Home - Part B

We're not dealing with a house built on vanity, but a home built on value. Relationship. If you boil life down to its irreducible minimum, you have at that base layer one thing only, and that is relationship. Relationships.

Good ones, bad ones. That's what you have. That's what life is. That's how God created us to have connectivity, communication, relationship. God never created anybody to be independent. He created us all to be interdependent. There's a big difference between managing your house and building up your home.

One is far more important for your family. Today on Connect with Skip High Tech, Skip shares the steps you can take to build up your home with the love of Christ. But first, we want to tell you about a great resource that will help you pursue God's truth and apply it to your daily life. It's so obvious.

Chimpanzee head put on human body. But now, there are entire websites dedicated to helping us figure out if a story, speech, or statistic is true or not. Here's Skip Heitzig with an important question. Is there such a thing as absolute truth? I want you to just think about that question. We want to help you get started in answering that question with two brand new booklets by Pastor Skip, Why Truth Matters and God in Suicide. You see, the Bible makes truth claims. And some of those claims are, well, pretty absolute.

But how can you know it's really true? These resources will help you better understand the nature of truth so you can pursue God's truth in your life. And they're our way to thank you for your gift of $35 or more today to help expand this Bible teaching outreach.

Get your copies when you give online securely at connectwithskip.com slash offer or call 800-922-1888. Okay, we're in Psalm 127 as Skip Heitzig starts today's study. Look at verse two.

It's vain for you to get up early and to sit up late and eat the bread of sorrows. When you see that word here, it should ring a bell for you because it's a very specific Solomonic word. I don't know if that's an adjective or not. Solomonic word. It's peculiar to Solomon. He wrote a book called Ecclesiastes in which he used that word a lot, right? 22 times he uses the word vanity. Two times he uses the word vain. Two more times in that book he uses the superlative phrase vanity of vanity, all is vanity. He wrote that little book Ecclesiastes when he was at a very dark period of his own life. Everything had lost its luster. He seemed to be going through lots of activity, lots of motions and no accomplishments. The word vain means empty, fruitless, vapid, whatever word you want to assign to it. All of that has the idea of just nothingness. Nothingness.

Let me ask you something. Do you ever slow down long enough or stop long enough to evaluate yourself? Do you slow down enough to evaluate the activities that you are doing and simply ask yourself, are these activities significant? Are they significant? Are these vain activities or valuable activities?

Do you ever feel like you're in a rat race and the rats are winning the race? I have a lot of hobbies. There's a lot of interests that I have and because of that I know my tendency to get distracted and off course. And I have to evaluate myself regularly because my distraction levels are much higher.

There are some people who just love to build and organize and work and accomplish but just slow down long enough to ask, why? Let me give you three questions to ask yourself, three little questions that help in self-evaluation to see if something's of value or if something's vain. Question number one, how has God most gifted me to meet the needs of others? How has God uniquely gifted me to meet the needs of others?

Now I'm turning my focus on others by that question. Once I have the answer to that question, how I'm uniquely gifted to meet the needs of others, ask yourself this question. How am I exercising and honing those gifts according to God's plan for my life? And then the third question is this, am I trying to build something God doesn't want me to have? Those are good questions for self-evaluation so that your labor and your watching is not, in His words, for nothing vain. So reject empty activities, number one.

Here's the second decision, avoid unnecessary anxieties. Would you look more carefully at verse two? It is vain, empty, worthless, profitless. It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows for so He gives His beloved sleep. What that little verse describes in poetic fashion is the artificial lengthening of the day by adding more hours to your workload, and then, on top of that, adding worry to the hours that you're lengthening your day with. That's the idea of eating the bread of sorrows, it's anxiety, it's worry.

The Living Bible translates it, it's senseless for you to work so hard from early morning to late at night, fearing you will starve to death. Some of you have discovered that anxiety is a tireless tyrant. Back in 1851, can you remember that far back? Good, some of you are laughing, that was a joke, for those of you who weren't. Back in 1851, in London, England, in Hyde Park, there was an exhibition called the Crystal Palace Exhibition. And it was basically people gathering together, showing off their inventions. And in 1851, steam was all the rage, not iPhones.

Steam, because that was what powered things. And so they had on display there steam plows, steam locomotives, steam looms, steam organs, and even a steam cannon that shot real cannonballs, all based on steam. But what got everybody's excitement up was one machine, one machine that had 7,000 moving parts. When you switched this machine on with steam power, all sorts of things began to happen. Police began to pull, whistles began to whine, bells began to ring, gears began to turn 7,000 parts. The ironic thing is that machine did absolutely nothing. It made noise, and it turned around and around inside of itself.

And everybody oohed and ahhed because, listen to that, look at that. But if you were to ask them, what does it actually do, the answer would be, it does nothing. Well, worry is like that. You expend so much mental energy that you accomplish nothing.

Solomon wants to point out that there's a few things about personal anxiety. First, it is unproductive, just like that machine. It is unproductive. Notice what he says, it is vain.

It is vain, it is empty for you to rise up early and to sit up late. I found a little study from the University of Wisconsin about worry, about anxiety. It did a study, and it looked at what people worry about in life.

And here were their findings. They found that 40% of the things that most people worry about never will happen. They never actually happen. So that's pretty vain, right? 40% of all that activity are about things that will never happen. 30% of the things most people worry about are things regarding the past that you can't change anyway. That's pretty vain and empty to worry about that, right?

So now you're up to 70%. 12% were worries over the criticisms of others leveled at us. Most of it is untrue, but we worry about it. 10% of the things we worry about is about personal health issues, which last time I checked, doesn't improve when you worry, but it actually gets worse. They discovered only 8%.

About 8% of all the things people worry about are things that will actually occur and are legitimate concerns. So you get his drift. It is vain, it is unproductive. Second thing Solomon wants you to know, it's unhealthy. Because he says, to eat the bread of sorrows.

That's a pretty poor diet, isn't it? The bread of sorrows. What are you eating for breakfast? A little bread of sorrows here. Toasted, a little butter and jam. Want some?

No, thank you. It's an unhealthy diet to eat the bread of sorrows. Medical science for years, over and over again, proves the point that anxiety, worry, is bad for your health. I looked up on WebMD the other day, and they had this little statement, worry will affect the body. When worry becomes excessive, it can cause you to become physically ill.

Here are some examples. A clinic in Great Britain examined 500 patients, and they made the statement that one third of the visual problems exhibited by those in this study were due directly to worry and stress. Another study from Northwestern University said that worry restricts the flow of saliva in the mouth. That's important because saliva neutralizes the acid in the mouth. So when you restrict the flow of saliva in the mouth, tooth decay increases. Another study of 5,000 students from 21 different universities yielded this, worriers get lower grades.

So I suppose if you want to be a flunky with poor vision and no teeth, be a worrier. It's unhealthy. It's unproductive.

It's unhealthy. And here's a third, it's unbecoming of a child of God. It's unbecoming of a child of God. That's seen in this little phrase, for so he, God, gives his beloved sleep.

I don't want you to walk away misunderstanding this. I'm not saying that if you have insomnia it's because you don't have enough faith or you're not really a mature Christian. There's lots of reasons for that. There's lots of physiological reasons. But the point that he is making is this person who adds to the workload worry on top of that is simply showing a lack of trust in the wisdom and the provision of the God he or she says he trusts in.

It's unbecoming of a child of God. So the first two decisions, reject empty activity. Second, avoid unnecessary anxiety. And here's the third, cultivate relational priorities.

Cultivate relational priorities. Verse three, behold children are a heritage from the Lord. The fruit of the womb is a reward. You'll notice that there's a turn in this psalm. We're not talking about building anything anymore.

We're not talking about guarding anything anymore. We're off of building a house. And now we're talking about shaping a home and the relationships within it. There's three words I want to draw your attention to in the psalm. First is the word Lord. And if you saw, it's mentioned three times, that word. He is mentioned three times with that title, Lord. He's also implied another three times.

So a total of six times, this psalm either directly or indirectly speaks about the Lord and the relationship with the Lord. Then notice the word womb in verse three. Womb can only refer to one person in a family and who's that? The wife, the mother, right? The fruit of the womb, not the fruit of the loom. The fruit of the womb is the child that comes from the woman. And then children is a word mentioned two times.

So here we're not dealing with a house built on vanity but a home built on value. Relationship. If you boil life down to its irreducible minimum, you have at that base layer one thing only and that is relationship. Relationships.

Good ones, bad ones. That's what you have. That's what life is. That's how God created us to have connectivity, communication, relationship. God never created anybody to be independent. He created us all to be interdependent. As soon as God created Adam, first time God ever said something was not good is after he made man. And he said, it is not good that man should be what? Alone. It's not good.

I'm going to make a helper that is comparable to him. So he raised up a wife. And now there's this couple relating to each other. But then we read that God came to them in the cool of the day while they were in the garden. God was walking in the cool of the day. That section seems to imply that this was a regular activity that God would walk with his creation day by day.

That's what he wanted. Fellowship, relationship. So the idea from that and from this psalm is that our spiritual commitment should affect our relational activities. Our relationship with God vertically, let's look at it in terms of a plane, our vertical relationship with God should affect our horizontal relationships in all areas.

Hudson Taylor, the great missionary said, If your father and mother, sister and brother, if the very cat and dog in your house are not happier for you being a Christian, then it's a question whether you really are. Cultivate relational priorities. We struggle in this area, all of us do. Every human being does because this is where we spend our life.

Relating well or not very well with other people. Years ago I wrote a book on relationships and the reason I did was because it was based upon a poll that I took in this fellowship. I asked people in this church to write a little note to me about what they wanted the next series to be on. What are issues you are dealing with that you want answers to from the Bible?

Now I'm thinking most of them are going to be eschatological questions about the millennium or the second coming. 90% of them were better, maybe 95% dealt with relationships. How do I get along with my husband, my wife, raise my children, settle a dispute with a friend or a co-worker? It was all dealing in this area with relationships.

These are some tender issues. Some of the loneliest people I've ever met live under the same roof together. But they don't know how to relate to each other. Godly relationships is what turns a house into a home. Professor Nick Stinnant, maybe you've heard of him from the University of Nebraska some years back, did a study of families from five or six different countries including America but outside our borders down into South America and all over the globe. He studied families and this is what he said, his conclusion.

Altogether we studied 3,000 families. We collected a lot of information but when we analyzed it all we found six main qualities were in strong families. He said strong families, number one, are committed to the family. Number two, strong families spend time together. Number three, strong families have good family communication. Number four, strong families express appreciation to each other about each other. Number five, they have a spiritual commitment. And finally number six, they are able to solve problems in a crisis.

Want to turn a house into a home? Get better at relationship. If you say, well how do I do that, then start with some simple ideas. Listen more. Ask better questions when settling a dispute. Encourage people more frequently. How about this is so easy, smile more. You know this is a whole lot better than this.

Just a whole lot better, just goes a long way. Pray together, pray together, read scripture together. Cultivate relational priority.

Here's the fourth and final value or final decision to make and we'll close with this. Shape future destinies, shape future destinies. Verse four, look at this. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one's youth.

You can picture that, can you not? A warrior grabbing from behind in the quiver, the pouch, an arrow out to put in the bow to launch it. And he's going to aim. And he really can't tell you where it's going to end up precisely, but he wants to make sure the launch is nicely shaped.

It's just at the right angle with just the right pull. It's all about the launch of that arrow. So it is with children. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them. They shall not be ashamed but shall speak with their enemies in the gate. Children are a heritage from the Lord. That's the future generation.

One translation puts it this way. Children are God's best gift. Now every parent I've ever met will question this at least two times in the child's development. The first is the baby stage, the first few months. It's their first child. They bring the baby home and after a few months they're thinking, my goodness, this is a lot of work and noise and responsibility. It weighs heavily during those first few months. One creative individual described a baby as a digestive apparatus with a loud noise at one end and no responsibility at the other end.

Isn't that creative? The second place that they will challenge the children or a heritage from the Lord is when that child becomes a teenager and now the will is becoming fully developed and that child, now teenager, almost adult, looks at the parent and thinks, you're not all that. You're not so much as you think. You don't have the same esteem that you once had when I was younger and they're trying to relate to you on a different level and we struggle with that sometimes as parents. I thought teenage years were fabulous, by the way, but parents, many of them will disagree with me. Mark Twain, if you heard his advice, he said everything goes fine until the child turns 13 and that's the time you want to stick him in a barrel and hammer down the lid nice and tight and feed him through the knothole. And then he said, when the child turns 16, close up the knothole.

Better advice? Children are a heritage from the Lord. It's his best gift. Why?

Picture the warrior. They are on loan from God to shape their destiny and launch them correctly. That's the home. Home is where life makes up its mind. Home is where our convictions are hammered out.

The greatest influence for good or bad happens in the home. Sixteen percent of a child's time is spent at school. One percent at best is spent at Sunday school.

Eighty-three percent of the child's time is spent at home. That's why as soon as Samuel was born, his mom, Hannah, in her prayer of dedication said, I have lent this child to the Lord for as long as he lives. Lord, you've given me this child. I'm giving him back to you.

I'm loaning him to you. I want to shape this destiny by praying for this child right off the bat. So if you're going to spend energy in life, and we all do, make sure it's about people that you're building up, not just projects that you're building up. Because your kids are the only earthly possession you can take with you to heaven.

So let me sum it up by saying these three things, these three takeaway points. If you are trying to build your life apart from God, that is, what does it say? Vanity. It's vain. That's vanity.

If you're adding worry on top of all of that energy, that's insanity. But if you are building upwards to God and outwards to people and building up those relationships, now you have a valuable commodity. That's value. That's not vain.

Which will it be? A life of vanity? A house, activities, organizations, structures, teams, a lot of energy, a lot of vanity, or people? That's value. That's value. That's community, and that's valuable.

That concludes Skip Heisig's message from the series playlist. Now, we want to tell you about where you can learn about God and His Word in a flexible academic environment. Are you looking to pursue biblical studies beyond church and personal Bible study? Take your learning and your life's purpose to the next level with Calvary College. Registration for the 2021 spring term is open now, and the curriculum features both online classes and on-site classes at Calvary Church Albuquerque. Classes include biblical studies like Spiritual Foundations and the History and Authenticity of the Bible, plus classes and key books of the Bible like Daniel, Romans, and Revelation, with video content from world-renowned biblical scholar Skip Heisig. Calvary College partners with Veritas International University and Calvary Chapel University so you can earn an accredited undergraduate or graduate degree or simply increase your knowledge in biblical studies.

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800-922-1888. Thank you. Tune in again tomorrow as Skip Heisig explores the power of words and how you can use yours to give life and encouragement to others. Make a connection, make a connection at the foot of the cross and cast all burdens on His word. Make a connection, connection. Connect with Skip Heisig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.