Good Morning Everyone,
Our theme for this month: “Family”
Our Bible verse for today: “Now Israel (Jacob) loved Joseph more than his other sons because Joseph was a son born to him in his old age, and he made a robe of many colors for him. When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not bring themselves to speak peaceable to him.” Genesis 37:3-4 (HCSB)
Our thought for today: “All families are dysfunctional”
The dictionary tells us that to be “dysfunctional” means: “The condition of having poor and unhealthy behaviors and attitudes within a group of people.”
Well, that pretty much describes all groups of people at one time or another doesn’t it? Whether we’re talking about traditional families, or church families, or a group of friends who function like a family, or any other group of people who have things in common and who regularly spend time together, at some point they behave in dysfunctional ways.
The Biblical family of Jacob, whose story we follow through the last chapters of the book of Genesis, is certainly a good case in point. Now remember, Jacob was a patriarch of Israel. He was one of the Old Testament Biblical fathers that the family of God was built upon. And yet he had two wives and a couple of concubines; he produced children from four different women; he played favorites among his children (which generated considerable hatred and bad behavior among them); he was known to be a deceitful schemer who could not be trusted; some of his sons modeled that behavior and developed that character trait too; and Jacob displayed a consistent pattern of small-minded and self-serving behavior that some of his sons picked up as well.
It was a seriously messed-up family! And yet, God was at work within their midst and He did some mighty things in and through them. You can spend some time reading their story in chapters 37-50 of Genesis.
The truth is that at some time, and in some way, all families are dysfunctional. That’s also true of any other grouping of people that has family-like qualities. Such groups are made up of people, and people are flawed, and so that means that the group is flawed. Someone once said that “God loves some pretty odd people, and the proof of it is that He loves you!” So if you, and people like you, are in a family-like group, then that group is odd and flawed.
Because it’s true that all people are flawed, and therefore all “family” groupings are flawed (read: dysfunctional), I think it will be helpful for us to spend a few days thinking about how we can most effectively deal with the dysfunction that is an inherent part of our family life. This is important! There are no perfect people and therefore there are no perfect groups of people. So we need to be able to deal effectively with all the imperfections that exist among us.
But with that said, sometimes we have to deal with members who are seriously dysfunctional. I’m talking about someone who brings a level of dysfunction that is above and beyond the normal dysfunction of our special little group of inherently dysfunctional individuals. What do we do about that? We’ll give some thought to that tomorrow.
God Bless,
Pastor Jim
Oak Hill Baptist Church 