Family: Our Views and Values

We want our kids to know their grandparents in a really compelling way, in a really intimate way. We want the grandparents to be on the seat of wisdom for our kids. We want them to be constantly around, constantly at the head of the table, constantly sharing wisdom, constantly being asked stories. I'm Ann Wilson.

And I'm Dave Wilson. And you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. So when you think about the family I grew up in, what do you think? What's the first word that comes to your mind? Dysfunction. Is that bad? Does that hurt your feelings?

Two alcoholic parents, dad leaves when I'm seven, abuse, you name it. What do you think of your family? What do you think? Great people, fun. That's what I think of.

Yeah, and I always thought perfect. Oh, I didn't because I lived there. No, I mean your family in our little town of Finley, Ohio.

Any listeners from Finley? Did you guys do the families? Oh yeah, her dad was my baseball coach. Her brother was, I was a quarterback. He was my center. And my other brother was his coach too.

Yeah, that's right. So I knew the Barons really well and they were known in our town like sort of the perfect family. But then I got in that family. I'm like every family's sort of messed up, including even the one we've been leading. Well, and we didn't have any faith in our family growing up. And our family isn't the only family that needs help. Every family.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's why we exist at Family Life Today is to bring help and hope to your family. And I tell you what, as we come to year end, we need your help to help our family help your family. You know, with joining us as a prayer partner, but especially even now as a financial partner, as you make a donation to Family Life as part of your year end giving, it will impact not only your family, but other families that you love and care about. And Dave, I think the thing I love about this too, because like as a woman, I'm a shopper.

And when you. Yes, she is. And if you're able to help us with that year end donation, we would love to send you a thank you gift. Not only one, but two. And one of them is this cool new devotional. I wish you could see the book because it's beautiful.

It's green. Like a man would love it. A woman would love it by Dane Ortlund. And it's titled In the Lord I Take Refuge. And it's a daily devotional that goes through the Psalms. But along with it, you get the playing cards, which are conversation starters to play cards and have conversation. Yeah, it's actually a deck of cards and it has questions on it. This is super fun because it will open up conversations around the table. I can see how excited you're getting.

It's crazy. So we're no longer going to play cards. We're just going to have more marriage talks. Anyway, those are gifts that we're going to send to you as you give a gift to Family Life. And you can do that right now if you'd like a family life today dot com.

Or you can call us at 1-800-FL-TODAY. Man, oh man, we would value your partnership with us to take this ministry into more homes like yours. And we're grateful for you considering us prayerfully and financially to join us. So speaking of family, we've got Jefferson Beckke with us today.

Welcome to Family Life, Jefferson. Excited to be back with you guys. We were just talking about how, yeah, being with you guys last year was a blast.

So it's fun to be here. Yeah, last year was on a cruise ship. Yeah, weeks before COVID. Yeah, you know what? You know, you think about that. If we would have taken that cruise a week or two later, we might still be in that boat.

Because there were boats stuck out in the water for a month at a time. So we got home just in time. But you've thought a lot about family. And I've just read your book, Take Back Your Family, the subtitle from The Tyrants of Burnout, Busyness, Individualism, and the Nuclear Idea. Oh, it's a fun subtitle.

Right there, you have us all locked in like, yes, that is my life. Yeah, and then another way someone said the subtitle the other day, they're like, not that it's bait and switch, but it's a little bit of like, oh, yeah, I'm tracking, oh, yeah, I'm tracking, oh, yeah, I'm tracking nuclear ideal, huh? You know, like everyone kind of pauses on that one. But that's the fun part of the book is that I dive into that.

But yeah, I'm really excited for it. And I do remember when we were on the cruise, you were talking about a book about Sabbath and rest. And I don't know if you remember, I made the comment like, you're the fastest talking guy in the world.

How can I rest? Because you bring such energy, which I mean, we love. And this is me in a rested state. So you should see me if I'm un-arrested, you know what I mean? Like if I don't savage, you should see how fast I talk. Well, let's play a little game.

Here's what I do. I'm going to read you a quote about family. Tell me if you think you know who it is. This first one from a famous actor. Okay.

Who's been around for several decades. So I probably maybe won't know him then? Oh, you'll know him. Okay. You'll know him. I won't even give you any more hints.

But he said, family is not an important thing. It's everything. Oh, famous actor. I'll give you initials. MJF. Oh, Michael J.

Fox. Yeah, of course. Nice. I love him because I'm a Back to the Future guy. I was going to say, guarantee Back to the Future one, two, three. Okay, he gets a big prize for that one. Yeah, yeah. So Michael J.

Fox, but also Back to the Future. Like I'm obsessed. This is a... Got the memorabilia, got the posters. Got it all?

Got the Lego, got the little figurines. Yeah, that's actually... Did you get the car? Did you get the DeLorean? No, right. I want to get a DeLorean.

If I sell a few more books, we're getting a DeLorean. Did you know he felt that about his family? No, no. It's interesting, huh?

No, I had no confidence. Yeah, and he's still married. Yeah. That's cool. He's a guy that's sustained, you know, it's not...

In hardship and all that stuff, yeah. Yeah. I mean, crazy. Okay, here's another one. She's famous. Okay. She's no longer alive. She's across the pond. Okay.

Across the pond. She already knows. He may not know. No, that doesn't... She said... All you did is just separate like the world in half. That doesn't give me too many... That didn't eliminate it too much. Well, that's true. Family is the most important thing in the world. Oh, Princess Diana. Yeah. There you go.

Isn't that interesting, though? Yeah. That was a crazy one, too. The one...

These people are saying this when their family's so interconnected to their story. Hey, here's the last one. There's a bunch here, but here's the last one. Famous coach. Okay.

All right. And he said the most important thing in the world is family and love. John Walton. You mean Wooden. Sorry, John Wooden. I was like, yeah, Bill Walton and John Wooden.

I put them together. You're right. John Wooden. Am I right? You're right. I reference him in the book.

That's why. I love him. He's like one of the best coaches. Hey. Yeah. That's pretty remarkable. I love him.

These people are older. A lot older than you, and you knew. Yeah. But so the John Wooden one is a classic one, though, because, yeah, he's such a... Because as you know in the book, I just go into like sports analogies, team analogies, and he's just such a brilliant coach.

Are you going to share your story? He's one of the best. Well, you know him? Oh, no.

Well, you want to hear something crazy. Yeah. You're going to bring this up.

Dave holds this against me, and you're going to think you are the worst wife ever. He had to miss some game or some ticket for someone? Yeah. Somebody who had a little bit of money, and he calls me up one day and says, hey, I'm sending the jet over. He lives three hours away. We're jumping on the jet, just you, me, and one other guy to go see John Wooden in LA. Oh. We got a private audience with John Wooden, and I'm like, when? He goes tomorrow.

Private audience and a private jet. I'm in. Yeah, yeah. A thousand percent. Yes.

John Wooden, 10 NCAA championships. Yes. There's no way better. You got to be kidding me. And what does my wife say?

Uh-huh. I say, you can't miss this son. We are gone all the time for his birthday. He's going to be 16.

Like, you can't miss it. We've missed all of his birthdays. I'm like, this is son number three.

Who cares? It's his 16th birthday. He's never going to remember. You can't miss his birthday. Oh, my goodness.

He already holds the other ones against him. I do not go. Yes, yes.

I do not go. I'm there for Cody's birthday. He doesn't remember to this day.

Yes. And John Wooden dies a week later. I would have said, Cody, bring the birthday party on the plane. Exactly. There he is. Mom, how could you let Dad miss that for my sake? Like, I did it for you. That's incredible. All right, enough about our family dysfunction.

Those are good, though. So Jefferson, I mean, a lot of people know you because we stumbled across you. I don't know how old you were when Jesus over religion came out. Yeah, like 10 years ago.

I was like 22 or something. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, first we saw the video online, and then you wrote the book, and you're a New York Times best-selling author. You've written several different things.

But, oh, and we should say this. Married? Yep. How many years? Well, married to us in nine years. Three kids. Kinsley, who's in the room behind me, seven. Middle kid, Cannon, who's five. Lucy, who's our youngest, age two. And we've got a dog named Aslan, too, because we're Narnia fans. Oh, that's awesome.

Yep. And we live in Hawaii. Live on Maui.

Been there about seven years, but from Tacoma, Seattle. Wow, that's cool. Really cool. Well, talk about take back your family, because I've read it, we've read it, and are really excited about it. But it's more than just take back. There's a passion. Yeah, 100 percent. It's so scary about this whole idea of family.

Talk about that. Yeah, so I talk about that in the first chapter, where essentially, you know, our family's kind of story got captured by another family's story. You know what I mean?

About ten years ago, nine years ago now, me and Alyssa, or so it would have been eight years ago, because we were just married, we were in Jerusalem, and we were visiting some friends of ours. They're a family from Cincinnati, but they were splitting time for business reasons in Jerusalem and Cincinnati because of the business he ran. And they were just starting to unfold themselves, or they had been the last ten years up until that moment, and folding themselves into a lot of these traditions that, you know, would be traditionally Jewish. But, you know, through some conversations and the relationships that they've had, essentially, we're convinced that, yeah, hey, like, we're Christian, we're evangelical, we love the Lord, but he was a Jewish guy, let's just pay attention to some of these things that are going on. You know what I mean? And kind of, he always calls himself the wild olive shoot branch, you know what I mean? Which is what Roman says, like, you know, we're the wild cousin, where it's like, you don't have to adopt at all, it's not a law, but we get to kind of be crazy and grab some and leave some.

You know what I mean? Yeah. And because of that, their family was just radically different, just in how they loved each other, how they served each other.

You have teenagers that are just, you know what I mean, like, for the Lord, honoring and respecting them, staying in on Friday nights because they want to be with the family. And so I talk about this idea of Sabbath in the first chapter of this, you know, being at a traditional Shabbat dinner with this family, three generations, storytelling, and I was just kind of, there was a shuck of, like, this is weird, first of all. Yeah.

You haven't seen that here. No, it felt weird. Yeah, it wasn't really that magical yet. It was more like, this is weird. Then it was like, wow, this is also deeply compelling.

Like, something here feels right, feels kind of interesting. And so through that chain of events kind of started pulling back the curtain on, like, just asking him why. And I remember saying, hey, like, why do you do family so different and weird?

And he just was like, he pushed back and he's like, we don't do family different and weird. He's like, the Western American culture does family different and weird. You get before 1850 outside of the West and almost every family across all time has been doing a lot of these things. They're all multigenerational. They all kind of center economic activity in the home or at least in the home pushing then out of the home. Like, if you were to go into the DeLorean, back to the future reference, go back 200 years and you were to just ask someone what, like, give me your picture of an ideal family or just you say the word family, like, what comes up in your mind?

Most people would immediately back then probably think of 23 people, 25 people. You got three generations, you got next door, you got the aunt and the uncle, you probably have four or five employees that are kind of circling around that home as well in regards to apprenticing and serving and all these different types of things. Now, if you ask someone what family is today, we say four people, mom, dad, kid, you know, a boy and a girl and maybe a dog and a white picket fence. Those are just radically different visions of family. And so that's essentially kind of that premise I start with and it all kind of, then I kind of just do my style of book writing after that.

It's just like, why, what, when, where, you know, research and stuff like that. We actually wrote a book called Vertical Marriage and then, so we did a vertical marriage tour of the Holy Land. So we took 25 couples on a bus, well, on a plane. The bus once you were there.

But we did what you just said, the Shabbat dinner in a family's home. It was powerful. It was the most impactful thing.

I don't know how to describe it. What's funny is it's never seen, like when people look at the itinerary, they're like, I want to go to the sites and this and this and this, but most people leave with that being one of the most meaningful moments. Exactly. And as we watched, I mean, I was teary a lot of the night because the father is blessing the children. They're laying their hands on and even verbally affirming the wife, the Proverbs 31 woman. It was incredible. And I came home, I told Dave, we are doing that. We are doing that every Sunday. We had this meal and we did it once because the meal prep, like I need to share the meal prep for all these people that I'm having.

Yes, exactly. It was so powerful because there was connection. There was story. There was blessing.

The kids were heard. It was beautiful. We'll talk about why we did it once. I mean, cause I don't think we're that unique. I mean, the Wilsons did it once, but I bet a lot of families are like, that's, that's something. I mean, when you're sitting in that home, there was almost this aroma. You're like, why am I resonating with what's happening here?

We need to recreate that. And you, in the early parts of your book, you're saying, here's what happened. There's been a journey that the families got on. Talk about that. Yeah.

Well, first I'll even talk about two. Yeah. Like that point that I think you brought up, which is really true, is most families, when they start getting into wanting to implement wisdom for their own family based on a breakdown or something, compelling they saw they want to implement, we tend to bite off more than we can chew. So then we kind of jump in on the deep end rather than just kind of slowly building a house. But I think that what that does is that shows it kind of is a smoke signal of our own vision of family.

Again, if God's vision for family is a 500 year multigenerational project with your last name and your kids, kids, kids, kids, kids, like Deuteronomy says it is, well, then you can chill out and you've got some time to implement. But if you have a Western mind that's linear in time, right, where if you miss a moment, there's no going back. Well, then you're going to always feel this pressure and also stop doing something the minute you miss it. And so it actually comes down to your philosophy of time.

I know it's a weird way to put it, but there's kind of, and I think I even maybe talked about this part on the cruise last year, but it's hard to say it on audio only, but I'll try to describe it. Or there's three kind of visions of time, right? There's the Eastern vision of time, the Western vision of time, the biblical vision of time. The Eastern picture of time is essentially just a circle where time is meaningless, meaning it's not going anywhere.

It's not pushing anywhere. It just goes in the same. So we would get, that's like reincarnation, right? Just kind of like life is meaningless.

You're a cog in the wheel. That's not really us, right? The Western, we'd be more the Western vision of time. The Western vision of time is the opposite where it's a straight line. So it's like there's a beginning, a middle and an end. There's no rhythm, there's no cadence, but there's also no going back. There's no season.

There's no, there's no nothing. It's just like a rocket ship. Like it's just like shooting out until you die. And that's why we also live our lives based on bucket lists, because when you believe time's a straight line, then you need to start putting those things in there to check them off.

And that is the average American family. A hundred percent. A hundred percent that we, you know, all of us, that's just the air we breathe, right? And even, it's even why the Psalms say you kind of become what you worship at some level, right? It's like we, I do think we worship the time in the West. And so it's not a coincidence that our hearts feel like kind of the stopwatch, right?

Just like clicking and ticking and the anxiety and all that. But the biblical view of time is a little bit of a blend between the two, but also neither of the two where it's a spiral pointed forward. So a spiral kind of goes forward, but then comes back, goes forward, that comes back, but it's also progressing. And so that vision of time leads to what I call kind of progressive being. Like you start to actually form an identity and renew yourself around a certain practice. And so that's what I talk about in the book where, you know, living in what we call seven day rhythms is actually probably the biggest superpower a family can do is believing that God gave you seven days. And if you kind of perfect that, like if you perfect seven days, you perfect a life essentially. And we're not trying to be perfect, but you know what I mean?

Like when you can kind of steward seven days, then you can steward an entire life. So yeah, there's a lot of tangents there. But that was one thing I thought of with that is that when you just start there, then you lose the pressure because you're like, oh, I get to go forward, but come back again, try again, go forward, but come back again, right? And it's about more about compound interest, essentially.

It'd be almost a metaphor for it. Yeah. And you said your friend that was talking to you about how they live in Israel said, well, when you peel back the curtain, you start to understand what's happened to the family. So talk about what has happened.

Yeah. So I alluded to it earlier, but yeah, there's a lot of jumps that I would say the West has taken. The couple that I highlight because there's more than these, obviously, would the Industrial Revolution was a pretty significant one, right? So there's been a couple of Industrial Revolutions, depending on what we're talking about. But let's just say like late 1700s, mid 1800s, that around that time and all the way actually to about 1900, when like the assembly line and Henry Ford and stuff like that. But that 100 or so years, I don't think we realized the implications that that had in the sense of, OK, work before that was very agrarian, not necessarily agricultural, but it was very trade based.

So it was very apprentice based. Families kind of had their own businesses. You were a blacksmith family, a bread making family, whatever. And then essentially because the scale of production and warehouses and the Industrial Revolution, we then started needing to produce more. And so then we did that by pulling all the fathers out of the home and sticking them in a warehouse and saying, OK, if you go here, then we can kind of get to the scale and this efficiency and all these different things we like. But what we don't realize that did is that didn't just take the father's presence out.

It did two things. It took the father's presence out of the home and kind of broke that dance that was happening in the home, you know, where he's gone most of the day. Whereas before the sons or the daughters, they're working alongside and doing everything together. Yes, it wasn't just like the dad hung out and watched TV back then, you know, either. Like the dad was working, but there was like a symbiotic kind of dancing relationship. That's also, too, by the way, why a lot of us feel like children. Like the minute someone in the West is having another kid, like, oh, you find out you're pregnant, you immediately feel anxiety. But 200 years ago, they immediately celebrated because to us, it's a drain.

Right. To us, it's like because we're a consumption based world because of the Industrial Revolution. You've got to go make more money. You've got to make more money now to feed that mouth. When 200 years ago they celebrated because we have another employee.

That's why they had average 10 kids, because they to them, they needed those workers. Now, we could even say there's problems with that. Sure. But I'm saying it's a different model. It's a different model when to us, you know, we see kids as consumers kind of sucking the life and money and resources out of us, rather than I would say the biblical model is more kids as actually contributors to the team.

Like that God is actually gifting you with certain personalities and wirings and filling gaps in your team by giving you the gift of children that you want to try to study and pay attention to and inflame so that you can kind of go on God's mission, you know. Yeah. And so you also talk about you get the Industrial Revolution. One of your chapter titles was like what Sears did to the family. Yeah, that was my favorite chapter. What in the world is that about? Yeah, that was my favorite chapter, actually.

I love because I love just like research and all the random stuff, you know. And so that one was the quick version of that is essentially Sears. A lot of people don't realize this, but Sears was like the Amazon before the Amazon, right? So a hundred years ago, the Sears and Roebuck catalog was like massive.

It was like I think it weighed a couple of pounds, right? But we had one. Yeah, exactly. Well, your parents had one. Yeah.

Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, they were around for a long time, obviously. But around the turn of the century, I think it was around like 1920, maybe 1930, they started to do these mail order home kits where you could actually literally like fill out in the catalog that you wanted this home from the picture. And a train car would show up with like a waxed seal on it that you would break and open. And it would just be a complete DIY house with instructions, the exact count of nails that you need, the exact, you know, two by fours you need. It's like IKEA as a home. Yes, exactly.

Exactly. Except what was also crazy is these homes are actually like really good material and really well made, which is crazy, shows you like the average craftsmanship of like a person back then is crazy. But, yeah, and so but we're talking about that in the book, though, why it's important is, you know, when you dig into kind of Sears reasons for doing those, they basically were wanting to build their business and they were seeing that families live multigenerationally. And so what would mostly happen is someone would get married and then they would kind of like build on like a little apartment on the back of the home, right?

Or kind of like make like almost a triplex back then. And Sears was like basically they had a light bulb moment of like, hey, we can create more customers if we just kind of start advertising and convincing people that they need to like have their own home. And so they were actually one of the early people to kind of have that mantra of like when you get married, it's the ideal of success to have your own home, take out a mortgage, all these different types of things. Right. And I just talk about how like the subtle implications of that are that we no longer live multigenerationally. Right. Not that Sears is the only one to blame, but they're actually a massive part of the cultural shift. And so it wasn't just because we think, oh, like to me, I just say like, think about that.

Like it's not because it was a really good reason. Like we don't we don't not live generationally anymore because like, oh, it's not you know, we want our privacy or whatever. We can say those things now. Realistically, we just were consumers that got advertised really well.

And then now we're just kind of like down the river. You know, I would say most of us have never heard of that. Yeah.

Don't you know, I never heard of researching it. We want to launch our kids and the leave and cleave and all that stuff. Totally. So let's talk about that.

Should we be living with our parents? No. So the fun part about this book, it's part of under a ministry called Family Teams that we've been doing for the last couple of years with our mentors. And we have a couple thousand people, you know, in our membership program and some of these other things.

So we get to kind of see the like Petri dish and the experiments of how people are living this out. And so, yeah. And so that's a common question is like, oh, does this just mean, you know, we should live together?

I would say no, by the way. But what we say is, but you should hold the value of the word we use is integration. So, of course, we can't go back to 1850. Of course, we can't all be farmers, all the different types of stuff.

Right. And it's like what Wendell Berry says, one of my favorite authors, where he's like, we can no longer basically we are an industrialized society, but you can now bring an agrarian spirit to your living. You know, you can't you're not just going to get a farm. But you can bring the spirit of a farm to your work.

What's that look like? I think just like more rhythmic, more living with cadence, turning off your phone, living and living in the seasons, whatever it is. But like farms operate on that context. Right.

Farms have to submit to seasons. Right. But we don't because we have electricity in this and you know what I mean?

So there's it's kind of like thinking about it almost like a metaphor that helps put you in a certain season. But yeah. So then to answer that question, I would say the answer is generally no. But we have seen people experiment with that and it go really well. But even like, you know, for example, our family, like we just we're making a bet on this. And so we bought a two acre place, you know, where we live and we're moving from our house. And Alyssa's parents are going to move on, live on the property, not in our house. But so I think there's a way to do it in like a compound way.

That's really fun. I've seen another family that we know that actually loved it is like, you know, the parents and the two of the married kids couldn't really afford a home. I think they were in a really expensive place like, you know, San Francisco, something like that. It was tough for everyone, even the parents, to get kind of what they wanted. So then they all three went in together and bought like a compound themselves and like. But there's something about it where you don't have to live together, but you do need to integrate the generations.

Right. Like we want our kids to know their grandparents in a really compelling way, in a really intimate way. We want the grandparents to be on the seat of wisdom for our kids. We want them to be constantly around, constantly at the head of the table, constantly sharing wisdom, constantly being asked stories. And when you do that, that level of integration, it's really easy and quick to see how powerful it is, how much it feels natural.

How much it feels like it should be. It gets at what I kept reading over and over throughout your book, this theme of God's design, God's heart for the family. And I'm quoting you as a multi-generational family team on a mission.

That's a big mouthful. Yes. We break down that phrase of like, you know, when you go back to Genesis, there was a problem in Genesis.

Right. So God creates the Garden of Eden. But a lot of people don't realize this, but the rest of the world didn't look like Eden. So there was the Garden of Eden, but then there's still like all of Earth. And it was clear that God was kind of making a prototype, kind of like here's a prototype of like bringing order out of chaos. But the rest of the world was still untamed. I mean, it wasn't the Garden of Eden.

And so there was kind of a job, like a problem of like, how do you make the rest of the world look like this? Right. Now, of course, God could have solved that any way he wanted. He could have just created more. He could have just snapped his fingers, whatever.

But he decided to create two humans, which is fascinating to me. Right. You know, or even take a step back for that. If that was a problem that you were faced with, is that would that be your solution? Probably not. Right.

Most like in the West. If that was our problem, we would probably create a nonprofit. We'd probably make a board of directors or we'd probably, you know, do a bunch of venture capital and maybe create an app.

I don't know, crowdsource something. God's number one answer to the untamed world that needed order was to create male plus female. Put them together and then say the job is too big for you to. So now I have a bunch of babies. That was the actual solution. Like, and now go subdue, reign, rule, multiply. That to me is so fascinating and compelling to just that idea itself that, yeah, there's a ton of implications below that. But that that alone, I think, is kind of the starting point.

Yeah. And I think, you know, you just laid a foundation for a big conversation, which is the beauty of what God's design was. Even when we started with quoting Michael J.

Fox and talking about family and Princess Diana. They were tapping into something. I don't even know if they understood. They're tapping into that's at the heart of what God wanted family to be. Yes. It's more than us being consumers.

He wants us to literally allow Christ in us to impact others through us. Yeah. Multigenerational. I mean, I would say that yearning, I feel like we all have that. Yes. And it's God given. Yeah.

We don't feel like we know how to solve it. I feel like exactly. Yeah. And I don't have a guitar in here today, but if I did, you'd be in trouble because I'd sing it. But the first time I heard the blessing.

Yes. When I teared up, you know, may your favor be upon us. And our family and our children and their children. And that's a scripture. I mean, it was just like that passage in my life coming out of a broken family to now trying to change the whole legacy.

It's amazing. I'm tearing up going, that's the vision God has for husbands and wives and families and our children. I think all of us at a visceral level understand the importance, the significance, the power of a family in our lives, especially at this time of year. We think about family and just how significant it is. And when we begin to get our arms around that and understand that we can begin to be more purposeful and intentional about strengthening and building into our own family.

That's what we're all about here at Family Life. And that's what's at the heart of Jefferson Bethke's new book, Take Back Your Family. It's a book we're recommending. We have it in our Family Life Today Resource Center. You can order it from us online or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY. If you're looking for a book that will help you refocus and reprioritize your family, to put your family where it belongs by God's design, get a copy of the book, Take Back Your Family by Jefferson Bethke. Go to familylifetoday.com to order your copy or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. 1-800-358-6329.

That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. You know, when we start to get our heads and hearts wrapped around God's grand design for marriage and for family, we begin to see God's purposes more clearly. We begin to see where the power to change the world resides. It's not in a political office somewhere.

It's not in a corporate boardroom. The power to change the world resides in your home, in your marriage, in your family. At Family Life, our mission is to effectively develop godly marriages and families.

We believe godly marriages and families are the most significant element by God's design to change the world. And we are so grateful for those of you who share that conviction with us and those of you who express your support for what we're doing through your financial gifts. The month of December, as we've told you, is a significant month for ministries like ours.

As much as 40% of the revenue we need to operate in the year ahead will come in during this month. And we have a great opportunity here in December for Family Life Today listeners to see your giving multiplied. We've had some friends of the ministry who have gotten together and agreed that they will match every donation given in December, dollar for dollar, up to a total of $1.5 million.

Now that's a steep hill for us to climb, but we're asking Family Life Today listeners, will you be as generous as you can be knowing that whatever gift you give, it's going to be doubled because of this matching gift opportunity? And to say thank you for your gift, we'd like to send you a copy of the new devotional from the book of Psalms by Dane Ortlund. He was a guest recently on Family Life Today. His book is called In the Lord I Take Refuge, 150 devotions from Psalms. His book is our thank you gift when you make a year-end donation and allow that donation to be matched dollar for dollar.

So if you can, go online at familylifetoday.com today or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. Make as generous a donation as possible. And we just want to say thank you in advance for your ongoing support of this ministry. We appreciate you. And we hope you can join us again tomorrow when Jefferson Bethke will be here again to help us dig a little deeper into what God had in mind when he created the family in the first place. On behalf of our hosts Dave and Anne Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today.