Resources by Topic: Marriage and Family

We view life through an extra social category called ‘adolescence’, a category that would have been completely foreign to men and women just 100 years ago.

“Should we get married?” Few questions deserve more careful attention. When dreamy-eyed recklessness yanks people into marriage, the end is often conflict, disillusionment, separation, and divorce, or at best, a second-rate marriage.

We live in the same house that we did when our daughters were small. Now they're grown and we have four grandsons. All those years our daughters were growing up, we never built a fence in our yard. There was no need.

I think the current political debate concerning abstinence vs. contraceptive based sexual education has failed to include an important variable in the discussion of what to teach in school: sexual well being.

It requires only that we humble ourselves, that we learn, affirm, and live out the biblical pattern of womanhood, and that we teach the ways of God to the next generation.

Imagine if strangers approached your 12-year-old daughter and said they wanted to talk with her about her problems at home, at school and with boys.

The older generations are hoping we will mindlessly assume our place as the “next” in line. That way, they won’t have to explain why my generation has had to experience so much pain and heartache.

I’m convinced that it’s very dangerous to give large amounts of money to kids who haven’t earned it.

Today countless children grow up begging and grabbing and clinging onto all the things money can buy. As adults, they rarely outgrow this shallow self-centeredness, but simply graduate to more money and bigger toys. Living their lives on earth as if this were all there is, they fail to prepare for their eternal future.

The fact is that our children will not stand up and resist this tide unless they become men and women of character, courage and spiritual vitality. We are to pass on to them the baton that was handed us by a previous generation of Christians.

When one of my students in an ethics class at Multnomah Bible College paraphrased Scripture on the subject of children, it inspired me to do the same. One of these statements is from God (Psalm 128:3-5), the others from a godless world. Can you choose which?

I have learned the joy of asking every time I receive any form of income, “Lord, who do You want me to give this to?”