Priorities

A few months after we started walking seriously with God we saw a tape of Pastor David Yonghi Cho from South Korea. This man spoke of how he started walking with God as a young man in a nation so poor that people literally laughed at him for thinking that he could even get a bicycle, and now he pastors one of the largest 'churches' in the world; 1/2 million people or some such. But he also spoke openly about how his own children had suffered because he was so busy 'doing the will of God' that he had no time for them at all, and how they suffered now as adults from the neglect in their childhood due to his calling from God.

To be honest, this man spoke of a Christian experience that I had never even imagined at that time... everything was so new to me, and I felt in no position to make a judgment about that – and probably wasn't. But now that some time has passed, and I have considered it careful and well, I have to posit that this great pastor completely missed his primary calling in life – to parent his own children – and so compromised his qualification to even serve as an elder in the first place.

This a grave warning to me, and a warning to us all.
All this was brought to my mind as our family was watching a DVD of Chip Ingram teaching about 'Your Calling'. I have a lot of regard for Chip, but in his teaching about your calling in life it was very striking to us how 'job' oriented his whole teaching was, and basically no time was devoted to the family.

Folks, our priorities before God fall into four categories.
1st Priority: God
2nd Priority: Spouse
3rd Priority: Children
4th Priority: Everything Else

By this I mean your immediate, personal relationship with God, Spouse, and Children. Going to 'church' is Priority Four, not Priority One. Going to 'work' is Priority Four, not Two or Three. We easily convince ourselves otherwise. The natural flow of life in this world presses us in the opposite direction. It presses us to devote ourselves to our 'job' first, to the kids second, to our spouses third, and then, if there is anything left over, to God. This alone goes a long way to explaining the high divorce rate in our culture. Often the kid's time is actually dedicated to sports, cheerleading (of all things!), Youth Group activities, etc. Because the Western 'church' has accepted this pattern our results vary little from those of the secular society.

Looking at this ordinary Christian view of life, it seems that the accepted norm for the Western 'church' is not the Biblical depiction so much as some sort of Hollywoodish, Make-Room-For-Daddy, Father-Knows-Best view of a time somewhere in the earlier 20th century, where Father leaves the home each morning in the Family's one car, the children go off to school for the day, and the wife stays at home to 'keep' the empty house (presumably from being completely empty), and society's worst troubles are kids running in the school-halls and chewing gum in class.

All this is, of course, merely a 'pleasant fiction', but it does seem to be the frame of reference through which the 'church' views all the scriptures on the family. But it doesn't really fit the Biblical picture at all.

To begin with, the woman was given to the man to be, "a helper comparable to him." Today, the woman is most often the helper of another man, as an employee outside the home. If the man has a 'helper' it is likely another woman hired to do the job for pay; and at any rate the man and usually the woman are performing their work day in and day out with other members of the opposing sex instead of their own spouse.

Then, the man and his helper are supposed to be engaged in the training and rearing of 'Godly seed' (Malachi) who are taught the commandments of God day in and day out by their own father and mother. Instead they are sent out of the home to be taught a God-less 'education' by the schools (public, private, or religious); raised primarily by their child-peers, secondarily by the hireling-teachers that are vastly overwhelmed by the number of students.

The man is supposed to be engaged in some productive/constructive enterprise, his wife should be his helper, their children should be cared for by the man and his wife who are raising them first in godliness, and second in the craft or trade or industry or agriculture that the parents are engaged in: both to help the family, to raise Godly seed, and to teach the children a living and the value of work. Education is included in the process, but education is a means to an end, not the end. There is no point in education for its own sake apart from producing the Godly result.

Instead, the man and his wife go to a job and invest most of their emotional ties on a daily basis in the people of the 'workplace'. The children are raised by strangers and hirelings in an impersonal institutional system, with no real work engaged in, and lots of so-called 'education' for its own sake, but no learning of any real trade or craft, to the end of producing employee-minded young adults who also will go out and get 'jobs'. To make up for missed child-rearing, the man and his wife spend their remaining time and marriage shuttling the kids to various busy-ness activities and catering to them by sending them to spend time in the homes of children that they spend all day with anyway. All of this is designed by the god of this world to ensure that Godly seed are not raised, and that children are maximally influenced by society, secular music, TV, movies, worldly thinking, and unbiblical belief.

This mindset has so infiltrated the churches that it is almost impossible to tell the difference between Christian and non-Christian life. Having accepted the busy-ness approach, a 'spiritual' family will keep itself busy shuttling the children to 'spiritual' busy-ness like Awanas or Youth Group Activities which give the impression of contributing to Godly childrearing, but actually accomplish very little if any such thing – and scrutiny of 'church'-kids bears that assertion out. Barna finds that 2/3 of Youth Group kids leave the Way, and other surveys place that figure from 2/3 to 80%! Our own observation of the personal lives of 'Youth Group Kids' indicate that God is definitely on the back burner if on the burner at all, as their behavior, music, TV choices, movie choices, clothing, dating, and many other things clearly demonstrate. I would posit that the high figures of young people leaving the Way is that they aren't in the Way to begin with, but rather that the dissipation of their lives is contained in churchy drinking glasses that give a thin, transparent veneer of godliness during the Youth Group years; when the glass is tipped their lives spill all over the table because there was nothing else holding things together.