In His Own Words--Chapter 2

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Chapter 2 – Jesus and Our Families

The congregation of my first church in rural Wisconsin was so small that I could easily have visited every family once a week. Instead, I went door to door seeking new people. One evening, I ended up in the living room of a family that was watching a Billy Graham crusade on television. When the program was over, I said, “If you had been there, would you have gone forward to receive Christ?”

They answered, “Probably.”

I said, “Would you like to receive Him now?”

They said they would, and they did—all of them. Not long afterwards I baptized them, and they became regular attenders at the church. Unfortunately, conversion did not immediately transform an unhappy family into a joyous one. On more than one occasion, the lady of the house came to me with an unusual request.

She would begin by pointing out passages such as the following.

If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple (Luke 14:26).

And He said to them, "Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times as much at this time and in the age to come, eternal life” (Luke 18:29-30).

Then she would beg me to send her as a missionary to another country. Perhaps some of the Lord’s precepts seemed rather burdensome, but not this one. She thought it would be a relief to leave her family for Jesus’ sake. I kid you not. This actually happened.

Though this lady was misguided, her notions were close to actual the experience of many missionaries. Today’s tearful goodbyes at the airport are little in comparison with nineteenth-century servants of Christ considered routine.

John Paton, missionary to the New Hebrides buried his first wife and infant son on an island filled with cannibals. (He slept for some time on their graves to prevent the natives from exhuming and devouring them.) Not long afterwards, he barely escaped with his own life. A few years later, he returned to a neighboring island with his second wife. Though the majority of the indigenous population on this island were eventually converted, the Patons were frequently in danger of losing their lives. They also had to endure year-long separations from their school-age children. For them, as for many missionaries, the calling of Christ meant putting Him above their families.

Family Loyalty in the Old Testament

To put in perspective Jesus’ insistence that we love Him more than we love our families, we need to go back to the Old Testament. I begin with the respect children are supposed to have for their parents.

Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the LORD your God gives you (Exodus 20:12).

He who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death (Exodus 21:17).

Jesus quoted both of these passages in Matthew 15:4 to highlight the respect and care children should have for their parents. Lack of such respect was so serious that it is scathingly denounced in the Old Testament. For example, “The eye that mocks a father and scorns a mother, the ravens of the valley will pick it out, and the young eagles will eat it” (Proverbs 30:17).

On the other hand, parents properly love and care for their offspring: “A good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children “(Proverbs 13:22). A mother’s love is so natural and good that we are shocked when a mother murders her child. God’s love is like a mother’s love, only better.  “Can a woman forget her nursing child and have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you” (Isaiah 49:15).

What is important enough to warrant breaking the bonds of familial duty and affection? Loyalty to God supersedes loyalty to family.

 If your brother, your mother's son, or your son or daughter, or the wife you cherish, or your friend who is as your own soul, entice you secretly, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods”  (whom neither you nor your fathers have known, of the gods of the peoples who are around you, near you or far from you, from one end of the earth to the other end), you shall not yield to him or listen to him; and your eye shall not pity him, nor shall you spare or conceal him. But you shall surely kill him; your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. So you shall stone him to death because he has sought to seduce you from the LORD your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery (Deuteronomy 13:6-10).

I hasten to add that we are no longer under this provision of the Mosaic Law. That harsh sentence was part of God’s zealous determination to preserve true faith in Israel until Christ came. However, it is clear that loyalty to God trumps loyalty to family.

Loving Family More Than God

I heard recently about a man who gave a Bible to his unbelieving sister. The next day she died in a car accident. This man became bitter and has backed away from church or any discussion of spiritual things. His love for his sister was apparently greater than his love for God. Probably most of us have loved ones who will spend eternity in hell. Oh, how that thought pains us! It torments us. But the question we must face is who holds first place in our hearts?

It is an old, old temptation, for Adam loved his wife more than he loved God, so he followed her into sin and death. Men are supposed to love their wives with a self-sacrificing love as Christ loved the church (Ephesians 5:25), but sin enters when a man loves his wife more than he loves God.

I have often seen children pull their families out of church after the parents have pushed those children into sports. Team sports on Sunday capture the child’s heart. The father’s heart has already been captured by Sunday afternoon football, so he has no moral authority to keep his child from playing on Sunday. The parents love the child’s present happiness more than they love the child’s eternal wellbeing, and more than they love God. The result? Church attendance becomes an occasional event, and ten years later the parents bewail their child’s lack of faith.

Even without that kind of parental short-sightedness, families are divided. Apart from the gracious work of the Holy Spirit opening our eyes, we are blind to Christ and hostile to God. As the prophet Micah put it,

For son treats father contemptuously,
Daughter rises up against her mother,
Daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
A man's enemies are the men of his own
     household (Micah 7:6).

Wait, doesn’t that sound like something Jesus said? Yes, indeed.

Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;  and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me (Matthew 10:34-37).

It is not just an accident or poor family dynamics that creates a spiritual division between two people who would naturally love each other. Jesus divides people. He slices down through those natural ties and demands whole-hearted love for Himself.

Jesus was not asking any more or any less than for Himself than the Lord God required of Old Testament believers. God told Jeremiah not to marry and raise sons and daughters (Jeremiah 16:2). In order to be God’s prophet, he had to set aside his natural human desire for a family. One morning God told Ezekiel that his wife would die, and the prophecy came to pass that very evening. She was “the desire of [his] eyes,” but the Lord would not permit him to weep or mourn for her. God used her death and the hiding of Ezekiel’s grief as a prophetic parable for the people. Wow! That was harsh. It was “A Severe Mercy.”[1]

Does the demand of Jesus—that you put Him first in your life above your family—does this demand shock you? It should. Would it have shocked a first-century Jew? Absolutely. He would have understood that no one but the Lord God has the right to demand such allegiance. 

Hear, O Israel! The Lord [Yahweh] is our God, the Lord is one!  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might (Deuteronomy 6:4-5).

If Jesus was not God, He was setting Himself up as a deliberate rival to God. So, He was either God or a demon from hell. You choose.

Before we leave this topic, are there family ties that threaten to pull you away from Christ and His church? If the devil discovers that a family picnic or a birthday party for Aunt Matilda’s dog is enough to keep you out of church, you won’t be worshiping with other believers three Sundays out of four. Do you resent God because a loved one has died in unbelief and is now suffering the wrath of God? Has God called you to a ministry that would move you away from your family, and are you hesitating to go because you love them so much? Does your faith in Christ create so much friction with your relatives that you are beginning to think following Jesus is just not worth it?

Jesus is worth it. Jesus is more important than your father, your mother, your sister or brother. Jesus is more important than your wife or husband or children. Jesus all by Himself will be enough for you because He is God, but since He loves you, He will give you even more.

 Jesus said, “Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or farms, for My sake and for the gospel's sake, but that he will receive a hundred times as much now in the present age, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and farms, along with persecutions; and in the age to come, eternal life” (Mark 10:29-30).

The church will be your family when your family turns its back on you. “If my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up” (Psalm 27:10, marginal reading).

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[1]  This title of a great book by Sheldon Vanauken is a quotation from Book viii of Augustine’s Confessions.