Experiencing God at Home

Experiencing God at Home, Digital Edition

Based on Print Edition

Copyright © 2013 by Tom Blackaby and Richard Blackaby

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

978-1-4336-7982-7

Published by B&H Publishing Group

Nashville, Tennessee

Tom Blackaby and Richard Blackaby are represented by the literary agency of Wolgemuth & Associates, Inc.

Dewey Decimal Classification: 649

Subject Heading: PARENTING \ CHILD REARING \ GOD

Unless otherwise stated, all Scripture references are taken from the New King James Version (
nkjv
), copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc., Publishers.

Also used: the Holman Christian Standard Bible® (
hcsb
), Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Holman Christian Standard Bible®, Holman CSB® and HCSB® are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers.

Also used: New American Standard Bible (
nasb
), © the Lockman Foundation, 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, used by permission.

Dedication

Richard

I’d like to dedicate this book to the many moms and dads I have met over the years who sincerely want their children to experience God’s best for their lives. Don’t give up on the children and family you know God wants you to have! Thanks also to my wife, Lisa, who has been such an amazing mom, and to Mike, Daniel, and Carrie, who make me proud and bring me joy every day.

Mike, Sarah, Richard, Lisa, Sarah, Daniel, Carrie, and Sam

Tom

I wish to thank my parents and grandparents who have gone before me to lay such a great foundation for me to follow as a parent. And thanks also to my wife, Kim, and three children—Erin, Matt, and Conor—for their patience with me as husband and dad and for being the family I always wanted to have.

Erin, Tom, Kim, Matt, and Conor

Contents

1. Introduction: Setting the Stage

2. Biblical Overview

3. Our Home

4. Richard’s Family: A Study in Contrasts

5. Tom’s Family: Leading by Example

6. The Seven Realities of Experiencing God

7. Roles Parents Play

8. God Is Always at Work around Us

9. God Calls Us into a Love Relationship

10. God Invites Us to Become Involved with Him in His Work

11. God Speaks by the Holy Spirit through the Bible, Prayer, Circumstances, and the Church to Reveal Himself, His Purposes, and His Ways

12. God’s Invitation for You to Work with Him Always Leads You to a Crisis of Belief That Requires Faith and Action

13. You Must Make Major Adjustments in Your Life to Join God in What He Is Doing

14. You Come to Know God by Experience as You Obey Him and He Accomplishes His Purposes through You

15. Getting Your Family on the Right Track

16. Developing a Godly Legacy

17. Blessing Other Families

Conclusion: Helping Your Family Experience God Today

About the Authors

Chapter 1

Introduction: Setting the Stage

The fact that you are reading this book suggests you probably want to be a great parent or grandparent. You might also be concerned about whether each of your children will grow up to love and honor God. Unfortunately, today there is a lot to be concerned about! Parenting has never been an easy task. However, the world in which we are raising our children today contains ubiquitous temptations, pressures, and dangers unlike anything our parents could have dreamed of when they were raising us. We live in an age when we desperately need God’s help if we are going to succeed in raising our children to become godly young adults.

Though this book is written from the context of modern American culture, the principles God uses when working with families are not limited to a particular era or cultural context. God’s standards for the home remain the same, regardless of the generation or culture. The application of those principles will be unique to each home, but they have proven effective time and again as a means of building God-honoring homes and spiritually healthy families.

In this book we will apply the Seven Realities outlined in
Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God
to the crucial task of raising children. To be honest, we have written numerous books before, but it has taken a long time for us to feel comfortable enough to write this particular one. There are several reasons. For one, while we have been leaders in numerous settings, being a parent has been one of the most challenging assignments we have ever undertaken. We have collected a bucketful of lessons on what not to do! However, we have always believed that if there was one thing we wanted to “get right,” it was to be a good parent. To that end we have spent the last three decades learning everything we could on the subject, regardless of how painful some of those lessons were! We have finally come to the place where we believe we have gained some valuable lessons that need to be shared with other parents. Second, we wanted to wait until our own children had successfully “survived” our parenting failures before we ventured to put our thoughts on the subject down in writing! Both of us are married to our first wives and we each have three children (ages thirteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-two, twenty-five, and twenty-seven). You’ll hear more about them later, but as of today they are all walking with the Lord and doing great. We sincerely hope that the truths you learn in the following pages will result in a profound blessing for your family.

Throughout this book, we’ll refer to our families. Often we do this not because we believe our families or our parenting skills ought to necessarily be emulated, but because we want to show how we have implemented biblical principles in our own homes. Our children provided the laboratory for our child-rearing research! (They may have wished we had used mice!) In this book, we’ll relate to you some of our successes. Sometimes we got it right! But we’ll also share some of our failures. The key is not so much what we did but the biblical principles we learned and experienced.

The Current Situation

As we begin, let’s quickly review the context in which we are raising our children. The following statistics and summary statements are fairly current to the publication of this book. They were taken from a variety of research organizations, government sources, and Christian organizations that pertain to the family in North America. See if is anything surprises you.

Family Statistics

Marriage/Divorce

• Sixty-five percent of kids grow up in a home with two married parents, and 35 percent of all children in North America are affected by divorce.
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• Only 45 percent of children grow up in a home with both of their biological parents.
  2
  
• Divorce rate: in US 46 percent, in Canada 43 percent.
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• Living common-law increases the chance of a marital breakdown by 50 percent. Marriages preceded by a common-law union are distinctly less stable than those that began at the altar.
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• Religious belief decreases the chance of divorce. People who attend religious services during the year have between a 10 percent and 31 percent lower divorce rate.
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• In general, the predicted likelihood that a marriage will succeed is higher for people who marry in their thirties, did not live common-law before the wedding, have children, attend religious services, are university educated, and believe that marriage is important if they are to be happy.
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• Problems experienced by children of divorced couples:
  
  • Increased alcohol and marijuana use
    
  • Greater likelihood of problems with peers and authority figures
    
  • Less likely to marry and more likely to divorce
    
  • Twice as likely to experience anxiety, depression, and self-esteem issues
    

Bullying in Schools
7

• One in four teens are bullied; one out of five kids admits to being a bully or doing some “bullying.”
  
• As many as 160,000 kids stay home on any given day because of bullying. Fifteen percent of all school absenteeism is directly related to fears of being bullied at school.
  
• Forty-three percent of students fear harassment in the bathroom at school.
  
• Each month 282,000 students are physically attacked in secondary schools.
  
• Forty-three percent of kids have been bullied while online. Ninety-seven percent of middle-school students admit to being bullied while online.
  
• Every seven minutes a child is bullied. One out of every ten students who drops out of school does so because of repeated bullying.
  
• Every thirty minutes a teenager attempts suicide due to bullying. The leading cause of death among children under the age of fourteen is suicide.
  Bullycide
  is the new term for suicide as a result of being bullied.
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