Day 15 - Family Rules

Family Rules:

Keep your promises

Share

Think of others before yourself

Say I love you

Listen to your parents

Do your best

Play fair

Say please and thank you

Always tell the truth

Laugh at yourself

Hug often

Use kind words

Love each other

Lists such as this one are quite the trend right now.  Why is that?  Is it strictly just for decorating or is there something at its core that makes us say, “Yes, I want my family to stand for something.”  Or do we want others to think that we stand for something but it’s only a wistful ideal?  

What is interesting to me is that there is a scripture to back up most every single one of these rules on all of the different signs I have seen.  One of my favorite scriptures whose truth I see everywhere I turn, and I see it in this, is, “That which has been is what will be.  That which is done is what will be done.  And there is nothing new under the sun.  Is there anything of which it may be said, ‘See, this is new?’… it has already been done in ancient times before us.” Ecclesiastes 1:9,10   God established family rules that looked just like this list thousands of years ago. We put them all together on a cute distressed wooden sign and claim it “new”.

God formed us for His family. You were formed for God’s family. We must choose to be a part of His family, and if we do, there are “family rules”.  Not burdensome, ball and chain, unattainable kind of rules, but basic living rules.  Like, “Play fair”, “Always tell the truth”, “Share”, “Love each other”. Paul says in 1 Timothy 3:14-15, “I’m writing …so you’ll know how to live in the family of God.  That family is the church of the living God.”   This means there is a “way”.  

Jesus lived and walked the “way”. He took our family rules to a whole new level when He basically cleared the slate and said it boils down to this one rule… “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another.  By this, all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”  John 13:34,35   The word used for “new” here means unused, fresh, novel…new in regard to form or quality. He was, in essence, saying, “Loving others is going to look different now.  It’s a fresh, new way. It is going to look like the way I treated you and what I did for you.”  Jesus loved by serving and placing the needs of others over his own.  If we are to love as Jesus loved, we need to know what his love looked like.  His love was sacrificial.  His love was unconditional.  His love was constant.  His love was self-sustaining…it ran on “auto pilot”.  It was the foundation of all that He did.  Everything He did was motivated by love, even every rebuke.  

As Rick Warren states in the first sentence in the book, What on Earth am I Here For, “It’s not about you.” …It’s about the family.  Whatever we do personally affects the family.  Loving like Christ is a selfless, servant-minded, sacrificial love. Sacrificial?  A sacrifice is a destruction or surrender of something for the sake of something else.  Offering something precious. In other words, surrendering ourselves, which is a precious offering, for the sake of someone in the family.  Love sacrificially…and since families, and the family of God, can’t live as islands of collective individuals living unto themselves, there must be some basic rules to help us practice daily how to be more sacrificially minded, in order for everyone to live productive, fulfilling, and purposeful lives.

Warren says, “That Christ would command us to love indicates that it is not just a feeling or a preference….IT IS WHAT ONE DOES! IT IS HOW WE RELATE TO OTHERS…a decision, a commitment, or a way of behaving.”  Truly loving others is a proactive decision we must make daily.  If we are in God’s family, we love.  When I was growing up in my family with my four siblings, my dad would often call family meetings.  We would all gather together in the living room and sit on the couch or on the floor and face our parents with eager ears, never quite knowing for what purpose the meeting had been called.  Sometimes they were held for encouragement, sometimes for rebuke, sometimes to express needs, sometimes to solve problems, sometimes to pray, sometimes to share, and sometimes to forgive.  When he was trying to impress upon us a certain character quality of which we were all falling short, he would say, “You are a Ray!  This is what Ray children do!”  It was not optional.  Because we were a part of the Ray family, we were expected to live to a certain standard. We had very clear family rules (and they weren’t hanging neatly on the wall!).  They were ingrained into our hearts by daily practice.  Yes, we continued to make mistakes, but always persevering to live in way that brought honor to one another, to our parents, and to our family as a whole.  God has set the standard for us through Christ….”You are a Christian.  This is what Christians do.”  It is not optional.  We love one another.

We could reword these family rules to help simplify them down to that one thing which Christ commanded:

If you love others, you will…

Keep your promises

Share

Think of them before yourself

Say I love you

Listen 

Do your best

Play fair

Say please and thank you

Always tell the truth

Laugh at yourself, because love is not prideful

Hug often

Use kind words

“By this, all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”  What do people know about you when they look at the rules by which you live? What does your love look like? Are your eyes straight ahead, proactively and deliberately choosing how you make each step, each action, each word count for the family? Are you preferring others? Family rule number one, number two, number three, number four, number five, number six, number seven,…Love one another.