The idol of family

In many passages in the Bible, God warns his people not to follow other gods instead of him. The word for this is ‘idolatry’, which means to worship an idol. In traditional religions, idols often took the form of little statues or carvings which were bowed down to and sacrificed to. That’s not normally how it looks in the modern world. We might think that we are generally less religious than ancient people, but that’s not quite true. All of us are worshippers; we all worship something, live for something, and for many people that’s not the true God. This can even become a problem for Christian people. We know God is the one worthy of worship, yet our daily lives might be revealing that in practice we are worshipping something else.

One big modern idol is the family. God, in his kindness, places people in families. A well-functioning family is a blessing, whether you are a child, a sibling, a spouse, or a parent. With the busy pace of life, it is easy for our focus on the family to be emphasised to the point that it becomes an idol in our lives. Something good can become an idol for us when it becomes what we love most, what we live for, at the expense of God. Over time we might feel our emphasis on our family increasing and our passion for Jesus decreasing.

How might we know if this is happening? Let me give some possibilities:

1. With the busyness of life, including so many children’s activities and recreation possibilities, some of the traditional ways that families have blessed others have dropped off. Hospitality, welcoming others into your house for meals and fellowship, has become a much lower priority for many families. The end result might be a happy family home but one that is very inward-focussed with no intention to bless anyone else.
2. Parents always have the tendency to live through their children. There is such a focus for academic marks, for music proficiency, for sporting glory, that all the free time and money goes to self-improvement for our children. We can speak about our children all the time to anyone who will listen. But somewhere along the line, church dropped down our priority list, services get regularly missed for other events, and our passion drops.
3. Family worship disappears. It used to be standard for Christians to have a devotional time around the dinner table with family every night. It gave a forum for parents to teach the Bible and pass on their faith. Now this is rarer, many children grow into adulthood in a Christian home not knowing their Bible or understanding why God matters so much.

The principle is that we should be thanking God for our families and using them to serve Him well; the reality is that it is so easy to see God as being there only to bless our family with very little focus on serving God with our families.

How can we turn back to a healthier view of family? We need to thank God for the family he has given us, whatever shape that takes. And we need to stop and think before filling our days with so much busyness. If we are not intentional, life just fills up, and things we think matter drop off. It’s like packing a car boot for a holiday. You need to fit in the big inflexible stuff in first, like large boxes and eskis. The other things will fit around the edges. If studying the Bible as a family, getting to church, and finding ways to bless others are priorities, carve out the time. It is hard to do this later on once all the time is full.

Here are some possibilities of how families can be part of our serving God with our whole heart and our neighbours as ourselves:

• Find a way to serve the church family together with your family. Maybe that will be having others around for a meal or going to Bible Study together.
• Make discipleship a priority for your children. If they can play the violin to perfection and derive complicated mathematical formulas, but they have no idea what the Bible says or why they should care, something has gone wrong. It is hard to beat a regular time set aside in the week to read the Bible and pray together.
• Let the others in your family see your faith acted out. If they see you value Bible reading, and you speak about how great Jesus is, and you look for opportunities to evangelism, they will value those things too. Families are an opportunity to model faith to one another and learn from others in a lasting and intimate way.

Families are a great gift from God. Let’s use them well to God’s glory.