GYC West 2015: Saved to Serve

Family Health

Mark Bond

GYC West

Ingredients For a Healthy Family

Father in heaven, Lord, we come to you for guidance in our families and our homes.

And Lord, we thank you for the guidance that you have given us.

And Some of the ideas that we're gonna be sharing this morning, Lord, we just, we ask that you would breathe your life into them.

You are the creator, Lord, and we just ask that you would create an atmosphere of love and peace and hope in our homes.

And that there would be joy and smiles and laughter in the presence of our children and our spouses.

Lord, that you would be present in all that we do.

Well, I've entitled this final presentation, Ingredients for a Healthy Family.

And the interesting thing, when you take a mental assessment of a project like this is you start doing a lot of self assessment.

As Conn was talking about some of the marketing things, there's the planning phase, then there's the implementation phase.

And then at the end of that, you look at it all and you say, hey, what was working, what went wrong, what went right?

And that's kind of what happens for us as we're looking at these topics.

And there's a lot of self assessment and looking at our family and saying, well, what of these things did we do right?

And I would like to think that, man, we did everything right, but we didn't.

We've made a lot of mistakes as a family, as parents, as spouses.

But by the grace of God, in that reassessment phase, you always go back and plan to reimplement and make changes and adjust.

And so it's a cycle, it's an ongoing cycle.

And I'm thankful personally for the opportunity to do some reassessment and look for places where we can improve and increase our effectiveness as a family.

If you're gonna make a list or a recipe of ingredients, I think obviously they typically put on the side of a cereal box or on the side of a can of food at the grocery store.

The first ingredient is the 1 that's the most, the highest content in the recipe.

And so if we're looking at first things first, Obviously, we've got to start with spiritual things.

Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.

And all these things will be added unto you.

We've actually talked about that verse a couple of times.

But I didn't want to go into this kind of a laundry list of ingredients for a happy home without the obvious of, it really has to start with God first.

And in the middle, and at the end, and all the way through.

And included in that, putting God first, is the concept that Con actually touched on in the last session and that is abiding.

And what does it really mean to abide in Christ?

And 1 of the things that I've learned is that abiding isn't something that happens in the morning during daily devotion or at the evening time during family worship.

It's not something that happens once or twice a day.

And another word that came to me in that is like a clinging and a cleaving.

And I've said this to Kana many times over the past 6 months that I feel like I'm just clinging to her and she's clinging to me, and we're clinging to the Lord together.

It's like this constant state of staying in God's presence and holding on to him.

If you abide in me and my word abides in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you, John 15, 7.

And then this clinging, another word for clinging is the word cleave, to cleave to something, right?

We don't use that much in normal conversation.

But some of the newer translations actually use the word cling instead of cleave.

If you cling, cleave to the Lord your God, as you have done this day.

Joshua is admonishing the children of Israel, cleave to the Lord.

And Jesus actually used the same word in Matthew.

It says, And he said, for this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, and the twain shall be 1 flesh.

Again, an old English term, but it's about clinging, it's about abiding.

It's a part of the texting through the day when we're apart from each other.

It's the phone calls, it's emails, it's being together even when we're not together, it's this constant state of oneness.

And that is just an amazing concept, but it's really true.

In fact, we've wondered if in heaven, we don't know exactly what we're gonna be like, maybe we'll even be more 1, maybe we'll be able to read each other's thoughts or be more completely connected with each other as a unit in heaven.

We don't know exactly what it's gonna be like.

But we have to cling to God and cling to each other.

So I think it's really 1 of the, again, 1 of the key ingredients when you start at the top.

Now that doesn't mean the rest of the ingredients as we get towards the end of the list are less important, or unimportant as we get towards the end.

But I think clinging, abiding, and putting God first in our lives, without that, the rest of the recipe, it's like the bread won't rise.

There's no sweetness to the recipe at all if we don't include those first 2 ingredients.

Family worship's an important part of having a healthy family.

And I'm thankful that over the years, Kana has had such a passion for family worship.

I lament the fact that often I would show up at the last minute for family worship and be there and be present and listen, but sometimes nod off.

I wasn't always as active in the family worship process as I used to be.

And really in the last 4 and 5 months, as we've had family worship again with a renewed purpose in our home, it's interesting cuz it's different when you have a 4 and a 5 year old, or 2 and a 3 year old in the house.

Now we've got Adriana and Taylor are the last 2 at home.

Chelsea's in the dorm, Emily Beth's living in Hawaii and married.

So with our 2 younger ones, You've got a 15 year old and a 16 year old, and you call for worship.

And it would be easy to tell if they didn't want to participate.

But if you call them and you say, hey, we're gonna have worship now.

And you hear things all rattling and booming and then in they come running.

And we appreciate their willingness and their eagerness to be a part of our family together time there towards the end of the day.

Kana had a really good formula for family worship in our house, and it worked really well for us.

You need to figure out what works for your family, but I'll tell you, Ellen White talks specifically about keeping family worship short and to the point and not dragging it out and making it boring for the kids.

In fact, I've got a quote in here, and I think I'll show that to you in a moment.

But 1 of the formulas that worked for us, we would find inspiring books.

Books like A Thousand Shall Fall, have you read that book?

There's dozens and dozens of books that are biographies about Christian leaders who have done amazing things.

And under amazing circumstances and against all odds.

We would get to the end of the chapter and they'd, read 1 more chapter, please can we read 1 more chapter?

So you know you've got them when they're begging for more.

And then, so that would be part of the family worship time.

There'd be this exciting, gripping, edge of your seat kind of a story.

And then we would read some passages from Spirit of Prophecy.

We actually read not even chapter by chapter, but passage by passage, all the way through the great controversy, through patriarchs and prophets, through all of these books of the entire conflict of the ages series, and our kids were young.

And we would think, well, Will they understand these concepts?

It's not just shoehorning it into trying to force the foot into the shoe.

We would stop and if they have a question, it's okay if we only got 2 paragraphs into this thing.

And it took us years to get through them, but they've read them and they've heard them and they've got all these concepts buried in their heart by just little pieces at a time.

And the third thing that we would always do is have a scripture passage or some sort of a, you know, some time in the Bible as well.

We're a very musical family, so you might think, well, they always sang songs.

Conna Bond

A More Beautiful Story- Christ Our Editor

I wanted to address today something that I think maybe doesn't get addressed enough.

And I've entitled this presentation, A More Beautiful Story.

So this is what, session 5 of GYC West 2015 for the family health track.

So I've called this a more beautiful story, Christ Our Editor.

These are some of the things that we have looked at over the last 4 sessions or so.

We've kind of figured out that what we value, sometimes overall and sometimes at any given moment, is what dictates all of our actions at any given moment.

The supreme value is love, God is love, and we know that love never fails.

Sometimes we wonder, and we look at the circumstances around us, and we wonder what does that really mean?

But we know that that's a promise that God has given us.

So we try to make sense of this promise that love never fails.

We also have talked about the fact that love, when it's in place, and when it takes over in our lives, leads to a deeper awareness.

And that deeper awareness then sets the stage for deeper engagement in our relationships.

And when we have that deeper engagement then faithfulness is an outcropping of that awareness and that engagement.

So that's just kind of a sum of some of the overall, in case you missed the the broader points of what the past few sessions have really been about.

You know, these are the things that we would hope that you would take away.

Mark is actually going to talk next section a little bit more about engagement and faithfulness and abiding.

So my question to you now is, have you experienced pain and suffering so deeply that you felt that you could not go on?

Anybody in here never experienced that depth?

Yeah, and I'm talking about pain and suffering, not where you can make sense of it, where you can say, yes, okay, I see how this God can make good out of this.

But where you literally are so blindsided by this kind of misery and pain and you cannot make the sense out of it.

It just seems senseless to you and as a result you feel that you cannot go on.

I personally believe that this is part of our faith walk in this life.

Like Job, there were a lot of things that happened to Job.

Of course, we can look back on Job's story and make sense of it, right?

But when he was in the midst of it, that didn't really make much sense to him.

And we are called to be faithful through and in spite of this kind of pain and suffering.

To go to a point, you said you were reading, or 1 of you were reading, or your friend is reading Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to be able to be to this point where when things do not make sense, God still makes so much sense to you that you can still find a way to go on.

But in order to test that, you have to get to that point in your life where you really do feel, you know, it is a choice to make that determination as to whether, you know, I'm facing this misery and this sorrow, and I feel like I cannot go on.

Now, for many of us, this does not come until we have faced something in the context of family.

But usually this kind of sorrow comes in the context of family.

It comes possibly from an unfaithful spouse, or it comes from the loss of a child.

Now most of you, you just don't know love until you've had children, really.

And then you know you would literally lay down your lives for your children.

And yet, sometimes when you feel as if they may be slipping away through your fingers, You feel as if I cannot go on, I cannot face eternity without this child.

And then you understand just how deeply the father loves us.

And all of a sudden, love and the concept of love and The concept of a love that is eternal and that never fails really starts to make sense.

But I want to talk about some things today that hopefully will help prepare you for that moment, if and when it hits, or if it hits again.

That sense of I have really hit something now that's too much for me to handle, and I feel as if I cannot go on.

And as I said, this often happens in the context of our family and our relationships.

We know, the Bible tells us, in the world you will have trouble.

We have all kinds of promises for good, but we also have some assurances about what we will face as Christians.

But do you know what the next phrase is in this verse?

Yes, But be of good cheer, because I have overcome the world, John 16, 33.

Now, again, that makes sense, and sometimes we can actually do that when the suffering makes sense.

But how do you be of good cheer when the suffering makes no sense to you?

That is a huge battle in the Christian life.

And yet, sometimes it's actually your children who are standing back and watching you face this battle.

And this is going to be the testing ground.

You know, we got to stand back and look at Job, right?

For our children, they may never want to read the book of Job, okay?

It's distant, it's this guy from way in the past, the Old Testament, what does that mean to them?

And so how we react and how we respond in these kinds of situations is a huge consequence to our children's lives and their faith.

And sometimes to our spouse's lives and faith, or our brothers and sisters, even our parents, we can have a deep impact on.

And so how we respond in these kinds of situations is very important to consider.

So the question that I wanna consider today is, what do you do when things go horribly wrong?

We know that there are 3 really, really important things, right, that from 1 Corinthians 13 it says there is faith, hope, and love.

And if you don't have hope, what good is love to you anyway?

We tend to focus on the love aspect of things.

But I think we're living in a world where people's hearts are languishing for lack of hope as much as anything else.

And so this is telling us that we have 3 essential things.

Love is the most important, but the other 2 are also essential.

Faith and hope, love, and they go together.

So how do you cling to hope when you're in the midst of hopelessness?

So some of the things that I've shared with you over the past day have been about shifting your perspective on something.

You know, focusing on the value that is driving your action instead of focusing on the action.

Shifting perspective can sometimes empower you to make certain types of decisions and respond to crises in a certain way.

So again, I'm going to share some things with you today that I hope will shift your perspective and prepare you and give you hope, give you courage to face those times of hopelessness if and when they hit you.

And I believe if they haven't already, they will.

It's really important when you're facing a crisis, a crisis like of the depth that I'm talking about, that you know the truth.

And this is in times of peace, in times of growth, these are the times where we gather knowledge, we gather wisdom.

And hopefully that wisdom will be enough to see us through, that it will be a basis for our faith when we face really bad circumstances.

And of course, part of knowing the truth is knowing the truth, right?

Knowing Christ, I really don't separate these things in my mind.

I mean, if Christ truly is the source of all good things and all knowledge.

He said, if you know me, you know the Father.

If I know him, if I know his heart, I know who he is.

So the Bible says, then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.

Again, knowing the truth is gonna prepare you for times of crisis and for times of shaking when you face a sorrow and a pain that is deeper than you feel that you can bear.

So I want to give you some things, just highlight a few ideas, a few perspectives that come straight out of scripture that I think sometimes get overlooked, but are ideas and perspectives that if you cling to these, when you're faced with these kinds of circumstances in your relationships, in your family, you know, and in your marriage relationships, that you'll be able to face them and go on and not give up.

First of all, we have to remember that God has a plan.

Okay, we tend to see him as kind of separate and distant.

Now there are theological views out there that do see God as separate and distant.

And yet sometimes we tend to function as if we think he is far away and distant when we're facing our crises or making decisions or whatever it is we're doing, going about our business.

Practicing the Presence- Make Your Bed

Father in heaven, thank you so much for the time that we're spending here.

I'm remembering and relearning and reliving and being reminded of ways that I want to be present in my family's lives and also have you present in my life.

And Lord, to that end we pray and we just ask that you would speak through me today.

May the words of my mouth be acceptable in your sight, oh Lord.

Well, Kana talked a lot about the power of presence.

And I shared with you the epiphanies that I had early this year back in January.

And the way the Lord has miraculously given me clearer vision.

But that's not to say that any ideas or thoughts or sermons that I may have preached before were not still to his honor and to his glory.

I was still hoping to at some point go deeper with the Lord.

I don't think I actually even realized the lack of my depth at that point.

I have always wanted to be in His presence.

I just didn't really know how to get there, as I said earlier.

But I've seen some metaphors in my life for the opportunities that we have to spend time when we're apart from each other.

As Con and I, as I shared with you, were living in 2 separate towns, there was quite a bit of time that we spent on the phone.

As she said, using technology, we would text all throughout the day.

We would Skype and video conference and use FaceTime to see each other face-to-face even though we weren't physically in each other's presence.

And Emily, Beth, and Matt, our son-in-law, had quite a long courtship where they were in 2 different parts of the country.

And part of the time when he took the job in Hawaii, she was in Walla Walla, he was in Hawaii.

And so they would be every evening Skyping each other and seeing each other face to face for 45 minutes or an hour and getting to know each other that way.

So if there was a title for my sermon, I think I would call it practicing the presence.

But I think a subtitle might be called make your bed.

And let me share with you a little history, a little background.

If my mother was here right now, she would confer and affirm the fact that I was not the best at making my bed as a child.

Once I heard it a thousand times, Mark, make your bed.

It's very rare that on their own without prompting that Taylor will have his bed made when he leaves for school in the morning or Adriana.

She's a little better than Taylor probably, but still not batting 100%.

And I'm blessed to be married to a woman who actually appreciates a house that's nice and neat and in order.

And I haven't always been a wonderful helper in that vein.

Back to Menu

All Teachings

Ingredients For a Healthy Family

39m

A More Beautiful Story- Christ Our Editor

48m

Practicing the Presence- Make Your Bed

31m

The Power of Presence

53m

How Do You Know There Is a God?

57m

The Value of Value

48m

Sorting Out Fact From Fiction

45m

False Prophets of Health Ministry

21m

SDA Dietary Philosophy

1h 34m

Nutrition Evangelism

49m

Living Longer, Better Lives

1h

New Testament Vignettes

21m

Sound Doctrine