My pulpit message notes: Family conflict to family purpose

Family conflict to family purpose

My Pulpit Message Notes are transcribed from the sermon preached at the Nairobi Baptist Church (NBC) Ngong Road on Sunday 27th November, 2022 Preacher: Reverend Kwame Rubadiri. Scripture: Genesis 30:1-14. Topic: Family conflict to family purpose.

Anyone who has been married longer than five minutes knows that the worst conflicts take place in families. The fact is the closer we are the harder it is to get along.

- Conflict is part and fact of our lives and it is a propellant/fuel for our relationships.

- Conflict does not have to leave a trail of destruction.

- There is always a greater purpose or service as we go through various conflicts in life. I use the word propel / propellant in a very careful way because all of us are familiar with what propellants do for us. We use them all the time. We use them to come to church. We put fuel in our vehicles to get us where we want to be. That fuel had to allow a certain number of very well controlled explosions to take place in your engine. There are a number of explosions that go on every time you switch on your car and every time you drive, tiny explosions go on to allow the car to be propelled.

- As long as they are controlled, everything is fine. You get from point a to b. But the moment an issue of uncontrolled / unmanaged propellants begin to mix, or they find themselves in the wrong part of your vehicle, that vehicle has a potential to become a bomb. And this is where most of us suffer because we don’t know how to handle conflict. We don’t know how to handle this propellant. It could be used to help us, It could be used to heal us.

- We don’t need to look very far to see what the bombs of conflict have done in our society, especially since the global pandemic of the past two years.

- Psychologists are now telling us that there are higher rates of suicides taking place, and these are mostly among young people/teens. Regardless of social economic status, we are looking at murder suicides reported in our media. The majority of these are taking place in families. Siblings and parents are fighting about property in and out of court and people are fighting over trivial and even traumatic matters. Some people are fighting just for the sake of fighting because that is all they know.

- I heard a very sad story a few days ago reported in the news in Uganda. A family that has gone through separation, with the parents fighting over what is not very clear. And they decided to separate and the children were spending time with mom sometimes and with dad on other weeks. The father decided to go and pick up his daughter from school a couple of days ago and found a boda boda that normally brings the child to school, ready to pick her up and take her home. And he meets the father of the child who says, you don’t need to be here, I’ve come to pick up my daughter to spend some time with me. The boda boda guy because he doesn’t want to get in trouble with the mother, says, ‘let me call her and find out if this is okay.’ The father of course gets very upset and says that is no business of yours,I am telling you that I am taking my daughter to spend some time with me. The boda boda guy insists that ‘I don’t want to get in trouble with your wife, the mother of this child, so allow me to call her so this can be straightened out.’ The next thing that happened is absolutely unbelievable. This man took a revolver, shot and killed the boda boda guy in front of everyone who was watching at the school. This is a bomb that has been in the making and perhaps is seating ready to explode in so many families across our world. - Sadly we are not providing steps in our churches to try to address this.

- This says to us, the closer our relationships are, the higher the stakes are to try to resolve conflict. The problem is we will probably find ourselves undergoing, or undertaking even more difficult levels of reaction and explosion in our society simply because we do not deal with conflict.

- I believe that the degree to which godly marriage and family really matter is the degree to which we will address conflicts in our families.

Four ways God wants us to address conflicts in our marriage

1. Establish the truth (Genesis 30)

2. Engage the players (Genesis 42)

3. Express the pain 4. Embrace purpose

Establish the truth (Genesis 30)

a. Identify the historic impacts have led to current conflicts

b. Have children become pawns in the conflict?

c. The truth may hurt, but it’s necessary to help you.

- This is a continuation of Genesis 29 where we read of two women / sisters who are in conflict. They lived in the same house, now they married the same man, Jacob, not because this is what Jacob wanted. He was tricked into marrying the older sister, Leah, and he really wanted to marry Rachael, the girl he had fallen in love with, and this was the one person that was closest to him.

- Leah, the Bible says she was weaker, meaning not as good looking as her sister was. Because Jacob preferred Rachael, Leah knew that she had to do something to win the love and affection of her husband Jacob. She thought the only way she could do this, because she was the one who was having children before her sister, was to have as many children as possible.

- Unfortunately because of these tensions / conflicts between husband and wife, between sister and sister, later on between mother and child, many seeds of suspicion and hatred were sown into this family and the generations that followed.

- It was interesting that every time there was a flareup of this commotion /conflict when a child was born, the child was given a name that had to do with what was going on at that particular time.

- Most of us are used to the idea, know friends of ours from different ethnicities in this country who would name a child according to a time of year, a season, time of day etc. In this particular case Leah and Rachael, would name their children, especially their sons based on what was going on, based on the nature of the conflict. This led to the children becoming pawns in the relationship between mother and father.

- Many children in these days are carrying the burden of internal suffering because of how their parents have treated or even named them.

- One of the things that was particularly painful about this experience especially about these two sisters is that nothing is said about this conflict or difficulty that was faced in the time before they got married. It was in this family setting, of this new relationships that suddenly pain got into the family.

- The rest of the book of Genesis to the end to the book have to deal with what goes on in this family and how conflict was eventually resolved.

- We are told seven chapters later that Israel i.e Jacob, loved Joseph more than his other sons because he had been born to him of his old age and he made an ornate robe for him and when the brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak a kind word to him.

- Jacob got into the mix of adding to the pain of this conflict by showing favouritism to one of his children. It led to an extreme and unimaginable consequences, strife in the family.

Message to fathers

I think the greatest damage that any father can do, is not to recognise, or to affirm their children however many they have. I know that there are fathers who have had, or sired children before they got married and they are doing their best to take care of them, amen. There are those who have many children doing their best to take care of them, but only seem to support the ones who are doing well and neglect the ones who are struggling in life. One of the worst things a father can do to their children, sons, or daughters is to fail to be present in their lives and to fail to praise them when it is necessary. ……….

- Jacob failed to do all of these things except for one of his sons and he did it publicly. He showed that Joseph was not only his favourite son, his admired, desired son, he made sure that everyone else in the family knew it, sowing a deeper seed of pain and suffering. What he was doing, sadly, for his own family and sadly what many other families are doing today is that, he weaponised childhood.

- Too many of our children grow up in a situation feeling as if, I am not quite appreciated/loved in this context. So they do their best, work their hardest to try and impress their parents.

- Most parents don’t realise that the one person that really matters in a child’s life, even more than their parents and this is true for teenagers as well, is the opinion and the approval of their parents.

- I know of teenagers especially in my line of work, would give up an hour, two days, a week with their friends to simply have the approval of their parents.

- And if there are parents who feel that giving their children freedom and everything that they ask for, gadgets, being their friends, the best you can do and if you don’t take time to be present in their lives, you don’t take time to honour them, to praise them in some way, you are going to find yourself in the same boat that Jacob found himself.

- This problem grew in the lives of the sons of Jacob. The Bible records of how after he had been given this robe, Joseph is sent by his father to go and check on his brothers and they see him, but because of this ingrown hatred that has been a part of their lives from the time that they were small children, they look at him and see him coming from a distance, and the thing that comes straight to their minds, his how to take this young man out.

- Something has to have really broken in the life of an individual for you to decide that there is so much hatred to get to the point that you can conceive and actually decide that it would be a good idea to remove this person from the face of the earth is a serious problem of conflict in this family.

- These young men, decided, they didn’t carry out their initial plan, because big brother Reuben stepped in saying, let’s not kill him, Reuben’s idea was to rescue him and take him back to his father because he knew his father had a great and deep sense of affection for Joseph. But the brothers did something that I think is even worse, and they did this to their father. The Bible says, that they took Joseph’s robe after they had sold him into slavery, they slaughtered and goat and dipped the robe in the blood and took the robe back to their father and said,

“We found this, examine it to see whether it is your son’s robe.” Does this belong to your son? They don’t even call him brother. And he recognised it and said, yet it is my son’s. Some ferocious animal had devoured him and Joseph is surely torn to pieces, and Jacob tore his clothes, put on sackcloth and mourned for his son many days.

- The relationship between Jacob, dad, and the rest of his sons, the ones who were ignored / not appreciated had eroded so much that they thought absolutely nothing about finding a way to deceive their father in the most painful way.

- We never conceive or decide to ourselves that we are going to do something particularly painful, or cruel to someone who is a part of our families. The sad part and I’m so glad that the Bible has this story in the Word of God is that this is where many of us live, especially if you come from big families, or what we now call extended family. Where it seems that certain children from certain backgrounds get a better attention, or maybe the parents have grown up or even left the scene, the ones from this particular side of the family are the ones that are going to a better portion of the inheritance. We need to do something to stop it from happening.

- We need to establish the fact that this is the world that we live in. - This is the issue that we must face. These are the problems and the sad fact of the matter is that when we go to church we look our best, or we do our best to look our best and we argue and have a huge blowout fight on our way to church even as a family and walk in smiling. Walk in looking like nothing is wrong. And if we don’t establish the truth we are not going to get very far on this matter.

Engage the players (Genesis 42)

a. The “parties” in a conflict are real people

b. Joseph’s pain and his brothers’ guilt had to meet head-on and each one had to take responsibility.

Now we find that Joseph has been sold into slavery in Egypt and far as Jacob is concerned, he is dead. The brothers know that there is all likelihood that perhaps Joseph had died in Egypt, they have no idea where he had ended up and they don’t care up to this point.

- It is important especially for those of us who are going through a difficult time of clashing to recognise and sadly and this is what our courts do, simply call them parties instead of recognising that they are human beings. I guess part of it is simply to put a distance between how people feel and not to deal with the pain that people are going through.

- These young men in Genesis 42 recognised that Joseph had not died. They didn’t know this a that particular point. The only person who recognised them when they came to Egypt to find bread was the brothers themselves and because they were being treated by this leader / governor of Egypt, they thought to themselves, we must have done something wrong. There must be something that we did in the past, something we did to our brother that has brought us to this point. And they said to one another, the Bible records, “Surely we are being punished because of our brother. You saw how distressed he was and how he pleaded for his life, but we would not list and this is why distress has come upon us.

- Now they move from the point of complete disinterest to what may have happened to their brother. To the point where now they begin to realise that something is happening to them because of what they did to their brother.

- They recognise that the experiences of their lives then had something to do with their behaviour many years before.

- There may be some experiences that you and I are going through now that we think to ourselves, that maybe this would be different if I hadn’t treated so and so they way that I did. Or this would be very different if they hadn’t said what they did to injure my life.

Express the pain

a. What is your story? Have you told it to anyone?

b. What are the wounds that have never been healed?

As the players begin to engage and discuss what’s going on, it’s important when we are dealing with conflict to be vulnerable, to be open and to say, this is actually what is happening and to say this is why I feel the way I do about you, or about this situation.

- Too many of our families are trapped to being silent to one another because they failed to trust one another.

- The one place to be completely free to ourselves, completely free to be open and safe is in our families. But when we begin to injure one another, to hold things against each other, when we begin to take action in hurtful way against one another we find ourselves losing our ability to work together?

- So ask yourself, what is your story with respect to the conflict that you may be dealing with? Why is it that you have never been healed? Why is it that there is still this nagging pain? And maybe it came from childhood, or from a more recent experience. Why does it still hurt?

Embracing purpose

a. Healing can only be secured if someone is prepared to forgive.

b. Joseph went further than forgiveness by assuring his brothers and reminding them of God’s purpose.

There is a possibility of getting out of this situation. - We establish purpose because of what Joseph did after his brothers had hurt him / injured him so painfully.

- Joseph pleaded with his brothers not to do anything to him. The brothers confirmed that, yet they sold him. And he went into slavery, never thinking, or never expecting that someone from home will come to rescue him, that maybe his brothers will come to their senses and they will come to look for him. He ends up in Egypt all by himself with a foreigner, in a foreign space and he is a slave and through the wonderful acts of God in his life he rises to the position of second most powerful person in Egypt. And having reached out to his brothers, having asked for their forgiveness and indeed having forgiven them, and they recognising that this is indeed their brother Joseph, Joseph says something to them that put’s all of this into perspective. Something that you and I should discover. He says to them, "Hurry back to my father and tell him this is what his son has said, God has made me lord over all of Egypt. Come down to me, don’t delay. And he kissed his brothers and wept over them.”

- Joseph had it in his power to imprison his brothers for the rest of their lives and never know that it was their brother. And yet he decided to take the direction of forgiveness.

- He decided that what had happened to him was not as important as what God wanted to happen to the whole family.

- Too many of us would probably put ourselves in the position of wanting to be vindicated, wanting everyone of us to pay for that hurt, desiring that they should know why they are suffering because of the way they caused us to suffer.

- What Joseph did is a huge invitation to us to embrace purpose. Because Joseph saw the big picture - he said to his brothers, “You intended this for harm, but God intended this for good.” You intended to kill me, but God took all of that suffering, conflict, strife and He has put us on the trajectory not just of surviving, not just to overcome the pain of this famine that we are going through and not just so that we can go back and say that everything is all right now, we are healed, but so that through this family the purpose of God can be fulfilled.

Through this family the Lord Jesus Christ could come, the line of Judah, one of Joseph’s brothers. Through this line, Jesus of Nazareth, the Saviour of the world would come to this earth, pay for our sins and that Jesus gives us reason to live today.

- If Joseph had decided, I am not going to forgive these wicked brothers of mine and deservedly so, could we safely say, maybe God could have found another say that we definitely would have had the Lord Jesus Christ come through, this dysfunctional, hateful family?

- All this is to say that no matter how bad your circumstances are in your relationships in your families, God has a better and bigger plan.

- Despite all the pain that you may have gone through in this life, the pain that your own relatives inflicted upon you, maybe your own parents, your own siblings, and despite how that pain is a part of your life today, God has a plan that will far outdo any of the problems and the pain that you have experienced if you would allow him to take over.

- Joseph is a powerful reminder to us of the significance of taking the first step to forgive.

- Joseph went further than forgiveness - as far as assuring his brothers. He said this is quite okay. God did this because He wanted to save all of us because He wanted all of us to experience His favour.

Challenge

Whatever conflict your families have dealt with, or faced, would you be the first one to forgive. Would you be the first one to make a step to say we need to face this problem. We can’t allow this to move from our generation to our children.

Too many of us are raising children who have gone through a weaponised childhood and is not fair to them. It is not right that your burden becomes their burden and they live it for the generations to follow.

Purpose transcends pain. It is bigger than all the players involved and it gives the truth at the centre of every relationship because purpose will always shed light on conflict and force us to deal with it.

Questions

1. Could you be the one to take the first step to forgive in the area of conflict in your family?

2. Could it be that you are in this place today to hear the Holy Spirit say to you, enough is enough? It’s time for you and your family to heal and connect to the purpose of God?