Fam – Four Unchanging Rules for Families

This podcast is presented to you by Pastor Jason Burns and Access Church in Lakeland, Florida.

For more information, visit Access.tv.

We are in week two of a series that's going to take us all through the month of July called FAM.

And in this series, we want to talk about the FAMs in our life.

We want to talk about your family, your nuclear family, your immediate family.

We want to talk about your extended family.

We want to talk about those weird uncles and aunts.

Come on, anybody want to admit?

If you don't have one, it might be you.

Just check yourself.

Check yourself.

We want to talk about friends that feel like family, and I really believe that we should talk about the church family.

Next Sunday, we're going to talk about what it means to have unity in the church family.

That's going to be a powerful one next week.

But today I want to talk to you about our families.

Last week we opened with this verse, and I want you to see it again.

The book of Proverbs, the wisest man to ever live, Solomon, said this.

Not education, not book smarts, not reading more, not studying psychology.

It takes wisdom to have a good family, and it takes understanding to make it strong.

I think this is God's desire for us is that we would have families that are strong, that stand up as a beacon of light to our increasingly dark, distant kind of world.

I really believe that as more and more families walk through brokenness, the church should rise up as families that are strong and unified together.

In fact, my prayer for some of you in this series is that there will be people in your life, people you work out with, people that are at your job, people that you know through your kids' school, that say about you, I don't even know if I believe all that they believe, but I want what they have because they see that there's something different in you and in me.

To get us started, this week was an emotionally draining week for my wife and me.

It just, I'm just gonna be honest, it just was.

And it was emotional for us because it feels like time is slipping through our fingers.

It feels like time is going so fast.

My oldest son Joey is going into his senior year of high school, and that doesn't make sense to me because I think it was only nine months ago that I was a senior in high school.

Makes no sense.

That laughing hurt a little bit.

It just is.

And so um, some time ago, I gave my wife a gift, and when you've been married almost nine or almost 20 years, as long as we have, it's hard to give your spouse a gift that floors them.

It's hard to give your spouse a gift that makes them cry.

And I did it though, 17 or 18 years into marriage for Christmas, I went out to my garage and I found this box.

Now, if you've been married for more than five or six years, you have some boxes in your garage that have been there for a long time.

They're collecting multiple layers of dust.

Many people have a box full of old random cords in their garage.

Anybody have one of these?

And you have it for years, and then there's a day when you're like, we should, we don't need this.

We throw it away, and what happens the day you throw it away?

One week later, you need one of those cords you just threw away.

That's how it works, just letting you know.

We had another box that had been with us from season to season in our life.

It had made multiple moves with us, it had lived in multiple houses.

It was a box that inside contained lots of old videotapes.

And these were videotapes from when my wife was a little girl.

It was videos of her family, of her as a six-year-old, ten-year-old, twelve-year-old, fifteen-year-old growing up.

It chronicles all the fun years, all the weird years, all the braces years.

It just chronicles all of those years, but we had no way to watch it because we live in a digital world, and this has been like two, three, four generations old in technology.

So for Christmas one year, I found a company that you could mail a box of all the old home tapes to, and they'll digitize them and they send them back to you on a flash drive so you can watch them or post them on YouTube.

Well, I gave her this gift for Christmas, and you know, like we've been married for so long that if I bought her a necklace or some jewelry, she'd open it and go, Oh, thanks.

It's great, I love this.

And then we'd move on.

But when she opened this box and I explained what I had done, you ever seen someone ugly cry?

Come on, anybody ever had this?

It's not just tears, but it's the can't catch their breath, bubbles coming out of noses and all kinds of weird stuff.

It was that.

It was an ugly cry, and it was awesome.

I loved it so much.

And it was fun after we got the videos back a few weeks later, and it because it felt like we had stepped into a time machine.

It felt like we had entered another dimension, and even though we were living in the year we were in, we were looking at videos that happened 20 and 30 years ago.

It was fun because styles changed, girls had poofy sleeves, and it was funny because they had the weird hair bobs up in their hair.

It was funny watching and seeing like soda bottles and seeing how the Pepsi or the Coke logo has changed over time.

It was just like we had stepped back into time and it was fun.

And it was a weird reality because time just moves so fast.

It feels like yesterday and it feels like today, and it also feels like it was a lifetime ago.

Some years ago for Christmas, my mom did something really special for my family.

She took all of the old photographs we had, and there were thousands of old photographs that we had printed, and she wanted to digitize them.

So, as an act of love, she scanned every one of those pictures and she put them on a drive and gave them to me and my brothers and our families.

And every once in a while for fun, I'll just kind of go through it and I'll click through it.

And it's such an interesting feeling because in some ways it feels like a lifetime ago.

But in other pictures, I look at them and it feels like it was just yesterday.

I don't know if you've experienced this before, but can we be honest?

Time is weird.

It just time is weird.

This week I was on some social media and a memory popped up from a few years ago where I had posted a picture of me with two of my buddies in college from, you know, six, seven months ago, and that's like 20 years ago at this point.

And I saw it, and just in a moment, it felt like I was just there.

I remember where we were, what we were doing.

I remember the Abercrombie shirt I was wearing in the picture.

I remember it.

Time is weird.

But then time got real weird for me because this weekend, my daughter Ella, my precious daughter, turned double digits.

She turned 10 years old.

And I wasn't emotionally prepared or stable enough for this.

And to make it worse, on like Wednesday or Thursday, my wife, who is so intentional, came to the living room where I was sitting and she showed me a video she had been working on.

She was making a video of all these clips of Ella's life from birth to age 10.

The video starts with her holding Ella for the first time in the hospital.

And it keeps going through these little moments, these snapshots of Ella's life as she was little, and then her first steps, and then her as a toddler.

And she brings it out.

It's about two-thirds done, and she goes, I wanted you to see this.

And she puts this emotional, sappy music behind it.

And we sit there and watch it, and she's proud of herself for her video editing skills, and she looks at me, and I am melting down.

Like I am crying, ugly crying.

I don't feel good, I feel sick in this moment.

And she goes, What is wrong?

And I said, Look, I can't explain it.

Time is not weird.

Time is a jerk, a big fat jerk.

Anybody understand this?

And it goes so fast, and there's nothing you can do to slow it down.

Time just feels like a jerk.

One of the funny things about time is how over time rules change for families.

Have you noticed this?

Like, like 20, 30, 40 years ago, doctors told parents different information about how to let their baby sleep.

In one generation, they were told to let them sleep face down.

The next generation, they're like, no, no, that's dumb.

Let them sleep face up.

We don't really know.

I remember as a kid, um, the rules were very different.

As a little boy, I vividly remember sitting on my dad's lap as he drove our van across the country.

Anyone else want to admit to breaking the law with me?

Anybody else remembered moments like this?

Times change.

Now the rules are so strict.

They want your kids sitting in a car seat till they're about 47 years old to protect them.

Times change, rules change.

Here's all I know about how the world changes.

In a world that is ever changing, we must hold on to that which never changes.

What are the things in our families that never change?

And so today I want to look at four unchanging rules for families, and here's what I want to do.

I want to encourage us to live a little bit more like Jesus.

And to get us started, I want to look at an interesting moment in Jesus' life.

Jesus was immensely popular.

People would travel from all over the Galilee region to hear him speak or to hear or to see what miracle he was going to do next.

And it says this about Jesus in the book of Mark.

Mark's account from Mark 10, 13 says people were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, to hug them, and to embrace them.

But the disciples rebuked them.

And when Jesus saw this, he was indignant.

He was angry, and he said to them, Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.

He says, Truly I tell you, anyone will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child, will never enter it.

And then it says, and he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them, and he blessed them.

There's some principles in Jesus' life and ministry that I want us to get our minds around.

If you have your message notes, pull them out.

I want you to write these down.

I'm gonna be honest, the first one's a little weird.

It's a little awkward because over time our understanding of words tends to shift and change.

Allow me to explain this one, but number one is our family should be high touch.

Does this feel awkward to anyone else besides me?

Because over time, the word touch is kind of taking on a dirty, negative connotation.

Let me uh kind of uh tell you, I understand this, I get it.

Uh, this this next couple weeks, my son Gavin is in a play at Lakeland Community Theater called School of Rock.

It's based on an old movie, School of Rock.

And if you haven't seen it, it's really, it's a great movie.

But in the movie, uh the main character is a guy who's really just kind of a loser in life, and he has this moment where he intercepts a phone call that was meant for his roommate, offering his roommate a temporary job teaching students, and he thinks to himself, this is a way I can make some quick cash.

So he pretends to be that guy, he goes and teaches these students who are at this really prestigious kind of private school, very uppity, you know.

And he he meets these kids, and long story short, he turns them from good students into his own personal rock band.

It's a really funny movie.

And towards the end of the movie, when the parents find out that he's been lying to them and sneaking around and getting these kids to turn into a bunch of rock stars, there's this awkward moment that I want you to see.

Check it out.

My name is Dewey Finn.

And no, I'm not a licensed teacher, but I have been touched by your kids.

And I'm pretty sure I've touched them.

Okay, can we be honest?

Touch is a little bit of a funny word.

Can we be honest about this?

Uh, I have a pastor friend who pastors the big church, and for a long time they had a special ministry for kids who had additional needs, special needs children, and they called the ministry special touch ministry.

I was like, bruh, you should hire a millennial or a Gen Z to think about it before you print it.

You know what I'm saying?

And so, like, let's be honest about this word touch, it's weird, but I want you to understand when appropriate, touch is actually a gift.

One of the reasons that when a baby is born, that they take the baby, clean them off, and immediately place them on their mother's skin, skin to skin, is because there is something powerful conveyed through touch.

It's love, it's acceptance, it is affirmation, it is affection, it's closeness.

The word touch has been hijacked by our culture, but I want you to understand this.

God's intention is that a home would be a place where proper touch, affection is showed in beautiful, amazing kinds of ways.

One of the funny things is your kids get a little older in home is that as they age, their need for touch never decreases.

In fact, it actually probably increases, but the older they get, the weirder it tends to get.

Like my wife and I have two sons, and then we have a younger daughter.

And our sons, when they were little, it was so much fun.

We'd hug, we'd cuddle, we'd wrestle, I'd give them a kiss on the cheek.

We we had fun.

Now that they're a little older, like it would kill my children if I pulled them in and gave them a kiss on the cheek.

It would literally, they would literally just die of embarrassment in the moment.

But here's what I know they still need to be held, they still need to be affirmed, they still need affection in a physical kind of way.

I have a daughter, she just turned 10, Ella, and Ella, she's still at the age where she loves to cuddle.

In fact, she has become a manipulative little girl.

She will come up to me and she'll say, Dad, my daddy hug tank is running low.

Whatever I'm doing, I put it down and I hold her and I hug her.

Why?

Because children need affection.

The older they get, they still need it.

And here's one of the sad realities for many of us to deal with it's that girls tend to receive positive, affirmative, affectionate touch from their families at a ratio of five to one over boys.

We have to figure it out.

I want you to see this about Jesus later.

I mean, earlier in the book of Mark, it says about Jesus that wherever he went into the villages, towns, or countryside, they placed the sick in the marketplaces, and those people begged him to let them touch even the edge of his cloak, and all who touched it were healed.

I want you to get this.

This word healed in the Greek language, original language, is found something like 39 or 40 times in the New Testament.

Twenty of them refer to Jesus touching a person or a person touching Jesus, and in every instant the person was healed.

There's something powerful about learning how to give proper, affectionate touch in our homes.

Number two, I need you to understand our families need our time.

Here's the thing about you and me.

We're busy.

Can we be real for a moment?

There's a lot of things happening, there's a lot of plates that we're spinning, there's a lot of fires we have to put out, there's a lot of people counting on us.

And here's what we tend to do: we tend to cheat our families because we think, well, they love me, they love me unconditionally, they'll forgive me.

Time is actually your most precious commodity.

Not money.

You can always get more money.

You can never replace the time you have.

I want you to see it in Jesus' life.

And Jesus, we read it earlier, Mark chapter 10, verse 13.

Mark 10:13

People were bringing their little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, but the disciples rebuke them.

Don't you know how busy this guy is?

Don't you know how important he is?

People want to meet with him.

Keep your kids away.

And what does Jesus say?

No, no, no.

Let them, let them be with me.

He offers them the thing that's the most valuable to any person his time.

A lot of us, we also buy into this lie that here's what I can do.

I don't have lots of time to give my kids, so what I'll do is I'll give them quality time.

You can't plan quality time.

You just can't.

You can plan something and the whole thing can go awry.

Can I tell you when the most quality time I've experienced has been?

In the little unplanned moments?

In the, hey, I'm gonna run to the store for a quick errand, and one of my kids says, Dad, can I go with you?

The most meaningful quality times happen when I'm like sitting in the living room working on something, and my kid says, Dad, can we talk for a moment?

They interrupt me, but they get my attention.

Can I show you how kids spell love?

T-I-M-E.

How do we give time?

One of the greatest indicators of how you'll spend your time is the things that you are in proximity to.

Okay, I'm gonna be honest and tell you, I don't have this one nailed.

I struggle with this.

But is there ever a moment with your kids when you're not on your phone, not glued to your device, not glued to TV or the news, where they just have your attention.

I want you to hear something about me.

I need you to understand.

A lot of churches will praise moms on Mother's Day and beat dads up on Father's Day.

So it's Mother's Day and it's like, oh, you're the greatest thing ever, and dads, you're the worst thing to ever exist.

You're the scum of the earth, try harder.

That's that is not how I roll.

Okay, are you with me on this?

I don't roll like this.

But I do want to say something sharp to the dads in the room.

There was a study done a few years ago by Focus on the Family Ministries, and in the survey, they they this is crazy.

They came to discover that the average American dad spends 37 seconds of meaningful time with his children per day.

37 seconds.

Maybe you're like me.

I can get skeptical at stuff like this, and I'm like, what if it's wrong by 10 times 370 seconds?

That's just over six minutes.

Even that feels shallow and insignificant in comparison.

Not only should we do better, we can do better because it matters.

Number three, our words should give blessing and encouragement.

Proverbs 18, 21 says, Life and death are in the power of the tongue.

Our words build up or they tear down.

I'll be honest with you on this one.

I mess up in this one sometimes.

There are times when I can be tired, where I can be busy, where I can be frazzled, where my kids or even my wife catch me at the wrong moment, and I use my words in a sharp way, and it's devastating to them.

We need to think about what comes out of our mouth.

The words we say give life or death.

Here it is from Jesus again at the end of the verses we just read, Mark 10, 16.

And he, Jesus, took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them, and he blessed them.

His words gave life in the situation.

There's this interesting moment.

Earlier in the book of Mark, Jesus is just about to start his public ministry.

And in the story that's called the Baptism of Jesus, where John the Baptist baptizes Jesus in the Jordan River, which I got to do this five years ago, got to be baptized in the same river Jesus was baptized in.

Very cool experience.

And as this story happens, it's interesting because we see all three members of the Godhead, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

We see all of them in this story.

I don't want you to pay attention to the words that God the Father speaks over his son Jesus.

Mark 1, 9 through 11.

At that time, Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.

Goes on, it says, just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit, there's the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, descending on him like a dove.

So we've already seen Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

With you I am well pleased.

God models this even in the picture of who he is as God.

You had this moment where Jesus is there in the water.

He's being baptized, and God the Father speaks over his son.

These three powerful phrases.

Number one, you are my son, speaks to his identity.

Number two, whom I love shows his affection.

Number three, in whom I am well pleased, it show his, shows his affirmation.

Doesn't have to earn it.

He has it from the identity.

He has the affection.

He has the affirming words of his father spoken over him.

Your words carry massive, massive weight.

Several years ago, Harvard Business Review did a study, and they wanted to study the power of words in the context of teams and how teams are effective.

And here's what they found.

In the highest performing teams, they use positive words.

They use 5.6 positive words over every one critical word.

Medium performing teams use 1.9 positive life-giving words to every one negative word.

Check this out.

Low performing teams used 0.36 positive affirming words to every one critical or negative word spoken over a person.

Three negative to every one positive.

And I want you to see this in families.

It should be ten to one.

It should be for every negative or critical thing you have to say.

There's ten positive things you're saying.

Why?

Because we're leaving deposits in them that will carry them through the rest of their life.

Final thought, and then we're done.

Number four.

Godly families, they don't just think about now, but they leave an inheritance.

You find this right in the book of Proverbs, the Solomon, the wisest man to ever live, says this in Proverbs 13.

A good person leaves an inheritance for their children's children.

I think there's three different kinds of inheritance he's talking about.

Let me show you them.

First one is a financial inheritance.

Some of you read this and you're like, well, I'm out.

Some people die and they leave wills.

I'm dying and I'm leaving bills.

Come on, anybody else feel that?

Right?

Whew, that touched the nerve.

Okay, uh.

I think that when you start thinking in terms of legacy, when you start thinking in terms of generations, you're gonna think about your money in a different way.

We ask the question often in our church about your legacy.

What will you do that will outlive you?

When you think about your money, you need to ask the question how will what I've earned keep on living and keep on making a difference in the lives of others?

I love this phrase that some other pastor said it's a bad assumption to think that all of my extra is for my own consumption.

Like we have to live our lives in a way where we're thinking about leaving something to the next generation.

But but there's two other inheritances that I think are even better.

The second one is what I would call an honorable name inheritance.

Let me ask the question someday when you are dead, your life is buried and gone.

And people talk about you, what will they say?

My whole life, I have been blessed with godly parents, godly grandparents.

For generations, my family has been a family that has sought.

The things of God.

For many years in my life, when I run into someone who knows my parents, they use words about my parents like legends, heroes, best of the best.

And I stand on those shoulders.

My name, if you know me, is Jason Burns.

That's not my full name.

My full name is William Jason Burns.

I was one of those rare kids.

Anyone else in the room go by their middle name?

Anyone else have this?

A few of us.

It's just, it's an interesting, it's a weird subculture of people.

We're weird people that do this.

And it was never really a big deal, except for the first day of school in like fourth grade when the teacher's going down the list and they always said your first name real weird.

The reason my first name matters to me, though, is I'm the fourth generation of William J.

Burns.

My great-grandfather was William Jefferson.

My grandfather and my dad were both William John and William John Jr.

And I'm William Jason.

My son is the fifth, William J.

Joseph Burns.

Some time ago I was cleaning out some stuff, and I found this old newspaper clipping of the generations.

This is some 41 or 42 years ago.

Like they actually, they actually had printing back then.

It's hard to believe.

And here's a picture of four generations of us together.

My great-grandfather, my grandpa, I called him Papa, my dad, and that's me.

One of my favorite things in this is it says that this there's all these generations, and they rage in age from 87 to 9 months.

And then this next line is so funny.

The nine-month-old is on the right, and the story is elsewhere in this issue.

Like they had to point that detail out.

Which one is the nine-month-old?

All it means is for over 40 people, 40 years, people have still struggled to think for themselves, okay?

Why does this matter?

Because my name carries with it a beautiful weight to it.

My name, the Burns name, has a bit of a legacy to it.

I want to stand on the shoulders of my parents, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents.

I hope to pass along a legacy that is felt for generations to come.

And it starts by having a good name, an honorable name.

Final, final inheritance that maybe is the most important of all.

It's what I call a spiritual inheritance.

Talked about this a lot last week.

In fact, last week, after one of the messages, I was out in the lobby, and a sweet lady stopped me.

She goes, That message was so good, but what do I do if I've messed it all up?

And said, girl, first of all, you just get in line.

Like we haven't all got it all figured out.

We've all messed it up.

But here's the point for all of us you'll never be a perfect parent, but you can be a praying parent.

What should you pray over your family?

Ready?

Pray the promises of God.

Speak them as though they are.

Pray the promises of God and trust that God, the promise giver, will also be God the promise keeper.

Let me read you one of my favorite ones, and this is a beautiful prayer for you to pray.

Steal this, pray this prayer over your kids.

It's right from the scripture.

Psalm 138, verse 8.

Psalms 138:8

This is the prayer.

The Lord will work out his plans for my life, for your faithful love, O Lord, endures forever.

I think we should pray this promise from God over our children.

Here's how you can say it.

The goal of this prayer is simply that my family will fulfill God's will and purpose for their lives.

This means you're praying for your kids, you're praying for your family, you're praying for those in your life, and you're praying not just your hopes and your dreams, you're not just praying that they'll make a lot of money and be successful.

You're praying the promises of God over your children.

Why does this matter?

I believe the words we pray become prophecies we will see in the future.

Why?

Because God, the promise giver, is always God the promise keeper.

If I had another 30 minutes, I would walk you through a bunch of other promises of God.

If you don't follow me on Instagram, pull your phone out right now, follow at IamJason Burns, because literally after the last service, I posted a list of the promises of God that you can pray over your children.

Take a screenshot, save it, and let's be people who pray the promises of God over our children.

Why?

Because there's lots of good inheritances you can leave your kids.

If you leave them a ton of money and they stray from God, all the money was worthless.

But you can leave them nothing but a spiritual inheritance and spend eternity with them in heaven.

Like, like we're playing for keeps, and this matters.

So here's how I want to end today.

I want to spend our last couple minutes praying a blessing over you.

Some of you, you hear this and you're like, I have royally messed this up.

You can't be perfect, but you can be a prayer.

You can be someone who prays over your family.

Some of you, you're on the front end of this, some of you haven't even started your own family yet.

What if you started the fabric of your future family by praying the promises of God over your future spouse, over your future children?

No matter what age or stage you're in, all of us can pray this.

So let's do this.

All across this room, would you bow your head and let's pray together?

God, thank you for your word.

Thank you that in a world that's ever-changing, your promises never change.

So we make this decision today, God, that we hold on to your promises with everything we've got.

God, first of all, I pray for our families that are in this room today.

I pray, first of all, God, that we will be high touch, high affection kinds of families.

I pray that we will be intentional about our time, that we won't just say it, but we'll actually live it out.

God, I pray that we will start to think in terms of leaving a legacy with our lives that matter.

Maybe it's a financial inheritance, maybe it's a good name, but ultimately, God, may this church be recognized as a church that leaves a spiritual legacy, that for generations to come, our children will know you and they will follow your ways, that you will work out your will and your plan in their lives.

We hold on to the promises of God as though they're true for us and for our families.

God, my prayer is that all of us will change the way we pray.

Maybe we'll stop praying these simple, passive, oh God, keep my children safe prayers.

And we'll start to pray, God, make them dangerous in a way that affects hell and leads people to heaven.

May we pray big prayers over our kids.

And God, would you do miracles in our families?

The kind of miracles that people stand up and say, I don't even know if I believe it all, but I want what they have.

And we thank you in advance for that, God.