General

Since the recent sexual revolution, it has become  increasingly acceptable to sneer the family values that prevailed during the 1950s. 

Some commentators look down on the quaintness and naivety of “Leave It To Beaver,” “Father’s Knows Best,” and “Ozzie and Harriet”–as if those wholesome family-oriented shows are something to flee like the plague.

I grew up during that time. It was not perfect (which is true of every period), but there was something about the family love of that era  that should not be laughed at.

Ozzie and Harriet were right. Family is your greatest treasure. Are you nurturing and appreciating the family heritage God has given you?

Some sermons you never forget. They impact you, etch your mind, give you insight that last a lifetime. It is rewarding for me, as a public speaker, to meet people who say that they never forgot a certain message that I gave which touched their life.

Today I’d like to honor Oren Paris, one of the early leaders of Youth With A Mission (and father of singer Twila Paris), who gave a message, probably thirty years ago, that I never forgot.

His text was Psalm 16:6: “The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places. Indeed, I have a beautiful heritage.”

I don’t recall many details of the message. But I remember good ‘ole Oren, a winsome and passionate southern preacher (he started YWAM’s work in Arkansas) talking with near awe and deep gratitude for the multi-generational family God had given him.

He had good reason to be proud. His family lineage included many followers of Jesus, including quite a few Pentecostal preachers who shared God’s love for generations. They include Loren Cunningham, the founder of YWAM who is Oren’s cousin and his brother Leland who was Youth With A Mission’s North American director for many years and now works extensively in North Korea.

Oren’s family line also included a few scoundrels and prodigals as all families do. He was honest about them all.

But what struck me was Brother Oren’s incredible delight in his family. Many times in his message he exclaimed what a beautiful family inheritance he had! He was grateful for his forefathers, enamored with his immediate wife and children, and excited about their future.

Oren treasured his family heritage. He is now in heaven with many of those ancestors while others from his line carry on here on earth.

I was deeply impacted by his love of family and set my heart to treasure my own–just like Oren.

However, that revelation was harder for me because of my own background. Yes, I did grow up in the era of Ozzie and Harriet when American family life seemed wholesome and strong. But as many families know (including Oren’s!), mine experienced some difficulties.

If you count multiple generations, those trials included the sudden death of loved ones, incarceration, divorce, suicide, health problems, adoption, and even estrangement from relatives. (One Boehme relative “left” the family two generations ago and was never heard from again. I still pray for his possible children and grandchildren because God knows who they are.).

I also didn’t have any Pentecostal preachers in my background, but many good Lutherans! So I think I sub-consciously believed that our own family problems out-weighed the positives. I didn’t default to thinking of my heritage as “beautiful.”

Maybe you can relate. Possibly you were abused as a child, a victim of alcoholism, or divorce. Maybe you grew up poor, lived in a bad neighborhood, or endured various family crises that damaged your view of the “heritage.”

If you feel that way, what you went through is real–but it is not the full picture God wants you to have of the family he gave you.

Let’s back up for a moment and ponder our beginnings. Most believers accept that life started with God creating the heavens and the earth. In our minds-eye, we can see the Master Builder speaking into existence the universe, designing the plants and animals, and putting in place all the stars and planets.

When we think of creation, we naturally gravitate to God making stuff–of which we are a part.

On the other hand, if we get our idea of origins from a secular science class, the emphasis is different, but really the same. There’s no mention of God, but just a “Big Bang” that created the universe billions of years ago and evolved into what we see today.

Evolution teaches a slower and de-personalized life process, but the overall emphasis remains: The emergence of stuff. But here’s where we need a higher view. Is life really about the “stuff” around us?

I think not. Here’s a more accurate picture.

Once upon a time, only the Godhead–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–existed. “They,” the unexplainable Three-in-One, were not only the “First Family” but the Creator of what we now see and enjoy. And, the essence of the Godhead is relationship–Three-in One–loving, enjoying, appreciating, delighting and caring for each.

It is the biblically-understood Trinity that provides the only meaningful explanation of love and relationships. Evolution does not. If we are just a mass of matter, where does love, feeling, sensitivity and altruism come from? From amino acids? It makes no sense. Nor does belief in a single God who has no other relationships and doesn’t need any (such as the Islamic “Allah”).

The biblical truth about the Godhead answers the mystery. Love and family originate in the heart and mind of the eternal, omniscient, omnipresent Trinity (First Family). And the Triune God decided many years ago to multiply it.

Creation was not primarily a Big Bang of stuff. It was an Explosion of Love that the Godhead released into the universe. The stars, planets and earth were simply the backdrop. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit so desired to share their family-love relationship with others that they decided to create a universe and world where their love could be multiplied.

Thus, with the heaven and earth as a necessary environment, God had made man in his image, with the ability of mind, emotion, and freedom–the ability to enter into loving relationships with God and also with other human beings.

It was all about love. It’s still all about love. The goal of missions is love through reconciliation to God. The means of salvation was love, provided through the gruesome death of the Son.

This makes sense because God is love (1 John 3:4)

And God’s structure for experiencing, nurturing and multiplying his love explosion is the family unit. Genesis 1 tells us how God created the environment,  but Genesis 2 describes God’s real intention–creating human beings to share loving relationship with him–with the nuclear family the centerpiece.

Family–with God and other humans–is the crux of it all.

If we really understand this concept, that God created us for love and placed us into families to nurture and discover His love, then certainly “our heritage will be beautiful to us.” And the closer we look at our immediate families, we will see the hand of God in their formation.

The time frame of Ozzie and Harriet was simply a good “picture” of God’s desires for mankind–loving, caring parents, obedient children, and family nurture, unity, gratefulness and appreciation–all things that ultimately bring glory to God.

Those family attributes still exist today, but our God-denying secular culture is chipping away at them on many fronts. The AP recently did a story on how the nuclear family–especially marriage–is dying in America. You can read the sad tale here. It was also announced this week that 50% of African American youth and 40% of white American young people have been arrested. 70% of black children are born out of wedlock.

The devil is trying to destroy the family because it most represents the purpose of God.

So how can we treasure the family God has given us? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Pray for a God-given revival of loving, nurturing families.. I take a prayer walk everyday and pray for different themes. One day the prayers focus on families all over the nation and world. I also pray for for all my family members on all sides of the Boehme-Cookson family.

2. Pour great grace and love into your family relationships. A friend of ours once said that “this generation needs a lot of grace.” Lavish it into the lives of your parents, children, and grandchildren. Grace and love are the primary currencies of God-oriented families.

3. If your family is fractured, work to repair it and draw in others in need. One family on our street adopted four foster kids. We have many friends who have adopted children or are foster parents. YWAM Adoption Ministry and Streams of Mercy are good ministries to those in need of family. Support them. Join them.

4. Get together often to love one another and create rich and meaningful memories.

My most special memory this Christmas was our entire family watching a four minute video that our son Nathan produced called “Home for Christmas.” The clip was a reminder of our family heritage. It showed our old home being built, then some snippets of past Christmases we enjoyed together.

When we viewed it on Christmas Eve, we experienced a “God-moment” as every single family member (and a few additions) wept openly over the love we’ve shared over the years.

Tears of joy and remembrance.

The video is here for you to enjoy. I know it’s not your family, so the heart tug will not be the same. But put your own family faces into the reel and think about God’s love explosion that produced your unique family.

Ozzie and Harriet were right. Treasure the family God has given you.

And shout with all your heart: “Indeed my heritage is beautiful!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Disputing the Big Bang – The Family Love Explosion of the Godhead

 

It took place two thousand years ago, but the birth of Jesus Christ changed the world and brought true hope to you and me.

Today we encourage you to minimize the world’s many distractions and worship the One Who was born to die for your sins and bring you eternal life.

Here’s a great song that will remind you why He came.

Merry Christmas from Youth With A Mission.

I am a big fan of Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Charles Krauthammer. In the past few years, like a shooting star, he has ascended the heights of American punditry to become one of the most respected  commentators in the nation.

No wonder his latest book–Things That Matter–currently sits atop the New York Times best-seller list. It is a great read would make an excellent Christmas gift for any of your thinking friends and relatives.

However, after reading the book, it strikes me that although Charles Krauthammer may be among the most robust thinkers of our day, his book reveals a glaring weakness.

Charles Krauthammer has a missing source.

Dr. Krauthammer is a 63 year old  physician/psychiatrist who launched a journalism career the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981. Then, he was left of center politically.

Now he is a staunch conservative.

In 1972, during his first year in medical school, he broke his neck in a diving accident and remains a paraplegic. Whenever you see him on television, he sits upright, almost regal, in a chair, not drawing attention to the fact that he has no feeling from the waist down.

The accident changed his life, but not his spirit. Determined to finish his studies on time, he asked his Harvard instructors to come to the hospital and project his lessons on the ceiling of the hospital room. Thus began years of learning to live without lower body movement.

Her still graduated with honors–on time–with his classmates.

Now forty years later, he has reached the pinnacle of political discourse by being a regular on the Fox News Channel and writing a weekly column for the Washington Post that is syndicated in over 400 newspapers.

How did Charles Krauthammer go from being a liberal (working on Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign) to being a clear-eyed conservative? His simple answer is: “I was young once.”

Meaning? He “grew up” over the years as he watched the Democratic Party go from being strong on national defense to making deals with dictators (e.g. the present mullahs in Iran.) Like Ronald Reagan’s conversion before him, be honestly states that “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. It left me.”

On domestic issues it was a different matter. “The Democratic Party remained true to itself. I changed. The origin of that evolution is simple: I’m open to empirical evidence. The results of the Great Society experiments started coming in and began showing that, for all its good intentions, the War on Poverty was causing irreparable damage to the very communities it was deisgned to help.”

Krauthammer says, “As I became convinced of the practical and theoretical errors of the social-democratic tendencies of my youth, it was but a short distance to a philosophy of restrained, free market governance that gave more space and place to the individual and civil society. In a full circle return, I found my eventual political home in a vision of limited government.”

Charles Krathammer became a foreign policy conservative because he recognized evil in the world which couldn’t be appeased. He became a fiscal conservative because socialism doesn’t work and free enterprise does.

Now to the book. Things That Matter is an updated collection of his best columns of the past thirty years. It’s a fast-paced read with each chapter sharing a distinct thought in usually 2-4 pages. There are three sections in the book

PERSONAL

The opening section contains his most emotional writings on family, friends, manners, follies, space and earth, and his passions and pastimes which include baseball (he’s an avid and knowledgable fan of the Washington Nationals) as well as chess. (His column on Big Blue the computer beating the ‘human” world champion chess player is a riot.)

One of Charles’ greatest gifts is profound pithiness. In an article about bank robber Katharine Ann Power who killed a policeman and orphaned his children, then rationalized her actions, Krauthammer observes, “Allen Bloom once described a man who had just gotten out of prison, where he had undergone ‘therapy.’ He said he had found his identity and learned to like himself. A generation earlier he would have found God and learned to despise himself as a sinner.”

But no. The new, secular world is about self and changing the definition of sin. “Reflecting on the man who learned to like himself in prison, Bloom notes that in the life of this ex-con the problem lay with his sense of self, not with original sin or devils within him. We have here the peculiarly American way of digesting Continental despair. It is nihilism with a happy ending. Except for the orphans.”

I can’t do justice to his writing style in this snippet, but you get the point. In most of his columns, Krauthammer lays out the empirical or common sense understanding of truth and then drives it home with a verbal left jab–leaving you stunned and sobered..

“Except for the orphans.”

POLITICAL

Krauthammer is primarily a political commentator who wanted to keep politics out of the book. He says that “this book was originally going to be a collection of my writings about everything except politics. Things beautiful, mysterious, profound, or just odd. Working title: There’s More to Life Than Politics.

Then he gives a powerful explanation as to why that changed. “But in the end, I couldn’t [leave out politics]. For a simple reason, the same reason I left psychiatry for journalism. While science, medicine, art, poetry, architecture, chess, space, sports, number theory and all things hard and beautiful promise purity, elegance, and sometimes even transcendence, they are fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must they must bow to the sovereignty of politics.”

“Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything, because, in the end, everything–high and low–lives and dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away.”

“This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933. Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay and everything burns.”

Read those lines again–and never again share a negative view of politics. It makes or breaks everything else–either promoting freedom or allowing tyranny.

HISTORICAL

Krauthammer’s final section is a compilation of his best writings on past history, the 80s, 90s, the Cold War, the Age of Terrorism and what is coming in the future. Three essays in this section are speeches he gave before national think-tanks. They’re worth the entire book. One is called the “Uni-Polar Moment,”a subject you’d better become familiar with. The others are “Democratic Realism” and “Decline is a Choice.”

There are quite a number of essays in the book on the Jews, the Holocaust, Middle East etc. Krauthammer is a Jew–so he knows his own people. Maybe that’s one reason he is so brilliant: by ethnicity, he is one of God’s chosen. On the humorous side, Bob Weiner says, “the reason God created Gentiles is that somebody needed to pay retail.”

(Read that again and you’ll get it!)

Here are a few more Krauthammer quotes:

• Social Security: “The average senior receives in Social Security about a third of what the average worker makes. This is one Ponzi scheme that can be saved. Social Security was not meant to provide two decades of green fees for baby boomers.”
• 20th century: “The uniqueness of the 20th century lies not in its science but in its politics. It invented the police state, the command economy, mass mobilization and mass propaganda, mechanized murder and routinized terror–a breathtaking catalog of totalitarian horror.”
• Left and right: “Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”
• Voting: “I don’t really care what a public figure thinks. I care about what he does. Let God probe his inner heart. Tell me about his outer acts. Know them by what they do and judge them by their works.”
• Politics (again): “If we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction. Politics is soveriegn in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.”
• Border security: “When you build a wall to keep people in, that’s a prison. When you build a wall to keep people out, that’s an expression of sovereignty.”
• Jihad: “The greatest moral monster of our time is the suicide bomber. It is the ultimate perversion of the ‘good death’ done for the worst of motives–self creation through the annihilation of others.”
• Me Generation: “Its genius is to take the stigma out of self-love and turn it into virtue. Its beauty is to take health and hygiene, and make them a religion. In a political era demanding more public displays of piety and morality, liberals can now enthusiastically declare,’We got religion too!'”
• Atheism: “The declining faith in the supernatural has been accompanied by the rise of the monstrous totalitarian creeds of the 20th century. When people stop believing in God, it’s not that they believe in nothing; it is thereafter that they believe in anything.”

I agree with Dr. Krauthammer about 95% of the time. That’s despite the fact that I am a follower of Jesus and he is a non-practicing Jew.

But that brings me to his one missing source--which leapt out from the pages of Things That Matter. In a number of chapters on abortion, the origins of the earth, capital punishment and a few other issues, I put question marks or “No’s” in the margins of the book.

For example, he said he didn’t “oppose capital punishment,” but was against it. He remarked that “For some people, life begins at conception.” Also, he’s against creationism being taught in the schools and says that “The Bible is not about fact. It’s about values.” Again, we shouldn’t teach “biblical fables as science.” He also believes that the earth is 4.5 billion years old and postulates there is life on other planets (one column is entitled, “Are We Alone in the Universe?”)

A final example is a heart-wrenching treatise on the future of the Jewish nation, in which he believes Israel will either be annihilated or never return to their land again. “The Ten Tribes had melted away into history. Every other people so conquered and exiled in time disappeared. Only the Jews defied the norm. Twice. But never, I fear, again.”

On all these points I disagree. God is the author of just capital punishment. Life does begin at the moment of conception (Psalm 139). Creationism and macro-evolution are both faith-theories that should be debated. The Bible is about facts, not fables. The earth may not be billions of years old and there is no evidence of life anywhere but on planet Earth.

As for Israel? God is currently bringing the Jews back to their land where a great end time revival is coming where “all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:26). The end is not at hand for the Jews. Their salvation is nigh.

So why does is the wise and thoughtful Charles Krauthammer either confused or simply wrong on these issues?

He has one missing source: The Bible. He apparently does read it or know it. It clearly answers all those questions and many more. Charles Krauthammer believes in God, but has not grounded that belief in the inerrancy of Scripture–our guide, compass, sourcebook on reality.

By honest seeking, looking at empirical evidence, and thoughtful brilliance, Dr. Krauthammer has arrived at the truth in many areas of his life. What is lacking in his journalism is the best source of wisdom–the Bible,

I learned the majority of the “things that matter” in my life from the pages of God’s Word. I hope Charles Krauthammer finds his missing source.