Parent Compass Radio

Jonathan Evans: My name is Jonathan Evans and I am the son of Dr. Tony Evans, and many people will know that name. I also have to say I’m the brother of Priscilla Shirer because people know that name as well. I come from a great believing Christian family. My dad, Dr. Tony Evans, has been preaching now for 50 years. This is his 50th year. He’s been at our church for about 43 years. He started the church, Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship. He’s from Baltimore, Maryland and he started a church with 10 people in a house in 1976, and now has about 12,000 members.

He has a radio broadcast that started in our garage with my mom putting his tapes in packages and just going to the mailbox and dropping them off, and now it’s on a thousand stations in over 130 countries. There’s a lot going on. He was the chaplain of the Dallas Cowboys during the Tom Landry days. He’s still the chaplain of the Dallas Mavericks, and that’s been since their inception as an organization. He’s kind of really paved the way in more ways than one for our family and many others. It’s hard to follow in his footsteps, but it’s a great thing to learn from.

All of us in the family—it’s my mom and dad and then Crystal is the oldest. She’s Crystal Hurst now. Then Priscilla, who many people know, Priscilla Shirer. Then I have my brother Anthony, and then it’s me. So, it’s four of us. I would say that a lot of people would know Priscilla from the movie *War Room*. She was in the movie *War Room*, plus she’s a nationally known speaker. If you’ve seen the movie *War Room* or the movie *I Can Only Imagine* and then there’s a new movie coming out that the Kendrick brothers are putting together called *Overcomer*, she’ll be in that movie as well. She’s doing really well. She never really asked to be in the movie scene, but God said, "I want you to do it." People would ask me if she has ever acted before, and I’d say she’s been acting her whole life in the house. She’s been doing really good with that.

Anthony is the singer. He has eight to ten albums now. He’s been singing all over the country. Anthony has been leading worship at our church every first Sunday, so he’s still committed there while doing it all over the country. He’s doing really well as well. Crystal is the mom of the bunch. She’s got five kids, but she’s also a book writer, she’s an author. She’s got two books that she’s written: *Kingdom Woman* and *Is He Still There?* which was written for women. She does that, she helps build our small groups at our church. She’s real structured in her mind and how she puts things together. She’s fun, too.

People ask me all my life what it was like to grow up with Dr. Tony Evans as my father and Dr. Lois Evans as my mother. For me, it was just life. I didn’t know any different. I didn’t know that there was a difference until I got older. When I got older, I realized God gave me something special. That’s when I really started to treasure the parents that I had, and the siblings that I had, and the opportunities that I was given through their hard work and what God has done in their life.

There’s a lot of great things that I was taught and blueprints that I was given that I realize a lot of people don’t have. Really, it was just up to me to decide how I was going to use those and how I was going to further that legacy and that foundation that had already been built. I have to give a lot to my parents for first of all giving their lives to Christ and then showing how that permeates through them to the children and how we live that out afterwards. Growing up was a lot of learning, a lot of understanding, and in some ways pressure. When those are your parents, you’re starting to think you can’t do this and you can’t go there because of who they are.

Then you begin to build your own relationship with God and you realize the reason why you live the way that you live is because of who He is in you. Realizing not to distance myself from my parents, but to do so spiritually so that I can have my own relationship with God. I spent most of my life riding the coattail of my parents' relationship with God, and I thought that was good enough because of how strong they were. But I realized it wasn't. It also taught me how to have my own relationship with God and how to use their blueprint with that new relationship. It’s been good.

I think off the top of my head about funny stories when it comes to my parents and my brother and sister, but most of those things would happen for us at the table. The table was wild. People think the Evans family sits down, they’re at the table, they’re listening to Tony Evans crack open the Bible and all that kind of stuff. We were throwing food, we were talking crazy, we were having a good time. My parents couldn't keep us from being silly and acting crazy. It was a wild time, but it was a fun time where we just got to spend time with them. We’re a crazy bunch and we have fun.

I ended up going to Baylor University in college where I met my wife. We met at Baylor University and, just fast forward because time flies, we ended up getting married and now we have five children. The personality of our family is very fun, very fun-loving. We’re on the go. Each child obviously is different and they present different fun things for our family and different challenges for our family.

Kelsey, the oldest, she’s the artist. She’s the one who doesn't want to be held in a box. She’s the one who doesn't want to do anything formal. She likes to just be open spontaneity; that’s her thing. Jonathan is the thinker. It goes from Kelsey who’s at 100 to Jonathan who just wants to sit still, analyze, make sure it’s okay, ponder things. Camden’s the wild man. He’s not happy unless he’s beating up his dad, running over his brother, or running into a wall or swinging from the chandelier in our kitchen. That’s Camden. Kyler can get away with anything because we call her "sweet sweet." She’s daddy’s girl. We’re still learning who Jade is.

It’s a fun family. There's a lot of activity going on. All of our kids play sports or doing art because we can’t just sit around and play video games all day. We get them involved in a lot of activities and they love to travel. I try to bring them along with me when I’m traveling so that I make sure I spend that quality time with them because I’m gone. We have a lot of fun, we do a lot of family activities. We make sure that we’re at the table each night doing activities with each other, getting to know one another. We just go. We’re just doing what we feel God is calling us to do.

I think when it comes to having children, choosing right versus wrong is very important to parents. We really just wish we could take our brains and put it in their head and just let them go with that. But the reality is that they’re going to have to come into relationship with Jesus Christ, and they do that first and foremost by understanding that He’s real through your life and through the example that they see, but also understanding that they’re going to need to build their own relationship for themselves.

I learned in my own personal life being raised by Dr. Tony and Lois Evans that they had such an outstanding relationship with God and it was great. But I realized that their relationship with God wasn't going to work for me. It was good to see, it was good for me to learn blueprints, but I had to have my own personal relationship with God in order to actually be able to choose right from wrong. In order to choose right from wrong, you basically have to deny yourself, which is what the Bible says. Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.

Really understanding that in order to deny myself and take up my cross, I better really love God for myself. I better really love Jesus Christ for myself. I better really have a relationship with Him for myself and be really in love with Him if I’m going to obey Him. That’s what John 14:15 says. If you love me, you will do what I say. We want kids to do the right thing and we want to pour into them, "This is right and this is wrong." But like all of us, they’re born with a sin nature. We all have a natural knack to the wrong thing. We know we should eat the salad, but we love McDonald's. That’s just the way that life works.

The question is, how in love with being spiritually healthy are you that’s going to take you to eating right spiritually? That right and wrong is not just a question of decision-making, it’s a question of spirituality, making a decision with your spiritual self and really helping them fall in love with God instead of falling in love with rules. Rules without relationship will always equal rebellion. If you have rules but you don’t have the relationship, you’re asking for rebellion. If you want that kid to choose right from wrong, first of all they need to have a great relationship with you, know that you love them even when they’re doing wrong. God demonstrated His love towards us that while we were yet sinners, that’s when He showed His greatest love. That’s our job, but also telling them and helping them understand the importance of having a relationship with Jesus Christ and falling in love with Him. Because if you love Him, the offshoot of that is that you’ll obey Him.

Technology is big. Obviously, when you talk about social media, when you talk about the culture that we’re in right now, it’s all about screens, television. It’s all about seeing video. Technology is big in our culture. It’s used for good things, but it also can become a hindrance to the family. It’s a big hindrance to the family that I’ve noticed. If I give my kids some screens, they’ll never look up for hours on end. They’ll never look up. Their person-to-person skills are very low due to the fact that they don’t need to have community. They don’t need to have people around or conversations. That takes away from family time.

We recognized that as our kids were growing up and getting older, and I know most parents, all parents, are going to have that same thought or problem as it relates to technology. What we’ve done in our family is we’ve decided that Monday through Friday there is no technology. We have zero screens, zero TV, zero phones. We put everything away and their job is to interact as a family. Our job is to interact with our kids as a family, so everything is shut down.

Kids get used to it. Now they’re creative. Now they play outside. There’s something called "outside" that a lot of kids have forgotten about. They’ll come in and ask for a bottle of water, and I’m like, "No, stay outside. There’s a hose outside." That’s what we used to drink out of when we were growing up. Just get the hose, drink out of that and stay out there. Have fun, enjoy one another. Learn how to deal with one another when it comes to sharing, all of these different things, these small skills that they don’t learn with technology, and we don’t want that to take away from our family time. Monday through Friday, there is no technology in the Evans household. Saturday and Sunday, we allow it for a certain amount of time.

When that time comes, they binge on it now. They’re excited about it, but that’s okay because they spent the whole week taking care of their responsibilities, loving their family, and loving God. That’s our prayer every night in the opposite order. We say love God, love your family, take care of your responsibilities, have fun. That’s our rules in our house. We want to implement that naturally. I would encourage parents for sure to shut that down. It’ll be hard, especially if you have teenage kids. It’s going to be hard for them to backtrack to that, but then they’ll start loving. They’ll appreciate that when they get older, that all of that family time they had being creative, board games, going back to the old school a little bit is really how you have family time and how you can pour into and really get to talking to your kids again. Now the talking in the household has gone way down because other people are influencing our children instead of us. We have to change that.

Words are huge when it comes to family. I learned this best from my dad and my mom, but my dad specifically because my dad was just unusually patient. The fruit of the spirit, patience, he’s got that, and he’s got it on a whole other level. My mom has it too, but we noticed that my dad was just like—he never raised his voice. For me with five kids, it’s hard for me. I’ll start raising my voice and then I start thinking I messed up on that one because I remember how my dad and mom raised us in a home where even when we made bad mistakes and even when we can see the frustration on his face, he would just talk to us.

Now that I have kids, I realize how hard was that to never raise your voice? I remember bathing one of my sons and I’m on the phone with my dad. My dad’s talking to me and I’m like, "Hold on, Dad." I’m like, "Camden, get in the tub!" He won’t get in the tub. He’s running around playing with everything, doing everything except what I’m telling him to do. I’m raising my voice just trying to get him in the tub.

I remember my dad saying, "Jonathan." I said, "Yes, I mean, yes sir." I had to calm myself down. He said, "Have you ever heard me raise my voice at you like that?" I said, "No, sir." He said, "It’s a fruit of the spirit. Patience, son. You got to have patience. The more you continue to grow with God, the more you realize how patient He is with you. You can see your relationship with your kid the same way. You got to be patient. Just talk to him, keep reiterating, just help him understand how important it is to be obedient." I’m like, "Yeah, but you’re Superman! I can’t do that."

The importance of that is because kids pick that up. There’s so many kids that’ll say, "Oh, well, I guess I am just like dad. I guess I am just like mom." You want that to be a good thing because they’ve been sponges their whole life on how you’ve raised them. Patience—they say patience is a virtue. It’s a big deal. Words—if you’re operating from frustration and if you don’t take the time to say, "You know what, let me come back to this in a second. Let me think about this," and if you react, then you’ll end up saying something that you’ll regret.

Kids remember. They remember situations where adrenaline has kicked in. Adrenaline causes remembrance; it’s a scientific thing. People remember things where they had adrenaline. If there was someone who hurt you really bad or a situation where you won really big or a big play that you made in football, you’ll never forget those moments. When you pierce your kid with bad words or telling them they’ll never be anything or out of frustration, you’ve heightened adrenaline. They’ve heard you and they’re never going to forget it. Those words will define them and the enemy will use those to define them for a lifetime. They’ll have to break the cycle.

If parents are out there and they’ve said those things to their kid, what parents don’t do well is apologize. But if you apologize, you help your kids understand real life. You help your kids understand even someone who I view as never wrong can actually show that they were wrong. They need Jesus just as much as I do. When they see the parent say, "I was wrong. That’s not what God would want me to do. That’s not what God would want me to say. I reacted out of frustration, out of my own humanity. Please forgive me. That’s not who you are. Now let me speak life into you. Let me change that," kids respect that.

My career and in what I do now is ministry. I actually started doing the thing that I was running from my whole life. I was running from anything that had anything to do with Tony Evans. If it had anything to do with a pulpit or preaching or God’s word and all of those different things, I was fine reading it by myself, but I definitely didn’t want to get up on that stage and do what he did. I was an athlete my whole life.

I played football, played football for Baylor, was in the 2005 draft class with the Dallas Cowboys. I’m asking God to let me run out of that tunnel and play football. That’s what I wanted to do is to play under the lights in the NFL. It’s been my dream since I was a kid. I remember God saying, "I think at this point, I want you to kind of transition into ministry." I was like, "No way. There’s no way I’m leaving the NFL to go preach or do ministry or anything that I grew up around. I want to try to do something new, do something for myself."

Again, thinking selfishly, God kept saying and He kept nagging me as it relates to ministry. He kept poking and prodding me to go to seminary. I was very adamant that I’m going to play in the NFL; that’s what I want to do. There came a time where I was working out to go play for the Kansas City Chiefs. I was just running, and while I was running, I heard a pop. Fell down on the ground, reached back, felt my leg, I had torn my Achilles tendon. God said, "Now, I need you to walk in the direction that I’m calling you to walk in because the direction that you’re walking, you’re being stubborn. I’m calling you."

The guys came over and were like, "Are you okay? Are you okay?" I’m laughing. I’m just laughing. They’re like, "What are you laughing at?" I said, "Because it’s the clearest that I’ve ever heard God in my life. I’ve been walking in the direction He doesn't want me to walk in, trying to play my own way because I want to run out of the tunnel. He’s telling me to go to seminary and I wouldn't do it, and now I can’t walk literally."

I put on a boot, I got my crutches, and I walked right into seminary. I started at Dallas Theological Seminary in 2011 through that story. What happened was is that someone asked my dad to come back and be the chaplain for the Cowboys. He said, "Well, I don’t have the time to do it, but my son can do it because now he’s trained." Then I got called by the Cowboys to come back and be their chaplain when I used to play for them. I came in there as their chaplain, and I remember standing in the tunnel to run out of the tunnel, and I called my dad and I said, "We finally made it to the tunnel." He said, "That’s because you listened to God."

For the last eight years, I’ve been the chaplain for the Dallas Cowboys running out of the tunnel every single week in the NFL. God was just waiting on me to listen and surrender. That’s my career now. I’m the chaplain for the Dallas Cowboys. I also work with my dad in ministry, and it came through running at first, but then God teaching me, "You walk my way and I’ll give you actually what you’re asking for, just in a different way."

Fighting the fight for our families is a big deal because my dad mentioned to me before that the saga of a nation is simply the saga of its families written large. When you’re looking at all the things that are going on with our country and seeing all the broken areas and you’re looking at it from a national standpoint, you really can just look at it from a family standpoint. 70% of African American homes don’t have fathers in the homes, 40% and rising in the Anglo community. When you essentially have a lot of men missing in action when God had called them to be the leaders in the family—fathers, raise your children when it talks about in Ephesians 6—we’re really supposed to be on the front line with being there for our kids.

It’s hard to fight a battle for your families when men are nowhere around. Starting there is men recognizing the important value that they have to be key contributors to the family. All of these kids these days are having to raise themselves. We’re seeing fatherless homes and we’re seeing a lot of kids having to parent themselves and then you’re getting what replicates itself from that in these communities.

One of the things that my dad taught us is if you want to lead your family, especially as a man, you need to at least make sure that you’re at the dinner table. I know that you’re busy, I know that you have a hard schedule, I know that you travel. But if you can sit down with your family an hour to an hour and a half every day, you can look each one of them in the eyes, you can ask them what’s going on at school, you can talk about what’s going on in their relational lives. You can pull open the Bible and read a scripture, which is why me and my dad created this book called *Kingdom Family Devotional* to help men and women sit down with their families and to talk to them about responsibility, respect from a biblical perspective.

It’s really being able to give kids what God had designed: parents. When you give them parents and when those parents are teaching them God’s design and that they’re created in the image of God, they can grow up learning and understanding what their output to the world should be with their specific gifts and skills—not for narcissism, but for the glory of God. It’s also for parents to understand that they’re not just having children to have look-alikes, they’re having children for God to have look-alikes. When we understand that we’re there for God’s image and to pour God’s image into our kids, then we know that it’s not simply about happiness, it’s about holiness.

In America, we’re chasing happiness, and because of that, you’ll get brokenness because you’re chasing a feeling. Happiness is dependent upon what’s happening. Because of that, we have people splitting from the homes, we have people that are saying, "Well, I just want to be happy and this doesn't make me happy right now, so I’m going to try to find the next right now." Hopefully, that right now lasts longer than that previous now that didn't last long, and then I’m broken again. We’re jumping around trying to find this happiness instead of realizing, wait a minute, I’m here for holiness. Holiness is first and a secondary benefit of that is happiness. Once we have that right perspective, then we can fight a battle because we’re going to stick in to win the war. I think the important thing is having the right perspective, understanding that this is a God thing that we’re participating in and that it’s not an our thing that we want God to assist us in. Give that to our children and be around, especially at that dinner table. That’s the time that we get.

Key advice that I was given that I learned, especially when it comes to fighting battles and raising your children and getting the next generation ready for what God is calling them to, is that knowing that the best way to raise your children is to work on your marriage. Children are sponges. They soak it in, they’re watching and they’re learning and gaining their expectations from what they’re seeing. Working on your marriage and having a marriage that’s biblical, that represents what God has called it to be, that learns how to have those disagreements and have those arguments to where we realize that we’re actually on the same team. Sometimes teammates will have those disagreements, but it’s only because they’re trying to go in the same direction, and kids learn that. They see that.

Really focus on your marriage, the holiness of your marriage and how your marriage really reflects the image of God. To do that, you have to bring God into it. That’s why sitting at the table is so important because they see that you are bringing God into the family. How does God see how I’m operating in my marriage and with my children, and how do my children see that I’m implementing God into every aspect of my life? Marriage was meant to be a union of three, not just of two. It’s supposed to be representing who God is. God is one God in three distinct co-equal persons: God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. They have the distinctions in who they are, but they still make up one Godhead. Our marriage is supposed to have that type of unity. A lot of times, it’s been split or fractured because we think it’s a union of two and not three, and God is nowhere to be found. For the kids to see that our parents are really bringing God into this, they’re working on their marriage and that’s the type of marriage that I want to have—that’s what it looks like, that’s how you agree, that’s how you disagree—helps for the next generation of marriages, for the next generation of children, the next generation of parents. That’s generational. That’s how you move forward.

One of the things with single parents—my oldest sister was a single parent for a while. Her first daughter was born out of wedlock in college. I remember being in my bedroom as the youngest, I’m still at home, and my dad gets that call and she’s like, "Dad, I’m pregnant." I remember how my dad responded. He said, "Okay." He said, "First of all, what we’re going to do is not back up a sin with a sin. This is my grandchild, we’re keeping this grandchild. You can get that out of your mind now. Second of all, your life is not over. God is a redeeming God. He’s going to bring this child in and we’re going to love this child, we’re going to take care of this child."

We do. Her name is—we call her Care Bear. She’s Caris, my niece. Crystal gained so much value from my dad speaking life into a situation where in her mind when she was making that call was, "This is the end of the road for me." You’re thinking all of these negative things because the enemy has a way of taking a mistake and amplifying it in your own mind. My dad spoke life into her and I’ll never forget that. I’ll never forget my dad speaking life into my sister Crystal and because of that, she just went to a whole other level. The way that she parented, the way that she raised Caris while she was at college station—she went to Texas A&M and she was doing both at the same time—and now she’s writing books and she’s a part of bringing our small groups together. Now she’s married and the guy that she married had a child out of wedlock, so they had a blended family and then they had three more children. Those children who were raised in those single homes for a while were still able to see what it looks like. The situation has been redeemed. When you talk about single parents, don’t ever give up because God hasn't given up on you. He has a plan for your life and His word speaks life even into a situation that you think is so hard, and that is really hard. But there is something coming. There’s a plan that God has for your life where God can redeem not only that situation, but generations to come based on you living for Him even though things may not have gone your way.

Suicide has become huge in our culture specifically around the world but really spiked in America where people are no longer seeing the reason for being, the reason for living. Really, as it relates to social media, suicide has gone up since social media has come about and become a big thing in our culture. Social media in and of itself is narcissistic. As you see, many people will walk around with the phone in their face and it’s really about trying to let everybody else know what I’m doing, building a brand for myself, trying to see how many followers I can get. If that’s all life is, then life becomes a dead end because it begins to turn on you. But that’s what you wanted. You wanted to create glory for yourself when really it belongs to God.

The reason why I believe suicide has gone up is because whenever you step in God’s territory, you’ll lose your mind. God is the only one who can handle that many followers. God is the only one who can handle that level of fame. God is the only one who can handle the thing that you’re trying to get. The reason why you’re trying to get it is because you’re created in the image of God, but the enemy has done a great job of turning it. He has done a great job of making it not about Him, but about you and using that image of God thing to take that desire and focus it on yourself when we’re supposed to be vessels to push it back to God because really He’s the only one who can handle it.

I think the reason why it’s gone up with social media is because social media has made an already narcissistic culture more narcissistic. When you are the purpose of your life, you run out of purpose because we are not living for what God’s purposes are in our life, which always has to do with being a blessing to someone else, seeing someone else be introduced to God, seeing someone else learn about Jesus Christ, seeing someone else flourish in their purpose and being a part of pushing them up, which pushes you up. We’re stuck with ourselves. Whenever you’re stuck with yourselves, Romans 1, that’s still a part of God’s wrath. Social media again has been used for good things. There’s good ways to be because it’s pushing to the uplifting or the spiritual grounding of other people. But it’s also a vehicle that I think that has created a lot of chaos and has heightened narcissism, which I think is one of the higher reasons for suicide today.

We have to turn that with helping people understand the real definition of a blessing. A blessing is not just the favor of God to you. That’s a dead-end definition. A blessing is the favor of God to you so that it may flow through you. When you understand how what you have is supposed to be to the benefit of God’s kingdom, which always blesses someone else, then you never get tired. That’s why it’s more blessing to give than it is to receive. That’s why the Bible says those things, because you never run out of purpose that way.

As it relates to sexual immorality, which is big everywhere around the world, it’s actually a gift that God has given that we have naturally as people that we’re not using in the right way. It’s hard. Reality is it’s hard for the single person out there that has all of these natural desires that are God-given that are great desires because God has given them to you. The goal biblically is to abstain until your marriage because that is the union that God has designed sex for.

The reality is that we have to get out of feeling like and thinking that we own ourselves. The Bible says in 1 Corinthians 6:19 that you are a temple of the Holy Spirit and that you have been bought with a price. Basically, it’s telling you that you don’t own you. I know you have your feelings, your thoughts, your perspective—whether it’s career, whether it’s sexuality, whether it’s plan, all of those different things—but it’s really handing over and submitting all of those things to God and recognizing that if I dive into my purposes that God has for me, that I can be so full of what God has for my life and the purposes that He has for my life that it’s easier for me to not focus on the feelings that I have in my life.

Our job is to be a manager and not an owner. We’re supposed to manage our careers, our families, our finances, our sexuality and we’re supposed to put all of those things under God. So, it’s really a conversation about stewardship. How am I stewarding not only my finances, my children, my career, but how am I stewarding my sexuality because God owns that too? If I step outside of the stewardship of God as owner, then I put myself at risk of what comes from me as owner. Romans 1 is kind of the harshest wrath of God where He gives you over to yourself. He lets you be you and when He lets you be you and you—because you want to be the owner so bad and you want to take full responsibility for the decisions you make based on your feelings, based on your happiness, based on your sexuality, based on your finances—then He gives you over to your ownership. A lot of times, we realize we’re not as good of an owner as He is.

Really, when it comes to sexuality, it comes to the conversation of stewardship and how am I stewarding my feelings, my sexuality, and my ability to wait on what God has called for my life. How am I stewarding that? Am I letting God be the owner or am I trying to be the owner? If I am, then I’m at risk to my ownership. I think that’s what we have to think about. We have all of these broken situations, but those broken situations don’t become because we’re allowing God to own. Those broken situations come anytime we’re trying to own and anytime we’re saying, "This is what I want for my life right here, right now," even when it comes to sexuality. A lot of the single parenting, a lot of the sexually transmitted diseases have run rampant that weren't here 30 years ago, and all of a sudden all of this stuff is showing up. It’s because God is saying, "Okay, you want to own, I’ll let you see how that works itself out." I’ve learned through my life that letting God be the owner and me being the manager in every area of life is how you have success, because He doesn't make mistakes.

Pornography is another big one. Again, when you talk about the accessibility of pornography, I’ve done school rallies where they ask me to come in and speak specifically on pornography starting in fifth and sixth grade. Starting in seventh and eighth grade, I have to sit down with these kids in auditoriums and they’re sneaking off with their iPhones—which to me they have a little bit too early—but they have their iPhones, they have Safari, they have full internet access on their iPhones and a push of a button they can look at whatever they want.

The access to pornography is huge. Obviously, it’s going to be one of the biggest industries because you’re pulling on what’s natural to a person to distort it, to make money off of it and to build an empire off of it. It becomes another addiction. Now it teaches men how to deal with women in the wrong way. It teaches women what they should expect from men in the wrong way. It helps contribute to the family disaster that we have in America now because people come into it with these expectations that were built not from God’s word but from a pornographic world that was not a part of God’s plan, bringing other people into the context of sex that God has built.

It’s become an epidemic in our culture. But really, in order for parents to try to help our kids understand that, first of all we have to be the ones that are having these conversations with our kids. Too many times, the kids are finding out through their friends or through their school or through social media. Then once they get introduced to it, they want to hide it from their parents instead of their parents helping them know that it’s there, these are the things that are out there, this is the chaos, this is what God thinks about it, this is God’s perspective on it. This is what God thinks about sex—sex is supposed to be in a marriage, here is why. Having these conversations—a lot of men especially, since I’m a man I can talk about—we run away from that conversation. We don’t want to have it, we don’t want to do it, we don’t want to be a part of it. But we’re supposed to take the lead in it and helping our kids understand what it is. Otherwise, they have access to get that information anyway, a lot of other ways. When they get it, it will not be biblical.

This is one of the main vehicles that the enemy uses to tear apart God’s design, which is sex as a whole but specifically pornography in our country. I would encourage parents to do what I’m about to have to do here in a second. My oldest is 10, but me and my wife have already started talking about marriage and husband and wife and using different situations that are outside of us to see, "Well, you see that? The reason why it’s so hard is because the way it was done." God—when God speaks, He’s not lying, He’s telling the truth. It’s up to you to obey Him and understand that He has the best for your life in mind because He’s the one who created your life and He has the design for it. We’re already starting the process and then we ramp up on the reality of what things are in the world. I think that’s important is for parents to be on the front line, and if we’re not on the front line, then we’ll always stay in the back.

Jesus overall, God—He has a whole another standard, a whole another standard of righteousness that He’s calling us to. Matthew 5, Sermon on the Mount, is perfect righteousness. It’s basically about perfect righteousness. If you don’t have the righteousness of the Pharisees, you’re still unworthy, and their whole thing was about trying to be perfect. So, He was talking about perfect righteousness.

The question is, how do you live up to that standard? Well first, it comes with accepting the standard of who God is. The only person who’s ever been able to live up to the standard of God is God Himself through the person of Jesus Christ. He was able to do it. That’s why we as Christians accept Jesus Christ into our life, because He’s the propitiation for our sins. He’s the one who satisfied God’s standard, which is a very high standard.

Not only do I want to satisfy Him spiritually, I want to satisfy Him on earth, in history, in the way that I live my life. Ultimately, it boils down with the greatest commandment: loving Him. How much you love Jesus will be displayed in how you live for Him. It will be displayed in your choices on stewardship, it’ll be displayed in your choices in your marriage, it’ll be displayed in your choices with your children, it’ll be displayed in your choices with your career. There’s a lot of things we want to do and God is calling us.

It’ll be displayed. When it comes to lust, when it comes to adultery, when it comes to sexuality, when it comes to pornography, all of those still fall under: how am I stewarding my feelings, how am I stewarding some of the natural things I have going on in me? How am I stewarding with my love for God? Do I love it more than I love God?

I’ve met the standard for heaven, but the question is, am I loving Him on earth? I tell people I don’t give them a book of rules because, like we talked about and like I’ve said before, rules without relationship you’re still going to have a problem. That’s what the Pharisees had. They had a bunch of rules, but they didn't have any relationship and they were still having a problem with Jesus. The important thing is not just to give a list of rules to your kid, but give relationship to your kid, both with you and with Jesus Christ through you so that they can build a love relationship with righteousness. When you build a love relationship with righteousness and you see the fruit and the benefit that comes with righteousness, you’re more apt to choose righteousness, but not based on rules.

The law was given just as a mirror to show you how bad you are. When I see "drive 70 on the highway," that means 75 to me, that means 80—what it does is it just conjures up in me a nature that I already have just showing me the law. It shows me how bad I am, how often I break the law. But you give me a relationship, you give me someone that I love, then I’m more apt to obey those rules without even knowing I’m doing it.

There was a woman one day who was in a broken relationship and she wasn't married, but she was in a relationship and this man had all these rules and she hated it. She ended up ending the relationship. He was always saying, "Do this, do that, do this, do that," and it was a relationship built on rules and she hated the relationship because of that. Then she ended up getting married to another man, and one day she was looking through some things in her basement and she found a list of rules that was given to her by her previous relationship that she hated. She laughed because now she realized that she was doing all of those things in this new relationship and she didn't even know it because this new relationship was built on love, not just based on rules.

What we do as parents a lot of times, it’s easy for us to throw in a bunch of rules and a list. But without a solid foundation on relationship and a solid, pure love for Christ that’s not built on rules, you’ll realize that they will want to buck the system just because there’s a system. But if they have a relationship of love, then they’ll follow the system and not even know they’re doing it.

With what I’ve learned just as a parent, speaking life—for parents, it starts with you. It starts with you as an individual and then it moves to the family. Psalm 128 says blessed is everyone who fears the Lord and who walks in His ways. You’re blessed when you fear God. That doesn't mean you’re scared of Him, but it does mean you take God seriously. When you start taking God seriously—how would I know that I take God seriously? Simple: you walk in His ways. That permeates itself down to your family. It starts with these individuals because our broken families come from broken relationships from broken people who refuse to take God more seriously than they take themselves, their careers, their finances, or their feelings of happiness.

If we can get parents to start there—how serious do I take God and does that permeate itself through how I live my life? If not, then we need to change that by being connected to community. Iron sharpens iron, so one man or woman sharpens another. Being connected to community so that I can continue to grow in me taking God seriously because that filters itself through to the family. Psalm 128 goes on to talk about the family, then it talks about the church, then it talks about the wellbeing of the city and the whole nation. It goes through this funnel, if you will, of getting to the nation. But you can’t talk about the nation until you talk about the city, can’t talk about the city until you talk about the church, can’t talk about the church until you talk about the family, and you can’t talk about the family until you talk about you. To have a good family, you got to have a good you, and to have a good you, it starts with a good God that you give yourself to, not just some areas of life, but all areas of life and let that work itself out.

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