PASTOR’S CORNER: The greatest gift

On Sunday at church, we celebrated Family and Friends Day. God’s greatest gifts to mankind are family and good friends, who make life enriching, fulfilling, and purposeful.

To have family and friends, good family and good friends, enriches life, which is what God intended when he himself said, “It is not good for man to be alone” in the book of Genesis. God knew after observing Adam that life and the world would be a lonely place without someone to share the highs and the lows with, the camaraderie of a group of people who are likeminded and those who, through the same blood, unite in fellowship, love and mutual understanding.

What would the world be like without a family and a friend? I loved the fact that on Sunday morning, the gathering was not for a funeral or homegoing service. Nobody was being eulogized, there was no grief or sorrow among us because of the loss of life. There was no casket up front with a flower spread and flowers all around. We celebrated life and the living and not the dead; thank God. We were glad about the fact that we were able to look at our family and our friend or friends. We knew that they were there, and they knew that we were there. We could talk to them, and they could talk to us.

Sometimes, we take these things for granted until we don’t have them. We don’t love on each other enough. We don’t say, “I love you” as we should. We don’t cherish moments like these; a time to shut it all down, come together at church and worship, sit down in the fellowship hall and break bread together, and we should.

I have noticed that folk will stop whatever they are doing, get off the job, jump on a plane and fly thousands of miles to come to a funeral, and that’s fine. But, the person who died didn’t even know that they were there. We all came to celebrate our family, our friends, while they knew that we were there. We enjoyed one another while we had the chance.

Friends, let it not take a funeral to bring us together like this. Enjoy your family and your friends today.

Now friends, I want to establish today that family is a gift from God, the greatest gift, and a gift is to be cherished. However, this cherished gift we call family is being threatened today. It’s been threatened by unforgiveness, immorality and by Satan’s attack on the family. The foundation of this world is the family, and the foundation of the family is God! And the axis on which the church turns is Christ. Satan wants to destroy both. Y’all heard that right here.

The axis on which this world turns is the family, and the axis on which the family turns is God. Satan knows it and if he can dismantle the family, he can destroy mankind. That’s why there is an all-out assault on the family — to kill, steal, and destroy this gift. It started in Genesis when Cain rose and killed his brother Abel, establishing the first murder in the family, and it has been chaos ever since.

But that’s why we’ve got to save the family; and it starts at church and with God. When parents are afraid of their own children, when children are sexually abused by members of their own family, when as Jesus said “father is against son, mother against daughter” (Matthew 10:34-39), when a man’s enemies are those of his own house the family is in trouble, when the Bible has been removed as the centerpiece of the home, when we take God out of the home, hear me when I say the devil moves INTO the home. Then there’s an axe to grind between family members, but we’ve got to change that. Time is too short and people are dying too fast. Too much trouble is in the land, but that’s why we’ve got to put God back in the family. That’s the only way that the family is going to survive.

Joshua calls all of the families, the elders of Israel to appear before him at Shechem. He gives them a history lesson in just how good God had been to them (Joshua 24:6,7). We need that sometimes, because when we forget history, we tend to drop the ball. We become entitled. We leave our first love. Families need history, husband and wife need history. Remember how you felt when you were dating; how your blood boiled when you held one another’s hand, the things you did that made your relationship special, how you both fixed up, smelled good and wore starched shirts and pretty dresses.

Remember how the family prayed together. Everybody talked when they ate around the table. Everybody went to church, and if you didn’t go to church Sunday morning, you couldn’t go out to play that afternoon or go anywhere else. Children didn’t go to school and raise cane like they do now. They knew better; “yes ma’am and no sir” was the order of the day. The home was a God fearing home. The father was in the home and the disciplinarian; the mother taught Bible verses. Young folk respected all adults; wouldn’t drink alcohol or curse in their presence. That’s how we got over, but that’s why we’ve got to save the family. Joshua said “But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord,” (Joshua 24:15).