• The poverty rate for children living in single-parent homes is five times the rate for children living with two parents.
• Divorced men experience an average 42% rise in their standard of living in the first year after divorce, while divorced women (and their children) experience a 73% decline.
• School-age children living with a parent and stepparent, or divorced mother only, are 40% to 75% more likely to repeat a grade and 70% more likely to be expelled from school.
• Children who grow up in fractured families are less likely to graduate from high school than children from intact families.
• A disproportionate number of runaway teens come from step-parent households.
• Young sons often experience nightmares and a “father hunger” soon after the dad leaves home. In their teens, they are more likely to have increased levels of aggression, gang membership and other emotions and behavioral problems.
• Young daughters of divorce often experience anxiety and guilt. In their teens, they are more likely to be sexually involved, marry younger, be pregnant more often before marriage, and become divorced or separated from their eventual husbands.
• Children of divorce typically experience depression, drug and alcohol experimentation and a diminished ability to form lasting relationships.

Source: Free to Be Family, published by the Family Research Council, a division of Focus on the Family.

Tags: children, divorce, family, marriage

How important is your family?

Former President George H. W. Bush was asked, “What is your greatest accomplishment in life?” He could have replied that as a fighter pilot in World War II, that he was shot down and survived, or that he was US Ambassador to China, or was Vice President of the United States, or that he was President, or won the victory in the Persian Gulf War with few caualties, or had two sons as state governors, or one of his sons became President of the United States.

Yet Bush said, “My children still come home.”

Remember God’s order: Family should be next in line after God, then career and ministry. If your family is out of order, so will everything else in your life, including your service to God.

Tags: Bush, family

What would you do for $111,000? Back in 1993 Houston Oilers football player David Williams missed a big game and was docked that amount. What was the big deal? His wife had given birth to their first son, Scot, and David stayed with her through the whole experience. His coach objected and critics said the team should have sent a jet to pick him up for the big game, but Williams thought it was important to stay by his wife.

If David Williams continues to demonstrate this kind of commitment to his family, then Scot too is likely to see the importance of right priorities. In my years of ministry, I have seen many situations when men put their jobs before their children, only to see them rebel against the faith later.

I remember one evening after dinner I was sitting in front of the TV with my young daughter on my lap. I announced that I had to go back to the church for a meeting and she asked why. I told her that I was a pastor and people in the church had to work, and if I wanted to meet with them I needed to go in the evening. In disgust she replied, “I wish you weren’t a preacher!”

That night challenged me. From then on I made every effort to spend more evening time with my family.

God said, “You shall teach these words diligently to your children” (Deuteronomy 6:7).

Would you sacrifice $111,000 for your family?

Tags: children, family, priorities

A second spiritual blessing Paul describes in Ephesians 1:5: “In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will”.

To predestine something is to preset the destination before hand. So, Paul declares that God had predestined you to come to Christ even before you responded to the message. That doesn’t mean you didn’t have a choice in the matter, but that God knew in advance the choice you would make.

Note also that the destiny he preset was that you would be adopted into His family. The second spiritual blessing, then, is that we have been adopted into the family of God. To be adopted is to be an outsider who is legally brought into the family to become an insider. With no claim to family rights, family rights are bestowed upon you by the authority of the adoption.

An adoption is a legal process that will hold up in a court. In the case of the spiritual adoption of sinners like us, it means that we are brought into the family of God as full members. He treats us like sons and daughters, not mere servants.

What have you learned about adoption that sheds light on our relationship with God?

Tags: adoption, family, predestination

Missionaries Paul and Karen Whitley were our guests last night as they passed through the area. We put them up in our guest room downstairs. About 1:30 they woke us up to tell us there was water in the basement. We immediately checked and saw that storm water was coming into the basement under the outside doors. I hurriedly got the ShopVac but saw it was no use. By the time we went back to bed there was 3 inches of water in the basement, with the sump pump running continuously. Never in fifteen years of living there has the water been within 50 feet of our house.

When I saw we could not control the flooding, I flew into moving important things to a dry place. I started with the closet in my den, which had many family heirlooms, including a family Bible dating back to 1832, family history books, etc., stacked in cardboard boxes on the floor. Then I went to rescue some of my Dad’s coin collection books and packaged proof sets from the ’50s laying on the floor of another room, then rescued twenty or so family photo albums on the bottom shelf of a plastic shelf unit, and a couple of older guns still in the original boxes standing in two inches of water. I appreciate Paul helping in the rescue effort in the middle of the night.

In a moment like that you don’t have time to think. Afterwards I reflected on what we had focused on saving first. It wasn’t expensive things like the computer, TV, or furniture. They can be replaced. It was the irreplacable items that represented family and our lives together.

There seems to be a lesson in every crisis. What lessons have you learned in the testing time?

Tags: family, flood, test

In 1965 Charles Schultz introduced ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’, and it has since become a classic. In this simple story the Peanuts gang is getting ready for a Christmas play and nobody is paying attention. Charlie Brown finally yells out in frustration, “Isn’t there ANYONE who knows what Christmas is about?” Finally Linus steps up to quote the Christmas story, straight from the Bible.

According to a recent Gallup poll survey, a large majority of the US population believes in the Virgin birth of Jesus Christ according to the biblical account. But does anyone really know what Christmas is about? The commercialism of the west makes us ask the question anew. How many people will bury themselves even deeper in debt in a vain attempt to purchase their children’s love? And the precedent (no pun intended) we set under the tree each year locks the next generation into the same pattern of holiday indebtedness.

Let me encourage everyone to take a few moments this Christmas to read the Christmas story with your family. And reflect on what Christmas is supposed to be from God’s perspective. Someone has got to be reminded of what Christmas is about.

Tags: Christmas, commercialism, family, indebtedness, Virgin birth