Because I wrote, and I wholeheartedly live by, the words I wrote day before yesterday, I might be one of the more qualified persons you know, one of the safest people you know, to say this today:

Second to Christ Himself, membership in, participation with, God’s family is one of life’s top priorities.

Yes, there exists a wonderfully beautiful theological truth behind the Hebraic Old Testament mandate of “a lamb for a household”.

AND it is equally true that God’s church is God’s idea, and it cannot be diminished, set aside, or even customized to fit our busy modern lives.

This is a “Both/And”. A divine tension.

“I” by myself do not constitute the bride of Christ. You, on your own, do not “the family of God” make. Your family does not “the family of God” make.

There’s a wily deception afoot in the culture that tries to make us believe that “time together as a family - just us” - must be guarded at all costs, and that “sowing into our marriage” is a large part of our Christian obligation. We are inclined to invest “on the home front” at the expense of our service to the community of saints…which has been, is, and always will be the family of God.

Some time ago, someone left a church ( I choose to refer to this like Paul did of one of his personal experiences, “whether in the body or out of the body I do not know”…”whether our church or another church, I shall not say”…) with no clear church home to which they would go. Now, they made this decision because of a perfect storm of other influences, but they weakly cited the call of Abraham (when he was Abram) to “leave his family, not knowing where he was going”.

There’s a couple of glaring issues with this line of thinking - both issues reveal a touch of understandable immaturity, but also a willful lack of Biblical, contextual understanding:

1. Abram was the prototype for the whole entity of the people of God in all of human history and eternity! (psssst: you and I are not. We’re just not as important. Much like we are also not Job, who was also a prototype, and aren’t you glad?)

2. God thought nothing of removing Abram from his family of origin, to establish the more important thing: the family of faith. It was one of God’s most foundational, and one of His earliest acts in His own plan of salvation.

So, their whole reason for leaving should have actually been their biggest, most Biblical reason to stick and stay: God is calling each of us into a far greater reality - and that reality is our participation in God’s household. My autonomous inclinations are to be set aside in favor of the overwhelming value of being a member of God’s family.

I am not saying that your family should not be a top priority.

I am saying that your family should make a local church family a top priority.

See the sweet difference? It’s in the outworking of it, fighting through the tension of it into greater freedom to pursue the heart of God together as a family, that actually makes for strong families. To be on journey to the Celestial City together, together seeking that city that has foundations whose builder and maker is God, it is that kind of togetherness which “tends towards” abundant life, in both marriage and family.