Skip to main content

Are We Really in Danger of Making an Idol of the Family?

Image Source: Wikipedia

By Kevin DeYoung - Posted at The Gospel Coalition:
“One of the acceptable idolatries among evangelical Christians is the idolatry of the family.”
That’s what I tweeted last week. To be honest, I didn’t think much about it. I’ve said similar things in sermons for the past decade, and I’ve tweeted similar things before. But this time—I was later told by friends who track with Twitter more closely than I do—the statement took on a life of its own as this one sentence was liked 1,600 times and bandied about on social media for the next few days. Unknown to me, I was (depending on who you ask) suddenly saying something wonderfully courageous or terribly misguided.

So let me clarify.

As far as I can tell, I first uttered this statement (or something close to it) in a 2010 sermon on Mark 3:31-35 entitled Jesus’s Real Family. The tweet itself comes from a more recent sermon on the miracle at Cana in Galilee. My point in both cases was that a commitment to family must not come before a commitment to God.

I began the Mark 3 sermon by noting two competing notions of the family in our culture: family as straight jacket (as in the 1998 film Pleasantville) or family as center (as in the 2000 film The Family Man). In one view, the family keeps you from everything you really want. In the other view, the family promises to give you everything you really want. Jesus promoted neither of these views. There’s no doubt the second view is much more common among Christians, and it does overlap with some Christian virtues. But it too gets some crucial things wrong when it comes to the family. I argued back in 2010 (and would argue the same today) that, according to the Bible, the family is good, necessary, and foundational, but not ultimate.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Wokeism: When the Cure is Worse Than the Disease

 Posted at Churches Without Chests : Africa receives some American errors that are quite beneficial. For example, before the NBA finals, the Super Bowl or the World Series, sports merchandisers produce memorabilia of both finalists winning, so as to be able to immediately sell when the final is over. Unfortunately, half of that merchandise represents an alternate universe: where the team that lost actually won. What happens to the champions-that-never-were T-shirts and caps? Much of it is donated to third-world countries, where needy folks wear shirts displaying an event that never happened. Hey, we’re not complaining. Another shirt on a poor man’s back is a good thing, even if it celebrates what never occurred. Error is sometimes beneficial. Some imported errors are profoundly destructive, though. The worst of them are theological errors, for what touches Scripture touches ultimate realities. Two such errors that originated in America are particularly devastating for a country like m

MAGA's Morality Problem

U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert speaking with attendees at the 2021 AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. Photo by Gage Skidmore (Source:  MAGA's Morality Problem | Shane Vander Hart )  By Shane Vander Hart When a voting base dismisses the importance of private virtue, we shouldn't be surprised when their leaders lack it. Elected officials having affairs and the like is not new, we've seen Republicans and Democrats caught in scandals. What is new, however, are those being dismissive or defensive of the behavior. Does personal morality and character matter when considering political candidates and elected officials? For me, for me that is an unequivocal yes. The MAGA movement disagreed excusing and elevating a serial adulterer to the White House. We are seeing the fruit of this position today. Continue here.

God, History and the Nations

 By Bill Muehlenberg - Posted at CultureWatch: Published September 12, 2023 Good news about rogue rulers and evil tyrants: A major problem we have as mere fallen and finite creatures is that we lack perspective. We do not see the big picture and we do not consider the long term. Christians can be just as guilty of this as non-Christians. We can too easily become overwhelmed by events going on around us. This can especially be true regarding wicked rulers and evil nations. I have been around for a while now, and I recall worrying greatly about things like the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Communism seemed to be the wave of the future back then. But of course the wall came down in 1989, and over seven decades of godless Communist rule came to an end – at least in that part of the world. And many empires have come and gone over the centuries, be they the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Romans, and so on. Yet when we see powerful and evil nations today, it still can seem like they are