Victorious Family

Chris Tomlin wrote a song years ago that asked an important question…Is He Worthy?

Is He worthy of all the blessing and honor and glory?

Is He worthy of this from you and me?

Who is able to do immeasurably more than any other? Who is able to heal your land and mine? Who is able to heal your family and mine? Who is able to redeem you from the wrath and deepest shadows that we face in this lifetime?

Is He worthy? Is the God of this universe worthy? Is He who He say He is?

Did He conquer the grave through His Son, Christ Jesus? Is He the Creator? Is He the one who is Sovereign? Does He reign over all?

What about your family? Is He worthy to be worshipped by you and your children? Are His promises worthy of being investigated and found to be either true, lies, or not worthy?

What if His claims were true? Are True? What then?

“To make Christ known to your kids.” What if that truly became your “one thing?” What kind of difference would it make? Not just someday, but every day.

Here’s the way I sort of I look at it. I don’t think any of us would disagree with the notion that if 100 percent is full capacity on what our personal calendars and career obligations can accommodate, life is always trying to cram about 120 percent, 130 percent, 140 percent—a lot more than 100 percent anyway—into a space that can only hold so much, no matter how well we multitask or how little sleep we get. So, while you and I tend to consider ourselves the exception—that somehow the same rules of capacity don’t apply to us, with our clever and capable ways of managing things—guess what? They do. So every day, like clockwork, between our varied assortment of have-to-do’s and want-to-do’s, we each top out by necessity at our maximum 100 percent. And whatever else we intended to include or to swap out for something else, all those extra things get stuck off to the side somewhere, undone, untouched, even if we’ve displaced them with lesser things. That’s just the way it is.

And that’s why knowing our “one thing” is so important. Because when we’re clear about what we absolutely do not want to leave this earth without doing, based on what God has shown us through His Word and His Spirit, we’re going to make dead sure not many days pass us by when that “one thing” doesn’t factor somehow, to some degree, into our 100 percent. We’ll see to that.

But not without a plan, we won’t.

No matter how much we say we want it.

Dr. Gail Matthews, a psychology professor at Dominican University in San Rafael, California, conducted new research to test for some of the same variables that allegedly went into the classic “Harvard Goals Study” and “Yale Goals Study” of the 1950s—or whatever it was called—either of which has now been debunked as urban legend. And though these current findings aren’t quite as dramatic as those bogus numbers from yesteryear appeared to indicate, the facts still remain impressive enough to create some solid conclusions. They confirm that people who don’t just think about their goals but who (1) write them down, (2) turn them into action points, and then (3) hold themselves regularly accountable for their results are nearly twice as likely to achieve them, by a difference of 76 percent to 43 percent.[1]

That’s strong. That’ll challenge your pre-sets. Clear, written, actionable plans with built-in accountability work. And when you consider that the stakes of the plan in our case are whether or not our children will be given deliberate opportunities to own and stretch their Christian faith and to experience the real activity of God in their hearts—right here in our homes where they can personally see it and feel it—I don’t think we’ve got much of a choice to make. The difference between being halfway successful and almost guaranteed successful is, for us, the difference between lifelong regret and generations-long legacy. It’s the difference between hoping our kids received enough spiritual lessons in children’s church to navigate a grownup world, as opposed to knowing we’ve poured Scripture and truth into their hearts at up-close, personal range which, as God says in His Word, “will not return to me empty” (Isa. 55:11).

So, it’s worth whatever changes we need to implement in order to make this happen. And it’s worthy of the same (or greater) level of planning that we’d give to anything where the success of the matter was significantly important to us.

Is He worthy?

Be Intentional and Get Started Today. Order Your Victorious Family HomeKit Today – www.victoriousfamily.org/homekit

Written By Terence Chatmon

Terence Chatmon is CEO of Victorious Family, a family discipleship ministry spanning more than 100 countries that equips and empowers family champions (parents) to be intentional in bringing their children up in the training and instruction of the Christian faith. This piece is based on his new book “Do Your Children Believe? Becoming Intentional about your Family’s Faith and Spiritual Legacy.”

[1] http://www.dominican.edu/dominicannews/dominican-research-cited-in-forbes-article