Musings from SHDZ ARK

So . . . what are YOU going to do about comparison in your life??

Unrealistic expectations so often get us into trouble . . . and there’s no place more damaging for wrong expectations than our marriage. Steve Stroope in this excerpt from It Starts at Home shares some great thoughts:

If we’re not careful, we may find ourselves seeking to remake our spouse into who we think we need them to be to ensure our happiness. Our desperate need to change them turns into manipulation, and the more they resist, the less we enjoy being around them—possibly even wondering if we married the wrong person.

What if we released unrealistic expectations before allowing them to undermine lifelong love? Sooner or later we need to rest in the reality that no spouse—regardless of how cute, perky, calm, or hardworking he or she may be—can meet all of our needs. . . . . God surely wants to meet many needs through our spouse. But only He can meet all of our needs. Plus, we must remember that not every perceived need is an actual need in our lives. Sometimes what we expect from a spouse is exactly the opposite of what God knows we need in order to become more like Christ.

As painful as it may be to accept, my wife, Marsha, is God’s primary instrument for making me a better person. Despite what I perceive as my needs in life, my deepest need is to grow up. I begin to do that when I stop placing impossible demands on the person God has called me to serve.

The person you married has the potential to be a pretty good spouse. But he or she would make a terrible God. Releasing unrealistic expectation means accepting that my spouse is as imperfect as I am. It means recognizing that he or she can’t possibly meet all of my needs.

Good words here! God has given my spouse to make me into a better person! Our deepest need is to grow up! And our spouse would make a terrible God . . . May God help us to remember who is God and who is not . . . and may He help us to genuinely thank Him for the gift He’s given us in our spouse!

Blessings to all you “second servants” out there!

It’s amazing what comes alive in Scripture! Recently I was reading in Genesis 6, and verses 8-9 struck me with interest. The first seven verses are pretty depressing—everything is turning out badly in the world (does that sound familiar?). However, in the middle of all this evil and darkness comes this verse, “But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.” What a refreshing comment, and yet one filled with humility . . . because Henry M. Morris notes this appears to be Noah’s own words! Morris goes on to note that v. 9a—“This is the genealogy of Noah” appears to be “Noah’s signature concluding his personal record” from Genesis 5:29 through 6:9a. Noah’s “last word” was to emphasize how much he found grace in the eyes of the Lord!

Morris then notes that the rest of verse 9 would likely be the comments from Noah’s sons, stressing the godliness of their father. What a perfect Father’s Day moment—an example of three sons giving honor and tribute to their father! Sons, what will you do to give tribute to your father this Father’s Day?

Finally, putting verse 8 and 9 together, we have a wonderful picture of the process of salvation in our lives . . . First, we find grace in the Lord’s eyes. Then, we experience justification (“Noah was a just man”)—being made righteous (“just as if I’d” never sinned). Next, we experience sanctification, the process of being made blameless (complete and mature) in our relationship with God and man. Finally, we experience the joy of walking with God in total faith. Like Noah, his ancestor Enoch walked with God . . . and then “was not, for God took him.”

This Father’s Day, let’s honor Noah and the model he gives us in these two verses of Genesis, asking God to do the same in us. Moreover, let’s take time to give tribute to our earthly father . . . and most of all, our Heavenly Father!

Hollywood has glamorized the concept of “falling” in love . . . However, as we seek to strengthen our homes, it’s helpful to remember that this concept is nowhere found in the Bible. Steve Stroope makes these comments in It Starts at Home:

We sometimes falling in love as if we were walking along life’s road before stumbling into a wonderfully refreshing pool of romantic bliss. We didn’t make a choice to love the other person. We “fell” into their eager arms. As thrilling as that may sound, the notion of falling in love carries with a very dangerous implication. You see, if we can fall into love willy-nilly, we can also fall out of love in the same haphazard fashion.

Don’t get me wrong. Romantic feelings are a wonderful, God-given part of dating and marriage. But they are the effect, not the cause. In a healthy marriage we choose to love even when we don’t feel very loving, often prompting loving feelings to follow. In an unstable marriage it works the other way around: We wait for loving feelings to inspire loving choices.
True, lasting love is more about conscious choices than chance encounters. We commit ourselves to another human being and accept the dual responsibility of learning and meeting their needs. The emotions of love will—in the soil of real life—shrink and expand with the circumstances of time. But the strong pier of commitment provides stability.

Choosing to love . . . commitment . . . these are the foundations of a healthy marriage and strong home. Let’s make some good choices today to love our spouse . . . and let the feelings follow our choices!

It Starts at Home by Kurt Bruner and Steve Stroope makes the compelling case for spiritual formation to begin at home, but this excerpt helps to clarify that both the home AND the church are needed in our family’s spiritual development. Read and ponder . . .

Spiritual formation begins at home, but it does not end there. The home cannot be the church any more than the church can be the home. Christianity is a communal faith to be experienced through corporate worship, under pastoral leadership and amid what many call “doing life” with other believers. God never intended a family’s faith to occur apart from local church engagement. But neither did He design the church to replace the home. Left to do the entire job by itself, a church can only impart enough of the faith to inoculate kids against taking it seriously. Church and home, like a watering can and the soil in a flowerpot, are both essential to the job.

To build on the imagery, I would just suggest that what is needed is the soil of the home, the water of the church, and the sun of the Holy Spirit! Together, they are a powerful combination for creating fruitful and bountiful plantings of the Lord!

I thought this picture was a very powerful illustration of how important the home is nurturing the roots of our “budding flowers”—our children . . . Enjoy this additional excerpt from It Starts at Home by Kurt Bruner and Steve Stroope:

Imagine four budding flowers representing my four children. I gently cradle them in my hand, careful to protect the delicate roots reaching out from the narrowing tips at the bottom of each stem. Aware of their need for the living water of the gospel, I bring to a watering can called the local church where pastors, Sunday School teachers, and student pastors pour the life-giving nourishment of the good news onto their lives. But the water simply drips off the sides of my hand, failing to penetrate the dangling roots of their thirsty hearts.

Concerned, I urgently look for another solution. Fearing my children will wither and die unless I find a more effective means of imparting strong faith, I grab a bigger, more contemporary-looking watering can—one with cutting-edge music and a cool-looking student pastor—hoping it will more effectively reach my kinds. But the heavy flow of water just splashes onto the ground.

Obviously, the problem is not with the size or style of the watering can. Roots only grow if planted in soil. Yet an entire generation of parents seems to have missed God’s design. Faith must be nourished in the rich soil of a God-honoring family. The church’s role is to prove the water. But lifelong faith requires deep, abiding roots.

Let’s make sure our budding flowers are firmly planted in the rich, God-honoring soil of our own homes!

Here’s another tremendous excerpt from It Starts at Home: A Practical Guide to Nurturing Lifelong Faith by Kurt Bruner and Steve Stroope. In this passage, Kurt Bruner shares about the power of incarnational living . . .

No matter how creatively we proclaim God’s Word to children at church, they are more likely to believe their experience of the faith at home. That’s because incarnation trumps proclamation.

Incarnation literally means “en-flesh-ment.” God became a flesh-and-blood human being to reveal Himself to us in a way written words could not accomplish. . . . . No wonder every major heresy in church history has been an attack on the doctrine of the incarnation. Satan hates that God became flesh. He also hates healthy families because they serve as flesh-and-blood icons of the unity and love that flows within and from the Trinity. The Scriptures tells us that when husband and wife become one flesh in the pleasure of marital union, it creates a picture of the beautiful union between Christ and His church. It also reaps the gift of children, filling the world with more fleshy reminders of Satan’s mortal enemy.

Life comes from unity with God and others—moving toward others. Death means separation—moving away. Happy homes echo the intimate joys of heaven. Broken, troubled families, by contrast, imitate the loneliness, isolation, and anger of hell.

Do you want to make the Devil cringe as if hearing scratching nails on a chalkboard? Then celebrate fifty years of marriage or enjoy laughter with your children around the dinner table. Satan does not fear a religion that merely stencils words on a stone wall, or even preaches them in a sermon. What he dreads is when the Word becomes flesh and blood in the tangible context of a God-honoring marriage and family.

Let’s become a “flesh and blood” picture of Christ in our homes today!

I’ve recently discovered a great book entitled It Starts at Home: A Practical Guide to Nurturing a Lifelong Faith by Kurt Bruner and Steve Stroope. It reinforces so many of the messages that God has been showing us at our Household Worship Service, and it is exciting to see that the larger Body of Christ is beginning to wrestle with the same issues. Here is an excerpt from the foreword, written by Bill Hybels, as he comments on his support for the thrust of this book:

The time has come to innovate once again. The landscape of the world in which we minister has shifted dramatically during the past three decades. The upcoming generation confronts an obstacle to belief that goes beyond worship style, teaching relevance, or church-program excellence, because it is not about what’s happening at church. It’s about what’s missing at home.


You’ve probably read the reports. Even the most conservative estimates tell us that we are losing more and more of our own children to unbelief. Many of those most inclined to embrace the gospel—children, like my grandson, who attend church with their parents—are rejecting the Christian faith. Despite an enormous investment of time and money into some of the most innovative and effective church programs in the history of Christianity, generational faith transference is in serious decline.


If the local church is the hope of the world, then we must take seriously the church’s responsibility to call couples, parents, and grandparents to create God-honoring homes. Only then will we see the tide turn on declining generational faith transference.

What (or Who?) is missing at your home? Let’s ask God to fill our homes with His Presence, so that the next generation will truly run after Him with all their might!

I’d like to point you to an article I read recently about the battle for validating same-sex marriages--http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/may/11.52.html?start=1. Referencing the New York Times, it noted that half of the gay couples in San Francisco consider their relationship to be “open” (i.e. meaning that partners consent to each other having relations with other partners). This is not a “normal” marriage relationship . . . and granting validity to same-sex marriages runs a serious danger of invalidating the marriage institution itself.

Faithfulness in marriage (as clearly called for in Scripture—see Hebrews 13:4 for starters) is the greatest opportunity to strengthen and uphold the marriage relationship in our culture. Note this conclusion of the article:

As Catholic author Christopher West says, "Chastity is first and foremost a great yes to the true meaning of sex, to the goodness of being created as male and female in the image of God. Chastity isn't repressive. It's totally liberating. It frees us from the tendency to use others for selfish gratification and enables us to love others as Christ loves us."

Let’s be well-informed when the argument for same-sex marriage comes around to our corner of the world, and let’s demonstrate a chastity that is God-honoring and marriage-affirming!

Here’s another interesting lesson from our backyard . . . Last year, we had two of our trees that were both doing very badly . . . so both were cut down to the ground. Here’s what one of the stumps looks like . . . not much there!



But . . . here’s what the other one looks like now!




What’s the difference? Well, apparently there was quite a bit of life left in the roots of the second one, and a vibrant new beginning is demonstrating itself!

What’s the “takeaway”? I see several:

1) There are times when we need to “go back to the roots” . . . when what we have going is too unhealthy and too destructive to continue . . . so it all needs to be pruned away.
2) However, the key is the health of the roots . . . do we have good roots? Are the roots healthy and vibrant? If so, new life will spring forth!

“There shall come forth a Rod from the stem of Jesse, And a Branch shall grow out of his roots.” Isaiah 11:1 (NKJV)