Relational Health

and hear your word and figure out a way to apply it to our lives. lord, you are wonderful. you are mighty and you are marvelous. and we worship and exalt you tonight, jesus. i pray that you would anoint my lips of clay, god, as as i bring forth your word, i pray that it would not fall on deaf ears, but god, help us to hear it. help our our brains to understand it. help our hearts to receive it. and i pray that there would be something that we can take away from tonight, lord, from your word. i pray that you would help us as we fellowship one with another. help us to encourage one another, lord, because you are our sustainer. you are our redeemer and you are our savior. and i thank you for that, lord.

i pray that you'd be with us tonight, lord. touch every need that's represented in the room. touch those who have traveled to camp meeting. i pray that you would touch those that are in service. i pray those you touch those that are traveling on vacation. pray that you would protect and keep the body of christ. and lord, we give you all the praise and all the glory and all the honor. everybody said, "amen." all right, you can go ahead and be seated. i said a little bit earlier, tonight is the kickoff of camp meeting. if you have never been, it is a great a great time of pe of getting together with people all over the state and worshiping the lord together.

so, if you're free on thursday or friday night and you want to make the trek, i would encourage you to do so. so we are continuing this week. we are talking about relational health um as it is in the healthy homes challenge. we are doing this series in the month of july really focusing on families. if you were here last week, brother jonathan melhaney from franklin, tennessee, he actually we kind of went out of order, but he talked about mental health and building resilient families. does did anybody enjoy his teaching? we listened to it and it was great. great teaching coming from years of experience, um, years of pastoring, years in the in the mental health profession, and it was it was great.

if you did not get a chance to listen, i would highly encourage you to go find that live stream, listen to it from last week. it was wonderful. all right, we're just going to dive in. are y'all ready? here we go. we know that there are many types of families represented here at cornerstone. even in this room. um, and our desire as a church body is for every family and every household to pursue being healthy. amen. we recognize that not every household is composed of multiple people. um, yet every home can be healthy. while these principles that we're talking through in the healthy homes as we talk about spiritual health, mental health, um, physical health, financial health, i'm there's one i'm i'm missing one.

spiritual, mental, physical, financial, relational, the one i'm teaching on. um, so, um, it's all all the principles are going to be tailored towards a more family dynamic, but hopefully, and i do think that they are applicable to every single type of household. so, if you're a single adult, if you are a single parent, if you are a married couple with or without children, we want to see and the lord wants to see all of our households to be healthy. amen. we find a simple truth in john chapter 10 and verse 10. that the enemy is purposed for three things. he is purposed to steal and he is purposed to kill and he has purposed to destroy. but we serve a god who has purpose to not only provide the opportunity for life but life more abundantly.

what a what an incredible promise. some translations even say that they may have life, yes, and have it full to overflowing. another translation says, "i, the lord, want them us to have life in the fullest way possible." another translation, one of my favorites, but i came so that my sheep will have life and so that they will have everything that they need. what an incredible promise. thank you, lord. so the purpose doesn't stop at the individual. the purpose for abundant life, abundant life doesn't stop at the individual. but where do we mainly live life and who do we live life with? with our families and in our homes, right? i do believe that the abundant life that god has promised us, it extends to the home and to our family.

so if you would um i'm going to put that into that verse. john 10 verse 10. the thief comes only to steal our homes and to kill our homes and to destroy our homes. but i, the lord, came that your homes and your families may have life and have it more abundantly. healthy homes don't happen by accident. i think we all know that. it happens with intentionality. healthy individuals create healthy homes and healthy homes build healthy churches. this is the reason that we're doing this challenge. the reason that our pastoral team has decided this is a great challenge for the month of july because we want to see your home healthy. god wants to see us, our homes, and our church to be healthy. can everyone say healthy? it's like the key word.

we're going to say that a million times tonight. so, tonight we're going to talk about relational health. everyone say relational health. we all have a family of some kind. family relationships are some of the most meaningful connections that we have, but also can be some of the most complicated relationships and connections that we have. the family is the first social system to which an individual is exposed. and we each have a family. some of you are related, but we each have a family of our own. family relationships carry a unique weight because they are unsolicited. you can choose your friends. you can choose your career. you can choose your mentor who speaks into your life. you can even choose your spouse.

but you cannot choose your family of origin. the term family of origin refers to the emotional, the relational, and the psychological environment in which a person is raised or born into. it influences, how many knows? it influences how our emotions are expressed, how caregivers are available, whether they're emotionally available, whether inconsistent or somewhere in between, how conflict or disagreement or difference is handled. can everybody say amen? and then you get married and you figure out, oh, that's completely different. which roles children's were children were implicitly asked to assume within the family system. so, every family system is different. some of you assumed roles early on. maybe you had younger siblings.

um, you had to figure out how to help your parents to raise your younger siblings. some of you were assumed roles that you weren't meant to carry at an early age. some of us experienced a lot of change early on in life and it required us to learn some adaptability. maybe i could go on and on. every single one of us have our own thing that we could say about our family of origin. we all have that and it has influenced our behaviors. but i want to be careful. it is very popular. i do think and i work in the mental health world and i see i see the rise and the falls of the popularities and the terms that we talk through.

and i want to be careful because it's really popular right now within our society um with the rise of mental health issues and some conversations around it to look at our families of origin and often it's brought with resentment or demonizing them and that is not the purpose of this lesson. the purpose of this lesson is to understand this that every family or unit system runs on patterns. everyone say patterns. that's going to be another key word tonight. patterns. believe it or not, families develop patterns. whether we are doing it intentionally or whether we are doing it subconsciously. families will develop predictable and repetitive ways of interacting, of socializing and resolving conflict.

and like i said, sometimes this can be intentional or it can be explicit or it can be implicit. we could all right now think of a family that we know. it may be your own. it may be another family with certain identifiable patterns. if you don't mind, go with me on that. i saw some smirks on some faces, some grimaces on faces, but every family has some sort of identifiable pattern, right? i'm going to list some. so, we have i'll start with my own just to get everybody comfy, though. we leave at 6 o'clock means that we actually leave at 5:45. family hyperunctual household, you have to be on time. this is their pattern. my dad i know if dad says we are eating dinner at 5:' i know that he is sitting at the table at 4:45 and he's already got it.

he's got our reservation. we arrive and we're there. that is a pattern. does anybody relate? no. oh. okay. let's see the next one. the there's there this is an identifiable pattern. the total chaos but we always make it family. they're arriving everywhere on two wheels, but they're smiling and they made it. the everything is a high stakes competition family. the family where a casual board game um on a friday night or a backyard game of cornhole can turn into what feels like to some of us the olympic finals. there is the still in the parking lot family, the family that is consistently the absolute last to leave any event. they're social butterflies.

the car is running, the headlights are on, the kids are asleep, and mom and dad like to socialize. there are many, many, many types of families. can we all agree? and we see these identifiable patterns, and these are just funny ones that i that i came up with. um, believe it or not, we're talking about relational health, but every family has those patterns. we laugh at those patterns. they're funny and they're harmless because we all have something unique that identifies us and those those patterns that we h that make us who we are and every family has them.

but how many knows that we don't just have default patterns that are humorous um of being incred incredibly competitive or social, but we also develop as humans in our families highly predictable automatic patterns for how we handle life when we experience stress, when we're overwhelmed, when we experience pain, or even when we experience offense. and when someone or some ones get hurt in the house, the pattern that we choose matters eternally. can everybody say amen? um, now i want you to i want to be clear and i want you to hear me on this that there is no family and there is no individual sitting in this room anywhere in the world that is exempt from the experience of pain or stress or overwhelm or offense.

i don't want us to think for one moment that growing up in a certain household or with a certain family of origin would excuse a family or an individual of experiencing offense. it's part of life. it's part of of living life's experience. there is a reason if you've been following along in our healthy homes challenge, try to turn to the right page. there is a reason when you open the book and you look at your weekly challenge, there's a reason that each section in this book has weekly habits to check off. so, it's got the habit of praying together and you check off the days, the habit of studying together for a certain amount of days, the habit of going to church together, the habit of eating together, and the habit of family night.

these are weekly habits that are in this book. and there is a reason these are habits that build positive patterns in our homes through consistency and practice. and it's not easy. it's hard to explain to my one and a halfyear-old how we're we're sitting and we're reading and we're doing this together. it's hard. it's not easy. and we're all in different seasons of life. but they do start to give us this predictable pattern of behavior in our homes so that when pain or offense comes, we have a pattern already for handling it god's way. a family's relational health is not determined by the absence of conflict, but it's determined by the presence of a pattern that we have for handling it.

i think all of us at some point in time there is a negative pattern that we can so easily fall into sometimes and it may start from a stressor, an overwhelming experience, a pain caused by a hurtful comment. and a lot of times we may or may not be offended by something that was done to us but to somebody that we love or care for. and if we're not careful, it grows into what we would call unforgiveness. and eventually when unforgiveness is not um faced and it's not dealt with and eventually it turns into a pattern of offense or bitterness that would keep us from living the abundant life that god has purposed for us to live. so in psychology, bitterness or offense actually acts as a cognitive filter.

so it actually changes part of the chemistry of our brain. a cognitive filter is a distorted perspective or view, a distorted lens through which we begin to be to view the world. and it may start small. it may start in a distorted way that we we see a person or an individual or a family or an event or an experience and then if left undelt with it can grow and it's slowly becomes the way that we view most everything. when we hold on to a grievance, our brains actually build a mental case file. if you've ever seen the little cartoons of somebody going into their brain and going through the case files and they're trying to locate um something, our brain will actually start to build that case file against the offender or the experience itself.

this pattern can be explained by what is called, i'm going to use some technical terms, but maybe um popular enough for you to have heard it, cbt, cognitive behavioral therapy. there is something called the cognitive behavioral triangle which shows us how our thoughts and our feelings and our behaviors are interconnected. so to understand how this works, i'm going to go through a simple kind of everyday example and it always starts with a thought. how many knows how quickly our thoughts can happen? after years of experience, our thoughts happen before we even know it.

so, let's say your spouse or if you have teenagers at home, your teenager, your child, somebody in the home forgets to do a chore that they promised to do like taking out the trash. if there's something that we haven't dealt with or if there's some little seed that's in there, unsettled hurt, our brain with that cognitive filter doesn't just see this as a simple mistake. it will instantly jump to a negative automatic thought. they always do this. anybody ever thought that? i am guilty. they expect me to do everything. they clearly don't care about me or respect my time. those automatic thoughts that come up. so that's the thought part of the triangle. so we have the thought and it instantly changes maybe our emotional temperature.

we don't just feel the minor annoyance of, okay, the trash wasn't taken out, but maybe it feels like a wave of, "oh my goodness, i cannot believe." and it becomes almost um like a wave of resentment, of bitterness, and a desire. sometimes we will will engage in frustration or sometimes distance ourselves or withdraw. so our mood drops before they even have a chance to explain. this is the feeling part of the triangle. so, our thought happens, the feeling is met, and then because we're feeling better, then our actions change. and this is the behavior part of the triangle. does anybody relate? just me? we all do this to be honest. and in all honesty, i did it this morning. so, yesterday, we get home from vacation and we're tired.

we've gotten up at 2:30 in the morning. we flew all day. were tired and i knew i knew i needed to go to the grocery store, but i decided not to because i was tired. so, my wonderful husband this morning, he got up and he went to the grocery store and he brings food home. i cook breakfast and we sit down to a very simple breakfast, eggs and bacon. and yes. yes. so, but before i knew it, my husband so, we're eat our breakfast and my husband, hey babe, did you make any more bacon? and after after i could make all the excuses in the world, my first thought was, i cannot believe he's asking me to make more bacon. doesn't he know i have so much to do today?

and all this is going through my head and it's been a split second and all he did was ask for bacon. doesn't he know that i have to reheat the stove and i have to put the bacon in the stove and i'm supposed to do this and ag needs this and and before i knew it, i'm like mad about making bacon and it's the silliest conversation. it's the silliest thing in the world and he's like never mind. i don't need bacon. i don't need bacon anymore. um but and immediately the temper of the room had changed because he asked for bacon and i had all of these internal thoughts happen of things that i hadn't dealt with. and so from what would seem to be a simple request, here comes a pattern.

in order to improve our relational health, in order to improve those patterns, the ways that we're thinking um and feeling about our families, and to break the cycle of those negative thought, feeling, and behavior triangles, what we need is a pattern breaker. and i am so glad to tell you that his name is jesus. and he gives us hope. he literally came to break the pattern of the enemy, one that would have us defeated and bitter and broken. he gives us life and he gives it more abundant. now, he didn't promise it would be easy. in that old song, he never promised. i can just hear the robinson singing it. he didn't promise it that it would be easy.

if it was easy to break these cycles and to have these habits, then everybody would do it, right? if it was easy, then then there would be there wouldn't we wouldn't have hurts and we wouldn't have pains or addictions or substance abuse and the constant need to numb what feelings come from offenses or pain that we've experienced and not resolved. this is where and this is kind of the point that i want to focus on tonight. and talking about relational health. and i felt so strongly the lord impressed on me that this is where the power of forgiveness steps in as a both a psychological and a spiritual circuit breaker.

by consciously altering our thoughts, those automatic thoughts that we think, we disrupt that negative loop, shifting our emotional state and opening the door to healthier interactions with our families. i don't know about you, but that's something that i i definitely want to pursue. always pursuing growth. letting go of anger toward another family member is rarely easy, and it requires a lot of repeated effort. that's the practice. that's the habits, repeated effort, and it requires humility. and it requires patience. so, practically, what does this look like? how can we actually practice strengthening the relational health of our homes by practicing forgiveness?

i heard a message not too long ago, and i went to look back and to see his name. i could tell you what he looks like, but i don't know what his name is. but i heard a message where the preacher said this, that the greatest demonstration of our comprehension of the gospel is our willingness to forgive. so the bible actually gives us a framework for this. and i want to be careful because i know forgiveness can be such such a hot topic. and i know that and i hope you understand my heart tonight. there are some ways that the bible lays out how we can take forgiveness and practically um put it in our our thoughts and practically apply it to our family systems. and the first step is probably one of the hardest for me is that we learn to forbear.

everybody say forbear. forbear. and this is specific to minor offenses, small offenses. someone asking you to cook bacon. no, i'm just kidding. um, to forebear actually means it means to refrain, to abstain, or to hold back from doing or saying something. this is so i'm reminded when i was younger, about when i was a teenager, and i can actually say that now because i'm 30. when i was younger, um, my brother, my older brother stephen would get so angry with me. we would be having family discussions, mom and dad, and stephen and i would be having discussions and we had them often and disagreements, fights, whatever you want to call them, discussions. and we had them often. and and stephen, i i used to feel this like intense desire.

and i think i don't know maybe some people can relate. i just needed them to know i was offended and i needed them to know why and i needed my voice to be heard. any parents of teenagers understand that. and i would just talk and just like like an open fire hydrant. and my brother amidst the conversation would look at me and he would say, "len, if you would just close your mouth, this conversation would be over and we could go do what we wanted to do. and how do you think i responded to that?

and i would get so mad and he would say, "if you would just be quiet and just agree, we could just move on." and i would think to myself, "well, no, i need them to know." but that was not the biblical way to do it because god actually calls us to self-control, to learn learning to forbear for minor offenses. um, in proverbsap 19 11, it says, "good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense." and i want to bring up an analogy. so, i want you to think of forbearance or abstaining from speaking or abstaining from giving your your immediate feedback. i want you to think of it as the shock absorbers on your vehicle.

whether it's a motorcycle, whether it's a bicycle, whether it is um a car, a bus, any sort of mode of transportation is going to have these shock absorbers. okay? if your car had a suspension made of rigid solid steel with no give, every single tiny pebble or pothole on the road would rock the entire frame. a drive down a normal street would eventually rattle the car to pieces, right? the shock absorbers don't change the road, but they absorb the bump so that the passengers don't feel the total impact. so, in a household, thinking of forbearance as the shock absorbers, minor offenses are the everyday little pebbles on the road. maybe the tone of voice that's used when someone's tired or the fact that they forgot to grab milk on the way home.

whatever these little minor offenses would be. if our homes have no relational shock absorption or they have no forbearance or the ability to overlook or give the benefit of the doubt. if we're made of rigid steel and inflexible, which sometimes can be a sign of being tired, being overwhelmed, being stressed, then every minor bump can be damaging. so, i'll read proverbs 19:11 more time. good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense. so the first thing that the bible teaches us is that we learn to forebear for minor offenses or we learn self-control when it comes to minor offenses. the intentional choice to control oneself when provoked and that's hard. that is hard.

the second thing that we learn in scripture is we learn that forgiveness and reconciliation are two different things. we must understand forgiveness. we must understand reconciliation and how they work hand in hand. so there are some things that are too big to just overlook. there are some things that i mean if you drive off of a mountain, you're going your shocks are going to feel it. there are some things that are too big to overlook. and there are some offenses that require action in order to avoid bitterness or a negative effect down the road. i do fear that at some point we have taken forgiveness and we've taken re i can say it reconciliation and made them the same.

but they are not synonymous in relationships and with conflict resolution. reconciliation means bringing people or groups together to reach a truce or to end some sort of estrangement. it is an active process that goes beyond simple forgiveness. but it is ti typically reconciliation would require each party to be willing to have some sort of mutual agreement to where you can come back together. there are instances where reconciliation would be damaging or would not be appropriate depending on whatever offense has happened. we've seen and you may or may not have seen this on the news or or on facebook. we have seen those videos where a family member and they may be in court due to some sort of violation that happened to their family member.

and i i i'm thinking of a specific instance and i can see her face. once again, i can't remember what the what the court case was, but her son was killed by a man and she stood and she spoke to the man in court and she actually forgave him. now, that would be an act of forgiveness for a very hard thing that happened, but that would not be reconciliation. they're probably not going to do book club together or something. but there are instances where reconciliation would be damaging or is not appropriate. they're not excusing what's been done or reconciling that relationship.

but what they are doing, what she is doing is realizing that they cannot live life under the weight that bitterness would introduce and they take time to release themselves from that. that is forgiveness. now the bible calls us to forgiveness. and let's go into scripture. so matthew chapter 5 verse 23 and 24. so if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. first be reconciled to your brother and then come and offer your gift. so before you come to god to give your worship, if you have ought with your brother or your sister or somebody, the scripture says leave it there. get up and go reconcile to your brother.

we look at matthew 18:e1 15 and it says, "if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. if he listens to you, you have gained your brother." so coming back to relational health, when we are hurt by a family member, our default pattern may be to and we all have our own. it may be to withdraw. it may be some of us use humor as as um a pattern, maybe passive aggression, or some of us would go to a third party to vent. but jesus commands for us to go directly and privately to that person. the ultimate goal here isn't to win the argument, but the text says, the scripture says that the goal is to gain your brother. in this instance, it's about restoring that relationship. this is the way that paul says it.

so romans 12 and verse 18. if possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceibly with all. and let's look at ephesians 4 and verse 32. this is actually found in your series book for this week. you're going to read it, i'm sure. be kind to one another. be tender-hearted, forgiving one another as god in christ forgave you. so if anybody can relate to this as a child, uh my parents used to if my brother and i were at aught with one another, if we hurt one another or if we were angry at one another, they would make us hug for an aotted amount of time until we were ready to say that we were sorry. anybody else?

i've seen some families do like a huge t-shirt that they put both of them in to make them hug, get them close and really uncomfortable until they're ready to forgive one another. and these are simple simple illustrations, but we've all experienced that at some point. um, and then the next thing that scripture teaches us throughout scripture, we see this call to be countercultural. so we are moving beyond the cultural model for forgiveness. we actually have very few good models of biblical forgiveness in modern culture. um a lot of times culture would teach us a script of self-preservation trying to figure out how can i get around this in a way that i preserve my myself.

sometimes it sounds like, "i'm sorry if you felt that way." or sometimes we we may not regret the action or we may more regret the fact that we were caught doing the action. i'm sorry i got caught or i'm sorry and now i feel embarrassed. i think about the tv shows and the movies that are made today almost always and you can almost just like script it and you know what's going to happen. almost always a character makes a mess, does something, makes a massive mess, and instead of taking direct responsibility, they spend the entire rest of the show or movie trying to figure out how to hide the truth and build some sort of workaround. everybody know what i'm talking about?

i guess movies would be really boring if they like did something wrong, then said sorry, and then like the movie's over. but got to have this whole arc of like trying to figure out how to make it right without actually making it right. but we actually if we dive into scripture, we find this beautiful illustration of what a countercultural apology would look like in the story of the prodigal son. the son made a huge mess. he damaged family relationships by his actions. let's go into luke 15 verse 11. and it says, "jesus continued, he's telling a parable. there was a man who had two sons. the younger one said to his father, "father, give me my share of the estate." so he divided his property between them.

not long after that, the younger son got together all that he had, set off for a distant country, and there squandered or wasted his wealth in wild living. after he had spent everything that the father had given him, there was a severe famine in that whole country and he began to be in need. and we see this story and the son decides after he has wasted and he squandered all his father's money with riotist living, scripture says, or wild living or spending it on whatever he wanted. we see this biblical model of a countercultural approach to seeking forgiveness. he doesn't plan a speech to minimize his behavior. he doesn't plan to say, "dad, i'm sorry if you felt hurt.

i really needed to find myself." culture would have told him maybe to try and figure out some sort of workaround. i can imagine him figuring out a way to come to the brother and be like, "listen, if i pay you back a little bit, if i pay you back, will you go you all of those workarounds, but we don't find that. instead, we find him rehearsing." he actually rehearses it to himself. a deeply a humble script rooted in ownership and responsibility. let's look at luke 15 verse 18 and 19. and it says, "i will arise and go to my father." and this is him rehearsing it. and i will say to him, "father, i have sinned against heaven and before you. i am no longer worthy to be called your son.

treat me as one of your hired servants." so first he acknowledged his sin and he follows a biblical model or a godly model of going straight to his offended party, his father. he doesn't demand trust. he offers to work to show his repentance. and what a beautiful depiction of what it looks like to seek forgiveness. and what does the father do? he embraces him. it actually says that he was standing there waiting for him to come home. when the son took his inheritance, it didn't only affect the father. this father had every right to be frustrated, angry, upset, bitter because when he took his inheritance, the father had to divide it between the two sons. so the father's wealth, his position, everything about the father's life had changed.

this leads us to understand a more biblical formula for forgiveness both asking and extending and gives us the ultimate goal to work towards in improving our relational health. let's look at psalm 103 and this is my last scripture. psalm 103 verse8 and we'll go to verse 13. the lord is compassionate and he is gracious, slow to anger and abounding in mercy. he will not always contend with us, nor will he keep his anger forever. he has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor rewarded us according to our guilty deeds. for as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great his mercy toward those who fear him. as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our wrongdoings from us.

just as a father has compassion on his children, so the lord has compassion on those who fear him. and we started tonight by acknowledging the simple truth that healthy individuals create healthy homes and healthy homes build healthy churches. that is the entire reason behind our healthy home series and it's why we are tracking and we're practicing those simple weekly habits because they are intentional negative pattern or they are intentional not negative they are intentional pattern builders and who better to pattern our lives after than the lord himself. jesus stands ready tonight as our ultimate pattern breaker. um we can look at his example.

he was a savior who while being beaten, being bruised and broken, he looked down at the very people who plunged the nails into his hands and what did he pray? father, forgive them. and that is the standard. it's not easy, but that is our formula. and we forgive because we have been overwhelmingly forgiven. and so in looking at living the abundant life in our homes, restoring or maybe continuing growth and relational health, um i wanted to bring to us tonight the need for forgiveness. if we could all stand. thank you guys for for being here tonight. we could all stand and let's pray. lord, i thank you for this night. thank you, jesus, for for the this healthy home series and challenge that we that we have been challenged with.

i pray that you would help us, god, as we build upon relational health and building health with those who are in our families, who are in our family systems, maybe friends and partners. lord, i pray that you would help us, god, to pursue biblical forgiveness. jesus, i pray god that you would help us to pursue health in our families and growth with one another. lord, you give us the promise of abundant life. and i pray that over us tonight in jesus name. amen.