Winning At Home | House Rules

well where are my rule followers out there anyone want to admit that they're a rule follower okay you will enjoy the
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message today because if we're going to win at home we need to have some rules
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right uh growing up I I didn't participate in rules very much
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especially at home my family had this rule that if if you swear you had to
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have soap put in your mouth to anyone else's family do this and my parents were just so darn good at not swearing I
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don't think I ever saw them eat soap me on the other hand I've tasted a few
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different flavors of soap in my life as I grew up I learned to appreciate
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rules a little bit more as a as a high school Pastor I actually would take students to camp and we we had three
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rules every year at Camp the first rule was we stick together so if we eat or we when we go to worship
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we do those things together the second rule was beyond time
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and on time meant five minutes early to any of the scheduled activities the third rule was don't be a knucklehead
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see there were three goals for camp but we grow closer to God we grow closer to each other and we have fun anything that
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gets in the way of one of those things is what it meant to be a knucklehead see
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rules are intended to help make sure that goals get accomplished and well-designed rules make sure those
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goals get accomplished efficiently correctly and without regret
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they make sure we kind of are all on the same page and rules sometimes even make
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sure we know what sorts of consequences need to be handed out and when so for
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today we're going to talk about some rules that are designed to help all of us
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win at home but I want us to make sure we all know what we mean when we say win
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at home throughout the series we we've we've talked about this verse a few times
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Jesus said in response to our worries and our needs in life he said but seek
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first his kingdom and his righteousness and all these things will be given to
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you as well what he's saying here is that there's something that's more important
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than us getting the things we want there's something that's more important
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than us having a bigger bank account or or a bigger house there's something that needs to take priority over having a
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clean home or a quiet home or kids on the honor roll there's actually
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something that comes before even our most basic needs and our and our biggest
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worries Jesus said seek first
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his kingdom and his righteousness which means everything else in our lives
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ought to come after that so in this series all the principles we've talked about all the resources
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all the events the classes have been designed to help you and your family seek first his kingdom
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and his righteousness and today my objective is to share with you three we're going to call them house rules three rules that are designed to help
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you keep his kingdom and his righteousness first and these rules all come directly from
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wisdom that's found in the Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament Proverbs
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are these short clever sayings that provide wisdom for different situations
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in the Book of Proverbs in the Bible is just it's this whole collection of these things so I'm confident if we can put in
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place these three that will set ourselves up to win at home to seek first his kingdom
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and his righteousness rule number one is this walk with the wise and for our context today
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wise people are people who who offer insight for how you or your
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family can seek first his kingdom and his righteousness in whatever stage of life you're currently in the first rule
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for winning at home is really about how do we spend quality time with wise
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people we talk about this all the time in our student Ministry we tell our students
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things like your friends are determining your future your friends are influencing your future and so we create as many
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opportunities we can from middle school and high school students to be around people to be around peers and leaders
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who are helping encourage and strengthen their faith in fact pretty much
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everything we do with our students is designed around this rule our weekend
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programming our events our our camps we actually have a high school fall weekend coming up next week you can still sign
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up for that everything we do with our students has this rule in mind and the proverb that this comes from is Proverbs
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13 20. walk with the wise and become wise for companion of fools
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suffers harm notice if we spend time with wise people
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this says we just kind of become wise kind of happens naturally but a friend
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of fools doesn't necessarily naturally become a fool in fact a companion of
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fools may never themselves become a fool but what they'll do is they will suffer the same harm
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as a fool because that's who they associate with if you get in a car with a drunk driver you suffer whatever harm
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they cause if you invest your money with a foolish investor you suffer whatever harm
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because if you trust your friends when they tell you the Nutty Professor too is a good movie you'll suffer for an hour
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and 49 minutes if you're like me I had some friends in college that that convinced me it would
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be funny if I jumped off a dorm pretending to be a pterodactyl I suffered a couple bruised ribs he walked
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with the wise and become wise for a friend of fool suffers I don't know in my case a couple bruised ribs
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so who are you walking with who are the people you're going through
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life with and are they people that are helping you seek first his kingdom and his righteousness
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a few years ago my wife and I went through the 242 kids child dedication class these classes are actually
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happening at at almost all of our locations this week you can still sign up for those classes too and during this
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class we were asked to to write down some some values we wanted to instill in our son that we were going to be
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committed to kind of raising him up with these values and I want to share with you what we wrote down I'll put it up
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here but I'll read it from this this plaque we have for him it's important to know our son's name is Wilder that's
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going to play a part in this this is what we said we said we want our son to know that our love for him is wild and
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God's love for him is Wilder that's actually where he gets his name from we said we want him to be wild wildly
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kind wildly Brave wild with his love wild with his generosity wild with
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Adventure wild with Grace wild for Jesus wild for others we want him to know he is free to be
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wildly himself and that we will always be wild about him you know who made this for for our son
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not his mom and I was actually my sister-in-law and
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and then for his first birthday we had some friends from our small group who put some of those phrases together on a
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t-shirt for him months after we had gone through this class our closest friends and family
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were reminding us of the commitment we made see one of the things I love about our child dedication classes is that from
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the outset they help us parents understand the sorts of people that we would be wise to surround ourselves with
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and Surround our kids with do you have values
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for your family do you have values for your life
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do you hey have you established some values that help ensure that you seek first his kingdom and his righteousness
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and if you don't would you be willing to maybe Today sit
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down and establish some for you or your family
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and if you had somebody you've drifted from them would you be willing to sit down and re-establish some values that
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help ensure that you seek first his kingdom and his righteousness see if we walk with the wise we
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naturally become wise but a companion of fools
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suffers harm see if we aren't careful to establish values that help us seek
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first his kingdom and his righteousness if we aren't careful to surround ourselves with the sort of people that help encourage and strengthen those
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values our tendency is to drift towards whoever shares interests with us not
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values interests whoever accepts us but acceptance can sometimes be a trap especially in
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the transitions of life High School to college to the workplace you move to a new town
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or city maybe you just got out of a relationship and you're looking to start a new one
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maybe you've been divorced but now you're open to the idea of dating again especially in the transitions in life
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our tendency just kind of our human nature is to gravitate towards people who share our interests or people who
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accept us but we have to be careful to to make friendships to build
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relationships with people who encourage and strengthen the values that help us seek first his kingdom
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and his righteousness and those people may not share interest with us they may eat at different restaurants
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they may root for different teams but if we spend time with them they will make us
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wiser and the best place and definitely the easiest place to find those people is in
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a small group part of the reason why small groups are so important for us around here is because small groups are just full of
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these people who are trying to help each other when at home
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so who are you walking through life with who are the people that are influencing you and your family and are there people
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who are causing doubt in you other people who are chipping away at
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your faith are there people that when you spend time with them they they bring out a
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different sort of person than you are everywhere else and not in a good way
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if there are people in your life that are causing you to compromise the values that help you seek first this Kingdom and his righteousness those people are
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fools to you and you would be wise to consider the harm that you or your family may suffer
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at their expense look God loves those people absolutely
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but if there are people in your life that are causing you to feel like you have to be a little dishonest with your
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friends and family because you you kind of live in two sort of lives those relationships are foolish and you need
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to end those relationships they need someone they need is not you
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rule number one for winning at home walk with the wise and rule number two is this borrow someone's
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game plan here's what I mean by that someone has been through whatever season
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of life you're currently in and has figured out how to seek first God's
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kingdom and his righteousness in that season someone has accomplished what you're trying to accomplish in life and
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has come up with a game plan for how they did it you would be wise to make an effort to
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find that person or those people and ask them if you could borrow their game plan
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especially especially if you're in a brand new season of Life some some season of Life you've never
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been through before because how could you possibly to know what to do in a season of Life you've never lived before
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when my wife and I took home our son from the hospital you know what we had to learn about being parents
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literally everything we didn't know we didn't know anything at the time we took
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our son was not even five pounds when we took him home from the hospital and we put him in the car seat and we
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started driving we're like so wait how do we do this were we allowed to have a child in our
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custody and then we get home and we look at each other we're like I guess we just like take turns holding him for six
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months I don't know every parent that's ever had a first child you you know this feeling
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luckily for us we had we had our family we had people from our small group who were seasoned and Seasons ahead of us we
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could ask questions we have we have many people that are still helping us navigate how do we do
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this every college student every engaged couple anyone who's ever started a new
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season at a job you know that feeling wait how do I do this how could you know
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how to do something in a season of Life you've never been through that's why
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the smartest thing you can do is find someone who's been through that season and won and say hey can I borrow your
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game plan there's a there's a proverb that goes like this listen to advice
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and accept discipline and at the end you will be counted among the wise
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for some of this this means we need to get better at listening to advice
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for some of this this means we need to get better at accepting discipline for some of this this means we need to
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stop pretending like oh we can figure it out yeah
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for some of us this means we need to admit that we've we've gotten some things wrong and you know what else it means the at
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the end part it means that if we're willing to do this if we're willing to listen to
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advice and accept discipline will not only be wise in this season
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but that will be wise for the rest of our days
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if you're the sort of person that the posture of your life the the pattern of your life is to listen to advice and accept discipline you'll be wise in this
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season and in the seasons ahead so
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what's an area of your life where you could get better at listening to advice
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and accepting discipline are you parenting toddlers
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are you parenting adult children have you recently retired
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have you recently gone through a tragedy or or a health scare
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are you trying to restore a marriage someone has been through whatever you're
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currently going through and and has figured out how to seek first his kingdom and his righteousness in that
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maybe your next step is to find that person or those people and ask hey can I can I borrow your game
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plan and our church is is full of people who have done this
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and some of them don't even know the wisdom they have until they're asked and many won't know
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that you want or need their game plan unless you ask
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one of the things I've learned over my years as a pastor hearing many of your stories and sitting down with many
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families in this church is that there's some stuff that I've learned
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that I didn't really know I learned until I started talking with people there's things that Brittany and I have
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been through that we're able to help other people with
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but we don't know anyone needs our game plan or or wants it unless they ask us
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about seven years ago my wife and I kind of like fell into a game plan for
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finding rest and connection in our marriage we both have a tendency to kind
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of just work work work until we burn out we have a tendency to do that in our
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jobs but also in our relationship and so we found ourselves through those first few years just kind of working ourselves
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dry mentally physically relationally emotionally and so one weekend we we both realized
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hey we have Mondays off we both have Mondays off let's just let's just go on
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an adventure on Monday what if we just started doing Monday Adventures and so we started this thing that we
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call Monday Adventures every Monday we go somewhere
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it doesn't really matter where we we try to look for a good cup of coffee and a good place to hike
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but the point is is that we're getting away we're connecting we're resting and and what one week we drove all the way
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to Pittsburgh and back on a Monday because why not this is an adventure and there's good
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coffee in Pittsburgh we don't go that far we're too often it's kind of crazy but
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but then we had our son and we said okay we got to include him and these Adventures so this is what we did
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we bought ourselves a jar we put 939 marbles in it one for every
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week we're going to have with our son between when he was born and when he turns 18. and we said what if every week when we
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go on a Monday Adventure we we just lose one of our marbles so that's what we do that's our game
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plan is we intentionally lose our problems we we're not perfect sometimes we forget
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but we take these Marbles and we leave them at coffee shops and on Hikes we left them at the zoo not in the cages
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we're like you know on the trail some we buried them in beaches we we put these things all over the
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place they're a reminder both of how much time we have left with our son but they're also a reminder to be
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intentional as a family and spending time together it's it's our game plan
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and we've been able to share the Monday adventure thing and the marble thing with many new couples and new parents
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and honestly every time we get to share it we love to share it
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we love to share our story
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but we don't know anyone needs that or wants that unless unless they ask and sometimes when they
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ask we're like man we actually do have a gameplay and we're not perfect there's a lot of things we don't have game plans
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for there's many game plans we've borrowed there's a lot of things we still need to figure out but when we get a chance to
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share something it's just so rewarding especially if you're in a new season of
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Life listen to advice and accept discipline and at the end you will be counted among the wise and if you've
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been through something and you've sought first his kingdom and his righteousness
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you might not even know how much wisdom you have until you start sharing
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so if someone invites you to grab coffee with them or if someone invites you to drop in their small group will you say yes
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if you've got something will you share it with someone they maybe you've heard this quote
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before that experiences a hard hard teacher because she gives the test first and the lesson afterward
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the only way to avoid this is to get out in front and invite wise
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counsel in then you'll have the test and you'll be ready you'll for when for
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when the test comes you'll have you'll have the lesson
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borrowing someone's game plan is not it's not weak
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it's wise it's a sign of maturity you want to win at home walk with the wise
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borrow someone's game plan and the third rule is this pay attention to the signs
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signs on the road are there for our Direction and our protection and signs and relationships signs at home
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do the same there's a proverb that says this The Prudent see danger and take refuge but the simple keep going and pay
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the penalty prudent just means wise and careful The Prudent see the danger and they
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respond to it the wise see signs and they pay attention to the signs they
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pay attention to what's going on around their life they pay attention to what's going on with their kids and their friends and their kids friends they pay
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attention to what's going on in their marriage and when they see something they do something about it
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because it's always a temptation to ignore signs isn't it and especially
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relationally it's a temptation to ignore signs and the reason why we usually ignore these
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is because we just don't really know what to do but nothing gets better in a
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relationship because we ignore it if you don't know what to do
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take refuge get advice from someone if more than one
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person has told you something that you need to work on that's a sign
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you would be wise to see that as danger and take refuge to do something about it
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I've been pulled over before because I just ignored science I mean literally just honestly didn't see something that
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was right in front of me get pulled over and pay the penalty
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there's also been times where I've just kind of intentionally disregarded the signs I mean speed limits are a
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suggestion right Anna you pull up to a no turn on red I'm in a hurry I don't see any police I
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don't really just make this turn just this one time some of us do more than just ignore
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science at home some of us are intentionally disregarding them
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if you've ever heard yourself say things like hey don't ever bring that up again
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I don't want to hear that anymore quit telling me that
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those are signs what is that for you
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what sorts of things do you respond to in those ways
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wise see those as signs and they do something about it
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the prudency danger and take refuge but the simple keep going and they pay the penalty
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and you may not be the only one who pays because everyone who looks up to you
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everyone who depends on you everyone you're responsible for may end up paying
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as well I mean you don't have to look too far at your past to find a time where you were hurt
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where you were left out because somebody else didn't pay attention to his sign
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and now you've got I don't know what do we call it stuff you deal with
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stuff that makes you suspicious or vulnerable in future relationships and it's hard to unpack that stuff isn't it
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but what happens if we don't what happens if we don't deal with the pain from our past is what it just kind of
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like takes root in us and we start to carry that into all our other relationships often it's it shows up as like anger
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resentment bitterness and if we don't deal with it
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we forget even where that started we forget where it comes from it just is it's kind of all over if we don't see it
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as danger and take refuge if we just keep going
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wisdom tells us we'll pay the penalty the Apostle Paul warns us like this
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sit in your anger do not sin and do not let the sun go down while you're still angry and do not give the devil a
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foothold does the devil have a foothold in your life
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it's often the penalty we pay it's anger it's bitterness his
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resentment attached itself to your life is it hiding out in the corners
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of your relationships and you just sort of drag them along
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you'd be wise to see that as a sign and do something
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about it does your family
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have to tiptoe around your anger issues does your family have to navigate your
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emotional outbursts your mood swings are there certain things that you're the
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people closest to you have to avoid because they always escalate something in you those are signs
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is your family trying their best to ignore your substance abuse problem it's a sign
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and the people who love you most would love for you to unpack those things or help find someone that would help you
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unpack those things because if you don't
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if you just keep going you'll pay the penalty and so will everyone who's close to you
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so let's pay attention to the signs quick recap here's three rules for
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winning at home number one walk with the wise surround yourself with the sort of people who help you seek first his
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kingdom and his righteousness number two borrow someone's game plan
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listen to advice accept discipline from people who have been through whatever you're going through
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and pay attention to the science if something feels off don't ignore it
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unpack it if we are committed to ins instilling in our lives and our
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families the sort of things that help ensure that we seek first his kingdom and his righteousness I'm confident that
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we'll start to see some wins at home but if you're not seeing winds at home
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especially if you've been tracking with us through this series and and things aren't turning around quite
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as quickly as you hoped they would hang in there don't give up blessed is
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the one who responds to wisdom I told you at the beginning of the
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message uh little kid Misha didn't participate much in rules especially at home
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I think I just didn't understand why I was supposed to or needed to and as I was putting together this
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message today I kind of started to feel like well I'm just telling them to follow
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these rules and seek first his kingdom but 11 year old niches in the back of my mind going but why like
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why would it like what's in it for me and I think the answer to that is in the second half of that Matthew 6 33 verse
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when Jesus said but seek first his kingdom and his righteousness and all these things
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will be given to you as well what are all these things
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Jesus is referring to everything we need
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everything we're concerned about he promises that God will take care of
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all these things and I thought about that I thought well
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of course he would he loves us and God demonstrated his love for us by
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taking care of our needs and our concerns and not just the pressing ones
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contained within this promise is something far deeper than just how are we going to pay the bills and get food on the table because shortly after Jesus
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said these words he went to the Cross to take care of our sin
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on the cross Jesus Paid the price for our sin and when he rose from the dead he took care of what sin had broken in
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our lives and in the world he conquered death Jesus through his death and Resurrection took care of our deepest
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needs and the deepest concerns of our life so why should we be diligent
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to do the things that ensure that we put his kingdom and his righteousness first because the king of that Kingdom loved
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us so much that he laid down his life for us
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so can we establish a few rules that help us put his kingdom and his righteousness
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first let's walk with the wise borrow someone's game plan
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let's pay attention to this signs and if you've done these things and you're like will you share it with someone
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can we make a commitment to help each other win at home
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I think we'd be blessed if we do I'd love to pray for you God thank you
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thank you for the wisdom of Proverbs but thank you far more
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for Jesus and God may we in response to what you
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what you've done for us humble ourselves and put in place the values put in place
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the rules established the boundaries and parameters of our life that help us keep
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being help us keep the first things first in God as we as we
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take steps to seek your kingdom and your righteousness to you be all the honor and Glory forever and ever amen