Date:
August 21, 2020Stretch Your Mind
The secret of staying young is within you. It has nothing to do with where you live, how much money you make, who you’re married to, or how your kids turn out. It has everything to do with your attitude.
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Family
Living harmoniously as a family is an ongoing, intentional journey. The beginning of that journey is marked by great anticipation and genuine excitement. A bride and groom have high hopes and great dreams as they start out life together. However, as in all journeys, unexpected challenges pop up, including the arrival of children, which requires the couple to cultivate valuable parenting skills—without a handbook! At each age, from preschool through elementary school, each child requires his or her parents to make adjustments along the way to keep the relationships harmonious. Just about the time parents get their arms around all of that, the teenage years arrive! This stretching and complicated time calls for even more adjustments and a greater willingness to change if the parents hope to sustain harmony in the home. Then, after all that adapting, a new set of challenges arrives—the children reach adulthood, with minds of their own. Can there still be mutual respect and meaningful relationships in the family? Can harmony continue between parents and their grown-up kids? Absolutely! The question is, how?
We Live in Different Days
Life is complex. Our world is more complicated than it was even 20 or 30 years ago. Even though many of the values we grew up with now seem passe the basics never change—they’re summarized in Micah 6:8, to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.
Love the Giver Not the Gifts
Whether it’s your family, friends, job, or home, everything you have is from God. Look within—are you more enamoured with the gifts God gives you than with God Himself?
What to Do When You've Blown It
Too often, we end up saying “if only I had known then what I know now.” Since there’s no way to go back and relive our lives, we need to focus on the best way to respond to these painful memories. Otherwise, we will live under clouds of blame and shame and be paralyzed by fear.
Suggestions for Parenting Grown-Up Kids
Living harmoniously as a family is an ongoing, intentional journey. The beginning of that journey is marked by great anticipation and genuine excitement. A bride and groom have high hopes and great dreams as they start out life together. However, as in all journeys, unexpected challenges pop up, including the arrival of children, which requires the couple to cultivate valuable parenting skills—without a handbook!
Accepting Reproof from Those Who Love Us
Many of us have the right motives, but we just don’t know how to reprove one another the way God intended. In this message, let’s seek to understand the value and process of speaking the truth in love so we might gain—and share, especially with our children—the helpful insight that can remove blind spots and bring about needed change.
Unpacking Our "Ancestral Baggage"
We know that we are all sinful and in need of salvation, but often, we fail to consider that we bear the specific “bents” of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. When we think about it, all of us must admit the direct link between the people we have become and the lives of those who formed our heritage—for good and for ill.
Map of God's World
At times we all find the route God has chosen for us doesn’t make a lot of sense. Especially when life takes a turn we don’t expect. But as Chuck Swindoll says, “Welcome to God’s World.”
Growing Up Swindoll
Chuck Swindoll did not discover from his parents who he is. Knowing who you are as a child, through your parent’s eyes, gives you security and confidence.
A Father's Teaching
Remember the first time you lived alone? What did you draw on in your mind first thing in the morning? It was probably some instruction or encouragement you remembered from your parents. You learn your first lessons from your family—they see through the fog.
