For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption [into God’s family].  And by him we cry, “Abba, Father,” the Spirit himself testifying with our spirit that we are God’s children (Romans 8:14-16).

Welcome to a new week, a new month, and a new sermon series!

Family: Fascinating!  Frustrating!  Wonderful!  Weird!  We so desire our families to be beautiful; so often, they are messy.  How do we find the beauty in the messiness?  How do we manage the messiness while not giving up on the beauty?  That’s what we’ll be exploring in Your Beautiful, Messy Family.

God is, as we say these days, “into” family. God identifies himself as a Father; God formed humans so that they could form families, so that the earth could be stewarded into fruitfulness.  God chose Abram because he wanted to form a family through which all the families on earth would be blessed.  He sent Jesus his Son (more family language!) so that in him, we who trust him might become children of God.

When it comes to families, Christians have a kind of “dual citizenship”: we have been adopted into God’s family, and we continue to be members of our earthly families.  We are children of God and children of our mom and dad.  We may also be parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, immersed in a relational network that is long and wide and deep, and which can get pretty complicated.  Pretty messy.  So messy, that we may feel the Beauty Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

This “dual membership” in both God’s family and our natural family involves some unlearning and some learning.  We should be grateful for all the good that has come to us through our natural families, even if there was (or is) a ton of mess going on.  After all, none of us got here on our own!  And we may have learned some things growing up that we now can see aren’t in harmony with the family ways and rules of God’s household.  Some things to unlearn.

And, since God’s ways are not our ways, there’s lots to learn, and to keep learning, even if we’ve been believers for a while.  What we learned in our natural families comes pretty naturally to us; they are our “default settings,” especially if we are stressed, pressured or in conflict.  The ways of God’s family are by and in the Holy Spirit – they don’t come “naturally” and we won’t naturally “default” to them.

Messy as your family may have been or may be still – and as messed up as we might be because of it – God is able and willing to bring his beauty into the mess.  The key to unlearning what needs to be unlearned, and to learn what needs to be learned lies in the most-oft repeated command in Scripture: “Be not afraid!”

What might be one messy thing from your natural family you need to unlearn?  And one beautiful thing about living in God’s family you’d like to learn?  Be not afraid!