Slides: Family and Friends

By David Feddes

Evaluate family ties

• Family’s impact on you: 
Is your family helping or harming you? Are they making you better or worse?
• Your impact on family
: Are you helping or harming your family? Are you making them better or worse?

Impact of spouse

An excellent wife is the crown of her husband, but she who brings shame is like rottenness in his bones. (12:4)

An excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain. (31:10-11)

Marriage portrait

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior… Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. (Eph 5:22-25)

Headship is NOT:

• Being superior and having more worth or wisdom than your wife
• Bullying or forcing wife to submit
• Independent of God’s authority or the authority of church and government
• Ignoring wife’s wishes and wisdom
• Insisting on your own way
• Making every decision, being an control freak, and never delegating

Headship IS:

• Self-sacrificing love that pictures the self-sacrificing Head of the church
• Gently providing and caring for wife
• Protecting and empowering your wife to flourish in beauty, joy, and holiness
• Being considerate of your wife’s wishes, weakness, and strengths
• Taking the lead in example and action
• Making tough decisions and taking responsibility for the consequences

Submission is NOT:

• Regarding the husband as smarter, better, or worth more than the wife
• Going along with your husband’s cruelty and pretending his sin is okay
• Disobeying God to obey husband
• Being passive and stifling creativity
• Keeping quiet and never questioning, criticizing, or advising your husband
• Doing nothing without first getting husband’s permission, and doing nothing beyond home

Submission IS:

• Submitting to Jesus and picturing the church’s submission to her Savior
• Wanting to honor husband’s authority and embrace his leadership
• Supporting your husband to help him reach his potential as a man of God
• Compatible with thinking for yourself
• More effective than nagging, if a husband needs to be won over from ungodly ways
• Powered by calm contentment in Christ
  (Source: Sam Storms, The Hope of Glory)
  

Winning without words

Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. (1 Peter 3:1-2)

Harming home and self

He who commits adultery lacks sense;
he who does it destroys himself. (6:32)

A man who strays from home is like a bird that strays from its nest. (27:8)

He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it. (Eph 5:28-29)

Be good parents

Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. (Proverbs 22:6)

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. (Eph 6:4)

Training or tyranny?

Rebuking: correcting, private
Raging: insulting, public

Disciplining: fair, loving, limited
Damaging: bullying, bodily injury

Directing: instruction, example
Dominating: rigid control

Follow good parents

Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching… for they will prolong your life many years and bring you prosperity. (Proverbs 1:8; 3:1-2)

The eye that mocks a father, that scorns obedience to a mother, will be pecked out by the ravens of the valley, will be eaten by the vultures. (Proverbs 30:17)

Don’t follow bad parents

Do not be like your fathers… they did not pay attention to me. (Zech 1:4)

You always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. (Acts 7:51)

You were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers. (1 Peter 1:18)

Family is not destiny

The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself. (Ezekiel 18:20)

Flourishing families

Children’s children are a crown to the aged, and parents are the pride of their children. (17:6)

The father of a righteous man has great joy; he who has a wise son delights in him. May your father and mother be glad; may she who gave you birth rejoice! (23:24-25)

Evaluate family ties

• Family’s impact on you: 
Is your family helping or harming you? Are they making you better or worse?
• Your impact on family: 
Are you helping or harming your family? Are you making them better or worse?

Evaluate friendships

• Friends’ impact on you
: Are your friends helping or harming you? Are they making you better or worse?
• Your impact on friends: 
Are you helping or harming your friends? Are you making them better or worse?

Impact of friends

The godly give good advice to their friends; the wicked lead them astray.(Proverbs 12:26)

Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm. (Proverbs 13:20)

Avoid bad friends

My son, if sinners entice you, turn your back on them! (1:10)

Stay away from a fool, for you will not find knowledge on their lips.(14:7)

Do not make friends with a hot-tempered man… or you may learn his ways and get yourself ensnared. (22:24-25)

Friendly advice

Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy… the sweetness of a friend comes from his earnest counsel… (27:6, 9)

As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. (27:17)

Close friends

Never abandon a friend—either yours or your father’s. When disaster strikes, you won’t have to ask your brother for assistance. It’s better to go to a neighbor than to a brother who lives far away. (27:6-10)

Guarding friendship

A troublemaker plants seeds of strife;
gossip separates the best of friends.(16:28)

Love prospers when a fault is forgiven, but dwelling on it separates close friends. (17:9)

Faithful friendship

A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity. (17:17)

One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. (18:24)

Ultimate friendship

Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command… I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. (John 15:13-15)

Evaluate friendships

• Friends’ impact on you
: Are your friends helping or harming you? Are they making you better or worse?
• Your impact on friends
: Are you helping or harming your friends? Are you making them better or worse?

Christ-centered

• Christ lives in you, so display His life in relationships—starting with family and friends.
• If Christ lives in family and friends, then nurture Christ in them.
• Each family role and friendship says something about Christ.