Part Two: The Kingdom Agenda of The Family – Jesse B. Bilberry, Jr.
Living all of life by The Kingdom Agenda is the way God wants us to live! We need to model in a very powerful way the Kingdom of God on earth, as it is in heaven, in every area of life. Non-believers will not be attracted to the good news of the Kingdom of God by what we say, but by what they see in our lives. Lots of people in our messed-up world are dispensing good advice, but good advice has never changed the human heart. Only the Good News of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the eternal truths of God’s Word will fix America’s families and communities. I thank The Reverend Dr. Courtney Brown for affording me this opportunity. Early in my calling I recognized how important the family government was to God and His Kingdom agenda. That’s why it is so important that those who have the opportunity to be “a voice crying in the wilderness” today ought to take advantage of it, and lay out a strategic discipline of living according to God’s Kingdom agenda. We all need to take a serious look at God’s Word, which will enable us to live our lives as God intended us to live them in all areas of our lives. “The wilderness is crying for a voice!” (Voices). I pray that we all will fix our eyes firmly on the Kingdom of God and let that perspective govern our view of this universe.
Early in life and my ministry, when I heard the word family, the first thing came to my mind was father, mother and children. I know there are many people who don’t have complete families, and had no choice in the matter, whether through death or divorce. God cares very much for these people, but His ideal is still a father and a mother rearing their children in their homes, preparing them to take their place as God’s representatives in their own homes someday. The reason America and the universe is unraveling is because our families are unraveling. That’s why there is no greater effort parents can make than to keep their families together and to keep them strong. The only way this can happen is to follow God’s Kingdom agenda.
We are laying a biblical foundation for God’s alternative, His kingdom agenda for His people. So far, we have seen that the kingdom is God’s comprehensive rule over all of His creation. He is Ruler of His Kingdom, the universe is His Kingdom’s realm, and it operates by His rules.
Now we want to talk about the way God governs His Kingdom. Like it or not, all of us are under God’s Kingdom rule. Even non-Christians are under God’s rule. They are accountable to His sovereignty. They may not be in the kingdom in terms of their relationship to God, but they are under Him in terms of His position. When it comes to the way God governs His Kingdom, the word you need to grab hold of is covenant. God administers His kingdom through His covenants.
THE DEFINITION OF COVENANT
COVENANT
[kuhv-uh-nuhnt]
An agreement, usually formal, between two or more persons to do or not do something specified. It is a legally binding relationship God has ordained to administer His Kingdom. We could also say that a covenant is the biblical mechanism by which God runs His alternative program. Covenants, have also been referred to as: “The Backbone of the Bible.” We don’t talk a lot about covenants today. But we should. They’re one of the most important themes in the Bible because they act as the skeletons upon which the entire redemptive story is built. From Genesis on, God enters into one formal relationship after another with various humans in order to rescue His world. There are two kinds on covenants in the Bible you need to know: 1. An unconditional covenant is an agreement between two or more parties that involves no stipulations of any kind for fulfillment of. 2. A conditional covenant is an agreement between two or more parties that involves stipulations of some kind for fulfillment. There are many publications on “God, The Covenant Maker.” My prayer is the reader will do further study.
THE BEGINNING OF THE COVENANTAL STORY
Like every good story, the covenantal story began long ago in a land far, away—the garden of Eden. It is there that God created humans in His image to be in relationship with Him and to act as partners to help Him spread goodness throughout the world.
Since God’s first kingdom government is self-government, let us look at The Personal Covenant. When we came to know Jesus Christ, we entered into a personal covenant with Him. We turned the government, the directions of our lives, over to Him. One reason we should go to church is to find out what the Governor of our lives has to say to us.
Because we have entered into a personal relationship with Christ, when we stand before Him at the judgment seat of Christ it won’t be a group meeting. “Each one” of us must give an account to the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:10) We cannot call anybody else to stand with us. “Let a man examine himself.”
Philippians 2:12 is a verse you need to memorize. Paul said, “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” Why? Because you are personally responsible to God. The implication of this is staggering. It means we need to stop blaming everyone else for our mistakes. Someone may say, “But you don’t know what my mama did. You don’t know how my father failed and messed me up.” That’s true. That is not the issue. But the issue is what are you going to do? We need to take personal responsibility for our lives. People want the government or the church to do it for them. But God is asking, “What about you?”
God’s government always start with personal government. It operates from the bottom up within specific spheres of responsibility. This means that all government begins with self-government. Each one of God’s governing authorities cooperates and interconnect with each other without compromising jurisdictional boundaries in order to produce accountability, responsibility, and productivity on the lowest possible level. The individual should impact and strengthen the government of the family. The family should do likewise with the church, and the church should overflow to the enhancement of every institution in society.
Churches are having a limited impact on society today because they fail to understand that the goal of the church is not for the church itself but for the Kingdom. This nearsighted perspective keeps the church divided, ingrown, and unable to transform the cultural landscape in any significant way. And because this is so, society at large has no where to turn to find solid solutions to the perplexing challenges that confront us today—troubling problems such as crime, racism, poverty, and a myriad of other ills.
What kind of personal influence has the church been able to assert in the midst of this personal and family breakdown. A rapidly declining influence. While we have talked about being the family of God, we have been a family in crises, unable to provide spiritual leadership in our fledging culture. Rather than being the church in the world, we have allowed the world and it’s agenda to invade the church and help shape our thinking and our actions. This has led to weak Christians leading weak families bringing about weak churches resulting in a weak nation. It is not until the church reclaims its rightful position in society that the culture will have something to follow.
The role of the church is to disciple individuals and families in such a way that they learn how to progressively bring every area of life under the lordship of Jesus Christ. If He cannot be lord of all, He will not be lord at all. The church itself is to be viewed as an expanded household or collection of families under God’s authority and truth (see 1 Timothy 3:15).
In order to meet this goal, the church is to provide the primary collective context for its members to share in the five basic experiences. These are worship (the celebration of God for who He is, what He has done, and what He promises to do), fellowship (the mutual sharing of the life and love of Christ among the disciples), discipleship (teaching and training of a biblical worldview and becoming just like Christ), evangelism (to the unsaved in the world), and ministry (meeting the needs of others and serving God).
The church is the place where a biblical worldview is reinforced and where the Kingdom of God is corporately made manifest. The proper functioning of the church is crucial since it is the church family, not the nuclear family that marches into eternity. In addition, the church is to be the primary collective expression of God in history. It is where the principles, precepts and values of the kingdom are put on public display for the world to observe so that if any individual or institution would like to see what God would do to address a problem or need in society, all they need to do is watch the church in action. While the church is not to impose civil religion on the culture, it is responsible for being the religious conscience of civil government so that it understands and implements the principles of the Kingdom in the broader culture. In this way, the church functions as the salt of the earth and the light of the world (see Matthew 5:13-16).
THE FAMILY COVENANT
Every other institution in society is built and predicated upon the family. If the family breaks up, then those institutions that depend on strong families break up as well. Once that happens, there is no law you can pass that will make up for the devastation. There is no program you can institute that will fix what happens to people’s lives when a home is shattered. There is no politician you can elect to bring harmony and social order when the family is decimated.
No wonder Satan is attacking our families. He knows if he gets the family, he gets the future. If Satan can get a father out of the home, then he can rear a little girl who never knew what real love is like by the touch of a man who honors her. So, she looks for love through the touches of men who don’t honor her. Or if Satan can get a father to leave his family, the enemy can rear a boy to be an undisciplined and irresponsible man.
Now let’s look at God’s Kingdom agenda for His family government. The second covenant in God’s Kingdom is the family covenant, God’s foundation, the institutional building block for the rest of society. Malachi 2:14 calls marriage a covenant, and that covenant is expanded through the birth and rearing of children. The family was created to uniquely portray God’s Trinitarian character in history and proliferate His image throughout the universe (see Genesis 1:26-28).
Genesis 18:19 is a very enlightening verse in this regard. God entered into a covenant with Abraham in which He said Abraham was to rear his family according to God’s commands so that God could bring blessing to Abraham and his offspring.
Deuteronomy 6:1-9 is that great passage in which God says He is the Lord, and we are to teach our children about Him. Parents have the responsibility to get God’s truth into the hearts and lives of their children, that His blessing might come to the children through their parents. Parents are their children’s first teachers.
God told Adam about the trees of the garden before He created Eve (see Genesis 2:16-17), so Adam’s job was to tell Eve what God had said. There was to be a transfer of information from the husband to the wife—then, when they became parents, to their children.
Women have a very important role to play in the family covenant. When God calls a woman a “helper” (Genesis 2:18), how is she suppose to help? She is supposed to help her husband fulfill God’s calling on their home—and dog him until he does.
Now that does not mean that a wife is to nag or badger her husband. She is seeing her husband’s strengths and weaknesses and encouraging his strengths while taking up the slack in where he is weak. When a woman says, “My man isn’t everything he’s suppose to be,” she needs to ask in addition, “Am I the helper God created me to be?” It may be through her that the family will be preserved.
The breakdown at the personal level has had devastating effects on the American family. After almost forty years of failed social programs, the once-stable American family is rapidly deteriorating. Couples live as if they were wed by the secretary of war rather than by the justice of peace! While pastoring, a couple had to be on my calendar at least six months before the wedding. They had to go through a period of pre-martial counseling. In my thirty-five years of pastoral ministry, four couples cancelled because they would have been unequally yoked. Marriage belongs to God. He performed the first ceremony.
We are still hearing the figure of a 50 percent failure rate for new marriages, and more couples living together not married (sexual immorality). Materialism has become more important than maintaining marriages, and personal happiness has taken priority over family unity.
I want to leave you with some closing words that will encourage you. You may say, “My children are grown. It is too late to do all of this kingdom agenda work I missed. I was working too much. I was building my business. My kids are already gone. What do I do?” Your children may be grown, but it is never too late to pray. Psalm 127:4 says that children are like arrows in in their father’s hand. If you shot your “arrows” crooked, you can still get on your knees and pray for a good wind. You can ask God to catch that errant arrow and steer it back to target.
The husband lives under the authority of Christ and is responsible to Christ for the leadership and care for the family. The wife lives under the authority of her husband, and is responsible to him for the way she orders the household and cares for the children.
The children live under the authority of both parents. The authority over the children however, remains essentially one. The dotted line indicates that the authority of the mother is a derived authority, She, exercises authority over the children on behalf of and in the place of her husband. This has great practical significance for relationship between mother and children as you will see in further study on the family agenda.
Thus, God has structured the family along clear-cut lines of authority and responsibility. It is important to recognize that this structure at the outset, for it is so little understood in our day, still less practiced. Yet God has made the happiness and well-being and happiness of the family absolutely dependent upon the observance of His divinely appointed order.
Any change from that which His will has ordered only bring forth a misshapen form, for which there is no cure except a return to God’s original order.
God’s order for mates is nowhere more clearly and simply stated than in the Bible’s very first commentary upon the man-woman relationship: “Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.” (Genesis 2:24). To ‘cleave to one’s mate’ takes in every aspect of the relationship between husband and wife. There is no problem which can arise among mates, the solution for which will not be found in a deeper grasp of what it means to cleave to one another, to become ‘one flesh’ with one’s mate.
Everyone has an idea and a viewpoint, but I believe God has spoken and He has not stuttered. There are two answers to every question: God’s answer and everyone else’s. And everyone is else is wrong! God wants more than a casual relationship with us. His family government is His foundational plan for growing His creation, and He does not need us to redefine it for Him!
This is a “wake-up” call. I am so glad God is longsuffering. We ought to REPENT and bring our lives under God’s rule and passionately pursue the kingdom agenda!! We will get through this!
REFERENCES
Evans, Tony. The Kingdom Agenda; What a Way to Live! Moody Publishers, Chicago
Christenson, Larry. The Christian Family. Bethany Fellowship Minneapolis, Minnesota
