"Life Lessons From the Bible" Part 1
"Family"

I'm beginning a short series of messages today looking at some of the practical things we face in life (such as fear, failure, forgiving people), and how we can overcome these things. Our answers will be rooted in the Bible and its wisdom.

Today I want to look at how we can move beyond some of the limitations that our family and upbringing place upon us, so we can reach more of our potential as an adult and a follower of Jesus.

In the creation story found in Genesis 2, after God creates a man, then the woman, it says, "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24). One is to leave father and mother, and cling to the marriage partner. Jesus affirmed the necessity of leaving father and mother. He referred to the Genesis account as He taught, "But from the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female.' 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' So they are no longer two, but one flesh" (Mark 10:6-8).

Part of growing up involves leaving home - leaving our father and mother. There is the physical act of leaving home - moving yourself and your stuff out. Even more significant is emotionally leaving home and leaving one's parents.

Sometimes this doesn't happen! You have, say, a grown child living at home, still dependent on mom and dad. Then, there are those children who have physically left home, but have not yet separated emotionally from their parents. People might look at them and say, "She still depends on her daddy for everything", or "He's still tied to his mommy's apron strings."

This inability to separate from our parents can show up in marriage, where the parents still play too large a role in the adult child’s life. For instance, you have a decision to make, and you’re more concerned about what your parents think than working it out as a couple.
One of the early developmental tasks of marriage is for the couple to form a husband/wife bond that takes precedence over the relationship one has to parents. This doesn't mean you stop loving your parents, or that you can’t be close to them; it's just that your parents should occupy less of a central place in your life.

Leaving home, and separating from our parents, is important even if we choose not to get married. Our life as an adult should gravitate toward significant relationships with other adults rather than being focused on mother and father.

Of course, this means that as parents we have to let our children go! Some parents find this very difficult, for various reasons. This clip from the film Meet the Parents shows a humorous side to this as a young lady brings her boyfriend - soon to be her fiancée - to meet her parents for the first time.

The Bible says, "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24).

God's purpose is that we grow up, and establish our own identity. God created each one of us to be a unique individual. He wants you to be you, not just an extension or a clone of your mom and dad. For that to happen, we need to separate emotionally from our parents.

One of the things that can keep us emotionally stuck to our parents is the unresolved number of issues we might have with them. There are all kinds of "issues" that can cloud our relationship with our parents. For example, we may have a controlling mother or father. He or she can become a master at pushing just the right buttons to make us do what they want, or to make us feel guilty if we don't. We may be 40 or 50 years old, and mom or dad is still trying to run our life and tell us what to do. I counseled a lady once in her 70's, a dear, sweet Christian woman, whose mother was living with her, and still trying to run her life. My client was allowing this to happen. We would spend most of the therapy session talking about her mom. At 70-plus years of age, mom ought not loom that large and take that central a place in your life! I coyly suggested that she get a t-shirt that said something like, "I belong to mommy", on it.

Another of these "issues" that we can have with our parents is that we grew up with critical, perfectionist parents. We could never please them, never measure up to their standards and expectations. So, one way this could influence us as an adult would be that we spend the rest of our life trying to be the perfect child - we can be 60 years old and our parents could be dead, and we still have mom or dad or both sitting on our shoulder watching our every move, telling us we're not doing it right. Or, we've internalized this and, as an adult, have little sense of our own worth or little confidence in our own abilities.

There are all kinds of issues we can have with our parents. Feelings of being treated unfairly…abandonment issues…and when these are unresolved, they can hinder us from emotionally "leaving home", and becoming a healthy adult.

One of the fascinating ways this plays out is that when we have unresolved emotional issues with a parent, we tend to try to work them out with a spouse, or the significant adults in our life. Some of the "stuff" that may be creating problems in our marriage, or in our important adult relationships, is really "stuff" that hasn't been finished off with a parent or parents. It may have little or nothing to do with our spouse.

Murray Bowen was as an M.D. and a therapist who gave us some great insights into family relationships. He once attended a conference where a man presented a paper describing his attempt to separate himself emotionally from his own parents, and some of the dynamics of that. Dr. Bowen was impressed with what the man said, and he began to share this information in his teaching of psychiatric interns at Georgetown University. That group of students began to use those insights when they went back to visit their parents. They'd come back to class and share how it had gone back home. Several surprising things happened: (1). These students tended to do better in their clinical work with patients. (2). Unlike Dr. Bowen's other students, these students weren't coming to him for private counseling about their own family problems. The conclusion he drew was that as these students began to resolve some of the issues with their parents, they began to be healthier in their relationships with their marital partner or other adults.

We've all grown up with imperfect parents - who were raised by imperfect parents! All of our parents are a mix of healthy and dysfunctional personalities. Our parents can be a very positive influence - giving us values, modeling what a healthy adult looks like. Some of us been blessed with wonderful moms and dads. But, to be honest, some of us have rather dysfunctional parents, and the issues we have with them have not been resolved. And these can be keeping us from becoming the healthy adult or the mature Christian that God wants us to be!

So, what can we do if that's the case? Here are some thoughts.

Take time to reflect on your growing up years and your relationship with your parents, and how it is affecting you now. What strengths and good qualities did you get from your parents? On the other hand, what issues are there with a parent or parents that still may be unresolved, and affecting how you function as an adult?

If your parents are living, you might want to consider talking with them in an honest and loving way about your childhood – what you appreciate about that time of your life and what they gave you, and also what things you wish might have been different. Now if your relationship with a parent or parents is not good, this could be risky. So you might want to get some coaching and guidance from a counselor in working through some of this. But a starting point towards health is to take some time to reflect on how your growing up years are impacting your adult life and behavior.

God wants you to discover and celebrate your own God-created uniqueness. Our job as parents is to give our children roots and wings - to give them a stable foundation so they can develop trust and self-confidence – then to gradually pull away and let them develop into their own person. (Hopefully, if we raise them in the way of Christ, they will choose those spiritual values, but we can't control that).

This means that we have to allow our children, as they mature, to differ with us! I remember a young lady I saw in therapy, who saw herself as a bad person, no good. What had happened was that when she became a teenager, and began to have different opinions from her father, this didn't fly. He was the only one who had a right to an opinion in that household. Eventually he threw her out of the house - because everybody had to agree with him, or else! So instead of recognizing that what she was doing was normal and
healthy, she swallowed the idea that she was a bad person. This was hampering the way she functioned as an adult, a wife, and a mother.

How was it in your home? When you had different views from your parents, was that encouraged, or were you punished? John Bradshaw says, "In a healthy family it’s orchestrated so you can be who you are. In a dysfunctional family you are told what to be.”

In the Bible, Abraham is a splendid example of a man who "left home" in order to fulfill his unique God-created destiny. (Remember Abraham? The father of the Israelite nation, the one God chose to set in motion salvation history). Listen to how it started:

"Now the Lord said to Abram, 'Go from your country and your kindred and
your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great
nation and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a
blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will
curse; and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed" (Genesis 12:1-3).

Notice, Abram is to go from his father's house. Remember, families in that culture were much tighter than they are in our American culture - there was a much greater sense of "family", what with tribes and clans. But, he had to leave home in order to fulfill God's purpose and destiny for his life.

Also, one of the most important things we can do to separate ourselves emotionally from our parents and become a more mature adult is to define ourselves. Self-definition.
Murray Bowen called this the "differentiation of self" - or being able to define ourselves as a person separate from our parents.

See, some families are “enmeshed” or emotionally stuck together. You don’t know where one person ends and the other begins. In this type of unhealthy family, everyone is expected to think alike, feel alike, act alike. And there is this pressure to be like everybody else in the family in order to stay “in”. Children raised in this kind of family often find it very difficult to feel ok about being their own person and moving on with their life. As soon as they disagree with their parents or others in the family, family members feel hurt and angry, and the person often feels guilty about this.

But the thing that this person needs to do is in a firm yet loving way to define one’s self: this is who I am, this is what I believe, this is how I think, this is what I am willing to do, this is what I will not tolerate, etc. As easy as this sounds, for some this can be very difficult without feeling like they are doing something wrong.

We see this powerfully demonstrated in the life of our Lord, Jesus! When Jesus was 12 years old, his family went up to Jerusalem for the Feast of Passover. When they left, they didn’t realize that Jesus was left behind. (People traveled in caravans, and they assumed
that He was with others in the larger group). When they hurried back to get Him, He was in the temple, conversing with the Jewish teachers and leaders. Let’s pick up the story:

"After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers,
listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were
amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him they
were astonished; and his mother said to him, 'Child, why have you treated us like
this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.' He
said to them, 'Why were you searching for me? Did you no know that I must be
in my Father's house?'" (Luke 2:46-49).

There is something very contemporary about this story! Here's a pre-teen, with his own ideas, wanting to do his own thing, and parents who are upset and given to a lot of anxiety over it! Already, at the age of 12, Jesus is beginning to establish His own personhood, and to fulfill the unique role God had designed for Him.

Very early in life, children have this natural tendency to discover who they are - and its our job as parents to cooperate with this process, and encourage our children to be the unique individuals God created them to be.

There is much more that could be said and I’ve just scratched the surface on this topic, but I hope that it gives us some tools to use in our striving to grow into mature adulthood, and to be the unique person God created us to be.

Sermon preached by Harry L. Kaufhold, Jr.
Lititz United Methodist Church
January 6, 2008

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