Family: What Kind of House Are You Building?

Family: What Kind of House Are You Building?      Kelly Durant 8-18-13

1.Hebrews 3:1-6 Therefore, holy brothers and sisters, who share in the heavenly calling, fix your thoughts on Jesus, whom we acknowledge as our apostle and high priest. 2 He was faithful to the one who appointed him, just as Moses was faithful in all God’s house. 3 Jesus has been found worthy of greater honor than Moses, just as the builder of a house has greater honor than the house itself. 4 For every house is built by someone, but God is the builder of everything. 5 “Moses was faithful as a servant in all God’s house,”[a] bearing witness to what would be spoken by God in the future. 6 But Christ is faithful as the Son over God’s house. And we are his house, if indeed we hold firmly to our confidence and the hope in which we glory.

2. All of you who are children of the Lord should be learning from every experience in life! All things are for a purpose, every experience, and every conversation. Have you ever asked God after a visit with someone, or with a family member you don’t know too much about, what good came from this? Do you ask yourself, what should I pray for now? Was I blessing to them?

The young artist Taylor Swift seems to write a song about all the experiences she has with people in her life, be they good or bad. Her music is quite catchy, one of my favorite songs of hers is “Why You Gotta Be So Mean?” It’s a song about a person in the family who mocks and belittles others. In all families there are amazing people who are a great inspiration to all and sadly there are others that are quite terrible and they have left scars on everyone! Well, in my case I either write a poem or sermon about my experiences, ha!

I know my experiences in life are very similar to most of yours. God wants each of us to not live life like a goldfish that cannot remember past 10 seconds always doing the same mistakes as the ones who were before us, but rather God has reversed our path to become a royal priesthood, a superior class, who study and become enlightened with all the wisdom of the Bible of Moses, Solomon, and above all that, that of Jesus. Your and my goal is to build a stronger spiritual house through our children as the years pass, to improve upon the stock, as we cannot reply on the forefathers legacy.

3. The more exposure you and I have to God’s word and to the various people of the world, absorbing the lessons to be learned, the wiser you and I will become. (That is if one practices the Bible, obeys God’s will, and chooses to love Him and others as He commanded!)

I am sure many of you may want to hear about my family and all of what we did on vacation. It was an experience of doing repairs (at my mother’s house), traveling back and forth to many homes, as well as non-stop listening, talking, and often eating! Fellowship, food, and fixing!

I was very pleasantly surprised to meet up with many pleasant and loving relatives!

What I can tell you about my family is probably identical to what you would tell me about yours, that within the group there are good Christians who are faithful, just, loving, and authentic who hold relationships together like glue, but then there are others that due to their own personal issues, sins, or demons, despite some good done, have provoked pain and disillusionment to the many that endured them.  This is a reality of life in this fallen world. Jesus wanted to change life from being a hell on earth to making it a Kingdom of God on earth, a heaven now, and a heaven later in a new body after the resurrection! What a task it is get others to change! Only Jesus through the Holy Spirit can do the miracle in them which He did through us some time ago!

4. In the history of Israel we discover that the 12 tribes were not always united (an understatement) as a family. That is what makes the Bible so realistic and authentic, it is not a fairy tale of a perfect world, but rather a recount of what goes wrong when family people do not obey God and become greedy or excessive with their carnal passions! The nation of Israel many times had their families divided due to punishments from offending God, including divisions from wars, slavery, dispersion by enemy conquerors, and from eternal feuds.

Many immigrants like yourselves can relate to Israel and to how many years can roll by you before you are able to re-connect to family. The sad reality is multi-millions of people, and Cubans are a perfect example, never even get to go back and visit family. A large amount of people lose family contact due to bad political systems, like from communism, and others loose family by death or by choice due to repulsive sinful actions that are too offensive to ignore.

I understand how many of you feel not having family close by in some way because for 14 years while I was in South America I only had as family my wife and kids and my “holy brothers and sisters, who share in the heavenly calling”, (as stated in verse 1). Family is often considered to be a certain bloodline and name, but real family is only held together by those who have the faith and name of Jesus in common.

5. In 1990 I arrived back to Tulsa from Colombia as a scared immigrant, with no money and 4 preteen kids. I did not get to visit many aunts and uncles then, but in the end a certain aunt did help me to get a good used van so in it we packed all we owned in suitcases and moved to Miami where we got a new start in life.  It almost seems that all the years in between then and now all us were so busy just finishing school and college, doing God’s work and paying bills that it was difficult to keep up with the larger extended family having little free travel time.

For everything in life there is a time or season, as in Ecclesiastes 3:1-12, a certain timing for everything and I thank God I could at this time period in my life get to see not just my 2 grandsons, but also several of my young second cousins in the spring of their lives full of energy and talents. I also saw several others in the seasoned fall years of their lives like myself, and there are others that are in the winter of lives with not many more years left.

6. Staying connected with family is often hard to do but you and I must work at it so we have opportunities to give and receive love as God intended! We are all created to love and that is the most important need in life that only God through family can fill. Are you aware of the scientific experiment that proves a baby left alone with no affection or love dies after a few months?  Scientist Bowlby in 1945 did an observation on delinquent and affectionless children and reported that the effect of a hospital and institutional care can lead to an infant death after a few months. He was commissioned to write for the World Health Organisation's report on the mental health of homeless children in post-war Europe while he was head of the Department for Children and Parents at the Tavistock Clinic in London after World War II. He produced the monograph on Maternal Care and Mental Health published in 1951, which sets out the maternal deprivation hypothesis as a means to explain why 1 in 2 infants die in conditions without love or affection. But God’s solution is this: Psalm 68:6 God sets the solitary in families: he brings out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land.

Jesus cared for the disciples families; people often overlook the fact that they had families! Matt 8: 14 When Jesus came into Peter’s house, he saw Peter’s mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever. 15 He touched her hand and the fever left her, and she got up, and began to wait on him. With all the mother-in-law jokes out there, Jesus really did have compassion to heal her!

7. Reverting back to the verses in Hebrew of today: Each family is as an individual house sharing the same common last name and similar genes and also, for example, Levi would indicate you were of the priest tribe. Did you know each name indicated the historical talents of your family? For example my wife’s name Arteaga means one who does art. Castillo (Castle) would mean either one from Castillo (Spain) or one who served in one. In Brazil the Jews under persecution 300 years ago migrated adapting the names of fruit trees as a covert indicator of their heritage.

Your parents and ancestors have either built up, or torn down the family’s reputation, but in the case where Jesus is introduced as supreme over the family, that family acquires an honorable status and salvation. Heb. 3:6 But Christ is faithful as the Son over God’s house. And we are his house, if indeed we hold firmly to our confidence and the hope in which we glory.

Those that do not build on Jesus are set up to fail. Like the two homeless bums warming their hands around a fire in a trash can in a dark and dirty alley; after talking about life one says to the other, “Well, for the record…I did it my way!” The other one looking at his dirty clothes says, “Well, next time I am going to do it Frank Sinatra’s way!” Funny, right? They both should have done it Jesus’ way!

What we learn from how people live is no matter what a person builds,  acquires, or loses for the family in this life, what matters to God is if he or she has built on the foundation of Jesus who is superior to any ancestor, Moses, or any other prophet who ever lived. He is the name above all names! Heb.3: 3 Jesus has been found worthy of greater honor than Moses, just as the builder of a house has greater honor than the house itself.

8. Families have a past and it is appropriate to recognize them. Many of you know I admire my past heritage of Native Indian (Chickasaw). Have you ever contemplated how brave they were along with all of your great-grandparents to survive in the wilderness? Up until about a hundred years ago people had to homestead on a piece on land, chop down their own trees to build a cabin for their family to live in and then hunt food to survive. As a kid I use to practice shooting arrows and throwing knives and tomahawks into trees; but catching an animal for food is not easy! I’m afraid I would have starved to death or eaten squirrels like the mountain people do!

When you think of family names, there is a famous Afro-American basketball player named Kevin Durant. I saw T-shirts with Kdurant on them while in Oklahoma and my eyes would focus on them trying to understand what I was looking at since my email is kdurant7@gmail.com, and my blog is kdurant7.blogspot.com. Anyway, sometimes people will ask me, are you related to him? I laugh and say, yeah, he’s a cousin I haven’t met yet! Ha!

We know many of you here and we know a lot about your family relatives. Regina and I have known in the past 35 years thousands of cases of families good and bad. In the missionary pastor line of service we have seen cases of extreme love and cases of extreme cruelty.  

9. The heritage or house last name you and I are born with, with our own individual particular circumstances, no one can change. The family, the race, the sex, the health issues, and the time period on earth we were born in, not a single one of us can change! We can choose, however, to either live bitter and complain and blame others for our circumstances, or we can just appreciate the good we have been given and rise above it all. Many people tell me stories of growing up poor in South America and they are middle class now. And middle class in the U.S.A. is like the ultra-rich class compared to most other nations!

In the end, family life is what you make of it, God gives us freewill to “do as we please” but a wise person will control their destructive habits and they will build their house upon the rock Jesus Christ and not on the sand. Great fathers and mothers have been those who have lived holy lives and these great examples that go down in history honored in all families.

Referring to family names, did you know that William Booth the founder of our Salvation Army in 1865, who helped millions out of poverty and saved souls by preaching salvation in Jesus was a cousin to John Wilkes Booth who shot President Abraham Lincoln dead? What a contrast of paths taken! The selfless, holy and wise William Booth drastically changed the world for good, yet the carnally minded politically motivated John Wilkes Booth died in infamy.

10. No matter where you are in your relations with others, Jesus can fix and heal things! The way it works is you allow Him to fix YOU first and then your positive influence will rub onto others that are closest to you. Others may be guilty, you may have to forgive crimes done against you but to focus blame on others is useless; you and I must focus on making OURSELVES be like Jesus!

Here is a promise that we all must stand firm on to claim for our families: Acts 16:31 And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.

We all want our house to be saved, so today, take the decision to love Jesus more! Take the decision to include him as a priority in your schedule. Make Jesus the center of your heritage. Build your house on Him and you will see how everyone close to you will be blessed.

Family is what God originally created in the beginning in the garden with Adam and Eve and it is Satan that wants to divide and rob us of that blessing! Fight to unite others of your family to Jesus and then you will see a loving change take place of love and forgiveness, and you will have a hope and a future with God’s blessings!

Come forward now let’s pray together for your family to be converted. And if you have prayed years for someone and they have not changed, then just rest in God that you have done your part! You are only responsible for your actions so be patient, you may live to see a change but a few years later. But even if nothing changes you have the peace of knowing you let it go and put it in God’s hands and that YOU did the change to have Jesus name above your own! Prayer…