Russell Moore:
(From the chapter, The Cross as Family Crisis.)
Family can enliven us or crush us because family is about more than just the life cycle of our genetic material. Family is spiritual warfare.
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The Bible says much about family, but it does not do so from the warmth of the hearth, but from the Place of the Skull.
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Family is awesome. Family is terrible. As Christians, we already have a category for that. The cross shows us how we can find beauty and brokenness, justice and mercy, peace and wrath, all in the same place. The pattern of the Christian life is crucified glory—this is as true for our lives in our families as in everything else.
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If family were easy, we could do it in our own fleshly self-propelled willpower. If we could do it on our own, we would not bear a cross. And if we are not bearing a cross, then what we are doing would not matter in the broad sweep of eternity. Family matters. That’s why it is hard.
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Family can be humiliating, but what’s more humiliating than family is being naked, covered in blood, hoisted on a pole, while people gamble for one’s clothes. And yet, we’ve all been there, in Christ. Once we’ve been crucified, and survived to tell the tale, one would think we could admit to one another that we need help in the spiritual warfare that comes with life together in our families. One would think we could humble ourselves and confess to one another, to ask for forgiveness, when we hurt or fail one another. One would think we could deal honestly with the pain of our own childhoods without fearing that we are predestined to live out our parents’ mistakes or to live our lives performing for their approval for whatever they expected of us.
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Those who neglect their family responsibilities and those who deify them end up in the same place, at giving up.....Our families are important but not ultimate. The devil doesn’t mind marriage experts or parenting experts. The devil doesn’t mind class valedictorians or a mantle full of trophies. The devil does, though, tremble at a cross. The end result of our mission as families is not to impress our peers that our kids are well-behaved enough not to keep us awake at night, but that they are, like us, crucified with Christ. To go back to Jesus’ cross-hymn from Psalm 22, the end result is to be that “it shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation; they shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn, that he has done it” (Ps. 22:30–31). That he has done it; not that we have done it. Family humbles us. Family humiliates us. Family crucifies us. That’s because family is one of the ways God gets us small enough to fight the sort of battle that can’t be won by horses or chariots but by the Spirit of the Lord.
Our families shape us. We shape our families. The cross should shape both.
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