“For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.” – Ephesians 5:23
The key to understanding family is covenant. Outside of Scripture, people don’t understand covenant. That’s why marriage and family are failing and not thriving, because we don’t think biblically or covenantally. It’s mentioned hundreds of times in the Bible with words including covenant love, lovingkindness, steadfast love, loyal love, devotion, commitment, loyalty, patience, and reliability. My favorite is The Jesus Storybook Bible, the one we’d read to our kids when they were really little, where it says a covenant relationship with God is a “never stopping, never giving up, unbreaking, always and forever love.”
Salvation, our relationship with God, is a covenant. It’s a special, unique, designated relationship. The key to every covenant in the Bible is a covenant head who is responsible to see that the terms of the covenant are kept and the people in the covenant are cared for. So, in our new covenant salvation with God, Jesus Christ is our head because of His death, burial, and Resurrection.
If you’re a Christian, you have a covenant relationship with God. If you’re married, you’re supposed to have a covenant relationship with your wife. You can read in Malachi 2 that He refers to marriage as a covenant in which you, the husband, are responsible for loving your wife and together raising godly offspring. True or false, if you don’t love your wife, does it affect your kids? We often think of marriage and parenting as two separate things, but they’re actually two sides of the same coin. The best thing you can do for your kids is to have a loving relationship with God and a loving relationship with their mother. If you don’t love their mother, you’re going to do damage to your legacy. It’ll be less likely that you will have godly offspring.
The key is for you, as the man and family head, to follow God and help your wife and kids do the same. One study reports, “Did you know that if a child is the first person in a household to become a Christian, there is a 3.5 percent probability everyone else in the household will follow? If the mother is the first to become a Christian, there is a 17 percent probability everyone else in the household will follow. But if the father is first, there is a 93 percent probability everyone else in the household will follow.” (1)
In a covenant family, who is the head? The husband and father (Ephesians 5:23). What that means is the child is not the head. Have you ever seen a family where the child is actually in the driver’s seat? The family makes decisions based on the child because the child is the strongest personality, is selfish, and makes the parents feel guilty. The parents have handed headship over to the child, but the child should not be head of the covenant. Other guys defer headship of the household to their wives because she’s the stronger personality. You won’t get godly offspring, and you won’t have a happy marriage because no one at your house will respect you. You won’t look forward to going home because you’ll feel like it’s your second shift of work and you have another boss and performance review.
Tomorrow we will end this series with a challenge.
Are you a good head or a bad head when it comes to loving and leading your family?
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