DRESS MY NEST 09
I was browsing through the television channels one evening and begin to read all the titles of the shows that were being displayed and decided to write a book on the titles. When I saw Dress My Nest a very popular show I couldn’t help but think of the disfuntional nation we live in today. And how desperately need to learn how to dress the nest. (building the family)
I love the old testament to follow as an example to us. No better example of how we must dress our nest. I am not hung up on the law aspect.
But just to read of the people of their successes as well as their failures. The family is so vital to life. The next generations depend upon the success we have and to be able to pass the mantel to.
We see: The bible is the only way to dress our nest:
The first five books of the Bible present to us this early experience of Israel as they discovred their history of what God had done through their ancestors.
And it describes this special relationship, a relationship we call a covenant relationship, because there is an actual agreement between God and humanity, and that's talked about in the first five books of the Bible.
And this relationship, this covenant, this agreement talks about how God makes certain commitments to us and how we make certain commitents back to God. And so, the old part of the Bible, well it's all old to us now, but the older part, the Old Testament is a desription of this first agreement for the nation of Israel.
And we are now living in what we call the New Covenant. That's a new agreement that has come through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is where God wants us @ this present time.
So the words we are going to hear though since it's part of the same agreement, the same God who is relating to us in humanity.
There are many things we can learn from this early relationship, 3,500 years old, a relationship between God and his people. And this part of the covenant that we are going to read from Deuteronomy 6, verses 4 to 9, these verses talk specifically about our response as families to what God has offered to us. So let's hear the words of Deuteronomy 6, verses 4 to 9.
"Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your sol and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children.
Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorfrmes of your houses and on your gates."
we have to talk about it even though we are all not in the same stage or place of life and that issue, one of those isues that we have to deal with is the issue of parenting. And
"Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give to you today are to be upon your hearts."
The first responsibility in Dressing our nest in parenting is to model what it means to have a God-centered life; to model it even before we speak it
Model= Dict. copy of object
. This is a reality check. You know, no amount of talking, no amount of bringing people to church, no amount of paying high tuiton to send your kids to good school is going to make up for the fact that you don't model what it means to be a Christian family. We did all the above!
Now, we can look at some obvious things, you know the parents who drive up to church and drop their kids off to go to Sunday school and to church and then they go over to Starbucks. We may think of this insane but it’s the truth.
They are modeling something. They are modeling the fact that church and religious things are for kids and when they grow up this is what they will be doing.
The one thing both of our adult children confess is that we were an example to them in word and in deed. And in return they (copied an object) modeled themselves after us.
. Dressing our nest is about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, to follow him.
. We come from a good family and we have respnded well to what God has done through that family. And then we have a certain toughness that no matter what life throws against us we can survive, and we can prosper, and we can even thrive, because of the things that were built into us through those years, through those experiences and those relationships we have in the family.
And if a family is really bad, then we can spend the rest of our lives trying to heal from those wounds. So it's really important for us to be serious about what it means to be parents.
Being in ministry as many years as we have it’s still astounding to the mind how many young people cannot move past the hurts they inquired from their parents and the inviormrnt they came from.My husband Bishop Pruitt could have been a product of his environment. However,He made an conscience decision at an early life to follow hard after God and not let his future family suffer the consequnces of his past wounds. He all the years raising our family was determind not to let the curses of his past become a present life style.
Dressing the nest is important work. There are some things that God only does through the family and so I think it is important that we reconize that there are some things that God wants to do through parents that he is not going to do by you dragging them to church.
In our home having been saved at the age of tweny five and having two children five and six we had an advantage because of their young age that some parents don’t have because salvation comes to the home when children are older. However, I believe the principles remain the same. That we must bait the hook of our children to provoke them to wanting God in their lives.
I am in firm believe that we as parents should have strong values in our homes. One of them is we all go to church when the doors are opened. Constancy is the answer to every solution.
Now that's important, for us all to be at church, but we are here to support the family in what it is doing. You can see from the verses we just read that there is a central responsibility of the family for what God is doing in our lives.
Families are incredibly important and God created it to be that way and that's good. That is part of the special thing that God is doing through you; shaping your children, giving them skills, teaching them about relationships, and teaching that they are as people.
That's all part of your role. And part of your role too is that every parent is an evangelist, the primary evangelist that God has given to the life of your children. Now the church can help. Great youth events can help. A good Sunday school can help, but you are still God's primary voice to them. And so we need help. This is an important part of life.
I think of our church when we do baby dedication and the vows that are made by the parents. We always try to convey to the parents that they will set the example to their child.
So since there is so much responsibility there we need to think about what it means to be parents and to convert to what it means to make a Godly home. And so we are going to look into this passage in Deuteronomy and take a look at some of the things that it teaches us.
I want to look in the first few verses again, verses 4, 5 and 6.
What do they see of us when we encounter a difficulty, how do we handle that? What's our response? How do we approach God? How do we approach each other in those times of stress?
We are modeling what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. Do they see us pray? Do they hear us pray? Do we pray together? Do they see us study the Word? Do they understand that we see ourselves and our story as disciples, as parents, as being inside of the big story of what God is doing in the world?
What do we model to our kids? This all seems so extremely overwhelming even as I write this…
But these are vital points! So:
Where do we begin?
The first part of dressing our nest is to be a Godly person, to seek God and to seek God's faith.
What's it say here? "Love the Lord God with all your heart, with your entire mind, with all your strength with everything that you are."
We always taught our children that there was nothing impossible for them in Christ Jesus. But they learned first in life that they must seek God first in their world.
There is another way that we shape them and we produce That's the first part.
Dressing our nest is talking with our kids about what it means to be a Christian. So, the second part of this it says, impress them, meaning these commandments, these truths about God, and impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.
It's important to share our faith with our kids. But this word "impress" kind of scares me when I first see it because I have this image that you sit your kids down in a straight back chair in a darkened room, you put lights on them and you know you say, "This is the truth". That's not the model here. It's a natural thing.
So there are these natural moments; watching a commercial on TV. and if somebody acts out, you can say, "Is that a good thing to do? What's wrong with that?" letting the world be an example even when it’s bad..
Or if they do something good be able to address it.
It might be a nightly devotional with our kids. When they are really small we just pray God's blessing on them. When they get a little older, we actually started to train them they have the same anointing as we do if operated in faith believing.
Let's go to the next few verses here. It says, "tie them," again talking about these laws, these commandments, these things that God has revealed about themselves, "Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.
Write them on the doorframes of your houses, and on your gates." This whole picture is that this is really important stuff. It's got to permeate our family. This is a high priority thing, this relationship with God and the things that grow out of this relationship to God, and so the way we set priorities in life is part of us establishing a Godly home.
One of the decisions that Bishop and I made early in our marriage, is that we were going to have dinners together as a family. So that meant that I wasn't going to quarrel during dinner time. We were going to be like leave it to beaver’s home. (Most of the time that worked)
. We had a few rough patches about that, but basically we just accepted the fact that this is the time we talk together as a family and we enjoyed that for years and, in fact, pretty much till the kids got into high years of high school.
In dressing the nest priorities our essential.
Now think about all the tensions that come in to our families because we don't set priorities, because we pack too much in and so the good, or the kind of good, starts to push out the best and so we have these situations where we've got so many things packed into the afternoon that we are yelling at our kids,
"Hurry up", "Do this", "Eat that", "Get off the phoe", "We've got to go to this or we've got to go to that" and at the end of the day we feel like glorified taxi drivers or slave drivers. Why? Becaue we didn't say no to some things, in order to say yes to others.
We set priority or bondries to television shows my children watched. We decided one hr. was sufficient. This enabled our children to develop themselves in creativity. This also give them time to learn scriptures and project and develop them them into their destiny. This really worked for us because our children as adults are so accomplished in every area of their lives.
How does this begin?
We do this by the power of God.
. We need the power of the Holy Spirit.
What does your day look like in terms of the priorities that we see God gives us in scripture?
Now there is one other thing that's in this passage and it's in the same two final verses.
Reminders! And synbols!
It says this, "Tie them, these commandmnts, these things revealed about God, tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads." Write them on the doorframes of your house and on your gates."
This whole idea of having these reminders in life, these symbols in life, that remind of us what our story really is and how our story relates to God's big story. Where are we in relationship to God and to one another?
We need symbols of that and so for the Jewish family, one of those symbols was the one that they put on the door post and they call it the Mezuzahs and it's a little container and inside it are the very verses we read today. When we were in Israel they had these Mezuzahas on the doors.
Israel is such an amazing plce to go. It totally made the bible come alive even more than it did.
"Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, is one Lord and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, your mind and your strength".
And so every time they would go in and out of the house they would have that reminder right there, "We are a covenant people. We are in relationship to the creator of the world and the one who has made an agreeent with us and this means that we shape our lives certain ways and they had that reminder there."
As we dress our nest First, we have a new relationship.The Old Covenant was something you were born into. If you were born of Jewish parents, you were an Israelite. You were an Israelite because all your family had been Israelites. It wasn’t a choice that you made – it was pretty much made for you.But to become a Christians is something else again. You can’t be born “into the church.” You CAN be born of Christian parents and be brought to church every Sunday of your life. But you can’t be “born” a Christian just because your parents were.You have to be reborn “of water and of the spirit” (John 3:5). You have to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. You need to recognize that you are a sinner in need of forgiveness and repent of your sins. You need confess Jesus is your master, the one who will now run your life.
The reason we don’t need to be taught to “know God” is because THAT is one of the basic requirements of belonging to God in this New Covenant. So, one of the great promises of this NEW covenant is that we’ll have a personal relationship with God.No one else can make that decision for you. But when we’ve made that decision, Romans 8:15 tells us we have “… received the Spirit of Sonship. And by him we cry, "(Abba,) Father”The reason we don’t need to be taught to “know God” is because THAT is one of the basic requirements of belonging to God in this New Covenant. So, one of the great promises of this NEW covenant is that we’ll have a personal relationship with God
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