Perfect Family | PERFCT | Menlo Church Live Stream

But what we're gonna discover today in the book of second Samuel is that there is a man who wrote the book of Psalms in your bible, the man who is repeatedly described as a man after God's own heart, who lived in a home that makes whatever raunchy reality television show you can think of seem tame, and he's in the bible. [00:32:09] (19 seconds)  #ManAfterGodsHeart

And that kind of drift that we're gonna see in his life and family didn't happen overnight either. It happened over time because David, who's king, he had lost his moral authority. A few chapters before the one we're gonna look at today, David assaulted another man's wife and had her husband murdered to cover it up. God would eventually forgive him, but don't miss this important reality. Forgiveness doesn't mean there are no consequences. It didn't mean that for David, and it doesn't mean that for us. David's sin, it created a credibility gap in his parenting and in his leadership. [00:32:28] (37 seconds)  #ForgivenessWithConsequences

Now like so many of us, if we're honest, for David, he got comfortable and he let himself get complacent. Because he wasn't where he was supposed to be and he wasn't there when he was supposed to be there, it was easy to let his eyes drift. And in this case, literally to Bathsheba, a married woman bathing on the rooftop below. And in a night, he goes from the hero to the villain. [00:35:29] (24 seconds)  #GuardYourEyes

Now this wasn't an affair. Bathsheba really had no agency or choice in this. She could either say yes or be killed. So when she gets pregnant, David goes into cleanup mode. He goes into damage control, and it would escalate to him having Uriah, her husband, killed on the battlefield to conceal his assault and his deceit. And finally, in part three, we have the prophecy. [00:35:53] (23 seconds)  #CoverupHasConsequences

Act two reveals the failure of community. When David's son shares his deep and dark feelings for his sister, Jonadab becomes an enabler. He basically helps him come up with a plan to get what he wants even though it's deeply wrong and hurtful. So he tells Amnon to fake an illness, to trick his dad into sending Tamar in to care for him, and then to trap Tamar, an innocent girl who would be assaulted by her own brother. And then as soon as he gets what he wants, his lust turns into loathing, and he discards her with a lifelong hatred. [00:38:14] (40 seconds)  #WhenCommunityFails

The problem for David is he's guilty of kind of the same thing, And his kids knew about it. And because he wasn't willing to own his own dysfunction, because he wasn't willing to be honest about what that meant in him, he ends up defaulting to passivity, which is what we often do when we are unwilling to deal with our own stuff. He didn't punish Amnon. He didn't comfort Tamar. As a matter of fact, in the text, we don't hear from him talk about it at all, likely because of the weight of his own unaddressed shame. [00:39:37] (30 seconds)  #PassivityCosts

And because of David's inaction, the brokenness of their family just kept mutating. But this time, it mutated into rage. Absalom, Tamar's full brother, sees what this had done to his sister, sees that his father did nothing, and decides that if the king won't bring justice, he will bring vengeance. He'll become the judge and the jury, but only after he lets this anger and this bitterness marinate for two years, at the end of which he would murder his brother. [00:40:16] (35 seconds)  #InactionBreedsVengeance

Now I wanna pause here for just one second. Do you still feel like your family is too messy for God to love them? This is in the Bible. God loves you. Think about it. God used David as messy as he was, the power struggles and wreckage in his own family, and this is just a slice of it, to be a part of the lineage that would bring Jesus, the rescuer of the entire world. [00:40:51] (25 seconds)  #GodUsesTheMess

Remember, God doesn't heal perfect families because perfect families don't exist. He heals honest ones, and so both of these require some of that honesty. The first tool is called the mobile effect. Think about like a simple mobile hanging over a newborn baby's crib. And if you're like, I thought that was pronounced mobile. I googled it. You can say it either way. If you pull on just one piece of the mobile, what happens? [00:42:21] (26 seconds)  #MobileEffect

Families are a lot like that. We are an interconnected system, and we react to one another to maintain or regain balance even if it's not good. We just default back to what we know. So use this tool to think about David's family a little bit. When David pulled the string of passivity by refusing to take action with his son and daughter, the whole mobile shifted to compensate. Without David as the judge, Absalom becomes avenger. And before you and I get too judgmental, how could they possibly do that? We do a version of this too. [00:42:55] (35 seconds)  #FamilySystemsMatter

The second tool to help understand some of our patterns and observations we'll call the generational echo tool. A quick way of thinking about this is with the statement, what God doesn't transform, we will transmit. You can think, you know what? I won't let anybody else see this. Even if they can't hear you say the words, they feel the impact of it. Because pain travels in our families and our lives. The dysfunction that it creates often runs downhill into other relationships and even into the next generation. [00:45:00] (31 seconds)  #GenerationalEcho

Well, one of the reasons that we know David is a man after own God's own heart, it's it's not because he had a perfect family. Certainly not. It's not because he did everything perfectly. He certainly didn't. It's because in part, when he hit rock bottom, he remembered where to look. When he hit rock bottom, he gave us Psalm 51 as a road map for how to stop this echo in his life and maybe even in yours and mine too. In this important poem, he starts with an unqualified confession. [00:47:03] (30 seconds)  #Psalm51Roadmap

This is the first step in healing. It's to stop pretending that your family is perfect. No family is perfect. God doesn't heal perfect families. He heals honest ones. Now this can sometimes feel disloyal. It can feel unappreciative. It doesn't mean that people didn't do their best. Even in the home that I grew up in where that was messy and painful, I still got a better version of family growing up than my parents did. It just means that we stop pretending. It just means that we can be honest about the experiences that we have, what we've gone through, what we're going through. [00:47:34] (33 seconds)  #HealsHonestFamilies

So here's a practical step that you can take this week. Even if you are just dipping your toes into the water of faith, God won't heal what you don't reveal. See, for some of us, we just think, well, I'll just keep this stuff a secret. Can I tell you a secret about an omniscient, omnipotent God? You have no secrets from him. It is not doing you any favors to pretend that you are keeping something from him. As a matter of fact, it is often holding back the kind of work that God wants to do in your life by pretending he doesn't know it already. [00:48:37] (34 seconds)  #RevealToHeal

Maybe you're only gonna share it with God. Maybe you'll share it with a close friend. You'll you'll write it down or you'll share it out loud. These moments are so sacred. And I bet you have some people in your life that you can trust with this information that would show up way better than you think they would. Is it the way that you default to the silent treatment and conflict? Is it the way you freeze under pressure when you feel scared or intimidated? Maybe it's your explosive anger that everyone walks on eggshells around you to try to avoid. Simply by naming the pattern, God can begin to bring it to your mind and his strength to consider changing it. [00:49:18] (37 seconds)  #NameItChangeIt

Second, audit your circle. If our circles are all family pattern mobiles, we have these family systems that are moving where we are connected. We are adjusting. We're taking on roles. How is your circle helping you or hurting you? I've heard it said this way that your future is largely an average of the quality and direction of the decision making of the five closest people to you. How do you like that math? [00:49:55] (25 seconds)  #AuditYourCircle

David's son had a friend who gave him the worst advice, and David had a friend named Nathan. David's friend told him something that he wanted to hear, but it destroyed his life. Nathan told Daniel something that he didn't wanna hear, but saved his life. Which kinds of circles do you have? Are you like David's son, hearing the kind of advice you want, but it's destroying you? Or are you like David, willing to hear the difficult truth? [00:50:20] (31 seconds)  #TruthOverFlattery

Finally, move toward grace. Now this isn't difficult work, what we're talking about. This is not difficult work to do on your own. It's impossible work to do on your own. We are wildly dysregulated. We are living in these family systems of dysfunction all the time. And the undeserved favor of God, what really is the definition of grace, that's our only hope for really living a different kind of life in a sustained way. [00:51:21] (24 seconds)  #MoveTowardGrace

Hyssop is a small plant that served as a brush for ceremonially cleaning someone. David, who is the king, is confessing to God that he has gotten himself unclean to the point that he can't do this on his own. Some of you, you don't come back to God because you're like, I just need to clean up my life a little bit. What the king of Israel is telling you is you can't do the cleanup. Only God can. [00:52:08] (25 seconds)  #OnlyGodCanCleanse

``You need a source of love that doesn't come from your family tree or at least your earthly one. See, Jesus is the only truly differentiated person who's ever lived. He stepped right into the messy mobile of humanity. He ate with sinners. He touched lepers. He dealt with the betrayal, but he never let that pull him into the dysfunction that was around him. When people praised him, he didn't get a big head. When people spit on him, he didn't lose his identity. Why? Because he was anchored to his heavenly father. He knew who he was, so the world couldn't tell him or try to trick him into thinking he was someone else. [00:55:34] (43 seconds)  #IdentityInChrist