Building Faith Families with Steve Demme

We are all human. And we all have our own stuff. We have each sinned, and were brought up in dysfunctional families. Who we are is a combination of our past and our present. We each have a story. The good news is that we are not alone. We all have strengths and weaknesses. We all share a common woundedness. Today’s episode is my story over the past year and a half, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Fortunately God is a wonderful Redeemer, or as I heard recently, the Great Composter.

To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God's grace means. -Brennan Manning

Building families of faith begins with each of us having a personal vital relationship with Jesus. Then we begin to build a foundation for our home on the word of God with Jesus as the cornerstone.

Jesus loves us and like us. He lights up every time we come to Him. He knows us intimately, He designed and created us. But believing and assimilating this truth takes time, in the truth. Jesus says, As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Then he adds, “Abide in my love.’

Abiding in His love, does not come naturally. It requires intentionality and purpose. Paul exhorts us to remain rooted and grounded in God’s love and care. To rest in His care and stay in this good place, requires transformation of the way we think about God and His love for us. This renewing of the mind occurs as we meditate on the truth of God’s word.

We each have to work out our own salvation and find out how we can best be renewed in our minds. I have found benefit in putting together lists of scriptures, prayers, and Psalms to help me. My feelings and emotions are as changeable as the wind, but God’s word is a rock.

The best thing I can do for my family is love God with everything in me, and be fully assured that He loves me. As I receive grace, then I am equipped to give grace. As I experience the love of God in Jesus, I am able to then love others as He has loved me.

The best gift we can give our children, is to love them unconditionally. When they are loved like this, it prepares them to receive grace, or God’s unconditional love. But we can’t give what we have not received. So how do we experience this divine love and not leave our first love as did the Ephesian Church? Many of us have heard of God’s love so much that this expression has lost it’s power. So I am going to share how God made me know that He likes us. That He knows us intimately and still likes us.

There are two components that are important to understanding this important dynamic, His nature and His work. God is. He doesn’t change. He can’t change. He is the same, always. He is also love, and He is light.

Malachi 3:6 I am the LORD, and I do not change.

Hebrews 13:8 Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

1 John 1:5 God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.

1 John 4:8 God is love.

This is His divine nature. We can bank on God being God forever. We are His workmanship. He is the one who gives value to our being.

He designed and created us in His image.

He adopted us and made us His children.

We have value as a part of the body of Christ

We are a temple of the Holy Spirit.

He knows us intimately.

His love and affection, His eternal “like” never changes because He never changes and His work endures forever. He reveals this love in His word and then tells us to Abide in my love. John 15:9.

May God help us to live, abide, and dwell with the knowledge that we are liked and loved with an everlasting love! Amen.

The love of God is revealed to me in the words of Jesus in John 15:9 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.” The best activity I can engage in to make me a loving husband and father, is to believe that God loves me, just as I am.

As I soak in the love of God, I am a new man, more like my savior and prepared to love others as He has loved me. My vision for the family has changed from: “Where each lives for the other and all live for Christ”, to: what I now I see as a more biblical statement: “Where each lives for Christ and all love for the other”.

To begin to grasp the love of God, we need to being with the good news, or the gospel of Jesus. I have chosen 2 Corinthians 5:21 to represent the truths of the gospel. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

There is nothing I can do or anything I can add to make God love you more. In Christ we are accepted totally and completely. Our salvation and sanctification are both gracious gifts from God.

I mistakenly believed that salvation was by His grace, but sanctification, was by my efforts. The more I did for God, the better the husband and father, the more God would love me and like me. Any semblance of works, nullifies grace. If I am working for something it is no longer a gift.

Ephesians 2:1 "And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, ... 4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; 9 not as a result of works..."

The only appropriate response to grace is, “Thanks”.

Closing Prayer: John 17:26 "I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”

Building a home begins and ends with a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. In this episode I begin by sharing how I heard the good news for the first time and met Jesus, the Son of God.

When I was a teen, I was invited to a Young Life Ranch in Colorado. The question that was posed to me, “Have you met Jesus?” A song that had just recently been written, and encapsulates my testimony was, “He’s Everything to Me”.

In the stars His handiwork I see, On the wind He speaks with majesty

Though He ruleth over land and sea, What is that to me?

I will celebrate nativity, For it has a place in history

Sure He came to set His people free, What is that to me

'Til by faith I met Him face to face, And I felt the wonder of His grace

Then I knew that He was more, Than just a God who didn't care

That lived away out there, And now He walks beside me day by day

Ever watching o'er me lest I stray, Helping me to find that narrow way

He's everything to me.

2012 was a period of personal reconstruction. Sometimes we need to reexamine our relationship with Jesus Christ. Over a period of many years, I had begun to believe that God didn’t love me the same way as He did in Colorado. I mistakenly supposed that I had not lived up to His expectations. A distance crept into my connection with my Savior.

One of the ways God showed me how much he cared for me unconditionally was through my son John, who has Downs Syndrome. Johnny loves me for who I am and not for what I do. And I love John for who he is, and not for what he can or cannot do. This kind of love is only a glimmer and a taste of the love God has for each of His children. He loves us for who we are, period.

As I asked God to help me love Him, He surprised me by revealing His love for me. I protested and was pointing out that I wanted to love God with all my heart, but He was showing me how much He cared for me. But this is biblical since 1 John 4:19 says, We love, because He first loved us.

The main verse that the Holy Spirit quickened to my heart and mind was, John 15:9, As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. I have no doubt of the Father’s love for the son, and here Jesus tells us that He loves us the very same way. Hard to assimilate, but true nonetheless.

Loving God precedes parenting, and being Loved by God, precedes Loving God. Perhaps the best thing we can do for our marriage, is for each of us to let Jesus loves us, so we will fall in love with Jesus and comprehend God’s love for us in a fresh way. For when we are loved unconditionally we can love unconditionally.