Cobblestone Family Ministry

The following is a transcript of the Family Ministry podcast episode of the same name. Before reading, it may be helpful to first listen to this sermon , dated July 10, 2022. Please use earbuds or listen when kids are not around as the sermon covers sensitive topics. MARANDA Hello, and welcome to the family ministry podcast, where we equip you to disciple your kids God's way. I'm Maranda, and today we have a special topic for you. We are going to be talking about instilling a biblical worldview in a culture of ungodliness. This podcast was inspired by Andrew's sermon last Sunday. So, if you were not at church last Sunday, and you haven't heard that sermon, I recommend you go to the sermon podcasts on the website and look for the sermon dated July 10, 2022. And the title is The Gospel: I Am Not Ashamed. I highly recommend listening to that podcast first, and then come back and listen to this one so it will all make sense. And to help me address this very special topic, ...

Did you know that God really, really likes you? Often times we are willing to believe that God loves us, but we don't think He likes us. We believe that He loves us so much that He gave His only Son to die for our sins, but we don't think that God actually enjoys us. We don't think that He wants to spend time with us.  We know that we should spend time with Him, but we tend to think that's for our benefit, and don't consider the fact that God actually gets something out of the time we spend with Him too.  And let's not even talk about how we feel the need to prove our devotion to God by spending time with Him and the guilt we feel when we don't! On second thought, maybe we should talk about that. Sometimes we imagine God as this cosmic task master who's analyzing every move we make just so He can criticize us. But He's actually not like that at all. There's an often-overlooked book of the Bible that tells us a great deal about God's character...

Prefer to listen to this teaching? Check out the podcast. The thing I never realized about parenting until I became one is that none of us really knows what the heck we’re doing. For some reason, as single young adults, we often think we know exactly how we’ll parent. [Not to mention how everyone else is doing it wrong!] But when that first baby comes along, we realize we don’t have a clue. I think this is, in some ways, by design.  God often asks us to do more than we’re capable of in our own strength, to ensure that we stay in step with Him, relying on His grace.  However, though the intricacies of parenting are complicated and require absolute reliance on the Holy Spirit, God has given us the broad strokes in His word. These “broad strokes” provide a framework that we can easily implement in our families to keep us on track in the day to day.  Fortunately for us, the framework is simple, easily understood, and takes minimal effort to implement. Very early in the histor...