What’s normal in your home may not be so normal in other homes. Is it dad tax on food? Or drinking pickle juice when all the pickles are gone? Or a specific type of meal on a certain night of the week?
Whatever your family's quirks, “the one thing you should normalize is God’s normal,” asserted William Hurtado, education presenter at a Family Discipleship Festival at the Puyallup Church. “When you pursue God’s normal, that means your daily habits, practices, your lifestyle is not so normal to the secular world. The world’s agenda is to normalize their value system into your family life.”
“God made families the most important group in society. The family unit is a basic building block of society. We need the institutions of schools, churches and local governments. However, it’s not their job to raise children. It’s the parent’s job, given to them by God Himself. We need to empower families in their highest calling.”
Hurtado blended Love and Logic parenting framework with the highest calling for parents — to provide spiritual nurturing for their children.
“God’s goal for your family is to help you be holy. To be prepared for heaven. To train you to make it to God’s summit,” Hurtado shared. “The highest education is learning character qualities so that you can be like Jesus.”
Hurtado explained why he chose to highlight the Love and Logic model. "It distills the basic parenting styles in easy-to-understand ways, defined as helicopter parents, consultant parents or drill sergeant parents."
“We can’t expect families to have good discipleship if there aren’t good disciplines at home. We need to normalize good disciplines in our homes so we can normalize discipleship. We need love and logic. They compliment each other within our families.”
So, what does discipleship in the home mean? With the aid of children spinning a colorful wheel of options, Hurtado focused on healthy family habits such as church attendance, praying with children, getting involved with service, discussing questions, exploring outdoors, having family worship and finding ways to integrate faith into everyday life.
“A strong discipline foundation helps us to normalize kingdom of God living through discipleship,” Hurtado concluded. “God is knocking at your family’s door because He wants to be present.”
