts, and it is only together, each
ministering his or her gifts to each other, that we can reach toward full
maturity in Christ (I Cor. 12-14).
Each Christian home should be a pro-Christian marriage,
counter culture in an increasingly uncomprehending and secular culture. Each
local congregation of Christians should consider itself a pro-Christian
marriage, counter culture where the members encourage one another in the Lord
and help each other understand how to be more biblical husbands, wives, fathers,
mothers, sons and daughters.
Michael McManus and his wife Harriet have provided clear
and compelling evidence of the difference faith commitment and church
involvement can make in keeping families together. Through their Marriage
Savers program they have teamed up with more than 10,000 clergy in over 200
cities to establish “Community Marriage Policies.” The results have been truly
astounding.
In the first 122 communities, divorce rates fell an average
of nearly 20 percent in seven years, cohabitation rates dropped 33 percent and
marriage rates have continued to rise with the passage of time. The McManuses
have shown that when churches commit to meaningful pre-marital counseling,
marriage support groups, and the mentoring of younger couples by older couples,
the pro-marriage and intact family results are extremely astounding in all types
of American communities: urban, suburban, rural and North, South, East and West.[1]
There is ample, manifold evidence that such conscious
support and activity on behalf of families and churches impacts families and
their children in very positive ways. In Hardwired to Connect. The New
Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities the scores of researchers and
social scientists who compiled this ground-breaking study concluded that the
connectedness of intact families both benefitted from, and promoted, religiosity
in important and substantial ways.[2]
An important recent study by Doctors Nicholas Zill and
Philip Fletcher found that in the United States:
An intact
two-parent family and regular church attendance are each associated with fewer
problem behaviors, more positive social development, and fewer parental concerns
about the child’s learning and achievement. Taken together, the two home-environment factors have an additive relationship with child well-being.
That is, children who live in an intact family and attend religious services
regularly generally come out best on child development measures, while children
who do neither come out worst. Children with one factor in their favor, but not
the other, fall in between, scoring less well than those who have both factors
going for them, but better than those who have neither factor in their favor.[3]
In 2008, the Barna research
group released new data on marriage and divorce in America. The research
revealed that while most Americans still get married, a surprising 22 percent of
adults had never been married. Additionally, 33 percent of those who did marry
had divorced at least once.[4]
The population subgroups with
“the lowest likelihood of having been divorced subsequent to marriage” were
“Catholics (28 percent)” and evangelicals (26 percent).[5]
As the Barna group delved into their data, they found that people who identified
themselves as “born again” Christian—defined “as people who said they have made
a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in their life
today and who also indicated they believe that when they die they will go to
Heaven because they had confessed their sins and had accepted Jesus Christ as
their Savior”—experienced no difference in divorce rate from the general
population.[6]
Surprisingly, such born again
Christians had the same 33 percent divorce rate as the national average
unless they also fell into the “evangelical” sub-group of born again
Christians (26 percent divorce rate) who not only meet the born again
requirements but had seven other distinguishing characteristics described as
follows:
saying
their faith is very important in their life today; believing they have a
personal responsibility to share their religious beliefs about Christ with
non-Christians; believing that Satan exists; believing that eternal salvation is
possible only through grace, not works; believing that Jesus Christ lived a
sinless life on earth; asserting that the Bible is accurate in all that it
teaches; and describing God as the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity who
created the universe and still rules it today.[7]
The inescapable conclusion one
must draw from such statistics is that, at least for Protestant Christians in
North America, depth of faith and felt sense of duty to practice that faith has
a significant impact on marriages remaining intact and healthy.
When the Barna research is
combined with both the McManuses’ experience and other secular research, it is
clear that when people of faith live their faith and associate with others who
live their faith, it has a very significant positive impact on both the survival
of families and the quality of life in those families.
Endnotes:
[1]
Michael McManus, Marriage Savers (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995);
Michael McManus, Insuring Marriage (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,
1996); and Michael & Harriet McManus, Living Together: Myths, Risks &
Answers (West Monroe, LA: Howard
Books, 2008).
[2] Hardwired to Connect. The New Scientific Case for Authoritative
Communities. A Report to the Nation from the Commission on Children at
Risk (New York: Institute for American Values, 2003). pp 27-31. cf.
Why Marriage Matters: Twenty-One Conclusions from the Social Sciences
(New York: Institute for American Values, 2002).
[3]
Nicholas Zill and Philip Fletcher, Special Report: National Survey of
Children’s Health Finds Intact Family and Religious Participation Are
Associated with Fewer Developmental Problems in School-Age Children
(Madison, WI: Wisconsin Family Council, 2008) p.1.
[4] “New Marriage and
Divorce Statistics Released” (The Barna Group of Ventura, California,
May 31, 2008). www.barna.org.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
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