Experiencing God at Home (26 page)

Finances

A third area that must be adjusted if you are to join in God’s work is your finances. Where you put your money reveals what is most important to you. At times, parents make the mistake of donating money to their church and other charities without letting their children participate in the process. Your children need to learn that money is not something to be greedily hoarded but generously invested in God’s kingdom. When appropriate, children should participate in decisions concerning how family finances are donated.

When Richard’s son Mike graduated from college, Richard and Lisa gave him a unique graduation gift. It was an orphan from Bolivia. Richard and Lisa signed Mike up to sponsor the young girl through Compassion International. They paid the first couple of months while Mike got on his feet financially, then they left the monthly payments to him. Mike was thrilled!

There are innumerable ways in which you may need to adjust your finances in order to join God in His activity in your home. Some parents turn down promotions or lucrative transfers because they know their teenager is plugged in to his youth group. The parents realize God’s activity in their child’s life at that crucial stage of development is more important than the parent advancing another rung up the corporate ladder. Parents may decide to spend less on Christmas gifts so their family can go on a mission trip instead. Our parents wanted to invest in the spiritual condition of their children and grandchildren, so they paid to bring them all on a trip to Israel. Though it cost a lot of money, what a thrill it was for them to sail on the Sea of Galilee and to stand on the Temple Mount along with their grandchildren and talk about the significance of the Scripture with them! When we were both in college, our parents wanted to help us experience an international trip. They paid for us to go to Austria. We had an amazing trip seeing numerous tourist sites. We also got to participate in a worship service with Romanian refugees who had escaped from their oppressive Communist regime so they could practice religious liberty. Many escaped with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Some were shot at as they swam across the river to freedom. As we worshipped with these people, it was incredible. They were filled with joy! They would approach us and lovingly share Bible verses with us. They worshipped for hours, having four different sermons, Communion, and a foot washing! As two North American Christians, we had never witnessed anything like that! To this day we have no idea how our parents came up with the money to pay for that trip. They just knew it was important. But even they might have been surprised to know how many dozen countries we would minister to in the following years as a result of the seeds our parents planted in our hearts when we were college students.

The key is not the dollar amount you spend on your children. Some families have more income than others. The crucial factor is being willing to adjust your spending as the Lord directs you so you can join Him in what He is doing in your children’s lives. We might also add one caution. Sometimes we get too obsessed with what it will cost us to do what God is telling us. The price may seem too steep. We may know it would be good to take our teenager on a mission trip or to forego a promotion to stay near home, but we may balk at the apparent cost involved. The problem is that at times we fail to consider the cost involved for
not
following through with what God is calling us to do. The price of disobedience to God is
always
far greater than the cost of obedience!

Family Time/Vacations

A final area of adjustment for parents is with family time. As we’ve shared, we grew up in a home that was always filled with guests around the dinner table. Our father had the world’s
worst
puns! We’d sit around the dinner table and try and “one up” each other with a play on words. Guests would look on in bewilderment as we would laugh uproariously. We never had a large home, but we seemed to always have company. We learned that our home was an oasis of healing. On at least two occasions, high school or college students who were thrown out of their home by their parents ended up at our house when they had nowhere else to go. Latchkey kids often spent time after school at our house. Holidays were often an opportunity to share our joy with others. Both of our families have shared Christmas with people who had nowhere else to spend it. One year, Richard’s family became aware of a single young woman in his church who worked with college students. She was unable to return home to spend Christmas with her family, so Richard invited her to share Christmas with his. Richard secretly asked people in the church to contribute Christmas presents for their guest. On Christmas morning, the young woman was overwhelmed when Richard’s children kept pulling more and more presents out from under the Christmas tree with her name on them. It was a wonderful opportunity for Richard’s children to experience what it was like to bring joy to someone else rather than merely indulging themselves.

There are times when you may feel that God is leading you to use your family vacation to go on a mission trip or to invest at least a portion of the time helping someone in need. Our uncle Will took his family to the same vacation spot every summer for years. Each year they would minister to the same small church near their campsite. The children would bring their instruments to play special music, and their family would seek to bless the small church each year. Their family still had lots of fun, but they also incorporated blessing a local church into their vacation plans.

Of course, there are times when God may lead you to focus specifically on ministering to your own family rather than to others. The important thing is being open to how God might lead you to use your family times for God to work in and through your home.

Summary

You cannot go with God
and
stay where you are! The reason more Christians are not experiencing God is that they are unwilling to make the adjustments required to join God in His work. Whether it is helping your children adjust to God’s activity in their lives, or it is you making the adjustments, it is crucial to respond immediately to what God is doing. We hope that in the coming days you will be quick to respond to whatever it is God asks of you.

Questions for Reflection/Discussion

1. What are some adjustments you sense God wants your children to make? How might you help them do that? Where do you think the greatest area of struggle might come in that process?

2. How might you need to make adjustments in your walk with God if you are to join Him in what He is doing in your children’s lives?

3. How might you need to adjust your schedule to join God in His activity?

4. How might you need to make adjustments in your finances to join in God’s activity?

5. How might you adjust your family times or vacations so God can work in fresh ways in your home?

Chapter 14

You Come to Know God by Experience as You Obey Him and He Accomplishes His Purposes through You

A Sad Car and a Happy Daughter (A Story from Tom)

My daughter Erin called recently and informed me there was a loud noise emanating from her car engine and lots of liquid on the street. She was able to drive it safely to a parking lot where she was hoping I could magically solve her problem over the phone. It turned out her 1996 Neon was on its last legs. I had already changed the brakes, brake pump, radiator, gas intake pipe, lights, and tires. Now the water pump was gone. My mechanic friend and I fetched her car, and through a series of driving, stopping, refilling the coolant, driving, stopping, refilling the coolant, we eventually made it home. I intended to perform the four-hour ritual of installing a new water pump myself. Well the four-hour job mushroomed into eight, with no end in sight. In desperation, I called my mechanic friend to rescue me. No amount of phone calls was going to get that water pump replaced. He brought the right tool (which I didn’t know existed) to dislodge the pump, and within minutes it and the timing belt were replaced with covers, bolts, and screws all tightened fast. When the master mechanic works with you, things go a lot quicker! I received a nice “shout out” on Facebook from my daughter along with a photo of a dishevelled dad with greasy hands and a bemused look on my face.

Involving God through Obedience

“Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” This quote has been attributed to Confucius. It may be an elaboration on another quote attributed to him: “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand” (circa 450
bc
).

Many of us have heard Bible stories since childhood, but we could never identify with them, nor did they seem real to us or applicable to our daily lives. We may have listened to stories about God’s amazing work through the great saints of the past or through missionaries in remote villages, but it always involved
other
people in
distant
places. There is a heart cry within many Christians today to experience in their life what they have heard about all of their life.

The Christian life was not meant to be
read
about
but to be
experienced
.
It is only as we step out in faith, as God prompts us, that we experience in our life what people in the Bible experienced in theirs. The quickest way to help young believers grow in their faith is not to have them read a book about it but to take them by the hand and guide them to obey God’s instructions themselves, one step at a time.

There is an interesting story in the life of Joshua that, while truly spectacular, has great implications for our life and family:

When the people broke camp to cross the Jordan, the priests carried the ark of the covenant ahead of the people. Now the Jordan overflows its banks throughout the harvest season. But as soon as the priests carrying the ark reached the Jordan, their feet touched the water at its edge and the water flowing downstream stood still, rising up in a mass that extended as far as Adam, a city next to Zarethan. The water flowing downstream into the Sea of the Arabah (the Dead Sea) was completely cut off, and the people crossed opposite Jericho. The priests carrying the ark of the L
ord
’s covenant stood firmly on dry ground in the middle of the Jordan, while all Israel crossed on dry ground until the entire nation had finished crossing the Jordan. (Josh. 3:14–17
hcsb
)

Joshua had only recently been commissioned as the top general of his nation. He didn’t have a lot of experience at the helm, yet people must have wondered what they were in for when he ordered the army to begin marching straight for a fast-flowing river! That was not the most strategic way of launching an invasion! If the army
did
get across, they’d be trapped in a land brimming with enemies who wanted to kill them. It appeared that the young general was marching his army headlong into a disaster. Yet this was no random decision on Joshua’s part. He wasn’t trying to prove he could be just as daring as Moses had been. The Israelites were stepping into the Jordan River in
obedience
to what God had
told
them to do. When Moses parted the Red Sea, he had done so by raising his staff
as God directed
(Exod. 14:16). Joshua might have been excused if he had frantically scrambled to find Moses’ staff as they approached the edge of the river! This time, however, God did not make use of any shepherding paraphernalia. Instead, He instructed the priests to take the lead and march straight into the river.

How did the priests know the water would part as their feet touched it? They didn’t. For all we know, the priests at the front were taking deep breaths and strapping on their life vests (water wings)! But forward they went. The most significant truth of this story may be this: the water didn’t stop flowing until their feet touched it. Had the Israelites decided to stop at the river’s edge and wait for things to dry up, they might still be waiting! Often God’s power is not exercised until His people’s feet get wet. The priests and soldiers had all heard stories from their parents of how, in an earlier era, God parted the Red Sea. Only that day, they weren’t hearing stories about what God had done through other people; they were experiencing God’s power
firsthand
.
Our children don’t need to merely hear about what God did in the Bible, or through missionaries in the 1900s, or even in our life. They need to experience God firsthand.

Stepping Out in Faith (An Example from Tom)

Every family should have its own “Jordan River” experiences where God performs miracles as they obey God’s will. A couple of years ago I faced a crisis. I was trying to pass through the airport in Lagos, Nigeria, with my seventy-five-year-old father. Due to delays in previous flights, we arrived in Lagos after the check-in counter had closed. Though the plane did not leave for another hour, we were told it was too late to check in. With my father being diabetic, the next plane to Atlanta leaving two days later, and our plane still sitting at the gate, we had to find a way to get ourselves (and our luggage) aboard. My father is anything but a confrontational person (he would rather wander down the aisles of Walmart for hours before he would bother to ask an employee for directions to the laundry detergent aisle), so I knew that though he has flown roughly three million miles over the years, he was not exactly going to get “raucous” with the airline agents in order to get us checked in! We bowed our heads in the crowded airport and prayed for God’s intervention. As we approached an agent, he firmly shook their head and said “no” to our plea, mumbling something about “airline policies.” But then gradually, he relented and agreed to allow us to present our case to the person in authority over him. The process continued (slowly) while we watched our plane being loaded and preparing to depart (without us). My father remained remarkably calm (there are times he can look amazingly “Moses-like!”). I, on the other hand, was on the edge of panic, knowing how difficult it would be to be stranded for two days in that foreign city. I tried to summon all of my charm and problem-solving ability and, when that didn’t work, attempted to look as pitiful and pathetic as possible! (That wasn’t difficult!) Without going into all the details of what God did to get us on that plane, I can assure you that when we finally boarded our plane, we knew we had just witnessed God in action helping us arrive home safely. God didn’t have to part a sea or a river, nor did I get to use a cool shepherd’s staff. But God had miraculously parted a sea of red tape and had made a pathway through bribery-infested, corrupt, inefficient bureaucrats. When you repeatedly experience God intervening in your life in practical ways, you marvel at how amazing life can be when God walks with you throughout each day.