The first word that’s essential to building a grace-based family is SURRENDER.
When I first asked Luella to marry me, I didn’t have a clue about what it meant to surrender. As I look back on the early years of marriage, much of our struggles could have been avoided if I knew how to surrender.
By the time our children came along, I still hadn’t mastered this concept of surrendering. With each new stage of their life, I had to learn to surrender in a different way. Again, many of the mistakes I made as a parent could have been circumvented if I had only known how to surrender.
So how can you avoid these mistakes and struggles? The answer is found in one sentence of one prayer: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10)
As a spouse, as a parent, as as child, or as a sibling, you can build a family of love by surrendering your kingdom to God’s kingdom, by surrendering your will to God’s will, and by surrendering your earthly desires to God’s heavenly desires.
If God isn’t in his rightful place at the center of your family, guess who you’ll stick in his place? Yourself! You’ll make it all about you – your schedule, your pleasure, your control. And if everyone in the family is vying for the throne of the home, you’ll experience endless conflict, criticism, and dissatisfication. Some of you are experiencing that chaos right now.
Let’s be honest today: our biggest problem isn’t that we don’t love our spouse or our child or our parent or our sibling enough. Our most significant struggle is that we don’t surrender to God enough. When we fail to surrender to God as we should, then we won’t love the people in our family in the way that he calls us to love.
Are you ready to surrender and experience a beautiful, grace-based family? You need to understand this: surrender is not an event; it’s a process. Every day you need to surrender again, because as long as sin remains in your heart, you’ll have a desire to stick yourself in the center of your family and make it all about you.
Cry out to Jesus today and say, “I’m not very good at surrendering, but I want to be.” Christ will meet you in your weakness – he loves to respond to people who, in brokeness, seek him for help.