You know, many people on their wedding day, the day they start their covenant marriage, they want to give their marriage partner their whole heart.
You know I wrote a book a while back called “Living on the Third River”, and people are always asking me, “What is the Third River?” This is a book about how to prosper in your financial blessings.
Judgements and vows in your covenant marriage.
You know, many, many parents really battle and struggle with how to discipline teenage sons and daughters while still using family blessings.
You know for many years, we have been talking about the power of the blessing of a father. And we see in the Bible and - actually just in culture - when a father blesses his son, it changes something on the inside and releases that son in confidence, in purpose, in destiny. You know I saw an incredible example one time of an eighty-seven year old father who blessed the sixty-five year old son. It was life changing for him. It happened this way: a friend of mine who is in his forties had learned this principle of blessing and practiced it with the twenty one year old son. He had noticed that his son was just having an inability to make a decision that he want to go to university and study something or go get a job or go to bible school. And since the son couldn’t decide, he was sitting at home doing nothing. And, so this man in his frustration was praying and wondering, “How could I help my son to make a decision and go forward?” He caught this concept of blessing and realized “When I look at my son’s eyes, I see a scared little boy,”
You know several years ago, I wrote a book called “ Wealth, Riches and Money” along with my friend, Earl Pitts, the co-author. You know, I find it most people think wealth, riches and money are the same thing. But they really aren’t. You know, there’s an interesting scripture in Matthew 22 whey they bring to Jesus a question. Should we pay taxes to the Romans or not? Jesus said, “show me a coin.” He said, “who’s picture is on this?” They said Ceasar’s. And Jesus said we’ll give this Ceasar’s what his ,and give the God what’s His. I think most of us had heard that story. But you know very few people realized that when Jesus said give to Ceasar what’s his, what was he talking about? He was talking about money. Do you know that most people think money belongs to God. No, money belongs to the world system. Money belongs to Ceasar. So how are we supposed to relate to money? What are we supposed to do with it. How do we keep it from dominating us? How do we dominate it? I find that many many people have money as a huge focus in their life simply due to the fact that if they don’t have enough of it, they have a constant fear “I’m not gonna be taken care of”, “I’m not gonna be provided for.” On the other hand, some other people have a lot of it, and their fear is, “I’m gonna lose what I have.” And so I found that people that have a lot of money, or people that have little money many times have the exact same type of fear, and focus on money on the inside. So, how do I get free of that? How do I get to a place where I govern money, and I tell it what to do, instead of money governing me and telling me what to do? We talked a lot about that, and give you some very specific strategies in the book “Wealth, Riches, and Money”. I encourage you to check that out at our website www.familyfoundations.com
You know, many years ago, I discovered a critical key that every parent has in his or her hand to release the future destiny of a son or daughter. And that this key is the key of blessing, imparting blessing. You know, almost every culture in the world has a rite of passage at the time of puberty – some way to release a boy to be a man or a girl to be a woman – except our culture. Our culture is virtually the void of that here in North America and our Western-European base culture. And many people have discovered in recent years the power in ceremony like Jewish people have – a bar mitzvah type of ceremony orbatmitzvah – where a boy is released to be a man, a girl is released to be a woman. And in much of our Christian heritage, we really don’t know how to do that. And so, for many years, people asked me, “How would I go about doing that? I want to have a celebration like that, but I’m not Jewish. So I don’t know how to have a bar mitzvah. How would we do that?” And so I wrote a little book called Bar Barakah: A Parent’s Guide to a Christian Bar Mitzvah. And bar barakah probably isn’t pronounced exactly correctly in Hebrew, but ‘barakah’ or ‘brakah’ is the Hebrew word for blessing. And so ‘bar’ is the Hebrew word for ‘son of,’ so ‘bar barakah’ is ‘son of my blessing’ or ‘bar barakah’ would be ‘daughter of my blessing.’ And in this little book, we have sort of a boiler plague describing what you might do to prepare a son or to prepare a daughter for such a ceremony, when you should do it, who should you invite, what would the ceremony look like, how would you do it. And little did I know when I wrote that little guide, it would become one of our bestselling books. So many people are interested – what to do it, simply don’t know how. So if that’s an interest of yours, you’d like to learn howcan I release my son to be a man, my daughter to be a woman, I encourage you to pick up that book Bar Barakah: A Parent’s Guide to a Christian Bar Mitzvah. And here’s an amazing thing. Do you know it really should be done during teenage years? But we have had so many stories of people, writing us back and saying, “You know, I did it when my son was in his thirties and my daughter was in her forties.” One man even told me: “My grandfather, at eighty-seven years old, performed a blessing ceremony for his sixty-five year old son on his sixty-fifth birthday.” And it was life-changing for the sixty-five year old son. The reason I’m saying that is it doesn’t matter what age a person is. Every person has a longing in their heart to be blessed and be released by a father and mother. So I encourage you to pick that book up. You can get it at our website: www.familyfoundations.com.
You know one of the most difficult things for parents to learn is how to discipline their children without taking their children’s value or destroying their children’s self-esteem. You know many, many parents don’t pre-plan their discipline and, as a result of that, they just shoot from the hip and end up damaging the emotions and the identity of their children, wounding their children, making their children feel worthless because of what that son or daughter did. You know we’ve taught so many parents how to learn to discipline their children and build their self-esteem, to bless and honor their children while they’re disciplining.
You know what I find one of the biggest difficulties that many wives have is believing that their husband did not intentionally mean to hurt them. I hear so many wives tell me “He just doesn’t love me. He really doesn’t care.” And I tried to hear with them, “You know, many times he just didn’t know he was hurting you.” And so many wives say, “Nah. Nobody could be that stupid. Nobody can miss that.” You know that a lot of husbands really do and why I wanna hear with wives is that many times a husband really is blind to the way he is hurting his wife and doesn’t realize it. Let me just give you an example.
Several years ago, I wrote a book called The Ancient Paths. You know many people ask me, “What on earth is that about? What does that mean?” And it actually comes from a Bible verse Jeremiah 6:16 that says: “Stand by the ways, and seeing as where the ancient paths are, where the good way is in walking it and you shall find rest for your soul. You know that the entire first chapter, you can read online for free. It’s at familyfoundations.com.