The Purpose Driven Family

I am sure by now that most people have heard of the book, The Purpose Driven Life, by Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in California. Well, I know at least 20 million of you have. In this book Rick Warren discusses finding your purpose in life and re-focusing your life on the plan and life that God has in store for each of us.

The book has inspired me to do something in my own family to bring purpose and focus back to our family. I feel that our family unit has become cluttered with to many branches, and that many are keeping us from growing in the areas that we should. There are so many things these days that allure and prevent growth personally, spiritually, and of course as a family. With the allure of television, video games, extra-curricular activities, and the internet just to name a few. Each of these has the intention of attracting thoughts, minds, and resources from you and your family. They spend millions of dollars in developing advertising, creative programming, games, to do so, and they do it well.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that all of these things are of the devil and that there will be gnashing of teeth should you do any of these things. What I am saying that un-checked that not just these things, but a lot of things can get in the way of what we were put here to do. Now that part, I know the devil has a hand in. Anything to distract us from what Gods has for us the devil will use against us. For us this was not immediate, but a very gradual process, which is typical of you know who. He does not necessarily want us to jump of the deep end immediately; he is just fine with a slow gradual draw much like the Millennium Falcon being pulled in by the tractor beam of the Death Star.

I am at the point where I have seen too many things in our lives that have got in the way. But, what do I do now? What changes do I make? How do I get our focus back on the things that God would have us do? As the leader of the family I had to figure this out.

After much prayer about this, here is what I came up with. We are going to have a Purpose Driven Family with a 30 Days of family focus. We are immediately going to cut certain things out of our lives for 30 days and get our focus back. I have decided make these changes immediately for the whole family:

Cut television entirely
No Video Games
No Computer or internet use at all
Addition of daily journaling (prayer or personal)
Daily age appropriate bible study
Weekly family meetings to talk about where we are and how it’s going

Now comes the hard part, how do I communicate this to a 7 year old girl, a 12 year old by boy, and my wife? After much deliberation and prayer and trying to make it harder than it is, which is typical of us men, God gave me a plan. I gathered the family we prayed and I gave each of them a quick questionnaire. It asked things like:


1. What is some of your favorite things to do?
2. What is a new book or series that you would like to read?
3. What is something that you would like to improve on?
4. What is something that you have wanted to do but have not found the time?
5. Who are your friends that you play with or talk to most of the time?
6. Who is someone that you know but would like get to know better?
7. What do you spend most of you your time doing while you are at home?

Read this verse:
John Chapter 15 verse 2
"Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit.

What do you think this verse means?

There were more but the idea of it is I wanted to get a gauge for where we were individually of what is important to us and how we spend our time trying to make the things important to us really important. As well as when I hear the “I’m bored and have nothing to do”, I have a list of stuff right here. I know it’s presumptuous and sneaky, but what can I say. Part of it also was goal setting, and part of it was the realization that the things that we say are important to us we do not show it in how we live or spend our time or efforts. Hopefully this will give us something to come back to in 30 days to see how it has changed.

God put this verse on my heart to illustrate what we were doing. We were cutting off the branches of our family tree that were taking away from our “tree food”, so that our other branches like spending time with family, personal bible study, spending time with mom and dad could grow. The 12 year old picked it up real quick, but it took the 7 year old a little time, but she got it. She explained that the tree can only take so much food and water and that it could only grow so much. So if we cut off some of the bad limbs, that our good limbs could grow bigger and better. She got it! They all got it! Shame on me for expecting moans and groans about what we were doing.

We were almost done. The last thing that we did was we took an item representing each of the things that we were giving up (such as a remote control) and laid them on the table. We each put our hands on them and prayed for God to release us of the control that these things have brought to us and bring focus back to our family.

Everything has been going so well, and I am so thankful for the family that God has given to me to enjoy.