What Sin Does to our Families
The older I get, the more I find myself grieved by the way sin distorts and disrupts human lives… especially by the way it perverts the good gifts of God. And family has to be one of God’s more inspired gifts. From the beginning, it’s been part of His provision for our comfort, for help, for safety and intimacy. He intended it as a laboratory for learning, an organized and protective structure where his people could help each other, support each other, learn from each other, experience intimacy. He even modeled it in his own being—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—all fulfilling different roles but living and working together in unity. (Have you ever thought of the Trinity as a working family?)
Then sin came along. And I’ve told my children again and again—also, sadly, shown them vividly—sin never affects just one person. Just as sin corrupts individual lives, it warps whole family systems (and nations)—causing them to either fail in their purposes or perverting those purposes to cause actual harm.
God made family as a place of emotional closeness and safety, where men and women and children can have their physical and emotional needs met, where we don’t have to be alone. Instead, we use our closeness to wound each other, exploit and abuse each other, to take out our pain and alienation on those who have chosen to love us and, even sadder, those who have no choice but to live closely with us.
God set up family as a forum for teaching and transmitting information and knowledge—including knowledge of him—from one generation to another. Instead, we pass on habits of blame, anger, laziness, abuse, addiction…from one generation to the next. We teach our children how to lie and keep secrets, to live in shame. At the same time, we fail to pass on important truths about God…or we load these truths with such pain and emotional baggage that they are distorted in the transmission.
God gave us roles and structures to help us work together in harmony, to balance and complete and help one another, to work together in unity of purpose. Instead we live together in chaos and confusion. We lord it over each other, rebel against one another, sneak and manipulate, lock ourselves into power struggles, even use coercion and violence against one another. Or we may we fall into that familiar dynamic of tearing each other apart, then just as fiercely defending each other against someone on the outside.
God also created families as strong, resilient, self-protective organizations. (He invented family dynamics, remember.) But under the influence of sin, that self-protection turns into denial and secret keeping. We internalize our shame, cover up our collective sins, hide what we really are from outsiders or even ourselves. We do our best to present a strong, happy, united (and good Christian) face to the world.
And what about the church?
The family of God? God created families to live in close fellowship with Him and with others—families gathered together in community, ministering to one another and reaching out to bless the world. Jesus founded his church on the family principle, insisting that those who share faith in Him are related more intimately than even those who share blood.
But our Christian communities and organizations so easily fall victim to the same sinful dynamics as our families do. At worse, we succumb to pride and hypocrisy. We concern ourselves more with preserving our witness and our influence than with confronting our relational realities. We practically idolize “the family” while putting up stumbling blocks for real, hurting families in our midst.
This is exactly what Jesus nailed the Pharisees for doing—accusing them of being “whitewashed tombs…filled with dead men’s bones and everything unclean” (Matt. 23:27, NIV). Sadly, it still happens in our Christian communities . . . except we often like to pain our whitewashed tombs with the label of “good Christian family.”
It really is a mess, isn’t it? Sin always makes a mess.
Aren’t you glad sin never has the last word with God?
It Begins with You
But what does all this have to do with you?
If you’re a Christian and you’re in a family…or from a family…or want to be part of a family…it has everything to do with you.
If you’re a Christian son or daughter, brother or sister, husband or wife (or ex!), parent or grandparent, aunt or uncle, grandchild, niece, or nephew…it has everything to do with you.
In fact, it begins with you.
Chances are it’s you as an individual who is reading this blog. It’s you as an individual who grapples with sticky or confusing family issues. You as an individual who wonders if you’ll ever be free of the family secrets and family-related shame that make you mutter, “I wish” or “Yeah right” when you think about your picture of a Good Christian family.
If you’re like so many good and sincere Christian people I know, you’re wrestling with genuinely tough issues:
• How do I honor my parents when my parents beat you or neglected me. . . or worse?
• How do I live in peace with brothers and sisters who manipulate and criticize me—or worse?
• How do I raise up children the way they should go when they defy me at every turn?
• How do I respect a husband who spends entire weekends in a LazyBoy…or love a wife who is angry and resentful?
• How do you hold a family together through a bankruptcy…or a sexual addiction…or the death of a child…or years and years of no communication and simply growing apart?
• How do I deal with the shame and disappointment of realizing my actual family doesn’t even come close to the family I always wanted…not to mention what God expects?
• How do I possibly share the realities of my home . . . or my financial circumstances . . . or my marriage with all those good Christian families in my church?
• How do you I counsel and support for my family-related pain without feeling I’m exposing or betraying the ones I love?
• How do I love my family when I feel like I don’t have any love left in me?
• How do I cope with my feelings of family shame…and the fear that others might condemn me because of it?
We all need grace.
And by grace I mean more than mercy, more than kindness.
I mean our Lord’s ability to change those things in our world that are totally beyond us to change.
His ability to make straight what once was crooked.
His ability to restore righteousness where sin once reigned and establish his kingdom in the very midst of a fallen world and society.
His uncanny, almost unbelievable ability to heal distorted family legacies, to bring function to the dysfunctional, to bind up the brokenhearted (Isa. 61:1) and heal the seriously messed-up—including our family failures, our complicated issues, our generational nightmares, our impossible relationships.
To do now what he promised to Abraham so many thousands of years ago and kept reiterating over the centuries—to make your family and my family a blessing to the world.
It’s hard to believe, I know. Hard to trust when you’ve been hurt or disappointed…again and again.
Hard to peek behind the good Christian family façade.
But we serve such a loving, merciful, eternally able God. He can do so much with our families, no matter how faithless, failed, fallen, fractured—or fearful—they are. And whether or not they fit your particular community’s or church’s or society’s picture of a Good Christian Family.
It may not always work the way we think it will, however—or the way we think it should.
Sometimes the process of healing takes years or decades of pain and struggle. Sometimes it takes generations. God’s grace doesn’t negate the consequences of sin, and it doesn’t guarantee the restoration of specific family units or relationships. And it certainly doesn’t keep us from failing again…and sinning…and letting our particular family dynamics transmit and exacerbate and protect that sin. Yet if we look for it, if we keep listening for God’s voice in the middle of our messy family realities, we discover that His amazing grace is always there for us, moment by moment, moving us forward toward healing and redemption for our beloved, fallen families.
Word of Grace: Never forget—God loves your family more than you ever can. He specializes in blessing the world through the messed-up and the brokenhearted. Trust him.
Tammy Maltby the author of The God Who Sees You (with Anne Christian Buchanan). Copyrighted material. Used with permission. Permission required to reproduce. All rights reserved. 
http://www.amazon.com/The-God-Who-Sees-You/dp/143476799X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1342027875&sr=8-1&keywords=tammy+maltby
