This touches me deeply as truth. I have counted on God for this in the lives of my children, grands and great grands and I have not been disappointed. I desire all families to embrace this.
The Christian Family as a Channel of Revival
And a prophetic word from Mrs. W.
JAN 02, 2026
Mrs. Watson was in prayer recently and received word from the Lord about families. I won’t share the whole thing, but part of it reads,
Revival is an outpouring from our families; overcoming strongholds, living in holiness, love, peace, and joy. Revival will come from the overflow of healthy families and prepare a runway for the Holy Spirit to land among us.
The restoration of family and its centrality for our lives as Christians will be important in the coming days as God renews the church. Biological and adoptive families are central to this. Spiritual families are as well.
The root of the Christian family is marriage. The creation narratives of the first two chapters of Genesis are the basis for the Christian understanding of marriage. The man and woman are created for one another, as we read in Gen 1:23-24:
The man said,
“This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called ‘woman,’
for she was taken out of man.”That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.
Jesus himself refers to this passage when discussing marriage in Matthew 19. Any discussion of Christian marriage must proceed from these passages.
Likewise Scripture describes the relation of Christ and the church as a marriage. For example, Revelation 19:7 reads,
Let us rejoice and exult
and give him the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come,
and his bride has made herself ready;
to her it has been granted to be clothed
with fine linen, bright and pure”—
for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.
When God finally renews all things, Christ will be united with his bride.
In the Western world we have come to treat marriage as a legal contract. It’s useful for tax purposes. Since the implementation of no-fault divorce it can be easily dissolved. Many couples have opted to forgo it, viewing it as an out-of-date, even burdensome relic of a less enlightened age. For Christians, however, marriage is not just a contract. It is rooted in both creation and eschatology (how we think about the age to come under God’s rule). It is part of God’s creative design. It points us to God’s redeemed future.
Understanding the theological basis of Christian marriage doesn’t exempt a couple from the challenges marriage entails. When I got married, I had no idea what I was doing. Neither did my wife. Now we’ve been married for 28 years. Sometimes it’s been easy. Sometimes we’ve had to navigate storms. Long marriages go through hills and valleys. Sometimes they die and are reborn. People change over time. In many ways, my wife and I aren’t the same people we were thirty years ago when we started dating. Marriage requires not just commitment to the other person, but to marriage itself. It requires adaptation, patience, and self-sacrifice by both partners. And for a marriage to be healthy, both partners in the marriage need a certain amount of emotional health themselves. At times, dysfunction can become so extreme as to manifest in infidelity or abuse, in which case the covenant of marriage is broken, perhaps beyond repair.
When Christian marriages produce children, either by natural means or adoption, it is the responsibility of the parents to raise them up in the faith. My parents did this, and my wife and I have done it as well. To raise up children in the faith doesn’t just mean taking them to church, though doing so is crucial. It means talking to your children about your own faith and allowing them to see the fruit of the Spirit in your daily life. Your children learn by watching you. They are more observant than they often let on. For me, that’s been one of the most unnerving parts of being a father.
It is the job of Christian parents to protect their children from malign influences such as pornography, drugs, or the use of social media at a young age. This can also mean finding an appropriate venue for schooling. The rise of homeschooling is unsurprising in light of the kinds of ideological agendas pressed on kids in some public schools. In the third grade my wife and I took my older son out of public school and put him into a classical Christian school in the Anglican tradition. It was one of the best parenting decisions we ever made. His school not only gave him a high-quality education, but it helped to form him in the faith. Granted, he’s an Anglican now, though he was raised as a Methodist. Quite honestly, as long as he’s an orthodox Christian, I don’t care what denomination he chooses. I care about his soul and salvation, not his liturgical preferences.
It’s easy for busy people—including pastors and other church workers—to take for granted the ones who love and care for them the most: the ones in their homes. They feel they have to give 110% to their ministerial vocation. By the time they get home, they may have nothing left except for exhaustion and frustration from the day’s work. This fractures the home, and the dysfunction repeats from one generation to another. I have to be honest: I’ve done this. I’m not proud of it. I’ve tried to do better for a number of years, and I’m still working on it. Our families deserve our presence, love, thoughtfulness, and compassion. God can break down strongholds of workaholism and other kinds of vocational obsession if we surrender them into his hands. He can transform our disordered loves and use them for His glory.